(Click on photo, then open in a new tab to see it full size)
Razor clamming has been central to the local culture and economy since humans first arrived here. (Best current guess: 15,000 years ago. And counting.) We used to be allowed to dig any tide low enough, and the limit was, uh... so many I never had to know what the limit was.
Then when I was in high school, the combination of overdigging and a shellfish epidemic closed all the beaches, as in no more digging, ever. Together with a catastrophic failure of the logging industry, it blasted the whole coast back to the 1930s. We never fully recovered.
But back in the 1990s, fisheries biologists determined that stocks had bounced back enough to open the beaches for a day here and there, with a 15 clam limit. When the populations survived that, they authorised a few more openings. These days, we typically get a weekend per month between October and April. But it's no guarantee, and my suspicion is that what with development, and the Tribe fully exercising its treaty rights, we'll see fewer digs in the future.
But some openings this winter have put July 4 crowds on the beach. Digging that intense is harder and less profitable, especially for an old-schooler like me, who still digs with the traditional clam gun and his own hands. These days I'm often the only guy on the sand with a shovel, surrounded by tube-tuggers like the Seafair Parade.
So that's my solution: open the beach, ban the tube. Guns-only from now on, just like the day.
Links to Buddhist movies galore, with synopses. Many are instructional, if you're into that. Also many feature films, like those periodically reviewed here. You many never need to leave the house again.
So it's midnight, and I'm meditating on the lower deck when my fat lamp suddenly goes out. With only twenty minutes to go, I decide to sit tight. (No pun intended.)
Until something literally almost climbs into my lap. I yell, and it scatters. After collecting a flashlight, I see this.
It's the night shift. (Note my zafu and zabuton in the upper right.)
They scope me out, more from procedure than concern.
"Don't look like much."
"Don't smell like much, neither."
"No worries, guys. It's just a big Buddhist monkey."
And they continue their rounds, as if no one were there.
I recently watched this again, for the first time since it came out 'way back in 1998 CE. I liked it then; the cultural themes were timely and important, and the plot, performances, and cinematography were excellent.
Then it disappeared from cultural radar, and I seldom thought about it again. In the intervening years I became a monk, and The Truman Show became a completely different film.
The premise is simple enough: a production company builds a giant set, peoples it with actors and advertisers, and drops in a real baby. Hidden cameras then broadcast Truman Burbank's entire life, public and "private", and the resulting 24-hour soap opera becomes the highest-rated show on the planet. The prescience is eerie; reality TV at that time was still limited to MTV space-fillers, watched mainly by high school kids.
Imagine. Just thirteen years ago, the notion of mass media dominated by voyeurism was still dystopian.
When we come in, Truman is a twenty-something insurance agent, raised on a steady diet of fear: fear of the new, fear of risk, fear of the unknown. The news juxtaposes reports of distant tragedies with glowing accounts of the seamless perfection of Seahaven, Truman's island fishbowl. (American friends encouraged not to read too deeply into this.)
But the kid isn't happy. Sure, he smiles a lot. He's cheerful, funny, upbeat. But something's wrong. For one thing, Klieg lights occasionally crash to the sidewalk, almost killing him. And the media's explanation ("airplanes") only works if you want it to.
And that's just the beginning. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the film, or haven't seen it recently, but anyone who's tasted alienation will relive Truman's travails: being forced to participate in advertisements for no apparent audience; the odd feeling, laughed down by one's peers, that choices are rigged off-screen; and the readiness of the world to break its own laws when convenient.
And the more insistently our hero questions all of this, the more desperately – even violently – he's smacked back into place.
Director Peter Weir's genius starts in the casting. I'm not an unreserved fan of Jim Carrey's trademark burlesque, but his Truman is so understated, so believable as a good-hearted schlemiel surrounded by users, that he quite won me over. He's just eccentric enough to be real – seekers are eccentric.
Ed Harris similarly nails Truman's "God," the intense, soft-spoken, beret-ed and bespectacled TV producer Christof. Self-important artistes are not Harris' stock in trade, but his grasp of this one is almost creepy. And Natascha McElhone, in a small but pivotal role, does one of the best jobs of playing an actual woman I've seen in a long time.
Like the main character in The Matrix, a film more deeply ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist, Truman is driven to confront a reality that is, if not exactly illusion, at least bowdlerised and rationalised to the point of absurdity. The great strength of Truman is that it delves into the process of coming to that epiphany, and the courage required to step beyond it.
In short, The Truman Show is great companionship for those of us who have been there, one that will keep you mulling and meditating its metaphors for months. (Not bad, eh? I just made that up.) Whether it will mean anything to others, I can't say, but at minimum it's a Feast of Good: good writing, good acting, and good directing.
(Adapted from The Neighborhood Forager, by Robert K. Henderson. Copyright 1999 Chelsea Green Publishers, White River VT. Available in bookstores; signed copies available from the author [me] for $24.95 plus shipping.)
The Eatin' O' The Greens is hard upon us, so to kick off the bacchanalia, I propose a pæan to that prince of the pot: Urtica (stinging nettle).
Mediæval monastics, greatest scholars of their time, lived on nettle broth, tea, beer, and greens. Nettle root soup was virtually the only dish served in the severest orders. They also wore habits of nettle fibres, sowed it in fallow ground as green manure, boiled the whole plant for fertiliser and organic pesticide, and whipped their backs with bundles of fresh nettles to strengthen their spiritual discipline. Today, banks of nettle veil monastery ruins all over Europe, an ever-faithful servant shielding the bones of the once-great monastic system from the mocking view of the profane.
