In The Southwest: Keane & Fogel

Written by

Kristin Keane / Harris Fogel

Caught

I.

I am not sure who made the Grand Canyon so wild—it is hot, petrified, ready to bake you alive. In summer, the air strangulates, suffocates, smothers. The way it takes you by the neck, you must dip your entire face—your whole body, even—into the Colorado River for relief, the residue evaporating from your skin as quickly as air releases from a punctured balloon. Dehydration comes regularly and the canyon takes lives that way. Sixty-five to be exact, lifeless and seized on the switchbacks off the rim. Some come for the beauty, but usually it is for the risk.

Once a man waited out the heat by resting, foregoing the hike down towards the river because of fatigue. When his friends returned, they found him dead. I would like to ask that man: Were his last moments with the canyon as intimate as two hands pressing together? Did he see inside himself? Was there a choice?

dessert landscape

Backyard, Pioneertown, California, c. 1999 – 2003 ©Harris Fogel

II.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the Grand Canyon because deep in the gorge I fell into a rapid and the river and I had a moment with one another. I traveled with an outfitter one hundred twenty-six miles in, two billion years of geological history and layer upon layer of eroded rock, a deep gash inside the Earth’s crust. A silty river, colored like chocolate milk rests below the rim, one hundred twelve rapids dotting the surface, shifting and changing every moment; it does not die. The crests of them are entirely whitewater, turbulent and frothy. Formed by holes, formed by heavy, collapsed things; formed by blockages; formed by waves themselves—breaking white-capped haystacks. They are not all the same of course, and a guideline indicates their power by numbers one through ten. We went there to ride across them, hang on for dear life and fly through them, the river guides cowboys armed with wooden-oared reins. The danger was the draw: it made us feel more alive.

The water, remarkably, is not the only peril inside the canyon. Dust storms take you by the throat and during monsoon season, the way the river sweeps into the craggy channels between the rocks, you can get pinned against a boulder and drown. That’s not to mention others: sunburns so intense the layers of your flesh become as powdered as a cigarette sleeve’s ash. The winter temperatures drop so far below zero, the frigid water can freeze your extremities so they snap off the way you break a candy bar in half. Sheer cliff edge’s hairpin turns and rattlesnake bites, the thorny ends of catclaw acacia brushing against your bare legs, poisonous scorpions, the bulls’-eye shaped targets of mayfly bites, left for other animals to sink their stingers inside. It goes on.

When we arrived at Lava Falls, one of the most technically difficult American rapids, the guide turned and said right before the drop, “You really don’t want to go over, so grasp the raft tightly,” after I asked what we should do in case of emergencies, in case the whole plan fell apart down there. In fact I asked this just moments before we got slammed, before the raft lifted up and licked the sky one last time and we hit the wave train in a way that we might as well have been striking the stony surface of the canyon wall. She had also said, “Just make sure you have thirty seconds of air in your lungs,” and something else about not getting caught on anything.

But thirty seconds is a big stretch, after all. It is enough time to forget why you’re there, to make a terrible choice, yield to something. When I saw the guide fumble the oar as the rapid approached, bending down towards us high and glossy in the arch of a snakes’ tongue, I thought: that’s really beautiful; and then: it’s over.

III.

The rapid. Days of getting beaten down by swells of water, pummeled at the edges of the rafts’ frames, made it hard to tell we had flipped, but then I felt my feet looking for a place to anchor themselves where the foot straps should have been. I opened my eyes under water and saw the detritus the canyon spit out floating around inside, brown as a nut. It was quiet under there. I was quiet under there, twisting around the places where the water’s velocity shifted me. I realized I couldn’t really hear the rapid because it is thing you feel, even after breath has been knocked clean out of you, even when your ears are wide open. My heart met the rapid’s heart, they fastened, and we slid down a drain together.

It was a bludgeoning like a baton to the right cheekbone with the rush and force of two magnets’ poles: a tethering that could not be undone. Days could have passed under there, who knows? We compared notes. Bodies: my extremities to its jagged, pencil-thin twigs; the mosaic of its bedrock to the freckled constellations of my shoulders. We have both dreamt of butterflies. In mine their crab-shaped bodies fluttered inside my grandmother’s antique jewelry box; in the rapid’s, their wings were made from weighty arrowweed, sinking them in the river just as soon as they pitched themselves into the sky. The rapid lined my regrets and secrets up like smooth river rocks and held my face up to each buried one: I’ve toiled too long in places I should have left sooner, spent too much time in worry. I hide from myself. It is hard to weep in water, but right then I found a way. You might not believe me, but the rapid shifted shape and showed me myself.

I paused trying to recall what Betsy had said right before the drop. (Be careful not to get caught up, or be careful not to get caught on, anything?) The rapid and I agreed this was a moment when time appeared to fold in on itself.

IV.

I don’t know how I came up, or where. I remember immediately trying to commit to memory the things felt inside: arousal, pulling my heart from inside of its heart. I turned back from the rescue raft and suddenly it was gone. The waves barked up from the other side, and considering the mess of the current, there was no going back. You might tell me that a wave never dies, but it also never doesn’t.

dessert landscape

Cholla Study No. 2, Joshua Tree, California, c. 1998 ©Harris Fogel

V.

The last night on the river, a guide is struck by lightening. Chasing pineapple upside-down cake with thimbles of bourbon, we sang “Happy Birthday” while fingers of electrostatic zipped across the canyon’s edge.

“Lightening rarely comes off the rim, so we’re fine,” someone actually said right before a bolt hit the umbrella we stood under to keep dry. The passenger we were singing to still held a plate of cake in his hand, seven candles stuck into the slice, one for each decade. At first I thought the struck guide was gazing at the lightening from his back like he was watching clouds form—unicorn, bear, ice-cream-cone-riding-turtle. I was reminded of the rapid, how it could reshape itself into anything. But then someone said, Is Jim dead?, just like that. A few of us stepped towards him. He was blue as a starling egg, but breathing.

Yucca Valley landscape

After the Fires, Pioneertown Road, Yucca Valley, California, c. 1999 – 2003 ©Harris Fogel

VI.

I went there to bake under the sun, contort myself up rope ladders, travel into something famously perilous. I went there not to be remembered of death but to push against it, to ride the river’s wild edge and feel more alive. The awakening was supposed to be in the risk of the rapid, not in falling for it: it lives unapologetically, moves the way the stars and shifts of the moon’s gravity go, careens and turns and bends for itself because what makes it up is everything else—it is the rapid, but it is the river, the dirt, the rocks—living by its own accord, unafraid and unapologetic of what’s next. We see danger in the way that light flashes against a rapid’s foamy ridges, and the rapid just sees the light.

Nine Mile Canyon landscape

Nine Mile Canyon, Above Owens Valley, Inyokern, California, c. c. 1999 – 2003 ©Harris Fogel

VII.

I could have done things differently down there. I could have reached harder for a handhold, pinched the tips of my fingers between a slot in the rock bed’s surface, wedged my feet inside a gap, bowed my head to exhale. I could have punished myself, ended things. I could have caught razorback suckers with my bare hands, ripped their heads clean off with my teeth. Under is where fear finally stops. Under is an uncomplicated surrender. Under is a good place to hide. The guide got struck by lightening that night, and he went back the very next summer. I wanted to ask him what he experienced inside that streak of electricity, how he felt underneath the pulse. I didn’t get the chance to, but I’m guessing I probably already know. If the opposite of cheating death is dying, then what do you call the place in between?

VIII.

Somewhere along the way we learn fear, we worry for what’s coming next, relinquish ourselves to control, to loss of pure unrestraint. Then we hide from ourselves. I’m no good at learning from the past, but I know now there is a place under that rapid more powerful than the roar of the water ricocheting between the canyon walls, a place where you can go get caught. A rapid doesn’t drown anyone: it lives primal and intrepid, unafraid of broken bridges.

Here’s a trick I’ve found to feel more alive that is not in dodging rattlesnakes, their forked, smelling tongues: I imagine heading for the edge of the vertical drop, but do not ask what will happen next. I see the rapid ahead, prettily misshapen and speeding towards me. I do not sink my feet into the footholds of the raft; I do not grip the straps so tightly my knuckles go white. Instead I let go, press my hands together. I think about time, butterflies, drain holes. I pull my fingers apart and set the palm of my hand against the place on my chest where my heart is under. I listen. I wait for time to fold.

De Anza Cycle Park landscape

On the Road to De Anza Cycle Park, I-60 east of Moreno Valley Near Banning Pass, Riverside County, California, c. 1999 – 2003 ©Harris Fogel

00

Kristin Keane lives in the Bay Area. 

Harris Fogel. These photographs were made using an 8×10-inch Deardorff view camera; for most of the images the camera was fitted with a Fuji 250mm F6.8 lens. The original book maquette of a Few American Cultures was created in 1993 at the request of the late Reinhold Misselbeck, then curator of the Museum Ludwig in Köln. Housed in a black plastic negative binder, it was filled with one-of-a-kind Cibachrome 8×10-inch contact prints printed on the glossy print material when I lived in Palm Springs, California. The advent of digital imaging allowed me to revisit the work and reconsider it in a larger framework.

The project began in the 1980s, with several themes; water politics in the West centered in California, the western landscape, portraiture, the South, etc., all cultures unique to themselves, but overlapping at the same time. I have continued to work on the project, creating new images, evolving and expanding. The shift to the 8×10-inch view camera not only slowed me down, but it allowed an exploration and description of texture instead the rough jottings of texture that smaller formats provided.

Natural Phenomena: Thomas & Hines

Written by

Osprey of the Blue Refuge

I come over the dunes into morning light, white light, the kind of light that makes my tripod and 600-millimeter lens worth the weight.  I am hunting osprey.  For two weeks, I have walked the beaches of the bird refuge, sleeping in my car at the park campground.  I’ve found two nests.  One sits on a wooden platform beside the campground, its stick-and-sod lattice woven with denim thread and fishing line.  The other came down from its nest tree after the last hard rain.  I stood right there.  I watched it fall.
Early this morning, I went to the visitor’s center to ask after ospreys.  I shook hands with the ranger, whose name I could not recall.  He knew mine.  He stood up behind his desk when I came through the door.  “If it isn’t John Cossman,” he said.  He waited for his name.  The visitor’s center is not air-conditioned, so he sweat.  I sweat.  Since I could not ask his name, I asked for a map of the island.
He was wearing a park ranger’s Stetson.  If he’d taken off the Stetson, I might have known him.  I knew we’d gone to school together, to the only island school.  I knew he was one

 who never managed to get away.  Growing up on Santa Rosa Island, you hear it from your parents and your teachers and Mrs. Lewis at the grocery: “If you want to make something of yourself, you’ve got to get off the island.”   At seventeen, I did.  Four years later, when my choices were Southeast Asia or medical school, I chose medical school.
He asked what work I’d been doing, and I told him I was working as a pathologist in Charleston.  I did not tell him fifteen months ago, I diagnosed a cyst from the left breast of a woman—we’ll call her Ms. Lydia Harris—as a radial scar, benign.  It was malignant.  One year later, they diagnosed tubular carcinoma, stage three, metastatic in five of seventeen lymph nodes.  You can’t know what might have been, but her prognosis now is nine months of hell and then fifty-fifty.  They printed an interview with her in the local paper, covering the malpractice suit.  She said, “I just want him to admit he made a mistake.”  But a man doesn’t make a mistake like that.  I have diagnosed tubular carcinoma more times than I can count and never gotten it wrong before.


