Wizened After the Fall

Mercury Manifesto: Commonwealth Edison, EPA, and the Poisoning of Chicago

2011-08-25T17:56:00.001-07:00

The press release caught my eye.

“The US Environmental Protection Agency will hold a public hearing on May 24, 2011 in Chicago on the proposed national standards for mercury pollution from power plants.

“New power plant mercury and air toxics standards would require many power plants to install pollution control technologies to cut harmful emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel and acid gases."

I couldn’t overlook this for a bunch of reasons.

First, I knew that it doesn’t take much mercury to poison a person.

Second, it’s hard to fathom quantities at the extreme ends of the measurement spectrum, given that the universe is as small as quarks in the particles that make up an atom of matter and as big as the space needed to fit billions of galaxies with plenty of room left over.

Third, as a high school science teacher, I have used EPA statistics on mercury poisoning as a means to teach the methods for putting into proper perspective what amounts to extremely large and extremely small quantities of things.

Midwest Generation Crawford Station on Pulaski, Little Village neighborhood

Fourth, I have known that two of Illinois’ oldest and dirtiest coal-fired electrical generating plants, Fisk and Crawford, are within the city limits of Chicago where I have worked for over four years.

It’s been widely publicized just how dirty these plants are. For instance, Fisk and Crawford, together, cost neighboring communities $127 million per year in hidden health damages, according to a report released in October, 2010 by the Environmental Law and Policy Center. The Clean Air Task Force found that air pollution from these two plants causes more than 40 deaths, 720 asthma attacks, and 66 heart attacks annually.

Finally, I realized that the hearing was just a brisk walk from the school where I teach, at the Crowne Plaza Chicago Metro, located at 733 West Madison Street in downtown Chicago.

Fisk, located in the Pilson neighborhood, and the downtown Chicago skyline

So never mind that the hearing was to be held right in the middle of my proctoring final exams. I felt I had to show up. And I knew exactly what I would be taking to the hearing if I was allowed to speak: classroom lesson demos of my mercury unit conversions.

Though a typical lumbering governmental bureaucracy, the EPA holds a tenuous place in national public affairs. Mandated to protect the health interests of citizens when they're faced with potential environmental hazards caused by industry, it’s been buffeted back and forth by bureaucrats who occupy both sides of the isle. Instituted by the most quintessentially Republican president, Richard Nixon, in 1970 (wait, Ronald Reagan holds that distinction), it’s been Republicans who lately have been out to emasculate its ability to enforce such things as the Clean Air Act. The EPA is bad for industry profits, held dear in the hearts of the many Republican owners of the means of production.

But the EPA is a good cop who, like a Boy Scout helping an old lady cross the street, might get a laugh from this Joe Citizen whose health they are mandated to protect. Even so, getting into the queue to talk to the EPA folks at the hearing took some back and forth with its handlers.

“The public may register to speak at a specific time at a hearing by contacting Pamela Garrett at garrett.pamela@epa.gov or registering in person on the day of a hearing. EPA also will accept written comments on the proposed standards until July 5, 2011. EPA will finalize the rule by November 2011.”

Pamela G. Garrett, US EPA, Research Triangle Park, NC 27711

Dear Ms. Garrert:

Please give me a 5 minute slot sometime after 2 pm to speak at the Hearing regarding mercury pollution.

Dear Mr. DePrez:

Atlanta is the only hearing location that has open slots. You did not mention which location, Atlanta, Chicago, or Philadelphia.

If you would like to show up at Chicago the team will try their best to work you in to speak. They are willing to cut into the lunch and dinner hour and possibly go beyond the 8:00 conclusion to give everyone a chance to speak. If you decide to try to be worked in, I need to know in order to have a list for the team, and you will need to plan on possibly being there for several hours to be worked in. Please let me know as soon as possible if you think you will be in attendance.

Dear Ms. Garrett:

Chicago, sorry. Work me in. I would need an overhead projector to make my points. It would take 2 minutes.

Dear Mr. DePrez:

You are on the wait list. Would you provide me with your address and phone number for our records? Thank you.

Midwest Generation Fisk Station in the Little Village neighborhood

The walk downtown was on a brilliantly sunny day in May, and it was hard to think that such pristine air was passively aggressive in its pernicious program to poison me with mercury. But the horror stories come from the EPA itself.

A concentration of 0.0005 mg (milligrams)/L (liter) of mercury is lethal. (That's five ten- thousandths of a milligram. There are 1000 mg in a gram and about 16 grams in an ounce.)

For fetuses, infants, and children, the primary health effect of mercury is impaired neurological development.

Symptoms include: tremor, emotional change, insomnia, neuro- muscular changes, headaches, disturbances in sensations, changes in nerve response, performance deficits on tests of cognitive function.

Such grim reaper statistics couldn’t put a pall on the frolic by the “baby buggy brigade” of moms with their kids in strollers protesting outside the hearing. I reminded myself that humor is a great way to habilitate the horror that we often end up facing as we navigate the uncertainties of life. I went in and started bugging the folks at the folding tables to get me onto the list of presenters. “We’ll try to work you in,” they said. “Sign up here.”

No they didn’t have an overhead transparency projector. Sigh. Underfunded education can’t give every teacher access to a laptop computer and projector, which the EPA had set up for presenters. So I had to find a way to photocopy my calculations to just hand the EPA guys if I got a chance. The hotel clerk was great helping me out.

The hall was packed. Kids were everywhere. Environmental groups sure knew that kids in costumes carried a rhetorical advantage. Mardi Gras at the Mercury Muck Musings. Electric utility industry reps were noticeably absent. But I got in! And it was just an hour later.

The four panelists looked bored. I was paired with a presenter who discussed the health statistics for possible mercury-induced ailments at a local city free health clinic. When it was my turn, I handed the four EPA panelists a set of calculations. They smiled wanly.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for a chance to share with you how I teach my science students to make sense of statistics.

“In this case, it’s you guys who give the lethal dosage of mercury, which is 0.0005 mg/L. And here’s the stated annual amount of mercury in pounds, 1,700, that the the seven Illinois Com Ed plants produce as a byproduct of burning coal.

“We fight a losing battle converting kids to metric, but metric is the rule. So, in milligrams, it looks like the plants annually put out 3,700,000,000 mg of mercury (Hg is the chemical symbol).

“We will now merge the milligrams to the toxicity concentration of mercury. We will solve for x through cross multiplication and canceling units so we can scale up to the number of liters this much mercury would pollute to human toxicity if it were somehow allowed to diffuse to that level of concentration in the blood of a human.

“We must follow the significant figures rules for handling measured amounts. We must also be sure that it’s set up to cancel units of measure so the answer is simply in liters. Notice the use of scientific notation so that we’re not having to write out long, unwieldy numbers.

“So the answer is 1 x 10¹³ liters. It’s hard to visualize that much water, so let’s convert it to gallons. A liter is the equivalent of 0.25 gallons or 2.5 x 10^-1 gallons. Cancelling liters and converting to standard notation, yes, it’s 3,000,000,000,000 or 3 trillion gallons.

“But here’s the clincher. How does one fathom that much water? It’s kinda hard. So lets imagine how much of Lake Michigan this much water would fill.

“Lake Michigan is one of the Great Lakes and is right next to Chicago. It’s filled with 1.3 x 10¹⁵ gallons of fresh water. The water that could be polluted by Com Ed’s annual pooping of mercury is 3 x 10¹² gallons. That’s 0.2% of Lake Michigan, or two tenths of one percent.

“Aw, what’s so bad about that? Doesn’t seem like much, but wait. The great Lakes are the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. So let’s do one last calculation. How many years would it take, at the rate of Com’s Ed’s polluting, and imagining that all of it ended up in the lake fully diluted, to raise the level of concentration to human toxicity?

“Answer: 500 years. Oh, the potential power that a couple of smoke stacks command!” Some nervous laughter broke out in the audience.

I excused myself politely at that point, thanking the panel, which returned the favor. At the break, I was surrounded by moms in funny costumes who wanted to know more about my programs with the kids. One mom, who home schools her kids, asked me for copies of any materials I might offer for teaching simple unit conversion and cancellation methods.

I shared with them how, ironically, I had noticed for years, when living 50 miles west of Chicago, the daily “coal train” of 100% hopper cars filled to the brim with Wyoming coal that passed through Geneva near my home, bound for Fisk and Crawford.

“I felt grateful for NOT living in Chicago at the time,” I said sadly. “Just last week, like the proverbial insult to injury, I counted 147 cars in the train when stopped at an intersection in Chicago on my way home."

So it was good to get all that off my chest in front of an appreciative audience, fellow citizens exposed to silent, inconspicuous, and insidious particles of death.

Then it was “back to the mines” filled with final exams to grade.

Rambles on the Rocks: Terror and Triumph in the Goddard Quadrangle

2011-08-21T10:05:00.001-07:00

South face of Mt. Goddard G. K. Gilbert, 1904

One of the most isolated places in the world is in proximity to some of the densest populations in the world in metropolitan California. Located, technically, in Fresno County, California, its canyons and peaks, part of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, defy the imagination. I’d like to record a few recollections of my saunters through this veritable terre incognito.

Maps made of the area date back to the first surveys by William H. Brewer and Josiah Whitney of the California Geological Survey in the 1860’s. Hikers and climbers use modern descendents of these first maps, some of which are configured into 15’ x 15’ quadrangles and show contours, trails, and lakes, peaks, and valleys. For years I have called the aforementioned place, simply, the Goddard Quadrangle.

Evolution Valley that drains north into South Fork San Joaquin River; Mt. Goddard at extreme lower left; Sierra Nevada crest outlined in stark red from NW to SE

Titles of notoriety befitting the historical era of its original mapping dot the rugged watershed that the “quad” illustrates. Most names were given by Theodore S. Solomons in 1895 on an expedition for a route from Yosemite Valley to the Kings River Canyon. Included are Mts. Darwin, discoverer of natural selection, Huxley, Darwin’s evolutionary theory bulldog, Wallace, codiscoverer of natural selection, Lamarck, an evolutionary theory predecessor, industrialist Spencer, “social Darwinist” profaner of the theory, and Emerson, transcendentalist. Mt. Goddard itself is named after civil engineer George Henry Goddard, who surveyed the Sierra Nevada during the 1850’s. All of them are over 13,000 feet in elevation. Evolution Valley forms a swath of descent to forested parts. A first professor of geology at fledgling University of California, LeConte, lends his name to another canyon.

In his first trip through the area in 1873, chronicled in John of the Mountains, pioneering Sierra explorer John Muir journaled about his passage up Evolution Basin to the high peaks on the crest. “The first tributary of any size is a bright active stream coming down in a foamy cascade of one thousand feet,” he wrote. “…had a glorious view of the Owens River and Valley, and of the Sierra, one broad field of peaks upon no one of which can the eye rest. They are gothic near the axis, a mass of ice-sculpture. Mount Emerson is imposing with its evenly balanced crest and far-reaching snowy wings.” Muir then describes the party’s encampment in the South Fork of the San Joaquin River canyon. “Up early and went with Clark to a point on the divide to view the landscape and plan the route. The view is awful- a vast wilderness of rocks and canyons. Clark groaned and went home.”

North aspect of the Goddard Divide; Wanda Lake on left; Mt. Goddard on right

I too have crisscrossed this region of gargantuan granite grandiosity many times over the years. For instance, I hiked over Muir Pass on my way from Giant Forest to Yosemite. I scrambled off trail up Goddard Canyon through exhaustively boulder-strewn Davis Lakes Basin to the lakes named after Muir’s daughters Wanda and Helen. I approached the ungodly, remote Enchanted Gorge from its gateway summits, a pair of metamorphosed volcanic rhyolite peaks named after mythological creatures from Homer's Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis. I attempted once to gaze down Spanish Peak, located in the “quad” kitty-corner to Goddard, to the stream bed below where the Middle and South Forks of the Kings River meet, and would have succeeded in visibly penetrating the view for its full 8,000 foot drop, 3,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon, were it not for the now famous smog generated by 28 million vehicles in a state of 35 million, or 0.8 vehicles per person. But the most memorable was a scramble to the top of the quadrangle’s namesake, Mt. Goddard, first climbed by Lilbourne Winchell and Louis Davis in 1879. It’s set off west of the Sierra crest and is therefore isolated at 13,568 feet in the middle of it all.

It might be interesting to note that all my trips into the region have been solo except this one. A fair lady accompanied me on her first “Fifty Miler” in the mountains. She declined, however, to scale the summit with me, which was the primary objective of that trip. The following is a description of the climb, made alone, and written in 1981.

“Picking the instruments of survival out of my backpack and tossing them into a rucksack, I marked off to myself, 60/40 parka and first aid kit, yes, granola bars, water bottle, bible, yes, yes, and yes… and strolled away from my partner’s tented encampment in the talus.

“The morning crispness breathed a kind of languid mien and framed expectant heart and soul with excitement spiked with dread. I trudged toward the mountain of tortured rock that catapulted another 2,300 feet into the sky. I eyed my objective. Separated from the spine of the Sierra proper, Mt. Goddard rose up in stark solitude, an apex down which some of the deepest creek canyons in the world are gouged. The Goddard quad map indicates how escaping snowmelt spills toward the south up to a total vertical distance of 11,000 feet to the canyon bottoms along the incredible Middle Fork of the Kings River.

“I bounded back and forth across the many streamlets that laced together the glacial runoff coming down from old and worn glacial icepack. The permanent ice rested on a nearly vertical slope and was haphazardly broken by the season’s heat and smudged by markings made when debris fell out of crevasses above it and came tumbling down the mountainside. Its appearance was like an old and tattered shawl blanketing the lap of a woman sitting with long, gray skirts, knees spread, and shawl spilling down pleats to languish at the hemline. Water gurgled under the steep wave of talus that had been knocked down by the expansions and contractions of the ice above.

“I parceled out a continuous litany of mini-goals, looking only to the one ahead, trying to suppress the merciless compacted collection that attempted to imprint itself onto my struggle. I scouted for some of the plants listed by Muir when he came through the area in 1873, Ivesia, Plemonium, and yellow Compositae. “I found larkspurs, columbine, Spiraea, and Dodecatheon,” he had written.

“Before me was a wall of rock hewn by erosion into vertical slabs that looked like pickets on a fence. I contemplated each move of extended, clasping appendage before feeling confident that a hold would contribute to my ascent. I felt grateful for each secure grasp on colorful crustose lichen-splotched granite in the vertical tumult of rock. I traced the toothy ridge carefully, following its disheveled sharpness south and around to the west to where it came brawling together with the great hulk of the mountain’s north face. Here, the granite splinters of the Goddard Divide reminded me of shark’s teeth ready to snap up into surprised flesh, sending me off balance and tumbling down into the gut of the range where I would be ground apart by gizzard talus and digested by enzymatic glacier waters a thousand feet below.

“SWOOSH! A few feet before my astonished face a falcon, no, two falcons, raced by, chasing each other around the top of the mountain. Effortless, even at 13,000 feet, these wedges of confident freedom were suddenly gone, having drilled away a thousand feet of altitude in seconds. Welcome to the island in the sky.

“Piles of dark gray cumulus began to assemble on the western slopes of the range. But I tried not to notice, thinking I’d be soon up and off the summit, heading back to the lady of the canyon down below. I was soon on top and attempted to absorb, in Muir’s words, “glorious” and, at the same time, “awful” views in all directions.

“Billowy masses of cloud began to obstruct the views. My whiskers and wisps of wool of my cap sparkled and crackled atop this natural lightening rod. I was ready to fry in any second. I tumbled head long down the talus, initiating a mini avalanche. I cowered under a ledge. Flashes of bolts slammed into the mountain. Thunder reverberated off canyon walls after crashing into them like boxcars against brick walls. Blizzard flakes drilled into nylon attempts to ward off cold and fear. I stared into gaping grayness, a merciless murk of wind and snow blowing past me. Awe and dread enveloped me, remembering how September storms can last well into the night. Socked in, I waited.

