Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
While I don’t necessarily agree with the old feminist notion that the personal is inescapably political, I do try and write about politics mainly through a personal or literary lens. For the rare exceptions, see Rants.
Graves of the Unknown Dead, National Cemetery, Chattanooga, TN
William Henry Jackson, ca. 1900
such a noble sacrifice the forest made
in its battle with the saw
it deserves no less than a full plantation of stumps
erasers white with chalk
erected in loving forgetfulness
of the blackboard
a stone tossed into still water
always lands in the center of a target
of spreading years
how well we know them then
these unknown dead
I like to tell people that the strength of this nation is not our military — although we intend to keep it strong. The strength of the nation is the fact that we’ve got compassionate, decent, honorable citizens who hear a call to love a neighbor like you’d like to be loved yourself. And that’s what we’re here to honor.
Each of you is part of a legacy of service that harkens back to our country’s earliest days. When Martha Washington — the husband [sic] of the first George W. — organized sick wards for wounded soldiers and made visits to battlefields to boost the morale of the troops, she volunteered for a cause bigger than herself.
And that’s why it’s vital for our country that our young people step forward — and serve a cause larger than yourselves.
Last night my mother and I caught the first few minutes of A Prairie Home Companion while putting the finishing touches on supper, and we shared a chuckle at Garrison’s monologue: some B.S. about discovering that his mother had led a wild life in the few years before she got married, traveling the country with a circus and dancing on the backs of elephants. He made much of the discomfort this new-found knowledge supposedly occasioned.
The story may have been fiction, but I think the discomfort is real. A good friend of mine regularly complains about one of her grown sons who seems unable to keep his embarrassment at her unorthodox views and behavior to himself. Granted that I am only hearing one side of the story, it sounds to me as if he is unable, or unwilling, to grant her the full freedom of an independent person, demanding instead that she remain forever defined by her role as his mother. That’s not only selfish, but infantile. In his defense, though, I gather my friend went through some rather profound life-changes right around the time her four children were leaving the nest: the sixties were happening and she was in the thick of things, getting an advanced degree and then starting an academic career. So no doubt it was very difficult for him and his siblings to see their mom suddenly having such a wild time — not back in her youth, where it could perhaps be forgiven or at least ignored, but right in the middle of her life.
For my own mother, the transformation has been less revolutionary and more evolutionary, I think, but there’s no question that both my parents are very different from the people they were when my brothers and I were forming our first and most lasting impressions of them. Mom likes to say she’s getting more radical with age, and that certainly seems to be true. For example, I remember years ago she used to groan whenever Dad put on one of his Bartok records, preferring the more standard Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. But thanks in part to our local NPR station’s endless and maddening parade of classical pablum, Mom now has a much higher tolerance — even craving — for the less conventional harmonies and rhythms of 20th-century classical music. I don’t remember her blasting Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and dancing around the kitchen when I was a kid, though I suppose it’s possible she waited until we were off to school to do that.
I’m also still learning things about her — though I have yet to uncover any hidden past life involving circus elephants, alas. Just the day before yesterday, she told me she thought that her interest in nature observation was really helped along by watching some bizarre flicker behavior when she was a young mother in Washington, D.C., pushing my older brother in a stroller through Rock Creek Park. “I was always interested in nature, but I think that was when I really started observing things and writing about them in my journal,” she said, adding that she’d have to try and find that entry in her Washington journal for the article on flickers that she’s planning. (Yes, she’s been keeping journals continuously for at least 44 years.)
This is a long way around saying that I am uncomfortable with this whole Mothers Day thing. Perhaps if the holiday had stuck with the pacifist vision of its founder, Julia Ward Howe, I wouldn’t feel that way — who better to end war, after all, than those who stand to suffer the most from it. But instead the holiday has become an excuse to promote (and of course commercialize) a one-dimensional view of mothers as self-sacrificing servants of their families, with negative repercussions for mothers and for children alike. Should children of alcoholic, abusive, or psychopathic mothers suffer a lifetime of guilt for their inability to worship at the shrine of Mom? Should new mothers struggle through the hell of postpartum depression because they don’t happen to find motherhood as immediately fulfilling and wonderful as the entire weight of our culture insists it must be? And what about moms who don’t fit the June Cleaver mold: those who are the primary breadwinners, for example, or perhaps the only breadwinners? I don’t think single moms should be scapegoated for social ills that have much more to do with endemic poverty and injustice. And I don’t think it’s fair to stay-at-home dads to associate the nurturing-parent role with femininity.
