FREE RANGE: FOOD, NATURE, PLACE, AND MORE

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Posted on May 25, 2012 by Heather

Cliff swallow nests at Madroño Ranch

The cliff swallows have returned to Madroño Ranch. They’ve expanded their housing development under the western eave of the Main House to several eastern eaves, one of which we can see from inside the house. We watched them build their nests, swooping down to the creek in droves and hovering, beating their wings like oversized butterflies, then soaring back to the house, landing under the eave with grace and precision, using their tails as props as they constructed—with no hands!—their elegant gourd-shaped mud nests.

Then we watched their babies poke their heads out of the nests’ mouths, opening their own mouths for food, their ever-busy, ever-graceful parents helping rid the air of the countless blood-hungry insects the recent rains have brought. I now know that the insides of these nests are also carefully padded with grass, having found a fallen nest on the porch last Tuesday morning. Also in the fallen nest were five tiny, almost featherless hatchlings, dead, and one eggshell, still improbably intact; it was so fragile that it disintegrated as I tried to pick it up. They hadn’t had time to crush their first homes before their second home crashed to the floor. The disoriented parents flew back and forth, but as I sat on the porch that morning it seemed they’d submitted to the new reality and moved on.

The swallows are a nuisance; they leave a significant mess under their nests. But I love them for their athleticism and the magical moment in mornings and evenings when they fly in mesmerizing patterns from nest to air and back and out and back again. If you sit on the kitchen stoop or stand in the driveway, you can feel as if you are the nucleus of an atom, part of something coherent and powerful, as if their trajectories were weaving some kind of electrically charged nest around you. And then you go back inside and they seem to do their chittering, beautiful work without you just fine. You weren’t the center after all, as pleasing as the illusion was.

One day during our recent trip to Big Bend National Park, we left the cool, dry air of the Chisos Basin and drove down to the Hot Springs Historic District by the Rio Grande. As we drove through the relentless desert, with not a tree to be seen, I realized that the innumerable yellow splotches I was seeing weren’t blooms from the recent rain but yuccas killed by the drought—how, I wondered, could there be a drought in the desert? The air-conditioned car suddenly felt as fragile as an eggshell.

By the time we got to the historic district, it was 95 degrees and humid, and the idea of sitting in the hot springs had lost much of its appeal; besides, they were closed due to the rains. It wasn’t quite a wash, though; we got to see the post office/store and barracks-style rooms built by J. O. Langford, a Mississippian who moved there sight unseen as a homesteader in 1909, with his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old daughter, planning to turn the hot springs into a business. He had heard about them as he was seeking a cure for malaria in the high, dry air of Alpine, Texas. Several people had already tried to claim the place through the Homestead Act of 1862, though none had been able to meet the requirements, which included a minimum of three years residence on the property. A west Texas old-timer is reputed to have discouraged Langford: “Nothing down there but rattlesnakes and bandit Mexicans. And it’s too far away—that damned country promises more and gives less than any other place I saw.” It was an eleven-day journey from Alpine, the nearest town (now about a three-hour drive). The Langfords held out until 1912 and left, not returning until 1927. In 1942 Langford sold the property for inclusion in the new Big Bend National Park.

What were they thinking? Floods, drought, implacable sun, virtually no trees, snakes, bandits, two young children, loneliness as relentless as the sun. And yet they made some kind of living—enough to build the post office/store, the modest set of rooms for visitors, and a bathhouse (now gone) at the springs.

The next day we drove to the other end of the park to Lajitas, one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been. The road to Lajitas winds through an even fiercer landscape than the one to the hot springs, if that’s possible—the soil toasted a lunar white, virtually nothing growing. We went through Terlingua, the dusty former quicksilver mining center, now the self-proclaimed Chili Capital of the World. Another ten miles toward great looming cliffs and we found ourselves in what could have been the set of an old western, but for the lush grass at the golf resort.

Although Lajitas has been a modestly populated and popular river crossing for centuries, it didn’t get weird until the 1970s, when a Houston businessman bought and poured $100 million into it, building an airstrip for small jets, an 18-hole golf course, 92 luxury rooms, and an upscale restaurant. Not surprisingly, the place went bankrupt, but another optimistic Texas businessman bought it for $13.5 million or thereabouts. When we were there a few weeks ago, admittedly the beginning of the low summer season, the place was virtually empty. The cliffs continued to loom, and despite obviously steady watering, the golf course was beginning to turn brown under the imperious sun. The high in Lajitas yesterday was 104 degrees. What are they thinking?

On the one hand, I admire the moxie of these people who go into the vast west Texas landscape thinking they will somehow outsmart it, or at least wrest a modest living from it. On the other, I’ve become aware of the necessity in every life for submission to some other force. In Big Bend country, most people would find that force pretty hard to ignore. To quote Flannery O’Connor, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”

In recent months I’ve found that the power of Love is as startling as the force of nature. When I found that my life was as fragile as a nestling’s egg, disintegrating as I tried to pick up its shattered pieces, something appeared, an unexpected padding, to help me into a new life. The realities of death and illness, grief and anger—the possibility that this new home will fall—never stop looming. But over time the steady swooping kindnesses have built an improbable nest in which I have been, for now (and what else is there?), protected.

Despite years of thinking and reading and analyzing, I’ve been overwhelmed by the steadiness of Love’s flow, as powerful as the wind and water eroding the west Texas vastness and almost as impersonal, a force that needs an outlet, that seeks to move where it is not. I’ve stood in the midst of the swallows’ enfolding flight and seen that it continues when I step out of it.

It’s almost harder to submit to Love because it is personal: if I were to try to return gift for gift, prayer for prayer, I would run out of time long before finishing. (Also, I would have to learn how to knit, equally unlikely.) I get why those ornery people think they can vanquish the forces of nature—Texans have fashioned themselves as the most stubborn of the stubborn. For a while I drove myself crazy when I tried and failed to respond individually to every kindness. What was I thinking? I’ve discovered recently that people I don’t know are praying for me. How can I possibly pay that back? I can’t. What can I do instead? Say uncle. Throw up my hands. Submit, give thanks as often as possible, bring some beauty into the world.

And be cautious about buying west Texas real estate in the expectation of a quick return.

What we’re reading
Heather: Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales
Martin: Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—The Early Years, 1903–1940

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Look out of any window

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Martin

The Window, Chisos Basin, Big Bend National Park
Last week we spent several days at the Chisos Mountains Lodge, in Big Bend National Park, with our friends Bruce and Margaret Bennett and Peter and Kay Willcox. (Longtime readers may recall that Bruce was my hiking buddy on coast-to-coast treks across northern England in 2009 and 2011.)

The Chisos Basin, the bowl in which the lodge sits, is more than a mile above sea level. The only break in the surrounding ring of volcanic mountains is the Window, a triangular notch through which one can see the Chihuahuan desert thousands of feet below, and, on clear nights, the lights of Study Butte and Terlingua, some fifteen miles away. (That’s it in the photo above.) It’s no accident that the dining room at the lodge, and many of the guest rooms, look out over the Window; it is mesmerizing.

