The Family Reunion

Airydale, PA

photos by Kim Brown

Camping and Decamping, July 17 to 23

If we'd been feeling a bit more prosperous we probably would have rented a bigger car for our vacation.  We won't get the Suburban back from the school until it's time for Monica to start driving the students again, so we're down to our 97 Saturn station wagon.  That may be an environmental virtue on our part (the thing gets 34 miles to the gallon still), but it meant packing five of us, all our normal gear, plus camping gear into a little car.  Fortunately I'm very good at packing.


So Saturday noon we swung by Jiri and Sharka's, where the boys had slept overnight, paused for some iced expresso from Jiri, stopped again in New London at the Latin grocery for Alberto's bunuelo quesito - and by 1:30 were in the plaquey arteries of the interstate highway system.  Across Connecticut, up through the state to Danbury, then across New York, sweeping upwards toward the Catskills.  We stopped in Hancock for beer and dropped down into the Pennsylvania Poconos.

Lake Como was as usual except for the old white pine along the road, snapped off by a storm.  It crushed the old arbor vitae in its fall.  The ruin of a tree lay on its side, a russet-colored heap clashing with all the summer green.  The cottage was warm and dry, with the lake low and stagnant, as though it were the end of August rather than the middle of July.  The phoebes were nesting under the eaves and the beaver was active along the lake.  The blueberry bush in the font yard was laden despite constant depredation by the catbird and wrens.  A deer walked up the dirt road.


Sunday was a beautiful, cool morning in the 50's.  We fired up the toastolator and coffee was soon burbling in the antique percolator.  Monica tore out the fading daisies on the flagstone patio.  A hummingbird came to investigate.  We drove over to Scott Center to pick blueberries and raspberries, but the maples are shading out the bushes and picking by the handful is a thing of the past.  The boys and I hiked toward the hilltop, beyond George's fallen-down hunting cabin and up past the flagstone quarry.  Years ago the gypsy moths thinned the canopy and this time of year the trail is lost in thickets of goldenrod and briars.  As we blundered around growing lost and hot and weary, we ate all our berries for sustenance and had none to bring back to Monica and Alberto, who'd grown impatient and hungry waiting for us in the shade.

In the evening, back at Como we took the canoe to the Upper Lake.  The little vessel is still a bit flattened from last summer's Delaware River fiasco and for a little while a little fountain was jetting up from a hole in the bottom.  Nico plugged it with some grass and pine needles.  The shallow, swampy lake is rimmed by dead trees, a sign that the beavers must have been left to perfect their dam under the bridge that connect the lakes.  But now the water level is down and cool, green grass grows all around among the decaying roots.  Phoebes and waxwings hopped at the shallows; a kingfisher complained; a great blue heron watched us as Canada geese retreated.  As night fell, below the cottage, we built a fire in the fire circle and toasted marshmallows.  But the bats have died out and the mosquitos were voracious.

In the morning, Nico and I took a circuit of the lower lake.  The white water lilies that Dad planted years ago have spread all the way to Gene's Camp.  Below the lower bridge, there didn't seem to be any water at all going over the concrete dam.  Beavers were doing some work there, but to no purpose until there's more rain.  We locked the canoe, packed up, closed up the house and departed southwards.  Arrived at Mom and Dad's in the afternoon.  Dad was hobbling and grimacing from last week's surgery, when he'd had his left knee replaced.  The boys were soon into the pool, and Monica and I followed.  Scores of butterflies and hovering hawkmoths flickered in his plantation of bergamot, bee balm and ox-eye sunflowers.

On Tuesday we left Alberto and his gear in Mt. Gretna and departed for the Seven Mountains, the convoluted, corrugated heart of central Pennsylvania.  Chris was waiting for us there at Penn-Roosevelt State Park scoping out the sites.  We settled on #12 a walk-in back among the hemlocks and along a gurgling, mossy stream.  In the ridges and canyons of the 7 mountains, there is woods and water, streams and hidden springs, hemlock 500 years old, grouse and bear, and a million billion blueberries, with trails through it all.