I realize I’ve been uncommonly fortunate in having stable, nurturing, and happily married parents who are also among my best friends. Perhaps it is that friendship that makes me resent the imposition of culturally approved scripts about parents and children. But I think there’s something more than a little patronizing about the way we treat mothers in general. Exhibit A comes straight from one of my mom’s favorite rants: “Mother Nature.” For some reason, good ol’ boys and developers just love to talk about Mother Nature, I’m not sure why. It always makes me flinch.
In memory of the Holocaust survivor who saved a classroom
I grew up wary of doors:
open, they could give you away;
closed, they could stop your heart
with a knock at midnight.
Humans were herded into pens like animals.
Let us go once more into the garden, my friends.
As an adult under Ceausescu
I learned to fear the walls & the furniture,
anywhere an electronic ear could be hidden.
Only outside could we speak
about our dreams.
Let us go once more into the garden.
When I told them I wanted to emigrate to Israel,
all of Romania became my jail.
Fired from my job, I still left the house
every day with my briefcase
so the children wouldn’t suspect anything,
so they could grow up without fear.
I mailed a manuscript out of the country
disguised as a series of letters.
Let us go, my friends, let us go.
Fears should be faced in the open.
Too long indoors, & the mind
grows walls of its own.
Even here in Blacksburg, one day
a tree fell on my house–
anything can happen.
Let us go once more
into the garden.
UPDATE: You can listen to the poem here.
Most Americans live in an in-between place, neither quite town nor country. Sometimes there are sidewalks, and sometimes there aren’t. Such places still tend to be called suburbs, but now that so many of their residents work as well as live there and don’t commute into a city at all, that term seems more than a little dated.
My South Jersey cousins referred to the place in these photos as “our development,” which I found interesting. They’ve lived there for ten years, in a house that was new when they bought it; the oldest parts of the subdivision go back twenty years, they told me. But they continue to think of it as a development: something new. Something without a history yet.
But the land has its own history, of course, suggested most visibly by the trees. Although many of the trees in front yards were planted when the houses were built, many backyards had larger trees that were obviously decades older than the houses. This particular development appears to have been built on top of a mosaic of farm fields, wooded hedgerows and small woodlots. The trees in the above photo marked one edge of the development, a beauty strip separating the community park from a commercial zone. The park is basically a sports field circled by a running track, with only a single clump of trees next to the swing sets. We’re looking across a muddy construction site toward a new Lowe’s — a mega-hardware store that includes an indoor lumber yard. To the right of the picture, a five-acre chestnut oak and mountain laurel woods is fiercely posted with “No Trespassing” signs. At its heart: a private residence of about the same age and design as those in the adjacent development. This is a graphic illustration of one factor driving the growth of suburbs: our love of privacy. And by “us,” I don’t just mean Anglo-Americans. The overwhelming majority of immigrant homeowners live in the ‘burbs, too.
One of the things that distinguishes many of the most recent housing developments, at least in this part of the United States, is the plethora of fences. Very few back yards were without a tall wooden fence separating them from their neighbors. Does this reflect a growing concern for the safety of children, I wonder? By contrast, older towns and suburbs tend to have, if anything, low fences that one can see through — the proverbial white picket fence.
Though my cousins’ development seems to qualify as a genuine neighborhood, where kids play in the street and residents of all ethnic backgrounds mingle easily, I think most activity still takes place either indoors or in backyards. I saw vestigial front porches on a few houses, but I don’t think people spend a lot of time sitting on them watching the cars go by and chatting with their neighbors, as they might in an archetypal small town like the one near me (Tyrone, PA).
The typical American home is becoming positively Arabic. In place of a courtyard or pergola we have the pressure-treated deck, but the spatial emphasis on a private walled garden (or lawn) inaccessible from the street is identical to what you’d find in old Damascus, from what I read.
