tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31794919188797934072024-03-08T10:34:36.882-08:00Looking at AmericaA series of essays on the changing American cultural landscape, from modified mobile homes and prefab hogans on the Navajo Nation to the unfinished Tyvek-covered additions in rural areas. The goal is to tease out something of American character from the contemporary world through which we pass, often unseeing.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.comBlogger60125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-40142130541069820742014-08-20T13:35:00.000-07:002014-08-21T08:36:05.075-07:00Late Summer: Netting <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
We were supposed to start in the late morning, but I didn't see any activity till just after noon, when Emmett went by in the white pickup with the broken intake manifold. Coming up the hill from the Feather Farm, the truck emits a particular signature, somewhere between the blat of Danny's dirt-track racer with a broken piston and the tinny roar of Dennis's Dodge Caravan without a muffler. The nets were piled up in back, stuffed into big black contractor bags.<br />
<br />
I recognized them even before Emmett waved as he went past. We'd packed those bags last fall, struggling to keep the nets from twisting or knotting up, leaving the bags at the end of their row of vines so Harry could slap duct tape on the side, writing the length of the net and its condition. That was October. The grapes had been harvested weeks before, and denetting was the last communal work of the season. The nets cut into your hands, already cold and stiff from the early morning frost just lifting as the sun reached higher.<br />
<br />
The vineyard is up on a hill across the creek and past the clover field. By an accident of acoustics, the rise next to the barn and the rise of the vineyard converse with each other the way you might have spoken to your sister or your friend with the tin cans and wire you used to make telephones as kids. I could hear Emmett dropping the bags one by one at their rows, and then the truck headed back to the farm. <br />
<br />
I'd been reading in one of the old metal lawn chairs the Old Man had refinished years ago, and I'd refinished years later, each of us certain our remedies would halt the inexorable return of rust, and each of us wrong. Now pockets of dry paint had floated up and cracked and the widening circles of dark rust rubbed off on your shorts while you sat there. But it didn't matter. These were chairs almost magical. Sitting in them, you were nearly touching the Old Man again, nearly hearing his voice, nearly watching him as he bent to the task at hand, patient, rigorous. <br />
<br />
The Old Man had admired Harry for his workingman's ethic and his seeming inexhaustibility and the futility of so many of his programs. The vineyard was one; the Old Man knew it was never to be a money maker and that troubled and enthralled him. Why would anyone do something so difficult and so unlikely of success? I once told him that Harry and I made a game of calculating how much we made by the hour from our vocations. Harry was a little ahead at 13 cents an hour when the Old Man died.<br />
<br />
Agriculture of the sort that goes on around here doesn't really resemble farming, at least not as the last century has understood it. There are machines involved, tractors, sprayers, mowers. But the land is too discontinuous for mass-production monocrop cash farming except in the flat plains around the rivers where the fields wave with sweet corn destined for the markets and restaurants of New York City, an hour and a half south. The land rises irregularly beyond the floodplain, responding to millennia of wind and water, glaciers descending and receding, tearing the land from one spot, revealing the stony bones of the earth, leaving floods of gravel and broken rock. In the lower middle of our pasture, a granite upthrust emerges, hidden by the grasses of summer and the snows of winter, revealed in the spring floods.<br />
<br />
In this broken topography, we adapt our desires. There's the clover field on Harry's side of the creek, where the floods go, and on our side there's the hayfield. We share a part of the woodlot with its stands of sugar maples and its heritage chestnuts still standing though long dead from the blight. Some times are for cutting down and dragging out those old trees to be sold to the cabinet makers; some times are for syruping off and some for haying and some for gathering the old planks from outbuildings that washed into the creek in the hurricane or the big spring flood and can be put up in the half-collapsed woodshed to be used when someone comes with a restoration project. <br />
<br />
Today it was netting time. The first year the vineyard was mature enough to produce well, Harry had walked the rows with his friend and teacher and they'd agreed it was nearly time. That was a Saturday, and Harry had called the crew and told them harvest was going to start early Monday morning. On Sunday afternoon he stopped by the vineyard to drop off some tools and found the vines stripped bare. It was surreal, the sort of disorientation you might have felt when you came out in the morning to get in your car and found it wasn't where you'd left it, and you wandered up and down the street, unable to believe it had been stolen. Harry, too, had wandered between the rows, stooping occasionally to see where the grapes had once been, until he came to the place that Nick had mowed too close, leaving the center shaved to dirt, and saw, in the dust, the dense interweaving of tracks from a rafter of wild turkeys. It was a bad year, worst of them all, though there'd been other bad years, years when nothing came of the harvest but a gallon of sour grapejuice, when the weather went south-- a late frost or an early hurricane or a sudden violent thunderstorm throwing hail. You couldn't do much about weather, but you could net the vines and keep the birds out. So we did.<br />
<br />
I was heading down to the house when Emmett pulled into the driveway in the pickup, its bed carrying the rest of the tools, a cooler populated by old juice jars washed out and now filled with ice-water, and the last few netting bags. <i>It's time, right? </i>I called. <i> I'm just going up to change: no buttons, long sleeves, long pants, gloves.</i> He came out of the cab anyway. <i> I wanted to tell you, </i>he said<i>. I was up at the vineyard Saturday and I got a free live music concert</i>. <i>Nice stuff</i>. <i>Made me want to dance up there.</i><br />
<br />
The big band had trouped in on Friday, taking over the studio, turning up the amps and working up the sets to play on Sunday down at the outdoor gig. It had been a noisy weekend, punctuated by feasts and field trips and long stories and tender fingertips and hoarse voices by the end. Now they'd packed up, promising to call when they made it home safely, dawdling in the driveway, the car windows rolled down so as to talk through just one more thing, before backing out and heading up the hill to Mountain Rest Road and then up Main Street in New Paltz and onto the Thruway.<br />
<br />
When I got up to the vineyard Harry had brought the tractor round with the netting trailer hooked behind. He and Peter Lundgren had devised the thing; it was a contraption with chain and angled metal and a platform where Emmett would stand to pay out the netting from the bags through the raised guide as two of us, me on one side, Dennis on the other, would walk along behind, laying the netting across the long rows of vines. Dennis wasn't there yet, and while we waited for him we occupied ourselves with the small chores that make it go more smoothly later-- untying the bags and setting them within easy reach; testing the machinery. Then the three of us went down the rows, picking off the grapes that had already been pecked by the birds. You need to get them out, to interrupt the beautiful cycle that doesn't include human harvest or wine as part of its rhythm: bird; yellowjacket; moth; mold.<br />
<br />
Dennis took the left side; I took the right. A few of the netting bags had been hand-loaded last year, after the ritual of October, for reasons I don't remember. But those nets were twisted up, and by chance the first two rows were trouble. When the nets twist, the solution is to spin the bag but it takes some time to get the instinct for which way to go, clockwise or counterclockwise. Midway through the second row Emmett remembered the routine, untwisting from the farthest spot back, and then continuing that spin down to the bag. We were ready to settle in.<br />
<br />
The day had dawned cool, more like late September than mid-August. Now, though, the sky was cloudless, an intense, almost metallic blue that made the leaves of the sycamore trees at the vineyard's edge seem alternately vivid green and near-silver. The sweat stained our long shirts and pants and we pulled them away from the skin underneath as we walked back up from the finished rows, kicking the nets underneath the vines so the tractor wouldn't catch on them when Harry took it down the next row.<br />
<br />
There was some casual talk--about the troubles with permits that had closed down the Hopped-Up Cafe where the other band played and where Emmett's brother was a regular; about the noisy motorcycle Danny Cross had bought to replace the customized pickup with the glass-pack mufflers he'd had to sell; about the grass-killer Emily had sprayed around her vegetable patch; about the variable amount of chlorine in the Rosendale municipal water we were drinking-- but mostly the talk was focused on the task at hand. <i>Taking up slack!</i> Emmett would call, and he'd hold the netting still while the tractor moved forward. <i>Rip! </i> meant a segment of the netting was torn open and Dennis and I would have to be careful to lay it right so that later Harry could come by and close up the holes with clips and string.<br />
<br />
There were 23 rows, and we didn't take but one water break: the flow of things seemed to resist the idea of stopping and then starting up again. Once in a while a car or a pickup would drive past. Toward the end, the girls who lived in the brick house came out with their babysitter and the little dog and raced around the new-mown clover field, spraying each other with water pistols while the dog dug through the hayrows to find the dead-- voles, field mice, snakes, the occasional rabbit who had leapt the wrong way as the tractor and the haymow came up. Then they went in, and we set on the last row without speaking at all, leaving only the sough of the wind in the evergreens over on the far hillside and the grumble of the little tractor's 20 horsepower engine, still steady though the tractor dated to the '40s.<br />
<br />
And then we were done. <i>Two and a half hours</i>, Harry said: half as long as last year, which was better than any year previous. We stood around the tractor for a little while, talking about the differences in technique this year from last. Then it was time to move on. Harry took the tractor back to the Feather Farm. Emmett took the pickup. Dennis drove off in his ancient Dodge Caravan with the bad muffler, and I walked down the hill to the house and, behind it, to the studio, to pull the cables and the mics from the carry-all bin and reassemble the practice space for tomorrow, when Kim and Sevan and David and Jim would assemble, to work on the next song, and the next.<br />
<br />
I no longer practice alone. It has come to seem alien, even unseemly. What is the point of working on technique when what matters in the end is finding the time, feeling the music breathe, waiting for someone to suggest, someone else to affirm, then to take it up for a while, and then hand it off or set it down? <br />
<br />
When we left the tumult and compression of the city for this place, it seemed we were moving from communality to solitude. But we'd had it backwards. Now even the dead commune with us, in dreams, in the wind, in the moon's travel, in fragments of words to be crafted into song, or work, or wine, in the talk of those we work beside or those who listen to us, as we work, while they, too, make the small adjustments, move rhythmically down the rows, lay things out in order, stopping, now and then, to hear the music swell from the old barn, cross the creek, and rise up the hillside to the vineyard.<br />
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-5021957886901308262014-04-30T07:10:00.000-07:002014-04-30T07:17:42.096-07:00Spring: The Inventory<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Spring<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>The Inventory</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am filling out the inventory sheets, listing everything
that was damaged or ruined when the storage room flooded in the spring thaw. There are two sets of spreadsheets; one will only take entries keyed in on the computer. It contains
locked-out rows that will later serve the appraiser, who will take the
information we have gathered and determine what portion of the value of things
is to be granted to us. The other, truncated to fit on a standard sheet of
paper, is to be printed out; each iteration is 25 pages in length and has space
for 198 entries. Even then the spaces to
be entered in pen or pencil are small, and legibility matters, for the
appraiser will check each computer entry against these raw sheets, attentive to
fraud or padding. There is little to
worry him with us, for we have lost so much that could not possibly be priced
out or claimed, but he will not know
that, or if he trusts us, the next one up the chain of response at the
insurance company will scrutinize his report all the more suspiciously. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For the task I have chosen a mechanical pencil normally
delegated for the crossword puzzle, a pen that is favored for its fluid release
of ink, and a backup ballpoint given us by Ulster Savings Bank when we signed
the paperwork for the mortgage on the farm. I have locked the sheets into a clipboard
that was once my father’s: Bakelite,
with a metal spring-loaded blade that still has on it some residues of my
father’s left hand as he held it while writing. I remember it from the days
when it served him for notetaking at the Saturday autopsies in the cold ceramic
rooms at Yale-New Haven Hospital, with their stainless steel walls consisting
of outsize cabinet drawers, in each of which lay the body of someone who was
not supposed to have died that way. When
the clipboard came home with him, to be balanced on his left knee as he
transformed notes into reports, he would often set it on the arm of the big
leather chair that was his to work in, weathered footstools on either side piled with medical
textbooks and reference volumes. He
would be in the kitchen, getting a further splash of whiskey or another ice
cube, and I would sit temporarily in his place, reading over the cryptic
scribbled observations of injury, recapturing the sequence of wounds and
affronts, imagining the outrage, disbelief or resignation of the person I had
watched him slice open with scalpels and saws as I waited between the trip to
the music store and the drive back home in the small car, still faintly conveying
formaldehyde and alcohol and bleach from the place of the dead to the retreat
of the living. Then I would hear the
slight squeak of his rubber-soled shoes and the creak of the eighteenth-century
wideboard floor planks, and I would slide down along the leather to stand beside
him as he sat back down, waiting to hand him his tools: fountain pen, folders, clipboard.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When he died, in another house and another state, the
clipboard lay by that same chair, though the leather was worn through in places
and the legal pad inserted in the clipboard had his handwritten list of assets
and liabilities, bills to be paid, the location of documents, written with care
in his small, crabbed hand. He had left it for me, for I was the executor of
his estate, and he wished his death to be as free of inconvenience as possible. When we, his three children, held our lottery
for the things in that house, my sisters were surprised that I put the
clipboard on the list, and then used so many of my allotted points to ensure I
got it, and the footstools, and the chair.
She was not with me on that day, though we had worked together on the
list; she remembered the small important
things, like the clipboard, and the kitchen blackboard on which the notes
dating back decades were still faintly visible under the greetings and the
drawings of grandchildren. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She came down later, and we packed what mattered and watched
as the movers came and loaded it into the truck and took it off to be stored
until we could settle on what to do next. It was two years before we bought the
farm and another year to finish the clearing out and building up. We were
worried that these belongings had been lost or neglected during all that time,
though we’d sent a check each month to the address outside of Morgantown, West
Virginia. When I called down, the woman
who answered must have known our unease, for she reassured us without prompting
that they’d been taking good care of our things.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The truck was too big to pull into the driveway; the driver parked by the side of the road,
opening the big doors in the middle of the trailer where our small load
resided, nestled between the furnishings of other households leaving that
gorgeous ravaged place for some more hopeful landscape. Opening the boxes containing my mother’s good
china and the carefully wrapped miscellany of memory, taking the shrink-wrap
off the furniture, we realized the house was filling with a barely perceptible trace
of the smells of that other place, and the one before it, the old old house so
similar to this one, and yet so different.
It was a good homecoming.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Still, there was much
to be done. She had the leather chair
repaired and when the back house was completed, it went in there. Before the old man moved in with us, we
searched online until we found the same risers that had made it easy for my
father to get in and out with his canes and then his walker and then the
wheelchair, and we situated it so that it gave a view of the crabapple tree
with its two bird feeders noisy with tumult, hunger, greed. The chair’s ownership changed with a shift of
vowel and apostrophe: the old man’s
chair became the old men’s chair, and though he pretended to disapprove of the
amount I spent on birdseed or the frequency with which it had to be filled—<i>twice a day! Ridiculous</i>, he declared,
pronouncing the word as if the short expulsion were separated, to emphasize the
necessity to rid oneself of the ridiculous—I could tell it pleased him.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not everything could be easily fit within this new old
place, even with the back house added on, for the old man had his own things that
he wanted by him, and we wanted him as comfortable as he could be. It wasn’t just the things that came in that
moving truck. There was also all the
residues of our own lives, with their inevitable confusion as to value and
indispensability. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Moving here meant for me a gentle eviction from the large
office with its floor-to-ceiling metal bookshelves, each one marked with a foil
decal on which was stamped the inventory number for that particular piece of
state-owned property, and no other. Rusting in places, scuffed and bent, held
stable only by the weight of 35 years of books, unclaimed papers and exams,
piles of Xeroxed articles for seminars or honors sections, they seemed unlikely
subjects for theft, but the university was a state university, and regulations were
clear. Every few years, someone arrived
to do inventory, combing the office for each small silvery disk with the
numbers stamped into it, and matching that number to the list, first carried on
a clipboard like ours, and then later called up on the screen of a portable
computer that, from year to year, shrank from a cumbersome suitcase set up on a
table to a thin lozenge held in one hand and tapped with a pen by the impatient
auditor who looked, with something like contempt, at the messiness of an artist’s
life, then headed to the next, no doubt more orderly and rational, state-run
enterprise. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Down below my office was a storage closet, narrow and deep,
with a single light bulb behind a metal shield at the very front, by the door,
where the secretary and the office manager kept the reams of copier paper and
the boxes of old files. Past the
makeshift wall of paper and supplies was a cube of empty darkness into which I
had brought the boxes of negatives and proof sheets, the work prints, the files
and reference notebooks I had taken from the darkroom at the top of the house
when the mediator determined that I should not return at will to work in a
place occupied by those I had chosen to leave.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That was years ago. Now we had decided, she and I; there was to be no more waiting, no more
half-hearted moving back and forth from one life in a Midwestern landscape we
had neither of us planned to occupy for more than a year or two, so many
decades before, to a place that was rough, uncomfortable, and right in its
light and obscurity, its brown winter
fields stopped by ridges and hills, streams, ponds and stone walls, the smells
of hot earth and stone and the rush of wind rattling the old windows the snow
raced toward but never quite touched. We had made our announcements and
negotiated the accommodations that must come with a sudden abandonment of
expected responsibilities: teaching assignments, exhibitions half-planned, the
apartment lease and the friends with traditions and obligations. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The packing had a sort of hallucinatory quality to it; the
rooms expanded and shrank unexpectedly, requiring more and more trips to the
U-Haul store for boxes and tape. In the
end, the movers came without comment at the great <i>stupa</i> taking up most of the office, dismantling it box by box, each
one with its contents and destination written in large letters on the top and
side. Then they took on the closet, rearranging the orderly array of office
supplies to reach the archive of a vocation that had never comfortably fit me
and was now set aside for one that did. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
People think that photography is a craft, an art of
observation, but really, it’s not. It’s a medium of <i>compilation</i>; properly
practiced, it is more like scooping up samples of earth at an archaeological
site, leaving the sifting and the classification, the placing in vitrines and
then the construction of explanations and narratives, to others. The best
photographers were most like the dowsers I’d known as a child in the New
England woods, with their strange twisting divining sticks and their uncanny
capacity to hit water time and again. It
is an art of the intuitive, declaring the democracy of things. It was hard and unsatisfying to me, though I
did it for thirty years without questioning my motives. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When we bought the farm there was no question of building a
wet darkroom; our water was hard and smelled of sulphur even after the
contraption that stood by the pump in the cellar and groaned and shook as it ended
its recirculation cycle at 4 am on Thursdays, and the leach field for the
septic tank ran perilously close to the creek. There was a vague plan of
scanning the best work from the negatives, and finding a used inkjet printer of
the sort I’d worked with in the digital lab down the hall from the classroom
where I taught. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
For the first months after we moved, the boxes of books, the
files and legal pads, the lecture notes and annotated lists of pictures, and
the crates in which the archive was held, had all been stacked on pallets, in
the center of the main barn, covered with plastic and tarps to protect them
from bat guano and bird droppings, while we planned the building of the back
house. Though we are just two now, we
had thought from the first to extend the old house so that the old man, and the
old woman, too, if she would abide it, could live, secure and protected,
watched over by us and by those we could find and trust to serve as
caretakers. Later, we knew, we would
also need that place, with its wide doorways to accommodate wheelchairs and
walkers, its special shower and the long big closet to keep what was still
needed or too hard to leave behind. We
would not give up this farm, this land; that we were intent on. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Harry designed the back house, modeling it after the plain
structures that often attached to the sides of farmhouses like ours, to shelter
the most vulnerable and essential animals.
Then, as farm families extended, the outbuildings were shored up, and
floors laid, so that they might serve as living spaces for the old or the very
young, or for the farmhand or the oddjob worker. Once it weathered a bit, once
the grass grew back and the forsythia and the mountain laurel spread from small
plantings to unruly explosions of yellow and green, this version would look,
from without and within, as if it had been there for two centuries or more.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Underneath, we’d had the engineers design a storage room,
plain, low, low enough to require that you move around it on hands and knees;
deliberately useless for any purpose other than the one for which it was built. It was meant to be impregnable. It sat on two feet of crushed stone, through
which ran a criss-cross of perforated drain pipes that fed into the long pipe
that ran underground, at a laser-sighted pitch, to take all water down to the
creek. The walls and floor had been sealed along their outsides not once but
twice, in proprietary envelopes with names like Rub’rSeal and WickAway. The air was filtered. The door locked.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Into that space we moved the ruins of that other life,
organized this time, inventoried, and set in systematic proximity: negatives in their archival envelopes in
their archival boxes set beside their equivalents in the proof sheets and the
work prints, so that, should I ever return to it, I could work with a clinical
efficiency that might mimic my father’s when, in his white lab coat, in his
Saturday sessions, he catalogued the dead in the tiled rooms of the morgue. The archive sat in the center of the room,
for easiest access. Along the walls I arrayed the boxes from the office proper,
each one with its outer side demarcated by the fat letters of the permanent
marker. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And then we shut and locked the door, and walked away. The barn soon filled again, with other
remnants, other tools. A wooden sleigh the old woman couldn’t bear to see
rotting away in a neighbor’s field. Cans of paint. Tool chests. Bicycle frames
and spare pedals, water bottles, handlebars and shifters. Air conditioners in
the cold months. Gardening tools. Bins
of fertilizer and seed. And just inside the big double doors, the old man’s
tractor. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was the last in a long string of tractors he had bought
to manage the oversize yard of the house they’d moved to when the last child
left. He used
to sit upon that tractor as if it were a moving throne, straw hat on his head,
and you could see him from the front window of the small house on the big grass
yard, appearing and disappearing as he made the orderly rows of cut grass
aggregate until, after hours stretching into days, the lawn was mowed, and he
had been moved to patience, after respite inside the armor of the motor’s
noise, in a silence of his own making,
antidote to the agitation and tumult crowded inside that house. When he came up by us, as they say around
here, he left the tractor for others to use down there. When he died here, in his room above the
archive, they sold the little house. One
day we borrowed Harry’s truck and drove down to get the tractor, but the tires
were flat and the battery dead and it was too heavy to wrestle up the makeshift
plywood ramp into the pickup bed. We
called G&G’s Lawn and Garden Equipment up on 209, to pick it up and get it running. Two weeks later it came back to us, driven
down the hill from the shop to the farm by a boy perhaps old enough to drive a
car, or perhaps not. I had to teach her how to work the combination clutch and
brake, how to find the sweet spot in the throttle, how to raise and lower the
mower blades, how to engage and disengage them. That evening, she rode it past
the creek and the woodlot, back and forth, the mower disengaged, and it was
nearly full-dark before she called me to maneuver it up the concrete ramp and
into the near-empty barn.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When the helpers arrived to evacuate the storage room it was
already night: Clint and his brother David, Mike their father, and Clint’s three children, with contractor’s
pole-lights, a shop-vac, a dehumidifier,
and five heavy-duty plastic bins with wheels on one end. That afternoon, Tom from Mr. Rooter had torn
his fingernail off and nearly broken his wrist when the router cable twisted in
a sudden tangle before he could get his foot off the remote switch for the
motor clutch. <i>Something in there, all right</i>, he said, and after wrapping up his
finger with gaffer’s tape he untwisted the cable and ran it back up the pipe. It was close to an hour and I was hauling wet
cardboard into piles when he called me back down to the far edge of the lawn
where the pipe ended. He held up a plug
of sycamore roots dense as packed clay in places, trailing nearly eight feet long. Behind him, water shot from the pipe’s end a
clear ten feet before landing in the middle of the creek; it ran like that for
close to an hour before it tapered to a gush and then, over the next few hours,
reduced to a steady stream. Under such
pressure, nothing is impervious.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even with seven of us, getting everything up to the barn
took many hours. Clint’s youngest was cheerful
to the end, glad to be at his father’s side, and his uncle’s, and his
grandfather’s. The girls were worn down,
their voices rarely heard and monotonous when they did speak, to direct us
where to drop our loads. Because the boxes had all split, and the storage
systems inside as well, Clint and the boy stayed down in the crawlspace,
filling and refilling the big bins, while we carried them up to the barn where
the girls waited to empty them, wherever there was space. When they left it was near midnight.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the first, I had thought to hook the tractor’s battery
back up, fill the tank with gas, and back it out, leaving a staging ground for
the unloading. Now even that was filled
with bins in which the negatives lay inert, the information they had assembled
strangled by the swollen wet gelatin emulsion. On its first trip between the
back house and the barn, the tractor had bogged down in the muddy approach, the
trailer behind too heavy for the big back wheels to hold traction no matter how
low the gear. The moon was rising as I unhooked the trailer and drove the
tractor under the lee of the barn roof and went in to bed. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We had finished the back house in January of last year, and
the old man moved in a couple of weeks later. He had warned us we had built too
extravagantly for his purposes, but most days he would migrate from the
breakfast table to the couch to the old men’s chair, to catch the sun through
each successive window as it moved across the arc of the day. At night
sometimes the moonlight would awaken him and he would hike up in the bed to
look at the greening hayfield and the stars above it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He died there in May, and it seemed our rage and grief would
stay trapped within us forever, throttled and poisonous. That summer and fall
seemed like winter; chill, distant, hard ground and even the birds silent. We
spoke of things observed—the red-tail hawk behind the haymow watching for the
field mice and the voles, the single brilliant dwarf red maple at the edge of
the woodlot as the trees around it passed through their color cycles and then
shook off their leaves and stiffened—but it was rote, spoken as if from another
room or over an old long-distance line once the formalities had been dispensed
with and it was time to break the news that was bound to be bad. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was a tough winter. Snow came early, before Thanksgiving,
and with none of the excitement of a place transformed to brilliance, none of
the anticipation of visitors and celebrations. The special china stayed in the
hutch; the ancient damask tablecloths didn’t come down from the attic. The snow
slid off the metal roof of the back house and by the end of February it was
piled halfway up the windows and more. For weeks the bird feeders needed no
refilling; there were no flashes of red or black at the edge of attention when
we walked past the windows through which he used to watch the cardinals and the
redwing blackbirds and the blue jays and doves. When it did warm the change was
sudden; 15 degrees one day, 60 the next, and the snowmelt rushed down the swale
we’d cut to keep the runoff from the upper fields deflected from the house.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I opened the Bilco door down to the storage room on Wednesday afternoon, I
noticed a different odor, more like the packed clay of the crawlspace under the
old house, or the Puritan dirt of the cellar back as a child. When I opened the
inner door at the base of the stairs the lights didn’t go on; with a
flashlight, I could see small pools of standing water here and there. I
canvassed the pipes with the flashlight looking for breaks but the only
evidence of something wrong was a trail of seepage at the base where the wall
met the floor, here and there. It was after five when I called the contractor
and my voice was shaking; I had seen that the bottom layers of the archive had
taken water. The boxes were dark at
their bases, and bulged. Clint asked if
there was water coming in and I said no:
just seepage now. He said they’d
be out first thing in the morning.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was Mike whose truck was in the driveway at 8 am; I went to put on my waterproof boots and my
gloves to meet him at the Bilco doors.
When I got outside, he was already coming around. <i>Clint told me you didn’t have water down there now</i>, he said. <i>I opened the Bilco doors and there’s 4,
maybe 6 inches of standing water. I
gotta go back and get my rainboots</i>. I told him I’d go down since I had my
boots on, and he stood at the top of the stair as I pushed at the inner door,
feeling a new resistance as I did. When I
got it partway open, water gushed out into the small space at the base of the
stairs—6, then 8, then ten inches of water.
I got down on my knees and the water poured into my boots as I crawled
one-handed into the storage room, holding the flashlight high. Then I went back out to get the camera and
the flash.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The morning after we emptied the storage room into the barn,
the wind shifted to the northwest and the temperature began to drop. By three in the afternoon, it was 26 degrees
and when we went to bed the thermometer outside the kitchen window over the
sink read 16. Up in the barn, the sodden piles froze into place. The pile of
cardboard left outside the Bilco doors glued itself to the hard earth and it
was a week before we could begin to clear it out. Twice the insurance adjuster
called, asking for the inventory sheets;
he was, no doubt located in Atlanta or Phoenix or San Diego; beneath his
cheery script there was an undertone of skepticism, or perhaps incredulity, at
our slowness. The furnace man came out
and inspected, pulling himself out of the crawlspace to tell us that the motor
had been flooded and so had its regulating circuit board. It was running now,
he said, but it would need to be replaced.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She came home on Thursday night, and we had three days of
warmer weather predicted. By then I had
gone in to survey, but the piles themselves, even when they weren’t frozen
solid, were so cold that they chilled and stiffened my hands after just a few
minutes of tugging at the tops of things, trying to clear paths so that we
could evacuate everything to assess what we had lost.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We did the first paper inventory like this: I laid a long row of plastic sheeting out in
the dry stubble at the edge of the hayfield, nearest the barn doors, and we
weighted it down with the rusted iron counterweights we had taken from the old
windows we’d rebuilt or replaced when we moved into this place and began to
strip it back to its origins—plaster under the wainscoting, wide chestnut
floorboards under the narrowboard pine and cracked linoleum, rough adze-hewn
beams obscured by decorative molding.
With the sheeting in place, we took what we could carry, in loads, and
laid things out on the plastic. Then I
photographed each array, walking the length so that later, in the studio, I
could stitch the individual frames into one panorama of loss. Then we
took turns writing on the inventory sheets, removing what was described back
into bins we’d bought at the hardware store. It took all three days before we
finished: forty pages of inventory sheets, ten items to a sheet. At the end of
that, she returned to work, and I set myself to the task still half-done. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is a certain rhythm to this part of it. Each item on the handwritten sheets must be
transferred and then attached to certain facts:
brand or manufacturer, model number, item description, quantity lost,
item age in years and months, estimated cost to replace per each, replacement
cost source, original cost, source of original purchase, and purchase
method. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some of these can only be estimated. Entire rows of required information are blank
and will remain so. I cannot remember
how or when that copy of Susan Sontag’s <i>Regarding
the Pain of Others</i> came to us, or why.
Perhaps it was a gift, though I doubt such astringent witnessing as
Sontag’s would strike anyone as proper to be unwrapped at Christmas or on a
birthday morning. I don’t know the price paid, in 1970, for my copy of Charles
Olson’s <i>Call Me Ishmael</i>, nor can I
consider the dense spidery handwriting that tattooes the margins or the
half-started lines of poetry written into the endpapers to degrade the
condition of the book in ways an insurance adjuster could understand, though I
feel the hot flush of shame on my neck when I read what is still legible of
what I put down when I was 20 and thought myself a writer. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But that is the purpose of inventories. They are a toting-up of things, after a close
examination of their worth. And while
the value of some things leaks out over time, others become denser and more
precious, while others yet stay sodden with trapped sentiment. Postcards from a woman I once thought I
loved. The fingerpaint birthday
portraits Molly and Taylor made for me when I was still strong enough to hold
at bay the madness of that other house and protect them from what was wrong and
could not be righted. Nights I would put them to bed and wait until they were
deep asleep, and then I would ascend to the darkroom above them to work until
two or three in the morning, watching as the blank paper, red-orange under the
sodium-vapor safelight, would darken and then something discernible would
appear, some fragment of what had gone before me as I stood or walked, the
small camera to my eye, protected from assault or knowledge.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tearing the sheets
of work prints one by one off the piles, now, I am struck with a sense of
witness to a person I don’t want to know again, traveling through spaces and
times unpleasant and alien. <br />
<br />
But in the midst of this desolate activity, this inventory,
small solaces, perhaps more painful to come upon than the growing realization
of so much life wasted: pictures of those I loved, and those who have loved
me. Molly, her head turned away from me
to display the feathered ornaments she has woven into her hair in Mr. Daniel’s
kindergarten class, the shallow focus of the 8x10 view camera’s long lens
rendering almost indistinct the back yard in which she stands, dry and sterile
in memory but, the negative reports,
lush, overgrown. Taylor, at two still tow-headed, hiding behind a turned-up
wagon. My love, before, even, I knew that I would love her, standing in the
middle of the intersection of two dirt streets in Silverton, Colorado, looking,
impatiently, past me and toward the mountains that, I remember, rose abruptly
behind me.<br />
<br />
Molly and Taylor are grown, now. They come here from far places and new lives, with lovers and wives, now with the child they are fostering, and he crawls across the chestnut wideboards, chasing the cat, while the dog follows, to protect him. They bring gifts and music and instructions as to what we are to do next: goats, chickens, solar panels on the roof of the barn, a retention pond for the livestock, bat houses for the slowly repopulating colony that once raced from the barn each evening at dusk, before disease ravaged and destroyed it. They plan to come here, when the time is right.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When we moved here we knew what we were getting into, and we
didn’t. Snow tires and tilted floors,
hurricanes forcing water through the window frames, sump pumps and poison ivy,
the knowledge that we will always be newcomers even as we lie dying in the back
house decades hence. It was our folly to imagine we could engineer an
impervious space, so that we might keep intact, immaculate, an archive of a
past we had occupied uneasily or not at all. The ash tree stands like a
petrified sentinel where the lawn meets the hayfield, even as the deadly
emerald ash borer migrates southward, mile by mile, year by year. Already we
are planning the tree to plant in its place.
