HIDE-A-WAYS, CABINS, WRITING RETREAT, MAN CAVE, WHAT?

'ELIJAH CREEK CABIN'

What better place to be? What more does a person really need? The 'cubby-hole' of the creative soul; the nest of the Black-capped chickadee, the leafy-walled capsule beneath the prostrate elm truck of the woodchuck, the woodstove's fire before the writing desk and rocker chair, the chamber music of Mozart and Mendelssohn, the breezes of early morning and the proud step of a Great Pyrenees Mountain dog beside me? I ask this as if I were some poorly clothed monk chanting his wonders to the distant, ancient, purple mountain peaks. I ask as if I really understood the reasons for 'want' and for 'non-want'. It is a simple place, a cabin, a writer's hamlet of escapism, a refuge from the miasma of the media; -TV, the Internet, conservations of friends, chores on the farm, expectations, desires for the self, the pouring into a glass and the lighting of a fire, the hope for salvation in a world of fright and folly! It seems all so many penumbras studied until there is a light of a more complete kind again.
I enter my 'Chicken Shack' -writer's cabin and look about. The desk awaits me. I hold my laptop in its case beneath my arm. The woodstove will next be lit and another fire of kindling and split log will dance and flicker about the place. The warming flames are needed on such a December morning. My bookcase contains a small and unique hodgepodge of books and research items. The bookcase is located beside my writing desk along the back wall shelves of the cabin near to a small window. I sit in my chair before the desk and turn to the assembly of books. There is Thoreau's WALDEN and Henry Beston's OUTERMOST HOUSE, there is Hemingway's COMPLETE SHORT STORIES and his ISLANDS IN THE STREAM, there is Jack London's VALLEY OF THE MOON and CALL OF THE WILD, there is Dante's DIVINE COMEDY and Kerouac's DESOLATION ANGELS, there is Edwin Way Teale's A WALK THROUGH THE YEAR and NORTH WITH THE SPRING and then there are the research booklets of all design on Cape Cod and the Ozarks of Missouri, etc...
My manuscript (unfinished still - WOOF OF THE SUN) stares at me from the side shelf of the desk. I place my laptop down and begin to type finding the folders in Word 2007. The words come easy at first and then the thinking process slows the prose down. I write strong and true for an hour or so and then quit.
I am lucky to have such a place as this but I await the springtime return of the bird songs and the budding of the greenery and flowers. It is December and I am already impatient.
Again, what better place to be? The sunlight through the cabin's windows and the breath of the winter's voice outdoors keep me in a strange company. I wonder how many writers and artists hide and find a certain place to extract their inner souls as I do? I honestly do believe that 'ART' is man's only gift to the earth and because of this 'ART' is his only true salvation. A bird lands on the outside sill of the window across from where I sit. It is a Cedar waxwing. He is looking through the speckled glass. The sun shines on his bright woody colors. He is wondering about me. I smile. I have a feeling that he knows more than me on such a day as this.    

'SEPTEMBER CRICKETS' - OLD CAPE COD WRITINGS

Of a well lit cafe table,

Provincetown brick-work laughing;

I, for one, would rather sit beneath the umbrella

I, for one, would rather plod along through the sand dune amber

That is destination Race Point Beach from Snail Road.

And, I, for one, would rather watch the ocean cheer and curl and crash

In its immortal rolling dance of shoreline wisdoms.

I, for one, would rather sit myself down beside sacred driftwood sun-blond,

Feet in sand, toes alive, eyes watery bright,

salted air exalt!

Then, the pink sky sunset balcony legs stretched,

Drink in hand, scantily clad, Mozart heard from the inner room;

Earlier, Provincelands Road, I spoke with a toad,

As I leaned against my bike,

Somewhere on the winding path between Herring Cove Beach and Race Point;

The high-tide rivulets and bath-pools of water,

The gentle colors of the Moors in deepness of green and brown and all life,

The smell of the marsh and salt air together like seasoned chocolate,

The glisten of the sun like a sugary staple seen and tasted,

I am wind-cuffed, sun-lightened hair, and salted, reddened skin,

I am a sailor like Ulysses staring silent, awed in nature's drunk,

Without a sword or oar in hand,

"The ocean and land are one mighty Cape Cod!"

Lovers of the canvass, lovers of this place, lovers of this Pilgrim's Landing;

Portuguese Fishing Village, artist's haven, hamlet of diversity;

Sea weathered driftwood in the shape of an arm, wrist and fist;

A classical shape for us,

For we are September Crickets.

-Robert Scott Caldwell

9/24/00

-Provincetown, Cape Cod. 