Trees play a vital role in the modern exurban landscape. For one thing, they provide visual relief from the uniformity of lawns and fences. A small woods like the one at the end of this street can add several thousand dollars to the value of each adjoining lot. My cousins were more practical when they bought their house, though, realizing that the developer was making no promises about preserving any woods. They settled for a thin strip of pines in their backyard.
Trees are often signifiers of place, as well. Where small towns had Oak and Elm Streets, the suburbs have Maple Drives and Cherry Lanes. And it’s not uncommon for suburban subdivisions to bear names like The Pines, Park Forest Village, or Gray’s Woods.
Under the backyard pines, as in so many of the other yards that I could see into, my cousins put a playhouse for their kid. As a species, I think, we are drawn to the company of trees. The other thing fueling the spread of the suburbs, aside from our love of privacy, is our love of nature — or at least a certain vision of the bucolic. Natural habitat is disappearing not because we hate nature, but because we want to live in the middle of it. I include myself in that.
Front-yard trees are more for show. The cherries were in blossom when I visited in the middle of April, held for a couple of weeks by the unusually cold weather. For some, this might evoke New Jersey’s official nickname, the Garden State. But in fact that nickname dates back to when the sandy fields of South Jersey grew crops instead of houses. Before the invention of the refrigerated truck enabled California’s Central Valley to supply produce for the entire nation, New Jersey’s small farmers kept much of the northeast in fresh vegetables.
What will happen when the price of oil becomes too high to support the shipping of food across continents? At about the same time, if Peak Oil Theory predictions are correct, much of the suburbs will become uninhabitable, unless they are quickly reconfigured to put essential goods and services within walking distance of most residents, and unless the larger houses, increasingly expensive to heat and air-condition, are replaced with earth-sheltered, passive-solar structures. The big box stores will go out of business when their centralized supply chains collapse. So it doesn’t require any great stretch of the imagination to suppose that within our lifetimes, my cousins’ development — by then, if they’re lucky, a true town — may be ringed by farmers’ fields once again.
During the painful, forced transition to sustainability, most of the trees in these pictures will probably disappear, cut down for firewood. The lawns will be dug up for vegetable gardens. People will probably spend a lot more time outdoors, whether they want to or not, and will come together in ways we haven’t seen since at least the Second World War. The summers will be hotter and longer than anyone can remember. And because people will need plenty of shade in the absence of air conditioning, I predict they will lose no time in planting more trees.
__________
Don’t forget to send in tree-related blog posts for the next edition of the Festival of the Trees by April 29. See here for more details.
Back to the Basics
A local bottled-water company describes its product as “mouth-watering.”
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Why Similes are the Most Common Poetic Device in Contemporary American Poetry
Well, like, Americans prefer similitude. Y’know?
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Context is Everything
The sign said, “Cut your own.”
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Going Native
As kids, whenever we were really bad, our parents would threaten to give us back to the Indians.
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Haploidal
In my past life, I was in two places at once.
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Remember This
A politician in hot water never says “I can’t remember,” because that might make him seem forgetful and incompetent. He says, “I don’t recall.”
Last Thursday, en route to south Jersey to visit family, we went a little out of our way to visit the new Cabela’s store in Hamburg, PA. Cabela’s is a retailer of outdoors gear, primarily for hunters and fishers. They call themselves an outfitter, but this is no back-of-beyond outfitters store; it’s a monstrosity. Pennsylvania had to outbid several of its neighbors to get it, offering the corporation all kinds of absurd tax breaks and subsidies. You can’t really call it a big box store, because it’s not boxy in shape. Instead, it’s built like an enormous lodge, rising to a point in order to make room for a two-storey-tall, artificial mountain at the center of the store that serves as a diorama for a collection of taxidermy mounts from all over North America. Trophies from other continents — mainly Africa — line the walls. There’s an entire elephant over against one wall, not far from the fish tanks.
The mountain in the store is a rocky crag bearing little resemblance to the long, low ridges we think of as mountains in Pennsylvania. In the photo you can see Kittatinny Ridge behind the bronze sculpture of a heroic frontiersman and an Indian in a canoe. Two hundred and fifty years ago, this mountain was indeed the frontier and the edge of Indian territory, where refugees from ethnic cleansing to the southeast and in surrounding states took temporary shelter. Today, however, Kittatinny Ridge is best known for the world-famous Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, which was started by an amateur ornithologist named Richard Pough who objected to the once-popular sport of shooting hawks and eagles on migration.