We spent the cool, sunny mornings hiking the Lost Mine and Laguna Meadows trails, which begin in the basin. On Friday afternoon we drove down to the Hot Springs Historic District and Rio Grande Village, and on Saturday afternoon we drove down to Terlingua and then on to Lajitas. We saw various flycatchers, Western and summer tanagers, Mexican jays, canyon towhees, a Say’s phoebe, a blue grosbeak, a Western kingbird, a black-footed ferret, and several rabbits, in addition to a disgruntled-looking coyote padding along the road in Rio Grande Village; we saw centuries-old pictographs and petroglyphs at Hot Springs. We ate dinner at the truly surreal Lajitas Golf Resort and Spa, at which an episode of the reality TV show Ammo and Attitude was being filmed. (No, we’d never heard of it either.)

All of this felt like pure gift to Heather and me, given the events of the last six months, which as most of you know have been hard ones for us. At the beginning of December Heather learned that the source of the pain in her left hip that had been bothering her for a couple of months was in fact a stage 4 cancer that had already metastasized to the bones in her pelvis and spine. Then her father, whose own health had been declining since the death of her mother two years ago, died a week before Christmas.

Heather’s cancer is still officially of unknown origin, though molecular analysis indicated a 90 percent probability that it was breast cancer—despite the fact that years of mammograms and, more recently, a battery of tests and scans had found no tumor.

In January, she began a regimen of four chemotherapy infusions, one every three weeks, combined with monthly infusions of Zometa, a bone strengthener developed to treat osteoporosis. At times we wondered if the treatments were worse than the disease; the chemo affected her palate to such an extent that few if any foods tasted good, and the Zometa brought on agonizing flu-like symptoms: aches, joint pain, fatigue.

Heather lost about twenty-five pounds, much of it muscle; she had always been an athlete, and the ensuing weakness, which affected her posture and her gait, was in some ways much harder to take than the loss of her beautiful hair, much as she hated that obvious and public signifier of illness. (After her hair had started to fall out, she had me shave her head, which I must say was not a duty I had ever imagined performing on my wife; after I finished the job, we joked that if she just got a few tattoos and piercings, she’d be indistinguishable from much of the rest of the population of Austin.)

Perhaps the most tiresome thing about Heather’s illness—aside from the physical effects, of course—was how boring it was. We found ourselves utterly unable to focus on anything except her illness. Events in the world outside us passed virtually unnoticed; we found ourselves unable to concentrate on anything—writing, reading, you name it—beyond the reality of illness and treatment. We were locked in the dark house of her cancer, and we couldn’t even imagine the world outside.

After her fourth chemo infusion in March, she got a break of five weeks before returning to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for testing and evaluation. At Anderson she had a PET scan which failed to find even a single lesion; she was, unbelievably, completely cancer free.

It was as if all the doors and windows of the house in which we’d been shut suddenly flew open, and we could see the sky and trees and streets and people outside. Our trip to Big Bend marked our first tentative steps back into the beautiful, messed-up, complicated world.

The Window is mesmerizing. Like any gap in any wall, any break in any symmetrical pattern, it naturally drew our eyes; we always want to see beyond our immediate surroundings, to see behind the curtain. For us, emerging from the claustrophobia of Heather’s illness, the view from the Window was a symbol of the vastness, the wholeness, that we had been unable to imagine during these last six months. But of course it was there all along, waiting patiently for us to lift our heads and look.

What we’re reading
Heather: Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
Martin: Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

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A father’s legacy

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Heather

Henry E. Catto Jor.

Heather’s father Henry E. Catto Jr. died on December 18, 2011. The following is an adaptation of remarks she delivered at his memorial service at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio on January 7.

My friend Mimi Swartz wrote a wonderful piece in the November 2010 issue of Texas Monthly about the lovely and sometimes exasperating process of getting to know her father after her mother died. Pic Swartz had been one of my father’s dearest friends since before Mimi and I were born, but I read her piece with more than just the prurient pleasure of reading about someone you already know in excellent prose. She very accurately described a process I recognized in my relationship with my own father but that I hadn’t thought about yet. My mother, like Mimi’s, was the switchboard operator through whom most family information was routed. When she died, I was faced with what appeared to be a daunting task: getting to know my then-seventy-nine-year-old father without a mediator.

I don’t mean for a minute to suggest that he was somehow absent from my life. He drew silly cartoons on my lunch bags when I was in grade school, perhaps to make up for the fact that no one would trade lunches with me—my mother was an early adopter of what was then called “health food,” and the other kids utterly scorned my lunches. He scared the shorts off all his children (and his wife) when we made our yearly summer drive from San Antonio (where we lived at the time) to Aspen, Colorado, over a then-unpaved Independence Pass: he loved to pretend to lose control of the station wagon and hear us shriek with pleasure at our narrow escape. (My mother’s shrieking may not have been pleasure-based.)

Through my teenage and college years, he impressed on me the importance of being prompt (although I’m not, particularly). The sight of him sitting in a grumpy heap of plaid bathrobe at the bottom of the stairs late at night was one I learned actively to avoid. He also taught me the importance of looking up the meaning of words I didn’t know. One day he wrote me a note for school: “Please excuse Heather’s absence from school yesterday. She was malingering.” When I didn’t ask him what malingering was, he suggested that I look it up. After I did so and shrieked, “DAD-dy!” he wrote another: “Please excuse Heather’s absence from school yesterday. She was gold-bricking.” Not yet having learned my lesson, I had to shriek one more time before I received a satisfactory note; my love of dictionaries has continued to this day.

He drove me to Massachusetts from our home in northern Virginia for my freshman year of college at his own alma mater, pointing out places he had known and loved as we got nearer Williamstown. As we approached my dorm, he suddenly spluttered in outrage at the displacement of his beautiful old frat house by an architecturally unfortunate library. Aggravated as he was, he refocused his attentions to carry my station wagonload of stuff to the third-floor room and cried before he drove away, even as he continued muttering imprecations against willful artistic ugliness, an issue that vexed him all his life.

I also knew that he could be an unusually good sport. Political discussions, of course, were always central to our family’s common life, and my mother, who was a Democrat and always up for an argument, never let a political proclamation from my father drive by without pulling it over and checking its registration. She taught her children well, which means that it’s likely his whole family voted him out of a job he loved in 1992, when President Clinton came in. I never heard a word of recrimination. He didn’t stop trying to show me the true Republican light, however much he felt its glow in the past years had dimmed. In fact, in the end I was forced to admit that he might have some points worth considering.

I already knew these things about my father when my mother died: that he was funny, a stickler for precision in language, an advocate for order and beauty in the arts, and usually a very good sport. That’s not a bad list to start with, or even to finish up with. What I’ve learned about him in the last two years without my mother has surprised me and left me very grateful, despite the cost of the knowing.

