Madroño Ranch

FREE RANGE: FOOD, NATURE, PLACE, AND MORE

Learning to listen, and love

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Heather

Ash juniper (juniperus ashei)

I have a new role model: Steve Nelle, a wildlife biologist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, an arm of the USDA, in San Angelo. Martin and Madroño Ranch’s redoubtable manager Robert and I went to hear him speak about “Managing Your Hill Country Habitat Effectively” at the spring meeting of the Bandera Canyonlands Alliance in Utopia last week. There was a good turnout of area landowners, ranging from all-thumbs novices like Martin and me to older ranchers whose wide, calloused hands spoke to a lifetime of work with the land.

For those of you with no interest in land management, stick with me; it’s not actually my topic, although Nelle gave an excellent presentation on the role of ash juniper (commonly referred to as cedar) in the Hill Country ecology. Cedar is a species that everybody loves to hate because it’s so remorselessly successful, often at the expense of other species—sort of the Gordon Gekko of Hill Country flora. People here have Opinions about how to manage cedar, ranging from getting rid of most of it to getting rid of all of it.

Nelle spent most of his talk gently lobbing little bombs onto these Opinions, even as his rhetoric defused them. First, he had the authority of thirty-five years of fieldwork, although even as he established his authority, he encouraged us to question it, pointing out that he had spent most of his time in mesquite country, not cedar country. Second, he showed that he knew his audience by noting that one of his principal sources was a local, Eric Lautzenheiser, who has argued that cedar has been unfairly stigmatized; when he brought Lautzenheiser’s name up, Nelle had to pause briefly while several in the audience discussed the exact location of the Lautzenheiser family’s ranch. Third, he was funny. He quoted H. L. Mencken, who said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is simple, neat, and wrong,” and when someone asked him how to address a specific issue, he began by saying, “This isn’t the right answer; it’s just what I’d do.” Finally, he acknowledged that there are multiple ways of managing land well; he encouraged each of us to be patient, persistent students of our own land and not to let anyone else tell us what to do with it. He trusted that all of us loved our land and wanted to do the best we could for it. In other words, he expected the best from us.

During the talk I wondered if people might not actually get up and leave, so persistently did Nelle herd up and shoot the sacred cows of cedar control. In fact, as we left, Robert said something like this: Well, hell! He just blew holes in everything I thought I knew! But we agreed that the presentation was ultimately persuasive because of Nelle’s disarming willingness to claim little authority for himself, to link his own experience to someone already known to many in the room, and to respect the experience of everyone present. I’m ready to send him to negotiate between our warring political parties in Washington and Austin.

He was the latest and most welcome example of how people of strongly differing opinions might talk to each other, an undervalued skill these days. The religious historian Karen Armstron recently published a book entitled Twelve Steps to a More Compassionate Life, structured consciously around the twelve-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. With it, she hopes to reclaim what she says is the original and most powerful directive of all the world’s great religions, which is to train adherents to become skillful practitioners of the Golden Rule in both its positive and negative formulations: always treat others as you yourself wish to be treated, and do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you. She adds that all these religions “insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group; you must have concern for everybody—even your enemies.”

She lays out a program to help us break our addiction to egotism, which causes us to act with thoughtless violence in both private (our thoughts and relationships) and public (our politics and religion) arenas. “We cannot think how we would manage without our pet hatreds and prejudices that give us such a buzz of righteousness,” she writes; “like addicts, we have come to depend on the instant rush of energy and delight we feel when we display our cleverness by making an unkind remark and the spurt of triumph when we vanquish an annoying colleague.”

To those who would belittle this effort as naïve, she responds that the great religions all arose in response to profound violence:

[T]he sages, prophets, and mystics of these traditions did not regard compassion as an impractical dream. They worked as hard to implement it in the difficult circumstances of their times as we work for a cure to cancer today. They were innovative thinkers, ready to use whatever tools lay at hand in order to reorient the human mind, assuage suffering, and pull their societies back from the brink.

They were warriors of nonviolence, working to break the deeply entrenched cycles of violence directed at self, neighbor, and the world—not a job for the faint of heart.

These are the (wildly simplified) steps she suggests for those who would break their addiction to egotism and violence:

learn what the world’s religions teach about suffering and compassion;
look at the expanding rings of your own world and see where suffering is present and compassion is absent;
develop compassion for yourself, for if you cannot acknowledge your own pain, you will not be able to acknowledge the pain of others;
use the power of art to develop the muscles of empathy;
learn to watch yourself mindfully, without judgment, in order to know who you are and to know that you are more than your thoughts about who you are;
know that every other being has the same desire to be seen and acknowledged that you do, and to act toward others accordingly;
acknowledge the extremely limited horizon of your knowledge, of yourself, of anyone else, or of any particular situation;
wonder how you might speak to someone with profoundly differing views from your own, given the fact that you know very little;
become aware that you cannot restrict your wonderings to people you know, but that you must extend your hope for wellbeing beyond the bounds of your tribe;
become curious about a people you know nothing about;
realize the radical commonality between you and those whom you don’t know;
see that to hate your enemy is to hate yourself, and that to love your enemy is a matter of survival.

I actually don’t like this book very much; it calls me out on lots of behaviors I thoroughly enjoy, like the one that calls us away from trying to defeat opponents verbally and exhorts us to enter empathetically into a rival viewpoint. Armstrong points out that we often identify so strongly with our ideas that we feel physically assaulted when they are questioned, criticized, or corrected. Truth becomes an ancillary issue when we are so enmeshed with our ideas that we can’t imagine another way of thinking, nor enter imaginatively into a perspective that counters our own. Armstrong exhorts us to listen with “the principle of charity,” which requires us to assume that whoever we listen to has as much need to be taken seriously and respectfully as we do.

Well, hell.

While pondering Armstrong’s injunction to respond charitably to my fellow humans, I was reminded of the description of Charles Darwin in Adam Gopnik’s Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln ,and Modern Life. Gopnik wrote that even if Darwin got some of the particulars of evolution wrong—which he did—he got them wrong in the right way, because the spirit of his enquiry into the minutiae of biological operations was filled with the kind of reverent curiosity about all living creatures that Armstrong calls us to show about the human community. Gopnik describes Darwin’s last publication, an unlikely best seller:

The Origin and The Descent of Man are more obviously great books, masterpieces of the human spirit. But if I had to pick up one book to sum up what was great and rich about Charles Darwin, and in Victorian science and the Victorian mind more generally… it might well be On the Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms. Limitless patience for measurement… an ingenuous interest in the world in all its aspects, a desire to order many things in one picture, a faith that the small will reveal the large. And a gift for storytelling: Darwin makes the first person address never feel strange in this scientific text, because we understand that the author is in a personal relation with his subject, probing, testing, sympathizing, playing the bassoon while the earthworms listen and striking the piano while they cower, and trying in every way to see who they are and where they came from and what they’re like—not where they stand in the great chain of being beneath us, but where they belong in the great web of being that surrounds us, and includes us.

Personally, I can imagine playing a bassoon for earthworms more easily than I can imagine entering imaginatively the minds of the many politicians and cultural commentators whose bloviating makes me seethe. But our survival depends on listening carefully and appreciatively to each other. Steve Nelle will make me think about the particular life and condition of each cedar tree we cut down. Perhaps this mindfulness will extend out toward my own species, though I may have to route it through the earthworms first.

What we’re reading
Heather: Amy Stewart, Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army and Other Diabolical Insects
Martin: H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 (still)

Posted in More | Tagged Adam Gopnik, cedar, Charles Darwin, compassion, earthworms, H. L. Mencken, Karen Armstrong, Texas Hill Country | 1 Comment

Bivalves and F-bombs: happy birthday, Dad!