Gorges that drain south into Middle Fork Kings River; Mt. Goddard at upper left

“Finally I caught glimpses through the gray of peaks above the Ionian Basin, cast in crimson before a rapidly advancing dusk. Misty corridors revealed the slash of Goddard Creek below Ragged Spur. I began making my way slowly down slippery talus, checking my advance carefully against memories made before socking gray cloaked the mountain again. I waited while eating raisins and reading Proverbs. I had to backtrack more than once to a point where I thought a route down ought to begin. I felt the namesake of an area west of Lake Tahoe I hiked once, Desolation Wilderness.

“I decided on a descent down a coullar that would effectively be a point of no return. Surrounding me were Promethean shafts of iron oxide-stained granite that impaled a fiery red Olympian sky. I clutched at damp and slippery rock with numb fingers. A cracking sound startled me, and I peered over a ledge toward glacier specks coming into focus. An avalanche! Boulders far away tumbled in slow motion down the ice fields of the glacier on Goddard’s north face.

“Exhausted legs, caught like prisoners between the freedom of gravity and the slavery of resistance, counted out uneven periods like a broken metronome. I could see a network of rivulets that collected the waters of Upper North Goddard Creek that, in the darkening mist, lacked any kind of definiteness, more like seeing a Martian canal system through clouds and torment with a telescope.

Davis Lakes from the north face of Mt. Goddard Divide; camp below; lakes drain down North Goddard Creek to South Fork San Joaquin River in Goddard Canyon

“Suddenly I saw a speck of red in the darkened moonscape, a pinprick in an expanse of madness. Camp. Then back again to obscuring cloud-choked depths. I blessed each vertical foot of drop.

“Once in the darkened basin below the glacier, I passed granite monoliths that seemed to ponder my stumbling gate with rather benign indifference. A silhouetted figure came out to greet me. I wondered if my eyes appeared wild and prophetic. I don’t remember saying anything at first. We walked together back toward camp.

From the Soul of the World: Ravinia Festival and the Song Interpretations of Jackie Evancho

2011-08-09T20:28:00.001-07:00

Watching Jackie Evancho sing is a religious experience. The vocal virtuosity of this young performer from Pittsburgh had “gobsmacked” me early on with incredulous astonishment that produces tear-filled sobs of smiley joy, a reaction that no one else has ever caused in me. So my visit to Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, IL to hear her sing in person on August 7, 2011 was like a visit to the sacred mysteries of Eleusis or Mithras in ancient Greco-Roman times.

Neither pouring rain nor screeching cicadas could drown out the effect that seeing this prodigy’s performance was going to have on me. I, of course, already knew what that effect would be. But I went with an inordinate desire to know why. A hypothesis provided by others is Evancho’s interpretive genius. But more important in my thinking is the psychological state she enters when she sings. Evancho says she is taken possession by the music. So I went to get an inside look at the genius of Jackie’s interpretations, especially when under the influence of her music in front of a live audience.

Due to the patient work of a key member of “Jackieville” and another who coined that title for Evancho’s facebook page and made a banner blazoned with its moniker, I was able to get a second row center seat. Unlike other venues, the spot set up for her on the stage was just a few feet back from the edge. I spent part of the interminable wait while the Chicago Symphony Orchestra warmed up speculating on what Evancho would seem like at her place there just 15 feet from where I sat. The height of the pair of microphones set up for her meant that she must be petite, a very tiny girl. How she, being so small, commands the power that I know she has made me wonder.

Then the prelude to the opening number began, during which she appeared from stage right, smiling and waving with one hand while carrying a water bottle with the other. She was resplendent in a beautiful purple dress. She was not overly “done up” like in so many of her talk show appearances. With grace and poise, she positioned herself behind those microphones. As I suspected, Evancho exhibited a diminutive stature with a porcelain delicacy as if a figurine atop a music box, that is, until she gathered herself in preparation to sing. In that moment of truth, Evancho underwent a physical transformation from a pretty little girl, kissed blond by summer sunshine and chlorine at the pool, all smiles and “angelic adorability,” to a strangely adult-like diva who takes complete command of her artistic performance.

Ticket to the Soul of the World

I observe this transformation regularly in the best artists where I teach, a high school for the creative and performing arts in Chicago. The head of school there says our students have a passion for their art, one that they discover early in their lives. Jackie discovered hers at the age of seven, turning eight years old. From that point forward, parents, like Jackie’s, have to put up with their student’s peculiar and sometimes aggravating initiatives and prodding that, in the case of my school, compel parents to come to our open houses, children in hand, to listen to us offer a way to channel that passion to its rightful fulfillment.

Lovers by Shigeru Umebayashi is Jackie’s favorite song on her CD Dream With Me because “It’s so powerful; there’s so much emotion in it.” The theme from the film House of Flying Daggers, it was first on the playbill. The memory of a loved one lost, the “you” of “You ARE my true love,” is a universal experience. Perhaps all she needs is the memory of the loss of her pet duck MoMo to a hawk in order to evoke it. The accent is on the ARE, when she tilts her head back, eyes closed, clutching the fist she makes with the other hand with which to beat her breast, and the verb is exhaled with such force of her breath that she makes the microphones on Ravinia’s stage undulate. It’s the end of the stanza. She opens her eyes, lets her arms fall to her side, and gazes with a dreamy sadness out over the audience while the orchestra continues on with an interlude. That look is priceless. One can observe her render the same look of ethereal melancholy after each high note in Dark Waltz, a crossover classic popularized by New Zealander Haley Westenra on her first internationally published album Pure in 2004, and produced as part of the video marketed to PBS contributors, Dream With Me In Concert. Now comes the last line, which she begins a cappella. “Your voice still echoes…” She stops abruptly with a hard consonant “s” after she effortlessly raises the pitch ever so high with her light lyric soprano skill. The pause is pregnant. Then, “in my heart” escapes her chest as she lets her diaphragm and intercostal muscles relax. The orchestra reenters on the last word. I finally stop shivering and dry my eyes. She just has it.

Agreeing that “angels” are the source of her inspiration to sing in the classic style

Starting with the aforementioned moment of truth prior to each song, Evancho’s passion apparently gives her permission to surrender to a possession by the music that is in her mind and soul. The words aren’t important. Music is a more universal language of passion. She made that obvious at the age of nine when singing the Puccini aria O Mio Bambino Caro without being able to tell Debra Crosby of the Talent Quest TV show beforehand what the title to the song meant. She grasps the music and appropriates it into the center of her being. As said before, she wasn’t taught that. “Nobody can teach you that,” said Ehkzu. “She just has it.” She closes her eyes feeling it. She must communicate it or suffer deprivation. Though the words aren’t important, it helps that she has a seeming photographic memory for lyrics and perfect diction. If she could, she would look you directly in the eye, like she does in so many of her early YouTube videos.

I lately made friends with someone who became a fan in March of 2009 after seeing one of her YouTube videos. He proceeded to donate to the family’s fund drive to support the production of her first CD, said to require about $20,000. In June of 2009, on a live computer feed, he watched Debra Crosby brought to tears as little Jackie softly sang O Mio. He went on to buy 35 copies of Evancho’s CD Prelude to a Dream when it finally came out. Before her “discovery” on the TV reality show America’s Got Talent (AGT), he helped raise money for a second family-produced CD. Then he helped get Evancho’s YouTube audition tape that the family submitted to AGT voted number one. For his efforts he is named in the credits on her second CD O Holy Night, which debuted in the number two position on Billboard’s Top 200 and earned her the distinction of usurping Michael Jackson as the youngest performer to put out a CD in the top ten of Billboard’s charts.

The “Jackie Effect” that had so thoroughly converted this fan, even though it was only in its nascent stages, was clearly visible in the video that snared his heart and subsequent devotion. It was the YouTube video of Evancho’s cover of Britney Spears’ song Everytime.

This homemade video, filmed in a corner of the Evancho’s house, let’s call it “The Love-Lost Laundry Room Lament,” shows Jackie’s emotional connection to the music she sings and epitomizes her latent genius for interpreting it. Study this video. A cute sports cheer, “Go Pittsburgh Steelers,” gives way to a total immersion into her fast becoming characteristic mental and emotional “zone.” Watch her. She looks down and gathers the folds of her mouth, closes her eyes, then looks up right at you and begins her soulful rendition of this heart-torn love song. It’s all there. She shakes her head in dismay and sways back and forth with eyes closed. The tone of her voice indicates that the impact is wrenching the words from her. Then she raises her hands up so you can see her flared fingers and laments like a propitiating preacher, “You seem to move on easy…” then turns her head away as if blind struck by the corporeal emotion of it all. Study her at the 2:45 second mark when, between verses, solemn glances around her give way to a sad, downturned demeanor. She is waiting to go on, though it looks like she just can’t. At the end of the need for lyrics, the music still playing, she is visibly wracked by the meaning she has so effectively made of it. Suddenly it’s over. The spell is broken. She makes furtive glances as if she doesn’t know where she is and needs to get reoriented. Then she smiles sweetly and says, “Thank you.” A child has just come back from a journey to the soul of the world.

I felt humbled upon realizing that piano prodigy Conrad Tao would be featured at Ravinia. In the words of Piers Morgan of AGT, “I know what is going to happen here, we’re going to wake up tomorrow and America is gonna be going CRAZY...” I was “feeling goose bumps” well before 17 year old Conrad walked out onto the stage. This performer does not press piano keys. Rather, like a harpist, he pulls at them, rhapsodically plucks at them from his heavenly lyre with gentle, graceful flourishes of his hands, as if they held the conductor’s baton in order to coax heaven-sanctioned sounds from the soul of the world. In the midst of Imaginer by Walter Afanasieff and Lara Fabian (the words arranged more appropriately for Jackie’s young age), I had to pinch myself. There these two prodigies were, teamed together, in the words of conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos, giving us “hope for the youth of America” through music.

I don’t know much about opera, though Evancho has put me on a steep and rapid learning curve, but I’ve watched my niece who just graduated from the classical voice program at Notre Dame. She appeared stiff at her senior recital, saying afterward that holding onto the piano of her accompanist with her right hand “was allowed.” I had given her copies of Jackie’s music but never heard back from her. I feel sorry about that, how rule-laden operatic performances must be in order to best exemplify intentions in the minds of the genre’s composers. But classical crossover has a more universal appeal. It’s more approachable. Imaginer marries the masses and thus made me, a member of the class of commoners, marvel and melt in the midst of these two young performers. Not opera, Imaginer “allowed” Jackie to do something else that I appreciate, being a school teacher who is well versed in the theories of educational psychology. Though behaviorists say, “prove it,” the branch generally called “cognitive structuralism” describes how one’s mind constructs its percepts of the world into seemingly three dimensional concepts like arranging furniture in a living room. Evancho’s hand and arm gestures, just like Conrad’s sweeping pectoral pronunciations, corral the mind’s musical meanings into intended arrangements. The result is a pleasing sense for the evocative expression that the mind wants to make out of the music. It may be only suggestive, but Evancho’s fluid stance and undulating hand gestures kept time with the unfolding of the song’s magical mystery of “old wars dissolving, a world without hunger, the extinguishing of all fires by a single God.” Did she need to study the words or only learn to pronounce them in flawless French? Did it matter? Their meaning flowed out of the sung soul of the world, especially the verse that she raised up to Conrad’s crescendo, “ouvrez les yeuxxxxxx!!!! (Open the eyes!!!), her hands in fists pounding the word’s compelling command out of the center of the living room, her heart, and up and out of the ceiling above it, her head, with eyes closed and larynx channeling its soaring energy like a rocket launch.

I now understand what Dr. Clark Rosen, director of the Voice Center at University of Pittsburgh Hospital means when he says her genius is not simply that voice; rather, it is her brain that constructs a virtuoso performance of Imaginer by expertly coordinating all her physical apparatus, lungs, throat, and skeletal and muscular gesticulations.

After coming back down to the soul’s center at the end, Evancho croons softly as she gently shakes her head, like brushing one’s self off after the exhausting physical exertion of an athletic performance. Yes, Jackie can croon like the Las Vegas rat pack. She did at eight years old in Everytime at the end, at nine years old in Teaching Angels How to Fly before and after the last refrain, and here at age eleven in Imaginer. They may merely have been in the body, but these two performers created for me an out-of-the-body experience.

Making the closest encounter with the soul of the world, at least for me, were Evancho’s renditions of The Lord’s Prayer by Mallot and arranged by Nicholas Dodd, and of To Believe by Jackie’s uncle Matthew Evancho. I sense that the Evancho’s are very spiritual people, and it is no accident that these two pieces were included on Dream with Me. It is worth noting that BOTH of these gospel-hinting songs were chosen for Evancho’s road tour. This decision effectively forced the exclusion of other, less “spiritual” songs because the play list had to be kept to a maximum of eight or nine to better preserve Evancho’s voice. Perhaps piety becomes a more suitable attitude the closer in proximity one is brought to the soul of the world.

On the AGT Tour in LA singing the spiritual “The Prayer,” written by David Foster

David Foster wrote the spoken prayer part for her in To Believe, and I think it is the fulcrum upon which Dream With Me and its concerts are balanced. For me it is the most powerful point in Evancho’s performance. She stops, publically faces the world as her witness, and tells God that she intends to do the very best that she can. And she does so without the dour solemnity of a penitent; rather, with the singsong cadence of a raconteur. She’s telling a story about her arrival at the center of the soul of the world. She told David Foster, who asked her what is going on in her mind when she sings, “when I sing something just overpowers me and makes me very comfortable and very happy.” It also makes her very courageous, offering her a conviction that grants her command of the soul of the world, and I was struck to the core of my being hearing her recite this prayer at Ravinia.

Like a switch that completes an electrical circuit, Evancho needs an audience with whom to reciprocate the intense emotion she elicits from the music. Heart to heart communication must come full circle. Her experience of that emotion is personal. She then communicates it in a manner very personal. At Ravinia, it seemed as if Miss Evancho sang just for me. It was like I was the only one in the audience. I knew I wasn’t, but she possesses the power to reach out to individual hearts. Someone said, “This little eleven-year-old girl is expressing feelings that only I have ever experienced, and I don’t really know how to comprehend that.” Perhaps we all help make up the soul of the world, and she has been gifted with an innate understanding of its universal nature and how to connect each one of us to it.

When I gave her a double wave, a gesture that has become the trademark for her effervescent charm, she gave one back to me. That is because Jackie feeds off her audience. Authentic artists are not so much concerned with the effect the art has on them as they are about the effect it has on their audience. Many aspiring artists must learn to move past mere potential in which it seems as if they are in their art rather than their art is in them. Good art leaves the artist behind and stands alone, shimmering, mesmerizing, drawing the audience in, beckoning to be received. It is noteworthy that Evancho’s meteoric success is primarily based on performances in front of live audiences. Like a good entrepreneur, she knows the customer is everything. She needs to connect with “you guys” out there who are watching her and for whom she sings. It began with the YouTube videos. “Hey, it’s Jackie, and I’m here to sing….” When she connects, the effect it has on her is part, parcel, and reciprocal with the cause, the passion, with which it began. Only then can there be those endearing, wide-open smiles and clutched hands extended straight down. The audience’s response finishes a cycle and serves as positive feedback with which to accelerate the system. When I yelled, “We love you, Jackie!” she literally hopped into the air. I remember Howie Mandel, after her inaugural AGT rendition of O Mio Bambino Caro, exclaiming, “Jackie, you’re amazing!” This elicited from her an absolutely priceless giggle. Such positive feedback makes her interpretations for the songs she sings gain in power, passion, and perfection over the course of the concert. This is what made the last two songs at Ravinia, Sarah McLachlands’s Angel and Lloyd Weber’s All I Ask of You the best of the best. Evancho’s sense that her audience successfully empathizes with the passion with which she communicates through her singing fortifies her genius and accelerates the maturation of its expression.

