tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4012124287621447032024-03-27T01:37:55.728-05:00Free RangeFood, nature, place, and more.Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.comBlogger81125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-21201202227615294532011-04-01T07:09:00.000-05:002011-04-01T07:09:50.019-05:00We've moved!As of Friday, April 1, <i>Free Range: Food, Nature, Place, and More</i> has relocated to <a href="http://madronoranch.com/?page_id=92">the brand-new Madroño Ranch website</a>. We hope you’ll make the trip over and explore the new site, and we apologize for any inconvenience. Thanks for reading!<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather and Martin</i></div>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-47024017867701320332011-03-25T06:42:00.001-05:002011-03-25T06:43:36.794-05:00Tragic waste: some thoughts on the s-word<div></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm9WKEvG_Mvz0huWWAUUm2pVWaGvYVxgo285UpCRyTdocFXxqShmOqBLYoQty195bmu_TkHqExPmiYGjmXXGnZ6rd2tOv_8x4eTRzI1zOWEeyqfOuoK1YkqxljWY90iu09g1e31GZeF5k/s1600/nuclearboy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm9WKEvG_Mvz0huWWAUUm2pVWaGvYVxgo285UpCRyTdocFXxqShmOqBLYoQty195bmu_TkHqExPmiYGjmXXGnZ6rd2tOv_8x4eTRzI1zOWEeyqfOuoK1YkqxljWY90iu09g1e31GZeF5k/s320/nuclearboy.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Watching the bats from the kitchen stoop at Madroño Ranch the other morning was a little like watching my own thoughts. They swooped in and out of my line of vision, limited by the dawn darkness, more audible than visible. <br />
<br />
Actually, my comparison is disrespectful of the bats; their flight is only <i>apparently</i> erratic, driven by the ever-changing location of the insects they were chasing. My thoughts are <i>actually</i> erratic. As the promise of light bloomed into dawn, the bats settled into the bat house, a feat of precision flying and landing almost like none I’ve seen, and I noticed the pile of guano under the house and thought that soon it would be time to collect it and put it into the compost pile. <br />
<br />
And so began my musings on shit and the difference between good shit and bad shit. My apologies to the bats become ever more profound.<br />
<br />
One of our current projects at the ranch is figuring out how to use the abundant quantities of manure the residents of the Chicken Palace produce. Currently, it’s just collected and dumped onto the compost pile, but we’re working on a plan to get the chickens more fresh greenery to eat, in part self-fertilized (by the chickens, that is). We’re planning to cordon their pasture off into sections and seed the sections with cover crops, alfalfa, rye—whatever the season will grow. We’ll soon have a rainwater collection system in place and will be able to irrigate with it (assuming it ever rains again). Using a portable fence, we’ll be able to rotate the chickens from section to section. We have no idea if this will work, but it seems like a good idea and a fine, closed-loop use of all that poop. We’re also looking to collect buffalo leavings (summer “interns”: consider yourselves warned!) and use them as well.<br />
<br />
Perhaps you’ve noticed that I used all sorts of synonyms for shit in the previous paragraph; one of the few I didn’t use is “waste,” because in natural systems, or systems that mimic natural systems, shit isn’t waste, it’s integral and beneficial. Paraphrasing Our Hero Wendell Berry, <a href="http://michaelpollan.com/">Michael Pollan</a> notes in <i>The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals</i>that industrial agriculture has taken an elegant solution—crops feed animals, whose manure in turn fertilizes crops—and “divide[d] it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm... and a pollution problem on the feedlot.” Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_Animal_Feeding_Operations">CAFOs</a>), the current source of most of America’s meat, produce mountains of manure that becomes toxic to the animals and to the communities around them, and the monoculture farming that produces most of America’s grains and vegetables doesn’t use animals to fertilize the soil, requiring farmers to use chemicals instead. That’s the difference between good and bad shit: when something that could be beneficial becomes useless, even toxic, waste.<br />
<br />
In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if a community’s or even a culture’s capacity to endure might not be assessed by how effectively it mimics nature in dealing with its own discharge. I’ve just been rereading T. C. Boyle’s darkly comic <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Drop-City-T-C-Boyle/dp/0670031720">Drop City</a>,</i> which begins at a northern California commune of the same name in 1970. The commune’s stated <i>raison d’etre</i> is to provide its residents with a place to escape the confines of bourgeois America and get back to the land and basic values by expanding their consciousness with meditation and drugs. <br />
<br />
Of course the place is utter chaos, overflowing with the metaphoric excrescences of abusive sexual practices, racism, child neglect, and rampant narcissism, along with literal shit. The septic system is overloaded and the two characters who concern themselves with the problem get no help at all from the community. Eventually, the county government threaten to raze the buildings because the commune constitutes a health hazard. Because they can’t deal with their own shit on any level, the residents of Drop City abandon what was once beautiful land and move their chaos to the bush country of Alaska just as summer is waning. When they get there, most of them realize that they need to leave or get their shit together so they don’t die.<br />
<br />
The problem is that getting your shit together necessitates acknowledging that you are, in fact, going to die. (It’s still Lent, after all. You knew we’d get to this.) Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Death-Ernest-Becker/dp/0684832402">The Denial of Death</a>,</i> identifies the human dilemma in scatological terms: we are the “god[s] who shit.”<br />
<blockquote>Look at man [<i>sic</i>], the impossible creature! Here nature... [has] created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience.... He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, not even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden man bears, the experiential burden.... Each thing is a problem and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, “It is precisely the god-like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” There it is again: gods with anuses.</blockquote>Human civilization, says Becker, is built on this unease, which encourages us to throw our energies into an “immortality project” by which we deny our smelly mortality; those who confront it with none of the filters an immortality project provides wither into mental illness. Becker doesn’t attempt to solve this conundrum but rather to set some boundaries within which we can wrestle with it with “the courage to be.” He writes in his conclusion: “We need the boldest creative myths, not only to urge men on but also and perhaps especially to help men see the reality of their condition. We have to be as hard-headed as possible about reality and possibility.” <br />
<br />
So it was with interest that I watched <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sakN2hSVxA">the video produced by a Japanese media artist</a> to explain to Japanese children why everyone was so worried about the Fukushima nuclear reactor after it was damaged by the tsunami and earthquake on March 3. The video compares the damaged nuclear reactor to a boy with an upset stomach who needs to poop. So far the boy has just farted—smelly enough for everyone around him—but the video assures us that a team of selfless doctors are doing all they can to prevent Nuclear Boy from pushing out his stinky poop. <br />
<br />
The video says that the Fukushima reactor is more like Three Mile Island Boy—who just farted—than like Chernobyl Boy, who not only pooped but had diarrhea that went everywhere, likening nuclear waste to a dirty diaper. My first thought after watching it was that Japanese doctors would be overwhelmed by waves of constipated children, convinced that evacuating their bowels might bring their struggling nation to even deeper depths. My next thought moved me to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/weekinreview/20chernobyl.html?ref=todayspaper">images in last Sunday’s <i>New York Times</i></a> of the city of Chernobyl in its abandoned state and the interview with one of the guardians of “the sarcophagus,” the concrete structure built to contain Reactor No. 4, and that can’t come in contact with water without risking the escape of highly radioactive fumes. Scientists estimate that an area around the reactor the size of Switzerland will remain affected for up to 300 years. The aftermath of a nuclear meltdown “is a problem that does not exist on a human time frame.” The guardian figures that the work he does will be available to his children and grandchildren.<br />
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Using my heavily truncated recapitulation of Becker’s thought, it seems that proponents of nuclear power (which I have sometimes been) are refusing to be “as hard headed as possible about reality and possibility,” are as unwilling to get our shit together as the drug-addled utopians of Drop City. We are as schizophrenic as the video artist who proposes that we just not poop. A few pages away from the article about Chernobyl was a piece by a Japanese astrophysicist who wrote in reference to the Fukushima reactor crisis: <br />
<blockquote>Until a few years ago, power usage in Japan was such that during the summer Obon holidays, when people typically return to their ancestral homes, it would have been possible to meet demand even if all nuclear power plants were turned off. Now, nuclear energy has come to be indispensable for both industry and for our daily lives. Our excessive consumption of energy has somehow become part of our very character; it is something we no longer think twice about.</blockquote>Now that I’m trying to tie together all these thematic threads, I have to swoop back to my bat-intensive stoop, to the manure-heavy compost pile in the pasture outside the Chicken Palace. May we humans be as useful as Madroño’s bats and chickens as we consider our energy future; may we refuse to resort to the narcissistic chaos of Drop City’s residents, who left their spiritual and literal bad shit for someone else to deal with.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="329" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/QAr0g8ihRhg" title="YouTube video player" width="410"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Karen Armstrong, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Borzoi-Books/dp/0307595595">Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Nicholson Baker, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anthologist-Novel-Nicholson-Baker/dp/1416572457/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301053385&sr=1-1">The Anthologist</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-54360680739687102712011-03-18T06:58:00.000-05:002011-03-18T06:58:57.675-05:00March Madness: mountain laurels, plastic ducks, and 'roid rage<div></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.touchofheavenyardart.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/est-99_Snow_Whites_Grumpy.85101838.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="253" src="http://www.touchofheavenyardart.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/est-99_Snow_Whites_Grumpy.85101838.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
I apologize in advance if this post seems unusually grumpy; I’ve been in a lousy mood all week. The arrival of spring in Central Texas always has this effect on me. As the weather turns warm and moist and the <a href="http://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=CECAT">redbuds</a> and pear trees burst forth in clouds of colored blossoms, as the <a href="http://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=SOSE3">mountain laurels</a> fill the air with the scent of <a href="http://koolaidworld.com/img/p/132-225-thickbox.jpg">grape Kool-Aid</a>, as Heather and the rest of humanity get all goo-goo-eyed over the season of hope and rebirth, of pastel colors and eggs and baby chicks and bunnies, I grow ever gloomier, because I know what the sights and smells of spring really augur: the onset of another brutally hot summer. And in Texas, summer can last well into what would be considered fall, or even winter, in other places. To me, spring is the annual reminder that I’m about to spend six or seven months covered in a thin film of sweat. And did I mention the <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Aedes_aegypti_biting_human.jpg">mosquitoes</a>?<br />
<br />
Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a cool, even chilly climate, but after almost three decades in Texas I have yet to acclimate fully to the summers here. Heather, on the other hand, loves hot weather; our personal comfort zones have only about a ten-degree overlap, as once the mercury climbs above 90° I begin to melt, and once it drops below 80° she begins to freeze. Under the circumstances, I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve been together for thirty years and married for twenty-five.<br />
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Of course hanging over everything else this week is the dreadful news of the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/japan/index.html">earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan</a>, and the grim <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/12/world/asia/20110312_japan.html?ref=asia#1">aftermath</a>, with threats of nuclear disaster. We can’t yet know the final outcome of these events, but I worry that they may be a harbinger of even more catastrophes to come. <a href="http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-11-todays-tsunami-this-is-what-climate-change-looks-like">A story on Grist.org</a> suggested that climate change might cause more seismic and volcanic activity, as melting ice masses change pressures on the earth’s crust.<br />
<br />
That’s scary all right. Equally scary are fears of massive radiation leaks from damaged nuclear reactors. We know that coal and oil and natural gas are all finite sources of energy, and that solar and wind power have limitations; nuclear power was supposed to be a sort of panacea, although we can wonder about the wisdom of building reactors in any place prone to major seismic activity. And then there’s that pesky problem of what to do with all that <a href="http://greenopolis.com/files/images/us-import-radioactive-waste.jpg">radioactive waste</a>....<br />
<br />
These gloomy reflections fit right in with the book I’ve been reading, Donovan Hohn’s <i>Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.</i> The light-hearted title and subtitle are deceptive; the book is actually a thoughtful, and frequently depressing, contemplation of the problems of industrialization and pollution, and, most germane to the grim news from Japan, of the unintended consequences of technological advances. Reading it has not improved my mood.<br />
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It does, however, tell a fascinating tale. On January 10, 1992, south of the Aleutians and just west of the international date line, a freighter sailing across the northern Pacific from Hong Kong to Tacoma encountered rough weather. Somehow, as the ship rolled and plunged, two columns of containers stacked on the ship’s deck broke free and fell overboard, and at least one of them burst open as it fell, setting 7,200 packages of plastic bath toys – each containing a red beaver, green frog, and blue turtle, in addition to the yellow duck pictured on the book’s cover, but who’d buy a book titled, say, <i>Moby-Turtle</i>? – loose upon the waters. As the toys began washing up in unlikely places, they attracted attention from various news media – who could resist such a story? – and Hohn became obsessed with them. <br />
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The book ranges widely, both geographically and thematically: Hohn’s obsession takes him from his home in New York to (among other places) Alaska, Hawaii, South Korea, Greenland, and China’s Pearl River Delta, the industrial zone where the bath toys were manufactured, and he manages to work in reflections on the plastics industry (with a nice shout-out to my old UT Austin American studies honcho <a href="http://www.utexas.edu/opa/experts/profile.php?id=276">Jeff Meikle</a>), the changing definition of childhood, the history of American environmentalism, and more. He writes well and often amusingly, but the overall message of his book is dire: we are almost literally drowning in waste, and we don’t really know what to do about it. Apparent solutions turn out merely to mask, or perhaps exacerbate, the problem; sincerely well-intentioned people disagree violently about what to do. And more and more garbage ends up in the oceans.<br />
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There was a time when all of this might have been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that spring signals the return of baseball. “Spring training”! I used to consider those the two most joyful words in the English language, other than “<a href="http://www.cookiemadness.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/peach-cobbler.jpg">peach cobbler</a>” and “<a href="http://www.wpclipart.com/money/bag_of_money.png">tax rebate</a>.” But that was before the steroid-fueled nightmare of the last fifteen years, in which <a href="http://www.jtbourne.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/mcgwire-before-after.jpg">unnaturally</a> <a href="http://www.sports-hacks.com/Uploads/jluc311/Steroids_Sammy-Sosa.jpg">swollen</a> <a href="http://sportsnickel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/roids_bonds.jpg">sluggers</a> rewrote the record book and permanently distorted the shape and balance of the National Pastime.<br />
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Now baseball is all but dead to me, and spring is when Tito and I fill out our <a href="http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/tournament/bracket">NCAA tournament brackets</a>, an annual exercise which makes manifest the depths of my almost complete ignorance of college basketball. (I usually pick the University of North Carolina Tar Heels to win it all, because I’ve always been a sucker for <a href="http://www.thesportssession.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/09ncxlarge1.jpg">their baby-blue uniforms</a>, but this year, in case you’re wondering, I boldly picked Duke to beat Kansas in the championship game.)<br />
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I don’t know what it will take to pull me out of my annual springtime slough of despond. Maybe the Blue Devils will actually go all the way (or, if not, maybe UNC will pull off an upset). Maybe the endorphins and tryptophan in a megadose of <a href="http://www.treehugger.com/chocolate-easter-eggs.jpg">Easter chocolate</a> will jolt me into a more agreeable frame of mind. Or maybe I just need to find more cheerful reading material. <br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vgeZEdbv_m8" title="YouTube video player" width="480"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Karen Armstrong, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Borzoi-Books/dp/0307595595">Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Donovan Hohn, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=yKPqty4knx8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=donovan+hohn+moby+duck&source=bl&ots=jFuMexegEV&sig=mc9fAg4v-6-ZMxxxSX65_FtCVBo&hl=en&ei=IEeDTe3UMMmI0QH17fzKCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEMQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-49175393841961377072011-03-11T06:45:00.001-06:002011-03-11T10:59:31.207-06:00Lenten reflections: dead trees, bafflement, and submission<div></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuIeBXPOrSRxd4RFwCAPgCp8QSxAab3aO_34AoYyaq994Ngv_9QekhsXTdG7fDpKct94OCzLTJXKL3gh1dmJGpQDALuz7Gz-gaBlO6RM4F8uXbtGaHiyoJmqdwieueTZ2dRx6AwBNCx-c/s1600/IMG_1857.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuIeBXPOrSRxd4RFwCAPgCp8QSxAab3aO_34AoYyaq994Ngv_9QekhsXTdG7fDpKct94OCzLTJXKL3gh1dmJGpQDALuz7Gz-gaBlO6RM4F8uXbtGaHiyoJmqdwieueTZ2dRx6AwBNCx-c/s320/IMG_1857.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Fittingly, this Ash Wednesday began with a vigorous north wind, the kind that knocks dead branches out of trees and can make you a little leery about walking outdoors. It blew me back to the moment that I first got a glimpse into the meaning of Lent. <br />
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I had vaguely thought of “giving something up for Lent” as an opportunity to practice self-discipline and to display a sense of commitment to a “good” life, a sort of spiritual calisthenics that made you feel better, especially when you stopped. The events I recalled weren’t, on the surface, particularly interesting or dramatic, but they allowed me to see myself from a previously undiscovered vantage point; for the first time, I could see I was like a tree filled with dead branches that needed some serious pruning in order to keep growing. Observing Lent wasn’t a way to prove how strong I was; it was a space offered in which I might look at all my dead branches and wonder how I, with the north wind’s help, might clear some of them out, while trusting that I wouldn’t get knocked out by falling timber.<br />
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A time for submission—no wonder Lent gets a bad rap. Who wants to submit, especially after a look at the roots of the word: “sub-” is from the Latin for “under,” and “-mit” is from “mittere,” to send or throw or hurl. To submit to something is to hurl yourself under it—“it” presumably being a force much greater than your itty-bitty self, a force like, say, a speeding <a href="http://image.automotive.com/f/features/12681277+pheader/131_0902_02_z+1973_ford_f350+front_view.jpg">F350 pick-up</a>. In fact, it might even take some courage to submit to the scouring blast of Lent.<br />
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In <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2011/03/maps-and-mobility-living-in-not-on-land.html">last week’s post</a>, Martin considered some of the complexities of being from a particular place, ending with a beautifully expressed desire to be here, rooted in this rocky Hill Country soil. Imagine his exasperation when I said last night that I felt like I needed a vacation. My desire to run away (presumably temporary) probably has several sources, but one of them may be an awareness that the idea of Madroño Ranch is taking on heft and weight, leaving behind the dreamy elasticity of fantasy. <br />
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I’m reminded of my reaction to our daughter Elizabeth’s first vision test. It had been suggested by her third grade teacher, who had never had a student make so many arithmetic mistakes, especially in copying problems from the chalkboard onto paper. The test results were normal; Elizabeth wasn’t nearsighted, just math-impaired. First I mourned that she would never be an astronaut or an engineer or a mathematician, but then I realized that we now knew more about who she really was; she was beginning to take on her own form, independent of my fantasies for her.<br />
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In a lovely essay entitled “<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=FfXxIaSYzc0C&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=%22poetry+and+marriage%22+wendell+berry&source=bl&ots=vla8HWA6fs&sig=3ConCpXnwyOmMJNf4twSH7_CESM&hl=en&ei=fVh5TcCRO-jp0gHLsK3vAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms</a>,” Wendell Berry (of course) unearths the kinship between marriage and formal poetry: both begin in “the giving of words,” and live out their time standing by those words: <br />
<blockquote>In marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one’s own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and living within the limits of creaturely life. We live only one life and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.</blockquote>Choosing a form implies the setting of limits, limits that appear arbitrary from the outside or at the outset, but that can open into generosity and possibility as they are practiced. Even as they limit, these old forms point their practitioners to a way through self-delusion toward truth, through loneliness toward community. Individual failures are certainly possible, but they aren’t necessarily arguments against the forms themselves. In fact, <br />
<blockquote>“[i]t may be... that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” </blockquote>This past weekend we hosted “Hog School” at the ranch, the second in an ongoing series of sustainable hunting/butchering/cooking/eating extravaganzas put on by Jesse Griffith of Austin’s <a href="http://daidueaustin.net/">Dai Due supper club</a>. I spent much of the weekend baffled (and not in a good way) by rifle-toting guests scattered across the property hunting feral hogs, by the seemingly effortless magic with which chef Morgan Angelone produced gorgeous and delicious treats from the kitchen (<i>my</i> kitchen, mind you, my <i>philandering</i> kitchen purring in someone else’s hands), by my own mental contortions. <br />
<br />
I finally decided to go for a walk where I was unlikely to be mistaken for a hog. Marching through the field by the lake and muttering imprecations against the wind (no birds to watch), the lack of rain (no grass coming up), and the hunters (no long walks available), I decided to climb to the base of the cliffs above me and head back to the house by a new route. <br />