I told him I’d retired.
He said, “Good for you.”  He said he’d seen my father a few weeks ago at the food mart.  My father lives waterfront on the island’s eastern shore.  “Said he was thinking of selling the house, heading north.”
I shook my head.  My father built that house fifty years ago.  My wife Sandra has been trying to get him to sell and move up to Charleston, closer to us.  She thinks he’s lonely.  I tell her he likes his space, same as I do.  I said, “We’ll have to pry him out of that house.”
“Lots of people are selling,” he said.  “Going inland for work.  I’ve had every fisherman on the island come through this office in the past three months.  They stand just like you’re standing, asking have I got work for them.”
“I’m not looking for work,” I said.
He said, “I tell them like I’m telling you now.  I tell them if I had work don’t you think I’d give it to you?  In a minute, I’d give it to you.”
“I’m not looking for work.”
He rolled his chair back from the desk, tipped his hat up on his head.
I nearly had his name when Charleston called.  I let my phone ring itself out against my hip.  It was the lawyer, wanting to confirm tomorrow’s meeting.  In the message, she said, “Eight in the morning, doctor.”  She said, “See you then.”  We are to meet before the deposition.  The deposition is tomorrow. The deposition is at noon.  I could have left 
 

then, poured a small coffee to go and taken I-10 into the sun.  I could have been home in time to eat dinner with Sandra.  But I had remembered his name.  I leaned across the ranger’s desk, tapped two fingers down on the laminate.  “Russell,” I said, “I am looking for osprey.”

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

I walk east, skirting the loose sand of the dunes, because Russell pointed me east.  He said there is a nest this way.  “Keep to the shore.  You can’t miss it.”  I keep to the shore.

From the air, Santa Rosa Island looks like a body afloat on the tide, the bridge a single arm stretched overhead, fingers sunk deep into the Florida coast.  The migratory bird refuge runs along the island’s southernmost point, three miles of undeveloped shoreline.  I am glad to be here, herding sandpipers up a lip of shore, dodging the stranded jellyfish that shine like blisters. Tar balls pebble the beach.  I kneel at intervals, steady my camera on my knee and try to photograph the hurried sandpipers, but the sun is too high.  Even underexposed, the sand behind them is too white.

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

Sandra calls.  I feel her humming against my hip.  I take the phone and hold it in my palm.  She will want to know what time she should expect me home, to know if I hit traffic in Mobile, construction outside of Atlanta.  “Where are you?”she asks in the message. She asks twice.  If I called her back, I would tell her, “I’m leaving now,” and she would say, “I’ll wait up for you,” and she would wait and wait.
Last time I talked to Sandra, she told me they could take our savings if malpractice didn’t cover the suit.  They could take the Roth where we’ve been putting money every month for retirement.  They could take the house.  She said, “I’d hate to lose the house.”
Ospreys orient home by the sun on their biannual migrations.  They come to this island from Cuba, following a trail of floating rigs, whose derricks offer places to perch, to rest their wings or lock talons and sleep.  At night, when there is no sun, they fly by the stars—not single stars, star patterns, constellations.  If clouds obscure the stars, they follow the grid of ultraviolet light.  If they are blinded in the name of science, they use magnetic cues to find their way.
I haven’t slept in the house in Charleston in weeks.  I wouldn’t mind if they took it.  I could stay here, sell prints of my photographs, maybe work as a docent in the visitor’s center, make enough to keep myself in boots and canned peas.  I’d enjoy that sort of work, put-your-feet-up work, work that doesn’t help anything, doesn’t hurt anything.  When I get back to Charleston, I’ll tell them take the house.  I’ll tell them take it all.

At the fishing pier, a male osprey flies reconnaissance over the water, flexing his wings as though he might dive.  I pause, focus the osprey in the viewfinder of my camera.  I only have one photo of an osprey diving, and that one was an accident.  I’d brought my daughter Lacy down to see her grandfather and was taking pictures of her out in the surf.  She was maybe seven.  In one picture, right in the corner, I caught an osprey with his wings tucked, tipped down toward the water.  Lacy is just beside the bird, with her skirt bunched at her waist and one hand skimming the surf.  In the print it looks as though the osprey is coming to land on her shoulder, tame as a hunting hawk.  Lacy’s studying now in Virginia, studying biology, planning on medical school.  I’ve told her there are worse ways she could go.
On the fishing pier, a man works a cast net, his cooler open and empty at his feet.  His hands spider across the webbing—limber hands, young hands.  My hands are stiff.  About a year ago, I started having trouble grasping the fine-focus knob on my microscope.  I took to working just with the coarse focus, playing it out and back until the tissue came clear.  And I have thought about that.  I’ve thought if the image was sharper maybe I would have caught it, would have seen the slight pinching of adipose tissue stained orange, a rusted carcinoma.
Behind the net fisherman, a blue heron skulks, hoping for a handout.  Last summer, the pier would have been packed shoulder to shoulder, families sleeping at night in lawn chairs to keep their spot, farming their narrow patch of ocean.  That was before the spill, before word came from the trawlers of eyeless shrimp, crabs without claws, two-headed fish, fish covered in boils, in black lesions, fish that bled black at the hook and were black inside, gills and muscle and bone, like they’d been charred.

Strung along the pier’s railing are animal bones, threaded on fishing line with pop tabs and shells as spacers—the bones of fish washed up on shore, of birds and turtles found dead on the beaches in the months after the spill.  I walk past a large pelvis, a pelican’s perhaps, and a skull that looks distinctly canine.  Someone has added a Marlins cap and a strand of holiday tinsel.  At the end of the pier, a sign reads “Make Them Pay.”  The oil company has paid.  If I look to my left, I will see the cranes and backhoes, quiet for the weekend, which have started construction on a twenty-five-story hotel made possible by the county’s claim check.

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

Santa Rosa Island was spared the worst of the slick.  Off the Louisiana coast, it is said the oil sludge was so thick you could walk between barrier islands without sinking into the water. They burned what oil they could off the surface.  

Families gathered on Louisiana beaches to watch the lighting of the Gulf.
On the shore beside the pier, a man wearing headphones plays a free line in shallow water, catch and release.   He hasn’t bothered bringing a cooler.
My osprey has ceased his arcs and settled on a branch overlooking the waves.

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

“What are you after?” I ask the man with the free line.  He pulls his headphones down from his ears, and I repeat my question.
He says, “Anything that’ll bite.”

We get to talking.  He’s headed through to south Florida, comes down every year about this time and stays until spring.  “For the warmth.”  He asks about my camera, asks if I’m shooting for a magazine, and I shake my head.
“Retired,” I say.
“These things happen, John,” Gary said after the summons. Gary and I shared an office.  We shared cases, the head-scratchers, passing them back and forth until we came to a consensus.  The day I misdiagnosed Lydia Harris he wasn’t in the office.  His son was pitching a little league game, and he had gone to watch.
“You’re a good doctor, John,” he said.  I stood looking at my microscope in its heavy dust cover, at the slide trays stacked ten-high on the desk beside it.  “You think you could take them for me, Gary?” I asked him.  “Just for today?”
He had a stack of his own, but he took them.  They asked me to resign the next day.
I tell the fisherman, “I’m living like I should have been all my life.”
He tells me he’s retired as well.  He was a conductor, he says.  “The Cincinnati Orchestra.”
The osprey leaves his perch, and I raise my camera.  I watch him fly.  “You miss it?” I ask him.
He shakes his head.  “It’s the nerves,” he says.  “You get so a body just can’t take it anymore.”
The osprey shades the water with his wings, searching the shadows for the flash of a darting fish.  At that shine, he will hover, positioning, then plummet feet first, extending his head at the last moment so beak and talons enter the water together.  He will miss just one catch in fifty.

The net fisherman has brought up three small herring and lowers them carefully into his ice chest.  I lift my camera.  I take one photo—the ice chest, man, and heron all in a single frame.  The light is heavy, iron light.
I tell the conductor I’ve been photographing ospreys.  “Keeps me occupied,” I say.  He can understand that.  He’s fishing just to toss the fish back.  “Only found two nests so far,” I say.  I tell him there’s some who blame the oil for that, say it’s made for bad fishing, say the ospreys are staying away.  “Somebody cut corners,” I say.
He shrugs.  He says, “Somebody wasn’t paying attention.  That’s my guess.”
I shake my head.  I’ve thought about it, of course, thought I might have been distracted.  I’ve thought maybe the Saturday Gary’s son pitched his first game was the Saturday Sandra told me she was going to visit her sister for a few weeks, maybe a month, said she needed some time away.  “I’ll come with you,” I said.  She said, “You’ve got work.”  I told her I’m ready, anyway, to be retired.  “Work three more years for me, John,” she said.  “Just until we pay off the house.”  I told her she knows, doesn’t she, that I need her here.  She said she knew.  But it can’t have been that Saturday.  That Saturday I didn’t go into the office.  I stayed at home with her.
“Grossly negligent,” I say.  That is the phrase the courts will use.  I say, “They knew what they were doing.”
The  conductor has caught a fish.  He wades out into the water to take it by the tail, gets it unhooked and tosses it up to the heron on the pier.  It is a fifteen-inch sea trout, one-headed.  The heron does not, of course, want it.  Too hard to get down and keep down.

The  fish flaps against the pier, tugging for water, jumping like the ground beneath him is hot enough for cooking.
The  net fisherman comes away from his net to stand over the fish.  “That’s a catch,” he says to the conductor.

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

The conductor shrugs.  “Been at it a few hours.  About time.”
The  fisherman nudges the sea trout with one toe. “You see the herring out there?” he asks us, pointing over the water.  “I bet this one was after the herring.”

I look where he points, and I see them, flashes of silver, fish flying from fish.
He says, “Man tried yesterday to charge me three bucks a pound for skipjack.  Three bucks a pound, and the fish so thick out there you could shovel them up.”

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

The  conductor says, “I’ve never heard herring to leap like that.”
“Any fish’ll jump if he’s got cause.”
My osprey hovers above the school.  I lift my camera.  I catch him with kinked wings.

“You got a boat as nice as that camera?” the net fisherman asks me.
I shake my head.
“I’m in the market,” he says. “They took my seiner to Luling to help with the clean up.  Might as well take my legs, I told them, but they just needed the seiner.”
“I don’t have a boat,” I say.
I’d lease her from you if you didn’t want to sell,” he says.  “Schools like that I’d turn a profit quick.”  He tugs at the brim of his ball cap.  He is looking down at the trout, which has more meat on it than six herring.  “You just going to leave it?”
“I was meaning the bird to eat him,” the conductor says.
“Bird doesn’t look interested to me.”
The conductor shrugs and pulls at the cord of his headphones, which dangles, cut, at his navel.
The net fisherman stoops and takes the trout by the jaw.  “You don’t want him.”
The conductor says, “I wouldn’t eat anything out of the Gulf.”
The net fisherman lowers the trout into his ice chest and starts packing away his net. He says, “What else is there to eat?”  He lifts his cooler onto his shoulder and makes his slow way down the beach.  He stops once to rest, and I point my camera at his back, but the sun is out in front of him, shining directly into the lens.  He is just a shadow, the world brightened to rainbow around him like oil sheen on water.
I turn back at a splash.  The osprey is coming up out of the Gulf, shaking the water free of his feathers and gaining altitude.  He is not carrying a fish, not carrying anything at all.