Chris and I both have strong memories of going along with our grandfather in his cattle truck on Wednesday mornings to pick up livestock for transport to the Belleville sale. We'd stop at a farm and load up a dairy cow, then to the next for a half dozen pigs or a couple of sheep, and so on.  We'd unload the animals into the maze of stalls and passages at the sale barn.  Then linger as Grandpa talked farming and Valley gossip with other men in overalls and caps.

So there was some nostalgia in it for us on Wednesday as we pulled in along the line of tethered buggies to the hot, dusty parking lot of the Sale.  Flea market, baked goods stands, produce sellers, tool makers all in full swing.  Amish, Mennonite, English all mixed together, the gamut from browsing tourist to Anabaptists in dusty straw hats chatting in Dutch.  Mom had given the boys $20 each and they were intent on buying weaponry with it.  Porter a sword and Nico a survival knife (with fishing tackle, compass, matches and so on in the hollow metal handle).  And we bought pastries and little yellow plums.  They were auctioning off eggs inside: "For a white dozen, 55 cents - do I hear 65?"  Monica went searching for food and found a turkey dinner somewhere.  The boys and I ate fried food out in the heat.

At the livestock auction they were bidding on horses.  Just like I remembered, the auctioneer seemed to be telepathically able to read the twitches and tics of the audience enough to tell who was bidding against who.  There was a  9-year old Morgan that would need to be re-taught to pull a buggy.  A pair of half-sister mares that had never been asked to work.  A wild-eyed speckled gelding that fought the tight bridle-grip of the the beefy Amish youth who led him.  (That one went for $165 and probably condemned himself to a journey to a Mexican slaughterhouse.)  Nico was appalled at the switches they used on the piglets and he gasped and covered his face with his hat when a sluggish one was picked up by the hind leg.  We left before the dairy cattle came up for bidding.

After the heat of the Valley, we climbed up and over Stone Mountain to cool off at Greenwood Furnace State Park with a swim in the old reservoir.  A couple of weeks of heat and slow water means the lake is just cold rather than being the brutal springwater that I remembered.  We weren't the only ones splashing in.  Even an Amish family parked its buggy in the shade and took to the water -- a mother and eight kids -- from teenage girl down through toddler in a straw hat.  The straw hats and shoes came off, but otherwise the kids went in fully clothed, suspenders, bonnets and all.  On the other side of all the exposed American flesh, a Chinese family, presumably, by the look of their hosts, on some sort of mission exchange, also went in fully clothed.

On Thursday we climbed up the trail along Detweiler's Creek, then picnicked and gathered blueberries along Bear Meadow, but the trail there wound back into the woods rather than wending along the swamp itself so we didn't hike far.  I showed Monica and the boys a dead rattlesnake I found, which was probably a mistake.  The greenbottle flies were working away on it.  We left the Seven Mountains for the afternoon to drive into State College for ice cream.  Porter was smitten with the huge buildings and sprawling campus and declared confidently that this was where he was going to come to school to study either engineering or biology.  No quaint Colby College campus or UCC for him.  He's been asking questions about college ever since.


Back at camp the others slept off their ice cream and I went for a hike up Thickhead Mountain.

On our way out on Friday, we came across a timber rattler crossing the road. He was fat and sullen and yellow with dark markings.  He shook his thin black tail at us as he slunk through the undergrowth.  This was a hundred yards from where we'd been berry picking two days before.   Monica swore she'd not wade into these huckleberries and laurel again until she'd gotten herself some heavy boots.  In retrospect, I'd guess the Amish berry-pickers in their waders weren't just wearing them for the swamp water.

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Last week's Daily Show with Jon Stewart, had Marilynne Robinson on it talking about how we need the best insights from both science and religion.  And that scientists make a mistake when they set themselves up in opposition to religion.  As I thought about global warming and resource depletion and US jingo-militarism,  I felt myself reflexively bridling at the idea that science should defer to religion in some way.  After all, religions and the anti-science they accompany seem like primary stumbling blocks in our efforts to solve our most pressing problems.  Religious conservatives (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu) have an affinity with the various tribes of denialism (whether concerning evolution, climate change, human sexuality or whatever).  They share a penchant for willful ignorance and an unwillingness to place faith (so to speak) in empirical evidence or scientific consensus.