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Though they can be steep, the Hill Country hills aren’t exactly the Alps; climbing to the base of the cliffs only takes a few minutes and a lot of grabs at branches to keep from sliding back down in the loose mulch and rocks that just barely hold the hills up. Once I got into the still-leafless trees, I began lurching across the perpetually shifting terrain and found that it was impossible to walk and look at the same time; if I wanted to walk, I had to watch my feet carefully, and if I wanted to look, I had to stop and make sure I was balanced before I shifted my gaze. It made for slow going because, unexpectedly, there was a lot to see that I hadn’t noticed from below.<br />
<br />
I found a fine moss-covered boulder that allowed me a new vantage point from which to look down and into the trees and brush I normally looked up at, a posture that causes the painful condition among birders known as “warbler neck.” I quickly misidentified several sparrows, and with an un-aching neck, was able to track down some raucous <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/001_Spotted_Towhee%2C_Santa_Fe.jpg">spotted towhees</a> making rude observations from a clump of yaupons and to lecture them briefly. Staring at my feet as I staggered across the hillside, I found that grasses, indeed, were beginning to sprout, despite the drought. Skidding onto my derriere—it always happens off-roading on these hills—I was able to observe the first blush of blooming redbud tree, closely guarded by the great daggered yucca beside it. And then, as the wind picked up again, the rich thick smell of honey clogged the air. The source? Tiny yellow blossoms nestled under <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Agarita%2C_Agrito%2C_Algerita_%28Mahonia_trifoliolata%29.jpg">agarita</a> spines—tiny and extravagantly generous and impossible to pick without getting pricked. The wind blew my hat off, and, setting off multiple rockslides, I chased it gracelessly down the hill.<br />
<br />
Limits: from dust you were made and to dust you shall return. Bafflement: unexpected forms arising, unforeseen paths opening. Submission: throwing the deadwood of the ego into the flames of the Unnamable One. That’s a lot to wrestle with for the mere forty days of Lent.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="250" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4u1JtucdoV4" title="YouTube video player" width="410"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Adam Gopnick, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Angels-Ages-Darwin-Lincoln-Modern/dp/0307270785">Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Donovan Hohn, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Duck-Beachcombers-Oceanographers-Environmentalists-Including/dp/0670022195">Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-49235187306363978992011-03-04T06:58:00.000-06:002011-03-04T06:58:39.207-06:00Maps and mobility: living in, not on, the land<div></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.kqed.org/assets/img/arts/blog/Solnit_Poison.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="273" src="http://www.kqed.org/assets/img/arts/blog/Solnit_Poison.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
I was surprised, while reading Rebecca Solnit’s fascinating <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Infinite-City-San-Francisco-Atlas/dp/0520262506">Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas</a>,</i> to realize that I probably know substantially more about the history of Texas than I do about the history of my native San Francisco.<br />
<br />
Of course, this realization should hardly have come as a surprise. After all, I’ve lived in Texas for more than half my life, whereas I left California at age seventeen, for college, and never moved back. Moreover, I spent more than half of my time in Texas working for the <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/">Texas State Historical Association</a>, mostly researching and writing local history.<br />
<br />
Still, it was a little bit of a shock. Despite <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2011/02/these-boots-were-made-for-blogging.html">my recent purchase of a spiffy pair of Lucchese boots</a>, I still frequently think of myself as a Californian, not a Texan. Texas is where I live, but California is where I’m from, and that can be a significant difference. Especially in the South (and Texas is in many ways as much a part of the South as of the West), where you’re from—your “people,” your frame of reference—is still as important as who you are. But while I retain vivid, detailed mental and sensory images of San Francisco and the Bay Area—the sights, the sounds, the smells, and, yes, the tastes—I don’t really know how and why they came to be. In Texas, on the other hand, I learned a lot of the stories before learning the places they explain.<br />
<br />
Solnit’s book presents both foreground imagery and background narrative. It is a series of maps and essays which manifest unexpected symmetries or contradictions: “Monarchs and Queens,” which simultaneously maps butterfly populations and sites significant in the history of the city’s queer population; “Poison/Palate” (above), which juxtaposes some of the Bay Area’s leading “foodie” establishments (Chez Panisse, Niman Ranch, etc.) with nearby mercury mines, oil refineries, chemical plants, and other sources of toxic pollution; and so on.<br />
<br />
In reading and looking at this beautiful book—and it really is beautiful—I have learned a lot of local history, and also experienced that rush of nostalgia that accompanies any return, be it literal or literary, to your homeland. Just seeing the names on the maps, the extant and (especially) the long gone—<a href="http://www.sanfranciscodays.com/postcards/large/pc239-beach-playland.jpg">Playland at the Beach</a>! <a href="http://www.outsidelands.org/surf_theater.php">the Surf Theater</a>! <a href="http://www.oldhandbills.com/images/060623/Canned_Heat-Youngbloods-Winterland.jpg">Winterland</a>! <a href="http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/zims2.jpg">Zim’s</a>!—brought on a shiver of memory worthy of a Proustian <i>madeleine.</i> As Solnit writes, “the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain.” She notes that the residents of Managua, Nicaragua, long after an earthquake that destroyed much of the city, “gave directions by saying things like, ‘Turn left where the tree used to be.’”<br />
<br />
Similarly, my San Francisco is a palimpsest, an accretion of layers and memories, things and people living and dead, real and fictional—<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton">Emperor Norton</a> and <a href="http://maxmedianet.com/hollywoodland/ktml2/images/uploads/Maltese_Falcon.jpg?0.6968834616405345">Sam Spade</a>, <a href="http://www.fest21.com/files/images/Lawrence%20Ferlinghetti.jpg">Lawrence Ferlinghetti</a> and <a href="http://www.city-data.com/forum/members/lionking-42035-albums-things-make-you-go-hmmm-pic25497-harry-callahan.jpg">Harry Callahan</a>, and countless others. All of them were and are integral parts of where I’m from.<br />
<br />
But that very notion of being <i>from</i> someplace is somewhat vexed. Locals say “I’m from here” all the time, but to me saying you’re from someplace usually implies motion, absence, a sense that you’re no longer there—that you’ve left it behind. In the United States, we have traditionally defined ourselves as an entire nation of people who are from somewhere else. My mother was born in Italy and my father in Brazil (though his parents were born in Scotland and Austria), which makes me about as American as you can get. After all, even the so-called Native Americans who were here before European contact originally came from somewhere else, presumably across the <a href="http://www.nps.gov/bela/historyculture/beringia.htm">Beringian land bridge</a> in pursuit of mammoth and bison.<br />
<br />
In a fundamental sense, then, ours is a culture built on the sense of limitless opportunity awaiting us just beyond the horizon, just over that next rise. We have never stayed put, geographically or socioeconomically: the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the Dust Bowl all pushed or pulled the new nation westward, across the continent, and we still seem to believe that, if we really make a hash of things where we are now, we can always pick up and move on to some uninhabited place (traditionally further west) where we can start fresh.<br />
<br />
And some astonishing transformations did indeed take place out on that peripatetic frontier: a poor boy from Kentucky by way of Indiana and Illinois turned into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln">Abraham Lincoln</a>, an itinerant river pilot and printer’s apprentice from Missouri headed west and turned into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain">Mark Twain</a>, and so on. Even after <a href="http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/images/turner.jpg">Frederick Jackson Turner</a> famously proclaimed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Thesis">the end of the frontier</a> in 1893, our restlessness did not cease. In the twentieth century, the promise of economic opportunity and escape from Jim Crow drove <a href="http://theblackbottom.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/great_migration_1916-1930.jpg">the great migration</a> of African Americans from the South to the north and west. Our current president, a son of Kansas and Kenya who was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is merely the most recent testament to the persistent power of the American notion of mobility, whether upward or westward.<br />
<br />
Back to the Left Coast. In <i>Infinite City, </i>Solnit writes, “A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds—in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church’s sphere or a hospital’s intersections.” This is inarguably true of San Francisco, or for that matter any city; I would only add that it is no less true of a farm, a rural village, or any place that has borne the prints of generations of human existence. Like, say, Madroño Ranch.<br />
<br />
All maps, even ones as imaginative and beautiful as the ones in <i>Infinite City,</i> are by definition reductive. They represent reality in two dimensions; we experience it in (at least) three. Maps, in other words, lack depth, and depth is what makes us and our world real. We don’t inhabit places flatly (though we certainly inhabit plenty of <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Dallas_Texas_Skyline10.jpg">flat places</a>!), but in depth, both geographical and temporal.<br />
<br />
That depth is what we hope to gain personally at Madroño Ranch and also encourage in others, but we know we cannot simply will it into being. It grows and accumulates over time, and with care and effort; it is, in fact, a kind of rote learning, going over the same ground again and again, literally and metaphorically, until you have worn a track into the surface. John Muir noted that “Most people are on the world, not in it”; one of our hopes, now that our Austin nest is empty and we’re at the ranch more often, is that we can gradually learn to live and move <i>in,</i> not just <i>on,</i> this small part of the planet.<br />
<br />
This is why Heather has grown increasingly ambivalent about travel; the world is full of fascinating places, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of our own. We hope it’s not (or not just) provincialism, but we want to be <i>here.</i><br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="250" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/sl-pjb7y3y0" title="YouTube video player" width="410"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Adam Gopnik, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=v0ZmHqtW_ycC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gopnik+angels+and+ages&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=4jZtTbyOO8L78AbezuCMDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Steven Rinella, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Ys1msOAETFEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=steven+rinella+american+buffalo&source=bl&ots=lkH0LYcDNf&sig=N2WElEgaaoMk0mOYSUVZyIcNy4k&hl=en&ei=azZtTfGVAoL7lwfgqLT9BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-60560815936987847582011-02-25T06:46:00.000-06:002011-02-25T06:46:49.853-06:00"If you got a field that don't yield": writer's block and the language of community<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Eug%C3%A8ne_Grasset-Encre_L_Marquet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Eugène_Grasset-Encre_L_Marquet.jpg" width="276" /></a></div><br />
One of the many notable gatherings Martin and I participated in this past weekend was the opening of my sister <a href="http://www.isacatto.com/">Isa Catto Shaw</a>’s show at the <a href="http://www.harveymeadows.com/">Harvey/Meadows Gallery</a> in Aspen, Colorado. In a series of watercolors and collages, she took the dark, mute burden of grief over <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2009/10/mothers-legacy.html">the death of our mother</a> and worked it into beautifully articulate packages, in some ways (perhaps) making that grief more easily borne because it is shared with a community of unknown mourners who see the paintings, with the community of artists from whom she has drawn inspiration, and from the community in which she and her family live. As far as I could tell, the opening was a wonderful success, the gallery full to overflowing as Isa and the ceramicist <a href="http://andersonranch.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/doug-casebeers-recent-travels-to-china/">Doug Casebeer</a>, with whom she shared the show, each spoke movingly about the impetus behind their individual efforts.<br />
<br />
Knowing that she had been working like a madman for several months, I was glad (and deeply moved) to see the results of her labors. And aggravated. We’ve been talking since our mother died about a collaboration of my poetry and Isa’s art to be entitled “Blessings of a Mother.” Isa’s done her part, and it’s intimidatingly beautiful. <br />
<br />
I, on the other hand, have done squat. This doesn’t mean I haven’t thought obsessively about the project or that I haven’t written multiple lists of topics and scraps of lines and stillborn poems. It does mean that I’ve been willing to be endlessly distracted and grumpy about it. I’ve developed all sorts of hypotheses about why I’m not writing and what I might do about it, most of them ultimately involving running away from home. My favorite defense against the terrorism of the blank page is to read, figuring that in doing so I’m in the company of someone else who has faced, at least temporarily, the tyranny of <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2226/2284950973_c1ced20b93.jpg">That Which Demands Expression And Remains Unexpressed</a>. Plus, if I’m reading, I can’t write.<br />
<br />
So here’s what I’m currently reading to fend off—and perhaps eventually to outsmart—the intimidation tactics of the blank page: <i>Standing by Words,</i> a collection of essays by <a href="http://www.wendellberrybooks.com/index.html">Wendell Berry</a>, in particular the title essay and its assertion that the primary obligation of language is to connect the idiom of the internal self with the multivalent tongues the self encounters in community, both human and otherwise. When language loses that capacity—a loss currently encouraged by the forces of industrial technology—both the self and its community languish in their isolation, succumbing eventually to a fatal disconnection from the web of love and life. <br />
<br />
As always, Berry is defiantly unfashionable, insisting on the possibility of “fidelity between words and speakers or words and things or words and acts.” He believes that genuine communication is possible, even if its processes are ultimately mysterious and unavailable for dissection by specialists. The life of language is rooted in community and by the precision that life in community necessitates: “It sounds like this: ‘How about letting me borrow your tall jack?’ Or: ‘The old hollow beech blew down last night.’ Or, beginning a story, ‘Do you remember that time...?’ I would call this community speech. Its words have the power of pointing to things visible either to eyesight or to memory.” Community speech doesn’t imagine abstract futures; rather, it deals with what IS. It creates a walkway between internal, personal systems and external, public systems. Community speech registers the need to include both objective and subjective experience; it deflects the argot of specialists; it recognizes spheres of being beyond its domain. Says Berry:<br />
<blockquote>If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect or responsibility for the whole.... [Community speech] is limited by responsibility on the on the one hand and by humility on the other, or in Milton’s terms, by magnanimity and devotion.</blockquote>Although I would argue with Berry’s assertion that all specialists are without awareness of their place in the “whole household in which life is lived” and thereby exclude themselves from the liveliness of community speech, I hearken to the limits he sets on speech, limits that protect the tender shoots of hopefulness, a crop that can be distressingly rare in an often grief-stricken world.<br />
<br />
Forgive me. For an essay that aims, in part, to wrestle with ways to express the specificity and universality of grief, my language is so far distressingly abstract, a symptom, I suspect, of my current stuckness. I just received a note from an acquaintance who recently lost her husband to pancreatic cancer; she wrote that although she and her daughter have prepared for his death for a year, “it is like the bad dream where you show up for an exam without having read the book, in your PJs, totally unprepared.” I was struck by the generosity of the image, by her assumption that, though I have not experienced her particular and devastating sorrow, I could somehow imaginatively engage with it, and that we both belonged to the same community, despite the fact that we’ve only met twice before.<br />
<br />
Writing is usually perceived to be a solitary pursuit, and in a very literal way it is. I’m trying to remember, however, that when I stare at the blank page or screen I’m seldom alone. (I’m not referring to the cats who often take naps behind me on my chair.) Trying to remember: trying to listen for the cloud of witnesses, the dead and the unborn, that root us in the past and impel us toward the future. I found <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke">Rainer Maria Rilke</a>’s <i>Duino Elegies</i> compelling after my mother’s death, in part because their language is so rich and their meaning so elusive, like a whispered conversation from another plane of being. In the translation by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, they begin with this lament:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic<br />
orders? And if one of them suddenly<br />
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his<br />
stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing<br />
but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,<br />
and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains<br />
to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.<br />
And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note<br />
Of depth-dark sobbing.</div><br />
Although Rilke refuses to call on the angels, they soar in and out of the poems, weaving them together, helping create a complex whole from parts threatening to hurtle toward meaninglessness and isolation. <br />
<br />
I’m usually suspicious of angel-talk, but Wendell Berry and my widowed acquaintance and my sister all remind me that I am—we are all— <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxN2xALFVJb2KEWIPksi3pxxUxCCQH-UgHhwU47jbdos6wseqbeA4LzuwQP_8oBMEIj3rgty2yAO9fSFJTAWUSULiXzHWzgdThpzEv3euSq_JD-qmDlKcktT3oUOmDt71JaxsqLwqx/s1600/DerHimmelUeberBerlin.jpg">surrounded by angels</a>, by community, even when we don’t sense its presence. When we are deaf to its song, we are deaf to our own.<br />
<br />
Now if they’d only settle down and write those poems for me. Or at least recommend some nice writer’s residency where I could get them started.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="329" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8NmR-oKdkGw" title="YouTube video player" width="410"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Wendell Berry, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Standing-Words-Essays-Wendell-Berry/dp/1593760558">Standing by Words: Essays</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Rebecca Solnit, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Infinite-City-San-Francisco-Atlas/dp/0520262506">Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-43312853718474854762011-02-18T04:04:00.000-06:002011-02-18T04:04:55.412-06:00These boots were made for blogging<div></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://a1.zassets.com/images/z/1/4/0/1400311-p-DETAILED.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://a1.zassets.com/images/z/1/4/0/1400311-p-DETAILED.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />
Cowboy boots are on my mind today. And (heh) on my feet.<br />
<br />
Of course cowboy boots come with so much symbolic weight it’s a wonder I can even walk in them. The cowboy is the most iconic, romantic, heroic figure in American history. Lean, laconic, and independent, he represents the way we like to imagine ourselves: tough as nails, self-reliant, unafraid of violence but guided always by a rigid code of honor. <a href="http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/at0180.3s.jpg">Owen Wister</a> and <a href="http://images.ha.com/lf?source=url%5Bfile%3Aimages%2Finetpub%2Fnewnames%2F300%2F3%2F7%2F8%2F2%2F3782413.jpg%5D%2Ccontinueonerror%5Btrue%5D&scale=size%5B450x2000%5D%2Coptions%5Blimit%5D&source=url%5Bfile%3Aimages%2Finetpub%2Fwebuse%2Fno_image_available.gif%5D%2Cif%5B(%27global.source.error%27)%5D&sink=preservemd%5Btrue%5D">Zane Grey</a> helped establish the archetype, and <a href="http://www.freemooviesonline.com/magazine/images/stories/cinema/actors/roy-rogers/roy-rogers2.jpg">Roy Rogers</a>, <a href="http://www.fiftiesweb.com/gene-autry-1.jpg">Gene Autry</a>, <a href="http://cowboylands.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Audie-Murphy.jpg">Audie Murphy</a>, <a href="http://content.answcdn.com/main/content/img/getty/9/3/3076193.jpg">Gary Cooper</a>, <a href="http://www.westernpostersandprints.com/images/John%20Wayne%20Cowboy%20Poster.jpg">John Wayne</a>, and <a href="http://www.cowboydirectory.com/E/eastwood.jpg">Clint Eastwood</a>, among many others, elaborated it for generations of children (and adults) on screens both large and small. In an increasingly urbanized society the image of the cowboy may seem quaint and anachronistic, but it can still exert <a href="http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Toy-Story-2-toy-story-478719_1024_768.jpg">a powerful pull</a>.<br />
<br />
All of which only partially explains why I just bought myself a pair of <a href="http://www.lucchese.com/index.php">Luccheses</a>—NV1503s in waxed and burnished olive leather, if you must know, as in the photo above—and why that’s such an unlikely thing for me to have done. Allow me to explain:<br />
<br />
I have traditionally had a sort of ambivalent attitude toward cowboy boots. I have tended to associate them more with a certain kind of urban Texan—plump, loud, razor-cut hair, wearing pressed jeans and a white shirt, driving a too-big pickup—than with the rugged individualist of the bygone frontier. And then of course there’s that whole unfortunate association with <a href="http://www.bloggingtheboys.com/images/admin/ray.jpg">a certain professional football team based in Dallas</a>.<br />
<br />
Moreover, my feet are famous throughout the tri-county area for their extraordinary width and flatness. They are the <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Great_Plains_Nebraska_USA1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Plains_Nebraska_USA1.jpg&usg=__NJP4l2YylaCXqqKI-ZFlCMzEX8I=&h=492&w=740&sz=239&hl=en&start=15&sig2=EsAbft2Vry_TGlBAS6W0VA&zoom=1&tbnid=HjqGNFZPPAzzTM:&tbnh=158&tbnw=252&ei=LWtdTa6DBcmWtweLxtHYCg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgreat%2Bplains%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26biw%3D1212%26bih%3D668%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C497&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=657&vpy=349&dur=2024&hovh=183&hovw=275&tx=157&ty=69&oei=JWtdTdHQLcWclgeS8JTHCg&page=2&ndsp=13&ved=1t:429,r:6,s:15&biw=1212&bih=668">Great Plains</a> of footdom. My footprints resemble <a href="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2787/4108639767_25233233ef.jpg">the round tracks of a hippo</a> rather than the delicately scalloped tracks of most humans.<br />
<br />
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I have a long and often painful history with cowboy boots. I bought my first pair in London, of all places, at a very trendy boutique on Chelsea’s <a href="http://blog.londonconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/IMG_1790.jpg">Kings Road</a>, during our honeymoon many years ago. (I know, I know: what kind of idiot travels from Texas to England to buy cowboy boots? All I can say in my defense is that Heather had just bought a pair, and I didn’t want to be left out. Also, I was young and foolish.) They were a sort of honey-colored suede, with white stitching, lethally pointed toes, and rakishly undercut heels. They were also one size too small, and way too narrow. The shopkeeper—a pox upon his cynical soul—assured me that they would stretch, which was of course utter nonsense. I probably wore them no more than twice, each time suffering horribly while they were on and requiring a great deal of assistance to peel them off my swollen feet, before finally coming to my senses and giving them away.<br />
<br />
A few years later Heather’s parents gave me a pair of boots for Christmas. They were made of thick reddish-brown leather, completely devoid of decorative stitching, with squarish toes instead of the classic pointy ones—in other words, they weren’t really cowboy boots at all. They were, however, the correct size. I wore them a few times, usually at Christmas parties and the like, before deciding that they were just too heavy to wear much in Texas.<br />
