The Promised Land of Sun

We are frozen

Frozen in the hinterland

We are posing

Posing with scrapers in our hands

We are nosing

Ever so slowly toward the promised land

The promised land of sun

They are bending

Bending in their icy vines

They are sending their branches

Crashing on our power lines

They are fending

Off destruction by causing mine

I can only be mended by

The promised land of sun

I am bumping

Bumping off these four narrow walls

I am thumping

Up and down these narrow halls

I am slumping

And I can’t wait for this season’s end

I am jonesing for

The promised land of sun

I am seated

Seated in a frozen car

I’m defeated

Though I really wish that it would start

I am beaten

And I’ll have to go on back inside

And wait there for

The promised land of sun

It is pretty

Pretty fucking cold outside

It is slippery

Not what Paul Simon had in mind

It is nippy

Makes your bladder itty bitty sized

Alerting you to head for

The promised land of sun

The Colors of 2019: January - The Salad Days (Green)

I gave myself a writing task for the year 2019. I cut up twelve squares and on each wrote the name of a color. During each month of this year, I’ll randomly choose a square and see what thoughts each inspires. Which memories does it conjure? Which associations does it hold? Which paths does it want to lure me down? As we evolve, our cultures, our technologies compel us to be visual creatures. More and more we experience the world through our eyes—staring at screens, checking phones, watching TV, watching the road. No longer following our nose, we seek information from what we can see. So, with eyes wide open, here we go.

January 2019 – The Salad Days (Green)

My mother’s favorite color was green. We lived in a pine green house on Lois Drive in Williamstown, New Jersey, where I grew up. Mom’s name was Myrtle, like the low-growing leafy green ground cover that now fills my front yard and blossoms in the spring with small purple and white flowers. Her middle name was Rita. Myrtle Rita Boyle Pfaff. She never liked her name. If I’m honest, I didn’t care for it either (although I like it more it now that I’ve seen the flowers blooming). You don’t run into many Myrtles these days. Some names from her era have returned—Ruth, June, Helen, Iris—but no Myrtles. Not that anyone ever called her that. “Myrt!” was what Dad used. “Myrt, can you make me a sandwich?” Myrt or Sweetie or some other Dadly euphemism. Of course, we always just called her Mom. My nieces and nephews all called her Mom-Mom. I heard her first name so infrequently that it caused me to pause when a relative would visit or someone would call and ask for Myrtle. Who?

Our house on Lois Drive was in one of the first subdivisions built in Williamstown after World War II. I’m guessing that my parents used Dad’s GI benefits to get a home loan and move to South Jersey from the suburbs of Philly where they’d grown up. Back then, South Jersey was all pine barrens, vegetable farms, and fruit orchards. Basically, the sticks! I’m sure people from Philly still feel that way. I know the New Yorkers do. What’s that old joke? Why are New Yorkers always so cranky? Because the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey.

The lot where we lived had been a cabbage field until we moved in. Dad used to tell stories about how the developer hadn’t gotten the landscaping right when they graded the property. For the first few years, every time it rained, all the water from the neighboring houses would flow right into our cesspool. No wonder our grass was so green. By the time I came along (the eighth of nine children), that backyard grass had well-worn sandy base paths from countless games of kickball, baseball, stickball, wiffle ball… Do kids still play wiffle ball?

Our front yard had maple trees where Mom and our neighbor would sit in the shade. The backyard was for playing; the front yard was for sitting. It was like that inside the house too. The rec room was for lounging; the living room was for company. Our neighbor worked in the office at St. Mary’s where we went to school. Her son was in my class. After school, she’d kick off her shoes and sit in the green grass in her stocking feet and have a cigarette while he and I helped her search for four-leaf clovers.

We moved to Boca Raton at the end of my first year at St. Mary’s. In Florida, the green was less pine green and more aqua marine—the green of the ocean in the shallows, the green of my beloved Miami Dolphins, the green of patio furniture and beach umbrellas, the green of our built-in pool where I learned to swim (woohoo). For two years, we lived in a house with a screened-in, figure eight-shaped built-in swimming pool. It was like we died and went to Florida. You could swim about six or seven months of the year. We lived in that pool in the summer. We’d play a game we called “butt bumpers,” where one person would sit in the middle of a black inner tube in the deep end, and the others would jump from the sides and try to dislodge him. My mom hated that game. She forbad us from playing it. We played it all the time. Until she pulled out the “your father” card. “When your father gets home…” Of course, when Dad got home, it was everybody out anyway, so he could enjoy a leisurely post-work dip, usually with a Kent cigarette dangling from his lips and a cup of coffee within reach along the edge. Dad drank coffee the way people today strive to keep themselves hydrated with those big water bottles. I don’t know how he ever slept.

Alas, Boca was just a brief stopover for the Pfaff clan. Two years later, we were back in South Jersey, back to the pine and maple and oak and birch green of Forest Hills, another new development in Billsville. This time our house was white, so Mom chose green carpeting in the living room. It was the kind of carpeting that was a single color, but it had a patterned texture that made it seem more complicated. When you fell asleep on it, you woke up with part of the pattern inscribed on your face. And of course, we had another big green lawn. In Boca I learned to swim. In Forest Hills, I learned to push a lawn mower. I liked Boca better.

Forest Hills was filled with boys our age. Here, we continued the never-ending cycle of kickball, stickball, football, basketball, baseball, hockey… except now we played mostly in the street. That big green lawn had too many big green trees. Down the street, we had a park where I began my long love affair with basketball. During the Golden Age of Forest Hills basketball, some of the best players in town came to play there. If you lost you sat, so people played hard. I was too young to really be competitive, but I would bug my older brothers until they let me play (usually when they needed an extra body). The courts were atop a hill that sloped down to a small pond. If you threw a bad pass and the ball rolled down the hill, guess who was fishing it out?

I think of those early years as the “salad days,” before Watergate, the gas crisis, the recession, and worst of all, puberty. Those were the green days of growing up. Before everyone started getting married and moving out. Growing up with so many siblings, it was a pretty lively place. At Sunday dinner, we had the big table for the grown-ups and the pig’s table for the not-yet-grown-ups. Mom would make a roast with mash potatoes, peas and carrots, and green beans, green beans, green beans. And for dessert? She’d make lemon meringue pie, and if you were around when she was making it she’d let you spoon out the extra lemon filling still warm in the pot. Those were some good licks. Way to go Myrt!

Whale Song

Years ago I adapted a poem by Mary Oliver into a song. I’m not much of a poetry guy usually, although I’ve written my fair share. I have some earnestly horrific journals from college that … well … let’s just say no longer fill me with joy and should be shredded and composted. But Mary Oliver was one of Diane’s favorites, and from time to time she’d want to share one with me, looking at me with that hopeful face that I find hard to resist, and among those occasional readings, I was introduced to the poem Bone. 

Diane had brought it up the night before. We were having dinner with some visiting colleagues, and one of the architects shared his interest in the Pleistocene Epoch and the study of fossils. One of the perverse silver linings of climate change and the melting of the permafrost is that paleontologists are discovering and learning more and more about mastodons, mammoths, saber-tooths, sloths, and the rest of the cast of Ice Age. Diane noted that it reminded her of Mary Oliver’s poem Bone, in which the poet describes finding the ear bone of a pilot whale on the beach one early morning. For those who live along the coast, this is apparently not that rare, as this particular bone is very hard and often the last piece of the animal to disappear into the ether. The bone was from an animal that may have died hundreds of years before.  It was tiny. It would have been invisible, buried deep inside the whale “in a house of hearing.” And she used it as a segue to ponder the nature of the soul—“so hard, so necessary … yet almost nothing.” 

And I loved the imagery of a person strolling along the beach in the “pale, pink morning light,” inspired to think those thoughts we can sometimes be prone to think, about eternity, about our place in the enormity of time and space. Oceans can send you to that place. It’s so big and powerful and alive. Oceans, mountains, rivers, even the wide open prairie at dusk, the forest in a rainstorm, or the chaotic silence of a January snowstorm—they inspire us to think about the larger things, those that we find precious, those that we find magical. And then someone like Mary Oliver comes along to put that inclination into words. Thank you for that, Mary. Rest in peace.

Bone

by Mary Oliver 

(from Why I Wake Early, 2004)

1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out

what the soul is,

and where hidden,

and what shape

and so, last week,

when I found on the beach

the ear bone

of a pilot whale that may have died

hundreds of years ago, I thought

maybe I was close

to discovering something

for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest

in any of us, man or whale; shaped

like a squat spoon

with a pink scoop where

once, in the lively swimmer’s head,

it joined its two sisters

in the house of hearing,

it was only

two inches long

and thought: the soul

might be like this

so hard, so necessary

3.

yet almost nothing.

Beside me

the gray sea

was opening and shutting its wave-doors,

unfolding over and over

its time-ridiculing roar;

I looked but I couldn’t see anything

through its dark-knit glare;

yet don’t we all know, the golden sand

is there at the bottom,

though our eyes have never seen it,

nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down

into fractions, and facts

certainties

and what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,

truly I know

our part is not knowing,

but looking, and touching, and loving,

which is the way I walked on,

softly,

through the pale-pink morning light.

A Dream of Imperfection

I woke up the other day with the last images of a dream loitering in my head. I was seated in a sun room with my brothers and sisters. We had just returned from a visit to the Constitution Center in Philadelphia and we were sharing our impressions. It was an unusual dream. I don’t know what prompted it. Growing up in a working-class family with eight brothers and sisters, museum trips were not on the agenda. I grew up with the mistaken stereotype that museums were for rich people. Ironically, I have spent most of my professional life not only visiting museums, but designing exhibits that make museums more welcoming and engaging for all visitors. And yet I still have not become rich myself. Hmmm?

My brothers and sisters expressed a general sense of approval for what they had seen, although I can’t recall any specifics. The Constitution Center interprets the historical experience of Americans grappling with the rights and freedoms articulated in our foundational documents. When my turn came, I surprised myself by launching into a kind of speech about the unlikely daring of our founding fathers. The phrase “band of bandits” lingered in my head as I lay there trying to replay the dream. It really was quite amazing. This geographically dispersed and culturally diverse group of colonists managed to assemble in secret to first declare their independence from the age’s reigning superpower, and then to organize themselves in such a manner that they intentionally divided the powers of governance among federal, state, and local bodies, with each further parsing their authority to executive, legislative, and judicial branches. “We the people” … WE, the collective, embody this government. WE choose individuals among us to temporarily exercise the duties of governance, but WE retain the power. And, even more profound, from that founding Declaration, “WE hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It would take us a while for “all men” to mean “all people” (and some would argue we still have some distance to travel in that regard), but what an extra-ordinary statement and how eloquently written.

