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William Stafford

Posted on September 9, 2008
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I have a new hero, William Stafford, a poet closely identified with the Pacific Northwest. I was researching some quotes and poems for an article when I ran into a few by him. The first one that hit me was called “Just Thinking”:

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot—peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.

I loved the language, the simplicity and the directness of it, the unusualness of phrasing, the writing of the being in the now. “Been on probation most of my life”. Those words achingly echoed how I’ve always felt about my life. Trying to be better than I am, knowing how immature I am about so many things, knowing the growing up that I have to do. Reading the paragraph of letting the bucket of memory into the well brought waves of memories rushing back, memories from childhood, from adolescence, from my time in the US. Not specific images, but just a flood of impressions that seemed to capture the wonder and bewilderment of being here. I was hooked to this man. I had to find out more, read more. And the more I read, the more I became hooked.

Since I was a child, I’ve been partial to wordpeckers, people who play with language in unusual ways to convey something profound. My first encounter with this pleasure was in listening to Hindi film music. The poetry of some of the lines would enchant me, the words ringing in my ears, instantly memorized. With many lyrics, I’d be able to guess how the song would go, what words would come. But with some, it was like being sucked into a vortex, inexorable, taking my breath away. For example, the song “Kabhi Kabhie” has beauty, yet is so simple, no complicated Urdu words and has such a poignant ending.

The poetry that I encountered in school mostly left me cold, maybe partly because I was too immature to appreciate them, maybe partly because the teachers who taught them, couldn’t fully understand, appreciate or communicate them. The first poem that touched me was “Ode to a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The first line “Hail to thee, blithe spirit”, stuck with me as did the lines: “Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”. I felt instantly that the man was onto something.

As I grew older, I ran into others that moved me such as Lord Byron and Robert Frost. Having studied outside my home state of Karnataka for most of my schooling years, and moving like a vagabond between states, learning different languages every three years or so, left me with little appreciation for the regional languages including my mother tongue, Kannada. English and Hindi were the two constants and so my appreciation for the beauty of language was manifest mostly with them.

William Stafford was born in the first years of the last century, when the world was entering the first of the wars that ravaged the world. Coming of age during the second world war, he protested the draft as a conscientious objector and performed alternate civilian services. He became a teacher, married, had four children and hardly had any publication till he turned forty-six. And then the poems came pouring out. He wrote every single day for fifty years, has apparently composed over 22,000 poems of which about 3,000 have been published. He died in 1993, in Oregon, where he spent the latter part of his life. The day of his death, August 28, was a couple of days after Kitty’s death day, the 26th. For a while he also taught at San Jose State, a college nearby here. How the mind seeks a narrative where there maybe none, a pattern that is only discernible to the maker of it. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, said Joan Didion.

Stafford’s most famous work, the one for which he won the National Book Award is called “Traveling Through The Dark”. It tells of his coming upon a dead deer on his way home, on a narrow, mountain road. As he tries to roll it out of the road, to make it safe for other drivers, he makes a discovery.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

Coming across the passage in the middle of the poem, left me gasping. For some reason, I’ve carried the lines from the Hindi song “Zindagi Ka Safar”: “Aise jeevan bhi hain, jo jiye hi nahin, jinko jeene se pehle hi maut aa gayi”. I originally thought of them as meaning the road not taken, of lives not having lived because of the choices we make, of fear and suspicion. I now see that even literally interpreted in a context like this, the words possess an enormous power. Just being born is a miracle, a blessing.

Stafford said that he is a butterfly, not a butterfly collector, that he wants the experience of a butterfly. He addressed the here and now in his poems, drawing inspiration from the things that surrounded him, finding in them for us, awe and beauty of the kind most of us find by staring at a naked sky, full of stars. For example, in a poem titled “Ground Zero”:

While we slept —
rain found us last night, easing in
from the coast, a few leaves at first,
then ponds. The quietest person in the state
heard the mild invasion. Before it was over
every field knew that benediction

I felt god touch me, the hair on my back stand up, when I read that last line. How life affirming rain is and how beautifully he says it. That word benediction seems so apt, no other word could have taken its place. He can take the same scene, say rain, and turn it in many different ways, each beautiful, each wondrous. Here’s an excerpt from the poem “Waiting For God”:

This morning I breathed in. It had rained
early and the sycamore leaves tapped
a few drops that remained, while waving
the air’s memory back and forth
over the lawn and into our open
window. Then I breathed out.

