Thoughts in Isolation

Covid has taken over my life. I’m not invincible and too many days testing positive force me to sit  looking out the window at the cold whiteness of winter.  Isolated from the outer world, I turn to my books and inner thoughts for entertainment. Thoughts of wide open spaces color my imagined world. 

One of the writers with whom I  always find  nourishing thoughts is the Montana writer Ivan Doig. Born to the rigors of life on a sheep ranch, he excelled  in his studies and went on to earn a doctorate in history. He never taught college classes. Instead with the able support of his wife who did teach, he wrote full time. My favorite of his is a book he titled This House of Sky. In it he details his early life and schooling in rural schools of Montana, Northwestern University, and University of Washington.

One day at Northwestern a professor asked him to stay after class for a moment. Doig’s grades had slipped and caused the teacher to take note. Doig learned from that meeting that he must change his approach to studying. “Memorized dates and facts would not carry me in college as they had in high school, I must think out essay answers now.”

Essay answers. In other words he needed to start thinking and forming his own thoughts, instead of just taking the word of others and spitting them out verbatim. He took the lesson to heart and wrote a dozen or so books that offer plenty of thoughtful and entertaining reading. That leads to our North Dakota scholar, Clay Jenkinson.

Jenkinson involves himself with many projects, seemingly all at once. One of late has been following the route in the country of John Steinbeck’s book Travels with Charley. He has posted videos and narratives about that trip and promises a book on what he found. But another of the activities he involves himself with is hosting a retreat at a lodge in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho. This year’s two session meeting centered around the work of Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey. The topic for the second session dealt with some of William Shakespeare’s work.

What he reported from those sessions - the paricipants want a quality of conversation they are not always getting where they live. They come because they want something more than the information fed them through screens. They want to talk about ideas with others who want to talk about ideas. He laments the decline of liberal arts and humanities in the United States. It’s reminiscent of Doig saying he had to start thinking out essay answers now. After Idaho, Jenkinson headed off to Vail, Colorado to conduct a “Conversations on Controversial Issues” seminar.  

One more thought about Ivan Doig fits comfortably. He talked about the “stopless ricochets through the past, to places and persons of twenty and thirty years ago.” Isn’t that the way memories flit about, some lingering, some gone quickly. I’ve got lots of them like that.

One memory, simple as it is, keeps revisiting me when the thermometer drops low and ice crystals hang in the air. A door of the house where I grew up held a large frosted pane of glass on  which a bull elk had been etched. He stood in a mountain meadow bugling his intent to the mountains in the distance. This is what imagination does. Was I wrong thinking it was a message for me to get out and do my own wandering in the wilderness. The image is not yet complete, though, since one cold winter and through that same window I watched a large snow owl gliding back and forth over our south pasture. It still ricochets ghostlike through my thoughts.

We used to live without flickering screens glaring at us all hours of the day. Life was quieter with  minimal sensory intrusion. A picture remains in my memory of evenings in the living room where the family gathered. One gas lamp and one kerosene lantern provided  the necessary light. In  that light I could twist my fingers into shadow figures of imaginative animals that walked on the wall. Simple pleasure!

I’m not sure if a covid-fueled brain becomes muddled, but insignificant thoughts still flit. Here I stand on the side of a grain box and dip into the wheat with double-cupped hands to lift and heft the contents. Isn’t that what the big guys do? Too soon the years added up where I had to play the role of a big guy and climb into a dusty grain bin to shovel. The air felt so good upon exiting even though a lot of hacking and coughing followed.

Some of us thought we would never catch this beastlike Covid-bug, but it has certainly proved to me it favors no one. A song by MercyMe tells me “ Better days coming, watch and see… We'll dance through the pain and the sorrow …Knowing there's gonna be better days.”