BOTTOM DWELLERS IN A SEA OF AIR

On my “guides to” shelf, next to the ones about flowers, birds, mammals, or trees are a couple of guides to clouds.  The sheet of stamps about clouds pictured above is tucked into the pages of one of them so I can use it for a bookmark, but sometimes I just take it out to look at it closely.  

This time of year the big picture window in my kitchen, the one that faces east, is a skyshow.  Of course, in Montana every day outdoors is a skyscape, a great theatre of extraterrestrial forces.   Water vapor under the influence of temperature, wind, and light is a fabulous medium for sculpture.  Look, a bunny!  Look, Julius Caesar!  Eastward is the prairie, a long descending decline towards the Mississippi River which drained what was once a shallow inland sea.  That was an inconceivably long time ago.  What I see every day in spring is the winter’s moisture, locked into ice for months, now rising from land heated by the longer and more direct energy from the sun.  It builds into massive cumuli, looking solid as marble palaces.  At first the bottoms are relatively pale, but as the snow melts the bottoms turn darker and darker until they are purple and sail like dark-hulled ships with small dark tenders in front of them.

This morning was an ebbtide dawn on a long sand beach, the darker strata of cloud making narrow strips between the shining lagoons and tide pools of light -- all without much color, just black and white photography of exquisite resolution.   Other mornings the eastern sky is a riot of color, a bed of sea anemones in coral, lemon, and even lime, but that’s mostly after the fields are being burned so that smoke filters the light.  Much of the attention to the sky comes from the wish to predict the weather so as to plan things like field burning.  Every summer someone miscalculates so that the fire runs away, leaving black patches at the least and possibly burning a structure.  The planet wants to burn, wants the volatile oxygen to make living things into carbon.

In winter the clouds are frozen, dropping to the ground as snow.  In spring the clouds are frozen, the snow starting to drop, but meeting updrafts from the warming earth and rising again, but freezing again and rising again and freezing again, until it is pellets of hail or even jagged chunks of ice capable of crashing through canopies and patio covers, pounding dents into cars, and even killing chickens.  But that’s a little later, more like June.

In the nineteenth century when it seemed every man of leisure was caught up in the task of sorting and naming natural phenomena, the clouds did not escape and the names devised then by Luke Howard, a quiet young Quaker, have prevailed over many more inventive and fantastic ideas.  His breakthrough realization came from simply being observant and reflective.  Instead of letting his imagination run away with fantastic metaphors or on the other hand simply assuming all the clouds were up there in the sky like bumper cars at a carnival, all sliding around on some ethereal plane of glass, he observed that they passed in front of each other and that the shapes could be divided into categories.  

Then the balloonists began to realize that the sky is in layers, each with its own characteristics and behaviors.  Height breaks clouds into four families. A are high clouds, having a lower level of 20,000 feet above the ground. B are middle clouds with a base of 6,500 feet, C are low clouds with a base near the Earth’s surface, D are clouds of vertical development, having an average lower level of 1,500 feet and an upper level of high clouds.  Bicoastal commuters far above the clouds see how high those cumulus thunderheads can tower.  Those who winter on the prairie know how the January overcast can practically rest on the housetops.  

In spring and fall, the skies are complex: high ice putting a ring around the sun even as wind grinds lower clouds into lenses like flying saucers at the same time that in between a Chinook wind arch forms to the west where the jet stream (Airliners love to hitch a ride on that!  What a fuel saver!) pushes everything back to reveal a blue hem of sky.  And then we see a “storm shelf” (in winter a snow shelf, in summer a rain shelf) of clouds like a second range of mountains rising on the shoulders of the Rockies, waiting to drop enough watery weight to cross over.

For some reason I haven’t  figured out yet, there is often a break in the overcast on the eastern horizon, so that there is a dawn interval of sun when the cats sit together in the east window to watch the birds begin to move around.  Sometimes it is on the western horizon so a warm sunset gleam shoots light low across my front room, falling across my book and dazzling my eyes.

Some of the air wants to rise and some of the air wants to sink.  The collision is electrical, literally, and the friction makes thunder and lightning that recharges the prairie with nitrogen.  In the early days the lightning strike fires mixed with those set by Blackfeet and some say that’s how they got their name: walking across the charred grass before the new shoots came up through it.  They expressed their deep respect for lightning with Thunder Pipe Bundle ceremonies which gather the spirits of animals to protect their tipi poles from becoming lightning rods.

People who fuss all the time about possible contradictions between science and religion, assigning one to the left brain and the other to the right brain, would do well to consider using their eyes and skins and ears to participate in the universe by awareness of the skies, an ocean of air in which we are bottom-dwellers.  Temperature, humidity, wind and electricity are parts of our own bodies and we react as much as any other creatures.  Even our hair responds to the weather.  Both God and electricity can make your hair stand on end.

SPRING FLOWERS ARE AN UNDERGROUND EVENT

One of the first signs of spring in Valier is when the librarian sets out a mug-sized bouquet of “crocus” on her counter.  Her sweetheart is out on the land and brings her the first wild and furry lavender chalices he finds.  They bloom at approximately Easter and so are called by some “pasqueflowers.”  That’s the way they show up in my “Field Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers” by John J. Craighead, Frank C. Craighead Jr. and Ray J. Davis.  Yes, the same family so involved in grizzlies.

Grizzlies take a big interest in early blooming prairie and foothill flowers because in order for them to be “up” so early and so actively, they store energy from last summer in corms, rhizomes, tubers, and bulbs, all of which can be sorted by their formal characteristics once you dig them up.  Since these little storage systems are underground (spring is an underground, even subversive, development on the prairie) grizzlies and people need to know where to dig -- it is their pretty flowers that betray them.  Those big harrowing claws on a grizz are  not for killing so much as for digging.  The most sacred object at a truly traditional Sun Dance Medicine Lodge is the digging stick of the Holy Woman.  Gardeners know how attached they can become to a tool, even if it is an antler or fire-hardened wooden stick worn to fit the hand.

