Thoughts While Listening To Azure Ray...

Bedrock, hold me blameless in each of these faithless disturbances.

See that I wouldn’t fall in love anew each day were it not for the perfect ways of them. Know that I wouldn’t wander and drift astray were it not for the sweet images their swaying breasts and shifting hips brush upon my mind. Believe that I wouldn’t be swept along into hopeless distraction were it not for their long soft hair and their sparkling eyes. Trust that I’d not feel such sweet compulsion were it not for the electricity of their every touch.

Cornerstone, hold me faultless for seeking to satisfy the ravenous depths of this famished heart.

Touched By Lakshmi...

She led me up the rope ladder into the half-lit meditation room beneath the oldest and roundest tower of Mas des Rigolos. Within that small space, three sticks of Nag Champa incense burned like monkey joints before a stone carving of Durga set upon a wooden milk crate which served as a sort of makeshift altar. The slow sonorous pluck and drone of a sarod paired with a sarangi ran tendril-like notes out into the air. I recognized the piece – Raga Sindhi Bhairavi. For a long strange moment, I felt totally removed from everything which I recognized as home. Reaching backward across an outstretched quilt as she climbed in after me, I fell beneath her into some kind of rapturous haze.

“You are needing to remove your trousers for this to work properly,” Pradeep’s twenty-three year old sister Lakshmi Shankaran whispered into my ear as I lay staring up into the drifting smoke.

Who was I to resist such a marvelous offer - after all, she was only visiting the States for a few days on her way to study with relatives in São Paulo. Having nothing to lose, my fingers worked easily at the oversized western oval buckle of my wrinkled brown leather belt. Unbuttoning the fly of my mud-caked canvas work pants, she pulled them gently down, careful to leave my flannel boxers in place, and tossed them away into some shadowed corner beyond the frame of my awareness. Rolling me onto my stomach, she sat down before me in padma-asana and looked into my eyes.

“What exactly are you going to do to me?” I asked as she unscrewed the lid to what looked strikingly similar to a jar of petroleum jelly lettered with Devanagari script and adorned with some blue-skinned crown-sporting Hindu deity. “You’re starting to make me nervous – in a good way.”

As the lid came away from the luridly colored container, she dipped three slender brown fingers inside and smiled with the corners of her lips. “Don’t be concerned, Babuji,” the young woman stated confidently and directly with just a hint of flirtation in her voice. “In a moment, you’ll most certainly be feeling more wonderfully than you can imagine.”

“Lakshmi,” I overheard myself speak into the patchwork. “Are all the girls in Chennai as interesting as you?”

She laughed quietly and then caught herself. “No, I am quite certain that all the other girls of Chennai are thoroughly lacking in polish and refinement and uniqueness. And also, they know nothing of the secret which I am about to reveal to you. They don’t know the trick to Neem Ghritam.”

In that instant, she pulled her three fingers from the little jar and I saw that they were covered in what appeared to be some sort of honey or gel. Hitching up her raw silk wrap with her other hand and rising to her knees, she moved along beside me until, straddling my body, she seated herself over the small of my back. Her hands felt like warm fluid magic as they kneaded up and down my bare legs, working hard against my relieved flesh.

“You have certainly done quite a number to yourself. There are not many blisters, but your lower legs are very red and inflamed,” she said sympathetically. “This must cause you a great deal of itching.”

“Well, there’s no denying that I’ve got a pretty good case of poison oak. First time since I was sixteen years old and got it on my hands after roaming the woods behind the Shull place,” I replied, remembering how embarrassed I felt going to school with my swollen and blistered fingers. “Actually, my ankles itch so bad that I can hardly sleep. But when you forage the banks of the Willamette in shorts, I guess you just kinda take your chances.”

Closing my eyes and allowing myself to completely enjoy the feeling of her strong youthful fingertips massaging the length of my hamstring, I thought that I could feel the ten-thousand prickling hotspots cool somewhat. The irritation which had kept me scratching ever since I’d returned from casting line after absent steelhead seemed to abate. Things felt promising for the first time in days.

“So does it really work, Lakshmi? Or is it just something about your touch that has this effect on me?” I asked as she turned around and reached over my head for the jar, the curve of her breast brushing carelessly along the nape of my neck.

“Ayurveda rasayanas such as Neem Ghritam always have a good effect on poison oak, Babuji.” She laughed unselfconsciously in playful response. “But they most certainly convey more enjoyable sensations when I am the one to administer the treatment.”

Imagining "Project Dory"

Her lines are elegant yet utilitarian - which are exactly the lines I find most attractive.

Potential uses are plentiful - setting out crab pots in some salt-water bay, drifting along with lines in the water hoping for salmon or sturgeon, lounging on the water of one of the high Cascade lakes.

Space will need to be cleared for the construction of the vessel.

Money will need to be allotted.

Transport to water will need to be considered.

More on Project Dory later.

Hunting Toward Early Evening...

