Walking the Berkshires

In Spite of Everything, Spring

Next month I will find a reason, and make the time, to spend a day and a night at Windrock, at the big house by the sea.  I will come for the ospreys that follow the herring, riding high in wild, whistling cries on the wind.  I will stand by the Agawam flume and watch the blue backed fish stacking up in the plunge pool, holding fast all together in the current and waiting for the moment to leap. 

The season has been closed for several years now with herring and alewife stocks so depleted, and so watching the fish returning is harbinger and augury both, a prognosis of the advancing season, of new life, and the health of the environment all together.  It happens around my birthday, when the trees are still bare but budding.  I imagine this as a time of solitude, though I may well have a child or two turning me gladly outward.

I went stargazing last night, stepping back from the unhooded streetlamp and into the shadows.  Then I could see those cool, pale fires hung like beads of glass in the branches of the sugar maple.  The night was well advanced, for I am active long after sundown like the owls in the pines.  I saw the promise of crepuscular Spring, Virgo arisen and Orion stepping off beyond the fatal tail of Scorpio.  I saw Saturn suspended off the shoulder of Pollux, like the disembodied self who appears on the wing to pilots fighting gravity.  I saw a whole section of unfamiliar sky, a patch of lost memory, or perhaps never before seen for what it was. 

I remembered the Southern Cross, twisting in the steel trusses of the old wind pump where I perched in the veldt by the waterhole, waiting.  I thought of spinning tales of Norse gods and northern lights while sailing a dog watch with my uncle Rob beneath a rain of blazing meteors in the Gulf of Maine.  Of the wisp lights of June fireflies beyond the garden gate. Of that once in a hundred year aurora that spread above the valley one March night when my parents, sister and I were driving home from dinner.

I am in love with all this.  I let it sweep through my shuttered soul.  I soak it up like groundwater in a dry riverbed, store it against the failure of the rain.  This is how I atone, how I connect.  How I breathe.

Raymo on Tolkien

"J.R.R. Tolkien, the Master of Middle Earth, suggested that the world of magic and monsters is only another view of adjectives.  The mind that thought of 'light," 'heavy,' 'gray,' 'yellow,' 'still,' and 'swift' also conceived of the magic that let heavy things fly and turned lead into gold and stones into running water.  By contrast, the world of the twentieth century is by and large a world of nouns and verbs, a world of objects moving in space and time, a world devoid of magic.  What we see is what we get.

Except...for that time each afternoon at the pond where the boys fished.  From adjectives, I let my mind invent the old bass in his lair.  He was as light as a cloud in that watery element or lay on the bottom like a smooth stone.   He hid in the gray shadows of the pickerelweed or flashed yellow like refracted sunlight.  He was as still as the reflection of the moon in the water or as swift as the whirligig on the glazed surface of the pond.  Adjectives are the stuff of imagination."

                    - Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night; An Astronomical Pilgrimage, pp. 115, 116

I pepper my prose with adjectives.  I like a dish with some zest: not so much that it overwhelms the senses, but enough to tantalize and stimulate.  I like reaching for the less frequent turn of phrase, the more exotic, just a dash, where it is a perfect pairing.  Mine is a world of magic and monsters, together in the same dish. 

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.

Poet on a Plane

I am not a frequent flier.  When I do travel by air, I sit by a window, as much to transcend my physical confinement as to relish the world from above.  The seats are narrow and the hours are long, and I have to give myself over completely to the pilots inside their fortified cockpit and have faith in unknown flesh and machinery. This is not an altogether comfortable place for one who values self reliance.

Last week I flew from Hartford to Detroit, and from there to Lexington, Kentucky to visit my sister and her family.  I am in one of those hard places where something deep inside is struggling to surface.  Part of me fears what may emerge, "what rude beast, it's hour come at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born."  The human heart has far more than its 4 physical chambers, and some of these I would much prefer to bypass.

And so I boarded the plane, carrying far more than my small carry on bag. And in such a place I found unexpected grace.

You cannot pick your companions when you fly alone.  You can retreat into yourself and the too small space you have been allotted too close to the occupant of the next seat.  Or you can find, beyond all expectations, a profound connection with a perfect stranger born of shared circumstance and mutual experience.  When I used to rely on my thumb for transportation, backpacking in the Pacific Northwest or trekking across Southern Africa, the very act of accepting a ride from a stranger was a goad to conversation.  Some of this was a way to take the measure of the other, but also to give rein to our better natures.  You have to be open to the possible when you travel this way, to embrace the moment, to adjust expectations.  I haven't felt like that for a long time.