<br />
But these new Luccheses fit my astoundingly wide, flat feet right out of the box, and they are lightweight enough to make me think I might be able to wear them comfortably even when the temperature is above freezing. Moreover, they are quite dazzlingly beautiful: fairly restrained, as cowboy boots go, with decorative contrast stitching on the shaft and more subtle stitching on the insteps, though the toes are sharply pointed.<br />
<br />
How often will I actually wear them? I have no idea; I may ultimately conclude that they make me look more like <a href="http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2008/04/08/amd_randyjones.jpg">this guy</a> than <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjLiaSUi-XPq88q_nnxr1QwHG_cArLRrl6HnaYxa2C6m7GoVXA85FG6Qefrn0UXKLpDuU_8sdCFpKP4yEbXfuZJb95ILTUtFmctUGy99C6KpzP4k83L42vgfItH7Vi8tVWnt1XVa9_Yep5/s1600/lonesome+dove.jpg">this guy</a>. Also, we seem to be moving into spring, and my usual warm-weather wardrobe involves shorts, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks, with a Hawaiian shirt and sneakers for more formal occasions. Still, I like looking at them in my closet, and it’s nice knowing they’re there if and when I need them.<br />
<br />
The bottom line is that these boots are a symbol of my willingness to take on the trappings of my time and place. We live in Texas, and we own a ranch; we are Westerners, in other words, and we yearn to partake of the best of that heritage. I’ve made no secret of my loathing for many aspects of contemporary Texas (just ask Heather). Wearing cowboy boots is a step—a small step, perhaps, but a significant one—in my long journey toward acceptance and acknowledgment of who and where I am. This is my life, and these, believe it or not, are my boots.<br />
<br />
Next on my shopping list: a <a href="http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c314/kylecor42/gram_parsons.jpg">Nudie’s suit</a>!<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="329" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yhZ2sBdCUhA" title="YouTube video player" width="410"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> William H. Eddy, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Other-Side-World-Essays-Stories/dp/0970895100">The Other Side of the World: Essays on Mind and Nature</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Philipp Meyer, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Rust-Random-Readers-Circle/dp/0385527527/ref=tmm_pap_title_0">American Rust</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-62285759600352144212011-02-11T07:34:00.000-06:002011-02-11T07:34:04.276-06:00Meat and flourishment: carnivorocity, take three<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Joachim_Beuckelaer_K%C3%B6chin_mit_Gefl%C3%BCgel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Joachim_Beuckelaer_Köchin_mit_Geflügel.jpg" width="280" /></a></div><br />
<a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2011/02/bloody-hands-bison-harvest-at-madrono.html">Martin’s post last week</a> describing the first slaughter (and I use the word “slaughter” advisedly) in our new endeavor as purveyors of bison meat elicited a comment that urged us to consider the ethical fault line (presumably) running through every conscience, that unsteady place where we find ourselves rationalizing our actions to ourselves or to whatever audience our imaginations conjure up.<br />
<br />
Martin tried to make his/our unease clear with the post’s title: Bloody Hands. So I’m wondering once again about the ethics of <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2009/12/carnivorocity-take-two.html">carnivorocity</a>, as visible and treacherous a fault line as abortion, euthanasia, gun control, climate change, or cloning: when you stand on one side of the fault line, it’s easy to think that the earth itself will justify you when it opens up and swallows the dummies over there, proving that you were on the right side, at which point you can stop worrying all the time, for heaven’s sake, and go on your merry way without thinking about the issue ever again.<br />
<br />
As usual, diving into the conversations available on the internet just sucked me deeper into the murk. A defense is available for every possible position and offered with wildly varying degrees of civility: meat-eaters supporting vegans and trashing vegetarians; meat-eaters sneering at any thought of self-restriction; vegetarians and vegans calling meat-eaters all sorts of names; vegetarians acknowledging that some meat-eating is environmentally acceptable; meat-eaters acknowledging that American meat production and consumption is for the most part grotesque. What’s a utopian-minded bison rancher to think?<br />
<br />
Serendipity, as usual, is my guide: in chasing internet rabbits down their holes, I found a momentary resting place in a review of Maggie Kozel’s book <i><a href="http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/the_color_of_atmosphere:paperback">The Color of Atmosphere: One Doctor’s Journey In and Out of Medicine</a>.</i> After describing a flummoxing patient she had as a second-year medical student, Kozel said, “[I] devoured the answers without asking the right questions.”<br />
<br />
Of course, if you’re obsessive the way I am, then you’ll immediately begin worrying about what the right questions are, as in, if I’m “right” then others must be “wrong.” One of the hallmarks of the debate about meat-eating and its impact on the environment or the individual soul is the array of statistics and science that each side has amassed to prove the objective superiority of its argument. I’ve been persuaded by both sides and neither side, depending on the time of day, what I’ve just read, the weather, my most recent meal, and/or the health of my family, among other random criteria. <br />
<br />
In other words, I don’t think science and statistics by themselves allow us to ask the right questions, since apparently convincing evidence can be found to shore up either side. Eating is one of those human activities rich with multiple levels of meaning; expecting questions directed at a specific level to adequately address the full range is a little like expecting a monoculture to support the diversity a polyculture allows. Although science poses some vitally important questions when it examines the issue of meat-eating, the nature of its inquiry must ignore other equally pressing but less quantifiable questions, such as, what conditions allow a multi-species community to flourish? Does eating meat (by humans) contribute or detract from our community’s flourishment (a word coined by our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of <a href="http://www.thunderheartbison.com/content/">Thunder Heart Bison</a>)?<br />
<br />
I hear the howls of protest even before I finish typing this sentence: how do you measure flourishment? Who decides the standards? Invalid! Too subjective! Well, yes. That’s what makes this a fault-line issue: it addresses the limits of our humanity and so necessarily includes subjective experience. To be honest, I don’t know how to measure flourishment; I suspect you just know it when you see it. And when you see it, you’re moved to describe it, knowing that the urge will be frustrated to at least some degree because flourishment, like all fruit, is the result of such a complex interaction of elements in space and time that any description will be incomplete. And of course it’s not a steady state; it waxes and wanes as circumstances change and sometimes double back on themselves.<br />
<br />
In this context, the question of whether meat-eating is ethical can be answered unequivocally: it depends. One of the preconditions for flourishment is a sense of justice, a perspective that includes but also rises above the immediate tit-for-tat concerns of fairness. The scope of justice includes not just humanity but the earth itself—and perhaps the cosmos. It unrolls over the course of history, recognizing that particular injustices sometimes take generations, centuries, or millennia to wither, even with the powerful witness and effort of prophets and their followers. As I said in <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2009/11/carnivorocity.html">an earlier post</a>, it may be that vegetarians and vegans are living forward into a time where justice is more fully realized. At the same time, issues of fairness and justice press at us every moment in this world where the lion and the lamb cannot yet lie down together, where predators are a vital part of an ecosystem that has developed in sync with domesticated animals.<br />
<br />
Can meat be produced and consumed in a way that encourages justice and, hence, flourishment? I think it can. There are multiple instances of communities and societies that eat meat and live within that delicate balance that looks to the long-term well-being and dignity of the system as a whole, places like Joel Salatin’s <a href="http://www.polyfacefarms.com/">Polyface Farm</a>, although there are many, many others. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.) There are multiple instances of communities and cultures flourishing without eating meat, most notably for the purposes of this post the Hindu cultures whose vegetarian cuisines I eat with great pleasure. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.)<br />
<br />
Likewise, there are communities and cultures that eat meat without flourishing, including most of the industrialized world, where concern for short-term profits and their consequent incitement of unrestrained appetite smother any hope of flourishment under mountains of animal excrement and anguish. Those places that encourage us (in the industrialized world) to measure the value of food in one way only—cheap is best—smother flourishment. Food is at the center of family, of community, of myth, of life. To reduce its essence to a single component is to denature its multivalent nutritional value. <br />
<br />
Back to the ethical fault line, that place we stand uneasily, knowing that we may be swallowed: may those of us who recognize the fault line join hands—bloody or not—across the chasm and help each other seek the firmer footing of justice as our foundation. Flourishment will surely follow.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="410" height="329" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ywtgRmIyYV8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Hilary Mantel, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Hall-Novel-Booker-Prize/dp/0805080686">Wolf Hall</a></i> (still!)<br />
<b>Martin:</b> Rodney Crowell, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chinaberry-Sidewalks-Rodney-Crowell/dp/0307594203">Chinaberry Sidewalks</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-57090572808429640762011-02-04T07:16:00.002-06:002011-02-05T08:48:44.845-06:00Bloody hands: bison harvest at Madroño Ranch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKWh0QiZuTuUDMnPEPYm2DbWQIeDgnaMRqTk2w8gqjLIkyNQlrWg8na7YJl7cCihT8EJBNCSJDIRLxVMqIJLJ2dDrnHAQLlTEtKvns_vJdXuR4L9pxFZdw-c_152YlH_HuG3C9ZJXm0dA/s1600/DSCN0142.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKWh0QiZuTuUDMnPEPYm2DbWQIeDgnaMRqTk2w8gqjLIkyNQlrWg8na7YJl7cCihT8EJBNCSJDIRLxVMqIJLJ2dDrnHAQLlTEtKvns_vJdXuR4L9pxFZdw-c_152YlH_HuG3C9ZJXm0dA/s320/DSCN0142.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
The very first fruits (though “fruits” hardly seems the right word) of our very first bison harvest are ready to sell, but getting to this point has been a long and sometimes frustrating process. The last stages of that process were both harrowing and, in a dark way, fascinating; squeamish sorts may want to stop reading here. “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xacRTqk5QFM">Meat is murder</a>,” the Smiths sang in 1985, and whether or not you agree with them, it is undeniably a bloody business. <br />
<br />
The harvest took place on Monday, January 24. We’d been both dreading and looking forward to it, and planning for it, for months; Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, had ingeniously cobbled together a refrigerated trailer to haul the dead animals to Mercantile Meat, in Utopia, to be turned into packages of meat, and we had long since chosen the two young bulls, the bison equivalent of <a href="http://epguides.com/BeavisandButthead/cast.jpg">obnoxious adolescents</a>, who would be the first to go. Despite all the planning, though, the reality of assuming responsibility for the death of so large and magnificent an animal was more than a little intimidating.<br />
<br />
Early on that beautifully clear but chilly Monday morning Heather and I drove up to the flat near Robert’s house, where the herd had gathered. There we met Robert, Meat Inspector Mike, and Robert’s buddies Robert (whom I will henceforth call Other Robert) and Keith (whom I will henceforth call Not Robert), who were there to assist. We all gathered in a circle while Heather read a prayer she’d written for the occasion, which I suspect disconcerted several of those present. Then Robert, Meat Inspector Mike, and Not Robert climbed into Robert’s Chevy Tahoe with Robert’s .270 rifle while Other Robert, Heather, and I kept a safe distance.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzLQHtTJHQ5sYVs7DbKp2r0aLjByv2mDFYyn3qAsojZsmdCMkyG1sz835LLVJSO6zz8yGuVwShGWlreQlHM94M80GC9aMcG978cepw22WJ2G_9C0m_GQTqnc0hGy7kPDJ0IT74bFMs4w0/s1600/DSCN0122.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzLQHtTJHQ5sYVs7DbKp2r0aLjByv2mDFYyn3qAsojZsmdCMkyG1sz835LLVJSO6zz8yGuVwShGWlreQlHM94M80GC9aMcG978cepw22WJ2G_9C0m_GQTqnc0hGy7kPDJ0IT74bFMs4w0/s320/DSCN0122.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
A few minutes later, it was over. Two rifle shots shattered the stillness of the morning, and after each, even before we’d finished flinching, 1,500 pounds of bison was dead on the ground. This was the moment we’d been waiting for, and fearing, and the magnificence and sorrow of it were overwhelming. Both deaths were instantaneous and humbling, and strangely intimate; all the world seemed somehow to have narrowed to this short stretch of dirt road; other places, other people, were unimaginable. Robert, Other Robert, and Not Robert worked quickly and efficiently to bleed the first carcass and load it into the trailer, and we turned our attention to the second.<br />
<br />
At this point things got <i>really</i> interesting. We knew that bison tend not to scatter when they hear gunfire or see one of their number fall; in fact, frequently the other members of the herd gather around the victim, curious about what has happened to him or her, or perhaps paying their last respects, before getting back to business as usual. But this time, the head bull went over to the second carcass and repeatedly butted and pawed at it, determined to revive his fallen comrade.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LJ18x4PqEcbPgSoPRD48UiR6WaL6Ad-6FjGJ9gKGOSIGHqhX_tQxQ_c9iuTNXPcGJTqVKzZw9kfVDfjHyS_Jf8yJJ5lIoettCW-USqvm_9rGzNGKFrHO6MH3313aFhb60Jub-0CES-o/s1600/DSCN0127.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LJ18x4PqEcbPgSoPRD48UiR6WaL6Ad-6FjGJ9gKGOSIGHqhX_tQxQ_c9iuTNXPcGJTqVKzZw9kfVDfjHyS_Jf8yJJ5lIoettCW-USqvm_9rGzNGKFrHO6MH3313aFhb60Jub-0CES-o/s320/DSCN0127.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
This was a problem, since we were not particularly interested in arguing with nearly a ton of angry bison. By yelling and waving, we convinced him to back off a few feet, just far enough so that we could go to work on the carcass, but Robert kept one eye on the angry bull (and on Heather, who had appointed herself the designated angry-bull-shooer). He glared at us throughout the process, but kept his distance.<br />
<br />
With both carcasses safely inside the trailer, which had been set to minus-ten degrees, Robert, Other Robert, and Not Robert climbed into the cab of Robert’s pickup and our little caravan set off for Utopia, some thirty miles away.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRizOiWoHAZuxcDInQ-OkFOgg8euIbgTJdcqksHK9rp2SCM5WbiVa41M-WWIRwz7e0T9hd9NcRA1QVMecpHv5nyCnl8rdpKVJt1nFz1j74spMgjW5UiiqYrmUsJsSRPdPVyt_urnhZZM8/s1600/DSCN0135.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRizOiWoHAZuxcDInQ-OkFOgg8euIbgTJdcqksHK9rp2SCM5WbiVa41M-WWIRwz7e0T9hd9NcRA1QVMecpHv5nyCnl8rdpKVJt1nFz1j74spMgjW5UiiqYrmUsJsSRPdPVyt_urnhZZM8/s320/DSCN0135.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
All had gone about as smoothly as we could have hoped to this point, but we encountered some metaphorical bumps on the <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/RoadToUtopia_1946.jpg">road to Utopia</a>. As Robert’s pickup was hauling the laden trailer up FM 337 west of Medina, smoke started pouring out from under the hood: a blown radiator fitting. They limped to the top of the hill, where they found a couple of empty whiskey bottles at the side of the road and, after coasting down the other side, filled them with water from Mill Creek which they poured into the overheated radiator.<br />
<br />
Thankfully, the truck made it the rest of the way into Utopia—a little later than we’d planned, true, but it made it. After Robert backed the trailer up to the tiny loading dock we had to drag the dead bison out of the trailer, across the loading dock, and through the tiny door and into the plant—not an easy undertaking, and one which required the combined efforts of Robert, Not Robert, Other Robert, and me, as well as Joe, the owner, and a couple of plant employees. When we were done, I had blood on my hands literally as well as figuratively.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrVwmL7327gC6KB_gHwbxqt9WBvyLb6rzjE05Z5oXLXryKUTmgritubhEcHt9lw6Ibe2dgVDcmN_Bn2f2UqrZc3SLsYkCRfYctQJLoecAlDppACC8kPmw8Pz5SKCWDAQR-ZncnLIsJz3E/s1600/DSCN0136.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrVwmL7327gC6KB_gHwbxqt9WBvyLb6rzjE05Z5oXLXryKUTmgritubhEcHt9lw6Ibe2dgVDcmN_Bn2f2UqrZc3SLsYkCRfYctQJLoecAlDppACC8kPmw8Pz5SKCWDAQR-ZncnLIsJz3E/s320/DSCN0136.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
After all our efforts to honor and respect the death of the bison, the way in which they entered the plant seemed disrespectful and undignified. But necessity is a mother, as we say at our house, and it was a tremendous relief finally to have them there.<br />
<br />
When we got back to the ranch, we were still a little stunned by the morning’s events. It had already been a long day, and we were still a little unnerved by the magnitude of what we had seen and done (or, more accurately, caused to be done). And we know we still have a lot of work ahead of us; actually figuring out how to sell several hundred pounds of bison meat is way out of our comfort zone. (We’re hoping to sell all of it wholesale, and only in the Bandera/Kerr County area.) But we feel like we’ve taken a major step.<br />
<br />
After witnessing a bison harvest at our friend Hugh’s ranch several years ago, Heather wrote a poem called “Sacrifice.” The details are necessarily different, but it still captures some of what we felt:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Ash Wednesday: one year I stood in thick cool<br />
dust along with several others, waiting for<br />
an ancient drama to begin again,<br />
waiting as if I weren’t an actor in it<br />
too. Through the thorny brush the bison<br />
entered, awkward bodies wary, dense beneath<br />
the bulky wreath of muscle draped across<br />
their shoulders. One shook her head—so massive<br />
that her horns looked dainty—watching us with<br />
eyes black as moonless snake-filled summer nights.<br />
We climbed into the pick-up, all except<br />
the shooter, who moved with quiet purpose <br />
as we sat in silence, waiting for the shot <br />
that finally came—shocking, if expected—<br />
and penetrated mercifully, the cow dead<br />
before she finished sinking to the dust.<br />
Another man performed the bleeding when<br />
she was hoisted, limp, still warm, head-down,<br />
carotid artery cascading blood <br />
a color and consistency I had <br />
never seen before, a frothing cochineal <br />
oasis in the thirsty dust. I asked<br />
the shooter if and how he steeled himself<br />
for harvest. Pray two days before, he said,<br />
Sit quietly. We watched the hands prepare<br />
her for the journey, another kind of life.<br />
Her body, treasury of light and grass<br />
and epic wanderings, will enrich <br />
a larger body now, a body more than <br />
body when it knows the incarnate cost—<br />
be it hoofed, winged, scaled or even rooted <br />
life—of nourishing itself. Around us, <br />
bushes burned in lilac, white, and yellow <br />
flames, their incense rising toward the hawks<br />
and caracaras, wheeling in mandalic arcs,<br />
awaiting our departure so to gather <br />
in the dust and then consume the bloody <br />
pool, their bounden duty.</div><br />
Perhaps subsequent harvests at Madroño Ranch will become more or less routine; doubtless we’ll have a better idea of what to expect, and be somewhat better prepared. (We may even buy a more powerful pickup, one that can pull the trailer to Utopia without overheating.) But I pray we never completely lose the profound sense of awe and, yes, sorrow that attended this first harvest. May we never lose the full awareness of what we do and have done. May we remain humbly thankful for the life—and death—of these magnificent animals. May I always remember the blood on my hands.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="329" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Rv-_mzVBSF8" title="YouTube video player" width="410"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Hilary Mantel, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Hall-Novel-Booker-Prize/dp/0805080686">Wolf Hall</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Roy Bedichek, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=k05sqhzN4N0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=adventures+with+a+texas+naturalist&source=bl&ots=0fWuN4kMJn&sig=HizfBSZHnMM2ucuHz8RhhbDbmM8&hl=en&ei=uM5KTfXxFoOB8gbF75T0Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Adventures with a Texas Naturalist</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-30647468754933909512011-01-28T07:15:00.000-06:002011-01-28T07:15:15.384-06:00Shooting holes in the Constitution: some thoughts on guns and violence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.mysanantonio.com/mediaManager/?controllerName=image&action=get&id=485900&width=628&height=471" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="http://www.mysanantonio.com/mediaManager/?controllerName=image&action=get&id=485900&width=628&height=471" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Recently, like many Americans, I’ve been thinking about the issue of guns in civil society. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting">The tragic shooting in Tucson</a> certainly focused attention on the topic, as did <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/01/05/132652351/tracking-gun-dealers-linked-to-mexican-violence">a story on National Public Radio</a> that identified the United States as the source of most of the guns being used by cartels in the Mexican drug wars, a story that aired days before we visited friends whose ranch is just a few miles from the Rio Grande. But other, more personal circumstances also got me thinking, like the three different episodes of gun violence, or the threat of gun violence, occurred during the past semester on the college campuses (2,000 miles apart) where two of our children are students. And all this happened before our first bison harvest at Madroño Ranch this past Monday, in which two 1,500-pound animals were felled by single shots from a .270 rifle.<br />
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Full disclosure: I don’t own a gun myself, although we have a gun safe well stocked with rifles and shotguns at the ranch. (They mostly belong to our son.) My grandfather taught me to shoot with a pellet gun, an activity which he oversaw carefully and I enjoyed mightily. I still take pleasure in target practice and found, the one time I tried it, that shooting skeet was a fine way to while away an afternoon. I don’t hunt and don’t expect that I ever will, although I have no objection to ethical hunting. I’ve thought that it might be wise to have a pistol when I wander around the ranch, in case one of the dogs riles up a pack of feral hogs and brings them back to me. My fear of shooting my own dog is sharper than my fear of rampaging pigs, however, and I remain pistol-less. <br />
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While there’s been no change in the number of guns I own, my thinking about guns has changed considerably over the last few years, to wit: I’ve concluded that there’s a difference between urban guns and rural guns. (Yes, yes, hold your applause.) A gun is a necessary tool on a ranch or farm. I’m very grateful that Robert, the ranch’s redoubtable manager, is an excellent shot. If the bulls we harvested this week felt any pain, it was less than momentary; they were dead quite literally within a couple of seconds.<br />
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And then there’s the issue of self-defense. A friend recently told me about an encounter he’d had on his remote South Texas ranch with an armed and heavily tattooed non-English-speaking trespasser he suspected of being a member of the fearsome <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_Salvatrucha">MS-13</a> gang. My friend didn’t have a firearm at hand, but fortunately, after a tense exchange, the trespasser left. “I’ve never felt so naked,” my friend said. I understand: I, too, would have wanted some clothing in that situation.<br />
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And yet, and yet... we recently saw and thoroughly enjoyed <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1755219970">the Coen brothers’ adaptation of </a><i><a href="http://www.truegritmovie.com/?gclid=CPboppP926YCFchl7AoddBtm0Q">True Grit</a>.</i> That is, Martin saw it; I had my hands over my eyes during several violent scenes. Even so, I loved the movie. At the same time, I made a new connection: imbedded in the myth of the American West is the image of the lone gunman, meting out swift and violent justice. No amount of regulation is going to smother the breathe from that compelling image.<br />