Stafford was also admired as a teacher. He has written two books on the writer’s craft, Writing The Australian Crawl and Crossing Unmarked Snow. He travelled far and wide, encouraging poets and writers in countries as far away as India and Nepal, in countries as diverse as Iran and Singapore. His teaching style was called “no praise, no blame”. He said: “.. in the process of writing and in the process of teaching writing, assessment is in a decidedly secondary position”. He said that his function as a teacher was to enable a student achieve what (s)he wanted, not critique. If a student, for example, said that he was not happy with the ending, Stafford was willing to help the student with that, but not critique the ending himself.

He was the Poet Laureate of the US, when it was still called “Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress”.

He said that he woke up every morning at 4 am, ran three miles three times a week, and then sat writing till his wife woke up at 7 am. In his poem, “The Way I Write”, he writes:

My head lolls to one side as thoughts
pour onto the page, important
additions but immediately obsolete, like waves.
The ocean and I have many pebbles
to find and wash off and roll into shape.

His love of language is clear in his many sayings. Writing that he grew up during the days of Vietnam war and Watergate he says that he is seeking not just freedom of speech, but freedom in speech, of writing that does not tolerate duplicity, of language that feels “uncomfortable if it distorts the proportions of discourse”. I’ve always held that music can go where words cannot, but reading Stafford makes me wonder that just as reading Byron or Nazim Hikmet or Frost or Emily Dickinson makes me wonder that. Stafford seems to address that directly when he writes: “Language can do what it can’t say”.

As a poet, using the briefest of expressions to convey a mountain of meaning seems critical. In his poem on Emily Dickinson, he distills the essence so well in so short a piece:

On that page where the whole world moved
and other people ran
frantic in their lives to stay the same,
she was the stillest one –

Eye in the night to lag or surge,
ready to catch the shine
of the newest star or the old sky in the brain
where the right word again begins time.

His belief in the power of language is clear in that last line: “where the right word again begins time”.

He was a pacifist, which is another great quality in a person. His latest book culled from his collection is called “Every war has two losers”. His son, famous in his own right, Kim Stafford, writes that his father wrote on behalf of the unknown good in our enemies. He wrote in 1955 that “Armies are a result of obsolete ways–just as gibbets are, and as thumbscrews are, and leper windows.”

In his book of poems called Passwords, he ends with:

World, please note -
a life went by, just
a life, no claims,

A stutter in the millions
of stars that pass,
a voice that lulled -

A glance
and a world
and a hand.

I remembered the song “Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon” in which similar sentiments were echoed. I remembered Kitty when I read the lines “a life went by, just a life, no claims”. I constantly measure myself against that and the urge for leaving a mark behind, of doing something of some consequence. During the course of my forty years, I’ve chipped away at that desire and managed to convert it to one of living well and dying well. And one central element in that journey has been to come across and savor works such as those by William Stafford.


References:
1. More Than Has Ever Been Found: 17 poems by William Stafford
2. Selected Poems of William Stafford
3. Sleep of Grass: A Tribute In Poetry to William Stafford

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Parenting: The Fears

Posted on August 3, 2008
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A few days after Kitty had died, I found myself lying curled up on the kitchen floor, at 4 in the morning, convinced that we’d lose the baby in Shanthala’s womb again, that Shanthala would also die and that there was nothing I could do about it. I was terrified, crying and I could feel my heart beating so hard and fast. I called a friend in India but could not reach him. I hung up not knowing what to do. A few minutes later, I told myself that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life terrified like this. I realized that I had even less control in life than I had thought. That was an epiphany.