It is curiously true that both the Greeks and the Blackfeet had a Persephone story, except that in the Blackfeet version, their “Persephone” is taken up into the sky and there is no mention of Demeter.  Instead, the woman is cautioned not to dig up a very big turnip.  She does and through the hole in the sky she sees home and becomes almost fatally homesick.  No mother or lover comes for her, but her husband finally lets her go home with her by-now baby boy.  She is cautioned not to let the baby touch the earth.  He does and vanishes, just like Euridice when Orpheus looks back.  Mythologists puzzle over these variants/similarities.

Another bulb with mythology attached is the bitterroot, which is an essential ingredient for the ceremonial soup served at Blackfeet Bundle Openings.  This flower comes up on the western side of the Rockies so the Blackfeet had to trade for it.  The west side tribes have a story of a group who nearly died of starvation until a woman showed them where to dig for bitterroot by looking for the small tufts of leaves before the flashy flower comes.  On the east side the same sort of woman finds the little buffalo stones capable of calling the real animals.  Both are about low-status people who know how to feed the group.  Compare with the Christian story of loaves and fishes or possibly, in the Old Testament, manna.

Pasqueflower is a member of the buttercup family and mildly irritating or toxic, as are other buttercups.  Bitterroot belongs to the purslane family, along with Spring Beauty never known to be toxic and sometimes called Groundnut.  Raw, the corms are supposed to taste like radishes, but baked supposed to taste like baked potato.  (Compare to exotic meats always “tasting like chicken.”)  Camas is a lily and a major food which the Indians called “quamash.”  A beautiful purple flower distinguishes it from “death camas” which looks very similar though it has a small pale flower.  Great meadows of camas attracted the early tribes to come dig and and bake them in holes heated with stones from fires.  The results were made into cakes and Lewis and Clark were grateful to get these.  It was the traditional expedition to get camas that stirred up the attack and pursuit of Chief Joseph across Montana.

The biscuitroot family, which looks like little umbrellas (umbelliferae), is also made into cakes and Lewis and Clark recorded that they were happy to trade beads, buttons and trinkets in order to get them.   Yampa is another wild version with a good food reputation. Other biscuitroots modern folks would recognize by their similar smell are dill, anise, carrot, myrrh, parsnip, parsley, caraway and celery.  

The yellow Glacier Lily, the Frittilaries, and the Shooting Stars are the most charming of early blooming wildflowers, responding to the day length and the availability of water, so that they start blooming when the prairie is thawing and then bloom in succession up the foothills and into the alpine locations for the tourists to capture in June.  Glacier lilies, which are found in this guide as “dogtooth violets,” are bright yellow and have petals curled back with a flourish.  There is a variation with spots on it, predictably called a “Leopard Lily.”  Fritillaries hang down like bells.  At first they are yellow, but as they age, they turn red.  Shooting stars or Birdbills look as though their reddish-purple petals had been pushed back by a high wind so that their center does indeed look like the beak of a bird about to peck the earth.

Versions of these plants exist in their ecological variations over much of the planet and some have been domesticated for gardens, which always means they are encouraged to be bigger, brighter, fancier and rarely eaten.  Not every bulb is edible, as starving people in war zones have discovered the hard way by eating daffodil bulbs, which are poisonous.  Knowing plants’ histories, their likely choice of location, their seasonal schedule, is a way of being in the world, becoming part of it all.

If you get someone who knows the local botany to walk over the prairie with you, you will learn names for these spring wildflowers that are local, an ecology in themselves tracing the fancies and memories of the people who live there. Glacier Lilies, called that here mostly because there are sheets of them in Glacier Park, are also called Fawnlilies by the sentimental and Adders-tongue by the suspicious.  Fritillaries are sometimes simply “yellow bells.”  Camas is “Swamp Sego” because it is closely related to Sego Lilies, which are also a good food source, especially used by the Utah Mormons when they first arrived and times were lean.  The inedible but pious Pasque flower has many names:  Prairie Anemone, Windflower, Blue Tulip, American Pulsatilla, and, of course, around here we just call them “Crocus.”

THE SKY HAS FALLEN

This is a quote from “Sightings” which is an e-mailing that comes twice a week from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School where I earned an MA in Religious Studies.  

There are  “varying classes of college-level teachers: tenured and tenure-track; full-time but non-tenure track (such as visiting professors, lecturers, and instructors); adjunct faculty, who are generally paid on a per-course basis; and graduate student teachers and teaching assistants whose teaching is often bound up with financial aid or other program requirements.

“Yet contingent faculty—all those off the tenure track—make up approximately 70% of instructors in American higher education. Of those who hold terminal degrees, adjuncts are often worst off: pay generally hovers around $2,000-$3,000 per course, although some large, wealthy institutions may pay as much as $7,000, and some smaller or public schools pay even less.

“In order to make ends meet, most adjuncts teach at multiple institutions. They earn no benefits, have no job security, and often lack access to other perks that full-time academic employment can bring: eligibility for promotion; an institutional home (avoiding the dreaded “independent scholar” label); budgets for books, conference fees and travel, and professional organization memberships; the ability to sponsor events and conferences; uninterrupted library privileges; a voice in university and departmental affairs; and even office space and supplies. All of this affects their ability to teach, mentor, and research.

“Adjunct positions are disposable, not temp-to-hire; but precisely for that reason, their numbers are increasing: some foresee the day when tenured faculty are primarily administrators for departments consisting entirely of adjuncts.

“. . . the myth of academic meritocracy—including the promise of decently-paid, full-time jobs to all deserving Ph.D.’s—continues to thrive, despite extensive documentation to the contrary. This means, in turn, that after devoting five, ten, even fifteen years or longer to the study of religion, a pursuit they both believe and are told is critical to understanding the contemporary world, even graduates of top schools realize too late how little chance they have of earning a decent livelihood and making a contribution to their chosen field. They are powerless and stuck, exploited by the ones who hold the keys to their professional future.”