Most of you who knew him have probably noted that I haven’t yet mentioned what might be my father’s most salient characteristic: his charm, which, having swum in all my life, I had ceased to notice. When I did notice it, I often thought of his charm as an accessory, a frill. Charm just wasn’t Serious. It wasn’t Deep. It was Frivolous.

In the past two years, Dad and I spent a considerable amount of time at M. D. Anderson, where I watched him “oozing charm from every pore.” What I came to realize after a while was that his charm was not directed just to the people who might be useful to him. It oozed all over the place in a cheerfully undisciplined flow. Cashiers in the cafeteria, janitors, doctors, volunteers, nurses, all laughed at his jokes, smiled at his suspenders and bow ties, graciously tolerated his corrections of their grammar, and responded to his courtly interest in them so that lightness and buoyancy tended to bob up where he was. I began to notice it in other places we went as well, this capacity to disarm people from all walks of life, people who might easily have dismissed him as a stuffy, inflexible elitist.

This is the backdrop against which I made my most unexpected discovery about my father: he had a capacity to ask genuinely for pardon when he had offended and to forgive when offended against. I have come to see his charm as an outward and visible sign of a deep humility, a bloom that became particularly noticeable to me after my mother died. It was something I had completely overlooked—and perhaps something he hadn’t known about himself and which may have sprung from the sharp compassion that can emerge from grief.

In the last two years we had many, many opportunities to ask for each other’s pardon. Although he had a pair of very expensive hearing aids, he rarely wore them, preferring to accuse me of mumbling and requiring me to repeat myself with frequency, followed by exhortations not to yell. One morning I was driving him somewhere and just lost my temper when told to stop mumbling and yelling yet again. “Maybe,” I said with some asperity, “you ought to consider apologizing to me for making me repeat myself over and over again when you could just put in your damn hearing aids.” He raised an eyebrow and said, “But it’s so much easier to blame you”—and then, just before I pulled over and throttled him, he truly apologized, although he did not put in his hearing aids.

We spent a lot of our time together arguing. We argued about his driving and his tendency to want to control his medical appointments without telling anyone about them. We argued about what he considered my tendency to worry and fuss. We argued about the need for nurses. We argued about the need for new kitchen appliances. We argued about moving the TV in his room to a place where he could actually see and hear it. Arguing with my father was not a novel experience. What began to follow the arguments was. Almost inevitably, I would get a call a few minutes after an argument, or a request for my presence, followed by a genuine apology, which in turn, allowed the same to be called forth from me. I learned that the moments of annoyance were never the last word. I learned to respect and be led by a depth of sweetness that I had previously judged to be frivolous. I learned how to love him all the way down because he showed me how to do it.

Learning to see the deep roots of his charm—which sprang from a genuine desire for peace at global and personal levels—I have come to see that my father was one of the blessed peacemakers Jesus called the children of God. That, in his own struggle with grief, he could reveal himself as this child of blessing was his greatest gift and example to me. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed is Henry Catto, with or without his hearing aids.

What we’re reading
Heather: Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Martin: Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

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Love, light, and Wallace Stevens

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Martin

Heather and Martin at Williams College

Yesterday was the solstice, the shortest day of the year; Heather’s father died last Sunday; and we’ve received various other pieces of bad news over the last few weeks. It would be easy, under the circumstances, to give way to fear and sorrow and the belief that we are surrounded by darkness. But I want instead, on the eve of Christmas Eve, and in the wake of Heather’s last post, to talk about light, in particular the light and joy and comfort of love, in particular our love.

Heather and I were classmates and fellow English majors at Williams College. We started dating during the spring of our senior year, which means, for those of you keeping score at home, that we’ve been together for thirty years now, though we didn’t bother to get married until 1985. But I first noticed her during our sophomore year, when we were both taking a course called “Religion and Literature,” taught by a formidable scholar named Barbara Nadel.

Now, neither of us had any business being in this course; we knew very little about literature, despite having declared ourselves English majors, and even less about religion. The course was one of those three-hour seminars that met one afternoon a week, while the syllabus included inscrutable writers like Paul Tillich, Bernard Meland, and Wallace Stevens, which meant that at the end of each class I knew even less than I had at the beginning. The upside was that, since I never had the slightest idea what was going on, I had lots of time to stare at girls, and Heather—glamorous, sophisticated, obviously way out of my league—immediately caught my eye.

She clinched the deal, unwittingly, on the last day of the semester. Babs Nadel, as we irreverently referred to her, had assigned us a final paper, and Heather, as she admitted later, had put it off until she was forced to stay up all the previous night writing it. Moreover, she had come down with a severe cold, which left her severely congested. The combination of lack of sleep and a head full of cotton wool meant that when she came to class that afternoon she sought out the largest individual in class and sat behind him, hoping to avoid catching Babs’s eye. (Babs, terrifyingly, would call on people at random to answer the incomprehensible questions she posed.)

Somehow, Heather had gone that entire semester without once being called on, but of course her number came up on the last day of class. Babs asked some particularly knotty question—I don’t remember what it was; probably something about Stevens—and called on Heather, who had by now slipped into something approaching a comatose state.

Heather later described the awful sensation of gradually coming to consciousness to realize that everyone in the room was staring at her expectantly, apparently awaiting her response to a question she hadn’t even heard. She completely whiffed, of course, and it was at that moment that I said to myself, “THAT’s the girl for me—she’ll never know what hit her!” It took me another two years to wear down her resistance—today I’d probably be arrested as a stalker—but when she finally crumbled, just a few months before we graduated, she quite literally made me the happiest young man in the world.

(Warning to our kids: you probably shouldn’t read this paragraph.) When we first started dating, of course, we were completely in lust with each other, in that embarrassingly hormonal way of young lovers. (When recalling our younger selves, I always think of the Austin Lounge Lizards song “The Golden Triangle,” which contains the lyric “two bodies were thinking with only one gland.”)

Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, that intense youthful passion settled into a steadier, more consistent condition, something like, well, love. We’ve certainly had our ups and downs since then, but the former have vastly outnumbered the latter. We’re still happily married (to each other, I mean); we have three beautiful, thoughtful, and compassionate children; in Madroño Ranch we’ve found a fulfilling, challenging, and just-plain-fun project on which to collaborate now that our nest has emptied. Life, in short, is pretty damn good.

Except, of course, when it isn’t. This is traditionally the season of giving, but this year it has been even more disjointed and chaotic than usual, and we haven’t been feeling terribly festive. I finally decided, just yesterday morning, that the best and most meaningful gift I could give Heather was an attempt to tell her how much I love her, and how much she’s meant to me.

