Winter of Content

Spring will come.  It is an unavoidable  rebirth, an awakening, so I move slowly, carefully.  The winter is so nice in its own right, but we cannot tarry long without food and something warm.  We can rest and grow stronger through the season, like a tree gone to dreamland, having spent the Fall storing sugar and reaching out with roots for further sustenance.  All through, it gathers the nutrients from fertile soil, knowing the planned slumber is at hand.  Store up thoughts, perform rituals of rising early for reading and meditations, stay up late to milk the day.  Or stay up late, talking and dreaming, drinking and reading, and sleeping in very late, while we can.  Thoughts of Spring get us through the cold from time to time, but not without preparation.  More time in sleep means more visions to be interpreted, a hardy, often fruitful work.  Good, productive days - at work, at home, in bed, in our studies, outside -  enable better rest.

 I cannot coax our Chicken Sally out of her basement abode, even though I shoveled a grassy path to all her eating bowls.  We have spoiled her with her own basement room, feed her lettuce, veggie, and fruit scraps.  I must not become too content and well-fed in my own winter abode.  Time for walks and bicycle jaunts, and close, persistent reading.  What are the chances of a slumberous ride to Hygiene this winter, to visit that small stone church, the one of my dreams?  No one will come with me. They said so around the fire at the End-of-the-World party.  Easier to drink and be Merry and just not think about such coldness.  But the swirl of flames on that frozen night stilled me, the release of all that stored energy.   I must store up my own and stay alert, practice patience for the sojourns ahead.  We are meant to be alone at times. We have a wintery part that is not understood by others, but that is where the work must be done, alone.

  Good Hours

   I had for my winter evening walk -
   No one at all with whom to talk,
   But I had the cottages in a row
   Up to their shining eyes in snow.

And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of  a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces.

I had such company outward bound.
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.

Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o'clock of a winter eve.

                                      -Robert Frost

Transcript #2 The Maytrees

About a third of the way into this beauteous book.  Annie Dillard's writing steamrolls me...did anyone make a movie about this story?  It, like so many others, would lose so much in translation.  But this part would have jazz from 1950s Provincetown in the air, gulls, and blurry-eyed flashbacks of laughter, one after another, and mumbled voices.  The one time I ever visited Provincetown was with some Santa Cruz exchange students I met while studying at the University of New Hampshire.  I never would have left Creamcheese, NH, had it not been for these folk.  I remember a saltwashed boardwalk with lots of coffee shops and bookstores, having crabcakes for the first time out on some pier, finding beads for our necklaces, and the people dressed like the fisherman on that blue, cylindrical salt container - Mortens? - as though any minute it might start raining, which it did.

     After their first year or so, Lou's beauty no longer surprised him.  He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes' home.  No, what so endeared her now and forever was her easy and helpless laughter.  He felt like the world's great wit.  She worked, walked, stood, or sat like a mannequin, shoulders down and neck erect, and his least mot slayed her.  Her body pleated.  Her rusty-axle laugh sustained itself voice-lessly and without air.  At table, if she was still chewing when the laugh came rolling on her backward like a loose cart, she put a napkin on her head.  Otherwise she dropped on the table.  If it slayed her yet more, she knocked the table with her head in even beats.  Or her long torso folded and her orbits fell on vertical fists on her knees.  Unstrung with hilarity, she lost her footing and rolled down a dune.  More than once - anywhere - she dropped backward and staight-legged like a kid in diapers.

     He fell in love with Lou again and again.  Walking, he held her hand.  She seemed, then and now, to roll or float over the world evenly, acting and giving and taking, never accelerating, never slowing, wearing a slip of red or blue scarf.  Her mental energy and endurance matched his.  She neither competed nor rebelled.  Her freedom strengthened him, as did her immeasurable reserve.  Often she seemed the elder.  She opened their house to everyone.  Actively, she accepted what came to her, like a well-sailed sloop with sea room.  Her face was an organ of silence.  That he did not possess her childhood drove him wild.  Who was this impostor she sang with in college - how dare he?

     Their intimacy flooded.  Love like a tide either advances or retreats, Maytree opined into a recent notebook.  Their awarenesses rode waves paired like outriggers.  Maytree thought Plato wrong:  physical senses and wordless realms neither diverge or oppose; they meet as nearest neighbors in the darkness of personality and embrace.





Transcript #1 from The Maytrees

I should like to transcribe literature on an old manual handed down from a friend, where one must remember to snap the key down quick and crisp.  I would start with poetry.  I find memorizing short little phrases for the printed page, sometimes written, sometimes scrolled out here on the laptop, somewhat meditative, especially in the winter.  This exercise is all the more important when one begins to long for lost remembrances.  May it help us remember our dreams, for who speaks to us there?  The same who gives us a language to interpret in snatches of visions and vignettes, each perhaps only a few seconds long, as we collapse repeatedly while reading, having spent our energy elsewhere.  This happened last night, so early, and yet it seemed so, so late.  I sometimes do this while reading to the children, and they wait in giddy anticipation for the day's strange tide to begin spilling out as words used to replace the printed words in front of me.  I am beguiled of the real, printed world by such reading, and often ask questions to see if they're actually paying attention.  These inadvertant soliloquies are at times helped along by too much drink, but more often than not, just the day's sojourn itself, especially if a bikeride was involved.  I am tired, but I must also read, for it informs my innerworld so.  As of late, I have fallen in love with the simple words of The Bible, of Frederic Bastiat's The Law, with anything at all written by Annie Dillard.

  
  An excerpt from Dillard's The Maytrees...

     Moving houses was Maytree's paid work.  Since he returned from out West and the war, Maytree hauled whole houses for hire, on afternoons only.  He got paid for hi-jinks.  He worked some afternoons with his old college friend Sooner Roy.  They started as carpenters, turning porches into rooms, adding apartments, and raising roofs.  Then for friends they moved the Protos' house on a Monument Hill traverse.  They detached the pump, braced corners and doorways with two-by-sixes, jacked the mildewed house, and with advisors pushed it onto a haywagon hitched to a mule team.  The mules were having none of it.  Maytree forbade whacking the mules with planks.

     Old Flo Pronto, inside, chopped onions and carrots.  People could hear her knife hit, or was it a hatchet.  Maytree guarded the mules while Sooner rounded up two tractors and Flo Pronto cranked up her woodstove.  The tractors, themselves whacked, worked.  Splay-legged in her wobbling kitchen, Flo Pronto cooked on the woodstove a slumgullion to feed the crew.  The chimney smoked, and its smoke marked their route.  Schoolchildren broke out to trail the house.

     The more houses they moved, the more house-moving jobs offered.  People dragged anchor to a patch of trees, or a hollow cheap to heat, or a patch of waterfront exposed but eminently rent-outable.  The process stimulated Maytree, and Lou, too - and children, and retired sailors, and off-duty coast guards, and neighbors - by its many routes to disaster.  

    

Growth of the Soil and Shades of Organicism

  

     In Growth of the Soil (1917), one of Knut Hamsun's chief protagonists, Isak, carves a farm out of the Norwegian backwoods thicket.  He seems to successfully thwart the encroachment of mining interests bent on extracting only material wealth from the wildland, establishing a family and a homestead out of, first and foremost, a rigorous individuality.   His stubborn will and creativity is mostly spent expanding the self-sufficiency of the private farming enterprise we come to know as Sellanra, in the fabled hinterland of old Norway.  The stout, headstrong Inger, a singular woman possessing a quiet, perhaps stronger resolve, joins him early in the story, and their destiny leans towards raising their children away from civilization and all its attendant ills.  The physical clearing and caretaking of the land represent one aspect of growth, and we are regaled in several passages by Isak's display of brute strength and perseverance.   Those qualities hint at the spiritual dimensions that he must raise up and nurture if he is to survive.  The law of the land - for his wife Inger kills their firstborn child - seems at first to threaten their growth and development, a reminder that their outpost is still embedded in a man-made community, replete with rules that may potentially rein in their young family.  This is a brief description of how the structure of the state, as espoused by Louis Althusser, will meet with, and be circumvented by, an ideology of nature and organicism that Hamsun metes out in this spare, resplendent narrative. 

     Isak's philosophy of life is one of work, a seemingly organic toiling on the land that will produce not only the food that will sustain his family, but the knowledge and satisfaction that it was done on their own.  He himself works for no man, and stands apart from the men in town who labor for a wage to purchase their sustenance.  Such notions will be somewhat lost on their son, Sivert, who sets up shop selling miscellaneous goods to the neighboring folk.  All items are imported from the adjacent towns and far-away cities, and where people do not have the money for purchases, he extends easy credit.  His business goes bust, as those from the surrounding farmsteads do not earn the wages necessary to ever pay off their debt to the store, or else refuse to.  It would appear that the Sellenra farmstead, as an economic concern, and particularly Isak, stand emancipated from such drudgery.  His resources are the fertile soil, his oxen, and his hard work ethic.  Their dependence on outside labor is minimal, with inputs limited to seed stock and an occasional part to improve the efficiency of the harvest.  And that harvest, the fruit of that labor, in turn fuels his body and those of his animals, and allows him to barter for materials to feed his family and expand his settlement.

 

    

     We might see this humble farmer and his slowly growing family as fulfilling normative roles.  One who lives on the fringe of civilization retains more freedom to pursue land of one's own, to cultivate of one's own accord, and to raise a family to continue the tradition.  We might read into this a fierce independence, resonant of early American pioneers who struck out to extract wealth from untrammeled wilderness.  Isak is portrayed from the beginning as one who has eschewed civilization to become a self-made man.  "He never read a book but often thought about God...the majesty of the earth and what was above the earth filled him with a deep devoutness many times a day.  He was sinful and godfearing."  Not an intellectual, but a resourceful thinker nevertheless, he cannot be different than most men, save for inhuman strength and endurance.  He has already, even at this early juncture, taken steps as a single-minded man, whose fates are often deeply tied to early success or failure.  At every turn early in the narrative, Isak makes progress.  He finds goats to husband.  He inquires among the local Laplanders if there is some tireless woman who might come along and join him, and two pages later, we are introduced to Inger.  He constructs a simple shelter to call his own.  We are convinced – as Isak – that he is autonomous, that this could be happening to anyone who has fled the town for the good life, given enough good fortune, by God or by virtue of hard work.  In this sense, Isak is constructed as part of this larger collective, an archetype of the rugged individualist whose growth is still measured in material wealth, and whose success is legitimized by the fascination and exuberance of those around him.  He is not a slave to a capitalist system, but he will certainly be confronted by it, and only time will tell if he will subject himself to the system.

     When Isak's wife is summoned to the local village to stand trial for the murder of their infant daughter, we understand that such authority must exist, and that grievous acts must be met with careful interrogation to mete out deserved punishment - or freedom in the case of innocence.  There is no question that young Inger will have to confront the court, for this is the ritual exercised in the real world.  Inger is complicit and perhaps unconscious of this, as are we, as is Isak, and as is every other character that catches wind of their child's death.  Standing "among the clever practitioners of the law, she was an inferior party...."   This may give us the sense of Althusser's connotation of the legal state authority as a Repressive State Apparatus, one which assumes its own integrity, that those coming before it must prove their integrity, and whose authority in such matters is unquestionable.  The judge in this case has a clubfoot, and perhaps in order to ultimately show that such authority can be human, and specifically, empathic, Hamsun here may inadvertently allow us to find favor in this state apparatus.   Building to that episode, the feeling of impending doom slowly gives way to melancholic respect for those that decide that Inger meant only to spare her daughter the same torturous, shameful childhood that she herself endured for having a severe harelip that nearly incapacitates her speech. 

    

    

     What, precisely, is the ideological contradiction presented, perhaps unwittingly, by Hamsun in the vignette of Inger’s imprisonment by the state?  It is this character’s resilience – dependent upon a dogmatic, God-given will to endure long suffering, and a penitent heart that will not forget her act – that will transform her internment into a time of growth, of gaining the salient qualities that will enable her to subvert the state’s claim over her family’s homestead.  Settling into several years in jail, having skirted the death penalty, Inger develops her budding sewing skills, and is granted the opportunity to learn to read and write.     Beyond securing greater agency, she undergoes an operation, paid for by the state, which essentially fixes her speech impediment.  In no way can we say her life is not improved by her incarceration.  The re-invigorated Inger, contrite and now more able to contribute to the Sellenra homestead, returns home.  The business of raising their two boys, who stayed at the farm, and a young girl born to her in prison, takes on an almost idyllic nature.  Isak is astonished by his young daughter.  A creature of civilization, "her speech was like a song, an incredible language from Trondhjem; her father had to get it translated now and then."  The rough-hewn figure of Isak, industrious, shy, stubborn, and still possessing the work ethic of an ox, stands in stark contrast to this mother-daughter pair hailing from the city, far away from their organic home hacked out of the wilderness.  Inger has been all but reborn, having endured as a subject of the state, but now free to do as she pleases.  She will impart to Isak and her children a need for continual growth, of renewed commitment to their place, hewn organically from the first cabin and the first fertile plot of woodland soil, and for Isak specifically, the need for expanded patience and spiritual perseverance in the face of the state’s ceaseless posturing to claim their land for mineral rights.   Isak’s commitment to family and homestead becomes revitalized.  Beginning to see himself as a patriarch, he becomes heartened to a newfound dedication to the surrounding community that has grown up around Sellanra. 

     Through an intimate association with the land around them, and the people they barter with and help in their own homesteads, Isak and Inger build an independent-minded community that exists on the fringes of the state.  Their civilization has roots in their resourcefulness in their use of the raw landscape, and a dependency on one another.  As a farmer, Isak brings a special skill set, passion, and abundant energy in raising his home and fields.  As a father, Isak is counseled, shaped, and inspired by his wife’s will to learn new skills.  His own skills-based literacy is shared out among his children and neighbors, and the seeds he plants are as much about independence, self-sufficiency, and hard work, and will nurture this community.  Inger brings an empathic note to his demeanor, softening his edges, enabling him to reach out to his children and his neighbors in ways that his stubbornness prevented before.

 

 

     The short-term predictability of a mine on his land – the state’s idea – is nothing compared to the longevity of his farm.  The state stands apart from, and cannot lay claim to, what has been established at Sellanra.  It takes Inger to engender a faith in this, but it first means he must learn to see the state as a threat to what he has established.  Isak, by the stories end, will never enfranchise the state to exploit his land.  His stubbornness is now coupled with an awareness of the forces beyond his settlement, and his expanded heart, his new-found patience, will continue to allow it to grow and in return nurture the families that reside there.  Such a community is where certain people will be drawn.  Hamsun may even be suggesting that the state would do well to not interfere where communities are grown in this way, as though by a natural force all their own, some might say a God-given force. 

        If literature has a productive role in the formation of ideology, not merely a reflective role, one might say that the Marxist idea of being imbedded in superstructure – that Isak and Inger and their neighbors occupy a peasant class meant to provide natural resources for the state – is shown here to be shallow and threadbare.  Althusser believed that specific subjectivities, or ways of being, might emerge within a largely autonomous superstructure, that is, the state and social consciousness.  If a society’s base is its economic structure, then these peasants actually engage and operate largely outside of society’s normal  relations of production and consumption.  Still, within Althusser’s model of people finding their role as subjects to the state, even suggesting that we create ourselves as subjects, there is little room for agency, that basic capacity and consciousness to act in this world as we see fit.  So Hamsun’s novel may suggest, again, unwittingly, that this approach falls short.  This is all the more compelling when one considers that Hamsun was a dyed-in-the-wool fascist who, quite controversially, sympathized with the Nazi’s.  An organicist approach will look not at the great historical structures that shaped the main characters in a narrative, but how our characters evaded them and operated largely on the outside of them.  It pays attention to those groups, forces, and voices not readily discussed in history, perhaps even silenced by history.  There is an exploration of the minutiae of everyday encounters in the lives of everyday people, particularly those that have been oppressed and are largely disempowered, because these details are anything but trivial.  Here is a tale of a couple and their intimate relationship to nature, emblematic of their relationship to one another, with all the attendant mystery of love’s forces and God’s methodical changing of the created seasons, all of which nurtures and sustains them, and forces their growth.  Therein lays a great message, perhaps a quandary, for those who only see Hamsun as a scion of an irrepressible ideology, one talked about in dark, complex undercurrents.  He has perchance plowed up a land and sown seeds in his writing which hint at how we might prosper on the fringes of our society.  Isak and Inger’s interior monologues show us that this particular farmstead will become fruitful, that their lives become fruitful, by consistently agonizing over the details of what is the right thing to do.   

Tour de Frack

Setting out near dayfall was the next solemnest thing to do, rather than morning, for I would have missed all the faces and the updates around the table at the anti-fracking meeting.  Some people meet for worship on Sundays.  Mine is a daily walk, haphazardly organized around the fireplace during the morning, often out to the front porch on brilliant mornings, eyes closed but sensing the heat of fire or sun, and the hint of light.  Vespers is a bike ride, these days by moon, or moonlight diffused through stacks of cold clouds, when I ask not to be careened into by one of the diesel engine trucks or Aunt Lillian in her station wagon with her big German Sheppard in the back.  It is usually a reminder of what I’ve been reading, for, despite the traffic and the waft of combustion, there are moments of quietude where I can afford more wakefulness.  The literature I’ve perused as of late has been more journalistic, and more scientific than I typically read outside of work.  There are only so many articles and papers one can absorb regarding the dangers of hydraulic fracturing in a day before feeling ready to drink rum to oblivion.  Down-in-the-toilet, staggering for lack of nutrients, clean air, clean water, nearly toxic-level rum drinking.  It is, at times, a lonesome endeavor.  But this is a journal, in part, of bike sojourns, of reading, and not of the need for drinking.  That is ever-present and understood.  One cannot drink caramel snickerdoodle non-fat lattés and talk about these things.

Jacki Schilke in North Dakota, in the heart of the Bakken Shale, regrets allowing hydraulic fracturing on her property.  Currently some 32 fracking wells operate within 3 miles of her 160-acre ranch.  She has dealt with chronic pain in her lungs and rashes ever since, for about one year.  In one instance, she needed emergency care for a respiratory attack endured while working in her barn.  Doctors have diagnosed  her with neurotoxic damage and constricted airways.  Ambient air testing by an environmental consultant showed high levels of benzene, methane, toluene and xylene, known to be affiliated with fracking.  These hazardous wastes are also known to be highly carcinogenic, and can lead to birth defects and organ damage.  Shortly after drilling began, in the summer of 2010, several of her cattle began limping from swollen legs and infections.  Many cows quit producing milk for their calves.  Within a year, five of her cattle dropped dead.  Many of the volatile organic compounds associated with fracking leak from engines, compressors, open tanks, ponds holding the "produced" frack wastewater, flares, and spills.  Chemicals injected underground - up to 400,000 gallons over the life of a single well - can migrate through abandoned wells or improperly cemented well casings.  The petrochemical industry estimates that 60% of fracking wells will leak over a 30 year period.  In 2011 alone, oil companies in North Dakota reported over 1000 accidental releases of oil or frack wastewater.  This form of extracting natural gas has not been vetted as other methods of oil, coal, and gas extraction.

This has not been an isolated event.  In New Mexico, hair testing of sick cattle grazing around hydraulic fracturing well pads showed that 54 out of 56 were positive for petroleum residues.  Herd animals which are exposed but not apparently sick can be sold to middlemen.  A peer-reviewed report by a veterinarian and researcher at Cornell suggests a strong link between fracking and illness in farm animals raised for food.  The study's authors, Bamburger and Oswald, consider cattle to be sentinels for human health, like the canary in the coalmine.  Farmers need clean water, air, and soil to produce untainted food - but as the largest private landowners of shale land in our country, they are disproportionately targeted by oil and gas companies.

I ride up Highway 1 in search of the source of toxic smells my family has experienced just a few years back.  It started when we moved in about 11 years ago.  The northeastern edge of Fort Collins, according to the map, contains active and inactive drilling sites.  Several appear to lie just within city limits, while others are just outside, within Larimer County.  Along Douglas Road are small ranchettes and horse properties, some of the nicest, uncrowded rural country in the Fort Collins area.  I will not make it that far north this day, for the sun is fading fast as we approach the solstice.  I turn up Richard’s Lake road, its claypan surface seemingly resistant to washboarding, quite nice for a bike.  After 15 minutes or so I’ve traipsed through unexpectedly nice neighborhoods, and while the average property size is large, there are also clusters of houses like in my own neighborhood.  Some of the undeveloped lots are all sagebrush, brome, cottonwood, and elm.  There is a rabbit here and there, and more cars on the road than I was expecting.  There’s a whole other world over here, about a mile north of our home, that I’ve never even explored.  I cannot tell where Richard’s lake lies.  I cannot find any pipes or fenced-off areas or signage to indicate well pads.  It is dark, I will have to return, and perhaps venture further north and east.  That must be where the action is.

I have wanted to ride to some of these fracking wells, to taste a hint of metallic arsenic, the sickenly sweet smell of toluene, the odourless spin and reel of benzene, the noxiousness of hydrogen sulfide.  Satellite maps of the Poudre River snaking through Windsor show, when you keep clicking zoom, what appear to be fracking well pads.  There are curious buildings along the course of the river towards Greeley, or rectangular plots just adjacent, perhaps just parking lots.  But there are no cars.  That will be an all-day trip superseded by  immersion into the literature of havoc, of vaporous solvents which should only be used in a chemical fume hood, of sickened cattle, a sentinel species if there ever was one for the health of our rural landscape.  It is a literature of cold science, describing the disruption of our endocrine systems, of backache due to overworked kidneys, of neurotoxic symptomology and severely constricted airways.  There are rashes and teeth falling out for a rancher up in North Dakota.  There are ponds and streams which refuse to freeze over, now that their freezing point has been reduced by supersaturation with brine and heavy metals, the spillage of frack wastewater that comes back to the surface.  All these things are to be prevented.

Currently, no state requires a hydraulic fracturing company operating on private land to list the ingredients in its fracking fluid until fracking is complete.  In these rural districts, it then becomes difficult for ranchers and farmers to prove that toxins in groundwater didn't come from application of pesticides, fertilizers, or farm equipment.  The burden of proof is on the landowner.  This has got to change.  Those in our rural districts and growth management areas often lack the representation that those within city limits have access to, making it more imperative that legislation be passed to prohibit this form of gas extraction until it can be absolutely shown to not violate people's civil liberty to safeguard their health and those of their livestock.  This is their livelihood, and in many ways an important part of our culture in the west.  Ranchers are often good stewards of their land, as their survival and ability to establish a reputation as good food producers depends upon clean water resources.  When a farmer pumps groundwater to irrigate a field or water his animals, that water will enter his crop plants or animals, exit as vapor to the clouds, and return as rain, perhaps even back to the watershed from whence it came, but likely will fall on other lands, perhaps a few time zones away.  This is the basic hydrologic cycle.  When a single well is fracked, several million gallons of water taken from lakes, streams, and groundwater aquifers become trapped in the deep geological strata, essentially removed from this cycle.  The water that is returned to the surface, the flowback or frack wastewater, is untreatable.  There is no known way to return this water back to a clean form for domestic use, or back to the hydrologic cycle, either.  Another disparaging fact is that, in the midst of a drought cycle, many farmers are increasingly unable to compete with the oil and gas industry's cash assets when trying to purchase water.  At auctions here in Colorado, they are able to offer up to twenty times the price that farmers typically pay water utilities.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, Section 322, enabled the hydraulic fracking industry to be exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act.   This industry is also exempt from the Clean Air Act, Superfund Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, all designed to regulate other industrial activities.  They do not have to report their emissions of chemicals into air or water based on exemption from the Toxic Release Inventory under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act.  A recent study also shows that uranium and arsenic become solubilized in the process of hydraulic fracturing, coming back to the surface, and similar evidence that radon and radium are released as well.  Jacki Schilke and her husband have both lost crowns and fillings in their teeth, a phenomenon that has been associated with radiation poisoning in past studies, as well as high selenium levels, also discovered in their water.

I am nearly back to Highway 1 when, trying to discern how many deer are grazing just to my right, I begin to veer too close to the edge.  I overcorrect, cutting a sharp left which lifts me up and over the bike, smacking the clay with my elbow.  I write now, still smarting, and still anxious to get further along.  A few nights later I had a nightmare.  Blue-uniformed officials were presiding over a great Hanukkah festival, and I stood in line to get my latkes.  People were ecstatic  about their latkes.  I got mine and immediately discerned, as we sometimes do, something evil afoot.  The latkes were clearly fried in oil waste, fracked from the specific homeland of our community.  My body was already beginning to shudder from the smell.  One of the officials noticed that I noticed, and pointed me out.  Don’t eat the latkes!  I cried.  Panic and an all-out chase ensued.

References

Bamberger, Michelle & Robert Oswald (2012)  Impacts of Gas Drilling on Human and Animal Health, New Solutions (22)51-77.

Coman, Hannah (2012)  Balancing the Need for Energy and Clean Water: The Case for Applying Strict Liability in Hydraulic Fracturing Suits, Environmental Affairs (39)131-160.

DuBois, Shelley (2010)  Does the EPA Have the Tools to Regulate Fracking?, www.money.cnn.com

'Fracking' Mobilizes Uranium in Marcellus Shale (2010)  EurekAlert!, Oct 10, www.eurekalert.org.

Lustgarten, Abrahm (2008)  Buried Secrets: Is Natural Gas Drilling Endangering U.S. Water Supplies?, www.propublica.org.

Royte, Elizabeth (2012)  Fracking Our Food Supply, The Nation (Dec 17).

Sandra Steingraber's Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in An Age of Enironmental Crisis

The cold, hard facts about our man-made world reverberate in Sandra Steingraber's Raising Elijah with a stultifying rhythm, and a general unease settles in about our naivety regarding how seemingly inert products in our daily lives are reaping an environmental toll.  When her investigative prowess, honed as a research biologist, is turned towards arsenic in playsets, agrichemicals in our food, and environmental disasters at the hands of multinational corporations, she at first succumbs to an intolerable rage.  And as anger can sometimes do, in the minds of some, it becomes her driving force for action.  She reaches her tendrils out to other scientists, physicians, volunteers, and parents, and with clarity of purpose they pinpoint the likely chemical culprits which at approved levels should be benign, but which are increasingly found in our environment - in our bodies - at alarming levels.  Here is a biography of chemicals and how they make their way into soil, into our playgrounds, into our point sources of water.  They have well-heeled interests, largely corporations, ready to lobby for them, but who will advocate for our health?  Steingraber makes a strong point, using several case examples, that we the people have had to speak up on our own behalf, becoming the watchdogs in an arena which increasingly favors  entrenched industries bent on unheeded capital gain.  Never are we so aware of these potential threats than when they begin to affect our personal health, and so her narratives are strongest when her own children appear to suffer the consequences of simply being in proximity to certain manufactured products.  There is a veritable crescendo of concern when in the final chapter she examines hydraulic fracturing of shale to obtain petroleum.   All the descriptions of her local foodshed - the clean water and living soil that they depend on -  build to this moment, for here lies a process that threatens to undermine the sustainable bedrock of her community, and the integrity of the surrounding wetland and woodland ecosystem.  In her eloquent preface, she conjures the memory of Elijah Lovejoy, abolitionist, who was riddled with bullets and killed in 1837, who would not refrain from speaking out against slavery despite death threats to himself and his young family, and whose resoluteness and moral courage before the mob, and indeed, his martyrdom, inspired many to think critically about this institution.  We have read about such display of character in our turbulent history, and part of the beauty of Steingraber's testament is the call to rise up with the same spirit, a caring, investigative, perhaps angry spirit, to stop a senseless assault on the very thing which we depend upon for our health - our environment. 

Bird of Prey

Friday 12 Dec 2012

The morning has risen in tones of soft blue, filling my bedroom, and later, I notice, the living room.  Why have I never noticed this here?  vuja De, I have never been here before.  Light shimmers this morning in my own dwelling, the soft glow off water in cave, where no shadows can be made, for the light is reflected from all around.  Once, I awoke in a snow hut, near Lake Zimmerman, and purple and green clouds appeared to be soaking in through the ceiling.  The ceiling was wet - or, actually, no, touching it made it clear that it was snow melt refrozen and glistening, and the slowly changing colors were the sun making its way up, or the Earth it her slow roll, and the sun was just a silent spectator lording over all the life and color given.  Lo, even the sun knows he is made.  Orange streaks crept in, and I lay still and slow on the snow shelf.  I had thought I was going to freeze to death, had eventually felt content with that, and only then closed my eyes to the world to let the coldness take me, only to awaken to such splendor.  That was the first time I felt as though it was winter, that season.

The first day of winter this year belongs to this today.  Hot sun and frostbit grass.  Hot tea on the trail and just a few sips now and again; breathe, let the crank help you, breathe, sip.  All is effortless.  Out into the meadow behind Lee Martinez, hard left, and there is a massive bird swooping from my left, down, down and low, and she's going to collide with me.  I squeeze the brakes hard, and startled, I should think, she drops the small animal she's carrying and banks for her rested tree.  Somewhere in the grass is her hapless prey.  There, it crushed the frosted wild rye and bromegrass on its way down.  It is a squirrel, huge, fattened for the winter ahead, sacrificed for this magnificent bird to feast upon, for she must prepare for the winter, too.  The squirrel looks lively.  It's big and stretched out, like it was reaching for something when it was caught.  The majestic bird watched me from her perch, other black birds hopping around her, while she just gazed, non-chalantly.  Shall I climb that tree when she is away, to check out her lofty, nested cave, just to see how others live?  A nestfull of dead squirrel, perhaps.

Let this mean that winter will warm my spirits this season.  Let it be hard-earned grace and patient waiting and searching through slumber.  Let dreams lead me, let my reading lead me, let all coalesce and come to fruition, whatever is supposed to.  Let there be work to occupy, and let those who are supposed to help and push that work along make themselves known.  There are flying squirrels, and there are flying dead squirrels.  Omen?  The calf has been fatted, and you shall partake.  Or, do not eat of the road-killed squirrel, I will bring you hawk-killed, free-range, organic squirrel.  Or, life is all Darwinian survival, and you are but a silly squirrel looking around for a nut, when you should have been watching the skies for the predators.  Or, this is the most amazing thing you will see all day, a glimpse of the real things that go on all around you, while you worry about what movie or what book to get into next. 

Bookclub Just Before Winter

North College, you are something of a pleasure now.  Once, I cut through some fields, headed for Albertsons, for there was enough snow for X-country skis, and work was cancelled due to blessed snow.  In a small copse of trees I spied a hammock, pack wedged up higher, and a small fire pit cobbled together from cinder blocks.  There was smoke, rising faintly, with no one discernable.  Now there is a vacant lot of dirt, and an odd columnade leading up to King Soopers.  Before that, I think there was a farm here.  Sugarbeets were grown and tended by Volga Germans, who were replaced by Mexicans.  This entire square mile was farmland and sugar refinery, and I traipse through like an interloper bent on a more comfortable ride.  Time scattered the farmer; sagebrush, kosha, copse of trees, wild rye, and homeless person became the succession. 

The bike lane is well delineated and wide, and where one barely had room to spit previously, there’s now enough room to lean back and fiddle with headlamp, arc lazily as you balance, just before mounting the hill for your first view of Terry Shores. 

The intersection at Willox bares redbrick and concrete red crosswalks.  Your lane is clear.  Peddle south, and, depending on the traffic, hie close to the road at the carwash, for here it narrows precipitously, or you swing into the wide walkway there.  The potholed and cracked shoulders are the vestigial reminders that only a few years ago, this area met 12 out of 14 criteria to be categorized as a slum.  It is cold; there are cold faces waiting solemnly for the bus, and snow barely precipitates out of the sky.  Now at the bridge, ice has formed a thin veneer where you dove and shot back up, the bonechill giving way to soft heat of sun as you clambered up the roots to the mud.  The Poudre is a quiet simulacrum of its recent past.  Who dares be baptized through this patchwork ice now? 

And so the workday proceeds.  In the morning your tone and attention to minute details sets the stage for failure or success in the afternoon.  Not always, but often.  Experiments planned weeks in advance have had a chance to ferment and change.  If this was my work, I could keep going, and this would be the post breakfast tea.  Lunch would be a cold sandwich beneath the streamside oak at Rolland Moore Park.  I like to walk in the meadows on the outskirts of that park, which is like most parks, too well-groomed for their own good.  Your afternoon tea is a book you’ve read, but there’s a newness and familiarity not detected before.  You write.  Supper is the ride just outside of town, looking for a new route, and a new place to sit and write.

The ride home is a call-to-arms.  The gentleman cutting stone tile this morning at Mulberry and Howes is wrapping up for the day.  What a wonderful job that must be.  Cut and carve, fit just so.  See what you’ve accomplished on an hourly basis.  The light is green.  You go.  A large car turning left cuts in front of you, and you avoid a collision with a gentle squeeze of the brakes.  The cop which was behind the car flashes lights and blares his siren once, pulls up behind, and you go forward.  It is good to have reaction time.  You take a jaunt over to Mason, turn north at the bus depot, and a car turns down your lane, going the wrong way.  Brake.  Hop off and pull bike onto sidewalk.  Make your way down College, now wide.  Beautiful stone address markers are going in.  This all must have cost millions.  On the road in front of now-abandoned Showtime, a station wagon cuts in front of you.  This time your clenched reaction barely saves the crash, and you stare incredulously.  She stops and rolls down the window, “I’m so sorry!”  That’s okay, you say.  The large German Sheppard in the back regards you coolly.  You double check that all your lights and blinky are working.  Headlight, check.  Today might not actually be a bad day to die. 

Dinner is quick, but refortified, you take your children to their evening engagement, then it’s back south down College, back on your bike, for an uncommon treat – bookclub at The Crown.  Tonight, Annie Dillard’s A Writer’s Life.  The moon is an uncanny, slightly globular spider egg, encased in an oblong ring of silk.  It is a luminous caul from which it will have emerged this time tomorrow.  You are thankful for this cold.  You peddle slowly beneath lampglow, down a largely quiet street.  The Crown has the soft glow of warmth that you feel before you step in, then down in the basement, fellow booklovers are gathered around the corner table, the discussion on-going.  Friendly faces all around.  You drink water, drunk on exhaustion or the remembrance of certain passages, or likely both.  Where are the soothsayers warning us to read more?

In The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot says, or rather, one of his polyglot voices says – Stop.  Sympathize.  Control.  I say stop, be quiet, read.  On the ride homeward, wondering about one’s need to sketch out what is this mundane life, what is salvageable but disillusionment, I begin to feel perhaps it is to refine the disillusionment.  A slow pull into the world of literature, its body a massive, still-changing canon, with ever more writers being packed in as onto a giant clay globe.  The world that I ride upon is not the real one either, but also my projection of the form, my incomplete projection.  No amount of beverages will see me through this.  There is not enough.  There is not enough liquor in the world.  Our discourse lies before us like a newly-laid, black tarmac of pitch and resin, in the low night.  Even this wide, white line which hems me in is artifice.  I wish to be uncorrupted by the writing, or the speaking of the writing.  The form might be found in silent despair, also known as prayerfulness, or ecstasy which comes right after the despair, and perhaps it motivates this slow movement from place to place – slow, even long-suffering movement, as if against a tide, and then stillness.  The writing, or is it the creating, of the new, slackjawed understanding that we are mostly alone.