Every windy day brings a rain of branches from the sycamores, and we
pick them up and pile them by the house until they’re dry enough to go down in
the old woodbin in the cellar to serve as kindling for the winter. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We could have laid a different style of pipe; Schedule 40, it’s called. It’s thicker and more rigid, and instead of
inserting the 20-foot lengths one into the next, you seal each joint with an
epoxy that renders one continuous span from house to creek’s edge. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But there’s a reason we didn’t do that. Pipe that long and
that rigid is prone to crack when it’s pushed and shoved by frost heave and the
compaction of soil in drought summers. To lay it right, you must lay it deep,
and then it must exit deeper, angled to allow for constant runoff so ice plugs
don’t form. The creek comes too high;
the house, its first stone wall laid in 1784, was built too low.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the end, it came down to the dumb, thoughtless will of
the sycamores that stand ten feet or so from the lay of the drainage pipe. They
send their roots not just to gather water, but to grip the tenuous shifting
earth, hold it firm and brace themselves, shedding branches as they do, as if
tossing aside what they no longer need in order to shift their strength, drawn
from water and sun and broken rock and their own leaves decomposed and melding
with the rest of what is here, the better to rise and rise, and to withstand
the next great wind or hard, hard winter.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just now I rose from the inventory sheets to let the dog out
and to look again at the sycamores, with their piebald bark and their crooked
limbs, only now showing the first small bulbs at their ends, bulbs that will,
in a couple of weeks, open up to show that they are actually leaves, clenched
tight to stay safe against the chance of another hard freeze or violent spring
storm. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The wind was up. When
I opened the back door, the sound of a hundred redwing blackbirds settling into
the stubble, the resident flock, weeks late arriving because of the cold, rose
and fell as the wind soughed through the pine grove. Back in the woodlot that
is partly ours and mostly Harry’s, the big pileated woodpecker was drumming his
territory on the hollow trunk of a dead tree, his brilliant red tuft barely
visible through the welter of branches. <br />
<br />
On Friday we will assemble to practice in the
barn, and the music will leak out of the cracks to compete with the throaty
roar of the dump truck as the Bushes come back from the job site up past
Kripplebush, and then we will troupe
noisily down the muddy pathway to the house to drink and eat and drink some
more. David’s big bass sits in the
pantry of the back house, where the old man kept his oatmeal next to his
microwave and his minifridge on the table we brought with him when we brought
him here. Surely someone will begin to play it, late, too late, when we are so
tired but not yet willing to give it up, and we will think of something that
the guitars can weave to clothe its call, and then it will be time to go, and
to let go.</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-33992635872268375242014-01-02T15:03:00.000-08:002014-01-02T15:03:05.233-08:00Traffic vs. Weather<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b style="font-size: x-large;"><i>Traffic</i> vs. <i>Weather</i></b><br />
<br />
<br />
When we first encountered the fifteen-minute-long weather reports that aired four times a day here, we found them charming, but exasperating. <i>Meteorologist Paul Caiano</i>'s discussion of regional weather broken into six separate reports seemed quixotic, affording variations so small as to be invisible. How much could things vary between the <i>Mid-Hudson Valley</i> and the <i>Litchfield Hills</i> a half-hour away? By contrast, his discussion of <i>major weather events in the past 24 hours</i>, with their attention to the last waterspout reported in the South Pacific and the global and continental low and high temperature records for the day, seemed a bit like showing off. Ciaano's high, nasal voice rose and fell but his emphases seemed wrong, as if he was reading something handed him just moments before airtime.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
We were used to Chicago's radio, where the weather reports were quick, informative, personable. <i>It's gonna be a bad one out there tonight: you bundle up or, better yet, just stay at home and snuggle with a good book or a loved one</i>. The weather reports were appended not to news but to traffic; in fact it was traffic that mattered, and the segment titles agreed: whether <i>on the 8s</i> or <i>on the tens</i> or <i>on the half-hour</i>, it was always <i>Traffic and Weather</i>, not the other way around. The tone of the announcer didn't change between the two; in fact, most of the time <i>weather</i> was there to explain <i>traffic</i>, or to prepare you for workarounds-- take the train, not the bus; make sure your windshield wipers are working well; stay off the I-90 corridor where there's bound to be semis jack-knifed or stalled where <i>bridge freezes before road surface</i>. </div>
<br />
We bought the farm just after the Great Crash of 2007. For a few years we had looked at real estate in Chicago, more than a little skeptically. Various agents would solicit our interest, and some of the places <i>were</i> interesting; they promised the possibility of changing lives by changed geographies. In Chicago, a shift of neighborhood is also a shift of transportation, which brings new faces in the train cars or the buses, and new vistas out the windows. After the awkward first months, things would settle down; you'd recognize people whose schedules matched yours, and you could imagine their lives, filling in the stories as new details emerged. Similarly, there'd be places you'd look for; a tree that, so vivid so early in the fall, might not make it through till spring, or an explosion of yellow forsythia in a yard that grew dense and green over the spring and summer. Just the repainting of a carwash sign would, for a time, be a cause for comment. <br />
<br />
We'd been in the same place long enough that those pleasures had dulled. The Red Line, our train line, was rebuilding half its roadbed; everything would be slower, more awkward, frustrating. And we'd read the reports on the importance of home ownership, of real estate investment, of <i>wealth building</i>. We weren't the sort to watch investment infomercials on television, but there was a vague sense of opportunity left behind. So we started, haphazardly at first. Then, as the calls began to come, and the notices appeared in the inbox daily, then hourly, we found ourselves part of a new class of people, new to us, at least: <i>house-hunters</i>.<br />
<br />
There were places that looked out at vast sweeps of cemetery, places tucked in what seemed improbably like cul-de-sacs-- improbably, because Chicago's grid forbids the frivolity of small closed areas or hidden clusters of people and houses. There were run-down two-flats and converted manufacturing lofts and bungalows in neighborhoods where police and fire families had lived for generations. There were places we felt we might be welcome, and places where we knew we would always be outsiders.<br />
<br />
What all had in common was the price: too high for us. And when we pointed this out to the broker, he or she (always better dressed than we were, always with a nicer car and a more perfect sheen to the skin) would look at us blankly. Then would begin the homily on remedies: second mortgages secured by a note-of-hand to bridge the down payment, specialty mortgages with escalation tiers and cascading principal payments and guaranteed rate-links and refi codas. It was religion, and we knew it.<br />
<br />
So we stayed in the rambling rundown top-floor walkup that looked out onto a small beach where the drummers assembled for their drum circles, and the boys with their baseball hats with the tags still on them cocked crazily on their modified afros as they perched on the backs of the park benches, warily eyeing each other while the lifeguard watched them from the top of the tall white chair. We were immunized from danger by Georgie the dog, whom the gangbangers had adopted a few years before, because she was so very old and so careful as she walked, and because she was direct in her relations with all people, and received directness in return. In the winter, they would stop us to ask how she was doing; was the salt still hurting her paws; did she mind it when it was this cold? In the summer, when we would bring her out to the beach, they wouldn't look at us from their stations on the benches, but their hands might stray down, casually, almost as if by accident, so that Georgie could put her nose in the warm palm and nudge it gently before going on. <br />
<br />
Back East, at the edge of the Hudson Valley, the old man and the old woman were often sick, or in need, and we found ourselves driving over the Skyway, into Indiana, then Ohio, Pennsylvania, crossing into New York at Port Jervis, then reversing the drive a few days later. As the market faltered, we began to think of buying something there, something that could draw us when the time came. We had not planned to live long in Chicago; we were Easterners, both of us, and the sublimity of the Midwest and the spectacles of a vertical city you could observe from a distance, approach, enter, and then exit, smoothly, with a steady continuum of rise and fall: these were treasures we spoke of to others, to visitors and outsiders, but with less and less enthusiasm and more and more duty in our voices and gestures. As the apartment crumbled around us, we looked eastward.<br />
<br />
The farm had been a real estate disaster. You wouldn't have guessed it from the gorgeous webvideo Mary Collins Real Estate had produced back when the market was smokin'; Pachelbel's <i>Canon</i> played in the background and the vaseline-smeared lens idealized the soggy wet stretches where the hayfield approached the creek. There weren't any interior views of the house or the barn; instead, there were carefully crafted approaches to the buildings that accentuated their rural and colonial heritage. You'd never guess that the old wideboards had been covered with pine and the plaster walls with wainscoting and the only trace of a kitchen was a stove stuck improbably in the main room, with a bathroom vanity for a sink and a refrigerator always and only filled with pizza boxes from Benny's and gigantic bottles of Pepsi and Sprite.<br />
<br />
Before Mary Collins stepped in, the couple who'd owned it had attempted to exploit the letter of the zoning dating back to the 1950s, parceling out the acreage into fifteen one-acre lots, proposing paved lanes that they must have imagined would be magically impervious to the relentless drainage from the ridge to the creek, magically immune from the state's wetland regulations. When the proposal died on the desk of the town planner, they were disgusted; for weeks afterward, they raced their all-terrain-vehicles in great loops around the property, the halogen headlights illuminating the stubble and warning them away from the deep rivulets, sometimes dry and hard, sometimes brimful with snowmelt or the runoff from a sudden storm. They relented and redrafted: four five-acre luxury-living sites with the wetlands redesignated as common parkland and playground. This time they made it to committee, where they sat, we're told, stiff and silent as the planning board asked them questions they could not answer.<br />
<br />
And so they turned it over to Mary Collins, and to the soft-focus videographer and to Pacelbel's <i>Canon</i>. By then, though, they were a year behind the market, and their new place on Long Island, so attractive, so affordable when they'd bought it in giddy anticipation of their real-estate speculations, now had entered the second tier of its multi-story stairway of rate increases, and <i>refinancing</i>, once the equivalent of a brisk walk from one department at the bank to another, now became something closer to one of those dreams in which it is impossible to run, and then to walk, until you feel yourself falling forward in slow motion toward the quicksand in front of you. <br />
<br />
Shortly after the third tier payment increase kicked in on that place on Long Island, and long after Mary Collins had graciously bowed out of the picture, they sold us the farm. For a year after that, I continued the drive back and forth whenever the university schedule gave me seven days or more. The furniture back then consisted of an inflatable bed, a card table, and six extruded plastic lawn chairs, one of which stayed at the table with the laptop. Oh, and a dog bed. <br />
<br />
We thought we'd continue that way for a while, but the tug was too great. Even now, with the hayfield nearly obscured by the steady fall of snow, and the heat in the house and the studios only barely able to keep up with the steelhard cold that locks the pools down at the wetlands into grey lessons in the geography of small dangers, and the creek longer audible under the waves of ice it has made of itself. Even now, when, I am sure, back in Chicago the buses run in the tracks made by the city snowplows and the most intrepid of hipsters are still riding their single-speed bikes down Milwaukee Avenue toward the School of the Art Institute or the design studio in the South Loop. Even now, I know what it means to recognize a place as home.<br />
<br />
<i>Traffic and Weather on the 8s</i> was more than a comforting murmur to us. To those who drove, it was the most important part of the radio morning or evening. If you lived in the suburbs, or the exurbs, or reverse commuted to one of those office parks out in edge city, you knew that the Jane Addams was actually a fragment of Interstate 90 heading northwest past O'Hare Airport and Schaumburg; that the Ike was the Eisenhower and the Eisenhower was I-290; that the Bishop Ford was I-94 and you didn't want to take it if there was any way around it. Repair crew incidents or rollover accidents were Greek tragedies into which you found yourself, perhaps merely as a member of the chorus, but perhaps as Lear or Macbeth or Oedipus. When <i>traffic</i> came on, you stopped what you were doing in mid-gesture; your eyes turned inward as you visualized the elaborate network of roadways, felt the ebb and flow of them, probing for the places where the ripple effect would be least. Perhaps your lips moved in a silent litany as you added up the different times, discarding one, holding another in your pocket, just in case, the way an old woman counted score at cribbage or rummy.<br />
<br />
These days, we treat Paul Caiano and his weather reports with a similar intensity of attention. What was once charming or eccentric is now urgent; what seemed rambling or deliberately overstuffed is now taut, even compressed. There's a reason for every part of it, even the most obscure or distant in geography. That waterspout over the Sea of Japan: it will never reach us here, but it does remind us that our dangers and catastrophes have their counterparts or trump cards far from us.<br />
<br />
It's not just that they close the schools when the snow forecast looks bad. The superintendent is up at 6, waiting for the first of Caiano's reports, his computer open to the email address of the school closing hotline. This is a stretch of country with many hills, some mountains, and very little in the way of surplus tax revenue. A plow with a sander on the back has to cover most of three or four hamlets, and the driver is paid by the hour, not by the day, week or year. We may get out today. Or we may not. Or worse: we may not get home.<br />
<br />
That's the winter's tale. In the summer, when the thunderstorms race down the mountains toward us, a hailstorm can flatten Harry's vineyard in a half-hour and end the year's harvest. In the fall and spring, there's the threat of clashes between cold fronts coming in from the north and warm air heading from the south, picking up moisture as it meanders out over the Atlantic and then back in again. Wild bursts of water, inches in an hour, can overwhelm the drain tile in the fields and leave the corn or the pumpkins, the beans or the peppers, mired in, where they can rot in days, ruining the season and dimming the hope for the down payment on a new haymow or corn harvester.<br />
<br />
Or there may be nothing here at all, nothing but blue skies, puffy white clouds, a pleasant breeze, everything a weekender up at the b&b at the top of the hill imagined when they made the online reservation months ago. But up past Ashokan Reservoir and Phoenicia, in the dense cover of the Catskills Park, such a storm will sweep in and then disappear, invisible to the valley. An hour later, you can hear the creek begin to rumble as you stand in the kitchen listening to Paul Caiano on the radio: rumble, then develop sibilants, the percussive cracks as the water throws tree limbs and pieces of storage sheds or old mobile homes up over the banks before it, too, rises over the edge and then spreads quick and, by comparison with the main channel, silent, unobtrusive, up past the outhouse, toward the main house, and the sump pumps go on in the cellar and the crawl space, and they don't stop, even as the sun shines as cruelly as ever, the clouds waft past, reflected in the spreading pool that threatens the second haying.<br />
<br />
The descriptions of fronts and troughs, of <i>warm air massing off the Outer Banks</i> or <i>a Manitoba Clipper gaining strength</i> isn't exotic color any more. It's a compilation of possibilities, and you listen with your gaze turned inward, working out the calculus that could mean hailstorm or blizzard, or a line of small tornadoes dropping improbably onto the bucolic stretches of hayfields and dairy cattle up and down our valley, tornadoes like the one that ripped the front off our barn three years before we bought the place, when Pachelbel's <i>Canon</i> was still the ode to the place.<br />
<br />
They cancelled school early this morning. As a consequence, the town didn't call the plow drivers to the garage. Better to wait; three inches on the roads slows things down, but most everyone has an all-wheel-drive car or a pickup, or big tough snow tires with aggressive tread, tires that spew mud up the sides of the car when the thaw lasts more than a day or so. The plow came by at 10, doing a quick pass so the van that takes the group-home patients to dialysis and physical therapy and to medical appointments could make its morning run from the place up in the woods at the top of the hill, behind the Bushes. About an hour ago, as the sky was visibly darkening, I heard it come again, just ahead of the return trip; when I looked up from shoveling the walk, I saw the van go by, slow, stately, the guys strapped into their wheelchairs high up inside the windows, looking out indifferently at the line of evergreens striped with white and the man in the old parka with a shovel, and a dog racing around him, reveling in the snow.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-56088722198156484882013-10-15T08:02:00.000-07:002013-10-15T08:07:09.136-07:00The Early Morning Sirens<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
They went off just after 6 am, undulating wails continuing for three minutes or so, then stopping for a minute or two before recommencing. It was still dark, and we lifted our heads
off the bed to see if we could tell which fire station it came from. Then we waited to see if the big pickups from
up the hill would blast past the house, their flashing blue volunteer lights on
the dashboard. That would have meant
Stone Ridge, or Kripplebush. When that
happens you can’t help it; you start to worry that it’s the house of someone
you know.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course it’s unlikely.
We don’t know people who smoke in bed, or fall asleep on the couch with
a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and those are the most common causes of fire around here,
especially at that hour. The coal
smolders in the mattress or cushion, until the acrid smoke awakens someone, or
the alarm clock sounds and someone rolls over to turn it off and sees the
tendrils of flame around the bedroom door.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s the late-day sirens that should concern us. Then it’s brush fires that catch the edge of
a woodlot, or move through the dried cornstalks of the neighboring field. Or it’s an electrical fire, a snapping arc
unheard in the noise of the floor sander or the table saw that overloaded the
antiquated knob-and-tube wiring in the ceiling or walls, the insulation long
rotted off the wires set too close together back some eighty years or so
ago. Most everyone with an old house has
some knob-and-tube somewhere, even if the electrical has been upgraded. The weekenders, probably not: they had everything ripped out before they
moved in, at the recommendation of a local contractor, maybe Brian, or Clint,
or Kurt, or Will, who knew these clients could pay whatever it took for
absolute peace of mind, and pitched the job accordingly. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The rest of us live in houses where the electrical has been
upgraded haphazardly. In the ‘50s and ‘60s,
BX cable came in; it was great for
snaking through and around old plaster-and-lathe walls, with its flexible metal
outer shield, also rodent-proof. Later
materials were safer, but not so resilient or adaptable to the complexities of
old houses built in stages by country people without much money but long
stretches of time available for home handiwork. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Still, there are places where it’s just about impossible to
replace the wiring. In the lofts that
were once attics, long ago converted to bedrooms with bunk beds for children
too many for the house, who grew up and left, moving to the cities or the
suburbs, where there was work and possibility.
In the crawl spaces under the kitchens that were built ramshackle atop
the clay soil and, after they’d done their initial settling, hunkered down and
grasped the main house firmly, holding on more tightly with every coat of new
paint on the outside, the work done by the owner or by a neighbor free to do
chore-work between seasons, painters who would stop and get a hammer and nails
to tidy up where things had separated, or who might add a length of 1x2 furring
to close up the draft coming from the crack between parts of the house. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even a skinny electrician, well-paid with weekender dollars,
isn't eager to take on a crawl-space job. First
you have to check for mice, but also for possums and groundhogs and skunks who
have taken up housing down there where it’s warmer and close to the compost
heap or the apple barrels. Then there are the spiders; grown men who wouldn’t think twice about
brushing a hornet off their arm will pause before confronting the pale-white
spiders who live in that eternal darkness beneath the hum and clatter of
domestic life. Then there’s the standing water that accumulates, particular
after a rainy fall or spring. It’s not
much—not enough to justify a sump pump or some complicated drainage plan, but
when you are inching along on your back, with your toolbelt turned around and a
spool of electrical wire between your knees, it’s not pleasant to feel the
water seeping into your hair. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s not that regular electricians charge too much for this
work. We’re talking about the ones who know you and have been out before to fix
the strange little blackout that hit a ceiling fixture in the living room, an
outlet in the hall, and the front door lamp, the crazy breaks that happen when
the replacement wiring was done by expediency and not logic, wiring probably
done by their father or uncle when they owned the business some decades ago.
No, they won’t even give you a price.
<i>It’d be too much to do that
stretch</i>, they tell you. It’s not
worth it to you; as importantly, it’s not worth it to them. <i>I refuse to charge you what it would cost to
do it</i>, they tell you. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So that little stretch of knob-and-tube stays there. More than likely, they disconnect it, and
they run channel along the walls, low and close to the baseboard, or down where
the baseboard meets the floor, to power the outlets and the lights that once
depended on that wiring down there. Most of us have that sort of wiring
interspersed throughout the house—along the ceiling of the dining room, down from
the upstairs hall light to the bottom of the stairs, or leading to the outside
light that goes on when guests from out of town are coming in after dark and
might run into the propane tank or just keep driving down into the drainage
swale, thinking they’re still in the driveway when they’re definitely not.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But of course you don’t know who did the work for the
previous owner, even if you’ve had the house for fifty years. Maybe that owner himself, Mr. Pratt, or Mr.
DeGraw, did the work, and he left the wiring hot while he was laying in the new
channel, so as to have power continuously, especially as he was doing that work
between chores and jobs that called him away, and that wire went to the toaster or the floor furnace or some other indispensable part of everyday life.
There are back rooms of houses around here, rumpus rooms and tool rooms
and tack rooms and junk rooms, where the wiring’s still left, half-done, from
1953, the conduit and the outlet boxes piled in the corner, awaiting the attentions of a man dead for decades or living, barely living, in the county nursing home up in Kingston, the oxygen tank strapped to the wheelchair and the television eternally blaring, a premonition of purgatory, or hell. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even if it’s finished, there’s always the chance that he forgot to cut
off power to the old line, or simply undid the connections at the electrical
box, where some later owner, or some electrician called in for another problem,
reconnected it to see if that was the quick fix to what might otherwise be a
long and tedious search for the real cause. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hornets build nests.
Groundhogs dig past the weak spot in the foundation and, if they’re
confronted by a rotted piece of wire dangling across their next venture, they
might gnaw it, or maybe just push it aside—push it enough so that, when the
next rains come, and the crawl space takes on a little water, the puddle
reconnects hot and ground, and the wiring sparks, again and again, against the
three-hundred-year-old beam, softened by dry rot or carpenter ants, ripe as
tinder for the flicker and the wisp of smoke. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now’s the season when these things happen. Now, when the
first frost is hinted in the silver sheen of the topcoating on the haygrass back
toward the creek. Now, when the dry
leaves rustle as the bear comes in from the woodlot to steal the windfall
apples beneath the tree furthest from the house. Now, when you look up from the firewood splitter to watch the phalanx of geese in their call-and-response arc across the grey sky. Now, when the groundhog moves
from his summer home in the cool darkness beneath the unheated barn, and seeks a place where the heat of human comfort leaks down through the wideboards
of the kitchen floor. Now, when the mice begin to look for every possible
scavenge to insulate their winter nests.
Now, when the sirens wail at 6:08, as the sky’s just showing light,
and we raise our heads and try to be sure just which station it’s coming from,
secretly saying: <i>it’s not us, I know
that. I hope it’s not Harry, with the band saw set up in the dining room of the
old farm. I hope it’s not Patrick and
Cindy in that new house they’ve rented, plugging things into unfamiliar
sockets. I hope it’s not Jake. I hope it’s not Ike. I hope. I hope.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Those whispered secrets travel along the circuits of
community. They, too, are fragile. Some are old, and frayed. Some are new and untested. Most of them are so ingrained in the everyday
life around here that you don’t even know they’re there until the siren sounds
and you bring them to mind, and heart, and prayer.</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-77274277049204219822013-09-01T13:37:00.000-07:002013-09-01T13:58:20.018-07:00Some Necessary Lies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Down past the end of the hayfield and into the woodlot where
in late fall you can see the surveyor’s stakes that delineate where our
property ends and Harry’s begins, the creek makes a pair of quick turns. In between, there’s a deep pool with the
stump of a great tree sitting improbably upright where deep becomes shallow
again. That tree when it fell was the
cause of that deep place; during one
hurricane and another, and through the fall and spring floods, rushing water, diverted
under the massive trunk fallen across the stream, dug and dug until some
equilibrium was reached or perhaps just until Peter Lundgren came and cut up
the obstruction. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was a three-day job, far longer and more complex than he
had expected. The tree was oak, and
oak-hard, and the water too deep to stand where a few judicious cuts with the
chainsaw might have freed the great logs to fumble their way downstream, likely
grounding at the next wide curve, down toward the gristmill where, in a couple
of years, they could be assailed again, to be cut up for firewood. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There was also the very real danger that comes with a
powerful chainsaw wielded under unstable conditions—ground underfoot that was
part slippery rocks and part shifting sand and mud; hardwood sodden and in
places still living, making for unexpected changes in the way the saw might
move; and, toward the end, the weight of the pieces clamping on the cut. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Normally, Peter told me, you cut from above and below in two
opposed V formations, but this was impossible, for the trunk was still half
under water. The days were hot and sticky, and the flies and mosquitoes were
heavy and difficult to ignore. When he was done, he’d sliced the tree into four
parts, with only the middle two headed downstream. The still-leafy upper branches stayed on our
peninsula, to be propelled by the next great storm, the one that washed
great swaths of the Catskill Mountains down the slopes, swept most of two
villages away, and brought portions of houses, house trailers and woodsheds to
us. The next spring, Harry complained, only half-joking, that we’d sent that
awkward, debris-clad monstrosity down to the gristmill’s waterfall just to
ensure that he’d have to pay Peter twice for the same project. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On the other side, Harry’s side, the stump, five feet high,
its remaining big roots forming an irregular ball more than eight feet across, tilted
near-horizontal through the end of summer and the winds of fall, until the
great storm of mid-October. We didn’t
live here all the time back then. It was sheer chance that we’d been back for a
long weekend of closing-up when the storm came in from the Atlantic, flooding much
of New York City and leaving sudden lanes of knocked-down trees and yawing
power lines sweeping diagonally across the hillsides up here. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So we didn’t see the stump again till Christmas time, when
we went back down with the old dog in the first snow of the season. There it was, perfectly upright, on an island
of its own making in the middle of the deep spot where the creek turns. It seemed impossible. At first we imagined it was some other stump,
washed down from far upmountain, but the next day, when the sun had melted the
snow off its top, we could see the complex trajectories of Peter’s experiments with
geometry, physics, and biology, with the angle of the chain, the power of the
saw, the stubborn resistance of the waterlogged tree. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It sits there still, some years gone. Today we walked with the new young dog, and
when we got to the stony places before the deep pool, he threw himself
enthusiastically into the water, wallowing, drinking, and then turning his
three tight turns before laying himself down in the shallows for a few moments,
cooling himself from his wild running in the hot late-August sun. Downstream from him, in the
places where the water had fallen enough to bring the bottom stones up to bask
in the dappled sunlight, leaves, some of them already orange and brilliant red
and yellow, clung and nestled, as if placed there. Up and down the creek from that vantage
point, only a single leaf actually floated, delicately, atop the slow water. Back
up to the hayfield, we stopped for a moment to watch a chevron of geese heading
south-southeast above us, braying their itinerary to each other, calling out the corrections and then settling in to the long trip. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How do the geese, the trees, the haymown grasses staying
brown despite the rains and the warm sun, know what we do not, that it is still
summer, but it is also fall, disguised by hot spells and sudden thunderstorms,
by barbecues and mornings reading the papers in the lawn chairs beside the
stonework patio Dan has built for us? I know what it is. I am a studious
observer and I have spent most of my life in places like this, where hot
summers always mute to fall and then to bitter winters with the irregular iron-hard
ground unsteadying your feet as you walk from the house to the barn or studio
or the car in the morning darkness. The angle of the sun grows longer and the
time it is high overhead diminishes. The
darkness comes sooner day by day, so I look up surprised from my work to see
that the clock in the window and the light beyond it contradict one another—it is
seven, still an hour from time to print out the day’s work and carry it in to go
over while sitting in the chair on the grass, and yet it is already too dark to
read the words were I ready to end the sentence here and summon the printer to
click and hum. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The verb is wrong:
the trees don’t <i>know</i>, nor the
geese, nor the haygrass. They are
organisms responding to loss of what they need for their exultant lives. And,
as yet, we don’t know either; it is August still, for a few more days, and we
express a mild sort of outrage that the living things around us are so wrong in
their judgment. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Soon, though. Soon it
will be time to call Nick and contract with him for a new load of
firewood. Time to relight the pilot on
the propane furnace, and take the air conditioner out of the studio window so
the storm windows can go on and the screens be lugged up to their winter home
in the hayloft. Time to look for the bin of sweaters up in the attic crawl-space,
and bring out the bags of winter coats, hats, gloves, thick socks and sturdy
boots. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Between this moment, still summer, only measurably late by
the evidence we view with disbelief, and that one, when hard darkness seeps
through the bare scuttling branches, there will be days of a plangent beauty
unimaginable now, while the rumble of thunder cuts through the wet, exhausted
air, days we don’t believe yet, despite the evidence we amassed last fall, when
we trapped the best leaves between sheets of waxed paper and ironed them, just
as we had when we were children, and then again when our children were young
and the ritual was new to them. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All the rest of what is around us knows. It is we who do not know. It is past time to buy a generator so the
sump pumps will not fail us when the next hurricane knocks the power out for
hours or days. It is past time to have
talked to Nick about that firewood; he is back in school now and may not have
time for weeks or longer to take Harry’s tractor out to the fallen trees in the
far woodlot and drag them to a clearing, set up the mechanical splitter, cut
the logs, and leave them open to the sun and air long enough that they will
burn hot and clean come November. And so I will be out behind the barn myself,
in a month or so, cutting up the old rail fencing, splitting the slices of oak
from what Peter salvaged of the fallen tree, now, finally, purged of the
deep-soaked remainders of the high creek that brought someone’s shed, almost
intact, tumbling end-over-end to smash, disintegrating, into the stubborn tree
that had stood for a century or more before finally falling across the
imaginary line that separates one piece of property from another, one season
from the next. Cut and split and stack;
my hands will be blistered in new places, different from the blisters of the
rake and the hoe in the spring or the wheelbarrow and the paint scraper in the
summer. Then bring the first loads in to the woodbins by the two fireplaces,
the old one small and narrow accommodating only a single day’s fuel, or maybe
two; the new one, the one that Harry designed, knowing what we had forgotten,
how long is the trek up the hill and past the stand of evergreens, flashlight
in one hand, carrier in the other, to replenish
what should have been enough for this cold spell, this blizzard, but was
not: this new one big enough that it can take two loads from the trailer we
inherited from the old man along with the tractor that he loved so
immoderately. He is gone now, and that, too, is something we do not believe,
yet. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is good that we are not so honest as the geese, the
trees, the haygrass. We will stand as we
do now, soaked by the sudden rain, and count the seconds between the flash of
lightning and the snap of close thunder.
We will sit and read the papers in the morning, watching the edge of the
woods, persuading ourselves that the dense green is not already tinged with
just a hint of yellow, that the red leaves and brown and orange that we see
trapped in the creek, glistening and supersaturated by the gloss of the water,
are just evidence of the stress of hot weather and the sudden unexpected
violence of the stormy winds. Despite ourselves, we will not prepare but will
instead revel in what is, in what will soon be memory, and regret and,
flickering, anticipation of each next moment. </div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-54045584941734718182013-08-07T11:42:00.003-07:002013-09-01T13:52:07.917-07:00Waiting for Rain at the Farm<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve been rebuilding a big powered speaker we used to use
for Siobhan’s old standup bass, a band and a half back, when I was living in
Chicago. I’ve been waiting for the rain, but it hasn’t come yet. Now for a moment the sun has come out, though
the clouds are black in every direction. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The parts came in two
installments. First the brown UPS truck stopped where the driveway used to turn
in—it’s backwards to the road, but safer than trying to pull over when there’s
no shoulder and a sudden drop into the ditch that races with floodwater when it
rains hard. That was the big JBL high-frequency driver for the horn; we’d blown
that at a charity gig for a group home for the developmentally disabled. It
didn’t matter that much when you’re using it as a low-frequency bass amp. Then we managed to break the input and that
pretty much sidelined the thing. The UPS
guy knows me pretty well by now; he commented that the package was too heavy to be a
book, and it wasn’t from Amazon, which is the usual reason for him to stop by.
I told him what it was for and he sympathized.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The second was from Brian Hendrix down in Florida; it
was the input component console. He’d
sent it Priority Mail, which made sense from his end—he’s in a nondescript
quasi-industrial park south of Orlando, and it’s not far from the post office
on Michigan Avenue, right on the way to the entrance to the Florida Turnpike.
Priority has the advantage these days of including automatic package-tracking,
too, which can matter when you’re sending a lot of packages of sensitive
electronic components to people who are depending on you to have things ready
for the next bar or lounge gig. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But Sharon doesn’t get out of her little white truck, so if
something doesn’t fit in the mailbox, she doesn’t deliver. In fact, she sorts
the mail, along with Kathy and Dennis, so she doesn’t have to bother putting most
packages on the truck—she just fills out the yellow-green delivery attempted
card and puts the package in the pickup shelves. If I get the mail in the
afternoon, I can go straight in and pick up the package rather than waiting for
her to return to the post office and let someone file it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yesterday I was going over the copyedits of the Dylan chapter,
and it was complicated—I was having to listen to every song I’d quoted to make
sure I had the words exactly right, and Harry and I were supposed to go out
riding at 4. I called him at 3:30, knowing he was fabricating the kitchen
cabinets for the farmhouse, and was probably going to get himself wrapped up in
the sequence and the details and lose track of time. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
As it turned out, he couldn’t extricate himself from the
glue and the clamps till just after 5, so I didn’t check the mail till 7:30
when we got back. It was close to dark by then;
the clouds had been moving in since 4, and Harry said we’d have rain
after midnight. The big corporate
weather site had said not till this morning, but Harry has lived here all his
life, so I tend to believe him, and not to fault him when he’s wrong. We are in what’s loosely called the Hudson
Valley—the gentle swale that great river has cut over epochs, as it has
wandered between the Litchfield Hills over in Connecticut, and the Catskills
over here in New York. In fact, ours is the Rondout Valley, carved by that river
between the obdurate conglomerate stone of the Shawangunks, the easternmost
vestige of the old Appalachian range, and the Catskills. Because it’s a valley in a valley, weather is quixotic, and our own valley, formed by the Kripplebush Creek,
is even more isolate and unpredictable.
