Note: This recounts my time at Holden Village during six weeks in May and June of 2003. While it is an accurate description of the atmosphere and the milieu at that time, the more time that elapses since then, the more salt you should take with this account.
 

In May and June 2003 I spent six weeks on sabbatical at Holden Village, a Lutheran retreat center in the Cascade range in Washington state. The location, in a deep valley just south of Glacier National Park, is so remote it cannot be reached by car, only by a three-hour-plus passenger ferry ride plus a forty-five minute bus ride. There are no phone lines and no radio or TV reception, and thus no internet access. (A satellite phone and helicopter landing site exist but are used only for life-or-death emergencies.)

Operated since 1962 as a non-profit retreat center, the village is open year-round, occupied by a staff of about 70 during the winter and by up to 450 staff and guests during the summer. Except for a few quiet winter months, the village offers a variety of classes, craftmaking and leisure opportunities. Physically, the former mining town consists of about 40 buildings from dormitories and multi-family homes to a dining hall, large gymnasium and rec center, and a crafts and library building, as well as numerous pieces of a physical plant that includes a hydropower generating system, large vehicle maintenance facility, and a full carpentry shop. The whole town, built in the late 1930s by a mining company, was given to the Lutheran church when the mine closed in the late 1950s.

I had been laid off from my last job in the software industry in October 2002. I seized the opportunity to finish writing the novel I had started several years before, and completed the first draft at the end of the year. During the first few months of 2003, I made fitful revisions to the novel, but wanted a time away from home in a place where I could concentrate on my writing with few distractions. I had visited Holden as a guest a few summers before, and knew it was possible to stay there fairly cheaply for a length of time. Best of all, the fact that there were no phones, no internet, and no radio and TV meant there would be few distractions, and I would be able to finish my second draft before my unemployment insurance ran out and I had to go out and look for another job.

I wrote to Holden Village in February 2003 and asked them if I could come there for several weeks; eventually it was arranged that I would come the first week in May and stay for six weeks under a "half work/half pay" plan they offer for sabbaticals. Under this arrangement I would work eighteen hours a week in the dining hall kitchen and have the rest of the time free for my writing. I asked for a dedicated work space and was given the freedom of a double room, ordinarily occupied by two people, to myself. There I could live and write and -- an important part of my creative process -- take naps whenever I wanted.

On May 3, 2003 having packed my laptop, a new pair of rubber boots (I thought it would be rainy), and clothes for a variety of weather, I boarded a train that took me from the Bay Area to Seattle, then took two different buses to the town of Chelan, Wash., a small tourist town at the bottom of a fifty-mile-long lake.

5 May 03 -- Chelan, Wash.

In a motel in Chelan, the jumping-off point for Holden Village. The boat leaves at 8:30 tomorrow morning. But til then, I'm keeping the TV on "Baseball Tonight" and "Real TV."

To get here, I took a train from Emeryville to Seattle -- 23 hours -- stayed overnight there, and then took two buses -- total 5 hours -- to this small town. Best thing about the train trip: sleeping whenever I wanted. I took a xanax an hour before getting on the thing, and I slept blissfully not only just about all night, but whenever I felt like it the next day, such as during the boring flat part of Oregon between Eugene and Portland. Second best part: snowy trip over a mountain pass between Klamath Falls and Eugene. I don't know the name of the pass but going through a snowy forest of firs, with a foot of snow on the ground and in the air, was beautiful. Worst thing about the train trip: utterly boring dinner companions. I didn't expect to talk to anybody on the train, but you're forced to in the dining car, because the dining car workers make you sit down wherever there's an available seat. So I sat with two boring retired couples, the second worse and stupider than the first. And with the second couple, there was an (Iranian? Indian?) software nerd, and I thought we could bond a little, but he utterly ignored me. I tried to keep up polite conversation, but they were hopeless. So I had chocolate cake.

Second worst thing about the train trip: the food on the train, except for the chocolate cake.

True to form, the last couple of hours of the trip were the most excruciating, as we crept slower and slower through Tacoma and toward Seattle. To top it off, the way the train arrives in Seattle is: it pulls past the station and into a tunnel, then backs into the station. The only thing alleviating this was the utterly cute black girl who sat next to me from Portland onward, replacing the young but dull-faced blond girl who I never once saw get up from her seat in 20 hours.

I spent the night at a Days Inn on the edge of downtown Seattle, and slept pretty well again. Surprisingly, I woke up at 6:10 just like that. Okay -- so I went and had a leisurely breakfast in a nearby classy hotel. The weather was gorgeous this morning -- rather cool, but beautifully sunny. Instead of taking a taxi, I dragged my sixty-five pound suitcase the five blocks to the shabby (is there any other kind?) bus station. After buying a ticket, I dragged it back three blocks to the nearest Starbucks, since the bus was not until 10:30.

I slept again on the bus, waking only to cross the Cascades on U.S. 2. The road is relatively flat even as it rises, but then right before it starts climbing seriously, you see the most dramatic peaks ahead. Down on the road in the valley it's sunny and maybe 60 degrees, but looming very much overhead you see dramatic snowy crags wreathed in clouds and snow showers, We encountered a few flakes as the bus careered up the grade. But just when I thought the mountains were getting serious, we crested the pass (el. 4180) and started down all at once. When we were down amongst the green grass once again, I resumed my nap.

Finally we arrived at Wenatchee, a town I once set a little story in when I was a teenager, under the serious misapprehension that it was deep in the forest. What it is is the center of apple orchard country, and they had just had the Apple Blossom festival. (No signs contained the word "festival," for some reason; it was just called Apple Blossom, period.) The local newspaper contained excited tales of the teeming festivants, for whom the event is a sort of Mardi Gras, in the sense that they do the thing where the boys give the girls strands of beads and the girls flash their tits -- that is, the girls yank up their shirts and bras, briefly revealing their breasts, in exchange for the beads. I guess the more beads a girl wears, the sexier she is supposed to be, or something. Conversely, if a girl were walking around wearing no beads it must be because no one has asked her to flash her tits. Anyway, the newspapers were full of accounts of it all. My favorite bit was when a reporter asked the owner of a local crafts shop which sold the beads to teenagers about the "requested ban" on selling beads -- apparently the police had asked local shops not to sell them. The owner of the crafts shop actually laughed and said, "Yeah, right -- when there's so much money to be made?"

I got on another bus to come to Chelan, and here I am. I got a ride to the motel from the proprietor, and then I walked the two-thirds of a mile back into town and bought a few things like a flashlight. I walked downtown again after dinner.

It feels so long since I sat down at this computer. I didn't even open my files for my novel for the last two weeks; it feels strange to type at all. I had to force myself to write this much.

Tomorrow, the boat -- and an end to newspapers, television and all.

6 May 03 -- Holden Village

Last night, in the motel, I had a dream in which I was telling Christine about a dream. In that dream-with- the-dream, Christine, Philip, Jenny, Cris, Sara and I -- Jews, unbelievers and believers alike -- were taking part in a mass. We were all part of the procession or something; more than that, we were all worshipping together.

It was odd that I included Philip only in that, of the group of people I remembered, he was the only one I'm not very close to. But the fact that he was there just made the group more inclusive. On the boat this morning, I wrote my first postcards. Telling Christine about the dream, I wrote, "I guess you are all accompanying me in some secret way."

The boat, which left Chelan on time, arrived ten minutes late at "the port of Lucerne," the drop-off point for Holden Village. That spot has also apparently become the site of a lot of cabins belonging to a boating club from Chelan. Those are down by the lake -- more than ten miles on a winding gravel road away from the village site. The road, which I and several other arrivees traveled in a school bus driven by a hearty old guy named Ed, climbs 1100 feet in the first two miles, and an additional 1100 feet in the remaining eight or so. Along the way we passed a little snow on the ground, then more and more. There was none on the road, which was perfectly dry, but a goodly amount in the forest -- a foot or so.

I traveled up with a family of four, a couple of spare people, and a guy who looked about 19. We pulled into the village -- as people refer to the collection of buildings that make up this place -- and were greeted by a welter of teenage girls who were all overjoyed to welcome back the 15-year-old, as if she were some kind of rock star. (I learned later the girl was a long-time resident, and the girls who welcomed her were, like her, students at the tiny Holden School.) They made as much fuss over her as I would have expected them to make over the cute 19-year-old guy.

In the village there are some large snowdrifts where snow had slid off roofs. Across the road from me, for instance, next to a hundred foot-long building, is a hundred foot-long pile of melting snow shaped like a long wedge, 18 inches high on the short side and six feet high next to the building.

I was placed in a room which, even though it contains two bunks, is mine alone through my stay here, because I am on "sabbatical." And it has the three items I required, a table, a chair, and an electrical outlet. It's also heated much better than I expected; unless they decide to turn off the heat, I won't have any trouble working in the room at all.

I ate lunch with the angelic boy, whose name is Luke -- he was assigned to the "maverick" team, which is the name for the gung-ho young men who do all the hauling and heavy lifting -- and with the bus driver Ed. While we ate, other people kept stopping by and saying a few words to Ed about logistics -- such and such was happening today at a certain time -- as if depending on him to keep it all straight. I asked him what he did around here besides drive the bus, and he said he was merely the head bus driver. But clearly people treat him as some kind of father figure. There are many, many complex relationships here, including cross-generational work relationships and friendships, that go back years and even decades in some cases. I know that to be true from hearing little stories on my first visit a few years ago, when I spent only a week here as a "guest" (not doing any sort of work at all). People drift in and out of here for various periods of time, beginning in some cases when they are children, and continuing as teenagers (like the ones I saw today) and young adults (people in their 20s, like many working in the kitchen) and then getting married and bringing their own kids here. That old guy Ed may have driven buses here for ten or twenty years, in which case he may have seen kids grow up and bring their own kids back. It's that kind of place.

Nevertheless, they have room for people like me, who have only been here in the most limited way, or Luke, who's never been here at all. The two of us got a lot of orientation, and I got my work assignment. For my 18 hours of work per week, I'll be in the kitchen six days a week from 9 to noon, and have only one full day off. I was rather hoping for more full days off, and had even been wondering if they would instead give me a schedule of three six-hour days instead of six three-hour days.

But I'll see how it goes. This way I can get down to work on my book at the same time every day. I envision having a bite of lunch myself, taking a nap in my room, and then working steadily for the next four or five hours.

In any case, I was given a whirlwind tour of the kitchen and pantry facilities by J., a hippie replete with a full beard and long patchwork skirt. I had already gleaned the news in staff orientation that eight people, mostly from kitchen staff, had been suspended a few weeks ago for smoking dope. Given the appearance of J. and the other kitchenites, most of whom affected a similar Deadhead/grunge look (though no other boys went so far as to wear a skirt), this was not hard to believe. But I'm also guessing that many of the outcasts took much of their expertise with them, so the kitchen might be a wee bit shorthanded not only in bodies but also in experience. However, I was also told that the outcasts are going to be permitted to return "with a clean slate" on May 14 -- a week from tomorrow -- so any shortfall should be made up then. It might be a tough week for me, though, if that kitchen tour was any indication. The place is well organized, and it would be easy for someone who already had some aptitude for kitchen work to find their way around -- to commit to memory, for example, the storage locations of tomatoes, cheese, prepped foods, leftovers, knives, aprons and beans -- not because they have a better memory than I but because the tour I was given would have made sense to them. To me it was like giving a tour to a dog -- perhaps even less effective, since a dog would at least remember what things smelled like. I'm afraid my success in the kitchen will depend on the people who are working with me -- whether or not they can effectively train and supervise me while getting their own work done. If they leave me to flounder, it won't be a pleasant experience. But surely they are used to taking people like me and putting us to work. I shouldn't worry too much.

As for my room and work area, it's great. It lacked only storage for my clothes, but I got some empty cardboard boxes out of the cardboard box disposal area -- it was part of the kitchen tour -- and made little shelves for myself, just as I did in college. The desk, four feet by three, is perfectly adequate. It looks directly out a south-facing window at another, similar dormitory, the one with the wedge-shaped pile of snow in front of it. Behind that building -- which, since it is situated a little lower on the hill, I can easily see over -- is a stand of fir and larch trees, and beyond that, across a ravine, a splendid snow-capped mountain rises eight or nine thousand feet. Firs cover its flanks in attractive, uneven patterns, with treeline fairly high up. A sharp-looking ridge extends to the southeast to another peak that looks even higher. During lunch Ed told me that during the winter months the sun doesn't even rise over this mountain; it's only seen for an hour and a half through the saddle between that peak and another mountain to the west. In mid-February the sun is finally visible for the first time over the peak, and this occasions a festival, called "Sun Over _____ (name of peak, which I forget) Day," during which they have a cookout, a bathing suit contest and volleyball in the snow (the temperatures being, of course, well below freezing). That's the type of good clean fun they indulge in here. As for my personal vices, the drinking of alcohol is allowed in "private areas," according to a pamphlet, so I won't have to feel guilty about having brought a fifth of cognac for my own consumption.

Time, already, for supper, at 5:00. I should go, the better to be sociable.
 

I went to dinner, which was a tasty pile of stir-fried tofu and vegetables over brown rice -- even the menu matched the esthetics of the kitchen staff.

Sitting at my table (it's all "family style" with rectangular tables of eight) was someone even more alarming than the kitchen staff -- a hippie my age, or only a little younger. What was scary about him was that I was too young to be a proper hippie; I graduated from high school in 1974, and the culture during my time in Austin was decidedly post-hippie hippie. (Sign seen at 1977 gay rights rally: JEWISH DYKES FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. We were already moving into the era of assertive queer activism, and that was before AIDS.) He had long hair, a beard, a medallion and a headband -- like a character in Easy Rider or a Cheech and Chong movie.

Things got worse. At the nightly Vespers -- the liturgy for which apparently changes night to night -- several youths donned straw hats and overalls, and led, using exaggerated hillbilly accents and instruments including a washtub bass, a service called "Mountain Vespers." The tunes were simple and sounded all right, though each number sounded rather similar to me, and the children present seemed to enjoy it a lot.

Very cute, I wanted to say. But the lack of seriousness by all involved and the inauthenticity of the whole hillbilly presentation made it all seem silly. Why hillbilly, I thought -- this is the Cascades, not the Appalachains. And these are suburban kids, they aren't from any mountains at all, even these. Why the playacting?

Afterward I took a short walk, up the road to the point where snow still covered it, and came back -- less than a mile. The afternoon was warm, but the air here deep in the valley cools rapidly. Even though sun still gleams on the peak of ______ Mountain as I write this at 8:00 pm, and it must have got up to at least 60 degrees around 4:00, it's already in the low 40s. I know because there's a thermometer across the way. My room was actually too warm when I returned, and I shut the heat off while I finished making the bed and arranging my things.

While I walked, I realized that instead of worrying about my kitchen job, I should be thinking about my book. After all, I haven't thought about it at all in a couple of weeks; it's doubtful that I'll be able to just sit down and get underway without spending at least a few hours going back over my notes. However, I don't anticipate the kind of hesitation I experienced in March and April, when I was more or less afraid to start tearing up Part 2. That's all done now. I have 40 days in which to work; by the time I leave, I really must be done. In fact, as I've said before, I'd also like to come out of here with notes on "Moving Out."

I haven't said that Cris and I had a big argument, the same day she got back from her vacation in Canada, over the getting-married conundrum. I felt like I was living through what I want to write about in "Moving Out" even before I write word one. Indeed, perhaps it's too current in my life now.

Last rays of sunlight on _______ Peak: 20:12:47. I know the peak slightly to the southwest is a little higher because it had sun on it for about a minute and twenty seconds longer.

7 May 03

Last night -- my first night at Holden -- I went to bed about 10:15 and had a number of very vivid dreams. I hadn't had any cognac, by the way, or anything else to put me in an altered state. It was just the combination of the new atmosphere, the altitude, and the slightly excessive warmth of the blankets.

First I dreamed that I was watching a film I'd seen before. It was a German or Dutch or Scandinavian film, something from the 90s combining stylized direction and costuming with realistic acting. I dreamt that I was watching the end of the film, and it seemed so familiar, it was like a favorite film I'd seen at least once before. The film was about a sort of negative utopia in which advertising had replaced drama and writing as literature; people treated television ads, which had extended themselves until they were the length of music videos, as carriers of the primary literary culture, as books and plays do now. In the end of the film I was watching, a piece of an advertising sign, consisting of an outsized arm and hand holding an automobile tire, was handed down from above to someone who was apparently being honored. As he carried this artifact through stately halls, an orchestra and chorus performed the sprightly advertising jingle that had become so famous about the tire.

There was also a very short scene in which two women, dressed very stylishly as if for tea, exchanged a passionate kiss.

As I was watching this film and enjoying it so much -- my mind making it into a complete film I'd seen and loved before -- a friend happened along, Jenny or Christine. I had them watch the end of the film with me, and then restarted it -- I was watching on DVD -- insisting they watch the first few scenes with me. I don't remember now what the first few scenes were.

I woke up after this, after only a single sleep cycle; it was only midnight. I could hear people still coming to bed in the dorm. The notion of a culture that revered its advertising to the exclusion of other creative forms, and the images from the film (though they were quickly melting away, and this morning I can remember only the smidgen described above), resounded through my mind, and I wrote down a little note to remind me, because I might be able to use the idea in a story sometime: how advertising becomes the primary art form in a society devoted (one supposes) to consumerism.

Then I went back to bed, and during the night had another, even more vivid dream. I was with Christine, walking through a residential neighborhood, and she stopped me and said, "Look -- know what that (house) is?" I saw it was the house she had been living in during her affair with me (not really -- only in the dream), although now (in reality as in the dream) she has sex only with women. The house had been repainted other colors but we still recognized it. ...[cut dirty part of dream]... I ran until I reached a ravine where a crumbling freeway was being torn down. It was, I realized, a freeway that had formerly run along Sunset Blvd. in San Francisco, and I was in a spot in Golden Gate Park, among shaggy pine trees, where the freeway had ended. Scrambling among the broken pieces of concrete, I was afraid of being crushed when they shifted as bulldozers and breaking machines worried them.

I woke up again, had some water, got back to sleep again. Toward the end of the night I had a third memorable dream. Again I was taking part in some liturgy. Later I was walking along the streets of an unknown city -- perhaps L.A. or a part of Oakland I'm unfamiliar with. A Thai Airlines van dropped some people off at a laundromat, and I realized that laundromats were a standard in-city depot for Thai Airlines for some reason. I went into the laundro and kept getting in the way of an apologetic man who was transferring his laundry from washer to drier. Off to the side there was a red hooded sweatshirt that someone had left behind in the laundro; nobody wanted to take it because it was a gang's colors and wearing it would be dangerous, so it sat there, perfectly clean and wearable.

That was the end of the third dream. By now it was a little after 6:00 and I decided to get up finally, but conscious of the fact that everyone in the rooms around me was still sleeping, I spent the next 45 minutes simply typing this account of my dreams.
 

8:25 pm -- Today was my first full day at Holden and my first day as a kitchen worker. All my fears proved groundless; there were enough other workers, with enough expertise, and they were able to handle the fact that I didn't know much about what I was doing. There was another fellow there who had only one day on me, an innocent, moon-faced 18-year-old boy who expressed enthusiasm about almost everything.

I couldn't quite count the number of people working with me, because it seemed to change over the course of the morning. But there seemed to be between four and seven others, doing various things, and some overlap between our shift and the next. There were enough people working that they gave me a break from 10:30 to 11:05. That meant I missed the post office, but I had just enough postcard-rate stamps left to mail the letter to Cris I composed last night. So that went out today.

When I got off at 12:00, it was lunchtime, and after that I retired to my room and worked for about three and a half hours on chapters 27, 29, 31 and 33 -- which constitute a certain phase in the relationship between the Gene and Dolores characters. I had worked on redoing those chapters before, and never felt like I really got what I wanted. But today things fit together well, and now I feel I'm ready to move on to the next section, i.e. the next phase of their relationship.

In addition to the bits illuminating their relationship, I cut a great deal about motel maintenance. My original idea was to depict this horrific battle between Gene and his fear or repulsion at doing the physical work on the motel. But it never did really work, and today I cut out a great deal of what remained of that.

I knocked off a little before 4:00, took a two-mile walk, and had a quick shower before dinner. After the interlude, we had another gathering masquerading as Vespers, this one worse than the last. We all went outside and stood in a grove of trees, the mosquitoes excitedly feasting despite the coolness of the early evening, while some people said some things about the spirituality of trees. Even the hillbilly liturgy last night had standard texts; this was simply some earth-spirituality gunk. The good thing is that it was short, and by 6:50 I was back in my room.

I read some, then worked on my notes a little before knocking off. I'm tired. I'm going to read and then get into bed.

8 May 03

Last night's dreams: First I dreamt that Christine was showing me her new apartment, a beautiful suite with wood floors and exposed beams in a lovely building with Moorish details. I noticed that the wooden posts on the sides of the fireplace had hexagonal bottoms, and pointed it out to her, for she had not noticed before. Then I looked up to see if the hexagonal theme was reflected in the ceiling, and saw that from that room you could look through a skylight into the lobby of the building and see people coming down the stairs.

Another dream contained several anxious scenes: a hostage crisis at a Russian airport, including a big explosion and bodies flying; a harried hotel clerk who would run off to see about something while his phone rang off the hook; and a comic book story about a roommate the artist had had with a psychopathic personality. I knew the type well from my days in Austin.

I removed from the bed one of the blankets I'd had on the previous night, when I'd been much too warm, and I slept a little better, I think, though the heat in the dormitory was still up way too high. In the morning I went about the room naked, it was so warm, and when I got dressed to go to breakfast, I opened the window to let in the 40 degree air. I'll wish for some of that heat late in the afternoon.

Before my kitchen shift, I'll spend some time looking over the chapters I have to work on today.
 

10:00 pm -- The Vespers service tonight was the first out of three that had any meaning at all. Using Psalms, the verses of a single hymn, and a few contemporary readings, it had as little to do with the traditional Vespers texts as last night's did. But it was formed in a way that allowed one to worship.

Afterward there was a weekly event, the Community Meeting. In fact it is a meeting for staff members, of which I am one by virtue of my kitchen assignment. In addition to the time spent on the usual announcements one would expect, there was a good deal of time devoted to process and to events around the suspension (no one uses that word) of the eight kitchenites for smoking dope. Next Wednesday their suspension is lifted and some of them will evidently be coming back, and much is being made of their return.

After that, I waited around for the Compline service that's supposed to happen on Thursday nights. I didn't know the time, I thought it was 9:00 or 9:30, but I was pretty sure it was supposed to happen in the same room as our Vespers and meeting. But nothing ever happened. I waited around until 10:00 to make sure I wouldn't miss it. In the process I made a spectacle of myself, I'm afraid, skulking around the building while others chatted. There's this guy on staff who is obviously deranged. He skulks around muttering and treats items of clothing as pets, stroking them and muttering to them. (He was here the first time I was at Holden, too. I was alarmed to see him on my first day here this time, as I had forgotten all about him, and now here he was. He's on the housekeeping staff, according to the pictures board. Everyone simply ignores him.) I was afraid that in hanging around the Koinonia building anxiously waiting for Compline I was behaving like him and that other people were staring at me and comparing us.

Speaking of housekeeping, I signed up for a short shift on my day off, Monday. Just to contribute to the commonweal.

9 May 03

A little ill at ease last night, I didn't go to bed until 11:00, instead of at 10:00 as on the two nights before. But even after I turned out the light, I was a little restless... [Finally] I slept straight through to 6:00. So in fact I slept better than on previous nights.
 

10:55 a.m. -- They told me to take a half-hour break from the kitchen. Some people were still sitting in the dining room having conversations, and I sat near a group but not quite in it, hoping someone would speak to me and make me feel a part of things. But no one did, so I emptied my coffee and came to my room to read. I wonder if, having been here now for 72 hours, I haven't missed the window of friendliness where, having provided my name, my job here and how long I'd be around to any number of polite staffers, the others have decided I'm simply dull and can't be the object of any more attention which might be wasted.

After breakfast I took a two-mile walk -- it's a mile down the road to the bridge over the creek, I was told -- and then I spent my shift chopping green peppers; I'm about to go back and finish the job.

10 May 03

Yesterday I found myself chopping onions next to Rolf, who wrote a "hymn" that is supposed to be sung throughout the summer; it's supposed to express the summer theme, which is based on some Isaiah and Revelation texts. I asked him how finished with it he felt. Pretty finished, he replied. I said that for some reason I had a yen to hear it in three. He seemed extremely surprised. "Three-four time?? Well!"

"That would probably slow it down a little," I said. He said he'd think about it.

