Alors, Et Toi? | Coming To Know(Assay)

coming to know(assay)

By parris Ja Young

I had been out in the pasture, turning dry cow pies over or stirring wet ones with a stick. I noticed the old dry ones were full of holes where maggots had eaten their way through. Those that were not fresh but still soft contained wriggling maggots that fled quickly from the light of day. Only the fresh cow-flops, less than an hour old or still steaming, did not contain the blind, white worms.

I asked my mother, who was usually attentive, “Where do the maggots come from? They're in every cow pie.” She was busy with the dishes or some motherly chore and did not answer me.

That night I had a vivid dream of a cow pie. It was fresh but cooling and spread lavishly among bright green blades of new spring grass. As I watched through dream eyes, two golden manure flies landed atop it. They had sex. The male flew off. And I watched as the female laid eggs.

I had seen with my own eyes in real time every frame of this movie. This was the first time I had seen it all linked.

I awoke excited. The maggots did not come up out of the ground. Maggot eggs did not pass through the cow. Maggots hatched from eggs laid by the golden manure flies. The maggots ate, turned into chrysalises as the pie dried, then hatched, flew off, mated and laid eggs on a fresh flop.

Wonderful! And most wonderful of all was my realization that I had observed all the parts of the answer before I had asked the question, but those parts had lain disconnected in my mind until the question, and then something had integrated them and shown me the result.

I could learn without a teacher.

Of all the ways of learning, this wass my favorite.

Walking through the forests of Mineral County, Montana, as a youngster, I noticed holes here and there; shallow bowls in the earth two, three, even four feet deep. Beside each bowl the excavated dirt lay in a pile. These holes were ubiquitous; as far as I penetrated into the wilderness, as high as I climbed the steep forested hillsides, I found these holes and heaps. Where did they come from? I imagined they were test holes dug by prospectors.

Perhaps I should have asked my mother. Instead I had to watch the process, seeing it bit by bit over the years, although all the parts of the answer are present in the forest every day. I had to see the trees fall, uprooted. I had to see the roots of these downed trees gripping a huge fistful of earth, torn up and out and held by the roots until the roots rotted and the dirt fell in a heap beside the hole. It took a while for the “ah-ha” to arrive.

There are times we don't know what we are learning. We gather a little of this, learn a little of that, until one day we ask the question, or discover the “ah-ha!” moment.

There are exceptions, of course. For instance, I once learned by repetition, but I am not sure what it is I learned. I spent years in the darkroom, occasionally emerging astonished to find the day had turned to night, or to find the sun just coming up. I don't know exactly what I learned, although I could offer artificial, purely reasonable suggestions—cleanliness, attention to detail, orderly process, practice—but my photography improved steadily without benefiting me very much with conscious detail. Perhaps words, thoughts, ideas, pictures were not necessary, since I was the mover as well as the moved. Perhaps it is mostly when the lesson is outside of us that we question and wait.

I remember looking up from my fishing in the Little Blackfoot River and seeing damage on the cottonwood trees that crowd the river. Above my head, eight, ten, twelve feet up, the bark would be torn—the scars looking very much like the scars left on trees by a dozer blade when a logging road is punched in.

No reasonable explanation was at hand. No clues representing the various stages of the progress of time or process that I could integrate.

There those cottonwoods stood, a lesson in the mystery school of learning.

They stood there for years, until we prayed for the pond.

There is a run-off pond on the family place that used to be filled with water all year long. I remember seeing a moose cross it while my parents were combining wheat. The pond got smaller and smaller as the earth got warmer and the water rarer. Finally it held water for only the early part of the summer.

So I called upon a friend. She is a clown spirit. She led my little family and some friends and some children in a ceremony, then left.

That winter, 1995-96, it snowed somewhat heavily, and when it melted it all melted at once. My field was covered in water. To drive the pickup out we had to leave the road and travel the high ground and still there were times we needed to ford water. The water was so cold that it lay green over the unmelted snow at the bottom of the low places.

And up the Little Blackfoot River, great sheets and hunks of ice tore loose and drifted. The river drove these pieces downstream and where the pieces jammed, the water backed up and drove them harder. Not far upstream from Missoula there is a hanging footbridge over the river. On the far side, on the flood plain, someone had built a nice little home. The ice tore down the bridge and crushed that little home against the steep bank. And the top of the ice, eight, ten, twelve feet above the high-water mark, gouged bark from the cottonwood trees.

BIO: His forest cabin is not on the grid, nor hooked to the telephone system. Parris ja Young has a laptop wired underground to the battery array in the back of his muscular but bruised and battered ol’ Dodge Ram. When the batteries wear down after a few hours, the screen on the laptop looks like a single frame of a videotape of a fast pan of a Paul Klee painting. Then he digs out the manual typewriter (anachronistic remnant of a former technology) known for reliability.

The ribbon fails to lift. He throws it (gently) across the room; picks up a pencil. The point breaks. No matter. Parris writes on, undaunted but determined.

Despite early success, he has enjoyed far too few rewards lately. “Used to be I wrote for money, fame, and sex. Now I’m older, the sex thing is pretty well worked out. Fame would be nice, but it’s only icing. What would be grand is to make an honest living—you know; like an adult.”

Parris works with the Missoula Writers Guild. Has never missed a MisCon. Can that $600,000 for movie rights be far away?

Born on the Montana Highline in 1942, Parris visited nearly every state with his parents. He has been writing since the 4th grade in Darby, Montana. Once he received a nomination for the Nebula Award. Didn't win. He carves wood for much of his living and makes up the difference with woodcarvings and chainsaw carpentry.

He is living proof that a family need not have much money to be happy.View his writer's page on: EditRed


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