Strangely enough, it is not the quality of her voice that matters to her. While in New York City last June promoting Dream With Me, Jackie told a New Zealand reporter, “Whenever I sing I sound like a normal kid, almost. I don’t see what’s so special about my voice. When everyone says, ‘Oh my goodness, Jackie, you have such an amazing voice,’ I go ‘I don’t really understand.’ I mean I just sound like a normal kid. I mean I hear a lot more maturity to it, but I don’t hear, like, I don’t hear what everyone else is hearing and why it’s so amazing.”

Why Evancho can’t understand this had puzzled me until now. It is true that such a nonplussed reaction is appropriate for a genius and also a kid who just wants to fit in with her peers. This was illustrated in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon’s mathematical genius character Will Hunting refuses to leave the construction jobs of his working class buddies from south Boston, with whom he grew up, for jobs with the intellectual big leaguers. Stellan Skarsgard plays the role of the brilliant mathematical Fields Medal-winning professor Gerald Lambeau who takes Will under his wing when he gets into trouble with the law. When Professor Lambeau critiques an even more brilliant paper that Will writes for him, Will expectorates, “Hey! This is so easy that it’s a joke. And I’m sorry, I really am, that you can’t do it.” I can thus take Evancho’s word as a “truthful girl,” as well as a preternaturally intelligent one, that she can’t acknowledge that she has a voice so awe-inspiring that even adults can only describe it as the voice of an “angel.” Even her parents initially misunderstood. Their suspicions required testing. In their own words, “after her showing in the competitions, we thought there might be something here…” But Evancho just sees the music, her experiences of it as it seeps out of the soul of the world, and her desire to communicate it.

Now I know that the driving force of Jackie’s genius is her passion for the music and having an audience feel it too. Matt Damon’s character gave himself away in that he plied his blue collar janitorial services at MIT, one of the most intellectually prestigious universities in the world. Being where it matters, picking the place where passion can be communicated most successfully, explains how and where one can find Evancho’s interpretive genius-in front of a live audience. When asked during AGT where she would most want to perform, she said, “on a stage, any stage.” There, she doesn’t hear herself sing. She’s too busy. Called by her muse to the center where the music is, she, like a siren, a savior figure with outstretched arms, palms up, is busy beckoning us forward to join her at the center. What she hears, what she can take to heart, what spurs her to improve in her use of her gifted pipes every time she sings, is the praise of an appreciative audience. It affirms that she has successfully gotten us there. Out of that little girl then, like a sipapu on the floor in the center of a Southwestern pueblo kiva, has come the soul of the world.

Seekers of Exotic Escape: My Classmate’s Close Encounter with Comet Hale-Bopp aboard a UFO

2011-07-30T12:23:00.001-07:00

Her eyes peered down pensively at me from atop the cliff. My friend and I were swimming at Slippery Rock west of Eugene in Oregon’s Coast Range. It was a warm, leisurely summer day in July, 1975.

“Jump,” I yelled, treading water in the pool below. Two dozen feet of empty space gave freedom to her fall, ending next to me with a splash.

Soon after that innocent summer idyll, my friend the jumper, Susan Francis Strom, disappeared for 22 pensive years apart from disavowed family and friends. During that long self-expulsion, she sought a similar passage through empty space, outer space, this time in a flying saucer to a literal space in the heavens. Her chance came when the Hale-Bopp comet appeared at its nearest and brightest point on its trip around the Sun in March of 1997. The freedom of her fall would end with a different kind of splash though, death by suffocation, along with 38 others in the largest mass suicide in American history.

I’m hoping this story gives closure to long-simmering grief for my friend as I attempt to explain what led to her participation in the lethal ritual that she and the rest of a fringe group, called Heaven’s Gate, celebrated in Rancho Santa Fe, California that fateful March. My explanation requires blazing a trail through what Campbell calls a “cultic milieu” filled with an interesting, eclectic, and sometimes rather odd assortment of metaphysical musings, made rife, perhaps, by the quickening approach of the end of the second millennium.

Revitalization Movements

The period 1960 to 1990, according to McLaughlin, comprised the “Fourth Great Awakening” in the history of American religion. Socially induced forces, especially materialism and economic determinism, were causing “cultural distortion” (Wallace) in the collective unconscious (Jung) of Americans, leading to a break down in the consensus of agreement with the ways of the established order. Many of the disaffected, including a large portion of the baby boom generation, intellectually exhausted by the tumultuous sixties, sought resolution for a deepening sense of alienation through “consciousness-raising” experiments with alternative religions. These seekers became potential waves of amber harvest into the barns of, especially, auto-licensed doomsday cult “de sac” builders at the dead ends in the mushrooming “farm housing developments” of the new religions.

One disaffected, disenfranchised entrepreneur was former music professor Marshall Herff Applewhite, age 42, along with his partner, former nurse Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles, age 47. In September of 1975 they instructed subordinates to tack up flyers around Corvallis, Oregon that advertised a meeting on Sunday the 14th in a convention room, rented under a fictitious name, at the Bayshore Inn in Waldport, 16 mi. south of Newport on the coast.

The text of the flyer continues, as follows. “Two individuals say they were sent from the level above human, and will return to that level in a space ship (UFO) within the next few months. This man and woman will discuss how the transition from the human level to the next level is accomplished, and when this may be done... This is not a religious or philosophical organization recruiting membership. However, the information has already prompted a number of individuals to devote their total energy to the transitional process. If you have ever entertained the idea that there might be a real physical level in space beyond the Earth’s confines, you will want to attend this meeting.”

My friend Susie was intrigued.

Changing Her Major

I had met fellow Botany Major Susan Strom while we were both enrolled in Structure of Seed Plants at Oregon State University the previous winter. I remember taking a real liking to her after a long talk in the Commons. Her dark eyes, set wide apart in a pleasant face, held a soft sadness that made me want to just hug her.

Cordley Hall, Department of Botany/Plant Pathology Oregon State University

She told me of her camp counseling experiences, and I told her of my camping and backpacking in the Sierra, beginning as a boy scout at age 13. I said to her that my starting out in forestry was based on a love for trees. I’d emigrated all the way from Virginia for the chance.

“My tree-hugging disaffection with the tree-chopping utilitarianism of forestry led to the purity of plant science,” I continued, feeling a bit chagrined. Susie mostly nodded in agreement without saying much.

She had come out from Omaha. I could feel that her sense of dislocation was of a vaguer sort. I remember a confused look in the deepest brown eyes I’d ever seen up till then. It was a retiring look of longing and sadness for peace and tranquility somewhere on the lovely green earth, but she couldn’t tell me exactly what she wanted.

I remember our consensus that, unlike classes in plant ecology and primitive plant morphology, labs in the course we took together didn’t involve live plants, just dead slices of parenchyma tissue fixed on slides. We were supposed to explain how cells had differentiated at the behest of unseen indole-3-acetic acid and gibberellin growth hormones before permanent immobilization on the little strips of glass.

We both got a “C” in the course. We shared a desire for a more dynamic organic vitality.

Susie had a degree to finish, but read the flyer and saw opportunity to learn something new, along with a kind of academic ne’er-do-well acquaintance in our crowd named Dave Van Sinderen. I had found out that summer that she had shacked up with him at a town commune cohabitated by mutual friends on 32^nd Street. Three years older, he drifted between interests, spending time, for instance, at the National Outdoor Leadership School of Lander, Wyoming, learning how to lead wilderness trips. Camping gear was their furniture, with sleeping bags on the floor. I was jealous and didn’t want to go to the meeting.

Reeling in the Catch

I try to imagine the experience through Susan’s eyes, beginning with that recruitment meeting in Waldport. Applewhite’s and Nettles’s aliases would change over the years, yet “Bo and Peep,” respectively at the time, exhibited the power to intrigue.

Susie must have thought the humorous titles (rounding up their sheep) that poked fun at themselves rather disarming. (Don’t take yourself too seriously.) Bo had a giddy, child-like demeanor, the charisma. He was the spokesman with the resonate voice of a former opera singer. Peep was the quiet, more serious leader who took a back seat.

What did Susie hear? Evacuate Earth, ascend to the next level, because the kingdom of heaven was at hand. A space ship, a UFO, would be the mode of escape. “How interesting!” she must have thought. This was not your typical millennial message heard in the Bible belt surrounding Omaha. It had Star Trek, with aliens thrown in.

Susie and Dave were given a chance to ask questions. I’m sure the organic language for how the Earth was one of many space “gardens,” and how humans were “plants,” put on it by alien forces, as were other beings elsewhere in the universe, appealed to Susie’s botanic sensibility. She and Dave were like “caterpillars” waiting to be metamorphosised by the Two’s divine agency into “butterflies.” This too, I’m sure, appealed to their Earth Day-bred environmentalism.

The recruitment method Bo and Peep used was clever and different. They kept the message brief to keep the curious guessing, though there had been a lengthy question and answer session, with rigidly scripted answers offered at the end. Their ability to answer curtly, forthrightly, and without embellishment meant to give the message a sense of plausibility. And the speakers stuck to the message. There was no talk of life style or living expenses.

Then the screening process began. Since Susie and Dave wanted to inquire further, they gave their phone number and were called a day later and told of the follow up meeting at a park near Eugene. The intent was to slough off the gawkers and hostile hecklers. When Dave and Susie declared a serious interest in trying out as novitiates, they were again told they must leave everything they own, and were given a week to decide. Then they would be called collect about the next step. ''It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,'' Dave told friends. When the call came, they said they were ready. They were given directions to a campground in the mountains just west of Livermore, CO. Dave and Susie packed up Dave’s VW microbus and left town.

The Anointing

He from Corpus Christi, the son of an itinerant Presbyterian minister, and she from Houston, raised Baptist and born again at age 11, Applewhite and Nettles were seeped in the Christian gospel of the Deep South. Bo had taught music at St. Thomas Catholic College in Houston, home of NASA. So he and Nettles must have been familiar with alleged UFO sightings and visitations from outer space, kept under wraps by the government. He read the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. He decided objects people thought were angels were, rather, UFO’s.

Skyline, Houston, Texas

Applewhite, a divorced father of two after 16 years of marriage, was fired from St. Thomas, perhaps for a homosexual affair with a student from the Montrose section of Houston. What do you do when a deep Southern upbringing has taught you to despise your malfunctioning sexuality that predisposes you to ridicule, ostracism, and denial of salvation? Applewhite checked into a sanitarium seeking exorcism of his sexual preference. There he met nurse Peep, divorced mother of four who dabbled in astrology. They hit it off immediately, platonic, clairvoyant love at first sight.

It was a marriage made in outer space.

Applewhite’s vision of self-loathing became a convenient source for a new and powerful kind of redemption. Bolstered by a rejection of their dissatisfying pasts, both decided they were no longer who they once were. They began to wander by stolen car for three years exploring new identities. Neither he nor Nettles were immune to protean inter-changeability. Their self-stylized divinity would evolve throughout their “careers.” but, for now, they decided they were the Two of Chapter 11 in the book of Revelation. Fire from their mouths would devour their enemies (including bosses who fire you for being gay?). They would smite the earth with every plague. After their prophesying, they would be killed, and everyone would rejoice because the prophets had tormented those who dwell on the earth. Three days later God would raise them and call them up into heaven. Not the typical career objective unless this is a delusion of grandeur with a noticeable absence of any type of sexuality in the list of job qualifications.

Wandering in the Wilderness

Soon after her departure, Susan was admonished to write home on a handout postmarked in Livermore. She wrote her parents in Omaha, saying, ''The only way I reconciled leaving you is that I can help you from the Next Level, God's Kingdom.'' A mimeographed statement on the back suggested that even if she were to be killed, her body would be resurrected and would continue on into the next level. If this was alarming, it was because of where and when and under what conditions would she be in "the Next Level." Best hoped for was a spiritual place of repose and security from which to dispense some sort of benevolence. Worst feared for was that she was going to die soon at the hands of a kidnapping cult of death.

Despite the extreme situation of her present status, she and others were tapping into a universal sentiment going back to Plato. According to Angus, Plato, under the influence of oriental mystery religions and their attempt to respond to a yearning for immortality, wrote that man is a "heavenly plant and not of earth." He is the "spectator of all time and all existence" with an "innate knowledge of the heavenly patterns, who in self-examination can adorn his soul, which is by nature immortal." Properly situated, the soul can face the future, for "fair is the prize, and the hope great, and the venture glorious," not in a "sensuous continuity of existence," but in increasing "god-likeness in a differentiated eternity," a status that can be achieved by boarding a UFO. Susan was embarking on an adventure. Her stance as an "exhausted seeker," however, meant suspending her training in scientific thinking and declaring intellectual surrender.

Bo and Peep kept quiet watch over the nomadic group. Talks around campfires with new recruits under the stars came natural to Dave, the wilderness environmentalist, and Susie, the camp counselor. It must have been exciting, a radical departure from previous norms, yet non- threatening. And the fervent but low key exhortations of the Two fit the protean style of seekers, many who flitted like flies in and out of the new religions. Serial experiences that “taught something new,” according to Lifton, was an adaptation to the “flooding of imagery” wrought by mass communication and rapid change in modern society. I remember my own “strong ideological hunger” and shifting allegiances in those days as a Religious Studies major.

There was no hard sell. Anyone was free to leave, often given a bus ticket home. They weren’t being smothered in love either. There was no forced fusion into a collective identity dictated by their new elders. The present community wasn’t important. The future “shedding of their containers” on an individual basis, and thus the effectual eradication of community and the need for it, was everything. What bonded them together was simply the wait. Sometimes silence prevailed around the slowly stoked campfires, each listening to the wind and watching the shooting stars. Up there somewhere was their immediate destiny.

Nomadic wandering took the Two and their new initiates through a series of scruffy campgrounds. Susan and the rest were made moving targets during this initial period of indoctrination, a cosmological disappearing act, in order to evade family members or hostile vigilantes looking to rescue recruits who had earlier disappeared without a trace. They stayed in places such as Medicine Bow National Forest, WY and Bonny Reservoir, CO. Sometimes over the years they would settle for a time in towns where they earned money working as waitresses or store clerks. Recruitment was spotty and attrition high.

Rules of Order

Except for Jesus, who came "eating and drinking," every great teacher from Plato to John the Baptist, from Paul to Plotinus, decreed that a lifestyle of asceticism was a necessary qualification for religious life. Many questioning young Americans had been raised in affluence and its covert offering of sexual freedom, but Bo and Peep were seasoned critics of materialism and sexuality and its renunciation for their nascent religious purposes, ones that declared that the spiritual and the natural were mutually antagonistic and ultimately irreconcilable. The body is a tomb of the soul. Saving the soul required escaping the body. These body snatchers were body deniers.

In accordance with austere ascetic practices that were in reaction to the corrupting influences of sexuality and materialism, and also with the need to discipline, regiment, and subordinate new members, the Two exhorted Dave, Susan, and the rest of their prospective flock to give up sex, drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. I have always wondered how they took the no sex message. What made this easier, I’m sure, was their being paired in rotating partnerships. Each would monitor the other’s self correction regarding base human behaviors unbefitting the divine sparks of goodness that aliens had implanted within their corruptible “containers.” Such “catalytic conflict” between the new recruits would promote the “overcoming” process and maintain party line equilibrium. The Two would thus control through this reciprocal feedback between partners.

A sign that building community was unimportant, which made this group stand out compared to other new religions, talk with older, more experienced members was discouraged. More importantly, the Two needed absolute control over the fluidly evolving party line. Recruits were treated to low key sermons by the Two from folding chairs in camp. When hitting a sticky point, they would excuse themselves to go confer privately. They also circulated handouts amongst campers.

Sacred Tablets

I am fascinated by how Bo and Peep kept up with these scripted revisions on the road in the days before laptops. I picture a portable, manual typewriter much like an old fashioned war correspondent’s with which to make and mimeograph evolving doctrine.

A pair of vigilantes who doggedly followed the Two’s convoluted trail, finally intercepting them at Rock Cut State Park NE of Rockford, IL, was able to listen to some of their sermons and examine handmade scripture on October 6, only 22 days after the Waldport, OR recruitment event.

