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| Deserts, caves, the north woods, the redwoods. Mountains, yes, and water in all its forms, water and all its shorelines. Place, it doesn't have to be beautiful. Even just dirt; that's a place and if you live on it, it's your place. And if you have no place to live, not even just dirt, well, get a rock. Buy a rock, beg a rock, steal a rock, put it in your backpack and you have a place. |
The mid-day sun has washed the colors out: all that remain are a glinty beige-white and as indescribably soft mauve, almost a gray. Even the sky is no longer blue. Shadows are empty, shadows are a deep absence of light, shadows are black holes impossible to see into. Sylvie remembers the childhood cartoon shows where the desert sun is surrounded by pulsating circles and Wile E. Coyote crawls weakly, tongue lapping the sand, looking for a waterhole. She smiles. Real coyote is of course wise enough not to appear in this scene at all. Real coyote is at home in a shady burrow, no doubt - far from here. Or perhaps not far.
Above her head, one crow - or raven - circles low, in case some creature has died in the night and now lies, easy lunch, in the middle of the road. But nothing at all is lying in the road, and raven/crow disappears behind buff sandstone, cawing once.
At her feet, ants perform antly duties, perhaps unaware of Human so near. If she stands still long enough, lizards might come out from crevices and flick their tongues at her.
Giant blocks of stone rise sharp from the valley floor, the glassy parts white flame under this sun. Twenty miles away, layers of hills lap the horizon, their sagebrush and mesquite mere blackened dots at this distance.
Sylvie knows she must be sweating but there is no moisture on her skin to prove it. Parched air sucks up each molecule before it can join with other molecules to form drops. Her dress hangs loose, providing shade for her legs at least; the hat drops a shadow to her lip line and no further. Today it is easy to believe the warnings about the ever-thinning ozone layer. She can feel the thin high vibration of the ultra violet seeping beneath arm hairs, altering her cells, changing her skin forever.
Would tarantula move in such heat? Or rattlesnake? Can cold blooded creatures sweat to relieve their discomfort? Or would snake shrivel, would spider cook inside its waterproof skin?
At her feet, a white gleam. She bends to look. A tiny crystal cluster is nestled in the curve of a larger protecting stone. She takes it in her hand, looks up and around her. There is no likely cliff for this stone to have fallen from. Has some person walked past this very spot already today, left it on purpose? Did coyote carry it in his mouth last night and, bored with it already, drop it here?
Sylvie stands up.
Her light is green. She steps into the street.
- from Stone Woman, Cactus Man , Diane Moomey 1995
At sixty degrees below zero in the Laurentiens, nothing moves. No wind will blow, no snow will fall at that temperature: storm systems move only on much warmer days, when the temperature is nearer zero. There are places farther north, of course, where blizzards hurl themselves across the land at eighty below, but here, that will not happen. Here, smoke from chimneys will rise straight up, skies will be clear, stars clean and sharp. Beneath the snow, mice and shrews may creep around in tiny tunnels. Above the snow, nothing will fly or crawl or hop.
Even the humans' cars will not move tonight. The electric battery blankets and block heaters that serve so well at thirty below are useless now, their heat sucked away as if it never existed. Tires are stuck fast to the snow beneath them; door locks, filled with the tiny ice crystals of condensation, will not accept a key. A human who wishes to travel tonight will have to walk.
And this one who walks, will have to walk carefully. Fast enough to stay warm, but not so fast as to begin to sweat. That one will not breathe the air directly but will put a scarf over mouth and nose and breathe from that warm pouch.
Even at dawn, when the temperature rises to a mere forty below, the air is not to be taken in: the ice crystals that form instantly in the breath would cut the lungs before they melted. In the valley, a fog of ice hangs low, white as water fog. One who walks into that fog will feel prickles on any bare skin, and will not allow this bare skin to touch metal: hat and scarf are carefully arranged so that even glasses are enveloped in a cloud of warm air.
In the clear stillness, the sound of cars on the highway is sharp and close. These are obviously pampered vehicles, ones that live in heated garages. They all have covers over their radiators so that only a small portion is left exposed, since a speed of fifty miles per hour at this temperature makes even pure antifreeze too stiff to flow properly.