It rained on and off between noon and about 6:30, not enough to make things muddy. I didn't get as much done yesterday on my book as I should have; I mostly made notes on ch. 42. There was supposed to be a "barge shipment" coming -- i.e. a truck full of freight that had made the last leg of its journey here by barge. I was told that when the truck bearing the shipment arrives, they ring the bell and all the kitchen crew and all the mavericks form a line stretching from the loading dock into the various storerooms, and hand down items along the line to their proper place. This is done by someone at the head of the line verbally calling out the name of the storeroom the item goes to, and as the item is handed down the line, the destination is repeated until it gets there. I wanted to see this feat and take part in it, so I sort of hung around after dinner until the truck finally did arrive about 7:20. Then the unloading all happened much as predicted. After the things for storage in the hotel -- the dining hall complex -- were unloaded, the truck pulled up to one of the lodges and we unloaded some large items for the remodeled building, including two gas ranges and a refrigerator.

By participating manfully I hoped to draw attention to my usefulness and cheerful willingness to help out with things. I hope people noticed. I don't want them to get the idea that I'm just some social dud.

The other day at the Community Meeting, someone mentioned that "The Wizard of Oz" would be shown tonight, and somebody said something about a "performance" related to it. This evening I found out what the "performance" activity amounted to. One guy spent the whole day feverishly making costumes for a live version, which turned out to be merely a five-minute dash through the story, as acted out largely by kids. I think the problem was that people weren't as familiar with the story as the guy wanted; he probably envisioned some kind of queer enactment where people would know all the little details and imitate the actors, but we didn't get that. It was still sort of fun, but it seemed awful short in comparison to the hours of effort he put into making those costumes.

Then the film played. The last time I saw it was in 1984 with Catherine, her mother, and 700 screaming queens in the Castro Theatre. Seeing it with fifteen kids and fifteen adults (most people skipped the event, to my surprise) in this setting was definitely different. I still looked at it with queer eyes; it's impossible now not to see the gay longing for home, for love, for companionship, and for recognition in the movie's themes. And it was also interesting to see in light of the banishment of the kitchenites and their soon return. I thought I might write an essay about it.

I got to sleep about 11:20, the latest yet, because I was trying to finish my Graham Greene book. The only dream I remember involved a lot of fighting and conflict and even a trial. There was this red-haired girl in a café, and when I rejected a sardonic comment she'd made, her friends came at me with large black-and- chrome rifles and arrested me. Throughout my trial she kept pestering me and annoying me; I was powerless to do anything until finally I just thrust my fingers into her mouth to shut her up. ...[cut dirty part of dream]... Now we were at a party with all her friends; I realized it was my big chance to escape, and I ran out of the house and down the street. She followed me, begging me to come back; I was unlocking the door to a garage where my car was kept, and I said that if she wanted me, she would have to come with me then and there, and not go back. She was painfully torn by indecision. There the dream ended.

Today is Saturday, and I have dish crew after my lunch shift. Then I really must get down to work on ch. 42.
 

3:30 pm -- Dish crew lasted until 2:30. Then I just sort of collapsed on the floor of my room. I had worked continuously from 8:00 to about 12:00 and then put in two short shifts in the dish pit.

Today's humorous kitchen event developed slowly, like the good joke that it was. Toward the beginning of the shift, some people were commenting on how a pan of beans had been a little soapy, and were wondering how that came to pass. The leading suggestion was that there had been soap residue in the pan when it was used for the beans. The shift progressed. Most of the time I was chopping onions, but some of us kneaded bread for a time. The bread had been mixed the day before, risen overnight, and now had to be kneaded and baked in pans. I wasn't a very successful kneader and chose to go back to chopping onions for the rest of the shift.

After 11:30 I switched from kitchen crew to dish crew. A little before 12:00, while I was just taking a break for lunch, a chorus of howls rose from the kitchen. Eight kitchenites were standing and laughing in the area between the pass-through window and the range; one of them was holding a piece of the bread that had been baked during the morning.

They had discovered the solution to the mystery of the soapy beans: someone mixed up the container of dish soap with the container of canola oil. They used identical containers and were close enough in color and consistency that no one had noticed that the oil that was used for the bread was actually dish soap. Much hilarity ensued as we all tried to figure out whether the mistake extended beyond the beans and today's bread; possibly yesterday's bread was also tainted.

It meant throwing out all the bread that had been baked that morning -- none had been eaten except those first few bites by one of the kitchenites -- and making a lot of jokes all through lunch such as "We can use less toothpaste tonight." Crackers, not bread, were served with the soup. Later in the dish pit it fell to me to wash out the breadpans and the plastic containers that are used to store bread, and I said loudly how easy they were to clean. At least one person laughed.

At 12:30 several busloads to high school kids arrived. This is one of the "May Youth Weekends" during which groups of Lutheran high school-age kids and their youth group leaders come for a Saturday-to- Monday stint. It meant a second seating of 160 for lunch. This is actually the second such consecutive weekend, but I was not here for the first one, having arrived only on Tuesday.

This is my 5th day here. Dinner's only an hour and 20 minutes away now -- I napped. I'm not sure I can get much done on my book, but I'll try.
 

10:20 pm -- I did end up putting a few hundred words to the beginning of ch. 42 -- just a bare outline of events. Sometimes I look at what I've written and I see how sparse, how mean it is in terms of detail. The phrase "a wealth of detail" is a shopworn cliché, but for good reason: it suggests that a lot of detail enriches a story. My novel, on the other hand, is heavy on conversational trivia but very, very short on scene-setting and sense of place.

But anyway, I did make a start, which is more than might have been expected given that I was not able to start until 4:00 or so.

The hundred-plus teenagers -- most of them between 13 and 15, I think -- are suddenly everywhere, often accompanied by adult leaders. After dinner there was a long interim with worship at 7:30 instead of 6:30. I sat down to read at my favorite place outside the post office/store, a little covered wooden porch that is shaded at any time of day. A posse of youth set up shop on the loading dock about 60 feet away, led by their obese leader. He was both tall and fat, like a football player, and had an unctuous smile and a voice that carried. It was all right while they were joking around, but when they started doing a Bible study, I got up and moved to another place.

Passing another group, I heard a girl remark, "I'm sorry, but where it says, 'And life more abundantly' -- well, I have a hard time imagining life being more abundant" (than it already is). Good point.

In a conversation at dinner, and in overhearing the fat youth leader's remarks, I became conscious that the adults who came with the kids, if not the kids themselves, are veterans of many visits here. They feel like they've been here a million times and know the place forwards and backwards. This gave me a feeling of vertigo when I considered the thousands of people who, with whatever range of experience here that amounts to their justification, must feel the same way. All I was trying to do was be friendly and reach out to people whom I viewed as guests, but they made me feel like I was the interloper.

My feeling grew more pronounced when I happened upon a large wall display put up last year on the 40th anniversary of the community. Pictures, articles and paragraphs -- most of which I couldn't read on account of poor light -- memorialized influential leaders and staffers from decades past, people who are not only not present now but unknown by probably 90% of the current staff. It's discouraging to think that you could work here season after season, or year after year, and yet be almost or completely forgotten once you leave and the rest of the staff, which has all been here less than you have, turns over itself. It was also depressing to think that the young, vibrant people from the 1960s and early 1970s are now middle-aged people in their 50s and 60s, many of them no doubt very conservative about gender politics if not social politics.

At 7:30 there was the Prayer Around the Cross service. When I was here in 2000 -- the timeline on the wall confirmed that was the year -- this service used Taizé music. Now they're using other tunes which I suspect were written by someone here. It's not that most of them are unsingable -- most of them are perfectly singable -- but they don't lend themselves to repetition, which is an important element in this type of service. [Cut cranky comments about worship services.]

After the service I took a short walk, and then (an error in judgment) had some ice cream. It meant standing in line with a dozen bubbly and stupid teenagers; watching them interact was as painful as being a teenager had been. But the real problem was that I shouldn't have had ice cream. After the dinner of bean burritos, it sat heavy on my stomach, and it didn't taste good enough to be worth it. I had some yesterday and should have let it go at that.

Finally I sat down to read some more. I finished the Greene book and have started on Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. I read the whole first part and started on the second. Certainly is a tour de force. The library has Crime and Punishment, and maybe I'll read that next. I've read it once but a very long time ago -- 1985, on my camping trip with Catherine. (I went car camping with Catherine! It really happened, but what an idea!)

11 May 03

7:30 a.m. -- I dreamt of a long, complex violent episode of "The Sopranos." It seemed to be set in Hollywood.

Because I am on sabbatical -- apparently the only person in the village at the moment on that status, as far as I can tell -- and needed a place to work with some privacy, they gave me a double room and no roommate. This morning as I lay in bed thinking about getting up, I realized how good I have it in my room alone, not having to worry about disturbing a roommate, being able to nap in the middle of the floor as is my wont, and turning out the light whenever I want. It's quite luxurious.

I was also thinking of the liturgy here. To paraphrase the Jewish lady complaining about the food at a Catskills resort, the worship here is terrible, and there isn't nearly enough of it. Why can't they have a morning prayer every morning at, say, 7:00? A few people would probably come to it. Same thing with Compline -- why isn't it offered every night? (Except maybe on Saturday nights when the place fairly rocks with all the teenagers.)

I could volunteer to host these services, of course, but then I'd be putting myself on the spot. Probably no one would come, and then I'd feel bad -- and have to keep doing them. Just like the situation at St. Francis. Why am I always the person who wants more opportunities to meditate and pray? Thank goodness for Sara, who gets it, and who instigated the morning prayer at St. Gregory's. I guess I was influential in that, because I told her of morning prayer devotions back when she was converting and I was doing it regularly. She started the habit and then turned it into a communal thing.

I showered and shaved, now off to breakfast and a walk. Brilliant sun this morning.
 

9:30 pm -- Physically, I've had a strenuous day. Much of my kitchen shift was devoted to the production of almost three dozen meat loaves. When I walked into the kitchen, a bunch of people were standing around kneading the ground beef, raisins, curry powder and whatever other vegetables; I joined them in breaking up small pockets of still-frozen beef. J., the head kitchen hippie, then assigned me major responsibility for the rest of the dish's production. I had to fill loaf pans, 35 of them, with the meat mixture, and pour over it a milk-egg mixture. Then I had to put them in the oven. It all sounds simple, but it was fraught with small mistakes, rework, and a constant anxiety about my meaty hands: hands that have touched raw meat are considered contaminated, so anything I touched had either to be disinfected instantly -- such as the handle to the walk-in fridge -- or put into the pile of dirty dishes. I picked up four cookie sheets because I thought I'd need them to set the loaf pans on, realized I couldn't use them, but still had to put them in the dish pit because they were contaminated.

Once the loaves were finally in the oven and the extensive contaminated area carefully cleaned, my job still wasn't over. I had, an hour and fifteen minutes later, to remove them from the oven, check their temperature with a meat thermometer (165 degrees was the standard for processed meat, I learned in the food safety class, and J. intended to stick to it) and then figure out how to remove each loaf from the pan and serve it. I've always hated cooking anything more complicated than a pizza -- anything more than an inch thick, that is -- because it's so difficult to know whether or not it's actually cooking. Of course, that was what the meat thermometer was intended for, and sure enough, at the end of 75 minutes when we removed some of the pans from the oven, they were only 145 or 150 degrees at their center -- so back into the oven they went. I had to get help in removing and replacing them in the oven, because they were damned heavy -- they were cooked in pans that were connected four together, with the resulting object of meat and metal weighing at least twenty pounds -- and the oven was at shoulder level. A carnival of removing, measuring temperatures, and replacing heavy loaf pans ensued. And then when we finally determined that it was safe to serve them, we were faced with the task of getting the loaves, which were each at least ten inches long, out of the pans and onto platters. There was a good deal of grease mixed with extra milk-egg mixture that had not cooked or boiled away, so we had to deal with that. The final presentation of the meat loaves on the platters left a great deal to be desired. But onto the tables they went.

I was exhausted at the end of all this, not to mention greasy and sweating. My shoulders and arms were sore from hauling around those hot, heavy pans. So I took a shower and lay down for a while. Then I went to the second sitting of lunch, and actually the meat loaf (called here bobootie for some reason) tasted great. But I didn't season it or even mix the milk and eggs, so I couldn't take much credit for it. Nevertheless I asked several people whether or not they had liked it, and they all said yes. So aside from sore muscles, I felt all right about it in the end.

After lunch I sat down on the porch to read. It was a splendid day, over 60 degrees and sunny with almost no breeze. A woman who arrived about the same time as me, a German named Heike, asked me if I wanted to go hiking, and I said yes. It meant I wouldn't get to work on my book today, but I was so pleased that she asked me, and besides, it was such a gorgeous day. We went up Copper Mountain to the Honeymoon Heights area -- the site of miners' houses which are no more. Little evidence remains that there were ever houses up there, but the point was the hike. Much of it was through deep snow, though, since that is the north side of the mountain, so hiking was rather strenuous as well. Heike was pleasant to be with; we talked about books a little. We were back in less than two hours, but then I was really tired. I did nothing for the rest of the afternoon except lie down and read a little.

After supper was the weekly Eucharist. The place was packed with all the teenagers, and someone make a miscalculation about how hot it was going to get in there. They must have realized their mistake part way through, since I thought I discerned a slight cooling toward the end of the 75 minute-long service. The bad part was that I was crowded in between people. Since I was the only one on that bench when I sat down, I can only guess that the people who came and sat on either side of me must always sit there. It was like being in the middle seat on a 737, only there was no little air vent over my head. I got so warm that when it was finally over, I sat outside without a jacket for twenty minutes in air that had cooled to 48 degrees.

Tomorrow's my day off, though I have signed up for some housekeeping in the morning. I shouldn't have done that, but I didn't know how tired I'd be after today.

12 May 03

7:10 a.m. -- Three staffers in their 20s are standing across the road from my window in front of the "Hike Haus" preparing for a hike. Two of them are the usual nondescript young men; one is the stunning girl with honey-blond hair who is the Head Maverick. The two guys have snowboards strapped to their packs, which are sitting on the ground. The three of them cluster and apply sunscreen, or maybe zinc cream; then at the last minute the two guys take off their outer layers and stow them. The girl stands so regally, so self-assured, so relaxed. She doesn't shuffle or move in jerky movements like the guys. She's like a cat, every movement is minimal and purposed. Then they shoulder their packs and set off; she doesn't have a snowboard, which just makes me love her even more. In just a moment they're out of my sight.

All this took place in utter silence from my perspective. The double-glazed windows and the insulation in this remodeled dorm are extremely effective. That's one reason it's been uncomfortable when the heat has been on too high -- there's nowhere for it to go.

I had a dream in which Cris and I were involved in some real estate transaction in New York. We had met a real estate agent in a restaurant, but after dealing with him for some time, she discovered the guy had no credentials at all and was simply impersonating a genuine realtor for his own perverse enjoyment. Also in the dream was the fact that they'd moved the onramp to Hwy. 101 near our house several yards to the west.

It seems my dreams are becoming duller. I have been sleeping a little more deeply; and last night while getting ready for bed, I drank a full shot of cognac. I didn't wake up until 6:40, which is at least a half hour later than I have been.

It's my seventh day here; not counting my departure day, I have 36 more days to work on my book. Today I'll finish chapter 42. I'll have to write to the end, then go back and put in more detail. I must take a workshop of some kind in providing detail.

The morning is beautifully clear, like yesterday, but it looks like there's more of a breeze.
 

7:50 pm -- I spent two hours, from 9:00 to 11:00, vacuuming in one of the dorms just vacated by the departing youth. (They hadn't actually departed but were singing up a storm, most of the time, in the auditorium across the road.) I tried to vacuum as meticulously as I could, so I was only 2/3 of the way finished when some folks came along and I was relieved by J., the kitchen head.

I got a fair amount done on ch. 42 during the afternoon, but my work was interrupted for an hour by another training session I had to attend -- fire emergency training. A good thing to do, and I didn't begrudge the time. The guy wasn't a very good trainer, because when he was done people still had a lot of seemingly basic questions.

Then I worked some more, went to supper, took a shower, and went to another really bad Vespers service. In this one, the camp director, Janet, gave a talk on some workshops she'd just attended. The theme was supposed to be forgiveness but I didn't learn a thing about forgiveness. Most of the time I was spacing out, watching the other residents to see if they were paying attention any closer than I was, and thinking that Janet reminds me of a boss I once had for a short time.

Afterward I took my standard two-mile walk down to the bridge and back. The afternoon and evening turned coolish, with a breeze but not a chilly breeze like the one we had Friday, I think it was.
 

8:10 pm -- Just as the sun was beginning to set, I saw the three hikers -- the ones I saw leave in the morning -- walk past my window in the other direction. They had gone to "Northstar," I saw on the hiker signout sheet. Wherever that is, it must take at least 5 hours for three super-fit 25-year-olds to hike there, snowboard for 5 hours, then spend 3 hours hiking back down. Total exactly 13 hours. They looked pretty tired, but in a healthy, glowing, super-fit 25-year-old way.
 

9:25 pm -- I lay on the floor a little bit. I felt vaguely sleepy but not enough to go to sleep. I was a little surprised I was logy after my two-mile walk, but I realized it was more an emotional state than a physical one.

I left my room, thinking that if I could move and breathe a little, I might change my emotional state. But that didn't really work. Instead I went into the periodicals room and read the latest (May 10) New York Times and part of an issue of Tricycle. It became hard to concentrate after a while, so I came back to my room. Walking up to the dormitory I thought, well, it's too late, I'll just bag it. Entering my room, I thought, why don't I just be a little compassionate with myself? And if I were, what would that look like?

The Buddhists say desires are incessant; desires cause suffering when we realize our desire is not going to be satisfied (even if the desire is very vague); therefore suffering is unending. End desire and you end suffering.

But desire has a different meaning in the Christian context, according to Fenton Johnson, whose book I just read (can't remember the name at the moment). Examining the various aspects and qualities of celibacy (from both a monastic perspective and that of the secular priest), he concluded that desire -- sexual and otherwise -- is a gift from God. Its holy quality is in the potential it has to unite one with the desired other, that is, as an expression of God's desire for union with us. This desire is easily profaned, but the point is that desire is not inextricably linked with suffering. Johnson writes as someone who has studied both Zen Buddhism and monastic Christianity.

Right, so anyway, what's that got to do with me and the prospect of being compassionate with myself?

One of the things that is bothering me here is that no one seems to recognize me. They seem to have the capacity to recognize only two types of people: those like themselves, and/or those who contribute effectively to the commonweal. Since I can't be one of the former, I have to seek the latter quality in order to be recognized. And I am anxious about my ability to be a good contributor.

In a way, I'm a little disappointed with myself. I feel I ought to be less dependent on the approval or recognition of others. But I'm not; I'm subject to it. So that's one of my desires: to be accepted here by my mates.

I was going to say it's a good thing I am at least on partial staff, since otherwise there would be almost no opportunities for me to earn people's acceptance. But then I realized that if I were totally on sabbatical and not on staff at all, I would have no way to gauge people's acceptance of me, other than whether or not they sat with me at meals. It's being on staff, and treated in the kitchen like an outsider, that draws my attention to the whole dynamic.

My other desire, of course, is to make fantastic progress on my book. I don't see what could possibly be wrong with that; but I do remember someone saying that it might not be a good idea to get too attached to goals around my sabbatical.

13 May 03

6:30 a.m. -- I never really got, last night as I was writing in my journal before I went to bed, to the part about being compassionate with myself. I stated what were my desires that might be making me unhappy -- to be accepted by others here and to make fantastic progress on my book -- but I never really got around to being compassionate with myself. Whatever that looks like.

Perhaps it looks like me telling myself that I am just a writer, I do not have to be the most fantastic kitchen worker, all I have to do there is try my best with humility, be kind to people, and concentrate on my writing. That if I do those things it matters less how people are treating me or reacting to me (I must have a strong need for others to demonstrate love!).

All right, I'm going to try for an hour to write on ch. 42.
 

1:15 pm -- I was able to do some writing before breakfast. I finally got scene 42c off the ground. It's headed in the right direction and I'll finish it for sure this afternoon, since I have no appointments.

At breakfast I got my cereal and coffee and put it down at a table at which only Gary, the visiting "spiritual director" pastor, was sitting. He was eating and studying a book. When I came back with my toast, Liv, the friendly, warm kitchenite who's beautiful in a non-imposing way, was sitting with Gary trying to speak Spanish with him -- it turned out that the book he was studying was "Spanish for Dummies." They sat there and tried to awkwardly converse while I ate. Then a woman came along whom I recognized but didn't know her name or job. She said hello to them, and then realized they were studying Spanish and said, "I'll go to a table where they're speaking English." I wanted to say, "Hello, I speak English," but it would have only drawn attention to me and put her in the position of sitting and conversing with someone she didn't want to. So I didn't say anything and she went off to sit somewhere else. Thus passed a typical incident in the dining hall -- typical as far as I'm concerned.

I started my work shift half an hour early, since if I don't go for a walk after breakfast there isn't that much to do between 8:00, when I finish eating, and 9:00, when I'm supposed to start work. My shift passed uneventfully; I chopped vegetables for the most part, and performed other, even more insignificant, tasks. It was the first time a shift had felt routine. Chopping with me were Karl, the one guy who is gay for sure (he wears a short with a big rainbow triangle on it, along with the word Pride), and Bruce, the Catholic Worker activist who is the one who made costumes for the "Wizard of Oz" night. I was positive he too was queer, but the other day he made reference to a woman with whom he had had children; later I asked him about that obliquely and he didn't say anything that could be construed as queer. As for Karl, he did refer today to his parents finding out he was gay and refusing to pay for his college tuition (the subject was where he went to college). But he didn't even say the word gay: he talked all around it without saying it, yet it was quite clear what he was talking about. If Bruce hadn't been there I would have said, oh come on, why don't you just say you're gay, for God's sake? But as I find myself frequently saying the wrong thing and making statements that come off the wrong way, I kept my mouth shut. I put my foot in my mouth later when he was answering the question of how many brothers and sisters he had. He revealed he had two sisters who were identical twins, and that they were starting to differentiate from each other as they grew into being teenagers. "Is that sort of a relief?" I asked. He didn't understand me at all. "Well... it's fine," he stammered. I meant to make a joke about how twins can sometimes be formidable and even intimidating in their alikeness, but it went so far over his head that I don't even know if I can use the words "over" and "head" to describe where it went.

Also I said something that could be construed as criticism of the weepy girlfolk music that was being played on the kitchen stereo, and somebody went to change it. I shouldn't have said anything; I think Anne put it on and I want her to like me, and she shows no signs of doing so. In fact she's so carefully polite and correct with me that I have the feeling I must have already pissed her off about something. She did ask me, though, to help her serve lunch, and if she despised me, she probably wouldn't have asked my help at all.

So I am completely preoccupied by positively adolescent relationship anxieties. I think it's because almost all these other people are between 18 and 25 (Bruce might be in his late 30s) that I'm reverting to the anxieties I had when I was that age. Because I'm thinking precisely as I would have in this situation if I had come here as a 22-year-old. The only difference is that now I'm able to keep a tighter rein on my tongue than I would have then; then I just blurted out whatever struck me as funny. Of course, as my comment to Karl about his sisters shows, I'm not always successful.
 

4:25 pm -- I finally finished ch. 42, after having (finally) an unbroken afternoon to work. I ended up patching some dialogue from ch. 40 -- where I had moved the scene where they go to a movie for the first time, and she asks him whether he's serious about her -- to ch. 42, where I wanted them to really talk about that. The conversation, coming now after the swimming scene, marks a turning point in their relationship.

I feel so much more satisfied with my work on the book than I have in several days -- during which I struggled with the chapter. I'm going to have to be a wee bit more protective of my time, I think. Having less than four hours in the afternoon doesn't work nearly so well.
 

It's almost 9 pm and the almost-full moon has risen. Apparently in two days, on the full moon, there is supposed to be a total eclipse of the moon as it rises. So it says on the schedule, which doesn't say what activity, if any, is supposed to accompany that event. The way this place is, even though there are twice-daily announcements and many bulletin boards, they still convey only the most basic information about what goes on; most information is through word-of-mouth, exchanged during meals or work shifts. Not that anyone tells me much at those times.

There is a fascinating social strata at Holden Village. At the bottom of the social hierarchy are guests -- people attending workshops or conferences (we just had 170 youth and youth leaders depart, and 40 church secretaries arrived the same day) or as part of a church group. Next come short-term staff with no other connections to the place or experience here -- like me. Next come longer-term staff who are here for a year or more; they are relatively high in the social hierarchy because they really run the place. At the top of the hierarchy are the people who combine a stint of service with a long history of being here. For example, one of the kitchenites is here for just two weeks, but his parents actually met here in the 1960s and he has come here more times than he can count. It's sort of like being able to trace your ancestors to the Mayflower or to the Revolutionary War. The more entrenched you and your family are, the higher your status.