Fear. Along with death, it is one of the great unmentionables in life. We tiptoe around it, we allude to it and though we run our lives driven by it, we won’t openly admit to it or talk about it. Parenting comes with one of the biggest fears of all, the fear of losing a child. The primary fear of parents, of even my parents generation was of losing the child. Even today, the under 5 infant mortality rate (U5MR) is significant in many parts of the world, of the order of 185-285 deaths per 1000, though the world average has decreased from 198 in 1960 to 83 in 2001. India has the highest absolute numbers of infant mortality and maternal mortality according to a report by the organization, Save the Children. After Kitty’s death, I came to the realization that an unspoken reason why many parents have a second child is to help them overcome the potential loss of one child. That fertility rates are higher in places where infant mortality is higher bears out my observation. When I asked some parents about this, they admitted that it was a factor though they didn’t openly talk about it.

I sometimes wonder how I’ll survive if Maya were to die, if I’ll survive. A good friend’s brother-in-law lost their two year old daughter to SIDS. They had left her sleeping with her grandparents and gone out. When they came back, she was dead, she had never woken up. I wonder sometimes how they go through life, how they find the strength to wake up each morning. But thanks to my 4 am epiphany and Kitty, this is not really a fear I live with.

One of the myths of parenting is that if we’re good parents, bad things can’t happen to our children. If bad things do happen to our children, we’re somehow responsible for it, there was something that was in our power to affect the outcome, but we failed to exercise that power. We so accept this myth that I think many parents are unable to openly admit to the feeling of powerlessness, of the illusion of control, of the fear of walking at the edge of the precipice all the time. As a result, we express our fears through behaviors that cause our children to suffer from different forms of neuroses. The lines from a Louis Simpson poem “The Goodnight”, speak to the dangers of such expressions:

A man who cannot stand
Children’s perilous play
With lifted voice and hand,
Drives the children away,
Out of sight, out of reach,
The tumbling children pass;
He sits on an empty beach,
Holding an empty glass.

While I think I lost a major part of my fear that night on the kitchen floor, the feeling hasn’t entirely left me. All through the pregnancy, I found myself keeping an emotional distance from the outcome because I was afraid of another loss, so soon after Kitty’s death. Of course, Kitty’s death had numbed me too. Typically, I like to read up a lot about whatever it is that I’m going through. But I didn’t read up much about pregnancy. I didn’t read about all the possible things a mother can do to ensure that she has a healthy baby. I didn’t read up about labor and delivery, of what it maybe like to be present at a caesarian section. I didn’t want to know all the possible things that could go wrong and then add my fears to Shanthala’s labor. I decided that I’d worry when someone told me to. That made for a very enjoyable labor and birth for both of us.

When Maya emerged, I didn’t check to see if she had the right number of toes and fingers, that her face might be misshapen or that she may be damaged in some way. Apparently most men count the fingers and toes when they first see a new-born baby. I said to myself that if something was wrong, I’d know about it soon enough and therefore all the worry of how she might turn out was useless.

The fear started the second day after she was born. All infants lose weight after they’re born and it takes them upto two weeks to regain their birth weight. Western medicine has decided that it is not OK for a new-born infant to lose more than 10% of her birth weight. I have not been able to obtain the data that forms the basis of this diagnosis. Maya was weighed every night, just after midnight, when we had finally managed to put her to sleep and were just shutting our exhausted, sleep deprived eyes. A nurse would come in, start undressing her to weigh her, which would wake her up and we’d all be up for another hour or two with an unhappy baby. I don’t know why they chose to come at midnight or at a time when the baby was asleep. The third day I requested them to not wake her up, that we’d call them the first time she woke up after midnight, before we fed her.

Maya lost almost 8% of her birth weight in the first three days. The pediatrician who came to visit us told us that she recommended Maya be given some formula to supplement the breast milk to reduce the weight loss. We ignored her recommendation because we had hoped that Maya would be exclusively breast fed. The next day she insisted that Maya be given formula as she had continued to lose weight. We gave in.