Heather has given me gifts all year round, for thirty years now. The greatest gift of all, however, is one that I have not yet fully unwrapped. I’ve always been of a somewhat gloomy disposition, inclined to see the downside of most situations. (“Expect the worst and you’re seldom disappointed” has been my motto.) Heather, on the other hand, always projects optimism, always expects things to turn out better rather than worse. When I was younger, and for an embarrassingly long time, I tended to think that such a stance was an indication of shallowness and/or naïveté, but slowly, over our years together, I’ve come to realize that it is exactly the opposite. It is, in fact, a conscious and deliberate choice, a rigorous and gallant determination not to give in to darkness and inactivity, but to bestow grace and hope by stubbornly shining light on everyone and everything around you.

I know that my pessimism has often frustrated and disappointed her, and I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how much I admire her patience, her forgiveness, her determination, her spirit, her steadfastness, her depth. I have learned so much from her; I still have so much to learn. Sometimes it can seem that darkness is all there is, but now I know better. Now I know that where there is love, there is always light.

What we’re reading
Heather: Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Martin: Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

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Angels in the dark

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Heather

Angel on the Puente Libre

Jesus said to them… “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” (Mark 13:24–25)

These were among the words that greeted the Christian New Year a couple of Sundays ago, the beginning of the Advent season. Well, dang, commented some of us who meet after the 9 a.m. service at All Saints’ Episcopal Church to discuss the readings. We might as well fold up our tents and go home if this is what the season’s bringing.

By the end of the discussion, we surprised ourselves by agreeing that there’s something oddly reassuring about the passage in which these verses are embedded, despite the Episcopalian squeamishness often evoked by the apocalyptic Jesus. All this talk about judgment and suffering is fine coming from John the Baptist—what can you expect from someone who eats locusts? When Jesus talks about judgment and end times, however, I get linear, literal, and cross. The world didn’t end. Jesus was wrong. Untrustworthy. Oh, forget it. I’ll just sit here alone in the dark.

But eventually I have to note the quotation marks around the darkness-coming passage, which means that Jesus is not just throwing wild predictions around. He’s quoting scripture, from the times when other prophets saw God’s people careening off toward the wilderness without so much as a water bottle. The world did not come to an end after Isaiah used this imagery eight centuries before Jesus used it, something Jesus probably noticed. Nor did it come to an end after Ezekiel or Joel used it in the interim centuries. It was (and is) poetic language used to jolt people out of their open-eyed, daylight sleepwalking. Wake up! There is darkness around and within us, but it’s not what we think it is. There is light as well, and it too is often not what we think it is.

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s most violent border city, angels have taken to landing at crime scenes, at busy intersections, even on the International Bridge. They stand about ten feet tall, with wide feathered wings, and carry signs that say things like “Murderers, Believe and Repent.” The fact that these angels are actually teenaged members of Salmo 100 (Psalm 100), a tiny evangelical church, doesn’t make them any less impressive: in fact, I think it makes them even more so. Frustrated with the lethal violence that flays their city and with the flabby ineffectiveness of public policy, these young people persuaded the city to donate old office curtains that they turned into robes, raised money for make-up and feathers, and began their work of shocking people awake—particularly those who continue to perpetrate and permit the demonic activities that so plague the city. Their performances are beautiful and dangerous: they stand without speaking, without means of defense, in places where they are very likely to encounter the demonic forces unraveling their world.

They have seen the sun and the moon cease to give light, seen the stars fall from the sky. They have seen the signs that their world is charged with darkness, but they have chosen an energy source beyond the darkness.

Most of us have seen the skies go dark on at one time or another; most of us have had times when it seemed that the world is going to end. What our little discussion group decided that Jesus was saying was that that there are times when the skies go dark and the world seems torn from its course. These times are unavoidable. But don’t think that darkness defines the whole nature of reality, or you’ll pull from a limited energy source, see from a restricted field of vision. Sometimes it takes darkness to remind you that there is light, and that you want to see it.

It’s easy to think about the darkness simplistically. I do it myself, noting the physical and spiritual relief that the pre-solstice days bring from the scorching Texas sun. I’ve noted that most things, including us, need darkness in which to grow. But I also hearken to Wendell Berry’s pithy distillation of the full power of the dark:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and wings.

Most of us—used to light, to a particular, merely visual way of seeing—have definitions of darkness that are inadequate to its full reality. Although there is blooming in the darkness, there are also things fully worthy of terror. Because we can’t see in the darkness the way we’re used to seeing in the light, we often have trouble discerning what blooms from what bites. And sometimes it’s the same thing.

In his book The Blessing: A Memoir, the poet Gregory Orr recounts the stunning journey of his life into the darkness, beginning when, at the age of twelve, he killed his brother in a hunting accident. His brilliant, erratic, meth-addicted physician father and his depressed mother, who died in surgery a couple of years later, were not able to help lead him through the dark, in which he lived persistently until an incident after he returned to the upstate New York village he called home after a shocking experience with Mississippi state police in a civil rights protest in 1965. When he got back, he found that many of the people he’d known all his life wouldn’t speak to him because of his civil rights work. The darkness he’d lived in deepened; he wore the mark of Cain.

At the end of the summer, before he left to go back to college, one of his high school English teachers invited him on a drive. She took him to the property of a sculptor who had died earlier that year. Ignoring the “No Trespassing” sign on a barbed wire fence, they climbed into a field filled with metal figures, suggestive of but not restricted by human form. He and his teacher wandered for an hour through the field. Thought Orr:

… these were soldiers of art. They brought no mayhem—only a longing to rise up and stand inside meaning as a man might stand in armor. There would be no violent struggles here. This was a field of blessing. A field where the mortal and fallen rose up, transformed…. Here in this field, arrayed in long lines, was an army of art. This army was engaged in a war against the nothingness and indifference of the universe. It wasn’t the kind of war history fought, where timing was everything and the clocks ran on blood. This was a war outside of time. It was a war where you didn’t fight, or march, or do violence to anyone…. Somewhere in this field was a rendering of each agony and exultation [the sculptor] had ever felt. And I could feel them, too. I knew that somewhere in this field Cain stood; somewhere else, his slain brother.

Our discussion group came to an equivalent conclusion about the disturbing, apocalyptic words of Jesus. (At least, I think we did.) He was offering his soon-to-be-tested disciples consolation: do not think that the coming darkness is all there is. His advice to them: stay awake. Stay awake to the angels that land in front of you, insisting that there is a way toward meaning. Stay awake to the power behind love, beauty, forgiveness, and mercy that moves in the dark and beyond it. Do not let the darkness consign you to indifference or despair. Stay awake.

What we’re reading
Heather: Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Martin: Calvin Trillin, Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff

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The meaning of meat

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Martin

It's not nagging if you wave a butcher knife, dear

“It is true, I came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself….” (Henry David Thoreau)

I spent last weekend in the company of six heavily armed women at Madroño Ranch.

Don’t worry; we’re not training up a secret army of Sarah Palin clones. No, these Hill Country Dianas were attending “Hunting School for Women,” our first ethical hunting workshop of the new season. Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club decided to limit the enrollment to six rather than the usual eight, since five of the six were first-timers and he wanted to make sure they received as close to a one-on-one experience with a guide as possible.

