Why I Joined 5,000 Citizens, Marching for all we Hold Dearest and Most Hopefully

All too often, whether child or adult most everyone gains something by being thrown into a role that is barely suitable for who they are; it often devolves into a tale of misery, or at least tedium, lasting for a while. In the abstract, it's 'getting out of your comfort zone.' One of my oldest friends down in St. Paul signed me up for a chant leader, even though I had already said I would come to yesterday's Tar Sands Resistance March, since public events, especially ones this relevant to health and well-being here on earth, are best enjoyed when two together can double the pleasure. I came unpracticed, had never used a bull horn, and felt my level of resistance to the task of leading chants mounting since I at any age I've backed down from becoming anything like a cheerleader. Moreover, eighteen years ago a long, severe bronchitis seems to have thinned out what yelling voice I have, the same kind of thing having happened to my mom in midlife, causing a huskiness in her voice forever afterward. I'd argue that chant-leading is a job for someone intensely motivated by a crowd and once and for all endowed with vocal cords suited for an ancient forum.
     Demonstrating is a practiced skill like anything else, I see that now. I could, after all, hold and flip around the little scripts bearing the words of call-and-response while holding the speaker of the bull horn and pressing the button, even if I rebelled against using the exact script--let's have no vagueness or unintended meaning like 'Tar sands oil has got to go!'--because that could be read as 'tar sands oil has got to go down the pipelines to the refineries, it can't be avoided,' etc. I kept grousing to my companion that I can't do this, though I didn't like hearing much of that out of my own mouth--what else for heavens sake had I come to these long-familiar streets to do? Frustration gripped me down our course between police barricades with the sense that I was a terrible slacker, a charade or a dummy marcher with my silent megaphone. My companion, also given a bull horn, muttered his qualms about how un-vocal our whole block of marchers was coming across, though he had no inhibition about his own chanting that lacked all sense of tempo much less tonal clarity. To the entertainment and awe of others around us he evinced all possible raw youthfulness deliverable from a geezer (his own term as he approaches 64 years of age, his boyhood volume and zests intact) along with a dreamful imperative to witness the people united, never defeated. There were times I had to chime in with him only because I saw I could and should. When I did we became a pair with bull horns, other voices to the sides and rear joining ours.
     'LOVE WATER, NOT OIL! Love water, not oil!' the chanting proceeded till individually and together we chanters could feel the words going stale. Up the line would be strains of something else. 'LOVE BICYCLES!' he began chanting, and then the response 'not oil!' would come back in a murmur. 'Love bicycles!' I chanted along with him, then changed it: 'LOVE HYBRIDS!' which remained our chant alone, no sharers. I still took pride in my little old 2002 hybrid car, the vintage Prius as we'd sometimes called it; he and I had done maintenance on that car. Some of the much younger marchers around us seemed comforted by having a chant leader but wanted to do chants either known to them or of their own making. We listened to them and then, through our bull horns, amplified at least one of their chants, whether someone had conjured it on the spot or not; 'Hey! Obama! It's hot out here! Hey! Obama! You talked the talk, now walk the walk! No Keystone pipeline!'
     As I listened to our disharmony at the outset and strained against my own revulsion at our scriptedness, I thought: we need rehearsals and orchestration...this needs to be carried off by people who have a feel for performance, better organized so the effect is maximum and elegant for all to hear and see...  But this is for heavens' sake a people's march, I am missing the beat and everything. It's for anyone and right now. Anyone can do better than I'm doing including me.
     What if though, in a state like Minnesota, rich in big choirs thanks to the German-Scandinavian heritage which gives rise to such music, there were an endowment for a street procession, costumed and sung in harmonic parts, miked to ultimate glory, danced and be-sloganed with upheld signs and the most evocative of T-shirt art on the torsos of huge opera singers trained to the limberness of dancers as they capered to the capitol or city hall--in towns all over the state, into neighboring states and provinces? What if? This could be done; we don't lack for theatrical people and composers who could collaborate for the cause of a climate that keeps us as beautifully as ever...
     We were doing the best that we could, getting better as we went. Demonstrations are normally ad-libbed a lot, the training and preparation led by brave souls like Patti, whoever she was and wherever she had gone, and others of mixed generations, unflappable-seeming people with dedication worthy of as much reward, I felt, as a city engineer's. Demonstrating at its best is an attempt to shout (or sing) out a vision of something that will inevitably develop as it goes, according to the inspiration that hits the different personalities caught up in it.
     I inferred that demonstrations can become a habit, or avocation, in which a person's own style gains a value that should not be overlooked in the planning stages: don't let anyone else sign you up for a role best expressed through someone else's unique energy. Know what your own is and go in prepared. Somewhere--I remember where now--I had written myself a note for a sign I could draw up that reads from my own heart and soul--I just didn't prioritize it soon enough to get the durable materials and put them, two-sided, on a flat wooden stake so I could hold it up for everyone far and wide to see.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Then I could have marched, even carrying my own megaphone if I wanted to invest in one, and been

whoever it was most natural for me to become in a march. But there will be future marches. As more than one of the spokespeople on the state capitol steps yesterday said: we have a lot of work to do.

