I am really glad my job isn't to manage this public relations disaster for the Borough Of Litchfield, Connecticut and its Board of Warden and Burgesses. Fair use excerpt from Rinker Buck's column in the Hartford Courant:
"For the past six years several military mothers here and their supporters have decorated the trees on the town green with yellow ribbons to express their support for local residents who serve in Afghanistan and Iraq.But on Tuesday the Borough of Litchfield's governing body, the board of warden and burgesses, voted to prohibit expression that involves ribbons on trees, and that has thrown this attractive tourist mecca in Litchfield County into an uproar...
...Borough Warden Lee Losee did not return phone calls Friday requesting comment on the board's decision. Two board of warden and burgesses members, however, while declining to be quoted on the decision, agreed to describe their reasons for banning ribbons on the green.
First, the board members said, Norfolk forester Starling Childs had inspected the trees on the green and concluded that the ribbons were hurting their health, encouraging the growth of fungus under the ribbons. Second, the presence of yellow ribbons on the green might encourage other groups to apply for permission to hang ribbons there.
Childs, who maintains the 6,000-acre Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk, is one of Connecticut's best-known tree experts. Reached on Friday, Childs said that he was asked by the Borough of Litchfield in October to conduct an inventory of its trees on the green as part of a plan for preserving the space. But Childs says that he was not asked to examine the question of the yellow ribbons and in fact did not even mention them in his report.
"They must be confusing me with some other botanist, because I don't remember even noticing the ribbons at all and I certainly didn't comment on them," says Childs. "The borough should know that if they wanted a professional opinion on the ribbons, they would have to ask for a written report, and they never requested that."Childs said that he saw the yellow ribbons on the trees on Thursday night, while driving through Litchfield, and he doubted they were causing serious damage to the trees."
Moms and apple pies are probably darting for cover in Litchfield, even as we speak.
It is very wet, almost slush before it hits the ground, but it sticks and will stay and by morning we may have four to six inches of it. My children did not wait for it to accumulate but were outside making snow people out of virtually nothing. At least one of the kids has no snow pants that we could find, and I need a couple of new pallets to lay before the back door where the ice builds up on the path, but if winter is truly here we are ready, now, and mostly willing.
I drove home through the early part of the storm, and in the higher elevations it was heavy and thick while lower down the roads were still warm enough to melt what fell. I remembered that my high beams merely light up the swirling flakes. I thought of how it feels to be in silent woods with snow on the ground and more falling, of how "the moon on the breast of the newfallen snow" is one of the loveliest lines in Clement Clarke Moore's classic. Of sledding at night in those wide fields behind the schoolhouse, and what tracks in the snow reveal to my otherwise impotent senses.
I like my winters white and cold. I like pond ice that freezes fast and black. I like the way the frost gets in my beard, and the winter stars spill their constellations across a moonless sky. I like how ice freezes on the rock face, blue where it is new, in draperies that reveal the hidden falls high on the mountainside.
My Vermonter wife curses the white stuff and says that only a flat-lander is fool enough to abandon the wood stove, but at its best the snow is a comfort to me, and feels right. It softens the edges, amplifies and enhances the architecture of the woodlands and the scoured outcrops. It covers the deep wounds in the land until spring, and lightens the hearts of my housebound offspring. Shoveling is a small price to pay, especially for the first snow of the season.
Alert reader Terry Cowgill, himself a fine journalist, observes this embarrassing correction by the Washington Post:
A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.
Clearly, the reporters and copy editors responsible for the WaPo DC edition were listing to something else on their Sony Walkmen in 1990 when Public Enemy released "911 is a Joke" as the third track on Fear of a Black Planet, an album significant enough to be considered worthy of preservation by the Library of Congress in 2005. Pitchfork Media calls it the 17th best album of the 1990's. Take that, Nirvana!
But perhaps these Post Toasties were underage when PE was telling everyone who saw Do The Right Thing to "fight the power zap bee", or whatever they were going on about in that song. It's not like it was on MTV or anything. Mind you, my college a capella group did an angelic arrangement of Fight The Power, in harmony. Now that's old school.
I've been watching the DVDs of Ken Burn's latest documentary: The National Parks; America's Best Idea. Burns and collaborator Dayton Duncan have brought their cinematic eye and art to the American wilderness, illuminating places such as the Grand Canyon - about which Teddy Roosevelt observed; "The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." - and ideas about conservation and public benefit that the filmmakers present as emblematic of American democracy.
It is a powerful story, carried forward by stunning visuals and Burn's signature treatment of historic images and personalities. Like many viewers I find it inspiring and it makes me want to visit and revisit many of these places (which will likely be welcomed by the Park Service in the face of a marked trend of decreasing visitation and connection between Americans and our Great Outdoors.
