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Walking around the too-wide, too-straight streets of Bakersfield, California.  Fidgeting with a pen and a little black notebook that I don't write in, I ask people about why the economy sucks for them and for the people they know, and what can be done about it.  (This passive tense intentional.)  I'm being an anthropologist for one of the bigger unions, experimenting with frames and rhetorical gambits, exploring the cognitive terrain of labor, class, job, economy, and power.  I talk to machinists and truckers.  I talk to black guys smoking weed on the proverbial street corner.  I talk to teachers waving their signs in protest of another round of corrosive budget cuts.  I talk to a white woman fallen out of the middle class.  In Los Angeles I troll the food line at a neighborhood's Cesar Chavez celebration.  I talk to people in their gardens or in their cars or on a bench waiting for date.

Then I sit in restaurants and bars, or on the bed at Anna's apartment in Glendale with my little black notebook and I write about what I see and hear - and compare this cognitive terrain to the arguments that labor organizers want to use - the assumptions they rely on - and see where things mesh and where they just crumple against each other uselessly.  And mostly right now, it's a lot of crumpling.

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Las Vegas

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Zion

 

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Zion

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Grand Canyon

 

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Sunset Crater and Wapatki ruins

Sedona

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Carefree, Arizona to Beaver Flats, Sedona

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I moved a few days worth of firewood in from the pile, stacked it along the wood stove, ahead of the coming night's snowfall.  Under the crystalline blue skies I was sweating in the cold, cold wind.  Oak leaves cartwheeled across the pocked snow-crust.

46th birthday and time for reflection - (though a long Sunday with the family bouncing around the wind-bound house doesn't lend itself to reflection).  Porter and Nico decided to craft me a carrot cake.

If life comes in thirds, the first 25 years are all about growth and adventure.  The second 25 bring the creep of entwining responsibilities and compromise, and the third 25 should be about the liberations of wisdom and peace.  I'm closing out that middle third.  And I'm going to take up beekeeping and plant a vegetable garden.

Monica will go to Japan instead.  And then together, when we can, we'll climb into the Sierra Nevadas where the earth and heaven overlap.

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The snow is down to 9 1/2 inches between the front door and herb garden.  But in the yard, where the sun shines the brightest, patches of grass show through.  Jake and Porter were pestering the Norway spruce with shuriken, and in their search for a ricochet they found a dead hawk under the rhododendron.   It was a red-tailed, the carcass pristine and undamaged - a magnificent animal.  Maybe in the confusion of wind it struck a branch and broke its neck - or maybe it ate a poisoned mouse - or maybe it was West Nile virus.  They boys carried it off into the woods.

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Dormancy . . . one of my favorite winter words.  I haven't been dormant entirely, not like the chipmunks or mourning cloaks, but clearly I haven't been writing in the blog.  In the yard, the snow that fell before Christmas is still on the ground.  12 inches deep between the front door and herb garden.  But it is steadily disappearing, shrinking away from anything that gathers the sun's heat.

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My great uncle Sam died a few days ago at age 85.  He was the last of his siblings; baby brother to my grandmother and her sisters.  Sam Tewksbury was one of the true characters of our childhoods.  A big, shambling man who never had a family of his own, for years he occupied a small room in my grandmother’s house, across the hall from Ya-Ya, the old Danish widow who rented the back apartment.  As a kid, the thing I found most remarkable about him was how he wouldn’t emerge in the morning until after 11.  Then he’d make himself something sweet for breakfast in the dented tin measuring cup that he used for most of his meals (except when he was forced into sitting at the table for one of the big family gatherings).  He was shy and slow with words.  If you asked him how he was, he’d always answer, “Oh, ‘bout the same.” 

I didn’t learn how to hold a conversation with Sam until I was 20 years old.  I must have found some patience by then.  If you’d say something to him, he’d respond with a non-committal “hmmm hmmm”.  But if you waited – I mean really waited while a minute or so of silence trickled by – saying nothing, asking nothing – he would give a real response to what you said.  And then you could respond as quickly or as slowly as you wanted and settle in for another long pause while Sam slowly cogitated and formulated his next statement.

