MARTIN MURIE, HERO

"A slight sag in the top wire.

Someone has stepped over, or was it just a range cow scratching its hide?

Great swatches of dark and of light, familiar and yet not quite,

and the lights and darks shift as if nothing is totalized, nothing locked in.

The winds, they touch your face differently,

they leave a tangy taste."

from the poem " Fences" by Martin Murie.


It was quiet from Yellow Springs and now I know why. Martin Murie has passed on to a heaven that surely must have packrats in it. “Packrat” was sort of his Internet avatar except that he operated mostly by snail mail. http://www.packratnest.com/ His strength was not innovation and splash, but rather a steady reminding presence: tenacious, relentless. Long before eBooks, Martin was self-publishing books he got printed locally and personally distributed through the upper New York area and on the web. Not just to bookstores, but to bait shops, service stations, antique stores, and whatever unlikely places he could find where people might pick up a book. They were engaging tales of guys working together to do good.

Because I wrote reviews of each of them, he sent me free copies. I expect that some day they will be invaluable in terms of dollars, quite aside from their invaluable content. For one thing Martin is connected to the history of environmentalism through his parents. See http://www.madeinwyoming.net/profiles/Murie.php and http://www.muriecenter.org/ The elder Muries were founders of modern conservation and environmentalist thought and organizations (The Wilderness Society), sometimes enduring harsh opinions when they were ahead of their times, as when they advocated for wolves.

It’s not easy to be the son of such people. I encourage readers to research the elder Muries separately but in addition to Martin, who made his own way. Martin’s earliest summer years were passed in the bottom of a drift boat so far to the north that his mother had to drape the boat with netting to keep the mosquitoes from carrying him off. His father was combing the watery country around them, making early waterfowl counts. Mardi’s account is in "Two in the Far North." (53 used copies for sale beginning at $2.37 on Amazon.) Some of Martin’s books are there as well, though you can probably still buy them through his website.

I didn’t know the following until I read the story in the Yellow Springs, Ohio, newspaper. This town is rather like Concord, a haven for artists, thinkers, and crafts people like Alison, who is a weaver. It is what Deleuzeguattari would call a rhizome.

Village veterans remember wars

By Megan Bachman Published: November 11, 2010

Former Antioch professor Martin Murie lives daily with the reminder of his service in World War II, having lost his right eye in the mountains of Italy. Like many veterans, he finds his memories difficult to live with. “I keep meeting veterans and we don’t talk much about the war — it’s just too painful,” he said. After stays in various hospitals after the war, Murie had to hitchhike and hop freight trains to get back home to Wyoming, where he gave the Purple Heart he was awarded for his injury to his mother. He also received a silver star for killing an enemy machine gunner, who was firing at his comrades, with one shot from his M1 rifle. Murie studied philosophy and literature at Antioch on the GI bill and later became a professor. Now he’s an anti-war protester and member of Veterans for Peace. “For the rest of my life — I can’t forget it, and that’s why I go to Yellow Springs every Saturday and I really am a vehement anti-war veteran,” said Murie, who commutes from Xenia to attend a weekly peace protest in Yellow Springs. “War is not the answer, we just can’t go on with it.”

Until aging forced a return to the Yellow Springs community, Martin and Alison lived in near-wilderness, as has been the custom of the family. Every weekend, too hot or too cold or pleasant, they demonstrated for peace, standing on street corners with signs. Sentries for peace. And over the years they formed a community of like-minded, tough-minded people, who had decided to draw the line.

What I learned from Martin and am only realizing now is that bearing witness is one justification for self-publishing. The academic world can be as stifling as the commercial world, but personally making books, writing columns, maintaining websites, telling stories can feed the enormous spiritual hunger that seems to be driving many people in a time when no religious institution is prepared to make the changes necessary to get the message out. Let alone figuring out what the message IS.

Martin had no doubt about the message. It is that the natural world is us and we are it. All our understanding and all our passion comes from being out on the land, afoot, storing up what we can. Loren Eiseley (Martin often reminded me of him) once wrote a little fantasy about breaking open a packrat’s nest and falling back to make room for all the cultural artifacts that fall out. Instead of spoons and combs, out fell concertos and fine paintings. You can imagine your own list of what you’d put in your packrat nest. That’s part of what writers do.

I met Martin on the listserv called “Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment,” asle@interversity.org ,one of the earlier and most persisting of the environmental lists. In fact, so long that since the Nineties it has been possible to see a generation turn over. The WWII people have nearly all left us now. The WWI people who were so germinal are gone. The Civil War people exist only in books. Out of their trauma came determination to make the world a better place, to become living examples of the Bioneer principles: everything is connected, everything is living, everything is changing.

We so hate it when that change means a loss, which it often does. But war teaches about death and as Raven, Martin’s daughter, emailed me, “ A massive tree is down. The forest floor is lit with a new light, and we are trying to adjust to it.” A person is just one element in an ecology. Martin is not gone but only transformed. And he transformed some of the rest of us. That’s how an ecology works.