Laid against this hierarchy are a number of cliques among the long-term staff. The attractive and fit twenty-somethings, the hippies (some overlap there), the fortyish women in their XXL denim shirts, the avuncular retired pastors. Then there are cliques by job function, each of which has its own place in the hierarchy. Housekeeping and the laundry have the lowest status; next comes office work, then the kitchen, then the mavericks who do all the day-labor, heavy-lifting type of work (wood chopping, moving, hauling), then the skilled trades like carpentry or maintenance of the basic systems (water and power, septic, vehicular) are highest in regard.

But like I say, your Holden heritage is what really counts. A twenty-year-old kitchen worker who has come here every year for the past ten years and has already spent one or two winters -- the ultimate way to earn status -- socially outranks the most skilled mechanic who is spending his first ever month here. Because everyone knows the kitchen guy, has stories to tell about him, and can converse with him about various in- jokes and lore. (By "everyone," I mean of course the members of his clique.) In contrast nobody knows the mechanic yet. He may be crucial to some infrastructure project, but if he's not part of a clique, he's practically invisible.

So it's a fascinating study in anthropology and psychology. But enough about that.

Tomorrow Act III of "The Prodigal Kitchen Workers" will commence. I'm a little anxious because their return means that a lot of the people who have been working in the kitchen will go back to their normal jobs, and the Prodigals will go back to their jobs in the kitchen -- with me. Most of the Prodigals were here throughout the winter, so they have much more status than me, their banishment notwithstanding. Or so I assume -- we'll see.

Now it's dark and the moon is high over the mountain outside my window; the air outside is getting rapidly colder, but I have the window open anyway because they remodeled this dormitory recently and the insulation and double-glazed glass is so effective it gets really stifling in here otherwise. Also, with the window open, I can hear the waters rushing by in the creek about 70 yards away. Since it's spring the creek is high and full and loud. I keep my window open until the last minute before I go to bed so I can hear it.

14 May 03

8:15 a.m. -- Start of an interesting day. I woke up unusually early and stayed in bed until a little after 6:00; then I got up and put some laundry in the wash, then took my two-mile walk before breakfast, at a slower pace than usual. On the way back, especially, with the breeze in my face, I realized it's going to be a much warmer day than normal.

I sat at breakfast with a man who said he was here for the Lutheran Staff Association retreat that started two days ago. As he talked, I got the idea he was the Eastern Wash. bishop who is basically leading the group. Well and good. He started talking to others at the table -- all of them older than me -- about some book I keep hearing about, and about how his family had lived at Holden for years and his daughters had contributed to the book. His kids "were really shaped by this place," blah blah blah. Another Holden legacy story.

Today marks -- in the words written on the menu board in the dining hall -- The Return of the Exiles. My kitchen shift will be over by the time they arrive, thank goodness. Then I'll go out, with everyone else, I assume, to greet the incoming bus. At the same time I'm supposed to have my meeting with the sabbaticals coordinator. But she said it would be a really short meeting. I don't think I'll share with her my insights on the social hierarchy at Holden.

There's someone in this dorm who snores. At least that's what I assume the noise is, an extremely low-pitched grating rumble, the sound of an amplified bass voice heard through walls. But the sound comes in intervals that are too regular to be speaking, and there are no radios here. So it has to be snoring. The sound somehow vibrates right through the walls, and I don't think it's right next door either. I've never heard a really loud snorer before and it's pretty remarkable. Earplugs wouldn't do you any good if you had to sleep in the same room.
 

1:15 pm -- At 12:30 I had my little meeting with the sabbaticals coordinator. I thanked her for making it possible for me to work in my own room, stick to a routine by keeping the same kitchen schedule, etc. She seemed to be treating the meeting a little perfunctorily, as if it were something she just needed to cross off her list. But at least she thought of doing it, and I didn't have any complaints to speak of.

At 12:45 the bus arrived bringing the returnees. About 40 residents -- a third of the staff in the village, plus a bunch of high school kids -- were there to welcome them. They crowded around the bus, squealing and waving. "It's like the Beatles are arriving," I said to the ops guy, about my age, sitting next to me. "Well, not quite," he said. People were shouting the names of passengers coming off the bus. "Fred, David, Meisha!" they shouted. "Paul!" I yelled. "Ringo!"

At 1:05 I went back to my room to work. At 1:10 a loud stereo started up -- in the room right over my head.

I went up there right away. It was one of the returnees, of course. I introduced myself and asked him to turn it down, told him I work in my room in the afternoon. Now I can't hear it at all, so that was effective. I'm glad I was here as soon as he turned it on. I feel kind of sorry for the guy, though. He was probably itching to come back to his nook at Holden and crank up his stereo. In my defense, though, I have to say, that's the first time I've ever heard a stereo cranked up here (except in the kitchen for the kitchen crew), so it's not like everybody does it.
 

9:00 pm -- By three o'clock the stereo was back on loud. I went to find the sabbaticals coordinator to report the problem to her. She suggested that the stereo would not be on during the day when the guy was at work, so I agreed to cut the guy some slack since it was his first day back and to let her know if it continued to be a problem.

After dinner it was blaring again -- it sounded like they were practically having a party up there. In fact I'm sure the only reason they don't have it blaring now is that there's a real party going on in another building which all the youngsters are attending.

I feel really taken aback by this turn of events. If it continues and the guy won't listen to reason I'm going to get pretty pissed off. I asked the village to provide me a quiet place to work and they fulfilled my request, but my request wasn't just for a week, it was for the whole time.

15 May 03

6:55 a.m. -- Such a quiet, cold morning. I got up at 6:00, brushed my teeth, fetched some laundry from the staff laundry room in another building where it was drying, and walked over to the dining hall to have a cup of coffee. (I say "walked over," but from my building to the dining hall it is a distance of 40 feet. That's my daily commute to work.) The Eastern Wash. bishop was sitting in a corner preparing a sermon or some other oration; I didn't bother him, but last night I conceived of a plan to witness to him -- that's the right word -- about St. Francis. He should be leaving today with everyone else and I shouldn't let him get away without the knowledge that he's met someone from St. Francis.

A quiet morning -- but as I write, the guy upstairs gets up. Actually there are two guys upstairs now where before there were none, I think. Naturally they make many thudding sounds over my head. That's normal and I want to be careful not to get too annoyed at things like that; if our positions were reversed, they'd probably think I was making a lot of thudding sounds too.

Last night at supper I was talking to two new arrivals. They are a couple in their mid- to late twenties, but they have none of the attractive cool that most of the young people here do; they're comparatively strait-laced. The guy in particular -- the more he talked, the more he fell back on cliché. He is older than Adam -- the wet-behind-the-ears ingénue who works with me in the kitchen, a gee-whiz college student whose innocence and enthusiasm are touching -- but apparently even more naÏve. The more we talked, the dumber he seemed. But he did make one funny remark. He asked how long I had been here, and when I answered a week, he said, oh, that's why you're so clean-shaven. I laughed and said, that's right, I haven't gone native yet. He was referring, of course, to all the beards on the young men. (I hope that Adam kid doesn't grow one -- if he did, it would probably be one of those awful Amish-looking chin beards.)

Speaking of Amish -- I forgot to mention, I think, yesterday's apple event. (7:03 a.m. -- the stereo upstairs starts playing, but thankfully quietly.) We diced a few boxes of apples, as before, for applesauce. Then we halved three more boxes of apples for cider, and led by Liv -- one of the warm, friendly kitchen girls, and very pretty too -- me and another new kitchenite used a wooden hand press to make cider. We went out on the loading dock, I guess to make sure we spilled stuff away from the building (and we did spill stuff). We took the ground-up halves (they had been ground up by machines in the kitchen) and put them into this vertical press and turned a big handle -- like an ancient printing press -- same principle. A sweet brown liquid came out and was collected in big pans, then poured into plastic buckets for storage. This activity attracted a lot of attention from passers-by. My co-worker was a sweet little 19-year-old college student with an eyebrow piercing. "I feel Amish!" she exclaimed as we turned the handle tighter and tighter. "Yeah, except for the piercings and the tattoos," I said.

My hands, and the wooden handle, got very sticky. And when I carried some of the cider in buckets back to the building, a cup's worth sloshed right down my shirt. I ended up taking off a little early from that kitchen shift just to take a shower.
 

1:05 pm -- The returned kitchenites went on shift today for the first time. The first thing that one of them did was come up to me at breakfast and tell me I didn't need to come between 9-10; I had only to show up at the weekly Kitchen Meeting at 10:00. So that gave me more than 90 minutes after breakfast to write, and I took advantage of it.

Then after the meeting I went on shift and really there were too many people. They had us doing maintenance and cleaning tasks, mostly.

Right before lunch I went up to the director lady, Janet, and asked if she was going to make an announcement about Compline -- the service that was skipped entirely last week -- because it wasn't on the schedule. She immediately said to ask the program coordinator, who happened along, looked surprised it wasn't on the schedule, and said, "Well, ask Rolf -- he leads it." I didn't see Rolf, the music director, anywhere around, so I just sat down. It was pretty clear to me that they didn't give a shit.

Diane -- I think her name is -- the lady who is actually the only person in the whole village I've seen who is an effective worship leader -- sat down next to me at lunch. So I asked her about the Compline service, and added the information that not only was it not on the schedule this week, it didn't even happen last week. As Janet had, she said to ask the program coordinator.

Speaking of Compline, I told her about my participation in the Benedictine group in San Francisco, and that started her off on a long tangent about having an oblate-like system for Holden Village. I didn't comment on that one way or the other, but about fifteen minutes later when I had a chance, I said, as obliquely as possible, "I was a little surprised that the worship here doesn't take more from the Benedictine tradition." And she answered that in a community like this one where there are kids, that kind of worship "wasn't family-friendly enough." I see, I said blandly, thinking, for goodness sake, there aren't that many kids. She added that even in Tuesday night's service of lectio divina, she felt antsy with thirty minutes of silence. (It wasn't thirty minutes of silence; it was something like four four-minute periods of silence.)

That conversation was followed by the worship-like event -- it's hard to call a lot of the things they do here worship, though that's what they call it -- which on Thursdays, along with the "hunger awareness lunch," seems to commonly focus on social justice issues. Today it was all about the Palestinians and how oppressed they were, and it was punctuated by selections from the writings of that 20-year-old Washington girl who got killed this year trying to stand in front of a bulldozer. It was all terribly one-sided and had that particular combination of glorying in victimization and sanctimony -- greatly heightened by the martyrdom of poor Rachel Corrie -- so typical of the American left.

The combination of the conversation about whether it was "family friendly" to do Benedictine-style worship and the worship-like event -- oh, I forgot to say that Janet got choked up reading Rachel Corrie's emails -- really depressed me.

Wow, it's snowing a little. It's been quite chilly all day, not like the last couple of days. (The weather actually turned at midday yesterday. The morning was warm and sunny, and then about 12:30, bam, a cold wind came up. Everyone standing and waiting for the arrival of the Prodigals' bus complained.) Nevertheless I just saw the Lawns and Gardens girl -- one of the Prodigals -- drive by my window, through the blowing snow, wearing only a t-shirt. I don't know if she was being macho in the snow or was just unprepared or in denial about the fact that it was a cold day.

The church secretaries' group is about to leave, so maybe I'll see if I can snag the bishop before he gets on the bus.
 

2:05 pm. I missed talking to the bishop. But I did see Rolf.

ME: I'm supposed to ask you whether there's going to be Compline tonight.
ROLF: Yes there is. It might be just you and me though.
ME: ... Okay.

I wanted to ask, "How do you account for that?" But he seemed so embarrassed by the whole subject that I just dropped it.
 

9:30 pm -- We had the weekly Community Meeting tonight, the second one I attended. This one was taken up largely by presentations of farewell to two long-time staffers -- one of the twenty-somethings and one of the forty-somethings. The young woman was celebrated as some kind of goodtime girl; she appeared in a red velvet prom dress carrying a glass of pink liquid, and after an enormously lame puppet show about her exploits here, gave a rambling, giggling speech in which she declared that upon leaving here, she was not going to go to church for a good, long time. I suppose that says as much as anything about the quality of worship life here.

After the second long goodbye -- much weepier -- and a number of kudos from various staffers to the departers and some remainers, the meeting continued with a somewhat disorganized presentation on improving dinner table conversation. By the time the meeting was over, after two hours, I realized how silly I had been for the last few days with all my anxiety about fitting in with these people. I now know I will never fit in with these people. What I need to do is just write my book and enjoy the place for what it is. It will not be all things to me, much less all people.

There was about an hour between that meeting and Compline, which was attended not only by Rolf and myself, but by at least two other guys. And a woman who's the girlfriend of one of the guys came in literally at the last ten seconds. I hope Rolf felt encouraged that, at least, it was not just him and me.

It had snowed on and off all day since noon, but no one thought it would stick. It was still coming down when the meeting ended at 8:00. But to my surprise, when I came out of Compline at 9:15, the snow was sticking, the lawns and tree branches were covered with a thin but significant coating, and it was still coming down gently, as in a Hollywood film. I took a short happy walk in it.

I got mail today: two postcards from Jack and Barbara Kling, and a letter from my mother. Still nothing from Cris. Today the mail started to be delivered daily instead of just MWF, so perhaps I'll get something soon.

16 May 03

1:20 pm -- About two inches of snow fell last night. When I got up in the morning, everything had a pleasant coating. I went outside just before 7:00 and took a few pictures. Just a few minutes later, when the sun came out from behind the overcast, it all started swiftly melting. It's all gone by now, though it's still cold outside, about 48 degrees. A few flakes fell during the morning but that looks like the end of it.

I feel much more cheerful this morning. I had a fairly pleasant kitchen shift, helping make bagels and then spending at least an hour and a half cleaning about 30 pounds of carrots. They were supposed to be made into carrot sticks but I didn't even have time in my shift to do that, so I handed it off to the lead cook for the next shift. Oh, and I also broke down the breakfast bar -- i.e. put the cereal away. When I got back to my room I found some Cheerios and a wheat chex in the pocket of my shirt.

The sabbaticals coordinator took me aside during coffee break, which happens every morning at 10:00 in the dining hall -- since I'm always in the dining hall in the morning, I'm always there for it -- and told me that she had heard the stereo of the guy upstairs, from across the street and down about 75 yards. "Not just the bass, I was gettin' some treble there too," she said. I told her about having to tell him last night to shut it off. She said that I might be able to move down the hall or something as a solution.

Okay, I'm going to get to work on my book.
 

4:05 and not a peep from upstairs. This is when the music started yesterday, but this afternoon I put a note on the guy's door asking him not to play any until 4:30. If he gets off work at 4:00 and dinner's at 5:00, I figure that's a good compromise.

Besides, I'm leaving after him.

The sabbaticals coordinator also told me that she could hear his music too -- from across the street and 75 yards down the road, standing outside the "Koinonia" building where her office is. So she's now aware of how loud it is. (She could hear it because he keeps his window open and the stereo's right next to the window. In fact, when the music first blared out yesterday, part of the reason it was so loud is that we both had our windows open, and I got the music not only through the floor but bouncing off the building across the street.
 

9:30 pm -- Another apparent party going on overhead. But it's all right. In my note I told the noisy guy he could go for it any hours but between 1:00-4:30 (almost all of, he's at work anyway) and after Quiet Hours start at 10:30.

I'm going to shut this down and get to sleep early. I tired myself out last night staying up late reading old journal entries from the last few years.

17 May 03

Saturday. 220 "May Youth Weekend" people will be up here this afternoon for 48 hours.

Got up at 6:00, washed my face, worked a little on ch. 48. I find the night's sleep opens me up to working in a quiet hour.

Breakfast: apple coffee cake, another product of the apple glut.

Here's a possible epigraph for "Knock Yourself Out," from a poem called "Dream of Lust" by Louise Gluck, from her book The Seven Ages:

... the spirit restive, muttering
I'd rather, I'd rather...

2:00 pm -- CDs that played in the kitchen today: "Too Many DJs," or was it "2 Many DJs." And Spearhead.

The kitchen is getting routine almost to the point where I can't remember what I did. Let's see. I broke down the cereal buffet, just like yesterday, and I helped a guy cut up 25 loaves of bread. We had to cut it by hand because it had cheese in it and the cheese would have messed up the slicing machine. At the last minute I cut up some green peppers. Man, I can't remember what else. They did give everybody a 45 minute break at 10:00 because we were so far ahead.

Yesterday one of my teeth started hurting. Significant pain if I bite down on something with it, so I've started chewing on the other side of the mouth. No idea what to do about it. There may be a dentist in Chelan the village works with, but since it's a three or four hour trip and an overnight stay at the minimum, I really don't want to have to leave the village to go to the dentist. Strangely, I had dental problems in Dec. 2000 on my writing retreat at Bishop's Ranch, but then driving to Oakland to see my own dentist (which I did) was conceivable. Going to a dentist from this remote place would be quite a bit more daunting, so I really hope it doesn't turn into something. I have no reason to think it won't, however. And today is Saturday, so in any case I won't be able to do anything til my day off, Monday.
 

9:15 pm -- I worked pretty steadily all afternoon on ch. 48 and finished the first draft of a crucial scene. Altogether today I wrote about 2400 words. Tomorrow morning before my shift I'll read it over and assess whether or not it communicates what it needs to.

Yesterday I finally got a letter from Cris. She started it on the 11th, more than a week after I left and five days after we last spoke by phone. She managed to mail it on the 12th, and I received it the 16th. Letters have been taking as little as two days (my mother's letter, mailed from suburban Portland) but I'm not surprised one took four. It was worth waiting for -- a chatty letter about the cats and the garden, which were exactly what I wanted to hear about. Here's a sample:

It was hell for those few days without kibble. Milagrito would come into his bedroom and when he realized I didn't have the right kibble, he would march to the door and clearly show his intention to leave. I had mixed the last couple of tablespoons of fancy kibble with some of their old dessert kibble. I gave him kibbles one at a time, and he would spit out the old kibble and only eat the new kind. Once I carefully selected three of the fancy kibbles and put them on my knee one after the other [the usual way of feeding M. kibble at bedtime]. By the third kibble, he decided that I was finally feeding him right and then I gave him several of the others, which he wolfed down before noticing the substitution. At which point he stopped eating. It's not so much that he can't stand his old kibble, it's the principle of the thing.

What's so funny about that is not only the funny (to me) description of the cat's behavior, but the even funnier stratagem Cris used, with her uncanny sense of cat psychology. I appreciated that letter a great deal.

Today I didn't get any mail at all, breaking my streak of, let's see, five mail days in a row with mail. Since the post office is only open 9-10 and 4-5, and the mail doesn't come in until about 1:00, the only time I pick up mail is after I knock off writing for the day -- which seems somehow fair. So today when I didn't get any, I took the letter to Cris I was still in the middle of writing and found a place to write. It wasn't easy, because all the Youth Weekenders were spread out in small groups in every conceivable place. But I found my way down to the basement of the library, where all the crafts rooms are, and found a room with not only a table and chair but a space heater that was running, so it wasn't like an ice box down there. I finished my letter and turned off the heater before I left the room. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do -- is the wool in that room going to freeze? I doubt it -- but I didn't feel it would be responsible to leave a heater running in a room where nobody was likely to go into until the next day.

Because so many guests were here beginning today, the staff was urged to come late to supper, which was a buffet. The day was too cold -- I swear it never got over 45 degrees today -- to wait outside or do anything outside, so I waited in the library until 5:30 or so. Then I crossed the road and climbed up to the dining hall. I was surprised to see some Youth eating outside on the deck despite the cold, but when I went into the dining hall I understood why. Though there was no more line for food, there were no seats whatsoever. People were eating on their laps, they were eating standing up, they were taking their plates outdoors. But it looked like the pack was breaking up a little, so I went through the buffet (baked potato bar, plus beans which I skipped -- I've been farting too much as it is) and found a place to sit. The meal was fine, but the dining hall was uncomfortably cold. It was 60 degrees in there all day long, and the presence of 250 people did not raise the temperature one bit, somehow. So I ate my meal and went back to my room until Vespers.

After Vespers I took my two-mile walk -- there was still plenty of light, and I'd made sure to wear a warm layer under what is a very thin jacket -- and then got in the very end of the line to get some ice cream. I've been eating some pretty small portions for meals the last several days and I felt it would be all right. I found myself talking to one of the adult Youth leaders, who said he worked for a long time for Boeing, then was laid off and got a sales job with a beer distributorship. He was so dumb. After finishing my ice cream I came back to my room, which is the only warm place in the whole village. (Speaking of dumb -- how smart is it to eat ice cream when you're already cold and there's nowhere to go to warm up?!)

18 May 03

10:20 pm -- I got up at 6:00 and took a shower -- there was no hot water last night so that was kind of the first thing on my mind -- then sat down and reread my work from yesterday. It seemed all right to me, but I mistrusted my reaction. I had the feeling there's more I still need to do to bring out the conflicts between Dolores and Gene and her father. Of course, there's still several chapters to go.

I did some laundry and went in to breakfast and then started my shift early. In fact it turned out I wasn't supposed to work this day at all. The returning Prodigal Food Service Coordinators had shifted the schedule so that Sunday is my day off instead of Saturday. But when I showed up this morning still under the impression I was supposed to work, the lead cook said yeah, actually it would be good, we sort of need you.

Since it is Sunday, when some kind of meat dish is always served at lunch, my main goal for my shift was to avoid working on the meat dish. I didn't want to happen what happened last Sunday, which is that I suddenly got put in charge of the meatloaf and spent much of the morning "contaminated" with meat and not able to touch anything. In this I was successful. I chopped a lot of onions, and I sliced a lot of bread, helping to make croutons. I learned how the bread slicing machine works. I was afraid to be in charge of seasoning the croutons, though, so one of the bearded lead cooks took over that part. I had been worrying about the amounts of the spices and oil and he just heaped a bunch on top of the bread cubes. I started laughing. "Oh, I get it, it's not such an exact science," I said. "Not when I do it," he replied.

The meat dish that did get prepared was Sloppy Joes. Heike and I snuck into the first serving -- there are two servings of meals during the jampacked May Youth Weekends -- and then set off hiking.

We hiked a 4.5-mile trail to Hart Lake, which is the closest significant destination of any significant distance. It was the same place I'd hiked (in a pouring rain) when I was here with the St. Francis people in 2000. But two months earlier in the year, the snow still melting across the trail and the wildflowers starting to come out, it was like a different trip altogether. I dressed in a very effective way, I must say. I wore a long-sleeved silk undershirt, a microfiber t-shirt, and the synthetic yellow raincoat I bought for this trip. (The only time I've put it on until today was the other evening when I took a walk in the snow.) When we got about 2/3 of the way up and it got a little colder, I put my black wool sweater on over the shirts and under the jacket. Between the silk, the microfiber and the wool, my sweat really didn't know where to go. A lot of it wicked off onto the microfiber lining of the jacket, then dried right away when I took the jacket off to air it out. In any case, although I sweated on the hike and a cool wind blew during most of it, I was extremely comfortable. I felt very well prepared.

We took several pictures on the walk -- all the things people are always taking pictures of: the bridge over the stream, the cascade below the lake, and the view back down the valley. We chatted about silly American attitudes about consumption. We paused at the lake and ate the food we'd brought. She shared her chocolate and her banana and I gave her an energy bar. Then we made our way back down. By the time we got into the trees the sun had finally come out and the wind was at our backs, so we were a lot warmer. I took off my sweater and packed it away again, and then I took off my jacket for the last 40 minutes. The whole trip took us 4.5 hours, for an average including rest stops of 2 miles an hour.

Then I took and shower and ate supper with the staff -- the kids had all eaten at the first serving at 5:00. It was odd because it really was just the staff in there and it felt suddenly like a family, even though we were spread out at seven or eight tables.

After dinner I found out what the process is for going to the dentist. There's a dentist in town that people go to. In order to get an appointment, you have to send a note by pouch on the boat; this goes to the Holden B&B, which is a downlake lodge where they have a phone and will make a call for you if you give them a dollar. They make an appointment and send a note back up the lake the next day. So that means I'll go downlake -- note the nativist expression -- on Wednesday, spent the night in Chelan, go to the dentist, spend another night there since I will have missed the boat, and finally come back on Friday. I'll spend money on the round-trip boat ticket and two nights in a motel. And to top it all off, I'll be treated by a strange dentist whom I hope he knows what he's doing. It will probably be a temporary treatment and I'll have to have at least two more sessions done by my dentist in Oakland when I return in June, if it's like the problem I had in Dec. 2000 when I had the same thing happen on my writing retreat at Bishop's Ranch. Then I needed a root canal -- sigh.

Then when I come back to the village I'll owe them work in the kitchen for the shifts I missed. If it's only two shifts I guess I can make up the six hours an hour a day for a week. I don't want to have to work two or three six-hour shifts.

Anyway, tomorrow is my day off. Or I suppose I could work my three hours so I wouldn't have to catch up on them later.