Later, at a civilized hour, the people will come out of their houses wearing ski clothes, padded with down and Dacron. For now, they stay inside and wake up slowly with another cup of coffee. The day will be short: not light until eight - thirty, dark again at four - thirty or five. Work, then a long lovely evening with friends and food and music, and perhaps Northern Lights.
- from Gens du Pays, Diane Moomey, 1995
Sylvie has just walked one mile uphill, feet strapped into wood-and-hide raquettes, down jacket unzipped although the temperature of the thin January air stands at less than zero, fahrenheit. She has climbed this hill especially to face North, to look with inner eye beyond the trees that now block her view, to point her nose at the place where no humans live. At no other time, no other place on earth has she touched a place unpeopled.
This lack-of-humans is a palpable entity, a wordless being whose presence is clean contrast to the buzzing panorama she feels at her back and to each side. In this North, the minds of rabbit and coyote, of deer and bear, make patterns of silence: rich, layered. Cool, somehow: lacking the heat of human thought. Spacious.
Another half mile will take her to the crest, a flat open spot that allows a view through leafless trees, and she will stand and watch the row upon row of hills that fill that northern place. With summergreen gone, white and gray and brown have a hundred shades each, now carefully spread over the miles-deep rock of the Canadian Shield.
The best view will be the one before twilight, on a day like today, when an overcast afternoon turns at four o'clock into evening. At the horizon, the cloud layer will be thick and dark; overhead, light with the last whiteness of the day. A few flakes will be falling.
One half mile only, not so far. The long raquettes make curved tracks as Sylvie swings each step wide, out and around and back again, not stepping on her own tails as she did all the first winter.
Silent. No birdsong, of course, and no wind, no animal noises at all, only the sound of her own brain and the minute clicks of snowflakes that strike her glasses tick tick.
Sylvie knows they are out there - coyote and marten and weasel- but they never let her see them no matter how long she stands still in one place. She sees only their homes, the trees under which and behind which she knows they are conducting faunal business of their own.
She lets her eye carry her over the snow, and follows it, flies with feral attention over hills and valleys until suddenly the dark is too dark, afternoon is evening. Night is no time for humans, not here, outdoors, in this winter North. If she stays any longer she will not be able to leave, she will grow fur and turn into bear, she will sleep out overnight and James will worry.
Sylvie snaps back into her cold human body. Later, when she is very old, she will come back here. On the very last evening of her life, a winter evening like this one, she will come to stay, she will sleep overnight in the snow with moose. Later she will do this but not tonight.
She zips the parka and pushes the raquettes ahead of her one half mile, one, half more. James will have made soup, or stew perhaps. And bread. He will have fed the fire, lit the lamps, fed the dog.
James is waiting. She opens the door.
- from Gens du Pays, Diane Moomey, 1995
Les mouches noires, the Black Flies: the dominant life-form of the North woods. We have two seasons here, Armand the grocer tells Sylvie: Black Flies and snow flies. Armand is right.
The instant the snow melts, Black Fly awakes and manifests itself as a new batch of the fly atoms that are its body. Last year's body died in August, leaving behind seeds for this year's body to rise like Phoenix from beneath old leaves.
This year's body, like the one from last year and all the other years, lives to eat. The human aura of warm air and carbon dioxide advertises fine dining from a quarter-mile away. Unlike Mosquito, who will eat only from a spot it can fly to, Black Fly will walk to areas not available to air travelers. This means that Mosquito will be found only on bare skin or on thin cloth, while Black Fly goes trekking into hair, through buttonholes, up pant legs and sleeves and down into socks. Black Fly leaves welts the size of a quarter, that ooze yellow pus and crust over finally after several days. Black Fly wakes when the sun rises and sleeps at sunset, when Mosquito takes over.
Black Fly will hover over a swimmer who has submerged to escape it, waiting for that one to surface again. Deep Woods Formula Off is ketchup for the main course. Black Fly owns the woods.
- from Gens du Pays, Diane Moomey, 1995
fin-fonds: noun: French. the word for "the end" and the word for "the bottom" rolled up into one word. The pits?