     The photo above was of a sign I spied at Lambert's Landing beside the Mississippi River, the gathering point for the march before it got moving, where we all felt about as disorganized and miscast as we were probably going to feel. I wished then that I'd had a sign like this lady's, since hers expressed the out-and-out danger facing us if we do not face down, undercut and replace or reorganize the corporate interests whose main interest appears to be doing whatever they deem most profitable, no matter what the most basic science shows will happen to our one and only planet and our offspring.

     It would be useless in a way, then or now, to add to the list of further threats that we can't escape as a result of our overpopulation: soil depletion, mineral depletion affecting all industry and urban expansion, water depletion, the increasing strife among the desperate. The idea that nothing grows without limit besides a cancer is too grim for politicians and business modelers to include in their public statements. We are each of us coming from where we're coming from. The focus of the day, of the decade and coming ones, is climate change.

     I took up global warming or climate change as a personal threat even at ten years of age or so, on first hearing of it on a TV program, probably a National Geographic special, somewhere at the beginning of the 1970s. Because I have always loved winter and chilly windblown landscapes where snows are abundant and welcome and so are all the wild animals, I was affronted even then that we all, collectively, could inflict fever on this earth, even leading to the death of all life from that fever. Now that I'm past fifty years of age and able to live year-round in what's left of the boreal region with its tamarack swamps, aurora borealis, long winter nights, porcupines, bear, moose and the apex predator the wolf, I'm doing as much art as I can dedicate to this realm,

Freshet from a Ghost-Marsh - original watercolor/mixed media painting about 18 x 32"

even though my watercolor/mixed media landscapes have been slow to sell. They are gloomy I suppose, to a lot of art buyers, barely if at all familiar and symbolic of the cold and unwelcome, the dank and the repressed. But for a lot of art pieces, the right buyer has to come along.
     The work above suggests the real landscape's dissolution by melt; an icy lakelet is offset by the river in the rapids of early ice-out, a flock of red-throated loons--which nest on Arctic shorelines--washing their way into the foreground. A sole wolf looks over his shoulder back beyond upheaved root systems, snags and stumps that characteristically trigger, in the imagination, the vision of a beast or carcass, or a defunct cannon or other manufactured throwaway. From the shoreline a waterlogged lean-to exposes its flooded-out interior with an old coat billowing forth on the rivulet that has blasted out two walls.
     This semi-forbidding community of plants and fish, birds and bugs all adapted to summers' long light and winters' long dark, undergirded by rock and habituated to watery seepage, is one of many kinds of places that will succumb, at least at the latitudes where we see it now, to a hotter climate worldwide. 

     Being out on that land normally quickens me, the way a weekend outing does when we feel its brevity before the long work week. What shy thing might I see through there that I've never seen before? But in my soul these familiar ragged horizons will live as long as I do, even if I'm denied a lifelong view of them. 

     This is not true for many of the native inhabitants, certainly not for the Ojibwe and the Hidatsa, within Minnesota and to the north and west into Alberta, or assorted people whose lives, as they say, are the land that would be crossed by and fouled by the inevitable leaks in multiple oil and gas pipelines. The First Nations' spoken language, their names when uttered, convey a kind of foreign lyricism to my Euro-American ears; their language sings a bit of other ages, a lost adaptiveness and intuition and built-in rhythms that took direction from earthly behaviors, those of animals and wind and water currents, that I know on my terms but probably not in that wholeness that unifies everything that ever mattered since creation.
     Somehow, in ways all put together, there will need to be ongoing resistance, changes in profit base, changes in the whole economy, our diets, our modes of transit--everything we do--if we are to keep the generations of humanity alive within the land that bore our ancestors. Yesterday was one of the rare few days when I and a lot of people of so many, many different origins who convened in St. Paul could feel a sense of collective will toward making the best of the coming crisis, whatever it will look like. If you enjoy lessons out of aboriginal legend, one I have been told of says if you see a hawk or an eagle it means you are on the right path. As everyone yesterday sat hearing the speakers on the capitol lawn, a red-tailed hawk dipped over us in spirals, then coasted away, and back. I then thought I saw it tuck itself into one of the slots on the far edge of the capitol dome, making do with the altered natural environment much like so many wild creatures in this new, Anthropocene era. All the creatures cope, sometimes in noticeable ways, much as we'll keep seeing it's time that we do.



   

All the Haunted, to the Farthest Edges of the Earth

It's coming to me lately that, just as older friends have said and just as written, it's probably enough to contact my dead kinfolk inside myself, where the dead live on, even if nothing happens to the person's departed soul except disintegration. It's enough, to think and say that the dead live on because, intact, the character of the departed person lingers in the memory of the fond survivor (me,) and acts upon the survivor by force of my innermost thought. What I see from my folding chair in a wooded swamp, of a would-be limitless profusion of tree-tips, clouds I first remember seeing, sunlit yellow, in the presence of my mom, is enough movement by way of my sight to animate what is left of her in me. Similarly, my sight of her hanging portrait done in pencil by an unknown friend in her community, and similarly anything I see, hear or consider that sparks my memory of her are all agents for her continuation past death. This adds up to the least deniable kind of experience, true as long as living memory retains the soul of someone who died.

