Monday, December 11, 2006

The finished product

I'm rather pleased with it. I hope my professor likes it as well. The formatting, of course, does not match with Microsoft Word.


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Time is an interesting construct of man. Something infinite we break down to measurable elements that we can control and monitor through devices on our wrists. Why do we do this? Because if we can define the system, we can name it and understand it and in doing so we give place to the men and women who are, were, and will be in the system. We call this history.
What we do with time, we do with place. Astronomists think of the universe like a rubber band that is stretching and stretching and will sooner or later snap back into place collapsing violently and explosively creating another Big Bang. We take a Universe, and we break it down to a galaxy, a solar system, a planet. We do this to understand it, to define the system. In defining the system we have named it; we call this planet Earth.
On the atomic scale, our definitions and our understandings break down. A scientist cannot measure something without altering it. When we stick a thermometer into a glass of water, we have altered the temperature slightly because the thermometer has a temperature of its own. To a hydrogen atom, a change of .001 Celsius is a drastic shift.
Eons to epochs to ages to centuries to generations to decades to years to days to hours to minutes to seconds to milliseconds to the firing of synapses – we consider a second and it is gone. A planet, a hemisphere, a continent, a country, a state, a city, a neighborhood, a house, and finally down to two men sitting in a room with 68 years and four feet between the two of them.
What I seek to measure in my grandfather is so infinitesimal compared to the scope and range of his memories I cannot help but alter it and watch as my definitions and understandings break down. As I try to take the history and earth of my grandfather and define it into named, hierarchical categories I realize the absurdity of trying to make sense of the history and earth – the system – sitting before me.
I cannot measure him; I cannot take his story, his history, and collapse it into a defined system. I cannot describe 8 days of his life without altering the memory, the measurement, the recollection.


My grandfather is history and my grandfather is the earth. He endures with a stubborn, unexpected strength like a Juniper beaten by time and the elements clings to a cliff face where all other plants would have given up hope. My grandfather is the earth, but the earth is not friendly. He is as harsh, blunt and stubborn as the lowest point of the Great Basin, and tough, unchanging and permanent as the highest point of the Great Basin. He is a wind worn, craggy mountain of the high desert. He has no soft, forest bedding and he has no majestic pine trees. The white hair on his head is not snow; it is a cracked, bristly, dried up Artemisia Tridentata you will find growing on top of a high desert mountain. If you thirst for his solidarity and wisdom, don’t look out south and west to the alpine country, look out east and north where the pine trees stop and the sagebrush begins. You will find a land that is harsh and hazardous and will not apologize for either of these.
My grandfather is this land, and they belong to each other. He has left more footprints on these hills than twenty representatives of my generation put together. The weight of his stories and memories could fill Lahontan Reservoir twice over and feed all the fish as well. My grandfather is this land and he does not apologize for it.
Until the age of six, he grew up in the Old Country. He is Basque and carries with him an ancient, mysterious legacy. His people were there before history was counted and his homeland was there before the peaks of the Alps had matured. He comes from the timeless Pyrenees where his first memory is chasing a chicken near a river. I can see my grandfather as a child running barefoot over the rich Pyrenees clay, dashing into a river and playing boyish games with the chicken – me boy you chicken; I chase you run.
When he came to America, all he left in the Old Country were his footprints and a dead chicken.
He leaves a new set of footprints now. He is old and bent over; he doesn’t have any feeling in his right hand and his knee doesn’t work right either. He has been through one heart attack, two car accidents, and countless farming accidents. He has a calcium growth on his left shoulder from a broken clavicle and scapula and a large scar on his forehead both from a car accident that should have claimed his life two years ago.
We don’t let him walk in the desert alone anymore because one wrong step and we fear the worst. But this is our fear, not his. I once saw him pick up and carry an eighty pound rock – half has body weight and eleven less his years – and with the determination of someone who knows he will live forever purposefully drop it right where he thought it should go. And since my grandfather is the earth, he would know. If my grandfather could have his way, he would be romping through the hills picking up old cans to recycle collecting money to send to missionaries in Spain or Italy or Indonesia. He would be setting traps to catch weasels and skunks and gophers to keep them out of my father’s front yard. He would be in the land everyday collecting more stories and more history to pass onto this generation.
My grandfather is my predecessor, the footprints he has left in this land call to me with a jealous ferocity. I would love to respond and go back to a simpler life, but this is no longer possible. I fear technology has been the fall of my grandfather. The things that have saved his life more than once are the same things that have slowly hastened the waning of my grandfather’s truly epic and timeless life.
But who knows? Maybe if you look hard enough you will see some of his footprints across Spanish Springs and Lahontan Valley. Their call will always remain as long as the earth remains with, hopefully, this question: Would you listen? Would you follow?


