August 2015 – Holly Brunelle

Week 13a: Flags Out

The morning was cool and crisp. There had been a storm the night before, and clouds still hung low along the slopes east of town. Wet red clay earth slopped under my tires as I maneuvered up the driveway and on to the road. It was the Friday before Memorial Day.

You have probably seen a photo, most likely taken in our nation’s capitol, a field filled with hundreds (or thousands) of white marble stones, an American flag fluttering before each one. These photos always bring a tear to my eye, with the two times I have been there in person were almost overwhelming. Back in March, while warming up in Arlington’s museum after my tour, I read that the flags are placed by volunteers. I remembered from a flash of green grass, white stones and flowering trees as I drove through years ago that Santa Fe was home to a national cemetery. Aware I would be in the area over Memorial Day weekend, I had added ‘Flags Out’ to my dharma schedule.

Mine was the fifth car to arrive. We huddled in our vehicles, three trucks, a rental sedan, and me in my SUV, clutching warm coffee, our breath misting in the thin mountain air. Slowly the lot filled, until new arrivals had to park along the cemetery lanes. As the sun emerged above the cloud layer we did too, and drifted to the parade grounds, towards the rangers and their flatbed ATVs filled with bundled flags. Folks formed natural clusters: vets in their leathers, each jacket telling a story; a local women’s group in cheerful colors, their male counterparts in white polos; a cluster of tan and blue cub scouts; local ranchers in dress plaid and jeans. There was even a group of local teens sporting inventive hair, make-up and piercings. Most of the faces belied Conquistador or First Nations heritage, and the voices lilted with Spanish, Pueblo and Navajo influence. I was quickly welcomed in, the camaraderie of shared sacrifice, instantly part of the tender club of veterans and those who honor them.

There were close to a hundred of us by the time we got started. After a few opening words, a reminder we were on hallowed ground, and instructions for placement (front, center, one foot forward) we were off. We fanned out from our starting point, self organizing amongst the rows. Flags in arm (four batches, twenty-five each, much heavier than you would think) I began on the nearest unoccupied row. The soil was wet from the night before and the flags were easy to plant. I would read the name on the marker, say a blessing, plant the flag, step to the next… name, blessing, flag… over and over… one row complete, the another… It was surprisingly quiet work given our number: taps of wood flag stems, fluttering cloth as the wind picked up, chattering birds in the nearby trees. Equally quiet were the Park Rangers and Marines who appeared alongside with more flags whenever my stash ran low.

The sun rose above the clouds shortly after we began, and soon it was bright and blazing. As I work I am approached by a white-haired woman looking for her brother’s grave. By chance I see it one row over (and the date, Korean era), and hand her a flag. Her breath catches as she turns away. Soon after I engulfed by a group of children, chattering gleefully as they leapfrog from grave to grave. They are not yet school-age; some graves get two flags (front and back) and some graves none. Their mom and I follow behind quietly making necessary adjustments, as their grandpa, his cap proudly attesting his Vietnam service, smiles at them through misty eyes. The cemetery is filling out now, not just us with the flags but also families placing bouquets at loved-ones graves. I am towards the top of the main hill when an brown SUV passes then stops ahead of me. Two women, Latinas in their mid 20’s, emerge with an arrangement of flowers, balloons, and a bow-adorned cross. It is a Marine’s widow and her sister, the home-made cross carrying messages to daddy from his two young sons. Back at the Zendo they will tell me, in a self righteous tone, that the plots are the true cost of war. I know better. For me, the true cost is not borne by those in the ground. Rather, the true cost is borne by those left behind, men and women physically or psychologically damaged by their service, grieving platoon mates, children growing up without mommies and daddies, parents growing old without their children, society who will never know the gifts these men and women might have shared. It is my eyes that are now misty as I continue on.

As I crest the hill, the solemn mood is broken by a pair of jolly men in a pick-up bearing much-needed water and (less needed) donuts, children streaming behind them between stops like a comet’s tail. Refreshed, I continue on to the back sections of the property. This section has markers instead of stones, so the flags appear a forest in the fresh spring grass. Here I help with a columbarium, the flags more challenging to plant with its gravel border instead of grass. Half way down we run out of flags, and my buddy heads out on a quest for more. I stop and look around, and find myself in a sea of red, white and blue. By the time we finish our row, we are the last ones on the hill. Together we placed 46,000 flags in ninety minutes.

