Walking the Berkshires

Aid and Comfort to the Enemy: An American Civil War Tradition Examined

 A guest blogger at Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory, Michael Schaffner has written a brilliant post that examines the evidence for the Angel of Marye's Heights legend, one of the most celebrated examples of charity to fallen foes in American history.  Go there now and read it.  

The national need for reconciliation and to make sense of all the loss and slaughter of the American Civil War helped to propagate stories like that of Sgt. Kirkland.  Whether or not it actually happened that way is less important than what the story represents (and to whom).   The idea the the better angels of our nature were present on our internecine battlefields helped "to bind up the nation's wounds"  and perhaps as well to redeem the humanity of former combatants. 

It has become a pervasive theme in the memory of this great national trauma as a war of brother against brother.  We still need it to be true, even now as we enter the sesquicentennial of that war, which is why revealing Kirkland as history records him, rather than as a core myth and symbol of "sublime compassion", is likely to provoke strong reactions.

There are many similar anecdotes from this conflict in addition to the Kirkland story, particularly those involving the fraternity of Masons.  A quick internet search reveals numerous stories from the Civil War when the obligation to come to the aid of a brother Mason in distress apparently trumped even opposing sides on the battlefield.

This theme is very much part of the folklore of the Civil War, and its memory has meaning to more than modern Masons.  It is possible that masons in the Civil War in mid 19th century America did believe and behave this way; that even if they were at war with each other there was peace in their lodges.  This is certainly how they wished to remember themselves in the decades that followed.

Freemasonry, however, was not universally accepted in America, nor across all regions of the divided country.  It may also be that postwar professions of christian charity and humanity toward captured or fallen foes helped reintegrate the secret society of Masons into the mainstream of reconciliation. 

Are such claims of the ties among warring Masons limited to the U.S. Civil War?  During the American Revolution, the association of many of the principle founders and members of the Society of the Cincinnati with freemasonry is well known (and well hyped). There were numerous military lodges among royalist as well as patriot battalions, and at least in the case of the British 17th Regiment of foot, the bonds of Freemasonry prompted a patriot general to return their captured Masonic regalia. 

But did patriotic Masons in the American Revolution give aid and comfort to wounded or captured brother loyalists, or British masons to their American brethren who fell into their hands?  And if so, can this be distinguished from the conventions of the treatment to which gentlemen and officers were entitled, especially in a war in which the status of rebel combatants was far from settled and the ties with the mother country had loosened?  There may be such examples, but they will take some serious scholarship to unearth, and they are not part of our founding myth.  They were not, in fact, needed as part of a process of reintegration of loyalists into the new republic, as perhaps they were as part of the process of reconciliation following the Civil War.

Tracks of my Tears

Tracks of My Tears (10/16/2006)

Tonight the shadows of the trees are like gunmetal against the snow. His thoughts are brooding and dark, so unlike this moonlit woods where nothing murmurs and gnaws at its edges. It is almost warm in here without a breathe of wind but he would welcome the cold, even to lie down in the folds of snow and sleep, to keep the sobs from thawing in his throat.

His boots sift through the snow, the only tracks to mar its starched surface. It is clean like the maternity ward in the halo of bright lights beyond the trees where he has left his wife and her empty womb. Stillbirth in an age of miracles is a lonely burden, but how different for her with a body that betrays, and how helpless for him who would have given anything to spare her, who will still make the arrangements and see to the ashes and become hard as rock because there is nothing else he can be.

He does not know the path. These are not his woods. He has not seen this movie before.

There are fresh tracks now before him, the broad splayed feet of snowshoe hare moving by furtive leaps from cover to cover beneath the trees. He turns aside and follows. The prints are sharp and recent, revealing to his poor senses the mystery that every other nose in the forest can tell without need of snow. There is comfort in this single focus, to stalk and pursue without doubt or distraction.