It is almost noon.  I have followed the call of a female osprey into brush so thick I cannot see the Gulf.  I did not think to bring a machete, so I swing with my tripod, with my arms.  My camera I do not swing, but tuck safely beneath my shirt.  The map, I have decided, as I fold and unfold it and turn it in my hands, is useless.  It does not show, for instance, the copse of pines shading my bare head from the advancing sun, nor the prickly pear which has just, obligingly, inserted a slender needle through the sole of my right boot into my largest toe.  And the marsh visible beyond the acacia could be any of three marshes.
I tighten the belt of my jeans and wade into that marsh.  The water is black and warm, folding around me.  I come up onto dry land soaked and blooded and feeling altogether good, because a female osprey is perched on a branch just two yards ahead of me, and my eye is level with her lizard eye.  She sees past me, past all the heavy-browed hominids right back to Homo erectus egg-snatcher.  She knows better than to trust me.
I wander the sand pines, searching for her nest.  Last week, I watched a nest fall from a sand pine in a grove like this.  It was an old nest, a decade old or older—four feet in diameter, two hundred pounds at least, enough seaweed and grass to start a slow process of decomposition, generating heat for the nestlings.  There were two nestlings.  When the nest fell, I was squinting through my viewfinder at their snaking heads.
The fall was quiet, marked only by the whistled two-note alarm call of the female osprey hovering above the newly barren tree.  I left my camera and crawled into the thicket of sweet acacia surrounding the trunk of the nest tree.  I spent forty minutes working on hands and knees, searching for the fallen nest.  I found it on its side—sticks and seaweed, down feathers, a scrap of denim.

The nestlings were alive, black-skinned and scaly, reminiscent of their reptilian ancestors.  They pulsed with their rapid, whole-body breathing, hissed, flicked their narrow tongues.  I took a few pictures, and that’s all I did.  I shot them

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

zoomed in tight with the aperture wide open.  I caught with my camera the vein of each pinfeather, the bristled legs of the bluebottle flies that swarmed the nest.  In the pictures, the background is blurred.  In the pictures those nestlings might be twenty yards up in the air.
I wander until I lose the light.  I do not find a nest, but I know it is close, because twice the female osprey flies a tight circle over my head.  I lift my lens to shoot her agitated. 

She wheels with spread wings, sounds her alarm to the standing pines.  I play the manual focus out and back until she is so sharp through the lens I can count the ruffled feathers of her necklace, which mottle her white breast.

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

I walk back to the campground along the narrow seawall surrounding the old naval fort.  As a boy, I rode my motorbike along this seawall, picking up speed and lifting the bike onto its rear wheel. In those days, colonies of plovers nested on the island, thousands of them, stretched for a half-mile

 

along the shoreline and packed so tightly you couldn’t pick your way through without putting one foot down in a nest.  You could walk right up to a brooding plover, take her from the nest with one hand and wring her neck, easy as collecting shells.  We used to cook and eat them when the weather kept us from fishing.
One night I took my motorbike down onto the beach and through the center of the nesting colony, plovers blowing up before the front tire like scraps of shredded paper. I came away from the colony scratched and splattered with urea.  My father, when he heard, was furious.  In part, because the bike’s sprocket and chain had to be replaced, but mostly because I had proven myself capable of malice he had not expected.
After that night, I could not get within fifty yards of the colony without being mobbed by a dozen birds, sprayed with excrement.  Every year it was the same.  Even when I returned after eight years away, the birds remembered me.  The plovers are protected now, the shells of their eggs so thin they shatter at a touch.  They don’t nest on this island anymore.
Sandra calls.  I answer.  I don’t want her thinking something happened to me on the road.  I don’t want her worrying.
She says, “John.”
I ask her if she thinks I made the misdiagnosis on purpose.
She says, “No.”  She says, “Where are you?”
I say, “What other explanation is there?”
She says, “Have you left yet?”  She says, “It was a mistake, John.  They know it was a mistake.”

 

I tell her I haven’t left yet.  I tell her I don’t know when I’m leaving.
“You can’t miss the deposition.  It’s against the law to miss the deposition.”
I say to her, “I know.”
“No one thinks you’re a criminal, John.”
I say, “I knew what I was doing,” thinking not about the Saturday I misdiagnosed Lydia Harris, but about all the other Saturdays, the Saturdays I remember.  The Saturday Lacy broke her wrist playing softball, and I signed out two frozen sections before meeting Sandra at the emergency room.  The Saturday Sandra’s mother passed, and we stopped at the office on our way to the airport, so I could sign out a lymph node biopsy—sarcoidosis, benign.  The Saturdays I bickered with Sandra over cold cereal and came to the office head-pounding.  I imagine the day I misdiagnosed Lydia Harris was a Saturday like any other Saturday.  I woke in the morning and left Sandra sleeping.  I made a pot of coffee, put Sandra’s mug in the microwave, so it would be ready to heat when she woke.  I drove twenty minutes to the office and parked in the lot reserved for doctors.  The office was quiet, as it always is on Saturdays.  It’s one of the reasons I like working Saturdays, you get the place to yourself.  I took my time over the frozen, just the single frozen, and finished the handful of cases left from the week before.  I returned home for dinner, and when Sandra asked how was it, I told her, “A good day.”  I told her, “One frozen, benign.”  I told her, “She got lucky.”

I call my father, because it is Sunday, because we eat dinner together on Sundays when I am on the island. He is free,

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

he says, and so I pick him up from his house and take him toJoe’s, the only diner on the island that doesn’t serve seafood.  After dinner, I ask him if there is any place he needs to go, but he says Mrs. Parker took him into town that morning.  She takes him once a week for groceries and to refill his prescriptions.  On Saturday mornings, she takes him to the brunches Gulf Power puts on for their employees, past and present.  He wears his denim work-suit and the gold star he was given at retirement for putting in forty years.  He retired at seventy-two, though I suspect they kept him on, those last few years, just out of obligation.  He’s the only one at the brunches with a star.  The other attendees are all kids in their thirties.  Pole boys, he calls them.

I bring him to the refuge, driving slowly to miss the ghost crabs that scuttle across the beach road.  We stand on the path leading from the campground to the water catchment tanks.  We have a clear view of the turnip nest, so named for its shape and the patch of turnips growing feral in front of   

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

it. There are three chicks in the turnip nest.  I steady my camera on its tripod, the viewfinder centered on them, just in case.

My father hasn’t been in the refuge since I came down with Lacy three years ago.  On that day he had to double the strings of his swimsuit around his waist to keep it from slipping down.  It was a green flag day, a calm day.  We went out into the waves, the three of us.  Lacy grinned every time I looked at her.  She was seventeen and already keeping her distance, but I like to think she enjoyed herself that day.  Dad lost his footing in the surf once, ended up tipped backward, working his arms in the water, head dipping under and surfacing again, spluttering.
I didn’t move.  It’s not something you expect to see, the man who striped your thighs with a Sam Browne belt panicked like a beetle on his back, swallowing water.  Lacy was the one who pulled him to his feet, and after she stayed close right beside him.  She put one arm around his waist, taking his weight, struggling with him up out of the water and into the dune fields.  I came behind them, watching her, thinking she was going to be all right, Lacy, thinking kids mostly raise themselves, wondering at how easily she loved him.
I asked him this evening if he wanted to go out into the surf, but he said he’d rather not, so we are watching birds.  The female is on the nest.  If we watch long enough, I say, we’ll see the male fly in with a fish.  He’ll have eaten what he can of the head and torn the rest away to lessen the weight.
He says, “I talked to Sandra this morning.  She seemed to think you were heading home.”
I say, “She doesn’t need to worry about me.”
“When are you heading home?”
I tell him I don’t know.

He says, “You’re a smart man, Dr. Cossman, and you’re throwing that away.”  He doesn’t approve of my early retirement.  He doesn’t know anything about Ms. Lydia Harris, who is right now walking through her house to her children’s bedroom, walking as though through sand, heavily.  She rubs at her neck, her shoulder, tired and aching in her limbs and right to blame me.
I bend again to my camera, focus it on the silhouette of an osprey on the near shore.  It might be the female from the nest that fell.  I can’t be sure. She is perched high over the waves, scanning for fish.  I wonder if she has abandoned the nestlings, and if some part of her is relieved to have finally failed, glad to have the evening to fish just for herself.
We wait another thirty minutes, though there’s no point.  The nest is quiet, and the light is low, western light, rusted light.  He is impatient, and so I drive him home in my car, which he does not like, crowded as it is with dirty clothes and an unrolled sleeping bag, canned food, camera equipment.
“Is there a restroom,” he asks me, “at the campground?”
We’re past the campground.  “I can go back,” I say, but I do not turn around.
He says, “I’ll be fine.”
He wets himself three minutes from his house.  I look over when I smell the ammonia, but he is backlit by the window, and I can’t see his face.  When I pull up into the drive, he says, “You go on in.”
He comes in a few minutes after me, says, “I’ve got sheets put on your bed.”  Says, “You sleep here tonight, and in the morning we’ll take your car to the wash to get the sand off of her.  You’ll ruin her with that sand.”

I wait until he is in his bedroom, running water for a shower, then I take a towel and a bottle of stain remover from the laundry closet.  He has tried drying the seat with a wad of Kleenex.  Bits of the Kleenex are stuck now to the upholstery.  I towel it dry, soak it with stain remover and towel it again.  I leave the windows open.

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

 We sit together in the breakfast room where I once fixed up an old Nikon rangefinder.  I shot two rolls of film with that camera, developed them at this table, in a darkroom I made by draping black canvas over a hat stand.

I stay long enough to share a pot of coffee.  He cuts coupons from the Sunday paper.  “I’m selling the house,” he says.  He looks at me over the paper.
I say, “This house?”  He built this house after we moved down from Virginia.  He was happy in those early years, living on a 34-foot sloop, trucking lumber over from the mainland.  I was happy.
“You don’t want the house,” he says, “and I’m getting too old to live like this.”
I say no to the first, no to the second.  I say, “You’re doing fine.”
He works his scissors around an advertisement for turkey sausage.  His hand shakes.
“If you want a smaller place,” I say, “I can find you a smaller place.”
“I thought I’d go with you to Charleston.  When you go.”
“I don’t know when I’m going.”
He nods.  “When you do.”
“We don’t have the space,” I say, “in Charleston.”
“All I need’s a place to sleep,” he says, but his house is full of things, and our house is full of things, and we might not have the house.
I say, “You built this place.”
He says, “I had a son to raise and no place to raise him.”  He says, “No one would build it for me.”
I drink my coffee.
He says, “I watched them bury Lutt Parker in sand so shallow next storm he’ll be above ground again.  You hit an age you start thinking practically about these things.”
“There’s time and time,” I say, “to figure all that out.”