19 May 03

There was something about last night I wanted to mention. I came out of my dorm as night was falling -- it must have been between 9:30 and 10:00 -- and got a glimpse of Buckskin Mountain. The sky was nearly dark but I suddenly realized the sky was absolutely clear -- not a single cloud. That meant that the snow on Buckskin, five or six thousand feet above the valley, was softly illuminated by the light from the western sky, so that it glowed against a backdrop of an indigo-colored southern sky. The mountain stood out against this dark sky so eerily, almost like a blacklight effect. It was so gorgeous.

I stayed in bed til 7:15 this morning, much later than usual. I decided to go ahead and take my day off today -- partly because all the teenagers are leaving after lunch and there's less to do in the kitchen today.

My tooth is a little bit worse. At breakfast, if I got the smallest bit of granola on the tooth while trying to chew on the other side, it would be very painful when I bit down. Clearly there is some pressure building up under the tooth that must be relieved. It's just like that problem I had before. I only hope I can wait until all the notes are passed and calls are made and I can actually be seen by the dentist -- certainly not before Thursday, three days from now.

Something happened at breakfast for the first time: people actually came and sat with me, rather than me inserting myself into someone else's table. When I was getting my food, the 19-year-old girl I pressed apples with -- asked me where I was sitting, and a couple of people came and sat with us; then when she left those people stayed, and then more came. I ended sitting and talking with a rotating group of about 12 people. It was really fun. I suppose I've now been here long enough -- nearly two weeks -- that people are starting to feel comfortable with me. I also wonder if I haven't lost a little of the city nervousness I had when I came here, and been made a wee bit happier by the hiking and the work and the lack of junk food.

Today's my day off and I started out with all those breakfast conversations, and then I finished reading the Dostoyevsky story "White Nights." I've already started reading the Nora Gallagher book Sara gave me; I'm about 40% through it already. It's not that long. I feel more like reading today than writing. Maybe I'll read the Gallagher book for the morning and write in the afternoon.

I remarked at breakfast today what a treat it is to have a morning shift and be off in the afternoon, and recalled that it was like those days of teaching summer school, where the schedule is like 8:15-12:30. Such a great schedule. You get your work done and you have the rest of the day to yourself. The same schedule was suggested in that utopian book everybody was reading in the 80s, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You, as an ideal mixture of work and leisure.
 

12:15 pm -- By sitting in the dining hall to read, I got roped into helping with a bulk mailing project. I put in about 90 or 100 minutes on that and finally just knocked off. I felt like I had kind of wasted my time, except that I did get a chance to talk to Mary, and we talked half-seriously about running a writing workshop up here next summer and promised to exchange addresses. Now I'm rather tired from sitting up and doing all that upper-body envelope stuffing while sitting in a chair. They aren't the best chairs for such work. Kitchen work is upper body too but you're standing up and it's actually easier, given the various kitchen tasks, to involve the strength of your whole body in that.

Lunch is in an hour. I think I'll nap til then, grab something really quickly, then come back here to work.
 

9:30 pm -- I worked on and off all afternoon -- despite two naps or attempts at naps -- and knocked off at 4:30. I finished all the work on chapters up through 50.

At dinner were the dozen new arrivals: people from a South Carolina seminary. I don't know if they're professors or staff. They don't seem very professorial but what do I know about people from South Carolina. Dinner was the chowder I spent the last two shifts prepping things for. It was extremely good, too.

After Vespers -- another unconventional service mostly consisting of one guy's monologue about how he had to give up his dreams of being a classical percussionist -- we lined up for ice cream. I felt like eating a lot of it, for some reason. I stood behind a few people from So. Car. When I told them of my book and its subject, the man declared, "I never liked Frank Sinatra's music, and I don't like that kind of lifestyle, either!" God knows what he was referring to by "lifestyle." Of course I had no rejoinder. An hour later I thought I might have said, "And with whom have you registered your objection?"

After the ice cream, I went up Chalet Hill, where all the longterm staff live. The woman who was the recipient of last week's teary goodbye is going to leave in a day or two and was giving away a lot of stuff. In addition to things that were conceivably worth something -- a set of sheets, a jar of tea -- she gave away all sorts of crap like post-it notes and a fingernail clipper. I wouldn't have had the nerve. I got there late and she was down to the dregs so I know she gave away better stuff before that. People were standing there with clothing draped over their arms. The best part was that she stood on an embankment and everyone else -- a crowd of thirty or forty people -- stood on the road and she threw stuff to people. The little kids all loved it.

I took and walk then and went out to the labyrinth, set in a clearing (The Ballfield, but goodness knows the last time a game of baseball or softball was played there -- the last time I saw it, it was just a swampy, muddy mess) ten minutes west of the village. I figured I had time to walk the labyrinth and return before dark, but I was wrong. It's a really big labyrinth. I started out at about twice kinhin pace, and after twenty minutes there was no end in sight and I picked up my pace considerably. I was at least twenty-five minutes into it before I gave up because it was getting too dark. Not too dark to see the labyrinth which was in a clearing, but too dark to walk the ten minutes back to the village along the tree-lined road. It was chilly out there, too.

My tooth is definitely worse today. I had some real painful moments at lunch when a tiny bit of food would find its way between the teeth there. The least pressure is very painful now, and I can feel the time is coming when it's going to start to throb steadily. Since it will be at least two and a half days before I can get into the dentist's chair -- this is Monday evening and that will be Thursday morning at the earliest -- I foresee going through some pain by Wednesday. The nurse here did say she had some real live pain pills if I got bad, and 48 hours from now I may have taken her up on it.

20 May 03

My tooth is getting a little worse day by day. Last night when I went to bed I put in my mouth guard, but I found that when I closed my mouth it contacted my sore tooth and made it hurt a lot. So I decided not wearing the mouth guard until this gets dealt with was the lesser of two evils. I have discovered that swishing my mouth with cold water relieves some of the pressure; fortunately the tooth isn't sensitive to cold.

After the pain went away, I was finally able to sleep. I had some very intense dreams, including a dream which for the first time featured people I've met here. One was about some kind of strange bacchanal which was more messy and weird than fun, and one was about a war being fought in Central Park in New York. That was the one that featured people from Holden.

I got up and spent the pre-breakfast period, and much of the breakfast period itself, writing letters to Cris and to Sara. I got another letter from Cris Monday, did I say that? Full of more news about the cats and the garden. She had a few things to say about her job and the fish (of which I'm much less enamored) and said she might have found a Sybase employee who wants to buy the truck -- except that he is a guy in his twenties and wants to pay $500 a month. It would be all right if he actually did that, but I doubt anyone in their twenties is stable enough or disciplined enough to write a $500 check every month for two years straight. Why can't he finance it?

It's an overcast morning, seemingly cold, but actually only 45 degrees at 8:45, where previous mornings were more like 36 or 38 degrees at that time. If we get any sun at all it ought to be a pretty nice day. Nevertheless the dining hall is cold and while I was sitting there reading and writing letters I wore both my wool sweater and my fleece jacket. The fleece jacket is so hideous that I don't wear it unless I really am cold.

I'm getting a long break in mid-morning. It's Tuesday, which is leftover day for lunch. I spent the first hour of the shift simply performing the cleaning tasks that get done only when there's no prep work to be done. Others were doing the same, and Bruce and Karl were learning to make bread.
 

8:00 pm -- My tooth bothered me on and off all day. I received no reply from my "pouch note" asking for a dental appointment. What bothers me as much as the tooth itself was the waste of time with the pouch note system to get an appointment.

The tooth made me spacey all day. Even though I took nothing stronger than aspirin or ibuprofen, my attention on the pain -- which itself was negligible -- prevented me from working on my book. I spent most of my free time reading the Nora Gallagher book Sara gave me. After dinner one of the people from South Carolina wanted to talk to me about writing, and I happily chattered away in the dining hall -- completely forgetting I was on dish team. I didn't remember until I was in Vespers, and I felt bad about it. It probably wasn't a strenuous dish team, but it's the principle of the thing.

I've definitely decided to go downlake tomorrow and try to see the dentist Thursday. I'll just go to his office first thing in the morning and present myself. Somehow I'll get seen.

This means I'll work tomorrow morning's kitchen shift as usual and then leave after lunch at 1:45 with whoever else is leaving. I'll get to Chelan at 5:30 or so, after the dentist's office has no doubt closed (although it couldn't hurt to go over there and check it out), and then get a motel room. At least I can give Cris a call and say hello. Sometime during the next day, I'll find someplace to connect to the internet, or at least go to the library and get on a terminal. Then I'll stay overnight again (the only boat leaves at 8:30 a.m.).

Then assuming I get seen on Thursday, I'll come back on Friday on the 8:30 boat, arriving in Holden at 12:30 or so, having missed both my Thursday and Friday shifts.

So I spoke to Miriam, the Prodigal Food Service Coordinator, and she seemed surprised I wanted to make up the hours. Sometimes I get the sense that they don't actually need me in the kitchen, that my three hours a day are more of a token participation than a real one. But you could probably say that about anybody's three hours, at least if they weren't a lead cook. In fact, today's kitchen shift was minimal. I reported at 8:50, was given an hour's break at 9:50 with everyone else, and then let off completely at 11:30, again along with everyone else. Reason: Tuesday is "leftovers" day, when stuff from the weekend is re-served. And prep for Tuesday night and most of Wednesday had already been done.
 

9:30 pm -- Took half a Darvocet the RN gave me, with a Tylenol, as instructed. Had already taken a Severe Allergy Tylenol a couple of hours ago to see if it would relieve the swollen, congested feeling in my head. There is swelling, of course, but it's not my sinuses.

I got the pills from the nurse in case the tooth was bothering me enough that I thought I would have trouble sleeping. Though it wasn't bothering me much earlier in the evening, it is now. So I took the pain pill.

21 May 03

8:15 a.m. -- Another overcast day, but they say it won't rain. "Not in May," the garbageman said authoritatively. Actually he's called the garbologist, in keeping with local practice of funny and gender-neutral titles. Garbage detail is called garbo.

The Darvocet I took at 9:30 helped me get to sleep. But I woke up at 1:00 in pain again. So I took the other half with some more Tylenol. It took quite a white but finally I went back to sleep and slept the rest of the night.

This morning the pain pill still seems to be having some effect; I feel spacey and in not very much pain. Curiously, my dopey mood seemed to fit that of the others at my breakfast table this morning. R., the 19-year-old college girl, and J.T., your typical bearded kitchen hippie, both put their heads down on the table after eating and seemed to blitz out. I'm thinking I'll walk in sick (ha ha: there is no "calling in") to the kitchen today; word is we have little to do (it's Hunger Awareness Lunch) and I don't trust myself with any sharp objects.

I straightened up my room just in case somebody feels they need to come in here for any reason while I'm gone. It had been looking pretty bad, with clothes and papers strewn about. On the other hand it took only five minutes to straighten up. I think I'll leave my window cracked open and a shoe in the door to get some air in here too.
 

1:15 pm -- I was packing for my two-day trip when I thought to check the message board to see if I received a "pouch note" today. And sure enough, a day after it should have come, there's a message from the people at the B&B saying they made an appointment for me for Friday morning -- a day after it should be.

I took three tylenol around 9:30 a.m. and they really knocked down the minor pain I was having. In fact, I'm hardly in any discomfort at all, aside from the congested, swollen feeling in my head. So I won't go out today, I'll go out tomorrow ("to go out" being the local verb for "to take the boat back downlake to the world of cars, newspapers, telephones, and dentists"). I wrote a note for Miriam, the kitchen scheduler, and a "bus slip" so they'll plan for me to be on that bus -- but the scheduling people weren't in the office, so I'll have to go down to the bus and tell them.

At lunch they announced there would be another nature-worship session tonight in place of Vespers. Of course they're calling it Vespers but jeez. On the plus side, I'll get to eat one of the chocolate brownies Meisha was preparing today. There was a widely hilarious scene in which practically everyone in the kitchen and the dish team got in on licking the bowl.
 

I wrote a friend:

.... For the most part the isolation [of being at Holden] is very positive -- no phones or internet, hardly any appointments or obligations -- just the three-hour shift in the kitchen six mornings a week, plus a weekly shift on "dish team" -- which means that, despite everything, I am making good progress on my book. It was a pleasure therefore to get your compliments on it, and to know at the very least that despite its length and the problems I'm trying to fix, you were able to get through the entire thing and enjoy it.

To answer your particular questions, the Bobby Blaine character is based loosely on Joey Bishop, with a few important departures. Bishop, for example, never drank, and never womanized; he was married to the same woman for decades. And a few of the incidents that Bobby recounts in his career -- such as the time when, at the Fontainebleau, Sinatra insisted that Bishop be accommodated in the same manner as himself; and the time when he sang Happy Birthday to a mobster and nearly got killed for revealing the mobster's presence -- those were drawn from magazine profiles of Bishop. But almost all of Bobby Blaine's career, save the parts that directly related to Sinatra (his job as the "hub of the wheel" of the Rat Pack's "summit" performances is pure Bishop), plus his comic style and monologues, I invented. It was a lot of fun to do so, to imagine a comic monologue and the comic himself monitoring, as he goes along, how the audience is receiving him and what bit he might go to next, and in addition use the content of the monologues, to some degree, to comment on the action of the novel. It was also great fun to write in a Jewish voice, or at least my approximation of it, to use Yiddish words and to employ the reader's own knowledge of what the career of a Jewish comic in mid-century was like. But I have to confess that I stole the conceit of a live comic monologue delivered onstage by a Jewish comedian from a scene in Don DeLillo's "Underworld," when he portrayed Lenny Bruce so effectively, and did so by inventing material for comic monologues by the Bruce character that sound to the read like Lenny Bruce. I figured if DeLillo can do it for a comic whom everybody knows what he sounded like, I can do it for a comic whom nobody does.

The problems I'm trying to fix in this rewrite have to do with the relationship in the second half of the book between Dolores and Gene. I felt my way through those scenes while writing the first draft, and as a whole I think the relationship is not properly developed on stage, as it were. So I'm writing some new scenes, and moving others around, so that their relationship develops in front of the reader's eyes instead of offstage. To give an example, in the scene where they're kicked out of the Riviera pool, they walk off and we don't see Gene again until more than 24 hours have passed. In my rewrite, I go into what happens when they leave the Riviera. They have a scene in which the embarrassment they went through together helps cement their relationship. I also moved the scene to later in the book.

I'm almost through the rewrite of their scenes. When I do, I'll go back through the whole thing and look at pacing, try to cut some of the interminable dialogue scenes, and generally smooth things out.

Oh, and to answer your other question, most of the stuff about Monroe was drawn from biographies and articles. I play a little with the timeline, but it seems to be a matter of record that during the filming of "The Misfits" -- which did actually happen that summer right after the Democratic Convention -- MM, already in a fragile emotional state, went up to the Cal-Neva and was treated in a very cavalier fashion by some of Sinatra's mobster friends, and that when she returned to the set to finish the filming, she was in a state of shock of some sort. I tried to suggest this in her last scene as she arrives at the resort. As for her appearances at the convention, they happened as I reported them. As did the incident during the national anthem with Sammy Davis, Jr. Writing this novel was, when dealing with the historical figures, a matter sometimes of merely connecting the dots between real events. Being able to do that was both fun and fascinating.

...

23 May 03 -- Chelan

Yesterday -- I didn't write a word, in novel or journal -- I got out of bed sometime around 7:00 a.m., having slept quite badly; I think the only complete sleep cycle I got was between 5:00 and 7:00. The rest of the night I just lay on my back or my left side (I avoided the right side with its sore tooth) breathing strenuously. It wasn't that my breathing was difficult but I wanted the breathing to fill as much reality as possible, because in fact my breathing was the healthiest thing about me, and if I paid attention to it I wouldn't be thinking about my sore neck or my sore tooth or my sore gum and whatever else the infection (for that is what it is) had infected.

And I had a fever. It was a bit too cool to lie on the bed without any covers, so I lay under a sheet, but my fever was such that any spot on the body touching another spot on the body produced heat of geometric proportions. My thighs, for example, pressed together when I slept on my side, were like a lower-body furnace. I often flapped the bedsheets to exchange the hot air for cool, but after a minute I was burning up down there. I don't think I've ever had a fever that was not associated with a cold or virus of some kind, where the fever rises until it bursts and then doesn't trouble you anymore. This fever was like being trapped in a small car on a journey with no foreseeable end. You could open the windows and endure an unpleasant blast, but you'd have to close them eventually and then you'd be stifling again.

But the antibiotics were having their effect. Though I didn't feel well enough to put in my kitchen shift that morning -- A., the perpetually sunburned redhead, who was the lead cook I reported my status to, responded by shrugging in a perfect balance of not caring on the one hand because he didn't really need me on the shift, and not caring on the other hand because he was completely unsympathetic to my plight - - on account of the fever and the lack of sleep exhausting me and the Vicodin making me spacy, the pain had mostly gone and the swelling seemed to be getting no worse.

I spent the morning napping, reading, and writing postcards. After lunch I packed for my downlake stay, and was sitting in the dining hall with about half an hour to go when The sabbaticals coordinator approached me, holding an Express Mail envelope at arm's length. She had an expression on her face that I interpreted as part fear and part disgust; I think she was afraid I was going to somehow blame her for my condition. (Actually I did feel rather resentful for her causing me to wait -- by insisting I go through the standard "pounch note" process for procuring dental appointments -- until the end of the week to get seen by the dentist, and making me go through both the pain and uncertainly of waiting and the expense of the holiday-weekend rates at the motel -- explanation below -- but I had already expressed to her, in a way that didn't blame her at all, that I wished I had gone down to the dentist early in the week without waiting for an appointment, and her I-don't-care shrug at the time was so expressive that I had given up, at least for the time being, any attempt to express to her either my discomfort or my bright ideas for how things could have gone better.)

The overnight letter was from Cris, and contained a letter asking for urgent information: she had accidentally ground up one of the credit card bills, after writing the check but before sealing the envelope, and needed the account number and phone number to call for the address. It was nice to get the letter, and it caused no anxiety in me because I knew I would be able to phone her that night and even though I didn't have the information she thought I did, I knew where in the house it resided. A few minutes later someone brought, from the freight that had just been unloaded, the box Cris had finally sent, containing my hiking hat, my red pullover hooded sweatshirt, a few chocolate bars, and, to my secret embarrassment, a large number of packets of pre-moistened buttwipes.

I just had time to take all this surplus mail back to my room, putting the chocolate into the sealed container where I also keep the oily, squirrel-tempting energy bars, before going down to board the bus. The nurse came and gave me one more pain pill to hold me over, and Heike came with a twenty dollar bill and a short shopping list, since I had offered to bring her anything she needed from the outside world.

Then came the trip on the bus, bouncing for half an hour down the gravel road to the dock at the lake; a reasonably comfortable wait at a picnic table out of both the sun and wind (everyone else waited on the dock, cowering from both, even though the boat wasn't even in sight at first, and then could be seen coming down the lake for at least twenty minutes before arriving), and a fairly interminable boat ride. The interior of the boat was too warm, and while there was sensual relief in the form of a current newspaper and a snack bar -- nothing looked good, though, and I bought only a bottle of cold water -- all I could think of was getting to the next stage -- the boat landing -- and the next -- getting to a motel. At one point I sacked out in a row of chairs, imitating ten sunburned, muscled kids in their twenties who were (I overheard) a Forest Service trail crew who had been working and camping in the wilderness for more than a week. The nap made me feel slightly better, but when the boat landed at long last -- it was after 6 p.m. -- I couldn't find a pay phone to call a motel and have them pick me up (which they do). Confident I could find one soon down the road, I began the hike into town. And I never found a phone until I was in the middle of town, closer to the motel than the boat; I ended up hiking all the way, about a mile and a half, which was no mean feat in my condition.

When I got to the motel I had stayed in a few weeks before -- the Midtowner Motel which is, actually, not in midtown at all, even to the extent this town can be said to have a midtown -- I was faced with another conundrum. They wouldn't give me a room for the two nights I required; it had to be only one night or four. Explanation: I had arrived on the day before a holiday weekend, and the motel -- all the motels in town -- had a policy of renting for the whole weekend only. I explained my situation and they allowed me to pay for three nights instead of all four -- three nights at holiday weekend rates. So instead of paying $45 a night for two nights, which was the rate early in the week, I paid $80 a night for three nights, with tax over $260. This was getting to be a pretty expensive toothache.

I went across the street to the wonderfully typical small town café and, for my first restaurant meal in two and a half weeks, had no idea what to order. In my addled state I ordered a chili burger. It was tough and greasy, but it served the purpose of giving me something to eat with my Amoxicillin.

In the evening I got a chance to talk to Cris on the phone. She was gratifyingly glad to hear from me and sympathetic about all the undignified and uncomfortable aspects of my state -- perhaps more so than I would be if our roles were reversed. I told her where to find the information about the credit card account, and she gave me the dental insurance information. I hung up a little after 10:00 and went to sleep and slept rather well, having eaten a little bit of energy bar and one more antibiotic capsule.

The next morning I went back to the café, where I ordered blueberry pancakes (steamy and limp) and one egg, scrambled, on the side -- a good idea. Then I brushed my teeth at my room and, at long last, walked back down the hill to the dentist.

Everything went as well as could be expected at the dentist. The receptionists took my insurance information and were able to process it; the dentist listened to my toothache's history and approved the RN's imposition of antibiotics, though he said he would have given twice as much. He looked at an x-ray of my tooth and looked at the exterior and said: 1) Nothing in particular was visible on the x-ray; 2) My infection had obviously responded to the antibiotics and he was going to prescribe more; 3) The cause of the problem might be something as severe as a "fractured root," which would mean oral surgery; but he said the tooth I pointed to was the very same one that caused this problem back in Dec. 2001, when I got the same toothache on the retreat at Bishop's Ranch and ended up having a root canal. I did not think to ask how I could have a "fractured root" on a tooth where there was a post instead of a root. In any case he gave me a prescription for more Amoxicillin, and in case the problem recurred, a different antibiotic and to top it all off, some Percodan. I requested "a few" Percodan and he wrote down 16.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around Chelan. In my addled state I had brought only green t-shirts and wore green pants, and so I looked ridiculous, and bought a black t-shirt that said LAKE CHELAN and had a picture of a speedboat; I got both the prescriptions and the rest of my downlake shopping done at Safeway, a block away from the dentist's office; went to the public library and used the internet to determine my itinerary back to SF when the time came; and came back and had a nice nap in my room. Then I went out again and had lunch and did some reading on a bench by the river. I had been skeptical about this whole "holiday weekend" thing, but during the afternoon I observed clots of six or seven people either walking by, driving by, or floating by (on the river). My theory is that people from the coast where it tends to be cool and overcast, come here where it tends to be sunny and warm (and it was, about 80 degrees). What they do here is still a bit of a mystery. I observed people wearing only baseball caps and bathing suits floating slowly by in speedboats that looked highly charged, like overloaded candy bars. I saw a few cars toting bicycles on their roofs, suggesting that the people had come here to ride them; I already knew that was a common activity here, because Cris's sister Vickie told me she and her husband, for whom riding long distances on bicycles is fun, had once come here to do that very thing.

But exactly what everyone is here to do is still not quite evident. Sitting here in my motel room, overlooking a perpendicular wing of the motel, I saw through the open window of another unit that a party of young men had arrived. Frat boys: baseball capped, heavily muscled, tanned, they resembled dissolute Marines or porn actors on break. One of them leaned out the window, then levered his bulgy body into the window to sit in it and get a better view. His bulk positively filled the window and was a surreal sight poking out of the side of the building. I also observed a large family of at least six people moving into the room next door. I don't understand how six people -- only one of them a child under 10 -- can stay in a motel room. I hope that whatever they came here to do, they do outside the room, and not much inside it. At least the frat boys aren't next door.
 

9:00 pm -- Cris is supposed to call around now, so I'm back in the motel room listening to the incomprehensible testosterone-soaked babble of muscular 21-year-olds on the first evening of their ka-raa-zee holiday weekend. There seem to be rooms full of girls and of boys. If somebody gets lucky with the opposite sex, things are going to get a little dicey. My recommendation is that they all turn gay for the duration. It would really simplify things.

I'm reading an Everyman's Library edition of every single Bech story by John Updike (a noted Lutheran, by the way). His portrayal of Bech's British publisher J.J. Goldsmith made me realize that a funny novel could center on a New York editor who is an amalgam of [two editors I've worked with]. The first chapter in the book would depict the aging satyr, still master of a domain that is shrinking and now corporate-controlled, entertaining in his office a young, earnest and somewhat clueless author -- in other words, a depiction of my meeting with K. in 1998 (was it?).

The only trouble is that I don't know anything about the New York publishing industry. The only thing that would really make the book interesting would be veiled insider information and gossip with changed names.

(Cris calls and we chat for an hour.)

Of course, I just wrote half a novel about Hollywood without ever having worked in Hollywood, and it seems to come across okay. Perhaps I could cobble together something about the publishing industry like that... But frankly it would be better to change the industry to something a wee bit closer to home. I don't know enough about New York either! For example, all the bars they go to and so forth -- no way could I realistically depict it.