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Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for intelligent gun control. I’ve never felt so naked as the day that <a href="http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2010/09/28/police_on_scene_of_shooting_on.html">a student opened fire on the UT Austin campus</a> a block from the room where our son Tito was in class. But I emphatically would not have felt more clothed if, as a bill passed by the Texas Senate in 2009 proposed, his fellow students been permitted to carry concealed handguns. Guns do not belong on campuses. Or in the hands of the mentally ill. Anyone who wants to own a gun has a responsibility to register, and law enforcement agencies should be able to trace every gun to its owner. Anyone who wants to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon should have to jump through a lot more hoops than a weekend hunter does. Gun shows should be heavily regulated. But the image of that lone, justice-seeking gunman is more powerful than any regulation. Did I walk out of <i>True Grit</i> disgusted by its glorification of violence? Of course not: I loved it, even as I was distressed by some of it. The story is part of my identity as a westerner, as a Texan.<br />
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On Wednesday, as I was wrestling with this post, Martin received a membership solicitation from the NRA. I suspect that the trigger for this unlikely offer must be the fact that he recently purchased from Amazon.com a copy of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Nh1rlJ8sg58C&printsec=frontcover&dq=ortega+y+gasset+hunting&hl=en&ei=fEJCTa6fBMH68Ab3s_jfAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6wEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Meditations on Hunting</a>, </i>the introduction of which was written by a visiting professor of environmental perception at Dartmouth College—not exactly a rip-roarin’ shoot-’em-up. If I’m correct, the NRA’s tracking mechanisms qualify as spooky at best, and maybe terrifying, but also revelatory of a mentality that refuses to see any kind of subtlety or gradation of perception.<br />
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Here’s the opening salvo of that membership solicitation: “Your constitutional right to own a gun is under attack by hundreds of anti-gun politicians, global gun ban diplomats at the U.N., militant anti-hunting extremists, radical billionaires and the freedom-hating Hollywood elite.”<br />
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The letter consistently associates freedom with gun ownership; restricting gun ownership equals restricting personal freedom. “Remember: the NRA is the one firewall that stands between our Second Amendment rights and those who would take our freedoms away.” Freedom, in this view, has nothing to do with national service, with love of country and fellow-citizens, with restraint or knowledge or self-discipline.<br />
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I visited <a href="http://www.nra.org/">the NRA website</a> and found it even more appalling than its fear-mongering letter. Of the assault in Tucson, it says: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this senseless tragedy, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and their families during this difficult time. We join the rest of the country in praying for the quick recovery of those injured.” There was no condemnation of the gunman who perpetrated the senseless tragedy. There was found no call for self-examination. There was no exhortation to the faithful to adhere to any code of responsibility or ethics. I found nothing that encouraged gun-owner restraint or training, or an acknowledgment of the enormous social responsibility that comes with owning a gun.<br />
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I did find a persistent paranoia that encourages NRA members and sympathizers to view strangers as threatening and potentially aggressive. I did find—even as someone with a sympathetic view of some gun use—a willful and destructive distortion of that figure so many Americans love: <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/Truegritposter.jpg">Rooster Cogburn</a>, the courageous gunman who takes the law into his own hands and then rides off into the empty landscape. Many of us love Rooster, yes, but his place is in the mythic past, not in the increasingly urban present.<br />
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I know and respect—and even love—individual members of the NRA; my grandfather was one of them. I went to its site in hopes of finding something to change my mind about gun control. But I left loathing the rhetoric the NRA has adopted in recent years. (In this regard, I highly recommend Jill Lepore’s excellent article “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/01/17/110117crat_atlarge_lepore">The Commandments</a>,” about the way various groups, including the NRA, have sought to interpret the Constitution, in the January 17 issue of <i>The New Yorker, </i>and thank our daughter Elizabeth for bringing it to my attention.) To encourage people to think that their fellow citizens are their enemies is surely to unravel the careful work of the Constitution, which recognizes the precarious balance inherent in a federalist system, a balance requiring trust, self-restraint, and mutual good will among its participants. So while calls for legislation are important in curbing American’s extravagant gun violence, they aren’t enough: we need to call the NRA’s violent distortions of the Constitution to account. Maybe guns don’t kill people: maybe it’s NRA rhetoric that kills people.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="329" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yDr3_EuRq_c" title="YouTube video player" type="text/html" width="410"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Thich Nhat Hanh, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=1dhgYD22jFIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=living+buddha+living+christ&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=WkNCTeHwL4OKlwfO7sAk&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Living Buddha, Living Christ</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Laura Hillenbrand, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=injpY-EerZgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hillenbrand+unbroken&hl=en&ei=g0NCTeLnBMH6lwf3mqAq&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-56526879364184076612011-01-21T07:10:00.000-06:002011-01-21T07:10:58.172-06:00South Texas: a fierce and unexpected beauty<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB8pbHKF2gfdj0eCBcvaUTboZJLE49elpm2Znw688v8qA24hZBHSko2a9uIgaPEGK2920iTbzG5jfNjmklL4T4zykVjyTcXt2EwNI1fbfzJRVn-oLI3YffMv4RJNmlzZw4NAOpt6d0JZ0/s1600/DSCN0089.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB8pbHKF2gfdj0eCBcvaUTboZJLE49elpm2Znw688v8qA24hZBHSko2a9uIgaPEGK2920iTbzG5jfNjmklL4T4zykVjyTcXt2EwNI1fbfzJRVn-oLI3YffMv4RJNmlzZw4NAOpt6d0JZ0/s320/DSCN0089.JPG" /></a></div><br />
Yum! This week has afforded me yet another in a long—seemingly infinite, in fact—series of opportunities to eat crow. Heather and I returned yesterday from a visit to our friends Hugh and Sarah Fitzsimons’ Shape Ranch, outside Carrizo Springs.<br />
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As regular readers know, Hugh and Sarah have loomed large in our efforts to get Madroño Ranch off the ground. Hugh, the <i>dueño</i> of <a href="http://www.thunderheartbison.com/content/">Thunder Heart Bison</a>, is our guru in all things bison; in fact, we bought our original herd of twelve animals (which has now tripled in size) from him three years ago.<br />
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But our connections with Hugh and Sarah go back much farther than that. Heather had been buying their meat at the farmers’ market for several years before picking up one of the business cards Hugh happened to set out at his booth one day. When she saw his name, something clicked.<br />
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“Did your grandmother live on Argyle Avenue?” she asked him.<br />
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Startled, Hugh affirmed that she did, and within a very short time he and Heather had determined that their grandparents had lived across the street from each other in <a href="http://www.alamoheightstx.gov/about/about-history.php">Alamo Heights</a>; that Heather had enjoyed many a snack of milk and cookies in Hugh’s grandmother’s kitchen; and that Heather was “Uncle Henry’s” granddaughter (“uncle” in this case being a term of friendship rather than kinship). They hadn’t seen each other for about forty years, but that shared history was the basis of a new friendship.<br />
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Furthermore, Sarah‘s brother sings in the choir at <a href="http://www.allsaints-austin.org/">our church</a> in Austin, and, as if all that weren’t enough, we subsequently discovered that our daughter Elizabeth and Hugh and Sarah’s daughter Evelyn were not just cabin mates, but actually shared a bunk during a summer at <a href="http://www.campmystic.com/">Camp Mystic</a>, many years ago. <br />
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The connections, in other words, are various and deep. But even though Heather had been down to Shape Ranch several times to observe Hugh’s bison operation, this week’s visit was my first. Heather had told me that the place was gorgeous, but Heather is after all a native Texan and therefore not to be trusted on such matters.<br />
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Now, you have to understand that <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Carrizo_Springs%2C_TX%2C_welcome_sign_IMG_4216.JPG">Carrizo Springs</a> is in South Texas. Flat, scrubby, harsh South Texas, of course, couldn’t be more different from the hilly, wooded, green Central Texas Hill Country which is home to Madroño Ranch. Never mind that most of my experience of them has been restricted to what you can see from a car at seventy miles an hour; as far as I’m concerned, flat places like the central California valleys, the Midwestern corn belt, and, yes, South Texas are to be avoided, or at least passed through as rapidly as possible en route to hillier, and ergo prettier and more interesting, places: the Bay Area, the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, and the Hill Country.<br />
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On Wednesday afternoon, the landscape grew steadily flatter as we made our way from Madroño down to <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Carrizo_Springs%2C_TX%2C_welcome_sign_IMG_4216.JPG">Carrizo Springs</a> via Medina, Utopia, Sabinal, Uvalde, La Pryor, and <a href="http://www.txroadrunners.com/images/pics/gemtrailsofsouthtx/crystalcity/PopeyeStatueInCrystalCity.jpg">Crystal City</a>, and all my old prejudices were kicking in, but I was prepared to be a good sport about it, for Hugh and Sarah’s sake.<br />
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We drove south out of Carrizo Springs on FM 186 and, a few miles after the pavement gave out, turned in at their front gate, and I began to taste that familiar corvine tang in my mouth. The land was not in fact perfectly flat, but softly undulating, yielding sudden and unexpected vistas. And it was undeniably scrubby, but the winter mesquite and sage and rust-colored seacoast bluestem and purple, pink, and yellow prickly pear were undeniably lovely. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqO_E8Oc2xRBDSevCIIS9hIsuWg7PoVvNGv3H_DZKW2btgpWycucBIvWcJu3mHu7omOXfofWj7HZKph7kguAjOY3crWAk9B-OuGlBV6xxV8BlM_JNdALH80A7ENK6_9mepR8SJVQ75FMA/s1600/DSCN0101.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqO_E8Oc2xRBDSevCIIS9hIsuWg7PoVvNGv3H_DZKW2btgpWycucBIvWcJu3mHu7omOXfofWj7HZKph7kguAjOY3crWAk9B-OuGlBV6xxV8BlM_JNdALH80A7ENK6_9mepR8SJVQ75FMA/s320/DSCN0101.JPG" /></a></div><br />
And the birds! Heather is the birder in the family, but even I was amazed by the number and variety of the birds we saw: caracaras and <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Cardinalis_sinuatus.jpg">pyrrhuloxias</a> and cardinals and thrashers (both brown and curved-billed) and <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Green_Jay_near_Roma%2C_Texas.jpg">green jays</a> and white-crowned sparrows and one big blue heron and assorted hawks and kestrels and... well, you get the idea.<br />
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After driving several more miles of labyrinthine dirt roads seemingly devoid of physical landmarks, other than the occasional oil pump jack, we somehow arrived at Hugh and Sarah’s house, which is shaded by Arizona ash trees (virtually the only real trees on the place). Hugh and Sarah suggested we dump our bags, grab some beverages, jump in the pickup, and drive up to a picnic table that is their favorite place to watch the sunset. We pulled up and found an amazing 360-degree panorama, with the sun sinking low in the western sky. Sarah told us that when the sun sank low enough, we’d be able to see the mountains of Mexico on the horizon.<br />
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Sure enough, as the sky turned tropical-drink orange and pink the mountains came into view. And then, a few minutes later, from the opposite direction, we saw the bright orange full moon rising behind the windmill. Then, to complete the jaw-dropping array of effects, the coyotes—at least two different packs—began serenading us. Clearly, the only thing to do was to return to the house and enjoy dinner and conversation, and still more red wine, around the fire that Hugh built on the back patio.<br />
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Yesterday a front blew in, cold and gray and misty, while we were on our morning walk with Hugh and Sarah; the sharp, wet wind made the brunch that followed, of scrambled eggs and sausage and sliced avocado and grapefruit and lots and lots of strong hot coffee, even more welcome. In some ways, with its unnerving, disorienting sameness and plentiful thorns and scarcity of water and shade, this is not a particularly gentle or hospitable land, but yesterday afternoon, when Heather and I finally left to begin the long drive over to I-35 and up to Austin, it felt, just a little, as though we had been <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Michelangelo%2C_Fall_and_Expulsion_from_Garden_of_Eden_02.jpg">expelled from the Garden of Eden</a>. And, believe me, those are not words I ever imagined myself writing about South Texas.<br />
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Hey, could I get a side of fries with that order of crow, please?<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="329" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-oqAU5VxFWs" title="YouTube video player" type="text/html" width="410"></iframe></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Jon Fasman, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Geographers-Library-Jon-Fasman/dp/0143036629">The Geographer’s Library</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Suzannah Lessard, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Architect-Desire-Beauty-Danger-Stanford/dp/0385319428">The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-91978975908878865172011-01-14T07:26:00.001-06:002011-01-14T09:55:19.797-06:00The rising light<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Creation_of_Light.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Creation_of_Light.png" width="254" /></a></div><br />
Although it’s sometimes hard to tell, we’re in the season of rising light.<br />
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Some of us have a confused relationship with this time of year. The prevailing story, at least in Western culture, has a particular purchase on anyone who’s lived through a northeastern, Midwestern, or Great Plains winter: that story relates the flare of cheer in the Christmas season, followed by a plunge into the long, dark, depressing slog of January, February, and March. People who live in this story yearn for sunlit beaches, skimpy clothing, and drinks with little umbrellas in them, reminding them of what they’ve temporarily left behind. Anyone with aching snow-shoveling muscles in New England after <a href="http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/44316/feet-of-snow-buries-new-englan.asp">this week’s blizzard</a> will attest to the power of this story of the season. The rising of the light—the lengthening of days—is a promise of kinder times ahead.<br />
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Many of us in central Texas long—perversely, perhaps—for this story to ring true here as well. (I’m wife or mother of some of them.) We yearn for a <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2a/White_Chrismas_film.JPG">white Christmas</a>, and when the late December temperature creeps up to the 80 degree mark, we moan, “It’s not supposed to be like this! It’s supposed to be cold!” Despite the prevailing story that cold and dark are to be dreaded, in central Texas this is the season to yearn for, the season of dark and (intermittent) cold. For at least some of the year, it’s the light and heat, not the cold and dark, that can be downright unpleasant, almost unbearable. I feel that our winter and spring (so compressed they can be conflated) are the equivalent of fall in New England: tourists come and say, “How beautiful!” but the natives sigh, knowing that what’s just ahead will require some toughness to get through. Here it can be a real pleasure to burrow into the dark; the rising light brings with it a whiff of the (probable) scorching to come. <br />
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My musing on light has its roots in non-climatological terrain as well; Martin and I are in a group that’s reading and discussing <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=QMLGGh0MxYkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=robert+alter+genesis&source=bl&ots=Yjn34xqGaw&sig=Xj9vTshCcqHB2gE5OLUAgUG6ElY&hl=en&ei=DMkvTbKLIoPUgAf5wumdCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">Genesis: Translation and Commentary</a>,</i> by Robert Alter. Although there’s no particular comment on that most famous of first utterances, Let there be light, I can’t help but think about what it might mean that light is the firstborn of creation, at least according to Jews and Christians. This light is distinctive from sun- and moonlight, which weren’t created until the fourth day, and which seem to be subordinate to the aboriginal light of the first day. As God’s breath hovered over the waters, over the deep, and the darkness, God spoke, and there was light. And God saw the light: presumably this means that God had not experienced light before this moment, although virtually everything I just wrote—God, experienced, light, before this moment—should probably be in quotation marks or resting upon a tower of footnotes. But according to this story, light is humanity’s older sibling, both of them created by that which knew the deep, the dark, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohu_wa-bohu">tohu-bohu</a> before they did in a distinctive way: before the light.<br />
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I’ve also been lurching my way through Marilyn Robinson’s elegant new screed <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Absence-Mind-Dispelling-Inwardness-Lectures/dp/0300145187">Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self</a>,</i> in which she argues against what she sees as an absurdly reductive definition of the human brain and mind by some, perhaps many, modern scientists, a definition that refuses to take into account what she calls “that haunting I who wakes in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently.” This “haunting I,” so profoundly felt, is dismissed by those scientists (or “parascientists,” as she calls them) as mere subjectivity or, worse, evidence of the annoyingly persistent and primitive superstition we moderns call religion.<br />
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In one of those serendipitous encounters with my subconscious, as I reread Robinson’s description of this persistent human sense of hauntedness, of leasing interior real estate to someone you recognize but don’t really know, I read the next sentence completely wrong. She writes: “Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM.” Except at first, I read “I AM”—God’s own self-definition—as “1 A.M.” <br />
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I AM often awake at 1 a.m., in the deepest dark of the night, the time when most of us know ourselves to be haunted. If you awaken at 1 a.m. with a dream vibrating in your mind, the dream stays with you in ways that it doesn’t when you wake to light. Sometimes you can play with the dream, poke and shape it in ways that make it pop when it encounters daylight. Sometimes at 1 a.m. you can be wide awake and create as complicated a <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Abildgaard_Nightmare.jpg">nightmare</a> as any dreaming mind can produce. To stalk the mind at night—at least, for some of us—is to move as close to the realm of tohubohu, of aboriginal chaos, as created beings are able to get, at least without ingesting psychotropic drugs or harrowing the hell of human atrocity.<br />
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Despite the categorical confusion it causes, this season may be my favorite, if for no other reason than the blade-bright light of late afternoon, especially as I get to see it from the kitchen window at Madroño. The copper and golden grasses of the pasture in front of the house blaze as the sun drops behind the western hills, each shoot seemingly sharp enough to pierce the chests of the bison passing across it. The bison themselves look like something out of an ancient dream, not the product of my own tiny experiences but arising from some atavistic communal memory. There are those who might pooh-pooh these moments as fanciful or irrelevant to anything “real.” But in this time of rising light, this time between sleep and waking, between the relief of winter and the slog of summer, I’m compelled to remember that light and humanity once inhabited the same chaotic womb, that we rise and fall together. It’s a good season, once you’ve written your thank-you notes, to watch the rising light with gratitude for the family of creation. And with resignation, too: if it’s already January 14, August will be here before we can even blink.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nGdFHJXciAQ?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nGdFHJXciAQ?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="410" height="329"></embed></object></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Cynthia Bourgeault, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=NBrSycOmZ2QC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bourgeault+mary+magdalene&hl=en&ei=ncYvTY_tCISglAeQn8S1Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Keith Richards with James Fox, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Life-Keith-Richards/dp/031603438X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1294976750&sr=1-1">Life</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-85220409788470781462011-01-07T07:04:00.000-06:002011-01-07T07:04:07.245-06:00A new year at Madroño Ranch: bison harvests, chicken tractors, hog schools, and more<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPvi1z1ZsXE2RCPRyrv09NSHOS-pceoJzVzsy_UWf4SxzfbGDIDrqxJTgOX7wGqXPMXELsceY-mjaYm6-yI8F1-tuMqQATMxaKKksXdaxJtYCx-Fiibfzq_GrZbYwiTZqxef5Jd2zNu4k/s1600/MadronoRoughRGB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPvi1z1ZsXE2RCPRyrv09NSHOS-pceoJzVzsy_UWf4SxzfbGDIDrqxJTgOX7wGqXPMXELsceY-mjaYm6-yI8F1-tuMqQATMxaKKksXdaxJtYCx-Fiibfzq_GrZbYwiTZqxef5Jd2zNu4k/s320/MadronoRoughRGB.jpg" width="280" /></a></div><br />
Happy new year! The beginning of the year is always a good time to take stock, so we thought it might be appropriate to look back at what we accomplished—and, erm, failed to accomplish—during the last twelve months. Much remains to be done before our hopes for Madroño Ranch are completely realized, though we took what felt like some significant strides in 2010. With apologies for any perceived self-indulgence, here are some of them.<br />
<br />
First, thanks to the wonderful and talented Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Austin’s <a href="http://asteriskgroup.com/">Asterisk Group</a>, Madroño Ranch now has a vibrant, striking, beautiful visual identity—logo (above), wordmark, etc.—which we hope eventually to splash all over actual and virtual reality. (Madroño Ranch T-shirts! Madroño Ranch gimme caps! Madroño Ranch bumper stickers and koozies and belt buckles and....)<br />
<br />
Second, we’ve begun to rethink our initial determination to offer residencies only for environmental writers, however broadly defined (poets, philosophers, essayists, whatever). We had initially thought we would restrict our offerings to writers because, well, as a couple of recovering English majors, we felt like we knew writing better than we knew art, and (perhaps more important) we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure (kilns, darkroom facilities, printing presses, whatever). Most writers, after all, are highly mobile these days, requiring little in the way of equipment beyond a laptop computer. But it has become increasingly obvious, even to us, that virtually the same is true of many visual artists as well—digital photographers and collagists, to name just a couple. Painters can travel with paints, portable easels, and suchlike. And then there are environmental artists, like <a href="http://www.rwc.uc.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/index.html">Andy Goldsworthy</a>, who use materials found on-site—rocks, leaves, branches, etc. Why should we exclude such creative thinkers from our pool of potential residents?<br />
<br />