On the other side of the planet, the North Pacific tribes slurped steamed nettle shoots and nettle root soup while building their own highly-advanced culture. They used fibres from pounded nettle stems to spin cordage that made industrial-scale salmon fishery a reality, which in turn formed the basis of the entire coastal economy. The Harpooneer, central figure of the whale hunt and an important religious figure, plunged his hand into a bag of nettles to prevent his thoughts wandering as he searched the misty ocean.
But it's nettle’s food value that makes it central to my own practice. Few vegetables, wild or domestic, approach it. Protein-wise, nettle outperforms beans. It also packs a significant wallop of iron, fibre, vitamins A and C, calcium, magnesium and a long list of others. And it seems the monk-physicians of old were right to put their patients on nettle broth, since in addition to being sustaining and easily-digested, it's also hypoallergenic.
When in doubt, simply pet the plant
you're looking at. If the experience
is unremarkable, it ain't this.
Nettle shoots start coming on about this time of year in the northern hemisphere, generally in moist, rich soil with partial shade. A single square stem bears heart-shaped, deeply toothed leaves, so that the plant closely resembles a big, hairy mint, to which it is a close relative. The "hair" is actually a million tiny, needle sharp spines that sting like the dickens when touched. (They lose this power with thorough steaming.)
Food also has to taste good to get on my menu, and nettle brings plenty of that kind of "food value" to the table as well. The greens have a complex bouquet, mingling faint mint overtones with a hint of the seashore. Boiled shoots are a good bed for steamed or baked salmon, and fresh ones can form a bed for steaming clams, then be eaten as a side dish. I call the blue-green water left over from steaming “nettle nectar,” because it tastes something like clam nectar. It can be mixed with tomato juice, eggs can be poached in it, or you can just drink it hot. To make delicious, nutritious broth, boil shoots until soft with onions and garlic, run through a blender, and strain. In its day, this concoction enjoyed as much prestige as chicken soup for healing the sick.
Wild greens generally excel supermarket produce in savour and sustenance, and nettles are among the best of the already best. And they're only available now, for a few weeks. So go eat some.
But don't make a salad from them.
Bad idea.
Cereal box prize:
An uplifting teisho from one of the great Zen masters of our time.
"Anything is possible when you smell like a monster and know the word 'on.'"
(The following is adapted from Growing Up Home, a manuscript of tales from my youth.)
In Olympia, Washington, where I grew up, people who couldn't swim were considered physically, if not mentally, disabled. So to avoid small town censure, and perhaps save our lives, my mother enrolled my brother and me in swimming lessons at the age of six and eight.
Back then, self-respecting Puget Sound kids swam in lakes, and on really hot days, the bay. I still abhor pools, reeking of bleach and God knows what.
But this was pushing it. I don't recall the precise month the course began, but graphic memory of icy grey skies places it closer to the previous Christmas than the next. The venue was Capitol Lake, a former mudflat of the Sound, dyked off in the 50s to make a freshwater reflecting pond for the state capitol dome. Black marine oobleck, stagnant river water, and municipal effluent combined there in a fermenting cauldron of corruption.
One whose temperature hovered just above freezing in that season.
Before our abject refusal even to undress in the dank bathhouse, much less enter the water, my mother bribed us with a Mountain Bar a-piece, payable after each session. And so we fell in with the blue-lipped, shoulder-hugging damned lined up in the pea gravel.
The only sound was the ominous lap of waves, from which we reflexively pulled our toes. We were all shivering too hard even to complain.
Eventually a high school kid appeared, in dry trunks and thongs, carrying a clipboard. A whistle was slung around the hood of his sweatshirt.
"Everybody in!" he ordered, stepping onto the L-shaped swimming dock.
Nobody moved.
As he rounded the corner a whistle split the air. "I said IN!"
A girl of similar years appeared behind us, urging us forward with menacing pushing gestures.
I don't know where Parks and Recreation got those instructors. Possibly they were young offenders working off community service. At any rate, when push came literally to shove, we found ourselves knee-deep in glacial sewage. Our tormentors ordered us to grip the dock and kick, to tread water, to swim across the boomed swimming area. We strove to move as little as possible, and not to put our faces in the water.
Or, God forbid, get any in our mouths.
So it went, week after week. Few images survive today beyond wretched misery; the rest have been firmly repressed. But I do recall huddling with another boy, numbly contemplating some B-movie invertebrate on the dock's slimy undercarriage. I've now spent my entire life on, in, and near water, but never saw its like again.
Mostly, I remember vaulting out of that arctic slough at lesson's end, clutching a beach towel around waxen shoulders, and simply savouring its terry cloth nirvana. Amazing how a slight shift in address can make a cold, soggy morning feel like an August afternoon.
I learned nothing about swimming that spring, but is that really the point? Capitol Lake is off-limits to swimmers now, condemned at long last by a lethargic county health department, so my nephew takes his mandated Old Settler swimming lessons in a heated indoor pool.
I worry about his moral development. Sure, he'll learn the side stroke, the dead man's float, the Australian crawl. But can the boy truly become a man without spending nine consecutive Saturdays waist-deep in a freezing mudflat while Colonel Klink snarls at him from the dock?
And will he ever know the sheer, ecstatic bliss a guy can get from a single Mountain Bar?