Sunday morning, five Mortgage Lifter tomato plants set into the ground outside the kitchen window, he stood next to her and ran his thumb along the base of her spine wishing for a smooth sensation, an easy brush loaded with secret intent, the feeling of an effortless connection which was bound to be denied him by the cracks and calluses of his skin. As he moved his hand up the back of her blouse, he could feel his coarseness catching on the bump of each vertebra and knew by the way she adjusted her posture that she felt it too. Wandering from the awareness of intimate touch, he realized that the years were beginning to tell upon him in ways which were less temporary, more permanent. Unlike in years past, when the hardness would fade, when some suppleness would return to his hands in the autumn after summer’s labor had gone down the road, he understood that age had recently and decisively hardened all the youthful softness of his caress.

She was sixteen years younger than the Farmer and had no good reason other than a random late-night dance floor collision to be standing in front of his stove wearing a loose wife-beater and a thrashed pair of denim coveralls. With yellow morning sunlight shining through the blue glass of the old Ball jars on the sill, casting harlequin rays across her bare tattooed shoulder, she fried crackling bacon in an heirloom skillet he’d been given by some long forgotten relation. He moved behind her and running his fingers up through her thick shocks of bright violet hair bit her hard on the curve between collar-bone and neck. Turning slowly to face him, she drove the blade of the spatula she’d been using into his sternum and pushed him back toward the refrigerator, head cocked to the side, laughing as hot pork drippings ran down his belly.

“You’re a creepy, dirty, stupid old man,” she said in an unfamiliar tone which seemed half-flirtatious, half-challenging. “But other than that, you’re not so bad.” And as his shoulders hit the white metal door, she backed off toward where she’d stood before.

“I made a pot of coffee while you were asleep,” he said while motioning toward the percolator with his chin. “Help yourself to whatever you like. I’ve got to go up the creek this morning and check on some crawdad pots I put out night before last. Go whenever you’d like, or stay if you’d like. The family won’t be back for another week. See ya.”

Pulling his rubber galoshes from underneath the blue hydrangea overhanging the mud-caked front porch, he listened to the sound of her humming some unidentifiable tune as she continued making up her breakfast and thought that this sort of thing can’t go on forever. Where she feels the wax of her oats, he feels the hinged lid of age closing over him and squeezing every physical capacity, every trick which had long drawn sweat-soaked bliss from the clutches of lovely strangers, deeper into a strong-box of irrelevant skills.

“I suppose things will eventually just settle down of their own accord,” he mumbled to himself as he swung up into the front seat of the Westfalia and buckled his belt. And even as he said the words, he thought of Ben, his Uncle Rob’s short-haired pointer. As a young dog, he could hardly be held back from taking off across the sage-brush after the scent of some ring-necked pheasant, hardly restrained against the basic hunger that drove him to hunt. Ten years later, though he’d perk his ears when the boys would carry their shotguns past the mat where he lay, he stopped running out into the wide fields. Stiff-jointed and grey-haired, he’d just stare out at the high desert and howl lamentably into the evening.

The Scent of Running Water...

I do my best running in the darkness, out past the city lights, halfway to the reservoir on the gravel shoulder, not knowing where the potholes are, going by feel and reflected moonlight. Existence becomes a mobile sphere three strides across, everything else falls into shadows and invisibility. Swaddled by the secrecy of night, I pass before the empty pastures like a barn owl, ghostly and silent.

Out there tonight at twenty past ten, just shy of a quarter mile past the old grocery where we used to buy our fishing lures, where the highway curves slightly to the east above the streambank, I caught the scent of the Silver Creek running unseen, though I couldn’t describe it. What words can encapsulate the smell of washed down soil and tumbled basalt, of dead water-skimmers and salamander bones – not any I know.

Steelhead Fishing & Other Self-Deceptions

Old black cottonwood reaching up into the dim rays preceding dawn. Slow eddy simmering with fallen leaves and algae in constant orbit against a crumbling bank. Distant diesel engine throb of the Wheatland Ferry straining toward Polk County across a wild spring flow. Rapid-fire slap of mallard wings racing north toward some sandbar islet up around the river bend. And looking out toward tangled bottomlands revealed in dappled half-light, the good Farmer waiting for some tired steelhead to strike – borrowed pole in one hand, flat bitter beer in the other.

Though his friends wouldn’t know by looking at him, he’s not so much fishing and drinking on the edge of the thick Willamette as examining the swirling river of life, struggling to understand the way of its going, to catch some glimpse of an enduring present tense, some evidence of what has passed, some hint of what is to occur within a fluid motion where everything and nothing arise and dissipate simultaneously. Perhaps, if he’d the ability to hone his perception to an ever-finer point, he’d find that so-elusive eternal moment in some overlooked gap: edging the swollen areola of a river bubble, exactly where the faintest ripples disappear into flat water, hidden in the tight empty spaces between molecular bonds.

Elegant osprey rising from a jumbled nest on a silver-grey snag, soaring off in search of some small life to crush. Half-felt vibration coming up the line from a silver spinner whirling unseen through the clutching current. Voices of friends complaining that plenty of fish are jumping but none seem to be biting. Tok-tok-tok of a woodpecker somewhere back in the brush. And feeling a passing tug, the good Farmer nodding his head, comprehending the chaotic laughter of the flood.