Thus began almost two months of fear that Maya was not drinking enough milk. We meticulously noted down how much she drank every day, when she peed and when she pooped. Every reference I could find said that a healthy, normal infant must drink about 2-2.5 times their body weight of formula. So, Maya who weighed 8.25 lbs at birth needed to drink at least 16.5 ounces of milk everyday. We had decided that even with formula, we’d only feed her when she wanted rather than on a schedule (such as every three hours which is what pediatricians in this country recommend). With this fear running inside me, I’d start worrying if she drank less. Even though she regained her birth weight in ten days, I worried if she drank less than the specified amount each day.

I scoured the web for determining the basis for coming up with 2-2.5 times number. If a baby is exclusively breastfed, how do you determine how much milk the baby nurses, I wondered. I found references that said that this number was for formula-fed babies and that it didn’t directly translate to breast fed babies. I also read that breast fed babies tended to gain weight slower than formula-fed babies, that the growth charts carried in pediatrician’s offices were based on formula-fed infants and that they were based on white caucasian kids. Maya was Asian and also was not exclusively breast fed or formula fed. So how was I to interpret all this information ? My fears of how much nutrition Maya was getting didn’t subside till she was almost three months old.

The other big fear was of of her falling ill at so early an age. So I insisted that people wash their hands before even touching her, demanding it even of Shanthala’s parents who were living with us. If someone wanted to visit Maya, I’d ask them if they were ill. When one of Shanthala’s cousins from out of town came to visit us, he came with his cute three year old son. I had asked Shanthala to check if her cousin and his family was free of illness before they came to visit. She didn’t and I was furious. I refused to take Maya down to meet them, pretending that we were asleep. When her father came to inform us that they were here, I asked him if the kid had a cold. “No, he doesn’t”, he replied, “But you can give him one if you want to”. I didn’t see the humor.

Maya started sleeping through the night when she was five weeks old. A good seven hours, from midnight till seven. Whenever anyone asked if I was getting enough sleep at night, I told them about her sleeping hours and I’d get shakes of wonder, of envy. You’re really lucky, they’d say, we didn’t get a whole night’s rest till our daughter was almost nine months old. So I awoke one night to find Shanthala staring intently at Maya’s sleeping form. Is everything OK, I asked. How can this five week baby sleep through the night, she said, something must be wrong. So in the middle of the night, I sit there explaining to her why I think she’s wrong and that everything’s well with Maya. The fear, awkwardness and insecurity of first-time parents is well-known.

Shanthala says that she worries about the future, especially of Maya having some kind of learning disability or developing that dreaded scourge of modern parents, autism. According to the famous Lucille Packard Children’s hospital, the number of school kids in the Bay Area diagnosed with autism has increased by 150% between 2001 and 2007. It almost seems an epidemic in California. I don’t worry about it too much, at least not now. I don’t know what I can do to prevent her from developing any of these problems.

Louis Simpson concludes his poem “The Goodnight” about learning to live with our fears as a parent, about never letting them become the guiding light in raising our children, that even though we maybe afraid, we must hope that each night is always only good.

Who said that tenderness
Will turn the heart to stone ?
May I endure her weakness
As I endure my own.
Better to say goodnight
To breathing flesh and blood
Each night as though the night
Were always only good.

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Naming Maya

Posted on June 9, 2008
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Maya. I have loved the sound of that name ever since I first heard it, in some ancient time. When it showed up in a list sent by Chomi, it quickly made it to the top of both our lists. Shanthala and I both wanted to pick a name that sounded mellifluous and meant something good. Shanthala settled on Aditi and I on Maya. Maya’s most popular meaning, at least to Indians, is “illusion”. “This world is a maya”, we’re prone to say, illusion implying falsehood. Shanthala was initially resistant to the name only because of this. Besides how it sounded, I also liked its universality. Off the top of my head, I knew Maya Angelou, the renowned African-American poet, the amazing Mayan civilization of South America and Maya Lin, the famous Chinese-American architect of the Vietnam Memorial Wall, who won the design when she was still in her undergrad. But I had to provide reasons to Shanthala on why our daughter would not be called “illusion” and so I researched the name. The more I researched, the more interesting was the genesis of the name and the legends behind it.