Often you can sit on the old metal lawn chair that’s on the uphill side
of the barn, sunlight on cool mornings, shade on hot afternoons, and watch the thunderstorms rage in a line five miles north, marching west to east, for hours.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I checked the mail and brought it in, putting the delivery notice
on the dining room table before sorting the mail into its four piles—hers,
mine, catalogues, junk for the recycling.
I put the water on to boil, took a shower, and listened to the radio
while I was making dinner. It hadn’t
started to rain, but when I let the dog out before going to bed there weren’t any
stars visible. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This morning it was still dark and threatening, and a few
sprinkles hit the windshield of the old man’s Ford on my way in to the post
office. Dennis went over to the shelves
as soon as he saw me: <i>book or manuscript?</i> he asked from the
corner, trying to determine the size of the box. I buy a lot of very used
books, and they come by Media Mail, which is extremely cheap though the time
frame of delivery is pretty flexible. I told him what it was, and we were both
a little surprised at the size of the box which, as it turned out, was mostly
full of Styrofoam peanuts. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Brian Hendrix is pretty much the only guy to go to for tech
help if you’re a musician in central Florida, and that includes the ones who
work the tourist hotel lounges and the kid-themed restaurants that have grown
up around Disney World. In the grownup bars you’d better know every Eagles
tune, and every Jimmy Buffett hit; in the kiddie palaces you’ve probably got a
worked-out script that treads perilously close to the real guys—Raffi, or David
Gonzalez—who have made it big enough to have agents and tour schedules. You’ll
know songs about dolphins and monkeys and also more than a few of the tunes off
the latest three or four Disney animation movies. You're putting on a happy face every night of the season, putting it on so hard it hurts at night to let yourself go. Off season, you've got repair projects piled up-- mixers with bad channels, processors missing their power sources, iffy cables-- and you'll be calling Brian to see what he's got and what he can order for you. Better do it now, while you've still got folding money left from the tip jar or the basket on the stage lip or the after-concert CD sales off the folding chair your girlfriend manned back when she still believed in you.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If it weren’t for
Disney World,the part of Florida where Brian has his shop would be a wasteland, pockmarked here and
there with sinking subdivisions and faded trailer parks populated by the old, too poor or too gullible to head for
the parts of the state that have something resembling topography, or scenery,
or views. There are shallow lakes where
the ground has sunk a bit over a few million years, and there’s bass fishing; the Seminole tribe found
excellent foraging before the speculative fevers of the 19<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup>
centuries in Florida pushed them out. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It doesn’t get much different, there from here, though there’s
a similar economy. There are the
tourists, here and there, and there are the locals, who try to eke out a living
as symbiotes or parasites. The musicians, there and here, nurse old or cheap
equipment, and Brian sends a fair quantity of tubes and transistors, toroidal
transformers and the like up this way. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So I have the big case split in two, and I’m using a
flashlight to illuminate the places where the press-on connectors go into the
circuit board. It’s dim, but since I
rarely work out here at night, there aren’t any good lights to turn on. Throughout
the year, I let the daylight determine my working life. In July I’ll be writing
or practicing or thinking, staring at the screen and then out the window at the
hayfield, till well after 8. There’s the break to ride, sometimes early, when
it’s hot; sometimes late when Harry wants to push up Mohonk before it gets too
close to the time when the landscapers race their trucks over the summit, pulling trailers with
their zero-clearance mowers tied down provisionally rocking back and forth as
they head too fast for the light and the
blind curves. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the winter, I start late and finish in the dark, sometimes the
light of the monitor the only source. I have that flashlight I’m supposed to
remember to bring back and forth, but often I forget it, and stumble down in
the snow, negotiating the icy patches by moonlight. Like the animals, like most
other people who are here year-round, winter is a time of longer sleep; the
days are often marked by necessary bouts of hard labor in the cold. Sometimes I
fall asleep on the couch out here, reading till the pages blur, and awaken,
disoriented and disconcerted, very very late.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s supposed to be raining right now; it was supposed to be raining this morning,
and last night; and it’s supposed to rain tonight, and tomorrow, too. So I have
set aside all the outdoor chores—painting the window wells of the old house,
picking the riper blackberries before they fall to the ground from the sheer
weight of the fruit on the slender boughs, thinning and moving, cutting the new
storm door for the back house dutch door and fitting it. Harm has his
hay-trailers out in the section he cut last week before the last bout of rain. He complained to Harry that we’ve got too
much standing water over in the next section, and he wants to wait another week
or so to see if it will drain. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He’s not going to be happy if it rains hard and long, like
it should. But it hasn’t yet. The clouds are black sprays beneath a veil of
lighter grey torn here and there to show the blue. Over on Mohonk Mountain, the lower layer
moves swiftly, obscuring Skytop and the Bonticou Crag while, further along the
ridge, the sunlit areas seem sharply greener by contrast. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We’ve got some time.
The rains are coming in from the west.
It’s a Canadian cold front, slow-moving, stalling sometimes and then picking
up momentum again. We’ll probably know when to close the windows on the old
house; the creek will start to rumble and rush as it fills from its headwaters
just down from the Catskills, in the Vly. The front will hit the mountains,
pushing over them, then fly down the other side and, where the cool air meets
the warmer uplift from the valley it will drop its moisture in blinding sheets,
and the smaller, narrower cuts will fill with rushing water. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The USGS map shows our creek in its drier, more permanent
version, beginning where springs draw to the surface and even in the droughts the rocks
are slick and shiny with moisture. But if you work your way above it, you can
see that there’s another five or ten miles of dry wash, waiting for those
sheets of water coming down the mountains in a roar that can overwhelm the
county culverts and rip the blacktop off County Routes 213, 3, 4, even the wider
and more barricaded 2, which runs into Catskill Park. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When the fronts come down like this, the creek unfurls up
there, taking in waters that in slower times would go to the Esopus Creek
further down. Stones roll, then the unstable rocks move, as the detritus from
earlier storms rises and frees itself from the once-dry bed and tree limbs,
rusted gas cans, parts of a fallen barn, and all the rest that was scraped from
the mountain hollows in the hurricanes of last October start down toward us. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You can hear it coming.
First there’s the rush and burble of water rising rapidly up the
banks. If you’re outside, at the right
angle to the amplifying wall of the barn, you’ll hear it, and head in to put
the windows back in the old milking room that’s now full of guitars and
computers and boxes of books and stacks of papers and photographs and old
magazines. Or you’ll head down to the old house to close the windows up on the
second floor, in the bedroom.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you miss that first wave, you’ll more likely hear the
second, a sort of muted, distant rumble under the sound of water. Small stones are racing along the creek
bottom, bouncing off the rocks that are already there, slapping against
the miniature pebble beach made in the big
storm year before last. The wind will pick up, and pieces of the sycamore trees
will break off and crash down onto still-hard, dry ground. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Then the susurration of the rain itself, bouncing off the
leaves, changing to a higher-pitched hiss as it hits the roadway, and dropping an octave when it crosses the front yard and hits the metal roof J.C. and his crew put on
last year. If you’re upstairs, you’ll
hear the individual punctures of drops growing more and more frenetic until
they merge into a full roar. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I hope you remembered to put the windows up in the studio. I
hope you closed the workshop door when you were putting the still-unpainted
screens back in, before you got distracted by some thought, some phrase, some
rhyme that might be teased into something if you moved obliquely toward it. I
hope you put the vodka in the freezer and turned the big tube-amp off so it won’t
burn hot and unattended, impatient with disuse, till the morning. Did I leave
that book on the metal chair? If so, I
hope I can unstuck the pages when it dries out. Will I hear from her? Are the
cats in? What will I cook, listening to the radio turned up louder than usual
to overwhelm the steady wash of noise from the rain and the hollow drumming
where the roofline extends past the gutter and the water hits the half-empty
galvanized pail set by the door to make filling the bird feeders easy on the
bad winter mornings when the cardinals flashed red against the snow. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Each season carries over into the next, and the next,
leaving things behind: the snow shovel still in the storm-entrance to the
cellar, the half-empty 50-pound bag of pasture seed shoved onto the workbench
next to the spare racing pedals for the good bike. Leaves, red and yellow, still brilliant, still stuck between
the sheets of waxed paper, in the book you open. A note from her, next to the
bed, left under the pillow as a gift, small consolation, the last time she and you rose in the dark and you made coffee while she
prepared to leave again. The picture of a dog who died last year, or was it the
year before, stuck into a frame holding that photograph of the two of
you in the doorway, both of you shielding your eyes from the brilliant summer
light, the light that will come tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, when the
front has pushed through and the last trailing remnants of raincloud and grey
dawn are somewhere else, somewhere east of here. Now it is silent, almost still, only the tall grasses moving just a little, waiting for rain.</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-849127587635077962013-08-05T08:09:00.000-07:002013-08-05T08:13:28.309-07:00The Secret Lives of a Fallow Farm<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
We don’t have big, long-maned, heritage workhorses to shake
their harnesses in the barn. We don’t
have horses at all. We don’t have dairy
cows in the old milking shed along the back of the tall barn, nor goats in the
area behind the workbench and tack stalls, where the pigpen used to be. Chickens
are all the rage among urban backyarders and back-to-the-farmers. Sometimes
when Harry comes for a drink and dinner, or to consult about something, he
brings a dozen eggs. They are lovely;
not brown and not white but blue, and pale aquamarine, and a greenish-pastel,
and the yokes are a dense, supersaturated yellow. Sometimes they taste, faintly, of coffee
grounds or even melon; the chickens have broken into the garbage again, or the
peacocks did, or the coyotes, and the chickens finished the job. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We aren’t growing organic kale or arugula or squash or sweet
corn. When they come into season we stop
at Gill’s on 209 on our way into Kingston to get the oil changed or pick up
primer at the Home Depot or make a party run at the discount liquor store. Cindy
Gill stands at the counter, a flowered apron over her blouse and shorts, and
rings up the pile of eggplants and peppers and squashes and beets and the corn
and maybe we’ll be eating a roast ear we took from the Igloo that serves now
not as a cooler but as a keep-warm and a steam-finisher for the ears that came
out of the roaster. That’s on Fridays
and Saturdays and especially Sundays, when the weekenders make it worth their while
to fire up the roaster, and the parking lot is full of Audis and Mercedes
Benzes and BMWs and Priuses and upscale SUVS, and Cindy looks sympathetically
over the heads of those stocking up for a week back in the city, as their
children, already restless and viscerally anticipating the long, dreadful
traffic jam that is the Thruway down to the Palisades Parkway and the GW
Bridge, or to 17 and, eventually, the Holland Tunnel, misbehave in ways that remind
you of the travail of parents not quite wealthy enough to have <i>au pairs</i> or nannies from Ireland, but
too immersed in their own lives and the life of the City to have yet learned
that it is their responsibility to control their children in places where
heirloom tomatoes fall easily onto the concrete floor or, if their children
commit such indiscretions, that they are responsible for apologizing, for
making at least an effort to clean up, for paying for what exploded rich and
red or yellow, sweet with juice no one will now revel in, onto the rough
stained floor. We look back at Cindy with equal sympathy, and we sometimes
break our own rules and get the paper towels from the rack by the onions and
mop up the lost treasure and put it in the trash can behind the cash register. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here’s what we do have. We have a hayfield. In the late spring and early summer, close to
a hundred redwing blackbirds will make their nests there, and they will perch,
watchfully, prepared to mob the hawk should it try for the nestlings. We have the hawk, a redtail, and his partner,
whom we see less often, for she, too, is nesting just into the woodlot that
separates our land and Harry’s. We have acres of milkweed dense along the edges
of the hayfield, and many more individuals interspersed in the tall grasses at
the middle, where the slight rise separates one spring flood-stream from the
next. We have a snapping turtle who has laid her eggs in the remnants of the
old woodpile, where the branches collected each spring after the winter blizzards,
and every fall after the hurricane season, pile each year, providing kindling
for the fireplaces and, every few years, the necessity of a burn pile, when the
county lifts its moratorium, and the volunteer firemen are sure they won’t be
overwhelmed by calls from those who can’t seem to understand that a burn should
be far from the house and the garage, without dry hayfield surrounding the
pile, waiting to carry the flames to woodlot or chicken coop. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We have seasonal visitors, we have sojourners, we have
seasonal guests and fulltime residents. In the early spring, the sky darkens
with waves of geese moving north. A pair of mergansers nests in the still pool
where the creek has moved after the last big hurricane redirected its flow,
carved out the swimming hole, and sent chunks of someone’s toolshed to rest
atop the rusted remnants of a Model A Ford pickup truck and the inner drum of
an old washing machine, back where the skunk cabbage and the ferns and the wild
raspberry and rose hide things till the late fall and the scouring of life that
leaves only the hulks and hulls and memories of things that come and go or
perch or die here with us. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We have fish in the creek, so Harry assures us, though I’ve
never seen one. What I have seen are the
crayfish, who explode from their muddy camouflage when your shadow crosses
their habitat. Once a man came around the back and I heard the hollow knock and
rattle of the unlatched screen from up the barn, as older neighbors say it, and
I came down to see what he might want.
Georgie was still alive then, though old, and her barking had only a
shadow of its old ferocity. He had
netted crayfish with his stepfather down there, and it had good memories for
him. Something he said, about learning
to trust the new man and his slow, near-silent ways. Now he had his daughter just on weekends; would
we consider letting him bring her down there some Saturday or Sunday to see the
place he and her grandpa had come to know, and to know each other? Of course, I said, and you should bring your
net if you’ve got one. We don’t catch
them ourselves; you would be welcome. It
was more than a couple of months, but one late-August afternoon I saw him
skirting the house, following the line where cut grass met hayfield, a young
girl, maybe eleven or twelve, striding in his footsteps, down to the creek, a
net, the sort you might buy in a Walmart or a Dollar Store, in her
hayfield-side hand. That was years ago; sometimes we see his truck parked on
the side of the road, on the triangle of property the other side of the bridge,
orphan land that should by rights be part of Harry’s clover field, but is ours
because the properties were platted back in 1780 and the creek ran straighter,
its boundary-banks a hundred yards the other side of where we are now. Once,
not long ago, I went out to warn them of the poison ivy pressing up against the
shoulder of the road, and I saw a teenage girl, tall and shy, sitting in the
driver’s seat of the truck now rusted out below the door panels, her father a
passenger, holding the nets across his lap.
I walked past without speaking to them; it was a moment close to holy
and I wasn’t going to break its spell. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Harm hays the field once a summer, sometimes twice if the
later season has good rain and sun. He could
do the first haying early, and be assured of two cuts, but we and he have
decided it’s better to let the nestlings have full term to leave, and to allow
the other nests and secrets to be undisturbed. The milkweeds in midfield, too,
can shelter early Monarchs, leaving greater area for the brilliant yellow and
black to flash in the evening light.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Dragonflies and dumb wasps who come into the studio and
pound their lives out against the screens until I give up, leave the keyboard
or set the guitar back in its case, and go out back to loosen the screen and
free the desperate grotesque to fly, dazed and disoriented, out into the
hayfield or over to the milkweed patch that crowds the edge of the milkpail
room where her studio stands orderly and still. Barn swallows who
swoop, dive and disappear into the eaves. Snakes under the barn, under the
kitchen, under the library, writhing quickly back into the field from the cut
grass where they’ve been sunning themselves on the flat edge of the glacial
bedrock that emerges, here and there, across the property. A blue heron who
comes and goes. A bald eagle whose nest
is down at Harry’s other farm, above the place where our creek emerges from
Pompey’s cave, meanders down the other side of Lucas Turnpike, and loses itself
in the Rondout; he comes when Harm is haying, leaving the redtails wary and
then if nothing large enough to interest him has emerged from behind the
haymow, tenders the field back to the hawks and, a day or so later, the turkey
vultures in for the dead snakes and the voles and fieldmice cut, bled and dead
at the hands of farm machinery. Their doubly hostile names notwithstanding, they
are beautiful in the air, their descents languid and geometric, though once
they land their ugliness is quickly apparent to the weekenders who stop along
the road above to photograph the rustic scene, Harm’s ancient tractors and the
baler still boasting the name of a company long bankrupt, its brand not even
valuable enough to merit purchase by some Chinese manufacturer who has taken
over the business of making things that are used to make things.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Groundhogs, lumbering, insulted, into the dense growth on
this side of the creek down past the Purple Martin house and the new river
birches just now establishing themselves. A mink, last year; we thought he was
an otter but he was too small, too quick, too inquisitive. That blue heron who
takes up for a time, awakening me of mornings with his fatalistic, disgruntled cries
as he arises from the nesting area to head for the Rondout where the better
fish are found. Gnats, swarms of them, vibrating in the hot air below the eaves
of the barn. White butterflies that float and flit above the mulch when she has
been watering, or in the well beneath the newly planted river birch that
replaces the willow downed in the great storm. Viceroys, miniature versions of
the Monarchs. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ours is not a farm, though we call it that. We have no
fantasies of a hardy, self-reliant life, in which we might reclaim some
romance-novel picture of a homesteader or pioneer, tanning the hides of the
cows too old to offer milk, cutting patches for the old shoes or panels to be
sewn into capes and pantaloons. Our lives are devoted to the opposite of
self-reliance, to mutual dependency, to trading and buying, to diversity and a
healthy respect for the specialties and vocations of others. Cindy Gill and her family, and the Davenports
closer in to town, and the Sheehans, and little Amy with her organic stand
selling just three or four things: these
are the people who provide us the greens and the squashes and the corn too
sweet to be tender, requiring that we find the toothpicks after the last ear is
done and the cobs are in the bag to be tossed with the other cuttings and
leavings, down in the growth by the little willow, at the creek’s edge. Young
Bush, Wayne Junior, hunts our property in the season, and sometime in late fall
he brings us venison cut and wrapped in butcher paper, the contents scripted in
wide magic marker: <i>Stew Meat</i>. <i>Steak.</i> <i>Burger.</i> Charles Noble has 70 head of
cattle who migrate across the open meadows of the wealthy weekenders, people
from the city, in financial, who are charmed by the lowing and the sight of the
small herd seen on a Saturday morning from the back porch. To get from one
pasturage to another, he has arranged to cross our hayfield, and the herd stays
overnight down in the lower reaches, where Harm doesn’t hay. In the spring, after the slaughter, he or
Francesca stop by with the charmingly packaged cuts, vacuum-packed and frozen,
their brand, <i>Moveable Beast</i>, perfect
for sale in the Manhattan farmers’ markets where they make their money, and the
locavore restaurants down in Red Hook and Brooklyn and up in Harlem, where the
population’s hip enough, and rich enough, for their particular culinary braggadocio.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What do we offer in return?
Buffer, recompense, reparation, even penance. Across the Rondout, on the
Schoonmaker’s farm, the cropduster whines and roars; to make its runs, it must
return across the edge of our woodlot, where, each first time of the season, we
are sure it is too low and will clip the tall oak and crash. That sweet corn is
better than the ears we get, or at least more tender, if a bit less sweet. Like Charles’s tenderloin and Amy’s organic
arugula and the Davenport’s tiny, misshapen eggplants of brilliant and
unexpected hues and patterns like snake-skin or butterfly wing, like the Gills’
heirloom tomatoes and Peter Lundgren’s honey, these crops will make their way
down to the city to feed the fashionable and the fickle. The big farms have
sequestered areas for organic growing, and they are far more careful with what
they spray, and where, and when, on the rest.
But this is still farm country, where ploughing edge-to-edge, where
draining a wetland, where growing to the demands of market and not the ideals
of diversity can be the difference between an economy-class winter cruise to
the Caribbean and a bankruptcy sale in the equipment shed by the highway. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Five years ago, the barn was filled with bats. In the twilight, they would emerge, black
clouds against the deep azure of the near-dark sky, racing along the grass and
above the meadow and down by the creek, erasing the air of mosquitos. They are
all gone, now. Three years ago at this time, the milkweed patches were thick
with Monarchs; yesterday I saw my second of the season, or perhaps the
third. Each year we look, a bit
fearfully, for the ungainly first landing of the heron, listen pointedly each
morning for the drumroll made by the pileated woodpecker on the hollow of the
dead tree where our woodlot meets Harry’s. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The bees are back; Peter Lundgren is secretive and a bit
smug about his cure for Colony Collapse Disorder; he should be, since in this
scarcity economy he can charge goldbug prices for his wild honey. Our clover,
our wildflowers, cacophonies of color down at the edge of the wetlands, are
noisy with his bees on the right afternoon, in the right month or week. He brings us a tub of honey when he comes by
to argue Puritan theology with me after the harvest season has begun to wind
down and before the deer hunting season has begun. There’s a few weeks in the late fall when he
comes by not often, but more often, the old pickup packed with beekeeper’s
equipage piled disorderly from bounding around in the fields between hives and
colonies, pulled into the driveway, while he waits to see if I will emerge from
the house or studio, having time to talk of theological precisions few others
could tolerate. I was at one time a scholar of the Mathers and the Winthrops and the others who defined a
steely intrepid way of conceiving human life, in New England.
A boy of ten, I received my own Bible from Reverend North in the nave of
the First Congregational Church in Guilford, Connecticut, the prize for
memorizing all the books of the Bible, plus two long passages, one from the
Old, one from the New Testament, and reciting to the Sunday School class four
separate Psalms, one each Sunday for a month, assigned to me by the assistant
minister, a theology student at Yale who came out to train and who, while kind,
remained unmemorable. His name is lost
to me, but Reverend North’s is not, for he preached the old Puritan way:
uncompromising, with no effort at rhetoric, building his sermons on a logic so
clear and so unyielding that all of my writing since has been made to construct
its opposites. I write not like the iron
law of the Heavens but like the unruly vines that keep the dog from marching
unimpeded through the undergrowth down to the fast and dangerous part of the
creek. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Peter’s bent is different; he came here from Minot, North Dakota to train as a
poet at the college, and somewhere the language of the Bible possessed him
fully; now he is the <i>rebbe</i> of a tiny
congregation replicating the church of the first years after Christ’s death. He
accuses me of Antinomianism or, worse, pantheism; I suggest certain fallacies in his doctrine; we talk of our grown
or near-grown children and the perils they will face. Then he starts the old
black Dakota, and all the tools, the hoods, the gloves, the boots, and the
spare screens and the roll of wirenet and the pruning shears rattle and shake in the back till the carburetor steps back from the precipice of vapor-lock and the
engine steadies, and he lets in the clutch and heads for home.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The bees are back, but the bats are not, and each year the
Monarchs have shown fewer and fewer. We
are, I said, recompense and reparation; not just us, but many others up here,
for whom the land is not a picturesque escape or a romantic folly-in-the-making
or simply scenery to be photographed from the side of our road, Harm’s old
tractor on one side of the frame, balanced on the other by the loom of our tall,
asymmetrical barn and, beyond it, the low outlines of the old house with its
red metal roof an appropriate contrast to the deep blue of the summer sky.
Paul and Sarah at the top of the ridge, his hammer echoing across the valley as
he repairs the ancient barn, her screen door slamming as she goes out to dump
the garbage in the composter; Harry with his vineyards and his clover fields,
great swaths of his property left to scrub or meadow,
slow-emerging woodlot and untouched riverbanks unvisited by the dangerous
unpredictability of human tourism. The bald eagle is back, after forty years.
The mink is perhaps a harbinger. </div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t know what it is I do here. I have little to show, if wild honey or the venison
or the eggplant are the particularities against which I must measure what I
make. Perhaps it is enough to witness; perhaps
it is enough to listen hard and stare relentlessly and seek faithfully to do honor
to the waves of wind across the hayfield, the bowl of the night sky and the
torn curtain of the stars. It’s all I have, and so I offer it. </div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-49034081995374112972013-06-07T16:16:00.003-07:002013-06-07T16:20:13.421-07:00Piranesi In Exurbia: Political Geography in America, Part Two<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i>Political Geography in America, Part II<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i>Piranesi in Exurbia: Rotting
Utopias at the American Edges<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the fall of 1991, <i>Washington
Post</i> writer Joel Garreau released, in book form, a version of his <i>Post</i> feature series on the rise of a new
form of American landscape. Not city,
not country, not suburban, these <i>edge
cities</i>, as Garreau named them, were located in previously underpopulated
areas, within a reasonable distance of a major metropolitan airport, but
otherwise forcefully independent of the older American geography that saw
cities as the locales for industrial and manufacturing economies, suburbs as
the place where the luckier members of the meritocracy lived, and the areas
beyond given over to agriculture, scenery or resource extraction.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What Garreau noticed first were planned communities
springing up along major outer-ring traffic corridors; simultaneously,
corporate office parks and research centers would occupy a swath of former
farmland, even as a combination of suburban-style subdivisions and new-urban
townhome communities would appear, almost instantly, off nearby roads. Both
forms would be marked by their isolation. The office parks would be ringed by
camouflage plantings hiding electronic fences with one, two, at most three
entrances, guarded by gatehouses occupied by security officials who monitored
incursion, or by unmanned security gates activated by corporate employee
identification cards. Similarly, the
subdivisions would often take the form of so-called “gated communities” (<i>privatopias</i>, my friend and colleague Evan
McKenzie named them, in an important premonitory book, published in 1994), in
which internal regulation and contract bound the individual community occupants
together, but isolated them from the financial, social, or political life
outside their walls or fences, in the guise of protecting them from <i>outsiders</i>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Garreau’s interest was in those edge-city clusters in the
Northeast Corridor, from Washington, DC, to the Massachusetts-Vermont border. They’re striking, and their fates deserve the
attention we’ll give them in later essays. But to see the picture in sharpest
outline, we might begin with a Midwestern example, not least because it’s so
easy to observe its shape, thanks to Google Maps. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Abbott Laboratories is a global pharmaceutical company;
relatively early in the edge city movement, it moved its corporate headquarters
out to the largely underpopulated Illinois farmlands far north of Chicago and
west of the older, super-affluent lakefront suburbs of the far North Shore.
Theirs is a relatively unsophisticated version of the more sprawling and
heavily landscaped “campuses” of places like Sears Holdings in nearby Hoffman
Estates.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Start by googling <i>Abbott Laboratories, Lake County, IL</i>,
though, and you’ll get a false site, a small office down in Lake Forest, one of
those older, super-affluent suburbs where wives pick up their husbands at the
train station in their Mercedes SUVs still wearing the jodhpurs from their
horsemanship lessons. Instead, you’ll get your fastest hit if you googlemap <i>Abbott Park, IL. </i>It’ll come right
up. But notice that the google entry on
the left lists Green Oaks, Illinois as the municipality where the lab is
located. That can’t be: Abbott employs more than 15,000 workers
within Abbott Park, and the village of Green Oaks only had a population of
3,855 in 2010. The village doesn’t even
list Abbott Labs among the businesses within its boundaries. Somewhere along
the line, though, Abbott declared itself a separate metropolitan location—it just
happened to sit atop little Green Oaks. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, you already know that there aren’t any green oaks
in Green Oaks—that old joke that Americans name their communities after the
picturesque feature they’ve destroyed to build:
it applies here. As landscapes
go, Green Oaks is a bit of a wasteland, a Midwestern desert. There are some forlorn water features, the
rigid linearity of their outlines indicating that they were at one time, or
perhaps still are, artificially made, meant to drain off the ground water in
the surrounding agricultural land, or to serve as industrial or agricultural
waste ponds, or both. One forms a lovely
triangle that you’d swear you’d remember from high-school geometry class if you
remembered anything from high-school geometry class. Another, visibly choked
with algae from the runoff of industrial-strength fertilizers, is hopefully named
<i>Shady Lane Resort Lake</i>. It’s bordered to the south by the railroad
tracks, on the west by the Illinois Tollway, on the north and east by no-longer-arable
industrial farming wastes. There’s no resort, no lane; there’s no shade,
either, unless you’re small enough to huddle under some marshy scrub that runs
along the older farmfield divisions.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Almost due north of that, though, is Abbott Park, a
picturesque greensward if you’re on Waukegan Road driving past it, with grassy
knolls, ornamental trees, clumps of shrubbery, hiding what’s behind. From above-- that is, via googlemaps-- you
see that it’s really just sham parkland;
the vast preponderance of land behind the screen is taken up with
warehouselike utilitarian structures surrounded by parking lots full of upscale
sedans—sunroofs galore, not a pickup truck or rusting minivan to be found.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cross Waukegan—virtually, of course, as to do so on foot
would be dangerous, indeed (in that regard, Garreau was spot-on: no sidewalks, no crosswalks, no <i>walk-don’t walk</i> appendages bolted to the
traffic signals)—and you get a sense of how those who work within the buildings
at Abbott live their off-work lives. The clustered townhomes look like
idealized interpretations of the tenets of so-called <i>New Urbanism</i>, the sort that made itself famous with the Disney
Corporation’s planned community, self-satisfiedly named <i>Celebration</i>. Here the ideals of the New Urbanists seem exemplified—essentially
to turn back the clock and turn on the airbrush to produce a replica of an
imaginary American town circa 1905, with manageable lawns to water, porches
upon which to sit, sidewalks to walk from home to neighbor, friend, grocery or
hardware store, or to the park, where the bandstand would feature a Sousaphone
and a big drum surrounded by trombones and piccolos, pumping out patriotic
piffle: <i>God Bless America</i>, followed, perhaps, by <i>Joy to the World</i>, Jeremiah the Bullfrog transliterated to the bass
saxophone.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The townhome communities around Abbot Park aren’t so fully
orchestrated; they cluster around a commons,
they’re appropriately intimate but with sufficient common greensward to give
the impression of gentility and spaciousness. Look carefully, though, and you’ll
notice: the structures are modular
prefabs, with faux clapboard fronts and <i>brick-it</i>
faux stonework on the false chimneys. Each townhome is built around and above a
two-car garage. There’s a reason for
that, and it’s not so the earnest mental worker can drive a block or two to
Abbott Park. The nearest supermarket is
many miles away; much further is that hardware store, and the nearest public
space is probably in the middle of Market Square, in Lake Forest, far to the
east. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Market Square is the earlier type of edge-community planned
development—it’s arguably the first planned shopping center in America (though
Kansas City, Missouri makes a strong competing claim), set across from the Lake
Forest commuter train station. If the
parking lots in Abbott Park are filled with Lexuses and Infinitis, the small
parking lot for the train station is populated by Porsches, BMWs and
Mercedeses. It’s small, though, not just
because it’s trapped in an older tradition of land use, but because it serves a
very different social and cultural class, one in which wife collects husband at
the station, still dressed in those jodhpurs we ogled earlier. Over at Abbott
Park, the family units are most commonly two-worker professionals; in many
cases, both of them work for Abbott, but if not, there are plenty of similar
high-skill professional corporate and research campuses scattered about. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As Garreau pointed out, though, proximity is a highly
relative matter out in edge city’s geography.
To go from Abbott Park to, say, the Sears corporate office park in
Hoffmann Estates, would take you just under an hour in regular traffic, close
to two hours each way in traditional rush hour.