Historical perspective makes for a chilling effect what one of the student leaders told them in those earliest days of the cult. “No one would need to die in order to go to the ‘next level,” he said. This prompted one of the eyewitnesses to respond, “Our fear of a mass suicide (my emphasis) resulting from hypnosis abated.” *

The eyewitness, after watching a sermon the Two gave to campers seated on a semi-circle of picnic tables, reported, “I had been trained as an actor and director myself, and had taught theater arts. As I watched this couple, the man especially revealed he was acting. He used every device he had for portraying himself as that which he needed to be. His eyes were tools, his hands were tools, his gestures, his voice, his silence, his choice of metaphor, his dress- all tools. He used them in a too-conscious fashion, revealing the kind of overplaying I had seen often when a student tries too hard to be convincing to an audience, or to himself. His overacting was not wild and obvious, but very evident to me.” *

The eyewitnesses pieced together the following heretical imperatives the Two preached to proselytes and handed them on pamphlets.

“After being born in the usual way of others come from the kingdom of God, it was revealed that we are the incarnate Two of Revelation. The kingdom of Jesus, Elijah, and Moses is a physical place. Souls are planted in all vehicles by God. Our task is to reveal to you, who are now ripe souls cultivated on garden Earth, how to enter the kingdom.

“If reading just the quotations of Jesus, nothing else, it’s the same process, which is called Human Individual Metamorphosis. You must deny all ties to earthly existence and suffer rejection by unripe and unresponsive souls. Aided by the powers of Fathers now nearby, a chemical change will transform your body into a celestial vehicle suitable for the kingdom. A spaceship will take you there. Souls onboard the ship will be the first ever to enter the kingdom.

“Souls of vehicles who die apart from this exclusive process will recycle into other humans through birth. Up to this point all have died and their souls have recycled. God’s originally implanted souls, which have been reincarnating over centuries, have been migrating toward the western United States. Ascended souls will become Fathers themselves and will control the destinies of other vehicles and their souls planted in gardens all over the universe. Meanwhile Earth’s garden will be hoed under, replanted, left alone, or destroyed.

“We (the Two) are not Jesus. Jesus did not teach love of others, how to get along with others. He taught this overcoming process.

“Anything that puts doubts in your mind is the work of disincarnates, powerful earth-bound souls who have died and think they are in heaven. Demons, they have power to keep you here by pretending to love you through friends and families, which is not loving. It is clinging. They especially use the prayers of your loved ones to keep you here. You must avoid all this at all cost.

“Your body doesn’t die from Human Individual Metamorphosis. The space ship that is coming soon will carry you live to heaven.

“Spending all your time and energy telling yourself that this message is true is imperative. Thoughts about all else must be discarded.

“Once the prophecy about us (the Two of Revelation) is enacted and we are at the next level, a second space ship will come for you, once your process of preparation is complete.” *

This ingeniously devised recruitment method for gathering followers with a whacky but not necessarily insane promise that they would not die but still go to heaven "could be envied by any salesperson who ever tried to close a deal by first getting a commitment." *

*Tom Robinson Northwest Magazine 1975

Gnostic Astronauts

Bo’s and Peep’s plaint was an offbeat fusion of Gnostic Christian heresy and science fiction. Souls, “divine sparks” that had always existed, would recognize their transcendent potentiality and return to Evolutionary Level Above Human, which had been their original and only true home. What they needed was the secret knowledge or gnosis (γνώσεις) required for it to work. Bo and Peep possessed the secret, boarding passes for a literal ride aboard a modern spaceship. Carnival hucksters operating rides at the county fair couldn’t have made the ancient heresy sound more appealing.

At the heart of Gnostic heresy is dualism, traceable to Persian Zoroastrian influence, which meant that the world of fallen matter ruled by “Lucy” (Lucifer and the lesser “luciferans”) is pitted against those with the divinely planted spark who must escape to heaven.

Susan may have recognized a familiar millennial narrative with a newly adopted and rather novel space age pedigree. The time for the fallen world of matter, ruled by Lucifer’s minions, to be “spaded under” was at hand. It is interesting to note that all the categories of this narrative were encapsulated in a physical body. A physical space ship would take her prepared physical body, which would not have to die first, to a physical heaven. Physical embodiment of divine categories is not unusual. It actually occurs in the writing of the Apostle Paul, such as the “body” (σάρκ) of sin (Rom. 6.6) and the “body” of death (Rom. 7.24), both which must be redeemed through a saving event that would “further clothe” one’s “tent” with one’s “heavenly habitation.” Having more clothes, not less, would enable “life” to “swallow” the “mortal.” And God gave the “spirit” as a first “installment” (Rom. 5.1-5). The narrative just needed updating with some cool technology.

Adapting dualistic categories to new age thinking in regard to the problem of HOW this would manifest physically necessitated revision over the course of the group’s history. At first, one’s ascetically prepared body, later “container-vehicle,” would transport its spark via space technology. Ultimately, the old container must be left behind and the spark must transcend to a new and different kind of container. The seed of suicide as a means to hasten the process eventually took root and germinated in the mind of Bo the Gnostic astronaut.

The Saved Remnant

In his book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes the following. “To plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented, yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader, or some new technique, they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. And they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their undertaking.”

Though useful, aspects of Hoffer’s model don’t apply. Susan, I’m sure, felt “discontent.” I had sensed that. But she was not “destitute.” There would be lean times, for sure, some of it deliberate, such as her Spartan diet at Rancho Santa Fe that consisted of pasta for breakfast, and fruit and lemonade parceled out till bedtime. And there were good times. Members sometimes managed to save enough from wages and money that new members brought in to afford several expensive campers for their travels. Dave bought the New Mexico property they lived in just prior to Rancho Santa Fe with interest from an earlier trust fund, a possession that, interestingly, the Two had not urged that he abandon according to ascetic discipline. Lee Ann Fenton, who did much of the bookkeeping, says $300,000 to $400,000 had been a reasonable estimate of its worth. And, at $7,000 a month rent for the mansion they died in, their web design business was lucrative enough.

Per Hoffer’s “potent doctrine,” an apocalyptic narrative of escape, each participant’s ego was initially spared. The individual, not the collective, was the subject of transformation, initially called Human INDIVIDUAL Metamorphosis. This principal is traceable to Christianity prior to Augustine, elucidated by St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c. 130-c. 202 C.E.). In Irenaeus’ view, the whole history of human existence is one of progress from immaturity towards perfection. Each human is adapted by nature for the acquisition of virtue by means of moral development and growth and finally brought to the perfection intended by God. Hints of this are in scriptures, such as, “Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling” (Philippians 2.12). Bo took this and cloaked it in Gnostic heresy, stated again simply, that each one is a prisoner within alien territory ruled over by an inferior deity from which one must be liberated and taken back to one’s true home.

Susan was told she was a “student” in a “class.” She thus had class projects and homework. The “works” or drills Susan performed with her check partner were designed to diminish the fallible “human” characteristics peculiar to her, since they detracted from the character of her “divine spark.” Drills were tailored to each partner’s peculiar peccadilloes. She may have been amongst those who were made to listen to the incessant hum of a tuning fork knocked over the head. The objective of this do-it-yourself initiative was to more effectively “tune in” to her divine spark’s connection to the Level Above Human. But, in general, the drills were designed to diminish trust in one's own judgment, inappropriate curiosity, deceit, sensuality, taking initiative without one’s check partner, and desire for attention.

“Shame and fear were the impetuses to keep you under control, to keep you from thinking for yourself,” former member Michael Conyers said. ''You were trying to define yourself as a pure vessel in Bo’s mind. Your punishment was him denying you his approval.'' I cringe at how acrid, conditional love in a relationship of utter dependence maintained Susan’s sense of belonging and security.

Group members were permitted to occupy their spare time with ''approved'' games, like Yahtzee, Clue and croquet. They read mysteries. They watched TV powered by a generator. Bo would point out the all- too- human frailties of contestants on ''The Price is Right.''

The leaders initially were open-minded and flexible as doctrine developed. They were quick to humorously declare their “fallibility,” for instance, with an “Aw, shucks” whenever the predicted flying saucer failed to appear. Like all movements, there eventually had to be, according to Weber, a routinization of charisma and solidification of identities and roles. They experimented with his being the reincarnation of Jesus to her incarnation of Jesus’ Father. (See In His Own Words Parts 1-10) Bo had sensed from the beginning that Peep was the more mature Older Member, and when she passed away from liver cancer in 1985 under the false name Shelly West in Parkland Hospital in Dallas, he was devastated. She remained with him, communicating to him from the Level Above Human. In the living room surrounded by bedrooms filled with 39 dead bodies, two chairs from Target sat perched on a folding table. One was for Peep. He successfully adjusted to her absence aided by such gestures, which helped to reinforce the group’s “extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future” (Hoffer) for 12 years more after her death.

Bo’s “irresistible power” (Hoffer) to keep the message plausible was originally due to his charismatic manner, which also described the product of the social relationship between Bo and his followers, but also due to his quiet leadership that, after her death, grew more rigid in its authority with each passing year. He slowly changed into Hoffer’s concept of the “infallible leader.”

Deprivation theory supports the thesis that constant isolation and reinforcement of the sacred narrative, a carefully cultivated sense of election, docile dependency to dictatorial leadership, and a habituated regimen, maintained a numbing mind control over Bo’s subjects. It was more than simply Bo’s need to dominate, to wield power. According to Berger, we confirm ourselves when we externalize our identity through conversation with others. An affirming audience powerfully reinforces that projected identity (Faurbach), which is appropriated as objective fact (reified, Nietzsche) in the mind of the adherent. In a closed community, the effect is reciprocal. An immediate space ship ride to a place without the troublesome aspects of sex, a place in which “they neither marry, nor are they given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30) would be a simple and effective solution to Bo’s repressed homosexuality, his “thorn in the flesh.” Manufacturing and maintaining multiple sexless followers like himself by means of ascetic practice and reinforcement would powerfully reinforce this androgynous self deception meant to eliminate once and for all his protracted agony over a deviant sexuality.

From Cult to Sect

The type of religious organization Susan and the others belonged to evolved along with the doctrine. The flying saucer community gradually transformed from a cult to a sect. This is attributable to the changes in the doctrine and its practice.

Initially its eclectic grab bag of metaphysical elements drew members who had no intention of restricting their ideology or their membership to a single group. Such is the nature of a cult. For instance, one could practice transcendental meditation in order to enhance one’s experience of any religious persuasion.

But Do and Ti, as they were now called, had to address the problems of the precariousness of doctrinal boundaries and authority. They began to proclaim the uniqueness of their message and the requirement of an exclusive adherence to it. Increasingly Gnostic notions of a dualistic cosmology made the message more exclusive, cloaking it in science made it more plausible, and autocratic authority protected it from challenge. They declared that change, evolution to ever higher forms, even in heaven, was perpetual. This wrapped it in the garb of the evolutionary science of Darwin. And spaceship flights to a material heaven somewhere in the galaxy wrapped it in the garb of the astronomy of Halley. Both, ironically, protected it from the secularizing tendencies of modern science and technology, which usually tend to induce assignment of authority for running civilization and its institutions, especially those that explain the way the world works, to agencies that are not religious. So deliverance from this world aboard a ship to a better life in the next level, and the arena for even further change, were both projected onto outer space in chiliastic hopes that the Level Above Human would be reserved only for them, the saved remnant. Only Do and Ti, the exclusive authorities, knew the way.

A permanent body of loyal believers began to emerge, sequestered and maintained without walls.

Managing the Household

Heaven’s Gate, being a sect, required that it maintain strict discipline, adherence to internal authority, and segregation from the surrounding social world and its government, toward which they maintained only the minimal relations required for economic and political survival. It used strictly cash in order to sever ties to the economic infrastructure of the banks, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS. This helped conceal the borders of the theologically sequestered community from mundane oversight by the established order.

I have always wondered how they got away with that. Conning the fallen world of Lucifer had become high art, beginning early. On their epic road trips in the early ’70, the Two had often skipped out on their motel and food bills, stating that they obeyed no earthly laws. ''The Lord will be as a thief in the night.''

When the threat of breaches in security died down in the ‘80’s, members sought well paying jobs, probably because Dave’s trust fund was exhausted by 1981. Phony resumes were submitted, which required elaborate ruses. Phone numbers for out-of-state ''references'' would ring back to the house through call-forwarding. Members pretended to be past bosses and dispensed high praise.

Margaret Richter, a high school valedictorian, was a computer whiz. David Moore was a master mechanic. Susan Paup was a technical writer. They never had any trouble finding work. All who found jobs pleased their employers. Group members were punctual, impeccably groomed, and collegial but not gossipy. They ate bag lunches.

I’ve also wondered what Susie’s roles included. Members without jobs worked in the houses. Each day required intricate scheduling that dealt with endless minutiae: who would peel carrots, who would bag garbage, who would drive whom to work. The group kept the Procedures Book, as big as a phone directory. It mandated the direction for pulling a razor while shaving and the proper circumference of a pancake. The lesson here was not so much that there was a single right way to do things, but that unquestioning obedience was essential for a Next Level mind.

Avowed masters of mall shopping, the Two outfitted members via T. J. Maxx and Burlington Coat Factory. Apparel, even underwear, was shared. Permission for sole use of any article of clothing was denied.

Members felt fondness for each other while busy with the burdens of mundane housework. But expression of such was forbidden. Giving a hug soiled the bodies of the affectionate. Or else such behavior proved an addiction to be overcome. Lee Fenton was addicted to giving and receiving affection. Dick Joslyn was addicted to egotism. John Craig was addicted to stubbornness. Angela Skala was addicted to pie. What was Suzie addicted to, I wonder?

And I wonder what Susie thought about all the regimentation, down to the rudiments, such as how toothpaste and soap were arranged in the bathrooms, and how to bake a bourbon pound cake “10 inches high” with which to reward (mollify and keep quiet) those who helped at the car wash. (Body-despising ascetics, they didn’t eat such food themselves, of course.)

Susie and the others, I’m afraid, didn’t think much at all.

Heaven’s Internet House Calls

The dawn of the inexpensive Internet pc around 1994 ushered in the ultimate, and final, windfall of Heaven’s Gate’s isolated economics. Work could be done at home. Those with early training in computer science went to work as web page designers, calling themselves, with entrepreneurial flourish, Higher Source. I picture sexless monks at pc’s all over the mansion stroking away at keyboards, lemonade and fruit dishes accumulating on the desk tops. Since computers free the imagination from the everyday world, inevitable downtime in pallid closed quarters led to graphic doodling with childish whimsy. Post-rapture imaginings took many field days, I’m sure. Sci Fi pop art kitsch popped up and got printed to adorn the tack boards in cubicle-like work areas. The following is a gallery of galactic gleanings that illustrate Heaven Gate’s techno-sentiment, emotional need, and cultural fluff.

After fleeing Earth, the cultists, now higher members, construct an Earth Lab

Controlling a typhoon on Earth; moving toward Saturn’s rings

Pluto’s polar entrance for a landing ship; descending to its inner core

Older Member exits shuttle to greet Plutoans; confers with Pluto’s chief

The Rapture or “Beam Me Up”

The sect had started out 22 years earlier “wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their undertaking,” according to the Hoffer thesis. The greatest “difficulty” was the waiting. Many had left as the wait dragged on. Those who held out were those who were irrevocably mentally hooked. Susan’s tenure of 22 years was amongst the longest. When Hale-Bopp appeared, the difficulty of their undertaking suddenly became simple. Continuing in support of Hoffer’s thesis, the sect discovered “some new technique” that provided “access to a source of irresistible power.” That technique was suicide.