So it has happened: the death of the university.  This is not a place corrupted by athletics, booze and carelessness.  This is a vital part of a major respected institution, hollowed out and collapsing -- just like publishing, journalism, financial institutions, political parties, the military, all the arrangements of Western-style humanities -- including third world clients.  Professionals were supposed to be the jobs that stayed, after all the plumbers and welders and other physical jobs had collapsed.  White collar institutions were supposed to be refuges.  High status intellectuals thought they had it made.

Institutions want renewal but without change.  Humanities, as they have been understood, have been linked in an Anglo-Victorian way to the middle class, to prosperity, to status, to decency and respectability.  But that’s suffocating, conformist, zombiliferating.  No wonder we thinking about the Fifties. This is why so much innovation -- whether exploration of sexuality, of black or indigenous culture, of profane or ghetto rhetoric, from substance abuse culture or from disease or rebellion -- has been excluded from the mainstream.  Yet these same forces are the source of new energy.  They sneak back through the music, the same way that religion sneaks back through “spirituality.”  But this time they sneak back with no money -- only the love.  And the kids go to tech school.  

Official humanities have become an exercise in maintaining the status quo, even if that means gradually de-oxygenating the whole culture. Middle-class bias is always to replicate what has gone before: the canon, the hierarchy.  If there is innovation at all, it often comes from looking at high-status people and trying to do what they do, whether it’s relevant or not. Lately the variation has been “crowd-sourcing” everything: what are your friends reading, what movies are they watching, what are they eating?  Here in ag country, everyone is keeping an eye on the next farmer over. Salesmen who pitch “everyone is . . .” will be successful.  It’s a high school sort of way to be.  Of course, the freshman in college goes out of his way to do the opposite and sometimes generates ideas that last a lifetime.  More often he finds out why the opposite doesn’t work and ends the search for alternatives right there.  And soon he may discover the social safety nets of Medicare and Social Security have been removed, because they were in the way.  Labor unions, employer paid health care, unemployment compensation, worker's compensation -- they're bad for business.

Nassim Taleb has been telling us and telling us.  Untested complex assumptions lead to fragility.  If you can’t produce proof, if you have no safeguards, if you have done no testing and considered no consequences, much less alternatives, it's "fragile."  Too much is context-dependent and when that context (maybe the weather) is changing radically, whatever is contingent on it is ended.  Right now in many ways the industrial revolution is withdrawing, partly because raw resources are either running out or being managed by wised-up wogs who want full value or so out-sourced that we’re doing what every army learns not to do: stretching our supply column too far.

The move to understanding and high culture that the internet was supposed to give us has turned out to be kids sexting.  I guess we have to get it out of our systems.  But I was surprised by the reaction to yesterday’s blog about the international high tension lines, which seemed to echo the determination of the oil industry people to truck loads so excessively large that they have to travel at night on back roads.  People seemed to feel that juggernauts crushing through our small roadside lives, in spite of every legal obstacle, or sucking the very wind out of the sails of our small boats, were not just metaphorical.  Aad, the Rotterdam poet, sent me illustrations from Chicken Little storybooks.

The sky IS falling.  No, the sky already fell on Japan, in the Gulf of Mexico, in coal mines -- impossibly.  The sky is always falling -- it lies around us in translucent jagged chunks like azure Jello rubble.  We have to step over it to get anywhere.  You know what was behind the sky up there all along?  The stars.  What did you think?  And pretty soon the sun will come up again and melt all these sky shards.  Expect floods.  Then renewal.

A REALLY WINDY ISSUE

Just before I moved back to Montana in 1999 from Portland, Oregon, I was working as the clerical support for the City of Portland Site Development department.  One of the city’s struggles was with the concept of “takings,” which was just catching fire.  If the team required that a wetland behind a projected supermarket be retained to catch run-off, the supermarket would declare that the city was depriving them of the potential profit from building on that area and demand payment for it.  It was sort of the reverse of condemnation -- that is, usually land-owners are paid when land is taken by the larger jurisdiction for the greater good of the community.  But this was part of the good design for the site.  It was such a new idea that when Brian Kahn (an environmental lawyer) and I talked about it, he didn’t believe it.  Now he does.

Larry Salois was my UPS man -- he has retired just now, partly to keep track of his lawsuit against the Montana-Alberta Tie Line -- high tension electricity lines across his mother’s property.  (She’s has Alzheimers and is in a nursing home.)  When he went out to see where the survey line ran, it crossed a wetland and was placed where it would disturb tipi rings, an ancient camping spot.  Both of these things, according to the negotiated rules, were not supposed to happen.  Larry was willing to accept a contract for the tie-line to cross his mother’s property, but he wanted it moved over -- not a lot, but enough to miss the wetland and tipi rings.  The company refused, afraid of having to redesign and jigger its line so much that they would lose some of their profit.

Larry is Metis (that’s why the French name -- he’s descended from the Red River people who come from a mix of Indians and early trappers) and he’s a bug for history, so we’ve talked more than just saying, “Sign here!”  I’ve taught relatives of his and worked with others.  MATL was operating under the assumption that 1) he was just a dumb Indian and 2) what he wanted was money.  Their assumptions were big city white guy attitudes.  This has been underlined by a letter in the Great Falls Tribune rebuking Hertha Lund, the lawyer who won the case against MATL that brought them to a standstill by blocking public condemnation of the land.  The tone of it was patronizing and irrelevant, calling her down for being “rude” to such important people as them.

When I left Montana the last time in 1991, Montana Power was a stable organization, the pride of the state.  Then they got computer fever and like gold strikers sold off much of the company in order to chase the cyber-bubble.  At the same time the power industry quietly de-regulated.  If they attracted any attention, they sent up a great flurry of protestations that they were only trying to make the state “business friendly.”  Yeeeaaaas.  VERY friendly.

So here I sit in Valier, within eyeshot of a huge wind farm, while Northwestern has not maintained or modernized the major transformers that feed the town well enough to keep them from bursting into flames.  I kid my cousin that my house is one step above camping out and she, having visited me, says,  “And that’s when your electricity works!”  Brown-outs are common, some of them bad enough to burn out refrigerators, furnace motors, computers and the fancy embroidery machines at Pony Impressions.  Insurance was balky.  

So do I really care whether Calgary or California needs more electricity?  Not a whole lot.  Let them conserve.  California, if you care to remember, is where some electrical plants were taken off line for “maintenance” in order to jack up prices during a heat wave that brought in a bonanza of AC use.  Kind of hard on some of the older folks down there.

Anyway, back to Montana.  Since “the dumb Indian who was just holding out for more money” turned out to be a shrewd Metis with a tough female lawyer -- not quite the thin edge of the wedge the big boys had hoped to intimidate as an example -- someone with good connections in the legislature thought of just passing a law giving MATL the right to seize land using condemnation law.  By this time the landowners further to the south and in other states had begun to figure it all out.  There is now a specialty law company that takes these cases, increasing expertise and resources to say nothing of public attention.

http://www.nationaleminentdomain.com/2011/04/articles/national-eminent-domain/montana-alberta-tie-line-files-brief/

One of the most interesting aspects of MATL is that it is international  and its owners are at least in part not American.  So the benefit of the eminent domain would be for a private corporation in a foreign country.  An international corporation is trumping state and nation, overriding local benefit.  They are trying to set a precedent for several transmission lines, all pointed out of state, that will make the company “too big to fail” or regulate.

Here’s a quote from Brad Molnar, a four-term Montana legislator and currently the vice chairman of the Montana Public Service Commission:

“If half of the capacity on MSTI  and Path 8 [other tie-lines] is filled with our current supplies we will be about 50 percent short to fill the needs of NorthWestern Energy’s residential customers and our industrial base. To replace this with a new 1000MW coal plant (like that is possible) would be in excess of $1 billion. And another billion dollars for new transmission lines to serve us as our current capacity would be exhausted shipping our legacy power out of state. Treason would look different in what respect?”

Strange world when an international corporation can come into Montana, not to dig up our copper, but to “take” our wind (originally touted as a way of sparing us from air pollution) in order to necessitate that our coal be dug up for a “takings” that will be our very breath.  Of course, the time is ripe.  People are worried about the economy.  In small towns people think,  “Hey!  If a bunch of wind farm guys move in here, I could probably rent my mother-in-law’s house to them now that she’s gone.  I could get the kids through college with that little extra boost.”  No one has a clear plan for twenty years in the future when the turbines begin to fail.

Here’s a quote from the Billings Gazette for April 5:

“Senate Republicans are floating a new proposal to break the legislative logjam over landowner rights vs. property condemnation powers of transmission line developers — but so far they’re not finding any takers.

“A House member who’s been pushing for stronger landowner rights said Tuesday that the proposal has some positive elements but still gives a green light to the Montana Alberta Tie Limited (MATL) power line to condemn property along its north-central Montana route.

“‘I’m not interested in the Legislature resolving the court suit,’ said Rep. Kelly Flynn, R-Townsend, referring to a legal battle blocking MATL’s condemnation power.

“‘I think that would be best decided by the Montana Supreme Court.’”

Take THAT, Montana-Alberta Tie Line, international corporation!

ARTISAN MANUFACTURING

Some memories from Paul Wheeler, who grew up around here (Valier & Browning) and now lives in Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho.  Or close.

• * * 

We used to have a great old machine shop here, Meeker's machine shop. Bob's dad started it way back. Bob when I first met him must have been in his 60's. The place fascinated me from the very beginning. Everything ran off one electric motor that ran a series of drive shafts hanging all over the shop. Leather drive belts and series of pulley's ran all the equipment in the whole shop. Lathes, benders, grinders, drills, hammers, and even bellows for their forge. I've always had a tough time with conventional tools breaking, so over the years Bob made most of the oversized ones I still use today. 

The first time I went in there  I was waiting around for something to be done and noticed an outhouse looking shack at the side of the building with one of those poster signs from a gas station bragging about the cleanest restrooms in town. Having to take a leak, I opened the door to see a clay pipe standing up from the floor about stool height, encrusted with petrified crap and used toilet paper wads. I bucked up and took a quick look into the recesses to see that it was just a direct route to the city sewer. 

Might have been a relatively modern town outside, but inside Meeker's it was as if you went back 75 years or more. Heated with their homemade wood stoves and any waste oil they could come up with, most of my tools and repairs were paid for in wood. Their prices were about 75 years old too. As cheap as I am, they'd always embarrass me with their low prices and I always paid way more than what they asked for their work. One job in particular I recall they'd spent several hours on a trailer hitch for me and he wanted $4.50. What? For materials? Nope, for the whole job! The only time their prices were realistic was if you were buying new metal and that was only because they had to keep up with replacement costs. They also had the best stocked nut and bolt selection in the country. Every odd piece of hardware you could ever imagine was neatly tucked away in their bolt room. If they didn't have it, they could make it.

Bob tried to retire in his mid 70's. Turned the place over to Wayne, his son in law who didn't do anything to modernize the place, but did start introducing more realistic prices. Bob never retired though, kept showing up for work every day because he just couldn't trust his old lathe to any one else. After Bob died, the place did too. I petitioned everyone in town to keep the place intact as a sort of adjunct to the museum, but the place was considered an eyesore so Wayne gave in and had an auction to sell all the contents. The building really was falling down. All made from local block. The mortar joints were missing and major cracks everywhere. Once all the hardware was emptied out the place just fell down.

The only thing left anymore are much sought after Meeker stoves and furnaces which folks love and use and are loathe to part with. I've got several of them scattered around and all in use still. I keep my eye out for them and snag 'em when I can. I kick myself for letting that place go without recording photos of it. It was an amazing place.

* * *

I like old shoe shops too. Worked for the fella that had the last one here for a bit. Not in the shop, but he got in some of my baby moccasins for repair and tracked me down to repair them, along with other moccasins folks brought in because they required hand stitching which he hated to do. Karl just died here a year or so ago, though he's been out of the cobbler business for probably 20 years. Interesting feller. Karl was a gruff old feller at first. In the early days, pretty secretive because he was a former Hitler youth and involved with the Nazi Party. I suppose he thought folks would judge him harshly for that. 

We were neighbors briefly when I rented a cabin next to his place after I got back from Hanford in 1980 or so. He loved my chicken eggs, so we got along pretty well after that. Once he invited me into his place and started talking wistfully about Germany and family and I finally convinced him to drag out pictures. He brought out an album full of photos before and during the war, in good times. Turned out he was also a violin player at the time and garnered respect and a better living through his music. He still had his violin in the closet but I never heard him play it.

Great Falls used to have all kinds of shoe shops. I was always bad about walking down the heels of my shoes so my mom made me get taps on them. Dang I hated those things!

I need to add Hanford to my stepping stones because it keeps coming up as a major way point in my life. When I quit there and had a bit of money in my pockets I stopped in Spokane and got measured for my first pair of White's boots that I'd always lusted after but couldn't afford. It was still downtown in those days at what I think was their original location. The place reeked of old-world craftsmen. As soon as the salesman saw the current boots I was wearing with the well-worn outside edge, he said they'd fix it so that never happened again or they would adjust them when they rebuilt them. 

When I was done he gave me a little tour of the back room to watch folks busily constructing boots. Came home to anxiously await my new boots which took a few weeks to arrive. When they came I put them on, wore them to work, got home at the end of the day and maybe for the first time in my life, forgot to take my boots off. No break in period, no sore feet. The only uncomfortability was getting used to their patented high arch, but what it really did was let your foot keep it's natural bend instead of squashing it in there. What they did to keep the heels and soles from wearing down on the outside was just offset the heel to the outside. My boots always wore evenly after that. Such a simple but elegant solution!

About a year after getting those boots I blew out the side of one planting trees. They were all I had so I had to make do. I went back to the rig, took a screwdriver and "borrowed" some screws from a door panel and screwed the uppers back on the  heel and sole. It worked and got me through the job. Then I sent them back to White's for rebuilding. They wrote me back, telling me that they weren't rebuildable because of my field repairs. I was outraged and sent them back a nasty letter with their own ad and pictures of boots that looked like they'd been chewed up and shat out the hind end of a grizzly, before and after rebuilding. Must have hit a nerve because a few weeks later I got a surprise box with a brand new pair of boots in it and a nice note to in the future, leave the repairs to them. Made a lifetime customer out of me right there!

THE DEEPEST KEY TO WRITING

Most of the advice to writers is about sales.  Much commotion about whether to go with e-publishing or paper.  Or maybe technical advice about grammar or plot or characters.  Or advice about how to begin, and hints about how to organize your desk.  All of it is irrelevant and distracting.  None of it is at the heart of REAL writing, which to my way of thinking includes poetry, video, songs -- maybe all of the arts.  Lately there has been talk about those who “can’t help but write,” as though that were another one of those states of being “chosen,” as though it were inborn, though plenty of people are illiterate all their lives, chosen or not.  Which not does prevent them from skillfully telling stories many ways.  We are taught in our schools that to “be a writer” is to learn certain categories and techniques, and then along comes someone who doesn’t but has a powerful message, effectively conveyed.  Or a new media is devised that makes print obsolete.

To what level must a writer go to get upstream of writing style, media, even literacy?  All the rules and assumptions about “writing” change with society, change with the kinds of media, change with the economy and so on.  Success is so entwined with complexity -- much of it entirely out of the control of the writer -- that it is impossible to predict quality by looking at the publisher or the sales numbers.  What is the most basic possible thing to know about writing?  What do REAL writers REALLY do?

The word I’m going to use here is French.  (Who am I to break with tradition?).  It is “donnée” which my French dictionary says is “data” (forget that) or the concept at the heart of a fiction, like a novel.  What I’m after is the concept-kernel, the irreducible issue that is addressed and explored.  In the greatest writers -- I will propose -- the insolubility of that little key quandary  is what drives the writing and makes it significant.  It is the donnée that both powers the writing and governs its quality by demanding eloquence, whether in word or image.

Of course we now know that brains work in ways that have evolved from aeons ago, genes built on genes so that when we write we use things left from reptiles, then from mammals, and then from proto-humans.  Our brains have a chemical basis that varies from one moment to the next.  They have an architecture that is shaped from birth, setting up the categories and processes that control our thinking forever afterwards, no matter how much psychoanalysis we have.  Partly a matter of environment and partly a matter of how our culture may interpret that environment in the interests of survival, we see everything in those terms, that innate grammar, that learned alphabet.

The inspired (obsessed) artist finds something insoluble, unsolvable, a koan (Buddhist is as good as French) , and circles it the rest of life.  Many of these deep puzzles are from very early life, issues of intimacy, desire, boundaries, identity.  Sometimes they become the core of something more formal and shared: nationality, education, marriage.  The deeper and more intense they are, the more they are able to upset others who have come to different conclusions, so that opposition and censorship quickly suppress any expression “in print.”  But if one is clever about metaphor or goes to a slightly more metaphorical art form, like dance, the same conclusions can be acted out without interference so long as certain arbitrary rules (which generally miss the point) are obeyed, like avoiding nudity.  The strange truth is that some iconoclastic “koans” are often in conventional terms, in plain sight, seen but not recognized.  Children with HIV?

It takes courage to put oneself “out there” in an art form because that is exposure to attack, but then gradually sometimes the attack becomes a conversion.  Mapplethorpe’s photography outwitted prudes by showing the flesh of flowers, then going to the flesh of men, until enough people saw the beauty of it to oppose and push away the anxious people worrying about the corrupting influence of nakedness.  

Lesbians wishing to write about their relationships have created a genre called “Kirk/Spock” because they disguise two women in the “personas” of the Star Trek characters.  Star Trek’s premise is the strangeness of the behavior of other cultures and a taboo on criticizing it.  I am thinking that sincere “porn” or erotica is on the way out because the forbiddenness of it, the uproar aspect, the subversiveness, is part of the kernel being expressed.  At a nudist club, no one cares that you are naked.  Sex is so commercialized that it means much less than it could.

But there are even more dangerous ideas, sometimes religious and sometimes about being a human being.  There is no refuge from the goofy ideas of religion by becoming a humanist, because the goofiness just follows into that domain.  If we could recognize the goofiness, maybe there would be fewer wars but wars are part of our goofiness, too.  For instance, this weird way we are fighting wars now -- not in self-defense but in self-defined “justice” that is a way of covering up for covert goals of corporations rather than nations -- is killing and maiming a generation of young men as well as driving the most qualified and competent officers out of the military.  Some of them are writing, pitting their love of the strategy, potency and teamwork of battles against the absurdity of trying to force a faraway people in an entirely different sort of place to be like us.

We need a book about teaching that tells the truth, right down at the central confrontation between a formed person and an unformed person, each educating the other.  More like discipleship.  Intimate.  Maybe erotic in the sense that ideas can be deeply exciting, in the sense that we penetrate one another.  Sexual language when dealing with generational difference is still one of the major taboos.  The politically correct shackles need to be struck off.  There is a lot of work to do.

Warm spring sun is shining today which makes me want to clean house.  I’ve saved so much in case it turned out to be important.  Now maybe carefully defining my donnée will clarify what to discard.  What IS my donnée?  I will only tell a few of you.  The rest of you must read what I write and figure it out from there.  I have no choice about writing it.

CONSOLING THE WINDIGO

Brace yourself.  This is a Sunday sermon.

When I listen to the email and listserv issues and blogs and e-articles, etc., I hear inconsolability -- the belief that there is no comfort or relief for loss and suffering.  The only palliative seems to be domesticity but it is never enough.  Life is acquisition, remodeling, fortification.  Dominated by prescriptive advertising.  This is pretty understandable when people are raising children, which is much of the point of domesticity. -- making a nest for ducklings.  I remember a hippie friend who wasn’t afraid of anyone until she had a baby and shocked herself with her sudden fear of street people rooting in dumpsters.

But I don’t understand the constant seeking out of trouble to watch, the active compiling of disasters around the world (some human and others geological), the hunger for photos of explosions and dead bodies, the greed for the details of rape and torture -- all of it replicated as realistically as possible in CGI movies about Zombies or CSI shows about murder.  It’s like the old Calvinist fascination with hell, which still continues in some quarters.  I think it comes from a denial of the dark side, an effort to encapsulate it as the Devil or Evil or objects of disgust so as to get it named, confined and excluded -- esp. from inside ourselves.

Timothy Morton’s thoughts about “dark ecology” seems to be partly focused on mystery -- the impossibility of a human mind big enough to encompass the universe, with the markers being black holes and “dark matter” -- and partly on the idea that the muck, infection, slime, excretion, rot and death we so reject and label (in Martha Nussbaum’s word) “disgusting” is the source of raw material and reciprocity.  That is, one bug’s rejected excretion is the next creature’s wine.  So part of the darkness is fearing the unknown and part of it is believing we are shit.

No wonder we’re inconsolable.  No wonder we think someone might try to murder us.  It’s as though we felt existence must be held open around us by our constant effort and achievement or it will close on us as though we were three dimensional figures in a two dimensional world.  Constant vigilance seems necessary but it wears us out, so we invent burglar alarms but they get triggered all the time which defeats the feeling of safety we want.  We feel ourselves in opposition to this world, superstitiously trying to be “good enough” to get to the next world which is imagined as effortless.

I think the remedy for our inconsolability is in participation and acceptance.  Easier said than done, esp. when one’s culture designates one for exclusion and stigma.  Stupid.  Gay.  Old.  Foreign.  Criminal.  Poor.  Sick.  Crippled.  Indigenous.  The trouble with religions based on books (Bible, Torah, Koran) is that there’s too much reading and not enough cultivating the gardens.  (Of course, this is my personal shortcoming so I take it seriously.)  I’m not saying we need the vegetables from the garden.  I’m saying it will do us good to get out there and dig around in the worms and compost,  Darwin’s tangled bank all mucky and weedy.  The word “HUMan” comes from humus, fertile soil.

“Dark ecology” is actually far darker than dirt.  I’ve rejected the common idea of evil for a long time, not because I don’t think there is any but because I think it is a human construct, a concept created by humans that only applies to humans both in terms of motives and in terms of consequent suffering and destruction.  The Japanese earthquake and consequent tsunami were not evil.  The nuclear reactors were the result of human evil -- failure to recognize, over-optimism, denial, false statistics and engineering.  The Japanese as a category are not evil.  The suffering is human.

The real darkness is that every creation is also destruction and it doesn’t care.  Jesus doesn’t love you.  Jesus is imaginary, only a concept.  (A good and useful one, but human-invented.)  The same with God.  We only have each other and sometimes not even that much.   But personal existence, attached to the world and each other as we get, doesn’t matter.  One winks out, another is conceived.

The curse and blessing of being human, the key inconsolability, is that we know this.  When we give up our denial and fear, we know very well that everyone dies.  All living things die.  Animal or vegetable, we go into each other as fuel and emerge as shit.  Once a person accepts that, dealing with the facts and hallucinations of our lives becomes much easier.  We only have to do as well as we can.  It will take some testing to see what that is, so we must tolerate our mistakes or it won't be a real test of boundaries, which are found by exceeding them.

We cannot comprehend the cosmos, but we can try.  We can imagine that there might be a color greener than green, but we can’t SEE it.  We can invent the premises of eternity or infinity, but we cannot perceive them.  So maybe this is the source of our fascination with evil and suffering:  trying to perceive the imperceptible.  What is the tortured person really feeling?  What is the torturer is feeling?  What makes a person able to do such things?  I would say it’s not the evil itself but the denial that such an act is evil and the refusal of the empathy that would force them to share the suffering.  

The same denial and refusal are what prevent consolation.  In our vigilance against what might kill us, we also wall out what might renew us.  This is not a new idea.  It’s in stories over and over and over from every culture.  I’ll tell you one I heard from Joseph Bruchac, a wise and generous Native American writer.  I heard it from him personally when he told it in an assembly in Browning, where most people are Blackfeet.  It was about a horrible Iroquois monster, a windigo which is a starvation cannibal embodying the struggle with winter hunger.  It was wailing and staggering across a frozen lake, looking for people to eat.  A young woman, unafraid, went to him, took his hand, and said, “Come with me, grandfather.”  She took him to her lodge and fed him hot soup.  Shrieking with the pain of it, he shrank down from his monstrous form and did indeed become just an old man again.

She was able to do this because of her confidence in what was right (feed the hungry) and her willingness to die in the effort.  People like her are doing this right now all over the world.  They are living consolation.

FITTINGNESS AS A MORAL GUIDE

Martha Nussbaum’s moral systematic for society is very helpful, particularly her boldness in confronting “disgust.”  I thought that before her book “From Disgust to Humanity” arrives, it would be a good thing to write out my own principles so I would be clear about what they are.  

The main difference is that I’m not doing “library ethics” based on reading the classics or anything since.  Rather I’m turning to nature for my patterns.  And yet I see the key importance of the relationship between the human individual and the community, which is so often the subject of classic stories that try to suggest solutions or at least identify the tragic losses.  I have no lists to offer, no commandments.  I will borrow a principle but tweak it.

The principle is Darwin’s survival of the fittest, but my tweak is that “fittingness” is the proper word.  The key to survival is not being able to overpower everything else but being able to fit in to everything else, to find a niche.  If that niche should be as a slave, and you hate it and are in pain, then that’s not fitting.  If you insist on being a slave and the culture has no use for slaves, no place for them, that’s not fitting.  I'm moving from a hierarchical understanding of Darwin (sooooo Victorian) to an ecological view, a systems view, because it fits what I know about the world.

The primary “document” is everything: the world around one.  But there IS writing and a body of thought that takes this point of view.  It is my attraction to deleuzeguattarian thought, to organizational design back in my pre-ministry days, and to the Bioneers on the radio.  (www.bioneers.org)  Nassim Taleb’s struggle to interpret the world -- and how one should act in it --  is useful, particularly his example of joyfulness as he goes.

The required activity is not self-questioning, nor is it a matter of campaigning to change the world.  Rather it is necessary (and often delightful) to be in “conversation” between oneself and the world, always remembering that oneself is also a constantly changing process, a system full of feedbacks, deadends and adventures.  The goal is not to settle into some kind of stasis but to continue growing, seeking, risking.

This is a major change of point of view for me, a conversion, since as a child my whole being was determined to prevent change, to keep my home the same, because anything else felt far too dangerous.  The whole definition of home was security and that meant consistency.  So part of growing up has been committing to risk, to know that part of me might be lost at any moment -- maybe ALL of me -- and to be willing to accept that.  This might be something like the Buddhist rejection of attachment, but I don't reject attachment to creation or other people, painful as it may be.  Neither do I make it my center, though I once did.  I suppose I’m passive in some ways -- but I don’t allow others to attach to me either. The best comfort has been the conviction (which might be wrong, but it’s a happy belief and sometimes demonstrable) that no change is really lost.  Time is a place and what has once existed is always there someplace, even if only accessed through memory.  

Another necessary acceptance is that of muck, darkness, perversity, pain, slime, and all the other disgusting stuff that any Manichean would oppose.  I see these qualities as a bed of creation, both literally in the world and psychologically in individuals, but also socially, which is a lot harder to accept.  Still, it is often the ghettoes, the drug houses, the brothels, the streets, the bloody rebel camps, that give rise to the future.  This is not to say such phenomena should be encouraged or supported, but that they are the raw material and motive for understanding what is happening in the whole system.  Do not attack the drug addict -- rather ask why a functioning culture would give rise to forces that cause people to do this.  And do not just address the drug addict outside the law, but also the forces that are quite legal.  In what ways are street heroin addicts like, say, insulin-dependent diabetics and if they are unlike, in what way?

My training as a minister, because of the particular time and place, encouraged the examination of systems rather than individuals.  One might propose that in a church system the minister is the one who defends the whole rather than the individual.  Taken to extremes, this might mean burning heretics at the stake.  Conscience doesn’t fit authority so conveniently as cremains.  This is not a fittingness but an elimination.  But if a minister becomes the individual who grips the denomination for his or her own benefit, that’s not fittingness either.  And yet, both of those alternatives happen in nature all the time.  Or seem to.  They MUST be fittingness.  These are invitations to reflection and experiment.  

My sympathy as an ecologist is with the “deep ecologists,” the REALLY deep ecologists who reject both anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism.  “Anthro” as the measure of all things gives us the “anthropocene era,” which may be self-snuffing.  This is neither good nor bad -- it just is.  The “isness,” the outside-of-humans reality that constantly unfolds and morphs around us is what includes us.  It is not opposed to us, but if we lose our fittingness we are gone.

The unique human abilities of reflection and enjoyment should be supported and celebrated, even when they are only the confusion and pain which are their “other” side, which are motivation to strive for a better fit.  We are all related.  However, one cannot process the whole world at one time, so it’s necessary to choose a part and deeply understand it, in the belief that in some fractal way this will develop both one’s ability to understand and yield information for better understanding.

Any action a person takes, no matter how guided by understanding, is bound to go “wrong” sometimes.  A process understanding of existence makes that necessary.  In fact, one may have to choose one’s own death, even if the circumstances are not at all one’s choice.  Like the woman dancer standing in the line being marched into a gas chamber, we can always imagine and choose a response.  Instead of shuffling along, she danced and was shot.

But one need not constantly obsess over choice.  Maybe the definition of domesticity is not having to be always struggle but to simply be in the world as it is, partly because you’ve made it your own place, a good fit.  By definition, this kind of system or thinking about systems, does not rest for long.  Enjoy it when it does.  This is actually an old way of thinking:  Heraclitean.  I used to have a sermon about it called “Honey and Wax: Sweet and Hot.”  I still have it somewhere.  Maybe I should double back a little.

MARILYN ROBINSON'S "GILEAD" Part Two

Once we had “canons” of what we should read and notes for future reference, but now we have Google and Wikipedia.  Okay.  I’ll go along with it.  GILEAD.  What have we got?

In the Bible "Gilead" means hill of testimony or mound of witness, (Genesis 31:21)

Half Gilead" was possessed by Sihon, and the other half, separated from it by the river Jabbok, by Og, king of Bashan. The deep ravine of the river Hieromax (the modern Sheriat el-Mandhur) separated Bashan from Gilead, which was about 60 miles in length and 20 in breadth.

In Hebrew, Gilead can also mean a memorial site, and is used to name boys, while "Gil" means joy in Hebrew and "ad" means forever, or eternity.

The name Gilead (Arabic: جلعاد Ǧalʻād‎) is used in strict sense of the mountainous land extending north and south of Jabbok.  The name Gilead first appears in the biblical account of the last meeting of Jacob and Laban (Genesis 31:21-22).  King David fled to Mahanaim in Gilead during the rebellion of Absalom. Gilead is later mentioned as the homeplace of the prophet Elijah.

* * * *

This is a well-known traditional African-American spiritual. The “balm in Gilead” is a reference from the Old Testament, but the lyrics of this spiritual refer to the New Testament concept of salvation through Jesus Christ. The Balm of Gilead is interpreted as a spiritual medicine that is able to heal Israel (and sinners in general). In the Old Testament, the balm of Gilead is taken most directly from Jeremiah chapter 8 v. 22: "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wounds of my [God's] people?" (Another allusion can also be found in Jeremiah chapter 46, v. 2 and 11: “This is the message (of the Lord) against the army of Pharaoh Neco … Go up to Gilead and get balm, O Virgin Daughter of Egypt, but you multiply remedies in vain; here is no healing for you” - see also Jeremiah chapter 22, v. 6.) 

The first appearance of the spiritual in something close to its current form is uncertain.  Glass attached to one of John Newton's Olney hymns of 1779 this refrain:

There is balm in Gilead,

To make the wounded whole;

There's power enough in heaven,

To cure a sin-sick soul.

The 1925 7-shape Primitive Baptist songbook Harp of Ages has an unattributed song "Balm in Gilead" with a similar chorus, but verses drawn from a Charles Wesley hymn, "Father I Stretch My Hands to Thee."

The second verse quoted below ("If you can't...") is also found in some versions of another well-known spiritual "(Walk That) Lonesome Valley."   . . . Lyrics are as follows:

Chorus (in bold):

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole;

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

Some times I feel discouraged,

And think my work’s in vain,

But then the Holy Spirit

Revives my soul again.

(Chorus)

If you can’t preach like Peter,

If you can’t pray like Paul,

Just tell the love of Jesus,

And say He died for all.

* * * *

“The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” a novel which Old Ames’ young wife loves and Old Ames sits up all night to read, is about feuds, a Romeo & Juliet tale in the Blue Ridge mountains.

Clearly, Old Ames is witnessing and tracing the lines of old schisms.  It is the old spiritual that is most relevant.

I may change my mind later, but I’m thinking about “Housekeeping” which is about women and could be interpreted as a way of being at home in homelessness, life as a journey, the trail of the lonesome pine.  I haven’t read it for a long time, but maybe one could put “Housekeeping” as third in a sequence about patriarchy:  “Gilead,” then “Home” and finally “Housekeeping.”  Surely the family home, the close community of small towns that we think of as the ideal, is like that old word “cleave” which means both to separate and to cling to.  The home family is the source of healing but also the source of the deepest wounds and most unanswerable questions.  

Warm common sense is the sort of advice a trusted auntie would give you at the kitchen table along with pie and coffee.  My two maternal aunts married two brothers who were in a state of war their whole lives.  The aunts were helpless to stop it.  They were not churchy and I'm not sure that would have helped.  Only one aunt had sons, fraternal twins, who inherited, bought, stole, acquired somehow the same land and continued the war until the present.  The next generation is not likely to be too different, though probably pretty soon modern times will take the land into unknown hands.  Already the timber has been sold off, leaving eroding pasture for sheep no longer profitable.  I’m the only preacher in the family but they don’t consider me family anyway.  We don’t communicate.

Likewise our whole politically riven nation is divided by the chasms and tectonic drifts of a whole planet.  Our own families are scattered by technology, yet joined by it, raising many questions about what to do.

Martha Nussbaum’s 3-part interview with Bill Moyers is an excellent guide to Marilynne Robinson’s novels:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK6kTY8vKx8 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRI5CLOCK_c&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCHmYaFhPcQ&feature=related

Especially in the second video, Nussbaum calls for a connected, human, domestic examination of ethics through fiction/theatre/stories.  Marilynne Robinson may have answered that call.  I don’t know whether she was consciously responding or simply coming to the same conclusions in her own way, as, on some level, do I.  Our shared tragedy is that we are all, no matter how hard we strive, caught in circumstances (sometimes our own bodies) beyond our control.  Then the larger society must lend support.  

If that means letting John Brown hide his mule and horses in our church, manuring the floor, then do it.  If your eye is put out, then contend that it is on that side where holiness can enter.  Eternal joy.  Gilead.  Tell it.   Hmmm.  I meant this essay to be about immanence, the welling up of healing from the land.  Maybe it is.