Going Home

I had a dream some time ago.

I was sleeping in our cabin on the White River or Wapi-Hanne, as the Lenape once called it.

In the dream I heard scraping below the window where I was sleeping. I looked out into the shadows made by the moon and observed a small herd of deer making their way through the side yard. This seemed common enough, so I laid down again to sleep. Whispering and hushed voices woke me a second time. I looked out again for the deer and found that they had shifted into the Miami that inhabited these banks long ago. I found myself outside with them. They moved in the halting and direct movements like the White Tail, were curious of me, and humored by me as well. They murmured among themselves while trying to figure what I was and eventually faded into the darkness and I awoke.

What are we made of?

Before conception we are essentially the negative space between charged particles and chains of DNA. Upon conception we begin to gain mass from our mothers blood, that has gained nutrients from the substances she has consumed. If our mother is famished we will draw from her fat, muscle, and bone.

I was conceived in southern Indiana and while in utero my mother subsisted on the venison and vegetation that that region of the earth produced.

So, I can say with certainty, that I came from the earth.

I have always been drawn to the musty smells of the woods and the rain. Choruses of frogs and cicadas beckon me into the night.

The cottonwood seeds floating on shade covered creeks rejuvenate my soul. The loam and stone under the ferns calls me home.

Life rises and falls like waves on the sea. The earth throws forth life to draw it back in season, over and over again.

The core of me is earth. For generations I have ran with the deer, I have floated on the wind, I have rained down upon the earth, I have slept among the stones, and I have sprouted in the sunshine of spring.

I consider myself fortunate to know without doubt, where I come from.

I know without doubt that the core of me will eventually return to the earth and those ancient paths.

And at some point, in some manner,

I will return.

Last Breath

The day my sister died I was a senior in high school.

The day before my sister died I was called out of class by a phone call from my brother Joe. "Carrie is at Riverview Hospital and I am going to pick you up at school in a few minutes."

I wasn't shocked by those words, I was accustomed to emergency trips to the hospital. I was familiar with dangerous medical procedures. Emotionally difficult revelations had become common occurrences in my life. At a early age, three or four, I became aware that that one of my sisters had died not long after I was born and that one other had died before I was born.

In the fall of my eighth year, on the day after my brother Joe celebrated his eighteenth birthday, I awoke to an empty house and the information that my brother Joe had been rushed to the hospital after experiencing a seizure. That day the diagnosis was that Joe had a mass in the right frontal lobe of his brain, but it was operable. Joe continued to receive operations, chemotherapy, and radiation in that region of his brain until his death at the age of twenty nine.

The summer after Joes first seizure, my brother Danny, who was twenty, fell to the floor in our family dinning room with a seizure.
He was found to have brain cancer as well. He would sustain extremely heavy doses of drug cocktails and prescriptions until surgical technology advanced enough to allow operations on the cancer that had nested in his brain. Danny would succumb to death three months short of his thirtieth birthday.

The summer of my tenth year my uncle William smuggled a revolver into the hospital where he was to receive treatment for shingles.
He had suffered for years with diabetes and organ transplants.
Uncle Bill met death with his own hands that night.

The winter of my thirteenth year my Grandmother was lowered into the ground.


Carrie was twenty nine when she died. She had a husband and three children, one had died late term, after the birth of her first child.
My sister Carrie was my surrogate mother when I was a child. I think my mother had her fill of kids by the time I came toddling around with my giant head. Carrie took upon herself my education in religious extremes at the local, extreme right wing, paramilitary, Pentecostal church.
Unfortunately watching my brothers , on a Sunday morning, ride off in the back of Dad’s pick-up truck on their way to a deer hunt, fishing creek, or tromp through the woods didn’t fare well on my sisters intentions.
When she married into life on a farm she would host the largest family gatherings we had ever experienced and always cooked too much food.
She was kind and could be rude. She normally wore a big smile, but never failed to rain down Hell upon the slightest miss-step.
I loved her. She was always sweet to me.

She entered the hospital on a Friday with flu-like symptoms, these symptoms happened to be the first signs that her immune system was failing.
She had many health problems the previous year and had been treated with many different antibiotics. The treatments had destroyed the normal flora of her bowels. Her body had been dumping toxins into her bloodstream, producing tremendous infection throughout her body.
Numerous antibiotics, many experimental, were pumped into her throughout the day.
Her blood pressure dropped, she retained large amounts of fluid, and her breathing became labored.
While she was semiconcious I stood by her bed as she gasped for breath. "I love you, Carrie."
Her response came between rapid breaths.. "I - love-- you." I was mortified by causing her to strain in responding to me.
She later slipped into unconsiousness and was placed on a ventilator. By Saturday afternoon the decision was made to remove her from life support.
We all stood in the room and listened to the solo performed by the ventilator. The check valves and pneumatics pumped and clicked in unison. The seal in the diaphram fell as my sisters chest rose. Once the nurse shut the system down we listened to my sister wheeze in and watched her chest rise. She would gurgle and her chest would fall.
Eternities passed between the last gurgle and the next wheeze. I knew what would happen, eventually one of these breaths would be her final. The room was sick with waiting and hope and prayer and promise and pain and tears and the next last breath followed by the next last breath, more eternities, and finally she was silent.

My sisters last breath would be the first of many, many, more I would bear witness to.
I now know it is never a good thing to wish for better things, because eventually you will wish your life away. I used to wonder what the world would look like without those thousands of 'last breaths' behind my eyes.