THEN A PALE GREEN

The Cape Cod rosebud blooms in sacred sunshine on the quiet of a warm, blue sky April day in Missouri. The dogs sleep on the side deck beneath the shady canopy of the torn green colored patio umbrella. Birds sing and speak. The hummingbirds have returned zipping and then pausing in the sky like tiny alien helicopters. They seek the honeysuckle vine and the sugar water of the feeder hung above the fence-line along the front of the house. All remains quiet; a country life peacefulness, -there can be nothing better. 
Earlier in the week I rode with a friend/neighbor in his truck with cattle-carrying trailer pulled behind to a family member's (his family) destroyed house. The tornados having caused a long path of damage through the area north of us in south-central Missouri (Dora, Missouri) and that had apparently made the national television broadcasts, had begun to move off but the roads were nearly impassable in certain spots. Power-lines were down, tree limbs were tossed everywhere and the progress in the truck was slow. My good friend and I arrived at the tornado ravaged home to find many, many other cattle carriers and various trailers parked in the front yard as other friends and neighbors had arrived to help with the damage and the salvage of the possible belongings worth saving and storing. It was a site to behold and it was my first time at seeing a home so 'gutted' and torn into pieces by such a power of a twister. ( I was to learn later that it was actually three tails of twisters having split and then converged again that ripped into the home) It must be added at this time that ALL occupants of the home (Thirteen, I understand) survived by holding out in the cellar of the home. Two people were saved by their fast act of stretching out and keeping low in one of the bathtubs of the place. The two saw furniture and articles moving down the hall as the stuff traveled and was sucked from the home! Incredible. A life-time of belongings destroyed while all stated the same thing, 'At least no one had died as most material items can be replaced'. Still, one can never make 'light' of the loss and the painful frustration. This could have happened to ANY ONE OF US on any given day or night. We are at the edge of 'Tornado Alley' geographically and it is always a deadly reminder of how fragile we can all become in a single moment. Mother Nature can be gentle and Mother Nature can be feirce! 
When the earlier-than-normal heat arrives and then the coolness of a northern air mass collides with it, here in this part of the country, all hell can break loose!  The thunderstorms becomes a hail storm and then silence and then a deep breath of a silent vacuum and then a possible sky of dark turns to a pale pink and then a pale green and it is usually all the warning that any person will ever
get. Look for a funnel cloud! 

So the earth turns and the life we experience is what it seems. Blue Sky follows darkness. There is a dance and a rhapsody. There is a cold rain and a sun-filled pasture of green grass soft and warming and allowing the eye to meander along its expanse and open width. There is the call of the cedar waxwing  and the golf-course size holes dug in the yard by the armadillo. April turns to May, May to June and the summer unravels its blanket of color and heat over us all. In the dusty road the cat strolls looking each and every way. The water snake moves along beneath the surface of the creek's water beside the wreaths of darkening watercress. The llamas relax in the shade of the sycamore tree. And still the poison oak grows. And still the morning glory blooms and climbs. And still the child recalls his mother. And still....

-RSC. {Elijah, MO.}    

ACROSS THE PASTEL SKY

"Gonna storm? Or gonna clear? Hard to tell on this 7am morn', with the wind blowin' the way that it's doin', gees.. and the dogs all up and sounding the way they are, shit, there aint no tellin'!" So, I walk out on the back deck boards and stand and look west. Good ol' west, well, maybe north-west, where all that horrific weather usually will come from, and I wonder. My horse is clicking her heels and the sun just refuses to shine and I'd wish'd I'd put more fertilizer on the south pasture if it is going to rain and run the creeks the way that they say that it's going to."Oh, well." She's poured me a cup of coffee but I'm up my usual hour or so before her to feed the llamas and horse and I'm having a (breakfast beer). "Hell, it's the country! The country life. There's chores and lots of hard work' if you own a farm and a beer in the morning never, ever hurt anyone! There are the 'church-goers' out here and the rest of us. They are nothing but a pile of hypocrites! "Praise Jesus, yea!", I say. It has been in the mid-80's and the sky has been a dazzling blue; there has been the sound of the creek and sound of friends laughter; there has been the RED SOX beating the garbage-yankees on opening night 2010, and there has been a hike or two up (Hudlow's Ridge) with the warm southern winds blowing a good 30 or 40 miles per hour and the wheeling of eagles in the sky watching us as the 'fire-ring' has been built like a mountain man poem! So... rain, billowy, damp, puff of wind, storm brewing, walk across the turned field, the tractor tire leans against the tree, and NOBODY writes like I DO! Rimbaud, -my hero, Hemingway too, H. Miller, Kerouac, (And where is Jack tonight? -Eric Andersen), Scott Fitz, Blaise Cendrars, Emily Dickinson needing a MAN real bad, and Saint Luke -the only one of them with the balls to really write about the crucifixion. Huh? How's 'bout that? City boy? City girl? So the tide rolls in on the Cape Cod sands, the bluebird wings through the Missouri Ozarkian sky, the Volkswagen Beetle rusts in the pine trees of Colorado (mine), the girl is stretched out in bed waiting for a favorite Bob Dylan song, the dogs bark and sniff the earth as they run, the summer waits in line for the spring to finish her magic, and, "I sat beauty on my knee" -Rimbaud; I hear the tree frogs  sing their cute-throaty call at night in the darkness of my Cape Cod Rose Bud plant about to bloom near to my hurricane lamp. -Robert Scott Caldwell.  I hear the voice of America weeping -Walt Whitman. I made all the money I've made in my life, bought all this land, and never worked a day like the rest of them! -E.Hudlow. And so there is an epoch, a rainbow, a stormy morn'; become a sunny noon. There is the promise of all. And just, please, all of you, just get your asses out of this thing called the media and America and the rest of the jack-ass religious nuts (Muslim) and regain your composure and love your life and the nature that surrounds you. For there is a white-tailed fawn in the field, there is a Cardinal boy with his girlfriend building a special nest for eggs and babies, there is a puppy somewhere being born (right now) that is unloved and needs warmth, love, food and a roof over his head, and we cannot save all of the world but we can try! But, please, I ask, ignore the cynics... join the luster. 'Our lives our drunken boats. Grap a beer. Port side!' 