But it occurred to me that, of course, Robinson is right (at least as I imagined her argument from a 5 minute interview).  Religion and Science are both central to any solution of the big problems.  In many ways Science is letting us down.  It is not solving the problems.  Its collective communication skills are weak, its political power is under-developed.  It has been timid and complicit and un-compelling.  So too is Religion letting us down.  It is not now directing the moral, cultural and spiritual power that it can marshal toward a positive stewardship of our earth or of our children's future.  But this can't be a blanket condemnation of either one.  We need both science and spirituality on board -- and in their best qualities.


As mentioned before, in my summer of blossoming pessimism, I've been reading the doomer blogs.  The Peak Oil analysts and the Climate Scientists, the Collapse Preppers and the Permacultists, and myself, we all throw our hands up in frustration that so many people are in denial about the ways our actions as a species are wantonly and stupidly destructive and unsustainable and simply unsatisfying.  Especially, now that science has marshaled so much evidence that things are going in all the wrong directions.


A few days ago, after reading a moving, elegiacal post by John Rember, I had to respond: 

It's hard to know what's coming -- and what we should have in our pockets.  Scarcity and loss doesn't bring out the best in people -- though neither does our current spectacle of conspicuous materialism cross-hatched by inequality.  If and when collapse (or terminal decline) reaches our various redoubts, luck and nimbleness will probably count for much -- and whatever preparations there are that can contribute to either.

I think I most dread a lingering, half-assed decline that leaves the assholes in state capitals and corporate boardrooms with enough residual power to grind it all out into a banal and stupid archipelago of podunk tyrannies.  (Sort of like what began happening in the rural areas of the former Soviet Union in the mid 1990's.)  And that it will turn out that our people's preference for being led by fools and charlatans is deepset and fatal.

What I most hope for is an awakening of the good in people.  Or not quite that, because I think most people are good, or would prefer to be, but rather a world (or tribe or community) where the good and joyful in people had more place and more scope.  And I think it is even possible (however unlikely) that a collapse of our System could make a space for that.

And the choice between such trajectories is, after all, as much a religious question as anything.

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A Chronicle of a summer visit:


We had a wonderfully full house this weekend.  It's not like the house had been lacking in life, with the four of us and Alberto, not to mention two cats, a guinea pig and a cornsnake, but my sister Cathie (8 months pregnant) and Eric and 2-year old Bridget, with their little dachshund, Portia arrived on Thursday.


We gave them cold beer and juice and ice water, but piled them back into their car for an outdoor concert at the Jonathan Edwards winery.  The good-natured crowds with their kids and their picnics were beginning to fill the lawns in front of the players.  We laid our quilts down on the grass, and opened Spanish olives and a cold bottle of Pinot Grigio.  The breeze across the vines was breaking the heat and the music was good and chilled wine even better.  We'd moved on to the winery's chaotic Stone Table Red before Jiri and Sharka showed up with Jacob and Filip.  Now the four boys disappeared and Bridget, drawn by the triple energies of music and air and other children, began to roam and find friends and dance to the music.  There was another bottle of wine.  We stayed into the dark.


On Friday, Monica and Nico headed off to camp early in the morning.  Nico was going to hunt mud puppies at Avery Preserve and Monica was taking her lot to the Beardsley zoo.  I was working at home, doing phone interviews with people around the country on agricultural nitrogen pollution -- trying to get at the conceptual models people are using to understand what the heck I am talking about.  Alberto was looking after the house.  Porter opted to skip camp and play guide for our visitors at the Mystic Seaport.  The snake slept quietly, forgotten behind the Zane Grey novels on the bookshelf.


In the evening, Monica and the boys went off to the movies with Patty and her girls -- to see The Last Airbender.  Cathie, having toured all day with a 2-year old, napped.  And I made margaritas for Eric and myself.  We talked and read and played with Bridget.  Portia and the black cat, Wilbur, negotiated a co-existence.