Maya is a name common to many cultures and countries. In Sanskrit, it means “enchantment” or “illusion”. In India, Bengalis and Keralites use the name fairly frequently. In the US, it is among the top 100 names used to name baby girls. Chinese and Japanese name their children Maya, Russians and East Europeans name their child “Maja” pronounced as “Maya”, but is the English equivalent of Mary. Among the Greeks, Maia (and pronounced as Maya) is an ancient name. Among the Basques, Maya is a short form of Amaya or Amalia, meaning “the end”. Even among Muslims, girls are called Maya because the word means “princess” in Arabic. In Hebrew, Maya is short for “mayim” which means spring or water. Maya is also the name of an Australian Aboriginal tribe.

In religions, Maya is a fundamental concept in Hinduism and Buddhism. In Hinduism, it is defined as a magical power, the power of a god or demon to transform a concept into an element of the sensible world. It is the fundamental female life-force or Shakti, other names for goddess Durga or goddess Lakshmi. It is this version of the name that makes it a popular name among the Bengalis (Durga is a very prominent goddess for the Bengalis), I presume. According to Sankara’s Vendanta, it signifies not only the illusion but also the power that created this world. Sankara says that Maya is not describable. Shri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the teacher of the famous Indian saint, Swami Vivekananda, was a strong believer in Maya and in its representation as the essential life force that created the world. In Buddhism, Maya is revered as the mother of Buddha though the popular meaning of “illusion” was apparently spread through Mahayana Buddhism. According to Mahayana Buddhism, Maya was also a female life force. I read that a Mahayana text says “Of all the forms of Maya, woman is the most important.”

In cosmology, Maya (spelt as Maia) is the eldest of the seven stars of the beautiful Pleaides star cluster (picture courtesy of http://www.seds.org/MESSIER/more/m045_tab.html).


In honor of the dawn of spring, the month of May is named after Maya since Maia in greek means “the maker”, she who makes life anew every spring. Maya Aditi Dutt was born in February, just before the beginning of spring, here in North America. So the name seems very apt to me.

The name is universal in mythology too. For the Greeks, Maia was the mother of Hermes, the god who is a messenger from the gods to humans. In Buddhism, Queen Maya is said to have dreamt of a white elephant entering her side and Buddha was conceived, immaculately. Though not many buddhists believe in immaculate conception, it is theorized that this idea influenced the story of the immaculate conception of Jesus. In Scandinavia, Maga or Maj (pronounced Maya) was the one who brought forth earthly appearances at creation.

Such a rich name, Maya. Such an apt name for a child who came to us, oh-so-many years after we started trying. A miraculous life force.


I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me. – Maya Angelou

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To Big Sur With Chomi

Posted on December 31, 2007
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Chomi and I drove down to Big Sur on the 21st. Big Sur is one of the main stops in the little tourist itinerary that Shanthala and I put together for any friend or family who’s visiting us, San Francisco and Yosemite National Park being the other two. If you’re not a nature lover and would prefer to see architecture and art, then we’d probably be poor companions though we’ve been to a few of the museums in ‘Frisco. We’re both followers of Byron’s line “I love not man the less, but Nature more”. Big Sur is one of the most dramatic confluences of sky, sea and mountains that I’ve seen, a temperate version of the soaring snow covered peaks and behemoth glaciers that we saw in Alaska. For example, Cone Peak in Big Sur is considered the largest coastal mountain in the lower 48 and it rises over 5000 feet just three miles from the ocean. Big Sur is perhaps the only place where the majestic coastal redwoods grow within sight of cacti and animals such as sea otters and cormorants live near arid climate creatures like canyon wrens. While there are a couple of a beautiful mountain and sea combinations in India especially in the place called South Kanara in Karnataka, they’re not as dramatic or as large as Big Sur is.