You’d have to go down Interstate 94 to Interstate 294 and then over to
Interstate 90 west, exiting at Beverly Road and winding into the Sears campus—along
with close to 6,000 other workers entering or leaving that campus. What this
means, then, is that the professionals who live in the vicinity of Green Oaks,
Illinois, eunequally split their commute:
on average, one worker is in transit less than 30 minutes a day, while
the other is stuck in traffic on average 3 hours, 47 minutes, more or
less. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is the sacrifice that exurban edge city denizens make in
order not to live or work in the dense core of the old American city. The reward is clear: median family income in Green Oaks is close
to $140,000; since the median salaries at Abbott and Sears Holdings are in the
$85,000 range, one can assume that double-income professional families are
reaching close to $200,000 per year. And they live and work in environments
that are comfortingly, relentlessly, homogeneous. In Green Oaks, 96% of the
population is white or Asian. African-Americans constitute just .14% of the
population. The schools, too, are considered excellent—Oak Grove Elementary
School in Green Oak is rated A+ on the standard measuring metric. If you were among the 866 pupils there,
however, there would be a better-than-even chance that you would <i>never</i> see a black face among your
schoolmates.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Part of the reason professional families settle out there is
encapsulated in those two telling facts about the school system: it is excellent, and it is astoundingly
homogeneous. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But that implies a level of autonomy that is only found in
the mythos of freedom-loving, adventurous, frontier-seeking America. The reality is that high-skills professionals
go where the work is, and the work has been <i>out
there</i>, where the absence of crumbling infrastructures needing costly
repairs, underemployed citizens needing social safety-net support,
environmental and safety regulations that might require costly remediation, and
savvy political and social activists looking to require the full costs of
settlement be paid by the incoming corporations—all those urban disincentives
were (at least, back <i>then</i>) blissfully
absent. Corporate planners made the
decisions; high-skills workers moved out there for the jobs.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, many of those high-skills, high-tech workers reveled
in the bland homogeneity of the exurban environment. If you are working 18
hours a day, six days a week, and you need to prepare yourself to pack the
moving van in a year or three or four to go to the next opportunity, the
amenities of the sensual, emotional and intellectual life afforded by cities,
older suburbs, or real rural communities don’t matter much. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you’re a couple that shudders at the prospect of a life
lived above a two-car garage, surrounded by people <i>just like you</i>, the nearest independent coffeehouse located more
than forty miles away, the nearest independent bookstore located all the way
down in Chicago proper, you might consider a different trajectory. You might decide to live in the city and
commute out to your workplaces. In
Chicago, this would probably mean that your double-commutes would continue to
be dramatically unequal—one of you commuting by CTA or bicycle or walking to
work somewhere in the inner-core city, the other trapped in the car on the
freeways, listening to Marcia or Jim giving <i>Traffic
and Weather on the 8s</i>, doling out, every ten minutes, your dolorous fate
for the next one hundred minutes. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yet to the surprise of the urban planners, the New Urbanists,
the corporate office-park designers, the upper-level corporate decision-makers
and the exurban county economic development cheerleaders who made the edge city
phenomenon happen, this is exactly what has begun to take place. The new American meritocrats are not dreaming
of a townhouse with a small concrete patio in back, upon which sits a gleaming
stainless-steel gas grill. They are, instead, the new hipsters, riding their
fixed-gear bikes down Milwaukee Avenue from Humboldt Park to downtown. Given the choice between a job at Abbott Labs
and one at a small startup in the West Loop of Chicago, they’re not even
bothering to show up for the interview out in the picturesque parking lots of
Abbott Park. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(Part of this concerns a more complex cultural phenomenon. The new generation of high-skills workers are
not just <i>information workers, </i> or <i>knowledge-workers</i>,
or even, more boldly, <i>high-skills workers</i>. They are, instead, <i>minds</i>; their skills are
found in their ability to think critically, hold multiple conflicting ideas in
balance while evaluating complex strings of possibility, push past the
instruction to fabricate and instead push on to actually <i>make</i>. They are, in sum, <i>creative
workers</i>. One important corollary of this shift is that these <i>creative workers</i> consider themselves the
owners of their own value, portable engines rather than fixed
information-assembly-line workers. Partly this is a consequence of the
cybernetic revolution they entered at birth. When most high-skills mental work
can be off-loaded to a bank of high-end servers in an air conditioned basement
room—hell, when you can buy the computing power of the entire Cold War
anti-ballistic-missile defense system <i>and</i>
NASA <i>and</i> the nuclear war arsenal combined
for less than a grand and put it in your backpack or fake Louis-Vuitton bag or
your man-purse, programming it yourself while you’re on the subway or waiting
for another beer at the Hopleaf—it doesn’t take much mental wherewithal to see that the shining path requires, rewards
and promises adventurousness, intellectual risk, social and cultural
flexibility. This generation doesn’t go hat-in-hand to Abbott Laboratories
hoping for a white-lab-coat job modifying the molecular structure of a
pediatric ear-infection drug like <i>Omnicef</i>
so as to keep the corporate monopoly.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This new generation is actually the second to reject the
siren call of the edge city life. A
decade ago, the commute pattern along Chicago’s freeway system tilted
decisively: in the mornings, the roads
were full and slow going <i>out</i> from the
city. In the afternoons, they were
packed with people escaping the edge city for the edgy one. These were people
trapped by the decisions made decades earlier to uproot corporate life from the
dense downtowns to the dispersed disaggregations of exurbia; they had to work <i>out there</i> but they were damned if they had to live there or, worse,
raise their children in that zombie-land. This was the interim generation,
cautioned by the dot-com bubble and crash, but not young enough to have grown
up the wiser for it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These days, the commute patterns are far murkier than
traffic planners and urban designers ever thought they’d be. In city centers like San Francisco, Chicago,
New York City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Pittsburgh and the like, urban life has
returned. In the early stages of
resuscitation, these resurrected cities are decidedly youthful—colleges and
universities have bought into underpriced downtown building stock, and their
graduates are the ones comfortable enough with the complexities of the edgy
city to hang around—after graduation, but also after six, seven, ten pm. As
these reborn city centers mature, they draw <i>empty
nesters</i>, who find the 24-hour street activity comforting rather than
threatening, and the youthful energy on those streets rejuvenating. The result is, temporarily, a doughnut-hole
demographic. What’s missing is the
school-age-children cluster. In Manhattan and Brooklyn, and in San Francisco
and other urban centers, that’s already shifting: that’s the hidden push behind charter schools
in places like Chicago, and it accounts for the dramatic rise in alternative
private and semi-private schools like Avenues in New York’s Chelsea, or the
Manhattan Country School on the Upper East Side, or the International School
for Peace, in Tucson, Arizona.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Avenues School is across the street from The Projects. At
least, they <i>were </i>The Projects, 20
years ago. Now we live across the street
from a park just a block north, a park that’s full of hipsters in hipster
soccer and lacrosse and even kickball leagues. The project kids are playing
basketball with 27-year-old VP-for-Product-Development types and 25 year old
MFAs with their own edgy Chelsea galleries. To keep the <i>creative workers</i> commuting down to those Silicon Valley office
campuses for a few more years—till they can be abandoned, that is, having
served their economic purpose—companies like Oracle and Google are running
private buses that pick up in the Mission and Pacific Heights and Noe Valley,
breakfast on board and full 4G wifi. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Out there in the edge cities, matters are more forlorn, more
dour. Communities like Green Oaks,
Illinois, and the larger community of Libertyville that engulfs it, were
swamped by the infrastructure demands and the municipal responsibilities that
came with the influx of the corporate office parks and their privatopia housing
communities. They had to build or expand schools and that required bond issues
and long-term debt, swaths of new teachers with their salaries and their pension
obligations, and curricula that were targeted to the demands of a new elitist constituency.
Most of them didn’t plan well: they were so enthused by the short-term
benefits of growth that they didn’t calculate the long-term costs of sewer
systems, of streets and sanitation, of snow removal and school bonds. They
usually built on the cheap and, two and three decades in, they are facing big
repair bills. Meanwhile, those corporate campuses aren’t generous in ponying up
the cash. Most of them got major tax
abatements to start things off, and they’re grumpy enough at suddenly having to
pay taxes at all. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some of them are even preparing to pick up and leave. As Garreau noticed in his study of the
just-maturing edge cities, the cultural environment of one is pretty much
identical to the next, and the citizens of edge cities are not tied by the
bounds of place. There isn’t any <i>there there</i>, so they have nothing to
regret when they go. The corporate
planners are working off much more sophisticated financial algorithms; those
older campuses have lost their shiny luster, and they need anything from a
major sprucing-up to a complete gut-renovation. At that point, a no-tax offer from some other
uncomprehending municipality in, say, North Carolina, or Texas, or Indiana, can
make it easy to pick up and leave. Two
years ago, Sears contemplated abandoning that Hoffman Estates campus; the tax abatement deal that brought them out
there was about to expire, and the numbers no longer added up. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s happening, sure.
But it’s not the smart, the flexible, or the <i>happening</i> move. That’s
occurring to the hottest and most savvy corporations; they’re looking for smaller but funky,
interesting, sensual locations—Tucson, yes, or Austin, but also San Antonio,
Pittsburgh. And they’re moving back into town—into the South of Market area of
San Francisco, for example, or the old Center City of Philadelphia and the Loop
of Chicago. Last year, Motorola Mobility
abandoned a sprawling Libertyville corporate campus and took over three floors
of downtown Chicago’s venerable Merchandise Mart, right on the Chicago River,
surrounded by icons of architecture and bustling with energy-nodes, from the
Art Institute <i>Al’s #1Italian Beef </i> to Buddy Guy’s <i>Legends</i>, arguably the best blues club in the country. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Motorola has 84 acres, complete with buildings, canteens, an
employee gymnasium, and nicely maintained privatopian roadways (<i>Technology Way</i> circles the outside, separating
the campus from the forested campus of St. Mary’s of the Lake Seminary). The sales agent, Binschwanger, Inc., says it
thinks the 1.1 million-square-foot facility would be best for a single
corporate entity—perhaps as a regional headquarters, or back offices. That last phrase signals the new trend: the <i>real</i>
offices will be back downtown.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you want to know what the edge cities might look like in
a decade or so, you can drive in on I 94 toward Chicago and get off in Skokie. That’s where the high-tech exurbia of the Cold
War years was located— where they invented, fabricated, and manufactured tape
recorders, microphones, vacuum tubes, precision gauges, innovative gaskets for
new-tech motors. They were made in sprawling factories in corporate parks that
are now all but invisible behind the overgrowth of once-tidy shrubs and
ornamental trees. The prairie is
returning, and these modest masterpieces of modernist industrial architecture—derived
from the famed factories you learned about in art history classes: Fagus factory, the Bauhaus—are hidden, their
terra-cotta brick still shiny, only a few of their metal-and-glass lightwells and
glass-brick curtain walls shattered by vandals. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Out there in Green Oaks and Hoffman Estates, the future in
ruins won’t look so pretty. No Piranesi
will draw fanciful exaggerations of these exurban campuses, crumbling grandly,
bedecked by vines and explored by lovers.
They were too quickly made, too cheaply built; their planners and
designers and owners had no illusions that their institutions were destined or
deserving to last more than the length of their tax abatements and a little
more. They’ll be easy enough to demolish, though where to put the toxic waste
of their construction and their production will be a conundrum for villages,
towns and counties already saddled with the cash-flow problems once reserved
for the deindustrializing cities. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Meanwhile, those cities are returning to full life. You can make fun of the hipsters of Brooklyn,
of Hoboken and Jersey City, of Harlem and now the Bronx all you want. They have returned urban life to the entropic
zones where deindustrialization seemed a permanent hammering of doom on the
hollow drums of emptied factories and neighborhoods. Wicker Park and Humboldt Park in Chicago, but
also Edgewater and the Pilsen: they,
too, are places where the creative generation makes its mark. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Back up to the high-map satellite views of Google maps. Turn on the traffic feature. Watch the patterns over a day. Look closely at a Friday afternoon—maybe this
early June in Chicago, when the Blues Festival is going on, or Manhattan when
there’s a live concert on Strawberry Fields in Central Park. Observe the shifts of color and then, if you’re
fully hooked, add the traffic camera sites. Then start mapping trajectories of
movement, and watching how Google calculates the time-of-travel at different
times of day (<i>36.4 miles, 48 minutes; in
current traffic, 1 hr. 28 min.</i>). You’ll
see the skeins of possibility, the ebb and flow of commerce and culture. You’ll fix your attention on one spot, then
another, perhaps for weeks at a time. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Check back here. We’re
going to look at some of those places over the next few essays. Malvern, Pennsylvania. San Jose, California. Danbury, Connecticut. Tucson. Penn Hills,
Pennsylvania. There are patterns in them, and patterns in the patterns. </div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-49492082269911585142013-03-02T14:40:00.000-08:002013-03-02T14:41:48.317-08:00Political Geography in America: Part One<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Political Geography
in America:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part One</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you don’t live in the US of A, and maybe if you do, the
notion of American political geography is pretty opaque.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hell, they haven’t even taught it as a separate
university discipline since Mark Twain wrote a devastatingly witty satire on
its vaporous imprecision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, actually,
Twain’s satire concerned political <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">economy</i>
and, when it was published in 1870, it was widely viewed as a send-up of
celebrated authors writing without knowledge or even a trace of shame about
whatever a paying editor might imagine would draw a readership.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Which is not to say that political geography hasn’t always
been essential to understanding America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But the best writers on the subject never mentioned the discipline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They wrote fiction:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora
Welty on the South; William Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner on California; Ken
Kesey on the Northwest states. Elmore Leonard has recently brought the
strip-mining areas of Kentucky, western Virginia and West Virginia proper into
stark relief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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There is a demandingly difficult academic journal devoted to
the subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Political Geography</i> recently ran a scholarly article about “enclaves
of abandonment,” places that were “resolved” by a political process that made
life within them impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One Indian
spent his entire life in such an enclave, ceded to Bangladesh but far from its
borders, leaving him an illegal immigrant to India whenever he needed shoes or
fertilizer, never able to enter his legal state because his enclave was
surrounded by Indian territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is
the subject of political geography—the ways landscapes and spaces lie at odds
with, or bring into being, political institutions and systems. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But most of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">public</i> writing on America’s political geography has always been, at
best, shallow and simplistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
later 19<sup>th</sup> century, and then again in the 1960s, the recurrent
distinction was between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The South</i> and
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The North</i>. Having spent a good deal
of the 1960s in West Virginia, which after all became a separate state by
seceding from Confederate Virginia over the issue of slaveholding, I had no
illusions that it held greater kinship with, say, Connecticut or even Ohio than
Kentucky and Mississippi—except insofar as Mississippi had a far greater, if
largely silent, black population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
‘70s, I played guitar and pedal steel in Austin, Texas, while getting a Ph.D.
in American Studies, and there the political geography was so fine in
distinction that not just different bars on the same street, but different
tables at the same bar, conformed to radically different political geographies.
At Threadgill’s on a Saturday night there were two-steppers who’d voted the
Communist party in 1936 and Houston corporate lawyers with manufactured tans
and endangered-species cowboy boots moving side by side with Kinky Friedman,
the Texas Jew-Boy. In one band, I was the only non-Chicano;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>when we opened for Saul and Rueben’s uncle’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conjunto</i> orchestra, there were long
comedic passages concerning my dress, my hair, and my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gringo</i>-stupid inability to speak either Castilian or streetwise
Spanish, none of which I could understand, as I spoke no Spanish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In an earlier, ill-fated attempt to monetize
my musicianship I played pedal steel in a C&W band so Christian that the
other members couldn’t play past midnight Saturday, minimizing the bar-take,
and refused to break down, move, load or unload the equipment on the grounds it
was work on the Sabbath. Leaving me to do all the work but not receiving any
recompense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I first met Saul and Rueben
coming home discouraged after one of those gigs, and followed some spectacular
guitar playing into a shitkicker fratboy birthday party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wheeled in the Twin Reverb, took the axe
out of the box, and became the band’s first and only White Boy. I grieve that
band daily.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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People said Texas was different, and Austin was different
than Texas, but I knew better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Driving
down the first time, in a wornout VW squareback with the Twin and the pedal
steel and about six guitars and a box of books filling the back, I had to stop
in Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA for the night when a big piece of steel belt emerged
from the side of the radial tire, causing everything to shake madly at anything
over 45 mph. I had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only thing I knew about the South in the
counterculture years I had learned from watching <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Easy Rider</i> in a theatre in Paris in 1970, but it was dubbed into
French, in a sort of muffled way and I could not follow the language. The South
was where pickup trucks pulled alongside you and blew you away with a shotgun. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA</i> was a Merle
Haggard song and I’d played it enough times to know the lyrics:</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee;<br />
We don't take no trips on LSD<br />
We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street;<br />
We like livin' right, and bein' free.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><br />
<br />
I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,<br />
A place where even squares can have a ball<br />
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,<br />
And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><br />
<br />
We don't make a party out of lovin';<br />
We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo;<br />
We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy,<br />
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.</span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span>At the time, I had hair about
to my waist, and while I was wearing cowboy boots, they were the wrong sort
(leather Fryes, well-worn) and my jeans had a zipper and a slight bell-bottom
“flare” to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was pretty sure I’d
be sleeping in my car in the tire shop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Instead, I met a very nice motel keeper and his wife, and had my first
chicken-fried steak at the urging of everyone around me at the diner, who were
thrilled to see a Yankee eat his first bite of what is still one of my favorite
foods in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After dinner, I
walked out to the small park, redolent of newmown hay and irrigated alfalfa.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The next morning, I was introduced to
biscuits and gravy, and also grits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
tire shop gave me the new tire just over wholesale because I was a musician. </div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today
the pundits still speak of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red and Blue
States</i>, which is something like hitting a soufflé with a hammer until the
pyrex breaks and then declaring the concoction and the glass to be of the same
family, since you could have called both of them <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dishes</i>—before you went at ‘em. American political geography isn’t
defined by state boundaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>State
boundaries are arbitrary and dangerous in much the same way the postcolonial
African states were rendered arbitrary and dangerous—no attention paid to
belief, to loyalties, to kinship patterns, to climate and crop and foodways. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If there’s a difference, between us and postcolonial Africa,
it’s been in the ways that the democratic political system has, until very
recently, forced not just compromise, but something more important—mutual
learning among unlikely and unsympathetic groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Evanston Illinois in the 1980s, the school
board decided to move white children by bus to a predominantly black elementary
school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until this time there had been,
in the US, virtually no successful busing of white kids out of their neighborhoods,
and this experiment had its typical sad future ahead of it—the wealthier whites
would send their children to private school, the empowered white would whine
and finagle their political representatives until quiet exceptions were made
and their children were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">grandfathered</i>
back into the old school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By some very
happy coincidence, I went over to the school in question and met the principal
who at the time was dressed in a light-up Christmas Tree of a dress, to which
no fewer than six small children had managed to attach themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She seemed utterly unfazed by this style of
meeting a representative of the apartheid-loving white side of the town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then and there, I fell in love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I grieve Clara Pate daily. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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But I digress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I
started going to meetings of the mostly-black PTA of the new school, I was
treated with the suspicion, even contempt, I deserved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These parents didn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">want</i> privileged white parents barging into their lives, with their
self-righteousness and their sense of entitlement and their ten-dollar
words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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I learned this the hard way, when the School Board announced
that they were not going to increase the number of teachers or staff to
accommodate the 100 or so new students due to arrive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was, of course, outrageous:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had no idea that the Board members knew
that when those two buses drove through the white neighborhood to pick up those
100 students, only three would get on:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Caroline
Winter-Rosenberg, Rocco deFilippis, and my son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At the time, I thought most of the kids would be on the bus, and by my
lights, this was an invitation to overcrowding and cheapening of resources. I
got up to speak about this, in an impassioned way, hardly noticing that all the
black parents were looking at me as if I were perhaps the most naïve rube to
have arrived in the Midwest since the Civil War. When I railed against the
Board’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">niggardly treatment</i>, though,
I heard an audible gasp and a rising torrent of response.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was too het-up to hear what was being said
until one parent got up and dressed me down for speaking of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nigger-treatment</i>. It took me a good
fifteen minutes to understand what had happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took me six months before any of those
parents would speak to me, and it was Clara Pate who took them aside and told
them to get over it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was a professor
and I used ten-dollar words when I should have used regular ones because I was
an ignorant naïve rube, but I was good of heart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope she was right;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>certainly I have spent the rest of my life
trying to live down my flaws and live up to her kind assessment of me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That, my friends, is political geography in America.
Boundaries matter;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>when they are
well-drawn, they confirm and amplify the strengths and weaknesses of the
citizenry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When they are badly drawn,
perhaps something new will emerge:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>something better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or something
worse.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-68243656793170505242013-02-14T15:52:00.002-08:002013-02-14T15:52:31.802-08:00Medals of Warfare<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Old Man was sitting at the table in the Little House we
built for him, basking in the brilliant light off the snow and reading the
paper. He likes to read me excerpts of
stories that seem particularly funny or absurd or telling. Today his hands were shaking as he read out
the news that the Pentagon had developed a new class of combat medals, a <i>Distinguished Warfare Medal</i>, to be given
to those who operate the unmanned drones that target <i>bad guys</i> and take them out from above.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>What are they
rewarding them for?</i> The Old Man asked.
<i>Courage?</i> <i>Are they sticking their necks out? </i> He paused and put the paper down. <i>You know</i>, he started to say. <i>I…</i>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But he stopped there.
He put the paper back down, carefully, between the coffee and the plate
of toast. He looked at me for a moment. <i>I
wonder what this guy Panetta’s military record is</i>. After another long
pause, he sighed, turned the page, and started to look at the used car ads. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am a Quaker. Not a
practicing Quaker in the sense that I go to meeting house. When I was in college, and the Vietnam War
was on, meeting house was a sacred place, full of the crackling energy of a
hundred people arrayed on rows of plain benches, all of them facing inward
toward an empty center. After the war wound
down, and I was in Texas, going to meeting was a different thing. It seemed no longer to focus me or to bring
into the room what I had understood as the indwelling of the holy spirit. I took my meeting outside, by myself, and I’ve
done so ever since. My alternative service was to run an Institute on American
Culture and Life for the U.S. Department of State for 16 years. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Old Man is 88. He was a Marine, and he landed with the
Marines at atoll after atoll to face the withering fire of pillboxed Japanese
and their kamakazi pilots. And he watched,
time and again, as his friends to his left and right went down and he had to
leave them to continue the charge up some coral reef or stony hill. He never
talks about it. Except once or twice to
me, and to his son Eddie, who was in the Peace Corps in the Marshalls and had
to evacuate the Bikini Islanders that second time, after the U.S. had told them
it was safe to return, the land was cleaned, and then conceded that it wasn’t,
and would never be. The Old Man and his son are bound together by shared
sorrows on blue-water havens full of hidden dangers, far from here.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The announcement this morning was brief. The medal is to be called a <i>Distinguished Warfare Medal</i>. It is meant
to reward especially competent service among the technocratic corps manning the
controls of the drones. It was invented and pushed through by outgoing Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta. I’ve never liked Panetta. He has always conveyed a sort of unctuous
manliness that’s the very opposite of the Old Man’s reticence. He’s paid lip
service to the Veterans’ Administration, but we have to beg the V.A. to repair the
Old Man’s hearing aid. When he needed a wheelchair they told him he'd have to
come down to the hospital to be "fitted." 40 miles away. It didn’t
excite any interest when we suggested that the necessity of a wheelchair
precluded a nice little drive, a long wait, and then a long drive back. Besides, they told us, we’d have to come back
to pick it up. Sometime. When it was approved. And delivered.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Panetta joined the armed forces of the United States in
1963, after law school. He stayed for
three years, starting as a second lieutenant, and leaving in 1966 as a first
lieutenant.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1963-1966 were tough years to be a soldier. Lyndon Johnson had decided to drastically
escalate the Vietnam War, with a <i>surge</i>
that brought the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—the Vietnam equivalent of George W.
Bush’s attack on Iraq after his invention of “weapons of mass destruction.” Between
1961 and 1964, the Army's rosters multiplied from about 850,000 to nearly a
million. Shortened tours of duty increased the dangers for inexperienced troops
and, more importantly, for the young lieutenants who were to lead them into the
jungle battles.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Leon Panetta never went to Vietnam. Despite the vacuum of
intelligent, well-trained lieutenants, he stayed at Fort Ord in California,
after a stint in Army Intelligence School. Fort Ord is on the Monterey
Peninsula, just off the Coastal Highway from the dunes and the ocean. Panetta was Chief of Intelligence Operations
at Fort Ord. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Somewhere along the way, Panetta earned an Army Commendation
Medal. It’s given out, the Pentagon
tells us, <i>to any member of the
Armed Forces of the United States other than General Officers who, while
serving in any capacity with the U.S. Army after 6 December 1941,
distinguished themselves by heroism, meritorious achievement or meritorious
service.</i> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In my old office at the university, I had a string of odd
awards given out for various reasons.
They were interspersed with a very impressive collection of bowling
trophies I had inherited from an old roommate, Bradford Collins, who liked to
collect them at yard sales. I think of
Panetta’s Medal as falling in the same category as all of those—somewhere between
a meaningless reward for the activities expected of the recipient, and overblown,
meaningless junk. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But it’s not surprising that one of Panetta’s last acts as Defense
Secretary was to invent a Medal rewarding activity as trivial and yet as deadly
and morally, ethically, legally and tactically insubstantial as no doubt was
the labor for which he was once rewarded, in another war. It was not hard to
volunteer for combat duty in Vietnam if you were a lieutenant. There was a desperate vacuum of intelligent,
educated, well-trained young officers.
Fort Ord, by contrast, is about two hours from the Condor Club on Broadway
in the North Beach section of San Francisco, where, in 1964, Carol Doda first
danced topless. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here’s an excerpt from the DoD’s press release: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<i>“This new medal recognizes the changing character of warfare and those
who make extraordinary contributions to [drone and cyberwarfare],” said Army
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The
criteria for this award will be highly selective and reflect high standards.”<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<i>The most immediate example is the work of an unmanned aerial vehicle
operator who could be operating a system over Afghanistan while based at Creech
Air Force Base, Nev. The unmanned aerial vehicle would directly affect
operations on the ground. Another example is that of a soldier at Fort Meade,
Md., who detects and thwarts a cyberattack on a DOD computer system.”<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is an Army recruiting page devoted to the category of <i>Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operator (15W)</i>.
It shows a boy—perhaps 12—wearing army fatigues, holding up a model airplane
glider. Further down the page is this:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">HELPFUL SKILLS</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px;">
<span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>*Interest in remote/radio control vehicles</b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px;">
<span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>*Organize information and study its meaning</b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px;">
<span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>*Think and write clearly</b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px;">
<span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>*Attention to detail</b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s not important that the grammar is wrong at a level to
make any 7<sup>th</sup> grade English teacher cringe. It’s not important that being able to <i>think…clearly</i> is merely considered <i>helpful</i>. It <i>is</i> important to see the
conjunction between that picture of a boy with a toy, and the notion of a
grownup with a murderous weapon directed via heads-up video-game technologies.
It puts the enterprise within that young boy’s limited moral universe—of <i>good guys</i> and <i>bad guys</i>—that’s also central to the wave of new video games that
mimic war without threatening to cause the player pain or consequence. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Almost nothing about the drone program makes sense to me
except its extraordinary power to do military and diplomatic harm without the
inconvenience of dying American soldiers. What this new reward clarifies is the
way the old values of American military mission—courage, bravery, risk, injury
or death at the hands of clearly defined military of enemies in declared wars—has
been utterly upended. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Distinguished Warfare Medal is the first new medal designated
since the Bronze Star was initiated in 1944, during the worst of World War II.
The Bronze Star also can be given for <i>meritorious
service… in a combat zone.</i> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Only four words. But
they make all the difference.</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-75761512015006507502013-02-13T07:04:00.004-08:002013-02-13T07:12:31.006-08:00Big pickups, wood-burning fireplaces, and the Hawk Above the Hayfield<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Last Friday they forecast a storm of the century, but our
little valley was right in between the two big storms that collided over
Connecticut and Massachusetts to devastating effect. The Old Man, who’s living with us now, was
worried she wouldn’t make it out of New York before it hit, remembering with
his long view the time she spent three days in a rest stop in Ohio, and the
time she ended up on the floor of some airport for a couple of days. She made the last bus out—at 3:30 pm.—and was
home by 7. The next day I shoveled for
three hours, clearing a path for the EMT ambulance in case the Old Man took a
turn for the worse.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yesterday started with a frozen rain that coated the piles
of snow with a crust of ice. Today a warm burst from the south pushed the
clouds aside for tears of blue that ranged from pale pastel up to the east on
the ridge, to a brilliant saturated Technicolor over to the south. Tomorrow it was supposed to plummet back down
ahead of a new storm, but now it looks like sunshine for the next week. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is normal winter weather here in the rural stretches of
New York a couple of hours north of New York City. Down there, though, where the coastal regions
whip up winds and froth the weather with salty air, floods and freezes, high winds
and surge tides aren’t giving up. Out in the Midwest, in Chicago where we used
to live, there’s been almost no snow at all, and the temperatures have been
wildly off their averages. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve been reading back copies of <i>Life</i> magazine—starting with its first issues in 1936 and ending up
around the moon mission. Weather is a favorite subject for American obsession,
and sensational picture journalism loves to ramp up the rhetoric. But <i>Life</i>
started publication two years after what had been the hottest summer and
hottest year on record in the United States.
1934 seemed to confirm the dour predictions that the Dust Bowl was not
an isolate phenomenon. After that, though, a long stretch of temperate weather
led us back through the rest of the Depression and the war. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Actually, <i>Life</i> had
a hard time with the weather for its entire active lifespan—the climate in the
U.S. seemed pretty temperate all the way up into the ‘70s. There were tornadoes in Tornado Alley, always
good for a sidebar, and local news photographers made a little cash with
time-lapse pictures of the twisters eliminating barns and false-front Oklahoma
and Kansas towns. There were hurricanes in the late summer and fall. Typhoons
and floods and earthquakes hammered the rest of the globe, but <i>Life </i>didn’t have the best luck with
freelancers in places where they took place. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Missouri River flooded nicely in 1955, and Margaret
Bourke-White did her trademark fly-around yielding a flood of aerial views of
the spreading waters. There was a good flood in Texas in ’53, and <i>Life</i>’r John Dominis got a great shot of
a man astraddle a homemade raft made out of three inner tubes, some scrap
lumber, and an orange crate, floating in the midst of a fruit orchard with only
the tippy-tops of the trees showing in neat rows. In ’53,<i> Life</i> got some official pictures of a flood in the Netherlands—dull,
but serviceable, and one or two even showed a picturesque Dutch windmill. ’52 was
a hot year, thanks to some very picturesque flooding of Venice, enabling the
return of the ever-popular gondola moorings, this time with some
newsworthiness. Kansas also had some
good flooding, and <i>Life</i> got a man out
there to show the U. of Kansas students heroically piling sandbags. ’47 was
good because both the Mississippi in the U.S. and major rivers in the U.S.S.R.
flooded, providing a we’re-all-in-this-together counterpoint to the Cold War
rhetoric of the moment. Oddly enough,1938’s great flood of the Huang He River
in China, a location dear to the heart of publisher Henry Luce, didn’t get any
photo-play at all, probably because the magazine hadn’t yet set up a sufficiently
wide net of stringers in the backcountry there. But ’37 had sent superstar
Bourke-White down to Kentucky for some heartstring-tugging images of pitiable
victims of the floods there.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
‘53’s North Sea flood, though, is worth returning to,
because it’s the one that drove the Dutch to invest billions in a flood control
system that’s now being touted for the New Jersey-New York-Long Island
coastline that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The Delta Works, begun shortly after the ‘53
flood and still being modified today, has so far cost each Dutch citizen 16
Euros—not a bad price, but wildly outdated. Building it today would require
something more like 100 Euros per capita. Doing the same to the East Coast of
the U.S. would cost, at a low estimate, a hundred times the Delta Works cost,
and it would take decades to get into service, even as it deflected the floods
and troubles elsewhere. Staten Island doesn’t have much of a future; nor does the Jersey shore, or the Far
Rockaways, or much of the coastline of Long Island. The Outer Banks of the
Carolinas won’t be there long. Georgia, Florida, Texas…<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not that we need to worry about that here in the Rondout Valley.
Yet. We have the Shawangunk Mountain ridge to our east, and the Catskills to
our west. But every river and stream running through here takes its source up
in the mountains, and every year the flooding has shocked oldtimers and flooded
houses and barns dating to the 1600s and 1700s.
Two years ago, we got a swimming hole where our property abuts Harry’s. Last year, it filled in again. The farmers
are losing their ability to predict a year’s season; Hurricane Irene left the
Davenport’s farm almost entirely underwater, and the Gill’s up 209 toward
Kingston was pretty much a washout, too. Rumor had it, if they’d had a buyer,
both families would have packed it up. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This year the price of firewood plummeted as the devastated
woodlots of Irene’s winds came in the market fully seasoned. Propane hasn’t moderated, and heating oil’s
still high and going higher. Natural gas
prices have dropped quite a bit, but that doesn’t do a rural dweller much good,
since the nearest pipeline is all the way up in Kingston, 20 miles north. A lot
of wood is being burned this winter.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Around here, there are three classes of people when it comes
to climate change, and all three of us are contributing to the problem, all
three of us have our heads in the sand and our short-term interest driving our
daily actions. There are the non-believers.
Kurt, Jr. up the hill has a top-end 4x4 pickup—long bed, double-cab, flare
fenders, the whole bit. He’s put stacks behind the cab with glass-packs and
when he downshifts they make a <i>lot</i> of
noise. At night, you can see the flames
popping out the top. God only knows how
he gets the thing to pass state inspection.
Last year and the year before he and his friends used to smoke pot and
drink beer around a campfire they’d build in Harry’s clover field and then when
they were <i>ready,</i> usually around 10 at
night, they’d fire up the Snowmobiles and race around the field doing figure-8s
before crossing the stream to run an obstacle course set up in our hayfield,
then hit it up to Paul and Sarah’s, then onto the Rail-Trail for a little illegal
drag racing. Somebody talked the Staties into running a few patrols, and that
led to some DUIs and some trespassing charges and fines and safety school
stints. This year the Snowmobile crowd
has tiptoed quietly along the edge of our woodlot before ducking into Harry’s and heading for the rail-trail. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But Kurt, Jr. hasn’t forgotten. He knows who made the calls—hell,
we all told his dad, Kurt, Sr. Every
time he comes past the house now, he downshifts and hits the accelerator, hard.
He’s my alarm clock. He does the same in front of the Baker’s up the hill—God knows
what crime they committed to deserve it, but there it is. In the summer, Kurt,
Jr. races dirt-track Modifieds over in Accord.