I guess his sisters considered him a bit simple-minded, but he never struck me that way.  He repaired televisions and other electronics in the back room of my grandmother’s store, and tended to the customers a few hours of the day.  He never spent a nickel if he could avoid it and he was frugal to the point of pathology.  He let me drive his old gray station wagon when I was 15 and taught me how to save gas by coasting down hills.  There were people who would let him know when a deer had been killed on the roads, so he could gather a haunch for his dog before the vultures got to it.  Whatever cash money he had he played into the stock market, at least that’s what my parents said, since I never heard him speak of it.   Despite the frugality he finally moved out of my grandmother’s house and into his own place (maybe she pushed him out, but the rent was low because the building was condemned and gradually falling down).  A true child of the Great Depression, he never voluntarily threw anything away, and he filled the dark house to the ceilings and heated it with scrounged scrap lumber and rolled newspaper.  Above his entryway he hung a graceful sign that said “S TEWKSBURY”.  It was an uncharacteristic flourish and I asked him about it.  He told me it was his parents’ “TEWKSBURYS” sign that he’d split and re-arranged.

Maybe his judgment wasn’t always the best, but I’d play Sam’s assistant even when I didn’t understand what we were up to.  I remember hunching behind wooden shields up by the barn while we attempted to break old television tubes by hurtling rocks at them (He vaguely explained about them being toxic and a bit explosive).  I think my sister Chris has a couple of scars on her leg from helping him with soldering television cables.  And I spent at least one afternoon shimmying up trees  with an old car seatbelt to check on cables he had run up over Tyler Hill for some reason.  Other times it was just to drive out to gather beechnuts or pick apples in abandoned fencerows, or to let the dog hunt for groundhogs.  On those outings he kept a small acetylene torch handy for tent caterpillars.  He was a tremendously gentle man, but he bore a strange hatred for tent caterpillars.  It seemed to bring him great satisfaction to watch the silk retreat from the blue flame and the singed caterpillars come tumbling out.

But Sam was always good to me.  On summer afternoons, when we were visiting, he’d gather up his little collection of short, odd-shaped baseball bats and his flat, ancient ball glove and we’d go up to the little league field to hit the ball around for a while.  Even in his 50’s he was pretty good.

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Here's Congressman Jim Shimkus of Illinois, who is jockeying to be chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.  He assures us that it's wrong to worry about climate change or human's destroying the Earth, because God, not man, will bring about the End.





Before the next election we will be dunking witches . . . .

h/t Juan Cole
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Nico, three of his classmates, plus a couple of younger students traveled down to Fairfield county to play chess in the tournament there.  It was first time for all of them, but they dominated among the unrated players, taking 5 out of the 8 top slots and walking away with team honors.

Good for them.

Porter was helping me staple up some insulation in the basement, and the neighbor kid, Jake, was hanging out with us.  I'd promised to take them bowling after lunch.


The man who built the house in 1950, Vernon Kendall, hadn't been a stickler for measuring so no two studs are spaced the same.


While I carved pink insulation with a hunting knife Jake and Porter surveyed the ceiling, trying to interpret the overlapping networks of plumbing, electric, heating pipes, phone cable and pvc that 60 years had laid in.


It's not an easy map to read, the circulatory system of an old house.  Conduits are added with none ever taken away.  There's some kind of elaborate alarm system that I still don't understand and a sewer pipe to nowhere.

They searched for treasure atop the beams and on the foundation wall between the joists.  Mostly they found old tubes of sealant or lubricant, decrepit fan belts, tin boxes, pipe connectors, the odd pressure gauge or clamp.  A bumper sticker for a tent revival.  Stuff like that.  I had to explain to them how the blade-butted spout for an old oilcan worked.