As I was laying there pondering the impetus and meaning of my dream, I thought about how we organize ourselves. We are social creatures. The first group that surrounds and nurtures us is our family. We are bonded to them whether or not we choose it to be so, whether we deserve them or they us. As we grow older, we expand our circle to include friends and neighbors, playmates, classmates, teammates, club members, colleagues, citizens, fantasy sports enthusiasts. And in widening concentric circles, we organize ourselves so that we can accomplish collectively what we cannot accomplish individually. Committees, unions, school boards, town councils, county boards, state legislatures, Congress, the UN, and (maybe one day) the United Federation of Planets—WE create bodies to organize and govern ourselves. Everyone is meant to benefit and everyone is expected to contribute. That is the goal. We strive for fairness, although we don’t always get there and we often disagree about what fair means. We don’t always get what we want. We are united but not of one mind, so we must use persuasion and compromise to move things forward, always striving toward a “more perfect union.”

That last phrase, “more perfect,” has always struck me as odd. Why more perfect? If a thing is perfect, it can’t be improved upon, so why “more perfect?” It reminds me of Darwin’s arrow of imperfection that over time propels the evolution of life. We are like our parents. We inherit traits from them. But we are not exact replicas. We are imperfect. But some of those imperfections turn out to be advantages. In a world that is constantly presenting us with new challenges and new opportunities, some of those imperfections turn out to be just what we need to make it over those hurdles, to embrace those moments. And as we join forces, the great diversity of our imperfections makes us ever more capable, ever more adaptable and inventive. WE become greater than the sum of our parts. And yet the “We” that we speak about still includes at its core that profound respect for each and every one of us. WE has to include all of us or it includes none of us. WE are in this together or it all falls apart.

We are living in a time of great, great change. The scope and pace of change has never been more sweeping or more rapid. It’s easy to become afraid, to want to step back and shield ourselves from that forward momentum. And yet our knowledge and technology have enabled humanity to be safer, healthier, and more prosperous than we’ve ever been. Still, that same technology informs us daily about the many, many areas in which we must improve … to become more perfect. We must continue to strive to make things fair. We must help those who are in distress. We must remember that we are stronger when we embrace our differences. And we must be wise caretakers of our home planet. We must leave the place better than we found it so that our children may thrive and pass it along to their children. We are a family, a community, a nation, fellow creatures sharing the same Earth. We owe that debt to ourselves and to each other. We all benefit. We all contribute. We all matter. That’s the dream.

Half-baked

Winter solstice. Midnight. This instant! The middle of the day.

“Isn’t every second of the day the middle of the day? How is noon any more or less midday than 3:37?”

“Depends on what shift you’re working.”

 “There’s always a flip side. An AM and a PM.”

 “A bright side.”

“A dark side.”

“An upside and a downside.”

Hump day. Mid-season. Halfway through the year. Half-time. Mid-life … just turned 57 … maybe a little past.

“Hopefully! I don’t like the sound of 114.”

“That’s a whole lotta Seinfeld.”

We live in the middle of the block … in mid-town. Inside a county in a state in the Midwest. We’re in between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rockies, north of the gulf and south of the lakes, between Columbus and Marietta. In the forest at the bend halfway up the hill. Between a rock and a landslide.

We all come from somewhere. Hometowns frozen in our child’s eye. We’ve just come from somewhere and we’re on the way to somewhere else. We had a map. We asked for directions. We Googled it.

“When?”

“I don’t know … back when … you know.”

“I remember that! We were there with the big blue thing and the skinny people.”

“Remember that picture? We were in the second row, between what’s his face and so and so. You know who I mean. I have it on my phone.”

Tomorrow.

“Next week we’re going. I can’t wait.”

“Now?”

“Well, now is almost always then.”

“Before you know it, we’ll be history.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know what happens afterward.”

We always need something to look forward to.”

“Anticipation is making me wait.”

“I hate waiting.”

“The light was still yellow, officer.”

“Why are we stuck in this lane? This check-out line? This zone?”

“I need a faster modem.”

We’re never at the beginning and we never get the last word. We were birthed into a movie after the coming attractions already came and went? In the darkened theater we pause to let our eyes adjust, enacting the drama of Plato’s cave.

“Who’s that? What’s happening?”

We scramble to catch up, to figure it out. After we leave, the story keeps spinning on. We wonder about a sequel.

“What happens, you know, next?”

I was never the biggest guy on the team, but not the smallest either. There’s always someone faster and someone slower. Someone just a little craftier, keener, wiser, leaner. Someone smarter, someone slicker. Someone more popular. Someone who’s always just one step ahead and someone who never quite gets it. If I’m honest, I suppose I have to admit that I’ve sometimes been that someone. Not always, but sometimes. Makes me want to strive to be better. Makes me want to show a little more compassion.

Measurement draws with a subjective marker. Attach a value to that which is here and that which is there. It all depends on the context.

“Is this close enough?”

“What’s the goal?”

Set an intention One can be better, more precise, and one can be worse, more ambiguous. Depends on how you define those terms and why. Draw a line in the shifting sands. What’s up now may be down later? What’s funky? What’s cool? What’s permissible? What’s allowed? By whom? Who’s in? Who’s out? Who’s Who?

“Who’s Next?”

We like to think we’re at the top of the heap on that uppermost rung of that long evolutionary ladder that stretches way, way back.

“Long before time had anyone to tell it.”

“We’re the last coat of paint on the outermost railing of the pier.”

The arrow of time. The wind-aided arrow of imperfection.

“Evolution unfolds like I throw darts.”

“Are we really at the top?”

“Is there a top?”

“Are there many tops? How many?”

“Is there a difference between a top that is unattainable and no top at all?”

Remember your elementary number lines with your ruler and your No. 2 pencil? We’d draw lines with arrows on either end facing outward. Negatives and positives count into infinity, pacing off the duel. Dot. Dot. Dot! But there are also spaces in between the increments. Where do you decide to round off? Within a foot? Within an inch? Within a centimeter? Within a nanometer?

When I was a kid in school the atom was the smallest? What would it have been for Grandma? A single cell? DNA? Now … now I don’t even know what they call the things that are inside? The smaller than an atom things. Electrons and protons and neutrons are off the market. Old hack. Bring on the quarks and leptons. Here’s your fifteen minutes.

“What’s a lepton? How many leptons in a quark?”

Time and distance stretch into infinity in every direction. The universe is expanding.

“Really? Into where?”

“What’s on this side of the universe and what’s on the other side?“

“How would you recognize the boundary?”

“Is there a border wall with armed patrols and internment camps?”

“Or is it like going from first class to coach? Are we in the economy universe? Do they have more comfortable seats on the other side?”

“And what about the beginning? Was there a beginning?”

God said, “Let there be light.”

“Really? Who was God talking to? And if there was no one else to hear, why announce it?”

“Let there” (so there was someplace that required illumination – there was a there there; and) “be light” (implying that illumination was somehow better or different than darkness). And why “Let”?” Was light previously forbidden?

“Who put God in charge anyway? Who made god God? Where do a I find God at the end of my dueling arrows? Or is god somewhere in the increments?”

“God is everywhere.”

“So, I just have to look everywhere to find God? Even at WalMart? Shit. That’s not really helpful.”

“God is a state of mind. Not a being. Not a deity. Not a God god. Just a state of awareness. Of the grandeur. Of the complexity. Of the connectivity. Of the humility. Of the beauty and the wonder.”

“Yeah, that’s maybe not all that helpful either.”

As far as I can tell everyone’s seeking comfort. “We all want to go home, We all want to have our toys, We all want to have peace of mind, We all want to have joy.” That’s how the song goes. But wow, there’s a whole bunch of spaces on that number line. “Where do I put my dot?”

“How do I find my dot? Have you seen my dot? Do you remember what my dot looked like?”

“No, you’re not allowed to rip your dot into tiny pieces and put them everywhere. You’re mucking up the system. Everyone just gets one dot.”

Midway. It’s come to this. Writing about a place, a distance, a moment, a mood. Contemplating the proverbial, the existential, the eternal, the nonsensical … basically all the “als.” Looking back but with one eye forward.

“Cross-eyed at the crossroads.”

Every intersection is a crossroads. Some just seem more monumental than others. More pregnant with possibility. A bit brighter perhaps.

“Is the glass half full or half empty?”

“Is this my glass? Where did I put my glass?”

“Follow your nose. The air doesn’t seem quite so dank down there.”

“Just direct your feet … to the sunny side of the street.”

A Trip to the Islands

Years ago, I participated in the design of the Visitor Center at the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area in the Mojave Desert just west of Las Vegas. A land of extremes, subtle variations in wind, heat, humidity, and soil mark the line between life and death at Red Rock. Aztec Sandstone towers above the desert floor, making the area a world-class rock-climbing destination. The cliffs are sheer and treacherous. In the higher elevations, naturalists find “sky islands”—isolated ecosystems where conditions diverge from those on the desert floor, enabling unique niches of plants and animals to survive, but also effectively fencing them in.

Some sky island inhabitants are immigrants, brought in by blowing winds, animal droppings, and the boots and pant legs of tourists. Others have been there for thousands of years, since the last Ice Age when the Southwest was much cooler and wetter than it is today. Back then, even lands barely above sea level could host woodland communities of spruce, fir, pinyon, juniper, and even Ponderosa pine. But when the climate warmed, the desert dried out the flats and steadily climbed into the hills until the mountain holdouts became marooned, surrounded by inhospitable lands that would quickly roast them if they dared to venture from their elevated retreats. Over time, each of these secluded niches followed their own evolutionary paths, driven by local topography and their haphazard makeup. Did you know that there are still jaguars and ocelots living in Arizona?

Sky islands exist in many places along the mountain ridges of the American Southwest, where deserts surround and confine them as effectively as the Pacific Ocean surrounds the many mountaintops that occasionally pierce its surface. Most Pacific islands were formed by the movement of tectonic plates, generating uplift and, occasionally, lava erupting from cone-shaped volcanoes. In 2014, NASA satellites were lucky enough to capture the birth of one such island, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (a name I love, by the way) in the Kingdom of Tonga, which sits in the middle of the South Pacific east of Australia.

It’ll be some time before the coconuts, iguanas and sea gulls move in. For a while, it’ll just be a steaming pile of rock. But they’re all coming, and I’m fascinated by how they get there. Some get blown in by cyclones. It’s a hazardous ride, but over thousands of storms, someone’s bound to win the lottery. Some fly in—think birds, bats, and lightweight spiders with fancy parachutes and the ability to withstand high altitudes without pressurization or pretzels. Others get floated in by debris. Palm fronds make magical life rafts for common geckos and any number of invertebrates and tree frog tadpoles. Some arrive in the slurry of plankton conveyed by oceanic currents. Somehow, these infant sea creatures know to head for land at just the right time. Pacific islands are often surrounded by coral reefs which, it turns out, make ideal nurseries.