“Virginia’s solid ground.  I wouldn’t mind Virginia.”
“You came to this island.  You left Virginia.”
“I came to this island to raise a boy up.  And I did that.”  He raps his finger down on coupons offering fifty cents off Selma’s Blueberry Spread or two stone-baked pizzas for the price of one.  “Island like this, you want to be just passing through.”
The visitor’s center at the refuge is closed.  I walk past it, east into the pine forest, toward the place where the nest fell.  I pass a park ranger headed the other way.  “You can’t sleep out here,” she says.  “You have to stay in the designated camping grounds.”
I tell her I’m just walking.
She wants to know if I have a camping permit, and when I tell her it’s in my car, she wants to walk with me back to my car.   We walk together.  She stays behind me, as though given half a chance I would turn and bolt.  She says, “There’s no camping in the park without a permit.”
It takes me ten minutes to find the permit. While I’m looking, she bends the brim of her hat in her hands.  It is the traditional park service hat, the Smokey Bear hat, the lemon squeezer.
I hand her the permit.  She looks it over.
“I haven’t broken any rules,” I tell her.
She hands it back.  She says, “Have a good night, Mr. Cossman,” and I do not correct her.
“At the campground, the conductor has built a fire using two-by-fours as fuel.  When he lifts a hand to me, I go to sit beside his fire, though the sun has just set, and it is still eighty degrees at least.  We sit in silence. I pinch the sand flies that

land on my arms and drop them into the fire. At intervals, he hums a few measures of nothing familiar, and when he realizes he’s doing it he glances over at me, grins, embarrassed, and slaps his left hand with his right, as though in reprimand.
There is nothing at his campsite but an army-issue tent and the chair he is sitting in now.  “Where are your things?” I ask him.  “Your car?”
“Sold the car,” he says.  “Ten years ago, it was.”
“How’d you get down here?”
“I had a buddy coming as far as Atlanta.  I got down all right.”  He kneads his hip with one hand.
“It’s the wet,” I say, because my knees have been aching and slow to bend.
He shakes his head.  He tells me he shattered the joint years ago.  He fell off the podium halfway through Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.  “Ten feet.  Down into the orchestra pit.”  He tells me they don’t list his name with the other conductors for the Cincinnati Orchestra.  Every other name, but not his.  “Nine months I waved a baton for them, and they can’t be bothered to remember my name.”
“I ask him what is his name.  Daniel Hartzog, he tells me, and I say it back to him to be sure I’ve got it right.
“What about you,” he says.  “Think they’ll remember you?”
“I say, “Yes.  I do.”
“Well then,” he says.  “That’s something.”
The other campers come from their air-conditioned fifth wheels and Winnebagos to join us.  They would stay in the cool if they could, but the conductor has built a good fire, and so they come with folding chairs and children and easy
talk.  The conductor is quiet.  A fly has landed on his cheek, just beneath his right eye, and he does not lift a hand to brush it off.  But when a man takes a guitar from a black leather 

Untitled from series Spirit Stories ©Jessica Hines

case and starts to strum, he puts on his headphones.  He leans over and tells me to have a good sleep.  He stands, offers his seat to a woman standing behind it, and ducks into his tent.

I leave soon after, because someone puts a piece of driftwood on the fire, and it burns with a smoke thick and black as tar, smelling of diesel.  I walk to my car.  If I left right now, I’d arrive in Charleston by nine in the morning, late but not too late.  In Charleston, Sandra is lying awake in our bed, not expecting me.  Ms. Lydia Harris sits in an empty
bathtub, fully clothed, nauseated.  Her eyes are shut.  The tub rocks beneath her, and she waits, waits for the rocking to cease, for the tide to pull back and leave her steady on the shore.  In Charleston, they have photographed the slide of adipose tissue using a lens dipped in cold immersion oil.  There is nothing in those photos I haven’t seen before.

 

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Award winning artist and storyteller, Jessica Hines, uses the camera’s inherent quality as a recording device to explore illusion and to suggest truths that underlie the visible world. At the core of Hines’ work lies an inquisitive nature inspired by personal memory, experience and the unconscious mind.

Morgan Thomas graduated with an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Oregon.  She is currently a Fulbright student, teaching English and creative writing in Darkhan, Mongolia.

Stanizzi & Marble: Listening

Written by

flying_birds_2

John L. Stanizzi / Anne Marble       

Skein

a length of yarn or thread wound on a reel or swift
nest of yarn on Zia Rose’s lap
beaks of knitting needles
pecking mittens into being

*
ice and wool
in murky chunks
inedible on mittens

*
mittens on the radiator
sun a hank of fire
on the horizon

*
the swifts are gone
but the blackbirds
murmur by the thousands

a succession or series of similar or interrelated things such as an incoherent skein of words
wounds healed
by the long stand of years
the theology of the sun

*
golden gratefulness
eruptions of wind
flowers bowing in the storm

*
listening to flesh
you draw closer
glisten with urgency


*
you leave
past the moon
swift with borrowed light
a flock of geese, ducks, or the like, in flight
low over Mansfield
coming together from three directions
three skeins of geese

*
the Chinese poets
might say they conduct a message
of love from afar

*
their boundless sound
the white flecks of their bellies
thrusting air up and down

*
your swift breathing
is the air
that reels me in

A Sign; acrylic on canvas; 30 in. x 40 in. © Anne Marble

Lungs; paper, ink, acrylic paint, glue on board; 24 in. x 30 in. © Anne Marble

LISTEN

for Cathy O’Reilly

On a clear, warm summer day
Cathy handed me a prize
she’d received from the surf.
It was a vertebra,
from a fish I imagine,
about the size of the top of my thumb,
and so smooth,
so rounded by the sea,
it felt soft.
I was holding it this morning,
rubbing the tips of my fingers
all over its unlikely velvetiness,
when I noticed that if I held it
so that I could look through
the hole in its middle
it looked like a resplendent ear,
this one small piece
of something from the sea,
something larger,
more complex,
and now on dry land,
a separate entity,
a curio given by the ocean to Cathy
and by Cathy to me,
so that now when I’m alone in this room
I no longer worry
that when I speak into the nothingness of frustration
my words will go unheard

The Messenger; acrylic on canvas 30 in. x 40 in. © Anne Marble


 

Magic Inside; acrylic on canvas 30 in. x 40 in. © Anne Marble

Magic Inside; acrylic on canvas 30 in. x 40 in. © Anne Marble

SKEIN II

I was on my way into the gym and
heard the geese blaring before I saw them,
a skein from the west, the V visible
but ragtag. I was looking up now, and
from the east a second skein was coming,
their raucous clamor growing as they rammed
the first V, though “rammed” may not be the best
way to describe what I saw; it was more
like the calibration of clockworks, each
bird part of a pinion meshing with the
larger wheel, a gear-train powering south.

As one bird pulled in behind the other,
their heart rates slowed but their speed increased as
they slipstreamed across the January
sky; and then a third skein came barreling
in from the north, the third wheel in this huge
going-train, urging and gliding, every
goose baying a one note song millions of
years old; and below their riotous noise

the V appeared with the kind of wonder
that becomes visible only after
it has happened. And I was left standing,
my senses staggered, my spirit increased,
as in the distance their yawping became
quiet, their instinct, their impulse for south
moving them along, me waiting for spring,
the geese gone, their perfect escapement done.

Chains; monotype print; 22 in. x 30 in. © Anne Marble

Chains; monotype print; 22 in. x 30 in. © Anne Marble

John L. Stanizzi— author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, and Hallelujah Time!  His poems have appeared in American Life In Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Tar River Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Rattle, and others.  He teaches literature at Manchester Community College. 

Anne Marble is a painter and monotype printmaker who lives in the Philadelphia area.  Her background in biology and environmental planning often serves as a reference for her work in both media. She is also the founder of a non-profit organization supporting several rural schools in Cambodia.  On her visits to Cambodia, she teaches printmaking to middle school students.  She maintains an active studio in Norristown,
Pennsylvania.  

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Birds modified from copyright http://fictionchick.deviantart.com/

The Good Life: Spartz & Bok

Written by

James Spartz

Three Perspectives on the Good Life: Carl Rodgers, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Scott & Helen Nearing

Pursuit of the good life goes by many names. To the ancient Greeks it was Eudaimonia – thriving, flourishing, or well-being. Synonyms include plentitude, harmony, or the equanimity of Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. In South America, Amazonian and Andean indigenous philosophies remain influential and, in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador, ways of good living or living well emerge as buen vivir in Spanish or sumak kawsay in Kichwa. By any name, “the good life” remains a synecdoche of values and virtues. From Aristotle in Greece and the Stoics of ancient Rome to modern philosophers of all stripes, living well remains a subject of endless fascination. Self-help shelves (virtual and real) are bursting with books on happiness. Contemporary comparisons of happiness to broader notions of well-being demonstrate a perpetual interest in the good life as a counterbalance to intemperate pursuits of leisure and

convenience.
What is the good life? How does well-being differ from happiness alone? Does it necessitate monk-like austerity? How can citizens in a society that rewards conspicuous consumption best engage in ways of good living? My own interest in answering these and other questions deepened while collaborating with Joe Quick, an anthropologist colleague doing field research in the highlands of Ecuador. His interests, though varied, include understanding how Kichwa people look to the ancestral past for inspiration in their efforts to build a better future. This occurs, paradoxically, as the national government appropriates the Kichwa concept of sumak kawsay in order to brand a model of development based on resource extraction involving the destruction of indigenous territories.

Influenced by this perspective, and in a spirit of “start where you are” and “use what you have,” I scanned my own bookshelf for signs of the good life. There, I rediscovered the work of psychologist Carl Rogers, the humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, and the husband-wife homesteading dyad of Scott and Helen Nearing – all of whom considered “the good life” in (mostly) North American contexts in the latter half of the 20th century. Exploring the good life through the lenses of Rogers, Tuan, and the Nearings – the focus of this essay – should not imply that these are the most important or even most interesting expressions of good living. These are simply where I began.
Investigating various discourses of the good life led me to discover other work such as philosopher William Irving’s A Guide to The Good Life – The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy; Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A life of Montaigne; and anthropologist Edward F. Fischer’s The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Well-Being. Books I found that approach good living more obliquely include Jeffrey Jacob’s New Pioneers; Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth; Dona Brown’s Back to the Land; and Dan Buettner’s work on Blue Zones, where human longevity flourishes among tight-knit communities around the world. Strivings for the good life also align with the field of positive psychology (e.g. A Life Worth Living, edited by M. & I.S. Csikszentmihalyi) and the ideals of Buddhism, particularly what scholar and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls ways of interbeing or living in harmony with the world and its elements, seen and unseen. Interested readers might also explore articles by Will Storr in The New Yorker; Robert Wright in The Atlantic; and Sebastian Purcell in Aeon, linking ancient Aztec philosophies to pursuits of good living. This is not an exhaustive list of resources but does provide a starting point for further exploration.