Jake dismantled my broken telescope.  Then they found real treasure, my uncle George's old archery gear from the sixties.  They quietly put the stuff away, but I know that unless I remember to forbid it, it will all eventually disappear into the woods, like the last generation of arrows and bows, just like my ducktape, nails, bungee cords, tarps . . . .

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Fred Clark at Slackivist makes an good point about why the barkers for climate change denial have had such blazing success and why the scientific facts about global warming have failed to sway the public:

[One] framework that I'm convinced plays a large role in American climate-change denialism is the quasi-religious desire to believe that harmful consequences can only result from deliberately malicious actions. If climate change were shown to be the work of a clearly identifiable villain -- something more along the lines of the pollution narratives of A Civil Action or Erin Brockovich -- then [people] might be more receptive to the idea. But they cannot accommodate facts that suggest the possibility of calamity due to the aggregate effects of billions of mostly innocent decisions. This particular delusional framework defends itself aggressively because a great deal is at stake for those who subscribe to it.

Clark's main interest is in the religious imprimatur on this, but I think he's exactly right that climate destabilization conveys a narrative that simply violates peoples expectations of justice and sense -- and at a deep cognitive-emotional level, people don't like that.  And as we know, people are motivated to not hear things they don't like.


Climate change denialists have worked to widen the chasm between climate scientists and the lay public when it comes to their understandings of what is going on.  Physical scientists (at least the good ones) really don't expect the natural laws they study to adhere to our arbitrary expectations of justice or right or narrative tidiness.  But because regular people DO have those expectations about the world they live in, the scientists seem to be offering a world that is not only physically in dire straits, but also a world that seems devoid of moral sense.  They tell a story where living a normal, even virtuous, life is going to destroy the planet.  The denialists, on the other hand, offer a world that not only is in no physical peril, but where vice and virtue are more sensible and human-scaled.


Advocates have been struggling to accommodate people's desire for this moral sense.  Sometimes they stress the virtuousness of individuals changing their lightbulbs or driving less, or they invoke moral ideas of stewardship.  But so far that's been a rickety foundation for a re-making of the global energy and economic systems.  Alternately, (and this is what we have mostly worked on) we can try keep the moral issues to the side at least long enough to enable people to understand climate change as a straightforward, technical problem.  Too much CO2 in the atmosphere is thickening a heat-trapping blanket - so we need to either reduce our carbon emissions or get the carbon out of the air.  That's the technical challenge.  It won't be easy, but that's what we have to do, and no amount of denial or procrastination is going to change that.  As far as moral narratives go, once this technical groundwork has been laid out, there is room for plenty of moralizing about what it means to make the hard changes as opposed to continuing with business as usual.

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The Nature Center has a "spooky nature trail" winding through the woods on the nights before Halloween.  The path is poorly lit with a hundred jack-o-lanterns flickering.   Because most people find a nighttime walk through the dark, windy woods scary enough, they were going with a fairytale theme this year.  Monica had volunteered us all to play our roles.  Porter, in my old gray Swiss army cape, was off in the Peter Pan area as one of the Lost Boys.  Monica was roaming the trail as Tiger Lily, relighting candles that had guttered out.  Nico, undaunted by any gender-bent nonsense, was Little Red Riding Hood.  And I found myself encased in a wolf costume.

Nico would skip up the trail in his red hood and cape.  Then as people passed me, I'd shamble out of the darkness and ask in my gravelly wolf-voice, "Have you seen a small child . . . in a . . . red riding hood?"  Often, I would add, "She smells delicious," and sometimes, "and you smell delicious."  And people would laugh.  In the darkness it was hard to see out of the mask, but as far as I could tell, some kids would hide behind their parents, some would lecture me about not eating small children; a few would merrily betray Riding Hoods whereabouts, though there were more who would misdirect me.  One growled me back into the shadows, another threatened me with her glowstick whip and two sisters demanded hugs that I couldn't refuse.


Toward the end the barred owls were hooting excitedly and Nico skipped away to explore the trail himself - eventually returning with reinforcements.  So he and his fearless friends piled onto to me and ground the big bad wolf down onto the leaves of the forest.