Still others get flown or floated in as seeds. They arrive stuck to the feathers of migrating birds, swallowed and later expelled in feces, or they float all by themselves, in hardened shells that can withstand the long saltwater cruise until the tide rolls them up on some sandy beach, where the sun warms and dries and triggers them to sprout. They face long odds, each of these castaways. But given enough time and happenstance, they populate one island after another. And yet because each is miles and miles apart, and may be inhabited by a different set of flown, floated, and/or pooped out creatures, their neighborhoods evolve in their own random directions. One island has salt water crocodiles or drooling dragons at the top of its food chain. Another is heavily trod by flightless birds. One island has huge invertebrates but no land mammals. Another has no coconuts but huge tree ferns.

When I think of such islands, my mind wants to leap to modern cities, urban islands where local geography and historical circumstances conspire to allow them to host millions of diverse creatures, sharing various evolutionary traits with their distant cousins, and yet each very much a unique mega-organism. Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City—all feel to me like great, urban islands surrounded by the ocean of prairie. Who was flown, floated, or dumped there seems just as random as the future inhabitants of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai. Once they each achieved some mysterious threshold they became magnetic, self-sustaining ecosystems, drawing more and more species and resources into their orb, donning their own cultural doodads, and expelling those that couldn’t make the cut. What makes the naked city go? Who puts it on the map? Who crafts poetic stanzas about its grand avenues, bustling streets, and back-alley hangouts? Who can’t afford to live there? Who is put off by the weather, the traffic, the noise, the pollution, the crime, the schools? Such considerations are no less daunting than the searing Mojave sun or the pounding Pacific surf. That very process of natural selection suggests to me that these urban islanders can feel just as confined as the residents of Red Rock. At some point, you’ve commuted so far from the Loop that it no longer feels like you live in Chicago. I don’t know what that distance is, but when you start rooting for the Packers, Chiefs, Colts or Lions, you’re off the island!

All this island talk leads me to wonder about SETI (the Search for Extra-terrestrial yada yada) and whether the Earth isn’t just another kind of island, the ultimate sky island, surrounded by a vast desert/ocean of space that confines and separates us from our galactic cousins. Just like the Red Rock residents likely have no awareness of their cousins in Mexico or California, I wonder about our ignorance about potential life in far-off galaxies. Perhaps, long ago, we were among those who were dropped here aboard a rogue asteroid, flown in with some random stardust, or even excreted by some ancient space traveler making use of our blue planet as a convenient porta potty. Over eons of time, we’ve evolved in our own Earthling ways, so much so that we might not even recognize life elsewhere as life. Hmmm? “I am a rock, I am an island.” Kind of gives that old tune a different spin!

The Tangled Web

“Those who ignore history are condemned (or doomed) to repeat it.” Versions of this quote are attributed to 20th century philosopher George Santayana, who wrote it in Reason in Common Sense in 1905, and to Edmund Burke, considered the founder of modern political conservatism, who penned something similar more than a century earlier. I’ve never really liked the expression, especially when further shortened to “history repeats itself.” People used the phrase to try to justify the importance of knowing history, as if by studying the past, you’ll be able to predict when the wheel will come back around. I don’t think that’s really quite how history works.

I prefer to look at history as context. History helps us to understand causation, how one action or, usually, one series of actions, contributes to a cascade of later reactions. History doesn’t necessarily help us to understand where we are going, but it enables us to understand how we arrived, and since people tend to be governed by the same hopes, fears and desires irregardless of the time in which they live, it does offer us some useful lessons about the opportunities and obstacles that may lay ahead.

A few years ago this idea came home to me when I was attending a family funeral. I grew up in South Jersey and, as I still have relatives there, I occasionally return for family functions. The funeral was held not more than a mile from my childhood home in a funeral home on the site of the five and dime store that we used to walk to as kids to buy soda and penny candy. In attendance, I saw relatives and family friends, many that I had not encountered for decades. It struck me that my experience of them had become like a movie that I had skipped out of in the middle to go to the restroom. While I was gone, the film had continued to roll, and so when I returned, I was not completely certain where the story had gone. The setting had changed; the town didn’t look quite the same anymore. There were characters that I recognized from earlier, but they too seemed to have morphed into older versions of themselves. And there were all these new characters, people I either didn’t know at all or had only met once or twice when they were toddlers. Now they were much older, playing much more central roles in the ongoing plot, and I was the uncle who kept calling them by the wrong names.

When we’re born into the world, for us it is the beginning, but in fact, we’re entering in the middle of a vast and complex story that has been continuously unfolding longer than anyone can remember. Our DNA is shaped by ancestors who may have lived in another part of the world thousands of years ago. Our language and customs, how we view the world and organize our thoughts, are similarly inherited from those who came before. In Wisconsin, the 19th century Norwegian writer Waldemar Ager tried to keep the speaking of Norwegian alive among his fellow immigrants because, as he wrote, “language is the breadbasket of culture.” You will find the same sentiments expressed by Native American tribal leaders who lament how central their language is to the survival of their cultural identity. Among refugees, you see how language divides generations. Young people, more adept at learning the new host language, assimilate rapidly while their elders become saddled and isolated by the past.

So as we enter into the mix, into this great forest of humanity, we encounter numerous weedy vines that reach and branch and snarl across time. These vines are often technological innovations. Some branches persist for a generation or two and then wither. Others grow into thick, far-reaching tangles that define and redefine the global ecosystem in predictable and unpredictable ways. Tools that govern transportation and information, those that tend to bring communities together, turn out to be the meatiest vines. Gutenberg’s printing press fueled an age of enlightenment. No longer was reading confined to scribes and nobles. Information could be shared much more widely. Maritime innovations fueled an age of exploration. Global traders exchanged tea, cotton, corn, potatoes, rubber, sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and host of other items that redefined the planet. Tragically, they also exchanged slaves, diseases, and animal skins. The results of that exchange continue to reach forward in time.

Jump ahead to the 19th century, and a new weed, the iron railroad enters the mix. Now you no longer need to live near a navigable waterway. Now you can transport people and goods across great distances at speed. Now the world has to be divided into time zones in order to manage this new form of transportation. And along those railroad lines, telegraph and later telephone lines transport information. Jump ahead a little further. Now you can take that same trip in your own car or truck. Now you can live in the suburbs and commute. Jump ahead still further. Now you can fly to any city in the world in the span of a single day. Or you can telecommute, and share your blog instantaneously with a few clicks, while lounging at home in your pajamas.

In Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, author Parag Khanna argues that connectivity will rule the future, much like it ruled the past. In a world in which global transportation and communications lines are criss-crossing the planet, those who are connected will flourish and those who are not will wither. Interesting, he also notes that looking around the world today, you’ll notice that those who are more isolated (e.g. North Korean, Iran, Russia, Niger, Yemen) also tend to be the most volatile. Turns out that erecting walls doesn’t do anyone any good, and in the end all such walls (the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall) are doomed to become tourist attractions, monuments to the folly of those who built them.

The Naturals

I love it when something you read or experience offers you insights that then cascade to other regions of your brain and trigger a “eureka” of understanding. I guess that’s how our brains work as we stair-step from one developmental stage to another. I recently read two books that each, in their own way, helped me better understand how complex ecosystems work. The first, Return of the Sea Otter by Todd McLeish, describes how the health of kelp forests along the Pacific Coast was due in large part to the actions of sea otters, who kept the sea urchins that eat kelp in check. The international fur trade once nearly wiped out sea otters. Apparently, their fur is about a million times more dense than the hair on human heads, even my daughter’s head on a humid day. Without the sea otters, the sea urchins were free to wreak havoc on the kelp, which in turn decimated the habitat that kelp forests created for numerous coastal sea creatures.

Sea otters are what wildlife biologists call a keystone species. Not to be confused with the residents of Pennsylvania, keystoners are like natural conservators. Without them, everything in their neck of the woods tends to go to hell. Google “keystone species” and you’ll be surprised by who’s on the list—prairie dogs, sea stars, termites, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, krill. It’s not just the big dudes, although jumbos like elephants are certainly represented. On the Great Plains, American Bison (aka. buffalo) were once keystoners. In OMG hard-to-fathom numbers, they once clipped and fertilized wide swaths of North America’s grasslands. They also wallowed their massive furry bulks in muddy depressions to cool themselves. Those wallows became ponds and ultimately wetland habitats.

In the Pacific Northwest, salmon are among the keystoners. Their epic current-defying spawning runs feed everyone from orcas and seals, to grizzly bears and wolves, to migratory bald eagles, to the towering cedars and redwoods that are ultimately fertilized by their rotting carcasses. Talk about a keystoner that keeps on giving. The same can be said for beavers in the Great Lakes and wolves in the mountain West. Beavers dam rivers, sorting sediment and regulating water flow for salmon and trout, and creating wetlands that nurture a rich diversity of plants, which in turn offer homes and food for countless birds, amphibians, reptiles, and rodents.

In the mountain West, it turns out that gray wolves labor like sea otters and once suffered a similar fate. They were hunted nearly to extinction because of their perceived threat to livestock. But in their absence, deer and elk multiplied and pigged out. Fewer saplings, shrubs, sedges, and wildflowers meant less habitat for small mammals, birds and even butterflies. Devoid of plant roots to hold stream banks, increased erosion filled in wetlands and choked streams. With their recent reintroduction at Yellowstone, much of this has reversed. Biologists weren’t surprised to see wolves rein in the elk population, but they didn’t expect them to change the land itself.

In Darwin Comes to Town, author Menno Schilthuizen, writes about ants as keystoners. Ants engineer their environment. Their highly organized societies build cities, grow crops, hunt and forage, and in so doing provide habitat for countless mites, flies, butterfly-caterpillars, woodlice, pseudoscorpions, millipedes, springtails and crickets. Collectively, these guys are called Myrmecophiles (literally, “ant-lovers). And, just as a side note, can I just say Myrmecophiles? Really? That’s what we’re going with? You couldn’t just say Ant Lovers, or Antus Loverus if you want it to sound more Latiny? It turns out that all those lovers of ants find ways to mimic the chemical signals that ants use to talk to one another, and thereby infiltrate their cities, where they feed on ant crops, ant pupae, ant dung and, well … ants! So in spraying a little Raid, you’re not just taking out a few ants but a whole colony of other tiny creatures.