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Martin

Swan Oyster Depot, San Francisco

My father, Franz Kohout, turns eighty-six tomorrow. He is, I believe, a world-class eccentric—an opinion, I should add, shared by many. He still lives on Nob Hill in San Francisco, a half block down California Street from Grace Cathedral, in the same apartment he’s inhabited for almost forty years, since my parents divorced. That apartment is a shrine to his stubbornly anachronistic personality, and his by-now-legendary miserliness.

Here are some things you’ll find in his apartment:

Several hundred kitchen knives, of varying sizes and intended uses but all of them razor sharp (“Don’t touch anything!” we used to tell the kids when we visited);
Closets full of virtually identical tweed sport coats, all of them several decades old;
Hundreds of vinyl LPs, most of them classical but also big band, Dixieland, Latin, easy listening, and pop;
Thousands of books, which have long since overflowed their designated shelves and are stacked up on any available flat surface—the hallway, the bedroom floor, etc.

The books in particular are hard to ignore. For many years, his chief means of expanding his library was to buy paperbacks in bulk, for a dollar a bag, at the Goodwill. This has led inevitably to an eclectic collection, in which an acknowledged classic like, say, À la recherche du temps perdu can inhabit the same shelf as, say, a biography of Le Pétomane.

Here are some things you won’t find in his apartment:

A television;
A computer;
A compact-disk player;
A microwave;
A bottle of wine costing more than eight dollars.

Seriously, it’s like the last forty or fifty years never happened.

Along with his eccentricities, however, he was (and is) a passionate outdoorsman. He was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, to a Scottish mother (the source of his cheapskatitude?) and an Austrian father. He and his younger brother Willi grew up speaking three languages: German, Portuguese, and, at home, English, because his father decided, in the midst of Depression-era Brazil, that English was the language of opportunity.

My father’s stories make growing up in that time and place sound like a tropical version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, consisting mostly of sailing on Guanabara Bay, camping on as-yet-uninhabited islands, encountering sloths and other exotic fauna, and the like. But somewhere along the way, with what I suspect was not always gentle encouragement from his father, he found time to crack the books, for he decided to become a doctor, and when he was twenty-five, with his father’s blessing, he came to the U.S. to complete his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania (and, incidentally, justified his father’s insistence on speaking English at home).

He met my mother, also an immigrant (from Italy) medical student, in Philadelphia, and they decided to marry, ending his plans to return to Brazil. Eventually they made their way to the San Francisco Bay Area, in some ways the American equivalent (albeit foggier and colder) of Rio, where they settled in idyllic Mill Valley; I was their only child.

In retrospect, I think my father tried to recapture some of the adventurous flavor of his own boyhood in California; we spent many weekends camping at Samuel P. Taylor State Park, and every summer we spent a couple of weeks at a rented cabin at Packer Lake, in the Sierra Nevadas. He was an early and enthusiastic cyclist long before Lance Armstrong made cycling trendy; he went on bicycle camping trips all over the country, and tried without much success to get me interested in cycling too, though I did complete at least one 100-mile ride with the Marin Cyclists.

More enjoyable for me were our excursions to Muir Beach, where the two of us (my mother, prone to carsickness, usually opted to skip the tortuous drive over Mount Tamalpais and back) went to harvest the abundant purplish-black, bearded mussels. Clambering over the sharp rocks, peering into tidepools, staring at starfish and sea urchins, prying the stubborn mussels loose with a crowbar… I loved everything about these expeditions except the end product, which was a dinner featuring steamed mussels—a disgusting thing to eat, I thought at the time. (I have since changed my mind.)

While he gave up the cycling several years ago, he and my stepmother Nancy (or, as we refer to her in the family, “St. Nancy”) still go hiking on Mount Tam almost every week with a group of friends, and spend several weeks a year at Nancy’s family’s beachfront cabin in Cayucos, just north of Morro Bay. All in all, it’s not a bad way to live.

But when I was a kid, I’m sorry to say, my father sort of embarrassed me; he was too exotic, too foreign. I desperately wanted our family to be normal, like one of those bland WASPy sitcom families, and it wasn’t. (It took me years to realize that no family is actually like those families on TV.) And with his penchant for filling up any brief silence or lull in conversation by sighing, groaning, interjecting exclamations in Portuguese (“muito bem!” or “isso não!”), humming or whistling repeated brief musical phrases, making strange little popping or clicking noises, he was (and is) virtually a grown-up version of Gerald McBoing-Boing, the cartoon boy who could speak only in sound effects.

And when it’s not sound effects issuing from his mouth, it’s apt to be speech well-peppered with a certain four-letter Anglo-Saxonism commonly known as the F-bomb. How, I’ve often wondered, can such a sophisticated, cultured man, a man who speaks half a dozen languages, who’s had season tickets for the symphony and opera for decades, who’s read most of the classics of world literature—how can such a man swear like a longshoreman? It used to drive Heather to distraction when our kids were young; at one point she actually asked him if he could dial down the cursing, but it did little good. “In-f*ck-credible” is one of his highest and most frequently dispensed compliments, and he merely added to his own legend at our older daughter Elizabeth’s college graduation several years ago. The whole family had had a fine and bibulous dinner at Mezze, one of Williamstown’s finest restaurants, the night before the graduation ceremony. As we said goodnight out on the sidewalk, my father said to Tito, “Well, see you tomorrow, old man,” to which Tito replied, “Yes, sir.” Whereupon my father immediately responded, “Don’t ‘sir’ me, you f*cker, I’m your grandfather!”

He could (and can) be maddening in other respects as well. I believe he is a sentimentalist at heart, an easy weeper like me—he wept like a baby all through our wedding and reception—but he likes to disguise that perceived vulnerability with a veneer of callousness. He is much given to harsh, dismissive, and politically incorrect pronouncements (“Brazilians are savages” is one of his favorites), but while he is misanthropic in general he is actually quite generous in specific cases—though I imagine he’ll be furious with me for writing that.

Another apparent contradiction: for many years, he spent every summer backpacking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He always got his credencial stamped at each official refugio along the way so he could receive the special compostela reserved for completists, though he insisted that he couldn’t care less about the spiritual or religious implications of the trip, and only did it because he read an article in Gourmet that raved about the food along the way.

And make no mistake: food is a Very Big Deal for him. He walks or rides San Francisco’s abundant public transportation everywhere (ah, to live in a civilized city!), and does most of his grocery shopping down the hill in Chinatown, where he strolls up and down Grant Street, stopping in one shop for vegetables, another for fish, a third for poultry, and so on; sometimes he wanders over to North Beach to buy a dry salame at Molinari on Columbus. For a special treat, he walks down the hill in the other direction, to Polk Street for lunch at the fabulous Swan Oyster Depot (see above) and, when we come to visit, for breakfast at Bob’s Donuts. (He has a raging sweet tooth, another vestige of his Brazilian youth; his idea of a cup of coffee is a large mound of sugar with a little liquid floated on top.) No matter where or what he eats, though, you can bet that he will relish every scrap and ort with an agonizing thoughtfulness; beards will grow longer, faces wrinkle, seasons change, and rivers carve new canyons while waiting for him to finish what’s on his plate. And then he’ll order dessert.

He is, in other words, a man who truly knows how to savor life, a man who has taught me much about the beauties and pleasures of this world. So, dad, here’s wishing you an in-f*ck-credible birthday!

What we’re reading
Heather: Alexander McCall Smith, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party
Martin: H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900

Posted in More | Tagged bivalves, F-bombs, Le Pétomane, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Santiago de Compostela | 21 Comments

The power of poetry: peace, demons, sonnets, and resurrection

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Heather

William Stafford
Something that might seem fragile—a group of words arranged on a page—turns out to be indestructible. (Ed Hirsch)

Sometimes—maybe even often—I wonder why in heaven’s name it ever seemed like a good idea to open a residency for environmental writers and artists. It can seem like an awfully precious response to the unholy forces in the world, to the seemingly implacable powers that sneer and smear and humiliate, ravage and amputate, and leave sterility in their wake. Surely there are better weapons, ones more powerful and direct, to fight the battle. Let’s face it: writers and artists don’t get a lot of press as warriors.