Everyone wants the good life, Yi-Fu Tuan suggests, but each pursuit is different – each is tracking a good life rather than any singular notion of the good life. This essay, in part,

Lil Blue, 2016 ©Gideon Bok

attempts to offer a counter-balance to notions of the good life that include socially damaging means to self-indulgent ends (i.e. unenlightened hedonism) rather than a more

 

balanced unfolding of modern life, in harmony with other social, economic, and natural systems. Perhaps seeking an answer to the question of “What is the good life?” is futile. Many answers are culture-bound and therefore difficult to translate or apply for other people in other places. To be sure, my own perceptions of what is interesting or useful about living the good life are culturally limited. I know only

Everyone, 2014 ©Gideon Bok

my perspective. What I hope to do, however, is investigate a few questions, provide some helpful clues, and offer measures of hope in a time of increasing uncertainty.
As a pioneer of humanistic psychology, also called client-centered therapy, Carl Rogers published perhaps his most

influential book On Becoming a Person  in 1961 as a personal reflection on 30+ years of professional practice. In one chapter – A Therapist’s View of the Good Life: The Fully Functioning Person – Rogers details certain characteristics he witnessed in people living more fully in their own unique lives. Twenty-five years later, Yi-Fu Tuan published The Good Life, a broader perspective on good living. Tuan examines humanity’s relations to space, place, and community across various cultural contexts. “Everyone wants the good life,” he writes. “How it is conceived varies greatly from culture to culture, and in a complex modern society even from individual to individual.” Like Helen and Scott Nearing, Tuan provides a focus on the agrarian perspective but, unlike the Nearings’ antagonism toward the city, Tuan also embraces the city as a hub of culture and vitality. Whereas Rogers takes a psychological view of the good life, and Tuan approaches the concept from a more cross-cultural perspective, the Nearings’ work can be seen as a case study in can-do Yankee perseverance laced with a practical socialism. Scott Nearing, an economist, first published Man’s Search for the Good Life in 1954. When re-printed in 1974, the book gained a wider audience among a new generation of homesteaders in New England and beyond. These writings and many later “good life” works by and with Helen offered significant inspiration for the adherents of a renewed back-to-the-land ethic. Scott Nearing’s social scientific observations, deeply intertwined with his economic philosophy, viewed the hard work and deep reward of homesteading as one providing the most direct path to good living.
It could be said that what these writers share, each in their own way, are views on sustainable living. Whether through the individual sustainability and resilience of Rogers, the cross-cultural diversity and place-based community analyzed by Tuan, or the calloused hands and clean spirited “bread labor” practiced by the Nearings; all are versions of practical sustainability. A buzzword du jour for 

environmentalists, sustainability can be taken here to mean systems of living that provide social and economic security – nested within environmental limits – without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to provide for themselves in similar ways. My hope is that understanding discourses of the good life in tandem with discourses of sustainability will help individuals and communities flourish in their pursuits of Eudaimonia, variously conceived. Such pursuits can, in turn, provide base levels of material and psychological security without denying other entities – present and future systems, human and non – the ability to do the same.

ROGERS: Launching Fully into the Stream of Life
“The good life is a process, not a state of being,” writes Carl Rogers. “It is a direction, not a destination.” Along this path people develop their own conclusions about what “good” might come from a given route. It is “selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction” (emphasis in original). The general characteristics of such a direction “appear to have a certain universality,” says Rogers. This life-long path is one of regular renewal in light of new experience. Rogers calls it Becoming – integrating one’s “total organism” into a cohesive yet resilient and adaptive existential whole. The good life as such tends to share three general characteristics: An increasing openness to experience; an increasing tendency to live in the moment; and an increasing trust in one’s self “as a means of arriving at the most satisfying behavior in each existential situation.”
An increasing openness to the variety of life experiences is not just about physical experience but the full breadth of psychological experience. This includes a willingness to engage in positive emotions (e.g. courage, empathy, tenderness, awe) as well as negative emotions or mental  

states (e.g. fear, dissonance, discouragement, pain).  Such openness is “the polar opposite of defensiveness,” says Rogers, and a key marker of the good life along with “increasingly existential living” which, given this lack of defensiveness, affords moment-to-moment opportunities to live life anew. Therapeutic clients of Rogers would “not infrequently” express the feeling that “What I will be in the next moment, and what I will do, grows out of that moment, and cannot be predicted in advance either by me or by others.” Put another way, Rogers describes such existential fluidity as the self emerging “from experience, rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit preconceived self-structure” (emphasis in original). In the process of becoming, Rogers says, a person acts as a participant in and observer of moment-to-moment experience rather than trying to master or control it.
The good life is “not a life for the faint-hearted,” says Rogers. This underscores the distinction between a meaningful, reflected-upon good life and the pleasure-motivated, short-term goals associated with what philosopher William Irving refers to as unenlightened hedonism – seeking pleasure while avoiding the negative, messy (and often essential) parts of robust life experience.
A growing trust in one’s self acts as “a means of arriving at the most satisfying behavior in each existential situation,” says Rogers. Rather than relying on guiding principles “laid down by some group or institution,” living well affords individuals the ability to develop and enact self-trust in response to new situations “because they discover to an ever-increasing degree that if they are open to their experience, doing what ‘feels right’ proves to be a competent and trustworthy guide” to truly satisfying behavior. The “complex weighing and balancing” of one’s lived experience comes to bear on any immediate moment as a complex computation, 

 

and not an infallible one, admits Rogers. But, because the good life also includes openness to experience, “any errors, any following of behavior which was not satisfying would be quickly corrected. The computations, as it were, would always be in process… because they would be continually checked in behavior.”

Still #1, 2016 (work in progress) © Gideon Bok

A person engaged in this process of living well, one who is able to view the present moment from a perspective of psychological freedom, “moves in the direction of 

becoming a more fully functioning person,” says Rogers. She or he is “completely engaged in the process of being and becoming.” This is not to say that external stimuli don’t factor into one’s judgment but does suggest an inverse relationship between freedom of choice and behaviors influenced by fear, defensiveness, or dogmatic norms. A more fully functioning person “would almost certainly not be a conformist,” says Rogers. The good life is also imbued with creativity and resilience. In the face of adversity, such a person is “most likely to adapt and survive under changing environmental conditions.” He or she would be creative in making “sound adjustments to new as well as old conditions,” says Rogers, and “a fit vanguard of human evolution.”
Living the good life, for Rogers and others, is a process of cultivating richness. This includes a robust diversity of life experience and, for Rogers, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, and enjoyable “do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process.” Happiness, contentment, bliss, and joy may emerge in due course but more appropriate adjectives, suggests Rogers, include enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, and meaningful. Living well involves the courage to launch oneself “fully into the stream of life.” When a person is inwardly free, says Rogers, he or she “chooses as the good life this process of becoming.”

TUAN: The Arc of Choice
“The good life haunts us,” writes the humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Everything we do “is directed consciously or subconsciously, toward attaining it.” In the Western world, Tuan says, the good life “is envisaged, historically, in a limited number of ways. One of them is environmentalism, which sees the good life as a consequence of a special type of physical setting.” Connection to nature, via the raw beauty of wilderness or the constructed nature of urban greenspace,

includes a wide spectrum of nature-linked settings and activities. Focusing on activities, such as those of the traditional farmer, rather than settings is another way to conceive of the good life. The yeoman is a lingering, if over-romanticized, “icon of the good life,” says Tuan.
Even though most urban people remain disconnected from the true toil of husbandry, the growing popularity of farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture programs suggests a renewed appreciation for small-scale farming. For many, this includes a growing concern for provenance – knowing how and where food is produced – as much as it can be a rejection of corporate agriculture and its stark environmental burdens. The good life, in this way, is not simply one of leisure and convenience but one of values on display as sustainable practice. It requires hard work. While various practices may or may not be as “green” as one might hope, over the arc of one’s life, the compass of good living points toward a true north of sustainability and resilience. What counts – the virtuous choice – is visible in the direction of a series of choices rather than any particular steps or missteps along the way. This includes a kind of openness, says Tuan, to “certain kinds of hard truth.” Such a direction points us away from naïve comfort and splendor – one enjoyed in “easy conscience” at the expense of others, as Tuan suggests – to a pathway of awareness and accounting for the costs of our actions “in the spoliation of nature and in the burden laid on people less fortunate than we.”
Connection to other people – relationship – is a crucial component for living well.  Contrary to Jean-Paul Sartre’s oft-misinterpreted assertion that “Hell is other people,” Tuan posits the opposite. “Heaven is other people,” he says. The full experience of living well “is necessarily filled with

pictures of human contact – erotic, affectional, courtly, and intellectual.” Lovers, friends, courteous relations with strangers, and stimulating interaction with people far or near all lead in the direction of good living. Connection to place is equally compelling. A healthy co-dependence on both the

Broken Arrow and Butti, 2015 ©Gideon Bok

Broken Arrow and Butti, 2015 ©Gideon Bok

constructed and natural amenities of a home base has allowed individuals and cultures to flourish since the transition of humans as a largely hunter-gatherer species to one of 

 

agriculture and centers of urban commerce. Few livelihoods are as directly connected to place than that of life on the farm.
“It is easy to be sentimental about the farmer’s life,” says Tuan, because the vagaries of country life have been written “almost entirely by members of the leisured class.” These are people “who know little, if anything, about the hardships of manual labor.” Yet the mystique persists. Land has virtue – spirit – and provides food, says Tuan; “Nothing can be more basic.” Acknowledging the culture of consumerism in full force by the mid-1980s, Tuan contrasts the noble (though often inaccurate) portrayal of farm life to that of corporate manufacturers’ “catering to appetites that may have to be invented by advertising.” The small-scale agriculturalist, compared to the mono-cropping industrial version who grows relatively little in the way of their own food supply, can more easily connect their daily chores with the food set upon the dinner table, suggests Tuan. The farmer “enjoys a degree of psychological security unknown to people of other occupations (such as salesmen or scholar) in which the linkages between exertion and the staff of survival are far more tenuous.” Echoing contemporary work by fiery farmer populists like Wendell Berry, Tuan suggests that

…a life in which what one does is so clearly tied, by a succession of discernible steps, to what one eats also appears more serious and in closer touch with reality than one in which the connections are remote and unperceived. The farmer does not live in a world of make-believe; his life is not a game. By contrast, the world of (say) an insurance agent, like that of a child, is rich in make-believe and miracles.

Despite what may seem like an idealization of rural life, Tuan also very much prizes the city. Good living from this perspective is not either/or so much as both/and. “The good life is lived in the city,” Tuan writes; “…nothing compares with the grandeur of the city.” It is not that country people can’t or don’t appreciate contemplating the good life like their more urbane counterparts. It is simply that city people, having more direct access to many modern conveniences, often have more leisure time. Farmers, Tuan suggests, have too much work to do. Farm life is a life of struggle that requires daily resilience in light of nature’s occasional unpredictability. City life, by contrast, “offers excitement and glamor, the root meaning of which is magic,” says Tuan. “What is magical is unnatural. The city is magical in its successful defiance of nature’s rhythms.”
The good life of the city offers new and unique experiences, strangers from strange places to engage with, a constant churn of sound, light, and bustle. Such unnatural existence is antithetical to rural living where stability and continuity are strongly favored. What works for some in their pursuit of good living does not work for others. A reminder of what Helen and Scott Nearing often said of their own pastoral pursuits – theirs was a good life, not the good life. One’s conception of what makes a good life often stems from foundational experience. Though the good life is fulfilled by an openness of experience from one moment to the next, as Rogers suggests, our perceptions are often deeply tied to past experience and sense of cultural belonging or cultural cognition. “The good life is a serious life,” says Tuan, “imbued with feelings of reverence that come out of an awareness of momentous events in the past – of a heritage that gives prestige but also imposes obligation.” Given the variety of human experience, the historical awareness and

connection of one cultural group differs from other groups. Virtues abound. To each their own good life.
“The good life need not be heroic or saintly, but if ‘good’ is to retain its moral meaning,” says Tuan, “it cannot be a life devoted merely to the pleasures of the senses. Such a life, in any case, would pall without periodic essays at austerity.” 

