Early Morning

Remembering My Father, William Stafford

Kim Stafford

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781595341860
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A prolific writer, famous pacifist, respected teacher, and literary mentor to many, William Stafford is one of the great American poets of the 20th century. His first major collection-- Traveling through the Dark --won the National Book Award. William Stafford published more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose and was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress--a position now know as the Poet Laureate. Before William Stafford's death in 1993, he gave his son Kim the greatest gift and challenge: to be his literary executor.In Early Morning, Kim creates an intimate portrait of a father and son who shared many passions: archery, photography, carpentry, and finally, writing itself. But Kim also confronts the great paradox at the center of William Stafford's life. The public man, the poet who was always communicating with warmth and feeling--even with strangers--was capable of profound, and often painful silence within the family. By piecing together a collage of his personal and family memories, and sifting through thousands of pages, of his father's daily writing and poems, Kim illuminates a fascinating and richly lived life.

V.

Tragedies Happen

Sleeping on Hillsides

At age four i told my parents I wanted to sleep with the rabbits. We were living in the Oregon house with the picket fence, a bungalow now gone, replaced by a mansion. Ours then was a humble refuge across the road from the convent, the Sisters of Saint Francis. The sisters held devotion in their cells. I had my own way.

Behind our house, a grand old maple presided over the rabbit hutch. Was that the house where my father butchered a chicken and prepared a feast to welcome my mother home from the hospital when one of us was born? I can’t remember. But I said I wanted to sleep with the rabbits, and my parents said okay. I left the house at dusk, and all was still.

As the sky grew darker, they heard me open the back door and come inside.

“Did you decide to sleep in your cozy bed?”

“No. I just forgot my pillow.” I rubbed my eyes, fetched my pillow. Outside, in the straw with the rabbits, I slept the night.

My mother has preserved a drawing of mine at age three—a series of lines and dots that represent, according to my father’s annotation, “someone walking in the rain . . . stars . . . footprints.” My own world apart. Even when the family camped out, I often took my sleeping bag and tramped at dusk to some remote promontory to sleep alone. At Cove on the Crooked River in central Oregon, it was up on the mesa above the canyon. In the Malheur country farther east, it was above that cliff where we found the cave. At the Metolius River in Oregon’s mountain forests, it was as far up Green Ridge as I could stumble before full dark to make my nest on the ground.

I had to get away because when I woke—often in the night, and finally at dawn—I had to feel the place uninsulated by comfort or company. I had to lie on the ground and sip the pine scent of morning.

In his book You Must Revise Your Life, my father tells about a similar impulse when he was young and living in western Kansas. He reports riding his bike beyond the edge of town, climbing into the breaks above the Cimarron River, and waiting for night:

On that still, serene day I stayed and watched. How slow and majestic the day was, and the sunset. No person anywhere, nothing, just space, the solid earth, gradually a star, the stars. Quail sounds, a coyote yapping.

In the middle of the night I woke and saw a long, lighted passenger train slowly pulling along across the far horizon. No sound. Steady stars. The morning was dim, sure, an imperceptible brightening of sky with yellow, gray, orange, and then the powerful sun. That encounter with the size and serenity of the earth and its neighbors in the sky has never left me. The earth was my home; I would never feel lost while it held me.

When an interviewer asked my father, “What religious experiences have been most meaningful to you?” he replied:

Every religious experience I recall that impressed me greatly has been in the presence of influences that combined several senses—no merely verbal experience, in a church, has provided a full religious experience. The most impressive such experience I recall was on the banks of the Cimarron River in western Kansas one mild summer evening . . . the feeling of being sustained, cherished, included. . . .

And in a poem he wrote a year before he died, he seems to attribute both his good luck and his isolation to such an experience on the prairie.

Why did you come back a dreamer, never to contend

like the others, always a little strange and alone?

It was those afternoons there in the open,

it was the whole world: I was drunk on the world.