Lucie says that where they live in their cabin is les fin-fonds. It's like the boonies, the middle of nowhere, she says. She, Lucie, could never live there; she could never stand to live the way they are trying to live. She and Claude would go crazy. But it's good for them to try, she says. It's romantic, and it really is the most natural way to live, after all. But she wouldn't do it herself.
All of that first spring and summer, is rain. Not good true strong rain that thrashes the windows and drowns the black flies and is gone in an hour: no, this is a petulant, sniveling, half-assed rain that hangs in the air and soaks the clothing and stays all day. The dawns are cloudless, and the naive mind thinks
surely today will be clear.
Not. At nine, thin clouds move in from the northwest, thickening until, by ten, the sky is covered and the rain begins.
Sylvie and James try to work in that rain, clearing brush, sweating under rubber, black flies wading through the drops to bite bare hands and wrists. They alternate between wearing the bug-net hats and ripping them off in claustrophobic rage. They drink coffee and cider and feel very sorry for themselves.
At four o'clock, the sky clears and the sun hovers for a brief bright moment before dropping below the tree line. Elsewhere in the county, more practical folk who have cut down all the trees around their houses, are enjoying the long, relatively bug-free northern-summer evening. James and Sylvie, at their cabin in the fin-fonds, share the semi-dark under the trees with the usual crowd of insects and each other, feeling very very sorry for themselves, indeed.
- from Gens du Pays, Diane Moomey, 1995
Seabirds when i am old, i shall live by the southern ocean, in a round house with no door, that i will build myself. i shall eat kelp. a grey cat will live with me, a very old gray cat, he will be indifferent to the sea birds which walk upon my skin. i shall lie by the water's edge each day, and mark the new year by the return of the gray whales from the north. or, i shall live in the redwoods, in mist and deep green shade. my lover will be with me: two ancients, we will build a treehouse of woven bark. bats will hang head down in the shadows above. -diane moomey 1996
© Diane Moomey
| Page One | Contents | La Honda | The Author | Webmaster | Top |
| Deserts, caves, the north woods, the redwoods. Mountains, yes, and water in all its forms, water and all its shorelines. Place, it doesn't have to be beautiful. Even just dirt; that's a place and if you live on it, it's your place. And if you have no place to live, not even just dirt, well, get a rock. Buy a rock, beg a rock, steal a rock, put it in your backpack and you have a place. |
The mid-day sun has washed the colors out: all that remain are a glinty beige-white and as indescribably soft mauve, almost a gray. Even the sky is no longer blue. Shadows are empty, shadows are a deep absence of light, shadows are black holes impossible to see into. Sylvie remembers the childhood cartoon shows where the desert sun is surrounded by pulsating circles and Wile E. Coyote crawls weakly, tongue lapping the sand, looking for a waterhole. She smiles. Real coyote is of course wise enough not to appear in this scene at all. Real coyote is at home in a shady burrow, no doubt - far from here. Or perhaps not far.
Above her head, one crow - or raven - circles low, in case some creature has died in the night and now lies, easy lunch, in the middle of the road. But nothing at all is lying in the road, and raven/crow disappears behind buff sandstone, cawing once.
At her feet, ants perform antly duties, perhaps unaware of Human so near. If she stands still long enough, lizards might come out from crevices and flick their tongues at her.
Giant blocks of stone rise sharp from the valley floor, the glassy parts white flame under this sun. Twenty miles away, layers of hills lap the horizon, their sagebrush and mesquite mere blackened dots at this distance.
Sylvie knows she must be sweating but there is no moisture on her skin to prove it. Parched air sucks up each molecule before it can join with other molecules to form drops. Her dress hangs loose, providing shade for her legs at least; the hat drops a shadow to her lip line and no further. Today it is easy to believe the warnings about the ever-thinning ozone layer. She can feel the thin high vibration of the ultra violet seeping beneath arm hairs, altering her cells, changing her skin forever.
Would tarantula move in such heat? Or rattlesnake? Can cold blooded creatures sweat to relieve their discomfort? Or would snake shrivel, would spider cook inside its waterproof skin?
At her feet, a white gleam. She bends to look. A tiny crystal cluster is nestled in the curve of a larger protecting stone. She takes it in her hand, looks up and around her. There is no likely cliff for this stone to have fallen from. Has some person walked past this very spot already today, left it on purpose? Did coyote carry it in his mouth last night and, bored with it already, drop it here?