Hale-Bopp's approach is the "marker" we've been waiting for -- the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to "Their World" --in the literal Heavens. (Heaven’s Gate website)

The media made a field day out of the giddy anticipation sect member’s presented in the “suicide note” videotapes broadcast to the world via ex member Rio DiAngelo at the sect’s web design employer. Hale-Bopp had ushered in the moment of truth, confirmed by its greatest brightness occurring on March 23, the day of a full Moon, which was also about the time of the Spring Equinox. And it was Easter Week, the holiest liturgical celebration in the West for an event involving the death (suicide?) of one of the greatest Higher Members to have ever visited Earth. It was an occult fantasist’s dream come true.

Never mind that the sighting of a bright “space ship” in the comet’s tail proved to be just another star. Their wait was over. It finally came time to ascend from their despised earthly “vehicles” to the celestial one made real by Hale- Bopp. It would start Saturday, March 22.

The rite was orderly, antiseptic, and precise. The house was in order without a dirty dish in the sink (Well, there was one unfinished load of laundry). Nary a drop of blood was spilt. All followed procedure: a communion cocktail of Phenobarbital in fruit, washed down with vodka, so the knockout would make death painless and unobservable to the communicant, and a plastic bag over the head to induce actual death by means of suffocation.

Susie was one of two partners who were the last to die, Tuesday, March 25. Here’s where putting myself in her place becomes especially difficult. I was curious about Susie’s paired partner at the end, nurse Julie LaMontagne, 45. Raised by a foster family, she got her nursing degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, graduating cum laude in 1974. Shortly afterward she saw her best friend drown and her birth father, with whom she had remained close, die of cancer. The deaths "just made her collapse," says her brother. "We could never get her back after that." She drifted through a series of New England communes until she stumbled on Heaven's Gate in the late '70’s. She became Applewhite's personal nurse.

Susan Francis Strom at the time of her passing, age 44

The only description made by outsiders came toward the end, just before the two moved to the mansion in one of the exclusive gated communities of Rancho Santa Fe. Susie and Julie had a rummage sale at their little house. Their neighbor reported that the women were dreamy, charismatic. “You were drawn to them,” she said.

Coroners know the precise sequence of decay dead bodies undergo at specific temperatures. Death began on Saturday or early Sunday, according to the San Diego County coroner, Dr. Brian Blackbourne. Susie and Julie must have experienced the certain stench of decay, evident by Tuesday, three days later. What did they think seeing no one being whisked away, neatly packed bag in hand, each with I.D., such as a passport or a driver’s license, despite the announcement by Do on tape that each was to “become another individual,” and a $5 bill and two quarters to demonstrate that they were not vagrants?

I have to imagine that the scene, each body laid out on a bunk bed or futon with the same uniform, black pants and tunic, each sporting a shoulder patch stating, “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” Nikes bought in bulk at $10 apiece, and each under the same purple triangular shroud, just made it right. Don’t question Do, even if he’s dead and smelly. Maybe they were just following Scripture. The words of Revelation state, “And those from the peoples and tribes and tongues and nations will look at their dead bodies for three and a half days, and will not permit their dead bodies to be laid in a tomb.”

The sacred narrative had demanded a major revision when Ti died in 1985, her body remaining quite bound to this world. The faithful would each ascend in a new “vehicle,” a parallel body, acquired with Next Level knowledge, with a different molecular structure. It would lack teeth and a digestive system, and, most importantly, a reproductive system. A whimsical portrayal of its childlikeness, innocent yet wise, all brain, adorned the mantle in the mansion’s master bedroom in which Do lay, propped up with pillows. Did Susie see such bodies appear at the scene? If so, maybe the journey was too brief to require a change of clothes, and the cash was in the wrong currency.

When it was finally their turn, Susie and Julie may have felt confused that they would be unable to complete the rite of transformation to the Evolutionary Level Above Human. There would be no one to take the ugly bags off their heads, neatly put them into the dumpster out back with the others, and place the purple shrouds over them. I find it noteworthy that they did not toss a coin or something that would determine how one would help perform the entire rite for the other, leaving only one partially able to complete the process. However, conditioned over many years to partner in everything class members did together, Susie and Julie performed the ritual in a seamless, synchronized choreography. Both were found with bags over their heads and no purple shrouds.

Aftermath

One has to admire how well they pulled it off:

1. Meticulous preparation, probably scripted in the conditioned manner of all their activities (some of it written on notes)

2. A “press kit” consisting of a flamboyant, even smug, announcement of their “do-it-yourself rapture” on the title page of their clandestine website, “Hale- Bopp Brings Closure to Heaven’s Gate; As was promised, the keys to Heaven’s Gate are here again in Ti and Do (The UFO Two) as they were in Jesus and His Father 2000 years ago,” and suicide notes in the form of farewell tapes, each bidding the world goodbye with child-like happiness;

3. A “last supper” at Marie Callender’s Restaurant in Carlesbad, the burden of choice eliminated by making just one selection, consisting of iced tea, dinner salad with tomato and vinegar dressing, turkey pot pie for entre, and cheese cake topped with blueberries for dessert

4. Perfect setting, a comfortable, big enough place in a gated community in which the covenants at the top of the list were about ensuring privacy, best exemplified by the absence of street lights

5. No witnesses, no interference, that is, until ex member Rio DiAngelo got the tapes. By then it was too late for him to become a witness, and thus an accomplice, or sound the alarm to do anything about it. It could have backfired. He got the tapes Tuesday by Fed Ex, when the plan was Wednesday. Susan was still alive on Tuesday. DiAngelo put them aside until Wednesday.

Who’s at fault for this tragedy, if it can even be called one? Applewhite? Despite sectarian characteristics, with its inherent top-down authority structure, the process he utilized was a direct outgrowth of the epistemological individualism of the cultic milieu. They came with their questions, and “freely” went with his answer, a powerful one in its freedom-inspiring simplicity. His potent message about “potentialities of the future” (per Hoffer) for each member of his chosen spaceship “crew” was the one and only thing. This world and all its factors past and present were categorically to be disparaged. The world was not real. Reality was, instead, always the near-future escape in a UFO. Susie felt freedom and special recognition in this divinely appointed opportunity that inspired confidence and gave a simple and powerful meaning to her existence.

But people died. Heaven’s Gate has been judged a death cult. That’s tragic, is it not? One can argue that history is replete with stories of people dying for their beliefs. However, these deaths will always be questioned. Was it 39 suicides or 1 suicide and 38 murders? American society is grounded, in part, on the legal protection of lives. And the members of Heaven’s Gate were in the grip of voluntary enslavement to an ideology that ignored these laws of the fallen world order surrounding them. They had abdicated self control to the decisions of their leader who wrote the book of laws governing their community. I am sure there was no give-and-take about that. Do called the shots. And people died at the hands of people. When is that legal? Times of war? They would have argued that they were at war with their enemies, the “luciferians” all around them. Everyone was the enemy, down to the very bodies they occupied. He said that.

Judged strictly by a legal, constitutional standard, Susie’s last act on this earth was felony assistance in multiple suicides. What about killing the enemy who is your self? Can she be blamed for that? Enter the Kavorkian legal conflagration. How about its premeditation? Enter the issue of mind control that “made her do it,” even after the leader who came up with the idea was already dead, probably by the end of the second “wave” of 15, sometime on Monday, March 24.

Being ordered to kill is an argument that failed to protect the Manson family girls, and also convicted Manson, though he was absent from the scene when the 1969 Tate/LaBianca murders that he ordered occurred. The scenario of Applewhite’s argument, if it could be played out in the courts, that the coming of the comet Hale-Bopp made him order self- inflicted murder, would have failed, as did his defense that an older member made him steal a car in the early ‘70’s. The courts would also have condemned his argument that the suicide sect members were not taking their lives, rather, they were giving their lives, “developing” them into a more advanced state. Suicide defined in his own context, in a clever reverse psychology, meant "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered.”

Moment of grief: technician at the San Diego County Morgue

The class for overcoming humanness was now officially over. 38 volunteers, conditioned by time and reinforcement to become unwavering fans (read fanatics), were compelled to obey the command of a man with a grandiose psychosis. You will know him by his fruits that included no sermon on the mount, sacrifice for one’s neighbor, social ethics or services, or honor for mother and father. Even Mary was allowed to be with her son at his death. The only fruit grown was powerfully legitimating his self-appointed annihilation with multiple participants made docile, unwitting, and willing by means of his relentless indoctrination that, in Susan’s case, spanned 22 years. According to Do’s reckoning, the time it took to prepare the class for the Level Above Human, from its reference, was 31 minutes.

In the end there was no one to indict, no one to try or convict, no one to incarcerate or commit. Justice had become too elusive. The only things that could be done were to notify next of kin, cremate the bodies, auction off the meager property left behind by the dead members of Heaven’s Gate (sold for $33,000, including between $100 and $130 for each bunk bed the bodies lay on, proceeds to go to the families of the deceased for burial expenses), and wonder about the status of the divine “sparks,” the souls of those who Applewhite and Nettles had come to liberate. On my part, I pray for Susan’s.

Beyond Opera: the Incredible Voice of Jackie Evancho

2011-07-10T17:24:00.001-07:00

The shy, retiring, and brilliant naturalist, Charles Darwin, had his bulldog to ward off the nay-saying theologians in Thomas Huxley. The diminutive, "nice," and brilliant classical crossover singer with an utterly unique ability, Jackie Evancho, has her bulldog to ward off the nay-saying opera professionals in “Ehkzu.” Time and again Ehkzu takes on the “expert” critics who insist on making Jackie out to be an operatic wannabe without portfolio. The following is an excerpt from his counterattack against the latest operatic critic, which I have edited so that it reads in general terms. After that is speculation about what it is that causes Evancho’s voice to have such an incredible effect.

Photo enhancement courtesy of Greg Chance

“Don’t judge Jackie's voice production by opera singer standards. She has never said she was an opera singer, or aspired to be an opera singer. In fact when interviewers call her an opera singer she promptly and politely corrects them, saying she's a classical crossover singer.

“Most--not all--opera singers do embarrassingly badly at singing pop and vice versa, as Aretha Franklin's trauma-inducing rendition of Nessun Dorma aptly shows. Each musical genre has its own standards for singing excellence. Opera singers most likely would do wretchedly singing Indian classical music, which employs training and standards fully as demanding as opera. And classical music that is not opera, such as lieder/art songs, is often trampled by opera singers' stentorian blasts when a more intimate sound would suit the music far better. It's not always better to ‘park and bark.’

“So while it's true that ‘a child's anatomy cannot support a full-voiced [i.e., operatic] tone,’ it's also true that this is irrelevant. It IS pleasant to listen to for those ‘without a working context of what a true, trained voice can and should sound like.’

“Ms. Evancho has a large number of fans who are thoroughly familiar with the operatic repertoire from Monteverdi and Gluck to Handel and Mozart and Weber and Verdi and Boito and Wagner and Puccini and Weill and Bartok, right on through Philip Glass and John Adams; who know, for example, that Ms. Evancho's Ombra Mai Fu was written for a castrato--a voice quality no living opera singer can reproduce, as it happens. So, by strict originality standards, what opera star has any more right to sing it than Ms. Evancho does?

“And when Ms. Evancho does sing opera arias, she does not sing them operatically--nor does she intend to, nor do her listeners want her to. I love Domingo's Nessun Dorma more than Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma, which I find pretty but insubstantial --and I love Ms. Evancho's Nessun Dorma which, in her capable hands, becomes such a different rendition that I don't even find them competing with each other. One epitomizes Turandot's storyline; the other is a concert piece serving artistic goals unrelated to the specifics of the aria as sung during a performance of Turandot.

“’Her parents are ‘exploitive?’ Unless the critics know them and can prove that they're exploitative parents, they should have the moral courage to realize that they slander them and should apologize profusely for their offensive assumption.

“That her work ‘almost certainly guarantees that any genuine career in the classical arts will never be an option’ directly contradicts the statements about her current and future prospects by Julliard voice teachers as well as music professors at Carnegie Mellon University.

“The fact is that she doesn't belt--ever. She always stays well within the limits of her considerable range. Her concert schedule is extremely light. She does challenging pieces like Nessun Dorma rarely. She's examined by an otolaryngologist biannually and more often by voice teachers to make sure that she's doing nothing to damage her instrument. And her mother, a nurse by profession, has stated repeatedly that they do everything in their power to ensure the long-term safety of her instrument.

“Opera critics express contempt for classical crossover music. I understand this attitude to a degree. It's certainly easier to sing When You Wish upon a Star from Disney's Pinocchio than Glitter and Be Gay from Bernstein's Candide. But difficulty of singing something and the aesthetic pleasure that something produces are independent variables. There are many operas that are emotionally shallow and, while not easy to sing, are not particularly moving. There are also many operas that are great works of art and are profoundly moving.

“Same goes for other genres. Peggy Lee's "Fever" rendition doesn't require much of a range, but her phrasing and nuanced delivery make it thrilling to listen to--in a way that the formally beautiful but emotionally pallid Flower Duet from Lakme does not. And some operatic pieces that are quite moving aren't that difficult to sing.

Photo enhancement courtesy of Greg Chance

“And even within opera, few have what it takes to do, say, Siegfried. That doesn't make a tenor who isn't a heldentenor worthless or even inferior. Just different.

“‘In truth, this girl's voice sounds no different from any other child who has had early vocal lessons.’ What? She’s an autodidact (one self-taught) who developed her distinctive sound without ‘early vocal lessons.’ There is not one YouTube link to any other prepubescent singer who sounds like her. I've listened to Beverly Sills and Julie Andrews at that age, and they don't sound anything like Ms. Evancho. They sound like girls with possible futures as coloratura sopranos. Ditto every single other recorded child's voice out there.

“And every parent who thinks their child is the next singing star links their YouTube clips to Jackie Evancho's. I've listened to all of them and not one sounds remotely like her.

“Operatic critical conclusions about Jackie Evancho and her parents are easy to understand for what they are, statements by those who are prisoners of their own expertise.

“Unfortunately, operatic parochialism trumps operatic education and makes critics unable to understand why Jackie Evancho regularly makes musical sophisticates and non-sophisticates alike tear up when she sings. The ancient Greeks, when exposed to the oratory of the Sophists, would say, ‘How well they speak.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they would say, ‘Let us march on Sparta.’

“These critics are like the Sophists. Jackie Evancho is like Demosthenes. At some level opera critics must realize this. So, is it sheer envy that makes these critics seek to belittle this young lady, her parents, her genre, and her fans? Is it the knowledge that she will be the beloved of millions and bring many to opera who had never listened to it before she exposed them to it, for decade after decade....while many critical operatic singers toil in obscurity?”

How then does Jackie Evancho have the power to stun people? I’ve seen the following words in print used to describe the effect of her voice: spellbinding, enchanting, enrapturing, entrancing, euphoria-inducing, rhapsodic. Many report laughing and crying tears of joy at the same time. Ehkzu reports that one of the professional operatic chorus singers doing backup for her Nessun Dorma as a guest on Britain's Got Talent said she was "gobsmacked" by this child's voice.

This experience, in my opinion, remediates “cognitive dissonance,” an inability to fathom what was once a common cultural currency in western entertainment for centuries, opera. Times have changed. Many Americans know what opera is but can’t seem to make much sense of it. The “recontextualized” or “crossover” sounds heard from Evancho, however, do make sense of the classical style of singing, wonderfully so. Her singing releases listeners from mystification with operatic sound. So pleasant, so familiar, it even has the power to cause ekstasis, (έκσταση), which literally means away from place, one’s mental place, meaning that one goes out of one’s mind when hearing Jackie sing. The place or state the listener is sent, into which she intends to send them, is a blissful one, a state of seeming grace.

This ecstasy can happen especially when watching her sing. In this sense, some compare her to the European singing sensation of the mid-nineteenth century, Jenny Lind. Like Evancho, there was something about Lind’s person, who could only sing to live audiences in the days before recorded music, that contributed to the success of her incredible voice. The biographical pamphlet promoting Lind's highly successful American tour states, "It is her intrinsic worth of heart and delicacy of mind that produces Jenny's vocal potency." She earned for promoter P. T. Barnum $5,000 per performance and for herself $350,000 in one year, a fortune in 1850 dollars. She gave most of it away to benevolent societies, particularly for schools in her native Sweden. As for Evancho, examiners of her character cite “purity, simplicity, humility, gratefulness, innocence.” Besides prodigious talent, she must share with Lind compelling personable qualities that reach out from behind her voice to captivate and enthrall audiences.