I guess I could set it in San Francisco.

But I'm wasting time. If I really want to think about a book other than the one I'm supposed to be working on -- and I treated the whole day as a complete vacation day, didn't even think about working on it -- I should be thinking about [my possible next book] "Moving Out."

The kids are still babbling outside. They aren't that noisy yet (10:15 pm). Not as bad as Marines. I think the real action is elsewhere -- thankfully. Down by the lake or something. But what the hell are they discussing for hours on end? I can't even discern the subjects. Once in a while I hear mention of the name of a pop star, or recollection of a past get-together. I suppose I should be grateful I can't hear every word, and that they aren't right next door.

I'm gonna try going to bed. Maybe I can actually floss my fucked-up tooth.

24 May 03 -- Chelan

Fortified by the extra antibiotics, by numerous diner meals, naps and long spells reading John Updike, I feel well-rested as I prepare to go to bed on my last of three nights in festive Chelan (small swarms of high school and college-age youths wander the streets; slightly older people in their twenties and thirties are actually doing what the kids wish they were of age to do, i.e. "partying," but not enjoying it as much as they anticipated, and comparing themselves all the while with the younger, cuter versions of themselves which are all too obvious on the streets. The streets belong to the young and beautiful, and the bars belong to the noisy and powerfully drunk). I've watched my fill of TV, ordered three CDs from Amazon to be sent to me at Holden, bought the items on Heike's shopping list (kleenex, batteries, cigarettes), and talked several times on the phone to Cris.

She was gratifyingly scandalized by my fever, said something like that could be dangerous. I agree, though I did start the antibiotics the same day I got the fever, and I think they kept the infection from getting totally out of hand. Now that I'm on a double dose, I'm feeling better than I have in a week. Tomorrow a breakfast, then the return boat-bus trip up to wonderland.

In tonight's conversation with Cris I tried to explain the things that make Holden a slightly weird and possibly dangerous -- at least to someone with a toothache -- place. I explained how guests were worthless in the social system; how the work schedule and operations systems had all been figured out long ago, thus leaving little room for creativity; how the liturgy was bad and how there was very little spiritual atmosphere. We agreed it would be a wonderful place on which to base an anthropology or sociology thesis.

I spent several hours going through the Dolores scenes today, cutting bits and in some cases whole scenes here and there. For example I ended up cutting the whole second Sunday dinner scene -- it was just a lot of banter. If it suggested a closeness forming between Gene and D's family, that's actually opposite to what's happening in the book at that point. I still have to deal with the crucial scenes in part 4 and do writing such that the Dolores scenes climax in what was my original idea: G and D's argument comes to a head at the motel just as Bobby arrives. I know I still haven't done enough to inflate the emotional atmosphere to make the reader care, or wonder, what Gene's going to decide. I'll have to hype things up somehow.

It's 11:30 pm. I need to get to bed.

25 May 03

10:30 a.m. aboard the ferry going uplake -- Gentle rain in Chelan this morning, so I was surprised to see 30+ people board the ferry; I had assumed sightseers would choose another diversion. The first hour of the trip was dominated by the noisy play of three or four small children between 4 and 6. Among them was a little boy who kept pretending he was in an action movie -- "Do you copy? Over!" -- and a little pink-sweatered girl in a cheap haircut, who with a beatific expression kept walking down the aisles saying "Ooo la la!"

At Fields Point, dozens of teenagers boarded, as if it were the start of a "May Youth Weekend" and not the end of one. The way the boat approaches the dock head-on, I couldn't see them on the dock, but judging from the fact that there were several up on the cliffs seemingly waiting for the crowd to thin out I realized what was happening. My God, I thought, they're up there because there are too many on the dock. I had not noticed last week that there were two weekend's worth of teenagers and program packed into this holiday weekend. One bunch came up on Friday and was due to leave today, Sunday; I figured I would see only them, outbound. I didn't anticipate another 200 kids starting today and leaving on Tuesday.

Given this crush, I was very fortunate to have today scheduled as my off day, for the kitchen had to make lunch for both groups -- 521 lunches, officially, and it's Sunday so it's meat. And not an easy one like last week's Sloppy Joes -- it was pot roast. So even though my absence meant I would have missed my shift anyway, I was relieved I didn't have to help with all that food. Five hundred and twenty-one!

Eventually the boat filled with teens and their happy, peaceful chatter, their innocent sardonic, joking remarks. They drowned out the children most of the time, but I didn't mind them as much, because I knew the teens would quiet down eventually. Sure enough, after half an hour a third of them were sleeping or reading. I was fortunate again in that none of the teens or anyone else sat beside me, leaving me plenty of room for my bags. In fact, the boat was still only two-thirds full.

Looking at the sweet-faced teens, I preferred them so much to the bearded 25-year-olds at Holden with their winter's worth of status and their laconic clique. I almost dreaded seeing my coworkers.
 

2:30 -- When the boat arrived, I got in line with everyone else to disembark. At the top of the gangway people were lifting their luggage into a truck. When I tossed my backpack up there -- the one lent me by Stella, the Hike Haus queen -- two people recognized me, which I found nice and a little surprising. Then in the village, the nurse greeted me when I arrived at the bus. She had not received my message, which I telephoned to the B&B on Friday morning, that I would be coming in today instead of tomorrow. My apparent failure to show up caused people a bit of consternation, she said. I have to admit I was gratified to know that there were a few people who noticed whether I was alive or dead.

Pot roast at lunch was on the tough side. But what do you expect when you cook dozens of pot roasts and then have to keep a bunch of the meat warm for the second sitting?
 

10 pm -- I stand corrected on the 521 lunches. The group of 180 kids leaving in the morning got sack lunches, not pot roast.

Incident at dinner: I sit down at table with R. and make a joke about her sunburn. She gets up and leaves the table.

It was in the flurry of seating when everyone was still roiling, so it wasn't as obvious as it sounds (to other people, that is -- it was obvious to me). But after that I had a nice conversation with other women -- sweeter and more charming and better looking, may I say -- about my book and my illness and the rat pack and Jack Kerouac. (It sounds like I monopolized the conversation, but I tried to change the subjects and we did get onto Kerouac and Gary Snyder a bit.)

Tonight: another Eucharist with poorly chosen, hard to sing music, badly composed prayers, poorly done readings of scripture, and the worst sermon yet. Certainly demonstrated that you can have an excellent delivery and yet have your sermon be silly and meaningless. Nevertheless, I commune.

Cool up here in the evening -- so pleasant! Not so humid. Back to routine tomorrow.

26 May 03

I fell back into the routine here with amazing ease. By the time I'd been here 24 hours, it was almost as if I'd never been outside. There were a few new people I hadn't met yet, but otherwise everything was the same, except for me feeling well. My kitchen shift consisted of slicing onions using a rotating knife, or meat slicer -- the last time I'd used one of those was probably at Schlotsky's in Austin in 1979, when using one of these contraptions I nearly sliced off the tip of my thumb -- and of performing other small prep tasks, such as "bowling" salad dressing (i.e. putting a ladle of salad dressing in small bowls to be set at individual tables) and toasting several cups of slivered almonds in the oven. The shift ended in a slight panic as the kitchenites had to set up the dining hall for the kids' lunch, as the youth group that was assigned to do so never showed.

Then I spent the afternoon bearing down on my novel. Since I decided last night to re-do a lot of what I'd done so far up here, I feel a new urgency. I worked fairly steadily all afternoon, though I was a little antsy and kept lying down for a few winks. But then I'd be back at it. Better yet, after Vespers I gave it another two hours, and got all the way up to the Sunday dinner scene, whose ending I have to change.

Vespers was a bowdlerized version of Prayer Around the Cross. Instead of a cross, they had set up several symbolic prayer areas where you could pray for the world (a globe), or for yourself (a mirror), etc. People were supposed to light candles at these areas. Unfortunately the sandy boxes to set the candles in were too small and the candles got too close to one another. They melted each other or caught each other on fire. I was sitting behind the two pubescent daughters of one of the staffers. Totally uninterested in the worship service, they merely sat and giggled as the candles collapsed. Come to think of it, perhaps they had the most realistic reaction to the service.

The present and last May Youth Weekend ends tomorrow, but the subsequent week is the last one that resembles a quiet week. Starting a few days later, church groups start coming in for the summer and the population of the village never drops below 120 again. I'm due to leave right after it gets really crowded.

27 May 03

The Updike I'm reading -- all the Bech stories collected in The Complete Henry Bech by Everyman's Library (a handsome edition I got on a remainder table at Stacey's, or was it Alexander Book Co.) -- is engaging and extremely enjoyable. A wonderful example of comic writing, the style is smooth, never strains for comedy and has few laugh-out-loud lines, but uses comedy and light satire to make its points just as cogently as Nabokov (darker satire) or for that matter any Russian. Not as twee as The Green Hour with its romantic flights; the observation is more exact, more merciless, without being unsympathetic or scathing. Makes me want to write like that. And yet I've never heard anybody refer to Updike as a terrific stylist. He has won the Pulitzer, however, and continues to publish short stories in the New Yorker, so he can't be dismissed.

The second thing I'm enjoying is the narration of the writing, completion, release and response to a novel that the character Bech does (in Bech is Back". It's almost like Updike is saying to himself, look, remember how easy it is to write a book and have everyone hosanna. Bech's success reflects on me, the reader; it makes me attack my own novel afresh. Thirdly, I'm envying Updike's use of characters who appear in book after book, not every year or two, but every decade or two: ten or fifteen years go by between Rabbit or Bech books. He made Bech Jewish to keep his world and observations separate from those of his more famous creation, yet Bech sojourns in a well-to-do Protestant suburb. If I were to adopt this pattern, I'd re-use Bobby Blaine, show him fifteen years down the line trying to hang on in the 1970s. (But would a novel about television in the 1970s, without the characters of Sinatra et al. to animate the satire, be of any interest at all?)
 

Letter to Cris:

While I was "downlake," my perspective on Holden Village and all its peculiarities and systems was a little jaundiced. It seemed immensely far away, and stranger than when I'd been there, and I wondered how well I would re-integrate myself. I was afraid that the sour perspective I acquired when I was away would have soured the experience once I returned.

The trip uplake was utterly crammed with teenagers. I had thought that by being gone Thursday to Sunday I would have missed the final "May Youth Weekend," but evidently they took advantage of the holiday weekend to run two of them -- one Friday to Sunday, the other Sunday to Tuesday -- back to back. I was coming up with the final bunch. Actually they joined the boat at the end of the road, which is an hour uplake from Chelan. The first hour of the trip was marred by the presence of about five six-year-olds who were as noisy and raucous as the college students that crowded my motel, and when the teenagers came aboard, their chatter simply drowned out that of the six-year-olds. And I knew the teenagers would tire out eventually.

I remember talking with you on the phone about how all the teenagers get there: they come in cars and vans that park at that end-of-the-road place -- Fields Point. You asked what happened if they missed the boat and I said Lutherans never miss the boat. I was only too right; I asked a couple of the youth group leaders how far they'd come and how long it had taken them to get to Fields Point. I learned they tended to leave in the middle of the night and get there at 5:30 or 6:30. But the boat leaves from there at 9:30 -- proving that Lutherans will allow an extra three hours just to make sure they don't miss the boat.

In the crush of kids I tried to slip into the village anonymously, but I was spotted by the nurse, who was waiting for the bus (rather, five buses were required to ferry everyone up the mountain). She said they'd never got the message I tried to send saying I would be arriving on Sunday instead of Saturday, so they were a little bit mystified at what had happened to me. Just another example of the inefficiency of the "pouch note" system. Still, it was nice that someone noticed whether or not I lived or died. And speaking of dental emergencies, it turned out that later that day one of the children got hit in the mouth by a swing and required an emergency trip -- i.e. the next day, by usual transport -- to the same dentist I saw. I guess the dentist gets them in spurts.

The next day was my first kitchen shift. By noontime I had fallen completely back into the routine, except that I got to regale people with descriptions of Holiday Weekend Chelan. And now that it's been an additional 24 hours, it's like I never left. Chop vegetables (today was zucchini), "bowl" substances for distribution at the next meal to individual tables, listen to the music playing on the kitchen stereo. I confess that while I was in Chelan I went to the public library and used the internet to, among other tasks, order a few CDs so I could make a contribution to the kitchen music. Yesterday was horrid, they played the Grateful Dead, but this morning they mostly played 80s rock and disco, to the point where one of the younger people moaned "Can we play something from this century please!?" Whereupon me and Bruce started yelling that when this music first came out it cost a nickel and we listened to it using sewing needles.

While I was in Chelan and it was warm and humid, there was at least one very warm day up here. All the snow drifts on the north side of buildings have seriously melted. You can sit outside all day and in general it's very pleasant. Low temps every night are now consistently in the high 30s and above instead of 27-33. Rain is seldom, though; I'm afraid those rubber boots were unnecessary. I'm trying to decide whether to bring them home or just leave them here in the communal place where people leave items they don't want to haul home. I guess I could use them on our annual very rainy hike.

I have finally figured out that the guy upstairs from me is just dumb. You may remember that t-shirt I have that looks a little like a softball uniform and says GEESE. He met me on the path between our dorm and the dining hall, looked at me and said: "Ha ha -- 'jeese.'" He mispronounced the word "geese."

A strange thing just happened. A fighter jet just streaked down the valley about 1000 feet overhead -- like the Blue Angels do during Fleet Week in the city. I saw him turn "downlake" and disappear. Not surprising, in a way. I know from my brother [a former fighter pilot] talking about these things that fighter pilots often take unscheduled detours over wilderness just to break up the monotony.

I'm feeling so much better. My antibiotics will last me until the end of the week. I do hope they've solved the problem. I'd hate to have to pack up and bail out of here early -- I am getting a lot done.

12:30 -- after lunch. At lunch, sitting with fellow kitchenites, I asked the question, "Did anybody see that jet this morning?" This evoked a lively discussion of how it often happens, the waste involved in putting on air shows by the Blue Angels, and the possibility of painting a "go away" message to the pilots on the roofs of the buildings. After five minutes of chatter on the subject, a silence settled over the table. After two minutes, I said, "Man, I'm glad the jet flew over today, otherwise we wouldn't have had anything to talk about."

Today is [Tuesdays are] Leftovers Day. They haul out pans full of lasagna, casseroles, and everything else that can be reheated, and put it on a long buffet. Generally a very popular day because everything in this category is warm and probably has cheese on it.

In my work on my book, I took a good look on Sunday at what I'd done so far, and even though I was almost finished through my first pass at the Dolores scenes, I still wasn't satisfied. So I dug back into the outline again and traced the evolution of their relationship once again, and realized where I'd have to go through on a second pass and pump up the dialogue. So I've started doing that now. I have all afternoon to work on it, as opposed to yesterday, when I had to join the dish team preparatory to supper.

1:15 pm -- It's hard to tear myself away from the Updike book and get to work on my own. It's fun to read, and I have such difficulty doing a lot of reading at home. Something's always interrupting, and it's not easy to find someplace to sit. Isn't that strange? It's one reason I have so many unread books at home.

28 Jun 03

I dreamt that I was attending some sort of college where Paul McCartney was among the instructors; in addition to the expected courses (Rock 'n Roll Theory, The Meaning of the Beatles) he also taught some low-level math course, I think. Typical of Paul to grab the opportunity to determine for the next generation the Meaning of the Beatles. A young woman -- also an instructor, or one of Paul's seminar students? -- played for me an outtake of a late Beatles number on which, she explained, they improvised in harmony. It was the trail-off of "All You Need Is Love" or something. Then she showed me a hat she had worn on a camping trip: It had a lantern on top of it, as if she were balancing a camping lantern on her head. I said it was suitable for camping, yes, but also perhaps for attending a play about Thomas Edison.

Last night I went to bed early. I couldn't read in the dining hall because there were people socializing in there, and since the kid upstairs was not playing his stereo, I took the chance of going to bed at 9:30. I left the window wide open; I knew it would get cold but better that than too much heat. And he never came home and played his stereo, and I slept until 6:00 or so. Very pleasant.

Earlier in the evening there was a wildlife event. I had overheard some people talking after dinner about a bear they'd seen behind Lodge 6 -- the creek side of the building which is right in front of me -- and a pregnant deer also in the vicinity. I never saw the bear, but about 7:30 the deer and its newborn fawn came walking hesitantly down the main street of the village. The fawn was spotted, awkward, skinny; it had a hard time keeping up with its mother. They paraded in hesitation step down the street while people quietly gathered or took pictures.

Yesterday I had a persistent problem with my computer. MS Word kept crashing it, which is rather inconvenient for me since that's all I use the computer for. I finally determined that I could start Word from within the MS Works Task Launcher, and it would be all right. So I worked the rest of the day like that -- but only after numerous crashes, a complete virus check, a scan using the emergency boot disk, and other magic spells.
 

5:45 pm -- I worked this afternoon on ch. 48. I have Gene coming back to the motel after the Sunday dinner and getting completely paranoid over the possibility of being slave-driven by the Sanchez family and being stick in the motel forever. Then I have Dolores coming to him a few days later and saying that they are indeed thinking of buying it, and shows him a plan to raise the rates on all the rooms after remodeling the whole place, and this really freaks him out.

I feel, in the last three or four days since coming back from Chelan, a complete change in my approach to these chapters. Perhaps through a mixture of the days away, the recovery from illness, the momentum of three weeks of work, and all the Updike, I now feel inspired. I know exactly what I want to do, and I go through chapter by chapter. Even where I have to completely reorganize material and do a lot of rewriting, as in ch. 47 and (today) 48, I know just what tone I want. It's a wonderfully empowered feeling.
 

9:30 pm -- It's Wednesday, right after the weekly big staff meeting. This is the place where everyone processes about things like the banishment and return of the kitchenites; it's also the place where the Long Goodbye presentations happen. The guy who has been the fire safety officer, a friendly, understated guy, got his tonight, since he's leaving next week. Then unexpectedly one of the short-term staff -- a pimpled 25-year-old who was here mainly to help with the May Youth Weekends and who is a self-styled rapper (he's a white guy from Minneapolis, of course) -- delivered a goodbye rap to the staffer who is the village idiot. Turns out he had bonded with the guy. Naturally the goodbye rap was addressed to both [the idiot] and his invisible friend, i.e. the article of clothing he treats as a friend or a kind of pet. It was silly enough yet sweet enough -- the rapper is this very sincere kid -- that it actually came across well.

They asked for feedback from the May Youth Weekend. After about 25 people had spoken, the sincere white rapper guy spoke up and said he had done a lot of "work" with "youth" and was surprised and a little disturbed when he got here to actually hear people saying to each other "Oh no, the youth are coming." One of the senior staff kind of jumped all over him, she said she had never once heard anything like that. I thought to myself, well of course people never voiced it to you -- you're the director. So I spoke up and said I'd heard the same as the kid, it may not have been the dominant sentiment but it was part of the vibe. Later someone thanked me for saying that, agreeing that she had jumped on the kid.

The whole last 30 minutes of the 2 hr 15 min. meeting had to do with the banished kitchenites and the experience of the village of re-integrating them. The processing started when one of the banishees read a statement in which he said he didn't agree with most of the points of the covenant or behavior guidelines which all the staff have to sign. So we processed that for a while. Finally the meeting broke up, and most of the people adjourned to the dining hall for a kind of party to celebrate the end of May Youth Weekends, except for the banishees, who all went to the smoking area [the upper porch of my dorm, Lodge 1] and processed.

29 May 03

I left the window open again all night, but it got down to about 40 and I was cold in the morning. It's hard to keep the blankets arranged on the twin bed. I got up at 5:55 and worked a little on ch. 50, drafting the first scene.

Then I went to breakfast, which was extremely excellent -- scrambled eggs and tortillas -- and sat with the owlish carpenter Joe, famous for making 41 drawers for Lodge 6 in a few days. He and another man, whom I sat next to during the Community Meeting last night [this was Jerry, the man a little older than me who worked both media and the Hike Haus], discussed Mormons and how wonderfully family-friendly they are, and about rules and "covenants" vis-a-vis last night's processing about the banishees. "It's like a different country," Joe said of Utah. "There's no poverty. They take care of their own."

I wanted to say, "That's great if you're a heterosexual and all you want to do is raise a family, but what if you're queer? What if you don't want kids? What if you're just a nonconformist? Then how great is it?" But I didn't say anything. Breakfast is not the time to be confrontational.
 

5:35 pm -- Kitchen shift was especially piffling today. There aren't many people in the village (though more than were here in midweek two weeks ago) and we always seem to be way ahead of ourselves. For the first 75 minutes Bruce and I worked on chopping lettuce -- a one-person job if we had been understaffed, but we aren't. Then a 45 minute break followed, and then a lot of cleaning and sweeping and then the lead cook simply let us go at 11:30, half an hour early. It's gotten so I've stopped going in early for the most part, though I went in 15 minutes early today.

It has been a gorgeous day -- almost 80 degrees and clear. So I went hiking. There was a wildlife moment just before the hike. I saw Stephanie and her brother Kurt leaning over the porch of the Hike Haus and she called, "There's a bear right here!" I went over there and saw a young brown bear, not fully grown by any means -- about the size of a 55-gallon drum -- about 30 feet away. Stella the Hike Haus queen came over and checked him out. "Come on, Stella, you can take him on," I said. She laughed and said, "I don't want to fight him, I just want to cuddle him!"

I took a hike today with a guy named Rich who'd been here a few days, a pastor about my age on sabbatical. We went up a fairly vertical trail to the saddle at the mouth of Copper Basin -- I can see it from my window and I had been wanting to go up there ever since I got here. It was a short but very strenuous hike -- 140 minutes up and 40 minutes down -- and we were back in about three hours.

Tonight the high school students will present a play to which everyone is invited. I don't feel like going, especially after I spent the afternoon hiking instead of writing. I just don't need to go and watch a bunch of high school girls noodling around a stage. No one will be taking attendance, I hope. It is of course not mandatory.

I hope the kid upstairs goes, though. His stereo is thumping away upstairs. I mentioned it to Rich and he said, "Oh, that must be the guy I was talking to yesterday who was telling me all about his stereo and its ___ ____ ____ " (types and degree of speakers of which I am ignorant).
 

9:35 pm -- I did skip the high schoolers' play, and instead stayed in my room and worked on my book. I managed to rewrite ch. 50. It contains the scene where Sanchez and sons officially inspect the motel, and the scene at the end of the chapter where Gene receives a call in the motel office that the place has been sold. In addition to these scenes, I wrote two new scenes, one before the inspection, one after. The latter re-used some of the false starts I've been batting around in my time here. In any case, I think I have things more or less under control. I'll smooth it out later.

Eighteen days left to work on my book, according to the calendar. I hope they're all as productive as the last five days.

30 May 03

I dreamt I had survived a thriller-like murder plot, that I was reading an English-language magazine about expatriate life in France, that I had awakened and was wandering down a street in a sort of Frenchified Oakland in nothing but a black t-shirt, looking for coffee. I slept from 10 pm til 6:30 like a proverbial rock.

Friday the 30th... I can't quite remember but I believe today is when, for no reason in particular, the numbers in the village start climbing. Church groups start coming, and random guests. We actually had several random guests yesterday, including a family where the mother was dressed in some horribly ugly ankle-length dress as if she were Amish or something. The full summer schedule with classes doesn't start until the 14th, though. This is like the last transitional period.

Yesterday the weather was so perfect I want to say so again. It wasn't just the 80 degree temperature, it was the low humidity and gentle breezes, perfect for hanging around in the shade. Days like that make you really love being here. Of course up to now I've had many more worse days, including that stretch of six or seven annoyingly chilly days leading up to my "out" when I just couldn't seem to get warm anyplace except my bed, which was too warm.
 

12:00 noon -- I'm in no hurry to get to lunch. This morning's kitchen shift was a trial. I walked in and A., the perpetually sunburned, overamped lead cook, asked me how I would like to make coffee cake for 125. I allowed as how I could do it if I got enough help. But I didn't get as much help as I needed. It took me nearly two hours to get the pans in the oven, and 40 minutes later the cakes still weren't done. I had to hand the task off to the next shift; I was grateful to be able to do so, but also a little humiliated. I hate doing unfamiliar tasks when I don't get enough help and advice. It was like being back in the software industry.

We'll see if the cakes came out at all. I may be facing even more humiliation, including behind my back. I imagine people asking "Who made that fucked-up coffee cake?"
 

12:45 -- Nathan, the lead cook on shift #2, saw me in passing in the dining hall. "Those cakes turned out splendid," he said. Oh really? The proof will be in the pudding, or in this case in the cake. We'll see how they came out when they're served.