It is also a story that embodies great complexity, with larger than life figures like John Muir who somehow outshines even Teddy Roosevelt in the first part of the series. Some of the "talking heads" help to weave together what for the sake of the story is tempting to cast as opposing conservation viewpoints rather than two sides of the same coin. The nation's first Forest Service Director, Gifford Pinchot, still gets less than his due, in my opinion, particularly after having just read Timothy Egan's brilliant new history of The Big Burn; Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. Pinchot was certainly more significant as a conservationist than just as the pragmatic proponent of sustainable use of forestland that he becomes when juxtaposed to the wilderness prophet Muir.
Those talking heads without whom a modern documentary would be unthinkable are a narrative device pioneered and perfected by Burns. I am always intrigued to see which emerges as the charismatic authoritative voice in the film, as Shelby Foote did in Burn's treatment of The Civil War. Two episodes into the series, there are two voices that stand out for me, but for very different reasons.
One belongs to William Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of the excellent Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. His is the voice of gentle intelligence and sensitivity, seeing the study of history and ecology as mutually sustaining (a perspective with which I am fully in accord).
The other is Shelton Johnston, a charismatic veteran park ranger, a marvelous story teller whose love of the parks is palpable. Johnston is an African American with considerable Native American ancestry who was raised in Detroit. More than this, his background makes him a distinct minority both as a Park Ranger and among visitors to our national parks. Not even 1% of those who visit Yosemite, for example, are African American. As Johnston said in a recent interview:
"It's bigger than just African Americans not visiting national parks. It's a disassociation from the natural world," said Johnson, who has worked in Yosemite for the past 15 of his 22 years in the Park Service. "I think it is, in part, a memory of the horrible things that were done to us in rural America."
The rejection of the natural world by the black community, he said, is a scar left over from slavery.
"All Snoop Dogg has to do is go camping in Yosemite and it would change the world," said Johnson, 51. "If Oprah Winfrey went on a road trip to the national parks, it would do more than I have done in my whole career."
The conservation movement in America has a long way to go before this disconnect is resolved.
Burns' film emphasizes that the creation of National Parks was a reaction to the wholesale exploitation of natural resources during the final decades of the 19th century. Yet the very idea of setting aside land for non consumptive public benefit would not even have been considered for the American wilderness if we had not already chosen to do so within our own developed habitat. The rural cemetery movement, the development of public parks within the urban landscape by Frederick Law Olmstead and those he inspired, and even the setting aside of some of the great killing fields of our nation's Civil War as monuments to its memory, all preceded the establishment of the first National Park.
This was not the case in the 18th century, when the Common was a place for the community's livestock and there were better uses for old battlefields than places of quiet reflection. We do not set aside land until we believe what it contains is both essential and irreplaceable. Nor do we invest in the survival of what we do not see as having value. Whether that value is intrinsic, as Muir would have it, or essential to our own health and well being, or both of these things, has long been part of the national conservation debate, and especially so regarding the conservation purposes, use and management of public lands.
One thing, at least, has changed since Roosevelt's Day. Nature does not take its course, at least during the span of human lives, completely free of our influence. Our hands may mar without our even being aware, but they can only mend if we are deliberately conscious in our choices and pay close attention to the results of our interventions. Having a national conversation along these lines would be a wonderful outcome of Burn's storytelling.
I need to get out in the woods. Doing so at this time of year means sharing it with deer hunters, and with bears that have not yet forsaken the beech nuts and berries. It means broader views opening up beneath the barren canopy, and being under mountain shadows by mid-afternoon. It means the cry of the geese above and the smell of the leaves underfoot. It means stepping outside the shell of myself and my daily surroundings.
I need to head for high ground. The autumn air up there is a matchless stimulant. I crave the knife edge of the long slope, the long view from above. I want to worm my way upstream in a cool ravine, amid the hemlocks and the wild trout in their plunge pools. I want to span my hands about the girth of one of those oldest of the old trees that remain in a few places that have never known an ax.
I want to step outside in the great outdoors the way the irascible Edward Abbey challenged us to experience it in the preface to Desert Solitaire:
"In the first place, you can't see anything from a car. You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe. Probably not."
On my knees, certainly.
I don't have 40 days to wrestle for my soul with the devil in the desert, or 40 years to wander there. I am 41 now, and here I am inside.
"Dad", said my six-year-old son, "How do you spell 'Heil'?"
I was in the next room, so he didn't see my double take. His only exposure to Nazis, as far as I know, has been 'The Sound of Music', but we haven't watched that movie for a very long time. Wondering where this was going, I dutifully spelled out "H-E-I-L" and waited for the next shoe to drop.
"Ok, Dad, I know how to spell 'Silver'" said Elias, "but how about Ahoy?"
Aha, I thought, this is about pirates, which are a current obsession in our house.
"Elias, pirates don't say 'Heil'," I said indulgently. "They say 'Avast", or 'Arr!'"
"Dad!", said my son, with that 'don't-you-know anything' tone that is the specialty of the child of clueless parents, "I'm not talking about pirates. I'm drawing a picture of the Lone Ranger, and he says: 'Heil Silver, Ahoy!'"