Photo enhancement courtesy of Greg Chance

Still, this doesn’t seem enough to explain what it is about her voice that causes this effect, this “melting of the soul.” Observers use terms like, “effortless, elegance, and beautifully soaring.” People cite phenomenological particulars such as perfect pitch and haunting timbre. Statements like “a light, lyric soprano tone that is integrated, smooth, round & buttery” are descriptive yet do not fully explain. She allegedly has good “diaphragmatic control.” What is meant by her ability to “blend modal and falsetto registers without passagio” over a wide range must give clues to the experts, but seems more like “analysis that’s paralysis” to the common listener. Piers Morgan of the show that gave Evancho national recognition, America’s Got Talent, says, “perfection.” Sharon Osbourne says, “heavenly.” Simon Cowell says, “magic.” Impressions, however, are not explanations, and we are still left at a loss. So is Evancho. People ask, and she struggles with a response. “An angel,” perhaps, gives her a sense that she is “the first to have ever sung the song.” Something causes her to become “possessed by the music” while singing, an ability that she attributes to God. She just thanks God for her voice and prays prior to each performance that God be with her on stage and sing with her.

Maybe there just simply are no words to adequately explain “it.” Evancho opens her mouth to sing and something happens. It is inexplicable and maybe ought to remain so. But the best I’ve seen is the conclusion at which Ehkzu arrives. “It's not just the pipes, or the training, or the wholesome attractiveness of the total package. It's that she understands, even at eleven years of age, the inner nature of art. And she communicates that in performance. Nobody taught her that. Nobody can teach you that. She just has it. And it will take her around the world and into the hearts of millions of people. She won't just be admired--she'll be beloved, because she embodies not just an extraordinary talent, but our highest aspirations.

“When I watch her perform I want to be a better person.”

Coming Full Circle for Esme, Little Saint of Cincinnati, with Love and Squalor

2011-07-07T21:54:00.001-07:00

I notice that today is the seventh of the month, which marks the passing of thirteen year old Esme Louise Kenney, little saint of Cincinnati, Ohio, this time twenty eight months ago. It’s a good time to consolidate recent events and their meaning in my heart.

Jogging a few weeks ago, I passed through Calvary Cemetery, my usual custom, which invariably got me to thinking about Esme. Outside the gates along the sidewalk, I chanced on a sheet of music. It contained a continuous refrain, filling both sides of the sheet, "Who whilst among the choir above, thou dost thy former skill improve."

I intuitively inferred that hereon I was learning about the status of Esme, who was aptly and preternaturally named after the character with self-assured imperturbability and aplomb in J.D. Salinger’s story, For Esme, with Love and Squalor. She, like her namesake, sang in a children’s choir. When I got home I reread Salinger. "At three-fifteen, the board stated, there would be children's-choir practice… Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children's voices, and not just because she was seated nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way."

I recalled what a teacher had written about Esme’s singing, due to her enrollment in Children’s Choir at Cincinnati’s School for the Creative and Performing Arts. “Gosh, I would stand outside room 313 during my lunch bell, the bell when Esme's choir rehearsed, and pick out all of the voices I recognized, and to my ears, hers stood out the most.”

I believe in signs. Esme is now a better singer.

At about the same time, I received in the mail a lot won at auction that is a first day cover with a plate number strip of stamps that commemorates the 150th anniversary of the defeat of General Burgoyne during the Revolutionary War. The envelope was franked in New York City, an “unofficial city” that the Post Office did not intend to allow for the first day of issue. The dealer stated the cover was unique.

First day cover of Scott 644 strip of five with plate number single

But what really caught my attention was that it was addressed in 1927 to someone living at 728 Circle Drive in Cincinnati. I Google-mapped the address….one block east of Winton Avenue as it passes Spring Grove Cemetery where Esme is memorialized with a planting of a Weeping Higin cherry tree. What were the chances of this?

Said before, I believe in signs. That was when I dropped what I was doing and got in my car to go there. I had to go. I took my journal.

At Spring Grove, next to the cherry, I reread what a friend had written. “I want to mirror your immensity. I want never to be too weak or too old to bear the heavy, lurching image of you. I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false. I want to stay clear in your sight.” She included a photo of Esme sitting at the dining room table when she was nine.

This had been my response. “Esme, you are etched into my soul. Your silence has become the voice of those who love you, who gladly bear your heavy, lurching image like a cross, who sat in that very chair eating your mother's duck dinner, who lit ashen rockets that lifted prayers and tears in your name up to the ceiling from where your computer sits, who you've taught by your love that embraced everyone you met never to remain closed and false, who slept on the floor under your drawings and poems and next to your books, feeling the patter of your feet over the oaken floor boards, who you have inspired to write and compose poetry from the heart, who have attempted to walk your lonely, horrific passion around a reservoir in a sympathetic attempt for it to become theirs and not just yours, prostrate all night in the snow and again all night in the rain under blinking Star Tower at your Golgotha where you gave up your last breath, embracing your immensity that appealed to the fatherhood of your tormentor upon that spot, causing conscience to replace falsehood long enough to put away for life any chance that others befall your fate, who call you their hero, their model of sainthood, who hope to gain by your sacrifice a chance to become like you, to stay clear in your sight.”

“E.L.K.” is written on the placard permanently affixed around the cherry for Esme Louise Kenney. Suddenly another kind of ungulate, the common whitetail deer, Odocoileus virginianus, bounded past within a few meters of where I was sitting.

“Hi, Esme.”

Camped that night at Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky, I walked in reverie, marveling at the goodness of nature’s lush deciduous architecture all suspended in pouring rain, and showing Esme how the wet leaves of the woods, filled with white oaks, walnuts, hickories, eastern junipers, paw paws, green ashes, and honey locusts, have spiritual connotations. Back in camp, I reflected on my experience.

“Leaves are small, numerous solar collectors, perpendicular to the sun for maximum absorption of light, and flat for maximum dispersal of heat with minimum weight per leaf. They are arrayed upon a scaffolding of twigs, which distributes them in layers that fill the volume of the canopy. Instead of raising one large ‘arm’ that displays one huge leaf, a tree raises many small fingers that display many small leaves easily over wide horizontal and vertical dimensions. Viewed from the side of the tree, one sees a lot of empty space for maximum ventilation. Viewed from above the tree, one sees what appears to be a continuous sheet of light-intercepting green. I think that architecture of leaves in ways that maximize utility and economy is fabulous! In fact, leaves in light are windows into the souls of trees.

Esme, you are like a leaf in light, a window into the soul of humanity. About that, you will never be forgotten.”

___________________________________

The following is a response by Esme’s mom that explores further the phenomenon of “circle” reflected at Spring Grove Cemetery.

Here is an aerial view of where we said goodbye to Esme. From the cemetery map you can not tell that it is a "circle," but it shows up on Google Earth. It was in the center of this circle that we were able to spend a few minutes with her between the coroner's office and her cremation. Her memorial tree is to the left, west of the road.

The Time We All Lived in a Yellow Submarine

2011-07-07T19:09:00.001-07:00

Sandbars ruled the route of the raft down the Savannah River. They directed the way around a bend. They were hazards to avoid lest the raft run aground. They provided a diving board for campers during a lunch stop. And they accorded soft rest for ten campers, Chief Bob, and me while all of us slept in tents pitched on them.

Pontoons technically kept the craft from being one, but the ten boys of Chimpta Group from Camp E-ku-Summee on the Uwharrie National Forest near Candor, North Carolina insisted on calling it the “Yellow Submarine,” and painted it a bright yellow with a toothy, impudent smile on its front. I suppose their giddy excitement at the prospect of floating for twenty eight days on it down the border between South Carolina and Georgia is what suspended more careful christening.

Why not paddle canoes, the usual therapeutic maneuver marshaled by the managers of the Eckerd wilderness camping program? Well, “it’s in the field manual” to use the words of Tom Hank’s character in Saving Private Ryan.

That manual would be the bible, of sorts, called Wilderness Road, published in 1965 by Campbell Loughmiller of the Dallas, Texas Salesmanship Club. Director of Camp Woodland Springs, the Club’s primary beneficiary, he had tinkered for twenty years by then with using camping as the tool toward rehabilitating kids with emotional problems. There’s a chapter about rafting down the Red River and then down the Mississippi to New Orleans. I looked it up recently.

From an academic point of view, perhaps the most pertinent undertaking for the trip was an intensive study of the Savannah River watershed. Map study and social studies provided the main focus. Putting in had to be below the “fall line” off the Piedmont Plateau before which much of the river had been stopped by dams. Serving then as one long spill way, the route from there to the city from which it derives its name was narrow, yet deep enough for big boats, including tugs pushing barges. We marveled one time in camp inspecting how the river captain of one such tug nimbly finessed its lumbering push toy around the narrow bend on which our campsite lay.

Using no power, just floating like Huck Finn’s, Yellow Submarine had no use for a rudder. So one of the academic questions in the preparation was how a sweep oar would be used for steering. Then there were measurement exercises of all kinds, from coinciding cabinet dimensions with equipment volumes, and loading weight with pontoon buoyancy specifications. I remember dissuading the menu crew from an inordinate reliance on breakfasts consisting of hominy grits with Cheese Whiz stirred in. Though never described using the term, “school” continued on board with lessons in art, botany, reading, and journal writing.

The boys had to calibrate river speed with channel length in order to gauge where to put in and take out according to allotted time of travel. The Savannah River turned out to be a rather fast-flowing stream. I proved that one day when swimming free, no PFD, so I could scull down to the river bottom. The river bottom whipped along handily underneath my feet. We easily reached the city of Savannah with time for layovers, I remember.

If one word summarized the feel of the trip, that word is gritty. Sand got into everything. Campsite cleaning became grit removal mostly. And if one paragraph summarized the meaning of the trip, that paragraph is found in Campbell’s book in the chapter RAFT TRIPS.

“If the raft belonged to the boys when they weighed anchor at Denison, Texas, it belonged to them now in a deeper sense. It had acquired a spiritual quality. It had been so intimately and vitally a part of their lives for these many weeks that they had regarded it almost with affection.”

Woodsy Domicile: Forest Gardening and The Elusive Return to Eden

2011-06-11T13:55:00.001-07:00

Home ownership holds a mythical place in the American experience, alongside no taxation without representation, Paul Bunyan, Ichabod Crane, motherhood, and apple pie. It’s the foundation of the “American Dream.” A science teacher mostly having worked in low-paying private schools, I was fortunate enough to satisfy strict criteria governing this critical piece in our capitalist economy only once in my working life. It was in the late nineteen nineties when, for about five years, I lived in a ranch house on an acre and a half of oak woodland in NE Illinois. This is a story of how the opportunity to live in this “woodsy domicile” was more than just an escape from the world of rentals ruled by landlords.

The county was once dominated by an oak savannah “prairie” landscape that, historically, was plowed into corn fields. And by the present time, “Chicagoland” sprawl had come knocking, rather more like pounding, on the county’s door. The Clinton boom era was personally seeing to it that these farms filled up with housing developments and shopping malls.

Meanwhile, I was very busy spearheading the development of an innovative curriculum for a new freshman science course at one of the public high schools. The program was based on a unifying principle: Matter interacts within systems of varying scale, which cycle and recycle matter as energy passes through them. The object of study would be the local landscape. Students would be encouraged to learn this science as they explored problems in the local community and their solutions, especially those resulting from land use issues due to sprawl. Fashioning this curriculum took me on a driving tour all over the county studying forest preserves, farm communities, and housing subdivisions. My observations raised pertinent questions that ought to be asked students. Should farmland be stripped of some of the richest topsoil in the world to prepare foundations for new buildings? How do engineers mitigate the effects of periodic flooding due to rainwater having fewer natural places to go, because all the new development included impervious asphalt and concrete? I was keenly interested in drainage patterns, following the flow of water through different parts of the landscape and observing how the county managed its developments in order to capture water that fell on them and channel it down the watershed. I studied modern detention and retention ponds that reflected a rather technocratic, engineering habit of mind regarding storm water abatement. There were also more intuitive, as well as “green,” approaches to channeling and dispelling water by using berms, swales, and native prairie landscaping.

Such lessons in how the county landscape was part of a watershed system through which energy, provided by incoming solar radiation, caused winds to blow, bringing, in turn, water vapor that precipitated and drained away as gravity pulled it down watercourses, was how I was able to find the “woodsy domicile.”

Although I had hired a realtor who only knew houses, I was more interested in the setting and had been keeping an inventory of interesting lots with “For Sale” signs as I wandered the rural roads. One in front of a ‘50’s era ranch hinted at the prospect of living on a glacial moraine that, over ten thousand years since the retreat of the mile-thick ice, developed the kind of clay soils supportive of thick forest. The lot had been subdivided from an old private summer resort belonging to rich Chicagoans. The woodland was old growth. It had never been formally cut. Dominant white oak cast cute dappled shade on this and surrounding lots that were zoned unincorporated township, with fire signs for address numbers, wells for water, and septic systems for waste disposal. Languishing all winter, the owners already retired to Arizona, the house sold well below its listing price.

The oaks, Quercus alba, were some of the largest and tallest in the county. I remember marveling at the way the most distal sprigs of leaves filled in the canopy like perfectly fitted jigsaw puzzle pieces with no overlap so as to maximize space and minimize competition. Each little solar collector leaf got its share in the distribution of light.

Managing what amounted to a woodlot couldn’t have been considered more than mere “forest gardening.” What I had wanted was simply to let the lot with its native species return to a state of balance, based on the principles that had led me to this little Forest of Eden in the first place. That sounds easy, but it wasn’t. Previous owners had put in lawn grass where the forest floor once supported a diverse mix of herbs, shrubs, moss, and lichen. They had used the old tractor mower left in the shed to scoop up and haul off the autumn leaves to huge rotting piles along the edge of the property. Some of the huge 150 year old oak trees were chlorotic, exhibiting a sickly pale green color in their leaves, due to the absence of necessary nutrients that were supposed to have been made available by the annual leaf fall. Who knows what pesticides and herbicides they used to maintain the monoculture of grass at the cost of a mix of interacting ground cover plants, insects, nematode roundworms, fungi, and microorganisms, which tend to more efficiently utilize and move nutrients through their cycles? Where there wasn’t grass were thickets of exotic, invasive weedy species. It was going to take a lot of work giving the wood lot back its more natural and self-sustaining properties.

And that work couldn’t even start until a more fundamental problem got solved: what to do with storm water. During the nineteen nineties, the area experienced a five hundred year storm that dumped seventeen inches of rain in twenty four hours. Taking my cue from storm water management policies and procedures, which had bubbled prominently to the surface in local building codes, and had become a foundation piece in the high school science curriculum list of topics, I got a chance to model a miniature version of a municipal storm water abatement system on the lot.

Storm water pooled along the front of the long, ranch-style house and leaked terribly through a basement window, which had been sloppily bricked in to make way for a bay window sometime in the past. With a pick axe, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow, I dug out thirty cubic yards of clay soil and fashioned a drain tile channel that led to an eight foot deep dry well filled with septic stone. It took all summer and, by means of brute muscle and bone, taught a personal lesson that served to ratify that critical piece of the freshman science curriculum.

Tutored in botany and forest ecology, I had to marvel at how foreign-evolved buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica, an understory shrub, dominated in the absence of competition under the oaks. First to leaf out in the spring and last to drop leaves in the fall, they hogged the filtered sunlight and living space, and prevented the natives from growing. In a fit of disdain, I dug up the buckthorn by their roots and dragged them all into brush pile after brush pile for burning. I used the same tractor set up to haul back the inadvertently composted, and thus organically rich, leaf litter, piling it onto the grass underneath the oak trees. I felt sadistic glee in smothering the grass while enriching the oaks with their long lost source of recycling nutrients. I drilled holes with an auger over their shallow roots systems into which I poured sulfur that would lower the pH to natural levels so that soil micelles would no longer imprison necessary iron.