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Ash Ketchum,

Pokemon trainer.

Nico is ready

for Halloween.

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 I quit work early yesterday to go for a hike over the stone wall – to trade the madding crowd’s ignoble strife for the smell of leaf-mould and the jab of the greenbriar.

I was distracted, though.  We’ve been doing work lately on environmental issues and I’d been reading the doomer blogs again.  So I took the ignoble strife in with me.  One prominent doomer, Guy McPherson, blogs that the speedy collapse of the industrial era is the only thing that can save the world from utter catastrophe.  The sooner the better if we want to preserve a viable biosphere.   A few days ago, he was writing about the myths that sustain our complacency in the face of global warming and the end of cheap oil, and there was one myth that I would have added:  the myth that we’ve progressed beyond the possibility of famine.  I spent half of September as an ethnographer among CAFOs, traveling through New Mexico, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and could see the way our food system is growing more and more monolithic and fragile.  It’s not just that we are shifting our food production to a CAFO system utterly dependent on a small class of operators, requiring huge inputs of grain, water, and fossil fuel – it’s that we are dismantling our back up systems precisely at the time when climate instability and fossil fuel shocks may completely change the rules of the game.  To say the family farms are disappearing is cliché, but what once seemed unfortunate, now seems potentially suicidal.  It's disheartening to see that broad base of expertise, commitment and attention to the food system, being systematically dismantled and tossed into the ashbin of history – all so that we can concentrate our food production into an ever more unstable edifice.

So it was that the normal grounding therapy of a walk in the woods, wasn’t having its effect.  I looked at the bounty of acorns under the scarlet oaks and found myself wondering how much nutritional value was there and how exactly did the Native Americans get the tannins out.  Staring up at the empty cones of the pitch pine, I tried to reckon what time of year you'd need to steal pine nuts away from the red squirrels.  Though there seemed to be no squirrels around.  Maybe they could sense my mood. 

There is a spit of high ground that juts out toward the Pawcatuck river with swampland on either side.  At some point in the past someone had homesteaded it, and in a clearing there is an old stone foundation built into the side of a hillock, a few dead apple trees and one lilac being slowly smothered by old-man’s-beard.  I found a place where beaver had been girdling some cherry trees and I pushed through stands of arrow wood and out onto the swamp.  The oaks have all gone red, the pines green and yellow and the lily pads were dying back into the black water.  I stood on the hummocks made by the small cedars and noticed that the sphagnum moss under my boots was taking on its own fall colors.  A flock of ducks circled, their wings whistling.   The jays, who had been offering noisy commentary ever since I left the path, grew quiet.  A light mist was falling on the back of my neck, a cool arpeggio from the darkening storm-sky.

And as I looked up the swamp toward open water and the colorful line of trees beyond, I found that my anxiety and depression had lifted.   I didn’t care what happened to humans.  We were the species that were supposed to have vision but if we were going envision ourselves to extinction, I just didn’t care.  The rain continued to fall onto my bare neck.  Cedar Waxwings flitted overhead, linking themselves together with their calls, their thin, barely audible thwees.   I found that I stopped worrying about what the damned species was doing.  At least we couldn’t destroy the swamp.  Oh, we could destroy this swamp, and we might take the red cedar and the tawny cotton grass with us into oblivion, but we couldn’t destroy the swamp – the wet confluence of rot and growth and slimy adaptation that meant swamp.  The sphagnum moss had outlived the dinosaurs and it would outlive us.

A flock of Canada geese splash-landed noisily on the water and I withdrew back into the woods to leave them in possession of the place.  I began my hike back on the path of pine needles and oak leaves, and gradually back into caring – about humans and what we are doing.  The fog of depression had cleared a bit.  I was ready to get back to work in the salt mines of public communications.  On the way home I stopped at an apple tree in the woods and knocked down a half-dozen small apples to take home to the boys.  And I would still look up how you eat acorns, just in case.

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