MY INSPIRATION: HOMEWARD BOUND, AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

                               

TRIBUTE TO HOMEWARD BOUND: THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

It’s said that the older one gets, the wiser one becomes. I’m glad that’s true, apparently, of most folks. The older I get, the weirder my life becomes. And so to adapt and adjust and stuff… Yeah, like THAT’LL work with you guys. (sigh)

I get my inspiration from some strange places. For all of my experience in LA and in the entertainment industry both as a staff magazine writer and under the mentorship of character actor and screenwriter True Boardman, Jr.; and despite the number of years I watched traditional hero in crisis saves the town, the country or whatever and even if he/she dies, they’re remembered forever movies for the courage to keep going, it’s like, "Hey, I was partly raised on a ranch but I did NOT come to town on a horse, okay?" (And not that there would have been one flipping thing wrong if I had, by the way.)

I was talking to animals before I was conversing with humans. For the first three years of my life ~ true story ~ I didn’t utter a single humanly intelligible word. They thought I was partially autistic. When I finally did open my mouth in their direction, I spoke in complete sentences. And they consulted upteen specialists before they asked Grandpa Seamus what he thought. He just shrugged and said,

"It’s obvious to me that up ‘til now, the lad hasn’t had anything to say to us."

He was right and I’ll allow as how I’ve been making up for it some since. I don’t consider myself a vain man but I do love the sound of my own voice. When it doesn’t inspire me, it puts me to sleep. I’ve noticed it has the same effect on most others. I don’t know what you call that in your family but in my house, we call it "a win-win situation".

The movie I go to for inspiration is a Walt Disney film called "Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey" http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search?query=The%20Incredible%20Journey. There have been two versions, both by Disney Studios, and I’m talking about the 1993 remake. (http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0211900/journey/incredible_journey.htm)

Though filmed in the Canadian wilderness, it’s about a family who moves 200 miles across the Sierra Nevadas to San Francisco and accidentally leaves their three pets behind.

It’s the saga of an aging but wise golden retriever Shadow (voice by Don Ameche), this pizza loving Peter Pan adolescent bull terrier with consistently more guts than good sense named Chance (Michael Fox) and this immutably prissy but surprisingly adaptable lady Himalayan cat, Sassy, (Sally Field) and what they endure to rejoin their human family.

It really works for me on several levels and not always in this order.

First, it’s a study in how diverse personalities unite behind a common goal. For these three, it’s following their human family to a new home.

Second, there’s no religion, politics, philosophy or any of the other things we tend to hide behind as human beings when we are confused or frightened by one another.

Third, these three make mistakes but it’s because they don’t judge one another by them that they learn so quickly and adapt so well.

Fourth, there’s an enduringly resonant sense of humour flowing through this film. It’s the kind that doesn’t involve hurting other people or mocking the way other folks think and feel. I like to believe it’s the kind of comedy that makes God smile. I suspect the Deity could use a gentle laugh now and then, especially considering what we, also His children, do to one another in our competition to be the favourite child. Harder for us, perhaps, than contemplating a universe with no beginning, might be accepting the notion that just MAYBE God alone has no favourite child.

Fifth, based on my experience in the woods, it’s realistic in terms of inter-species teamwork. And it’s a cooperative effort that has been going on a lot longer than human beings have been around. Ironically, we were a lot more that way once than we are now. As far as I’m concerned, that puts an interesting spin on Darwin.

The production values are flawless and panoramic. Ameche, Fields and Fox become the characters they portray so the casting, as far as I’m concerned, was perfect. One also has the distinct impression that these three were in the same room, at the same time, with three separate microphones, doing this like radio theatre. The musical scoring was beautiful and as right on the mark and mood as the photography.

There’s one scene where Sassy falls into a river and is apparently swept away for good (mournful music in the background, panning close-up on the faces of the dogs, panning to a sunset as the scene fades). The reunion is a tear-jerker, not the least in part because the cat caught fish and the younger dog learned to like them. (Not altogether surprising. Trout are my favourite meal fish as well.)

Emotionally, to me, it’s like when I start to get a little stressed, a scene will pop up and/or I’ll hear the music; remember the exchange between Sassy and Chance over dogs drool and cats rule, and the wise but stern voice of Shadow, reminding them that they need to get home and as fun as it might be for the two of them, this inter-species bickering isn’t helping any.

Perhaps lastly, it’s based on a children’s story published in 1952 by a Canadian lady writer named Sheila Burnford (http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0211900/journey/incredible_journey.htm) Now I’ll admit I’m prejudiced as far as Canada’s concerned, considering where I was born. But to me, any children’s story so simply set and crafted, in so naturalistic a setting, and which, in its time, has gone so far beyond the shadow of the Maple Leaf to reach so many, suggests that perhaps we have not lost our innocence entirely.

