The Big Time

At Dillon Beach all is grey, with ocean and cloud cover differentiated only by white trails of foam left from rolling waves. It's quiet except for the downpour, the wind whipping against the windows, and the sound of my voice reading poetry to the dogs to calm them down.

A muzzle rests on the toe of my aqua sneaker, a warm damp body lies against my hip. We’re holding out for a break in the weather, waiting for the sky to lighten before the sunset.

It's kind of working, this imposed serenity, just sitting when all the world's a swirl of crazy, absorbing a daily deluge of assaults from a malevolent regime, a relentless storm of hate and fear mongering.

To pledge resistance, yet seek refuge, resting in the safety of our living room, overlooking the sea, still I shudder at the confirmation today of an oilman bent on dismantling all environmental protections.

Such sacrilege, the water and land under siege by a band of white men with their moneyed interests.  Old news, perhaps, on this Pacific coastline, so long ago invaded by Sir Frances Drake, an English pirate who could not see his way through the fog (of greed?).

For 30 centuries, over 600 village tribes of Coastal Miwoks hunted salmon in surf nets. They gathered kelp and seaweed in woven baskets on the beach below, until the Spaniards and Russians decimated the native population by spreading disease, and enslaved them on inland ranchos.

Disbanded and diminished, the Coastal Miwok went unrecognized as a federal American Indian Tribe until the year 2000. Their tribe now numbers under 1000. This is the shameful history of the bluff my house sits upon.

In one of the Miwok creation myths, a silver fox sings of her loneliness in a prayer song and then meets the Coyote. “We will sing the world,” she proposes to this sacred trickster, and they create the world together by dancing and singing.  As they do so, the earth takes shape.

Emma Goldman was once admonished at a New York party that “it does not behoove an agitator to dance.” She explained, “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.”

I consider her words carefully and imagine the Miwoks, wearing yellow flicker feather headbands, black and orange feather plumes and skirts, dancing on top of the giant blue and green schist rocks in our backyard. They call their celebrations the “Big Time.”  During the Coyote dance, one dancer, the Coyote, goes around making fun of the other dancers. He tries to make them misstep.

And so I take my solace in the Saturday Night Live sketches and the tripping up commentary of the comics, having a Big Time.  I will seek out laughter while knowing with dead seriousness, that we must do everything in our power to take back our country.

The rescue Sadie stretches and stands up; her front leg, injured when she was homeless on the streets of Oakland, is still healing from surgery. The Cavalier Picasso walks to the door, eager to head out despite the falling rain.

"How will we keep living our lives?" I ask the dogs as I rise up from the sofa.