To top it off, this is Holy Week, when those demonic powers seem to have won. Today is Good Friday, and the Word is tortured, broken, murdered. Silenced. It’s a day that can be particularly horrid for writers, killing any impulse to communicate.

And yet, and yet… we spent last weekend at the tenth annual Poetry at Round Top festival at the Round Top Festival Institute, in the rich rolling countryside between Austin and Houston. Just the drive to Round Top presaged a mythic encounter, the possibility of resurrection: despite the extreme drought conditions in central Texas, patches of courageous bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes bloomed. Later than usual, apparently aware of the scorching to come, live oaks and pecans unfurled their precious leaves, whose sweet green humidity was instantly thrashed by stiff dry southern winds. Wildfires are blazing across the state: the morning we left, we smelled smoke from the Rock House fire in Marfa, 450 miles away. And yet spring unfurls its banners.

“So what? And, by the way, mythic encounters are so-o-o-o 1970s,” says the legion of demons in my head.

“Shut up,” I explain, thinking they might be right. It’s not as if spring has any choice. What’s courageous about doing what you can’t help doing?

My little herd of demons kept up its background sneering once we got to Festival Hill, a strikingly beautiful and eccentric campus of older wooden buildings enlivened by lavishly unlikely additions: stone grottos and follies, great tumbling fountains, stone cherubs and goblins and saints, whimsy and careful craftsmanship everywhere.

“Nice,” they said. “You’re doing a lot to challenge Big Ag and stop carbon emissions by ooh-ing and aah-ing and hanging out with a bunch of poets.”

“Shut up AND go away,” I said, enunciating carefully.

They thought that was funny.

We all settled down when Ed Hirsch shambled up to the podium. Hirsch is a much-published poet and teacher and author of How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a “surprise best-seller” only to those who haven’t read it. He’s one of those gifted speakers—warm, passionate, wise—who makes you wish that he could keep talking until he has nothing left to say.

He spoke about the power of lyric poetry to “allow the intimacy of strangers,” sometimes separated by centuries, even millennia. Lyric poetry, created in solitude, calls wildly unlikely community into being. He recounted his first contact with the power of lyric poetry, when he was electrified reading one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets.” He—a Jewish student at Grinnell College in the 1960s—was stunned to find someone—a British Victorian Jesuit priest, long dead—who could describe his feelings of isolation and distress better than he could himself.

Even deeper than the jolt of recognition, the young Hirsch became aware that Hopkins had made something from his desolation: “Holy shit!” he remembered thinking. “This thing is a sonnet!” He felt Hopkins’s “tremendous generosity to take that isolation” and create something of beauty from its wretched depths “so that I might come along later to be comforted.” Poetry in its very structure is hopeful even when it despairs, Hirsch believes, because poets must imagine “a reader on the horizon,” someone to whom the poem must be directed, in order to write at all.

Poetry as an act of generosity to strangers, as the creation of intimacy across divides of time and culture: these hospitable acts require courage, especially in a fearful time.

“How convenient for your chicken-hearted, lazy soul,” said my loitering demons.

“Don’t you slander chickens, you morons,” I replied irritably, having forgotten for a minute that they were there.

“Oh, we’re cloven by the thrust and parry of your rapier wit,” they smirked. “Oh, we’re slain!” And they fell all over each other, howling.

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

The next morning—Sunday, no less—we sat in the beautiful deconsecrated chapel used for more intimate readings, sunlight pouring through the neo-Gothic windows into the meditatively dim sanctuary. We listened to Chris Leche, a poet who has taught in war zones for the past ten years. She read three of her own poems along with a stunning essay by one of her students who was fighting in Afghanistan. He wrote about his struggle not to stand too long in the soul-destroying acid of hatred, most vividly triggered when he saw a ten-year-old Afghani boy, face filled with rage, stare at him and then pointedly pull a finger across his throat. Even as fury for revenge rose in him, the soldier remembered that this was a child, a child whose soul was already poisoned and dying. His words were like smelling salts to those of us seated in the sanctuary, jolting us into consciousness. This soldier had reached across time and distance and shaken us awake.

After Leche and several others (including our new friend Barbara Ras) read, we watched a documentary entitled Every War Has Two Losers about the great American poet William Stafford, who was born in 1914, the year in which World War I erupted, and died in 1993. (That’s him in the photo above.) From his youth, he was convicted by the certainty that violence cannot end violence, but only perpetuate it. He was a conscientious objector during World War II and spent the war in camps for conscientious objectors in California and Arkansas. He spent the rest of his life bearing witness to the possibility of peace as positive force, rather than a mere cessation of war. In the introduction to the book of the same title, Stafford’s son Kim, also a poet, writes:

as a child my father somehow arrived at the idea that one does not need to fight; nor does one need to run away. Both these actions are failures of the imagination. Instead of fighting or running you can stand by the oppressed, the frightened, or even “the enemy.” You can witness for connection, even when many around you react with fury, or with fear.

Many contemporary poets influenced by Stafford’s willingness to stand in the uneasy role of witness were interviewed in the film, including Robert Bly, Coleman Barker, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maxine Hong Kingston, W. S. Merwin, and Alice Walker. They all pointed to his insistence that we do the hard work of imagining “the enemy”: that we wonder about his family, his childhood, his children; that we imagine what might have led him to consider us as enemy; that we refuse ever to lose sight of his humanity, of his hunger, joy, and pain. The discipline of always imagining the enemy as clearly as he could imagine himself left Stafford, like the spring, unable to do anything but bloom with love of neighbor.

Stafford wrote: “Save the world by torturing one innocent child? Which innocent child?” He wrote: “Is there a quiet way, a helpful way, to question what has been won in a war that the victors are still cheering? … Or does the winning itself close our questions about it? Might failing to question it make it easier to try war again?” He wrote: “Keep a journal, and don’t assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy; artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results….”

He wrote and decades later I, like Hirsch first reading Hopkins, was electrified. I felt seen, known. When my demons woke up and started jeering, I asked them politely to come in. I wanted to know (maybe) where they were from. Ha! they said. You wish, they said. Yes, I said. When I’m brave enough, I think I do.

So many courageous poets at this festival, living and dead, bore witness to the glory and depravity of the human condition. Such a community of witnesses. Maybe spring really will come again (even if just barely this year). Maybe Jesus really will rise from the dead. Maybe it’s not ridiculous to open a residency for environmental writers and artists, to provide a haven for those whose efforts might electrify others to work for beauty, for harmony, for wholeness. For salvation.

What we’re reading
Heather: Barbara Ras, The Last Skin
Martin: Emma Donoghue, Room

Posted in More | Tagged Ed Hirsch, Holy Week, Naomi Shihab Nye, poetry, Round Top, violence, war, William Stafford | 4 Comments

The Trans-Pecos: fried chicken and freshwater sharks

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Martin

Cowboy on a shark

West Texas has been much on my mind recently, in part because Heather and I drove down to San Marcos a couple of weeks ago for a panel discussion marking the opening of an exhibition entitled Big Bend: Land of the Texas Imagination at Texas State University. And then last week came the news of the devastating Rock House fire that ravaged Fort Davis, which I followed on the Marfa Public Radio website.

Shocking and shameful admission: Heather and I have never been to Big Bend National Park. Oh, we’ve been to (and through) west Texas—far west Texas, I mean; the part of the state west of the Pecos River, pinched between Mexico to the south and New Mexico to the north, but maybe excluding El Paso, which is after all sort of a city—many times, and I even became a sort of long-distance expert on the region during my tenure at the Texas State Historical Association—more on that below—but that embarrassing gap in our knowledge remains.