I hope not.

Thanks for the ear, then, eh? And until next time…

Tags: Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Sheila Burnford, Canada, inspiration, Merritt Scott (Rusty) Miller, Mick McGuire, The Northstar Journal, humour, dogs, cats, wilderness, philosophy, films, Walt Disney, Disney Studios

A BIT OF SURVIVING HARD TIMES

Well, when the news is as bad as it’s been on some fronts lately and I find myself starting to get overwhelmed by it, my mind turns to other sources than the media for inspiration, meditation and rejuvenation. I learned that from my infamous Grandpa Seamus.

When they were young and Grandma Molly used to get real upset about the Depression news, Grandpa Seamus would invariably just real calmly get up, cross the room and turn the radio off. Then he’d walk out on the porch, put his weathered brown hands on the rough pine wood rail, and let his eyes drift to the majestic snowcapped Trinity Alps which rose like ice-shaggy Nordic gods and goddesses all around him.

If, when he walked back inside, Molly had turned the radio back on, he quietly unplugged it, tucked it under his arm and put it on a shelf higher than she could reach. He never said a word and he wasn’t angry. She knew that and since she wasn’t either…

Then, he’d go out to the barn and saddle up their two horses, Morgans both, while she got on the telephone box, cranked it and got ahold of Thomas Lightoot and his family to ask them to watch the place for awhile. At first, that was just the ranch. (Later, after their second daughter ~ and the one who survived ~ was born, it included her, as well.)

Then together, they’d pack their saddle bags and their blanket rolls, check the bandoleers and clean and oil their 44 caliber Colt revolvers and the Winchesters each of them owned. Yep, just like Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, except Seamus looked like Glenn Ford and Molly favored Jessica Lange.

Together then, they rode into the peaks that had sustained them for so long and which hadn’t changed much in anyone’s recent memory. They lived off that land, as high mountain and allegedly barren as it might have appeared to those who didn’t know it. They fished by wading upstream and catching rainbow and German Brown by hand. They sparked flint to dry moss. They watched deer gather at dawn watering and sated eagles soar endlessly overhead, benevolent masters of their domain. They avoided brown bear by keen noses and cougar by knowing tracks and not crossing trail. They weren’t armed to protect themselves from these, but from men who came into the Alps for not the best of reasons.

And yes, now as I reflect on it, in some ways, it’s like they recreated themselves as Adam and Eve, with the snake being the radio Seamus unplugged and set on a high shelf.

I don’t know all of what they did on those rides and my experience is based on some of those times when Seamus and I did that. But yes, I suspect they also made love, teased each other, played tag, etc. That’s the way of it with folks born and raised in the Trinity Alps. And, I suspect, elsewhere. That "inner child" is still alive in most of them, right up to the end.

I do know for certain that Molly came back a lot calmer and embarrassingly (for her) in blush. And while she stabled the Morgans, Seamus got the radio down off the shelf, put it back where she listened to it, plugged it in and turned it on. Together they carried in the saddle bags, bedrolls, firearms, etc. While he started a cook fire in the Fraser potbelly, she called the Lightfoots to thank them and to say she’d be by to return the favor, meaning in this case, eggs from the henhouse.

In the years ahead, this ritual was to stand them well, even when it couldn’t always be observed in the specific. During the Depression, the army stopped buying horses and Seamus ended up riding shotgun on a prison van that delivered convicts from the county seat in Redding to the state penitentiary, Folsom Prison, not far from Sacramento.

It was one hundred eighty miles down a highway that followed the meandering and sometimes serpentine Sacramento River. In its early days, that highway was tenuous at best. Between the driving rains and the tule fog of winter and the hot and relentless jungle humidity of the summers, it posed considerable challenges even to hay wagons.

Seamus had a couple of close calls and Molly begged him to find another job. There flat weren’t any and when he didn’t, she took off on a train from Redding to San Francisco and stayed there for awhile. She had what we learned from her diaries after she died, some extremely interesting adventures. We never knew, completely, because he never talked about it, what it was like for Seamus to come back to a ranch with no wife.

Grandpa never asked her to come home, though, and it wasn’t because he was too proud. It was because he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. She had to come home because this remote ranch in the Trinity Alps, with him, was home. Her home.

Folks I’ve spoken with who remember them during this period have said that Seamus’ normally alpine blue eyes were gray a lot. And that he was considerably more taciturn than usual. This for a man who was even more legendary in the Alps for that than Calvin Coolidge was elsewhere.