Meghan Brady as a young Grace Hartigan, 2014 © Gideon Bok

Meghan Brady as a young Grace Hartigan, 2014 © Gideon Bok

Moderate limits on pleasure-seeking, as Stoic philosophy suggests, can actually increase pleasure in other ways. This includes the hard truth of ecological limits. Creations of modern life, including societies and their economies, have limits imposed by the laws of thermodynamics – the laws of nature. Though such limits are generally unwelcome in a

consumer society, the truth of their existence remains.
The ultimate austerity, old age, is one that even the best of us cannot avoid. Mature people, rather than the young, says Tuan, are “better equipped to raise the question” of “What is the good life?” and to explore it thoroughly because “thinking about the good life must be based on what we know and have already experienced.” In trying to envision the good life in any detail, “the future… has to draw heavily on the past.” Planning ahead, says Tuan, entails taking stock and reflecting on “those things that seem to us least ambiguously good, of knowing the historical conditions that have made them possible, and then trying to see how these conditions can be expanded or changed so that the good things might flourish.” But how to create the necessary conditions for good living? Tuan considers three broad categories – body, personal relations, and world – “corresponding roughly to the sensual, the moral, and the aesthetic.”
Tuan’s book is reflective and draws on an array of cultural touchstones, including the inherent brutality of civilized society. Civilization, he says, “tends to destroy plurality: it eradicates, for example, local cultures and peoples.” The sheer scale of destruction that civilization has leveled on many of Earth’s ecological systems is “without parallel.” Yet, civilized society also produces geniuses, saints and “the severest and most clear-eyed critics of civilization.” Even those who denounce the inherent destruction of so-called civilized life, “Particularly as they are manifest in the Western world,” says Tuan, are also products of civilization. It is this relative sturm-und-drang of city life – with its commercialism, commotion, and occasional dependence on drink and drug – that Helen and Scott Nearing chose to leave behind. Though they, like Tuan, enjoyed extensive travel and intellectual engagement with a lofty crowd of urbane comrades, the Nearings’ home base – first in Vermont and later on the coast of Maine – provided an explicit rejection of city life and, as such, connection with the daily toils and rewards of self-sufficiency and a rewarding rural livelihood.

NEARINGS: Living at Five Levels
The essence of Scott Nearing’s vision of the good life is summarized in the introduction to the second edition of his book Man’s Search for the Good Life. Living well comes in many varieties, Nearing stresses, and “the good life is an ideal toward which people look and for which they strive.” Such a pursuit involves “a pattern of conduct which, if followed, will provide advantages for its devotees.”
In laying out this broad vision – one that stems from his own vigorous opposition to “discrimination, poverty, exploitation, and colonialism” – Nearing asserts several underlying assumptions. Pursuing the good life is, for its individual or collective adherents, more rewarding than other ways of being. People are able to distinguish good from less-good options for living. There is a freedom of choice in distinguishing good from not so good. In knowing the difference between bad and good, people will tend to choose the good (“this from Socrates,” says Nearing), and one who chooses the good will seek to shape the life of oneself and one’s community according to the requirements of choices that have been made. With a measure of hope, Nearing also asserts that if one fails to achieve the good life today, one can try again tomorrow; and, finally, “through effort, experiment and experience men [sic] will grow to a stature which makes the good life more attractive as well as more attainable.” These are the aspirations of an idealist, Nearing says, one striving “for the unity of theory and practice.”
If people today know the work of Scott Nearing, it is likely in the context of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The books he and his wife Helen published throughout the 1970s were, for many, as essential as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and other publications propagating the ideals of rural self-sufficiency. Such a marriage of theory and practice emerged across North 

America, Europe, and other industrialized regions of the global north and west, often acting as a counterbalance to rampant consumerism (i.e. the neoliberal economic ideals of free market capitalism). Few places saw this trend take hold like northern New England, from Vermont to mid-coast Maine. Such deep roots continue to bear fruit.
Scott and Helen Nearing’s homesteading narratives bookended the 1970s with a reissue of 1954’s Living the Good Life in 1974 and Continuing the Good Life in 1979. The Nearings moved from Vermont to the Penobscot Bay region of Maine to continue living in, working with, and fostering a community of like-minded compatriots around the virtues of living well. The Good Life Center, located at the Nearing’s former home at Forest Farm in Harborside, Maine, continues as a living testament to the Nearings’ ethics and ideals. The reputation of the Nearing’s idealism – though certainly not a naïve idealism – often obscured the realities of their challenging lifestyle. A life of chopping wood, hand working the soil, strict vegetarianism, and abstinence from intoxicants such as alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco (or anything else) was not the life for everyone, especially in the freewheeling 1970s. It is the inheritance of this legacy – one of hard work and self-mastery – that many modern homesteaders advocate for (and disagree about) in the ongoing practice of Nearing-like homesteading traditions.
The Nearings made “serious and various attempts to live at five levels” in both Vermont and Maine. These included living with nature; daily stints of bread labor; carrying on professional activities such as writing and correspondence; being neighborly and engaging with their “fellow citizens;” and “unremitting efforts to cultivate the life of the mind and spirit.” Such a good life then entails attention to environmental, economic, intellectual, social, and spiritual activities. A concern for not just human well-being but the

goodness of the larger biota was also evident in their conception of living well. Scott Nearing writes:

We also did our utmost to develop what we called the spirit of man. It is not enough to have a good earth supporting and improving a good society. It is also necessary that the various life forms (including the human) which inhabit the earth, should have a maximum opportunity to live a good life. Life in any community becomes “good” in so far as it utilizes and conserves nature, improves society and expresses itself in the good health of the inhabitants, their heightened sense of social responsibility and their success in developing successive generations of human beings willing and eager to live and help others live at the most productive and creative level that can be established and maintained by the present-day human family.

Thinking Ahead
The good life includes ongoing reflection and engagement with personal, societal, and planetary systems in ways that promotes the benefits of those systems and perpetuates the flourishing of other current and future generations. Through an authentic questioning of the true impacts of one’s daily activity, creativity in how we modify such actions as a way to promote future well-being, and engagement with others who are also pursuing ways of good living, we can truly create a better world. In doing so, those who enact the virtues of living well promote the goodness inherent in the world as it is and take part in sustaining the benefits and overcoming the collective challenges many face. The good life is an idealistic pursuit, open to everyone, but most successful for those willing to foster resilience through hard work and honest reflection on the virtues and vices of mainstream  

society. This seems particularly true in the Global North where resource consumption far exceeds the carrying capacity of ecological limits so often annihilated by the earthmovers of Progress and Growth.

Blackstar, 2016 (work in progress) ©Gideon Bok

Blackstar, 2016 (work in progress) ©Gideon Bok

In a consumer culture, many people get caught up in pursuing a version of happiness based more on the accumulation of material goods, power over others, ego, and domination of natural systems than the more altruistic pursuits of good living. Equating such hedonic tendencies to “the good life” 

makes a clear definition of the phrase challenging. A good life certainly includes a measure of financial security but it also contains a wealth of wisdom, empathy, spirit, community, and freedom of choice, up to and including a healthy sense of agency or self-efficacy. As global indicators such as the Gross National Happiness Scale, Happy Planet Index, and the Social Progress Index suggest, once the basic provisions of food, shelter, and clothing are in ready abundance, the accumulation of excess material wealth does not generally add to a greater sense of subjective well-being. Living well includes consideration for wider systems, an alternative to conspicuous consumption and ephemeral pursuits of self-satisfying pleasure. A working definition of the good life then remains as the freedom to experience one’s best vision of living so long as it does not impede on others’ ability (present or future) to pursue those same or similar goals.

As Barry Lopez suggests in The Rediscovery of North America, perverse versions of good living – i.e. modern pursuits of leisure and convenience – are rooted in a legacy of “lawless exploitation” of finite natural resources via the tradition of European colonialism. In contrast, pursuits of good living described here can be seen as inherently sustainable and supportive of natural systems – cohabitative rather than domineering, adult rather than adolescent. Closer to this spirit of a good life are ways of being that balance out greed and selfishness with the benefits of community resilience and individual character. This is the direction in which the good life moves, hand-in-hand with hard truths, hard work, and humility in the face of much deeper and older natural systems. Always present, always becoming.

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James T. Spartz is a teacher, writer, researcher, and Driftless Area native now in coastal Maine. Prior to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, he was a worker-owner at an organic whole-grains bakery, hardware store sales associate, social worker, and performing songwriter – but not all at once. Spartz is currently an Assistant Professor of Environmental Communication at Unity College.

Gideon Bok is an artist.  He graduated from Hampshire College (BA) and the Yale School of Art (MFA.)  He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. He paints, manages an organic farm, and teaches art.

Lines: Chapman & Fulkerson

Written by

Robin Chapman / Clint Fulkerson

Banff Centre
Dec. 25

Dear Ones—dinner of sweet potato fries
and Black Angus burgers with bloodied boxers
on TV, the puppeteer journaling her family
under the flickering fight. Circus instructors
plan their work on silks and ropes and hoops
and the 30 foot swing of the giant trapeze.
The far-flung world whispers to faces buried
in their screens.  The new Creativity Center rises
sheathed in steel and glass. In my studio,
the dark outside retreats before the sluice
of podcast radio, science news, gigabytes
of  music I transfer from my memory stick.
Attention is our scarcest resource—mine,
to find the mountains rising all round us,
the stars flickering beyond the drizzle of snow,
the earth in its journey turning us again
toward light, the text of good will arriving,
the red silk fluttering with its human freight.

Tributaries 3, 2016; acrylic on wood panel; 20 in. x 16 in. © Clint Fulkerson

Tributaries 3, 2016; acrylic on wood panel; 20 in. x 16 in. ©Clint Fulkerson


Erosion 2, 2015; acrylic on canvas; 48 in. x 48 in. © Clint Fulkerson

Erosion 2, 2015; acrylic on canvas; 48 in. x 48 in. © Clint Fulkerson

 


Turgor 2016; gouche on paper; 30 in. x 22 in. © Clint Fulkerson

Turgor 2016; gouche on paper; 30 in. x 22 in. © Clint Fulkerson

Dreams of the Science Writers’ Workshop

i.
I go naked to the Senior Center
to pick up our speaker, much
to the disapproval of the matron
and the surprise of the reporters
gathered to hear yet another
political candidate. We barely escape.

ii.
What do I want to shout?
Look at the plans of our scientists
half a century ago to bomb
in hundred-Hiroshima units
anyone we were afraid of!
Look at our powers to make
the poisons that could kill
all life, the viruses that the birds
could spread, the gene editing
and drives that could change
the lives of species in ways we know
nothing about! Look at our inventions
pouring into soil, and water,
and lives; it is not enough
to be a scientist, handmaid
or handyman to the state,
not enough to blow things up
or knock them out.

iii.
The headlines now fear robots
with machine intelligence.
Leonardo da Vinci: it was not enough
to make plans to improve the machines
on the rock shelf of civilization
to hurl stones and pour oil;
not enough to paint Mona Lisa
and walk beautifully about.

iv.
How be a peacemaker,
a baker, an obstetrician,
a dancer, a weaver, a musician,
a gardener, a lover of life?

v.
Cortés
ordered the burning
of Montezuma’s aviaries.
The US rained down
Agent Orange for years
on the forests
of Vietnam.  And now
our peaceful driving about
and heating our houses
and burning our trash
threatens to strip
the aviaries of all the world.

vi.
Mummified, we stand around the table
each in our open coffin shouting out
our own particular version of truth
for our allotted hour or number of words.
Amplified, true; but hard, in my dream,
to walk-about, and the reporters
have closed their notebooks.