And then, turmoil. A sideways leap, a red spot on the snow, with the prints of two, great wings transfixed at either side like the helm of a Valkyrie that stoops to retrieve the fallen. Assuredly an owl, that silent hunter, or to his doubting heart an angel descending in the quiet of the world, declaring life in death on beating wings.

All is still. Something gives way as he exhales, and breaks free. The moon passing through the trees turns always toward the world.

Testing the Ice

I delayed my drive to work this morning, one in a series of days when the the mercury has stayed below freezing.  We had open water on our lakes and ponds during the last snow, which means that the first ice of the year will not have to be shoveled for skating. 

There is a small pond in our neighborhood, choked with weeds in summer and slowly constricting from its shore in cattail and invasive giant reed, but it comes into its own after a hard freeze.  There is also a street light that is trained on the pond and makes it suitable for night skating.

I walked down to the edge, where there is still a discernible break in the dry stalks between the shore and the open ice.  I saw it was already thick, with a filigree of hard frozen black ice here and there on the milky surface.  There were no clumps of frozen snow, no cracked bubbles of thin ice.  Just hard, slick, level pond ice, unmarred yet by any blade.

Tonight I have a meeting to attend, but when I get home, with the kids all toasty and ready for bed, I will roust them and bundle them and fill their thermos with cocoa.   We will drive under the cold clear stars to the pond below the baseball field named for the native son who rose like a skyward arrow and fell to earth just as precipitously over less than three years in the Majors.  We will stagger and glide and slip and spin, rediscovering balance on our blades.  This can't wait for tomorrow, for then it may snow.  Fresh ice is ephemeral, and the moment is here and now.

Descant

"April is in my mistress face / And July in her eyes hath place

Within her bosom is September / But in her heart a cold December."

                                                    - Thomas Morley (1594)

I remember every note of the first tenor part for this shortest of madrigals. All the choral music of the Christmas season has put in mind my singing days, when I could follow my last, clear note reverberating from the Chancel through the high columned Nave.  In Canterbury Cathedral, this lasted seven seconds. 

It wasn't Morley, then, on that March night when we visiting choristers and the Dean's wife had that incredible space all to ourselves.  Illuminated only by the candles in our hands, the columns disappeared overhead.  We descended stone steps hollowed by the knees of pilgrims, and had a moment of musical intimacy in the crypt as powerful as what we produced in the endless space above.  I was not quite seventeen years old.

I have known two great stands of eastern trees that stood for cathedrals.  One was Cornwall Connecticut's Cathedral Pines, eviscerated in a whirlwind.  The other is Cathedral Woods on Monhegan Island in Maine, where Red and White Spruce contend with a parasitic dwarf mistletoe that conspires to lay them low, leaving only Balsam Firs and hardwoods to reassemble the forest.  I have wandered in Muir Woods and among the great Sequoia groves, seen the clear cuts amid the old growth of the Olympic Peninsula during the height of the Spotted Owl war.  I was befriended in a logger bar by a shell shocked Viet Nam vet who saved me from  the impotent rage of one of its patrons.  I was 21.

Sometimes I stand by the shore, watching the great swells dash and cream against the rocks below, and yearn to lift off like the gulls flying below the headlands.  An old friend once wrote a poem about the gravity arc of the rope swing, where "if you time it right, you can hang like lightning in the air."  Hang like the high note in the vaulted cathedral, or the toppling trees in the wind.  All of an instant, rootless, and lighter than air.

Astronauts in training simulate such weightlessness in deliberate free fall, in a plane flying parabolic arcs.  Astronauts in space are always falling toward earth.  Deep Sea divers can also become disoriented in their three dimensional environment, with only their telltale bubbles to distinguish down from up.  In my diving days, I sometimes would hang at neutral buoyancy, rising and falling ever so gently with every breath.

These days I do not sing in choirs, or swing out over dark water.  But I still wander, amazed, in the cathedrals of the heart and forest, and slip loose from earth as I lift my eyes on brittle nights brimming with stars.