In 1929, Pennsylvania’s Game Commission placed a $5 price tag on the goshawk’s head–a grand sum in Depression years. Two years later, while Pough was a recent college graduate living in Philadelphia, he became one of a growing number of conservationists opposed to the widespread movement to eradicate wildlife predators, including predatory birds.
Pough heard of the place locals called “Hawk Mountain” and decided to visit. There he saw gunners stationed, shooting hundreds of passing hawks for sport. He returned to gather the carcasses lying on the forest floor and take photographs. Pough unsuccessfully tried to stop the shooting himself, but his photographs were eventually seen by a national conservation activist–New Yorker Rosalie Edge.
In 1934, Mrs. Edge came to Hawk Mountain and leased 1,400 acres. She installed a warden on the property, a New England bird enthusiast named Maurice Broun, and Maurice’s wife and bird conservation partner, Irma Broun. The shooting stopped immediately and the next year, Mrs. Edge opened the Sanctuary to the public as a place to see the beautiful but persecuted birds of prey. She purchased and deeded the 1,400 acres to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Association, incorporated in 1938 as a non-profit organization in Pennsylvania.
The Cabela’s store is a huge tourist draw, as you can tell from the buses out front. There were at least as many schoolchildren there as we saw in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia the next day. Perhaps they were only stopping on the way to a field trip to Hawk Mountain. As you may have gathered by now, Cabela’s doesn’t just sell guns and boots (we were there for the boots), it sells a fantasy. A fantasy based on a romantic, even sentimental idea about nature that goes back close to a thousand years, I would argue, to when the word “forest” still meant “a hunting preserve for the king,” and “wild” was still indistinguishable from “willed” — as in “sovereign, opposed to one’s own will.” In the Middle Ages, the relationship between king and lion was more than symbolic; a ruler proved his kingliness by killing large predators, and substituting himself for them. We all know from Robin Hood the sorts of punishments that were meted out to mere mortals who killed the king’s deer. When Scots-Irish and other oppressed European tribesmen emigrated to places like Pennsylvania, they gloried in their new-found freedom to slaughter game. Every man could be a king! In practical terms, of course, the fur-traders depicted in the Cabela’s sculpture were lowly serfs to an international market, but we’re talking about fantasy, then and now.
I am far from opposed to hunting, as regular readers of this blog will know. I don’t hunt myself, mostly because I don’t think I’d have the patience, but I do like venison, and I love the whole idea of eating wild animals — except for those near the top of the food chain whose populations cannot support much hunting pressure, and which are generally not very good to eat in any case. Bears are kind of an in-between case — they can be carnivores, but in the main they’re scavengers, like us. Eating a bear, to me, would be almost like eating an ape or monkey: uncomfortably close to cannibalism. But I’d probably still try bear meat if someone offered it.
Does killing something inevitably objectify it? A lot of people would say yes, but most American Indians — and a lot of other indigenous peoples around the world — would probably disagree. From what I have seen, some Anglo-American hunters are also capable of killing without disrespecting an animal or treating it as some sort of walking target. And many of the hunters I know here in central Pennsylvania do express admiration for large predators — though that doesn’t necessarily mean they’d want to see the return of wolves and cougars and the competition for game that would ensue. Even coyotes are vilified in some quarters for their occasional predation on white-tailed deer fawns.
Which is not to romanticize indigenous hunters, either: their sacred stories often include something very similar to the Biblical story of the Fall, reflecting, I think, a nearly universal recognition of a tragic aspect to existence. And Indians no less than whites fantasized about a land somewhere over the horizon where all the game animals were plentiful and offered their bodies for food, again and again, with no adverse effect: the tragic vision’s comic, utopian twin. From an ecological perspective, both these visions contain elements of truth.