The Trans-Pecos, for all its stunning beauty, can seem a place of natural indifference, if not outright hostility, to humankind. In Pecos, Terrell, Reeves, Brewster, Jeff Davis, Culberson, Presidio, Hudspeth, and El Paso counties, the towns are few and far between, and always seem just a little, what shall we say, conditional. The dried-up remains of Orla, on Highway 285 between Pecos and Carlsbad, New Mexico, make the point hauntingly and emphatically, as does the Rock House fire: people can live out here, but not easily, and not for very long.

Yet even here, unexpected signs of civilization can spring up out of nowhere. My earliest experience of the Trans-Pecos came thirty years ago as Heather and I were driving from San Francisco back to San Antonio, the last leg of our epic road trip the summer after we graduated from college. We were driving through the vast emptiness of Terrell County on Highway 90. I was behind the wheel, with my foot to the floor of Heather’s little Toyota Tercel, as we swept around a long downhill curve, when a state trooper’s car suddenly appeared on the shoulder, radar gun pointed straight at us.

“Oh, shucks!” I exclaimed, or words to that effect, as I slammed on the brakes in an attempt to bring us back under, or at least close to, the speed limit—honestly, who obeys the speed limit out there?—but it was too late. He flagged us down and instructed us to follow him on into Sanderson, where he took us to the justice of the peace’s house.

We entered through the kitchen door, and the J.P., who turned out to be a very friendly woman, seated us at her kitchen table and served us lemonade, charged me some nominal fine (the trooper had rather sportingly knocked about ten miles an hour off the ticket), and sent us on our way with a cheery warning about all the other speed traps between Sanderson and San Antonio. All in all, it was about as pleasant an experience as paying a speeding ticket could possibly be—and we made it the rest of the 275 miles to San Antonio without receiving another ticket.

My next memorable experience of the Trans-Pecos came years later, on a family trip to Colorado, when we stopped for the night in Fort Stockton at the end of a long, exhausting day of driving. We checked into the first motel we saw (one of those generic places with a big central atrium), smuggled Phoebe the dog into the room (I believe I carried her under my jacket), and, too tired and dazed to uphold our usual standards, Heather and I told the kids they could watch TV and have fried chicken for dinner. (For years thereafter, whenever the subject of a family vacation came up, the kids would say, “Let’s go back to Fort Stockton!”) Again, an unexpected outpost of civilization—high culture! haute cuisine!—in the midst of America Deserta.

This trip took place at just about the time when, while working for the Texas State Historical Association, I was given the assignment of writing many of the entries on the Trans-Pecos for the New Handbook of Texas. I still remember some of the remarkable things I learned in the course of my research:

No matter where or how long you drive in the Trans-Pecos, you will inevitably come to a highway sign that says “El Paso: 330 miles.”
The population of Jeff Davis County increased an astonishing 300 percent between 1950 and 1970—from two to six.
The legendary swimming pool at Balmorhea State Park, in Reeves County, is home to a rare species of freshwater man-eating shark.
The Marfa lights are actually an elaborate practical joke left behind by the crew of the classic Texas epic Giant after they finished filming on location in 1955.
Marathon, in Brewster County, was the site of a battle between the Comanches and the Athenians in 490 BCE. The upset victory by the visiting Athenians (the Comanches had been favored by two touchdowns) marked the beginning of the rise of classical Greek civilization.

Three years ago, Heather and our daughters and I spent Easter weekend in the Trans-Pecos. The weather was unseasonably cold (Lizzie, on spring break from her Massachusetts college, was outraged; she had imagined a week of tropical languor after the rigors of a New England winter, and instead spent most of the trip shivering in 35-degree temperatures), but we had a wonderful time. Among the highlights were a “star party” at the McDonald Observatory outside Fort Davis and a drive down Ranch Road 2810 into the Chinati Mountains southwest of Marfa. Imagining what it would be like to be stuck out there with multiple flat tires and no cell phone reception, we chickened out and turned back before we made it all the way to the river, but it lived up to our friend Bob Ayres’s recommendation as possibly the most beautiful drive in Texas.

I offer all of the above to explain why I considered myself something of an expert on the Trans-Pecos when we went to the panel discussion at Texas State last week. Moderated by Jake Silverstein, the editor of Texas Monthly and a former reporter for Marfa’s Big Bend Sentinel, the panel included local writer Joe Nick Patoski and his collaborator on the handsome University of Texas Press book Big Bend National Park, the photographer Laurence Parent, author in his own right of Death in Big Bend: Real Stories of Death and Rescue in Big Bend National Park; Barbara “Barney” Nelson, an English professor at Sul Ross State and the editor of God’s Country or Devil’s Playground: The Best Nature Writing from the Big Bend of Texas; and Marcos Paredes, a legendary ranger who recently retired after twenty years at Big Bend National Park. How could these people possibly know more about the region than I?

All kidding aside, the discussion was lively and informative and marked by the panelists’ obvious mutual respect and love of west Texas. Each of the panelists presented a strong case for the significance and beauty of the Big Bend and the Trans-Pecos. Patoski argued that any meaningful discussion of the area has to include the portions of Mexico just across the Rio Grande as well; the river, he noted, is less a barrier dividing Texas from Mexico than a force that draws the two sides together. (Isn’t that a lovely way to think about the border?) Parent movingly recalled his mother and father impressing upon him at an early age the importance of our national parks. Nelson and Paredes spoke eloquently of the need to protect Big Bend from the sort of crass tourist-industry commercialization that has grown up around—and marred—so many other national parks.

Together, all four painted an irresistible picture of this, the remotest and most mysterious part of the state, and merely strengthened our resolve: someday soon—maybe this fall?—we’re going to make it to Big Bend. And then we’ll celebrate with a big bucket of fried chicken.

What we’re reading
Heather: George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (still!)
Martin: James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend (still!)

Posted in Place | Tagged Balmorhea State Park, battle of Marathon, Big Bend National Park, Fort Davis, fried chicken, Joe Nick Patoski, Laurence Parent, Marfa lights, speed traps, Texas State Historical Association, Texas State University, Trans-Pecos, West Texas | 3 Comments

Dorothea Brooke, Big Ag, and Betty Friedan

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Heather

Gerrit Dou's 1650 painting "The Dutch Housewife"

I’m a lousy housewife, which, in my initial phase of housewifery, is exactly what I aspired to be. Not for me the bourgeois passion for clean baseboards and orderly closets, especially after graduate school in literature in the mid-1980s, in the wake of second-wave feminism. Not for me the fate of the American suburban woman as Betty Friedan described it:

freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.

Nope, I was going to be an independent, defiant, equal-rights-demanding sort of woman who kept her mind on higher things and never, ever got a pedicure—which is why I completely fell in love with Dorothea Brooke, one of the main characters in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. So complete was my admiration for Dorothea that our younger daughter Thea is named for her.

In re-reading Middlemarch for the first time in many years, I find that my self-identification with Dorothea’s high-minded knuckleheadedness was spot-on. What my younger self missed, of course, was the author’s attitude toward it. In the first chapter, Dorothea and her much more practical younger sister Celia are looking through their dead mother’s jewelry. Dorothea, fond of renouncing things, at first tells Celia to take all “the trinkets” for herself. Says the narrator: “Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.” A few lines later, they find an emerald ring and bracelet they hadn’t known about before, and Dorothea’s eye is caught by their beauty, “[a]ll the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy.” And we’re only on page nine of 766; the buds of Dorothea’s knuckleheadedness blossom in a leisurely and luxuriant way, flower after flower bursting into a gaudy and most unpuritanic riot in the course of the first 250 pages.