He’s got a few other toys too—an ATV I seem to remember, and a dirt
bike. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Kurt, Jr. doesn’t believe in Global Warming. It’s too inconvenient. Everything that gives him pleasure
contributes to the problem. By contrast, his father, Kurt, Sr., has worked for
the Ulster County roads crew for thirty years or so. After Irene, he and his crew had to repair
just about every culvert and county-road bridge, and he knows damned well that
things are changing. He also knows
damned well just how much money it’s costing the county and the state with
every disaster. Our county’s small
enough in population that you can see the effect on your property taxes and it’s
not pretty. He’s got a fair amount of land, between him and his wife and his
mother, and like a lot of people he’s gone over more and more to woodburning
stoves and furnaces as the taxes eat at the heating oil budget. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Around here, a month’s propane in winter runs you $500 or
more—and that’s with a well-insulated house and a habit of keeping the
thermostat low. Heating oil is worse. So
the winter mornings are aromatic with the smell of woodsmoke, just as the clear
fall days are a symphony of chain saws and mechanical splitters and tractors
dragging the sledges full of split wood out to be covered and allowed to season
for a year or two. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a romance of the senses, especially for the weekenders
who like to think they’re embraced in the bosom of the rural life. But most of
the wood stoves and furnaces around here are old-school, which means each one
contributes the equivalent of four of Kurt, Jr.’s 4x4s worth of climate-change
pollution. Moreover, the trees being cut
down for firewood aren’t being replaced at nearly the same rate as they’re
being depleted. This is an area full of
forests dating to the years after the great blueberry burns of the early 20<sup>th</sup>
century gave way as blueberry farms made wild blueberry picking
uneconomical. The good burning trees,
like oak, are at full maturity now—a century or so later. If they’re replanted one-to-one, they’ll be
back to soaking up CO<sup>2</sup> in the early 22<sup>nd</sup> century. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Meanwhile, the weekenders drive up from New York City on the
Thruway, doing 80 and 85 to get here sooner, stuck in interminable traffic jams
down by the city where they idle and inch, idle and inch for sometimes
hours. Their houses with the picturesque
huge stone fireplaces ablaze on Friday and Saturday nights and all day Sundays
are paid for by hard corporate labor, long hours, and lots of travel—air travel.
A single New York-L.A. round trip contributes about as much to global warming
as a year’s worth of driving a moderately new car. A weekender doing two
round-trip flights a week makes Kurt, Jr. look like a Sierra Club eco-hippie. <br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The sun is setting on the hayfield, turning the snow shades
of pink and red. The hawk is perched in the top of the ash tree that will soon
be dead from the devastations of the Emerald Ash Borer, a virulent parasite
brought to the U.S. from Asia by international trade in the ‘90s. The creek is rising
as the snow melts up in the Catskills and by tomorrow it will have overflowed
its banks, depositing small icebergs within the treestand that separates Harry’s
clover field from the hayfield. The trees are already compromised; the rise and
drop of the creek so accelerated this last decade has undermined the old ones,
leaving them to topple into the water where they capture the branches and logs
and scraps of old farm structures during the spring thaw, making dams that push
the creek up over its banks. The old outhouse, once far above flood stage, has
listed to the side and will probably collapse this spring. I didn’t have time to shore it up this
year; I was too concerned with getting
culvert and French tile and working with the Bushes, Wayne and Wayne, Jr., to
dig drainage swales in the hayfield and between the house and the barn so the
dirt could hold topsoil and nutrients. All summer, all fall, the hawk watched
as we did this work. Now he has the
hayfield to himself, except for the evenings when Kurt, Jr. and the boys run the
Snowmobile caravan along the edge of the woodlot, duck onto the old timber road,
and head out into nature. </div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-7617815038692673982013-02-11T14:31:00.001-08:002013-02-13T07:03:10.529-08:00Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Loss of American Mission<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have been very busy this last couple of weeks at my new
job as an American hero. Last night, in
the midst of a desperate firefight involving violent <i>jihadists</i> attempting to take over an abandoned Soviet missile site
that was, CIA informed the <i>SEAL</i>
commander, still weaponized, I carried a wounded medic on my shoulders, fording
an icy stream while my colleagues provided cover with AR-15s and an
RPG-launcher. It was nighttime and my
night-vision goggles turned the scene an eerie pixilated monochromatic green.
Earlier, I had been heli-dropped into a Middle Eastern desert city—I was just a
soldier: they didn’t tell me what city,
or even what country it was, just that we were going in after some <i>bad guys</i>. With my radio picking up the chatter of my
fellow grunts, I went house-to-house trying not to engage innocent civilians,
though it seemed there weren’t any—even the young women hid machine pistols
under their flowing robes. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting
occurred a few weeks ago, there was a brief silence from the shill-organization
for the major weapons industry. Most
Americans have heard, though far fewer believe it, that the National Rifle
Association is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the major American arms
manufacturers. That interruption in
shrill declarations of a constitutional apocalypse soon to come from jackbooted
federal gun-confiscators was a dead give-away to the power behind the
organization. No genuine American
sodality could have remained quiet in the face of such horror; corporations,
however, are not human and so they operate under the rules of efficiency found
in algorithms and statistics about the depth and longevity of citizen response
to actionable tragedy, and unrecorded phone conversations with the congressmen
and senators they have bought and paid for. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For nearly twenty years, I directed and served as a
principal faculty member for an international institute on American culture and
life. It was a vocation I happened upon,
and it took a little time for me to realize just what was entailed. Every summer, 30 or so teachers,
teacher-trainers, university faculty members and education-ministry specialists
would arrive for six weeks of intensive training on the current state of the
study of the United States. Early on, I
and my colleagues thought it was our mission to provide high-order scholarly
briefs on new trends in scholarship here in America. What we learned was that this was not even
remotely the job that needed to be done. As my friend and fellow faculty member
Christian Messenger (great name for an Americanist!) declared, it was
“our privilege to explain America to the world.” But even that wasn’t
right. We learned that the subject, the
verb and the predicate of that statement were all laughably imprecise. <i>We</i> didn’t know America, at least not the
America that came to be the subject of the Institute. And so “explaining” was not a responsible
activity. Moreover, <i>the world</i> that sat around us in the blandly efficient classroom
wasn’t a monolith, and it certainly wasn’t going to sit still and drink in our
wisdom.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our constituency arrived, over the life of the Institute,
from almost every country on the globe.
We despaired of ever getting a Cuban, till one day Frank arrived; not only that, but his cousin ran an
excellent Cuban restaurant in Chicago, and Frank had already mapped out an
itinerary for himself with the help of the surreptitious extended network of
Cuban-Americans in the area. Was it Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan
from which tiny Yana arrived, with only a pair of high-heeled slippers (despite
our instructions to all to pack “sturdy walking and hiking shoes”) with which
she hiked the Petroglyph Trail at Mesa Verde National Monument and managed to
get herself left behind accidentally-on-purpose in a truck stop outside Gallup,
New Mexico, where she was surrounded by handsome, cowboy-booted truck drivers
with whom she demurely flirted while showing them pictures of her home country?
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There were America-loving Provencal teachers and America-hating
Egyptian school principals, and we quickly found ourselves baffled by the
Americas of both. They didn’t resemble
in any way the worlds within which we lived—and we were a pretty motley crew of
Americans: a guitar-playing country boy
with a Ph.D. from Austin, Texas, and a Peace Corps alumnus from New England via
Ethiopia, and a political scientist who’d grown up in the high-rise projects in
Chicago and was, with his wife and his mother and a few sisters, still
fostering an average of ten kids at a time.
There was a lesbian economist and a neoconservative historian and a
libertarian specialist on architecture and the city. Why the Department of
State kept funding us, year after year, seemed a strange miracle to us. We thrived under the first George H.W. Bush
administration, and we thrived in the Clinton years and we thrived under George
W. Bush and we thrived in the first Obama administration. The Great Recession finally killed us off—we couldn’t
build a program in Chicago that could compete with isolated state-college
campuses in places we didn’t even consider for our road trips. We had a good run of it. We put the documents in front of our participants-- <i>Dred Scott</i> and <i>The Declaration of Independence</i> and <i>The Plow that Broke The Plains</i> and <i>Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening </i>and <i>The Great Gatsby</i> and <i>The Statistical Atlas of the United States</i>. We took them to black gospel churches and 4th of July picnics and corporate law offices. They listened to Navajo <i>hat'aali</i> and James Brown and Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakam, whose <i>Guitars, Cadillacs and Hillbilly Music</i> was a favorite of the woman from Senegal who won our "how many languages do you speak" that year-- 1987, with a still-unmatched record of 27-- <i>not counting a few dialects here and there.</i> She was the first person to click <i>Xhosa</i> to me-- a language my daughter now speaks with some imprecision.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of my jobs as Director was to serve as the teaching
faculty member during the two-plus week tours of the U.S.A. that culminated
each program. Though there was a running
joke that a lecture by me on the subject of the changing vertical ecosystems of
the Rocky Mountain Plateau after a big Southwestern tamale lunch at a diner on
the Res was the best way to guarantee a long nap, I grew to love the work of
close observation as we passed through small towns and big cities, ranchlands
and industrial parks, weaving together the fabric that was this country to
which I had devoted my intellectual and creative life. After it was over, the alumni of those
Institutes that had developed close-knit and continuing virtual Institutes via
Facebook and websites extracted from me a promise to continue my tourbus
lectures. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That was what began this series of essays. I warned those alumni that I wasn’t going to
go political on them. That I would
remain what I had always sought to be—a quizzical observer, pointing out the
hidden significance of the details of everyday American life. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When the National Rifle Association’s shill, a man named
Wayne LaPierre, gave his stump-speech after the Newtown murders of small schoolchildren by an automatic-weapon-toting young man, I struggled to
keep my promise. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am going to skirt as close as I can to the edge; I’m going to use a deeply personal voice to
keep from seeming to throw some academic weight to what follows. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was raised in the woods and farmlands of Connecticut. My father came from Mormon rancher stock,
from the foothill communities outside of Salt Lake City. My mother’s family came from Mille Lac,
Minnesota. Every one of them owned guns,
hunted deer and turkey with them, shot snakes and coyotes when necessary. My grandfather’s World War I service revolver
was in a canvas bag in the attic of my house.
My father’s service weapon turned out to be up there too—we found it when
going through his boxes after he died. I
had a bb gun, then a pellet gun, then a .22 rifle. My Boy Scout troop master taught me to target
shoot, and I once won a turkey in a turkey shoot in North Guilford,
Connecticut. I was probably 13. The Bushes,
Wayne and Wayne Jr., hunt deer on our farm, and we get a portion of the venison
in return. We are glad to see the
overpopulation of deer, who infect the dogs and the people with Lyme Disease
and wander into the road to cause bad crashes and who die of starvation or
parasites: we are glad to see it
diminished, though not enough, by the New York State hunting season. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some years ago, a dear friend who is a bit of a gun nut took
me to a range to shoot, after an interval of two or more decades of increasing
rustiness at the task. We were shooting
at targets with pistols, and it was fun—a sport requiring precision and
strength and intense concentration and an affinity between self and machine
that’s not dissimilar to road cycling, though less demanding and less
thrilling, by my lights. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But what struck me that day, and the days after that at the
range, was that there seemed an inordinate number of fellow range-users who had
what can most charitably be called paranoid ideation. They were convinced the economic apocalypse
was upon us and only a hoard of heavy weaponry would protect them. They believed that jackbooted federal
officials were conspiring to take not just their weaponry but their houses,
their trucks, their children. They believed that crazy-haired black teen thugs
were at any moment going to drive out of the city to rape their daughters.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All of them had very specific accounts of people very close
to them who had been attacked in some way and saved from death or worse only by
brandishing or actually shooting their weapons at shadowy marauders. None of them could tell me just who it was
this had happened to. If they claimed it
had happened to them, they couldn’t tell me when, or where, and when I asked,
in what I thought was a tone that mixed curiosity and naivete, they became
increasingly agitated and threatening. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are many documented cases where this scenario either
took place, or was alleged to have taken place.
One site, gunssavelives.net has recorded over a thousand reports
involving homeowners, residents, shopkeepers, carjack victims and vigilant
citizens whose weapons killed, wounded, caused to surrender, or scared away <i>bad guys</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But the count reaches back more than a year and a half. In
19 months, across the entire U.S. guns have purportedly beaten back the <i>bad guys </i>just over a thousand times. Around fifty a month.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are two glaring problems with this statistic. There are close to 115 <i>million</i> households in the U.S. Just in sheer numbers, guns have
<i>saved</i> .00096% of households over an 18 month period. As important, the number
of households <i>saved</i> is just about 20% fewer than the number of households in
which a member was accidentally killed by a gun in the house. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s more to this.
If you read the stories in gunssavelives.net, you notice pretty quickly
that the notion of salvation by guns is pretty flexible. One homeowner shot a man whom he reported was
attempting to break into his house; he
killed him after, he reported, the man refused to leave despite repeated
warnings. But an onlooker who had
noticed the man earlier looking into parked cars and come out with a baseball
bat to scare him away decided it wasn’t an issue-- the man was talking to his
hand and yelling incoherently. The
onlooker then watched as the man approached and began banging on doors; the last one he banged on was the one with
the armed family protector on the other side. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In report after report, home
protectors provided the reports, often with no corroborating evidence. Many of the cases read disconcertingly like
that of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was talking to his
girlfriend on the cell phone inside the gated community where he was living,
and was shot in what a community-protector called self-defense. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is the issue of disproportionality: most of the cases I’ve read in a random
sampling of those on gunssavelives.net involved unarmed “home invaders”—read,
burglars, breakin-thieves, or smash-and-grabbers—shot and often killed by
multiple gunshots. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And it is the reason, I think, that Wayne Lapierre, mouthpiece of the gun industry, broke the
silence of the N.R.A. with a statement crafted entirely around the concept of “bad
guys” and “good guys.” <i>The only thing that stops a bad guy with a
gun is a good guy with a gun</i>, Lapierre declared. The disproportionality of gun use—unarmed,
nonviolent criminals or even noncriminals mistaken for criminals and shot—cannot
be allowed to stand. The moral argument
evens the score: one bad guy/one good
guy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In fact, many of the stories on gunssavelives.net concern
lone individuals heroically holding off more than one <i>bad guy</i>. This is also very
useful as arguments go. It sets the
<i>shooter</i> as the victim of disproportionality.
It defines the gun as <i>the great
equalizer</i>, as it’s often called by gun advocates. And it links often-sordid, trivial
confrontations of today within the context of America’s long mythos of the
Western. Each one of these <i>home protectors</i> carries the mantle of John
Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Gary Cooper.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wayne Lapierre’s diatribe about the Newtown shootings
focused on violent video games and movies that, he said, emboldened and incited
<i>bad guys</i> to action. I’m ready to grant that premise, on one
condition—that Wayne Lapierre concede the corollary—that the shootings of
unarmed people in the names of home-defense, that the accidental deaths and
injuries of gun-household children, that
the numerous self-inflicted injuries by incompetent or inexperienced gun users,
and the violent deaths of partners, spouses, friends and houseguests by
gunowners: all be placed at the feet of the American mythos of the Western. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let’s return to that other, brushed-aside circumstance: killings of family members by family
members. I don’t have good statistics on
this at the moment. What I do have dates
back to 1995, when just around 1,500 households saw one adult member kill
another. As far as I can tell, about ¼ of
these deaths were by firearm. I don’t
have statistics on the number of children killed by adults in their household. I don’t have statistics on the number of
forcible rapes by gun-owning family members occurred, either. Or the number of children killed by other
children in the house by a gun left there conveniently close in case of <i>home invaders</i>-- loaded and ready, in the bedside table drawer, or under the mattress or pillow, or on top of the dresser.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What <i>has</i> emerged
from my recent obsession with gun-violence data in the United States, is
this. There seem to be three broad
categories of gun owner in America. By
far the largest consists of people like me, and like my neighbors: gun owners whose guns are used for the
purposes of hunting or, in some cases, recreational shooting—from target
practice to skeet to the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Shoot. At the opposite extreme is a smaller but much
noisier group of people who see the world as a place out to get them or theirs, and who
view guns—<i>big guns</i>—as their only
recourse. This group believes itself to
comprise <i>the good guys</i>. What’s disturbing is that increasingly they are pushing those
who don't embrace their vision into that other role: <i>bad guys</i>. In their eyes, I'm a <i>bad guy</i>. I threaten them. I need to be protected against. Maybe, soon, I and mine need to be <i>taken out</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But I'm not worried. After all, there is my own recent change of identity, from <i>bad guy</i> to <i>good guy</i>. <i>I’ve</i> achieved this magical conversion by
shooting down dangerous foreigners, murderous children (Arabs, so it’s ok),
bomb-wielding women (Muslim), and, most recently (in <i>Call of Duty: Black Ops</i>) buffoonishly incompetent African Negro rebels
and marauders whose faces seem drawn from <i>Amos
and Andy</i> as much as from <i>Muammar Gaddafi</i>
or <i>Idi Amin Dada. </i>Playing those games, I appear to be embracing their strange, paranoid vision, in which Americans are always <i>good guys</i> and everyone else... well...<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do not see in these digital <i>bad guy</i> faces any resemblance to my friends
the world over—to Assam, to Yana, or Hiram, or Mohammed or Mamadou—men and women who
teach small children and sullen teenagers and overly-materialistic university
students and overly-obtuse graduate students, men and women who look at America
as a place of failing promise, and who worry about us. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Consider that, Wayne Lapierre. All over the world, good-hearted people who
love this nation and its heritage and promise are worrying about us. They aren’t worried that we’re not fighting
enough wars, or that our drones aren’t killing enough <i>bad guys</i> or that we aren’t going to enter a small, insecure nation
and attempt to eradicate its questionable nuclear capability, or threaten and
bully another much like it until it starves its people to death and decides to
nuke Japan. They aren't worried that we're losing our masculinity as a nation. They don't think that, without our rocket propelled grenades in their nation's capital all will fail.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They're worried we've lost our way. They are worried that
we’re caricaturing our own Constitution and trivializing its humanity-uplifting
propositions while celebrating its long-outmoded trivial features. They’re
worried that American toleration of rage and intolerance and paranoia inside our border is undercutting the very doctrine of skeptical tolerance at the heart of the American Experiment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They're worried that it's not just a small marginal minority that has abandoned evidence-based thinking or critical thinking in the name of
bizarre, Judeo-Christian-seeming <i>jihadist</i>
fundamentalisms, whether in Kiryas Joel, New York or Waco, Texas. They fear our increasingly paranoid behavior at home and abroad has already destroyed our ability to set an example in the
world for fairness, kindness, generosity, hope, opportunity, tolerance and
welcome. They worry we have lost our way and they wonder how any other nation
or civilization can take our place. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>For we must consider
that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon us.
So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have
undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be
made a story and a by-word through the world… We shall shame the faces of many
of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon
us till be be consumed out of the good land…<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Therefore let us
choose life<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>That we and our seed
may live…</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
John Winthrop, aboard the Massachusetts Bay Colony ship <i>Arbella</i>, on the way to America, 1630<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-18389788710914594442013-02-08T13:31:00.003-08:002013-02-10T08:31:41.498-08:00Shells: The Old and Empty Houses<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<h2 style="text-align: left;">
</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Old Man is sitting on the white couch in the Little
House we built off the back of the Old House.
He has a fleece-and-down throw wrapped around him and on top of that
there’s an electric blanket. The heat is set about six degrees higher than we
have set it before. He is watching the
Fox Business Channel and drinking Diet Cranberry juice. He is 88 years old and
he has come to live with us. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This isn’t news these days in America. A string of trends has been woven together.
The children born after World War II, the so-called Baby Boomers, are in their
top earning years, and there are many of them.
Many of them, perhaps most, are
in the middle class, owning houses that are larger than they need, now that
their children have left for college or careers. Those houses aren’t worth what
they were six years ago, and in many cases, they’re valued at less than the
combined debt on them. For many of this
group, that’s not so important—they have stable jobs for the moment, and their
houses have a patina of memories and associations they aren’t eager to give
up. But they also know there will come a
time soon enough when they will want to move to warmer climates or into more
hospitable surroundings. They are an
in-between generation, adjusting to a bustling family life that left the house
echoing and empty when it left. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the same time, their parents’ generation is entering the
final years of life. They are in their
80s, or 90s. Their own houses are
impossible for them—they have stairs that can’t be maneuvered, bathrooms too
small for wheelchair or walker, yards that have to be maintained, and the
terrible surprises of older suburban houses—furnaces that give out, roofs that
start to leak, air conditioners that fail or are inadequate. Their houses are
mostly paid off, if the housing statistics are accurate, but the equity in
them, meant to support them in graduated or assisted living facilities during
those last years, has evaporated. They
need a place to live, contact and stimulation.
They are afraid, even if they won’t admit it: afraid of falling in the shower; afraid of
running out of money or food; afraid of dying in pain, alone. They are also afraid of being burdensome, of
giving up their independence, of ending up like furniture, shuffling between an
antiseptic room with its too-glossy paint and its too-cheerful wall decorations
hiding the grimy corners, and a chair in a “day-room” with others too immersed
in their sorrow to speak. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Houses, too, grow forlorn when they are not tended to, when
they are left behind.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is a particular type of empty house that you might not
notice if you weren’t hipped to the subtle signs. In the sweeps of postwar suburbia you might
see them dotting most blocks—one or two.
But they tend to blend in with the others. Out in the countryside, though, they stand
out boldly, particularly if you pass them regularly. They are of a certain age—built, that is, in
the decade after 1948. They are
relatively modest. They are often made
of brick; if they are traditional wood-frame, they’ve been sided with vinyl or
aluminum, and there are often awnings over the windows and odd little
porchettes added to the front door area. There may be concrete patios in the
front or rear, and in some cases tidy, smaller swimming pools in the back. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s the place where you’d most clearly recognize the
house has been abandoned. Swimming pools
need to be drained and then covered if they’re out of season or out of
use. The covers aren’t usually particularly
hardy. After a season, they fill with
leaves and water. When the warm weather
comes, they disintegrate, or the loam on top hardens and the cover cracks and
breaks. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are other signs, subtler, but more easily seen from
the street if you’re attentive. Gutters fill. Window shades have a bleached-out
look, and if you go by the house regularly, you notice that they’ve not
moved. Weeds grow in the cracks in the
driveway.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Usually the lawn gets mowed, though not as regularly or
immaculately as it once was. And the
car, if it’s outside, doesn’t ever move. Or there isn’t a car there. The paper
delivery box overflows with old newspapers or it’s stuffed with circulars and
solicitations. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Those are the houses of the abandoned generation. When the <i>laissez-faire</i>
push to replace traditional retirement plans with self-managed 401-K plans came
in, that generation was already in its 60s, 70s or even 80s. The daytime tv
stations overflowed with reassuring promises from financial advisors and stock
brokers. When the next burst of <i>laissez-faire</i> enthusiasm came through,
this was the generation faced with a blizzard of Medicare option plans. Another blizzard of ads and plan prospectuses
overflowed the mailboxes. When the
George W. Bush administration gave full free rein to financial institutions in
the name of the “virtuous efficiency of
the free market” these were people whose retirement funds evaporated by half or
more, just as their health declined and their needs increased. Their houses dropped in value and the class
of Americans who might have been on the market, ready to take a modest, older,
slightly out-of-style home at the right price—those people seem to have been
swept away. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So the old ones were trapped in their houses, houses that
couldn’t adapt to their diminishing powers, houses they couldn’t afford to
adapt. An electric stair-climber costs
thousands. Retrofitting a bathroom so the old tub-shower combination is
replaced by a zero-clearance wheelchair accessible or walker accessible
sit-down shower costs many more thousands. Kitchens need to be reorganized with
the material for cooking right at hand, not up in a high pantry or down on
lower shelves. And regular maintenance
work that they’d prided themselves on doing was now impossible, and it wasn’t a
matter of hiring a neighbor boy or girl to mow the lawn or clean out the
gutters. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps they fell.
Perhaps someone came to the door and saw they were dressed in clothes
that needed washing. Perhaps even their pride wasn’t enough to hide the
struggles from their children and grandchildren.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so someone came and took them home. The empty bedroom on the second floor became
the new family room, and the family room on the first floor became the old
one’s place. There was a certain awkwardness all around. It’s hard to express gratitude to those
who’ve moved you out of a place you built, and one that built you, to find yourself
in a small, awkward room with a strange bathroom down the hall, and kitchen
privileges if you’re lucky and your hosts decide you can be trusted. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We were luckier. We
had seen things coming, and when contractors were desperate for work and
interest rates low, we worked with a dear friend to design a place that looked
like some farmer’s add-on, but inside was subtly adapted to the rhythms and
requirements of the old. We would need it someday ourselves. It wasn’t a decision difficult to make.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And now the Old Man
sits in the chair that was my father’s once, the one he sat in, too, as he
watched his 80s pass and his 90s approach, and waited for me, or Su, or Mart, to come. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And now the dusky light outlines the houses that can’t be
sold and can’t be lived in by those whose love affair with America and its
promises seems about to end in betrayal and loss: they sit, still furnished, the
heat still on, though turned as low as you dare—52, or 48—a few lights on
timers, lighting rooms unoccupied. Walking past them with the dog, or riding
past on a summer bike or driving by on the way to the market or the bank, you
might chance upon the moment when the kitchen light turns on, and then the
bedroom light, as if ghosts still lived there, ghosts whose lives were so
caught up in these places that they left the living bodies of the old ones, and
stayed behind, where the epithelia of their lives still clung to the walls and
the furniture.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sometimes, on bad days, it seems that way to me. It seems the Old Man eating his cereal or
watching the business channel with the sound too low for him to hear it, out of
deference to me and my habits, left the strongest part of himself back at the
old house, the one I go to now and again, to change the lights, to mow the
lawn, to empty the mailbox of circulars. On the good days, the brilliant light
that comes across the hayfield has a strange and novel beauty that startles him;
last week he awoke in the night to see the full moon huge beside the barn,
lighting up the clothes-tree where his robe hung, and putting a silvery glimmer
to the oxygen tank in its black-wheeled cart. He is grateful to be cared for
though it is something he would never have considered dignified or honorable
before. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am glad he’s here. He is going to teach me the secrets of
penny-stock fraud, and the scams of gold investing, and he knows the names of all
the actors and actresses who ever played in the movies, and every detail of
their careers. He has read every Larry
McMurtry novel twice or three times. He
looks forward to the night when his daughter comes back from the city to live,
however briefly, with us, her weeknight bachelors. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I was small, my grandmother came from Mille Lac Minnesota
to live with us. She taught me how to
make a pie crust and how to cheat at rummy. My children are grown, living far
away, but they look forward to their times with the Old Man. They see in his long life not the past but
history itself. And in their interest,
their sense of his momentousness, he swells a bit, surprised that what was to
him the inevitable rhythm of life is to them a key to understanding what was
never theirs. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-37901535160282445432013-02-05T06:49:00.001-08:002013-02-05T06:49:21.666-08:00Looking at America: On the Realities of the Games I: 9/11 and TheSim...<a href="http://peterbhales.blogspot.com/2013/02/on-realities-of-games-i-911-and-thesims.html?spref=bl">Looking at America: <br />
On the Realities of the Games I: 9/11 and TheSim...</a>: On the Realities of the Games I: 9/11 and The Sims There’s a swelling controversy around the virtual world and the way it infects and ...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-35455948695924648582013-02-04T14:09:00.002-08:002014-01-10T15:30:46.383-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<b><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">On the Realities of the Games I: 9/11 and <i>The
Sims</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">There’s
a swelling controversy around the virtual world and the way it infects and
poisons America’s youth. Most recently,
the National Rifle Association has sought to deflect the revulsion with weapons
designed for murderous warfare and readily available, often without even a
background check, to any adult. A young
man killed a schoolroom full of small children with such a weapon, in a town
not unlike the one I grew up in or the one I live in now, and the NRA would
like us to believe it’s because that young man lost his moral compass and
became addicted to violence by playing games like <i>Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare</i>, or <i>Grand Theft Auto</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">This
isn’t a new proposal. It reaches back to
the first mass-disseminated American mass shooting, at Columbine High School in
Colorado in 1999. Before that, various
killing sprees had been blamed on impressionable youths exposed to mass culture
excesses— rock and roll music, comic books, trash fiction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">But
it’s hard to resist a certain moral revulsion if you’re first introduced to
video games by watching a 12-year-old boy racing through the streets of a
Middle Eastern city shooting at civilians and watching the bodies flung
backward against the stucco walls, their red blood splayed across the whitewash
as they slide into the garbage-strewn street. It’s even more tempting after
reading what is perhaps the most interesting video-game memoir out there, Tom
Bissell’s 2010 <i>Extra Lives.</i> In that
book, Bissell chronicles in graphic detail his multiple addictions, culminating
with a coke-addled marathon of <i>Grand
Theft Auto IV</i> while in the midst of a gambling binge in Las Vegas. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Bissell’s
confessional follows a common trajectory:
he sinks to excess, finds help, renounces his addictions while
confessing his weakness, his sinful nature, and the many homely virtues he has
thrown aside, and then is redeemed, granted another chance to live the
archetypal American life, pursuing happiness:
a nuclear family, a suburban home, a stable job. We are left with an
implicit corollary: had he not been
Saved, Bissell would have fallen deeper and deeper into the amoral morass of
the decaying urban world in which murder, theft, prostitution, seduction,
robbery and rape are the means to satisfy the virulent desires unleashed by
immersion in the virtual world of <i>GTW</i>.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Personally,
I’ve played <i>GTW IV</i>. I’ve played it a <i>lot</i>. And I don’t buy it. I’ve
also hunted, shot pistols and rifles and shotguns, actual ones, and I don’t
find any seamless connection between the virtual world and the real. <i>GTW IV</i> is an engrossing collection of
puzzles—some related to recognizing plot, some to character, some to mastering
specific motor skills, and a great deal to solving elaborate spatial, logical
and temporal puzzles. Bissell’s narrative is a lot of fun to read. But it’s not the sort of story upon which to
hang national policy concerning the ready availability of assault weapons. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">I
don’t find <i>GTW IV</i> to be the
appropriate objective correlative for contemporary American life—at least in
the digital world. For that, I turn to <i>The Sims.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">I
will confess to an addiction to the virtual world of <i>The Sims</i>. I have certainly played it as many hours as had Bissell
his versions of <i>GTA</i>. But my experience is dramatically different
than was his. He experienced <i>GTA</i> as a fantasy escape from the
restrictions of middle-class life at the end of history. I was addicted to <i>The Sims</i> for its replication of that restricted world, and for the
ways it stimulated and directed the same synapse-connections as had my daily
life when I lived in the suburbs. But
just as my real life in that real world had been insistently and caustically
commented upon by my cultural historian’s observing ego, so also the gameplay
with which I reclaimed that experience was one marked by an almost schizoid
self-observation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">In
my case, daily play followed a certain rhythm.
In the morning, I’d start the game with anticipation, pleasure,
hope. I’d be delighted by the sounds (my
daughter Molly and I used to speak <i>simlish</i>
to each other), by the things to manipulate; I’d look forward to earning a
cache of <i>simoleons</i> to spend on
something new. After a couple of hours,
though, I’d get impatient, moving the gamespeed up to get to the next goal;
fastforwarding my sims’ reading so they’d raise their cooking skill and learn a
new recipe, or grunting with annoyance when a visitor came calling,
interrupting the necessary task with another necessary task—sacrificing
funbuilding tv watching for friendship-building interactions with the neighbors
at the door. After another hour or so, I’d be in a state of tense frustration,
yearning to turn off the game, to escape its demands, but unable to leave
things as they were. Then, finally,
frustration would win out and I would exit.
I’d look up from the computer screen at a sunstruck writing space
cluttered with open books, legal pads, outlines pinned to the wall, guitars in
the corner, cats on the rug, and it would all look a bit grey, washed-out. I couldn’t easily move from the game’s
colors, rhythms, and rules, to those outside of it, without feeling
simultaneously like it was a diminishment of sorts, and a return to a messily
unpredictable and complicated life, without clear goals. I yearned for the very thing I’d just
left: a virtual world as orderly as a
domestic sitcom from the ‘50s, in which, as here, all frustrations were small
ones, unmarked by fear of global holocaust or individual injury, decline and
death. My sims died; I didn’t. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">But
to return was also untenable; that world, that simland, was too frustratingly
limited. Its rules were too rigid, its
demands on my autonomy too great. It was disturbingly like a critique of
everyday American life, without the satisfactions of protest or the possibility
of transformation. But wait. Even the drug
of virtual agency quickly wore off. This
was a god-game: I should have
omnipotence, and omniscience, but I had neither. I could look down at the scenario, but from
only a small number of camera angles. I
could observe action, but only within the narrow confines of this home, and
this suburban lot. I couldn’t go next
door or see the workplace, or escape into a wider world. I was trapped. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">The Sims</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"> was released on January 31, 2000, at
the end of a short era of American peace and prosperity, when it seemed the
utopianism of the counterculture had found common cause with a technocracy
liberated from militarism and now looking for new missions. But Americans do not abandon the old myths
and symbols that easily. Where were the
cowboys and wild ones, where was the frontier, where was the promise of
personal mobility in this technocratically engineered program of steady, if
slightly boring, material progress?