It is of course no longer legal to shoot hawks and eagles, and most of us have learned to refer to killer whales as orcas, but our culture retains a deep ambivalence toward predators. Animal rights advocates no less than trophy hunters strike me as being guilty of over-sentimentalizing nature. If it is wrong to eat other animals, where does that put the true carnivores? Should we pray for their reincarnation as human beings so they can become as enlightened as we are?
Then there’s science. It may seem hard to believe now, but the “widespread movement to eradicate wildlife predators” mentioned in the quote from the Hawk Mountain website was instigated by professional wildlife managers in the name of science. It was once accepted wisdom that predators had to be eliminated for the betterment of nature. Mother Nature — the condescending term was as popular then as it is today — was like a little old lady, and wildlife managers and foresters were the boy scouts helping her across the street. And while it would be nice to think that we know better now, the ongoing aerial gunning of wolves in Alaska suggests that this mentality is far from extinct.
Can you tell which of the above two pictures was taken in the Academy of Natural Sciences and which was taken in Cabela’s? Does it matter? If a trophy is a kind of fetish, a repository of power and passport to an eternal frontier where the owner can be top predator, what about all those stuffed animals in a natural history museum? They’re there for educational purposes, we’re told, but what exactly can we learn from something we can’t even touch? They might as well be made out of wax or plastic — and why aren’t they?
I’m not saying that killing the odd bird or mammal for a scientific collection is going to push a species over the edge — except that, whoops, that is basically what happened with the ivory-billed woodpecker around the turn of the 20th century. What I’m concerned about here is the message we’re sending with all these lifelike dead animals, whether in a sporting goods megastore or in a museum. Is this how we want kids to think of nature: as a parade of attractive collectibles, with only fake mountains or painted backdrops for habitat? As long as breeding populations of these charismatic critters survive in zoos, or in small, scattered parcels of natural habitat — people might think — isn’t that enough?
There is another way, of course, and this photo illustrates one of them. Natural history museums may lure kids in with fossils, but I think they can really have an impact on their worldviews with great interactive exhibits like “The Scoop on Poop.” We had two seven-year-olds with us, and they loved it. Even us alleged grown-ups had fun testing our knowledge of poop-related trivia, or finding out how many hours it would take an elephant to eliminate our weight in dung. There were no stuffed elephants in evidence, either, just a pile of very realistic plastic poop.
It wasn’t only the interactive nature of the exhibit that pleased me; I thought the content was very appropriate, too. What better way to instill a sense of wonder in seven-year-olds then by letting them hold a 100 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur butt nugget? And if they manage to absorb the lesson that in nature there is no such thing as “waste” — if they begin to perceive even the seemingly most disgusting or threatening things as necessary and valuable — then in a few more years they might be able to teach all of us a thing or two.
BOOM. The crash of thunder jolts me out of a sound sleep. Oh shit, I mutter — there goes the DSL box.
There’s a qualitative difference between the thunder that accompanies cloud-to-cloud lightning and a cloud-to-earth strike. This was the latter: a heavy thudding crash with no echoes. And the kinds of storms that produce close strikes often sneak up quickly — just a few rumbles in the distance before a very close strike like this one. Of course, it isn’t quite as bad as it might be if the house weren’t tucked a little ways down into a hollow between two higher ridges. But we’re still less than a hundred feet below the ridgecrest, and the woods are filled with lightning-struck trees if you know how to recognize them.
I lie awake, listening to the rapidly receding rumbles: a small storm. But maybe another storm is on its way. I weigh the pros and cons of getting dressed and going up to my parents’ house in the driving rain to disconnect the magic black box that brings us — or used to bring us — high-speed internet. Closing the barn door after the horse got out, I think. It would only make me less likely to get a good night’s sleep. Hope doesn’t come easy to me.
But after half an hour or so, realizing that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep, I switch on my bedside lamp and get dressed. Only midnight! It felt as if I’d been sleeping for hours.
It’s a dark night, and for some reason I don’t feel like turning any other lights on. I like the dark. My feet feel their way up the driveway and across the slippery lawn where most of the snow has just melted off within the previous twenty-four hours. I pause at the front door to shed my shoes and set my umbrella down, then creep indoors like a cat burgler. My parents are away for the night, hence my need to look after the Plummer’s Hollow wireless network. I move through the dark farmhouse at almost normal speed, brushing the walls and doorjambs with the fingers of one hand. This is where I grew up — I could do this in my sleep. I think of the traditional blues verse:
I know my dog anywhere I hear him bark.