On this flight, my companion had the middle seat while I was by the window.  Yet it was she who directed my eyes to the afterglow of the buried sun.  It was she who showed a friendly interest that turned my inward focus outward.  What opened with talk of our separate journeys was soon revealed as twining paths with many interstices.  We were both making the same connecting flight.  She was a professor and woman of color whose star student from the Berkshires had just published an exquisite chapbook of poetry that grew from the loss of a first child in stillbirth.  I know both of those places intimately, and suddenly she was reaching into her bag and handing me her second copy of this work of which there were only 30 made saying I was meant to have it. 

From there, it was an extraordinary journey.  We spoke of writing and what sets the story free to come.  We spoke of Africa and race and finding common ground with those unlike ourselves and yet never apart from us.  She revealed a love of the natural world born on a farm in South Carolina before the end of segregation, and how she felt when she saw her first whale.  I talked of family history, and Faulkner, and what the world must have been like in the time before propellers when blue whales could communicate pole to pole.  I told her the story from Africa I have never been able to write, but not the fresh and secret pain I carry in my heart. 

This was not a confessional, nor was this other human being an angel or a muse.  It was, however, a time of joy where none was sought or anticipated, of gifts freely given even as their impacts were not completely known.  I liked who I was in that place. I value what was shared and allowed to shine. I carry that self knowledge with me now, able to look beyond the rim at the great unknown.  And I am grateful for the gift of rising above the unkindness of silence, for that will abide long after I land.

In Memoriam: What Henry Knox has to do with 9/11

In January, 1776, Henry Knox and his civilian teamsters  passed through Egremont, Massachusetts on their way through the Berkshires with a train of cannon and other war supplies destined for Boston.  In September, 2001, hijacked passenger airliners were deliberately crashed into the heart of New York's financial district, the Pentagon, and (after passenger intervention) a field in Pennsylvania.  As is evident from the photograph at left, these two separate events are now commemorated together in North Egremont.

The vertical marker is one of the 30 granite and bronze monuments placed in 1927 to commemorate the Knox expedition by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts during the Sesquicentennial of the American Revolution.  The route taken by Knox is poorly documented by primary sources, and in 1975 this marker was moved from its original location along Rte 23 in South Egremont to its present site in North Egremont to reflect a different theory of where Knox crossed the Taconics into the Berkshires.  The monument itself remains the property of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the small patch of open space on which it is situated is owned by the municipality.

The nearly horizontal plaque and its stone and cement base were physically integrated with the Knox memorial in 2002.  The North Egremont 9/11 memorial reads as follows:

"This monument is dedicated to the thousands of men, women and children killed by terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania on September 11th, 2001.  They died for our country and our freedom.  We shall not forget.  Dedicated on September 11, 2002 North Egremont, Massachusetts"

As a war memorial with the fresh association of 9/11, these conjoined monuments have attracted both a small American flag and someone's personal offering of a conch shell.  Visually, as a piece of public art, the Knox memorial is now the headstone, casting its shadow on the graves of 9/11.

In many ways, these memorials seem more dissimilar than alike, reflecting a great deal both about the events they commemorate and the values and attitudes of those who erected them and how we remember today.  There is something very intentional about the union of these two monuments, with one the visible extension and successor to the other.  There is a very clear message that those died in the terrorist attacks were as patriotic as those who dragged the cannons to Boston.   The North Egremont memorial was an expression of fresh grief and resolve to give meaning to terrible losses.  Whereas the Knox commemoration was an expression of state pride in the accomplishments of a favorite son and role that Boston, and the cannons brought from Ticonderoga, played in our Nation's founding. 

People in 1927 could look to recent victory in Europe - "Lafayette, we are here! -  as the coming of age of that nation which their Revolutionary ancestors helped to establish.  These monuments, which along with their counterparts in New York represent one of the earliest "heritage trails" established in America, gave a local connection to larger events.  That connection is precisely what this September 11th memorial is all about.  There is a strong cultural connection in this part of western New England to New York City which is home to many of our part-time residents. Many of us lost love ones there, or are close to others who did.

Local commemorations, however, often reflect individual sensibilities and the need to make the personal very public.  I do not know who was behind the North Egremont memorial, or the decision to physically integrate it with the Knox monument. I can contrast it with a private effort by her friends to plant a native American Elm cultivar with a stone plaque in the memory of a Salisbury, Connecticut resident who died that day.  I can also compare it to the current controversy in Kent, Connecticut over a grieving father's insistence that the wording of a public 9/11 public memorial to his son include the phrase "murdered by Moslem extremists."  The complete wording as proposed is as follows:

James Gadiel
February 3, 1978
A gentleman and a gentle man
Lifelong resident of Kent
Murdered by Moslem extremists
September 11, 2001

In recent days, what previously had divided a small town is now a conservative cause celeb thanks to national exposure.  I will note, as an aside, that "Muslim" and "Moslem" are not interchangeable, with the latter word an older transliteration that less accurately reflects the Arabic pronunciation /mʊslɪm/.  Some Muslims, I understand, find the older word offensive, analogous, perhaps, to calling Beijing "Peking". I rather doubt that changing from one self referential word to the other would address the controversy, but thought it worth considering that "Moslem" is the word proposed for the memorial.