Fukuyama said it well, when he confessed to “a powerful nostalgia” for a
more outsized drama, with Americans its most interesting heroes.</span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">In
the same month that George W. Bush took the Republican nomination for President
(declaring “In Midland, Texas, where I grew up, the town motto was, ''The sky's
the limit,'' and we believed it; there was a restless energy, a basic
conviction that with hard work, anybody could succeed and everybody deserved a
chance…”) Wright’s Maxis Software released <i>Livin’
Large,</i> the first of a string of “expansion packs” that added more
consumables and expanded the abilities of sims to act out in more extreme
ways—notably, to remake themselves—sim-ing their simness. Its success might, in
retrospect, be seen as a predictor of the way the election would go. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"> In January of 2001, George W. Bush gave his
first inaugural address, articulating with eloquence the backward-looking,
forward-driving America his campaign had come to exemplify:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: .9in; margin-right: .9in; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"> We
have a place, all of us, in a long story—a story we continue, but whose end we
will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator
of the old, a story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of
freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not
possess, to defend but not to conquer. It is the American story—a
story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and
enduring ideals. The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding
American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that
no insignificant person was ever born. Americans are called to
enact this promise in our lives and in our laws. And though our nation has
sometimes halted, and sometimes delayed, we must follow no other
course. Through much of the last century, America’s faith in freedom
and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wi<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3179491918879793407" name="9">nd, taking root in many nations</a>. Our democratic faith is
more than the creed of our country; it is the inborn hope of our humanity, an
ideal we carry but do not own, a trust we bear and pass along.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Two
months after the inauguration, a second <i>Sims
</i>expansion pack appeared—<i>House Party</i>,
which combined two emerging trends in the new American economy:
ever-more-conspicuous public consumption and display, and a
Bush-administration-fueled campaign to expand home ownership. As the ironic term <i>McMansion</i> came to be coined to describe outsized private homes with
triple or quadruple stall garages and cavernous “family rooms,” bought with
easy credit and the promise of infinitely rising property values and stuffed
with ever-more-elaborate consumables, <i>The
Sims: House Party</i> offered the
opportunity to create outsize entertainment rooms with giant televisions and
stereos, elaborate wet-bars, swimming pools, and all the accoutrements
simultaneously being built in the physical landscape of the American
exurb. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Then
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 turned the Bush-era swagger and its
Cold-War-era rhetoric of American moral superiority and global mission in a
darker and more paranoid direction. While
the number of Americans killed, 2,819, was the largest military loss on
American soil since the Civil War, it was a tiny fraction of the number of
American soldiers killed in Vietnam. It was 1/16 the number of Vietnamese
children estimated born deformed as a result of U.S. use of Agent Orange. Six years earlier, the Srebrenica massacres
by Serbs of Bosnians had killed 8,000 civilians. Death statistics for 2001 in
the U.S.: 42,000 highway deaths; 20,000 flu deaths; more than 15,000 murders.
One violent coup in any other part of the globe, one natural disaster in an
unprepared region reaped tenfold the number of innocents killed in 9/11.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">The
intensity of national response to the terrorist bombings of the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon in 2001 was far out of proportion, then, to the simple
numbers. It is more easily understood as
a complicated reaction to a larger sense of threat and injury that was
triggered by the attacks, a sense of wounded virtue at the violation of the
myth of national immunity. American
exceptionalism-- its moral gift and its geographical isolation—were to have
protected America from attacks both military and ideological. We had fought, and won, the Cold War not just
with military technology and investment, but with the moral superiority of our
political, social and economic systems, and we believed that our national
behavior in the drama on the world’s stage had convinced the globe of our
earnestness, our virtue, and our superiority as a cultural system and a
historical entity. We were poised on the
edge of a global revolution that would bring the combined powers of liberal
democracy and free-market capitalism to every corner of the world. Our
technologies had conquered the globe. Yet the fragility of our belief in
ourselves and our mission manifested itself in the force and turbulence of our
response to the terrorist attacks on that day. Over the following months and
years, we would be drawn back to an older, more paranoid Americanism, and we
would force the world to fit the mold of our older, more paranoid
Manicheeism: for or against us, friend
or foe, wounded but implacable force for good, or dark, demonic force for evil.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">The
frenzy of paranoid responses in the months after the attacks rekindled and
replicated Cold War responses of decades before.<a href="file:///C:/Users/pbhales/Documents/blogs/On%20the%20Realities%20of%20the%20Games%20I.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[i]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></sup></a> But there were differences. The Cold War’s sense of siege had been based
upon a threat of genuine national and global immensity: atomic holocaust, whether willfully or
accidentally ignited, that would eradicate the virtuous and the unvirtuous
alike. After 9/11 no evidence surfaced
of a similarly massive destructive force arrayed against us. The American rhetorical response to 2001’s
attacks bore little or no relation to the scale of the threat. Yes, there were tepid and sporadic discussions
of the potential for nuclear terrorism and “dirty bombs” on American soil, but
the vast preponderance of political speeches, journalistic essays, and common
talk, focused obsessively on further attacks on American symbols: hence the massive barriers around the White
House and the US Capitol, the surveillance at the Statue of Liberty and the
Liberty Bell. Most broadly, it was the
American sense of safe invulnerability that came under attack, and it was that
feature of the attack that succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of the
perpetrators of 9/11. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Within
a year of the 9/11 attacks, <i>The Sims</i>
had become the best-selling video game in history. This might seem unlikely,
given the increasingly frustrating and limiting nature of the gameplay, as the
novelty of its features wore off. Of course the cure for that was
quintessentially consumerist—buy an expansion pack that allowed you more ways
to shop, different raw materials with which to design and build your house, or
even (in the case of <i>Apartment Life</i>)
to live in something resembling an urban environment. What the expansion packs
amplified was the capacity of the game to serve as a huddling-place, a retreat
from a hostile world threatened by—already punctured by—unexpected, terrifying
forces, largely invisible but utterly venomous. This was a picture of the world
and America’s place in it that was trumpeted by the voices of the Bush administration,
particularly as the grotesque misstep of the Iraq invasion became clear. Even
opponents of the Bush propaganda found themselves exhausted by the virulence of
rhetoric and the shrill repetitive chant of the campaign. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Retreat
to <i>The Sims </i>represented a significant
trend in American cultural life. By
2008, the franchise had sold 100 million copies, almost exactly the number of actual
American households that year. At least
once a day, we can estimate, some member of every computer- or videoconsole-owning
American household was returning to the quiet, restrictive, orderliness of a
world modeled on the idealized postwar American utopia: the single-family home,
presided over by adults who disappeared periodically into workplaces invisible
and inconsequential to the <i>real</i> life
except for the wages their work brought—wages that enabled purchase of consumer
goods, and thereby drove the stream of their continuous production.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">The Sims</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"> franchise replicated middle-class
suburban life, with all its restrictions and anxieties, its sense of eternal
yearning, desire, and discontent. But it
also eliminated from that sphere the full-on darkness that lay at the edges of
the real American middle-class household, first in the Cold War, and then in
the so-called War on Terror: the threat
of undeserved, random injury or death, the eradication of the world, or at
least of <i>your</i> world, which, in the
solipsism of the post-9/11 American mind, <i>was</i>
the end that mattered. In the confines of its bright, stylized, virtual landscape,
we could reclaim, again and again, the promise of American progress, American
prosperity, American exceptionalism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">These
days, I’m over The Sims. The many
add-on packs, from Pets to World Adventures have sought to inveigle me, and
those like me, who have played so passionately, seem obvious, cheap,
diminished. Instead, I have moved to <i>Fallout 3</i> and its quasi-successor, <i>Fallout:
New Vegas</i>. Here the radical
flatness and infinite or near-infinite geography of the gameplay mirror GTA IV,
with a mordant satiric edge. There’s a certain satisfaction in seeing
Washington, DC in ruins; even more satisfying is to hear the unctuous
patriotism of the nation’s self-declared “President” on the virtual radio. The game is rife with post-apocalyptic jokes,
references, and scenes. On every front,
technology has failed—bioterrorism and genetic engineering, “survivability”
initiatives, robotic nuclear-cleanup machines:
all have turned out to render more harmful the already-toxic wasteland
that is the consequence of technological utopianism combined with political
grandiosity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 12.0pt;">
<i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;">Fallout 3</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"> takes on the caricatures of American
political mission; <i>New Vegas</i> does the same for laissez-faire capitalism, which has set
up shop in the ruins of Nevada’s gambling cities. In both cases, the pleasure
lies in a strange slippage between the horrors that surround you as you play,
and the sardonic intelligence that lies behind and weaves through the game
itself. Bracing satires on the grandiosities of the era of American superiority,
these games render politics in the real world all the more surreal, and they
make it bearable, for a couple of hours, a long, intense weekend, till even
this begins to seem snide, and you click the Quit key without saving, exhausted
with moral exhaustion turned to play. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div>
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<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/pbhales/Documents/blogs/On%20the%20Realities%20of%20the%20Games%20I.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” <i>Harper’s</i>, November, 1964, pp. 77-86.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-75015546059873361082012-10-10T07:49:00.002-07:002012-10-10T08:15:11.033-07:00 Stormy Weather<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
The report on Thursday showed rain through Saturday, as the
cold front continued to move in from the Midwest, slow but steady.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By Sunday, it was due to be colder, much
colder, with crystal clear skies through the week. The leaves would be at peak,
and the leaf-peepers would be up from the city, crowding the roads as they
headed from craft sale to self-picking apple orchard to pumpkin stand. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On Friday, the Bushes, Wayne and Wayne, Jr., came by to pick
up the Komatsu excavator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wayne Senior
was edgy; he’d been waking up nights impatient for the rains to stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I got
jobs waiting; not just yours, and I cain’t just sit around watching tv and
waiting for something to change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We got
some stumps to pull out on that new house up top the hill—we can do that in the
rain. </i>Later that day, as it cleared off a bit, Ed came with the new propane
tank that the Bushes were going to bury.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After he hooked it and swung it down from the truck and laid it by the
Porta-Potty, we walked around a bit so he could recollect where we’d run the
small propane line to the kitchen wall furnace a few years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We didn’t find it, but the line seemed secure
and gas was going to the unit, even if it wouldn’t light. The new one was on
order and he was planning to come in on Wednesday while the Bushes were burying
the tank and cutting the trench for the new line to the little house we were
putting up off the back of the old house. He was planning to do the install and
the hookup and the inspection all that one day so as not to have to twiddle his
thumbs while the Bushes poured the sand and the rough stone. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Charles came over late that afternoon to talk about bringing
in the herd to graze off the hayfield. It’s the last circuit of the year; they
start here, and then cross the creek to Harry’s clover field, then work
counterclockwise from meadow to meadow, as Charles and Francesca move the
electric fencing along with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Land
around here is way too expensive to make a go of a small herd; Charles
sharecrops the cattle with seven or eight of us, moving his cattle around the
hay-cutting schedules that differ from field to field depending on the
fertility of the soil and the rainfall. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mike and Clint looked at that extended weather report as
well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mike said on Monday they’d start
ripping off the old roof on the main house and get it decked so JC could bring
his standing-seam crew in from Connecticut to do the whole roof-and-gutter job
on the next dry spell. As of Sunday, there was a 10% chance of precipitation
for five days out, pictures of sun with a cloud in front of it on weather.com
and Accuweather both. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This morning I woke up to a steady rain, not too hard, not
drenching, but enough to worry its way under the roofdeck and the tarps and
drip down inside the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone was
off the roof except for Eric, who was looking for the spots where it came in,
so as to save the insulation. The electric fence was on, but the cattle weren’t
coming today. The Bushes weren’t going to do the propane tank and trench or dig
the new graveled ditch to direct the spring floods from the ridge down to the
creek.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ed didn’t even bother to come by
or call to say the hookup was off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mike
came in to the kitchen to check to make sure Eric had caught the leak.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Last night, Harm left a message while I was out in the last
light splitting firewood and watching Charles and Francesca lay the
fencing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I expect he was worried about
his hay-rights again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We don’t get
anything out of the haying, and each cutting takes another percentage of the
fertility of that soil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s right to be
worried.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are looking for a better
plan, pricing manure and talking to Paul up the ridge about having him plow the
full 18 acres of hayfield under so we can plant a nutrient-restoring rotation for
a couple of years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This isn’t great soil
to begin with—it’s clay-based, and it needs the composting of green that
withers to brown around this time of the year. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Out in the field where he was surveying to set the electric
fence, Charles talked to me about survival when you don’t have tourists or
weekenders or contracting or landscaping jobs to sustain the year-round
population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Around here, the builders
have split in two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few of the small
crews have gone upscale—people like Will Wallace do trendy work for the ones
who will always be rich no matter what the economy: geothermal heating units,
three-acre duckponds surrounded by artfully arranged plantings that include
full-size trees trucked in for $5,000 a tree and fed by drip-irrigation from
the pond using solar-powered pumps. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The bigger crews are pretty much gone, now, bankrupt or
shrunk to subsistence, to a couple of men with older pickup trucks and the
woodworking equipment relocated to the basement of the house, the big compound
with its hardwood kiln-dryer and cabinet shop and fixture showroom and sales
office abandoned, the keys given back to the bank. Mike’s crew here is small.
Dan was a children’s book illustrator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ethan is a kid, an apprentice who does the pickup and carries for Mike,
setting up the scaffolds and working the compressor. Eric shows up in his van
at 7 every day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a few years old,
and it still has the signage from when he worked for himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eric
Rose Contracting</i>, it says. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roofing
Siding Painting Flooring</i>. Like a lot of the guys who were doing ok before
the bust, he keeps the company name, though he’s working for Mike now. Mike
himself is 64; some days it’s just him on the job, because Clint has another
job somewhere and it’s smarter to pull the crew for a few days than lose the
work. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Charles has heard me talk about my son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Taylor is something close to a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">freegan</i>, a class of people, mostly
young, who have rejected the economic system and vowed to live outside its
cash-and-credit market.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freegans live by
barter and by exploiting the wastefulness of the dominant economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They don’t live on the land like the commune
people of the old counterculture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re
urban, and usually well-educated. They majored in music, and literature, and
philosophy, but also political science and economics and sociology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of moving into advertising, or video
game orchestration or consumer-desire polling, they went to Americorps or Teach
For America, where they were thrust into the bowels of American failure—places the
comfortable and the conservative—their parents, often—can’t even admit
exist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the West Side of Chicago where
he ran the computer lab for a middle school that had consistently failed the No
Child Left Behind criteria, Taylor heard from the kids that he was the first
white man they’d ever talked to who wasn’t a cop or a social worker. On
standardized testing day in the spring, the teachers at schools like that one
look out at a classroom in which perhaps a quarter or a third of the students
started the year there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re being
judged on the performance of pupils few of whom they’ve taught for more than a
month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kids have cycled in and out
of sometimes three schools in a year, as their families moved, or were evicted
from place after place, or as they themselves were passed from relative to
relative, foster home to foster home. It’s hard to be immersed in that world
for even a few months and keep believing in a brighter, shinier America where
freedoms are extolled and the heavy arm of government regulation is loosened so
a new crop of bright and shiny entrepreneurs can lift the economy to new
heights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Working at Americorps, Taylor started rooming with a group
of musicians and computer hackers in a drug-dealer’s block at the edge of
Humboldt Park, where rent was cheap and the three-flat was surrounded by vacant
lots from burnouts dating back to the riots of the ‘60s and ‘70s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dave, and Aaron, and Taylor and the others had given the dining room over to rows of humming servers-- Macs and HP and Lenovo machines that ran day and night. They were tied into a global network of
open-source software programmers who were building apps that could run on
crank-powered laptops linked to the internet via cellphone networks in places
like Malawi and Somalia, Laos and Mongolia. Everybody did overflow-work to get by,
living on the froth that cascades down the outside of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the craft-brewery glass poured for a financial
analyst whose Audi is parked outside the tastefully rustic or factory-themed
restaurant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I was thinking about
your son</i>, Charles said, as the last light was dying in the hayfield and the
fences were set, their neon-blue cabling glowing over the green and brown
grasses. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You know, before I ran cattle,
everyone I knew was a refugee from the city</i>. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The locals around here—they’re the ones I spend my time with now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’re used to living on the edge. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’ve been living on the edge around here
for generations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Schoonmaker’s down
209—you know them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’ve been here
since 1650, and it’s never been safe. The locals—they worry about the weekenders
and the city people; they can see that these are people who don’t know how to
get by, don’t know what to do. </i>I know what he means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m returning to skills I grew up learning—woodworking,
furniture repair, housepainting, plumbing. We’re looking for crops we can trade
off with others, the way Charles trades the organic grass-fed freerange beef—beef
whose organic grass freerange is our hayfield, and Harry’s and Paul and Sarah’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We can look for niche-crops to drive down to the locavore
slow-food restaurants that are all the trend in Brooklyn and Chelsea and the
Lower East Side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Taylor advises against
it, and Charles is on his side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
share a sense of doom, though from different angles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Charles sees the fragility of that market and
the system of faith that lies behind it. What do you do when all you’re
harvesting is thyme and rosemary and heritage tomatoes, but there’s no
banker-bonus epicure to support the restaurants that have been supporting
you?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Taylor, it’s more a matter of
ethics admixed with radical politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
believes it’s wrong to participate in a morally bankrupt system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, not exactly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s wrong to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">contribute to</i> that system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s right to participate by siphoning off its excesses to support the project
of building the tools for a different system. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the now-dark field, I stand by myself as Charles drives the muddy Toyota up Old King’s Highway, done for the night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The stars are emerging, as the weather
reports tell us they will emerge every night for days, after cloudless
afternoons loud with the rattles of activity:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the setting of the propane tank, the buzz of the jigsaw, the pop of the
pneumatic nailgun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I don’t think so.
I am looking at the cloudless, starry night and waiting for signs of the storm.</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-84635322109726082202012-06-26T10:05:00.000-07:002012-06-26T10:05:29.400-07:00Foreigners in Monument Valley<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Rebecca Solnit posted on her Facebook page a picture of
hands clenched on a steering wheel, with the formations of Monument Valley
visible beyond the rolled-up windows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve
never been through Monument Valley in a car;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>every trip has been in a Herrera Bus Company MCI luxury coach, up from
Albuquerque with 30 foreigners, and Alicia, our queen of travel and dispenser
of medications, and Karl or Maureen or Neil or, way back at the beginning, Eva,
to help me count heads, and to supervise while I shepherded someone to the
emergency room, and to sit in the back of the bus and doze with the rest of
them while I talked about the topography of the lower Rockies, the history of
mining in the Durango area, the cosmology of the Mormons, or about Navajo hogan
architecture, and water rights in the arid regions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or I’ve been on a bike, ice water in my bottle cages, extra
water in my jersey, a tiny circular mirror attached to my helmet to watch as
the Navajo water trucks lumber up behind me, their white polypropolene tanks
bulging over the sides of the back flatbed. As they’d pass me, pushing up the
grades into the stiff, hot wind, I might see the passengers looking at me
sidelong, maybe sometimes raising up their arms a bit, letting go of the chrome
outside mirror to give me the smallest semblance of a wave—men, women, or
children, in western shirts and blue jeans, acknowledging the foolhardiness of a
white man with a cyclist’s tan in black shorts and a garish team jersey, blue
and yellow, with the emblem of the Chicago Police Department on each shoulder,
grinding up US163, only a third of the way between Kayenta and Bluff, with the
sun already starting to touch the tops of the mesas.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Most of the time, though, I was leading international
education tours of the US, an American authority providing insight for the
foreigners who’d been picked to spend the summer studying American culture and
life, for the purpose of returning to write textbooks, revise curricula, teach
seminars, train other teachers, drawing on the weeks of lectures and the guided
tours, the boxes of books and articles we had guided them through (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the
Negro</i>, 1852; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sister Carrie</i>, 1900;
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">There Are No Children Here</i>, 1991…),
the encounters they’d had with Americans and with each other.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the Navajo Nation, I am a foreigner myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why deny it? When the bus turns left onto the
side road that leads to Goulding’s Lodge, the degrees of alienation
multiply.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Toyan, from Mongolia, laughing
at something her roommate has said, two rows behind me on the bus, is far
closer to native than I am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her DNA may
record her kinship to the Navajo; the contours of her face are akin to those of
the Navajo woman in a Navajo costume seated at a loom in the tricked-up hogan
that’s part of the guided tour;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>their
native tribal tongues are both derived from Athabaskan, the root language of
those Americans who crossed the Bering Strait so many millennia ago, and migrated
southward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of them stayed here,
before the Long Walk that forced the Navajo into internment camps, and returned
after that disastrous policy was traded for another equally as cruel, ignorant,
arrogant.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Navajo that live here now, the older ones, are legatees
of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Boarding School era, when they were taken from
their families, often by force, forbidden to speak their language, taught the
English language and the usual skills designed to make them good servants and
good employees when they left school at 18 or 19.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ones who speak the Navajo language, the
ones who continue to farm and herd, who migrate between summer hogans and
winter hogans:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>most of them were hidden
from the BIA officials, and they received their educations from their grandparents
and the members of their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">born to</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">born for</i> clans. They had to learn their
English later, and they did, in order to write the letters of appeal protesting
water-rights expropriation, or get their GED down in Gallup or over in St.
George, or pass the driver’s test in Arizona or Utah, getting the commercial
license after that, and perhaps the certification that legitimated them as
tourist guides outside the boundaries of the Navajo Nation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Navajo guides at Goulding’s don’t like us, any of us,
but we are tolerated for our group tickets on the Monument Valley tour, and our
tips at the end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the foreigners
try to engage the guide in conversation during the breaks when the cut-down and
converted flatbed trucks, with their rows of seats under aluminum or galvanized
canopies,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>disgorge our dusty group to
wander around in the epic scenery, taking pictures of Honeymoon Arch, or the
Thumb, drinking ice water from the cooler mounted to the back of the truck,
next to the folding stairs. Some of the guides are more taciturn than others,
but none in my years have ever been direct, or garrulous, save, perhaps, one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have set spiels, some better than
others, by which I mean, more ingratiating to white people, aliens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But even the funniest or most outgoing guides
stick to their scripts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Riita from
Finland asks the guide about his family:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>what do they do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>where do they
live?, thinking of the family structures I’d laid out in my talk on the bus—she
was awake, taking notes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is
resolutely, politely evasive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She knows
better than to push much harder than that, and leaves it be. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The names of the rock features reflect a similar resistance
veiled in accommodation to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Bilagáana</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">, the white people (some translate it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">white devils</i>), accommodating
the anthropomorphism of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bilagáanakʼehgo</i>,
the white man’s style of thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just
inside the Navajo Tribal Park, at the beginning of the circle tour you can take
with your own car, you’ll see Merrick and Mitchell Buttes, named after two
partnering prospectors, one of whom was shot by the Paiutes and, legend has it,
managed to drag himself three miles or so to the butte bearing his name, before
he died of his wounds. The Paiute had been there for many centuries; they traded
with the Navajo in an often-uneasy relationship, the differences rendered moot
when white usurpers and idolators like Mitchell and Merrick arrived, defiling
the sacred mountains looking for gold and silver. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Next up:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Mittens, articles of clothing unlikely to
have been found among either the Navajo or the Paiute, unlikely to have come to
mind when the first peoples were here, looking at the mesas and buttes that
jutted up from the desert floor. It was white people who named this place <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Monument Valley</i>;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for the Navajo, it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Place of Rocks</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further in, past Elephant Butte and John Ford’s
Point, you arrive at the pseudo-Indian names—Rain God Mesa, Spearhead Mesa, Totem
Pole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By this point, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bilagáana</i> talent for lumping all things
Indian in with all things exotic begins to take on the tenor of an imperialism
borrowed from England’s follies—Elephant Butte and Camel Butte describe
formations that look like images from tourist photographs of the 19<sup>th</sup>
century incursions into Egypt, Nubia, the Nile and, eventually, India.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Totem
Pole</i>: that’s a moniker based in some visitor’s conversance with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vanishing Tribe</i> fuzzygraphs of Edward
Curtis. It’s not some racial memory of long-abandoned ritual sculpture by an
ancient Athabaskan bloodline linking Kwakiutl Indians with the Piute and
Jicarilla and the Navajo.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">I call them <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indians</i> for many reasons, not least of
which is:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this is what they call
themselves to white people these days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Native American</i> is a term invented by
Western academics, as if to say so would erase the heritage of brutality and
self-assurance that won the West for the whites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One night, at the Best Western owned by the
Jicarilla Apache, one of the tribal officers told our group: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that term:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>just the most modern of the ways other people name us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We keep our names to ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we talk to the white man, it’s better to
use the words that sting with their disrespect for us. Indian is better that
way, don’t you think?</i> Some of the Europeans didn’t understand his meaning,
but the participants from Africa and the one from Pakistan nodded their heads and
leaned forward a bit in their chairs, giving him their renewed attention.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span>Past the fuzzy-mitten
stage, past the Hollywood Indian stage of the Monument Valley self-guided tour,
the circular route turns back, and the vacationers in their Ford Explorers and
their Chevy Tahoes lumber back up the dry dirt road to the Visitor Center,
where they can buy a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Navajo kachina</i>
at the gift shop without having to know that the Navajo have no kachinas in
their cosmogeny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a tenth the price,
they can also buy a Chinese-made kachina doll, or a dream-catcher to hang from
the rear-view mirror as they drive out to the motel in Mexican Hat, or head
toward the Grand Canyon for their next dose of superior sublimity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Navajo don’t trade in what is authentic
to them; anything in that gift shop is trade goods, the reverse equivalent of
what Wetherill or Goulding sold in their trading posts in exchange for
silverwork and turquoise when they set up shop here more than a century ago.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">If you took one of
the Navajo-sanctioned guided tours, as we always did, you went out past the end
of the self-guided loop;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the driver
stopped to switch the transmission to 4-wheel drive and activated the locking
hubs before dipping down into the sandpits and dry washes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Out there, the names
change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yei Bi Chei</i> is a formation of conjoined vertical rocks, consistent
with the collection of spirit figures for which the formation is named.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then there’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tse Biyi Yazzie</i> past that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The truck roars and lumbers, tilting alarmingly at times, and everyone
tends to fall silent at that point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
guide is guide no more; he, or she, is all driver, and the microphone is firmly
shoved into its receptacle on the dashboard of the cab that isolates her from
you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the far end of the long tour
Alicia always arranged for us, there’s a stop at Big Hogan, or Hidden Arch,
before the driver heads back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually
the tour disembarks at the Visitor Center, but for us the trucks head out of
the Tribal Park, crossing US 163 to deposit us at Goulding’s Lodge where John
Ford and John Wayne and the film crews stayed on location and, in the years
when the USIA and then the State Department released the funding early enough,
Alicia would arrange for us to stay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Covered in red dust, sunburned and exhausted, the 33 of us would tumble
out of our two tour vehicles, sternly enjoined to tip the guides before heading
in to the rooms to shower before dinner. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Once in a while,
some concatenation of circumstances would change our relations with the
guide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Toyan was with us, so also
was a woman from Kamchatka Krai, not one of the European Russians who dominate
that peninsula, but someone of decidedly Aleut lineage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Alyeska and Toyan ha</span>d hung together throughout the Institute—both
were ethnic-subculture Russians at a time when the collapse of the Soviet Union was still
a relatively new event, and they felt themselves to be eyed as exotic specimens by the participants from France,
Germany, Belgium, Italy. During one of the breaks of the tour, the guide approached them to
comment on the striking resemblance among the three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soon they were laughing; Toyan’s sense of
irony, already finely honed, found its match in the Navajo guide’s, and by the time
we headed back their informality had graciously enveloped all of us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of what little I know of the real Navajo
world began with that encounter. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">That <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was the time of the sudden storm and the flash
flood that swept down one of dry arroyos, taking with it a Lincoln Navigator,
its driver trying to grab traction as the current pushed the huge black block
parallel to the banks, quickly eroding the sandy soil on either side of the big
wheels and rendering each maneuver a little more treacherous, as the water rose
higher and the current grew stronger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A
rented subcompact with a family of German tourists burst down the bank, hit the
water, and floated down, coming to rest on the grill of the Navigator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Watching from above, waiting her opportunity,
our guide took up the microphone again, and began to narrate a play-by-play,
switching between the pompous sports anchor and the color commentator with
unerring skill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By then we were all
drenched, for we’d pushed aside the plastic drop-down walls the better to see
the comedy with cars below us, and our worry evaporated into antic laughter. </span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The two hapless tourist cars formed a momentary dam of sorts, and our guide saw her chance. In a moment we
were grinding down the embankment, and she yelled to us to hold on to anything
we could.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With a roar and a great
splash, we hit the stream, which was cold and powerful, cresting over the side
of the flatbed and sinking us nearly to our waists. Then we were coming up the
other bank, threading our way past the minivans and the rentals that were
hub-deep in the mud, burning out their transmissions in a panic of inexpertise
and lost <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hubris</i>. </span></div>
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<span>When we got to
Gouldings, we were all giddy; we emerged from the back, down the folding stairs
she had deployed for us;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she was dry,
immaculate, beautiful, her Tony Lamas hardly dusty, her red bandana with its paisley
pattern jaunty around her neck.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Toyan
and Alyeska were the last, and when they hugged her, they left wet, red-clay
imprints on her perfectly starched Western shirt, with its mother-of-pearl
snaps and cowboy pattern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They saw their
affront and begged forgiveness;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it was
nothing, our guide laughed—she was off work now and would be headed back to her
place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’d be
muddier than this by dusk, she promised, and she waved to all of us as she
roared off, just as the rain she'd raced us past struck us there, in the parking
lot at Goulding’s Lodge. </span></div>
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<span>It was hours before the second truck arrived with the rest of our group; they were silent, wet, and exhausted, while we were showered clean, still exuberant, watching the brilliant sunset behind John Wayne's old cabin, the one he'd stayed in when they filmed <i>Stagecoach.</i> Late that night, a little drunk, perhaps, we laid down in the road to watch the stars wheel above us in a silence broken only by our breathing. </span></div>
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-83113036574958670462012-06-08T11:02:00.002-07:002012-10-10T08:17:04.861-07:00Finding the Tea Party at Bulgers Hollow-Thompson Campground, Iowa<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Bulgers
Hollow-Thompson Campground, Army Corps of Engineers, NNE of Clinton, Iowa, May,
2012</b></span></div>
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We crossed the Mississippi into Clinton, Iowa, on US Highway
30. Leaving Chicago on a temperate
spring day, we’d driven a continuous sequence of memorials to Republican
presidents. I-290 is the Eisenhower
Expressway; it was on-and-off congested, in pockets interspersed with open
areas where the more reckless and the more harried raced it up to 80 and 85, hitting
the brakes hard when the next jam appeared.
The Ike runs through some tough spots—the West Side of Chicago is still
a landscape devastated by the King assassination riots; the burned-out blocks are full of junk: old
cars, some without doors, some burned out, piles of tires, the usual. What geographers
and planners call <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the housing stock</i>
is a mixture of worker bungalows and greystones; some of the greystones were
once substantial, even opulent single-family houses for the managers and owners
of the factories and businesses employing those workers. Going west, you’re traveling through
legendary bad neighborhoods, with names that resonate the way <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the South Bronx</i> does to a New
Yorker: East Garfield Park, West
Garfield Park, Lawndale, South Austin. Some
of the people are racing past you because this is their world; some of them are racing past you because they’re
terrified of some legendary catastrophe—four cars boxing them in and taking
them out; the breakdown that leaves the car stripped in minutes and the
occupants terrorized or dead. Chicago
doesn’t have a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Post</i> to
provide the detailed myths that intensify racial fear until the skin tingles
and the smell of it comes off your shirt.
It hasn’t ever needed one. The white drivers moving fast in their SUVs
navigate this angry, smashed-out ring of black rage and despair every working
day, on their way in to the air-conditioned downtown garage or out to their
near-perfect white-edge suburban cul-de-sacs.</div>
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After the Ike, there’s
I-88, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway. That intersection is about where
things change, where the racial turnover of the working-class suburbs like
Maywood (1960, 80% white; 1990, 12% white; 2000, 9.7% white) has reached its
outer limit, and the new edge cities, with their sanitized townhouse
communities and gated subdivisions and huge office campuses loom— communities
like Oakbrook, with its Butler National
Country Club, for decades home of the Western Open, Downers Grove, and
Naperville (2010: 76% white, 15% Asian).
Soon thereafter, you’re in the orderly grids of flat plains farmland—corn and
soybeans, soybeans and corn. I-88 passes
De Kalb, where much of the engineered corn hybrids were developed—the company’s
now a division of Monsanto, but you can still see the metal signs with the
bright yellow and deep green silkscreened logo on many of the cornfields on
either side of the Reagan.</div>
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When you exit at US 30, you’ve effectively moved back in
time by a half-century. US 30 is the
Lincoln Highway—another Republican president—and it was perhaps the earliest
transcontinental auto route, linking New York to California in 1913. The topography
is still relatively flat— from west of Rock Falls, this is entirely alluvial
floodplain of the Mississippi, which accounts for the original richness of the soil,
now long-replaced by mountains of chemical fertilizers, high-grade pesticides,
and complex farm machinery to enable the massive mono- or bi-crop agribusiness
that dominates the region. The farms aren’t particularly picturesque and they
don’t inspire nostalgia. They’re
dominated by grain silos, huge parking areas for the combines, the big
tractors, and the other farm equipment;
the old barns are usually long gone, replaced by prefab metal warehouse
buildings. The old farmhouses have mostly disappeared, as well—in their place, there’s a double-wide or a prefab or, if
the conversion was a bit earlier, a raised ranch or a split-level, with a bay
window aimed at the equipment yard or the road. </div>
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The Lincoln Highway crosses the Mississippi River in three
stages. First there’s a bridge over the east branch; then you’re over a string of three lush
mid-river islands—the sort that Huck and Jim hid out in, before they began
their raft-trip. Then there’s the last stretch of river. It’s a little
disappointing if you’re seeing the Mississippi for the first time, as she was—the
scale of it is broken up sufficiently that you don’t sense its power as perhaps
the most important feature of the American landscape.</div>
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I’d anticipated this.
