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Maig Two days ago in full breeding plumage, necklaced with white wing panels, a male magnolia warbler approached the rain barrel fountain but decided not to risk drinking in the open and disappeared Birds... "to watch the unceasing on-off // grace that attends their nearly every movement, // the same grace moveless in the shapes of trees" A bush on a hummock in the marsh full of five species of swallows, when they swirled off from it simultaneously, the air around them was a tinsel cascade of light and blues and greens and white-bellied grace Nesting tree swallows, the resident Hirundo rustica barn swallows, cliff swallows, bank swallows with the vividly perfect name of Riparia riparia, and northern rough-wingeds Five of the six possible northeastern Hirundinidae And a massive migratory flight of white-throated sparrows alighted across the region seen in profusion here there and everywhere within the five mile radius bicycled in the dawn the day of this California trip All of the Great Lakes but Superior in sun and sharp shadow on this passage The long fields go right to the water on this shore of Lake Huron Above Saginaw Bay Yellow perch, lake trout, whiting There must be euphoria in spinning tractors through a tight one-eighty at rows' ends Between Sturgeon Point and Au Sable Point Two Great Lake Thunder Bays, the famous one behind Isle Royale on Superior and a smaller one north of Sturgeon Point at Alpena, Michigan Mutter on at cruising speed, cruising altitude, making five hundred knots as though drifting, on beyond the Minnesota Mississippi and across the Black Hills I-90, like a totally purposeful, NE to SW point-to-point assertion of escape, somewhere past Rapid City, probably between Spearfish and Gillette in Wyoming, has broad exits opening to narrow dirt roads with ranchettes of fifty acres or so on them Up long lanes on naked slopes Above Sheridan the third exit on the Montana interstate is Garryowen Custer's Seventh Cavalry marching song was Garry Owen Sitting Bull missed the Little Big Horn because he'd excoriated his biceps in a purification rite a few days before in Sun Dance zealotry So it was left to Crazy Horse to pull it off We don't even know what Crazy Horse looked like Ghost Dance The Cheyenne fought as allies of the Ogala Sioux at the Little Big Horn Long Cheyenne lances, their graceful battle axes In the year after Little Big Horn the army had a plan to arrest Crazy Horse and speed him by the Deadwood Stage and then by rail to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas off Key West When he realized what was up and tried to escape at Fort Robinson on the White River in what is now northwestern Nebraska, he was bayoneted and mortally wounded by Private William Gentles Prairie dog, prairie falcon, prairie chicken, peachleaf willow, badger, buffalo Now the Rockies, the tractless Great Basin starkly mysterious from twelve thousand meters up, the Sierras SFO's new international terminal's white-silver futurism facing oceanward into brilliant afternoon sun Massachusetts high school sailors from Dartmouth by New Bedford bound for a regatta off Treasure Island in the Bay All of them in California for the first time, and in seven hours of flying recapitulating in a century and a half, the awe of the New England kids who crewed clipper ships into San Francisco via the Horn and sailed in through the Golden Gate At having come all the way A bus into the city over Potrero Hill to the Embarcadero BART From Powell Street Station saunter on up Grant through Chinatown toward North Beach, dropping downslope on Sacramento and back to Market on Kearny Not Phil Kearny who lost an arm at Churubusco in the Mexican War and died at Chantilly in 1862 immediately following Second Manassas, but for his uncle, Stephen Watts Kearny, or maybe for the whole family Or even for Denis, no relation, the extreme Chinese-Exclusion-Act California populist Jackson, Washington, Clay, Sacramento, California, Pine, Bush, Sutter, Post, Geary Montgomery, Kearny, Grant, Stockton, Powell, Mason, Taylor, Jones, Leavenworth, Hyde All that recent history on the big Market Street grid Sony's nearly vacant Metreon beginning to go seedy Advertized as where to "shop, play, eat" — in the predicate of self-absorption, all the oral-gratifying same Smudged chrome-steel facings, one of the escalators broken, the gift and souvenir shops gone tacky, yellowing plexiglass starting to go cloudy, fuscous restaurant fry cooker smell carrying through the food court pit The upper-level "Where the Wild Things Are" big cutout dioramas going dusty and forlorn, Maurice Sendak's shtick not having translated that well Just across the Yerba Buena gardens, Mario Botta's modern museum's rearing Egyptian forecourt's brown-black solidity Neutralized inside since last time with big, vivid color-striped panels offset to the sides and mini-dinky pipe-cleaner pastel lichen-growing busy trivia hanging from the parapets Public dismay at all that assertive architectural power mollified with papered-over timid compromise In this the country where nude statues are hung with loin cloths and tiny little girls wear swim suit tops On out Third Street toward the water to Pac-Bell and Willie Mays Plaza for the evening to watch Barry Bonds drive one out into China Basin in twelve innings against the Braves Next day mothing open in Berkeley until midmorning so ride BART out to its end stations First down the Peninsula to Daly City The Daly City BART had one hotdog wagon in the station that morning. Commuters milling waiting for trains, nothing to do, nothing to eat, nothing to read, no city, no music, no nothing Then out over the Bay across Oakland and through the hills up past grass slopes and narrow canyons to Pleasanton The coast live oaks all gone Still semi-rural with a rodeo ring with plank bleachers and an old hound walking away up canyon on a narrow ranch road lane The Pleasanton-Dublin BART Station sits close beside and absolutely parallel with the 580 Freeway, westbound northside, eastbound southside The din from both sets of lanes less than a hundred un-baffled feet from the platform California chaparral is