What is written in stone is meant to be gospel.  What we cast in bronze we intend to endure beyond our span of years.  What we chose to record, and how we record it, is what we want others to remember.  Yet time and the distance from living memory can make some public monuments lose their meaning, especially when demographics change and the old surnames on the war memorials are no longer represented in the community.  Three of the Knox monuments in New York have simply vanished, and others have been moved about in response to development.  "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!".

Imbuing the Knox memorial in North Egremont (which was moved to its current site just a few decades ago)  with the meaning of 9/11 may have rescued it from obscurity, even if for the benefit of modern interpretation of the more recent event.  As an historian I find the pairing troubling, but I also know that the object is not the event, but rather an artifact of its own time.  It is therefore subject to reinterpretation by subsequent generations, revealing much about what we remember, and how we recast the past to give meaning to the present.

In Which I Lose My Head Over Hallowe'en

I never do pumpkins by halves.

The Truth (and Tooth) Will Out

Traditional values in many American families include devotion to a benevolent and mystical Trinity.  I mean of course, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.  We encourage our children to have faith in unfair trade practices, endorsing the exchange of a plate of stale cookies, inexpertly dyed eggs or a bit of bloody enamel for disproportionate material gains. Those heretics that dare to question how that Jolly Old Elf manages to cover the entire world - chimneys or not - in a single night from his secret base in the warming Arctic are willing to suspend their disbelief in the face of mountains of loot.

With all false gods, though, there comes that time in every child's life of First Disillusionment, when the scales fall from their eyes, adults are fallible, and they must learn the vital life lesson that you can't trust everything you hear from those in authority.  My own parents decided when I was of tender years that they would no longer be complicit in the cult of the Dread One in the Red Suit who knows if you've been bad or good, but like all good fundamentalists I insisted that they were wrong and Santa Claus was as real as the rising sun. 

If you are going to deny all the evidence of modern science and put your faith in magical beings, then beware the Tooth Fairy, for she is fickle and prone to nodding off before you do and neglecting to stash a windfall of cash beneath your pillow.  Santa and Peter Cottontail pile on the sugar plums and gum drops when we have not yet reached the age of reason, but the Tooth Fairy waits until we are six, already well acculturated by our peers in school, and master of such exceptional achievements as the rudiments of reading, counting by tens, and riding without training wheels.  We may have seen elder siblings triumphantly gap toothed and clutching the ever inflationary rewards of their biological achievement, and so we block out any nagging doubts about who it might be who actually stuffs the stockings while we wait for our seat at the tooth exchange. 

Elias is six, and has a loose tooth.  Already I sense him wavering about St. Nick, although like the second child he is, he wants to be sure before he proclaims his disbelief.  It has never bothered him that the Easter Bunny hides the very eggs he made, but that house of cards is also ready to topple, because this is the year - just as he starts to cash in on his toothless status - when the Tooth Fairy will slip up and reveal all.

It happened that way for his sister Emily three years ago when she was in first grade.  It may have been her third or fourth tooth - the first had fallen out in the car and only a tear stained letter to the tooth fairy had accomplished the traditional exchange.  In our house the task of tooth fairy falls to the night owl, rather than she who retires with her books and is out like a light by 10:00.  There was great wailing and lamentation the next morning, when the bloody tooth was still beneath the pillow and NOTHING ELSE.  My daughter was inconsolable thanks to that inconstant pixie, so I was forced to peel back a layer of the onion and declare;

"I'm the Tooth Fairy"

And so, it quickly followed, I am also the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus.  Emily was quick to catch on that far from crashing disillusion, this in no way meant a halt to the seasonal swag.  It also was her initiation into the Grand Secret, for her brother still believed.  And believes to this day, but he has no younger sibling to smile at knowingly when he learns the Truth.  He may only have a passing acquaintance with the tooth fairy before he sees through those gossamer wings.  I suspect he will take it in stride, for there is still the same effect even if he needs a new hypothesis for the cause.  It will probably affect his parents more, our dissembling exposed, the secret out, and another milestone of childhood passing before our middle aged eyes. 

The tooth fairy will remember to set her alarm clock this time.

"Miranda" Unwrapped

Emily received an extraordinary quilt from her grandmother on her 9th birthday yesterday.  Mom is a gifted fabric artist, and her creations never fail to amaze.  Her incredible work has been well received at national juried quilt exhibitions, such as last year's Lowell Quilt Festival where her "Praise for the Morning" took third place in the small, non traditional category.