Needless to say, Dorothea doesn’t aspire to housewifery (nor, because of her gentle birth, does she much need to), but one of the minor heroes of the novel is, in fact a housewife. Susan Garth is wife to Caleb, a kind and financially inept land surveyor and agent. Before marrying, she was a governess, and after marrying she runs the farm, raises their six children, and continues to take in pupils, earning money for her sons’ formal educations. She makes her students “follow her about in the kitchen with their book or slate. She thought it good for them to see that she could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders, ‘without looking,’—that a woman with her sleeves tucked above her elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid Zone—that in short, she might possess ‘education,’ and other good things ending in ‘tion,’ and worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll.” Like everyone else in the novel, Mrs. Garth has her weaknesses, but her creator clearly admires her independence, intelligence, hard work and excellent housewifery skills, which include planning ahead and refusing to let anything, material or emotional, go to waste. When her son begins to snack on the peels from the apple pie she is making, she says, in between pronouncements on grammar: “That apple peel is to be eaten by the pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pastry.”

One of the most notable differences between Mrs. Garth and Betty Friedan’s housewife is that one is an independent producer in a local economy and one is a consumer in a transnational economy. Mrs. Garth’s life is the one from which science and labor-saving devices have freed Betty Friedan’s housewife, as they free her to choose whatever she liked in consumer goods. I want to make one thing clear: I’m not made of stern enough stuff to lead Mrs. Garth’s life, but along with the narrator of Middlemarch, I’ve come to see the unexpected power and vital importance of the place she and her spiritual sisters (many of whom are still around) occupy.

Speaking with an urban farmer friend the other day, I heard about the persistent policy roadblocks in the way of small farmers and the bureaucratic tactics that restrain and even stifle connectivity among local food producers. Although no complaints have ever been raised by customers of this farm in the twenty years of its operation, no sicknesses reported, the assumption of the Texas Department of State Health Services—and apparently of most governmental agencies that deal with food—is that non-factory produced foods are inherently riskier than factory-produced ones, even though the evidence is overwhelming that the reverse is true. My friend’s glum assessment was that the real issue, masked by the apparent anxiety over health concerns, is Big Ag’s desire to stomp out competition posed by small, organic farmers and farmers’ markets, which have grown at a remarkable pace in the last few years.

In “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” an essay that infuriated me when I first (mis- or under-)read it years ago, Wendell Berry muses on the responses he got from another essay published in Harper’s, many of which expressed outrage over his revelation that his wife types his manuscripts after he finishes handwriting them and accused him of exploiting her. He responded that the feminist outrage ignored two possibilities: that marriage can exist as “a state of mutual help,” and that households can operates as economies. The marriage and home that he has in mind looks very much like the Garths’ and

makes around itself a household economy that involves the work of both the wife and the husband, that gives them a measure of economic independence and self-protection, a measure of self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as a common ground and a common satisfaction. Such a household economy may employ the disciplines and skills of housewifery, of carpentry and other trades of building and maintenance, of gardening and other branches of subsistence agriculture…. It may even [he says slyly] involve a ‘cottage industry’ of some kind, such as a small literary enterprise.”

He hastens to add that what he says about this kind of marriage applies to men and women equally, and then calls for “a broader, deeper criticism…. The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that woman and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else,” particularly as it is practiced by global and “sentimental” capitalism, which operates a lot like sentimental communism: they both demand the sacrifice of “everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful” for the sake of security and happiness for “the many” at some unspecified future time. In freeing transnational corporations from the responsibilities practiced in local economies—knowledge of the needs and capacities of a particular place—our economy produces an astonishing number of products under the condition that consumers “agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.”

To be honest, I can’t really assess Berry’s pronouncements: my assumption is that, at least to some extent, he paints with broad strokes and tars good and bad alike. I’m pretty sure that there are big businesses with a profound sense of civic involvement and responsibility. Even so, I take very seriously my farmer friend’s assessment that Big Ag is out to crush competition, even if Big Ag would never admit that such is its goal. Even if it’s not, the policies Big Ag’s political muscle put into place have that effect. If the free market is the natural force we’re so often told it is, then, like a natural force, it requires a polyculture for true health, a carefully maintained balance of local, national, and international business. Just as humans can’t thrive when they destroy the delicate intricacies of topsoil or the webs of interdependency in particular ecosystems, so businesses—even big transnational businesses—will eventually cease to thrive if they undermine the necessary balance in which local economies can thrive.

Which brings me back to the unlikely power of Mrs. Garth and all those household economies that produce goods and services, those households that are not just centers of consumption, like the one described by Betty Friedan. These little centers of independence and self-reliance are beacons in the dark described by Wendell Berry and my farmer friend, revolutionaries in a war that most of us barely know is being waged. Who knew that excellent, productive housewifery could be an aspiration for high-minded knuckleheads? If Dorothea Brooke were to appear today, she might very well be a local organic farmer or some other tough-minded local entrepreneur. She might look a lot like Mrs. Garth.

What we’re reading
Heather: George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Martin: James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend

Posted in More | Tagged agribusiness, farming, feminism, George Eliot, Harper's, Wendell Berry | 2 Comments

Welcome!

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Martin

This is a big day for us, as it marks the debut, after many months of gestation, of our brand-spankin’-new website. In fact, this week I spent much of the time I would normally have spent agonizing over this blog post agonizing over the website. What should the structure be—which pages and subpages do we need? What should the color scheme be? Which pictures should go where? Which version of the Madroño Ranch logo should we use? And so on. I fell right down the rabbit hole, and I’m not sure I’ve fully emerged even now; this website will probably require some tinkering and tweaking for a while.

Actually, I’m sort of astonished that this day has finally arrived. Heather and I grew up in the Stone Age, when a chisel and a stone tablet were still the primary way to announce one’s presence to the world. (Here’s a picture of a creative writing class I took in college.) And while circumstances forced me to learn a little HTML as I made my unsteady way along what I laughingly call my “career path,” web design and construction is a kettle of fish of a different color. But in the twenty-first century it seems increasingly to be the case that if you don’t have a website you don’t really exist.

Fortunately, we were able to draw on the skills of Clint Hagen, the webmaster at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School. Clint very generously offered to help build the site, based on my vague explanations of what we envisioned, during his own time. There was a lot of trial and enormous amounts of error, all of it mine; I find it difficult to imagine what something I’m thinking about will actually look like on the screen, so frequently I’d ask Clint to do something, realize that it now looked terrible, and then immediately ask him to undo what he’d just done. God alone knows how many hours he put in on this project, and his patience was unfailing. Clint, I know it turned out to be much more of a pain than you had anticipated, but Heather and I are eternally grateful.

And, while I’m handing out the acknowledgments, I must mention our friends Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Austin’s Asterisk Group, the wonderfully talented designers who came up with our logo and other elements of our “visual identity system” (including that @#%& label for the bison meat, which turned out to be a real sticky wicket). Even though they would doubtless have designed a much more sophisticated and attractive website than this one, they very graciously agreed to review and comment on it before we officially announced it. (And in fact they deserve the credit for the site’s elegant color scheme, which we love; I had originally been thinking of a sort of beigeish-brown, which looked almost pink on some monitors, as the background.)

Then there was the issue of giving up the old version of our blog, which for the last year and a half or so has functioned as our de facto website—sort of a virtual toe in the very deep waters of the World Wide Web. We’d begun publishing Free Range: Food, Nature, Place, and More on Google’s Blogger software, and we’d gotten fond of it, or at least accustomed to its quirks. We’re using WordPress for the new site, however, and the prospect of migrating the blog from Blogger to WordPress was just a little scary. What if something went wrong? What if we didn’t like the new look as much as we liked the old look? Why did it have to be different?

Ah, there’s the rub. Different. In most respects I am by nature a fairly cautious person, I think. Or perhaps I’m just lazy. (Heather? Would you care to comment?) Whatever; I tend not to like change. My personal motto might be, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; and if it is broke, well, see how long you can get by without fixing it.”