chemise, whiteleaf manzanita, Indian manzanita, coyote brush, chaparral whitehorn, common buckbrush, scrub oak, leather oak, chaparral honeysuckle and chaparral pea Toyon, redberry, California buckeye, madrone Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino California white oak, California black oak, California live oak, canyon live oak, interior live oak Black Oak, City Lights, Small Press Traffic, Cody's Stellar's jay, raven, bushtit, chestnut-backed chickadee, acorn woodpecker, red-breasted sapsucker, redtailed hawk, Oregon junco, American crow Scrub jay, rufous-sided towhee, California towhee, wren tit, kestrel, turkey vulture, western grebe, eared grebe, double-crested cormorant, American coot Screwbean mesquite and birchleaf mountain-mahogany Clusters of red toyon berries in Myacamas bright sun frost A redwood stand above York Creek off St. Helena's Spring Mountain Road Ticinese immigrants planted the first vines on the Myacamas before the Civil War Some of their old stone terracing still holds, buried in the ground cover below second growth Doug fir In the high Myacamas hills with their spectacular views Leave in the morning toward sprawling Sacramento for Placerville and the mountains Coloma, where James Marshall noticed metal-bearing quartz as his Indian crew dug out gravel down to bedrock to reset a sawmill's tailrace and picked out shiny lentil-size chips that tested malleable In January, 1848 Sutter's Mill, where modern California started, old stone buildings under sugar pines, with a steel-cage jail smaller than the shipping containers the CIA used in Afghanistan A century and a half on, through the mother lode country on tight and narrow forest roads that skirt hydraulic-washed bluffs and deeply routed canyons plunging from the ridges The Gold Rush was immense and tailings from hydraulic mining in the 1850s raised the normal level of the Sacramento River down in the Great Central Valley by seven feet Each mining town had its dust and nugget horde, ten million in fifteen months, twenty-two in three years, some towns even more, the greed of the whole world was focused here After sunset on the porch of the old Wells Fargo strong house in Foresthill, steel doors and window bars, watch four planets aligned in a diagonal up from where the sun has gone With the slightest glimpse of even Mercury, a fifth, through the top of a white fir Out of Foresthill next day toward Soda Springs in the high country between Donner Pass and Emigrant Gap, the road is blocked by spring snow around the six thousand foot level Ponderosa pine, white fir, incense cedar, sugar pine, black oak stands On the French Meadows road near the huge Star Fire burn from ten months past Mountain dogwood blooming, sometimes six bracts, no Christian blood-brown stigmata like flowering dogwood in the East The Star Fire was over two hundred thousand acres, burned out of the bottom and up the canyons of the Rubicon and into the Middle Fork of the American almost to the top Brush hooks, Pulaskis, fire shovels and McClouds Slurry drops, helicopter recons, manzanita rush High Sierras, Low Sierras, the foothill country and the desert side Black bears saunter into campgrounds to lick peoples' heads in their sleeping bags for the hair tonic or conditioner or whatever Deer eat day lilies, coyotes and great horned owls take house cats, mountain lions stalk lone runners on lonely trails In a trail-head parking lot at about 8,000 feet on the road into Mineral King south in the Sequoia, yellowbellied marmots have been showing up by the dozens off the surrounding slopes to squat beneath parked vehicles Either to lick the road deposit or imbibe the coolant overflow or leaking brake fluid Marmots elsewhere in the Sierras haven't yet picked up the habit Leave the wild country north of the Middle Fork at Colfax In the manzanita and madrone to take I-80 back down Still in Placer County where the interstate empties out of the foothills just west of Auburn, agape at the vastness of the Great Central Valley Mountains set up around it like portable screens Mount Diablo's profile across it against the evening, near the water Carquinez Strait Bridge Benicia Suisun Bay Port Chicago, where two munitions ships and boxcars packed with ordnance on the pier between them blew at ten in the evening on July 17, 1944 320 American sailors killed, two-thirds of whom were black When the survivors balked at going back to load more HE, a mass court martial Pardons only came from the 1990s White House Epochs of history since only Ishi's people lived here Two hundred years of extensive coastal exploration and the first Europeans to look down on these safe-anchorage waters, fifty miles long and ten wide in places, were Sgt José Ortega's scouting party, sent out by Gaspar de Portolá who'd marched north from San Diego in 1769 Cabrillo missed San Francisco Bay in 1542 first of all, as did everybody after him The Golden Gate generally blanked by fog, totally inconspicuous against the background of the ambient hills Just more hazy Coast Range ridgeline crests So the first ships sailed through into the Bay only in the 1770s And with that we became a bi-coastal nationality San Francisco to New York both on water, with Chicago on the lake in between In singular terms, there are two distinct locales of the Lower Forty-eight, East and Central being the blue jay range, and the mountain and western realm that of the Stellar's jay Magnificent, active, inky-headed Stellar's jays "a flash of shimmering blue as the bird scales across an open space on set wings" Four time zones of North American jays, four time zones of what we have, the edge of the world from discovery until we became an empire scarcely a hundred years ago Facing the sinister quid pro quo complexity of the twenty-first century world Up on the huge Star Fire burn near French Meadows, salvage loggers worked black-face from the carbonized brush and bark They'd already been at it for nearly a year, salvaging in soot and ruin, counterparts of the Ground Zero crews +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to Les Murray in "Equanimity," John McPhee, Ralph Hoffmann.

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