I waited impatiently until the biannual garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, another invader from Eurasia, was in full bloom and then, in another fit of righteous indignation, either decapitated them of their flower tops with a weed whacker or laboriously yanked them up by their roots and bagged them until they suffocated to death. (Without bagging, the hardy little suckers would continue to grow and seed by the thousands, even though their lifestyle had been mercilessly reduced to laying in uprooted piles.)

County ordinances allowed open fires, so I applied carefully prescribed burns to keep weedy grasses and shrubs from becoming too dense. I hoped also to eliminate the seed bank of invasive species in the soil with its many years of accumulated annual deposits.

Oaks are mid-successional forest dwellers, dominant during the middle age of eastern deciduous woodlands. Their foliage is highly transparent to light. Such woods have high biodiversity. If allowed to mature in the absence of fire, these woodlands would fill with “climax community” species, including shade-tolerant maple. Only a few kinds of plants besides the maple themselves can thrive under these deep shadow-casting trees, so the biodiversity index is lower. Forest preserve enthusiasts rather prefer the bright, open, “park-like” effect that is maintained by prescribed burns under the more transparent oaks. The greater biodiversity that incoming sunlight supports in these communities enhances stability in the face of disturbances. In the case of drought, for instance, there will always be drought-resistant types to carry on. And if some critters were to be lost to species-specific predators, a myriad of other species would remain to maintain the efficient flow of energy and cycling of nutrients.

Without fire to clear away the competition, especially for light, oak seedlings don’t stand a chance. So like an expectant daddy, I welcomed little oak seedlings found sprouting in the understory and, in a spirit of doting parental investment, weeded around them and devised a caging system made out of chicken wire and chain link fence stretcher rods, available at Home Depot, to keep the deer from browsing them for brunch.

Oaks periodically “mast,” producing an overabundance of acorns. The adaptive advantage of this expensive behavior is that it overwhelms hungry squirrels and other predators. It also helps edge out the other sprouting plant competition. I remember falling acorns bonking the car top and roof all night long one autumn. The crop of plump, green orbs, after a winter of “scarification” by winter cold, a necessary step in the seed preparation process, resulted in hundreds of new born babies. I gave up the caging intervention strategy to let nature take its toll.

Also intending on successful rearing of new born babies were the dainty warbler commuters during the annual spring migration from Costa Rica and South American to their breeding grounds in Michigan and Canada. I remember chasing frantically with binoculars after a nervous little Blackburnian warbler, resplendent in his breeding plumage, as he desultorily zig-zagged from tree to tree all around the yard searching for insects with which to recharge his batteries before resuming the nocturnal flight north.

I did feel successful in gaining ground in the struggle to return the lot to a more primeval ecological state. Though it was part of an island of woods in an increasingly fragmented landscape, native forbs, such as shooting star, true Solomon’s seal, and Jack-in-the pulpit, much to my delight, began to make their appearance in the redeemed groundcover community.

As the lot recouped its losses, becoming more diverse in native species, it slowly began to showcase the twin concepts of greater efficiency in natural resource use and greater stability in the face of environmental disturbances that I struggled to teach students in my life science classes.

Still, I knew those giant old oaks were relics left over from a past governed by processes that maintained the forest system in a steady state of dynamic equilibrium untrammeled by human interference. In the back of my mind I sensed that this oak woodland replacing itself was wishful thinking, and I grieved whenever a big oak succumbed to the larva of beetles tunneling their way through its pulsing cambium layer, the life support tissue just underneath the bark. I also worried if and when the aggressively invasive gypsy moth might finally arrive to munch the food-making leaves of the remaining trees until they starved to death. Then the dramatic oak woodland would be gone. But I can say I enjoyed many moments when “all seemed quiet” on the ecological front, even though I knew that the goal of a post-glacial and pre-Columbian era-like Eden was, at best, an elusive one.

Bird feeder in front yard

Circumstances necessitated eventually leaving this oak forest idyll and moving into the city, but I will always remember how living in that “woodsy domicile'” allowed, for a time, a real sense of respect and mutual aid in my cohabitation with these interesting forest friends.

Ringered in the Polish Triangle of Chicago

2011-03-07T16:08:00.001-08:00

March 7, 2011

School’s out. It’s Casmir Pulaski holiday, the fourth in my tenure as a teacher in the city of Chicago. It was never celebrated when I taught in the western suburbs, so I decided to pay attention, knowing how important the day must be to the largest population of Poles in the world outside of Warsaw. Should be to the entire state, because the day is backed by Illinois law.

PUBLIC ACT 80-621. ILLINOIS STATE GOVERNMENT. BIRTHDAY OF CASIMIR PULASKI--FIRST MONDAY IN MARCH--HOLIDAY. Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly :

Section 1. The first Monday in March of each year is a holiday to be observed throughout the State and to be known as the birthday of Casimir Pulaski.

Within 10 days prior to the first Monday in March of each year the Governor shall issue a proclamation announcing the holiday and designating the official events which shall be held in honor of the memory of Casimir Pulaski and his contribution to American independence.

Passed in the General Assembly June 20, 1977 and approved September 13, 1977.

Americans often prefix their identity with their ethnicity, such as African American, Hispanic or Latino American, Native American, Asian American, and so forth, and in huge cities like Chicago, there is anything but a melting pot. Such is true in the Noble Square District, crisscrossed to form a one-block triangle at its center by Division Street, Milwaukee Avenue, and Ashland Avenue, the Polish Triangle, home to Chicago’s large Polish American community. Many here, I am sure, are proud to be Americans.

So was Casimir Pulaski, who is giving me my day off. Pulaski was born March 4th, 1747 in Warka, Poland. He became a national hero in 1771 when cavalry forces he led defeated the Russians in Czestochwa. Pulaski was wrongly accused in a plot to capture and kill the King, was arrested, and condemned to death for his part in the revolt.

Pulaski managed to escape, and made his way to Paris, where he heard of the British colonialist’s struggle to break free from England. Knowing he could never return to Poland, he sought out Benjamin Franklin in Paris to ask if he would consider hiring him to fight against the British. After hearing of his reputation, Franklin recommended him to General Washington. So the proud Polish patriot of an aristocratic lineage became a proud American patriot. In a letter to Washington, he wrote, "I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it..."

Washington knew that the colonists had no trained cavalry, so in September 1777, he convinced Congress to give Pulaski temporary command of the small, new cavalry detachment. On the same day Pulaski pushed back the British at the Battle of Brandywine. The next day he prevented a surprise attack at an area called Warren's Tavern. Congress acknowledged Pulaski's leadership and commissioned him Brigadier General. He was given command of four cavalry regiments.

During the winter at Valley Forge in 1777-78, Pulaski wanted to train the cavalry properly, but was instructed by Congress to rest his men during the winter, as was customary at the time. Later in 1778, Pulaski became frustrated that his cavalry had not been involved in any important battles. Considering resignation, he asked Washington to allow him to start his own legion. He offered to recruit men, outfit them, and train them his own way. He would prepare this cavalry for active duty. After many letters from Pulaski, Congress finally agreed. With 68 horses and 200 foot soldiers, the Pulaski Legion would become the colonists' first true fully-trained cavalry.

During a battle in Savannah, Georgia, Pulaski was wounded by a cannon. He died from complications of this wound, an American hero.

I can’t think of a better way to spend the holiday that celebrates a Polish American hero than catching a little background to help illustrate my attempt to complete the collection of plate number block first day covers with the Pulaski stamp, commissioned by the U.S Postal Service to recognize the birthday of the Polish patriot of the American Revolution 150 years following his death. So far, I’ve found five of this type of cover out of twelve cities in which the 2-cent commemorative postage stamp was sold on its first day of issue, January 16, 1931. Why so many cities? They had substantial populations of Polish Americans living in them. The general is modeled from a portrait in Jones's History of Georgia, printed from an etching by H. B. Hall. Behind the vignette are U.S. and Polish flags.

More significant to me, however, is what happened about a month ago. An artist friend from Cincinnati came up to take part in a gallery opening that featured her work. Staying with friends living in the Polish quarter, she invited me to eat at Podhalanka’s. You might miss this unassuming Polish mom-and-pop diner if walking by. But it sits on the south side of Division, a few feet east of Ashland, and half a block west of Milwaukee. In other words, it’s smack dab within the one-block Polish Triangle.

I got there early, and a gray-haired lady gestured to me to sit anywhere. I sat looking at the fake brick paneling and waited for my friend. The place looked like we were going to eat breakfast in a church basement or an American Legion hall. Of course there were pictures of the Pope and huge Polish and American flags. There was also a Matka Boska Gromniczna, Our Lady of “The Blessed Thunder Candle,” and plastic flowers. It was January, but Christmas lights adorned little plastic trees in the window. Once there, my friends said this was THE place for homemade polish cuisine.

The Polish mom bid me to pick up menus on the long counter. I practically expected her to be wearing fuzzy pink slippers. I ordered pierogi (Polish dumplings). My friend ordered sour borscht soup. Her artist friend ordered something made of cabbage. Then came a plate of potato pancakes with sour cream and applesauce. What I initially thought was a plain glass of water was a sweet drink called compote. The potato pancakes were perfectly crisped while not being too full of oil. But it was heavy food. I learned that the Poles have perfected a menu that feeds Slavic peasants, the basic ingredients which consist of pork, dough, potatoes, beets, and cabbage. Someone wrote the following Haiku to describe it.

Plump, buttery lumps

Smelling of onions and dough

You make me so fat

Her friend suggested that after breakfast we stop in to see the local Polish Roman Catholic Church, Saint Stanislaus Kostka, a grand neo-Gothic structure built in 1890. The chatter on the way was friendly and informal. We arched our necks to view its high tower of traditional masonry. The doors had their original, peeling paint. The interior was rich in old world grandeur. The sacristy was resplendent with silver and gold detail. And adorning the entire wall to the left of the alter was Our Lady of Guadalupe, quite a gesture to a tradition indigenous to the natives of Mexico who have assimilated the Spanish Catholic traditions into their own according to the experiences of a faith fashioned far away from Europe.

What happened next shook me to the bottom of my very sort of refurbished Catholic soul. And recounting it now is just as poignant to me. You see, my friend lost her sweet, kind, gentle, happy, thirteen year old daughter to the brutal sexual attack of a mass murderer. It happened March 7, 2009, exactly two years ago today. He is now on death row, and the family continues to heal. There has been an outpouring of sympathy, of course, and many memorials. My grieving friend said once that she is now a new kind of mother. "It is healing to have a sense of mission in life. I'm her mom in a different way. I feel like I'm carrying on her legacy now." And I have offered since meeting my friend any help I can to aid the healing process. My friend and I sat in a pew for awhile looking around.

“Look, Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

“Yes, Madonna and Child.”

“I have no child.”

“You have a child, and you are managing her legacy.”

We sat a few moments longer in silence before finally leaving the church.

It is fitting that today commemorates a Polish American hero so soon after a visit to the heart of the Polish community, the Polish Triangle, in a city that most certainly celebrates him. Because it is also a day during which many are commemorating the two year anniversary of the leave-taking of Esme Louise Kenney, the daughter of my friend. Esme too is a hero. It is my belief that through her incredible spirit she brought a serial killer to justice, and thus saves future lives. (See Strength Made Perfect in Weakness.) It is my hope and prayer that these many are also receiving inspiration and grace today like I am, and like I did in that Polish Catholic Church that day, from the sainted soul strength of this remarkable child.

Holding Ground in the Tar Heel State

2011-03-06T20:56:00.001-08:00

I thought I could make some money selling the stamps I collected as a kid when the American Philatelic Society National Exhibition came to Chicago in 2006. I just knew my American and British Colonial stamps that had been safely tucked away in wax envelopes for years had appreciated in value. They hadn’t. What appreciated on the spot at the exhibit was my rekindled interest in collecting stamps again.

First Day Cover of Scott 797 with hand- colored cachet by Torkel Gundel

Sticking out of the stamps I failed to sell was a canceled souvenir sheet with a facsimile of the 1934 National Parks ten cent issue, reprinted to celebrate the Society’s convention held in Asheville, NC in 1937. Staring at the vignette of Smoky Mountain National Park brought to mind life and times in the Tar Heel State of North Carolina.

First Day Cover of Scott 765 with hand- made cachet by Georges Laffert

The handmade map by Georges Laffert on my rare first day cover of the Smoky Mountains stamps, part of the Farley imperforate National Parks special printing of 1935, provides me with a visual cue for my wanderings around the state. North Carolina gets its nickname from those resistance fighters during the Revolutionary War who held their ground, aided by tar and pitch from the state’s expansive pine forests that they applied to their heels. The rich diversity of geographical landscapes is well worth defending. They include the coastal Outer Banks and their barrier islands, eastern Gulf Coastal Plain, central Piedmont Plateau, and western Appalachian Mountains.

The summer I graduated from a high school in Norfolk, Virginia, my brother and I went car camping on Cape Hatteras National Seashore. This landscape spends half its time in the air. Picket fences strung along the barrier islands to control the wind-blown sand still can’t keep meandering dunes from burying telephone poles up to their necks. Grit in our camp meals testified to winds believed to have ship- wrecked many a Spanish fleet off the coast. The light beam that pours out of the second oldest lighthouse in the U.S. on Ocracoke Island has to be as yellow as Spanish doubloons that still lie spilled all over the continental shelf.

A freshly minted college graduate, I returned to the state explicitly to backpack the Smokies on my way to Florida to visit my brother, then a lieutenant in the Navy, stationed in Jacksonville. It was June, and the summer rains were pumping trillions of fresh green plant cells plump with osmotic pressure. My degree in botany made the climb through numerous ecological zones to the summits a taxonomic thrill ride, because countless plant species had been cornered here by the last ice age’s walls of advancing glaciers. The biodiversity index is off the charts, and every ten paces required stopping to marvel with my ten-power lens at some new, exotic inflorescence.

N Menard http://red-dragon-goodness.deviantart.comartFirefly-Forest-82096168

The night before ascending the green-cloaked hills I was enchanted outside my tent by a silent, blinking Disney dance of dainty dervishes. This Tinker Bell firefly display sent my mind into a rhapsody that hopelessly distracted me from my reading Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way in the light of my Hope candle lantern.

The Eckerd Foundation of Clearwater, FL hired me to counsel kids with emotional difficulties in special therapeutic wilderness camps, and I jumped at the opportunity six months later to help open new ones in North Carolina. The first, near Hendersonville below the Smokies, opened in the dead of winter. Since I was slated to help prepare the next one near Candor in the Piedmont, I wasn’t put into a therapy group; rather was sent on errands such as driving a Kubota tractor down to Candor and returning with supplies.

Time off when your residence is your workplace and your room and board is your primary pay can be challenging in winter. An $8 room with a water heater the size of a pumpkin limited one weekend’s relaxation to an episode of the Donnie and Marie Show, accompanied by pretzels and a quart bottle of beer. Finding college campuses more affordable and more interesting places to crash, I got out of my sleeping bag in the snowy graveyard behind the chapel at Warren Wilson College near Asheville one Sunday morning and wandered into the service. Students were leading the liturgy, and an absolutely gorgeous girl gave the sermon. Using the need to patch my backpack where a squirrel had gnawed a hole in the side, I set up a repair service next to the table in the student lounge where I found her later with friends. The gnarly guy with the adventure stories and romantic employment eventually got the girl, well, almost. Her romance with another student was a nuisance, but for the next year and a half, she put me up in her apartment on time off days in exchange for serving as court raconteur, regaling her with tales from the outback.