Cathie, Eric and Bridget are not early risers, but we got them rousted in time to cook up some French toast and still make it to Stonington Borough's Saturday morning farmers' market.  Peaches and raspberries, blueberries and little red plums.  Lemon Italian ice.  And vegetables to last the week.  I tucked it all away into a cooler in the car and we walked the old sea-town out past the stone lighthouse to the jetty.  Bridget was in the backpack and Eric's shirt was soon translucent with sweat.  In the seaweedy water, pebbles clicked as ten thousand little crabs shifted them around in their incessant foraging.  Cormorants flew by and a lone Herring Gull sat watchfully upon a barnacle-encrusted boulder.  Napatree beach was golden in the clear light.  We ate lunch at Milagro - cactus salad, shrimp, carne asada, complex salsas.  I took Bridget on a walk to the green while the others finished up.  She held my hand and took a moment to sit on every bench and ledge.


I had to return the Mystic Seaport pass to the library in Westerly, and Eric, Nico and I took the opportunity to go for a walk around the town.  The library, park, bookstore, merchant strip and so on.  Westerly manages to convey a civic vitality -- staid and traditional maybe, but so unlike most old towns (if they have neither a college nor tourists) who have lost their hearts.  We got home in time to watch the Germany Uruguay consolation match -- possibly the best game of the 2010 World Cup.


At 4:30 Monica, Eric, Cathie, Bridget and I headed down to East Beach, three miles of pines and dunes.  The sun had lost some of its brutality by then, but the ocean was stirred up and the tide coming in.  Bridget didn't like the rough, pounding surf, though Eric and I both braved it.  As I swam, shredded seaweed tickled and clung and I felt like I should look like Swamp Thing when I skipped back up out of the turgid waves onto the beach.


We'd thought of going to Wakefield for Greek food, but instead Monica made us a dish of onions, green beans, tomatoes and finger potatoes for dinner -- from the farmers' market, of course.  And we moved deeper into the fridge's beer supply.


Chloe, the gray cat had greeted Cathie and Eric when they arrived, but after noting the dog and the toddler she then disappeared, not to be seen again.  Porter had followed suit, heading off with Jake off into the woods with hatchets, hammocks, a skillet and a day's supply of hot dogs, bacon and s'mores makings.  He'd return the next morning with tales of angry nocturnal deer and meddlesome raccoons.


Late Sunday morning Alberto went to mass and Cathie and Monica went off to Watch Hill to stroll the town and beach and have lunch at the Olympia Tea Room.  Eric, Nico and I looked after Bridget and fed on fruits and rice and beans.  He did some desultory packing and worked at a book review in opportunistic snatches.  Nico mostly read the book that Eric had bought him at the Other Tiger in Westerly.  In the afternoon, before they left for Pennsylvania, most of us gathered for the World Cup final between Holland and Spain.  We had to watch it on Unavision's slightly jerky webcast, since ABC was broadcasting it on TV and for some reason doesn't want a web audience.  (Why?)  On the bright side, I could more easily tune out the blather of the announcers since it was all in Spanish.  Nico and I were the only ones rooting for the Dutch, (though by the end I was rooting for neither team).


And then it was time for the Pennsylvanians to head off into the setting sun.

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I think I need to take a break from reading the news.
Thank god at least I don't have a TV.


From Mark Twain:

The most interesting information 

comes from children, 

for they tell all they know  

and then stop.

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Guy McPherson writes a thought-provoking doomer blog, whose subheading reads, "Humans have tinkered with the natural world since we appeared on the evolutionary stage.  Our days may be numbered.  As the home team, Nature bats last."


The collapse of the age of oil, and our utter inability to prepare for the approaching calamity sets the stage for a new ascendancy of nature and for the exit of humans from center stage and perhaps an exit from the stage altogether.  In offering an alternative to Guy's baseball metaphors, I wrote in the comments:


"Here’s an alternative metaphor if only loosely sports related: The Donner Party combination pie and hotdog eating contest. Had to be called off with a few contestants still eating because the food was sadly all gone. But no worries, the weather’s changing and it looks like there’ll be plenty of snow to eat."