SILVER WOLF

So if you want the mountain to come to you, 'call to it'! If you want the grave to have greener grass, water it with your heart! If you need the band to play louder, strap on a Fender Telecaster, damn it, and scream to the Gods as you strum! There is no telling what a man can do if he decides to do it! Here in the 'wilds' of the Ozarks I have pretended that I have run and hidden myself away, but, alas... it is not so very true. I have risen in the blue-gray soft glow of early dawn to try my hand at this writing 'wagon wheel' only to be disturbed over and over. It is a good disturb of which I speak, but it is a 'disturb' none the less. I think of the old man Henry Miller (Great American author -'Tropic Of Capricorn', to name only one title of many) having left his beloved Paris to make his way into the 1950's BIG SUR country of California only to find his sanctuary diffused by the likes of every know idiot, writer, poet, painter, tourist and the whatnot stopping in to see the famous 'banned' writer as they passed by; to simply 'chat'! It is a wonderful thing and yet a deadly thing. I find myself in many ways very much like the great author and conversationalist Henry Miller. I have my 'Chicken House' or as I've renamed it, 'The Elijah Creek Cabin'. I have this remarkable place in which to stroll across the field, forest and creek towards everyday. It is a small bucolic looking place on my land; this converted 'chicken house'. And it is here I wish to find solitude with my carried laptop and my dog following at my heels ('Eli') and all of the ZEN that goes into being left alone to only create and draw from one's own soul, brain, senses and muse, -ah, these words, words, words. (And to write these words creating a certain lonely and magical self-scripture)

But there are many times;

 I find myself listening to the sounds of tires on the nearby bend of the dirt road and looking up through the sun-filled doorway and windows to see a good friend arrived and ready for talk and a possible 'breakfast' beer. Another pick-up truck to take from me my poet's pen, my writer's dynamic, my chance at making cottonwood trees, tornados, ocean-child dreams, sun-washed pastures, white-tailed deer and bluebirds speak and paint on paper! I am an easy prey! I am a 'roll-over'! I am too nice! I am a dharma angel left to explain all or really nothing at all! It is the frying pan allowing the bacon and eggs to run the stove! I am a flower caught in the free soil of blooming and wilting.

And yet, I have never been happier! It is the tether of friendship. And I am very often left with the choice of throwing these friends/neighbors, -the whole lot of them over-board or chasing the enormous white whale with each of them as fellow salty, drunken shipmates! Ahoy!

So, I stand by the mystical campfire and drink the beers of late morning and afternoon and watch the hawks wheel above in the March sky. I watch the Missouri Moon bathe all in her wash of gold and amber illumination.

Earlier, I now know, there were words to be given a first communion and somehow they ended up at the alter of the agnostic. Oh, heck, there will be other mornings and sunsets to write the genius of the silver wolf. There will, -there will, just wait.  The silver wolf never grows tired. Look, he stands by the banks of the flashing creek. See him?  You must!

Ah-wooooooo!

-RSC. Elijah, MO.

   

IN MEMORY - CASSIDY

IN MEMORY - CASSIDY

( BORN OCT. 20 2008 - DIED JAN. 7, 2010 )

'I will never forget you my great friend. I will always love you'.