"This Old House is Falling Down Around My Ears"

We tend to think of tarring and feathering as the quintessential mob action in Revolutionary America.  Actually, the Sons of Liberty - or as the Royalists sometimes referred to them, the "Sons of Violence" - were more likely to target the property rather than the persons of those who opposed their cause.  This practice was a feature of the New York rent wars during the decades preceding Lexington and Concord, in which threats were made by angry tenants to level the houses of various lords of the manor.  The leveling spirit was not restricted to such agrarian revolts, but took hold in the cities as well. 

Pulling down houses was a significant feature of mob actions in Boston leading up to the Revolution.  Lt. Governor Hutchinson's home was systematically destroyed by a mob during the stamp tax crisis:

After attacking the handsome houses of the deputy register of the Vice Admiralty Court and the comptroller of Customs, a crowd of men in workaday garb descended on Hutchinson's mansion.  Catching the Lieutenant Governor at dinner with his family, the crowd smashed in the doors with axes and sent the Hutchinsons packing.  Working with almost military precision, they reduced the furniture to splinters, stripped the walls bare, chopped through inner partitions until the house was a hollow shell, destroyed the formal gardens, drank the wine cellar dry, stole nine hundred pounds sterling in coin (today this would be about $90,000), scattered books and papers in the street, and carried off every movable object of value...(T)he crowd worked into the night, spending almost three hours alone "at the cupola before they could get it down", and then finishing off the building as dawn broke.  "Gentlemen of the army, who have seen towns sacked by the enemy" wrote one the first historians of the Revolution, Boston's William Gordon, "declare they have never before saw an instance of such fury."

These tactics, if indeed that is the right word for the actions of a riotous assembly, were not American inventions, but were long established features of class warfare in Britain.   Rioting was then, as now, a paramount threat to property as well as to law and order.  Bonfires and burnings in effigy might ignite a mob, but pulling down houses demands far more energy than arson.  To loot and gut a substantial dwelling is one thing; to tear the slate from its roof and batter down its exterior walls something more altogether.  It is hard to imagine today's tea party movement taking such a page from the playbook of the tax refusing mob that dumped the tea in Boston Harbor.

The mobs that attacked Hutchinson's house and many others were spearheaded by gang leaders in league with political agitators.  The Stamp Act was the their motivation for resistance, but the passions of a mob are never so calculated nor so rational.  Look to the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 following the Rodney King beating verdict for a modern example.  Small wonder that the early national period in America saw a strong crackdown against popular resistance movements such as the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, or that Shays Rebellion was very much in the minds of delegates to the Constitutional Convention. 

My Latest Nature Notes in the LJ

The December 10th edition of the Lakeville Journal ran my biweekly Nature Notes column, readable here in full with free subscription.  Fair use excerpt:

"Now, as we shrug off the last warm days of autumn and feel the frosty ground firm beneath our feet, seems an odd time to take stock of the natural world around us.  True, with the branches laid bare we can see through the forest to the crags and cobbles that lie beneath, but this is hardly the time to sample a swamp to see what species it contains, or mark the passage of salamanders from their winter quarters to perform their rites of spring. 

Those seasons are either behind us now or still to come. But like the fabled ant that labors through the days of warmth and light to put up its winter store of grain, we can profit from taking the time to account for the species and natural communities that co-occur with our own..."

Seeing Yellow

I am really glad my job isn't to manage this public relations disaster for the Borough Of Litchfield, Connecticut and its Board of Warden and Burgesses.  Fair use excerpt from Rinker Buck's column in the Hartford Courant:

"For the past six years several military mothers here and their supporters have decorated the trees on the town green with yellow ribbons to express their support for local residents who serve in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But on Tuesday the Borough of Litchfield's governing body, the board of warden and burgesses, voted to prohibit expression that involves ribbons on trees, and that has thrown this attractive tourist mecca in Litchfield County into an uproar...