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Porter's back from a week in Bimini in the Bahamas, where he was there studying marine life with the Dolphin Communications Project.  He came back confident and happy, with a few more freckles and without much in the way of peeling skin.

It was pretty much hands-on marine biology.  His parents shelling out some money to see if Porter's fascination for dolphins and sharks translates to science research.   Says he wants to be an electrical engineer and a marine biologist.  So we'll see.  He's twelve years old.

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The milkweed is taking over the red raspberry patch.  




Red and black milkweed beetles chew the leaves.  






Monica says it's a good year for milkweed everywhere, so maybe it's a temporary ascendancy.  
Honeybees and bumblebees buzz the globish blossoms. 

No signs of monarch or tussock moth caterpillars, yet.  

A cicada-killing wasp weighted down the flowers of one, but flew off angrily when I looked too close.  

Nico and I waded in after red raspberries. 

 


















A pair of housewrens complained from the quince.  The berries weren't very sweet.  Not as sweet as the black raspberries that grow all around the property.  




Maybe they need a few more hot days.  We'll see how many the catbirds leave us.

_

Nico
with Chris
and Jaime
at Naragansett Beach.

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The thermometer crested at 87 degrees today -- the hottest day so far here in our woods.  Drawing the blinds wasn't much of a defense.  By 10 am I was driven out of the upstairs office and into the old-fashioned air conditioning of the granite basement.  There I worked on my laptop, clearing up all the tasks I'd neglected in the last two weeks of data gathering and analysis.

The family was scattered into the summer.  Nico was off at Dean's house, catching wood frogs, trampolining, wrestling, and generally rampaging.  Monica was leading her intrepid camp troops to Stepstone Falls in Arcadia.  Alberto, his Colombian blood completely untroubled by the heat, was upstairs vainly trying to rally the Brazilians over the Chileans in their World Cup match.  Porter is furthest off, in the Bahamas searching for dolphins and manta rays.

At 5 o'clock there was thunder and wind and cool air to settle the temperatures back down into the 70's -- and I could come back up from the cave.

Update:  an earlier version mistakenly depicted Alberto rooting for Chile instead of Brazil.  Anubis Bard regrets the error.  :-)

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Chloe, our gray cat, stalks by the flower garden.

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Euan Mearns posting at the Oil Drum put up a couple of sobering graphs showing the scale of the problem we're going to have getting off fossil fuels.

First, the good-looking news:

Then the sobering news:

The thin little line at the top (reddish if you can see it) is our current capacity for renewable energy.

It's possible that if we'd started a generation ago and we'd taken vast amounts of these fossil fuels and used them to build windmills and solar panels and tidal generators and cities that were energy efficient; and if we had created local, less energy intensive foodways and so on; and if we'd kept populations at a level that our ecosystems could support sustainably -- then we would be able to transition to an energy-sustainable system without our civilization collapsing.  But we didn't, and now there are a pair of locomotives coming down the tracks -- the first is the fact that oil production has reached its peak and is about to go into serious decline and the second is that if we don't figure out a way to leave some of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, starting right now, we are almost certainly going to send the planet's climate into a dangerous, and probably fatal, tailspin.

But we are doing nothing at all to the scale we would need to.   Denial, delusion and magical thinking reign.  There is zero political will to even acknowledge the problem, much less do anything about it.  Even leaving the active denialists aside, none of the rosy scenarios seem based in reality at all -- not those rooted in alternative energies, nor conservation, nor technological solutions, nor blind faith that we humans are up to this task and will inevitably figure something out.

Humans have an ability to concoct visionary futures, a profound power that has enabled humans to expand the realm of possibilities beyond what other animals could possibly manage.  Ironically, with that skill of imaginizing running up against the hard physical constraints of an energy economy, it is only enabling us to fantasize our way off a very real cliff.