I couldn't say this then or for years afterward, but now, I wouldn't trade those breaths for anything.

Failure to Follow Instructions

During the first week of Special Forces Selection I stood on the gravel inside Camp Mackall with over 300 other candidates. We were to begin the land navigation phase of testing and had just received our issued equipment which included two emergency flares. The cadre of the day stood on the podium in front of us. The podium had been painted black by some soldier from a previous course who had also painted a mural on the front that faced the candidates. The painted scene was a silhouette of some imagined battlefield with the arms of corpses, broken wheels, and barbed wire.
Below the scene, painted in white Gothic letters was a phrase something along the lines of " to the candidate engaged in war who rested and while resting died....")
The cadre briefed us on the task we were about to undertake and what we should do if some unfortunate event should befall us. He proceeded to hold up an emergency flare and spoke " This is an emergency flare. This is for emergencies. A broken leg is considered an emergency. Missing eyes are considered an emergency. Heat casualties are considered emergencies. Being lost is not an emergency. If you become lost, walk to find a improved surface road, upon finding such a road, stay there and we will pick you up. Once again, if you are lost, it is not an emergency."
He proceeded to demonstrate the proper way to employ an emergency flare and followed the demonstration by asking, "Are there any questions?" No one had any questions.

Before we began the navigation testing we candidates were given a time of day when the testing would end, this was called "index time". If you made your final point you were to assemble in formation for accountability (head count) before index time occurred. If you had not made your final point before index time, you were to proceed to the nearest improved surface road and wait for the trucks that would return you to the formation.

Most of us candidates had made our final point on the first night of testing and were relaxing around fires we were allowed to build. Shortly before index time we assembled in the cool darkness of a late hour in our sweat soaked BDUs on the fire road. Shoulder to shoulder we stood talking and recounting our nights trials and tribulations. Hut leaders were counting heads and reporting to the cadre who were walking about in front of the formation. In unison, the beeps and alarms of over 200 watches filled the night air. At the same moment the sky above the woods we were all facing filled with the pop and brightness of emergency flares. The fireworks display continued for the next five to ten minutes. The cadre cussed, shot azimuths to particular flare displays and walked into the woods to locate the poor candidates who failed to follow instructions.
The ranks were reduced considerably that night, for failure to follow instructions.

Dark Summer

This has been a good season for black berries, I managed to collect half a gallon from the tree line in the 'new nature preserve'.

For as long as I can remember I have been collecting the delicacies. It became a sort of ritual or rite of passage for me, I would spend those few days before the 1st of July crawling through the poison ivy and brush, swatting mosquitoes, and saturating my old shirts with sweat in the steamy bush of central Indiana to collect the dark berries. I would bring them home in an old milk jug and give them to my mother who in turn would bake a pie of them for my birthday present.
I always enjoyed consuming the majority of the pie with most of a gallon of ice cream.

The summer that my father suffered with brain cancer was very difficult. The disease caused considerable confusion and dementia within my father who had always been so clear of mind and thought. This was an understood condition, all of my siblings had suffered the same, but knowing that fact did little to satiate the pain I felt dealing with his state and time of dying.

I managed to complete my ritual that summer, I brought home the fruit and my mother managed to bake the pie. My mother, my father, and I sat at the small table under the light in the kitchen on Lone Oak Road. My fathers condition left us mostly silent as my mother served us all a piece of pie. The room was quiet except for the occasional 'tink' of the flat ware on the saucers. We all suffered in that silence as my father tried to feed himself. The dark juice from the berries trickled down his hands and onto his palms, he noticed this before we did and in his lost state believed and exclaimed with a great amount of panic that he had cut himself.
Quite a bit of time and consoling brought him back to a state of calm. He would have these episodes often, the troubling part for me was seeing the panic in his eyes during the fits, and what seemed to be shame and regret in those same dark eyes once the episode had passed. It appeared as if he, in a glimmer of sanity, realized the state of his mental condition and health and knowingly could do nothing.

My fathers body was placed in the ground that winter. Many years passed before I collected berries again. I have had black berry pies since then, and I will make pies with this seasons harvest, but the pies don't (and I don't think they will ever) taste as sweet as they did before that dark summer.

Red Light

I believe in finding and understanding the source of things.

Why ask why? I believe the answer to all questions begins before the thought of "Why?".

And in following the above statement my view must turn to things ancient and sometimes forgotten.

I will pose the following question I had while pumping gas into the work van this Spring as I stared blankly across the street at the local Hardees.

Why are the red lights of the Hardees dinning area so appealing in the dark of morning? Are they appealing because in the recesses of me there is a memory of red light, filtered through my mothers skin; a warm glow before my eyes while bathed in warmth, muffled sound, and the rushing of mixed heart-beats permeating my unformed and void person? Are they so appealing because they remind me of my first and last safe haven? Or is that warm glow reminiscent of warm hearths and fire sides. Maybe it is a genetic memory of the light that was cast on walls of safe caves and skin houses for so many thousands of years. If one believes in natural selection, which I do, one could link the physical reaction caused from the feeling of that appealing light to the subconscious knowing that if I place myself near that light I will find not only physical warmth, but emotional, mental, and spiritual as well. If I am near that light I will live. If my camouflage is perfect I will live. If I am fast enough I will live. If I am smart enough I will live.If I continue to live I will pass these traits genetically and hopefully through teaching to my offspring.....

Red Light....