Third, while we are still a long way from officially opening our residential program for environmental writers (and artists)—we have yet to construct the small <i>casitas</i> we envision as individual workspaces, and we have yet to hire the necessary personnel to cook and care for our residents—we have managed to find a couple of brave souls willing to serve as “guinea pigs.” <a href="http://melissagaskill.blogspot.com/">Melissa Gaskill</a> and <a href="http://www.edanklepper.com/">E. Dan Klepper</a> will each spend several days at Madroño Ranch in the next couple of months, working, resting, and experiencing some if not all of what our actual residents will experience once we’re fully up and running. We look forward to hearing their feedback, suggestions, etc.<br />
<br />
Fourth, our friend Jesse Griffiths of <a href="http://daidueaustin.net/">Dai Due</a> came up with a new and exciting way to open the ranch to a wider public through a variety of sustainable hunting, fishing, and cooking “schools” throughout the year. The first, Deer School, brought six guests to the ranch in November, and was a thoroughgoing success; now we’re looking forward to Hog School in early March and Freshwater Flyfishing School in mid-May, both of which have already sold out. If they go well, we’re hoping to make these (and perhaps other such schools) an annual tradition at Madroño Ranch.<br />
<br />
Fifth, we finally gained state approval of the label that will appear on the packages of bison meat we sell, which means we can finally go ahead with our first “harvest” (as it’s euphemistically called) this month. (We had hoped, naively, to harvest our first bison in October, but the approval process turned out to be considerably longer and more complicated than we had imagined.)<br />
<br />
Sixth, Heather made significant progress in her quest to become a true <i>chickenista,</i> following the example of local legend Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s <a href="http://www.boggycreekfarm.com/">Boggy Creek Farm</a>. Our original flock of fifty or so laying hens took up residence in their bombproof (and, we trust, owl- and hawkproof) new coop, which we call the Chicken Palace (pictured below). A few months later Robert’s brilliant creation the Chicken Tractor (actually a mobile coop on wheels) became the home of a new flock of about twenty younger hens. (As of last week, the two groups were just beginning to commingle.)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_bXKMB2sfWoDRx_96hX_gLlpEMHFd9MGwM_K7-W-8Zyg9hyphenhyphenxxLVIak4e3CUA8BiiBQ9TdYGqYYd9vws-cQsyPKsgXoLvjVYKVJXYM8qbiVOx9bClt8bK3g08rWZk3ugoDh_8PMfscmUg/s1600/IMG_1733.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_bXKMB2sfWoDRx_96hX_gLlpEMHFd9MGwM_K7-W-8Zyg9hyphenhyphenxxLVIak4e3CUA8BiiBQ9TdYGqYYd9vws-cQsyPKsgXoLvjVYKVJXYM8qbiVOx9bClt8bK3g08rWZk3ugoDh_8PMfscmUg/s320/IMG_1733.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Seventh, while we still don’t have an actual Madroño Ranch website (though we’re working on it!), we do have an official <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Madrono-Ranch/125688754141962">Madroño Ranch Facebook page</a>. We invite those of you on that ubiquitous social network to check it out, and click the “Like” button if you’re so inclined; until our website is up and running, that will be the easiest way to keep track of what’s happening at the ranch in what we hope will be an exciting twelve months to come. <br />
<br />
Perhaps none of these accomplishments sounds terribly important in and of itself, but each brought us just a little closer to our goal. Our hope for 2011 is that we—and you too, Gentle Reader—keep striding throughout the new year, whether the steps be large ones or small.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather: </b>Marilynne Robinson, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Absence-Mind-Dispelling-Inwardness-Lectures/dp/0300145187">Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self</a></i> (still—it’s hard!)<br />
<b>Martin:</b> Michael Lewis, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=eParwQ0YdrcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=michael+lewis+the+big+short&source=bl&ots=irYIreIS55&sig=gPz1j3iFxKSqy_1qkcP4wyaseDs&hl=en&ei=TxYmTaOOMsL-8AbmkKycAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11&ved=0CHAQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-7248237796198343262010-12-31T07:29:00.001-06:002010-12-31T07:36:15.400-06:00Getting to good food<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
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</i></div><i>Happy New Year! This week, sparing no expense as we recover from the excesses of the holiday season, we have once again secured the services of a top-shelf guest blogger. In this post, Tito Kohout reflects on some of the challenges of rethinking our societal infatuation with “easy” foods.</i><br />
<br />
I start feeling self-righteous when I see some greasy, fatty dude walking out of Wendy’s with a greasy, fatty Number 5 combo. He doesn’t know anything about anything, I say to myself as I pedal furiously past him. I bet he voted for <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/RickPerry2006.jpg">someone I find loathsome</a>. I bet his <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Kenny_G_photo.jpg">taste in music</a> is as bad as his taste in burgers. I bet he’s the kind of apathetic American who is, every day, moving us closer to breaking the seventh seal and unleashing some kind of very big and very biblical evil on the world. Then my stomach rumbles and I think that it’s only another dozen blocks until I’m home and can slather some Fiesta-brand peanut butter on my Fiesta-brand wheat bread fried in Crisco until it’s moist and crispy and freaking delicious.<br />
<br />
Yeah, that’s stupid. Like really stupid. Like <i><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Titanic-New_York_Herald_front_page.jpeg">Titanic</a></i> stupid. Here I am, with my refrigerator full of food from my neighborhood <a href="http://www.fiestamart.com/html/es/">Fiesta Mart</a> (which resides at pretty much the opposite end of the foodie spectrum from <a href="http://www.centralmarket.com/">Central Market</a>), looking down on some poor guy just trying to grab an easy meal. The <a href="http://www.earlcampbellmeatproducts.com/">Earl Campbell sausages</a> I mix with nameless cheddar cheese in my eggs aren’t any better, and I know it. After all, my parents write this blog, and organic, local, slow, humane food—what I’ll refer to as “good food” from here on in—is obviously important to them, although they weren’t always strictly consumers of good food; I distinctly remember <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Fish_sticks.JPG">frozen fish sticks</a> being one of my favorite childhood dinners.<br />
<br />
So where did they go wrong, raising a son who’s dumb enough to eat seventy-nine-cent cans of pork and beans on a regular basis? The answer is nowhere. I know that Fiesta’s meat comes from factory farms and its vegetables are probably shipped in from heaven-knows-where covered in pesticides. I know how wrong that is. But, man, it’s easy.<br />
<br />
I’ve got the expenditures of your typical dumb male college student: rent, utilities, <a href="http://www.hunsrugby.com/">rugby fees</a>, beer, and, of course, food in large quantities. To more easily afford these things, I buy the cheapest food I can. I’m not much of a cook—a few days ago, I suffered a pasta disaster of substantial proportions—but even the simple things cost more at the farmers’ market than at the supermarket.<br />
<br />
But even more than the financial price, the price in effort puts me off. I could find ways to save money. I could get a plot in the <a href="http://communitygardensaustin.org/?page_id=62">community garden</a> a block from my house. I could put myself out on the tutoring circuit again. I could sell my car, since I barely drive it anyway. I could be a better citizen of the earth, but I know I’ll keep on eating seventy-nine-cent cans of pork and beans as long as it’s convenient.<br />
<br />
The other day, my older sister told me that Americans spend a smaller proportion of their incomes on food than the inhabitants of any other country. I believe her, both because she’s generally pretty well informed for an older sister and because it’s believable; I certainly work to spend less time and money on food. The question is, “How do we not only make good food competitive in prices with the other stuff, but make the U.S. of A. and the world realize that good food isn’t some weird and mildly threatening eccentricity reserved for rich, white, liberal yuppies and scary people from the lunatic fringe?”<br />
<br />
I read my parents’ blog posts, and this is the part where they generally propose a solution to the problems they’ve outlined. I got nothing. I just know that good food is important for the survival of our species and of many others, and that we—not we the consumers of good food (I don’t include myself), but we the people—need to make good food not just a societal priority but a societal norm. Otherwise, we’re all in deep trouble, and I’m going to keep on eating Earl Campbell’s tasty, questionable, preservative-packed sausages.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Tito</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Marilynne Robinson, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Absence-Mind-Dispelling-Inwardness-Lectures/dp/0300145187">Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self</a></i></span> </b><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Jane Leavy, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=2KERPNCkMC8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=leavy+the+last+boy&source=bl&ots=jZqz_J6oFS&sig=UX0VdSn9t0NNbMMF3k8CuQKDVhw&hl=en&ei=dcscTd2bPJK6sQPWyfnvCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-7912973709410879052010-12-24T06:51:00.000-06:002010-12-24T06:51:25.418-06:00Listapalooza, holiday edition: all-time top tens<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://ca.pbsstatic.com/xl/61/0461/9780307160461.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://ca.pbsstatic.com/xl/61/0461/9780307160461.jpg" width="268" /></a></div><br />
Like Rob Fleming, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_(novel)">High Fidelity</a>,</i> I seem to have a strong taxonomic impulse. Longtime readers of this blog have already seen <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/08/listapalooza-top-ten-austin-restaurants.html">several</a> <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/07/listapalooza-summer-reading.html">manifestations</a> of my <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/06/listapalooza-top-ten-texas-movies.html">obsession</a> <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/03/listapalooza-top-ten-books-about-texas.html">with</a> <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2009/12/listapalooza-top-ten-books-about.html">list</a> <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2009/08/listmania-top-ten-songs-about-texas.html">making</a>, but Heather and the kids will tell you that one of my more annoying habits is my annual end-of-the-year insistence that we all update the Kohout family top ten lists. <br />
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Every New Year’s, I insist that the whole family, and whatever friends and innocent bystanders happen to be around, sit down and list their ten all-time favorite novels, movies, and albums. This always occasions a good deal of grumbling, at least from the family, but they usually do it.<br />
<br />
Here are the basic rules: <br />
<ul><li>Each list must include ten items, no more and no less, though I’ll cut you some slack when it comes to works in multiple parts (for example, we customarily count <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> trilogy or the Harry Potter series as one entry).</li>
<li>Unlike so many end-of-the-year lists, these aren’t your favorites from the last twelve months; they’re supposed to be your <i>all-time</i> favorites, which is why you’ll always find at least a couple of children’s books on my list.</li>
<li>The items don’t have to be in order of preference; just your ten favorites, in whatever order they occur to you.</li>
<li>Plays count as fiction, as does epic poetry (<i>The Odyssey, Paradise Lost</i>); lyrical poetry does not.</li>
<li>All this is done with the understanding that if you were to do it again tomorrow, you might come up with a very different list.</li>
</ul>Since we’re approaching the end of another year, and I’m preparing to crack the whip on the family again, I thought it might be interesting to share my own most recent top-ten lists, even at the risk of exposing myself to the ridicule of our readership. (More so than usual, I mean.)<br />
<br />
Without further ado, then, here they are:<br />
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<b>Fiction (in alphabetical order by author)</b><br />
Richard Bradford, <i>Red Sky at Morning</i><br />
Margaret Wise Brown, <i>The Sailor Dog</i><br />
Michael Chabon, <i>The Yiddish Policemen’s Union</i><br />
Kenneth Grahame, <i>The Wind in the Willows</i><br />
Dennis Lehane, <i>The Given Day</i><br />
Hilary Mantel, <i>Wolf Hall</i><br />
Herman Melville, <i>Moby-Dick; or, The Whale</i><br />
Richard Price, <i>Lush Life</i><br />
William Shakespeare, <i>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</i><br />
Wallace Stegner, <i>Angle of Repose</i><br />
<br />
<b>Movies (in alphabetical order by title)</b><br />
<i>Casablanca<br />
Funny Bones<br />
The Godfather/The Godfather Part II<br />
Groundhog Day<br />
Local Hero<br />
A Night at the Opera<br />
Sense and Sensibility<br />
The Third Man<br />
Wings of Desire<br />
Young Frankenstein</i><br />
<br />
<b>Albums (in alphabetical order by artist)</b><br />
Dave Alvin, <i>Ashgrove</i><br />
The Cambridge Singers/La Nuova Musica, directed by John Rutter, <i>The Sacred Flame: European Sacred Music of the Renaissance and Baroque Era</i><br />
Rosanne Cash, <i>Black Cadillac</i><br />
Manu Chao, <i>Clandestino: Esperando la Ultima Ola</i><br />
Derek and the Dominoes, <i>Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs</i><br />
Howlin’ Wolf, <i>The Definitive Collection</i><br />
Iron and Wine, <i>The Shepherd’s Dog</i><br />
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, <i>All the Roadrunning</i><br />
The Rolling Stones, <i>Exile on Main Street</i><br />
Jordi Savall, <i>El Nuevo Mundo: Folías Criollas</i><br />
<br />
<b>Bonus List: Nonfiction (in alphabetical order by author)</b><br />
Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris, <i>The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book</i><br />
Drew Gilpin Faust, <i>This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War</i><br />
Doris Kearns Goodwin, <i>Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln</i><br />
Adam Gopnik, <i>Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life</i><br />
S. C. Gwynne, <i>Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History</i><br />
Tracy Kidder, <i>Home Town</i><br />
Ben Macintyre, <i>Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory</i><br />
David Quammen, <i>The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions</i><br />
Henry David Thoreau, <i>Walden; or, Life in the Woods</i><br />
David Winner, <i>Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football</i><br />
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To me, one of the pleasures of this exercise, besides the inherently enjoyable experience of summoning up cherished treasures from one’s past, is seeing what’s on other people’s lists, which can be quite revealing. (I, for example, clearly have a thing for lightweight movie comedies and for books about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.) They can also bring some worthy books or movies or music to your attention, or inspire you finally to read or watch or listen to that classic you’ve been meaning to read or watch or listen to for years. <br />
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So what about you, Faithful Reader? What works have mattered most to you over the course of your life?<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Gail Caldwell, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=SHEbxb1gVtEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gail+caldwell+a+strong+west+wind&source=bl&ots=3l4woQF-gQ&sig=3-2-nsTAUxus_UUlLebsNJtceVI&hl=en&ei=CJYUTafsBoL78AbZhrHuDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDoQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false">A Strong West Wind: A Memoir</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=hc0ULBqlgVgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=republic+of+barbecue&source=bl&ots=ZPUypEmScd&sig=ZCAyOktOVehXmf-WMwIgrad0QME&hl=en&ei=UZYUTavEOIT68Abvz7ydDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false">Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-67632791610529765392010-12-17T07:19:00.001-06:002010-12-17T09:19:32.297-06:00Singing in the dark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Chupacabra.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Chupacabra.gif" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div>The relentless sunshine of the current weather here in Austin might make those in the Midwest or on the East Coast sigh with envy. A photo on the front page of Tuesday’s <i>New York Times</i> shows an Ohio man ineffectually fending off the great whorls of snow around him with an umbrella. His head is bent, his shoulders hunched, his attention presumably forced inward. Strangely, as I bask in the sunshine, I’m the one who’s a little envious.<br />
<br />
Not of the cold, certainly—I start getting chilly when the temperature drops below eighty degrees. But what I see in the picture is someone forced by the world to withdraw his attention from it, to shift his focus inward, even if it’s just to check in and notice that he’s cold. He won’t be able to stay out for long; he must retreat inside.<br />
<br />
In one of her typically wonderful blogs, our friend Joy recently wrote <a href="http://joyhowie.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/in-defense-of-darkness/">an homage to darkness</a>, to the gestational, inward gaze of the season of Advent. The punch line is, of course, that great discipline is required to move inside at this time of year, when a blizzard of parties, shopping, and end-of-year scrambling—or of loneliness and loss—assaults us. Frequently, we just sit out there in the cold, not realizing that we can go inside. Another friend of mine, prone to good works, told me that when she was pregnant and people called asking her to do something, she would look at her waxing belly and say, “Sorry, I’m busy,” and then go back to sitting quietly. Even as we attend to the frenetic tempo of this singular season, something beckons us, at least occasionally, to go inside and sit, maybe in the dark. <br />
<br />
And what awaits us inside, in the dark? Well, any child can you tell that: scary stuff! Chupacabras (that’s one in the picture at the top of this page, by the way)! Things with too many legs and too many teeth and not enough eyes! With too much hair or not enough, with horns and scales and long dirty nails! The list of monsters gets less imaginative but no less scary as we get older: past humiliations and failures, anxieties about money, relationships, reputation, health, death. All those things wait for us in the dark. (Of course, sometimes they wait for us in broad daylight as well.)<br />
<br />
But that’s not all that waits there. <a href="http://www.wendellberrybooks.com/">Wendell Berry</a>, my favorite grumpy sage, has advice on how to get by the monsters:<br />
<br />
I go among the trees and sit still.<br />
All my stirring becomes quiet<br />
around me like circles on water.<br />
My tasks lie asleep in their places<br />
where I left them, like cattle.<br />
<br />
Then what is afraid of me comes<br />
and lives in my sight.<br />
What it fears in me leaves me,<br />
and the fear of me leaves it.<br />
It sings, and I hear its song.<br />
<br />
Then what I am afraid of comes.<br />
I live for a while in its sight.<br />
What I fear in it leaves it,<br />
and the fear of it leaves me.<br />
It sings, and I hear its song.<br />
<br />
Those things we fear, according to Berry, have their own songs if we sit still and listen for them. In this particular collection of poems, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=RvsBDIKN5rEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=wendell+berry+timbered+choir&source=bl&ots=j6pCrv7713&sig=O6haWdtJmgjcrPq1ttxLCzfR-AE&hl=en&ei=AdkKTaD0MYGB8gbQiLWfAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997</a>,</i> the forest is his place of Sunday worship, where he brings his deepest questions and listens to the forest’s exhalations, to the words made of branch rustle and river rush and birdsong, iterations of the original Word spoken by God in the beginning. Berry is not alone when what he is afraid of approaches him; he’s in the midst of a community he knows intimately.<br />
<br />
This kind of trope can dissolve into rank sentimentality and cruelty when those in the midst of the light and bustle use it to admonish those sitting in the sight of what they fear to buck up. But Berry’s language in this collection is rooted in an ancient warrant for the practice of sitting in the company of chaos and darkness: when, as God began creating, God shared space with the <a href="http://www.newcaje.org/local_includes/downloads/40028.pdf">tohuvabohu</a>, the formless void, with the darkness, and with the deep. Through them came the words: Let there be. And what came to be was good. It sang. <br />
<br />
The fears don’t have the last word in the poem: Here’s the final verse:<br />
<br />
After days of labor,<br />
Mute in my consternations,<br />
I hear my song at last,<br />
and I sing it. As we sing,<br />
the day turns, the tree moves.<br />
<br />
Only after he labors and rests from his labors, after he sits quietly and listens to the songs of what fears him and what he himself fears, does Berry hear his own song. Only then is he able to join the singing already in progress, a singing that harmonizes with a wider reality (the turning of the day) and the immediate reality (the moving of the trees). <br />
<br />
Whether or not you’re observing Advent, the deepening shadows of the season encourage most of us to move inside and prepare ourselves for this inexorable guest, darkness. Some of us will cook, some of us will shop, some of us will wrestle with monsters and despair, some will not pause from our labors or notice anything at all. If possible, go sit quietly among the bare trees. Or sit hospitably at home with whatever invisible reality is leavening within you and tell everyone you’re busy. Then go find your community and sing.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> C. S. Lewis, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Screwtape-Letters-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652934">The Screwtape Letters</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> John le Carré, <i><a href="http://www.johnlecarre.com/books/our-kind-of-traitor">Our Kind of Traitor</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-34013817058146302282010-12-10T07:03:00.001-06:002010-12-10T12:45:06.059-06:00Meat and unmediated experience: Deer School at Madroño Ranch<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG_bpvNkZzMc6raHi3A5GRw8q-t-mPAJCUt3B3IViz_4o1VAWw5q8aY56R5yWUdTVrnWQNP1PASOg89G5dt8wi7Q2Hn71JGVEacXIRoWOk5Q4Hl-5-97Z8_WvfUpFN91AhDnM85RlqOhc/s1600/deercarcass.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG_bpvNkZzMc6raHi3A5GRw8q-t-mPAJCUt3B3IViz_4o1VAWw5q8aY56R5yWUdTVrnWQNP1PASOg89G5dt8wi7Q2Hn71JGVEacXIRoWOk5Q4Hl-5-97Z8_WvfUpFN91AhDnM85RlqOhc/s320/deercarcass.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
At lunch the other day, a friend opined that too much of what we all think and see and hear—and, yes, eat—passes through various filters (the media, agribusiness) before it reaches us; even our air is conditioned, he added, though I have to say I’m okay with that, at least in the summer. But his larger point is one that’s been in the back of my mind (and take it from me, there’s lots of room in there) for some time.<br />
<br />
Unmediated experiences seem increasingly hard to find. We have lost an awareness of the connection between our actions and their consequences, especially when it comes to food, especially when it comes to meat; it’s easy to avoid the stark truth that some creature was slaughtered, blood was shed, so that we might buy shrink-wrapped chunks of meat in the supermarket. The thoughtful (and splendidly named) English chef <a href="http://www.rivercottage.net/about/about-hugh/">Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall</a> writes in his <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/River-Cottage-Meat-Book/dp/1580088430/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0">River Cottage Meat Book</a></i> that “the human act of killing animals for food, once familiar to most of society, has now become so shameful that those who condone it—by eating meat every day—are entirely protected from thinking about it. Food animals are killed and their meat is cut up and packaged far from human eyes. By the time meat reaches the consumer, the animal origins have been all but obliterated.” <br />
<br />
Conveniently, this last weekend presented us with an opportunity to escape the shrink-wrap bubble in the form of “Deer School,” a hunting/butchering/cooking extravaganza at Madroño Ranch. Watching the skinned, eviscerated, and decapitated carcass of a 120-pound buck being carved up on your kitchen counter definitely qualifies as an unmediated experience.<br />
<br />
The man doing the carving was Austin’s incomparable Maestro of Meat, Jesse Griffiths of <a href="http://daidueaustin.net/">Dai Due</a>, and his audience, in addition to Heather and me, included six hunters—four experienced, two newbies, united in their love of food and dedication to the principles of ethical hunting—who had paid to spend a long weekend at the ranch. Four of them live in or around Austin, but we also had a couple who drove all the way from Michigan (!), sleeping in their <a href="http://www.golittleguy.com/teardrops/">Little Guy</a> trailer all the way. <br />