I ate lunch and talked to Julie, the 60-ish spiritual director. She's chatted with me several times; either she feels sorry for me or no one else will talk to her. We spoke of the Community Meeting that took place on Wednesday and the conversation in the last 30 minutes that ensued about the "covenant," i.e. the rules of behavior that everyone signs. I said that if they're perceived by some people as arbitrary, it's because there's no underlying ethos that they refer to. Same goes for the attitude about hospitality, whether to the May Youth or anyone: hospitality is talked about but there are no fundamental values underlying it -- such as the Rule of Benedict -- that would make it a living charism. She seemed to agree and said I should give that feedback to the People In Charge.

Could be. I've been going back and forth in my mind about what kind of feedback to give them. Since they obviously aren't interested in any ongoing feedback, but they do provide a form on which to give the feedback, I've been toying with the idea of writing something up for presentation when I leave. Sometimes I think it would be worthwhile; other times I'm convinced it would be a waste of my time. I have a couple of weeks left to decide.
 

5:40 pm -- Just took my last antibiotic. Now I'll cross my fingers. Could pray too.

Today was the first fire alarm I experienced. Having attended "hose house training" I assembled with a group in front of the Secondary Hose House while a larger group gathered at the Primary Hose House and full-vested firefighters searched the building in question. It was sprinkling a little but nobody minded. It's been overcast all day and finally it started sprinkling.

31 May 03

In a society where everyone is affluent, will gift-giving go out of style? Perhaps people will be obliged to give only custom-made gifts instead of manufactured items. The practice starts when people begin exchanging only gifts they make themselves, since in a super-affluent society, you can afford any manufactured item, and only self-made gifts are meaningful. But then, of course, people don't have the time or talent to make things themselves, so a new trade in custom-made gifts begins. This makes artists and artisans even richer than they were before.
 

6:00 pm -- I felt oddly light-headed all morning -- not faint at all, just a little bit hollow and thin, like the top of a whitecap blowing off in a gale. It was breezy today, no warmer than 70. But in the kitchen it was hot. I performed a number of insignificant tasks; perhaps the nadir of my career came when I was assigned to stand in front of a giant urn of black bean soup and stir it from time to time. Meanwhile slender minxes scurried around as if they all had a to-do list seventeen items long. After I was relieved from stirring, I took as long as I possibly could to wipe off some shelves full of rarely-used items including several oil cruets, the crystal top of one of which I dropped and broke on the stone floor. (Stone? Brick? Tile? It's damn hard in any case.)

In the afternoon I felt a little drowsy. I think I'm not getting enough exercise. I went for a walk yesterday but turned back when I felt a few raindrops. And logging trucks are going up and down the road all day long, making it extremely dusty to walk on. The loggers are from a particular church in -- everyone always cites the town -- Port Angeles, Wash., and they come up here regularly to process the trees tagged by the Forest Service. All afternoon, two trucks went back and forth in front of my window, raising a cloud of dust, hauling long straight fir logs up to the wood processing area and deadheading back down to the spot on the road where the logging is taking place.

The verdict is in on the coffee cake -- it's good. I knew when I saw one of the loggers take a second piece. The loggers are a group of men from Port Olympia, Wash. [Olympia? Angeles? Now I don't know] who come up here for a week twice a year to log trees that the Forest Service has tagged. These trees are then turned into lumber and firewood that is all used up here. In real life they are loggers -- this is a busman's holiday for them. Anyway, there they were, enjoying the coffee cake. It turned out extremely moist. I forgot to mention that they had me put rhubarb into the mix at the last minute. No one knew how that would play so they had me dump extra sugar in. It all came out fine. I feel vindicated. Of course no one else knew of my internal drama around the coffee cake.

Last night there was a talent show. Since this is the last slack period before all the summer guests start arriving, it was a chance for the staff to entertain each other. I went but I couldn't think of anything to do. Someone suggested I read from my work in progress but I couldn't think of a part that would require so much explanation and be so long as to be boring. Perhaps that's not a good sign. I sat there racking my brains for any material I might have that could be appropriate. Finally when I was going to bed last night I thought I could have sung "Who Wants Gum?" It's a cappela and G-rated.

Yesterday I took my last antibiotic. Then at supper I bit down on a nut and the suspect tooth didn't feel quite right. But this morning it's OK. I'm crossing my fingers.

 
While I was writing/napping -- my pattern is to write for half an hour, nap, write for 45 minutes, lay down again, etc. -- another fire alarm went off. Different building, different assembly point. Different weather: sunny and warm. Same result: no problem. It did wake me up, and I wrote a little more, but I still took another nap.

People who were here when I came, or even who arrived during my stay, are starting to rotate out. Karl, the gay guy, left the day before I went down to Chelan; Adam, the moon-faced kid who arrived the day before me, left a few days ago; the twins Stephanie and Kurt (he had no right hand, and played the French Horn) left yesterday, and Bruce the puppet guy is due to leave Monday. Perhaps that's why staff are so unfriendly to newcomers: they know the newcomers will just leave and break their hearts. Bruce, I have finally determined, is queer. His reference to having kids has now been explained that he art. insem. a dyke friend who then proceeded to have twins. The dyke and the two toddlers are visiting for the weekend. A lot of guests are coming into the village now, ahead of church groups.

1 Jun 03

Sunday -- my day off. I've been relieved of kitchen work on Sunday, which is always Big Meat Day. I never complained about the meatloafs I had to cook on that first Sunday, but maybe others complained about them; I'm not sure how my day off got reassigned from Monday to Sunday. Anyway I'm glad not to have to be in the kitchen today. While we were eating breakfast there was some poor lout cleaning whole chickens. {shudder}

I sat at breakfast with some of the people who are more my age. A couple of them were going on an ambitious two and a half day hike, "to Northstar." I'd heard people in days past talking about going "to Northstar" so I went to the Hike Haus -- which is a sort of info office and storage room for hiking and camping equipment -- and talked to Stella, the Hike Haus queen. She showed me Northstar on a map, a high mountain basically at the very, very upper end of the valley -- when you get there, there's no more valley. I looked at the map and said, "But there are no trails leading to any point on the mountain. Are people talking about just sort of going up to the mountain?" She said that no, people get close and then they just sort of improvise and go straight up. It turns out that that's where a lot of these snowboarders go -- it's said there's a glacier up there. The middle-aged people I mention -- well, they're in their early 40s -- are going to hike out there all day today and then camp someplace (it's all official wilderness so I guess that means you can just camp wherever you want), then spend the second day hiking up to the top, or somewhere close to it. They didn't seem bothered by the fact there are no trails. "They say it's obvious where you leave the trail," one said. I sat there smiling and thinking, great, you go for it.

I wonder if it's necessary to be one of these manly hikers to really understand this place. Clearly, completing several manly, difficult, off-trail hikes -- it's not enough to hike on the trails, you must go off the trail to really prove yourself -- earns you a lot of face. But I wonder if there's something transcendent about the experience without which you can never really understand the ethos here.

It's a little overcast this morning, kind of on the warm side. It could either get really humid and then rain, or get chilly and then rain, or just clear up and get really nice.

Leaving the dining hall I saw A., the most annoying 22-year-old who works in the kitchen, climbing up on the dish sink to make a joking lascivious gesture to some girl outside the building [he stuck his tongue out and stroked it with his finger]. This guy is bouncy and wiggly to a ridiculous degree. I can only imagine the hyperactive nightmare he must have been as an eight-year-old. I'm surprised his parents didn't murder him at some point. I've seen him return from hikes late in the day several times; he definitely knows the "obvious" spot to turn off the trail to go to Northstar.

After breakfast I was walking down the hall to my room and suddenly was very happy to remember we're going to New York in a few weeks. That will be such a -- I don't want to say antidote -- good experience to balance having been Way Out Here.

Departing today: Liv, the gorgeous, warm and friendly kitchenite. Standing in the crowd of goodbyers, I asked Meisha how long Liv had been up here. The short explanation is that she spent much of the winter but was gone during April; this was an indefinite goodbye. Part of one's status is judged by how many people turn out to wish you goodbye, and it's another local ritual. Not only do you get a personal goodbye from everyone who wants to come down and give you one, but once the bus starts moving the whole crowd (and it was a crowd today, at least 40 people) start waving, and they are obliged to wave until the bus is out of sight. This takes only two minutes, just the right amount of time to seem silly.

2 Jun 03

1:30 pm -- I woke up feeling logy and decided I needed to be more active. So I took my two-mile walk in the morning before kitchen shift. Actually I made a little side trip to see the footbridge on the Goat Trail, so it was more than two miles. Then kitchen shift was unusually relaxed, not to say unoccupied, for I was busy for the whole shift. Jonathan was the lead cook and I think he's just more relaxed than some of the others.

After lunch I ran into Bruce. He's leaving tomorrow and complained of having to do a shift on dish team when he really should be finishing his latest papier maché piece. So I volunteered to take his turn, and I just got finished with it. We got out at 1:30 instead of 2:30 like the last lunchtime dish team we had, so it was a good deal all the way around. Now I feel rather energized instead of tired.
 

9:00 pm -- Bruce's dyke friend from Tacoma came a few days ago with their twins, two utterly cute 22-monthers who love running around in 15-foot-diameter circles (any larger and they would be too far from one another).

She wrote a book about reading Exodus as a story about how empires behave, suggesting that modern developed nations with large immigrant populations behave just the way the Egyptians do in Exodus, and therefore it's a misreading of the story of Exodus for first-worlders to identify with the enslaved Israelites. That's fine if you read it from an economic perspective, but -- I said -- when I'm sitting in the Easter Vigil hearing that story about the Israelites going through the Red Sea, it's not a story about economics, it's a story about salvation through the waters of baptism; the story of salvation is not about economics, in fact can't be about economics. She replied that you have to read the whole thing, and take the latter part of the story -- the Israelites smashing the Canaanites et al. -- and deal with that. That that's why a certain prominent Native American theologian said he couldn't adopt the story of Exodus as his own, because he identified with the Canaanites. But Americans aren't entitled to identify with the Canaanites or with the Israelites -- we must perforce identify with the Egyptians, if we're honest. The rest of the presentation devolved into a discussion of how to make a personal economic impact by choosing to buy the right things. That goes nowhere for me. Of course you can make good choices in what to buy and what to refrain from buying, but for me that just leads one into a legalistic approach to life in which you can never be good enough, never be pure enough. She said it was possible to focus on these choices and live in grace, so that you're happy about the good choices you make and don't fret so much about the bad ones, but I'm not so sure about that. If I'm identifying with the Egyptians, then I'm stuck. I'm always the bad guy. Only way out is to move to Bolivian village, grow own vegetables, trade them for woven goods.

I had a big mail day today. Catherine sent me a book for a birthday present. It was actually something I got Christine a year or two ago -- a photo essay about the wild fashions of Tokyo youth. I opened it and showed Heike and a 70-year-old woman named Fran who seemed to enjoy it. I also got a card from Sara in which she jokingly told me to stop reading John Updike, she can't stand him; a letter from my mother, perpetually fretting about her sister; and a letter from the Klings including a couple of recent church bulletins. That was nice.

Today on my book I did not make a huge amount of forward progress, but I did a lot of rewriting in the two scenes I wrote yesterday, and made them much better. Feel like I can go on now and finish the chapter. It also occurred to me today that it may not make sense for Gene to decide to go back to Las Vegas after dropping off MM -- not the way I've written it now. I've written myself out of that ending.

3 Jun 03

Bruce and family are leaving today. I gave him a couple of letters to mail from Tacoma; it'll probably speed them by about three days. With the departure of Liv, Bruce and (tomorrow) Carolyn, along with non-kitchenites her boyfriend the rapper guy Dave and dancer Katie D., the kitchen crew has undergone a real turnover. Today I welcomed two 21-year-old Californians, Bonnie and Melissa, who will join the kitchen starting this week.

It was quite cool this morning; by the time I got out to the dining hall at 7:20 the thermometer said it was 41. After breakfast I took another two-mile walk, but instead of walking on the dusty road, I went the other way, up the valley and a few hundred yards past the wilderness boundary. I knew that at my usual quick pace I walk a mile in about 16 or 18 minutes, so I turned around after 20 minutes and I knew that would equal at least a two-mile round trip. Then I took a quick shower and I felt great. I'm going to make sure I take a walk every morning before work.

Jonathan was again the lead cook this morning, and again I had a relaxed shift. I'm convinced now it's his influence.
 

2:15 -- Said goodbye, with 30 other people, to Bruce et al. His two little girls, 22-month-old twins, came down to the bus, stood near the front tire which was about the same height they were, and pointed to it squealing "Wheel! Wheel!" When they got on the bus I drew little hearts in the dust on their window, and a boat. The bus driver had to blow the horn loudly to get me to step away from the bus so he could get it moving.
 

8:15 pm -- Got a slow start this afternoon -- greeted a bus, goodbyed a bus, and finally came into my room. Looked at my journal, stopped myself doing so, laid down for a nap. The kid upstairs played his stereo very quietly for five minutes, then stopped, but it was long enough to get me out of bed. Finally I started working, and wrote scene 58c: Gene visits Gustafson in the nursing home. I did 1200 words of that, knocked off at 4:20, checked the post office: no mail for me. "It's a first," marveled the postal girl. "A second," I corrected her, but actually, the day on which I got no letters or cards, I got a package. So today I got nothing at all for the first time.

It occurred to me lately, and now even more strongly with the scenes in chapters 56 and 58 featuring Sanchez and Gustafson, that what Sara said was true: the book is full of father figures for Gene. Bobby, Gustafson and Sanchez -- even the Buddhist priest (a priest, thus "father") -- all alternative father figures. To top it all off, his own is dead. Whether I meant to or not, I have written a book about a kid with no father who encounters all sorts of father figures: an encouraging, permissive but somewhat absent one (Bobby); an evil, slavedriving but weak one (Gustafson); a wise, permissive but ultimately aloof one (Lee); a warm but conniving and ultimately manipulative one (Sanchez). Add to that the one figure he really intends to learn from, Kerouac. In the end, the best one takes him away, only to set him free.

I should keep this theme in mind when making my next pass through the book. In addition, the other themes: the mystery of being an adult; the embrace of both sadness and happiness; the search for success.

At supper I sat down with a couple of old ladies. Then two little girls came and hovered and I invited them to sit down; they were among a couple dozen schoolchildren who came into the village today and because they were younger and a little chubby, none of the other children probably wanted them to sit with them. (See how I'm starting to speak the local lingo: they "came into the village.") Then a young man in a t-shirt and a military haircut sat down. He seemed socially rather lame, almost as bad as the ten-year-old schoolgirls, but then he excused himself and said he had gone on a fifteen-mile hike that day and was pretty tired. I asked him if he was part of the school group and he said "No -- I'm here on my honeymoon." I said, congratulations -- what other spots have you gone on in your honeymoon trip? He looked at me dully and said, "This is it."

"Okay," I said, not asking the obvious: where is your bride. No doubt she was exhausted after the hike. Then I remembered seeing them during my morning walk. While I was walking back to the village, they were on their way out, carrying water bottles in their hands. I remembered thinking, they must not be up for a very long hike, because they have no packs or anything. But they must have gone all the way to Lyman Lake, because that's the 15-mile round trip. They went all that way carrying their water bottles in their hands -- yikes.

Presently a young woman sat down next to the young man: evidently his bride. She looked like no young woman I had ever seen. Imagine taking a fat Iowa farm wife of 60 years old, and then using a computer to create a picture of what that woman might have looked like when she was 20. Such a picture would look completely weird, of course, because no fat 60-year-old looks anything like they did at 20; their ugliness is the result of decades of bitterness and repression. And yet here was that 20-year-old woman: thick glasses, dull brown hair worn in a loose bun, wearing a bunch of clean, pressed, utterly conservative clothes, and with the bones and facial structure of a fat 60-year-old white woman; yet she was 20, her face was unlined, and she was not even very fat. But you could see that she had never been pretty, never would be pretty, was fairly stupid. The only thing that distinguished her from an antique portrait of, say, the ugliest high school graduate of Clear Lake (Iowa) High School, class of 1951, was the fact that she wore a sweatshirt. Dull conservative women did not wear sweatshirts in 1951. Otherwise here was this atrocious person, saying almost nothing, eating gamely, basically presenting herself as: I have showered and put on clean clothes.

4 Jun 03

I had two vivid, involved dreams. One was about a mass transit system in Oakland that involved streetcars as well as little ferries that looked like streetcars and ran on canals. The terminal was an ancient place with lots of iron railings and gates in faded red paint, structures almost like cattle chutes labeled with the numbers of the lines. I remember that I was going to get on the 'M' line which was one of those ferries, it ran a rectangular route around the neighborhoods in the Fruitvale district.

The second dream featured a sort of combination presentation/performance I had to do -- as if it were the final presentation for a doctoral thesis. The subject involved the history of Christian art; I had a lot of pieces I'd borrowed, crosses and icons and (for some reason) masks, which I'd hung on the wall next to a large map/timeline I'd got from a museum. As the time to make my presentation grew closer, it became more and more like a performance. I had a script, a background tape full of bird noises, a symphonic score that an orchestra was going to perform, and about fourteen dancers-singers who were going to troop up a long ramp into the museum/concert hall itself. At the last minute one of the dancer-singers told me that Jenny couldn't be part of the performance because she was freaking out over some typical family tsuris having to do with her brother. The performance began and I said the first shaky words into my mike.
 

8:20 pm -- Today I wrote the end of ch. 58, marking the end of the rewrite of the Gene-Dolores scenes in my book. The first time I wrote those scenes, I had Gene eventually decide to leave, go to the bus station, and get picked up there by Bobby. In the rewrite I planned to go back to my original plan, which was to have them get into an argument in the office and then have Bobby show up and take away Gene, who suddenly decides to leave. I thought it would be more dramatic. But then I wound up having Gene go to the bus station after all. The whole chapter is better but I just couldn't get them into a big argument. The relationship ends in a sort of whimper. We'll see if that works out okay.
 

Letter to Cris:

Yesterday I sent a letter out with someone who was departing, asking them to mail it from someplace closer to civilization. They're probably going to mail it from Tacoma so I bet you'll have gotten it really fast. However, you might be in Yosemite when it arrives... I don't know your dates there. I'll just pretend you're at home awaiting my letters with the same bated breath I await yours.

Now that I've been here more than four weeks, I've gotten to a place of reasonable comfort in the kitchen. The rhubarb coffee cake notwithstanding, I feel a level of confidence while working that permits me to go through whole shifts without the kind of performance anxiety that dogged me for the first few weeks -- the feeling that I'm going to fuck up and people are going to think I'm a dolt and will be sorry I am here for so long. Now I'm able to get through a whole shift without that kind of anxiety. One reason is that there are now a lot of newer people and they are much more liable to fuck up than I am, but the main reason is that I know where everything is and have been exposed to most of the processes. I can even join in the bread kneading without feeling like everyone is looking critically at my kneaded loaves. Perhaps everyone is, but I feel more like joking about it.

The other conclusion I've come to is a reinforcement of the feeling that I'll never fit in here with these people, not the way they do. Whether it's because I'm just not interested in all their coded language and displays of in-group behavior, or because it's impossible for them to hear anyone like me who speaks from a perspective of the outsider, I'm even more positive that I'll never really be able to communicate with them.

Case in point. In the dining hall there is a whiteboard where the entrees for each meal are written. Below the entries for breakfast, lunch and dinner, there is a section that was actually started just a couple of weeks ago. It is a "conversation starter" question designed to get people talking at meals about something besides their jobs and their pecking-order communications. Today's question was "What are you going to do on your out?" Of course, that is an incomprehensible sentence to anyone who is not on staff here. An out, n., is a trip down the mountain and down the lake (usually -- or it could be a major backpacking trip in the other direction) for purposes of rest and relaxation. The same term is also used when someone has to go down for a dental emergency or on business, but I believe the context here meant "What are you going to do on your days off?"

I wrote beneath the question "This is meaningless to anyone who is not on staff" -- assuming the question is meant for everyone to discuss, not just the in-group. I regarded it as a typical thoughtless expression of elitism. And I was going to bring it up in the weekly community meeting that was held tonight, part of which is an open-ended section where you can voice your happiness or your frustration about something.

Before the meeting I grabbed S., who has always been friendly to me. I thought she was the one responsible for writing the questions on the whiteboard -- she's the one who started it a few weeks ago and announced it in the Community Meeting -- and I didn't want her to feel sandbagged when I brought it up in the open meeting. The way she responded really surprised me. First she said she hadn't been writing the questions for several days and didn't know who wrote that one. I said, as if it were obvious to anyone who thought about it for a minute, that the question was elitist because it used lingo that no one but staff could understand.

Instead of saying, "Oh yeah, you're right, I never thought of that," she said, "Yeah -- but looked at another way, it could be seen as a way to educate people and open them up to this staff lingo, so that instead of them maybe overhearing it and not understanding and feeling shut out, it would give them a chance to find out what it means, and then they'd feel included."

I couldn't believe she was defending it and trying to say it was a positive thing. I assumed I just hadn't explained my point of view clearly enough, so I tried again. But she came right back with her cheery defense. Then the meeting started, and when they got to the part where you're supposed to bring up "joys, gratitude, concerns and frustrations" -- following yet another maudlin Long Goodbye session for two long-term people who were about to leave the staff -- I just sat in my seat and didn't say anything. S.'s defense of the in-group behavior made me realize that people who are so entrenched in the elitist ethos simply can't hear or understand the perspective of someone who's not a member of the in-group. I felt discouraged because I didn't say my two cents, but especially because someone I might have expected to understand an outsider's perspective -- a fellow queer -- was completely unable to understand the point.

So that all just reinforced my feeling that I will never fit in here, and frankly wouldn't want to, if it means assimilating to the point where I can't understand the perspective of an outsider. And of course it's just another opportunity to remind myself that my work on my book is going well, that that's what I'm really here for and is all that matters.

By the way -- I heard no one in the dining hall discussing the question of what they were going to do on their "out." But then again, it's not a very original question. People talk about it all the time -- it's another way of bragging.

Catherine sent me a late birthday present -- a book of photographs of extravagantly costumed Japanese youths. You know those kids in Tokyo who dress up in wacky fashion gear -- sort of like Stephanie when she would dress up colorfully weird, only the Japanese kids have a lot of disposable income to spend on the hobby. The book is 200 pages of these cute 20-year-olds in unbelievable getups. The rather sheltered Americans here are of course dumbfounded by the book. My favorite reaction was that of a 70-year-old woman who looked at the book and then revealed the only scrap of personal connection she has to the Asian continent: "You know, I have this neighbor who is from Thailand. She's lived in this country for thirty years but I still just have the hardest time understanding her -- she speaks so softly. But she is just the sweetest little thing."

Tomorrow morning for the first and only time, I am on the garbage sorting team. They have several ways of disposing of things here -- they burn the paper and meat scraps, they compost all the non-meat food, they send white office paper to a recycler in Chelan, etc. -- and it all has to be sorted by hand. Then I'll go off to my regular kitchen shift, so it's a bit of a long day, but not as long as today when, in addition to my kitchen shift, I did my weekly slot in the dishwashing area. I don't mind these contributions to the commonweal, since in general everything runs smoothly, and I like things to run smoothly. I also want to demonstrate to people that I can hold up my end and am not a lazy dolt. Sometimes I even volunteer for an extra dishwashing shift when they need someone. It doesn't take away from my writing time; I still have my three or four hours every afternoon to work.

I'm not unhappy here. The days have turned very sunny and warm, though the early mornings are still 40 degrees. The afternoons are just gorgeous, and after I finish my writing, I go to the post office to see if I have mail, and sit outside in the shade reading, and it's very pleasant. And it's not that everyone is unfriendly. It's just a little frustrating sometimes. I'm not sure, though, given the chance, I would go to the trouble of coming up here again, unless it were to do something like teach a fiction writing workshop. The surroundings are gorgeous, the food is fine, and the accommodations are very comfortable, the stereo upstairs notwithstanding. Even the people are nice in that well-meaning Lutheran way. But they're just too assimilated and American for someone from San Francisco. Not that they don't hold all sorts of progressive political and economic views; they aren't politically conservative my any means. They just don't realize this isn't the best of all possible worlds.

Got no mail today for the second day in a row. I guess everyone got sick of writing me; maybe they got sick of my letters and didn't want to encourage me anymore.

Let me say something positive about being here. I realized today how comfortable it is to step outside the building and walk around, either to another building or just at random. In San Francisco, when you leave the house, not only do you have to make sure you have all your things -- your keys, wallet, etc, -- but you have to put on a street face and a sort of personal armor. Here you just walk outside and it's like being in your living room. That's nice.

5 Jun 03

Catherine's birthday. I sent her a card several days ago. Her answer, in a note with the book she sent me, reminded me she and Brandy were going to Hawaii for several weeks starting this month. I think it has something to do with his father, with whom they went on a weeks-long cruise a couple of years ago. Catherine would be 43 or 44, but to me she looks just about the same as she did when she came to San Francisco twenty years ago this month.

I wonder if today will be the third in a row without mail. It seems incredible, yet it could happen.

