Richard Hugo Tour: By the Time I Got to Wisdom

I was tired.

I do remember that.

And I know it was August 3.1992.

The day before, on Sunday, I drove east from Burns, OR to Vale, OR on into Idaho to Boise, Sun Valley, and all the way to Salmon.

The drive was glorious.  The Sawtooth Mountains staggered me and I kept my concentration by chewing Skoal wintergreen and listening to Joseph Campbell on cassette tapes -- which meant that in the future whenever I chewed Skoal I thought about the hero's journey.

I wasn't exactly on a hero's journey, but I was in search of a deeper understanding of Richard Hugo and Hugo was enough of a figurative father figure to me that I was looking to understand a father more deeply.

I got up as early as was practical to drive out of Salmon and to head out over the Lost Trail Pass to Wisdom.

Along the way, though, I stopped at the Big Hole National Battlefield, completely ignorant of what had happened there in 1877.

When I found out, it nearly buckled my knees:  the predawn surprise attack by U.S. forces upon the Nez Perce, the stiff Nez Perce resistance, the many deaths, and then the Nez Perce carrying on in their attempt to relocate in Canada.

I walked the battlefield, read markers,  explored the visitors' center, watched a film there, and eventually I left to drive to Wisdom.

To prepare to drive to Wisdom I read Richard Hugo's two Wisdom poems, "With Kathy in Wisdom" and "Letter to Kathy from Wisdom" at the battlefield.

Then, by the time I got to Wisdom, I was tired.

I opened my Hugo collection again to the Wisdom poems, which are also Kathy poems, and barely took any notes.  

First, "With Kathy in Wisdom".

the cliff is there>them on it is the dream

That's all I noted.  I remember standing on the desolate main drag of Wisdom near a general store looking up on the hill, locating what I decided was the cliff of the opening of the poem and dreaming Richard Hugo's dream of him and Kathy.  

The deeper feelings I had then and have now about Richard Hugo's love affair with Kathy grow out his letter poem to Kathy, "Letter to Kathy from Wisdom".

It's my favorite love poem in all of poetry.

I'm not sure I can articulate very well why, but here goes.

First of all, none of the external details of the poem relates to my own life.  As a man in my forties, I was never lovers with a younger woman; no one ever mistook me and a lover for father and daughter.  I don't fish.  I've never known what Hugo writes about here, going together with a lover to a remote town in the West to fish, eat in a small town diner, none of it.  I've never returned to the small town diner and thought about a young lover's demons and her breakdowns and her doctors.

What moves me so much in this poem is that it expresses my basic desire to be kind.  What moves me is Hugo's kindness, his hopes for Kathy, the way he assures her that while they are no longer lovers, their love endures. 

Two words:  "lovers matter".

Later:   "you were my lover and you matter". 

I don't have the language of a literary critic to explain why these words move me the way they do.

All I can say is that again and again, Richard Hugo gives his attention to what it's like to be in a world of "uncaring skies", where there's "gloom/ubiquitous as harm", where "our lives/are on the line".

This is not a poem of glamorous lovers, but it's a poem of love.  It's a world of tender, unlikely lovers, of "a lovely young girl and a fat/middle 40's man", "scratching for a home".

That's the best I can do right now. 

I'm not going to tell stories of lost lovers or even broken friendships with those in my life from whom I'm estranged and who matter.  The kindness I feel remains unexpressed.  Only I know it. 

These lost friends and lovers matter. 

By the time I got to Wisdom in August, 1992, I was thinking about lost friends and lovers, and now, in 2013, there are more to remember and this poem awakens my feelings for them, my private feelings of kindness and goodwill.