...Borough Warden Lee Losee did not return phone calls Friday requesting comment on the board's decision. Two board of warden and burgesses members, however, while declining to be quoted on the decision, agreed to describe their reasons for banning ribbons on the green.

First, the board members said, Norfolk forester Starling Childs had inspected the trees on the green and concluded that the ribbons were hurting their health, encouraging the growth of fungus under the ribbons. Second, the presence of yellow ribbons on the green might encourage other groups to apply for permission to hang ribbons there.

Childs, who maintains the 6,000-acre Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk, is one of Connecticut's best-known tree experts. Reached on Friday, Childs said that he was asked by the Borough of Litchfield in October to conduct an inventory of its trees on the green as part of a plan for preserving the space. But Childs says that he was not asked to examine the question of the yellow ribbons and in fact did not even mention them in his report.

"They must be confusing me with some other botanist, because I don't remember even noticing the ribbons at all and I certainly didn't comment on them," says Childs. "The borough should know that if they wanted a professional opinion on the ribbons, they would have to ask for a written report, and they never requested that."

Childs said that he saw the yellow ribbons on the trees on Thursday night, while driving through Litchfield, and he doubted they were causing serious damage to the trees."

Moms and apple pies are probably darting for cover in Litchfield, even as we speak.

First Snow

It is very wet, almost slush before it hits the ground, but it sticks and will stay and by morning we may have four to six inches of it.  My children did not wait for it to accumulate but were outside making snow people out of virtually nothing.  At least one of the kids has no snow pants that we could find, and I need a couple of new pallets to lay before the back door where the ice builds up on the path, but if winter is truly here we are ready, now, and mostly willing.

I drove home through the early part of the storm, and in the higher elevations it was heavy and thick while lower down the roads were still warm enough to melt what fell.  I remembered that my high beams merely light up the swirling flakes.  I thought of how it feels to be in silent woods with snow on the ground and more falling, of how "the moon on the breast of the newfallen snow" is one of the loveliest lines in Clement Clarke Moore's classic.  Of sledding at night in those wide fields behind the schoolhouse, and what tracks in the snow reveal to my otherwise impotent senses.

I like my winters white and cold.  I like pond ice that freezes fast and black.  I like the way the frost gets in my beard, and the winter stars spill their constellations across a moonless sky.  I like how ice freezes on the rock face, blue where it is new, in draperies that reveal the hidden falls high on the mountainside. 

My Vermonter wife curses the white stuff and says that only a flat-lander is fool enough to abandon the wood stove, but at its best the snow is a comfort to me, and feels right.  It softens the edges, amplifies and enhances the architecture of the woodlands and the scoured outcrops.  It covers the deep wounds in the land until spring, and lightens the hearts of my housebound offspring.  Shoveling is a small price to pay, especially for the first snow of the season. 

The WaPo: Too Square to be Hip

Alert reader Terry Cowgill, himself a fine journalist, observes this embarrassing correction by the Washington Post:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Clearly, the reporters and copy editors responsible for the WaPo DC edition were listing to something else on their Sony Walkmen in 1990 when Public Enemy released "911 is a Joke" as the third track on Fear of a Black Planet, an album significant enough to be considered worthy of preservation by the Library of Congress in 2005.  Pitchfork Media calls it the 17th best album of the 1990's.  Take that, Nirvana!  

But perhaps these Post Toasties were underage when PE was telling everyone who saw Do The Right Thing to "fight the power zap bee", or whatever they were going on about in that song.  It's not like it was on MTV or anything.  Mind you, my college a capella group did an angelic arrangement of Fight The Power, in harmony.  Now that's old school.