The most defining traits of the dead person's character, whatever they were, could hardly help but shape that person's influence on us after death. The yearning fantasy that follows from this admission is: do those personality traits still cohere to act in one or another dimension, even right in our world which is, after all, a forest of membranes that may admit or obstruct an unknown variety of energies, whether packaged together in an incarnate soul or free-flowing. If personality, or emotion-driven force, operates in the world freed from persons who once were incarnate, charismatic agents, do components of those personalities still, with divine or evil intent, work within the living organisms today, traveling via the sensory rigging? I trust that in a widespread manner they do.

All the currents and cross-currents of sensory recognition, deliberate and subconscious action and all that goes on below our senses, vestigial or vanguard, adds up to a haunted world, or, moreover, a haunted universe. All who have ever exerted personal will in the world and their successors, all the intentions united or at cross purposes with each other, all the birth and dying across the fan of living species have a role in the formation of what clutters the earth. How the living and the once-living impact the whole universe is a matter, we all know, open for eternal speculation. In the wild, the tightly-interwoven forces of creation and destruction might be conceived of as parallels of good and evil in the realm of our own society where good and evil bring reward, enhancement, fertility, profusion or else downfall. Enough evil in the midst of our own affairs brings retribution and ultimately collapse of society. Plague, volcanic upheaval, flood, landslide, fire and typhoon or tornado are the parallels, results of imbalances, in nature. Where human evil, shaping up as excess, is imposed long enough on nature we can expect to see cataclysm, drawn out as likely as not through many human lifetimes.

If there are ghosts of our own dead undetectable for the most part to ourselves, it is easily conceived that they linger, through necessity or vast preference, outside the dimension of time and space that we the breathing occupy, any access back to our zone being freakish or exceptional. So our lives with regard to this post-experience are at best round after round of hopeful conjecture spun off of tidbits, clues from what we witness, read or hear of. If castles, old battlefields, farms, mansions, hotels and boarding houses, theaters and more of our own construction hold the ghosts of unfulfilled persons, so must forests and wetlands hold some of the same elements--even where no one is there to conceive a vision of them.

To my imagination some of our Minnesotan and Canadian peatlands, which proliferate in this large county, look haunted by what used to live there during eons of a more abundant and diverse wilderness. What I'm seeing may be the same aspect that persuaded not-so-long-ago First Nations people that the Windigo and other spirits of the dead, not necessarily human dead, prowled those dank places. These were cannibal and misleading presences. Tumbles of wrecked trees, victims of storm winds and shallow frosty soil, subside into fantastic formations. A traveler today, playfully looking out, occasionally longing for whoever and whatever she or he may never see again can hardly help ascribing them character. The imaginary transition happens easily as you drive along the county roads.

This mixed media painting, nearing completion as we lose the grey and taupe of the winter landscape, is a vision of the far north where trees hesitate to grow, though a few have made their stand only to topple in the winds of the Arctic Ocean, the Bering and Beaufort Seas and parallel waters a-brim with ice. Soils are shallow and root systems are as a consequence flat like the feet of geese, ducks and the featured red-throated loons being flushed down a spate that suggests rapid melt from unaccustomed balmy winds. A lone wolf, like a sole survivor, peers backward in a remembered direction. Root clusters and hulks of once-living trees wield clawed arms and horns and prongs full of either menace or makeshift opportunity. The title is Spookage - the Liquefying North. As much as it is about anything, the work is about the amassed influences of all who have gone before us, faces and forms that we fear and animation that we yearn to have again, plus the beckoning Beyond--which mortal life as we live it is a tangled process of reaching into.

Consolation in a View of Crumbled Left-overs

As it turns out both my parents have died in the month of March, one late in the month, one in its first few days, though nine years apart. In the wake of my mom's passing on March 3rd I find myself reaching out again, the way I used to do, to the unseen beyond what I can even imagine to ask: where is she? out there? anywhere? If someone we loved with an unsurpassed depth has died it feels at the very least like an anticlimax not to know what, even though the personality may disintegrate, the individual's escaped energy has drifted into--if it's in some degree intact. Are they somewhere else or are they a part of the whole nearby surroundings or, as some people believe, are they reduced down to an essence and recycled into someone newborn? But I find myself in no hurry to get caught up in disciplines, or organized religious teachings, in pursuit of what must be indeterminable till we die. Knowledge, if there really is any on this topic, is intermittently my hope, yet it might come at a crippling price.

Old folks in the chilly latitudes have been said to die, more than at any other time, in late winter, faced with mounting hardships of the kind that prevailed during the era of widespread fireplace heat. Now, just upon the spring solstice the whole time period we're in has the feel, not to mention the look, of an aftermath, golden snow-mashed stubble out this window blurring into abstraction, an essence of late winter's colors blending, not the way mixed paint blends into a drab splotch, but into something dark yet luminous, winking multi-hued, no tone quite lost, the very emblem of a gentle accommodation of all strangeness. This vision itself might be Ruth, my mom. She maybe turns a little to and fro, like something hanging, with glints of color as if she remembered through me, the rememberer. This might be how she'll linger in my memory for as long as I live.

So by now I am at home again in late March, the look of the land comparable with other Marches and Aprils in a soothing continuum that, in the case of so many energetic people, impels them beyond that static-seeming prospect in impatience and boredom. My mother was a continuum the way emotionally stable people are who have absorbed a lot of cultural history and acquaintance throughout a career followed by retirement. In her last weeks as I took care of her and enjoyed final conversations, I went out on the net or outdoors and brought out bits of what I found there to distract and intrigue her however it might be possible. Through the need of movement I walked many circuits via the sidewalks, once taking a neighboring state park's trails, near her building spying a flicker browsing on a staghorn sumac still crowned with berries. The flicker was a tie with the growing springtime in the Midwest and Canadian border region where I'd be returning when this momentous interlude had run its course. Several evenings, as I explored the allegorical imagery of Angels in America on paired DVDs, I absorbed the background for the scene in heaven, an imaginary place seeming to have nothing to do with my mom, peopled with souls that appeared to have lived nowhere near as long as she did. Heaven in the movie had stone ruins and the kind of hush that is common to high vaulted places including California redwood groves, cathedrals, museums or even halls of government. Heaven's people were faded, at complete ease and in no hurry wherever they walked. Children there were giggling. My mom by that point was outspokenly impatient to die.

The sun-soft and misty portrayal of heaven in the movie followed me like a comfort down to New York City where I drove a load of inherited furnishings for Lea, my daughter, and back westward through Pennsylvania and the Lower Midwest and up the varying roads northward. The ruins in the artwork below, inspired by the movie, tell of places both missed and yet to be seen, since I've never been to Europe or to the pueblos or historic Spanish missions of America. Stone ruins affirm that not everything we've either alone or jointly effected in this world goes away but stays for ages, upholding the grace a few people envisioned for it in the physical designing, that is itself a part of our heritage. Cracks, broken edges and tumbling chunks bear evidence of our limits as the world goes on, incorporating all that we were and left of our handiwork. These ruins that I drew and painted were part of what I showed my mother in her last few days, and are everyone's history; the sumac is a tree of troubled, reworked soil and the flicker signifies ever-returning opportunity.

Flicker in a Crumbling Gateway

Heart Surgery, However it Happens

Since I've been sitting in my mom's terrace-level apartment for longer than two weeks now while she starves her sturdy old body of food and most fluids I figure I should, after all, be unsurprised at how long it takes for her process to run its course. Many, many people by my age have undertaken one or more death-watch, but this is my first.

It is at a few moments horrible; as often as not it's mundane, in the sense that we're all so equally mortal, on a par with rotting tree trunks. Even the beloved. But it's been gratifying, giving me days and days of opportunity interwoven with a long, dwindling goodbye.

We were a small family headed by mature parents, my sister and I their only two children despite their previous marriages and upheavals and re-beginnings. We thrived on our folks' loving gratitude for one another set against their memories of much less harmonious households. From my mom I feel I've received a lifetime of intentional and inadvertent gifts made most valuable by the remarks and adventures that came with and followed from them. Early in our lives we girls in our sheltered, gently disciplined, freedom-filled years must have sensed that we had a degree of family contentment, along with the trips and holidays we could always anticipate, that most of the kids we met through school were all in all lacking. We certainly had affectionate parents, especially our mom, who grew up missing affection from her mom, and so my mother's unique sweetness to this day pervades the mood of this apartment half-buried in Boston-area snow, like a burrow I have largely disappeared into. Today, again, I felt myself stepping out in the sun.

The harshest parts of this age-appropriate dying that I witness in its progress have been the dunks into bereavement coming after little respites ever since before mid-February when I arrived from Minnesota. It's up till now been as if she keeps dying only to reawaken when I come to greet her in the next hour at her bedside. My mom chose this destiny months, or even years, before turning 90 because the recommended surgical reconstruction of her heart's main valve would have meant an uncertain recovery, possible death in the operating or recovery room, long and likely incomplete rehabilitation with a short future of narrowed scope afterward not to mention major expense to the family. There was too much risk for too little reward. When she told me her decision in the beginning of winter she said, "I've done everything I want to do." She denied that she had been depressed, instead summing up her recent years and months as a period of contentment. Somewhere in the late fall of last year she wrote the following to share with her community of well-educated retirees many of whom continue to enjoy lives of privilege:

DECISIONS!  DECISIONS!

Have you ever noticed how often your days are governed by your  decisions?  Simple choices, such as when you will get up to start the day, activities in which you will participate, or whom you will join for evening dinner?  Gone are the days when we were governed by job or family obligations!  Now we organize our time by which day of the week it is, what times we are due for appointments, for participation in club activities to which we are committed, or for time alone to watch favorite television programs or read interesting books.  Or, if we don’t want to do anything at all, just sit and ruminate, we can do that, too.  We are free agents.

We do, however, have one more obligation, should we decide to accept it.  We need to decide how we want to end our days -- a gloomy subject to contemplate, perhaps, but that’s where we are in life.  We’ve fulfilled our family obligations (or not, depending on the circumstances); we’ve made our financial decisions; now we look to an abbreviated future.  And this is when one item rears its insistent head:  how willing are we to die?  Call it what you will -- meeting your end; going the way of all flesh; passing away -- the fact remains that sooner or later all life ends.  Energy flags.  When a life begins, it will one day end.

So, the question remains:  How willing are we for our lives to end?  If the idea is abhorrent, then we will go to all available means to prevent or extend our lives.  No medical treatment is too extreme; no daily routine too fatiguing; no diet too restrictive.  If, however,  whatever is is, then we become more philosophical. We accept our diminished energy; we perform as best we can the duties and/or activities to which we are committed; and we carry on.  No hard feelings; no extreme life-prolonging measures.  Just acceptance.  So be it. 
                      
by Ruth Katherine Beyer

By now she's lingered in her bed several intervals beyond what everyone expected. As I seize my daily chances to hustle outside for an hour or two I rehearse, again, dwelling in the knowledge that my mom is history, only a living presence I carry inside me, not a live person any more whom I can talk to. Unlike many survivors I've been given a chance to rehearse, since the likelihood has till now remained that I would go back into her apartment to share yet another conversation, if brief and repetitive. I walk in a madcap swinging manner in lug sole boots between the walls of snow and remember the character Prior Walter in the epic movie Angels in America which I was last week watching piecemeal each evening to my mom's amusement (she was no longer able to fix her attention on a movie whether she lay in bed or sat up to see the monitor.) Prior had climbed the flaming ladder to a godless heaven in order to confront death and plead for more life even in the face of all the suffering known in the 20th century and during the AIDS epidemic, to which he had fallen victim. He says of life that for him it's never enough; he can only, despite everything, want more of it. So, looking on the death that's most painful of any yet for me to behold, and most ever feared, do I.

This particular day I am watching her leave our realm of awareness; the nurse said the inevitable transition was coming soon.

To switch to another dramatic comparison, she reminds me of Sayward Luckett, the pioneer matriarch in Conrad Richter's novel The Town, unable to die yet even though she is days beyond being able to see or speak or gesture. She is a huge leftover tree from a virgin forest in territory that's been in her lifetime mapped and named Ohio, but is lying down, breathing, taking no sustenance. Her story was set before the American Civil War. My mom's is now, with upset of our climate set in motion. Live roots of her are tugging and snapping loose in my heart, and that's the heart-ache that's set me wandering between doorways inside her apartment as my sister and I keep the vigil with our mom's prescribed morphine and Ativan. Where a root pops free of my own live nerve endings, I console myself--having prayed as I'm skeptically not given to doing--a replacement petrified root will fill the empty socket, because there's no way so long as I live but that she will linger in her own established place in my heart. Devout people are correct: praying softens grief. Something nebulous comes to fill a void and then we merge into hugeness, where we find ourselves adrift but easier in ourselves.

The gifts borne to me via the energy currents of my mom have kept coming through life and through the approach of death. Conrad Richter's trilogy in paperback, The Trees, The Fields, The Town itself was a physical gift that lives on a shelf in Minnesota--I don't recall the year she gave it to me. Since I've come to Massachusetts to see her along I've reveled in the gift of time, to expand a website and set up a marketing newsletter in email, to learn to use this Apple computer for my various purposes that are beyond the uses she had for it. I've sat here by the big window that by comic accident lost its curtain rod and drapes, exposing sky and treetops and neighboring rooftops to my mom's wandering eyes in a way that was quickly a blessing for her, and begun on my third miniature watercolor in just two weeks.

Sometimes now I am for a few seconds afraid that I'll never get over this sorrow, it's so deep and chaptered back into childhood, but after all I'm still sitting here with Ruth, my mother, who hasn't died yet. She has that matriarchal body, with a hardihood that I'm sure she's passed to me. Out these walls I know of infinite unfolding stories that would shrink our particulars all to drops of water. This newest miniature watercolor she saw and enjoyed in its early development: it was due and proper to work on, given what the wide window shows of Massachusetts snowpack and what the bed shows of a woman's body shrinking ever deeper into slumber. The birds are a reminder of what has kept making people want to come back.

http://www.epiphaniesafield.com/new-art.html

Riding Eastward to Peer through Death's Door

This is the event that I feared since little girlhood, and this is the train that's taking me there to help, I guess, to see it through. My mother aged ninety years has given up eating; all of us daughters and granddaughters and a couple other old girls are trading shifts in her apartment where she clings to her intention of 'letting nature take its course.'

A drama of hearts has been roiling, quieting and welling up again all these past two weeks or longer. The train is retracing the courses of so many historical passages, certainly my own, and inevitably more and more whose evidence keeps receding into the ground with ever more accruing human occupation. Everywhere are ruins or defunct things drawing my eyes to them, such as the ornately cast and moulded end of a stone bridge like something from centuries ago in Italy, tipped on the rim of a ravine. The territory reaching ever eastward could be the surface of a brain bringing back to mind where we have all been on one occasion or another. The wheels on the track make a pulse beat; the conductor's horn far ahead is now and again muted into a likeness to a cello, or split into a medley of horns, symphonic, a rudimentary musical theme for the day's travel. We are trailing that undertone, like a far-carrying orchestral tuning-up, the opening to a new act in a drama across the spreading breadth of the upper Mississippi River Valley.

I

Not Weeds, but a Whole Neighborhood

Even along the remote highways edging Sax Zim Bog this low-snow February, even yesterday traveling Hwy. 61 toward Grand Marais on a professional errand I've been seeing strips of mowed stubble by the berm, before the trees. Workers are taking out forest seedlings with anything else standing. There's no snow to impede the mowers and trimmers. Most of the swaths don't follow any overhead power lines. Nor do they necessarily trace along the forest cut for the road. Even if safety and visibility, especially regarding deer collisions, is the issue, where the country is wide open, it seems to me why not have a screen of saplings along the ditch to stop snow drifting over the road? I sometimes suspect this is a local or county-level version of busy work, keeping employees paid for something, where it's not private landowners following custom just as always.

Officials for the roadways would for sure tell me how I'm ignorant. Yes, I know I am, but far from their mindset I, an aging stranger to our times, would secretly like to advocate for a lot of those old modes of travel that leave extended time to dodge around deer, porcupines, grouse, etc. The department of transportation would be having none of that. The highways are maintained for speeders, the ones who crash their vehicles on the curves where trees and rocks come right to the edge of the road. But on top of that, obsessive urges to contain/control nature win out time and again, shown by the urge of so many homeowners in city or country to keep a neatly mowed yard, people of every description driving their little tractor or taking their exercise behind a push mower. We've been trained to impose neatness on whatever plant community shows a ragged edge. In another observer's words on this subject, the ancestors of so many Americans were conditioned by the adage 'cleanliness (or could it be imposed order) is next to godliness', whereby we approve of shaved lawns all across town, even at the expense of so much fuel, air pollution, noise and bulky machinery.

In the middle of last week I attended the monthly meeting of the Arrowhead Chapter of Wild Ones,  whose mission is "To educate and to share information on the benefits of preserving and landscaping with native plants in order to promote biodiversity, environmentally sound practices, and a sense of place..." per their web page. These are people who, bit by bit or all in one swoop, have lost that notion that what's outdoors is invariably, more or less, a threat unless properly and traditionally managed. I wonder what it would take for them to become a majority among suburbanites.

The presentation was a DVD of a lecture by Douglas W. Tallamy on the unsung value of sowing  acreage that's presently taken up by lawn instead with trees, shrubs and soft-stemmed plants native to the region that we're in. Dr. Tallamy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. In a warm and witty manner, he incorporates the basic drive by people to spread themselves out over a landscape. Early in his lecture he demonstrates the vital usefulness of 'corridors' connecting our specks of remaining pristine wild land--and specks they are if you consider the breadth of wilderness that once took up our common space. The corridors are best seen not as belts to channel animal travelers predictably from grove to grove, but as groves in themselves, bands of interconnecting habitat widening out into hubs ideal for feeding and breeding.

In his article titled 'Gardening for Life', published in volume 22 of the Wild Ones Journal, Doug Tallamy reminds us that population in the United States is closing in on 306 million, which is a doubling within my own lifetime (I'm in my mid-fifties) and that the U.S. population keeps growing by 8,046 per day. As a consequence we have four million miles of roads and an estimated forty million acres planted with lawn, which is monoculture, a surface cultivated merely as a porous outdoor flooring for ourselves and a few pet warm-blooded animals. Our human growth as yet has no end in sight, and probably won't till physical limits bump into us in ways that we would rather not examine.

What woods and prairie patches we have left in the eastern and central sections of the country are to a huge extent overrun with trees and flowers that got there via horticulture--the plant nurseries and the everyday public they serve. Examples given of alien trees, shrubs and vines especially familiar to me include the multiflora rose, autumn olive and Japanese honeysuckle. In our suburban expansion we have favored exotic trees and flowers at the expense of what grew here all along. In transforming the landscape to serve ourselves we've--per Dr. Tallamy--"taken ninety-five percent of nature and made it unnatural."

He runs through an accounting of glorious native birds, cherished by a growing sector of our population that pursues birds for enjoyment or maintains feeders. The birds of forest and pasture are declining at rates that lead to some despair on the part of folk who remember their relative abundance from as recently as the 1970s and '80s. As we harvest whole forests, oil fields and grasslands, leaving pavement and woody rubble behind, we've been taking away a broad range of food from these birds as we select exotic trees or bushes for our outdoor perimeters, if we even bother to plant trees and bushes for ornamentation on the wastelands that are our lawns, by contrast with restoring supportive bird habitat.

Here is where the quietly exuberant mission of Wild Ones, the various Audubon societies and local native plant societies and bird clubs fits into the picture. For survival's sake we have to remember that we need biodiversity, the diversity of living species, as our own life support not to mention that of our fellow-creatures. We need oxygen that the plants transpire. We need the clean water that their roots filter and their decayed living matter harbors in the form of river and lake beds. We also need topsoil borne of more of that decayed matter, and we need pollination, all services of nature--we need the intricacy of the whole life-support system that we've been taking apart on this American continent. And so those of us with a will to help put it back together may as well change our clothes as befits the moment; we have a lot we can be doing to make our surroundings increasingly lively again. For all the variety we will be re-creating in our spaces, it has to fit the region in terms of local climate and soils. Help is out there in the form of native plant nurseries somewhere in your area. And, says Dr. Tallamy, if you replace the native shrubs, trees, grasses and herbs, the insect species that service them and the birds that devour those insects and larva will--as long as we haven't yet driven them to extinction--come back pretty quickly, as if to a banquet extended to them over a season or more.

He attributes the trend within the past several generations to design landscapes with exotic plants as a measure to starve insects that people had lumped together in their minds as pests. The imported Eurasian trees, shrubs and flowers have been largely free of insect infestation because they did not evolve here to host the various insects that feed off our own plants. And if we don't have to sit by the window or on the deck or patio and look at insects or at the leaves they've been damaging then we are somehow...more reassured? Everything seems more under our own control, our living room extended right out into our yards. And of course, many of us have said, it's better for the farmers if we keep down the insect pests that could proliferate if we just 'let things go.'

His article hastens to explain the relationship between insects and plants in terms of specifics: eons of coexistence between whole families of plants and neighboring insects has allowed those insects the benefit of being able to eat and digest those plants, and only certain plants, depending on the species of insect and its plant host. When the plant hosts are in their prime, so are the insects that eat and lay their eggs on them, sometimes right before our fretful eyes. But the native plants supporting the native insects will in turn invite a stream of native insect predators, many of them our diminishing American birds. Quoting from the article: "one bluebird pair brings up to three hundred caterpillars back to their nest every day. You will be hard pressed to find any caterpillars in your yard if you create habitat for breeding birds." A lot of us have forgotten about the web of nature, if we were ever taught much about it; the very wording mostly a nerdy cliche left over from science class or an organized nature hike, for lack of living examples out the windows of a typical home.

When I lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area I gardened with native prairie plants in a state of great enthusiasm since I still missed the countryside of my secure childhood, and the places I spent my week-ends and holidays. At one point in the suburb of Blaine, underlain with a light sandy soil, we had three long and billowing plantations, each on one side of our double-wide manufactured home. Even though we were surrounded by Interstate 35W, a state highway and huge parching barrens of trailer park lawn with a ball field, a few exotic acacia trees and scattered silver maples, we began attracting migrant birds who would otherwise have flown over the yard: I remember blackpoll, Nashville, yellow-rumped and Tennessee warblers and a singing Lincoln's sparrow in spring or fall as these functional gardens came into their own. When we moved out I moved with me as many of my favorite prairie plants' rootstocks as I could dig up and transfer in plastic bags. But I never saw them flourish again wherever I was able to relocate them in the city.  I sometimes wonder if a single one of them survives to this day.

Now I'm blessed to live in a depopulated farming area well to the north, with its high water table assuring plenty of swamp habitat where only a few landowners ever did much commercial agriculture. We still have forestland of native firs and spruce, cedar, tamarack and birch, maple, ash, chokecherry, juneberry, poplar and some oak and basswood. We have lesser-known native trees like the nannyberry, and native shrubs like the alder buckthorn and chokeberry. We have a reduced breeding population of warblers, vireos and sparrows in the nesting season. But even among these vestiges of the old wilderness bygone land-holders have introduced several kinds of herb from far-flung flower beds, from which they probably shared seeds and starts: common valerian, for example, from roadsides to secluded forest openings all over the region. To my surprise last summer I found a sunflower cultivar called Garden Golden Glow, fat and decoratively showy as a rubber flower on a swimmer's bathing cap, over where an unidentified landowner had maintained an apple orchard, now gone to weeds. (Many of us define weeds as anything growing in disturbed or dug-up soil by happen-so.) Along one forest-lined wild river I should not have been surprised when I discovered the invasive glossy buckthorn above a fishing nook.

For nearly twenty years I've kept painting native plants and landscapes, sometimes with a naturalized alien brought in because it seemed it had developed a profile of its own if only in my sight.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/89340939/watercolor-notecard-blank-card-harris?ref=shop_home_active_9

Note Card 4 1/4 x 5 1/2" "Startlement: Harris' Sparrow on an October Shore" features red pine, aspen, birch and a ground cover called Hudsonia--beach heather--found on sparse soils all the way north to the tundra.

               "Bluestems in the Autumn" original watercolor includes big bluestem, Indian grass and bush clover at season's end - card or print available by inquiry

As we fill up and commoditize ever more of our common land, the wildscapes of interdependent plants, insects, birds, reptiles and mammals of North America deserve all the promoting they can get, in art form, in seed stock and in the places we go home to. They can be revived right out our windows, even in an inner-ring suburb or downtown where the pavement ultimately ends.

Walking toward a Confrontation - a Rustic Perspective on Naomi Klein and Climate Change vs. Capitalism

It is agreed, except by the ones who can't bear to believe it, that we're in the decade now when humanity shows our true moral worth to the ones coming, our descendants, by recognizing that we can't go on in the fiery, consumptive way that we have for some centuries, blasting underground for more coal and petroleum so we can build more of everything, go faster and faster and sell out to an ever-larger customer base in the assumption that our biological support system won't come undone from all the plunder, leakage and reverberation.

When I heard the broadcast review of Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything : Capitalism vs. the Climate, Simon & Schuster, ©2014 I knew I had to buy it, read it and share it. The scope of the book is enormous; it opens in a chapter titled 'The Right Is Right - the Revolutionary Power of Climate Change,' allowing that the conservative right on the political spectrum, the ones most invested in the fossil fuel economy, are the ones who distinctly grasp that ending our extractive relationship with the earth would amount to throwing off the whole economic order that has enriched them. The tycoons of industries including oil, automotive, armaments, airlines, banking and agriculture, all so heavily wrapped in expectations of steady profit from steady growth, are the ones from whose ranks the founders of organizations like the Heartland Institute or the Competitive Enterprise Institute have come. Denying publicly that our activities could add up to anything unbalancing the climate is within the mission of these groups. They want climate catastrophe to be a hoax because only that would uphold the system in which they are experts at building wealth. Unlike the liberal other side, which has sought through various political and techno-means to impose curbs on the release of carbon--whether or not in practice obeying air quality regulations or investing in hybrid or plug-in cars or renewable energy--the right admits that relinquishing our oil, gas and coal-fired largesse would be the end of the capitalist system as we know it. The big-business liberal side has had trouble alluding to this fact in their policy statements.

Chapters further into the book take on the commonly held notion that technological innovation will not only save these same industries--in particular, commercial air travel, a notorious source of carbon emissions--but also leave room for their unlimited growth, and that all we need to do is to wait for engineering geniuses to come up with new clean fuels so we can get on with our lives. In fact, the speed at which we're overtaking the threshold of 2 degrees Celsius that has been set as the presumed safe limit to global warming does not leave time for that kind of waiting much less security through more, albeit cleaner, energy and transport.

Ms. Klein alludes repeatedly to the huge inequalities all over the world, in monetary wealth and opportunity and, as a consequence, in legal clout, engendered by affiliation with or lack of affiliation with the dominant economy. The dire imperative that we break up the consortia that profit from defacing the earth to go after petroleum, bitumen, coal, sulfides, diamonds, in sectors where they've never before been touched--corporations that would seemingly not care if their processes broke the planet into separate chunks spinning and spilling into outer space--opens paths to salvation for societies all over the world who face displacement by the giants. Redressing the crises in climate and the biosphere would also mean empowering countless individuals in all manner of storied or little-known places. This theme adds up to a current of optimism in Ms. Klein's book about climate catastrophe, a subject nearly as grim as any of the oldest tales about the destruction of the world at the hand of ogres, or justice for the sinful lot of us in the Biblical book of Revelation.

Subsequent chapters look at localized movements that have succeeded so far in stopping frack wells, for example, or transit corridors for coal and oil, because the people who were in the way had no choice but to stake their whole land-based livelihoods against the operators of the capitalist-backed ventures which collectively amount to such a force of destruction. Indigenous peoples in their longstanding respect for earth not as a mere cache of raw treasures, or just a big rock washed by treacherous seas, but as a mother and repository of ancestors may be the best examples of whose culture will survive all that we're doing (if, as I say, there will be any survivors, given everything that's self-serving and ignorant in human nature.)

Partly by reading Ms. Klein's acknowledgements crediting all her helpers in researching the topics and preparing the book's text, I was heartened to think of all the many enlightened visions being shared around the world about things that we will have to do in a new age not powered by dirty fuel. Imagine the whole world, with all its economies run by wind, sun, hydro and muscle power as of old through a  technological know-how integrating these energies on a sweeping scale that's virtually equal to our modern-day collective demand. While the movement to divest from oil and reinvest in renewable energies goes on, and deadly conflict at the frontiers represented by pipeline routes becomes an ever likelier part of history, seemingly more of us than ever continue pursuing what is happening with the birds, fish and other wildlife. I make and sell nature art to earn a living, and so I keep heading out for secretive sneak peaks at these creatures and their support system, preferring to go by foot or on skis, on a mountain bike or hybrid car.

On whatever front each of us exerts ourselves while seeing the overworked world for what it is, whether we're negotiating to increase the heating and cooling efficiencies of houses and public buildings, connecting North American First Nations tribal members with the financial resources to be their own job creators so they need not hire themselves out to coal and oil rigs, teaching children of the slums about nature and available services from nature in their home regions, teaching individuals bored to death by automated, denatured processes about the enjoyment of providing for ourselves by hand and controlling our own food and surroundings like never before---there will be newfound joy. There can be prolonged joy in discovering that what we thought was  irreparably lost is really in reach, or was never really gone.

 

 A Thawing Scene - 'March Marshland at Crex Meadows' - original watercolor matted on handmade cattail-fibre paper
 
Today I'll go out to the woods and swamp in their January hush, around saplings gnawed by deer in a shortage of the maligned four-legged predators like wolves that make deer scarcer, pathways crusted with a snow that never really gained any depth so far this winter, burning my calories on my skis and looking for the most interesting snags and stumps, ones full of suggestiveness, almost like driftwood propped up ready for a carver to animate with hand tools. Even though it's unnecessary I still photograph them as specimens for reference in my weird new swampland painting. I've got a little net bag made by somebody out of a recycled athletic jersey which I'll fill with the dried leaves of Labrador tea so these can further dry inside the house and become tea leaves for me or whoever wants to try some. The low-growing shrub of wet cold ground, Labrador tea (Ledum groenlandicum), will shoot out baby leaves in May or so and flower again, lavish and white, in the month of June unless we have a hot, advanced spring as is increasingly possible, affecting all blooming. It becomes urgent to me to get out and come back in and document what characterizes Saint Louis County, Minnesota and nearby Ontario because it will change, yet there will be witnesses who mourn the losses and replacements but go on with their own lives and old enthusiasms...I somehow trust and expect.

  Labrador tea sprouting in snowmelt

                                                                            Birch snag serves as a trail marker and food cache.