Compromise, 2016; acrylic on wood panel; 24 in. x 20 in. © Clint Fulkerson

Lattice, 2016; graphite & acrylic on wood panel; 16 in. x 12 in. © Clint Fulkerson

Tributaries 1, 2016; gouche on paper; 30 in. x 22 in. © Clint Fulkerson

Tributaries 2, 2016; acrylic on canvasl; 16 in. x 16 in. © Clint Fulkerson

Jan. 6,
Banff

Dear Ones—the avalanche cannons
are going off on chinook-slicked slopes.
Listening to their distant booms I try
to imagine the sounds close up, loud
enough to trigger the tree-felling rush
of snow and ice down mountain sides—
the way those New Year’s cannon fireworks
must have sounded to the blackbirds
in their roost—I wonder who set them off,
and whether they meant for five thousand
birds, in blind panic, to collide and die,
falling dead from the sky—no one
in that small Arkansas town is telling who
or why, though all must know by now
whether it was a kid’s tragic prank
or some hired exterminator’s culling.

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Robin Chapman is author of nine books of poetry, most recently One Hundred White Pelicans (Tebot Bach, 2013). She is recipient of Appalachia‘s 2010 Helen Howe Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Flyway, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Clint Fulkerson lives in Portland, Maine with his wife and daughter. He has exhibited his work in Maine at venues such as at Corey Daniels Gallery, Space Gallery, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the University of Maine at Farmington, and the Portland Museum of Art. He is represented in NYC by the Curator Gallery. His recent commissions include a mural at the Facebook Inc. NYC office, two murals at Maine Maritime Academy and a sculpture at USM Gorham under Maine’s Percent for Art program.

Clint’s work will be exhibited at the Unity College Center for Performing Arts in November/December 2016.

Climbing: Schaidle & May

Written by

Allen Kenneth Schaidle

Climbing Rocks

For many climbers,
climbing becomes spiritual,
religious,
transformative,
community,
identity,
art.

Not for me.
It’s just climbing rocks,
Big and small.
Finding beauty in the simplicity.

Life is complicated,
work is difficult,
and school is dense.
Sometimes even climbs can be, well, complicated too.

There’s anticipating travel logistics,
destinations,
routes,
brushing,
and beta.

I want climbing to be transparent.
No grander meaning,
I’m already overwhelmed with life’s meanings.

I don’t want a relationship with because then I’ll take, take, take and never give enough.
I’m struggling with this.
Just leave it as it is.
You know,
“leave no trace.”

And climbing certainty isn’t art
because then it can be judged
and that causes rivalry.

I want climbing just as climbing rocks.
Nothing more.
Just climbing rocks.

 

©Jesse May

©Jesse May

©Jesse May

©Jesse May

©Jesse May

©Jesse May

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Allen Kenneth Schaidle is a diehard Midwestern, educator, and activist. He holds degrees from the University of Kansas, Columbia University, and the University of Oxford. A native of Metamora, Illinois, Allen considers the creeks and forests of central Illinois his boyhood home as he continues forward in his life. 

Jesse May grew up on a small farm in the mountains of Virginia where his explorations of the farm and the surrounding woods were a constant. A large part of his exploration as a kid were supported by his Mom, who still supports his adventures to this very day. Recently, Jesse has been exploring  South America, Northern California, Utah, and South Dakota with his camera, all while camping and still enjoying the outdoors as much as he did when he was growing up.  It’s been a fun couple of years adventuring for Jesse, and he looks forward to at least a few more good years of seeing cool things. Jesse is a 2015 graduate of Unity College. You can follow him on Instagram.

How hemlock got its name

Written by

Chris Marshall


  Hemlock (eastern hemlock, as it is properly called) is a tree of some distinction, and worth getting to know more closely. It grows straight and tall; the largest hemlock on record measures 165 feet in height, and another famous specimen had a trunk seven feet thick. Hemlock shows a pyramidal shape, much like spruce from a distance, with an elegant taper. Flexible branches slope downward and out at a gentle angle from the trunk and turn upward at the ends with elegance, like the fingers of a South Indian dancer; this is the way they bend without resistance and shed accumulated snow. Young hemlock tops aren’t stiff like other conifers but yield gracefully under the pressure of snowdrifts. This soft supple quality distinguishes hemlock from spruce and fir, its forest-mates, whose bristly needles and firm branches we experience every Christmas. Hemlock foliage has been described as airy, feathery, delicate, fine.  From a distance the tree has the feel of a soft green cloud.

A    lot of people associate “hemlock” with poison.  Socrates drank hemlock and died, and we’ve never heard the last of it. In fact, there is a plant called poison hemlock, Conium maculatum, a weedy flower about three feet high that looks something like the common Queen Anne’s lace. It grows by water margins, roadsides and waste land throughout North America and the Old World.  The seeds and leaves bear a toxic compound much like South American arrow poisons. It causes death by disrupting the workings of the central nervous system: an ascending muscular paralysis gradually reaches the respiratory muscles, which results in death due to lack of oxygen to the heart and brain.

INDENT
~ The man . . . laying his hands upon him and after a while examined his feet and legs, then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. He said “No”; then after that, his thighs; and passing upwards in this way he showed us that he was growing cold and rigid. And then again he touched him and said that when it reached his heart, he would be gone. The chill had now reached the region about the groin, and

uncovering his face, which had been covered, he said – and these were his last words – “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.” “That,” said Crito, “shall be done; but see if you have anything else to say.” To this question he made no reply, but after a little while he moved; the attendant uncovered him; his eyes were fixed. And Crito when he saw it, closed his mouth and eyes.¹ ~

  So here we have a tall, handsome, deep-green tree of the dense forest – an eighty-foot-tall plant that can live for nine hundred years – sharing its name with a scrawny two-foot annual weed of damp pastures (and a lethally poisonous one at that!)

  Rural Northerners know one hemlock from another, even though city people might get nervous about a hike through the hemlock woods.  Robert Frost wrote, “The way a crow/ Shook down on me/ A weight of snow/ From a hemlock tree// Has given my heart/ A change of mood/ And saved some part/ Of a day I had rued.”  A student asked Frost about this sweetly quiet winter scene: “What did you mean by 

such a sinister image?” Frost was puzzled, and the student explained, “You know, the black crow, the poison hemlock…” Frost, Yankee to the bone, made some sharp observations about people from away and left it at that.

  But how did such different plants get the same name? For years writers have speculated that the tree’s needles resemble the plant’s leaves (they don’t), or that its foliage smells like the plant when crushed (it doesn’t). Evidently these guys didn’t get out in the woods much. The answer is deeper and more interesting – it takes us into the minds of the American colonists, and even further back to the Saxon occupiers of England more than a thousand years ago. The Anglo-Saxons’ name for the poisonous streamside weed was hemlike, a combination of “hem” (a border or margin) and “lik” (a leafy plant) – literally a “leek” that grows on the “hem” of the land. The plant was notable for its wildness and its ill-will towards humans – it grew on wet wasteland unfit for human gardening, encroached on productive fields, and poisoned

their browsing cattle. Other plants were beautiful, blessed, obedient to the human hand, helpful in our God-given work to improve the Earth and make it a garden.  Other plants lived under our care and settled happily on our fields and forests. This hemlock was otherwise – a contrary creature growing in useless and accursed places, resistant to our care, deceiving our cattle, and contributing only death. The hemlock plant epitomized evil.

  The British newcomers to North America found the poison hemlock herb growing here; they called it what it was and regarded it the same way as had their forebears.  They found the hemlock tree problematic, though, because it didn’t grow in Europe. It was clearly a conifer, and back in Britain any conifer was loosely called a “fir,” sometimes even the indigenous Scots pine. But how to distinguish the new species from the true fir, a familiar timber tree that grew on both continents? To choose a name, the British did what they had done a few centuries earlier when England began importing Baltic wood for ships

and buildings. The fine tall timber of Latvia and Prussia was a “fir” of a variety unknown in Britain, and so they had called it “Prussian fir,” “pruce fir,” and eventually “spruce.” In like manner, this new “fir” of the Americas became “hemlock fir,” or “hemlock pine.”

   They called the tree “hemlock” because it was accursed. Other conifers milled out as clean, clear boards and timbers; this new wood, compared to pine and spruce, was rough-textured, splintery, and tended to warp.  Other conifers grew on broad uplands and slopes where the human hand could be turned to productive lumbering and farming; this contrary tree seemed to prefer cold gullies, northern slopes, and terrains that resisted cultivation, wild marginal landscapes hostile to the civilizing mission of the farmer. In the world of trees it was a perverse sinner living in a godless place . . . just like the poison hemlock in the world of plants.

  Every kind of tree had its own moral character in those days. Oak, walnut, and chestnut were generous in feeding the farmer’s livestock, 

and strong and helpful for tool-making. Ash was beneficent in providing good firewood and straight-grained timber, and gave shade to cattle in the summer sun. The evergreen boughs of the “priestly” cedar served to remind humans of everlasting life (and so was planted in graveyards), but also brought welcome cash to the farmstead as homemade shingles went to market. Pine was king – straight grained, huge in diameter and height, growing everywhere, immensely valuable in the boards it provided. Trees like these represented virtues of dignity, strength, productiveness, religiosity, or courage, according to the temperament of the species. Think of phrases like “hearts of oak,” or “Old Hickory.”

  Always, though, Americans found those trees most beautiful that indicated the most fertile soil. In selecting a good farm, you would draw on the tree lore of several European nations, as well as locally acquired knowledge of tree habitat, to help you recognize good land for husbandry. The virtuous trees favored the same land humans did.

  In that world Hemlock was clearly evil. It chose for its home a terrain that resisted the divine will to cultivate Nature through human husbandry; its wood was uncooperative    
and resistant; it produced neither quality firewood nor good lumber nor useful fruits,nothing to aid its human neighbors. It was a moral poison … just like the herb known as hemlock.

¹ Plato. Phaedo, 117e-118a. In Plato, with an English translation by H.N.Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.

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Chris Marshall studies the historical ecology of land-human interactions on the Maine frontier. He is a retired Unity College professor.

The Hemlock Ecosystem Management Study is a multi-year study of how the loss of eastern hemlock trees affects ecosystems and people in Maine. The project is directed by four primary faculty members: Amy Arnett and Erika Latty from the Center for Biodiversity; and Kathleen Dunckel and Brent Bibles from the Center for Natural Resource Management and Protection with assistance from Unity College students.

Layers: Engelhardt and Frederick

Written by

James Engelhardt

You’ll never understand how
the knowledge comes to you—
the children naming animal tracks
at the river’s edge, the cribbage board
on the cooler—that you’ve come to love
someone who isn’t in the opposite chair
sipping their beer, their sunglasses
reflecting a mate who has been pulled
toward a different light, another coast.

Summer flows and dies around you.
A west wind summons a dust devil,
brings the smell of a distant wildfire.
The mews gulls and owls have fledged,
and autumn will bring darkness soon.