—from “Apologia pro Vita Sua”

Such a life in the open was mine when my parents entrusted me to the dark. I remember waking in the forest high on a ridge to see the full moon pouring silver over a buck strutting, crazy with rut, through the young pines. After The Winter’s Tale at the Shakespeare festival in Ashland, I walked along the railroad tracks until I came to a dark pasture and could pass the night in the continuing dream of what I had seen. At the desert place called Sky Ranch, where we stayed with our friends the Ramseys, I had to take my sleeping bag and find a place on the hill alone, free from interruption to the rustling starlight overhead. After that night, our host Jerry Ramsey wrote a poem:

It is a preference indicative of wit,

self-reliance, and indifference to the vulgar comforts.

Cantilevered there in your bag above us on

this rocky hillside in the dark, you are keeping

famous company in your chilly solitude—

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

the generations of Indian children

who came alone from far off

perhaps to this very hill in quest of the spirit

that would tell them who they were

and give them a power to be—

shivering, thirsting, famishing all day and night

so still in the grass that buzzards might land

at their feet, or Coyote come and breathe in their faces.

It could happen to you.

—from “Sleeping on Hillsides”

Another time, I remember my vigil under a lone oak on a Kansas hill. It must have been a family visit when I was fifteen or so. I had left the house while the others slept and wandered as high as I could for a look around. After midnight I leaned my back against the oak and watched lightning strike wheat fields to the west. The air was alive with the breath of damp earth and ozone smoke. I felt closer kinship to the oak, the wind, and even the lightning than with any human life. Mesmerized by the storm, I watched until in a close flash of fire I remembered the rule about the highest tree in a thunderstorm—and suddenly there was a ball of fire hanging in the air above me, spitting and swinging slowly back and forth. I ran, another flash, I fell on the pavement, put my whole hand into my mouth for fear, and the rain came gushing down. I was on my hands and knees in the gutter, drenched. Flash. I ran. Regained the yard at Aunt Peg’s house, crept into the family car, the backseat, and shivered myself asleep.

In the morning, I went into the house for dry clothes.

“Got wet, did you?” my father said, looking up from his writing. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah, caught by the storm.” I looked down, exhilarated by what I wasn’t going to tell.

“Well, better get cleaned up,” he said. “The others ought to be waking soon, and you can help with breakfast.”

I never told. That seemed the best way to honor the immensity of such a night. It wasn’t about words. You can write a letter describing a day of your life, a poem describing a war, a haiku about the moon—the increasingly compact density of the utterance keeps in balance with the growing immensity of the subject. Finally, the story is so huge only a silence will do it justice.

I remember one of the family’s cross-country drives, how we stopped at the bank of a river on the prairie that seemed an empty place. My father stood a little apart, looking around. Eventually we all piled into the car, and after a while, he joined us.

“What river was that?” I asked my father from the back seat.

“The Cimarron.”

The Cimarron. Now I see: he was there again, on his night of epiphany when he watched the train and felt “the size and serenity of the earth.”

In my own search for such encounters, I remember leaving the family where they lay in sleeping bags and slipping away into the dark. We were camped at the Metolius River in Oregon, and I had to find that precious pocket of time before the others woke.

Tall pines against the stars. The sound of the river to my left to navigate my parallel way through the dark. With my stick I felt the ground ahead and held my free hand before my face to fend off low boughs of pine.

An hour later I settled on a ridge above a bend in the river. The time was approaching for that familiar tension between two worlds: I had not seen what awaited me, and others might be rising soon. I needed to get back.

A fawn appeared from somewhere, stepped toward me, stopped and stared. Jumped in place, frisked about, disappeared. Came back, reached a wet nose toward me, jumped, was gone.

By the time I was back in camp, I had managed to clear the gri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• I. You Follow
• II. Among Things That Change
• III. You Are Pursuing
• IV. You Have to Explain
• V. Tragedies Happen
• VI. Don’t Ever Let Go
• VII. The Thread
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors