GROWING INTO IDENTITY IN A PLACE, EVEN A PLACE IN A BOOK

Limberlost second growth

In the lives of human beings there is a transition point between the part of childhood called the “adrenarche”, an awkward medical term that means the adrenal glands are waking up and in turn waking up the sexual maturation we call “puberty”.  During adrenarche (9 to 12) we are developing our identities as individuals and in puberty we are using our new identities by testing them in relationships that will be the hearts of families and the driving force of work.  That’s the ideal.  It is shaped by place.

During my own transition, my family traveled to East Lansing, Michigan.  Summer is the time of ceremonials, conferences, Chautauqua, organizational general assemblies, both religious and not.  My father worked for an ag wholesale supply cooperative which was near-religious for him because he grew up on the high prairie in the time of grain elevators when farmers were cooperating to control their own crops.  In Canada this meshed with the communal impulse but on the US side it had to be defended against accusations of communism by idealizing it as democracy in action.  The summer convocation was always on the campus of some agricultural college, that year in East Lansing.

Gene Stratton-Porter

My father’s mother grew up in southern Michigan, so the trip became a bit of a pilgrimage.  We stopped in Mendon, Michigan, to visit distant cousins, one of them Florence Dickerson, the female mayor of the town and another an older woman named Sarah Blum, a treasured friend of my grandmother.  Florence shockingly had had half her face removed because of cancer, but one soon forgot it was different.  Her personality was strong.  

Also we visited the Limberlost, the location of Gene Stratton-Porter’s classic “Girl of the Limberlost” and of several other beloved books I read because they were left from the childhoods of my parents and grandparents on both sides.

The lower part of Michigan and upper part of Indiana was a place of marshes, swamps and flood plains once spreading among massive hardwood forests.  Streams were “soft-bottomed” and so slow-moving that they were reflective as ponds.  One Michigan stream was actually called “The Looking Glass River.”  The drama that fed the Stratton-Porter novels was the ecology-destroying but enormously valuable cutting down of hardwoods to make furniture and homes for the population growing across the country at the “turn of the century” (from 1800’s to 1900’s).  

A Michigan Mansion

People were Victorian/Edwardian in the middle class way, able to build, furnish and decorate rather fine homes.  When one looks at the prominent historical places in Ionia County, Michigan, they are elaborate homes and county seats, the architectural egos of a people just forming “country clubs” and theatrical establishments.  They were upwardly mobile in a way that echoed the British class system.

Stratton-Porter’s heroines (few male heroes in her books) were all girls coming to consciousness as they moved from the relatively involuntary growth of adrenarche into the self-directed purposes of adolescence when -- in this new era -- education became important.  She herself was a self-taught photographer of birds and moths in the Limberlost, a woman of major achievement though she never finished high school.  Her husband was a pharmacist and she was interested in herbalism, particularly celebrating ginseng.  I own nearly all of Gene Stratton-Porter’s novels, reading them again and again.  Visiting the Limberlost was right on the line between fantasy and reality, a favorite "place" of mine.

Stratton-Porter was a bit of a racist, in her day against Asian immigrants because she was living in Los Angeles to preserve her health.  She was killed in a car crash with a streetcar at age 61.  So much for caution.  If she had been more aware and accepting in her youth, she might have written about the Chippewa and Métis who lived interstitially and persistently in Michigan while the farmers used industrial steam engines to drain swamps and process huge trees.  Often stigmatized and unable to access venture capital, the original indigenous people of the area took labor jobs and seasonal work.  It’s a novel waiting to be written.  They are still there, sending their children to Headstart.

Michigan writers seem to sort themselves between whether they are focused on the big industrial complexes, the automotive centers that support major cities and black populations; or instead are concerned with the hook-and-bullet macho tales of Ernest Hemingway and Jim Harrison that persisted in the northern part of the state.  By now, younger writers are facing the collapsed and rusted factories that once supported a flowering middle class and their pretensions, the last of the World War survivors hanging on with their memories in the small towns, today often bedroom communities.  

In sequence, the hardwood forests and slow streams supplied the early rural people with fish, fowl and deer.  Then industrial-level draining (steam engine pumps) diminished the “wild” lands and the trees were cut — both of which seemed like ways of increasing wealth/land until the ecology was changed and the same people hurried to establish the many nature preserves.  None of them would support a bear or a wolf.

  

When the major factories began, they were a chance to jump up income and learn major mechanical skills while commuting home to the farm.  Some farmers built runways and bought small airplanes like the ones that have been doing “touch and go” practice in Valier this weekend.  With enough growth of income, horizon and skill, a man could go anywhere and thrive.  Naturally, they headed to LA, the same as Gene Stratton-Porter.  A few relocated to San Francisco or even Lake Tahoe.

But a few hung on in the place they knew and, indeed, loved deeply after a lifetime of farming it, walking it, building on it.  After the streams were no longer used for transportation, the families near Portland, MI, who weren’t quite as early as homesteaders, sorted themselves along a country road.  The sources of prosperity that built the big houses were diminished now.  Industrial-style innovations in homes — electricity, piped gas and water — were early and a little risky so that big houses occasionally caught fire but weren’t rebuilt.

This house is now the location of a golf club.

Still arrogant and defensive, the young people sorted themselves into reconfigured families, some clamping onto the known world to prevent it from changing, to prevent themselves from leaving.  Others worked themselves to death on both farms and assembly lines.  The next wars were in Korea and Vietnam, soul-killing.  The drug of choice in this world of psychic twisting was alcohol, encouraged by older veterans who believed the best of times were those spent holed up in a motel with a bottle and woman.  And then drugs.

In the meantime, Gene Stratton-Porter bloomed and then escaped with a camera in her hand.  She was said to have had more than fifty million readers around the world.  Her house still stands in the Limberlost.  We visited it just as I was growing into myself.  The whole planet is different now.  Except in books.

A CONDOR FEATHER STARTED IT

Early on in my adventure into blogging, I wrote something about the condors that were once on the prairie and in the Midwest.  I had swallowed whole the book called "Freckles" by Gene Stratton-Porter, a red-headed female ornithologist and photographer of the Limberlost, a swampy forest of hardwoods in Indiana.  Many girls know “A Girl of the Limberlost” which is about a girl with a poverty-hardened mother whose helper is a thinly disguised version of Stratton-Porter.  Fewer know “Freckles” which became a movie starring Audie Murphy.  After seeing it, I sent him a fan letter and received a nice note and photo in return.  But the star of “Freckles” was really a condor, who dropped a feather on the boy. 

There are articles about the Plains Indians’ relationship to condors, which included a dance imitating them.  But I had to go looking for those articles.  “Freckles” was one of my grandmother’s books.  When I was growing up, the bookshelves were salted with books from earlier generations, including my father’s books about explorers and natural history writers.  In addition, I was devoted to Isak Dinesen’s books.  

So when my post about condors attracted the interest of writers on Stephen Bodio’s Querencia  (stephenbodio.blogspot.com), that contact has meant I’ve kept up with his blog ever since.  Several fascinating people post there, including Cat Urbigkit, a sheep rancher and a natural history writer/photographer who knows antelope and wolves, and raises big guard dogs.  A good sample at http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2016/08/its-fairly-predictable-that-within.html

Traditional hunting trio

Steve himself was passingly a Montana writer in the Bozeman cadre before going on south to Magdalena, NM.  He’s a connected guy through Saluki dogs, eagles and hawks, fine guns, Eurasia and a first marriage to Betsy Huntington (who died of cancer) and a second marriage to Libby, a strong partner.  He is female-friendly without being icky, but he’s also an exemplar of manliness, which he has centered in Eurasia, one of the most horseback macho warrior territories on the planet.  Born in Boston, he came to natural history through the great museums that resulted from the exploits of men now often demonized -- both those who went out across the country like Teddy Roosevelt and those who financed expeditions sometimes preposterous and often deadly.

http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2016/07/visiting-american-museum.html

Peter Matthiessen

Bodio says:

I ate it all, indiscriminately, as I did that of a generation nearer my own; Peter Mattthiessen, and the playboy turned edgy artist and conservationist Peter Beard were obviously cut from the same cloth. It says something about my naivete that I never even thought of the fact that, as Betsy Huntington put it with mild exasperation, "All those people were richer than GOD".  I thought everybody had adventures and wrote about them, so I found ways, and did. Later I was inducted as a fellow into the Explorers Club, a sort of unofficial annex across the street. Bakewell was recruited as a member of the crew of the first circumpolar flight in the bar of the EC! Before the war, adventurers seemed to belong to the Social Register, the AMNH, and the Club. Kirk recently sent me some xeroxed pages about Carter Burden's Komodo Dragon expedition in the 20's (I have the book- isn't he the grandfather of the editor of Vanity Fair?), from a book called "All About Scientific Expeditions", and seeing that it also had Beebe  et al, I asked if it should better be called "All About Scientific Expeditions by New York socialites”?. . .

It was really a meritocracy, though, and you didn't have to be rich, a New Yorker, or even an American to belong.

But it sure did help to have money.  Might not save your life — it didn’t keep Rockefeller from being cannibalized.  The transcendent end of the scale was Richard Halliburton swimming nude in the reflecting pool of the Taj Mahal by moonlight.  By today, people have walked across Africa with a GPS in their pocket and David Quammen, a Bozeman guy, is part of the new natural history urgent exploration pursuing the deadly passengers on mosquitoes that “Spillover” on us, as deadly as tigers. Like HIV.

So here’s the swerve.  Having followed all the Brit 19th century explorations of Empire, I didn’t exactly walk in their footsteps but instead, parallel, came to Blackfeet country, where the earliest aristocratic and filthy-rich Europeans came up the Mississippi/Missouri to the high prairie.  At the time I didn’t know that history.  It gradually emerged and almost continued as a virtual pattern.  The Sixties with Bob Scriver was focussed on the life a hundred years earlier, which meant that every day was a century milestone of adventure.  Natural history museums were also a strong shared tie, both the big institutional ones and the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, now dispersed.

This background prepared me for a decade-long writing friendship with Tim Barrus, at the end of years of intercontinental airplane travel by the gay community.  I heard about the inclusive relationships with all races and economic levels from bare survival to elegant hotels.  Atypical sexual orientations, rapidly surfacing to identified viability, turned out to be a kind of passport, an access to many other people outside the white male corporate hegemony.  Incredibly, sexwork gave trapdoor access to its underbelly.  (Women have always known that.)

What’s remarkable about T. is that he kept his attention always on neglected, abused, and traumatized children, mostly boys.  Because boys soon become men, this has resulted in a webwork of relationships and strategies, sometimes political but mainly focused on survival.  They are not made “normal,” but are inspired to help each other on their own terms, more humanities than science.  Now it’s not the airplane but the internet that is a way to explore.  

When I thought about boys huddled in cardboard boxes behind dumpsters in alleys, I thought about tough guys like Mattheissen surviving through the Tibetan mountain nights with strange foods and lurking pye dogs, in partnership with George Schaller, that redoubtable field biologist.  I thought that boys on the edge of civilization were as interesting as snow leopards, which are also maimed — at least the ones in zoos because they are caught by the foot.  Snow leopards cannot be taught to tell their stories, but boys can — even the ones who have been sexually abused, beaten up, dependent on drugs.  

Boys cannot and should not be kept behind bars, which is the solution our culture has for both leopards and troublesome kids.  It’s only another level of abuse.  I spent five years thinking about street animals when I worked animal control, but now I’ve spent ten years thinking about street boys.  When I saw some of their crazier vids, I thought of Peter Beard’s famous photo of himself jammed into a dead crocodile.

Peter Beard in a Crocodile

Only now am I becoming hopeful because of the new understanding that all life is connected, in process, interpenetrating, interdependent, and both constituting and exploiting the environment.  I live on the high prairie against the Rockies and never forget it, never let poetry lift my feet out of the grass, but now I want to know about my thinking instrument: my body as a recording organism up against the environment.  I watch the sky for falling condor feathers.  Or falling stars.

All that political thrashing we’re enduring is the death of another Empire, rather more various than the British one now jammed into the jaws of Brexit.  It’s a paper empire that lives on fungible exchanges through the Internet. I think it is doomed, but I don’t know what comes afterwards.  I’m interested in survival and therefore I turn to the “Smash Street Boys,” “Show Me Your Life,” and “Real Stories Gallery.”  I want to know how they make it through the night.

´EPATER LA BOURGEOISIE !

Julian Fellowes' book after "Downton Abbey"

The Middle Class has made a religion of books, but like the more recognized “church” religions, books are no longer what they thought they were.  Neither is the Middle Class.  As a townsman remarked to me recently,  “There is no middle class anymore.”  As my cousin noted, “We are told the Middle Class is endangered.”  He just retired after a lifetime of struggling to be what he thought was Middle Class, because that’s what that side of the family thought they were and should be.  That was the Scots side of the family.  (My father’s.)  

On the Irish side of the family the sense was not scrambling to go UP, but rather digging in one’s heels while sliding steadily DOWN.  The Scots were ultra-respectable: my grandmother objected to us saying, “Gee,” because it was short for “God” which is swearing.  The Irish were provocateurs: that grandfather loved to pick quarrels.  He had married above himself.  Both grandfathers were located in the transition from a farming world to an urban one.  On the Irish grandmother's side were profitable woolen mills and an artistic woman who married an architect and lived an upper-middle-class life in Pasadena.  I have one of her paintings, a still-life of a copper kettle with a geranium growing in it and a little covered dish made to look like a hen.  Domestic, tabletop, nurturing.  Middle Class.

When I went off to college at Northwestern University, my American lit teacher in Portland exclaimed,  “Oh, I’m so glad.  Now you’ll meet some rich people!”  She was a small bird-like woman, aging into ill-health, with huge glasses that I thought were because she was far-sighted but I now think compensated for cataract surgery.  Her heart was with Walt Whitman, who never thought about rich people, so I was puzzled.  

What she meant had mostly to do with the arts, that I would be exposed to good taste and refined living -- nothing to do with income really, except that rich people can help artistic people by accumulating their creations, even the experimental ones, or can become patrons.  She’s the teacher who taught us that it was fine to write in books, but we should do it neatly, meaningfully, and perhaps with a special pencil.  She encouraged us to get a leather-bound journal book and use it as a day book; that is, record thoughts and poems to keep.  I think that’s when I started using green ink.  Decades later someone at seminary stole my beautiful green leather journal.  

The Scots side had lots of books.  (My father went a bit over the top.)  They had been school teachers in the days when teachers kept order and supplied facts.  The Irish side -- at least the women -- weren’t much different than today’s female immersion-cravers.   These are novels that endorse Middle-Class ideas, esp. the burden of Middle Class women. (It’s not housework -- it’s carrying the culture.) I have a complete set of the works of Gene Stratton-Porter, partly inherited and partly bought.  (She had a career but it wasn’t writing romances, though she did that; it was bird photography.)  

Gene Stratton-Porter

Somewhere in the resulting surf, I search for the romance of ideas and find them everywhere, but often too cheap, too much aping others, too transient.  I thought religion would be different, but it wasn’t.  Still the same agenda: safety, repetition, replication, privileging the male but only so long as he brings in money.

Books are what you make them.  The Victorian bourgeois Middle Class women made them into strategies for rising in status (meaning making money and marrying well), escaping from rigid lives, and secretly enjoying sex.  (Imagine the Somali immigrant woman watching “Downton Abbey” for hints about how to order daily life.)  The novelistas of our times, who still believe in Victorian values but not Queen Victoria, a social category that includes the present and recent princesses, still also believe in the French kind of oppression, by which I mean “The Story of O,”  an account of dependent wickedness as a sign of distinction.  (Must I mention “Gray”?)  The middle classes are so fond of royalty and rich people because they have no actual idea of what those high-status lives are like, though they will buy many books about them.

