Tom Davis
I woke up at dawn on the longest day of the year
With images in my head:
Of a night on the Colorado National Monument,
Jim Fennell and I standing on a canyon’s rim,
Listening to the night sounds.
We weren’t sure if they were crickets or frogs or insects,
But we’d never heard a symphony quite like that.
It was summer, so the air was warm,
And there wasn’t a breeze.
The Milky Way above our heads
Was a silver light-river flowing into eternity.
Then we saw a round, bright light suddenly in the darkness
Hovering as it slowly descended
Toward where we were standing.
It stopped, pulsed, and then moved toward us again,
Sometimes almost leaping from one space to another,
And then rose upward and away from us
And then disappeared.
Later, after driving back to Grand Junction,
Hardly looking at the lights of the Grand Valley
Which can look like a stain of stars
Spreading below you on the valley floor,
We went to an open diner in the wee hours of the morning
And ordered cherry pie and ice cream
And sat talking about flying saucers
And whether we’d seen one
Or if it could have been some natural phenomena
That acted like a flying saucer.
Then another image from a different time
When we were standing above another canyon,
Trying to see the old remains
Of the mining flues that cling on the canyon walls.
There were clouds in the sky,
And the darkness was nearly impenetrable
And we could make out anything,
So we got to talking about philosophers
And raged over ideas as if the wisdom
Of the universe was in the great silence of the canyon
And our minds were feeding
From everything we’d ever read and the darkness itself.
Later we got into our cars and drove back to Uravan
Where Jim worked in the big uranium mill
And I worked in the grocery store,
Having no idea that one day the mill would be closed,
And the mines that fed it uranium ore would be closed,
And the government would spend a fortune
Cleaning up the leftover toxic waste and bulldozing over the town.
And yet other images:
Of reading some of the first poems he wrote
And shaking my head in admiration;
Laughing as he drolly told Mildred Hart Shaw
At St. Mary’s Hospital while looking at a crucifixion
That just looking at “that” made his foot hurt;
Of him and Pat, my young wife’s sister,
Standing together as they got married
And friends became brothers-in-law;
Listening when he told me that I was a fool
When I was afraid that I wasn’t nearly good enough
For the woman to whom I’ve been married to for 57 years.
Now he’s gone. A heart attack I’ve been told,
Though he’s had a lot of health problems in recent years.
I always thought he had one of the most interesting minds
I’ve ever encountered.
He once looked at me while we were in a park
In Grand Junction where we were both from
And started in on a monologue
That mused about being inside a perfectly round crystal
Where who you were was reflected back at you
From every angle possible.
Would you know who you really are? He asked.
Would that even tell you anything about yourself?
Could we discern something beyond our outside reflection?
He could spin out ideas like that in conversations for hours
Until you were numb with idea-fatigue.
Over the years we grew apart.
Ethel and I drove long hours to visit him and Pat
In Vashon Island, Washington, Las Cruces, Nevada,
And finally in Ola, Idaho
Where Jim had hand-built a geodesic dome house
(who in the world has the skill to self-build a geodesic dome house?)
Above a trout stream that tumbled and sang
Toward the distant Snake River
In a wilderness where long lines of elk
Wound through open meadows during migrations.
But the distances and my constant efforts
To work on poetry, novels, books of non-fiction,
And my life with my family
And my work for the Anishinabe and then the Winnebago
And then the Navajo in higher education
Filled up life and left the two of us
With phone calls that never lasted that long.
Once in Idaho, he took Ethel, I, and our daughters
On a hike into the mountains above Ola
And gloried in the summer sky
And talked about the rocks and geologic history of the land
And looked beneath the roots of the pine forest
To see the glory of a wilderness before Europeans
Came to the continent and made it possible
For him and Pat to live where they lived.
There is no way to sum up a life.
Jim Fennell was a unique man,
Someone who marched to Thoreau’s different drummer.
I think there is honor in that.
If we didn’t have those who march to different drummers,
Our lives would be much more regulated
With the ideas and behaviors that everybody else has.
We couldn’t learn how to stretch ourselves
To see ourselves inside an enormous crystal ball
Where we are reflected back at ourselves
So we can see if that enables us
To see who we really are.
Jim once wrote a small book
About mule deer behavior in the Colorado mountains.
When I shook myself out of that period between sleep
And waking into consciousness
Into the day after the longest day of the year,
I saw him walking in mountains
Where pinion trees huddle on rocky slopes
Beneath the deep blue of a summer sky,
And he was looking for arrowheads and mule deer
As he contemplated where today’s humans,
That he’d left behind,
Fit inside the immensity of space and time.
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