She is also exceptionally generous about passing her quilts along to those family members and close friends who would take the most delight in them.

Mom usually works from patterns of her own design and ideas that she has developed in her mind's eye. This is a small quilt which she completely as part of a master class taught by Christine Fries-Ureel, who made the pattern and showed Mom how to make the swirling fabric of the dress and stitch the windswept hair.  The quilt is called "Miranda", and is based on a Pre-Raphaelite painting by John William Waterhouse of Shakespeare's Tempest.  The sea foam is made from strands of sheep's wool, and the dress has unusual depth and three-dimensionality.

Mom excels at making "picture quilts, and as she was acquiring new skills in this class she had in mind her grand-daughter and her love of theater, faeries and myths.  "Miranda" has a proud place in a shaded corner of Emily's room, paired on the adjoining wall with the gorgeous, traditional mariner's star quilt her Gramma gave her on the year of her birth.  Boundless love radiates from every careful stitch and splash of color.

"The Spring Clad All in Gladness..."

The unseasonably warm weather we have experienced here in the Litchfield Hills over the last few days has really given a kick start to Spring.  Many of the bulbs, ephemeral wildflowers and trees are leafing out and bursting into bloom at least 10 days ahead of where they were last year at this time.  Temperatures are now more in line, with chilly nights and days in the low 60s, but already one's thoughts turn to spaded earth and seedlings in soil thta may yet experience a hard frost before it is safe for summer garden glories like tomatoes and basil that I await with great pleasure.

I can smell the smoke of someone burning brush through my open office window.  These early Spring days are precisely the wrong time to spark up a burn pile, with tinder dry lands and strong winds ready to carry embers and fan the flames.  It is a good time, however to burn invasive barberry, which has just expended its energy reserves in a first flush of green and will have a hard time bouncing back from a good scorching. 

Tomorrow is Mayday and this weekend is therefore the one time of the year when the women of Bryn Mawr College revel in white.  I have fond memories of maypoles on the green, strawberries and cream for breakfast and frolics on the grass from my years at Haverford and as a "Bryn Man". 

"Pray dainty nymphs, and spake / Shall we play barley break? fa la la la la..."

Who wouldn't trade their work-a-day attire for straw hats and morris bells at such a time?   It's good to be the goat-footed balloon man... 

Quickenings

"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said `Bother!' and `O blow!' and also `Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, `Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."

- Kenneth Grahame "Wind in the Willows"

There was a chorus of spring peepers singing praise songs in the twilight when I stepped outside last evening.  Nature's Great Revival is underway.  The maple sap run is over, the salamanders are on the march, and with the first ospreys back in Buzzards Bay, can the herring be far behind?  The finches at the feeder are shedding their olive drab for canary yellow, and redwings rasp in the marshlands.  Our human neighbors emerge from their dens on about the same schedule as the local black bears, shaking off their winter torpor and reclaiming their sometimes overlapping territories from long disuse. 

If the senses of my species were not dulled by progress and evolution, they would quicken with every fresh scent on the warm Spring wind.  They would pulse with the first impossible bloom of skunk cabbage, literary melting its way through the frozen earth through the heat of its cellular respiration.  They would feel the stirring of the aged and tattered mourning cloak, one of the longest lived butterflies, reemerging in senescence to mate with the impulse of youth.   They would thrill with the drone of insects drawn to sticky buds and rank wet earth.

This is the season of quickenings.  The word itself derives from the old English "cwic", meaning living or alive, but its modern usage is also appropriate for a season of accelerations.  The fetus is said to quicken when its movements can be felt in the womb.  The heart quickens with life and vitality.  The poetic language of the Nicene Creed proclaims the second coming "in glory to judge the quick and the dead."  It is no accident that the Christian celebration of Easter falls at this time, when new life is self-evident. 

My birthday is also an early Spring arrival.  In these parts, the daffodils will be in bloom a week afterward, and as a young boy I worked out for myself that the last patch of snow would be gone the week before.  The first of the spring ephemerals are working their way upward in the bare light below the leafless trees.  Dutchman's britches, wild leeks, trout lily and trillium will usher in April's wildflowers, along with the winking yellow eyes of blood root, and clusters of marsh marigolds adding their splash of color to shadowy wetlands. 

All these awakenings take place in a brave, bright time when frogs lay eggs in ice-rimmed pools and early birds battle for prime nesting sites.  Even as the season advances, a fickle rain can blight the apple's bloom just as surely as longer days call forth its flowers.  All around us, nature is striving, seeking, obeying urges as involuntary as breathing.  Spring is a serious business, yet still given over to the domain of the heart.   "Hang spring cleaning" says the industrious Mole, with a spirit that soars on diaphanous wings.  Even a raw wet day like today has a sweet expectancy, like a kite that strains on its tether, ready to take wing.