The Stimulation Question...

"Pradeep,” I asked half rhetorically as we worked to prep the ingredients of our partly-foraged supper, “do you find beautiful women or beautiful food more stimulating?”

His response was preceded by a pause just long enough to cause me to wonder if he’d perhaps not heard what I’d asked.

Cocking his head to the side and setting down his santoku, he responded, “Boss, I’m not certain that I’m understanding your question.”

“Pradeep, it’s a fairly simple question, but let me try explaining myself a bit differently.” I rubbed the crown of my head with my left hand and continued, “If I’m standing by the cyclone fence mulching the blueberry patch and a young woman with sandy hair walks by in a long draping skirt which the sunlight shines through just so, I’m liable to find her quite stimulating. It is quite likely that my whole being will react strongly to the sight of her and the imaginings which stem from seeing her. Do you follow me so far?”

“Yes, boss. I’m certainly able to imagine that. Have you actually seen this lady in the neighborhood of Mas des Rigolos?”

“I have, but that’s nothing to do with my point.”

“In that case, please continue with your explanation of this subject,” young Shankaran replied before pulling on his pair of leather driving gloves and going to work on the sack full of stinging nettles.

“Do we agree that a woman such as the one I’ve described is stimulating in the extreme, arousing to the point of distraction?”

“Yes, quite so – although there are no girls as shapely as those we have in Chennai…”

I cut him short as he began to ramble off on a tangent, as he frequently does. “That’s not the point, bud. And what’s more, you already know that I’ve got very broad tastes where the women-folk are concerned, so it isn’t even worth debating – I’m sure that your home-girls are every bit as exciting as a garden-variety Oregon hippie chick.”

“Please accept my apologies for digressing, it is a habit which I struggle to control. Go on with what you were so kindly explaining, boss.”

Taking stock of what we’d littered about the kitchen, I began to flesh out the whole stimulation question once again. “Pradeep,” I said, “what do we have here?”

“Begging your pardon, but you’ve already lost me once again.”

Perhaps telegraphing my growing impatience more that I should have, I snipped back, “What are we working with in this kitchen? I want you to name the ingredients we’re using and tell me what they do for you.”

A bit flustered, he plucked roughly at the leaves and stems in his hand. “I’ve these nettles we cut from the roadside by the edge of that river. What was the local name for it?”

“That was the south fork of the Molalla River between Glen Avon and Kegger Rock.”

“Yes, so I’ve these stinging nettles. They’ll go into the big soup pot. I can smell the stock reducing down on the range.”

“And what does that smell do for you?”

“Do for me?”

“What sort of response do you have to plucking those leaves, to smelling the aroma of the veg stock, to imagining the final result?”

Closing his eyes, he said in a tone somewhat softer than he'd normally use, “My mouth waters, the muscles in my stomach tighten, and I feel some manner of excitation. I become markedly aware that I’m really quite famished.”

“Now you’re on the right track. What else?”

“Well, there are the morels which are cooling now after their sauté in ghee. They seem a bit fleshy and they have a delightfully moist sheen of butterfat on their limp honeycombed caps. They remind me of tripe. Somehow, I think that your American puritans would not have approved of this sort of food.”

“Why do you say that?”

“They have a very vulgar look about them. One might think they would bring sinful thoughts to mind.”

“Do they bring sinful thoughts to your mind, Pradeep?”

His response was hurried and embarrassed. “No, it isn’t that they’ve brought sinful thoughts to mind. But it does occur to me that they might do so if I were to study them too closely.”

“What else?”

“We’ve the oyster mushrooms which I pulled from that fallen log above Butte Creek Falls. They are fascinating to me; I like to run my fingers across their tops. The texture is almost like the smooth, soft, tight skin beneath a woman's breast. Their shape is elegant and appealing to the eye. I imagine them in an omelet with melted paneer and dried chilies. It would be a wonderful dish with warm, oozing textures and fiery heat.”

“And, at this moment, how completely absorbed do you feel the imagined experience of what it would be like to consume these things, to taste them, to breathe in their scents, to chew them, to let them slide across your tongue, down your throat, into your belly?”

Smiling at the edge of his lips, he moved his head in that inexplicable back-and-forth bobble movement which seems to be an East Indian habit. He chuckled as he confessed, “I see what you mean now. All of my senses are aroused and my mind is entirely fascinated by hunger and desire and grasping. How interesting indeed…”

As his words trailed off, I put my original question back into the conversation. “Pradeep,” I asked once more, “do you find beautiful women or beautiful food more stimulating?”

Again taking an extraordinarily long pause, he seemed to juggle things through his mind, through his nervous system, through his emotional wiring, and then shrugged pathetically. “Perhaps you might share how you would answer this question?”

Realizing that it was a strange question after all, I responded with the first thing that came into my head. “Well, I suppose that it is a toss up in the end. You can’t be sustained by a woman. And you can’t make love to a bag of stinging nettles…”