This morning I had "garbo" duty for the first (and only) time. Because there is another public school group in the village, it mostly consisted of helping supervise and cheer the kids on. Holden Village has an extensive, labor-intensive system of sorting trash and various ways of storing, burning or otherwise disposing it. I won't go into a description of the system; it has more parts than I know of anyway. Our duties this morning consisted of chopping at kitchen waste to be put into the compost pile. That is, the kids chopped at it with shovels and I cheered them on and had them rotate. I taught them to say "gambatte yo!" -- a Japanese expression meaning "Go hard, do your utmost" -- to cheer on their mates. They were fifth graders and rather cute. One boy drew my attention to the fact that he was almost my height. One girl, very thin, who will turn into Audrey Hepburn, shyly asked me to guess her age, and when I correctly guessed 11 she smiled happily.

Garbo duty didn't last long enough to cut into my kitchen shift, where I spent almost the whole morning on two different prep tasks: cheese slicing and lettuce-cleaning, both for a sandwich bar for tomorrow's lunch. I wish we didn't prep lettuce 24-30 hours before it is to be used, but that's how they do it. It's about the third time this week I've cleaned lettuce. The stuff's organic and each leaf has to be thoroughly rinsed.

The two new kitchenites from Costa Mesa, Bonnie and Melissa, are now working happily. Bonnie had a day off the day after she arrived, and then started only today on the second shift, at 11:00, so her more outgoing buddy had almost two full shifts on her when she started. I feel like I'm watching over them a wee bit because they are new to the place and work in the kitchen and are from California. I don't want to come off intrusive, however, since I am like 25 years older than them. They would just think I'm weird.
 

7:30 pm -- Today was about the sixth warm sunny day in a row. It must have got up to 85. The sun is brilliant and beats down heavily. The only time I really choose to go out in it is to goodbye a bus, and then I wear my wide-brimmed hiking hat. It's very hot but it also keeps the sun off. Today the schoolkids left, the ones who chopped the garbage this morning. One of the teachers complimented me on handling them well. Actually I thought she was flirting with me for a second, but why would she, she got on the bus literally 90 seconds later.

7:34 pm -- The kid stops listening to his stereo. It's completely off now. He must have played fragments of 30 songs in four minutes, and now it's over. Fortunately it's pleasant to sit on the porch, and since he smokes cigarettes, I guess he can't stay in his room for long.

Today in my work on my book, I decided to work on that passage in the opening segment where I had a point of view problem. I ended up re-arranging the chapter and section divisions once again, so that where in the first draft I had three chapters, and in the second draft I had five, now I have one chapter with five sections. I quickly went through the whole outline and rearranged it accordingly.

6 Jun 03

Another in a series of warm, sunny days. Yesterday it was 88, though the nights are still around 40 at the coldest. Amazing how much it's changed in the last two weeks. Two weeks ago at 8:00 pm you'd definitely need a sweater and maybe a jacket as well. Now at 8:00 pm it's still 70. Once the sun disappears it does get cool -- and even though the official sunset is rather late now, the sun actually disappears from the valley floor by 7:25 because of the mountains to the west.

I had a rather tiring day in the kitchen, cleaning lettuce. It's all I did for three hours, because there are starting to be a lot of people here -- the church groups of 15 or 20 or 25 people each start arriving tomorrow -- and because the organic lettuce we get from a district farm tends to be rather dirty and buggy. Each leaf has to be washed carefully to keep out the dirt and bugs, and this takes a long time, so when you're cleaning enough lettuce for salad for 300 people -- which is how many will be here by Sunday -- it takes a while. Even the addition of a 20-year-old for the last hour didn't seem to speed up the process much. She was meticulous, which was good. But by noon when we went off shift we were still not finished, so the second shift had to do it too.

Exhausted by all this, and wanting to take a little pause in work on my book, I decided to spend the afternoon reading. I have one more substantial book I brought along, and it should last me ten days; and if it doesn't, there are plenty of books in the library here. I did check out a paperback and read a few Dylan Thomas short stories to delay starting on this last volume I had brought.

I also wanted to enjoy an afternoon reading on a porch outside in the shade. It still got awfully warm but there was a water faucet nearby and I took advantage. I just knocked off to pick up my mail and to start another letter to Cris before supper. I got her letter yesterday featuring many words about the cats, and I laughed out loud so many times while reading it that the postal girl -- who is already dumbfounded by the sheer amount of mail I receive, from Cris, and from Christine, Sara, Marilyn and once in a while others -- joked "Stop tormenting me!"

But it was a wonderfully funny letter. I now know why Jon Carroll writes about his cats all the time. But Cris's writing is funnier, or maybe our cats are just funnier than his cats. Or maybe it's only one's own cats that are funny, in which case he really needs to stop it.

The guy upstairs from me continues to plague me at odd moments with his use of his gigantic stereo. One of the annoying things about the way he plays it -- aside from the sheer volume -- is that he seems to let a single song play for about 12 seconds, then switches to a different song of which he plays only a fragment, and so on-- like a car radio stuck on the "scan" function. I can only conclude he has some special kind of retardation that, in addition to making him oblivious of what a pox his noise is, makes him unable to listen to even a single pop song for more than 12 seconds. Yesterday evening, for example, he switched on the music at 7:03, played fragments of about 25 songs in four minutes, then switched off the stereo, which remained off for the rest of the evening. I'm thinking, what the fuck??

Yesterday I took part in another little part of the Holden Village experience. I had "garbo" duty -- i.e. garbage sorting and processing -- for the first (and only) time. Usually this consists of helping the man whose whole job is the garbage -- he's called the garbologist, just another of those cute references it's impossible to avoid here -- sort it all, according to the way it's going to be disposed of. Paper trash is burned, except for what can be recycled; food waste is composted, except for meat waste which is burned. Things that are going to get recycled or that have to be put in a landfill are stored in a full-sized disabled bus until the bus is full, and then the stuff is transferred to a truck, which is driven down the mountain and onto a barge, then to the recycler or landfill site near the town of Chelan. (I keep forgetting to ask why they don't just throw the trash into the abandoned mine -- the mine which is the whole reason this place exists.) Oh, and the other part of garbo duty is helping chop up the food waste that's going to be composted.

My garbo shift was a little different because there was a public school group in the village consisting of about 25 fifth and sixth graders from a town somewhere in the state. They were finishing up a three-day field trip here. My duties mostly consisted of helping supervise and cheer the kids on as they decimated the apple cores, thrown-away pasta, and plate scrapings that were destined for the compost pile. The kids chopped at the mess with shovels and I cheered them on and made them rotate in teams. But they were good kids, not brats. If they had been brats I would have locked them in the landfill bus. I didn't say that, though.

I'm now at the point in my book where I've done all the rewriting I thought I had to do on the Gene/Dolores sections. Yesterday I started reorganizing the chapter structure yet again. The first draft had 30 chapters; now it's down to 24 chapters. But I did a word count and found I hadn't cut very much yet, only 11,000 words out of the first draft's 174,000. So now I'll do another pass and try to cut another ten or twenty thousand. I also have to rewrite the scene where Bobby goes to the set of Let's Make Love and talks to Arthur Miller. Instead of the genial interview of the first draft, I realized it would be much more interesting if Miller somehow heard of Bobby's betrayal of the British twit actor to the FBI, and uses the opportunity of his visit to give him what for. I've decided there need to be more consequences of Bobby's action; as it is in the first draft, he agonizes over it for a while, then it's mostly forgotten.

So not counting today, when I didn't work on the book, I have ten days left in which to work. That should be enough time to make a quick pass through the whole book and try to cut and sharpen and smooth things out. By the time I get home, I hope, I will be ready to put it aside for a while.

We had a "staff social" this evening right after supper. At first I thought, oh great, just another way for the staff to be aloof. We get a "social" and the guests don't. But while attending, I realized there is an advantage in that there are a lot of newly arrived staff who have come in the last week, and it was a good way to get them talking to one another. It also served to break down the walls between cliques. I got to talk to the young blond staffers, Melissa and Karen. Also there was a new girl I sat next to at supper who looked somewhat intimidated. Once I determined she was a new staffer -- she's going to work in childcare, a summer-only job -- I tried to be friendly. When she muttered she was from Texas near San Antonio, I remembered I had seen her on the lists of arrivers and departers. "Oh, you're the one from Seguin!" I said. She looked astonished, both because I knew that, and because I knew how to pronounce "Seguin" (se-GEEN with a hard G). I dragged her to the staff social and introduced her to Karen, who is typically down-to-earth and friendly.

It's pathetic, isn't it, that the only people I have enough confidence to talk to are 20-year-olds. But look at it this way: When I was their age, and indeed when I was 5 years older, I didn't have enough confidence to talk to them. I was such a drip at that age that they looked down on me.

The woman in the village who really reminds me of how I was treated in those days, and how I observed women behaved in general, is Kristi K. She is one of these people who have worked here forever; she is about 27, a graceful, deerlike, slightly hippified girl. She carries herself like a queen, never makes eye contact with anyone she considers beneath her -- she has never said a word to me -- and acts generally aloof. On the plus side, she did organize the "social."

So I ate cake at the social and a lot of ice cream after Vespers. I had really been looking forward to the ice cream and by the time it rolled around, I was a little too full to completely enjoy it.

I did a lot of brainstorming on my next novel project and typed up the notes. While I was working on that, the kid upstairs came in and started playing the stereo as follows:

8:51, begins playing a song
8:53, sudden silence
8:54, another song starts playing, followed by 9 more fragments
9:00, sudden silence lasting two minutes
9:02, another song starts playing, and last for almost four minutes
9:06, song abruptly replaced by another fragment lasting less than 15 seconds, finally silence

7 Jun 03

8:00 a.m. -- I went to bed early last night, before ten, and got up early. Determined to work off some of yesterday's dessert indulgence in the cool of the morning, I was out walking by 6:15, and did four miles. Not only is it cool nice and early, but the sun doesn't get in your eyes. You'd think all the mountains and forest would shield the low sun but since the main road runs east to west, you spend a good amount of time walking right into it.
 

1:20 pm -- Though I avoided having to do lettuce today, and my duties were not onerous, I found myself once again watching the clock during my kitchen shift. A. was the lead cook and P. was also on shift -- two long-term, well-entrenched 22-year-olds. Joining them was another young man who recently arrived but must be another long-experienced Holdenite, for the three of them worked together more or less the whole morning. When I finally finished my carrot chopping and approached the table where the three of them were kneading dough for the day's bread, A. told me to begin setting tables instead. Fine. But everything he said and did after that rubbed me the wrong way. He and the two others grew more and more uproarious, along with the music. I tired to stay out of their way but ignoring them was impossible, as they flitted and shouted around the kitchen like screaming Castro queens. By the end of my shift I felt like punching A.'s teeth in.

After lunch I went and sat on the porch of Lodge 4, which the Elderhostel people are vacating today -- I thought that would be a quiet shady refuge. But I had forgotten the fact that the incoming bus stops more of less in front of Lodge 4, and it was full of returnees, judging from the number of people who were welcomed by entrenched staffers. I even heard some of the arrivers calling for A., like little kids arriving at an uncle's house and asking for a favorite cousin who's been their playmate in the past. This did nothing to improve my mood, but it's time to get down to work.
 

9:15 pm -- Dusk. I got some work done on my book today, doing a word count of all the chapters and then going through two of them and cutting. I managed to cut about 2100 words more. But I didn't get a terrific amount done; I was in a bad mood left over from my kitchen shift. And despite the fact that supper was great -- salmon that had been barbecued by Ed Short, the avuncular bus driver who knows everyone and everything -- the guy who on my first day struck me as somehow more than a bus driver because people kept coming up to him and reporting logistical things -- my bad mood lasted all day and into the evening. Vespers meant shielding my eyes from the liturgical dancing of my nemesis A., who performs this role twice a week in addition to his regular cavorting about the village. After that I read my Frederick Exley book a little, but there was just too much traffic on the porch of my dorm, and someone was playing what sounded like the soundtrack of a Broadway musical on a stereo on the outer porch upstairs. So I went for a walk up to the museum and across the "second level" of mine tailings. There I kept running into the other Ed, the garbologist, who with his wife was guiding some visitors around. I ran into them so often I got embarrassed. Then I came back to my room, hot and still in a bad mood. Stereo is of course cranking away upstairs.

It occurred to me that what I'm really bothered by is the fact that I've let myself get so upset at these twits. The kid upstairs is just a thoughtless adolescent; A. is a hyperactive, extroverted, impervious version of myself at a certain youthful age: constantly performing, certain that everyone is delighted and entertained by his antics. Yet I'm letting them increasingly define my existence here. I suppose a "bigger" or more mature person wouldn't let them get on his nerves.

For much of the day, I mulled over in my mind the possibility of leaving early. I could leave two days early and have a better chance of catching a ride to Seattle. Of course then I would spend a lot of money staying in motels there waiting for my train; or I guess I could take the train early, if there were room on it. I could leave a week early, for that matter. I could leave tomorrow. I no longer feel as if my presence or absence in the kitchen makes any difference to anybody, so I wouldn't feel guilty about leaving my shifts. I have no interest, at least at the moment, in coming back here, so I wouldn't have any hesitation about pissing off the management. And I've paid in full, so I wouldn't be putting the corporation at any disadvantage. I guess the only reason I am not seriously considering packing up and leaving is that, when all is said and done, I am getting a lot done on my book -- the real reason I'm here.
 

10:50 pm -- The kid upstairs upstairs finally left his room to go to the dance that's being held in the gym. Before he left, I was so tired of listening to his fucking stereo that I went and just stood outside the dorm for a while listening to the kids on the porch talking. P., who cavorted with A. in the kitchen today, was telling somebody "I've been working in the kitchen here since I was 12." I came back into my room thinking, maybe I should just beg Heike to get me another room. Surely there are two people coming in tomorrow, who are staff, who are scheduled for a room, and they can take this one instead. I can clean it in the morning since it's my day off.

Since the reading light in here is terrible the only thing I can really read in my room are things on the computer. I opened and read the file containing my story "Booth Girl" and read the whole thing. I really enjoyed it and even giggled to myself once. At the end I said to myself, "That's a great story." Then I did a word count: something like 10,200 words. I do go on. It's still a good story.

Reading it is the only thing that has raised my mood all day. Now I can go to bed satisfied.

8 Jun 03

I went as early as possible this morning to the registration office to see about the possibility of moving to a room away from the stereo's noise. Unfortunately I waited a few days too long. It's really impossible. However, they revealed that the owner of the stereo himself is thinking of moving; due to a departing long-term couple, Heike might be moving into their room on the hill and the kid might be moving into Heike's room at the other end of the hall. That seems to be my only hope of escaping this madness.

I found out that the 50-ish lady in the room across the hall from me, Betty, is also disturbed by the noise, by the way. Plus, she is on the kitchen crew, and yesterday when A. and P. had the kitchen stereo cranked up and were screaming along with it, she was rather put upon.

I then went over to the kitchen schedule to see how much during my last 8 days or so I will be plagued by A., and to my pleasure I found that he's taking a vacation starting tomorrow and will be gone all week. In fact the only day when his shift will coincide with mine will be for one hour next Saturday. So I will be almost completely free of his antics. That's an even bigger relief than the possibility that the kid upstairs might move out, because he demonstrates at least some sign of being under control, whereas A. is completely out of control.

Strangely, I've developed a little split in the skin of my thumb. This used to happen all the time before I started using the special hand cream regularly. I think it happened again because of the stress this week.

In any case, this is a quiet morning, and a great relief it is. I think I'm going to find a shady place to sit quietly until the Matins service (they have it only on Sunday morning).
 

9:50 a.m. -- I ran into Miriam -- one of the Prodigal Food Service Coordinators, she is the one who does the scheduling -- and got my revenge on A. I told her that Betty had been a little too blown away by the volume of the stereo yesterday, and she was understanding and would talk to the boys. Ha.
 

9:20 pm -- It all came to pass today that Heike moved into the Agape building, replacing someone who moved into a more desirable spot, and the kid upstairs from me moved into her room, which fronts on the lower outside porch of our dorm. It quickly became clear why that was a desirable room for him. This evening he was grilling something -- meat or fish, I couldn't tell -- over a fire in a garbage can near the porch, and had hauled out his entire stereo onto a table on the porch and had it on to accompany his cooking. (I say he hauled it out, but actually he must have simply reached through the window that communicates to the porch.) So clearly he intends simply to take over the lower porch, using the window. No matter -- I was never a big porch sitter, and there are plenty of others, like the Koinonia porch behind all the disused wooden structures. Best of all, it's at the far end of the dorm -- a hundred feet away, at least.

So I am free of that fucking noise! Of course I have only 8.5 days left here, but those are 8 days I can work on my book and enjoy what there is here to be enjoyed, instead of splitting and going home like I was fantasizing about yesterday.

I saw Heike at supper. She was attempting to explain to Garbo Ed the string of departures and moves that enabled her to move into Agape. "Apparently there is an unwritten hierarchy of desirable rooms, with people just waiting to move into them," I said. "Yes!!" she said emphatically.

I never try to sit at meals with any of the kitchenites anymore. I sit either with guests or with middle-aged "uncool" staffers like the two Eds and Heike.

9 Jun 03

Jonathan was lead cook today, so I had a nice relaxed kitchen shift. I spent an hour taking the uneaten salmon from Saturday -- it was still in large filets sitting in pans as it was prepared to be served then -- and breaking it up with my hands. (I was going to make a salmon cream cheese spread but no one had a recipe for it, so all I accomplished was transforming it from whole filets to a large bowl of chunks. If only I could have taken a piece off one of those filets and just microwaved it -- yum.) Then I pulled some peanut butter, a task I also did a couple of weeks ago. It means simply transferring the peanut butter from 4- gallon plastic cans to aluminum bowls; it must be dragged out of the cans, and mixed using the huge dough-mixing machine, then stored in the bowls for use on the sandwich bar. Finally I sliced some bread and did a few other casual things. The atmosphere was as relaxed and low-key as it was tense on Saturday.

When I went over to my dorm before lunch to change my clothes, the Noisy Stereo Kid was again sitting out on the gravel barbecuing. He actually offered me some -- it was pork. He explained that when some long-timers had recently left, they gave him all this meat they had in the freezer in their chalet. Then after lunch he was still sitting there, having finished his meal, reading a paperback next to the barbecue can. He said he had to watch it until the coals cooled; that could take a while. He's being awfully friendly suddenly now that he moved.

Work on my book today -- more cutting and smoothing. From chapter 17 which was 6900 words, I only managed to cut a hundred, partly because a lot of the material was recent. It's harder to cut stuff I've just worked on.

Harry, the headband-wearing, hippie-looking operations guy, slouches past my window munching on a big carrot. As he passes I see he has three more big carrots in the back pocket of his trousers. It's pretty comical.
 

8:30 pm -- I worked on several more chapters today, and have gone through 13 of the 24 chapters trying to cut. I'm now just below 150,000 words. I've already attacked most of the longer chapters, and most of the ones in the first part of the book. I've been avoiding working on the chapters with heavy Gene-Dolores content because I worked on them so recently. It's fun going over stuff I haven't read lately, like Gene's "job interview" at Bobby's house, where he's under the impression that he's auditioning for a gag writer's job. There's some funny stuff there. I do have to replace one of the jokes though. That thing about the drunk just doesn't work on paper.

Seven more days to work. Maybe I'll take another day off to read.

After Vespers we all stood in line for ice cream. It was cooler all day today, and as we stood there, the wind felt just a little too cool; all these auslanders shivered. I stood there in my t-shirt enjoying it, thinking this would still be a warm evening in San Francisco.

10 Jun 03

Parading past my window at 8 a.m.: Four girl Mavericks -- those heavy lifters -- three of them willowy and muscled, one fat (but if she works for long as a Maverick she won't be fat anymore). They all wear kerchiefs over their hair, this evidently being the agreed-upon style for girl Mavericks this year. A few minutes later, another one, a boy, bare-headed, his tousled blond locks reflecting both his Nordic heritage and an early summer already spent in the sun. Wearing the beard many of the 20ish boys affect here, he is carrying a large sledgehammer over his shoulder; so must have Paul Bunyanesque loggers, miners, and finally Mavericks, trod this road for many years. Then come two 20-year-olds on garbo duty. Finally Stella slumps past, head down. There are times Stella is on -- when she's around people, especially her clique -- but when she thinks she isn't being observed, her posture actually suggests she is somewhat depressed. As if to prove my point, a couple minutes later she comes back out of the Hike Haus, head down, and encounters a colleague, whereupon she immediately blurts out a spirited greeting and begins swaggering.

I sat with Rolf at breakfast and observed him with his two little girls -- one 3, one 6. Both of them obviously adore him and are extremely pliable. The littlest one, a self-possessed and well-behaved tot, paused in eating her French toast -- which her father had humorously cut up into cubes for her -- while he rolled up her sleeves. She has the perfect childish balance of innocence, ego and conscience -- but her older sister also seems remarkably well brought-up. Rolf asked me what I did when I was not up here, and we fell into a discussion of layoffs, the tech industry, and real estate prices.

Another sunny morning, but like yesterday, a bit cooler and cloudier than late last week, when the temperature actually reached 91 one day. Yesterday was only 80; ten degrees makes so much difference.

After breakfast, I talked with Heike for a few minutes. She asked how my writing was going and said that I must be very disciplined. I replied that when I am able to go off to a place which I can dedicate to writing, where there are few distractions, then I can concentrate. So I have proved to myself over the last few years, beginning with that retreat at Bishop's Ranch in Dec. 2000, and it's very satisfying to know it to be true. She asked me how much longer I had, and when I said a week, she gave a regretful pout. I'll have to write her a few letters when I get back. I don't think she gets much mail, though she is married. As for me, I got no mail yesterday -- I think the magic is gone.

Christine leaves today for Vermont, driving 3000 miles across the country. I hope she takes the northern route since I noticed it is much cooler on the plains than it is in the deserts, where it's already over 100.

I did not develop a real sore throat, as I thought I was night before last. It must have just been a raw spot or a scratch or something -- perhaps caused by a salmon bone. During the time I thought I might be getting a real sore throat I imagined that the course of antibiotics I finished two weeks ago must have unbalanced my system and left me open to some virus that came along. But if in fact it was a real bug, my system instead fought it off successfully. I should also say that Sunday I was just getting over my stressful weekend of fretting about A. and the stereo guy, and no doubt the stress contributed to the soreness.
 

2:10 pm -- It rained at noon for about an hour -- not very hard, but real rain. By 1:30 the skies were jewel-like and the view of the mountains to the south was so clear, the colors so pure, that it was like a Kodak ad. I sat reading and chatting with Ben, a young man who is responsible for the Snack Bar. That is the little ice cream shop which heretofore has been open only one or two hours a week, but which is about to open up twice a day for two or three hours at a time. Ben -- late 20s, handsome, ironic -- will be in charge of a crew of several teenaged girls who come to work there for the summer. They are not the suntanned, hearty seventeen and eighteen-year-olds who are conjured up by the phrase "teenage girls," but slim pubescent fourteen and fifteen-year-olds. I saw him greet one. She seemed petrified by him, even though he identified himself as her putative supervisor. It was unclear to me whether she was following some parental injunction against talking to strangers or whether she simply had no social skills whatsoever (unlike, say, Rolf's tiny children this morning). Probably a lot of both. This freckled, budding Lolita, with pipecleaner arms that will no doubt quickly grow some muscles from all the ice cream scooping, was called Adrienne. I almost laughed but I was afraid my laugh would blow her apart like a dandelion.
 

8:50 pm -- In addition to reading today I did some more brainstorming on "Knock Yourself Out," one of the candidates for my next novel project. The brainstorming seemed fruitful but at the end I'd raised so many questions that it felt as if I'd gone backwards. I feel less satisfied than I have when I've spent a day working on "Make Nice." The reading is not such easy going, either. It's good writing but it's densely packed with language and ideas and the general theme is depressive even though the tone is ironic and the narrator often recalls events that are comic, if grotesque.

There are a bunch of music and theater people here from Valparaiso Univ., a school which is (despite what their drama professor says) associated with the "Missouri Synod" branch of the Lutherans, the more conservative of the large branches. (It isn't the most conservative Lutheran branch; there is a tiny body called the Wisconsin Synod which is truly reactionary.) It's a little alarming to have all these Mo. Synod people here; I want to shake them and beg them not to become fundamentalists. Their music leader led the "vespers" service tonight which featured two truly revolting songs she'd written.

I'm drinking the last of the bottle of cognac I brought along. I could have made it last longer but I thought I'd rather have one good-sized drink instead of three piddling ones like the one I had earlier this evening. I wish it had lasted a bit longer but it's heavy to carry so it couldn't be helped.

I received today the last CD I ordered three weeks ago from Amazon when I went to Chelan. I couldn't remember what it was -- it was The National Trust. I'm going to have fun playing for the kitchenites. I haven't even brought a CD player! Well, I could play it on my laptop -- but I have neither speakers nor headphones.