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An old friend, Marysia, came to visit early this week.  I met her my first day in San Diego 20 years ago.  She overheard me in the off-campus housing office telling a potential landlord that I was a first-year grad student in anthropology.  And we were housemates that year -- five of us in a big old house on Fort Stockton Avenue.  There was good food, and Elise's sunflowers, and every night a funny story of Susan's ESL students.   And Elise and Jordan making art in the garage.  I weathered my studies, Marysia did the same, while also grieving through the death of her brother.  The next year she was off to Poland to start her fieldwork, and we wouldn't live in the same city again until I returned from my own fieldwork in Central Asia at the beginning of 1997.  She was there by Monica at Porter's birth, and I have memories all jumbled up of many dinners and easy friendship with her and Axel.  But it was only a year and a half until she handed off her Chula Vista classes to me and moved to Tuscaloosa to be a potter and professor.


In tallying that up we were a little shocked to realize out that our friendship, which is one we both take for granite,  is based on only 2 and a half years of proximity.  But such is friendship.  Somehow those were times that let us know one another and every visit confirms it.


I was talking with other friends about time and its elasticity (it is midsummer, and the New England days have all been stretching lengthwise).   We think we have time or don't have time for the things we want to do -- and it's true to an extent.  (I still haven't gotten around to re-caulking the shower -- despite visualizing mold and rot inside the wall each time I take a shower -- because I haven't set aside the time.)   But when it comes to the important things -- the experiences and relationships that really enrich a day or week or year -- we have this ability to bring the passage of time to a snail's pace by simply being in the moment.  And in that way, the moment, minute, year, becomes almost infinitely dense.  And so there is time -- if only I am wise enough to occupy it.

The girl was part of the night
 except for eye whites
and smile teeth
and she said to my son softly,
"Porter, for you."


Green glowing on her hand,
a lightning bug, firefly.
He gently touched
his knuckle to hers,
and the bug crossed.
An insect frisson.

Porter was in a thoughtful mood the other  night

 and wrote a poem he called 

yin yang:

A sign of peace?

A sign of love?

The white a fluttering dove?

But what is the black?

The side that attacks?

What about the opposite color in each?

Is it just like the words of the preach

There is good in all evil.

There is evil in all good.

(All of this is under my hood.)

As the cultural anthropologist in a consulting team that works for non-profit clients, I find myself rambling across a mind-boggling array of different issue areas.  It's true that in one sense our work is very consistent:  nearly always looking into the cultural and cognitive models that people use to understand policy issues -- and using those insights to help advocates communicate better with their audiences.


But the particular issue areas that we're working within on any given week can run from racial health disparities in Kentucky, to progressive taxation in Alabama, sustainability of food systems in the US, France and Belgium, climate change, building support for arts programs in Ohio, youth programs in New York City, unionization among retail workers or meat-packers, changing national security discourse in DC, or building momentum for democracy and good governance around the country.


I'm grateful to put food on the table with what amounts to do-goodery.  For most of these projects, it's pretty low stress.  I enjoy solving the puzzles that we design and solve with our research.  I enjoy translating our insights into words that can reach and teach people new and more constructive ways of understanding things.


But when the work deals with the environment -- and particular with sustainability -- I begin to take the topic deadly serious and find the work more stressful and the challenges more distressing.  (I wrote recently about my anxieties about not preparing for what I see as a coming breakdown -- and partly that's a reaction to once again working with the Union of Concerned Scientists to educate policy makers about some of the ways we are destroying those underlying foundations that our survival depends on.)


I know from personal experience how little I like truly acknowledging the repercussions of our current rampage of unsustainable consumption and extraction.  It's hard to imagine how we convince the larger public to wrap their minds around it.  Upton Sinclair observed that:


“If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”


How much more difficult is it to get an entire society to understand something when their entire way of life depends on them not understanding it?

Nico sculpted a wood frog

The living ones,
we hear chuckling in the trees.

A crack-flash of lightning in the woods early this morning made Monica yelp, wrung a curse of out Porter, and brought Nico pattering down the stairs upset by a nightmare.  The strike had punctuated his dream -- there were two bombs in our house, and though no one was hurt in the first explosion,  his classmate's Mom went back for the cupcakes -- and she was blown up.