Schilthuizen uses the story of the ants as an entree into describing humans as keystoners. We create cities that obviously destroy habitat for many, many plants and animals. But our cities also create new habitats which are then populated by those plants and animals that are best able to adapt to the many unique niches that urban architecture provides. Take deer, for example. In Athens you can’t swing a dead cat without … er … ok, so maybe I shouldn’t put it quite that way. How ‘bout songbirds! Yeah, let’s do songbirds. Cities tend to favor songbirds with higher pitched voices over those with lower pitched tones. Higher notes carry better in urban environments where human vehicles and machines tend to hum in those deeper registers. Since birds use their songs to communicate, those who can hear themselves and their kin do better. Schilthuizen offers a number of examples in a book that I highly recommend. Two of my favorites are about urban crows and catfish. Apparently, in some cities those smarty-pants crows have learned to use slow moving automobiles as giant nut crackers. They’ve taken to bringing especially hard acorns to urban intersections where, after waiting for the light to change, they place the shells in the path of soon to be moving cars. Once the cars go by, voilà—your nut monsieur! Similarly, catfish swimming in rivers that snake through urban areas have learned that pigeons, common city dwellers, also frequent urban waterways to bathe and drink and, well, pigeons aren’t bad tasting. In fact, they go down pretty easy with a little river water.

Such stories about urban ecology offer a timely reminder that humans are very much a part of the natural world. In the museum business, for years we have tended to segregate human history stories in one wing and natural history stories in another. Now, more and more we’re forced to face the stark reality that we’re all naturals. Separating the two removes an essential player from the mix. Humans have obviously had a tremendous impact on ecosystems around the world. Even in the polar regions, where very few humans actually live, our activities are today reshaping those landscapes. And on the flip side, the non-human life forms that inhabit this planet have obviously shaped where, when and how human societies thrive. Look at Idaho, a state who’s shape really doesn’t make any sense next to all those Great Plains rectangles. Three major ecological regions exist within its arbitrary boundaries—the high desert sage steppe South; the rocky, mountainous middle; and the green, lush forested North. Even though the state’s residents all call themselves Idahoans, the people that dwell in each region live very different lives, nudged in this direction or that by their plant and animal neighbors. And why not? People and the land shape each other. Any bonafide keystoner could tell you that.

Pablo & Vincent

This song was born one Saturday morning, about twenty years ago when my son, Collin, was still in kindergarten. As I was walking through the living room, probably in the middle of weekend chores, I passed Collin and his friend Joey, huddled at our family computer. They were playing Power Pete, a game that came pre-loaded on the Mac. I think it was similar to Super Mario. Players had to navigate a kind of maze while gobbling various objects in order to accumulate points and advance to the next level. Our kids loved it! This was a pre-mouse Mac, so Lara (five years older than Collin) would operate the arrow keys to navigate while Collin's only job was to shoot ... over and over and over. Did I say they loved it? In a recent trip to Chicago, they both became filled with nostalgic glee when someone found a Power Pete video on YouTube.

On this particular Saturday, one of Collin's classmates had slept over and the two were intent on Power Pete in their pajamas. They had juice glasses at their sides and what looked like the remains of peanut butter toast or whatever Diane had fixed for them on kid-friendly plastic plates. It looked like a kinder-office. Today, I guess, you'd call them gamers. The only sounds in the room were the click, click, click of the keyboard, and the constant chatter between them. As I walked past, I happened to hear Joey say that his favorite artist was Vincent Van Gogh, while Collin offered that he preferred Pablo Picasso. It stopped me in my tracks. It was not the kind of chatter that I had grown used to hearing from these two. I would have expected something about Batman or Godzilla. No doubt their art teacher had been introducing them to various styles of art and, wonder of wonders, they liked it. And why wouldn't they? Van Gogh had that great explosion of colors leaping off the canvas. And Picasso, well, who can even say what was going on in his head? And what child wouldn't want to paint like someone who didn't seem to follow any rules at all. It would not be the first time that my son would surprise me.

Their conversation stuck with me for a long, long time, until some months later, I wrote this song, a kind of celebration of childhood and parenthood all rolled into one. We all wanted our children to meet the world head on with joy and wonder, even as we ran along beside them trying to be nurturing and supportive, but not too nurturing and supportive, just the right amount. It was at once exhilarating and exhausting. Remember the first time you took your toddler to the park, and she went back and forth between the swing, slide and teeter-totter, and after five minutes you felt like you'd been there for an hour? Remember the time you and your son were both home sick with the flu, and in your feverish state, grandma showed up with six hours of newly recorded Barney videos? Maybe that was just me.

Raising children was like time traveling. You immediately had a new appreciation for your parents. You saw them, maybe for the first time, as not simply parents, but people with hopes and dreams that maybe hadn't always involved carting your ass all over town. And then you looked at your kids, and you remembered some of the same reactions and feelings that you witnessed in them. Of course, you wanted them to benefit from your knowledge and experience. You didn't want them to suffer as you had suffered, even though, let's face it, some of that was out of your hands. Even when they were listening, they weren't really listening. But they were so joyous as toddlers, so filled with possibility, and so darned cute. We were forever grateful, but we really wanted to take a nap. 

Pablo & Vincent

Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh were playing

Power Pete in the den

Pablo did things no other painter could do

He made it to level 2 of the game

Batman and Robin painted windmills in fields

With swirling leaves and stars up above

But Mr. Freeze drew frozen pictures of ice

He wasn’t evil, just chilled to the bone

Action figures and magic markers

Concerts sung in the bath

Dried out paint sets and bedroom sword fights

Make us mad, make us laugh

Where do babies come from?

Where do dead people go?

What happens when you go outside without shoes?

You get a sliver inside your thumb toe

Sit up straight at the table

Brush your teeth before bed

Don’t leave your music on the living room floor

‘Cause you can’t keep all those notes in your head

Hats and mittens and soggy snow pants

Summer days at the pool

Can’t see how lucky we are to have them

Can’t wait ‘til they go to school

Babies don’t always smell good

Grown-ups don’t always know best

Naps are something you never outgrow

If you can have on then you’re truly blessed.

Emperors in Exile

So, I was watching March of the Penguins the other day on HBO—the one with all the shuffle stepping and belly sliding and egg passing and cute little penguin fluff balls that you just wanna squeeze to hear them chirp. Bring up the soulful strings. Cue Morgan Freeman. I think it’s a great film, but it makes me wonder: “Whatttt the hell is going on with evolution?” THESE are the ones that get to survive? Really? These are the gymnastics that some living organisms are required to perform in order to pass their genetic code along to the next generation? Really? There wasn’t a simpler way, a way in which maybe they wouldn’t have to brave minus-500 degree temperatures with gale force winds in six months of darkness while they’re trying to hatch BABIES? And these are the Emperor Penguins, not Prince and Princess Penguins, not Dukes, Duchesses, Madams, Sirs, or even Middle-Class on the Upper West Side Penguins. These are the god damn Emperors. What did they do to deserve that? They must have been horrible rulers.

I sometimes hear religious people, who claim to believe in such things, say, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” I gotta say … that feels like a massive understatement. Because – and I’m not even going to get into politics here—just the natural state of life on our precious blue planet seems so very, very very, very, very, very strange. Just watching those exiled Emperors, huddling in a circle against that cruel Antarctic wind—it’s either a shit-load of Hail Marys, or the longest, most complicated football play in history: “Ok, Jimmy you do a button hook around that bottle cap; Peewee, do a crisscross with Hermann and duck over the middle; Jake you fake right and do a curl behind Zeke; Jerry go long; I’ll fake the hand-off to Sudsy and pitch it to Benny coming around with Big Ed and Ugly Frank. He’ll fake the option, then lateral to Ozzie on the reverse. Wait for the sun to come up over the second iceberg, then toss it to Ike streaking down the coastline. Watch out for blitzing sea lions. Anybody drops an egg, we all fall on it or it’ll freeze solid in eight seconds. Break!”

What are they thinking about during that long, vicious, bitingly cold night? I mean, the Aurora Borealis is pretty cool, but I don’t think that’s gonna be enough. Maybe it’s a deep, repetitive reincarnation chant. “I’m coming back as a flamingo. I’m coming back as a flamingo. No way I’m doing this shit again. I’m coming back as a flamingo. Next time, I’m gonna be kicking it in the tropics. I’m coming back as a flamingo. Sandy beaches. All the shrimp you can eat. Nothing but palm trees and warmmmm water. I’m coming back as a flamingo. Hey!!! Watch it bub? Get your feathers out of my face? It’s my turn to be in the middle! I’ve been freezing my ass off out on the edge for over an hour. We gotta freekin’ line here, ya know! No cuts!... Next time …. Yeah, yeah, flamingo for sure. Pink and tall. I’m coming back as a flamingo.”

And Emperor Penguins are not even the only ones who have to endure such trials. Humpback whales mate and give birth in the warm, tropical waters around the Hawaiian Islands. That sounds pretty sweet. I mean, we lived in northern Wisconsin when our kids were born. Finally, an evolutionary adaptation I can get on board with. Woohoo!!! But there’s no food for them in those groovy Aloha waters. They don’t eat poi or pineapple. Their meals are served up off the balmy, storm-tossed coast of Alaska. So, the new mothers must swim there with their calves, who frequently need to rest atop mom’s back in order to have enough energy to make it to the surface regularly TO BREATHE. The journey takes them months, and, just to kick it up a notch, along the way they’re hounded by pods of Orcas, the smartest, most lethal hunters in the ocean. Thanks a lot Sherlock!

What would the evolutionary advantage there be? I suppose in most cases, it’s all about finding a place far from claws and teeth to bring babies into the world. Still, you would think they might catch a break and at least have a smoothie bar around the corner, just a little something to tide them over. A Krill Swim & Go? A Sardine Shack?

That breathing thing is another freaky evolutionary feature. “Ok so you’re going to be able to swim like a MOFO, I mean, you’ll be slicing through the water, darting here and there, graceful, quick, all day long, no problem, except every so often … and this is a glitch we just haven’t been able to work out of the software … every so often you’re gonna have to stick your snout out of the water, just for a second or two, to breathe. But you can go right back down again. Back to swimming, chilling, darting here and there … catch some fish … It’ll be beautiful.”

“And how long do I have to keep popping out of the water to breathe.”

“Oh, that’s permanent. That’s just something you do.”

“And if I don’t make it up. Maybe I get distracted, lose track of time, meeting runs late, stuck in traffic?”

“Oh, you’re gonna wanna make it back up to the air.”

“Well, let’s say I don’t, just once, for argument’s sake. Hypothetical.”

“You’ll die.”

“I’ll die?”

“Yeah. Sorry. That’s hard-wired in. DEAD as a doornail. Nothing we could do about it.”