I suppose that the “third” world, that is, the dark and marginal places where people yearn to get into the Middle Class, is no longer getting there with the help of books.  Rather they must be using their smart phones which are about information and where you are, a specialty of the part of the Middle-Class that developed from artisans and shop-keepers.  The novels that people read over and over as maps to rising (I certainly did) are now on video.  No longer do we watch the bourgeois tales favored by displaced Jewish entrepreneurs in Hollywood who didn’t have the chops to become psychoanalysts.   The indie and underground films are compelling but won’t always provide reliable maps.  On the other hand, who can map a world without a Middle Class that stays put as a point of reference while everything else shifts, empties, swarms with life that seems as foreign as the little monsters of the deep sea -- glowing, amorphous, predatory?  

These are personal essays, meaning that I make no pretense about writing about and through myself.  At first, given the chance to write what moving to Valier meant, I went straight to the Middle-Class immersive experience of partnering Bob Scriver.  It was hardly boring, and there was lots of sex, some wickedness, and always the landscape.   “Are you makin’ any money, Robert?” asked his dad every evening, puffing on his pipe as his mom served a little treat in her cushioned parlor.  He did; I didn't.  Irrelevant.

Not reading but writing changed me.  Refusing to be controlled by the Cowboy Art Cartel -- who wanted me to write something very different -- changed me.  Attending the Montana Festival of the Book, so Middle-Class that their heroes are all on NPR; writing accounts of other parts of my life: animal control, the UU ministry, this blog -- all changed me.  I was a revisionist visionary. Radicalized by realization.

Beware of writing honestly and intensely because it will change you more than reading any books.  One of the changes will be leaving paper for the glass screen.  Just as well, since avant garde exploratory books hardly exist anymore.  The progression has been:  novel (middle class), poetry (REAL poetry has no class), image (including all classes, rendering “class” irrelevant).  It has been a movement from immersion to submergence to emergence.

The necessarily final step will be nonexistence, death.  If a person can’t accept the reality of death and loss, but is always throwing up the safeguards, if a person can’t risk being stigmatized, violated, and possibly murdered, then the paralysis sets in.  If a person can’t risk creating for the sake of the thing itself in the moment instead of for the money, the status, the finger in an eye, then the paralysis sets in.  If a person can’t give up being simply a body in a social world with little relationship to whirling galaxies and swarming blood, then the paralysis sets in.

Gene Stratton-Porter, naturalist and novelist

If you follow Middle-Class ideas about success (prizes, money, speaking engagements, household recognition), you will be paralyzed.  But if you don’t, if you go soaring and spelunking, you’ll be changed and your mother will not recognize your success. 

I first read Gene Stratton-Porter’s romantic fiction on my aunt’s sheep farm where I found “Keeper of the Bees” on the screened second story sleeping porch that was necessary before there was AC. Stratton-Porter was a red-headed reckless woman who tried to save the great furniture-quality hardwood trees of the Limberlost marshy forest.  She mostly failed but she was certainly not paralyzed.  Whether she was Middle-Class or not is open to discussion.  Her novels were about struggling for prosperity and security.  She’s not forgotten.   Yet.  Because she was an ornithologist.   

Still, not so modern as a black swan.  The Middle-Class has learned to love the dark side.  A marker for horror instead of culture.  Now, why is that?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/consumed-by-david-cronenberg.html?emc=edit_bk_20140926&nl=books&nlid=14191488

BOTH SIDES NOW: "Freckles and the Condor"

It was early June when she first saw the condor, or rather its shadow. She’d been painting “plein aire” out on the open land, looking away from the mountains for once. The grass was barely long enough to be rumpled by the wind and then her eye went to the softly dark spot moving along the moire pattern of the grass. She thought it was a hawk, riding the thermals that were forming as the land warmed. Thunderheads were just beginning on the horizon -- she was only beginning to sketch them into her sky.

But then she saw that this bird was much bigger than a hawk or eagle and had an entirely different wing shape. It must have been seven feet from one wing tip to the other -- maybe more. It dropped down a bit more, perhaps to take a look at her own strange shape on the east slope prairie, then lifted and spiraled away and away until it disappeared like a mote in one’s eye being blinked away.

“Condor,” she thought, wondering why she thought so. But that can’t be. There haven’t been condors here since the buffalo disappeared. They were part of that paleolithic world that fit together tightly until the white people came in such numbers that they pried apart all the connections. “Condor.”

