6/15/98.. Coyote gets wet.

Buckets of rain. My awning collapsed under the inundation, then blew apart in the wind. This is at least the third time in the last 20 years I've tried to rig a big canvas fly as a sunshade; spent endless hours being hassled by the materials; only to have the whole thing come down on my head. Actually it was Seth's head one time, necessitating a rush to the emergency room. You'd think I'd learn that a tentrigger I'm not.

That's one of the benefits of age, supposedly. Knowing what you aren't good at, and leaving it for others to do. But the Whole Earth Catalog syndrome dies hard in a gray boomer. Auto mechanics, wiring, plumbing, drywall work.. and canvassing.. I CAN, but I'd be happier if I didn't.

I was reminded of this up at Bruce's the other day. Bruce had his lung surgery, and is back on his feet. Finished his annual boat repairs, and launched the SarahAnne on Thursday. Mel went down to Damariscotta and filled the truck with horseshoe crabs for bait. "WHAT A WOMAN!" Bruce declares. Anyhow, he'd picked up a prime copy of "The Last Whole Earth Catalog" at a yardsale. A totemic item.

Peggy and I bicycled around England and Wales the summer of 71, carrying a copy. The guidebook for an age. There seemed so much to learn, and so much to do, then. The whole world was going to change, and here was a list of the necessary tools. Looking over Bruce's copy last week, we hooted at all those good intentions. Or I hooted. Bruce had been busy dissolving his first marriage and trying to run a welldrilling business about the time us young guys were jumping off the train. The humor in the WEC isn't quite as pointed for Bruce, although he gets the joke.

What happened? Some of us Whole Earthers went back to the land, and discovered that was an awkward position. Others postponed the millennium indefinitely.The counter-culture got commodified, coopted and confused. There are still woodsy idealists, just as there have been balladeers since "Masters of War," but that revolutionary idealism is now as tattered as an old Whole Earth Catalog.

So I'm reading a germinal book, by an author introduced to me by Whole Earth: "Trickster Makes This World," by Lewis Hyde. You may remember his first book, "The Gift," which circled around "imagination and the erotic life of property." That was about art and giving. This one is about art and theft. And once again Hyde has given me a mythic reference for my present puzzles.

Hyde proposes that there are times when structures get frozen: social order is ossified, religious doctrines become dogma, the dominant dinosaurs get too specialized. At such moments the trickster steals fire from the gods, shits under the sacred throne, eats the eggs by night. Hermes, Papa Legba, Coyote, Raven: mythic tricksters disrupt the old order, change the rules of the game, and evolve new paradigms. They do lots of other things, too, but that's enough mischief for this rap.

Is that what happened in the late 60s? Were Ginsberg and Leary and Dylan and Garcia playing Coyote? Was Acid a new sacraments and the WEC a reformed text? Was the booming postwar America a petrified paradigm, where Blacks and women and social idealists were still marginalized, and the holy dollar the only measure of value? Did longhaired pranksters upset that applecart? And did that counter-cultural ethos transform the game?

Well, maybe. For a spell. Mythic time isn't measured in decades. Coyote is always with us, but we only see his footsteps at need. He unmakes only to remake. And when he's gone, it seems like an old joke.

This month a four-legged one has been hunting the local cats. Actually stalking through our neighborhood in the daytime. Probably a female with a litter of kits. The presence of coyotes in the backyard reminds us that "wild" isn't so far away. That the veneer of civilized order still has cracks in it.

That's what we realized in the 60s, and some of us got up on our hind legs and bayed. We tend to think that "The Revolution" failed. But did it? Viet Nam spoiled American colonial adventurism. There's a huge Black middle class. A kind of feminism has prevailed. Of course there's a new order, which has many of the ills of the old one. But society can't survive if Coyote lives in the house. You get the feeling that he might be due for a return engagement, though.

Reading "Trickster Makes This World" is reinvigorating. It resensitizes me to serendipity. Friday I went out looking for happenstance with my artkit in the early AM, and immediately encountered a big snapper, looking for a place to lay her eggs. CC almost put her snout in range, before I shouted her back. The nasty critter craned her neck, and waited for me to finish drawing her, before she turned and waddled to the bank, tumbled into the river. I sat down and did a watercolor of the scene.

Later in the day, puttering through some chores, I flipped the wheelbarrow off the compost heap, to find a big milk adder coiled in the hay. Diamond patterning. Altogether unsettling. And thrilling. It didn't wait for me to get my kit, just uncoiled sinuously, and was swallowed by the ground. I might have known there was something brewing.

Now we're in the third day of a southerly storm. It blew a gale Saturday night and Sunday, knocking out the power here for 6 hours. I bailed Sharpie three times yesterday. At first light this morning the river was over Jimmy's dock, and I chased loose gas jugs and buoys in my skiff. Bailed again. Immature eagles are hunting upriver along the floodwater, harried by boat-tailed grackles defending their nests. Everything is unsettled, like a time of transition.

Brent and Darryl spent today ripping out the plaster and lathe in my ex-shop. They've been stymied on the house they're building. Waiting for the trusses to be delivered. Meanwhile gutting our front parlor, and sheetrocking, is good foul weather work to fill the gap. But it feels strange for someone else to be working on our house. Even though I have a pile of work in the shop, and know that the dust would trigger my allergies, even though we can afford it, it doesn't feel, well, Whole Earthy enough.

Still some trickster in me. I could get to like it, though.