_

At 5:30 a.m. I set out for the airport with a cup of coffee and a smoothie warily circling one another in my stomach.  The Chevron station on Central Avenue was glowing in the darkness and I remembered that I had to fill up the tank in the rental car.  I pulled in around a CBS Channel Two News Van.  A blonde television reporter and her cadaverous, but affable camera man had been condemned to put together a pre-dawn price-shock-at-the-pump segment for the morning show, and they did their best to interview me as I groggily fumbled with my credit card and pumped the gas.  I tried not to sound like a moron.

Their questions and their chatting and their filming delayed me only a little and I made it to the airport in good time, circling into the rental car return lot.  I noticed with a sinking feeling that Enterprise didn't have a kiosk there, and I began to vaguely recall that once years before we had rented a car in Burbank, not so much at the airport as really near the airport.  And that had probably been Enterprise.  It was about 6 a.m. now, beginning to feel a little late considering my 7 a.m. flight, but clearly not late enough for any uniformed humans to be hanging around the rental car yard.  I wondered what would happen if I just returned the car to National instead.  Something really expensive, probably.  

Now began a process of driving that part of Burbank that could be considered really near the airport.  I tried to dredge up from memory the side street that Enterprise was located on.  All I could recall was that it was off a main street and the name of the street had been memorable for some reason.  6:05 . . . 6:10 . . . 6:15 . . . Winona Street - that's it!  and I screeched into a left turn and down Winona street.  The welcome green glow of an "e" showed me I was right.  Maybe they didn't want customers, yet, because they'd barricaded the entrance with a van and some pylons, but I sped into the "Shuttle Only" entrance, wound around to the back, handed a guy there my pink contract papers, and lugged my bags onto the airport shuttle.  

I try not to show up at security checkpoints sweating, since that's just asking for a lengthy pat down, but it couldn't be helped.  However, Burbank seemed to be expecting no trouble and I got to the gate in time.  In fact, by climbing in the back entrance of the plane (none of those fancy walky-tubes for Burbank - you cross the tarmac and climb the steps up to the plane like it's 1955), I actually got that seat by the emergency exit where no one sits in front of you.

Not that it mattered once someone noticed that an engine was leaking fuel.

_

_

Alberto was in high spirits this morning, smoothing the front of his yellow guayabera with gnarled hands.  His pension is due tomorrow (a couple days early since the 3rd will fall on a Sunday), which means he'll have lotto money and can stop praying that his numbers don't come up while he's broke.  But even more importantly, the weather girls on the TV were calling for record setting heat.  The man blooms like a tropical plant in the heat, especially record-setting heat.

I don't.  I wilt like a thirsty jewel-weed.  And I made hard work of wandering around the concrete sink of Los Angeles.  It was 92 degrees and I was realizing that I needed at least a half dozen interpreters to make headway downtown (Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese . . . .)  About 3 o'clock it occurred to me that if I didn't get out I'd be trapped by rush hour and surely die.  So I rode the 110 up to Pasadena, where there were trees to survive under - and where enough people were willing to speak to me in English about the sorry state of the nation.

_

_

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.

_

_

Las Vegas

_

Zion

 

_

Zion

_

Grand Canyon

 

_

Sunset Crater and Wapatki ruins

Sedona

_

Carefree, Arizona to Beaver Flats, Sedona

_

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.

_

_

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.

_

_

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.

_

_

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.

_

_

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
_

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 . . . .

_

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.

_

_

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.

_