<br />
In return for their money, the guests were taken on three guided hunts (the guides were Jesse, his omnicompetent buddy Tink Pinkard, and, after poor Robert, our ranch manager, was felled by a kidney stone on Saturday morning, our son Tito) and then instructed in how to make efficient use of whatever animals they shot. They also ate a series of truly spectacular meals prepared by the indefatigable chef Morgan Dishman-Angelone, who works with Jesse. <br />
<br />
Their collective haul included five deer and several hogs, though Robert shot the buck Jesse used for his demonstration the day before the guests arrived. As we all gathered in the kitchen to watch Jesse at work on the carcass, I was reminded of Rembrandt’s famous painting “<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Anatomie_Nicolaes_Tulp.jpg">The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp</a>.” A grisly spectacle, but also fascinating, and Jesse’s obvious care and skill were mesmerizing.<br />
<br />
True confession: I am not a hunter, though I am an enthusiastic carnivore and have done a good bit of fishing in my time; the only mammal I have ever knowingly killed was an obviously diseased raccoon who was staggering around in the middle of a hot summer day at the ranch several years ago. But we live in a meat-centric state (the <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=hc0ULBqlgVgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=engelhardt+republic+of+barbecue&source=bl&ots=ZPUwxxlT9b&sig=YFguHg2gtVydFR-QNO8aDJHovus&hl=en&ei=vjEBTaODAsP_lgeZv7jlBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">Republic of Barbecue</a>, anyone?), and I have come to realize the distance between my life and the realities of blood and bone that hunters and farmers and ranchers confront on a daily basis.<br />
<br />
Here’s Fearnley-Whittingstall again: “As I pull the trigger and... the beast tumbles, I feel the gap between me and the quarry, which a moment ago seemed unreachable, closed in an instant.” I think this is really the point of ethical hunting, responsible carnivorism, and eating meat in general: the realization that we, consumer and consumed alike, are part of the same system, much as we might try to deny it. Thus, in a funny way, a hunter—a responsible one, at least—rather than treating the animal he or she kills as an objectified and separate Other, is more likely to understand the profound interconnectedness that binds us all together.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAXXd2Oj20qvZrZwUQhPmDcROeK98BEktJGX_xoiDcYfuvPsWBFz1yfS3npzsqg-6S9v30kJt9DfqBCsreBk5OLxU9QjLoEOaX2VL8abwDsKQT1hyW__W9mFw6Si2fcADeiheUgF0-2pQ/s1600/venisontartare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAXXd2Oj20qvZrZwUQhPmDcROeK98BEktJGX_xoiDcYfuvPsWBFz1yfS3npzsqg-6S9v30kJt9DfqBCsreBk5OLxU9QjLoEOaX2VL8abwDsKQT1hyW__W9mFw6Si2fcADeiheUgF0-2pQ/s320/venisontartare.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Jesse and Morgan took virtually every piece of meat off that buck and used it for an extraordinary multicourse dinner that night. “We’re going to punish you,” Jesse warned us facetiously, and he wasn’t kidding: six courses, including venison tartare (pictured above, just prior to final assembly), venison paté with Jesse’s own coarse-grained mustard, braised venison flanks stuffed with chorizo, liver with mashed potatoes and apples, venison cutlets with grilled marinated radicchio, and, for dessert, Morgan’s signature Basque cake—salty-sweet crusted cake around a pastry crème center with candied persimmons and apples. It was an unforgettable meal, and left everyone—even Tito!—sated, at least temporarily: the next morning we had breakfast tacos with barbacoa made from the deer’s shanks and neck meat, which had been simmering in a crockpot overnight. Under the circumstances, “holy cow” hardly seems like the right expression, but you get the picture: we ate incredibly well, and that one buck provided enough meat to feed thirteen people twice, with quite a bit left over; thanks to Jesse, we’re looking forward to enjoying even more of it when we go out again over New Year’s, by which time I should be almost ready to think about eating meat again.<br />
<br />
And who knows—maybe the next time we host Deer School at Madroño (and we do hope there will be a next time) I’ll sign up myself. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that I was about as unconscious a carnivore as there was on the planet, and I’m in as much need of unmediated experience as the next guy. I’m not going to start refusing to eat anything I haven’t actually killed myself; that would be impractical, to say the least. But I do believe that hunting and butchering a deer or other animal for one’s own consumption is probably a useful exercise, and that the world might be better off if every unconscious carnivore were forced to undertake it at least once. A fuller awareness of the cost of satisfying our appetites cannot, I think, be a bad thing.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Wallace Stegner, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Safety-Wallace-Stegner/dp/0140133488">Crossing to Safety</a></i> (still!)<br />
<b>Martin:</b> Charles M. Robinson III, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Hand-Biography-General-Mackenzie/dp/1880510022">Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-10709803642957960142010-12-03T08:15:00.000-06:002010-12-03T08:15:49.992-06:00Hosts, guests, and strangers: thoughts on hospitality<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.castlesandmanorhouses.com/pics/cooking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.castlesandmanorhouses.com/pics/cooking.jpg" width="268" /></a></div><br />
The season of hospitality is upon us, with all its pleasures and burdens. Known in the Christian tradition as Advent, it focuses on the need for preparation, both for the very intimate event of a baby’s birth and for the cosmic birth of a new order. One of my favorite images for the season, if I’m remembering rightly, comes from a series of woodcuts made by a northern Renaissance nun. In it, she imagines herself as a housewife, preparing for the coming company of the Child and the Judge by cleaning the house of her heart: dusting, sweeping, washing, polishing. The images refuse any pretensions to profound theology or high art; they are reassuringly earth-bound and homey. If you pay attention, you can almost smell the baking bread.<br />
<br />
“Hospitality” is one of those words whose meaning has changed over the years. In our current culture, it often refers to an industry directed toward travelers or those in need who are expected to pay for its services. If hospitality isn’t a primarily economic exchange, it usually refers to the opening of home and hearth to friends, family, and associates. <br />
<br />
In ancient times (or in places that still hew to ancient ways), hospitality wasn’t a service or an option; it was a necessity and a moral imperative. Before the development of institutional hospitality (hospitals, hospices, hostels), vulnerable individuals outside of the normal network of social relations—travelers, refugees, the sick, pilgrims, orphans, widows—were able to rely, at least for a while, on a code of hospitality that brought shame to those who were able and refused to engage it. <a href="http://www.asburyseminary.edu/faculty/dr-christine-pohl">Christine Pohl</a>, professor of Christian social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary, writes: “In a number of ancient civilizations, hospitality was viewed as a pillar on which all other morality rested: it encompassed ‘the good.’”<br />
<br />
Curiously, the words “host” and “guest” are closely related etymologically, if they don’t actually come from the same source. Even more interestingly, “guest” shares an etymological bed with “enemy,” rooted in the notion of “stranger.” The idea that any of us might move from providing hospitality to needing it—to and from strangers—gives the word a kind of trinitarian energy that caroms from the poles of host to guest to stranger/enemy until the parts are indistinguishable from the whole. I don’t usually feel that charge when I check into a motel, but I think the hospitable artist nun knew that she was a part of that energy, as hostess opening her heart to the Child; as guest and sojourner on the earth; as stranger before the greatest mystery.<br />
<br />
One of the reasons I’m thinking about hospitality, aside from the advent of Advent, is that today we’ll welcome seven guests, whom we have never met, to Madroño for the weekend. They’ll be attending “<a href="http://daidueaustin.net/supper-club/upcomingevents/">Deer School</a>,” the brainchild of Jesse Griffiths, chef, butcher, and proprietor (with his wife Tamara Mayfield) of the <a href="http://daidueaustin.net/">Dai Due</a> supper club and butcher shop. Deer School will include several guided hunts followed by instructions on how to field-dress and use the animal from nose to tail, followed by some really fine eating. <br />
<br />
While I’ve been thinking recently about what it means to be a good host (new sheets and shower curtains), I’m also thinking about my role as guest, sojourner, stranger, enemy; after all, they are intimately connected. In <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/11/most-memorable-meals-take-three-giving.html">last week’s Thanksgiving post</a>, Martin wrote about the hospitable nature of the feast: “On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year....” As one of the cooks this year, I was less attuned to what I was giving than to what had been given to me: the gorgeous vegetables from local farms, the fresh turkey from our over-subscribed friends <a href="http://www.richardsonfarms.com/">Jim and Kay Richardson</a>, and the freshly shot and skinned half-hog that unceremoniously appeared on the kitchen counter (and then spent eight hours roasting in a pit) after my brother, his son, our son, and Robert, the redoubtable ranch manager, went hunting early Thursday morning. The astonishing abundance and hospitality of the land was quite literally overwhelming: half a 150-plus-pound sow is a lot of meat. <br />
<br />
I’m blundering onto mushy and possibly treacherous literary territory here, I know: <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Earth_Mother%2C_1882%2C_by_Edward_Burne-Jones_%281833-1898%29_-_IMG_7210.JPG">Mother Earth</a> nourishing her offspring, big hugs all around. But I’m increasingly grateful for the bounty of the place and hope the same for those who come here seeking community, solitude, rest, refreshment, and, yes, fresh deer meat. We call Madroño Ranch ours by some weird cosmic accident; the more we know it, the more we know that it belongs to itself or to something even broader, wider, more generous. What we hope now is to avoid being the nightmare guest/enemy, the one who comes and overstays his or her welcome within twenty minutes, who demands foods you don’t have, strews clothes all over the house, leaves trash and dirty dishes in the guest room, noisily stays up late, assumes you’ll do all the laundry, and never says please or thank you. Who seems to think he or she owns the place.<br />
<br />
We all know places where that’s exactly what has happened; for me, one such place is the stretch of <a href="http://www.aaroads.com/texas/ih035/i-035_nb_exit_154b_01.jpg">Interstate 35</a> between San Antonio and Austin, which Martin and I drove last Sunday morning, and which is almost completely lined with outlet malls, chain stores, fast-food franchises, and other such marks of our collective thoughtlessness. Somehow, we’ve managed to promote the idea, especially in the American West and particularly in Texas, that among the rights accruing to property owners is the right to destroy or devalue their property in the name of short-term economic gain. In fact, destroying property may be seen as the ultimate proof of ownership. <br />
<br />
I struggled in <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/07/made-for-you-and-me-thoughts-on-private.html">an earlier post</a> with the idea of land ownership, and I struggle with it still. All land came as a gift at some point. Not literally to its current owner, perhaps, but the land still bears the trace of its giftedness somewhere on that deed. In this season when we prepare for the arrival of guests, giving the gift of hospitality, or head somewhere hoping to be good guests, bringing gifts of thanks, it can be easy to forget that we are also always empty-handed strangers, constantly looking for a wider hospitality than we are ever able to offer or sometimes even to know that we need. We’re only a week past Thanksgiving; this is as good a time as any to thank the land that sustains us. Without it, we can never fill a house with the smells of baking bread and roasting meat—or any of the other things that sustain us.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Wallace Stegner, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Safety-Wallace-Stegner/dp/0140133488">Crossing to Safety</a></i> (still)<br />
<b>Martin:</b> Ben Macintyre, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=E6ZiYhuEW1MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=ben+macintyre+operation+mincemeat&source=bl&ots=AGlq8ZSuIU&sig=B3p51xt54J2MN_0_JEHBNKWGTTQ&hl=en&ei=_Ev4TLCGGIO0lQeasYHCAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-32642200907472747612010-11-26T09:51:00.000-06:002010-11-26T09:51:48.631-06:00Most memorable meals, take three: giving thanks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Thanksgiving-Brownscombe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Thanksgiving-Brownscombe.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><i>“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.” </i><br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—M. F. K. Fisher</i></div><br />
The day after Thanksgiving, when we’re all still riding that tryptophan high, seems like an appropriate time to resume our <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/09/most-memorable-meals-take-one-fire-in.html">occasional</a> <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/09/most-memorable-meals-take-two-lobster.html">series</a> of posts on our most memorable meals. <br />
<br />
Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, in part because it’s all about the eating with none of the anxiety that gift-giving can inspire. And I love all that traditional Thanksgiving food: the turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, biscuits, pumpkin pie.... <br />
<br />
This year, however, Heather announced that we would be forgoing the traditional turkey in favor of one of Madroño’s many wild hogs roasted in a pit—though after that announcement occasioned howls of outrage from daughter Lizzie, Heather crumbled and bought a turkey after all, just for the sake of peace in the family. <br />
<br />
Whatever. Thanksgiving is at least as much about the side dishes (dressing, potatoes, biscuits, vegetables) and desserts (pies—oh, my Lord, the pies!) as it is about the turkey. Rest assured that no one in our house went hungry yesterday—that’s an artist’s rendering of us in the picture above, by the way—though I confess that I’m glad to have the turkey, to indulge my annual quest for the Platonic ideal of the turkey sandwich. (We did bury half a pig in coals on Thanksgiving afternoon, however, and dug it up at 10 o’clock last night; looks like we’ll be snacking on turkey <i>and</i> pig sandwiches for a while.)<br />
<br />
Even more than it is about the food, though (and you’ll just have to trust me on this), Thanksgiving is actually about the fellowship. It seems to be the one major national holiday when there’s no anxiety about gift-giving, piety, or political correctness to distract or annoy us. We come together around the table with family and friends, and sometimes even with strangers, and we share food and drink and maybe a little <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football_on_Thanksgiving">football</a> talk, and then we stagger off to the floor or sofa or even bed to lie down and groan for a while, and then we get up and try to sneak back in for maybe just one more little piece of pie.... Okay, okay, maybe it really <i>is</i> all about the food.<br />
<br />
But on Thanksgiving that food takes on a deeper symbolic value than it does for most of the rest of the year; on Thanksgiving that quotation above from <a href="http://mfkfisher.com/">Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher</a> is truer than ever. On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year, when the exigencies of jobs, schoolwork, the finals of <i><a href="http://abc.go.com/shows/dancing-with-the-stars">Dancing with the Stars</a>, </i>and other responsibilities make the preparation and consumption of food little more than an afterthought. (<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Tvdinner.jpg">TV Dinners</a>, anyone?)<br />
<br />
Indeed, the thoughtful and conscious preparation and consumption of food was one of the prime inspirations for what we hope to accomplish at Madroño Ranch: gathering bright, creative people together around the table for nourishment both physical and intellectual. You could almost say that we hope to make every meal at Madroño a sort of Thanksgiving dinner, except that some of us would quickly weigh 300 pounds.<br />
<br />
But you’re wondering when I’m finally going to get to that memorable meal, aren’t you? Okay, here it comes. It was a Thanksgiving during college. As I wrote in <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/07/there-and-back-again-geobiography.html">a previous post</a>, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but went to <a href="http://www.williams.edu/">college</a> in western Massachusetts. In those days, largely for financial reasons, I made the long flight to and from home only for Christmas break (which usually meant <a href="http://www.worldmate.com/travelog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/flight-delayed-300x300.jpg">spending endless hours in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport</a> as winter snows played havoc with flight schedules) and summer vacation.<br />
<br />
One of my college classmates was a “townie”; his family lived and worked on a farm several miles from campus, and he invited several of us who weren’t going home for the holiday to Thanksgiving dinner with them.<br />
<br />
Honestly, after thirty-two years, I don’t actually remember what we ate that night. It was sturdy, simple farmhouse fare, and I’m pretty sure it included all the usual suspects: turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, and probably yams, and peas with pearl onions, and no doubt there was pie—pumpkin and perhaps several others—for dessert. I don’t even remember how many of us gathered around that well-laden farmhouse table; I think there must have been about a dozen, what with the family and us temporary orphans.<br />
<br />
But I do remember the feeling of being thought of, and taken care of. The warmth of knowing that, while I might be thousands of miles from home, I was still welcome at someone’s table. Every Thanksgiving dinner, when people gather with loved ones, or with strangers, to enjoy the abundance of nature transmogrified by the loving care of heat and spice and assembly, is a homecoming in miniature. At that farmhouse in Williamstown I was, if only temporarily, a part of a family again. <br />
<br />
I hope I had the good grace to send a thank-you note to my friend’s mother, but I was a callow and self-centered college student, and I suspect I didn’t. This belated acknowledgment hardly makes up for my youthful lack of manners, but Mrs. Burdick, if you’re out there, I want you to know that your generosity made an indelible impression on me, even if I didn’t properly acknowledge it at the time. I will never be able to give thanks enough for that wonderful meal, or for your kindness in inviting us to share it.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zciFHNrGoRs?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zciFHNrGoRs?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="410" height="329"></embed></object></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> J. K. Rowling, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Deathly-Hallows-Book/dp/0545139708/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1290565190&sr=1-2">Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</a></i> (again!)<br />
<b>Martin:</b> Marissa Guggiana, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Primal-Cuts-Cooking-Americas-Butchers/dp/159962088X">Primal Cuts: Cooking with America’s Best Butchers</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-38248011306544004832010-11-19T06:26:00.000-06:002010-11-19T06:26:21.256-06:00Faith, bureaucracy, and sheep: thoughts on changing one's mind<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Waldschafe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Waldschafe.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>In <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/11/sit-stay-stay-i-said-stay-dammit.html">my last post</a>, I decided to postpone my public ululations over the recent elections. As I’ve spent the last week or so in an apparently endless struggle to get the Madroño Ranch bison label approved by the <a href="http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/">Texas Department of State Health Services</a>, my ululative impulse has caught in my throat. Maybe Republicans and Tea Partiers are right. <br />
<br />
I mean, what difference can it possibly make whether the net weight of the package appears on the bottom third of the label (as required), the middle third, or (gasp) even the upper third? And don’t get me started on the “approved” list of cuts, a list whose existence we discovered only after we’d submitted the label, and which has driven our obsessively copy-editing family mad with its redundancies and omissions. Our “Boneless hump roast” was not on the list and so was nixed, but we’re fine if we say “Bison Roast (Hump).” Generously, the state allows both “Bison for Stew” and “Bison Stew Meat.” <br />
<br />
It’s enough to make me think Very Ungenerous Thoughts about the government’s regulatory role in business or about authority in general.<br />
<br />
Some of these thoughts are just moans, like the ones our dog Phoebe the Fabulous used to make when she was forced to stop on our walks while I looked at birds. Oh, the personal inconvenience! But the issue of authority has, in fact, been in my thoughts recently, to wit: when does authority cease to be authoritative? What makes us change our minds? What would make me stop being a “liberal” (if that’s what I am) and become a Republican, or even join the Tea Party? I’m not talking here about repressive political authority, but rather those internalized authorities to which we bow without really being aware that we’ve made a choice.<br />
<br />
In thinking about my own track record when it comes to mind-changing, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not primarily a rational process, as we often presume. Rather, it’s a supra-rational affair, requiring the willingness and discipline (and perhaps the talent) necessary to learn a new language.<br />
<br />
Here’s what I mean: I used to think that all Christians were most likely not just fools—an identity <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Saint_Paul_Ananias_Sight_Restored.jpg">St. Paul</a> claimed—but idiots. Jerry Falwell and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority">the Moral Majority</a> began to fill the airwaves when I was about fifteen or sixteen. Not having had much contact with self-professed Christians at that point, my exposure to this most vocal sector of Christians forced me to conclude that I could never be one of them. From what I could infer, they were anti-intellectual, judgmental, and close-minded. Their rhetoric made me think that Christianity represented everything I had been taught to turn away from. (Especially the “judgmental” part.)<br />
<br />
Imagine my chagrin when, after a series of unexpected and absurd events, I came to be enrolled as a student at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (now known simply as the <a href="http://www.ssw.edu/">Seminary of the Southwest</a>). My habitual place of study was <a href="http://www.texasfrenchbread.com/">a nearby coffee shop</a>. As I studied, I made sure that any books that had the words “God,” “Church,” or “Jesus” (especially “Jesus”—such an embarrassment) on the cover or spine were face-down and turned to the wall. I didn’t want to be mistaken for one of “them,” one of those stupid sheep who followed an anti-intellectual, judgmental, and close-minded <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/StJohnsAshfield_StainedGlass_GoodShepherd_Portrait.jpg">shepherd</a>. Authority. Whatever.<br />
<br />
I learned during my years at the seminary—and during my years as a practicing Christian since then—that I had been mistaken in my first ideas about Christianity. I had to change my mind, and, consequently, my self-identity—an anxiety-provoking and disorienting business. This doesn’t mean that I like all Christians. Or even most of them. When I started at seminary, knowing nothing, I had expected to find a bunch of Bad Thinking I could counter and correct. <br />
<br />
What I discovered instead was that my initial premise was wrong. I found out that practicing a religion is not the same thing as signing a lease, requiring you to follow a bunch of rules or else be kicked out. Rather, I found that practicing a religion is more like wrestling with a new language. There is a grammar to learn, there are rules to follow. But unless you immerse yourself in it, unless you try to speak it yourself with native speakers—even if you have a lousy accent—you will be just another <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/The_Ugly_American_poster.jpg">Ugly American</a>, unaware of your own foolishness.<br />
<br />