What would it be like for humans if we had to do the opposite? Every so many seconds you have to dip your head in some water to catch a breath or you’ll suffocate. Every step, every action, every decision would be measured against how long it will take you to get back to water. Talk about a biological clock! You’d always have that “tick, tick, tick” counting down. “Can I make it to Kroger and back? Do I have time to stop at the bank? If I take the bike path along the river and stop at the pool….” Instead of tanks of air, we’d have to strap on big water-cooler sized jugs. I’ve never gone scuba diving, but I’m guessing they’d be quite a bit heavier.

I can’t imagine that would get very far in the design process. I mean, I know there are no bad ideas in brainstorming but.… “It’s time for the regular weekly Evolution design team meeting. We’ve done some good work with whales, dolphins, seals, sea otters. A whole host of mammals are spending most of their days swimming underwater and surface only periodically to inhale. Now, we have a suggestion from upstairs, wants to shake things up a bit, try something new, think outside the box. What if we had a mammal that lived primarily on land, but had to go underwater to breathe? What would that look like? We’ve written all the brainstorms for new creatures up here on these big sheets. Fire-breathing dragon. Unicorns. Mermaids. And now water-breathing homo sapiens? Put your blue dots next to the ones you’d like to see fleshed out in the next design phase. Don’t worry about the budget. We’re just blue-skying it for now.”

The more you think about it, there are all sorts of evolutionary twists and turns that seem totally preposterous, and yet there they are, going about their business, flying here, swimming there, species with crazy tongues, hardened shells, bioluminescent organs, clear the room odors, doing it year in and year out. In Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that storytelling turns out to be one of the most important evolutionary advantages developed by homo sapiens. He argues that by being able to tell stories, we have managed to cooperate, join forces, work together in great numbers across vast chasms of space and time to accomplish what was needed to pass along our genetic code to future generations. Storytelling. Spinning the proverbial yarn. Weaving a tale. Talking some serious shite! And that has made the difference. That has taken us from caves of Lascaux to the Sea of Tranquility. Images, words, phrases, and sentences forming ideas. Creating stories has established connections, reinforced bonds, repaired injuries, unified communities, built nations. It’s not who has the biggest horns, the brightest feathers, the loudest bellow, the best nest. It’s our stories that have enabled us to succeed, the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell others. We have evolved the ability to tell stories that say, “If we all join forces, work together, learn to trust each other, we can do this, that, and the other thing. We can make our lives better. We can make a place for our kids.”

Hmmm? That’s kind of an awesome evolutionary superpower. I won’t say that there isn’t still a fair amount of mystery embedded in that trait, and “awesome” can cut both ways, but … as long as I don’t have to balance an egg on my feet in the freezing cold or swim half way around the world to get a decent meal? And I can keep on breathing, in and out, like always? Ok. I’m in!

Dancing to the Light of the Rising Sun

Taking in the West for the scenery

Want to leave the sadness of life behind

Walking in the shade of the greenery

Sitting in the glow of the campfire light

     And we go on and on

     Who knows how we found this song

     And we go on and on

     Dancing to the light of the rising sun

Living in the land of the creamery

Filling our apartment with peas and pies

Bringing home an angel of springtime

Smiling crinkled nose and two sweet blue eyes

     And we go on and on

     Who knows how we found this song

     And we go on and on

     Dancing to the light of the rising sun

Soon it came the season for moving

Little corner house near the old train yard

Sledding with our kids in the schoolyard

Walking to the park and going up and down that slide

And we go on and on

Who knows how we found this song

And we go on and on

Dancing to the light of the rising sun

Now we're in the hillsides of redbud

Appalachian hippies and stardust nights

Staring at the moon through our window

And swaying to the songs that we'll sing tonight

     And we go on and on

     Who knows how we found this song

And we go on and on

Dancing to the light of the rising sun

And we go on and on

Who knows how we found this song

And we go on and on

Dancing to the light of the rising sun...

As the Wind Blows

"I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul." Remember that song, an oldie from the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens? I always liked that song, but I guess I never really paid much attention to the lyric. "The wind of my soul?" Really? I mean, I know it's a metaphor, but ... really? That's what you're going with?

The lyric popped into my head as I was heading down the bike trail this morning. Coincidentally, it was windy, but then again, it's always windy on the bike trail, particularly as it hugs the Hocking River around the lower campus of Ohio University. You don't ever seem to get a break on the direction of the wind either. No matter which way you're headed, there is it, right in your face. Maybe it's just the way I'm prone to look at things. I think it has something to do with the bowl-shaped valley that we're tucked into. The winds come down from the hills and just sort of swirl around looking for an exit.

This time of year the wind is filled with vegetation, pollen mostly. The honeysuckle in particular is sweet in the air, but it sends me running for tissues and antihistamine. Later in the summer when the rains ease up and the land begins to dry out—about time for the county fair—you'll get clay dust blowing across town. It will be especially bad on State Street this year where the orange cones are out and road crews are hard at it. By the time they finish in September, the students will have blown back into town and so too the fall rains, wetting the leaves and carrying the spores of any number of molds and fungi. The smell of wet leaves puts me in mind of my high school cross-country days. Our home course meandered through the South Jersey pine barrens on trails that had a thousand curves.

As I understand it, our olfactory organs are close to the memory centers of our brains and that's why scent is such a powerful memory trigger. As a kid I lived near the ocean in South Florida. There the winds carry the salt air. It's an odor that's hard to describe but you know it when you smell it. It hits you as you exit the airport, as soon as those automatic doors open and you step through the threshold into a sun that is always a bit brighter than you remember, bouncing off all those flat roofs and white stucco houses. My days in South Florida were all pre-automobile ownership, so I spent a lot of time cursing the winds that never ceased blowing up and down the Atlantic coast. It felt like someone shouting at you.

As I was cycling this morning, I was thinking about whether you could do an exhibit about the wind. Sailing and aerodynamics came immediately to mind. For centuries, sailors have been adept at manipulating the wind, from whichever direction, to power their vessels forward. Being a landlubber, I've never really understood how they do that. Windmills have also been used for centuries, mostly to grind grain although in recent years more and more you see those great high-tech white spinning wheels that generate electricity. A few years ago, Diane and I visited the historic Adriaan windmill in Haarlem in the Netherlands. It was much larger inside than it looked, four levels each one with its own stated purpose. Traditionally, the master of the windmill had occupied a position of status in the community. Over the centuries, the mill had been used to grind stone, tobacco, and grain. Now it mostly grinds tourists.

The Wright Brothers conducted a ton of experiments in North Carolina when they were developing their glider. They studied the movements of birds and built their own wind tunnel to understand how air flowed over and under the wings. I attended a kite festival at Kitty Hawk where they did some of their experiments. I remember seeing historical photographs of them camping on a wide, sandy and obviously very windy beach. We were staying in a big house with a fully equipped kitchen and a jacuzzi. I like our way better.

At NASA they study global air currents and create animations that, not unlike oceanic currents, show how atmospheric winds constantly circulate around our planet. They pick up dust particles in the Sahara Desert and deposit them in South America, where the nitrogen therein fertilizes the rain forest. Similarly, warm water evaporating off the coast of West Africa feeds the fierce winds that we experience in the Caribbean. On the pancake lands of Kansas and Oklahoma, you get a variation on that theme in the form of tornados as dry winds blowing east meet warm humid air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico. I spent some time in the Flint Hills of Kansas. You could see the line of storms coming from miles away. It was at once mesmerizing and frightening. Residents there told us the winds never stopped. They were a constant companion on the prairie. It put me in mind of the Dust Bowl, of Woody Guthrie and the Okies making that long trek westward across drought devastated fields. Kansas still exhibits the artifacts of ghost towns and "quiet towns"—communities that still have residents but not enough to support a school. 

In Montana, I ascended Swiftcurrent Pass in Glacier National Park and was struck by the lush green forest down below us to the west, in contrast to the dry, rocky slopes that flattened into the Great Plains to the east. Climatologists call it a "rain shadow." The mountains stall the storms blowing in from the Pacific. They back up behind those tall rocky peaks, dumping rain on the western slopes and leaving the east parched and, that summer, scorched by wildfires. We experience a similar effect in Athens as the moist air rising from the Gulf backs up when it reaches the Appalachian Mountains.

In Wisconsin, they feel the bite of Arctic winds swooping down into the Great Lakes region usually with Santa. The thermometer dips below zero, and the hair in your nostrils freezes on the inhale. We used to call it "nose hair weather." You'd have to plug your car in at night if you expected it to start in the morning. The seat cushion wouldn't even crunch down when you got in. It was like sitting on a block of cement. 

In the Southwest where it is mountainous but the desert soil doesn't hold onto the heat, you feel the constant movement of hot and cold air up and down the slopes. The air flows downward in the mornings as the cooler night air descends into the valleys. But as the sun raises the temperature, the air flow reverses and the winds flow back uphill. It's like a temperature-driven teeter totter. We experience the same phenomenon in Athens, although perhaps less dramatically. If you watch the turkey vultures that daily ride the late afternoon thermals along the ridges, you'll see them slowly, effortlessly circling as they get a free lift from the rising warm air. They flap their wings to reach their desired elevation, then slowly circle downward, around and around, until they reach some elevation that tells them it's time to flap again. Turkey vultures have a huge olfactory bulb, much larger than other raptors. Like flying bloodhounds, they are one of the only raptors that hunt by smell rather than sight, which makes sense since mostly what they eat reeks of decay. It seems odd that they would be one of the only birds to develop that evolutionary trait. Imagine drawing that lot. "Well, Mr. V. we have some good news and bad news. On the bright side, we've given you a great wingspan and the ability to soar almost effortlessly. The bad news? Well ... the menu ... ugh ... your meals will be confined to dead, rotting carcasses. Oh, and we'll help you out by making your head bald to keep down the bacteria ... and you can pee on your feet to keep them clean." It's a hard knock life, I guess.

I wonder if songbirds are bothered at all by the wind. Obviously, a hard gust shaking the trees that hold your house can't be a welcome feature, but to watch them fly, they so deftly dart and dash over, under and around whatever obstacles present themselves, I can't imagine that the average breeze gives them even the slightest trepidation. What would that feel like—to be able to navigate so freely, so swiftly, and so weightlessly through the air? In the time that it takes me to stand up from my chair they can be down the slope and blocks away.