The weekend was a huge success, at least from our perspective, and while I know I shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations based on such a small sample size, I couldn’t help concluding that most women are more likely to “get” the whole ethical hunting thing, and more willing to listen and learn, than most men. (Of course, if I simply substituted “inexperienced hunters” for “women” and “experienced hunters” for “men,” that statement would be equally true; perhaps the most important factor in making this school so successful was the fact that five out of the six attendees were novices, not that all six were women.) For whatever reason, though, the weekend was as far removed as possible from the boys’-night-out mentality that prevails in some hunting circles, for which we’re grateful.

The ringer in the group was our dear friend Valerie, an experienced hunter and a regular customer of Jesse’s at the Sustainable Food Center’s Saturday morning farmers’ market in downtown Austin. In addition to her hunting expertise, Valerie brought a wicked sense of humor to the proceedings; she was the one who affixed the full-page PETA ad of Sir Paul McCartney proudly proclaiming his vegetarianism to the Madroño Ranch refrigerator, just below the inspirational magnet pictured above.

Helping Jesse and the multitalented Tink Pinkard make sure everything ran smoothly were Morgan Angelone, the phenomenal Dai Due “camp chef”; our daughter Elizabeth, the assistant chef; Jeremy Nobles and Josh Randolph, the trusty guides; and our son Tito, the assistant guide.

As if that weren’t enough of a hunting vibe, we also had two residents at the ranch: Jackson Landers, a hunter/author from Virginia, and Helena Svedberg, a student of environmental filmmaking at American University who is filming him for her master’s project.

It was, in other words, a fairly bloodthirsty group. But as Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, told the guests, we provide an opportunity for them to hunt; we do not, and cannot, promise them that they will kill, or even see, an animal. In the event, five of the six guests did register kills from our blinds, and all six went home with coolers full of venison and/or hog meat.

All in all, then, we’re happily counting Hunting School for Women as a win. But coming on the heels of our second bison “harvest,” it has us (again) thinking long and hard about our somewhat vexed attitude toward meat eating.

Now, I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of meat. Morgan’s bison burgers (a Friday night hunting school tradition), Jesse’s charcuterie, Ben Willcott’s pork Milanese at Texas French Bread—these are among my very favorite things to eat. And we happily accepted Valerie’s invitation to come over for dinner once she’s turned the 130-pound feral hog she shot into pork curry or some other delectable dish. But neither Heather nor I is a hunter; the only animal I’ve ever shot was an obviously deranged raccoon, presumably rabid, that we encountered staggering along the road at the ranch at midday on a scorching summer day several years ago.

In other words, while we certainly hope to make enough money from the sale of our bison meat to help support our residency program, and while we understand the need to control the deer and hog populations not just for the sake of a balanced ecosystem at the ranch, but for the good of the animals themselves (no one likes to see the starving individuals that result from overpopulation), we are a little, um, squeamish about doing the deed ourselves. Instead we are, in effect, allowing Jesse and Tink and Robert and the hunting school guests to do our dirty work. Does this make us hypocrites? Wouldn’t it be more honest for us to take rifle in hand and take care of this business ourselves?

Well, yes. Honestly, I don’t think I have a huge problem with the general concept of killing a feral hog, or even a deer, though I’ve been warned about the dreaded Bambi effect. (The bison, I confess, are a different story; they are so big, so magnificent, so valuable, that I’d be intimidated if I were the one required to shoot them.) What bothers me is the possibility that I might not be a sufficiently good shot, despite the numbers of beer cans and paper targets I’ve blasted over the years; I would agonize over the possibility that, due to my incompetence, the animal might not die instantly.

Of course I also understand that for us hunting would be a luxury, as it is for many enthusiastic hunters, and not a necessity; we are lucky to have other people who kill and process our food before we buy and cook and eat it. Moreover, not everyone can, or should, be a hunter; a healthy human ecology requires diversity and balance—vegetarians and vegans as well as carnivores; urban hipsters and rural rednecks; multinational corporations (well regulated, please!) and corner stores; butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. There should be room at the table for all.

That said, however, I believe firmly that every carnivore should, at some level, confront the meaning of meat: the death, blood, evisceration, and butchering that are inextricable parts of the process by which this chop or that sausage ends up on our dinner table. We’ve seen that process up close and personal during bison harvests and hunting schools at the ranch, and at the processing facility in Utopia that turns our bison carcasses into stew meat and steaks. But we haven’t actually pulled the trigger or wielded the knife ourselves—not yet, anyway. Perhaps we never will. But I hope we will always be uneasy about that fact, and thankful for the animals whose flesh we eat, and for those who allow us to do so.

What we’re reading
Heather: The Sun
Martin: Anthony Trollope, The Warden

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Field notes from inside my head: connecting art and commerce

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Heather

Christo, "Over the River"

Point One: When we attended the Alliance for Artist Communities conference in Chicago several weeks ago, I found myself eagerly awaiting the start of a session entitled “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies.”

Point Two: The other day, as Martin and I drove past the Kerrville Tractor Supply Company parking lot, always stacked with neat piles of gates, troughs, feeders, and such, I looked carefully to see if there was any nifty bit of equipment that we needed but hadn’t thought of.

I understood at that moment that someone must have performed a brain transplant on me in the dark of the night. Here are the kinds of sessions I would have expected to look forward to at the conference: “Why We Need More Poets”; “Why Food Should Be the Center of Every Residency Experience”; “Why All Residents Should Be Required to Stare at Bugs and Birds for Three Hours a Day”; “Remedial Programs for Residents Who Don’t Like Chickens.” Here are the kinds of stores I normally eye with pleasure: book stores, kitchen supply stores, stores with great selections of cowboy boots. Earned revenue? Farm equipment? Huh?

Points Three through Five or Maybe Seven: Recently I’ve read a number of interesting articles in the New York Times, some of them in the business section (more evidence of a brain transplant), about such issues as the transformative power of excellent design in the public places of poverty-stricken communities; the involvement of the Danish government in the redesign of unsightly power towers in rural Denmark; the surge of young entrepreneurs (examples: the practitioners of “Gandhian innovation” in India, the Unreasonable Institute) who see that for-profit business and social justice are not at odds with each other; the powerful but unfocused energy of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Also, the proposed Christo project over the Arkansas River in Colorado in which environmentalists, government agencies, and artists are tussling over how, if, and why the project should proceed.

What has linked these disparate subjects in my mind is a sense that we are witnessing a radical shift in thinking about the nature of commerce. In my lifetime, business has been a stand-alone subject, like medicine or law. As an academic discipline, it has been completely separated from the humanities. There may be writing requirements for business majors, but they’re usually specified as such. Studio art for business majors? History? Philosophy? I haven’t seen them cross-listed in any departments I’ve studied in. Business has been cordoned off and cordoned itself off.