If you ever have the opportunity to participate, I encourage you to do it. Not only is it a great experience, but it means a lot to the families and friends of the fallen. Flags Out is normally the Friday before, and Flags In (much more sparsely attended, but the gave us popsicles) the Tuesday after. You can locate the National Cemetery closest to you here: http://www.va.gov/directory/guide/division.asp?dnum=4&isflsh=0 and they can provide info on how to volunteer. Some also have a Bows Out/Bows In over the winter holidays.

Week 13: Muroc Field

I learned to fly at a small airport in a small town. This was in 1988, four years after the release of Phillip Kaufman’s movie The Right Stuff, and it’s beautifully-filmed telling of (among other things) hypersonic flight test operations in the Mojave desert during the 1950s. I was the lone female in a loose cohort of six, the other five high school friends the same age as me who had been smitten to some degree with the film. We all wanted to fly professionally, one the new F-16 for the Air Force, another F-18s for the Marines, some for the airlines, and I wanted to be a bush pilot, flying across Africa like Beryl Markham. Our instructor, rumored to have been an Air America pilot who had spent the year I was born landing Caribous up the sides of hills in Southeast Asia before returning to instruct F4 pilots headed to war. He was a real stick and rudder man, and was more than happy to indulge us with his wisdom: our lessons included not only aerobatics and operations at unimproved fields (no kidding, sometimes they were pastures or the levee roads between crops) but also the three simulated in-flight emergencies per flight that were the hallmark of military training during his era.

Best of all were the weekends, when we would rent every craft we could get our hands on for a ‘road trip’. Usually it would be out to Soda Lake, where we would land on a dirt road and the guys would take turns practicing aerobatics over the alkali flat before we headed over to California Valley for burgers and curly fries. But sometimes when we were flush we would depart – from the hangar used to launch Lindberg for Paris in the film the Spirit of Saint Louis no less – and fly due east to Mojave Valley, the end-of-the-earth site of so much aviation history: Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in the X-1; flights in the X-15 that Bob White (and eight others) piloted past Mach 6 to fifty miles above the earth; and the landing trials of it’s descendant, the Space Shuttle program. It was a heady time to be in aviation: the Rutan brothers were pioneering the modern ‘homebuilt’ moment with their swept-wing rear-propeller VariEze; the Reno Air Races were still small enough that you could participate without major sponsors; and America’s manned space flight program was ‘back in business’ after a two-year hiatus. This energy, both military and civilian, seemed focussed in this hot and dusty valley between Bakersfield and Barstow, and we were always eager to take a drink.

We would leave early in the morning, flying in loose formation, the green of the coast range, Central Valley and lower Sierras sharply transitioning to desert austerity just east of Tehachapi. The budding fighter pilots among us would descend, the rest of us close behind, and we would spend the next half an hour or so exploring the hills and alluvial fans that bordered the Most Holy of Airspace in as close to nap-of-the-earth flying as regulations would allow. Miles of tan sand, mottled grey with dried sagebrush, passed below our wings as we explored the long valleys, all the time maintaining the mandated five hundred feet from any person or man-made object, and with our throttles at red line to trade airspeed for altitude in the event of an unexpected downdraft or taller-than-usual joshua tree. During these flights it was easy for us to imagine being part of aviation history, the boys as test pilots born to push the envelope, me in the footsteps of air race pilot Jackie Cochran or adventurer Pancho Barnes. Once low on fuel we would head west to Rosamond or Mojave for a top-off and lunch before heading west back to the coast. It was this enthusiasm I had caught a whiff of two weeks before, and I was eager for another dose.

First another stop. I drove south through the Salinas Valley, windows down so I could bask in the 90-ish degree air, the cement highway resonating a reassuring tha-thunk tha-thunk as miles of cultivated crops, vineyards, oilfields and the dried open grasslands of military reservations passed around me. I met my college friend Esther* at her house, and we went out to get me a much-needed mani-pedi. Somehow, as we relaxed in the salon chairs, conversation turned to our experiences as military wives, something we had never really talked about before. Her husband had been a reservist based out of the Army Camp just north of her town, and had been called up during the surge. It had been a hardship for them in many ways. First, his active-duty allowance, even with hazardous-duty pay, was nowhere near his civilian salary. With two young boys and one caregiver away, she had to reduce her work hours, further adding to the financial hardship. Her children missed their father horribly and would sometimes act out as a result; military communities recognize this and have created programs to help children during deployments, but her civilian community did not provide the same support. They barely made it through his fifteen-month deployment and what was to come.