The moon tonight, about 4 days before full, is playing tag with Buckskin Mountain. It keeps disappearing behind clouds but right at the moment I think it's behind the peak -- a dramatic demonstration of the difference between the moon's path across the sky and the sun's. The moon tonight must be describing the path of the sun in early February, if the tales about "Sun Over Buckskin Day" are to be believed.

12 Jun 03

My last week at Holden. Having taken a full shot of cognac last night -- it was the end of the quart I'd brought -- I felt a little logy this morning, so I took my two-mile walk and now I'm full of vim. I came back and sat down in the dining room with Melissa and Bonnie, who looked bleary. Ed Short had said earlier that he had had to go to the upstairs porch and tell them to shut up at midnight last night, so they must not have got much sleep.

I'll have to get back to "Make Nice" today. I'll try to edit as many chapters as I can, cutting along the way. I think I can squeeze out another 5000 words from those 11 chapters, which will bring it down to 145,000. Still a little too long, but as someone told me, I should leave something for the editor to cut.
 

Later -- I made it through the rest of the book and got it down only to about 148,000 words. Close enough.

In the afternoon I went to a session held by one of the teaching staff, a professor at one of the Lutheran seminaries. The topic was "So you're interested in going to seminary." I thought there would be a bunch of 20-somethings there, but actually I was the only one, though another woman showed up after 20 minutes, having got back late from a hike. The professor, a woman about 50 named Barbara, was extremely positive and encouraging; she took my sheer presence as positive interest and kept saying things like there was a shortage of white male seminarians. She was even more excited when I told her I was a writer and had been a teacher. I did enjoy talking to her and it actually got me fantasizing about going to seminary and becoming a pastor. After dinner, however, I remembered that I had been a pornographer and that that might tend to disqualify me. And I actually experienced a little bit of disappointment at that realization.

Then the "vespers" service featured a little liturgical playlet by the visiting Valpo drama students. It was about one of Christ's parables about welcoming the tax collectors and sinners. It all unreeled fairly straightforwardly until they turned it into a discussion of accepting in churches real outcasts. They named junkies and alcoholics but the real outcast they finally got to was a hypothetical "former pornographer" -- are you going to welcome him into your churches? I thought that was ironically well timed, if coincidentally so.

13 Jun 03

Some rain showers throughout the afternoon. I feel done with work on my book. Of course there are a few i's to dot, but basically it's done. My trip here has been very successful in that regard.

I got a postcard from Christine and one from Sara, my first mail in several days. Christine changed her plans at the last minute and instead of driving and spending three months in Vermont, she is flying and spending four weeks. She sent her address. I think I'll write her from here so she'll have something waiting for her there.

As I mentioned, there is this group of drama students here from Valparaiso Univ. doing "liturgical drama" in some of the worship services. Some of them are doing half shifts in the kitchen. There was a time, when I was 17 and 18, when I considered joining a professional liturgical drama group called the Covenant Players. In fact, they invited me to come out to L.A. and join them. But by that time I had already been accepted by U.T. and had made too many plans to go; in fact, I did not have the mental and emotional wherewithal to actually divert myself from those plans, and I know I was certain at the time that my parents would not allow it, even if I were to decide to do it. Looking back, I have to agree with my 18-year-old self that they wouldn't "have allowed it" -- I'm sure my father would have pulled his only remaining trump card, the fact that he was paying for my college education but wouldn't do so if I were to delay it to do something he disapproved of.

I was talking to one of the drama kids the other day. She declared that she had wanted to be an actress since age 9, and confided that when she was talking to her Mo. Synod pastor before confirmation, he warned her that in that profession she would be subjected to all sorts of bad influences. So typical of the Mo. Synod attitude, often expressed by my parents, that the world is full of pernicious influences just waiting to ensnare the innocent.
 

To Christine:

I'm in my last few days here; today's Friday and I leave on Tuesday. I'm finished with my book, as much as I can. It's still on the long side, but at least it won't look totally pretentious for me to send in a manuscript as long as The Brothers Karamazov. I am happy with what I've done. I think the whole middle of the book is much better than it was before.

I didn't make any big changes to the Bobby parts; just cut them some. And the last couple of chapters haven't changed substantially either. Cris's comment was that Marilyn Monroe's crazy monologue at the end was just right, and that was a good thing to hear. I wrote that at your house, on Dec. 31, before we went over to Perry's, remember? I wrote 5500 words that day, according to my notes. I must have been concentrating pretty hard.

Things here suddenly improved about a week ago. In fact, between the noise of Mr. Stereo upstairs and the irritation a certain lead cook was causing me -- the 19-year-old hyperactive twit who was the guy who assigned me to make the coffee cake and then left me high and dry, and did various other things until I was ready to go after him with one of the many very sharp and long kitchen knives -- I was seriously considering going over the wall early about a week ago. But the next day the stereo guy suddenly moved to the other end of the building, the annoying lead cook went on vacation., and I was left to finish my book in peace. It's amazing what I can get done with some peace and quiet and a place to nap.

So I was feeling pretty cheerful. I'd gotten over all the social miasma and the pecking order; I gave up sitting with the kitchen people at meals and went and sat with the old ladies. Having hung out with Cris's family for the last 15 years I'm pretty much okay with old ladies so I would just sit with them. They love hearing about Frank Sinatra and JFK and Marilyn Monroe. In fact, I was feeling so cheerful that when I got an evaluation form in my box that asked how "satisfied" I was with the whole experience of being on staff, I only ranted for five pages about the cliques and the pecking order, instead of ten. "Do you have any suggestions for improvements to the volunteer program?" the form asked. Why, yes, I did have some suggestions.

The other evening there was a little dramatic segment of the evening service. A group of drama students from a Lutheran college is here doing "liturgical theater." As I expected, it involved a fairly pedestrian acting-out of a Biblical parable. But then they turned it into a piece about inclusiveness, about whether or not you really going to let outcasts worship in your church. And after they got through naming all the usual outcasts -- junkies, gay people, the homeless -- the final, the very worst outcast they could think of, was "a former pornographer." I thought that was pretty funny.

This Lutheran college happens to be a rather conservative school now, but back in the 1960s, before the more conservative Lutheran branch got taken over by fundamentalists, it was much more liberal. It was, in fact, the only university in the U.S. where the students burned down the administration building during a Vietnam War protest, in 1968 or so. I happened to know this because my older sister was a student there at the time. Now some of the drama kids are also working part time in the kitchen up here, and while I was asking about their school, I found out that they had no idea their forebears had burned down the administration building. "Yeah, ask your teacher!" I said -- a guy I had actually talked to about it the day before. They were all excited, like "Right on, our school protested the war!" (These kids don't seem that conservative.) Then I said, "Hey, maybe you should do a play about it. Ask you teacher about that too!" Then they were really excited. They are easily provoked.

Now that school has ended there are more and more college and high school-age kids up here. It's a little strange, because the college kids seem to be more like what we were like in high school, and the high school kids seem unbelievably young and dorky, like the fawn I saw stumbling down the road a few weeks ago.

In the evening I went to a couple of short plays by the drama group from Valpo. They laboriously migrated the parable of the Prodigal Son to Wyoming and had the title character returning to "the ranch" to die of AIDS. The "good brother," of course, goes through all this tsuris about having a brother dying of the "faggot disease," though naturally this is depicted ironically. Not badly done, but really about twenty years behind the times. The second piece was a more standard bit of liturgical drama elaborating somewhat, in an excruciating choral manner, on the resurrection of Lazarus. They had some nice hats and some fun dancing, but for the most part it was pretty lame. I felt a little sorry for the kids in the sense that they are stuck acting out this stuff which would have been plenty cool in, say, the late 70s. The AIDS thing would have been cutting-edge in 1985 or so, but once again it's pretty much a blast from the past. Even the smallest community in the U.S. has already been touched (as they say) by AIDS and has dealt with the shame and embarrassment stuff long ago. Then again, people in the Mo. Synod who are likely to see this stuff are probably the most likely to be in denial about it all.

Nice cool day, a little drizzly, and an especially cool evening. It was 48 degrees when I came out of the theater at about 9:30.

Tomorrow, a kitchen shift, and then perhaps if the management has any response to my staff evaluation it will come then.

14 Jun 03

Another cool sunny morning. They're all cool mornings, and when I open my blinds I see whether or not it's cloudy -- today is partly cloudy. But always I wake, around 6:00, to the dawn light and, if I've left my window cracked, the sound of birds. Last night was cool enough with the window open to use the quilt in addition to the blanket, and it's so cozy that way. (Would Thomas Merton ever use the word "cozy" in a positive sense? Doubtful.)

This morning I'm going to do a little announcement thing during the breakfast. It combines the standard announcement for departers about cleaning your room with a little this-day-in-history information and a poem, in the style of the NPR show "Writer's Almanac" announced by Garrison Keillor. I've even recruited a piano player to play the same little tune he uses in the background, the name of which no one knows.

I'll see A. on shift for the only remaining time today, and he won't come on til 11:00, so I'll be mostly free from his foibles.

This morning the kitchen shift was almost nonexistent. We all worked til a little after 10:20, then took a break til 11:00, then they sent all the "1s" home at 11:30. We'd already finished all the prepping, all the cleaning, and the sweeping and mopping. There were so many kitchenites once the "2" shift came on that we were practically stepping on each other.

I seem to have lost the Frederick Exley book I was reading. I can't find it anywhere in my room. I can't just buy another book at the bookshop, either; I have almost run out of money and the shop only takes cash, but that won't be a problem once I get to Chelan. I haven't found a ride directly to Seattle, either, and no wonder -- there are only three other people leaving the same day I am.

The summer season started in earnest today, with 120 people coming in; 35 more are due tomorrow. That moves the Vespers service to 7:30. Tonight it is fair to call it the Vespers service since they're using the Marty Haugen setting of the classic texts. The musical setting is typical Haugen -- melodies that sound rather like sentimental music for a television ad for an insurance company -- but at least the classic lyrics are largely intact.

With the extra time I've just been poking around on my computer, looking at stuff in the "Ideas" folder. Having ideas like: maybe I should run the four baseball novellas backwards, having the retired player's story first, then move backwards in time to the story about when he was a young prospect eighteen years before.
 

8:30 pm -- When I began here almost six weeks ago, the sun disappeared from the near peak of Buckskin Mtn. at 20:12:47. Now there's still sun on it twenty minutes later in the evening. My theory as to why it's not even later is that the sun has also swung northward, and is now blocked by the nearby peak of Copper Mtn.

I'm going to hike off to the "second level" [of the mine tailings across the creek] and see if I can find a good moon-viewing angle.
 

9:35 pm -- That was unsuccessful. After hiking out to the far eastern end of the second level of mine tailings, a spot that afforded a stunning view up and down the valley, I still couldn't see anything close to where the moon would rise/was rising. There was a mountain in the way. But I did get a nice walk of at least three miles.

I'll keep my eye out for the moon from the vantage point of my window. Since I'm across the valley from where I walked to, I have an angle not much worse than from my would-be vantage point.

15 Jun 03

[I met another writer a few days before, and showed her the first two chapters of my book. In response to her feedback,] I worked over chapters 1 and 3, where I thought there was a lot of the non-dialogue exposition that she might have been objecting to. I took out a couple thousand words and turned the exposition of the Maltz bit into a dialogue scene between Bobby and Frank. I think that, plus the stuff I removed from the first couple of pages, makes the opening zippier.
 

10:00 pm -- It was a lovely, lovely day, weather-wise -- about 72 and a cool breeze. Aside from working on my book in the morning, and cleaning the men's bathroom in the afternoon (something I volunteered to do; it took 90 minutes and was rather satisfying, not the work so much but to see later in the day the clean bathroom, which had been a real mess), I did very little besides read. I'm reading a copy of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose from the library here (I can't take it with me). I did a little bit of packing and took some stuff I decided I didn't want to take back with me tot San Francisco down to "Potty Patrol," which is the free-box section in the bowels of the dining hall where lost items end up and people simply leave stuff they don't want to pack home.

I had finagled a role in the Eucharist service, helping to distribute Communion. I had the bread, a coveted role, at one of three distribution stations I found it an interesting experience: all these faces kept coming up, one after the other, from throughout my time here. It was a little like my Holden life flashing before my eyes. Among the communicants was the haughty hippie-chic staff coordinator who never spoke a word to me (except for one time in the kitchen the other day when she said something inaudible. She was on dish team and I was trying to pry apart two buckets that had become stuck together, using a long metal rod the proper use of which was to sharpen knives, I believe. She spun by on an errand to deliver cleaned utensils to a corner of the kitchen and muttered something at me which, given the loud music and general noise, I didn't understand a word of except I heard her utter my name. It should be noted that buckets only become stuck together if the dish team stacks them while they're still hot.) We looked each other in the face as I handed her the scrap of bread, and I saw someone deeply immature and fearful, not haughty or aloof. I guess if I were 27 and were still coasting at Holden Village it would be because I was fearful.

Aside from the Communion part of the service, I couldn't help watching the ordained ministers and measuring myself for those roles. I wonder how long it's going to take me to get over this notion.

A fellow I spoke with briefly the other day came up to me after the service. At the Prayer Around the Cross he saw me sitting in zazen posture, and approached me then to say he had also done some investigating of Zen. Tonight he said he wanted to talk with me some more about how I integrated a Zen practice and a Christian faith. All I could think of to say was to recommend a couple of books. I should have just listened to him, I realized after we'd parted.

Tomorrow's my last kitchen shift. The lead is T. -- not my favorite. Another frightened college-age girl who has a tendency of withdrawing instead of being friendly with people. But at least she's spoken to me several times, and I have seen her relax a little bit.

Yesterday I saw Jonathan and told him I'd praised him (in my staff evaluation) for being the best lead cook, and I also thanked Miriam for saying a nice word about my work in the kitchen in the community meeting last week on Wednesday. She said I was a constant "solid presence" in the mornings. I've heard worse things said about me.

I noticed on the kitchen schedule, and heard it confirmed tonight, that my nemesis A. is leaving this week, seemingly indefinitely. (I mean as opposed to "for a month but planning to come back by the end of July," for example. On the other hand, no one seems to leave permanently. I'm betting he'll be back before next summer.) I can't say I'm not glad he won't be inflicting his phychosis on innocent kitchenettes. Girls seem to go for him, God knows why.

16 Jun 03

Last full day before departure, and last kitchen shift. I dreamt I was back home, in the bathroom, and Cris walked by in the hallway preceded not by our cats but a little white dog, a long-haired terrier whom we'd named Fluffy, of course. There was much more to the dream, perhaps related to that dream I had a few weeks ago in which there was a war being fought in Central Park.

I got up early, very thirsty, and after a shower took my two-mile-long walk. The air was cold at the beginning and warmed up rapidly. Another gorgeous day, warmer than the last few. After breakfast I puttered around disposing of more things from my room -- spare papers and so forth. I'm half packed. I'll do some last-minute laundry first thing tomorrow morning, then finish packing. The suitcase has to be on the loading dock by 10:00; it goes down in the morning with the luggage for the "fast boat."

When I walked into the kitchen, T. asked me "Well, would you like to move up to the next level?" She wanted me to make the soup. I thought it might be some kind of final exam or something. I acquiesced, since it was an easy rooty soup, made of onions, carrots, yams and (it is supposedly African) peanut butter. All was prepped ahead of time, of course; the only fine work I had to do was measure out a few spices. Annie took responsibility for the final seasoning. Halfway through the project, the machine we were cooking the soup in -- a huge stainless steel double-boiler contraption known as "the Grohn" after the nameplate of the manufacturer -- let out a deafening blast of steam through some release valve in the back. The release lasted about ten seconds and the suddenness and volume of the noise stunned everyone, especially me as I hovered over the machine. Fortunately one of the other lead cooks was around and said it had done that to her before, it was nothing to worry about. T. actually allowed as how when she heard the sudden burst of steam she envisioned me parboiled. She usually isn't that voluble about anything. Actually she was quite helpful throughout the project, more or less directing it; she didn't leave me to stew (ha ha) the way A. did with the coffee cake.

About that coffee cake, by the way -- on Sunday they served some really fucked-up coffee cake, without apology. My coffee cake was awesome compared to this stuff, which was practically inedible -- overloaded somehow with dry ingredients or butter or something, it never really turned into cake, just cooked dough dense as wet sand.

The sabbaticals coordinator flagged me down during the morning and said we should have a little closure session. She wore her usual diffident expression and I supposed that she had had a chance to see, by now, the staff evaluation I gave Roseanne on Friday afternoon (today is Monday). But it turned out she had not. She just wanted to know how things had gone with the sabbatical and the kitchen work part of my experience. About those things I had no complaints save the one about A. I wrote down in the evaluation; and A. is leaving anyway, so I saw no reason to bring it up. I simply said I had put some critique into the evaluation and she said good, because those things really do get read. Fine.

While we were talking -- we were sitting in the cool dining room a little after two o'clock, after the 1:45 bus had departed -- the Noisy Stereo kid came in with both hands and wrists bandaged. I supposed he had injured himself in the woodshop, where he works, but no, it was a leisure accident. He had fallen on a snowy slope and removed a couple layers of skin on the heels of his hands trying to stop himself sliding. "It doesn't hurt that much," he said cheerfully. "Tingles a little." "It might tingle a little more later," I said, deadpan. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that guy.

The soup turned out great, by the way -- in fact they ran out of the quantity allotted for the first lunch seating. (Now that it's high summer, there are two seatings for lunch and dinner to accommodate everybody.) I happened to sit across from my least favorite family, a sabbaticalling pastor with Jesus hair and beard, his extremely handsome yet perky wife, and their utterly painful little boy. The tot gives two-year-olds a bad name; he is the fussiest, most self-centered, whiniest little brat I can remember seeing in a long time. At age two his facial expression is constantly one of wounded outrage; his brow is always twisted in consternation that he might not have his every whim met instantly. When his whim is not met, he begins fussing in a loud irritating keening that reminds one of the evolutionary advantages of the high- pitched cries of human babies. This family is here for a solid month and the kid's grating whine has disrupted every worship service they've attended. They ought to go on television as an advertisement for birth control.

Cris sent me an express letter on Friday and it was handed to me special. She enclosed her usual epistle in an utterly cute card from the SPCA with a child's drawing showing a little doggy under a roof with a legend HOME SWEET HOME. It's her love code for missing me, a sentiment also roundly expressed in her letter.
 

10:15 pm -- While I was sitting outside the dining hall around suppertime, Roseanne came up to talk to me. She'd finally read my evaluation form -- which means that all the baleful glances I got from staffers whom I thought might have read it since Friday were merely baleful glances!

She said she was sorry I had gone through the things I wrote about, said "at least you were constructive," and said that much of the stuff on there had been voiced before or were "things we know." In particular she confirmed my impression of the low status of housekeeping as a job. With respect to the general welcoming attitude, I told her that she wasn't the problem, that indeed she had, on the day I came back from the dentist, picked me out of a crowd and said hello to me on the dock; that meant a lot to me, I said. I didn't say who the problem was. I'll let them hash that out when they go through the form.

I'm glad Roseanne came and talked to me. It kept me from wondering if and when people had read the form. In turn she said she was glad I turned it in on Friday so that she had a chance to talk to me before I left.

In the evening, before Vespers, as every night, they went through the arrivers list and blessed the departers. As far as I could tell I was the only one who stood up as a departer, though the posted arrival/departure list says there are three others. Anyway, I'm going to get a lot of attention tomorrow. I better be sure to brush my teeth before I head down to that bus.

After Vespers I scooped ice cream from 8 to 10. It was not as much an experience like I had at the Eucharist last night, but I did have a chance to serve ice cream to A., who didn't give me any bullshit. Now I'm back in my room at the desk by the open window, listening to the creek rushing past.

Schedule for tomorrow, my departure day:

7:30 and 8:15 -- do another "almanac" bit in the dining hall during breakfast
8:15 to 10:00 -- finish packing
10:00 -- bring suitcase down to loading dock and go back and clean room
then nothing scheduled until:
1:45 pm -- bus departure

17 Jun 03, Chelan

Back in Chelan having left Holden Village at the end of my six-week stay.

This morning I rose early as usual, did a little more packing and carrying of things to Potty Patrol -- including the hiking boots I came up with, boots that were starting to separate between the uppers and the lowers on both shoes -- and performed the "Holden Almanac" thing again. First time at 7:30, v. small crowd, but happily a team of hikers waited until I had done it. Between times I talked a little more with that writer C. about the issue of how much dialogue should be in my book. She was certain I had written a "commercial" rather than a literary novel. At this point I'm just as happy to have it called anything as long as it's published. I also questioned her about the "twenty-to-thirty page summary" or outline she said to include. She seemed to feel there was nothing magic about that number so maybe I'll make it come in a little under twenty. Then we did the almanac thing again, this time to a big crowd, and it was a bigger hit. I have to say it wasn't as fresh as the first time, however.

I spent the rest of the morning finishing packing and cleaning my room -- a task that had to be completed by 10:00 -- and spent the rest of the time just wandering around, more or less. I didn't have anything to read, having returned my Stegner to the library about 40% read, and I didn't fire up my laptop either to report on the paltry events of the day.

I saw one of the co-directors. She too said she had seen my staff eval. and said I had voiced things that had been and were being discussed. She put it in stronger terms than Roseanne had, however -- she actually said "the community was divided" on some of the issues. I took this to mean there was a difference of opinion, not a war. And I spoke for a few minutes to R.T., the poetry workshop woman who then became the temporary lead housekeeper, and told her what I had said about housekeeping in my eval. and how it needed to be lifted up. She nodded somewhat in surprise and said "Thank you for noticing that."

The time came for departure. I got up from the dining hall and said goodbye to the second shift.

I was the only person departing today; two youngsters went down in the same bus to go hiking and camping at Domke Mountain, a site accessible only from the lakeside. There wasn't much of a crowd, mostly the middle-aged and older people I'd taken the time to smile and say hello to. Also Miriam came down from the kitchen, along with this girl I'd seen her with often but whose name I never learned. Heike had gone fishing but had given me a warm note and a hug earlier in the day; she said my friendliness during her first few weeks had been important to her. But it wasn't a very big crowd and the goodbye took only a couple of minutes. So the bus bumped down the mountain with us. It seemed to take a long time, and waiting for the boat also took half an hour. A man who was smoking was sitting on the picnic table waiting so I sat on a rock with Ed Short the bus driver, who knows all the lore possible.

The boat came and I fished my return ticket out of my wallet and climbed on. I looked at a newspaper and then got rather sleepy and conked out for a while. It wasn't until after we'd made the Fields Point stop that a 50ish woman waved at me and asked me to sit down; she said she noticed I had got on at Lucerne and asked me about Holden and whether or not it had "changed" since she was there five or six years ago. After speaking to her for a while I discovered that when she was at Holden last her visit happened to coincide with workshops on the ELCA sexuality study, and she was apparently under the impression that most of what they talk about at Holden was homosexuality. She admitted the whole topic made her uncomfortable and that she was from a small town and was raised on a farm with conservative values and, let it be said, conservative child rearing methods. I said that living in San Francisco I had the opportunity to get to know a lot of gay people and that they were living ordinary American lives and weren't freaky or scary. (I didn't mention the freaky scary ones.) She said that one could live next door to a family where abuse was established and get used to it too. I said homosexuality wasn't like that, that it was a fundamental truth about the nature of these people and that Christian gay people are convinced that God created them that way. Our conversation went on for at least 40 minutes. I got the idea that this woman had herself been in an abusive relationship and had left it, because we talked a lot about the process of discovering your true self as opposed to what you were raised, however well-intentionally, to be.

The rest of the boat ride, and the trip to the motel -- I discovered there was a phone in the office of the boat company that I could use to make a local call to ask the motel to come and get me -- was uneventful. I walked back downtown and had a good salmon fillet at a very unobjectionable sports bar-restaurant type of place, then walked back up the hill and talked to Cris on the phone for an hour. I had not given her any news in several days so had not told her anything about the events of the last week. She was vastly amused at my story about the Holden Almanac thing, though she had never heard the radio show, and by the notion that I had possibly started some kind of tradition there. "You're going to leapfrog over a bunch of people in terms of status by actually starting one of their traditions," she joked, and I said yes, talk about a way to get a lot of face.

Chelan was hot when the boat arrived. At 6:30 pm it was still in the 90s, and I ran the air conditioner in the room for a few hours until it finally cooled off.

Tomorrow, a quick breakfast, then a trip on the 21 bus to Wenatchee.

Postscript

About a month after I came back, I got a letter from Heike, the German woman I had hung out with a little, and with whom I had exchanged some of my observations about the social hierarchy at Holden. She wrote:

Here at Holden, everything is pretty much the same. We had about three weeks when the staff was a little more grown-up in their behavior. But it changed this week.