Some years back, we experienced what's called a derecho, a line of fast moving, powerful winds that mowed down trees from Ohio to D.C. It came just a few months after the boulder fell on our house. Looking up at the trees on the ridge as they bent over the cliff, I couldn't help but wonder what god we had offended. Thankfully, no trees followed the boulder's path. But hiking through the forest afterward, you'd see dozens of mature trees that, forced to bend too far and too rapidly, simply snapped. There's a metaphor for you! For weeks after, the Athens County fairgrounds hosted caravans of power trucks moving out into the hills daily to repair electrical lines. Some friends suffered without power for weeks. Others benefitted from firewood that lasted years. I guess that's the way the wind blows.

Big Chimney Woe

The other day I learned that Chef Matt is now cooking at the Inn at Cedar Falls. I'm glad that he's moved on from the fire that sadly claimed the Hocking Hills Dining Lodge a few years ago, but seeing his interview put me in mind of lazy summer days in Appalachia and my favorite but now long-gone Saturday morning haunt. In a former life, Matt had been the proprietor, baker, and permanently-in-a-good-mood greeter at the Big Chimney Baking Company.

Big Chimney was not very big … the bakery that is, not the chimney. The chimney was HUGE, standing sixteen stories tall, a leftover from the coal mining era of making dough. It sat twenty yards or more behind the bakery, a rust-colored tower among the hardwoods. The Big Chimney bakery was, in contrast, quite small. Inside, just three or four tables crowded a deli case and assorted bread racks. On Saturdays, the racks overflowed with round, hard-crusted loaves. The aroma hit you as soon as you cracked the door—cranberry walnut, feta spinach dill, potato rosemary, Greek olive with sweet roasted peppers, sourdough, multigrain, pain du levan. On rare occasions, you’d find a bronze apricot jalapeño loaf, but Matt didn't make it too often. I got hooked on it once. He made it on Wednesdays, the same day that my physical therapy sessions took me near the bakery on the way to town. I wouldn’t say that it sped my recovery, but I didn’t miss any sessions.

The patio outside was where the real action took place. On Saturday mornings we'd arrive in carloads, rambling up the narrow drive barely wide enough for two cars to pass without someone straying into the ditch. Big Chimney sat at the end of a dead-end road in the woods at the edge of town. No one just happened by. No through traffic. Everyone here meant to come. Car tires crunched gray stones as we rolled up into the overgrown parking lot. Early arrivals snagged shady spots under thick, gnarly oaks with a stern gargoyle standing watch. 

The brick patio had a grid of about a dozen octagonal, hunter green umbrellas mounted above square weathered wood tables. We'd sit in the shade and munch bread and cheese, scones, croissants, plate-size cinnamon rolls and oozing chocolate éclairs. The cheese was rich, creamy, and smelly, the summer sausage spicy, and the coffee roasted, dark, and steaming.

Athenians lined up to buy Matt’s creations on summer Saturday mornings, either before or after a trip to the farmers market. Like sparrows they'd flutter from one to the other. We'd take our culinary treasures out to the patio to eat and talk. Ohio University draws a diverse crowd to our hippy skippy Appalachian town. We're a small but affluent community in the middle of Ohio's poorest county. You'd run across a wide cross-section out on the patio. Visiting professors, medical school interns, foreign exchange students, and a healthy assortment of what I call the "hill country long hairs"—folks that went to OU in the '70s and never quite managed to leave Athens. They stuck around and became a random assortment of carpenters, roofers, potters, plumbers, social workers, teachers, one or two doctors and lawyers, some self-styled entrepreneurs, a few architects, and more than a fair number of part-time musicians,. Some had actually gone to school for the career they would pursue. Most just sort of fell into something and then felt their way along, faking it until they made it. By 11:00 their cars would line the grass along the drive. It was very much a family affair, geezers to toddlers, and even the occasional shaggy, hopeful dog, trailing behind whatever kid still had food in his or her hand. 

Newcomers eyed available tables as they waited in a line that often extended out the door. They begged unused chairs or improvised seating along the low stone wall bordering the patio. Patrons relaxed in sandals, shorts, and sunglasses. They meandered from table to table catching up, making chit chat and sampling goodies. The patio would swell and then several tables would depart and the pace would soften until the next flurry. From about eight until noon, Saturdays, all summer long, the sparrows fluttered from farmers market to Big Chimney. Even when it rained, which it does a lot here in the summer, you could still take refuge under the green octagons.

September was my favorite time to be out there. By then, I was pretty sick of whatever we still had growing in the garden. You could begin to see some space in the canopy as the woods gradually began to dry and thin. In a few weeks the trees would be glorious. Appalachian autumns rock! But in early September, it was still warm, too warm without shade. The kids would be back in school, so the weekdays were full, fuller, and fullest. But Saturday mornings were still semi-sacred (after soccer practice). Out at the patio, you'd hear snippets of conversation as people got reacquainted. Who had been away at what beach? Who went to China? Who did an artist-in-residence? Who just deposited their college freshman in some faraway school? Who had to get a colonoscopy or an MRI? Who just got married? Who had a baby?

These were pre-cell phone days. No one was talking into space with an earpiece. No one was texting. No one was listening to music on earbuds. No one was looking anything up. If someone couldn't think of the name of the actor who was in that movie with the guy and the thing, they'd just have to figure it out later. People came with books, magazines, and folded newspapers that they intended to read or ... maybe they were just using them for cover, as an excuse to linger a little longer.

I have this memory of one fine Saturday morning. We’d come a bit late, missing the farmers market crowd. Matt's wife was just returning in their VW van-converted bread mobile. She returned with mostly empty baskets, never any feta spinach dill—those loaves got snatched up minutes after they dinged the starting bell. Occasionally she'd have some ten-grain, but usually not even that.

As we entered Matt barked merrily from behind the counter, "You're late!" We were among the leftovers, but the patio was still half full. In the corner, a couple of young lovers huddled over their coffee mugs. They looked like they'd just managed to crawl out of bed after a late Friday night on Court Street, Next to them, a large African man with a deep voice sat talking with his adult son. On the other side, a pudgy, divorced dad served two middle schoolers. I recognized him from geezer basketball. The kids fretted over a bee buzzing the table.

We sat next to a large Indian family who'd pushed two tables together to accommodate their numbers. They'd ordered two servings of focaccia with fresh tomatoes, basil, black olives, roasted yellow peppers, garlic, and bittersweet Gorgonzola. The kids turned up their noses at the Gorgonzola and held out for a big honking cinnamon roll, its football-size swirl encasing what I always imagined was at least a stick of melted butter. One of the kids played on my son’s soccer team. He was still wearing his lime green jersey from their early morning practice.

My wife was reading her book of the week while I sat, sipped, and idly eyed a red and black Honda motorcycle parked at the top of the driveway with a FOR SALE sign leaning against the gargoyle. I think it was Matt's. She chided me but I didn't really have much interest. I had a book that I was then reading for work, but that particular volume didn't get cracked open that day. Instead, I just leaned back, put my feet up on an empty chair, eased my sunglasses into place, and reached for another section of the dark chocolate brownie Diane had just finished slicing. Our kids? I don't recall where they were on that particular Saturday, probably some birthday/sleepover hoohah with friends. We had the afternoon to ourselves. It was delicious and I don't remember feeling a bit guilty. We weren't mining coal, you know.

P.S. Best of luck to Matt at the Inn at Cedar Falls. Yet another reason to venture out into the Hocking Hills!

That Picture of JFK

Whatever happened to that picture of JFK?

Whatever happened to the Jesus on the wall?

Objects have power, some intrinsically so due to their use or appearance, others through their associations with people, places, and events. Growing up Irish Catholic in a small town in South Jersey, I recall framed images of JFK and Jesus hanging on the walls of our home. Pope Paul VI was probably around somewhere as well, but those are the two that stick in my memory. Thinking about it now, I probably saw the same images in the homes of my friends, at St. Mary's Elementary School, and at church on Sunday. JFK was, of course, the first Irish Catholic to be elected President of the United States. He was a rock star in our house, bigger than Elvis. And Jesus, well, Jesus was all around us, or so we were taught.

Those images were a part of the landscape of my childhood. My parents carefully packed and carried them from one residence to another over the years. Other objects drifted away silently without notice. Only years later would someone ask, "Whatever happened to the two felt Christmas elves that mom use to perch atop the living room drapes—Santa's little spies?" Or "whatever happened to the console stereo?" Before 8-tracks, cassettes, compact discs, or digital players, we listened to music on a beautiful, polished cherry hardwood cabinet with a turntable embedded in its center and speakers at either end. Some of my earliest childhood memories involve listening to Peter and the Wolf, William Tell, Mary Poppins, and Peter, Paul & Mary (the same album that covered Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind). I learned to operate that turntable before I could read or write. My older sisters complained bitterly to my mother when they came home to find a broken needle, scratched Supreme's LP's, and/or album covers with crayon-colored Beatles' teeth. Years later, I was thrilled when my brother-in-law gave me a  number of vintage records from that era. It was only when I tried to play them that I realized my childhood sins had come full circle.

In my profession as an exhibit developer, we use objects to tell stories visually. Objects and images, displayed in evocative fashion, encourage visitors to find entry into those stories and discover truths about our collective past. Exhibitions of objects can be displayed to shine a light on particular individuals at particular moments, or they can be used to tell a larger story,  illuminating how much all human beings have in common, even when separated by great distances, divergent cultures, or eons of time. During my early career at the Chippewa Valley Museum in Eau Claire, I recall our collections curator going on about a red, plaid woolen coat. It had been worn by a young girl from one of the city's working class neighborhoods. The coat's patched inner lining, frayed sleeves, and stained elbow and chest pocket offered evidence of its use over many Wisconsin winters. It didn't take much to imagine a young girl sledding on a neighborhood hill or skating at a local park. You could picture that same coat hung along with others on a line of hooks at school, or at home in the mud room with wet boots and shoes on newspapers below, and wet stocking caps and mittens slung over a nearby radiator.

At the museum, I used to enjoy wondering through the collections stacks searching for inspiration for our exhibits. I found the domestic artifacts especially evocative because they were simultaneously familiar and foreign. It was easy to imagine the purpose of any number of kitchen utensils or sewing room tools, and yet so many of them had either been replaced by new technologies or abandoned by evolving circumstance. We had any number of spinning wheels, brought by immigrants moving to what they thought was the frontier in the late 19th century. Most survived still very much in tact because they were hardly used. The availability of inexpensive ready-made cloth made them superfluous in the New World. Their sentimental value enabled them to remain in the family, passed from one generation to the next, until they eventually found their way to the museum. In truth, much of our collection was built by donors on their way to the dump who thought to stop and ask if we were interested. We would sometimes find objects abandoned like orphans on our doorstep with explanatory notes pinned to them.