Shortly after arriving in-country, her husband had begun experiencing strong headaches. Visits to the doc did not help, while they did provide pain meds they were unable to determine the cause. Shortly after his return a vessel burst near his brain stem. In a few short hours Esther went from happy spouse adjusting to her husbands return to a late night airlift to a San Fransisco trauma center, agonizing days outside the ER, OR and ICU waiting as top neurosurgeons worked to stabilize him, and the dreaded ‘you may have to make a decision’ conversation while critical X-rays were being examined. I have often thought I had it ‘easy’, no wartime deployments, no communications blackouts after something had ‘gone wrong’, no guys coming home broken or worse. As awful as it was, mine was an unexpected knock on the door in the middle of the night, and her tale of navigating civilian and VA medical care and reimbursement systems have only reaffirmed this perception. Fortunately they were able to contain and repair the damage, her insurance was able to cover his care, and after months of treatment and a year of rehab he was home and back to work, though slightly different than before.

After a nice lunch and picking up her boys at school, I was back on the road, this time east on Highway 46. This road is known (at least locally) as a great place for scoping out folds, fissures, and other visible evidence of the San Andreas fault. It is also the road on which James Dean met his demise. So off I went, with a plan to get photos of both. But I had forgotten it had been a while since I had been to the area. My favorite gully was now fenced off (with cattle grinning from it’s banks), and my favorite crest of road, in the past lumpy with repairs due to the constant movement of the earth, was now the cleanly paved-over entryway to a hazardous waste facility. (Seriously.) I did snap a pic at the marker near the intersection where James Dean’s speeding Spyder collided with Donald Turnupseed’s sedan as the latter attempted a turn. I smiled as I drove through the next range, remembering the conspiracy theories that arose in the early 1980s when a mysterious object** was swarmed by DOD personnel who cordoned off the area within minutes of it’s collision with a local rancher’s fields. (One rumor was that when said rancher asked after his cattle, a suit wrote him a check for the entire herd on the spot and advised that any who wandered back were his to keep.)

The next day began at Mojave airport. I was not the only one caught in her web; I shared the restaurant with a family from Poland, the father and daughter clearly enthralled with the flightily and artifacts adorning the diner’s walls. During our late breakfast we were treated to the departure of a large Voyager-like glider with an impressive climb ratio. After the meal, I crossed the parking lot to read three lonely plaques. Much to my surprise, just past the stand of thirsty pink oleander behind them there was a small memorial park. One side was well-groomed, with cement walkways lined with desert stones, a green lawn, a ramped portico with markers commemorating significant milestones (and also those lost) during recent commercial space flight efforts, and a windowed display containing one-fifth-scale replicas of Voyager and Space Ship One. The other half of the space was… a community garden! I counted seventeen four-by-eight plots in varying stages of cultivation, a surveyors stick with a name in loopy cursive at one corner of each, a handful sparsely sheltered by young fruit trees. What a beautiful tribute, I thought, bringing the community together to cultivate flowers, tomatoes, peppers, squash and could that be… butter lettuce? in an area set aside to remember the fallen. I wandered through the rows, alternating my attention between the earth and the little blue plane practicing a routine in the aerobatic box above me.

Then the promised land: Edwards Air Force Base. There is a low hill a few miles inside the north gate where you can see for miles. I pulled off, a worn track in the dirt clear evidence I was not the first with this idea, and took it all in. Miles of dirty cream lakebed stretched before me, in a crescent to the east and south lined with low buildings and an air of secrecy. There was the compass rose, four thousand feet wide, it’s elongated loop visible over NASA’s test flight facility (if you look closely in the photo you can see it). And past it, the long straight scratch of runway, thirty-nine thousand feet of it, where the Space Shuttles alighted after more than half their flights to space. Down at the paved runways, what looks like Hornets, Eagles and Raptors scream into the sky, perhaps on patrol or perhaps to support training up in the ranges. Jet fuel, desert dust and wide blue sky, nothing smells like it. Being here, with this hallowed dirt under my feet, it was easy to remember the innocence, the joy, the camaraderie, back when flying was fresh, and new, and fun; how it opened up the world for me, made it seem like anything was possible. Somehow over the last few years, with the habits of daily routine, this had been lost and my world had gotten smaller.