We were traveling, after all, specifically to give her an opportunity to
see this bifurcation of the continent, this icon of the Midwest, before we moved,
permanently, back to the landscape that formed us. I was due in Dubuque that
Sunday afternoon, to talk about two paintings by American landscapist Thomas
Moran that had recently come under the museum’s purview. We could have driven straight across
Illinois, stopped at the picturesque tourist town of Galena, stayed at a
b&b, crossed over to Dubuque, and been done with it. But the Clinton crossing is just below a spot
where the river widens dramatically, a sort of aneurism in the narrower, more
winding character of the river above Cairo, where the Ohio River converges, and
where Huck and Jim had hoped to make Jim a freed slave rather than a fugitive.</div>
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Google Maps is a deceptive guide. Along the west side of the Mississippi, it
seemed there were a number of roads leading off US 67 and down to the river. As we came out of Clinton, the flatlands of
ancient Mississippi mud split on either side of the road: to the left, farms and meadows, and to the
right, dense woodlands, punctuated sometimes by croplands. At Bulger Hollow Road, I turned us to the
right, expecting a nicely paved route down to the edge of the river. Instead, we were plunging down a washboarded
dirt road, pressed on either side by trees that arched over the car and made the mood dark and even a little forbidding.
Soon the road was snaking between short bluffs, and then we reached the
bottom. There was the railroad track—the
one that used to take hoboes and itinerant musicians from Mississippi to
Minnesota, the one Robert Johnson wrote about, and Woody Guthrie, and Bob
Dylan. </div>
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Google Maps hadn’t shown a campground there—just an open
area right at the river. But the Army
Corps of Engineers had erected a small park around a boat ramp meant to
accommodate those metal boats with the outboard motors you see on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bassmasters</i> show on Saturday cable. We
pulled to the left along the road, and parked in an empty campsite. Behind us was a cinderblock privy with a corrugated
metal roof. The rest of the campground
was staked out already. Ahead of us was
a rusting-out monster truck—the type with the big tires and the high suspension—next
to a camper-trailer, the sort with pullouts on either side so that, settled onsite,
it could serve as the equivalent of a three-room shanty. There was a propane tank next to it, with a
beatup gas grille attached. There was also a small Honda emergency generator,
with a string of extension cords running from it. It wasn’t turned on. </div>
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As we opened the back doors of the Jetta wagon to let the
old dog out, a man came around the rear of the truck carrying something, and
watching us with evident suspicion. He
was moving quickly, jerkily; at moments
he seemed to be heading toward us, then he’d shift direction, ending up over by
the generator, where he bent down and then settled on his haunches, leaning on
the side of the generator, watching us, doing something with his hands. Another
man came out of the camper-trailer; well, he didn’t exactly come out—he opened
the half-screen door and put one foot down on the top step. After a moment, he said something to the
other man, but we were far enough away that I couldn’t hear what he said, or
the tone of his voice. I noticed, then,
that the tires on the camper-trailer were flat, and there was a good deal of
stuff clumsily wrapped in blue plastic tarp stored underneath it.</div>
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When we brought the dog around to the back of the car, I saw
the campsite on the other side of us; it was an RV, one of the smaller ones,
from the ‘70s—maybe a Fleetwood Jamboree or a GMC Birchaven. The paint was
faded, and there was plywood replacing one side of the split windshield. There were lawn chairs, four of them, around
the firepit, and there was what looked like a Barcalounger, one of the big
leather ones, partly covered with a plastic drop cloth. </div>
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Around the edges of the firepit, enclosing the area and
perhaps shielding it from the wind, a semicircle of yard signs: two of them
showed a coiled and hissing snake above the words <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t Tread On Me</i>, and another a stylized American flag attached to
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V</i> of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vote Freedom First</i>; above <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">www.NRAILA.org</i>. </div>
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We walked down toward the river. There were a few boats in a sheltered area
close to the banks, but between the river’s edge and the campsites, tall grasses
and weeds had grown up, interrupted by passages of mud and puddles, some of
them iridescent with the surface sheen of motor oil or gasoline. At the farm, Lyme’s Disease is commonplace—I’ve
had to take the antibiotic regimen once already—so we didn’t venture far from
the car. When we turned back, a man was
walking along the track from the far campsites, heading for the chemical
toilets. He was wearing a pair of boxer
shorts above a huge thump-hard belly tanned dark, and he was carrying a can of
Busch. As he walked, he stared at us frankly and directly; when he came past
the monster truck, he said something to the two men, and all three of them
laughed. </div>
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We got the dog back into the car; she wasn’t spooked, and
didn’t want to return to her makeshift bed in the back seat. I ended up lifting her in, and she looked at
me reprovingly as she settled in and the car began to move. We took the road
down to the end of the campground; every
site was filled, and almost all of them by encampments of people who had been
there for a while and were planning to be there a while longer. There were
Sarah Palin campaign signs, and down at the end there was a wire between trees that served as a clothes-line. It was
late afternoon, and a few people had already lit their grills. The women were dressed in Kmart sweats and
the men, mostly, in jeans and workshirts. </div>
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As we rounded the
curve toward the exit, the man with the Busch can came back out of the toilet,
and he waved at us. Up closer, he looked friendly, and he was wearing
flip-flops and his boxer shorts had Bart Simpson in a mask and cape, his
cartoon balloon read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watch It, Man</i>. </div>
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Past him, we could see the other side of that ‘70s RV as we
bumped past. Facing the entrance to the
campground, another sign, handmade, pushed into the hard ground by the empty
parking space with an oil stain in the dirt, said <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Campground Supervisor</i>. Now
we could see that this side of the RV was covered by a large American flag tied
to the roof rack, front and rear, with the sort of bright blue plastic roping you
buy at Uhaul or Budget Rental when you’re picking up the moving truck—not the 50-star
flag, but the Betsy Ross version with the circle of thirteen stars in a square
of blue. We turned to jostle over the railroad tracks, and headed back up
toward the highway.</div>
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The Bulgers Hollow-Thompson Park campground is about midway
between Clinton and Bellevue. In Bellevue, the
highway runs right along the river past Corps of Engineers Lock
and Dam Number 12. We turned left onto
the side streets, where the town is—mostly bungalows and ‘20s-era Midwestern
stuccos, many of them Sears houses.
There were some <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For Sale</i>
signs, and on those lawns, and others in front of houses evidently empty, the
grass was high. The yards weren’t
trash-filled; there wasn’t graffiti or even board-up plywood, as there is off
the Eisenhower in West Garfield Park and Lawndale back in Chicago. But you could tell. Back on 52, we passed a 10-unit condo
development on the river side, nearly completed but evidently abandoned, a
foreclosure auction sign in front of it.
The front courtyard, flanked on either side by two-car garages, was a
morass of clay mud, with puddles extending into the garages, over the concrete
pads. The views of the Mississippi from the river side were probably
magnificent; the auction sign said the project was completed in 2006. </div>
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City people don’t really understand the Tea Party
world. Mostly, it looks like relatively
well-dressed, middle-class people, the sort you see when you’re traveling in
the summer, at the RV parks and the Country Buffets. It’s hard to see what they’re so adamant
about: most of them are beneficiaries of
some government program—if they’re older, Social Security and Medicare; if
younger, the highways they drive in their SUVs to and from work, the subsidized
student loans that got them through college, the mortgage home interest
deduction. Their pleasant, middle-class demeanors don’t match the signs they’re
carrying, or the rhetoric of the professional politicians and pundits up on the
speaker’s stage. Watching them on the tv
news, you might think: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">they should be at a swap meet or a classic
car show</i>. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What have they got at
stake?</i></div>
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The people living at the Bulgers Hollow-Thompson Park
campgrounds are also the beneficiaries of the government’s largesse. The campground’s free; every couple of weeks,
the honey wagon lumbers off US 52, down that dirt road, over the tracks, to
pump out the toilets. While the pump is
going, the driver sluices out the bathrooms with disinfectant and replaces the
toilet paper. All winter, the Corps
ploughs the road, and in the spring a crew regrades the gravel and lays fill to
level the section leading up to the concrete boatlaunch pad. Somebody plants the grass, and someone mows
it, even if not all the way down to the river’s edge, as we’d hoped.</div>
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These are the new Okies.
They’re living down there because they were evicted from houses
foreclosed upon, or they simply went around to the bank and gave the loan
officer the keys before heading down here.
Before 2006, their lives were different.
They came down here to fish in their bass boats. They’d bought that monster truck, that travel
trailer, that RV back when they were making good money and it was going to
last. The C&W they listened to back
then was pretty much rock and roll with pickup trucks and telecasters and big
voices with Southern accents, praising American pride, American domination,
American resilience, hope, expectation. Those songs knit together a mythic past
with a promised future.</div>
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It was a powerful force, that music. I know:
Back then, driving back and forth across the country, I sang along in
the car, tears in my eyes, sometimes, and sometimes choking up with the power
of that communal emotion, the force of that promise. Now I hear those songs on
the country oldies station, and they are different. The emotions they wring out of me are marked by regret. </div>
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What do you do when you’ve lost it all—not just the physical
things, the house, the good car, job, bikes for the kids and vacation places,
but the myths and beliefs that gave meaning to the smallest and most mundane
details of an everyday life? What do you
do when you are living on food stamps and temp work and short hours at the
Walmart, driving a car that may or may not start up tomorrow when you have to
get to work, coming home to your uncle’s old ‘70s RV, the one he’d parked in
the back behind the grain silos when it was too much trouble and expense to fix
up, cooking on a gas grille or a two-burner propane campstove, running the
Honda generator a few hours a day to get the portable fridge cold enough to
keep the beer chilled and the food from spoiling? What myths, what beliefs, what community,
will you take to take the place of what is lost?</div>
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Looking to find a vantage point from which to take in the
great mythic expanse of the Mississippi River, we had come upon an Okie
encampment: people evicted from their
land, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ditched, stalled and stranded</i>, as
Dorothea Lange's Okie farmer coined his circumstances, and the phrase became the title of her 1935 photograph of
him. I wish that Okie’s declaration
might have found a new audience in the people down in Bulgers Hollow
Campground. But the signs down there were of a different sort. </div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t Tread On Me</i>: that’s a
manufactured slogan by a professional political organization underwritten by
billionaires, machine-printed on mass-produced yard signs and political rally
signs and banners, unfurled as part of a Republican Party campaign to retake
the Senate and the Presidency by redirecting the frustration and impotence of
Americans whose mythology has been stripped from them by adversity. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t Tread On Me</i> has another
inflection: it implores the powerful,
acknowledging weakness, subjugation. The
coiled rattlesnake beneath the words in that sign at Bulgers Hollow campground
isn’t really the threat it’s meant to be;
it’s the comforting dream of power and assurance that has long since
leaked out of lives, as the air in the tires of the camper-trailer and the Fleetwood
Jamboree. </div>
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Up past Bellevue, close to Dubuque, there’s Mines of Spain
State Park, where Catfish Creek spills into the Mississippi. I’d planned it so we’d turn off 52 and get
down to the river at dusk. But it was
cloudy and grey by then; the dog was restless and there was nothing on the
radio we particularly wanted to listen to. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All
Things Considered </i> seemed arch,
trivial; the big-conglomerate C&W
station was playing string after string of Saturday-night-bar-fight
anthems. We turned off the radio and
concentrated on the detour from 52 to US 61, the Blues Highway. I was driving with one hand, the other
reached back to rest on the dog’s soft flank.
From the passenger seat, she was doing the same, and for a moment, our
hands touched, and we wove our fingers together, resting them lightly on the
old dog, now settled back down and sleeping, each breath a sigh.</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-5808211677788993662012-01-03T15:45:00.000-08:002012-01-04T07:36:03.290-08:00Dessicated Houses, Under Water: Lake Havasu City, Arizona<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">You can tell that they’re foreclosure houses if you’re used to looking at the listings. The teaser—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you can own this house for as little as 3% down</i>—is followed by the warning: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Property is sold as is.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i> </i> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">There’s another hint: you can click the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more pictures</i> link, but there might not be any more pictures. Just the lone shot from the street up the driveway; it’s likely the photographer didn’t bother getting out of the car. These days, the banks aren’t paying much for the elements of a listing that might draw the casual shopper in. Besides, there’s probably not much to attract at closer range. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Over $140,000, though, you might see some inside pictures. That’s a good sign: it means the previous owner didn’t leave everything—plastic bags full of old toys, pilled blankets on the unmade beds, unflushed toilet, showerbath with the dandruff shampoo and the little wire soap rack still there in the corner, a lava-flow of dried soap running down the side of the tub. There aren’t dirty dishes still piled in the kitchen sink, the food crusts petrified by the desert air. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">That’s not to say the place didn’t look like that when the foreclosure finally went through and the eviction notice came with the sheriff or the bailiff or the hired process server. It means Bank of America or Wells Fargo paid one of the services that have appeared in the online yellow pages of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, services that send an estimator and then, after the bank has chosen which of the levels of cleanup it’s ready to pay for, a crew, with a pickup truck to carry off the leavings if it’s an easy one; if not, a dumpster for the fisted wallboard, the carpeting destroyed by water left on in the sinks, old socks or underwear stuffed in the drain to keep the flow slow and steady, ensuring the maximum damage. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It gets worse than that, of course—we’ve all read about the crews of scavengers who strip the house of every bit of metal, from the P-trap under the kitchen sink to the electrical wiring in the walls. With these houses so new, and Lake Havasu City so liberal in its building code during the boom years, there’s not a lot of copper piping—it’s mostly PVC. So there’s not nearly the boom business in scrap to be had here as opposed, say, to Detroit or Chicago or Cleveland, where the Sears houses from the ‘20s and the Cape Cods from the postwar years and the raised ranches and split levels from the ‘60s and early ‘70s are a trove of overbuilding. Even the porcelain sinks of the prewar places fetch a good price at the salvagers, especially if the faucets are still on them. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Cleaning the surfaces, ripping up and replacing the carpet, waxing the terra-cotta <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Southwest themed</i> tile floors, repainting the walls, emptying the swimming pool: these are the daily activities of the only growth industry in Lake Havasu City, these days.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">When the listing opens up to a set of pictures, you can often see the residues the cleaning service left, off in the corner of that photo of the cavernous interior of the four-stall garage— a box of contractor trash bags, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">super heavy duty</i>, a five-gallon tub of cheap paint, the off-white or ivory or even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Desert Tawny</i> that the entire place has been repainted, except for the bathroom. If it’s a HUD house, there seems to be some regulatory requirement that everything be photographed, and the pictures proliferate, and you can see the halo of slightly darkened, slightly more shiny residue where a thousand, ten thousand hands fumbled for the lightswitch just inside the front door, or the slight valley in the carpeting from the bedroom to the bathroom. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sometimes these HUD houses are on their second or third foreclosure. When that’s the case, you can see the half-finished work of the buyer or the contractor-crew that started to clean it up, the speculator betting—wrong—that the market had fallen as far as it could. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The market in Lake Havasu City, Arizona has not fallen as far as it could, not even now. In a week, the realtor has sent me 60 new listings, all foreclosed. Read the descriptions and look at the pictures, and you can see why. Almost all of these places, including some as low as $51,000, have RV garages or RV ports, in addition to the three- and usually four-stall garages. In some of these places, the square footage devoted to vehicles is much more than that allocated for the human dweller and mortgage payer. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Outside, the yards are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">desert landscaped</i>, which means the house is surrounded by dirt, with a few shrubs or a scrub oak tree or two. The driveways are empty.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It wasn’t this way six years ago, when I came through on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Freeways</i> project. Then the yards were desert landscaped, the stones were arrayed in geometric patterns, or tasteful arcs that led from one cactus to the next. In the late afternoon light, the cars gleamed: an SUV, usually a Ford Explorer or Expedition, plus a smaller car, a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry. If the door to the RV garage was open, or if the RV was parked outside, the garage having filled to capacity with other things—boats and their trailers, half-restored Corvettes, or just the neatly organized metal shelves filled with someone’s historic radio collection, or boxes marked with their contents (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hummel I</i>, next to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hummel II</i>, above <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Barbie I</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Barbie II</i>)—you could see the heavy-duty trailer hitch where that smaller car was attached on the trip from here to other places, places older, with longer histories and more seasons than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hot</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hotter</i>. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Lake Havasu City does have a history stretching back to the Great Depression, though to look at the houses for sale, you'd not guess it-- every one of the foreclosures in the last month’s listings was built between 1985 and 2008, and all of them look more-or-less the same: open plans inside, wall-to-wall mixed with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Southwest tiling</i>; hollow-core Lowe’s or Home Depot doors; windows without frames; great planes of drywall leading from entryway past kitchen and dining area, through the living room to the wall separating the bedrooms from the public areas; the bedroom ceilings often sprayed with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">popcorn</i>, so that they look, in the pictures, more like motel rooms stripped even of the anonymous furniture that you find in a Red Roof Inn or a Best Western. The kitchen cabinets aren’t built in—they box out from the walls, and where they show their ends, there’s rarely an effort to disguise the cheap panelboard. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">These are houses that were built <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">on spec</i>; real estate speculators bought the acre lot of an older subdivision, bulldozed the adobe ranch house with the desert chiller left over from 1948 or 1955 or even 1970, subdivided the lot into four or six or eight, and crammed the houses in with no concern for their permanence, beauty, or even functionality. There’s usually a swimming pool taking up much of the small back yard—it’s a swimming pool too small to actually swim in; it’s more like a large bathtub. In June, the average high is 106<sup>0</sup>; in July, it’s 111<sup>0</sup>. You don’t sit on the veranda or in the cabana drinking a margarita after taking a dip when, at 7pm, it’s still sunny and 98<sup>0</sup>. Inside, the kitchens aren’t made for real cooking. The stoves are pristine in the listing pictures; it’s the microwave that shows the signs of protracted use. There’s not much wear in the carpets, outside the master bedroom, that is. These don’t look like houses that were lived in. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Lake Havasu City was an invented place, invented by waves of speculation, dating back to the building of the Parker Dam in the mid-‘30s, flooding the Colorado River. From the first, the area was an epicenter for wild-eyed utopian schemes, schemes that emerged as the latest in a succession of spectacular misreadings of the landscape, the climate, the ecology. Exporting water across hundreds of miles to Los Angeles, San Diego, and the irrigation-dependent agriculture of the Imperial Valley, the Colorado River Aqueduct required half of the electric power generated from the Parker Dam to power the pumps pushing the water up and around mountainsides that cut across the desert wasteland. Traced on satellite photographs, the Aqueduct emerges and disappears as it’s piped through minor elevations; at Iron Mountain, though, north of Desert Center (average high temperature in July: 104<sup>o</sup>; average high for the year: 84<sup>o</sup>; total average annual rainfall: 4.4 inches), a massive pumping station shoves the water up one mountain, the rush downmountain providing the momentum to carry it all the way to Coxcomb Mountain, where it disappears under the harsh, vegetation-free rockfaces, returns as an on-again-off-again open ditch, then sinks beneath Eagle Mountain, emerging to the west to run parallel with the fantastically misnamed Hayfield Road. Along these stretches, the satellite pictures show dry washes under which the Aqueduct is piped. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Aqueduct is well-sealed; that’s evident. No river-loving willows or cottonwoods grow on either side of the waterway. The air is so dry that evaporation from the water’s surface is so quickly wicked up and dissipated that it fails even to provide a modicum of humidity for a plant to exploit. West of Eagle Mountain, it’s running north of Interstate 10 and south of Joshua Tree National Park until, a few miles east of Chiriaco Summit, another massive pumping station sends it back into the Eagle Mountains. There the remnants of the Hayfield Reservoir are etched on the land. In 1939, the Southern California Water District dug a small auxiliary holding reservoir, filled it, and watched the water disappear, sucked down by the porous desert soil that quickly cracked and dessicated, leaving an imprint of white like the ghost of a water-dream.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Hayfield is the last pump lift; after that, the water descends through a long string of tunnels bored into the San Bernardino Mountains, then emerges to water the Quail Ranch Resort and Country Club, passes the Perris Reservoir, and terminates in what was once the Cajalco Reservoir, now Lake Matthews, southwest of Riverside. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">By then the desert has ended; the satellite images show not a grey-brown shading to the hard white of the alkali desert but a brilliant irrigated green. Rancho Mirage, Cathedral City, Palm Springs: these are the oases that served as the fantasy models for Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Golf courses with names like the El Dorado or Indian Wells are surrounded by densely packed housing subdivisions, many with swimming pools behind each sprawling house, and all of them with green lawns fed by irrigation water. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This is what Lake Havasu City was supposed to have been. Look at the satellite pictures, though, and a very different process can be seen hidden in the archaeology of land, its color, its overlays with the grids of building and farming, its striving toward an orderly domesticity of human use subordinating the imperatives of climate, topography, soil. There are three golf courses—two of them carved out of the same small area near the city’s “center”, though the city has no center: Lake Havasu Golf Course, and London Bridge Golf Course. Further north along the lake's edge is the Refuge Golf Course. These are the spots of green you can read, inserted in the complex weave of subdivision streets. From a wide angle, at low magnification, the city seems ever-so-slightly greener than its surroundings. Bring the picture down, and you see why—almost every house has one, or perhaps two, green plantings—shrub palms, mostly, or perhaps mesquite or junipers, usually close to the house, where they can be watered with the garden hose early in the morning or late at night when the temperature drops below 95. And of course, the greens and blues of those small pools, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spa pools</i>, they’re called, contribute to the shift in color. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Along the lakeside, there’s a thin band of greenery, sometimes as narrow as two or three trees deep. That’s as far as the water can sustain life. Beyond that, the street views confirm what those of us who’ve patrolled the citys know too well: this is a landscape beyond <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">arid</i>. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What possessed those real estate agents, those speculators, those contractors and subcontractors, bank mortgage agents, those snowbirders and speculative landlords and city boosters: what did they see that isn’t here? Palm Springs, California, perhaps, where freely flowing water assured irrigation ditches for the golf courses, sprinklers for the lawns and parks, free-flowing water from the Colorado for as long as it might flow.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Not so Lake Havasu. By the doctrine of prior claim, it came too late to get more than a tiny stake in the water right beside it. What the foliage might steal from lake’s edge was about all that could be expropriated; upriver and downriver claimants were vigilant to keep their rights and slake their own desires for greenswards and golf courses, parks and playing fields. In Lake Havasu City, even the high school’s baseball and football fields are sparse and parched. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What Lake Havasu City doesn’t have in greenery or scenery, it more than makes up for in houses. Houses whose mortgages went <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">under water</i> at the very earliest moments of the Great Bust, and now are dessicated with the drought of interest, attention, fantasy that might bring buyers and dwellers. The spa pools are dry, the scrub palms are dying; inside the walls, behind the thin veneer of stucco, the 2x4s are twisting in the absolute dryness, for the air conditioner and the humidifier have long been turned off. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">When this happens to a city in a temperate climate—in Detroit, say, or Cleveland, or Philadelphia—over time the land and its primordial occupants claim back their portions, their rights. Camilo Vergara, my old friend, has been photographing these sites for decades.In one sequence, we watch as the dome of a library crumbles. It collapses. Then the compost of leaves and branches accumulates on the tiled floor. A tree grows up, rising through the ruined remnants of a Carnegie-funded American monument. Soon the neighborhood, the city, is a Piranesian fantasy, only it is American civilization that has had its time, its flowering, and its decay, and is now disappearing from view and from memory.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Not Lake Havasu City. There’s no foliage to reclaim this land. There’s no rainfall to hasten the decay, to return plaster to earth, wood to dirt. Instead, it will stand for centuries, perhaps millennia, until, finally, a great wind will come and brush it away, dust to dust.</div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com3Lake Havasu City, AZ, USA34.483901 -114.322454834.404255500000005 -114.38727680000001 34.5635465 -114.2576328tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-12536793616337879452011-12-11T15:04:00.000-08:002011-12-11T15:10:52.851-08:00The Last Weekend<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">It is the first real weekend in December; last weekend was just too close to November, and Thanksgiving. It is also the last weekend of deer-hunting season here, if you’re using a regular rifle, and not a muzzle-loader or crossbow. The day began before light with the sound of gunshot, both near and at a distance. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">By afternoon, though, the noise was coming from chainsaws and log-splitters. You can get a good electric-motor log splitter for around $350, or you could spend three or four thousand for a gas-driven 30+-ton splitter. These aren’t toys for weekenders; with a gas splitter hooked to an ATV you can get back into the far woods, taking on the big trees and splitting eight cords of wood in an afternoon. The sound of that gas engine echoes off the stone walls and the granite faces up the hills so it’s hard to tell where the work is.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That’s not a bad idea these days, when a lot of the splitting is being done on lands that aren’t necessarily owned by the crew with the splitter. Some is property long unoccupied; perhaps the owner has died or moved far away or gave up on selling it after the market collapsed a few years ago. In that case, there’s usually some long-standing agreement in place that has passed down by now from father to son and perhaps to grandson. If the land’s held by one of the old ones, you’re going to split that wood with them, and you’ll split it for them too, saving them the smaller logs, the ones easiest to lift and carry from the woodpile or the abandoned chicken coop or the old well-house.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Or perhaps it’s state forest land, or it’s on the wrong edge of Catskill Park or it’s part of the wide swath of land the city of New York has claimed for its watershed. This last one is a source of particular grumbling around here. Partly it’s the stern self-righteousness of the signs telling you to keep out. They have just a hint of the arrogance locals find in their dealings with the city. When the governor announced he was going to allow fracking everywhere except in the city’s water-rights areas, he pretty much epitomized the attitude: if it’s not safe for New York City water, why is it safe for us hardscrabble upstate hicks? Or the obverse: if it’s so safe, why kowtow to the environmentalist posturing of the city people, people who haven’t ever gotten water from a well.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The poachers up here aren’t cutting down live trees. There’s no environmental depredation going on. These are downed trees, and this year the woods are particularly thick with them, often great swaths running down a hill, big trees lying atop one another, their root system still balled by dirt. The hurricane, and the tropical storm, and a couple of microburst outbreaks took out whole stands of older trees, the tall ones that were most susceptible to the erosion effects of torrential rain and the subsequent strikes of wind. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That catastrophe of uprooted trees will make superb fuel for wildfires in a year or so if everything’s left alone. What’s the alternative? Have the city and the state send in a small army of forestry workers to cut it up and haul it away? And where will all that good firewood end up? In landfills. Up at the Nibble Nook diner, you might hear this line of argument five times between the first sip of coffee and the leaving of the tip. And the same applies to the deer who have begun to move away from the areas where there’s legitimate hunting, and into the state and city watershed lands. Up behind the warning signs for Ashokan Reservoir and the long stretches surrounding the pipes down to the city, they’re no less prone to the devastations of overpopulation—disease, starvation— and they’re all the more likely to end up hit by a car, your car, when they emerge, desperate, at dusk. It’s not like deer in the city watershed are magically protected from propagating deer ticks, and contributing to the Lyme’s Disease epidemic that has every long-timer up here with a case of arthritis and a hefty bill for horse-pill antibiotics. Up here, there aren’t many long-timers who’ll let their kids or grandkids watch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bambi</i>. They’re too busy checking them for the small black flecks that are immature deer ticks lodged and feeding, or the tell-tale halo of inflammation that tells you it’s time to head back to the clinic for another prescription.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But you won’t hear anyone at the Nibble Nook pretending they hunt deer out of some altruistic desire to eliminate Lymes’ Disease or rebalance the ecosystem to ensure a healthy deer population. Most of them aren’t particularly keen on the size of the rack, either. That’s for the stock brokers and financial guys up from the city, hoping for a nice trophy to mount in the game room of their weekend place. This is about meat, meat that doesn’t cost 6.99 a pound at the Shop-Rite, meat that also isn’t laced with hormones or depleted of nutrients by force-feeding for high feedlot weights. Like the firewood, dressed deer in the freezer sometimes means the difference between your dignity and the ignominy of the food pantry come February. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So this first real weekend in December, the last weekend of deer season, maybe the last clear, fairly temperate weekend for a while, the days were divided into three parts: hunting from dark to full morning; firewood splitting and hauling till the already-low sun touched the tops of the trees; then back to hunting. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In the late afternoon light the ridge is rendered vague by the haze of woodburning stoves and wood furnaces that are warming the mobile homes and the small raised ranches and the metal-roofed, paint-scarred houses with the retrofitted chimneys and flues home-installed, probably without a permit from the town. But I’m not too worried about the houses burning down. These are houses of the volunteer firemen; you can see by the blue lights on the tops of their pickup cabs or the dashboards of the fifteen-year-old Chevys and Fords and Subarus pulled over where there’s a safe space between the road and the woods. They’re hunting across Harry’s, and Paul and Sarah’s, and our place, too. They’ve owned this territory for decades, and they keep at bay the amateurs, the ones who shoot the joggers and the dogs and the cyclists. When a cow or goat gets shot up here, it’s not an amusing dinner table story about the stupid rubes upstate. It’s the loss of a significant part of a delicate financial ecosystem. The dangerous ones, the cow-killers, are posers up from Westchester or Long Island, with the best guns and scopes and the worst aim and no sense of what might be the other side of the deer when they miss.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Or they’re the ones you give a wide berth to at the supermarket or the discount beer distributor. Everyone knows who they are. Like the deer, they’re desperate, sickly, prone to reckless acts. </div><div class="MsoNormal">So you make sure your guys are out there. They know the property; they know the angle of fire; they know which way the roads are, and the houses. If they’re lucky, we’ll have venison chili and stew and maybe a roast, though we usually get the tougher cuts. We just gave them permission; they’re the ones who sat in the metal folding chair starting at 5am, or shimmied up the tree in the last moonlight, in the cold, and watched, and waited. They deserve the best of the kill and they’re not shy about taking it. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Next weekend will be different. That’s the time to pick up the meat from the guy with the handpainted declaration on the piece of beatup plywood leaning against the mailbox post: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">deer dressed 845-489-0913; </i> to take it home and put it in the old freezer in the garage after marking each pouch and butcher-paper parcel with the contents and the date, just in case you don’t eat it all before next year<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>Then it’s time to haul the wood close to the house, to stack it on the old ones’ porches, to fill your own woodsheds and the empty parts of the barn, to make sure the seasoned wood is near and the unseasoned is covered with a tarp or the sheets of metal roof that came off in the storms, too bent for salvage but useful to keep the deep snow out of the pile, so that it’s ready for next year’s stacking, next year’s heat. Maybe by then things will be better. Fuel oil might go down instead of up; you might get more jobs bid with a cushion instead of razor-thin just to get the work, and the boy might get more hours at the mall. New tires. Eggs over easy and ham instead of an order of toast and coffee at the Nibble Nook on Saturday morning. But that’s not for hoping. And it’s certainly not for planning. </div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-55449805965175919742011-11-29T09:07:00.000-08:002011-11-29T09:17:03.765-08:00Listening to Limbaugh on the Long Drive<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">AM780 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Your all-News Station!</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Traffic and Weather Together on the ‘8’s!</i></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Situation: dire. Traffic: a rollover semi- on 80-94 blocked all lanes and traffic was at a dead stop from the Indiana Tollway to the city. 90 minute delays at O’Hare. Lake Shore Drive a mess both directions from Hyde Park to Hollywood. Weather: wind gusts to 55 miles an hour out of the northeast: waves topping the seawalls and spume making visibility bad on Lake Shore; gusts from all directions toppling the double- and triple-trailers carrying some of the early Christmas packages from Amazon and REI and the just-in-time inventory to Macy’s and Nordstrom The Rack. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Fourteen hours of driving straight through yesterday: tired to the bone in the way that constant tension and no movement for many hours leaves you. Also cranky, grumpy, short-tempered from the persistent necessity for compromise: music or silence; stadium-anthem country or bad oldies. As the road darkened, the rain started, and the driving got harder. The news, usually a respite, was full of self-important commentaries on the Egyptian election, a subject long past its allegorical value, and discussions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, subjects years out of date. Rush Limbaugh was even hawking Cyber Monday on his radio show, pushing a Two-If-By-Tea mugset with the promotion code <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cybermon</i>, though he’d gotten it wrong for the first half of the show. When he began baiting an Occupy Wall Street caller-- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> of course corporations are people: the Supreme Court said so!</i>; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of course money is speech: haven’t you ever heard the phrase “money talks?”</i>—the level of demagoguery, normally interesting, had both of us reaching to turn the radio off. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">These are times when it is hard to have spent one’s life in pursuit of rationality. It started in first grade; Pa gave me a Wesclox wind-up with two bells on the top to take apart and put back together again, after I asked him how clocks told time. When the car pulls to the left on the Ohio Turnpike, it might take an hour to calculate all the possible causes and the odds for each: angling of the roadway by rational highway engineers seeking to control runoff; one tire underinflated; wind steady and strong from the southeast; misalignment; worn strut; suspension damaged by the deer that leapt into the front right headlight and caromed into the ditch on Thanksgiving night, leaving a baseball-sized dent and swatches of stiff fur imbedded where the light met the bumper. Then: the odds that a deer leaping across the highway would hit your car; the question of whether driving faster would lessen or increase the odds; calculating the angle of sight at various speeds and the predictability of behavior of any given deer. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">This is dull stuff. Describing a rational sequence, language loses its color and rhythm, and there’s little room for the play of rhetoric—an idea underneath percolating up toward the surface of the writing’s consciousness and then hovering for a moment before sinking under the weight of details and distractions precisely weighed as the keyboard clicks first fast then slow, interspersed with erratic silences as the mind retreats from expression to thought and calculation, then returns to the pouring of words into the unvoiced ear of an imaginary reader.