Reflections on Ken Burns' : The National Parks

I've been watching the DVDs of Ken Burn's latest documentary: The National Parks; America's Best Idea.  Burns and collaborator Dayton Duncan have brought their cinematic eye and art to the American wilderness,  illuminating places such as the Grand Canyon - about which Teddy Roosevelt observed; "The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." -  and ideas about conservation and public benefit that the filmmakers present as emblematic of American democracy. 

It is a powerful story, carried forward by stunning visuals and Burn's signature treatment of historic images and personalities.  Like many viewers I find it inspiring and it makes me want to visit and revisit many of these places (which will likely be welcomed by the Park Service in the face of a marked trend of decreasing visitation and connection between Americans and our Great Outdoors. 

It is also a story that embodies great complexity, with larger than life figures like John Muir who somehow outshines even Teddy Roosevelt in the first part of the series.  Some of the "talking heads" help to weave together what for the sake of the story is tempting to cast as opposing conservation viewpoints rather than two sides of the same coin. The nation's first Forest Service Director, Gifford Pinchot, still gets less than his due, in my opinion, particularly after having just read Timothy Egan's brilliant new history of The Big Burn; Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.  Pinchot was certainly more significant as a conservationist than just as the pragmatic proponent of sustainable use of forestland that he becomes when juxtaposed to the wilderness prophet Muir.

Those talking heads without whom a modern documentary would be unthinkable are a narrative device pioneered and perfected by Burns.  I am always intrigued to see which emerges as the charismatic authoritative voice in the film, as Shelby Foote did in Burn's treatment of The Civil War.  Two episodes into the series, there are two voices that stand out for me, but for very different reasons. 

One belongs to William Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of the excellent Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England.  His is the voice of gentle intelligence and sensitivity, seeing the study of history and ecology as mutually sustaining (a perspective with which I am fully in accord). 

The other is Shelton Johnston, a charismatic veteran park ranger, a marvelous story teller whose love of the parks is palpable.  Johnston is an African American with considerable Native American ancestry who was raised in Detroit.  More than this, his background makes him a distinct minority both as a Park Ranger and among visitors to our national parks.  Not even 1% of those who visit Yosemite, for example, are African American.  As Johnston said in a recent interview:

"It's bigger than just African Americans not visiting national parks. It's a disassociation from the natural world," said Johnson, who has worked in Yosemite for the past 15 of his 22 years in the Park Service. "I think it is, in part, a memory of the horrible things that were done to us in rural America."

The rejection of the natural world by the black community, he said, is a scar left over from slavery.

"All Snoop Dogg has to do is go camping in Yosemite and it would change the world," said Johnson, 51. "If Oprah Winfrey went on a road trip to the national parks, it would do more than I have done in my whole career."

The conservation movement in America has a long way to go before this disconnect is resolved.

Burns' film emphasizes that the creation of National Parks was a reaction to the wholesale exploitation of natural resources during the final decades of the 19th century.  Yet the very idea of setting aside land for non consumptive public benefit would not even have been considered for the American wilderness if we had not already chosen to do so within our own developed habitat.  The rural cemetery movement, the development of public parks within the urban landscape by Frederick Law Olmstead and those he inspired, and even the setting aside of some of the great killing fields of our nation's Civil War as monuments to its memory, all preceded the establishment of the first National Park.

This was not the case in the 18th century, when the Common was a place for the community's livestock and there were better uses for old battlefields than places of quiet reflection.   We do not set aside land until we believe what it contains is both essential and irreplaceable.  Nor do we invest in the survival of what we do not see as having value.  Whether that value is intrinsic, as Muir would have it, or essential to our own health and well being, or both of these things, has long been part of the national conservation debate, and especially so regarding the conservation purposes, use and management of public lands. 

One thing, at least, has changed since Roosevelt's Day.  Nature does not take its course, at least during the span of human lives, completely free of our influence.  Our hands may mar without our even being aware, but they can only mend if we are deliberately conscious in our choices and pay close attention to the results of our interventions.  Having a national conversation along these lines would be a wonderful outcome of Burn's storytelling.