Big Sur is the Anglicized version of the Spanish name of the place, “El pais grande del sur” (Big Country of the South). The names given by the native Americans who lived there, the Ohlones, the Esselen and Salinan, are probably lost to time. The famous Esalen Institute and Salinas, immortalized by John Steinbeck, are probably the only names of the native Americans still in common use around Big Sur. Everything else reflects the history of the place post annexation by the US following the Mexican-American War in 1848: McWay Falls, Pfeiffer State Park and Julia Pfeiffer Burns Park, Andrew Molera State Park, all names of settlers and pioneers or land grabbers of the wild west, depending on your inclination to label such people.

I haven’t been down to Big Sur in a while, probably last going there when I took my in-laws there back in 2001. The brain is a beautiful creation, a three pound gem, but it is not without its constraints, one of which is its memorization of an experience. To cope with a lifetime of memories, it digitizes an experience by remembering its peaks and troughs and filling in the res of the details on demand. So my recollection of Big Sur were only the highlights, a vague sense of thrill and a collection of wows. The memories were given a refreshing fill-in with this trip. As with any beautiful experience, words only go so far in communicating the experience.

Where Big Sur starts and where it ends is not fixed, but most agree that it starts as the road begins to climb past the picturesque town of Carmel, a town made famous by its residents such as Ansel Adams and Clint Eastwood, and ends as the road starts its descent past the Santa Lucia mountains. In between, it soars as high as Hurricane Point and the intersection of Nacimento highway – which leads down to the most remote of the original California missions – and drops down to almost sea level at many places such as near Point Sur lighthouse. The now rising, now dipping roads and the winding turns can make for some slow driving in many places, which is as well, it gives even the driver a chance to let his dropping jaw bruise his knee. There are numerous turnouts close to the edge that provide a never-ending opportunity to take the scene in and attempt to capture the three-dimensional drama of the place within the confines of a two-dimensional celluloid.


My tours are almost always whirlwinds, constrained by time. This time, it was more related to getting back early enough to rest a while before dashing off to a local concert. I also was unhappy to leave Shanthala alone by herself the whole day. In this late stage of pregnancy, she finds these long drives very discomforting and exhausting. Starting at seven in the morning, I hoped to be back by three in the afternoon or so. My plan included a heavy breakfast so that we could skip lunch and eat something only on return. My plan called for taking highway 17 to highway 1 and then followed highway 1 all the way to Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park for a quick hike to see the unusual McWay Falls and then turn around and head back home. I managed to deviate from the plan on this trip.

Highway 17 is a beautiful winding road that goes through the fancy neighborhoods of Saratoga and Los Gatos to remote houses situated off roads branching off the highway without regular highway exits to summit at Patchen Pass before descending into the city of Santa Cruz. Throughout the drive, there is either a bangup view of the Santa Cruz mountains or you’re driving through them next to groves of coastal redwoods and other evergreen trees. I’ve read that most people can recognize more brand name logos than flora and fauna and I’m sadly among them. I had hardly paid attention to the trees and the birds around me when I grew up and not having parents who paid attention to them didn’t help me much. Now I struggle to recognize a few of the common ones. In writing these articles, I research the web for pictures and descriptions of what can be seen on the roads that I passed through and try and remember them for other times.

Highway 17 also happens to be one of the most dangerous highways in the state as it’s filled with commuters in a hurry to get to work or home and taking the curves a little too fast. Wikipedia reveals that the locals call the Northern part of the highway after the Summit “Valley Surprise” as many drivers hit the median on their hurried way to the valley. Chomi enjoyed the ride and was staring out of the window beatifically, like a child in a candy store. The sunlight filtering through the trees provides a magical play of light. I can see myself losing focus on the road with so much to admire around. I take the slow lane and take my time to make it through the highway. It’s only about 27 miles or so.