After a quick stop at the Base Exchange (when did airmen get so young???) it was Air Museum Time. The museum at Edwards is smaller than you would expect, but oh! So Much History! Inside there are actual prototypes (and some replicas) of both well-know and obscure aerodynamic test programs, mock-ups of historical cockpits (soooo analog!), and the standard suits (flight and space) and other memorabilia you normally see in these places. They also have some great displays and dioramas explaining the lake’s geology, topography, flora and fauna, and honoring specific historic flights. And on the wall just before the exit there are framed handprints from many famous pilots and ‘star voyagers’ that helped create aviation as we know it today. Outside, standing proud in wind so strong it causes bent over weeds to wear an arc in the earth, are a dozen or so planes: an A-10, an SR-71, a P-51 replica, an A-7 and others. They even have helicopters, a Sea King done up in Navy livery, and a H-34 (military version of the -58) that, when I looked at the markings closely, had blades that were manufactured before I was born! If I was a dog, my tail would have be wagging big time!

By then it was afternoon, and a scorcher. It was back on the road for me, to Flagstaff, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. More soon!

Week 12: More Marin

Did I mention it was cold? Yup, during that first week at the farm it never got above sixty-five, with at grand total of two, yup, two sunny afternoons. I would huddle in my room, one of two in the dorm with no direct sunlight, hiding from the fog under layers of clothes and blankets, ruminating that it was So Wrong to be This Cold during the month of May. On the bright side (?), the grounds and people were beautiful. If you had to be stuck in the fog, Green Gulch was the place to be.

The student schedule was the same as the previous week, but knowing the flow provided a freedom to explore both the mental and physical environments. First were the sounds of the morning: the gong in the garden, rung eighteen times in the early part of the service, its low rumble resonating through or swallowed by the fog, depending on its density. Then waking birds, expected finch chirps, pigeon coos, and blackbird chatter joined by the loud, tropical-sounding call of the state bird, the California Quail, joined by the creak of the barn floor during kinhin (walking), and the crack of the building as the day began to warm. On the way to breakfast, the thick morning fog softening the edges of anything more than a few feet away, I observed my playing tricks with me: as I approach a hedge of green becomes an intricate bed of ferns, what at first glance had been a white bird transforms to a lily, with a uniformly brown redwood trunk unveils itself as the intricate ridges and valleys of bark and twined vines. My afternoon walks gained depth as well, no longer orienting myself to the valley but really seeing the details of the landscape: the careful training of the fruit trees in the garden, a birdhouse in a field of poppies, each of the flowers alone, but also as a member of a bed, and the mindful play of the gardeners who planned the groupings.

One of my favorite places (if Zen allows one to play favorites) came to be the farm shed and the surrounding furrows. As a reader, I was first attracted to the farmers’ expressions of the teachings, handwritten notes placed loosely in frames or burnt in wood, a friendly welcome back in to human fold towards the end of my afternoon strolls*. With each passing I came to appreciate the quiet details of the that had been collected over time: Buddha balanced on two red pavers and flanked by fresh wildflowers; a horseshoe arranged to catch good luck; a shelf of pinecones and stones; almost all found objects from the nearby earth. The crops were beautiful too: bouquets of lettuce, chard, and broccoli, their green rows dancing across the narrow valley. The garden housed a cornucopia of characters as well; two juvenile deer who connived their way through the fence (and had to be shooed out) every morning, the six-foot rat snake who lazed across the main path in late afternoon, the Great Blue Heron who kept the gophers and other rodents in check, not to mention the quirky and wise human gardeners, some novices and other who had been working this land for decades.

DSCN2209 My favorite meditation was also on the farm. Every Wednesday, instead of a second interval of zazen, we would hoe the fields as a group. (This was known as Community Hoe, not to be confused with First-Time Hoe, Student Hoe or Group Hoe, three until now unmentioned activities during the previous week.) We would file out of the zendo two by two and, after the quick donning of warmies, trundle down the morning-muddy path to the farm shed for our tools and instructions. After a short blessing we would choose our rows, one of us on each side, and with fogged breath, mindfully tease new weeds from the earth, careful to avoid the crops. It was a beautiful practice: the blessing of physical activity and quiet attention to the task, the sounds of metal in earth under the lightening fog, with all members of the sangha, from the newest student to the senior teachers to the Abiding Abbess working side-by-side for the good of the community.