One of the reasons I enjoyed the session on “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies” was its underlying assumption that there is a fruitful overlap between the arts and business beyond the mere sale of art objects. Most of us attending the session represented residency programs, ranging from very urban to very rural, from huge to tiny, from brand-new to venerable. Given the roller coaster of the economy and the shrinking of foundation funding, there’s a real sense of energy around the question of how residency programs might become more, or even fully, self-sustaining financially. What for-profit goods and services might residency programs provide, especially when they charge artists nominal or no fees for their residencies? The arts are so automatically relegated to the nonprofit world that the question frequently doesn’t even arise.

One of the participants in the discussion runs an organic farm outside Toronto and is able to provide space for artists and make a comfortable enough living between farming and renting space on her farm for workshops and events. An emerging program in Ajo, Arizona, is planning to use some of its space—an old public elementary school—as a motel that will feed its paying guests excellent local and organic food (they’ll have their own garden), making use of the cafeteria kitchen already in place. In fact, the twining of food and its place in the production of art was a persistent sub-theme of the conference.

All of this led me to wonder how Madroño Ranch could more closely unite the business of the ranch with the mission of the residency program, which was why the Tractor Supply inventory suddenly looked so interesting. What on the ranch could supply the artists in their work? And how could the artists contribute to the function of the ranch? How might the art and writing produced at Madroño waft beyond the perimeter fencing and generate appetites for new business and beauty in the community around us?

Wondering in a vague way about Nice Big Questions is one of my favorite pastimes, which is why I was so pleased to find the very concrete story about power lines in Denmark. The rapid growth of wind and solar energy production in Europe has led to the need for much larger power poles, which are undeniably unsightly. Even as people understand the need for them, no one—especially in rural communities—wants them spoiling the views. (These nasty things are going up all over the Texas Hill Country, every bit as blighting as huge billboards.) To help mitigate the NIMBY response to the power poles, the Danish government commissioned a contest among design companies to see who might come up with a less intrusive structure than the starkly utilitarian poles. While I can’t say that the winning design is anything I’d want on my own property, the very fact of the contest pointed to a way of thinking that’s foreign not just because it’s Danish: aesthetics matter, even when it comes to the most practical of issues.

Of course, the most practical of questions behind the most practical of issues is: what will it cost? How are the costs justified? Most of points three through six I watched in the fields inside my head related to those questions. In Denmark there seemed to be a shadow bottom line floating just below the financial one: can we make what we build beautiful? Can it be of a pleasure (or at least not a blight) to the community? The piece on well-designed public spaces in poverty-stricken areas noted that the addition of bright color to housing projects, or of new stairs to replace a steep, eroding dirt walkway in a slum, injected a sense of hope, order, and civic pride where it had been sorely lacking.

In these instances, government has pointed to the need to consider more than one bottom line when spending money. Many young entrepreneurs (this is a very interesting generation coming up) are aware that there isn’t necessarily a conflict between the need to make a living for themselves and making the world at large more livable. They operate with the assumption that there is more than one bottom line; their business must succeed financially. But they measure success not just in income to the company but measurable usefulness to the community in which they work. One of the impetuses behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, I think, is the (so far unarticulated) recognition that businesses, especially financial institutions and transnational corporations, have hewed to a single bottom line: short-term profit for shareholders.

Obviously a company needs to be financially profitable, but I think there is a sense that many of these shadow bottom lines need to be as visible and material as the financial ones in order to judge a business as truly successful. Does a business add to or detract from the beauty, health, social coherence, and ecological systems of the community in which it operates? A business may offer a lot of low-paying jobs and operate profitably but still gets an F-minus in the beauty, health, social coherence, and ecological factors. Is it a successful business? The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program is at least a template for how such bottom lines might be developed.

Maybe businesses—especially big ones—could offer residency programs for artists and environmental scientists, recognizing that the costs of such a program are as necessary to operations as paying for the lights. Maybe business and the arts (liberal and otherwise) can develop a new relationship, one that is more than just a charitable donation at the end of a financially solvent year. Maybe the arts are as important to business success (especially in a climate-changed world) as steel is to bridge-building. Maybe I’m standing out in one of the pastures of my mind, mooing to myself. And maybe there are some restless young business-oriented people ready to figure out how we might bring these shadow bottom lines clearly and boldly into view.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

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Second City, second harvest: pork bellies and bison blood

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Martin

Pork belly

Sometimes this whole harebrained Madroño Ranch scheme of ours seems to manifest a distinctly split personality. Last week, for example, we experienced, vividly and in close conjunction, two contradictory extremes, one exhilarating, the other sobering. The resulting psychic whiplash has left our heads spinning, or at least wobbling.

At the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities in Chicago, which I mentioned in my previous post, we listened to and learned from and socialized with some of the brightest and most creative people we’ve met in years and, incidentally, enjoyed for the first time some of the charms of that great American city. We also got to spend some quality time with our youngest, Thea, who flew up from Kenyon College for a couple of days. Finally, as a bonus, Heather, that notorious insomniac, slept better than she had in months. Our stay in the City of the Big Shoulders left us feeling upbeat and energized, determined to come back to Texas and implement a whole new bunch of exciting ideas—some of them shamelessly stolen from others, a few of them original.

Yeah, all that was great and all, but who am I kidding? The true highlight of our Chicago experience boils down to two magical words: pork and belly. We managed to have pork belly for dinner three nights in a row. First, on Thursday night, Heather and I had dinner at Mercat a la Planxa, a glitzy tapas place right across the street from our hotel. The restaurant was glitzy, crowded, and noisy—three qualities that normally would send us screaming back out onto the street—but we got the last two seats at the bar, crowded up against the vast mirrored wall, and a sympathetic and well-informed bartender took great and gentle care of us. We ordered, and enjoyed, a number of different plates, but our favorite was definitely the tocino con cidra: pork belly in apple cider glaze with a Granny Smith and black truffle slaw on the side. Wow!

Thea arrived on Friday, and that night we went with our friend Meredith, who lives in Chicago, and five other out-of-towners to Big Star, a very hip (and very crowded) taco joint in Wicker Park. We were told there would be a 45-minute wait for a booth big enough to accommodate our group, so we adjourned to an outside picnic table at their carry-out operation next door. After a few minutes of sitting in the chilly Chicago fall air, we decided to order a taco apiece, just to, you know, tide ourselves over. Naturally, several of us opted for the taco de panza, with braised pork belly, guajillo sauce, queso fresco, onion, and cilantro. Wow!

After the first round of tacos, we waited a while longer, until we started getting cold again, and then we ordered another round of tacos. After 45 minutes, our table still wasn’t ready, and we three Texans had had enough of the cold, so Heather, Thea, and I got a cab back to the hotel. (Apparently we made the right choice: Meredith reported the next day that once they finally got a booth, it turned out to be the noisiest, rowdiest night she’d ever experienced at Big Star.)