Having become reasonably fluent in Christianity, I’m trying to learn at least something about the other languages around me. As I learn more about Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, I don’t become less fluent in my own language; rather, I understand it more profoundly. I understand its distinctiveness and thus its limitations. I understand something of its fraught interactions with other religions and have learned the uneasy need for shame and humility. I try not to speak slowly and loudly in my own language when speaking to non-native speakers and hope they will do the same for me. In my limited experience, I’ve found hospitality, not hostility, whenever we try, in our different tongues, to speak with each other.<br />
<br />
And so I wait to hear yet again from the inspector at the meat processing plant about the newest version of our label. I know that he’s pleased about the results of the recent election, as are most of my Hill Country neighbors. I’m pushing this metaphor past its limits, but in order to be a good neighbor myself, I may have to have to learn a little bit of a new language. To understand myself better, I may have to be willing to change my mind. <br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QAi57a9eCf4?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/QAi57a9eCf4?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="410" height="329"></embed></object></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Wallace Stegner, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=SwUfJoxyXWIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=wallace+stegner+crossing+to+safety&source=bl&ots=D7gwGV9SFS&sig=Meixoo2YoWpY-HaIKeJmoJt1syY&hl=en&ei=wEblTJH4NIa0lQe1m4mfCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">Crossing to Safety</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> S. C. Gwynne, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=mpEBZLxaLJQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gwynne+empire+of+the+summer+moon&source=bl&ots=d75Qrag7hh&sig=XBXwfw7yj73dOKPLcMKFgS6pibg&hl=en&ei=AkflTMPGBsb_lgfHhOjhCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false">Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History</a></i> (still)Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-5718384194685719672010-11-12T07:03:00.000-06:002010-11-12T07:03:09.109-06:00A holy fool in “the land of the Philistines”<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/tejas/voices/images/neigbors-sm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/tejas/voices/images/neigbors-sm.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Greeks and Trojans, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, Serbs and Croats, Tutsis and Hutus—the collision of cultures is rarely, if ever, a pleasant sight. The protracted and bloody war between the Plains Indians, especially the Comanches, and the white settlers of Texas is among the most horrifying of all, marked by unimaginable violence and cynical deception on both sides. But even in the cruelest conflicts there can be people who exemplify honor and integrity. Such an exemplar was the <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Don_Quixote_5.jpg">quixotic</a> Robert Simpson Neighbors, one of the most intriguing, foolhardy, and tragically heroic figures in nineteenth-century Texas.<br />
<br />
Thanks to S. C. Gwynne’s excellent new book, <i>Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History,</i> Neighbors (pictured above) has been on my mind again. (Several years ago I actually thought I might try to write a biography of him, but eventually the impulse passed.) I guess I’ve always had a soft spot for those who try, against all odds, to <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/DO_THE_RIGHT_THING.jpg">do the right thing</a>, and Neighbors certainly qualifies.<br />
<br />
Born in Virginia in 1815, he was orphaned at the age of four and raised by a guardian. He arrived in Texas in 1836, after a couple of years in Louisiana, and from 1839 to 1841 served as assistant quartermaster and acting quartermaster of the army of the Republic of Texas. He served under <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fhabq">John Hays</a> during the Mexican War and was taken prisoner in San Antonio by Gen. Adrián Woll in 1842. After his release in 1844, he became the republic’s agent to the Lipan Apaches and Tonkawas; in 1847, after Texas became part of the United States, Neighbors received a federal appointment as Texas commissioner of Indian affairs.<br />
<br />
This was not an easy position. As Mike Campbell, the dean of Texas historians, notes in his magisterial <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gone-Texas-History-Lone-State/dp/0195138422">Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State</a>,</i> the federal government was virtually powerless to stop white settlers from occupying land ostensibly belonging to the Indians, because Texas, uniquely among the United States, retained ownership of its public lands when it joined the union; thus, federal law did not apply on the lands where the Indians lived, and the state seemed unable or unwilling to keep land-hungry white settlers from trespassing. As the Penateka Comanche chief Buffalo Hump told Neighbors, with some asperity, “For a long time a great many [white] people have been passing through my country; they kill all the game and burn the country, and trouble me very much.” Neighbors noted in March 1848 that this persistent trespassing “must necessarily and inevitably lead to serious difficulty.”<br />
<br />
Moreover, Neighbors’ distaste for violence was out of step with public sentiment. He tried to negotiate the return of <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fpa18">Cynthia Ann Parker</a>, the most celebrated Indian captive of them all (and the mother of <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Chief_Quanah_Parker_of_the_Kwahadi_Comanche.jpg">Quanah Parker</a>), but the Comanches rebuffed his efforts; Neighbors reported to his superiors in Washington that “I am assured by the friendly Comanche chiefs that I would have to use force to induce the party that has her to give her up.” (Cynthia Ann was unwillingly returned to white civilization in 1860, when Texas Rangers under <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/62/SulRossSoldier.jpg">Sul Ross</a> accidentally captured her during a raid on a Comanche encampment on a tributary of the Pease River in north Texas.)<br />
<br />
Neighbors, a Democrat, lost his federal job after the Whig Zachary Taylor was elected president in 1848, but was reappointed when Franklin Pierce reclaimed the White House for the Democrats four years later. (In the meantime, Neighbors found time to lead an expedition that established a trail between San Antonio and El Paso, part of which was later used by the <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/egb01">Butterfield Overland Mail</a>; organize El Paso County; marry Elizabeth Ann Mays in Seguin; and serve in the state legislature.) <br />
<br />
Neighbors was thus part of the vast machinery that slowly but inexorably (and often violently and duplicitously) squeezed the Indians off their ancestral lands, clearing the way for white occupation of the American west. But Neighbors was different from most of his fellow Indian agents: he treated the Indians with respect, and stubbornly defended them against the accusations, frequently fabricated, of land-hungry settlers who coveted the land set aside for reservations.<br />
<br />
Needless to say, this was not a popular stand in Texas, and Neighbors made many enemies among his fellow whites. In the mid-1850s, he decided that the only way to end the escalating tensions and violence was to establish reservations beyond the existing line of settlement. He finally succeeded in getting Secretary of War <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/JDavis.png">Jefferson Davis</a> to authorize the establishment of two reservations on the upper Brazos. Neighbors hoped to convince the previously nomadic Indians to settle down and become farmers—a shockingly misguided, if not downright stupid, notion, and one that was clearly doomed to failure. As it was, less than five hundred of the Penateka Comanches (only about a third of the band’s entire population) moved onto the Clear Fork Reservation, at Camp Cooper in Throckmorton County. About a thousand other Indians, mostly Caddos and Wichitas, moved onto the Brazos Reservation, south of Fort Belknap in Young County.<br />
<br />
And then, of course, the line of white settlement, moving inexorably westward, reached the upper Brazos, with predictable results. Whites who coveted the land began blaming the reservation Indians for the depredations committed by those who had refused to move onto the reservations. The loathsome <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8c/Baylor.gif">John R. Baylor</a>, who had been fired as an agent on the Clear Fork Reservation after feuding with Neighbors, became the editor of a virulently anti-Indian newspaper called <i>The White Man</i> and pledged himself to exterminating the Indians; toward that end, he called for, and even organized, violence against the reservation Indians. While acknowledging that the residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations were more sinned against than sinning, the government finally concluded that enough was enough, and decided to end the experiment.<br />
<br />
In the summer of 1859, therefore, Neighbors supervised the removal of all 1,500 residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations to a new reservation on the Washita River in Indian Territory. (Among the contractors involved in this trek was the San Antonio freighter James Duff, soon to become a notorious figure in the Hill Country, as I wrote in <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/10/blackest-crime-in-texas-warfare.html">an earlier post</a>.) In August, after leading his charges across the Red River, Neighbors wrote to his wife that he had left “the land of the Philistines.” Upon his return to Fort Belknap a little over a month later he was murdered, shot in the back by Edward Cornett, a man he didn’t even know but who apparently despised his conciliatory attitude toward the Indians. In <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=z4aTP9nYWjMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=walter+prescott+webb+the+texas+rangers&hl=en&ei=sqncTMaMKoT68Abnvp3pBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Texas Rangers</a>,</i> Walter Prescott Webb reported the story that a group of Texas Rangers, outraged by Neighbors’ assassination, “went after Ed Cornett, and brought him to justice without the aid of judge or jury.”<br />
<br />
I suspect that Neighbors himself, a man of honor and principle who believed wholeheartedly in the sanctity of the law, would not have approved. He seems to have been one of those ostentatiously virtuous men who manage to alienate and offend their fellows while living unimpeachable lives; perhaps the rest of us simply can’t stand being reminded how far short of the mark we fall. In fact, Neighbors may have had more than a whiff of self-righteousness about him. In <i>Empire of the Summer Moon,</i> Gwynne says that Neighbors’ behavior as Indian agent was characterized by “earnest and well-meaning naïveté,” as opposed to the “pure hypocrisy” of many of his peers, which sounds like fairly faint praise. By attempting to stand in the way of <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/American_progress.JPG">Manifest Destiny</a>, trying to turn the Penateka Comanches into farmers, and expecting the government to live up to the terms of its own treaties, Neighbors may have revealed himself as a fool. But we will never stop needing such fools, men and women who are unafraid to speak truth to power even at the risk of their lives, and God help us if they ever disappear entirely.<br />
<br />
Jeez. I promise I’ll try to find something a little cheerier to write about next time.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mPD0d-7UTP8?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mPD0d-7UTP8?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="410" height="329"></embed></object></div><br />
<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Wayne C. Booth, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=hS8vrZN3AKgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=wayne+booth+modern+dogma&source=bl&ots=DpvVreuzHQ&sig=Ta5Dgoagd8f-npWXAYWaas4CalI&hl=en&ei=m6bcTL2qLoO0lQepn6npBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> S. C. Gwynne, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591052">Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-26875207173035559822010-11-05T06:32:00.000-05:002010-11-05T06:32:25.687-05:00“Sit. Stay. Stay! I said STAY, dammit!”<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvvmCIpL2UTX0S8vC6jRXIdXqD_9HWUd-Jzkg1egkslk_rnsKf5qWOMAfDV_oFsIiyiUGwkxTJQ01PmZzV8TiopsVA2VAbSbzS6ZPnRLf-YSU4khv8qi9GTNCayjGGxhmnducs6E8jTTQ/s1600/IMG_1884.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvvmCIpL2UTX0S8vC6jRXIdXqD_9HWUd-Jzkg1egkslk_rnsKf5qWOMAfDV_oFsIiyiUGwkxTJQ01PmZzV8TiopsVA2VAbSbzS6ZPnRLf-YSU4khv8qi9GTNCayjGGxhmnducs6E8jTTQ/s320/IMG_1884.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Despite the temptation to give myself over to ululations for the natural world in light of <a href="http://www.grist.org/article/2010-11-03-putting-the-midterm-elections-in-the-context-of-the-latest">the recent midterm elections</a>, I will be brave and strong. In fact, I’ll look to our dogs for clues about how to move ahead in confounding times with good cheer, if not always with a lot of grace, and perhaps with only an occasional low moan or two.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/08/cup-of-tea-warm-bath-and-brisk-walk.html">In an earlier post</a>, I considered the change my walking pace has undergone over the years. What has remained constant is the presence of dogs on these rambles. When I’m in Colorado, I usually borrow dogs from my sister or my father. (Walking with my mother’s dogs was often a little demoralizing; she worried aloud that bears and mountain lions might attack them, but she never expressed any anxiety for me.) At Madroño, I’ve walked with a long line of brave and stupid dogs who’ve both saved me from and almost led me to some gruesome fates.<br />
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The first was sweet Daisy, a lovely golden retriever/English setter mix and the mildest of dogs—until she was on the ranch, where she became Trained Assassin Daisy, Scourge of Armadillos! I had never known that armadillos had much to say until I watched Daisy in hot pursuit of one at the north end of the property; speedier than it looked, it made a loud whirring noise, as if it were wearing a propeller beanie. Daisy missed that one, but she got lots of others. We decided that she loved them because they were “<a href="http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2010/04/14/">crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside</a>.” <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1hTv-PnOUKzchiVF0Yzo8jm12nTGTEC8BAv9N5QSej-vUzsVArm6PT0hFH4tHmUHjadg3B2vB7oBWkfWWqrGn2Nvej6pnwymRvLholteuR58eZSf8SyEIOPuBWXyx45i2EGAxG12cWIw/s1600/sc000bf369.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1hTv-PnOUKzchiVF0Yzo8jm12nTGTEC8BAv9N5QSej-vUzsVArm6PT0hFH4tHmUHjadg3B2vB7oBWkfWWqrGn2Nvej6pnwymRvLholteuR58eZSf8SyEIOPuBWXyx45i2EGAxG12cWIw/s200/sc000bf369.jpg" width="184" /></a></div><br />
One Thanksgiving Day at the ranch, we were all—parents, siblings, children, dogs, friends—walking up the steep hill above the lake when Daisy proudly came galloping up to us with what she must have thought was an unusually hairy armadillo in her mouth. She was delighted until she dropped it at our feet and found that much of it remained in her mouth. (It was, of course, a porcupine.)<br />
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Sweet as she was, she allowed us to pull out many of the hundreds of spines in her snout, under her tongue, in her gums, etc., but the job proved to be too much for us. Even though it was a holiday, we tracked down a laconic vet in Hunt who said he wasn’t doing anything but watching football, so sure, bring her on in. When they had gotten Daisy anesthetized and yanked out the remaining spines, Martin said to the vet, “Well, I bet most dogs only make this mistake once, right?” The vet cocked an eyebrow and said, “You’d be surprised.” Thank heavens we haven’t been surprised since then. <br />
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A few years later, we found a black puppy with a broken back leg at the gate who turned out to be Phoebe, our now-blind life-guide, <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/10/lessons-from-phoebe.html">about whom Martin wrote admiringly a few weeks ago</a>. Phoebe has been a wonderful walking companion, although one of her chief virtues—steadiness—may very well stem from the fact that her eyesight was never very good; maybe she just didn’t see all those armadillos and porcupines and deer. She did notice snakes, however, and helpfully made little sideways hops to notify me that I should step elsewhere.<br />
<br />
But even the admirable Phoebe occasionally caused me dismay. Aside from her tragic and annoying moans whenever I stopped to listen for and look at birds, Phoebe proved to be susceptible to wayward influences like, for example, our next dog, Honey. One day, a couple of months after Daisy died, I was at our neighborhood pharmacy in Austin. A couple of local kids who worked there had brought in a dog they’d found on the downtown hike and bike trail, skittish and covered with fleas. Their mothers had told them to find it another home. I looked and saw a fluff-bomb with an absurdly curling tail who might have had chow and/or golden retriever and/or some mountain dog in her, and maybe a little <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Ewok_SWExhibition.jpg">Ewok</a> too. The kids noticed that I couldn’t take my eyes off her and asked, “Do you want her?” “Yes,” I said, helplessly smitten. Martin said something else, which I can’t repeat here, when I returned home with toothpaste, shampoo, and a new dog, but Honey was irresistible.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZbAEQApTOczeiZxxyID7x3ZzpQM9APcodWJCz8PNgfcfLbf1-H6pamS41DhzHJtpieTn2ifnDyJSs-ChuvBgxzDshETqHqwp5vkUKJSvGq3tFHlrutcsgY5isnnK33VUhnP4m-HkH3Ys/s1600/sc000c2fcd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZbAEQApTOczeiZxxyID7x3ZzpQM9APcodWJCz8PNgfcfLbf1-H6pamS41DhzHJtpieTn2ifnDyJSs-ChuvBgxzDshETqHqwp5vkUKJSvGq3tFHlrutcsgY5isnnK33VUhnP4m-HkH3Ys/s200/sc000c2fcd.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />
She was also, alas, flightier than Phoebe. Once, after the kids and our friend Charles and I had scrambled up a beautiful and nearly inaccessible draw at the ranch, we came upon a herd of <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Ammotragus_lervia_-Roger_Williams_Park_Zoo%2C_USA_-adult_and_young-8a.jpg">aoudads</a>, who were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Honey got a young aoudad in her sights and went after it, determined to tear its throat out, despite the shrieks and rocks we hurled at her. She backed the youngster into a fence while its mother threatened to eviscerate her with her great curling horns. Charles gallantly gave up his belt to get our darling murderous fluff-bomb under control, as Phoebe valiantly barked encouragement from a safe distance.<br />
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Another time, one of my favorite emergency-backup children and I went walking with Phoebe and Honey. We were in the canyon where we had once found a pair of rusted iron bedsteads and a rusted cast-iron Dutch oven, just poking around to see what other inexplicable but suggestive oddities we might find, when we heard a series of distinctively coyotic yips in the dense woods around us. In an instant, the dogs were gone, gone, gone. Despite our most beguiling efforts, Phoebe and Honey yodeled their way up to the top of the draw, and then Dave and I heard something else: snorts. Hogs. The woods were so thick we couldn’t see them, but we could hear them. Lots of them. Close by. Oh, great, I thought. How am I going to explain to my best friend that her sweet gangly son was carved up by feral hogs because my idiot dogs went gallivanting off to be eaten by a pack of coyotes? We all made it back to the house safely, but Phoebe’s irresponsible behavior still galls me. <br />
<br />
And then another time, the dogs and I were out by ourselves when they, officers of ranch security, uncovered a plot by a couple dozen sows and piglets to disrupt our walk. Much barkage. Much squealing. Much inelegant scrambling by Someone to get into a tree and above tusk-level. Much hilarity in the kitchen after our return to think about Someone sitting in a scruffy little scrub oak for half an hour wondering if the dogs were still alive and if the pigs were really gone. Phoebe got a really scalding series of lectures for that lapse.<br />
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Generally speaking, though, Honey and Phoebe were fine walking companions. When Honey died of cancer a few years ago, we realized that she had been acting as Phoebe’s seeing-eye dog, because Phoebe’s deteriorating eyesight meant she was quite literally lost without her. Phoebe’s ranch rambles have ended, but Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound has become my new companion and is presenting all sorts of interesting challenges.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqJtzsZ7OYnzOA1dzQR0GPi9rOx4unMXliFD26MuF7EgddVZmX5wIwjGhSdjkVC8AsWHJj5KoacRanHkhGbBJhvb0ows-dO1PXYf0D2dEli6RUYe71gY7jHsU60oYKhyphenhyphenY-9vJVazlb66E/s1600/sc000c6c6e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqJtzsZ7OYnzOA1dzQR0GPi9rOx4unMXliFD26MuF7EgddVZmX5wIwjGhSdjkVC8AsWHJj5KoacRanHkhGbBJhvb0ows-dO1PXYf0D2dEli6RUYe71gY7jHsU60oYKhyphenhyphenY-9vJVazlb66E/s200/sc000c6c6e.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />
While she doesn’t seem to have Daisy’s and Honey’s ferocious streak (except, sadly, when it comes to chickens), she has a hair-trigger chase reflex and is speedy enough to catch a deer, as we learned to our amazement a few years ago (fortunately, once she finally cornered it in the angle of a fence, she seemed content just to lie there panting and stare at it), or anything else that roams the ranch. (She’s learned to ignore the bison, a fine survival strategy; despite their awkward-appearing bulkiness, bison are plenty quick themselves, and they definitely don’t like dogs.) I’ve started using a shock collar on her, to discourage her from rocketing off after hogs; I heard not too long ago about a woman whose dogs took off after a bunch of hogs, who then turned on the dogs, who then ran back to their mom, who ended up with sixty stitches in her leg from the pursuing porkers. Fortunately, Chula is a total wienie when it comes to pain, and the early results with the shock collar have been promising.<br />
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The adventures, clearly, will continue.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading</b><br />
<b>Heather: </b>Wendell Berry, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hannah-Coulter-Novel-Wendell-Berry/dp/1593760361">Hannah Coulter</a></i><br />
<b>Martin: </b>Dennis Lehane, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shutter-Island-Novel-Dennis-Lehane/dp/0688163173/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0">Shutter Island</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-83633955294625811672010-10-29T07:03:00.000-05:002010-10-29T07:03:28.792-05:00"The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Treue_der_Union_monument,_Comfort_TX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Treue_der_Union_monument,_Comfort_TX.jpg" width="217" /></a></div><br />
Our usual route from Austin to Madroño Ranch takes us through Johnson City to Fredericksburg via Highway 290, and then down Highway 16 through Kerrville to the turnoff opposite the <a href="http://www.armsofhope.com/pages/">Medina Children’s Home</a>. Every time I pass the sign for <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/rbtam">Turtle Creek</a>, an unremarkable little stream just past the turnoff for FM 1273, about five miles south of Kerrville, I am reminded of one of the bloodiest and most controversial episodes in the extraordinarily bloody and controversial history of the state: <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qfn01">the battle of the Nueces</a>, labeled “The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare” by the <i><a href="http://www.dallasnews.com/">Dallas Morning News</a></i> almost seventy years later. <br />
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Central Texas is dotted with German settlements dating from the mid-nineteenth century: Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels, Comfort, Sisterdale, and many more. The German settlers—more than 7,000 of them came between 1844 and 1847 alone—were a diverse group, according to the late <a href="http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2004-2005/memorials/jordan/jordan.html">Terry Jordan</a>, arguably the leading scholar of European immigration to Texas: “They included peasant farmers and intellectuals; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists; Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, and Alsatians; abolitionists and slaveowners; farmers and townsfolk; frugal, honest folk and ax murderers.”<br />
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Perhaps. But while some German Texans, including prominent journalists such as <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fli04">Ferdinand Lindheimer</a>, defended slavery, and others, like <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fbu03">August Buchel</a>, served in the Confederate army, the popular image was, and is, of a relatively liberal, well-educated, and homogeneous group who opposed slavery and secession and remained stubbornly pro-Union. In 1854, at the annual <i>Staats-Sängerfest</i> (state singing festival) in San Antonio, the delegates adopted a resolution condemning the “peculiar institution,” and in 1857, <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/04/of-frederick-law-olmsted-mr-brown-and.html">as I noted in an earlier post</a>, Frederick Law Olmsted applauded the abolitionist sentiments he found among the denizens of the Hill Country. It should come as no surprise, then, that many who supported secession and the Confederacy were suspicious of the insular, “radical” immigrants of central Texas.<br />