At least in our house.
I am not a frequent flier. When I do travel by air, I sit by a window, as much to transcend my physical confinement as to relish the world from above. The seats are narrow and the hours are long, and I have to give myself over completely to the pilots inside their fortified cockpit and have faith in unknown flesh and machinery. This is not an altogether comfortable place for one who values self reliance.
Last week I flew from Hartford to Detroit, and from there to Lexington, Kentucky to visit my sister and her family. I am in one of those hard places where something deep inside is struggling to surface. Part of me fears what may emerge, "what rude beast, it's hour come at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born." The human heart has far more than its 4 physical chambers, and some of these I would much prefer to bypass.
And so I boarded the plane, carrying far more than my small carry on bag. And in such a place I found unexpected grace.
You cannot pick your companions when you fly alone. You can retreat into yourself and the too small space you have been allotted too close to the occupant of the next seat. Or you can find, beyond all expectations, a profound connection with a perfect stranger born of shared circumstance and mutual experience. When I used to rely on my thumb for transportation, backpacking in the Pacific Northwest or trekking across Southern Africa, the very act of accepting a ride from a stranger was a goad to conversation. Some of this was a way to take the measure of the other, but also to give rein to our better natures. You have to be open to the possible when you travel this way, to embrace the moment, to adjust expectations. I haven't felt like that for a long time.
On this flight, my companion had the middle seat while I was by the window. Yet it was she who directed my eyes to the afterglow of the buried sun. It was she who showed a friendly interest that turned my inward focus outward. What opened with talk of our separate journeys was soon revealed as twining paths with many interstices. We were both making the same connecting flight. She was a professor and woman of color whose star student from the Berkshires had just published an exquisite chapbook of poetry that grew from the loss of a first child in stillbirth. I know both of those places intimately, and suddenly she was reaching into her bag and handing me her second copy of this work of which there were only 30 made saying I was meant to have it.
From there, it was an extraordinary journey. We spoke of writing and what sets the story free to come. We spoke of Africa and race and finding common ground with those unlike ourselves and yet never apart from us. She revealed a love of the natural world born on a farm in South Carolina before the end of segregation, and how she felt when she saw her first whale. I talked of family history, and Faulkner, and what the world must have been like in the time before propellers when blue whales could communicate pole to pole. I told her the story from Africa I have never been able to write, but not the fresh and secret pain I carry in my heart.
This was not a confessional, nor was this other human being an angel or a muse. It was, however, a time of joy where none was sought or anticipated, of gifts freely given even as their impacts were not completely known. I liked who I was in that place. I value what was shared and allowed to shine. I carry that self knowledge with me now, able to look beyond the rim at the great unknown. And I am grateful for the gift of rising above the unkindness of silence, for that will abide long after I land.
Survival is
surrender without
giving in.
I am going to live
with that thought.
The white panel truck that I followed on my way to work today had a black graffiti tag just visible on the left side side. The plates were New York, the mudflaps from Troy. And bracketing the doors in back were two green lettered bumper stickers with the message: "Jaliek Rainwalker Still Missing".
That sort of thing tends to occupy the mind when driving slightly below the posted speed limit on a winding road with 8 miles before the next passing opportunity. I caught vague impressions of the driver in the side view mirror. The glint of glasses. A white T shirt. Short dark hair and a white face with no facial hair. Was it his truck? His message?
It stayed with me at work, so I looked for the name. Jaliek was a 12 year old, in and out of foster care, who disappeared while in the care of his adopted father has been missing since November 1, 2007. Within the last two weeks, skull fragments were discovered in the woods in Saratoga county but they proved to belong to a missing 18 year old woman and not Jaliek. Some people cannot forget Jaliek, and now, neither can I.
Not mine: theirs. On this Armistice Day, 91 years after the cession of hostilities in WWI, there are just three confirmed veterans of that war who remain alive. Last year there were 10 confirmed WWI veterans still with us, down from 23 in 2007 and 53 in 2006.
108 year old Frank W. Buckles is the last remaining American doughoy. At 109, Jack Babcock, a dual Canadian/American national, is the last Canadian veteran. The last UK seaman is 108 year old Claude S. Choules, now living in Australia. That is all.
I am struck by what these oldest of the old have said about war as their numbers have dwindled. Claude Choules does not participate in remembrance day commemorations, after a 41 year military career that spanned both World Wars, because according to family members "he didn't think we should glorify war." Britian's Harry Patch died earlier this year, respectfully declining a state funeral and having said that "the only lessons to be drawn from the 'organized murder' of war were those of peace, compromise, and reconciliation." There is more in their words of Wilfred Owen than In Flanders Fields.
We marvel at these very few men from that time beyond all other living memories, but what they remember is more important than the novelty of their extreme longevity. The notes of their last post are sounding. What will we hear in their echoes?