I can tell my rider if I feel her in the dark.
I do switch on the light in my dad’s study, squinting as I unplug everything, then gratefully return to the darkness. I guess I feel as if the darkness covers my guilt, somehow. I should have been following the weather forecasts!
Back in my own bed, I realize that sleep isn’t going to come anytime soon. I sit up and grab a book off the nightstand: Walking the Bible: A Journey By Land Through the Five Books of Moses, by Bruce Feilor. It’s a little simple-minded in parts, and the author periodically makes statements I strongly disagree with, but every time I think I’ve had enough, he comes out with another good insight, or tells another great story about an encounter with some modern-day religious fanatic, and I decide to keep reading. I read three chapters and start a fourth before I think I might be drowsy enough to give sleep another try. But I still lie awake for another couple of hours with a knot in my stomach.
By morning, I’m resigned to getting by without the internet for however long it will take us to replace the black box and go through the series of complicated steps necessary to reconstitute our little network: maybe a few days, maybe a week or two. I’ll catch up on my book reading. I’m sure both my blog readers will be able to find other things to entertain them for a while.
Glumly, I go back up to the other house to plug everything in again, on the off chance that the lighning strike didn’t disable our connection. I double-click on the Firefox icon and wait. Nope, nothing. Well, at least we should still be able to connect through the computer’s built-in modem, via dial-up — unless that too has been blown. But after ten minutes of searching through my dad’s computer, I give up, unable to find the right program.
It could be worse, I tell myself: a power blackout, for example, renders me incapable of writing altogether. It’s been so many years since I’ve composed on paper, I have trouble forming letters with a pen, and the lack of an ability to instantly erase or rearrange lines totally throws me. But before I give up for good, I click on the internet connection one more time, and suddenly there’s Google News.
It takes a few moments to sink in. September 11 Mastermind had Plans to Bomb Australia, I read. Hamas and Fatah Present New Government. Major Powers Close to Iran Sanctions Deal. I sit back in the chair with a heavy sigh. This knot in my stomach isn’t going away anytime soon.
An enormous army-green helicopter squats on the roof. We pass through the hokey-pokey checkpoint, revolving in a kind of dance with our hands above our heads, praise the Lord. That’s what it’s all about. Then echoey corridors, the squeak of new boots. Craning my head to peer through a skylight, I see HONDURAS still etched into one of the battlements. I know I have nothing to fear, but keep my thoughts to myself in any case, sitting in silence at the desk I’ve been issued, or dividing up an enormous baked squash with a butter knife as if it were a pie, as if it were a circle only temporarily stretched out of shape. The orange meat crumbles as the blade passes through. Nobody here can eat another bite. The busboy fumbles with something under his fatigue jacket & my mouth goes dry: in another moment we will be filled with shards of metal and foreign flesh. If I’m lucky, I’ll live out my life with fragments of the enemy lodged in my side. I will turn myself around.
_______
Note: According to the OED, hokey-pokey (or hokey-cokey in the UK) comes from hocus pocus, the all-purpose conjuror’s formula dating back to the early 17th century. The nonsense Latin is popularly believed to derive from hoc est (enim) corpus (meum), “this is my body” — the words spoken when the priest elevates the consecrated host, marking the moment of transubstantiation. An 18th-century abbreviation of hocus pocus gave us the word hoax.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t know any of this when I wrote the first draft.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, a district attorney blogs his cases, a schlocky Christian painter marks his territory like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the overheard cellphone conversation of an animated mannequin makes the news.
Helena Christensen was in a state at the Chateau Marmont party. “I’m sitting here by my [bleeping] self in the lobby,” blared the tired and emotional supermodel into her cellphone. “Where are you? I had a bag with $500,000 worth of jewelry and someone took it!” Christensen’s rep says she later discovered that the bag — which actually contained a computer but no jewels — was in her car.
She must’ve been tired if she could confuse a computer with $500,000 worth of jewelry. Gosh!
[audio:http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/1/5/600283/Dont_Let_That_Deal_Go_Down.MP3]