And then on Saturday night we played hooky from the conference and opted for a family dinner, so Heather and I decided to take Thea to Mercat, where we once again had the tocino con cidra, among other dishes, thus completing our Pork Belly Tour of Chicago.

On Sunday morning, while Thea headed out to meet a couple of Kenyon friends, Heather and I had brunch at Eleven City Diner, a massive operation on South Wabash that a friend had assured us would offer an authentic Jewish deli experience. After a half hour wait for a table, we chowed down on massive sandwiches (a Reuben for Heather, brisket for me), followed by the shared indulgence of a thick slab of apple pie à la mode. Wow!

With all this meat on our minds and in our bellies, then, we flew back to Austin on Sunday night, only to haul ourselves out of bed at 4 a.m. Monday morning to drive to the ranch in time for our second bison “harvest.” This time we took three animals, under the watchful eyes of the state inspector and an observer from Animal Welfare Approved, from which we’re seeking certification. This harvest wasn’t quite as shocking as our first one, in January, but it was still a stark reminder that the meat we sell (and eat) is, at bottom, inextricably bound up with death.

Robert was the man with the rifle, but his daughter Ashlie, his friend Other Robert, and Other Robert’s son Travis were also there to assist. It was a beautiful morning, and the bison had thoughtfully assembled just where we needed and wanted them. Robert lined up all the necessary vehicles: the big new ranch truck, the refrigerated trailer, and the bulldozer with which he would hoist the carcasses off the ground to be bled and then into the trailer.

Robert’s an expert shot, and we’d been through this before, but it’s still a pretty nerve-wracking experience just to watch, let alone be the one pulling the trigger. The responsibility is immense; no one wants these magnificent animals to suffer, so each shot (one per animal) must be precisely aimed. On top of that, Robert had the pressure of having the state inspector and the AWA observer watching carefully—not to mention us, his employers. But he was, as always, up to the task: three times the rifle cracked, and three times one of the great creatures toppled instantly into the dust. It’s a sight that still disconcerts us, and I pray it always will.

Loading the dead bison for the trip to the processing plant is always a challenge, but after some sweating and cursing (mostly by Travis, who had to stand inside the freezing trailer and wrestle them into position) we succeeded. Robert, Other Robert, Ashlie, and Travis piled into the truck, and Heather and I followed them the thirty-odd miles into Utopia.

After our first harvest, the old ranch truck overheated while pulling the trailer up the hill on Highway 337 between Medina and Utopia; Robert poured water from a nearby creek into the leaking radiator with an empty whiskey bottle that someone had thoughtfully tossed onto the roadside, then nursed the truck the rest of the way into Utopia. This time, thank goodness, the new, considerably más macho truck handled the even heavier load (three animals instead of two) without even breaking a sweat.

Once in Utopia, however, Robert, Other Robert, Travis, and I, along with a couple of the Mercantile workers, were perspiring heavily by the time we literally wrestled the enormous carcasses off the truck, onto the small loading dock, and then through the tiny door (a regular door, not a garage door) into the plant. It was bloody, dirty, nauseating work, but after several hours we had all three bison inside, and Robert had their three pelts loaded into the trailer for the return trip to the ranch.

This is a busy time for us: we’ve got several hundred pounds of frozen packaged meat to sell; we’re looking forward to the arrival of two more residents on Sunday; and our next “hunting school,” this one for women only, begins a week from today. But I expect the events of last week—the optimistic inspiration of the conference in Chicago and the bloody reality of the bison harvest at the ranch—will stay with us for a while.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

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The Alliance conference: our first time in the Second City

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Martin

Chicago skyline

The Windy City. Hog Butcher for the World. City of the Big Shoulders. The Second City. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and Harry Caray’s “Holy cow!” Richard Daley and Mike Ditka. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Frank Lloyd Wright and Al Capone. “Let’s play two!” and the Chicago Seven. Grain elevators and packing houses and railroad yards and skyscrapers.

That’s right, Heather and I are in windy, chilly (well, at least by Texas standards) Chicago, where we’re attending the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities. The Alliance, based in Providence, Rhode Island, is a membership association of more than a thousand residency programs across the country and internationally, ranging from well-established giants of the field like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo to tiny, brand-new programs like, uh, Madroño Ranch.

Chicago is an iconic and quintessentially American city, despite (or perhaps because of) its myriad immigrant communities. Lacking the coastal location (though that is one big frickin’ lake!) and consequent internationalist perspective of, say, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, it is perhaps the most quintessentially American of all our great cities; famously, it was the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the accidental arrival in the Bahamas of a crackpot Italian mariner in the service of the Spanish monarchy who thought he had found southeastern Asia.

We’ve been looking forward to this conference for months, for several reasons: first, having attended several previous Alliance conferences, we knew it would be a fruitful and inspiring gathering, one that would leave us charged up and full of new ideas for Madroño Ranch; second, our younger daughter is flying up from Kenyon College in Ohio to spend a couple of nights with us in the city; and third, despite its undeniable greatness, neither Heather nor I had ever been to Chicago, unless you count the many hours I spent stuck at O’Hare Airport during my college years trying to travel from Albany to San Francisco or vice versa over the Christmas holiday break. Now that we’re finally here, we’re enjoying being in a real big city (sorry, Austin), at least for a little while, though we’re trying hard not to look like country bumpkins while we’re here.

The conference has also afforded us the chance to reconnect with other members of our peculiar little tribe who have quickly become dear and trusted friends: Caitlin Strokosch, the apparently inexhaustible executive director of the Alliance; Meredith Winer, a printmaker whose TRANSIT Residency is part of a rich cultural mix in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood; Liz Engelman, who divides her time between directing the Tofte Lake Center at Norm’s Fish Camp in Minnesota and working as the alumnae relations coordinator for Hedgebrook, on Washington’s Whidbey Island, when she’s not working as a freelance dramaturg; and Brad and Amanda Kik, founders and directors of the extremely cool Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design (ISLAND) in rural Michigan, whose mission (“connecting people with nature, art, and community”) obviously resonates strongly with what we hope to achieve at Madroño Ranch. (At Brad’s request, I brought him a bottle of Balcones Distilling’s Baby Blue corn whisky, which is apparently unavailable in Bellaire, Michigan; we’re returning to Austin with two handsome blaze-orange ISLAND caps in return.)

The conference itself is an irresistible (to us, at least; maybe you have to be an art-residency nerd to appreciate it fully) combination of practicality and pleasure. The schedule is packed—packed, I tell you—with fun and thought-provoking stuff. Austin’s own delightful Sara Hickman performed at the opening reception on Wednesday night. (The proceeds from her new compilation CD, The Best of Times, benefit the Theatre Action Project, where both of our daughters have worked.) The keynote speakers include Alex Kotlowitz, author of the bestselling There Are No Children Here and coproducer of the new documentary The Interrupters; Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway; and Audrey Niffenegger, visual artist and author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. The breakout sessions to which we particularly looked forward included “Engaging Local Communities: Artist Residencies and the Relevance of Place”; “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies”; “Supporting a Creative Practice: Solitude, Solidarity, and Social Engagement”; “Taking Stock: Outcome, Assessment, and Measuring the Unmeasurable”; and “Where Art Meets Earth: Integrating Arts, Ecology, and Communities,” led by our buddy Brad.