Wednesday nights were dharma talk nights. The first week the talk was by a former head gardener. It began with thoughts on the word vagabond, and spoke to the unease people have to the outsider, the traveller, the one who has chosen not to stray from the straight path society has drawn for us, and reflected on the root of the word, vagus, which is also the name of the nerve that transmits ‘gut feelings’ between the GI system and the brain. (I had viewed this first-hand the week before,when a pair of older travelers, a husband and his ailing wife, had been provided provided shelter and healthy food for several days until they were strong enough to continue.) She then reflected that Green Gulch had been designed as a refuge for those who wanted to step away from the world, and finished by recounting a recent meander through the Muir Woods with a noted arborist. The second week’s lecture was a bit different. One of the Zen Center’s senior teachers had passed three weeks before my arrival, and another the previous fall. In this lecture the head of the Zen Center advised that since it had been almost a generation since a senior teacher had passed they had found themselves unprepared, not only with respect to the effects of the loss would have on the community but also the physical arrangements of the viewing, funeral and internment. She then reported on a recent leaders meeting where they realized they themselves had not done this type of planning (at least to the extent that was needed), and their efforts to develop and codify formal processes, practices and rituals that could be used in the future. As prior military, I am always surprised to hear people have not done this type of planning (we used to update our ‘survivor plans’ every year) so a bit of a PSA here – if you have not had these conversations with your loved ones I encourage you to do so. Trust me, it makes things much easier if/when you ever need to use them.

The second week also brought another cast of fellow students: a quant from Mexico, a recent Berkely grad, one of the gardeners consorts, and a visiting priest from a related tradition. During dishes one morning (when we were supposed to be in functional silence), it came out that the fifth new arrival, a young man from Germany who had just graduated business school, dreamed of working for Tesla. It was not just the product, electric automobiles, but also the founder, one of the PayPal geniuses who has chosen to spend his money on projects that both interest him and improve life on the planet. One day this student was dropped at the nearby mall for the afternoon (to pick up some gardening shoes) where, it turns out, they have a Tesla store. He spent over an hour checking out the cars and in conversation with the sales advisors, and so impressed the manager he was invited back the next day for a test-drive. When he returned he was grinning ear-to-ear; he had been able to test the acceleration on a nearby freeway, then had driven the car back to the farm along the PCH. Best of all, they had requested his resume and a description of the type of work he was interested in. I love stories like this, where passion overcomes odds to rule the day.

Fridays were our day off, so I spent my last full day on trail, this time camera charged and memory empty, hoping for another hawk (alas this was not to be). My choice was ambitious: the Green Gulch Trail to Coyote Ridge Trail. Trail was a bit of a misnomer, it was actually the dirt road to Hope Cottage, a one-room artists lodge that hung on the highest point above Muir Beach. I tucked my sandwich in my pocket and headed off. My first waypoint was the Yurt. A group of artists had been staying in the Guest House for the previous few days, appearing in the garden like chimera, here, then there, then somewhere else. The Yurt was their base, and their work was laid out for display, watercolors of golden poppies or the shore (two that even matched photos I had taken), abstracts of the hills and farm, and sketches and color swatches to continue home. After a half hour of questions and sharing, I was off to trail, up through the mist, past a pair of extreme A-frame wood-built hide-aways, each with a side of floor-to-ceiling windows (one surrounded by young plants in pots), then a stand of young redwood, around a 180 turn, the water tank nestled within, to the open road, a thin ribbon cut in to the side of the hill mirroring the PCH on the opposite side of the valley. The deeply rutted grey track was alternately bordered by thick foliage (berry brambles, low trees) and open areas (grasses low sage), with an occasional wind-bent cyprus or juniper clinging to the side of the hill accenting the view. One turn nestled an abandoned stable, two stalls with small paddocks, the wood grey and cracked with age overcome by vides and wild grasses; another a chicken coop, gaps in the rusted wire providing shelter to new residents. DSCN2255 DSCN2258 Then, the trail shifted from west to south and I could see the ocean, the darker grey of water slowly blending with the fog along the horizon. It was windy, with gusts strong enough to lean in to; I sat down next to a patch of wild orchids and took it all in. Out came my sandwich, and over the next half hour or so, took in it and all that surrounded me.

The next afternoon it was back on the road, south and east for another stay in New Mexico (and possibly warmer weather). More next time.