Highway 1 starting from Santa Cruz is somewhat boring, going through mostly suburbs and farmlands with nary a glimpse of the sea. You can feelits presence, but just can’t see it, probably till you get close to Moss Landing and go overElkhorn Slough and see the harbor with all the sailing boats anchored, awaiting their captains to journey to the sea. It’s not till you near Monterey that the sea starts playing hide and seek with you till you pass Carmel. Then, it’s right there, on one side all the time, beckoning you to stop at every possible turnout and gape in wonder at the dazzling spread that nature has laid out.


The road starts climbing and the beauty unfolds starting from the turn at Tickle Pink Inn. The weather in Big Sur is almost an invariant, the place presenting a magical charm in any weather. When I first went there, on a Memorial Day many years ago, the fog had yet to lift its head from the mountains and the place had a fairy tale land feel to it. When I went with my parents in 2001, the weather was bright and sunny and we tripped the light fantastic. The weather was again perfect when I ran the Big Sur Marathon in 2004, an exhilirating experience and a memorable one as I finished the marathon exceeding my expectations. On this trip, it was mostly azure skies except for some clouds in the initial part of the day.

Big Sur has been kept remarkably undeveloped thanks to the untiring efforts of the residents there. Robinson Jeffers, an American poet who popularized Big Sur in his poems and attracted the likes of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson, captures this attitude in his poem Carmel Point:

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Thanks to their efforts, Big Sur is still largely devoid of human constructions despoiling the gorgeous views.

This was my first time in Big Sur in winter. Ice plants, imported from South Africa to stabilize soil along railroad tracks and coastal roads, dot the open hillside. They’re an invasive plant, but they sure look beautiful.



Bixby Creek bridge, a spectacular bridge over a deep gorge, along with its twin Rocky Creek bridge, is one of the highlights of the drive. It is one of the most photographed bridges in the world.


The green in the hills was offset every so often by the whites of pampas grass. As we approached Hurricane Point, the culmination of a two mile climb in the Big Sur Marathon, the dramatic Point Sur lighthouse makes its appearance. I’ve never managed to come at a time when I could capture this scene effectively as the sun is always behind the lighthouse. It sits atop a volcanic rock and is still an active lighthouse. We just enjoyed the view from the turnoff. As the road approaches Andrew Molera State Park, taller trees including coastal redwoods become visible. The yellows, the shades of blue and green were eye catching. There was a pullout from where we managed to capture the winter colors.


The drive continued to provide its share of oohs and ahhs till we got to Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. We disembarked for the short hike to see an instance of a remarkable type of waterfalls. Called tidefalls, these are waterfalls that fall directly into the ocean and McWay Falls is a brilliant example of such a fall. Falling from a rocky bluff into a iridiscently turquoise ocean. The setting is so idyllic, I find it easy to spend a really long time here watching the play of light on the waters. Unfortunately for us, the sun was positioned at the right spot in the horizon to spoil any possible picture of the scene and so you’ll have to take my word for it or look at some of the innumerable pictures available on the web. We also hiked to the primitive campground near the falls providing more spectacular views of the ocean.


We still had time and so I decided to take Chomi to the famous 17 mile drive just outside Monterey, which houses the world famous golf course, Pebble Beach. In the old days when Big Sur was just a name, we used to bring visitors to 17 mile drive to admire the spectacular coastal scenery. It is a private road and there is a charge to drive through it. The last time I was there, I was less enamored by its beauty, especially after seeing Big Sur. But time had erased any bad memories and I thought that the drive would be beautiful, though not as beautiful as Big Sur. It was largely a miscalculation. It is overhyped and though there I got a few beautiful snapshots of wildlife – such as that of a hawk below – and scenes of the restless sea, we felt that it was largely a waste of money.


We returned around 5 PM. Chomi said that he couldn’t remember when he last had enjoyed a day so much. It was only going to get more exciting. Next drive up was Yosemite which we tackled two days later.