Sylvie stands up.
Her light is green. She steps into the street.
- from Stone Woman, Cactus Man , Diane Moomey 1995
At sixty degrees below zero in the Laurentiens, nothing moves. No wind will blow, no snow will fall at that temperature: storm systems move only on much warmer days, when the temperature is nearer zero. There are places farther north, of course, where blizzards hurl themselves across the land at eighty below, but here, that will not happen. Here, smoke from chimneys will rise straight up, skies will be clear, stars clean and sharp. Beneath the snow, mice and shrews may creep around in tiny tunnels. Above the snow, nothing will fly or crawl or hop.
Even the humans' cars will not move tonight. The electric battery blankets and block heaters that serve so well at thirty below are useless now, their heat sucked away as if it never existed. Tires are stuck fast to the snow beneath them; door locks, filled with the tiny ice crystals of condensation, will not accept a key. A human who wishes to travel tonight will have to walk.
And this one who walks, will have to walk carefully. Fast enough to stay warm, but not so fast as to begin to sweat. That one will not breathe the air directly but will put a scarf over mouth and nose and breathe from that warm pouch.
Even at dawn, when the temperature rises to a mere forty below, the air is not to be taken in: the ice crystals that form instantly in the breath would cut the lungs before they melted. In the valley, a fog of ice hangs low, white as water fog. One who walks into that fog will feel prickles on any bare skin, and will not allow this bare skin to touch metal: hat and scarf are carefully arranged so that even glasses are enveloped in a cloud of warm air.
In the clear stillness, the sound of cars on the highway is sharp and close. These are obviously pampered vehicles, ones that live in heated garages. They all have covers over their radiators so that only a small portion is left exposed, since a speed of fifty miles per hour at this temperature makes even pure antifreeze too stiff to flow properly.
Later, at a civilized hour, the people will come out of their houses wearing ski clothes, padded with down and Dacron. For now, they stay inside and wake up slowly with another cup of coffee. The day will be short: not light until eight - thirty, dark again at four - thirty or five. Work, then a long lovely evening with friends and food and music, and perhaps Northern Lights.
- from Gens du Pays, Diane Moomey, 1995
Sylvie has just walked one mile uphill, feet strapped into wood-and-hide raquettes, down jacket unzipped although the temperature of the thin January air stands at less than zero, fahrenheit. She has climbed this hill especially to face North, to look with inner eye beyond the trees that now block her view, to point her nose at the place where no humans live. At no other time, no other place on earth has she touched a place unpeopled.
This lack-of-humans is a palpable entity, a wordless being whose presence is clean contrast to the buzzing panorama she feels at her back and to each side. In this North, the minds of rabbit and coyote, of deer and bear, make patterns of silence: rich, layered. Cool, somehow: lacking the heat of human thought. Spacious.
Another half mile will take her to the crest, a flat open spot that allows a view through leafless trees, and she will stand and watch the row upon row of hills that fill that northern place. With summergreen gone, white and gray and brown have a hundred shades each, now carefully spread over the miles-deep rock of the Canadian Shield.
The best view will be the one before twilight, on a day like today, when an overcast afternoon turns at four o'clock into evening. At the horizon, the cloud layer will be thick and dark; overhead, light with the last whiteness of the day. A few flakes will be falling.
One half mile only, not so far. The long raquettes make curved tracks as Sylvie swings each step wide, out and around and back again, not stepping on her own tails as she did all the first winter.
Silent. No birdsong, of course, and no wind, no animal noises at all, only the sound of her own brain and the minute clicks of snowflakes that strike her glasses tick tick.
Sylvie knows they are out there - coyote and marten and weasel- but they never let her see them no matter how long she stands still in one place. She sees only their homes, the trees under which and behind which she knows they are conducting faunal business of their own.
She lets her eye carry her over the snow, and follows it, flies with feral attention over hills and valleys until suddenly the dark is too dark, afternoon is evening. Night is no time for humans, not here, outdoors, in this winter North. If she stays any longer she will not be able to leave, she will grow fur and turn into bear, she will sleep out overnight and James will worry.