So, yes, I’m proud of what we’ve come up with in terms of structure and design; I think it works reasonably well and looks reasonably good. But what will it really mean for us to inhabit this virtual space? We’re not sure yet. Most obviously, it means that people all around the country, or the world, will be able to find out about us and our plans for Madroño Ranch, and that’s a good thing. But it’s also frightening; rightly or wrongly, I feel like we’ll be taken more seriously now. We may even be expected to act like grownups. (If you think that shouldn’t be a major concern for people of our advanced years, I can only respond that you obviously don’t know us very well.) Plus we have to make sure that we update the site often enough to keep visitors interested, and that is a daunting task. Having to come up with a new blog post every week has just about maxed out our creativity; how in the world are we going to keep generating the kind of fresh content that will make for a vibrant, attractive website?

And, let’s face it, as websites go, this one isn’t all that fancy. It is completely devoid of bells, whistles, streaming video, shopping carts, or other interactive features. The photos are almost all just crappy snapshots we’ve taken ourselves. Some day, no doubt, we’ll look back on this and cringe at how amateurish it all is.

But that day, we hope, is far in the future. Right now, we’re proud of our new website, and we hope it marks a significant step in Madroño Ranch’s slow evolution from harebrained scheme to harebrained reality. We’re glad you found us on our new home, and we hope you’ll take the time to explore it (and bookmark it for future reference). We tried to put in lots of useful information and pretty pictures while keeping it fairly easy to navigate, but of course we don’t know how useful or pretty or easy to navigate other people will find it. If you have suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. (I’m putting Heather in charge of the redesign.) And, who knows, in another ten years or so, maybe we’ll be ready to try Twitter!

What we’re reading
Heather: George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Martin: Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Posted in More | Tagged Madroño Ranch, World Wide Web | 2 Comments

Tragic waste: some thoughts on the s-word

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Heather

Watching the bats from the kitchen stoop at Madroño Ranch the other morning was a little like watching my own thoughts. They swooped in and out of my line of vision, limited by the dawn darkness, more audible than visible.

Actually, my comparison is disrespectful of the bats; their flight is only apparently erratic, driven by the ever-changing location of the insects they were chasing. My thoughts are actually erratic. As the promise of light bloomed into dawn, the bats settled into the bat house, a feat of precision flying and landing almost like none I’ve seen, and I noticed the pile of guano under the house and thought that soon it would be time to collect it and put it into the compost pile.

And so began my musings on shit and the difference between good shit and bad shit. My apologies to the bats become ever more profound.

One of our current projects at the ranch is figuring out how to use the abundant quantities of manure the residents of the Chicken Palace produce. Currently, it’s just collected and dumped onto the compost pile, but we’re working on a plan to get the chickens more fresh greenery to eat, in part self-fertilized (by the chickens, that is). We’re planning to cordon their pasture off into sections and seed the sections with cover crops, alfalfa, rye—whatever the season will grow. We’ll soon have a rainwater collection system in place and will be able to irrigate with it (assuming it ever rains again). Using a portable fence, we’ll be able to rotate the chickens from section to section. We have no idea if this will work, but it seems like a good idea and a fine, closed-loop use of all that poop. We’re also looking to collect buffalo leavings (summer “interns”: consider yourselves warned!) and use them as well.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I used all sorts of synonyms for shit in the previous paragraph; one of the few I didn’t use is “waste,” because in natural systems, or systems that mimic natural systems, shit isn’t waste, it’s integral and beneficial. Paraphrasing Our Hero Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan notes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Mealsthat industrial agriculture has taken an elegant solution—crops feed animals, whose manure in turn fertilizes crops—and “divide[d] it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm… and a pollution problem on the feedlot.” Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the current source of most of America’s meat, produce mountains of manure that becomes toxic to the animals and to the communities around them, and the monoculture farming that produces most of America’s grains and vegetables doesn’t use animals to fertilize the soil, requiring farmers to use chemicals instead. That’s the difference between good and bad shit: when something that could be beneficial becomes useless, even toxic, waste.

In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if a community’s or even a culture’s capacity to endure might not be assessed by how effectively it mimics nature in dealing with its own discharge. I’ve just been rereading T. C. Boyle’s darkly comic Drop City, which begins at a northern California commune of the same name in 1970. The commune’s stated raison d’etre is to provide its residents with a place to escape the confines of bourgeois America and get back to the land and basic values by expanding their consciousness with meditation and drugs.

Of course the place is utter chaos, overflowing with the metaphoric excrescences of abusive sexual practices, racism, child neglect, and rampant narcissism, along with literal shit. The septic system is overloaded and the two characters who concern themselves with the problem get no help at all from the community. Eventually, the county government threaten to raze the buildings because the commune constitutes a health hazard. Because they can’t deal with their own shit on any level, the residents of Drop City abandon what was once beautiful land and move their chaos to the bush country of Alaska just as summer is waning. When they get there, most of them realize that they need to leave or get their shit together so they don’t die.

The problem is that getting your shit together necessitates acknowledging that you are, in fact, going to die. (It’s still Lent, after all. You knew we’d get to this.) Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death, identifies the human dilemma in scatological terms: we are the “god[s] who shit.”

Look at man [sic], the impossible creature! Here nature… [has] created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience…. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, not even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden man bears, the experiential burden…. Each thing is a problem and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, “It is precisely the god-like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” There it is again: gods with anuses.

Human civilization, says Becker, is built on this unease, which encourages us to throw our energies into an “immortality project” by which we deny our smelly mortality; those who confront it with none of the filters an immortality project provides wither into mental illness. Becker doesn’t attempt to solve this conundrum but rather to set some boundaries within which we can wrestle with it with “the courage to be.” He writes in his conclusion: “We need the boldest creative myths, not only to urge men on but also and perhaps especially to help men see the reality of their condition. We have to be as hard-headed as possible about reality and possibility.”

So it was with interest that I watched the video produced by a Japanese media artist to explain to Japanese children why everyone was so worried about the Fukushima nuclear reactor after it was damaged by the tsunami and earthquake on March 3. The video compares the damaged nuclear reactor to a boy with an upset stomach who needs to poop. So far the boy has just farted—smelly enough for everyone around him—but the video assures us that a team of selfless doctors are doing all they can to prevent Nuclear Boy from pushing out his stinky poop.

The video says that the Fukushima reactor is more like Three Mile Island Boy—who just farted—than like Chernobyl Boy, who not only pooped but had diarrhea that went everywhere, likening nuclear waste to a dirty diaper. My first thought after watching it was that Japanese doctors would be overwhelmed by waves of constipated children, convinced that evacuating their bowels might bring their struggling nation to even deeper depths. My next thought moved me to images in last Sunday’s New York Times of the city of Chernobyl in its abandoned state and the interview with one of the guardians of “the sarcophagus,” the concrete structure built to contain Reactor No. 4, and that can’t come in contact with water without risking the escape of highly radioactive fumes. Scientists estimate that an area around the reactor the size of Switzerland will remain affected for up to 300 years. The aftermath of a nuclear meltdown “is a problem that does not exist on a human time frame.” The guardian figures that the work he does will be available to his children and grandchildren.

Using my heavily truncated recapitulation of Becker’s thought, it seems that proponents of nuclear power (which I have sometimes been) are refusing to be “as hard headed as possible about reality and possibility,” are as unwilling to get our shit together as the drug-addled utopians of Drop City. We are as schizophrenic as the video artist who proposes that we just not poop. A few pages away from the article about Chernobyl was a piece by a Japanese astrophysicist who wrote in reference to the Fukushima reactor crisis:

Until a few years ago, power usage in Japan was such that during the summer Obon holidays, when people typically return to their ancestral homes, it would have been possible to meet demand even if all nuclear power plants were turned off. Now, nuclear energy has come to be indispensable for both industry and for our daily lives. Our excessive consumption of energy has somehow become part of our very character; it is something we no longer think twice about.