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The End, Five Months On

Posted on November 26, 2007
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“In my beginning is my end”, wrote T.S. Eliot. From the moment he walked into our lives nine years ago, his ending was certain. That was the only thing that was certain. Yet, I continue to resist this specific ending. I continue to mourn, five months to the day, his death. Depression has a particular form, a particular way of expression, I thought. It is sitting still and staring at the ceiling, immobile, it is the refusal to get out of bed, it is the inability to go about the business of living. When thoughts of him rush to fill every empty space in my brain, when with each breath I inhale, his memories are once again relived, I wonder if I I’m depressed. Active grief lasted about two months and this despair, this sense of loss, has been my companion since then.

We traveled to Kauai recently. With Shanthala in her advanced state of pregnancy, we stuck to little walks on the beach, short drives to nearby places and lots of time hanging out in the cottage, reading books and surfing the web. We took with us the trilogy of the adventures of Norton, the cat that went to Paris. I had a fervent wish to have Kitty travel with us, but he seemed discontent to roam and prefered the warmth of the hearth. We had a cat sitter visit him every day at home to feed him, pet him and clean his litter. We had hired a non-professional cat sitter who came highly recommended to us. She always mentioned how sweet Kitty was and how he loved to be petted. Once when she was unable to cat sit, she recommended her cat sitter to us, a professional. This lady left notes about her day with Kitty. Here are some entries:

“I have brought some fresh catnip for Kitty cat. He spends the whole time lying on it, rolling around on it and meowing at me as I sit on the couch watching him.”

“Today, Kitty cat followed me upstairs when I put down food. I just had to laugh; there I sat on the floor cross-legged next to his bowl. He ate, he rubbed against me for petting, I brushed him, he purred. If I stopped the attention, he looked at me like “More petting please”. Too funny. I’ve never taken care of a cat that has this habit.”

“He is so cute when he lays on that next-to-top step and sticks his head through the bars looking down at you”

“He loves laying on that rug in the living room and pulling himself around and being petted.”

He always knew when we would be traveling and he’d get very upset. Initially, he’d get very anxious too, probably from being abandoned by his previous owners. Later he just got upset. He wouldn’t let us touch him or pet him. When we were leaving, he’d hide under the bed and refuse to come out. When we returned, he’d show his anger by sitting in the same room as us, but at a little distance from us, with his back to us, complaining his meows every now and then. Attempts to touch him then were discouraged. He’d typically get over his anger in twenty minutes or so and then no amount of petting would be sufficient. He’d rub himself against us and be around me all the time. Unlike Norton and many of the other cats that I’ve heard about, he never once messed up the house to show his displeasure at being left behind, just the twenty minutes of his “back to us” routine.

This time, I took his collar with me to Kauai. No quarantines for you now, I said to myself. We arrived at our cottage around 3 PM and within a few minutes, a cat, a black and white tabby, stood at the back screen door, meowing very determinedly to be let in. We let him in and he wandered the cottage, exploring the place as if he was checking that we had not messed up the place yet. He talked as much as Kitty did, though his voice was not as mellifluous. He let us pet him and soon vanished. We didn’t see him again till the day we were leaving. At 8:30 in the morning, he showed up again, this time at the front door. He let us pet him again before he went away. My brain cried out to ascribe meaning to these random events.

Norton suffered kidney failure too, but it was caught early enough that they put him on some saline drip twice a week to let him live long enough to die of cancer. Shanthala cried as she wondered why our vet had not prescribed the saline drip for Kitty. She has a colleague who has a cat with kidney failure but leading a normal life, thanks to the daily saline drip. I don’t know why our vet didn’t do this. It seems too late to matter now.

Kitty died again two weeks ago when I received a postcard from the vet, addressed to him, saying that it was time for his yearly shots. I have yet to call the vet and tell him that he’s dead.

Thus Nature spake — The work was done –
How soon my Lucy’s race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be. – William Wordsworth

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