You play your cards, peg your points,
and yet the hands you use feel lighter,
filled with some strange gas, not bone,
and in your chest a foreign sun
burns fiercely with joy and despair.
The coming nova will swallow the orbits
of all the planets around you now,
the cards, the board, the river, the tracks.
Unthinkable. How do you participate
in what you never wanted to be real?

the one road heading north
deadends in Deadhorse

night spills into the next day,
there should be an end

Santa Claus stops at Deadhorse, too,
leaves eleven months later, full of schnapps

you tell me your mother walked out
headed north

you say you were too young
to pay attention, to notice your father

had taken to drinking
out of an old Christmas glass

three wise men, a baby,
and a star

you add these
to the list of places you can’t go back to

MdwntrJrny

 

 
   Linden Frederick

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James Engelhardt’s poems have appeared in the North American Review, Hawk and Handsaw, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Terrain.org, Painted Bride Quarterly, Cirque, Ice Floe, and many others. His ecopoetry manifesto can be found at octopusmagazine.com. He is an acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois Press.

 Linden Frederick  is a full-time painter residing in the Belfast area of Maine since 1989. His subject matter is the American landscape at dusk or night, but with a cultural emphasis. For example, his 2004 one-person show MEMOIR was inspired by the small town where he grew up in upstate New York, and NIGHT NEIGHBORS (2010) by Belfast. A larger geography and therefore, different American sub-cultures, were explored in the shows AMERICAN NIGHTS (2002) and AMERICAN STUDIES (2008). Other recent one-person shows were NIGHT LIFE (2014) and PAINTING NOIR (2006). He has been invited to guest lecture and/or teach master classes at educational institutions. He is represented by Forum Gallery, NYC.

 

 

Featured Artist: Eliot Dudik’s Broken Land

Written by

Eliot Dudik

Broken Land

We live in times of great unrest ‐- politically, socially, culturally. The beauty and old violence in Eliot Dudik’s photographs remind us that generations of people have lived on this earth in similar times. The stillness in these photographs both reassures and disturbs us. The land abides and heals, regenerates, but the violence emerges elsewhere year after year. How do we flourish despite our collective stumbles? The schisms are many yet we look for meaning in the face of adversity. Like the land, we seek resilience. Resurgence. Equanimity. As we reflect on the year behind and launch in to a new year ahead, we want to pause and consider how we might learn from our own mistakes or missed opportunities. To cultivate beauty among the decay. To act as better humans, better neighbors, better friends. To flourish despite our stumbles.

~ the Editors, Hawk & Handsaw

Words from the Artist. The idea of history repeating itself generally associates with the notion that an attempt to recognize mistakes of the past leads to prevention of recurrence. Current political and cultural polarization in the United States seems to have blinded citizens to the effects of historical schisms: divisions that, having not been recognized and resolved, led to the horrific and devastating events of the American Civil War. The current political divide in this country is not dissimilar to that of mid-nineteenth century America, and to severely compound these issues, political leaders today, as before, are apparently incapable of lasting and formative solutions.

Perspective on the Civil War and contemporary culture are vast and deeply engrained in our heritage. Prying open and examining viewpoints objectively is exceedingly difficult, but an essential responsibility for all citizens to allow any possibility of cultural and political cohesion. My goals are to create landscapes that come alive with the acts of war, and cause, at least, contemplation of the nature of being American, to allow understanding, communication, and cooperation with fellow citizens. These photographs are an attempt to preserve American history, not to relish it, but recognize it cyclical nature and to derail that seemingly inevitable tendency for repetition.

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Eliot Dudik is a photographic artist, educator, and bookmaker exploring the connection between culture, memory, landscape, history, and politics. He was awarded the PhotoNOLA Review Prize in 2014 for his Broken Land and Still Lives portfolio, resulting in a book publication and solo exhibition.  Broken Land was most recently published as a feature in the July/August 2015 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.  FLASH FORWARD 2015 chose the series for publication and exhibition in Toronto and Boston.  His photographs have been installed in group and solo exhibitions across the United States and Canada including Dishman Art Museum (TX), Morris Museum of Art (GA), Masur Museum of Art (LA), Muscarelle Museum of Art (VA), Cassilhaus (NC), Annenberg Space for Photography (CA), Columbia Museum of Art (SC), Southeast Museum of Photography (FL), New Orleans Photo Alliance (LA), Carlson Gallery at the University of La Verne (CA), and the Division Gallery in Toronto, Canada, for examples.  Upcoming solo exhibitions also include the Griffin Museum of Photography (MA) and the Center for Fine Art Photography (CO).  Eliot is currently founding the photography program within the Department of Art and Art History at the College of William & Mary where he is currently teaching and directing the Andrews Gallery at the college.

On Activism & Cement Eclipses

Written by
©Isaac Cordal

Taylor Brorby

On Activism

 

Activism, for better or worse, seems to be the buzzword of our time. Climate change, gender issues, political policy, GMOs, education—all are laced with an element of activism. As I sit at my desk, scratch words across the page, or type letters on a computer screen, I spend more time thinking about what it means to be an activist writer in the 21st century.
My own work revolves around hydraulic fracturing and energy. At this time we, as writers, face some of the most pressing matters in humanity’s history–increasing acidification of oceans, transgender issues, economic wage disparities, women’s reproductive rights,  topsoil erosion. The list can, and probably should, go on and on. In my own work, in my desire to speak from a sense of place, peppered with an element of longing, fury, and hope,

I wonder where writers can best serve to help shift the conversation.
Many of us know the work of prominent activists–Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickled and Dimed, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—because their work is crucial in understanding not only the world we have left behind but also the world we live in. Without writers, we wouldn’t be able to see the pitfalls and foibles of our own actions.
In his 1996 book, The Book of Yaak—a lengthy defense of the Yaak Valley in northwest Montana—Rick Bass says, “Sometimes panic would spike up deep within me—electrical charges of fear registering off the scale—and I would want to abandon all art and spend all my time in advocacy. I still believed in art, but art seemed utterly

extravagant in the face of what was happening. If your home were burning, for instance, would you grab a bucket of water to pour on it, or would you step back and write a poem about it?” You, too, might often feel this when snapping open the newspaper or turning on your computer monitor.
Most days I feel the duality that Bass describes, scratching my head and scribbling in my notepad, wondering how best to convey the degradation of my most sacred place: the Badlands of western North Dakota. Over the past eight years of the Bakken oil boom,  the number of reported oil, saltwater, and chemical spills has topped 10,000; housing prices have skyrocketed; the drug trade continues to spread; sex trafficking runs rampant on the prairie; flares roar across the horizon. How do I put pen to paper to speak out against these horrible acts? Maybe the question is this: How do I speak out on behalf of everything I love?

 

Some days I spend time in bed,done-in by the magnitude of my self-perceived responsibility in writing about this matter, of trying to convey the beauty inherent in native prairie grasses—switchgrass , Indiangrass, or blue gamma—or the long-term shifting of silt, carrying the ancient dust of the Rocky Mountains, settling and forming the striated buttes and bluffs of western North Dakota. Even flora and fauna that I avoid, such as prickly pear cactus or the rattle of the venomous prairie rattlesnake, sneak into my prose. I feel this so deeply because it seems that amid the growing oil boom everything I love is withering and disappearing from my home.
But still I wonder where this writing can rest in our consciousness. So much of our world is divided between liberals and conservatives—

 

pro -choice and pro-life, large government and small government advocates, organic and GMO food. Where is the conversation that allows us to live in the muck of everyday life?
Activist writing too often lives in the political language of our day. Advocates with a pen create phrases that isolate and reprimand, forcing the reader to easily close the book, never reading another word. This should be recognized as a failure on our parts as writers. As Annie Dillard says, “We should mass half-dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”
I try to wake up my neighbors by writing letters-to-the-editor, perhaps our last hope for a democratic state; I travel around the country, speaking at colleges and universities about the perils and pitfalls of fracking; and I 

join  activist organizations that promote a different economic system and way of being in the world. Much of this, though, feels hollow, repetitive, and, well, not very fun.
In her essay, “Winter Solstice at Moab Slough,” Terry Tempest Williams says, “I think of my own stream of desires, how cautious I have become with love. It is a vulnerable enterprise to feel deeply and I may not survive my affections…If I chose not to become attached to nouns–a person, place, or thing—then…when a known landscape is bought, sold, and developed, chained or grazed to a stubble…my heart cannot be broken because I never risked giving it away.” Perhaps that is what I am arguing for in a type of new activist writing—a sense of love.
For many of us, writers included, there is a responsibility to render in words the passions of our daily lives.

We pick the world up like a water-worn stone, turn it over, hold it up to the light, examine it from multiple perspectives, and then ask: How shall I describe this? I believe this is how many activist writers feel as well, only their words can feel entrenched, harsh, and grating. I want a writing that is fresh, is filled with zest and gusto;  a writing that runs towards its subject, rips open the curtains, and lets the sun shine in. Writing should snap open our eyes, crack open our brains to new perspectives. Activist writing should not so much tell us what to think or feel but instead activate our own inner sense of emotions, energize our own ability to be and do good for the world.
In a beautiful essay called “Doing Good Work Together,” William Kittredge writes, “We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things

 because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things.”
But the story in the wider culture has fallen stale, allowing us to live in a world of particularity—we can choose to only listen to Glenn Beck and Fox News or we can sequester ourselves to The Huffington Post and Derrick Jensen. Activist writers recognize that we largely live in stories that are unworkable. We structure and build our lives around stories that threaten the lives of not only other human beings but also the other creatures of this planet; we export jobs we’d rather not do here to countries that pay lower  

worker wages and relax regulations; we help perpetuate a system that pushes piggish politics by depleting forests, rivers, and oceans. We simply haven’t found a story that allows us to be good.
The root meaning of the word activist comes from the Latin word actus, which means “a doing, a driving force, or an impulse.” Herman Melville knew something about finding the driving force in writing: “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
So in the 21st century I would like to propose that we reexamine what it means to be an activist, what it means to find a doing or maybe better yet, an obsession. Something where we, as writers, can apprentice ourselves, fingering our ways through the nooks and crannies of our minds, lunging towards phrases that create a patchwork of meaning for the reader  

and writer. Now perhaps more than ever Wordsworth’s words clang true: The world is too much with us.  And now seems the perfect time to sit, pen in hand, scrawling sentences that have the staying power like Muir’s, Shakespeare’s, Woolf’s, or Emerson’s—sentences that help reactivate our own reasons for writing in a world that seems to be more constricted by corporate greed, individual malaise, 

and political apathy. After all, in the busyness of daily lives, we need  a voice that slips in sideways and reminds us that stories are the bedrock of our minds and foundation to our beings.
As writers, we have a certain responsibility to put out the fire that burns our house. But after sorting and  
sifting through the charred remains, there is still the opportunity for expression, the opportunity to build with adjectives and verbs and nouns a sense of meaning and being in the world. Only after staring at the blank page day after day do we start to dig and find the gift that resides in every bit of verse and prose: The ability to change the way we see.

 

Isaac Cordal

Cement Eclipses

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Taylor Brorby is an award-winning essayist, and poet. His chapbook of poems, Ruin: Elegies from the Bakken is through Red Bird Chapbooks and his forthcoming anthology on fracking, Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America is through Ice Cube Press. He is the Reviews Editor for Orion Magazine.

Isaac Cordal is an installation artist whose project Cement Eclipses tackles issues of social importance. These tiny sculptures of people staged in various dire contexts provide thought and raise questions about what it means to be human today. The selected images were completed as part of a residency at The Arts Student League of New York in November 2015.