Now that I’m trying to tie together all these thematic threads, I have to swoop back to my bat-intensive stoop, to the manure-heavy compost pile in the pasture outside the Chicken Palace. May we humans be as useful as Madroño’s bats and chickens as we consider our energy future; may we refuse to resort to the narcissistic chaos of Drop City’s residents, who left their spiritual and literal bad shit for someone else to deal with.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Posted in Nature | Tagged agribusiness, bat guano, chickens, Lent, Madroño Ranch, manure, Michael Pollan, Nuclear Boy, Wendell Berry | Leave a comment

March Madness: mountain laurels, plastic ducks, and ‘roid rage

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Martin

I apologize in advance if this post seems unusually grumpy; I’ve been in a lousy mood all week. The arrival of spring in Central Texas always has this effect on me. As the weather turns warm and moist and the redbuds and pear trees burst forth in clouds of colored blossoms, as the mountain laurels fill the air with the scent of grape Kool-Aid, as Heather and the rest of humanity get all goo-goo-eyed over the season of hope and rebirth, of pastel colors and eggs and baby chicks and bunnies, I grow ever gloomier, because I know what the sights and smells of spring really augur: the onset of another brutally hot summer. And in Texas, summer can last well into what would be considered fall, or even winter, in other places. To me, spring is the annual reminder that I’m about to spend six or seven months covered in a thin film of sweat. And did I mention the mosquitoes?

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a cool, even chilly climate, but after almost three decades in Texas I have yet to acclimate fully to the summers here. Heather, on the other hand, loves hot weather; our personal comfort zones have only about a ten-degree overlap, as once the mercury climbs above 90° I begin to melt, and once it drops below 80° she begins to freeze. Under the circumstances, I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve been together for thirty years and married for twenty-five.

Of course hanging over everything else this week is the dreadful news of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, and the grim aftermath, with threats of nuclear disaster. We can’t yet know the final outcome of these events, but I worry that they may be a harbinger of even more catastrophes to come. A story on Grist.org suggested that climate change might cause more seismic and volcanic activity, as melting ice masses change pressures on the earth’s crust.

That’s scary all right. Equally scary are fears of massive radiation leaks from damaged nuclear reactors. We know that coal and oil and natural gas are all finite sources of energy, and that solar and wind power have limitations; nuclear power was supposed to be a sort of panacea, although we can wonder about the wisdom of building reactors in any place prone to major seismic activity. And then there’s that pesky problem of what to do with all that radioactive waste….

These gloomy reflections fit right in with the book I’ve been reading, Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. The light-hearted title and subtitle are deceptive; the book is actually a thoughtful, and frequently depressing, contemplation of the problems of industrialization and pollution, and, most germane to the grim news from Japan, of the unintended consequences of technological advances. Reading it has not improved my mood.

It does, however, tell a fascinating tale. On January 10, 1992, south of the Aleutians and just west of the international date line, a freighter sailing across the northern Pacific from Hong Kong to Tacoma encountered rough weather. Somehow, as the ship rolled and plunged, two columns of containers stacked on the ship’s deck broke free and fell overboard, and at least one of them burst open as it fell, setting 7,200 packages of plastic bath toys—each containing a red beaver, green frog, and blue turtle, in addition to the yellow duck pictured on the book’s cover, but who’d buy a book titled, say, Moby-Turtle?—loose upon the waters. As the toys began washing up in unlikely places, they attracted attention from various news media—who could resist such a story?—and Hohn became obsessed with them.

The book ranges widely, both geographically and thematically: Hohn’s obsession takes him from his home in New York to (among other places) Alaska, Hawaii, South Korea, Greenland, and China’s Pearl River Delta, the industrial zone where the bath toys were manufactured, and he manages to work in reflections on the plastics industry (with a nice shout-out to my old UT Austin American studies honcho Jeff Meikle), the changing definition of childhood, the history of American environmentalism, and more. He writes well and often amusingly, but the overall message of his book is dire: we are almost literally drowning in waste, and we don’t really know what to do about it. Apparent solutions turn out merely to mask, or perhaps exacerbate, the problem; sincerely well-intentioned people disagree violently about what to do. And more and more garbage ends up in the oceans.

There was a time when all of this might have been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that spring signals the return of baseball. “Spring training”! I used to consider those the two most joyful words in the English language, other than “peach cobbler” and “tax rebate.” But that was before the steroid-fueled nightmare of the last fifteen years, in which unnaturally swollen sluggers rewrote the record book and permanently distorted the shape and balance of the National Pastime.

Now baseball is all but dead to me, and spring is when Tito and I fill out our NCAA tournament brackets, an annual exercise which makes manifest the depths of my almost complete ignorance of college basketball. (I usually pick the University of North Carolina Tar Heels to win it all, because I’ve always been a sucker for their baby-blue uniforms, but this year, in case you’re wondering, I boldly picked Duke to beat Kansas in the championship game.)

I don’t know what it will take to pull me out of my annual springtime slough of despond. Maybe the Blue Devils will actually go all the way (or, if not, maybe UNC will pull off an upset). Maybe the endorphins and tryptophan in a megadose of Easter chocolate will jolt me into a more agreeable frame of mind. Or maybe I just need to find more cheerful reading material.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Posted in Nature | Tagged baseball, climate change, earthquake, Grist.org, Japan, March Madness, sweat, tryptophan | 3 Comments

Lenten reflections: dead trees, bafflement, and submission

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Heather

Fittingly, this Ash Wednesday began with a vigorous north wind, the kind that knocks dead branches out of trees and can make you a little leery about walking outdoors. It blew me back to the moment that I first got a glimpse into the meaning of Lent.

I had vaguely thought of “giving something up for Lent” as an opportunity to practice self-discipline and to display a sense of commitment to a “good” life, a sort of spiritual calisthenics that made you feel better, especially when you stopped. The events I recalled weren’t, on the surface, particularly interesting or dramatic, but they allowed me to see myself from a previously undiscovered vantage point; for the first time, I could see I was like a tree filled with dead branches that needed some serious pruning in order to keep growing. Observing Lent wasn’t a way to prove how strong I was; it was a space offered in which I might look at all my dead branches and wonder how I, with the north wind’s help, might clear some of them out, while trusting that I wouldn’t get knocked out by falling timber.

A time for submission—no wonder Lent gets a bad rap. Who wants to submit, especially after a look at the roots of the word: “sub-” is from the Latin for “under,” and “-mit” is from “mittere,” to send or throw or hurl. To submit to something is to hurl yourself under it—“it” presumably being a force much greater than your itty-bitty self, a force like, say, a speeding F350 pick-up. In fact, it might even take some courage to submit to the scouring blast of Lent.

In last week’s post, Martin considered some of the complexities of being from a particular place, ending with a beautifully expressed desire to be here, rooted in this rocky Hill Country soil. Imagine his exasperation when I said last night that I felt like I needed a vacation. My desire to run away (presumably temporary) probably has several sources, but one of them may be an awareness that the idea of Madroño Ranch is taking on heft and weight, leaving behind the dreamy elasticity of fantasy.

I’m reminded of my reaction to our daughter Elizabeth’s first vision test. It had been suggested by her third grade teacher, who had never had a student make so many arithmetic mistakes, especially in copying problems from the chalkboard onto paper. The test results were normal; Elizabeth wasn’t nearsighted, just math-impaired. First I mourned that she would never be an astronaut or an engineer or a mathematician, but then I realized that we now knew more about who she really was; she was beginning to take on her own form, independent of my fantasies for her.

In a lovely essay entitled “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” Wendell Berry (of course) unearths the kinship between marriage and formal poetry: both begin in “the giving of words,” and live out their time standing by those words:

In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one’s own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and living within the limits of creaturely life. We live only one life and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.

Choosing a form implies the setting of limits, limits that appear arbitrary from the outside or at the outset, but that can open into generosity and possibility as they are practiced. Even as they limit, these old forms point their practitioners to a way through self-delusion toward truth, through loneliness toward community. Individual failures are certainly possible, but they aren’t necessarily arguments against the forms themselves. In fact,

“[i]t may be… that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

This past weekend we hosted “Hog School” at the ranch, the second in an ongoing series of sustainable hunting/butchering/cooking/eating extravaganzas put on by Jesse Griffith of Austin’s Dai Due supper club. I spent much of the weekend baffled (and not in a good way) by rifle-toting guests scattered across the property hunting feral hogs, by the seemingly effortless magic with which chef Morgan Angelone produced gorgeous and delicious treats from the kitchen (my kitchen, mind you, my philandering kitchen purring in someone else’s hands), by my own mental contortions.