Sylvie snaps back into her cold human body. Later, when she is very old, she will come back here. On the very last evening of her life, a winter evening like this one, she will come to stay, she will sleep overnight in the snow with moose. Later she will do this but not tonight.
She zips the parka and pushes the raquettes ahead of her one half mile, one, half more. James will have made soup, or stew perhaps. And bread. He will have fed the fire, lit the lamps, fed the dog.
James is waiting. She opens the door.
- from Gens du Pays, Diane Moomey, 1995
Les mouches noires, the Black Flies: the dominant life-form of the North woods. We have two seasons here, Armand the grocer tells Sylvie: Black Flies and snow flies. Armand is right.
The instant the snow melts, Black Fly awakes and manifests itself as a new batch of the fly atoms that are its body. Last year's body died in August, leaving behind seeds for this year's body to rise like Phoenix from beneath old leaves.
This year's body, like the one from last year and all the other years, lives to eat. The human aura of warm air and carbon dioxide advertises fine dining from a quarter-mile away. Unlike Mosquito, who will eat only from a spot it can fly to, Black Fly will walk to areas not available to air travelers. This means that Mosquito will be found only on bare skin or on thin cloth, while Black Fly goes trekking into hair, through buttonholes, up pant legs and sleeves and down into socks. Black Fly leaves welts the size of a quarter, that ooze yellow pus and crust over finally after several days. Black Fly wakes when the sun rises and sleeps at sunset, when Mosquito takes over.
Black Fly will hover over a swimmer who has submerged to escape it, waiting for that one to surface again. Deep Woods Formula Off is ketchup for the main course. Black Fly owns the woods.
- from Gens du Pays, Diane Moomey, 1995
fin-fonds: noun: French. the word for "the end" and the word for "the bottom" rolled up into one word. The pits?
Lucie says that where they live in their cabin is les fin-fonds. It's like the boonies, the middle of nowhere, she says. She, Lucie, could never live there; she could never stand to live the way they are trying to live. She and Claude would go crazy. But it's good for them to try, she says. It's romantic, and it really is the most natural way to live, after all. But she wouldn't do it herself.
All of that first spring and summer, is rain. Not good true strong rain that thrashes the windows and drowns the black flies and is gone in an hour: no, this is a petulant, sniveling, half-assed rain that hangs in the air and soaks the clothing and stays all day. The dawns are cloudless, and the naive mind thinks
surely today will be clear.
Not. At nine, thin clouds move in from the northwest, thickening until, by ten, the sky is covered and the rain begins.
Sylvie and James try to work in that rain, clearing brush, sweating under rubber, black flies wading through the drops to bite bare hands and wrists. They alternate between wearing the bug-net hats and ripping them off in claustrophobic rage. They drink coffee and cider and feel very sorry for themselves.
At four o'clock, the sky clears and the sun hovers for a brief bright moment before dropping below the tree line. Elsewhere in the county, more practical folk who have cut down all the trees around their houses, are enjoying the long, relatively bug-free northern-summer evening. James and Sylvie, at their cabin in the fin-fonds, share the semi-dark under the trees with the usual crowd of insects and each other, feeling very very sorry for themselves, indeed.
- from Gens du Pays, Diane Moomey, 1995
Seabirds when i am old, i shall live by the southern ocean, in a round house with no door, that i will build myself. i shall eat kelp. a grey cat will live with me, a very old gray cat, he will be indifferent to the sea birds which walk upon my skin. i shall lie by the water's edge each day, and mark the new year by the return of the gray whales from the north. or, i shall live in the redwoods, in mist and deep green shade. my lover will be with me: two ancients, we will build a treehouse of woven bark. bats will hang head down in the shadows above. -diane moomey 1996
© Diane Moomey
| Page One | Contents | La Honda | The Author | Webmaster | Top |
She has recently completed Gens du Pays, a novel about her homesteading experiences in Quebec, Canada. Now and Then and Now Again and The Silverman, fantasy/adventure novels for young adults, were completed last year. Her current writing projects include more poetry, and an adult novel Ancient Oracles.
| Diane Moomey | |
| P.O.Box 709 | |
| La Honda CA | 94020 |
| 650-747-9711 | phone |
| dianemoomey@hotmail.com |
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