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Dull stuff, but it is what I believe in, not religiously, the way Grandma Catherine believes all things are here for a reason, but empirically, because from these careful tracks of logic something comes that can be verified and, when verified, can be extrapolated to the next circumstance. This is not what Rush Limbaugh practices. It is, indeed, what he abhors, fears, rails against. He knows nothing of the scientific method that has liberated us from cholera and made his ubiquitous voice possible. He knows nothing of the triumphant logic of athletic training, where regimen is built of precedent tested and modified by specifics: he is fat and loud and, when you listen carefully, you can hear that he has lost his wind from the nicotine and the bad food. When hospitalized with chest pains, he depended on doctors trained in the rational world he abjurs. Even in the car, hours into the long drive away from the place that is ours, from the rattle of locust seedpods on the roof and the rustle of mice in the walls and the surprise of mist on the hayfield in the hour of sunrise, I knew better than to be angry at a stupid mouthpiece selling mugsets with his picture on them to people who thought being flimflammed for $14 was a patriotic act. I knew better, but my hands were still tight on the wheel and I was hunched over as if punched in the stomach.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">It is embarrassing being caught out as an American patriot at a moment like that. For as we switched the radio from Rush to Chris Young singing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Hear Voices</i> on Froggy99, the big-country station, I knew I’d been brought back to my profound and unyielding love of my country, right or wrong. This is what I have spent my life fighting against, within and without, and I have lost every battle, within and without. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Limbaugh’s back-to-back combination of hypocrisy (so then, Rush, this must mean that abortion is legal and right, since the Supreme Court has repeatedly said so) and linguistic stupidity (so all analogic phrases must be read literally; no analogic figures of speech are allowed to be ironic?) was only a moment in a long season of willful hypocrisies and stupidities awash in American mass culture. For a moment, there, taut with impotent rage against this moment and this turn of things and this mouthpiece of malapropisms and misinformation, I thought to myself: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it has never been this bad.</i></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">But of course it has. It’s been way, way worse. When my great-grandfather settled in Provo, Utah in the 1890s, the nation was awash in plutocracy, a flood more influential even than today. Today the politicians of the right, and to my shame and sorrow, of the left as well, keep the bribe-money in legal accounts. In the ‘90s, they installed safes in their offices to keep the cash from the oil companies and the meatpackers and the steelmill owners and the bankers. In the ‘30s, Father Coughlin rode the radio waves with weekly addresses that Rush has surely studied, though rarely surmounted. When my father returned from the war, his eyes still yellow from hepatitis and his hands still shaky with weakness, he had a few years to recover his health and his hopes before McCarthy swept through the public eye, before Richard Nixon, running for Congress against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950 smeared her as a Communist fellow-traveler. My first vote for President was a vote against the same Richard Nixon. Right and left may be equally frail and quick to surrender to temptation, but American demagogues come from the right, and they feed on fear and play on patriotism. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">It’s been worse. I can say that this morning, with the wind gusts ruffling the fur around the dog’s face so she looks beleaguered and irritable, and we lean into it to watch the woman walk south to the bus-stop, waiting for her to turn around and wave, once more, as she always does. I can say it this morning, looking at the front yards of the well-kept two- and three-flats on my Ukrainian Village street in Chicago, each yard now tidily cleared of the controlled riots of sunflowers and roses and daffodils and daylilies and black-eyed susans in the midst of which you might have seen, in midsummer, a small ceramic statue of the Virgin, or of St. Andrew, the patron saint of the home country, or St. Michael The Archangel, patron of Kiev. The weekend before I left to meet her at the farm, my bag full of apples for the Thanksgiving pie and untidy printouts of recipes stuck into the piles of papers to grade, I had walked back and forth along the streets and watched the older couples weeding and clearing, putting saran wrap and traffic cones over the rose bushes and raking the last small leaves out from in between the small, well-trimmed evergreens. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">We will make it through this one. But it won’t be easy. It’s never easy. They’ll pull the driver out of the semi-, alive or dead, and they’ll pull the twisted metal to the side, and the cars will get by on the shoulder and everyone will stay later tonight as a consequence, just to get the work done. The sand- and mud-spattered cars on Lake Shore Drive will pull into the handwash on Clark or Broadway or on Dodge in Evanston or up at Clark’s in Naperville tomorrow or over the weekend, and the illegal Mexican workers will clean them off, vacuum out the insides, leave the stray dollar bills and the lost watch and the spare change in a neat pile on the passenger seat. In a decade or a generation, they’ll be citizens, or their children will, Rush to the contrary. Already there’s a Mexican restaurant in a beat-up RV parked by the Pilot truckstop off I-80 in western Pennsylvania, and the kids driving back to college and the truckers carrying the Christmas inventories from the container sites in Jersey City to the stores in Pittsburgh and Youngstown and Cleveland were lined up with us, waiting for the tamales. One of them, weathered and big-bellied, ordered three, and when he climbed up into the cab and shut the door, I saw it was festooned with Limbaugh bumper stickers. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">I hope they pull that trucker out unharmed. I hope, in any case, that it isn’t any of the truckers we were jockeying with all day yesterday. I even hope it’s not the one with the three tamales, the one who gave us a little wave and a smile as he pulled out in front of our old car, packed tight, with the old dog enthroned in the back seat, heading back from one place to another.</div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-76305540569968466492011-11-27T14:26:00.000-08:002011-11-27T14:26:44.644-08:00Settling In, Uneasily<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal">A week after Halloween, and all the weekenders and summer people are up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They drive too fast out of the hardware store, their faces set and pieces of building material they probably should not be allowed to purchase, let alone attempt to install, akimbo out the back windows of their Priuses, BMWs and Mercedes sedans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more stoical and self-righteous have older Mercedes diesels, cars that seemed smart when they bought them, 15 and 20 years old, with 138,000 miles on them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The plan was to stick them in one of those monthly garage spaces out in the boroughs, and use them to get to and from the place on weekends. Soon enough, that plan collapsed—even a spot miles from the nearest subway stop still cost more than a decent one-bedroom apartment in Kenosha, and besides, the small difference between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">diesel</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">turbodiesel</i>, a matter that had escaped their notice when they bought what they bragged at dinner parties was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">such a bargain!</i> turned out to mean the difference between a car that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could</i> get on the freeway, accelerating to a sane 55 or 60 in ten or fifteen heartstopping seconds as the big rigs bore down on them relentlessly, their airhorns blaring, and one that, on the best day with a downhill start, would never ever make it to 55 or 60 in time to avoid being run onto the shoulder, leaving them in the ignominious position of driving on the shoulder with the emergency flashers on for a good deal of the drive from the Garden State or the GW Bridge or 17 to the Thruway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">So now they kept the Mercedes up at the place. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We have a place in the country</i>, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we have a place upstate</i>, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a place in southern Vermont</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a place way up in Connecticut</i>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that is the way they speak of their destination as they ride the Central Hudson line or the New Haven Railroad out of Manhattan on those weekends. It’s not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we live up here</i> or even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we live up here as much as we can</i>. The language is about having, and being able to say you have, and not about living, with all its complications and its ordinary sublimities.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When they got the place, it was achingly lovely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the small mushrooms growing up inside the house along the stone foundation line were signs of a different life they would soon be leading, a life closer to the organic rhythms of things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They brought the cat up from the city, and in an excess of good nature, let it roam the field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps it brought them offerings—a mouse or two, perhaps still squirming though its neck was broken and flecks of blood showed on its tiny teeth, or a baby bird—before the hawk came down, or the coyotes, and the cat was no more. The pleasures of Friday night pizza from Benny’s on 209 wore a little thin after a few months, but the kitchen was so primitive, the electric stove off-kilter, the refrigerator capable within days of gestating green mold from its core, through the cracks between the plastic panels, requiring a thorough clean before the groceries could go in, after which the lettuce smelled like Clorox and the meat had a hint of lemony freshness that lingered on the tongue, and not in a pleasant way. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The big project loomed—an eat-in kitchen, historically correct down to the 19<sup>th</sup> century gas stove, with a half-bath containing a chain-pull toilet bought at the salvage place in Kingston for about twice the price of a new one, and still requiring the reporcelain job that smelled up the house for weeks with the stubborn nose of epoxy resin and acetone.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Summer was over, long over. In between there was the hurricane that took down the best and oldest trees and left the place without power for 10 days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Returning to that refrigerator and freezer, opening it to the reek of sour milk and rotted meat and the sodden collapsing remains of a Benny’s pizza box that gave up its contents onto the new replica wideboard floor, leaving a permanent stain evidently different than the carefully patinated replica stains the decorator’s finisher had put on in discreet aura of authenticity:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that was tough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trying to make the insurance claims after flood insurance had seemed such a needless luxury when the windows needed reglazing and the landscaper charged so much just to plow out the driveway before Friday night’s arrival:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that was tougher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sobering. If it weren’t for the fact that everyone else was in the same situation, it might have been humiliating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As it was, it was the subject of intent dinnertable conversation, back in the city and at the little fall parties in the waning weekends once the mess was subdued and the contractor paid off. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Now it was that weekend after Halloween, the weekend for closing up, or for making over. By comparison, closing up was relatively easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The heat was already on—you’d called the propane man to get the stubborn wall unit going the week after the hurricane, even if you had to pay a premium to get ahead in the line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The gutters had to be cleaned, the garage closed up, the firewood out back covered again with the tarp, and enough brought into the cellar to cover the first couple of winter weekends, but not so much as to attract the termites and the tarantulas that one of you believed, despite all entomological evidence on Google and Wikipedia, were bound to come in with the kindling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the least, the tell-tale mark of the Black Widow was sure to be found on the belly of the spiders that had seemed so benign all summer, so fascinating as they wove their death-shrouds around the still-buzzing horseflies and moths that were good riddance to bad rubbish anyway. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">The big job was the storm windows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was tempting to just give in and embrace the summer-people ethic—to turn off the water, drain the pipes, leave the faucets open, turn off the water heater, turn the valve on the propane tank until it would turn no more, lock the Mercedes diesel in the garage or at the least put the tarp over it, say goodbye until April, and wait for your turn to get the local taxi to take you to the train.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">But all those weekends of cross-country skiing, all those cozy nights in front of the fireplace, not to mention the turkey dinner at Christmas, or the New Year’s Eve party that you’d not have to drive home from, drunk, peevish, neither liking the person in the car next to you nor liked by them, or the chance to escape the piles of dingy snow in the city, saturated with dog urine and festooned with piles of poop and random garbage, to come to the pristine reaches of snow and the clear icicles dripping water in the morning sun:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>these were fantasies too irresistible to subject to the klieg lights of pragmatism and statistical odds-making. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">So you were bound to take the wooden storm windows out of the outbuilding or the garage loft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were heavy, and dirty with the cobwebs and bird-droppings and dust of summer and fall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had to be handled one at a time down the ladder, and then they had to be washed, inside and out, before they went on the window.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was always the mystery of the code—which number was the right one?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one in black magic marker on the edge, now somewhat obscured, or the inner one, in pencil? And the ones on the upper floors meant taking the ladder down from the storage shed and bringing it up to the house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You rued, perhaps, your decision to take out those standard storms, the ones that slid up and down a little squeakily but seemed to work fine, even though they weren’t nearly as authentic and they reminded you of the previous owners and their very different approach to living on, or near, the land. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So you’d paid to have them taken off, paid to have the old ones in the loft reglazed and painted, paid for the three or four that you never could find, the ones that went on the windows where you most needed succor from the storms.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Then there were the ones who weren’t closing up at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were in to prepare for the Thanksgiving turnout.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They’d invited their friends from the city, and their relatives from the suburbs, and college friends from the far-flung provinces like St. Louis and Houston, and this year, everyone was coming, charmed by the description of a long rustic weekend. This was to be a feast that would demonstrate the rationale for the double oven and the oversize refrigerator-freezer, the extra harvest tables bought at the antiques fair in High Falls or North Guilford or Rhinebeck, the midweight down comforters bought online from The Company Store to cover the historically correct replica beds in all the bedrooms that had been so assiduously insulated with environmentally correct ingredients by the green contractor last summer. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"> At the hardware store, stony-faced, the two factions faced off, first in <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the fasteners aisle and then with the custom-paint guy, and finally at the cash register.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything packed into a car never meant for any contents not wearing cashmere or khaki, backup lights impatiently gleaming as the parking-lot ballet worked itself out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the turnoffs from the main highway to the side roads, the cars would line up, waiting impatiently for a break in the oncoming traffic, where the dump trucks carrying road-repair gravel might afford a notch in the long line of cars going to and from the Thruway, to and from the supermarket, to and from Benny’s Pizza and the liquor store.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quick now, but not so quick as to knock over the paint cans or slide the 6 feet of aluminum gutter already angled rather dangerously out the window.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quick, because there was still more to do, and daylight savings had come, and the sun was already low on the horizon, though it seemed just moments from midday.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Where were we?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were in there, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were stuck between factions; more accurately, we were both of them together, an awkward, ill-organized to-do-list. We were, no doubt, the subject of knowing glances from the ones whose diesel pickups stayed idling in the back, daring anyone to box them in, the ones picking up stuff not for them, but for those who paid them to do the work they didn’t dare to do, and thereby made this marginal economy a little less harsh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Some of what we did marked us as sojourners, romantics tripping over the big feet of our illusions. Some of it was different:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we were semi-locals, here sometimes for months, and soon to be here for good. Ours was a different list. Call Wayne and Wayne about trenching the ditch in the hayfield.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Make the arrangements with Harry and Kurt for the deer hunters who’d be shooting across our fields to state their turf, so they’d keep the poachers and the trespassers at bay. Split the oak from the tree that went down last spring, and had lain in two-foot diameter segments out behind the garage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fill in the bird feeders. Talk to Jeff about the squeak in the front suspension—we’re driving back: is it safe? Bring the dog to the vet and the old one to the nephrologist. Cook and freeze the meals, labeling them in large clear letters with instructions on microwave times. Unplug the tv. Walk the fields one last time. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span> </span>It will only be a couple of weeks, maybe three, maybe four—it depends on the work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in that time, everything will have changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The roads will be emptier and it will be mostly pickup trucks on them, pickups and older sedans with noisy snow tires, and the Subarus of every type, age, and color, the only vehicles that will definitely make it to school, to work, to the doctor’s or the old one’s house if the plow is slow or the sand truck runs low. The prim houses with their historically correct colors will be dark, the chimneys cold, while the double-wides and the raised ranches and the Sears bungalows and the balloon-frame farmhouses will be nearly invisible under the protective walls of firewood and the wood-furnaces and the wood-stoves will fill the air with the smell of the cold and the fight against its menace. When it snows, we will shovel, side by side, unless some neighbor comes back from a morning of contract plowing and, sweeping in, honks us out of the way and in one pass clears us with a quick wave of the hand. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">We are not natives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We will probably always live in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the old Pratt house</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the old Pratt house that the ladies used to have</i>. But we are settling in. It is good to be so.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-84916479469629349882011-11-16T06:51:00.000-08:002011-11-16T06:51:53.794-08:00Looking at America: Closing Up<a href="http://peterbhales.blogspot.com/2011/11/closing-up.html?spref=bl">Looking at America: Closing Up</a>: I had missed the service at Christ the King on the Friday before, because I had to return to Chicago to teach. I’d told Harry I’d be back ...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-1847725059073444662011-11-14T09:09:00.000-08:002011-11-14T13:38:34.109-08:00Closing Up<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">I had missed the service at Christ the King on the Friday before, because I had to return to Chicago to teach. I’d told Harry I’d be back to help him when the others, the friends and relatives, mourners all, had left and he would have more use for me.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">I was up at 3:30 Friday morning checking my boarding pass to Newark and my printouts for the rental car; with these early flights, it’s hard not to lie awake worrying that the alarm won’t go off or the taxi won’t arrive in time. I had directions from Google Maps that took me from Newark Airport to the Thruway, after which it was pretty much rote memory to get over the mountain and back to the farm and to Harry’s. The first few miles took me right through Newark, so far as I could tell, and the rush-hour traffic was just beginning to thin out as the directions started to get much more detailed and complicated and I found myself trying to calculate just where I was on the sequence that Google Maps prints out. It’s always difficult to determine which set of mileages applies to which segment on the printouts, and the rental car’s trip odometer wouldn’t zero out, leaving me with recurrent exercises in addition and subtraction even as the traffic sped up and my chances of properly executing the moves diminished steadily.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">When I called Harry, I was somewhere between Ho-Ho-Kus and Mah-Wah on New Jersey 17. It was after I had turned on the smart-phone GPS and then obeyed an order to exit immediately, a move that got me onto Passaic Street in what was probably Rochelle Park, though I didn’t notice, as there was no return ramp to 17, and the GPS firmly and repeatedly instructed me to take an immediate U-turn and get back on the offramp. After a half-hour tour of the small-house suburbs of Jersey, I found a quick-talking Pakistani gas station manager who put me back on 17: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">two lefts and a right quick as you can, three blocks you see the sign</i>. I was clearly not the first person he'd seen flimflammed into getting off onto Passaic Street.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">The houses off Passaic were originally small postwar Cape Cods, close cousins of the famous Levittown, Long Island mass-production houses that are generally seen as the model housebuilder’s response to the housing shortage brought on by extraordinary demands of returning GIs and their new families. This was one of those small ad-hoc developments, and the streets here were named after the relatives of the builder’s extended family—Marion Avenue, Dorothy Avenue, Gertrude Avenue, and Ward Street were sandwiched between Spring Valley Road and Fairview Avenue.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">Catherine Pskowski, my mother-in-law, pointed out that the experience of most postwar house-seekers involved not mass-scale developments like Levittown, but small, in-fill projects like the one off Passaic—three or four streets filling in a few acres of residual farmland or a larger estate gone to seed during the Great Depression and unexploited during the war. She and Ed had bought a house like that on Greylock Parkway in Belleville, about 12 miles south of the development I was haplessly circling, as the GPS voice repeatedly announced it was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">recalculating route</i> and then, repeatedly, directed me to that suicidal drive the wrong way up the exit ramp on Passaic. She’d had an aunt who’d bought a house in Belleville, a more substantial place put up on spec. in the economic upturn just before we entered the war, when Lend-Lease and war conversion were restarting the American manufacturing engine. Now that developer had bought a parcel, run a cul-de-sac street into it, and was building a dozen houses on the satellite streets off the semicircle. It was small, but they were glad to have it. It was their first house; Fredericka was already born and Catherine was pregnant with Eddie. When they moved up toward Montclair years later, they’d had no trouble selling the Greylock house. It was a starter home, and now a new family was going to begin there.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">The houses on Dorothy, and Gertrude, Marion and Ward are no longer uniform boxes of a thousand square feet. As in Levittown, the generations of buyers and sellers have put their personal stamps on the houses. Over the last couple of years, despite the housing crisis, houses on Dorothy and Marion have sold for prices in the $350,000 range; they average about 2,100 square feet, and it was only because I have been studying Levittown’s transformations over the course of the postwar years that I could detect the small, unprepossessing starter home embedded in the elaborations of various remodelers: second and even third floors, dormers, large entry atriums, bulging extensions off the backs, filling most of the small lot with family rooms and bedrooms and large eat-in kitchens.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">But there were still near-untouched original houses tucked between the looming rehabs. They were the ones whose owners were out on that Friday morning, clearing the fallen limbs from the fluke October snow-and-windstorm that had swept through the last weekend, knocking out power for days and taking down many of the trees that had lined the streetscape. Those were the trees planted as saplings by the developer some 60 years before; fast-growing trees that had reached maturity decades ago and were now aging and vulnerable.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">The men and women out on that Friday were probably out of work or forcibly retired; they were the vestigial union workers who had soldiered on in the shrinking industrial economy until the Great Crash of 2008: commuters down to the factories and ship- and railyards in the towns and cities on the west side of the Hudson River, connected by the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan: Fairview, West New York, Union City, Hoboken. Now they had time to clear their yards of the storm’s detritus, and they looked at me as a suspicious stranger in a neighborhood wrapped up within itself and its shrinking hopes.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">In the Cold War years when this part of New Jersey was booming, NY 17 was a vital arterial roadway between the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel and the New York State Thruway, one of the major postwar superhighways completed before the Interstate Highway System was fully incorporated. During the years between 1953 and 1960, the road was widened and the intersections were converted to freeway-style interchanges, a process that had been proposed as early as 1936, during the first wave of “parkway” and other limited-access motorways. Along 17, the patchwork of interchanges, stoplights, construction zones and older and newer commercial strips made for a deeply frustrating drive if you were trying to get somewhere in a hurry. But for many of those who’d thronged to Jersey after the war, it was a sort of consumer-capitalist thrill-ride; LaZBoy franchises chock-a-block with Chevy dealerships, with metal-clad diners to stop at if you were heading, say, for the Irish or the Jewish Catskills, for the working-class and emerging middle-class summer cottages in clusters off NY 209 or perhaps up further, on NY28, to the hotels and resorts.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">Today you can still see vestiges of those cottage resorts on the roads up from 209. When you turn up toward the mountains, the roads get rougher and less populated, and you’ll see the concrete walls of swimming pools long abandoned to fill with leaves turning to loam, saplings growing up in their midst, with the collapsed roofs and disconsolate clapboard facades of the cottages sometimes visible under the welter of vines and weeds and brush.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0in;">I didn’t stay on 17 to the 209 intersection in Wurtsboro. I managed the last maneuver that got me to the Thruway, and I called Harry back, pretty sure we wouldn’t lose the signal this time. He told me we were going to take the netting off the vines; it was a three-person job, and Klink was back from Boston for the day to round out the crew. It was a gorgeous afternoon, and as we reached the end of each row, I had the chance to straighten up from the big can into which I was stuffing the netting as Harry drove the tractor forward and Klink walked along the other side of the row, lifting the netting off the vine-ends that had grown through the crisscross of sharp-edged plastic that discouraged the deer and the turkeys from feasting on the cab frank and the chardonnay grapes, and abraded my hands until they bled as I shoved the stuff down into the storage bags locked into the garbage can roped to the back of the tractor on the makeshift platform Harry and Peter had welded together a few years ago, working from a catalog photograph for a $5,000 version of the thing, sold by an upscale gentleman-winemaker supplier. Theirs had costed-out at just over $500 and, like everything Harry did, was simultaneously makeshift and meticulous.<br />
<br />
Stretching my arms toward the blue blue sky, I could see the hawk still following us along the updraft, and below that, Harry’s shoulders, slumped in a sort of resolute grieving, as he steered the tractor and Klink kept up a clatter of talk to distract us all from what we had no words to face. We were men in the company of men. We might pause for a moment, lapse into silence, look into each others’ faces knowing what was behind our careful demeanor. Then Harry would put the tractor in gear, it would make its slow arc to the next row, and we would begin again the ritual of work that could suffice for everything else we could not do or say.</div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3179491918879793407.post-76019490704572850952011-09-14T11:49:00.000-07:002011-09-14T12:04:44.318-07:00Highway Design Seen Sideways at High Speeds: Bus Crash Interstate 40 23 Miles North of Lake Havasu City, Late July 2002<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It was the left front tire that blew, and we were doing 75 when it happened, on Interstate 40, in a Van Hool luxury bus, with Bill at the wheel. Bill was a million-miler, a retired Army vet who’d been with the company for a decade. We’d had him for about a thousand miles, from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, back to Gallup, Acoma Pueblo, up to Durango, Colorado, then along the winding highway to Silverton, back down to Purgatory, then westward to the Grand Canyon. At a rest-and-tourist stop outside of Ash Fork, I’d watched Bill check the tire pressure and run his hand over all ten of the big tires, while I was on the mobile to the Department of State concerning a kidney infection on a participant from, it think, the United Arab Emirates.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">We had come down the elevation to relative ground level, and it was suddenly hot. We'd been warned away from the normal route to Las Vegas because we had a bus full of foreigners, many of them from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">former Soviet Republics</i> and as many from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">known Muslim nations</i>, like Egypt and Uzbekhistan, all of them fully vetted by the Department of State and six weeks into a sponsored American Studies Institute, but still too risky to allow over various bridges and dams. We were going to take I-40 to US-95 up to <i>Vegas, Baby!</i> As Neil, my fellow guide used to call it. This had an added benefit: it put California as a notch on the states-we-saw-in-the-States list, and California was a jewel-encrusted notch.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It was the left front tire that blew, and we were doing 75—the speed limit, not a bit over, for Bill was a by-the-book driver. We lurched, and I was thrown out of my seat. From the floor, I watched the bus veer wildly while Bill struggled with the steering wheel and the contents of the overhead compartments spilled out into the aisle. We headed down into the gravelly median, as Bill steered us past a guardrail that would have impaled the bus and sent me, at least, hundreds of feet forward through the windshield to die. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the gravel, the bus settled down: 70; 60; 50; then it slid onto its side, the gravel flying like a bow-wave as the prow of the bus rose into the oncoming lanes of traffic racing at us at 80, 85, 90.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">From their first incarnations in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York State, high-speed limited access freeways have wound through artificial landscapes of the picturesque. Take the Merritt Parkway or the Wilbur Cross, even today, and you’ll see rusticated stone overpasses marked with Gothic Revival details, set within a bucolic landscape of native trees, brilliant red and yellow shrubs, brief swatches of meadow, dark green or golden, close-cropped in places, in others left to grow tall and wave gently in the gentle breezes directed to them by scrupulously located groves of maples and oaks. On the Wilbur Cross Parkway, the median was a wide swatch of well-groomed lawn. The entrance to the Merritt Parkway in Greenwich dove through an apple orchard, then cut through stands of evergreens interrupted by tall individual hardwoods; on either side, rough cuts of granite rose and fell, their rock faces in winter brilliant with ice cascades. On the Taconic State Parkway, maples and other fall-foliage hardwoods crowded up to the lanes, and rills and waterfalls tumbled down the hillsides and raced underneath the traffic lanes.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All this was originally designed to be seen by a new kind of driver, part tourist, part commuter. The parkways and freeways were both vectors and destinations, and their architectural details and landscape designs were meant to be seen at appropriate speeds: 35 to 45. When landscape architect Gilmore David Clark was commissioned to design the Taconic, he was already a celebrated practitioner, with the Central Park Zoo and the expansion of Riverside Park to his credit; he organized the parkway’s vistas to expand and contract, showing mountain vistas, swaths of Hudson Valley, river views, and the more intimate details of rock and rill, maple stand and greensward.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">That’s all very well when you’re building in the ‘30s and ‘40s, for cars with bias-ply tires, drum brakes, bench seats, wide plate-glass windshields and windows that rolled down to let the breeze in, and 40 mph is pretty thrilling. It’s fine when the climate is seasonal but temperate and the rainfall is predictable and the watertable high. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Out in Arizona, on I-40, there’s no water at all most of the year, and the closest you’ll come to landscape design is a few cacti planted on the rest areas. That’s about the only place anyone would notice the scenery anyway, when the speed limit’s 75 and everyone’s doing 9 miles over that, if they worry about the radar, 20 miles over if they’re hot and irritable and in a hurry. If you’re bored, there’s low, brown mountains twenty miles away, but no matter how fast you’re going, they pass too slowly to qualify as scenery. The rest is desert scrub, sandy soil and trucked-in gravel for the median. Compared to the older back-east ones, it’s wide, and rather than doming slightly, it cups down in a V, so the flash floods will race off the pavement to be captured in the storm drains that run underneath the center, at the lowest point.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">We hit the bottom of that V hard enough to lurch back upright before coming to a stop, front wheels—one of them smoking-hot metal without a hint of rubber left on it—hanging disconsolately a couple of feet above the pavement. Bill turned to me as I pulled myself back upright, and I could see his hands as he tried to loosen them from the steering wheel. It took a minute before he could, and the tremors went up his arms and into his shoulders with a regularity that reminded me of the stripes on a rotating barber pole. In front of us, three cars had stopped and one of them was putting out flares while the others ran down the shoulders of the eastbound lanes waving frantically to slow the semis and the SUVs and big sedans that were barreling back to Grand Canyon Village and Flagstaff and Albuquerque and beyond that: Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It took the state cops a couple of hours to cordon us off, sort us out, and write us down. By that time it was 105<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><sup>0</sup></span> and most of us had left our water bottles rolling around under the seats as we dove for the door. Some of us huddled in the meager shade the bus provided, but wary as we were of the thing tipping over, we didn’t leave ourselves more than a single-file sliver, and it wasn’t much cooler there anyway. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Then the cops ferried us over to the nearest exit, where there was a Pilot Travel Center with a Wendy’s. It was air conditioned, and there was water for sale. It took a few hours to get a replacement bus out from Flagstaff, and by then the relief had turned to boredom and even discontent, and one of the European women, the one with the best shoes, had noticed injuries that might require the healing touch of an American lawyer. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Not the Muslims, you can be sure. They were too busy trying to blend into the formica and laminate dinettes—a little hard considering Ahmed had decided to dress that morning in full-on Saudi costume to demonstrate the virtues of Middle Eastern garb in hot desert climates, and most of the North Africans had followed suit, partly to outdo him in the brilliance of their plumage. The truckers pulled in with their little American flags tied to the rooflines of their cabs and their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let’s Roll!</i> slogans painted on the doors, and pretty soon they’d be clustered in small groups around the diesel pumps giving us the hard stares. Eventually they’d disperse, noisily blatting and airhorning their way back onto the interstate, and after a hiatus, another group would assemble. Even the state cops were getting patriotic; one of them decided to take Ahmed aside for a little quiet interrogation and I had to explain to him that the State Department wasn’t going to take kindly to my phone call if he followed through. Vigilante justice isn’t just a movie theme in Arizona; it’s a hallowed tradition. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">We made it out, though, and the European woman never did get satisfaction for the trauma she’d endured, despite calls to various American acquaintances who she hoped would know the right lawyer. The State Department had flown her over and put her up for six weeks and paid us to teach her and to ferry her around the scenic U.S. of A. and our Washington rep had a certain disdain for ingrates. When her story got around, the rest of the foreigners pretty much shunned her, and she had a miserable last two weeks of it, especially since she periodically forgot she was injured, arriving late at the new bus in the morning having forgotten to don her makeshift sling, leading her to reenact the injury in steadily more incredible melodramas to steadily more contemptuous audiences. In the group debriefing in DC, she tried one more time to unmask the bus company and Bill in particular for wanton disregard and cruelty, and she was loudly shouted down by the rest of the group. I think there was a little shoving involved, too. It was heartwarming evidence that they’d been studying the natives even in a Wendy’s attached to a Pilot Travel Center twenty miles north of Lake Havasu City, Arizona; they’d learned a little vigilantism, and Ahmed even did a passable Clint Eastwood, derived from the Westerns we’d been showing on the bus in the long flat stretches on either side of Oklahoma City.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I never did get to Lake Havasu City that year, though I’d planned to skip town and drive down there from Vegas, leaving Neil to keep the foreigners from losing their stipends at the blackjack table. I wanted to see the London Bridge they’d bought, dismantled, shipped over, and rebuilt as a tourist attraction. I didn’t make it back for a few years. After that trip, we changed the route, skipping the Grand Canyon and taking in the Navajo Res and Monument Valley instead. We kept the same bus company, but try as we might, we couldn’t get Bill to drive us again. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">All in all, though, it was worth it, even if I didn’t see the London Bridge. Later, when I went, I would find it was the wrong one, anyway—not the spectacular Gothic Revival Tower Bridge but the low, ornament-free New London Bridge designed by the brilliantly innovative Scottish engineer John Rennie. Rennie’s design was revolutionary, for it allowed far longer spans between piers, and no complex superstructure. Stripped to its bare, functional bones, it is the model for most modern American highway and freeway bridges.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">And that’s the problem. Out there in Lake Havasu City, New London Bridge looks like every other bridge you’ve ever driven over at 65 or 70 or more. It spans a turbid little cutoff of the Colorado River between two artificially widened bays; on one side there’s Papa Leone’s, on the other, Barley Bros. Brewpub. To juice it up, they’ve illuminated it with colored spotlights, but they don’t do much for the stolid grey stone of the bridge. Far more sublime was the sight of the bus, still cantilevered over the fast lane, as we saw it looking over our shoulders out the rear window of an Arizona State Patrol car driven by a fastidious young man trying his best not to gawk at Ahmed in his <i>bisht</i> and turban, and Fatou in her <i>takchita</i>, crammed into the front seat next to him. </div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04287218767733582486noreply@blogger.com0