I had the experience of going through the belonging of my parents after they passed, just as my wife has more recently done with her mother. Going through the belongings of someone who has resided in a home for decades feels like a geologist pealing back layers of time. Just below the loose, superficial veneer of recent correspondence, bills, magazines and medications, you reach the still-in-play level of clothing. Below that, a much deeper level of "retired" items contains any number of hardly worn sweaters and other gifts, mostly from well intended children trying to think of something nice to give Grandma for Christmas. Below that, there are the evening dresses, furs, jewelry, and maybe a hat box or two, evidence of a much earlier time when a fuller range of activities, family and friends was still in the mix. Stored randomly within these drawers, like glacial erratics, you'll find vacation figurines, souvenirs from the trip to Yosemite, seashells from the beach near Panama City, or artwork from children and even grand-children carefully wrapped and put away for safekeeping.

Diane seems determined that she will not leave such sedimentary layers behind for our children to unearth. Every six months or so, she goes on a throwing out binge and I end up making a Good Will run. Her latest effort is inspired by a book she read recently, which suggests that you pitch things not in chronological order, oldest out first, but in a prescribed order of topical categories (start with clothing). I feel like I've heard this sermon before, and yet each spring I find our basement ping pong table cluttered with any number of boxes, random blender parts, leaky irons, old curtains, TV remotes, defunct Christmas decorations, and of course, the ubiquitous phone cords.

I'm not a hoarder by any stretch, but I do admit to the enjoyment of seeing objects around me that reflect my life and the people with whom I have shared it. Every room in our home has photographs of our family, mostly our kids. Looking around my office as I write this, I can see the two-headed Lewis and Clark mug filled with pens and markers, and an Indiana limestone coaster under my coffee cup, both tokens from design projects early in my career. On the bookshelf, I see the Native American hand drum that my son wanted for his second Christmas and the flask that we found in his room after he moved out. On my desk, a themed alien lighter from the UFO Museum in Roswell reminds me of a research trip with my daughter and our unexpected close encounter at the grave of Billy the Kid. Diane thinks I need to clean my office, but I'm keeping my trinkets, along with last summer's solar eclipse glasses and the plastic figurine of the Pope standing in his white Pope mobile that we bought for my brother in Italy, but which I just could not part with. Papa Francesca baby!

Bird Years

My mother-in-law, Pat Hoffmann, passed away a few weeks ago. She was the most good-natured and optimistically practical person I ever met. I was lucky in the "in-law" department. Pat and Larry were both alternately helpful advisors, unswerving cheerleaders, jovial storytellers, able role models, willing babysitters, and amiable companions. Pat was 95 when she decided she'd had enough. While I was, of course, sad to say goodbye, I was happy for her to be able to depart on her own terms, peacefully at home in bed surrounded by children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren.

I had known Pat for more than thirty years, and yet I'm still well short of her age when we met. That age disparity has danced in and out of my thoughts these past weeks. It has been a very significant period for me. So many monumental experiences and people have transformed my life. I completed my collegiate education and pursued a more or less successful career as a museum curator and then exhibit developer, traveling across the country to learn about aspects of our natural and cultural history that have continually stretched my mind and reshaped how I think about the world. Much to my ongoing delight, I have learned to write and play music, first on the piano, but over the last decade, more and more on guitar and other assorted instruments. Most significantly, I have enjoyed the sweetest relationship with Diane, my wife and dearest friend. Together we have raised Lara and Collin and watched them grow up and leave the nest to continue their own journeys.

That all feels like a lot. Like I should be tired now and ready for a nap. And yet I still have nearly a decade before I even reach the Pat Era. I know from my studies that we humans have assigned many names to the various stages of our psycho-social development. We go through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age. We progress through various fixations, physical and mental challenges, emotional and hormonal peaks and valleys. I was expecting or at least half-expecting most of them, even the mid-life hoohah that I went through about ten years ago. But it feels to me like this current stage may have gotten short shrift in the literature. I had started referring to it as "the long grey" but now that feels too large, like there are some definite increments of time within that period yet to be fully cataloged—the name that name phase, the sleep interruptus phase, the over that or done with them phase, the days-of-the-week pill bottle phase.

Currently, we're in the Bird Years. Both our cats passed last summer. We loved them, and they both led mostly happy, comfortable lives sleeping on our furniture, eating premium cat food, shedding on our furniture, yakking up premium hair balls, scratching our furniture, and peeing on our premium carpets. We were glad to have them, but we won't be accepting any more applicants. Now we're watching the birds. I can't say when it began. We've always kept gardens, and for years we've noticed various cardinals, robins, bluejays, chickadees, wrens, goldfinches and other songbirds frequenting the yard. Summertime blooms attract astonishing hummingbirds and the tap-tap of pileated woodpeckers echoes along the ridge.

Not too long after the last cat departed, the first bird feeders went up. Hung from a pear tree within view of the living room windows, we watched squirrel after squirrel climb, dangle, and pillage. They did not mourn the cats and hailed the onset of the Bird Years with great affection. Last summer, a new squirrel-proof bird feeder—a Mother's Day present—hit the yard. The squirrels were unable to breach its defenses, but it hardly matters, as the birds that feed above them are surprisingly sloppy eaters. I estimate that they drop as much as they eat. Easily half of every 50-lb. bag of bird seed I lug home from the garden center still goes to the squirrels. Every sunflower seed extracted from the little feeder holes from someone standing on the perch sends a little shower of lesser seeds down below. The morning doves and starlings, too big for the perches, spend most of their time grazing on the lawn (along with the quite healthy squirrels).

Instead of taking photos of the napping cats, we now have photos and videos of the birds. The cardinals, especially, are quite striking in the winter when their brilliant red feathers stand out against the stark white snow. But the birding doesn't stop with the yard. On car trips, we're spotting red-tailed hawks along the highway. Along the bike trail, we keep a lookout for red-winged blackbirds in the tall grass, bluebirds in their little bluebird houses, great blue heron fishing along the sandbars, and the occasional osprey dive-bombing the river for dinner. A few weeks ago, a mother bob-white tried to con us into believing she was injured to draw us away from her nest. She doesn't know who she's dealing with. We watch David Attenborough, sister!

Last year we also discovered the bird cams. OMG! If you're looking for a way to lower your professional productivity... A pair of bald eagles raised a pair of awkward, gangly youths in a nest in the Washington, D.C. area last year, and they're back at it again this year. At Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, they maintain links to birdcams all over North America, sending back live footage of barn owls, barred owls, ospreys, red-tailed hawks, petrels, albatrosses, manakins, and any number of pond-frequenting winged creatures. Many of these birdcams show parents raising little ones. A warning alerts viewers that these are live, unscripted birdcams where anything can happen. Diane grew a little too attached to the Texas barn owls last summer. When a drought in the region triggered a food shortage, the older/larger siblings took to eating their nestmates. It was a last man standing situation. Diane was appalled.

I can't really remember when we started paying attention to the birds. Is it just a symptom of being settled in this home now all these many years? We don't go out as much. We don't have kids to run around. We're up with the sun, awake when the birds are going about there morning routines. Is it the cumulative impact of oh so many nature documentaries illustrating with increasing technological precision the behaviors of the wild and not-so-wild creatures with whom we inhabit this planet? Or is it a sign that we're calmer now, more mature, more mindful and attuned to our environment. Sure. Let's go with that.

Our children, as children are prone to do, make fun of this recent bird fixation. They act like we're one step closer to the old bird watcher's home, which, maybe we are, but hey, back to the Tim/Pat age disparity, that frail walker-assisted trip might still be decades from now. How much will we have learned about our winged neighbors by then? How much will we remember? And are there other mini-stages between here and there that I've still not guessed at? Misadventures in woodworking? Arrowhead collecting? Genealogy? The Chemo Two-step? The Colon Years?

We arrived home from Pat's funeral last week to discover that a robin had become the first to build a nest in the young Japanese maple in our front yard. A Wisconsin farm girl, Pat had always been on the lookout for robins as a harbinger of spring. My sister says that it's a message from beyond. I don't know about that, but it feels like a good sign.

What's a dandelion gotta do?

For nearly all the thirty+ years of our marriage, Diane and I have maintained some sort of garden. I admit up front that she's mostly been the brains of the operation and I've mostly supplied what little braun I can muster. Over the decades, there have been any number of gardening magazines and catalogs littering the furniture (and bathrooms). I can see her paging through them, committing the latin genus and species to memory while I struggle to remember even the pop-culture pseudonyms. And in said gardens, whether in Wisconsin at our first home or at our current "slipping down the hill" Athens location, we have always played this musical chairs game of planting and replanting said flowers, shrubs, and miscellaneous flora. We plant this purple thing here. The next year it needs to move because it's crowding out the small, leafy red things. We put in a row of these floppy silver lambs ear things there and before you know it they're crawling over the brick barrier and they're out of here. On and on, year after year, we play the role of community planner, trying to bring together a group of plants that share common sun and soil requirements while being able to peacefully live and let live.

Of course, a fundamental component of plant musical chairs is weeding. And here, I readily admit that Diane has done the brunt of the yanking. The reasons are three-fold. First and foremost, I hate to weed. Hate it! Hate it! Hate it! There's nothing more I can really say to hammer that point home. As Jack Nicholson pointedly explained to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, "I'm using the word hate here to describe how I feel..." Hate it!

Diane doesn't seem to hate weeding. Sometimes, in fact, in seems as though she almost enjoys it, especially after a soaking rain when the weeds just give themselves over to her dirty little fingers. She says that weeding appeals to her anal side, which is funny because I've not really noticed that fastidious side in the house. It's almost like our brains are wired to notice different things inside versus outside. Inside, I am irked by crumbs and stains on the kitchen counters, crumpled tissues on the coffee table, shoes and random items of clothing strewn about. Those things have never phased Diane. But outside, get thy weedy asses outta here! Where I, if I even knew the difference between what's a weed and what's not, could care less about yanking it.

Which brings me to the third reason for Diane taking the lead in the weeding department—she knows what she's yanking. She knows the difference between poppies and poison ivy (which I have contracted in some crevice nearly every summer of my gardening career). I've improved over the years. While I've still yet to crack one of her gardening magazines, I've hung around long enough to at least add up one plus one. But in doing so, there's one question that continues to perplex me: What exactly constitutes a weed? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with whether the plant is native or invasive because we have plenty of each. Similarly, plants that flower versus those with interesting leaves doesn't seem to be the criteria. It doesn't matter whether they grow tall or short, produce thorns or sticky sap, or grow in a tight spiral versus wandering and climbing hither and yon.