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To make matters worse, some of the more outspoken German Texans organized the Union Loyal League in June 1861, and by March 1862 they were openly celebrating Union victories and had organized a battalion of three well-armed militia companies, with <a href="http://wkcurrent.com/clients/wkcurrent/10-9-2008-2-52-52-PM-7118737.web.jpg">Fritz Tegener</a>, a Prussian emigré who owned a sawmill near Hunt and served as Kerr County treasurer, as major and commander. The militia was supposedly meant to protect the Hill Country from Indians and outlaws in the absence of Federal troops, but its presence, understandably, made the Confederate authorities nervous. Confederate general <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fbe24">Hamilton P. Bee</a>, commander of the Western Sub-district of Texas, sent Capt. <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fdu06">James Duff</a>, a former San Antonio freighter and founder of an irregular force called Duff’s Partisan Rangers, to take control of the area.<br />
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Duff, who declared martial law in July 1862, was later nicknamed “the Butcher of Fredericksburg” for his harsh actions as provost marshal; <a href="http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101196/m1/43/?q=southwestern%20historical%20quarterly,%20volume%2066">one historian</a>, writing a century after the fact, noted that “his arrests and depredations on the citizens of these counties seem unjustifiable,” though <a href="http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101221/m1/93/?q=southwestern%20historical%20quarterly,%20volume%20104">others</a> say that accounts of his cruelty were a “myth.”<br />
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At any rate, an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and confusion had settled over the Hill Country by August 1, when a group of about eighty men, most of them German Texans, met on Turtle Creek, just a few miles north of Madroño Ranch. Sixty-one of them, with Tegener in charge, decided that their best bet was to flee Texas until the hostilities died down—in retrospect, a tragic miscalculation. They determined to try to reach Mexico by riding west to the mouth of the Devils River on the Rio Grande (the site of present-day <a href="http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/EFS/lowres/STS056/STS056-109-27.jpg">Amistad Reservoir</a>) and then crossing into Mexico, but Duff learned of their plans and sent Lt. Colin D. McRae, with ninety-four mounted troopers, in pursuit. <br />
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The unsuspecting Germans made little effort to cover their tracks, and McRae and his men easily traced them across the Medina and Frio rivers before catching up to them on the afternoon of August 9 on the West Fork of the <a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/_ATuwZIDVEsU/SpHUpAQwjXI/AAAAAAAAAcw/GE4Dn-XHVxg/s1600-h/The%20Nueces%20River%20today%5B3%5D.jpg">Nueces River</a> in northeastern Kinney County. A few of Tegener’s men had reported seeing unidentified riders behind them, but the commander dismissed their reports and told the group to make camp in a grassy clearing on the west bank of the river.<br />
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The precise details of what happened next are lost to time, but the following seems to be the most commonly accepted version. McRae and his men attacked before dawn of the following day. Around twenty-five of the Unionists abandoned the fight almost immediately and managed to slip through the Confederate lines in the darkness and confusion. McRae’s troops killed nineteen of the remaining Unionists and captured nine others who had been wounded; Tegener himself was wounded, but managed to escape. Shockingly, the Confederates executed the nine wounded prisoners a few hours after the skirmish, shooting them in the head as they lay face-down and defenseless on the ground. As a final indignity, McRae’s men left the bodies of their victims unburied, “prey to the buzzards and coyotes.” The Confederate casualties included two killed and eighteen wounded, McRae among them. <br />
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And what of the surviving Unionists, you ask? Eight were killed on October 18, when another Confederate force attacked them as they attempted to cross into Mexico; nine others died in other battles. One man, August Hoffmann, reportedly made his way back to Gillespie County, where he remained in hiding, living on “pear fruit and bear grass,” until the spring of 1863. Tegener himself survived, though legend has it that during his long absence from Texas his wife, assuming he had been killed in the attack, married another man. Haha—<a href="http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/">awkward</a>! Apparently it all worked out, though, as Tegener himself eventually remarried and went on to become a state legislator and justice of the peace in Travis County.<br />
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The encounter on the Nueces almost immediately became what historian <a href="http://www.safariclubfoundation.org/content/index.cfm?action=view&Content_ID=387">Stanley S. McGowen</a> called “one of the state’s most controversial and contentious historiographical events.” The <i>Handbook of Texas</i> notes that “Confederates regard[ed] it as a military action against insurrectionists while many German Hill Country residents viewed the event as a massacre.” Regardless of which side you’re on, it was a terrible thing. In 1865, the families of the men killed on the Nueces gathered their bones and finally interred them at <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hjc16">Comfort</a>, where a monument was dedicated on the battle’s fourth anniversary, in 1866. The <i>Treue der Union</i> (Loyal to the Union) monument, pictured above, still stands in Comfort, and historians still debate how best to describe what happened to that group of fearful men who met on humble Turtle Creek on an August day almost 150 years ago.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Martin</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Philipp Meyer, <i><a href="http://philippmeyer.net/works.htm">American Rust</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> C. J. Chivers, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743270762">The Gun</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-7268468318325004572010-10-22T04:18:00.000-05:002010-10-22T04:18:05.767-05:00Barbers, bison meat, and the invisible hand<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wendellberrybooks.com/images/portwilliammap_large.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://www.wendellberrybooks.com/images/portwilliammap_large.gif" width="320" /></a></div><br />
I was back in my shiny new persona as salesperson last week, driving out to all the <a href="http://www.banderacowboycapital.com/contents.cfm?pg=places_ranches">dude ranches</a> around Bandera in hopes of scaring up a market for the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of bison meat we will soon have for sale. Reaction was generally favorable, despite the fact that I didn’t have some basic information at hand, like the prices we’ll be charging.<br />
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Aside from feeling like a dummy, a phony, and a <a href="http://www3.telus.net/rojay/cels/Ferngully%205.jpg">bat-brained loony</a>, I had fun. First, there’s very little that I enjoy more than looking at other people’s property. Second, I got to drive down some Hill Country roads I hadn’t been on before and go through the <a href="http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/spdest/findadest/parks/hill_country/">Hill Country State Natural Area</a>, a secluded 5,000-plus-acre park dappled with beautiful blooming grasses and gayflowers, stands of hardwoods, and shining creeks. The third fun thing was getting out and meeting people—not a pleasure my usually introverted self would have anticipated. Our pattern when we go to Madroño has been to get there and dig in, not coming out unless we need something really important, like the newspaper or beer or ice cream or antihistamines. Now, for the first time, we’re starting to meet our neighbors. We’re starting—just barely—to find our way into the community.<br />
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I’ve also been rereading Wendell Berry’s <i>Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself,</i> in which community is a central concern. (The book has easily reaffirmed its place on my top-ten favorite novels list.) So this week “community” seems to be the theme that wants to beat me over the head until I wake up and pay attention.<br />
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As you might guess from the subtitle, <i>Jayber Crow</i> concerns a small-town Kentucky barber whose life spans most of the twentieth century. Orphaned at an early age, Jayber is raised by a loving great-aunt and -uncle, who die when he is ten. He is sent to an orphanage and finally, a dozen years later, makes his way back to Port William to become its barber, grave-digger, and church janitor. A philosophical-minded bachelor, Jayber watches the community (that’s a map of the whole fictitious area above) over the course of several wars and the encroachment of highways and agricultural technology. Although he witnesses and endures great suffering, at the end he can say truthfully that his book is about Heaven because of the profound love the community bears for itself and for its place, both temporal and spatial.<br />
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In part, this love manifests itself in Port William’s economic life. When Jayber returns to Port William, he finds that the town’s previous barber has left, not being able to support his family on his shop’s limited income. Jayber is immediately taken by an old friend to see the town banker, who in introducing himself says, “I’m glad to know you. I knew your mother’s people.” He offers to loan Jayber the money to buy the old barbershop; Jayber describes the terms of the loan as “fair enough, but very strict in what he would expect of me.” <br />
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Jayber adds, “You will appreciate the tenderness of my situation if I remind you that I had managed to live for years without being known to anybody. And that day two men who knew who and where I had come from had looked at me face-on, as I had not been looked at since I was a child.... I felt revealed, as if to buy the shop I had to take off all my clothes.” Going into business requires him to become a part of the community, to care about its constituent parts in order to make his own way in the world.<br />
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I had imagined that this community might make <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/AdamSmith.jpg">Adam Smith</a>, the patron saint of free-market economics, sneer: it lives within the limits of the land’s fertility, repairs what is broken, patches what is torn, and remains deeply suspicious of debt. Its citizens are generous to those in need, recognizing that they cannot prosper individually without prospering corporately. The antihero of the novel, Troy Chattam, is an ambitious young farmer who contemptuously rejects the old-fashioned ways of his father-in-law; Troy’s mantra is “modernize, mechanize, specialize, grow.” He goes into debt to buy new machinery and listens to agribusiness experts who tell him to use every bit of soil on the place: “never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle.” He seems to be a firm believer in the “invisible hand,” famously posited by Smith in his magnum opus <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=NLoxfUPHoukC&printsec=frontcover&dq=adam+smith+wealth+of+nations&hl=en&ei=kOnATLLnBIGC8gbTr6HOBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Wealth of Nations</a>,</i> which supposedly guides markets to produce the highest quality goods for the lowest price to the benefit of both producers and buyers; this is what we used to call the American way. Like that of the city for which he was named, however, Troy’s is not a story with a happy ending.<br />
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But wait—why in heaven’s name is Adam Smith suddenly part of this conversation? Because I, despite my shocking ignorance of economics, just read Adam Gopnik’s <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/18/101018crbo_books_gopnik">fascinating article on Smith</a> in the October 18 issue of <i>The New Yorker.</i> In it Gopnik argues that Smith’s real question “was not the economist’s question, How do we get richer or poorer?, or even the philospher’s question, How should one live? It was the modern question, Darwin’s question: How do you find and make order in a world without God?” <br />
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Gopnik is ostensibly reviewing <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adam-Smith-Enlightened-Walpole-Eighteenth-C/dp/0300169272">Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life</a>,</i> by Nicholas Phillipson, but he is really using Phillipson’s book as a jumping-off point for his own meditations on economics and community. Readers of <i>The Wealth of Nations</i> tend to ignore Smith’s earlier <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=xVkOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=adam+smith+theory+of+moral+sentiments&hl=en&ei=zunATMXhO4T68Ab5ucHXBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Theory of Moral Sentiments</a>,</i> but by doing so, according to Gopnik, we “lobotomize our own understanding of modern life, making economics into a stand-alone, statistical quasi-science rather than, as Smith intended, a branch of the humanities.” In order for humanity to live in community, Smith posits the necessity of “an impartial observer who lives within us, and whom we invent to judge our actions.” Without this imaginative capacity, a market economy can’t exist; unless we can put ourselves in the place of our fellows, we can’t imagine what they might need. “For Smith, the plain-seeing Scot,” writes Gopnik, “the market may not have been the most elegant instance of human sympathy, but it’s the most insistent: everybody has skin in this game. It can proceed peaceably only because of those moral sentiments, those imaginary internal judges.”<br />
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Unfortunately, those imaginary internal judges recede into the background when producers band together in order to eliminate competition and control prices; according to Phillipson (via Gopnik), Smith believed that “the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the sovereign state to restore, free play.” The market works toward the benefit of all only when it is broadly just—defined (by me) as being in the long-term interests of both producer and consumer. When the scenario Berry imagines in <i>Jayber Crow</i> comes to pass—when economic and business practices fray the fabric of community rather than protect it—then we live in epically tragic times, like those of <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Hector_brought_back_to_Troy.jpg">Troy</a>. When we find communities in economic disarray, then, according to the father of free-market economics, imaginations incapable of sympathy are at the root of the problem. <br />
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Of course, this is a pretty self-serving position, since we at Madroño are about to go head-to-head with such giants as <a href="http://www.heb.com/hebonline/home/home.jsp">H-E-B</a>, who can charge much less for bison meat than we can. But I honestly believe that the long-term health of H-E-B depends on a diverse economic ecosystem in which the building of community—which requires a mutually sympathetic imagination—will rest on the flexible backs of small, dynamic businesses. Which maybe, with the help of our local community, we will become.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Wendell Berry, <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=KvVASuY00ssC&printsec=frontcover&dq=jayber+crow&source=bl&ots=OyLA9hYUrc&sig=0dnPRcj7n4PcBPc20YfdBT5DSoA&hl=en&ei=ptHATJnMH4O8lQeavsHVCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false">Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Bill Minutaglio, <i><a href="http://www.insearchoftheblues.com/">In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-401212428762144703.post-44776278482197815702010-10-08T07:20:00.000-05:002010-10-08T07:20:33.813-05:00Of mothers and mountains<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu11MsIWdhpNJtCt02xN8_mXTleTYzVk3lx33boMbl8gdntUftROvWhwQ6G0VsH_wciZtUf1jRaJr5uB-3CoOtJ0srRAxYDyMGOH7f2pGr-dmyzXgth6K0laaE3YprUgMDqyqDkKZFuCg/s1600/buckskin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu11MsIWdhpNJtCt02xN8_mXTleTYzVk3lx33boMbl8gdntUftROvWhwQ6G0VsH_wciZtUf1jRaJr5uB-3CoOtJ0srRAxYDyMGOH7f2pGr-dmyzXgth6K0laaE3YprUgMDqyqDkKZFuCg/s320/buckskin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>I’ve just introduced myself to the pleasures of Aldo Leopold’s <i><a href="http://www.aldoleopold.org/about/almanac.shtml">A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There</a></i>. Called the father of wildlife conservation in the United States, Leopold heard in the revving of the great American economic and technological engines the death knell of what he called “the biotic community,” in which humanity is merely a fellow-passenger, not the driver. <i>A Sand County Almanac</i> was published posthumously in 1949; more than sixty years later, Leopold’s ability to see where those engines would take us seems eerily prophetic.<br />
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Aside from what he says, I love his tone—warm and humble, courteous and scholarly. But what he says is compelling and important. In one essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” he recounts an experience he had as a young man working for the Forest Service in Arizona, at a time when land managers “had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/CMM_MexicanWolf.jpg">wolf</a>.” One day, from a “high rimrock,” he and his colleagues spotted a pack of wolves, including some pups, and opened fire. Leopold, having shot a female, climbed down and “reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”<br />
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Over the years, as he watched the destruction of the wolf population and the subsequent explosion of the deer population and disappearance of the mountain flora, Leopold came to understand the wolves’ vital place in the biotic community. He became a passionate, but never strident, defender of predators and other despised or voiceless members of his tribe, like soil, water, flowers, and mountains.<br />
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I’m thinking about the mind of the mountains because last week <a href="http://www.isacatto.com/">my sister Isa</a>, <a href="http://www.alpen-glow.com/">my brother John</a>, and I walked into what we consider their heart. We climbed up to <a href="http://www.mapbuzz.com/viewer/508">Buckskin Pass</a>, our mother’s favorite hike, on the first anniversary of her death. We agreed that <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2009/10/mothers-legacy.html">one of her greatest gifts to us</a> was a deep, abiding love for wild places, especially those in Colorado, a love she shared with everyone she could. I don’t know if she ever read <i>A Sand County Almanac</i>, but I know that she, too, thought about her response to the inner life of mountains and encouraged us to do likewise.<br />
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At the end of “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold writes this: “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.... A measure of this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.” <br />
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I was particularly taken with his misquotation of Thoreau; in <a href="http://madronoranch.blogspot.com/2010/02/massachusetts-part-iii-wildness-walking.html">a previous post</a> I wrestled with my own misquotation of the same line. What Thoreau actually wrote was this: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” But I love Leopold’s rendering, since the substitution of “salvation” for “preservation” gives the minds of wolves and mountains a distinctly theological dimension. (Coincidentally, I’ve also just discovered <a href="http://www.thomasberry.org/">Thomas Berry</a>, an ecology-minded priest and writer who proclaimed himself a “geologian.”)<br />
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How might the wild minds of the mountains save us? I’m not sure there’s a single answer to that question, especially since <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/04/national/main6835481.shtml">the mountains are just as capable of destroying as saving</a>. I remember times during our childhood forced marches when we had to sprint down from above tree line to avoid summer storms that seemed to come out of nowhere, bristling lightning. Even as their come-hither beauty draws me to these high places, their monastic austerity keeps me in my place. My brother John, an alpinist by vocation and avocation, has spent more time <a href="http://www.alpen-glow.com/gallery/content/upload_5_14_09_43_large.html">dangling in very thin air</a> than most normal people, and he confirms the almost erotic call and implacable heart of the mountains—or at least I feel sure he would if I asked him.<br />
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How might the wild minds of the mountains save us? Here’s one answer: in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Solace-Fierce-Landscapes-Exploring-Spirituality/dp/0195315855/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top">The Solace of Fierce Places: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality</a></i>, Belden C. Lane recounts the parable of an Englishman visiting Tibet some years ago:<br />
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<div style="margin-left: 0.25in;">Only as the grandeur of the land drew him beyond himself did he begin to discover what he sought. Walking one day toward a remote monastery at Rde-Zong, he was distracted from his quest for spiritual attainment by the play of the sun on stones along the path. “I have no choice,” he protested, “but to be alive to this landscape and light.” Because of this delay, he never arrived at the monastery....<br />
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Most compelling to his imagination was the fact that the awesome beauty of this fierce land was in no way conditioned by his own frail presence. It was not there for <i>him</i>.... Hence he declared, “The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they restore our courage with the purity of their detachment.” Becoming present to a reality entirely separate from his own world of turmoil strangely set him free. </div><br />
As John, Isa, and I descended from the emphatic heights, talking about a strangely controversial effort to designate 350,000 nearby acres of national park as a wilderness preserve, John stopped, turning around to look at Isa and me with his mouth wide open, pantomiming astonishment. Wondering what could possibly astonish someone as unflappable as John, I looked down the rocky trail. <br />
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A young man with no legs was walking toward us. Yep, walking, on his leather-gloved hands, up a trail that sucked the breath out of people with legs. His concentration was so intense that he was unable to acknowledge our presence. I recognized him as the subject of a story I had read online a few months before. Kevin Michael Connolly, born without legs, is, at age twenty-four, a champion skier, globe-trotting photographer, and charming smart-aleck, if <a href="http://kevinmichaelconnolly.com/">his website</a> is any indication. He’s also the author of a memoir entitled <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Double-Take-Kevin-Michael-Connolly/dp/0061791520/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1286540296&sr=8-2">Double Take</a>.</i> <br />
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I’ve never been quite as awe-struck by another person as I was in that moment. Once again, I felt very small, amazed by the community—this time the human community—of which I am a part. So many things, people, and circumstances by which I might be saved. <br />
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The things that ignore us save us in the end. They allow us to step out of the endless hall of mirrors we usually inhabit and to find ourselves in a relationship with something outside our fears, fantasies, and projections. This was one of our mother’s great gifts: she showed us how we could step outside our defended little selves for a while. She taught us where to find courage when we need it: in this place where we knew ourselves to be small and helpless and yet utterly at home, at least for a few ragged breaths.<br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><i>—Heather</i></div><br />
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<b>What we’re reading<br />
Heather:</b> Malcolm Gladwell, <i><a href="http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html">Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking</a></i><br />
<b>Martin:</b> Ingrid D. Rowland, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226730247/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0809095246&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1Y8SWP7JWDNB57Z0FBQZ">Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic</a></i>Heather and Martinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03698344320797727946noreply@blogger.com4