During the past couple of weeks we sometimes wondered whether we could really afford the time to come to Chicago, especially since it meant missing the Texas Book Festival, one of our favorite annual events in Austin, and since, after flying back to Austin Sunday night, we’re going to have to be on the road at 5 a.m. on Monday morning to make it out to the ranch in time for our second bison harvest. But we’re glad we came. We couldn’t pass up the chance to visit with and learn from old friends and new—not to mention the chance to see Thea, and to explore a new and fascinating city.

What we’re reading
Heather: Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

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Edsels and the Enlightenment: the downside of corporate personhood

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Heather

Occupy Wall Street demonstrator with sign: I won't believe corporations are people until Texas executes one
A headline in Monday’s Austin American-Statesman reported that the Texas Senate is poised for a political shift as four veteran conservative Republican senators step down before the 2012 election cycle. According to the article, those seats could easily go to even more conservative candidates. Beyond these four, the state’s new voting districts, created by an already conservative legislature, could usher in an even more heavily conservative super-majority. Rick Perry may end up looking like the Mitt Romney of Texas Republicans by next year, excoriated for any political impulse that looks toward a collective social goal as opposed to individual taxpayer rights.

George Will, whose elegant prose I enjoy when its content doesn’t irritate me, pointed toward the reason I find protection of individual rights a necessary component of, but insufficient basis for, the existence of government—a protection that Texans already promote aggressively. In a recent column, Will writes that liberalism’s project is “to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting the individual’s zone of sovereignty…. Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so that the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual.”

Anticipating the argument that corporations, especially through the power of advertising, have too much sway over a gormless public, Will notes that John Kenneth Galbraith first articulated that case in 1958, even as “Ford’s marketers were failing to make a demand for Edsels.” The public, Will implies, can take care of itself.

Finally, Will denounces liberalism’s penchant for “confident social engineering” in favor of conservatism’s insistence on “government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.”

Moving backward, as is my wont, the idea that liberals are the only social engineers in the political arena strikes me as curious. All laws and regulations, not just liberal ones, seek to shape society to a particular end; refusing to regulate has social consequences as profound as regulating. The idea that there was some Edenic time of self-balancing governments and economies sounds almost quaint—Newtonian thinking in a post-Einsteinian universe.

Quaint, if it weren’t disingenuous. Among the “individuals” that Will is loath to regulate is the corporation, a stance that, to a point, makes perfectly good sense and has a fine American pedigree. Why should individuals lose their constitutional rights when they band together in a common enterprise? It’s a reasonable question, but Will’s reply assumes a static definition of both individualism and corporations. The concept of an individual to whom particular rights accrued developed in a historical context of monarchies and established churches, whose comforts and quarrels were prone to break the backs of the faceless majority that lay beyond their own intimate circles. That the Enlightenment pried apart individual human worth and dignity from wealth and social status is its crowning glory. That its definition of “individual human” was grossly reductive is an ongoing misfortune, imprisoning those deemed less than fully human in a continuing serfdom, unworthy of the full panoply of rights.

As a nation, we have, most of us, slowly come to see those prison bars and to see that we tossed not only races, genders, and legitimate ways of being, but also whole species and ecosystems into an airless, putrid place. Politically and culturally, Americans have more fully taken in the view of a society based on universal individual rights for which Enlightenment philosophy cleared the way. Yet we continue to distort its essential insight—that every individual has an equal right to the pursuit of happiness—when the legal fiction granting personhood to corporate structures becomes destructive of the very individualism it purports to uphold. Indeed, today’s transnational corporations bear a suspicious resemblance to the great, lumbering bureaucracies (monarchies, established churches) whose primary goal was self-preservation and against which the French and American revolutions were fought.

In his last post Martin cited a New Yorker story about Don Colcord, the owner of the Apothecary Shoppe in Nucla, Colorado. Colcord prefers to be called a druggist, whom he defines as “the guy who repairs your watch and glasses. A pharmacist is the guy who works at Walmart.” Colcord repairs a lot of things besides watches and glasses, from chronic medical conditions to broken hearts. His is the only pharmacy for an area of 4,000 square miles, an area with no hospital. Much of Nucla’s population lives well below the poverty level. Until recently, there were a few other independent drug stores in the area, but the combined pressures exerted by insurance companies, big chains, and mail-order pharmacies when Medicare Part D came into effect in 2006 forced them to close—along with more than 500 other independent rural pharmacies nationwide that couldn’t order at the volume level of big chains. In order to keep his Apothecary Shoppe running, Colcord has had to spend his own savings at several critical times.

There’s a lot Nucla lacks, but in its druggist it has someone who sees the humanity of every person he serves, from illegal immigrants to N.R.A. members to the four transgendered people (none of whom live in Nucla) for whom he compounds medicine. He treats them all, whether or not they have the money to pay him. The generosity of his spirit is something that infuses the community and makes its way back to him: a drifter, an older man, settled in the neighboring town and, mistrusting doctors, relied on Colcord’s expertise in treating his high blood pressure and other ailments, one of which was chronic loneliness. When he neared death fifteen or so years later, it was Colcord who stayed with him, arranged for hospice care, organized a funeral mass for him, and went through his effects. He found that in his will the old drifter had left him $300,000—coincidentally, almost exactly enough money to cover the outstanding debts run up by customers who had been unable to pay.

As an individual and a businessman Colcord enacts a kind of sovereignty (the trait Will so admires) that becomes less likely when transnational corporations are defined as persons. When Walmart, to choose a convenient demon, is considered an individual with rights, the kind of sovereignty Walmart practices is based on profit. Let me hasten to say that I have nothing against profitable businesses; I rely on them in virtually every arena of my life. But the culture that arises from these super-sized “individuals” is one in which generosity of spirit and empathy become secondary—and often undermine—the reign of the profit of the few. A society governed by the values of enormous corporations must despise the apparently inefficient operations of a business like the Apothecary Shoppe.

As the heroes and villains of the Enlightenment sought to uncover the treasure buried in every individual (especially white male ones), cultures arose reflecting the shared values of those individuals, from Ben Franklin to Robespierre, from the American Revolution to the Reign of Terror. Sovereignty in and of itself is to be deplored if it leads to tyranny. When the values that drive successful transnational corporations predominate, the culture that arises among those “persons” is not value-neutral or necessarily benign, as so many business fundamentalists—so many of them in the Texas Republican party—seem to believe.

What we’re reading
Heather: W. S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius
Martin: Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas

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