What I've concluded after many not so careful years of observation is that the weed is in the eye of the planter. One gardener's weed is another's ground cover. Consider the common dandelion. Taraxacum officinale has been around for some 30 million years. Paleontologists find their fossilized remains in the fossilized teeth of fossilized mammoths. Archaeologists find dandelion bits stuck in the split wood handles of Paleolithic hoes. Dandelions have many positive attributes and yet they've been dogged by gardeners, lawn tenders, golfers, and dogs for centuries. Why are dandelions weeds? First of all, they're sunny. Who doesn't like the look of a tall, bright, puffy, yellow dandelion flower? What's not to like? They bloom early in the spring, bringing color and joy to those rainy days. Although they certainly spread, they don't climb over their neighbors. They don't have nasty thorns. You won't get an itchy, "kill me now" rash from accidentally brushing your skin against them.

They're edible. You can eat everything—flower, stem, leaves, roots. A quick Google search reveals that they're rich in vitamins A and C, calcium, and iron. They also contain detoxifiers which make them a useful ingredient in various medicines. Among their many medicinal qualities, they aid the liver, promote healthy digestion, and stimulate the pancreas to produce insulin. And teenagers, they can be used to treat acne. Baby! Why didn't I know that when I was 15? 

They can also be used to enchant a toddler. Remember tickling a child's chin with the yellow flower and pretending that it proves he or she likes butter? And when said flower turns into a whispy puffball, said toddler can amuse themselves by blowing or otherwise twirling said puffball around, scattering it's seeds to the winds and chasing them with glee. It's every bit as good as blowing bubbles without the soapy mess.

Finally, you can also make wine with them. I mean, common on, people! What's a dandelion gotta do to get some love? I have no idea why Ray Bradbury named his book, Dandelion Wine. I didn't have to read that one in high school. But a plant with it's own publicist, that's gotta be worth something. Still, year after growing year, it's "Off with their heads!" [That's starting to feel like a recurring motif in this blog. Hmmmm? I should probably look at that.]

Over the fence

So, we have some slippage going on behind the house. What used to be a gently sloping hill is now, in places, a crack, and in places, a cliff. There's not much that can be done about it that is financially feasible. The few options—planting trees and prairie grasses—we have done. Now it's just a roll of the dice to see how much longer we can maintain our view.

It's not the worst problem in the world. We're not Ebola victims or political refugees. There are so many families that would be happy to have a house, even one so precariously perched. Still, I must admit that it's kept me up nights. It's been the longest spring that I can recall, waiting for our little seedlings to take root, wondering whether the next rainfall will bring the cliff closer to our back door.

As I lie in bed thinking about it, I fantasize about the various objects we might push "over the fence" to bolster the cliff face. I say "over the fence" because there used to be a fence there, and so many of our rotten foods and other biodegradable waste have over the years been assigned that fate. Old Christmas wreaths, poinsettias, floral bouquets, mushy avocados, pineapple stems—"Over the fence!" It's felt like "Off with their heads!"

So how to fill in the hill? The first thing that comes to mind are old cars. They're big. It wouldn't take all that many. People already have that stereotype about Appalachia. We could pick up some old polluting junkers, drain the fluids, put them in neutral and ... over the fence. Of course, we'd have to make sure the first few landed just right. Call them the anchor vehicles. You wouldn't want each car to just go rolling down willy-nilly; they might end up on the neighbor's patio. A few well-placed station wagons, maybe a Pontiac mini-van or an old Caddy or two (It's been done before!)—they would establish a foundation, and then upon them we could roll any number of Corvairs, Yugos, Pacers, Escorts, Challengers... It could be a kind of lemon grove. We could advertise and create an online application process. Hummers and other obnoxious gas guzzlers, of course, would get preferential treatment. Take those babies out of circulation. Carbon sequestration!

Out of date textbooks left behind in our children's bedrooms might also do the trick. Intro's to economics, sociology, philosophy, accounting ... they were way over-priced and written to be outdated, so that each year's student body would need to fork over their parents' dough for the latest edition. I could add to them a number of dated encyclopedias, dictionaries and style manuals, and not an insignificant number of project reports—master plans, design schematics, conceptual studies. I always imagine that I might dig them out to find some gem of an idea for some future project, but that project has been long since eclipsed by the dust mites breeding on those faded pages. Ashes to ashes.

Part of me can't help feeling bad about throwing away books, however, even for this most practical of purposes. In a college town like Athens, the tactic might catch on a little too readily. Like padlocks on the bridge, before long I'd have carloads of students dropping by to deposit their used textbooks. The mound would soon block out my morning sunrise with the spines of Principles of Geology or Understanding the Dynamics of Political Discourse in the Age of Social Media and Fake News.

What about used, outdated technology? We're still holding warped vinyl, brittle cassettes, tangled VHS tapes and various no-longer-operational devices used to play them. They're all collecting mold on the pingpong table in my basement. Is that stuff biodegradable? How many chargers and phone cords do we have in that box on the shelf? Do we still use anything that they can support? Oh, and we still have a few miscellaneous parts for blenders, food processors, and coffee-makers, not to mention one or two computers. Most of the latter came with instruction manuals, too. That's at least another scoop or two.

Speaking of instruction manuals, there are any number crinkled, food-stained game boxes cluttering up my office closet. We never officially read the instructions, but they were sometimes referred to during heated late-night arguments, usually when someone new (not a relative) came to play. If we got rid of the board games, I would have more closet space and I wouldn't get dragged into those games anymore. Over the fence!

Onto the metaphoric land fillers—the petty grievances, the disappointments, the heavy self-loathing baggage, the unrealistic or just unrealized hopes and dreams, the overly optimistic to-do lists, the new diets (and associated workout accessories), the New Year's resolutions (and associated empty liquor bottles), the Lenten sacrifices (and associated guilt), the Christmas wish lists (and assorted twinkle lights that no longer twinkle), the self-help books and videos. Or maybe just start with all the despicable political blather, the annoying headlines that daily accompany my morning coffee. How many times are they going to lead with something awful Twumpy the President did or said? God! How many years of my life do he and the Bush/Cheney clan owe me? They've been dragging me and a good many of my fellow homo sapiens down for years. Surely all that negativity must have some weight that could support a crumbling clay hillside. All that methane gas emitted by those belching windbags. Over the fence!

Notes from the End of the World

 

The Spring of Our Discontent

Last night Diane and I attended "The Sixth Extinction," a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert about the impending apocalypse that may or may not include homo sapiens. It was a cheery night. To set the stage, it came at the end of a day in which it had rained on and off for hours—this after a month of ongoing rain and snow that has long ago worn out its welcome in Southeast Ohio. About mid-afternoon the alarm on my cell phone let me know that the national weather service had issued a flash flood warning for our area. From our dining room window, I watched sheets of precipitation cleanse the steep hillside across the street of the seed and straw that city workers had blown onto it only a day earlier. Workers were attempting to stem the ongoing erosion that a month earlier had collapsed a chain link fence while pushing not an inconsiderable mound of mud and stone into the middle of Fort Street. This, coming on the five-year anniversary of the 200-ton boulder that fell from said hill onto our house, was not a welcome sight.

At the same time, the hill behind our house has begun to slide. The maple tree at the edge of our backyard that we have been admiring as it grows to maturity is now about eight feet lower than it used to be. Where there was a slope, now there is a cliff. Diane and I spend a good portion of last weekend planting little hardwood saplings amongst the grape vines, forsythia, and other thorny brambles that continue to cling for dear life. Thank god for them! If not for them, it would be us at the bottom of the hill.

So things are going well. I had stopped downtown at Little Professor to pick up a copy of Ms. Kolbert's book before the lecture. As I sat in OU's Memorial Auditorium waiting for the hall to fill and my wife to join me, I read about the extinction of frogs around the world, caused by a common fungus that had unwittingly been transported around the world by, you guessed it, homo sapiens. As I read, drum beats of rain intermittently pounded on the roof far above me, so much so that I occasionally paused to look up and ponder what the what was going on out there. Diane arrived soon enough to inform me that pea-sized hail had pelted her as she fled from the street corner to the hall entrance. She had run about fifty yards with an umbrella. Her pants were soaked from her shins to her shoes.

Onto the lecture, Ms. Kolbert informed her audience that homo sapiens are contributing to the mass extinction of numerous of our fellow Earthlings in three main ways—by emitting greenhouse gases that are raising global air temperatures; by increasing the acidity of the world's oceans as a result of that same excessive CO2, thereby precipitating the collapse of coral reefs, so critical to oceanic biodiversity; and of course, by transporting invasive species, intentionally or unintentionally, to places where they should not be, thereby upsetting the proverbial biodiversity apple cart. It was not a pretty picture, nor one that suggested ready remedies. Judging from ice core samples taken from the world's oldest ice in Antarctica, we're soon to have more CO2 in the atmosphere than the Earth has experienced in millions of years. That's MILLIONS (with an S)! We've essentially turned the atmospheric clock backwards, taking all the CO2 that it took the Earth millions of years to put into the ground, and releasing it back into the air in just a few centuries. Good news!

Ms. Kolbert admitted from the outset that she had no remedies to offer. She was merely functioning as canary, informing us that we'd better do something dramatic soon, or else. She did admit that it wasn't happening because people didn't care. There are loads of people who care. She offered as evidence the story of scientists in Hawaii that have apparently resorted to giving certain bird species hand-jobs in an effort to get them to reproduce via artificial insemination. Hmm? I wondered if there were OU students in the audience considering such a major.

After the lecture, Diane and I sought solace in beer and pizza as we contemplated the end of the world. It was not our finest hour. Both of us are lactose intolerant. But hey, in the face of such calamity, the usual rules must be suspended. I awoke a little after 3 A.M., bloated, dehydrated, and wondering how to feel. It occurred to me that I was glad that my children do not yet have children of their own. "That's a horrible thing to ... think," I said to myself while I waited for the coffee. I could imagine my sisters scolding me. But even now, I can't help admitting that there's some truth in it. We're headed for a global Easter Islandesque collapse and, rather than mobilizing all of our brightest minds and best resources toward addressing it, we're distracting ourselves with ... Tweets. Really?

As a historian, I'm reminded of earlier generations of Americans who predicted the end of the world. Somewhere in my memory, I can see an earnest man with a sandwich board on New York's Fifth Avenue warning of the world's impending demise. Over the generations, there have been no shortage of cultists and utopians trying to separate themselves from the slipstream in order to prepare themselves for the big day. But this doesn't feel like that? These are not mentally unbalanced, deranged harbingers of doom shouting from street corners. These are scientists, independently in branch after branch, in universities and scientific institutes around the world, reaching data-driven conclusions in peer reviewed journals that are worrisome at best, and to be closer to the truth, down right terrifying.

The end of the world is upon us. Can I really be writing that? In a blog? And I'm not kidding? Really? And I'm completely sober, if still a little bloated from the pizza. Stay tuned.