She thought of a book she had read in childhood, finding it in her grandmother’s bookshelf. It was “Freckles” by Gene Stratton-Porter, the strong-minded “bird woman” who had fought to save the midwestern Limberlost ancient trees and the birds that lived in them. “Freckles” had begun with a huge black feather floating down from so high in the sky that Freckles, who was a timber-cruiser, couldn’t see the bird it fell from. It was a condor feather and even in those days they were supposed to be extinct in the midwest.

Of course, now the world of Gene Stratton-Porter with her huge box of a camera and hats tied on with veils and small towns where daughters struggled to come to terms with their mothers -- that world was gone now. In fact, Stratton-Porter herself had fallen afoul of the New Invaders, the post-colonial Marxist accusers who hated authority figures, hated any sign of racism, hated any science that didn’t agree with their notion of a Edenic world that never existed -- though they insisted that it had.

No feather fell from Clare’s sky. The science part of her brain kicked in. It wasn’t impossible for a condor to have returned to the east side of the Rockies, though it was unlikely. Still, the population pressure on the Pacific coast was driving out some of the people who had always loved living there, so why not these immense glorious birds, so scarce that they were individually known to the researchers. Who should one call? Maybe best to call no one. If the word got out, photographers and opportunist hunters -- polarized into those who practically worship animals and those who saw them only as raw material for their own lives -- would be everywhere.

She would keep it a secret. This had been a spring when the major blizzards persisted very late, so that some ranchers had moved their cattle up into the foothills too early. Meant to graze among the high country trees, they were instead trapped in deep snow the wind couldn’t get at, and they died in piles. It was impossible for cowboys to get in on horseback and gather them out, as they would in the fall. It was a gift to the grizzlies, carrion piled everywhere. Maybe that drew the condor. All ecologies are woven of pushing and pulling like that: deadends here, a breeze of opportunity there.

Still, a condor sighting was way out on the edge. Even in Stratton-Porter’s novel, the condor was a rarity and Freckles hardly knew how to react. She had read the novel so many times that she knew some paragraphs by heart:

“Out of the clear sky above him, first level with his face, then skimming, dipping, tilting, whirling until it lit, quill down, in the path in front of him came a glossy, iridescent, big black feather. As it struck the ground, Freckles snatched it up and with an almost continuous movement faced the sky. There was not a tree of any size in a large open space. There was no wind to carry it. From the clear sky it had fallen, and Freckles, gazing eagerly into the arch of June blue with a few lazy clouds floating far up in the sea of ether, had neither mind nor knowledge to dream of a bird hanging as if frozen there. He turned the big quill questioningly, and again his awed eyes swept the sky.”

No long black wing feather fell for Clare. She smiled at the use of the word “ether.” No one uses that anymore. When she got home, after a bit of scouring through her bookshelves, she located the book. She’d never been able to give it up. It was at the heart of her relationship to the world, not an artifact but a story.

The crucial passage was a few pages into the third chapter with a “margin decoration” by E. Stetson Crawford: a long wing feather obviously drawn from life. She recognized the artist’s name -- she hadn’t as a child -- and knew he was from that Parisian turn-of-the-century Beaux Arts school that guided so many fine Western visions. In the States he’d attended MacMonnies’ school (which partly belonged to Whistler) and she could picture in her mind the several fine Native American monumental bronzes done by MacMonnies. She recognized now that the marginal “drawings” were etchings.

Both Stratton-Porter and Crawford were part of an Edwardian time that saturated everything with Victorian Christianity, believing that this was the true way to see the world. Industrialism was just dawning, sending the great railroads stretching across the continent in the same way that the steamships went out across the oceans. Writers and artists had convenient access to a new world and because they met the Plains Indians with the romantic optimism that assumed surely nature was God’s work, gently forced all the Indian religious assumptions into Christian categories. Star Boy became Jesus and the earth became “Our Mother.”

Clare had forgotten Freckles’ Irish Catholic fantasy that the long black feather came from the wing of a wicked angel, battering at the Gates of Heaven for mercy. Universalism was sweeping the land, the idea that God -- in the end -- would forgive everyone, even Lucifer. All was optimism and security, if only a few wicked people could be brought under control.