The turning point for them was in 1938, I think, when a blizzard struck especially hard and out of nowhere. It froze the Alps and turned the Sacramento Valley into a flood plane that stretched as far as one could see. The prison van Seamus was guarding didn’t make it. But he did.

To this day, no one knows what he went through to get home. But, like I said earlier, it was one hundred eighty miles or so to Redding and it took him a week. He stayed overnight and then it was three days or so on snowshoes, with a pack full of tinned goods, back to the ranch, not knowing what to expect but mostly figuring on frozen hell.

As he crunched the final few yards through the snow cloaked forest which surrounded the ranch, he caught a gleam of light through the trees. His throat got thick, his heart started hammering and his eyes rolled to the Heavens in the briefest but sincerest of prayers.

On the porch waiting for him was Molly in deerskin, holding a lantern in one hand and her Winchester in the other. She was standing in the doorway next to a mountain lion hide stretched on the outside wall. And from their cabin came the smell of roasting venison. He looked at her and she nodded, so he came on ahead. And at the bottom of the cabin steps, he got out of his snowshoes and unslung his back. As she stepped aside to let him in, he handed her a brand new radio.

They stayed married for 55 years and he passed on first. She followed him less than a year later. The ranch on which they lived is now at the bottom of Whiskey Lake, in Shasta County, (Northern) California.

They’re gone now then; all physical traces absorbed back into the earth from which they both came, at some point in time or another. They’re at peace with the planet and the planet with them.

Has their time among us meant something and does it still? I suspect so. I’m still here. And I doubt seriously if I’m alone in those regards, eh?

Thanks, then, for the ear. Take care, stay well and God Bless. Until next time…

With thanks to Mike Browne and the Tomatoman Times TomatomanMike, for the example, and my god-sent brother Dennis for the nudge.

Rusty

SOMETIMES “LOSING IT ALL” IS NOT QUITE ALL IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE EITHER

                        

For a man of considerably modest financial means, I've been blessed with a real interesting circle of friends. One of them lost a million dollars in the stock market just about the time I found out I qualified for unemployment and am therefore not in immediate danger of imminent collapse.

Like most rich folks I know, he worked hard for it and for the right reasons. He figured that the more money he made, the better he could provide for his family. No, he wasn’t born into whatever it is we call the financially better off than most of us are. And at a year shy of 50, he’s wondering whether it’s all been worth it because in all this struggling, he sort’ve got out of touch with the people he’s doing it for and now what he wishes for most is love.

I may be naïve, but in my experience, that happens to all of us, at some point in time or another. I’ve seen what it can drive a person to, especially in hard times, and what it can drive a community, a region and a nation to, as well.  As tragic as it is, sometimes it can happen for a good reason, though.

In the first place, at the rate this high lifestyle is costing the planet, if it’s not slowed down some, there’s going to be less and less to pass down to our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters. That’s one good reason to re-evaluate our priorities. And whether over-industrialization is causing the greenhouse effect or not, it’s certainly not helping it any. I’m sure that streets with horse-drawn transportation didn’t smell real good but I can’t imagine Chicago a century or so ago ever ranking out as bad as LA does on a warm commuter evening today.

Second, when we’re working as hard as it takes to make more than we really need, we’re sacrificing the enjoyment of it. We’re stressing out, shortening our lifespan and guaranteeing that most of what we’ve got left isn’t going to be that much fun either. More importantly ~ at least in my house ~ we’re not being there for those who love us and need to be loved in return.

Third, it’s hard to pay attention to things going on in the larger world when we’re constantly that tired. It’s easier to react than it is to think things through. None of us, from the meekest to the mightiest, makes the best decisions under that kind of stress.

For Americans, at least, there’s something else that happens to us as a nation. We forget that this is a land where all of us ~ regardless of any other qualifer except being a human being ~ are equal under the law and in the eyes of that God In Whom We Trust. We forget that we’re a family and that families pull together, however much they may disagree, bicker and spoil Thanksgiving consistently. We forget that deep down inside, most of us want the same basic things and that maybe it’s just a matter of scaling down the size of that stuff before the planet gives up on us or we kill each other in the quest of more rooms than we can live in and more cars than we can drive at one time.

Maybe when we don’t have so much stuff to take care of, we’ll find more time to enjoy what we’re really doing this all for. Maybe love’s not supposed to come with so high a price tag. And maybe losing it all is really a chance to start over and do it right this time.

I sure hope so. I’d hate to think we’re going through all this for nothing.