I finally decided to go for a walk where I was unlikely to be mistaken for a hog. Marching through the field by the lake and muttering imprecations against the wind (no birds to watch), the lack of rain (no grass coming up), and the hunters (no long walks available), I decided to climb to the base of the cliffs above me and head back to the house by a new route.

Though they can be steep, the Hill Country hills aren’t exactly the Alps; climbing to the base of the cliffs only takes a few minutes and a lot of grabs at branches to keep from sliding back down in the loose mulch and rocks that just barely hold the hills up. Once I got into the still-leafless trees, I began lurching across the perpetually shifting terrain and found that it was impossible to walk and look at the same time; if I wanted to walk, I had to watch my feet carefully, and if I wanted to look, I had to stop and make sure I was balanced before I shifted my gaze. It made for slow going because, unexpectedly, there was a lot to see that I hadn’t noticed from below.

I found a fine moss-covered boulder that allowed me a new vantage point from which to look down and into the trees and brush I normally looked up at, a posture that causes the painful condition among birders known as “warbler neck.” I quickly misidentified several sparrows, and with an un-aching neck, was able to track down some raucous spotted towhees making rude observations from a clump of yaupons and to lecture them briefly. Staring at my feet as I staggered across the hillside, I found that grasses, indeed, were beginning to sprout, despite the drought. Skidding onto my derriere—it always happens off-roading on these hills—I was able to observe the first blush of blooming redbud tree, closely guarded by the great daggered yucca beside it. And then, as the wind picked up again, the rich thick smell of honey clogged the air. The source? Tiny yellow blossoms nestled under agarita spines—tiny and extravagantly generous and impossible to pick without getting pricked. The wind blew my hat off, and, setting off multiple rockslides, I chased it gracelessly down the hill.

Limits: from dust you were made and to dust you shall return. Bafflement: unexpected forms arising, unforeseen paths opening. Submission: throwing the deadwood of the ego into the flames of the Unnamable One. That’s a lot to wrestle with for the mere forty days of Lent.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnick, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Posted in More | Tagged bafflement, Dai Due, feral hogs, hunting, Lent, limits, submission, Texas Hill Country, Wendell Berry | 1 Comment

Maps and mobility: living in, not on, the land

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Martin

I was surprised, while reading Rebecca Solnit’s fascinating Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, to realize that I probably know substantially more about the history of Texas than I do about the history of my native San Francisco.

Of course, this realization should hardly have come as a surprise. After all, I’ve lived in Texas for more than half my life, whereas I left California at age seventeen, for college, and never moved back. Moreover, I spent more than half of my time in Texas working for the Texas State Historical Association, mostly researching and writing local history.

Still, it was a little bit of a shock. Despite my recent purchase of a spiffy pair of Lucchese boots, I still frequently think of myself as a Californian, not a Texan. Texas is where I live, but California is where I’m from, and that can be a significant difference. Especially in the South (and Texas is in many ways as much a part of the South as of the West), where you’re from—your “people,” your frame of reference—is still as important as who you are. But while I retain vivid, detailed mental and sensory images of San Francisco and the Bay Area—the sights, the sounds, the smells, and, yes, the tastes—I don’t really know how and why they came to be. In Texas, on the other hand, I learned a lot of the stories before learning the places they explain.

Solnit’s book presents both foreground imagery and background narrative. It is a series of maps and essays which manifest unexpected symmetries or contradictions: “Monarchs and Queens,” which simultaneously maps butterfly populations and sites significant in the history of the city’s queer population; “Poison/Palate” (above), which juxtaposes some of the Bay Area’s leading “foodie” establishments (Chez Panisse, Niman Ranch, etc.) with nearby mercury mines, oil refineries, chemical plants, and other sources of toxic pollution; and so on.

In reading and looking at this beautiful book—and it really is beautiful—I have learned a lot of local history, and also experienced that rush of nostalgia that accompanies any return, be it literal or literary, to your homeland. Just seeing the names on the maps, the extant and (especially) the long gone—Playland at the Beach! the Surf Theater! Winterland! Zim’s!—brought on a shiver of memory worthy of a Proustian madeleine. As Solnit writes, “the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain.” She notes that the residents of Managua, Nicaragua, long after an earthquake that destroyed much of the city, “gave directions by saying things like, ‘Turn left where the tree used to be.’”

Similarly, my San Francisco is a palimpsest, an accretion of layers and memories, things and people living and dead, real and fictional—Emperor Norton and Sam Spade, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harry Callahan, and countless others. All of them were and are integral parts of where I’m from.

But that very notion of being from someplace is somewhat vexed. Locals say “I’m from here” all the time, but to me saying you’re from someplace usually implies motion, absence, a sense that you’re no longer there—that you’ve left it behind. In the United States, we have traditionally defined ourselves as an entire nation of people who are from somewhere else. My mother was born in Italy and my father in Brazil (though his parents were born in Scotland and Austria), which makes me about as American as you can get. After all, even the so-called Native Americans who were here before European contact originally came from somewhere else, presumably across the Beringian land bridge in pursuit of mammoth and bison.

In a fundamental sense, then, ours is a culture built on the sense of limitless opportunity awaiting us just beyond the horizon, just over that next rise. We have never stayed put, geographically or socioeconomically: the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the Dust Bowl all pushed or pulled the new nation westward, across the continent, and we still seem to believe that, if we really make a hash of things where we are now, we can always pick up and move on to some uninhabited place (traditionally further west) where we can start fresh.

And some astonishing transformations did indeed take place out on that peripatetic frontier: a poor boy from Kentucky by way of Indiana and Illinois turned into Abraham Lincoln, an itinerant river pilot and printer’s apprentice from Missouri headed west and turned into Mark Twain, and so on. Even after Frederick Jackson Turner famously proclaimed the end of the frontier in 1893, our restlessness did not cease. In the twentieth century, the promise of economic opportunity and escape from Jim Crow drove the great migration of African Americans from the South to the north and west. Our current president, a son of Kansas and Kenya who was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is merely the most recent testament to the persistent power of the American notion of mobility, whether upward or westward.

Back to the Left Coast. In Infinite City, Solnit writes, “A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds—in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church’s sphere or a hospital’s intersections.” This is inarguably true of San Francisco, or for that matter any city; I would only add that it is no less true of a farm, a rural village, or any place that has borne the prints of generations of human existence. Like, say, Madroño Ranch.

All maps, even ones as imaginative and beautiful as the ones in Infinite City, are by definition reductive. They represent reality in two dimensions; we experience it in (at least) three. Maps, in other words, lack depth, and depth is what makes us and our world real. We don’t inhabit places flatly (though we certainly inhabit plenty of flat places!), but in depth, both geographical and temporal.

That depth is what we hope to gain personally at Madroño Ranch and also encourage in others, but we know we cannot simply will it into being. It grows and accumulates over time, and with care and effort; it is, in fact, a kind of rote learning, going over the same ground again and again, literally and metaphorically, until you have worn a track into the surface. John Muir noted that “Most people are on the world, not in it”; one of our hopes, now that our Austin nest is empty and we’re at the ranch more often, is that we can gradually learn to live and move in, not just on, this small part of the planet.

This is why Heather has grown increasingly ambivalent about travel; the world is full of fascinating places, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of our own. We hope it’s not (or not just) provincialism, but we want to be here.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

Posted in Place | Tagged Bay Area, Frederick Jackson Turner, frontier, home, maps, Rebecca Solnit, San Francisco, sense of place, Texas State Historical Association | 3 Comments

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