The footprints began in Fernley on March 14, 1934. My grandfather had taken a job from his Uncle Dave and would be working for the Spring, Summer, and Fall on Uncle Dave’s ranch herding sheep, tending the cattle and doing whatever else Uncle Dave needed. He had 1100 yearlings and 200 rams, a jenny, and a sheep dog all of which took up 7500 square yards when moving and 140,000 square yards when grazing. (Erquiaga 3)
This trip was one of many. The eight days lasted from Fernley to Derby Dam to Spanish Springs to Cold Springs to Hallelujah Junction and finally to his Uncle dave’s ranch, Plumas Ranch, near Chilcoot Grade and Long Valley Crick. All my grandpa has to say about it is, “I wore a out a good pair of boots in 8 days. I must have walked and run 250 miles back and forth holding back the yearlings and kicking those rams in the rear to make them catch up with the yearlings. That old Apache Army Scout (I forgot his name) anyhow, it was said that he could run 125 miles in a day. I don’t think he had anything on me from Fernley to the Ranch.” (Erquiaga 1)
“Did anything happen to you at all in those eight days?”
“Well, there was some snow up on top of those mountains by Fernley. I ate some of it to cool off and it gave me three boils.” To hear my grandfather tell it, those eight days are the most uneventful of his life.
The history flows from my grandfather like a spring, impossible to plug. It moves as freely as water running down a mountain swirling up and down and into every crevice of his memory without regard to whom is listening or how long he has been listening. Time is not a linear realization to my grandfather; time is a dense cloud of intertwined memories in which he exists. Listening to my grandfather speak is like following the complex weavings of a dream catcher. Paula Gunn Allen said in her essay The Sacred Hoop that the difference between the way American-Indians view time and space from the way non-Indians view time and space lies in a spherical, connected concept versus a linear, hierarchical concept. (Purdy and Ruppert 66) My grandfather is not an Indian, but the similarities are striking.
As I sit and listen to my grandfather telling stories I watch the water flow over rocks, and down the mountainside. I predict the course, but listen in contemplative silence as it shifts dramatically in time and space. Time and space. History and earth. How long for you, abuelo? How long before your history ends and you are buried in the earth? How long before time catches up with you and your space is occupied by a younger generation?


I think about his life, its progress and its passing. I think about what it means to be two generations away from a man who has done so much and lived for so many people. I think about how he feels when he looks over old photograph albums and consider the amount of history he has seen and been apart of; I imagine that history following him like an invisible, dense cloud of memories whose power emanates out of and around him. I think about this land and how closely he is tied to it. I think about him and his intense Christianity, and how much he has given and sacrificed to be apart of that spiritual mission in this area. I think about his faith and its irrevocable impact on my life.
Then I think about my life, its progress and its passing, and I wonder, is the path I walk a fitting memorial to the footprints he has left? Could I follow one who lasts and endures with absolute disregard for time and the wiles of everyday life?
I once wrote my grandfather a letter. How do you do it, grandpa? How do you stay so faithful after God took your wife, your eldest son, your youngest son, and your life in Hawthorne? How do you stay so faithful?
My grandfather once wrote me a letter. How do I do it, Johnny? You just keep plug going asking the gracious Lord for grace and strength. (Erquiaga 2)
Like a relic that should have passed with the heroes of Wagnerian operas, my grandfather remains with a mythical strength. But the magic from the rancorous and heroic Old World has gone. Now life looks at my grandfather as someone who should have faded when easy living took the place of the pioneering spirit, but life will not kill my grandfather no more than a gust of wind can crumble a mountain; wars, ranching, farming, Depressions, traveling, herding, catastrophes, rattle snakes, farming equipment, drought, car wrecks, the elements, and living have all tried. Time and the constant patience of the cosmos will take my grandfather’s life because the only thing that will ever destroy the earth and outlast history is time.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

don't read even bother reading this.

So I don't have emough time to start my homework or anything else related to academic success, but I do apparently have enough time to get on the internet and bitch about how hairy my back is getting.

Blah blah blah. What to say what to say. I guess I'm

well, shit. I'm just going to do some homework that I just thought of.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

I have been reading a lot of psalms

The world piled up hatred against me.
My enemies have laid traps for me;
They have sunk arrows deep into my heart
And fear stripped away my inhibitions.
I proclaimed my hatred of You and
My mouth poured blame on You,
“You have done this to me!
This is Your hand for You hate me;
You have lied to me,”
I said in my pride.
My pride and has blinded me,
My life is foolishness;
I have contemplated the ruin of my way
And my heart has raged against You.
Yet it pleased You mock me,
It pleased You to test me,
And You did not withhold Your hand.
The hypocrites say,
“It was for this man’s father’s sin that he suffers.”
“His own sin has done this to him.
This is his reward.”
But You have whispered in my ear.
“This is for My glory.
This is for My glory.”

Wait patiently on the Lord
For has heard you!
The days of your mockers are numbered
The days of their pleasure are numbered.
Soon, the Lord will come down in strength
And break the bow of my enemies.
Soon; wait patiently
For the Lord loves those who wait on Him.