I felt bad for those kid’s first taste of camp life, waking up in their hand-made tents in frigid subzero chill. We were trained to recognize, however, how much kids cared for their tents, which they never vandalized, because they built them themselves, learning basic math and writing according to the curriculum that lay subversively hidden behind the need to get the job done. Had they been told they “were in school,” they would not have been so cooperative. I felt quite proud of one made by Chimptas, one of my therapy groups, that was pentagon in shape, a first in Eckerd history. I heard that it confused the canvas cutter and sewer back in Clearwater due to the irregular specifications.

First order of business when the Candor camp opened that spring was getting the new campers out into their first month-long canoe trip. We chose the Haw River to put in, which fuses with the Cape Fear, the primary drainage channel into the Atlantic of that portion of the Piedmont Plateau. Kids lugged canoes and gear over an eighty foot-high coffer dam of strewn boulders, tumpted canoes in rapids, pitched tents in stinging nettle, and ate cold dinner out of cans due to spending twilight singing sleeping bags to get them dry in the campfire’s heat. Alleged therapeutic benefits justified the serial sets of ordeals. Then a severe spring storm blew in. The torrential downpour pelted our lean-to’s on an island all night long. In the first light we saw only the tips of the canoes jutting out of the water like miniature ice burgs, made vertical by their moorings twenty feet below the rising water. I stripped nude and, like a burlesque pirate with a buck knife blade in my teeth, dove down to cut the lines. The river was rising fast. Yanking everything in the campsite and dumping it into the canoes, we made it to high ground, where we waited days for the flood waters to recede.

Weeks later back in camp, stories after the chuck wagon meal lived up to their tall tail trappings. A roly poly eleven-year-old, infamous for running away from programs previous to ours by hot-wiring cars and making his get away while eying the road through the steering wheel, proudly recounted his group’s rescue off their river. They had hit five-foot standing waves after the storm, and all canoes tumpted. His pinned him to a tree, and no amount of yanking could dislodge it. Being years before cell phones, a counselor had to hitch to town to alert the sheriff’s department, who failed also in their attempt. The river was rising, and the other counselor, hospitalized later for acute hypothermia, was having trouble keeping the kid positioned so as not to drown. Finally a helicopter from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg was called in to wrench the canoe free. The pudgy camper, insulated from the cold like a harp seal, was no worse for the wear.

Trips from the scooped out creek beds of E-Ku-Summee’s pine- wooded 800 acres in the rolling Piedmont to the UNC campus at Chapel Hill for furloughs took me through the heart of Tobacco Road. Every stage in tobacco’s labor-intensive growing season was visible at some point. I’d see migrant workers topping shucks, ridding them of suckers and pests, pulling their leaves, or binding them to hang in open-sided barns for curing. Chapel Hill was a major stop during my years as a college town crasher. I tried to pick up girls in cafes along Franklin Street, such as the Carolina Cafe, while looking the part of a Southern Ivy League intellectual. I’d be reading Chaim Potok’s novels about young Jews coming of age in modern society, or else investigations of sudden personality change in the then epidemic of religious cults, or especially Kierkegaard, and I would strike up conversations with them. Then I would offer to buy them a beer at Spanky’s. On the road back to camp, I’d make it as far as Chatham Mill’s embroidered patch factory in Pittsboro, once being let in to marvel at the intricate machinery needed to weave them. Before it closed in 1996, it was the largest producer of woven labels in the world. I would crash in my little Fiat with the driver’s seat flattened, with just enough time the next morning to relieve my fellow counselor so he could take his leave for a day and a half.

There would be further adventures on the trail and river with those kids before leaving the Tar Heel State. One trip took us down the Savannah River for a month in a makeshift raft, the Yellow Submarine. Another trip got us on huge Lake Murray behind the the 1.5 mile-long Saluda Dam in South Carolina, which was an engineering feat in its day. The dam, using the native red clay soil and bedrock, was the largest earthen dam in the world when it was completed in 1930. The lake behind was once the world's largest man-made reservoir. I must recount one critical decision I made one windy day in our canoes along the southern shoreline. The gale-force winds were blowing from the south, threatening to side swamp the canoes unless we did something. So at a critical point in camp time, I signaled to the other two canoes to head downwind north, which would send us zipping with the wind across the fourteen miles of the lake. I was breaking in a new counselor at the time, who sat cargo in a canoe. Devout, he was reading the Bible, probably the passage in which the disciples are entreating their Master to calm the winds over the Sea of Galilee. Surfing the whiteheads, we made the opposite shore in record time.

In camp, the primary order of business was tent building. Each group site required four sleeping tents, Chief's sleeping tent, chuck wagon large enough for ten campers plus chiefs to sit around a center table, tool tent, and latrine.

The time frame for constructing a complete set was about eighteen months, the average stay of a camper. Then tents would, one-by-one, be torn down and rebuilt. Each camper thus participated in a complete cycle of camp building.

I had earned the $1,500 stipend for sticking with Eckerd for at least two years by an August, but stayed on for awhile longer as the counselor for the transition group of camper graduates close to being discharged, who spent time in a camp learning resource center and at home with their families on weekends. It was November. The leaves were falling. My exit from the Tar Heel State was, again, by way of the Smoky Mountains. I had no idea what to do next with my life. A week solo in the mountains would be a retreat to gather clues.

I met no one else on the trail. I had the Smokies all to myself. I needed them. You see, there was this girl in Urbana, Illinois I had been chasing for three years. I had been just smitten with her. Unsure of my future and of her, I braced myself against the winds and huddled over campfires in the empty huts on the Appalachian Trail. I felt the solitude of a lone black bear rustling in the fallen leaves for food. A storm pelted me in a flimsy plastic tube tent. I stripped to ford a raging stream, swollen from the all night rain, pack held high over my head. I had to test my resolve one last time regarding her, but lingered in the mountains, not wanting to give ground in the Tar Heel State. My heart had been shaken to its foundations once before with her, and the years on the road had been, in part, a response to that experience. My odyssey had been in her name. With my letters to her recounting my adventures, I had wanted to impress her. Like Odysseus, I wanted her to be my Penelope, to whom I would come home to drive away the suitors. It was times like those when I learned that I wasn’t truly the master of my fate, the marcher to my own drum. The silence of those Smoky Mountain miles told me I had bidden her to share in molding my fate. Unbeknown to her, she was.

My Scott 749 Plate Block with Selvage Number

Smoky Mountains by Michael Mancil

My Scott 765 set of arrow blocks from an uncut Farley sheet

Auto American

2011-02-02T22:38:00.001-08:00

Inventor Karl Benz in the first automobile

There are few baby boomers who can’t say that the auto holds a central place in their psyche. It certainly is smack dab in the middle of me, a ‘50’s boomer who can list every make and style he's driven in what the sociologists say is the primary personal metaphor with which to show off one’s status, a status traceable to rising affluence in the years following WW II.

So I’d like to cite a few milestones and tell a story about some experiences with this probably marvelous, possibly malevolent, metal fashioner of minds, especially minds molded by middle class American means.

This past November, for instance, marked the 30th anniversary of Blondie’s 1980 release of Autoamerican, in which lead singer Debbie Harry satirizes the pivotal position of the car in American society.

"Based on the desire for total mobility and the serious physical pursuit of religious freedom, the auto drove mankind further than the wheel and, in remote areas even today, is forbidden as a device too suspect for human conveyance. This articulate conception has only brought us all more of the same, thoughtlessly locked into phase two gridlock, keyed up, on it's rims and abandoned on the expressway."

Then there’s my rare, handmade first day cover by artist Dorothy Knapp, franked by a plate number block of stamps commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the American Automobile Association. These stamps were issued in 1952 while I was gestating in my mother's womb. The event anticipated my birth into the height of the auto age.

The auto might be a quintessentially American devise, but I learned basic auto maintenance driving Fiats, starting in 1977 with a white ‘68 model 124. The Italians do know how to fashion beautiful designs for vehicles. I drove a used Karmann Ghia in high school, a Volkswagen for which they designed the sleek body. But the 124 was a real ugly duckling. I bought it because I liked how it sounded like a Ferrari. Well, the engines of Farraris are also built by the Germans. It seems that the Italians can’t figure out how to engineer worth a damn the vehicle itself. Oil leaked from the 124's faulty rear main seal onto the exhaust manifold, sending a stream of smoke in the car’s wake. I had a stoner and fellow botany major friend of mine fix it at his new Corvallis, Oregon garage, the Rainbow Repair. Then it sat on blocks for months until a windfall student aid disbursement enabled me to replace the rusted rear discs, which had caused them to scrape against the pads, heat up, and expand until braking without my consent ground the car to a halt along with my status as an Auto American.

The windfall refund happened at the time of my graduation from Oregon State. Fixing the Fiat was the prerequisite for hitting the road. I replaced the head gasket and water pump myself. My roommate taught me how to time the tappets with feeler gauges, a needed task when cam shafts weren’t over the head like they are today. I kept the car tuned by hand all the way to Florida to visit my brother, once checking the point gap in an abandoned shed in the pouring rain. Once in Florida, a sudden summer rain squall soaked the pavement, and I slid to a stop under the lights at an intersection. There I was met by a Ford LTD that couldn’t stop either on the slick pavement, so it wrapped my Fiat around its huge front end.

I promptly replaced it with another Fiat when a used car dealer ran after me and threw a deal hastily scribbled onto a scrap of paper onto my lap as I was driving away from his dealership. It was a deal I couldn’t refuse, a shiny white 128 model with only 65K miles for only $800. Yea, it had been freshly painted, and the engine compartment had been spray painted black to hide a multitude of sins. First order of business was to replace the velocity joints, because the protective boots had cracked, allowing Florida sand to enter and grind the gears to nubbins. I had borrowed the price of the car from my brother, so I thought I’d pay him back by means of a quick summer job. But I was hired long term by a foundation that served troubled youth, and I had to return to Oregon to arrange my affairs. This necessitated another couple of trips across the country, this time in this lemon of a Fiat.

The belt tensor loosened on every major bump in the road, and I was underneath the car many times with a wrench tightening it. The 128 was Fiat’s attempt at a front-wheel drive four -banger for the masses, so the redesigned transmission, of course, gave out crossing over the Sangre De Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. I limped into Colorado Springs where an uncle lent repair money. When the rusted stabilizer bar broke free of the body in the Cascades of Oregon, I had to grasp the steering wheel like a vise to keep the car from lurching into the oncoming lane of traffic. The welder who fixed it failed to inform me that I needed an alignment, so the new tires I got in Reno on money borrowed from my folks while at their time share on Lake Tahoe were rubbed bald by the time I got back to Florida. At least that damn Fiat got me to Vegas where I caught a show performed to the Eagles new hit Life in the Fast Lane. It served as a theme song as I barreled down the Front Range into Denver, thinking I could save on gas by coasting the car in neutral up to 80 mph, while forgetting that a jury rigged weld job giving out would have put an end to this Auto American's life in the fast lane.

But I loved that Fiat, even though everything on that car except the engine gave out. It had no radio until I could afford a tape deck with speaker boxes I had students I was counseling build. It leaked rainwater, so I fiber-glassed sealed the air intake vents, thinking that’s how the rain got in. On a winter cross country trip home to my parents in San Diego for Christmas, I wrapped myself in blankets, because the heater didn’t work. In the mountains south of Mount Lassen on a trip to Reno to look for work during the winter of the ‘82 recession an unlucky jackrabbit broke the electrical wire to the fuel pump that hung like gonads between the rear wheels. There I was under the car and an unreal star-studded sky in the pitch black night fumbling to reconnect it. Later I had to run a wire directly from the battery to a toggle switch I stuck into the dash and then back to that electric pump. Flick the toggle or the car didn’t start. I wore out the brakes coasting down national forest dirt roads after a month volunteering with Summit Expedition, a climbing and stress-camping program in the Yosemite. I put in new pads and replaced that now gummed up fuel pump while overhearing the program’s director appeal by phone for new clients. Turning into the driveway after a 600 mile trip back from canoeing in the Boundary Waters, the steering wheel suddenly spun like a top. Zero steering. My partner and I sat there shocked by the notion of how fortunate we had been. So even the rack and pinion steering had to be replaced. I self-deceptively rationalized that each new repair would restore for good my freedom as an Auto American.

I was more than happy when making enough money allowed me to invest in a new pick up, and a "For Sale” sign eventually drew a dad needing a cheap car for his teenage kid. It still amazes me how I survived that Fiat. The funny thing is that I sold it for only $300 less than what I had paid for it eight years earlier. That price plus the repairs came to just over $3000. $375/year plus gas seems to me today to be a cheap price to pay for the freedom of an Auto American.

Most people have an intuitive understanding that the golden days of Auto Americans are coming to an end. A world power cannot perennially remain one when it runs on foreign oil. And the impact on the fragile biosphere must be taking its toll, especially given the growth of that impact. Passenger cars in 1960 numbered 61,671,390. Passenger cars in 2008 numbered 137,079,843, a 221% increase. The number of registered vehicles in 2008 was 255,917,664, or 0.83 vehicles per every man, woman, and child in the country (DOT statistics). When a typical vehicle puts a pound of carbon dioxide into the air every mile it is driven, contributing big time to the nine billion tons of additional carbon per year that until our age sat sequestered as fossil deposits dating back to the Carboniferous period in geologic history, an effect has to be on its way, if it isn’t already. As a science teacher I have taught a unit on rapid global climate change every year since 1989. It makes me a little uneasy facing students with the realization that their generation gets to figure out what to do with the consequences of mine, a generation that gave rise to the golden age of the Auto American.

Stacked Spirals of Stardust

2010-12-15T21:08:00.001-08:00

October 2, 2010

After witnessing the dedication of the luminous stacked spirals of Stardust, which now hang forever in memory of Esme Louise Kenney at the new School for the Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati where she attended until she was taken from this world, I found myself seeing metaphors in kind everywhere. I heard a poem read about stacked layers of hot Earth and cold ground laid out and looking up at the Milky Way, arms spiraling from its center, just like Stardust. After the dedication, I watched a stack of prone admirers under the memorial gazing up, legs spiraling from their center, just like Stardust.

At Spring Grove Cemetery later in the day I saw an ant with a dark abdomen and red thorax and head emerge with wings from its nest on the spot where angelic Esme’s gurney had been rolled. It crawled around in the grass, not sure what it was supposed to do with its newly sprouted wings. Then it suddenly took off and spiraled, just like Stardust, around the nest opening before flying away from its wingless neighbors, a terrestrial creature now an angel too, telling stories about flights to heaven and back.

If there are trees in heaven of which the ant can speak, then I’m sure they include trees like this memorial one that adorns “Esme’s Spot” where I saw the ant in Spring Grove. A weeping variety called Higgins cherry, it serves as an enduring, yet growing, changing symbol of her organic spirit, its branches weaving, elongating throughout her survivor’s memories of her and reminding them that her light can help them grow too, just like leaves in light that serve as windows into the souls of trees. I couldn’t help but notice also how its branches seemed to spiral from the trunk, just like Stardust.

After this I was witness to a prone supplicant during a long, wet, and windy night gazing up at Star Tower, the red beacon blinking slowly atop its highest point like a metronome as it marked the hours the supplicant spent in the lonely and terrifying stack of invasive shrubs behind the reservoir where Esme was killed, its bowery brambles spiraling, just like Stardust.

And on the lonely trek back to Chicago, astonished by what I had seen and felt that weekend, I stared awestruck up at a stack of cumulus clouds over an Indiana wind farm that stretched from horizon to horizon, the turbines of each mill slowly spiraling, just like Stardust.

Treachery in the Wild

2010-07-17T06:41:00.001-07:00

My wife was on maternity leave with our first-born, and I was hired to help fill the void of her absence at the nature center in central Illinois. It was high summer, very hot and humid. So I wanted to stay inside making pen and ink drawings for brochures, figuring out an artsy way to render the calendar of public events, and illustrating labels for jars of locally gathered honey to be sold in the gift store. But I knew enough about nature to lead public hikes on the preserve’s upland oak/hickory woodland acres. That’s when I ran into mimicry and murder during the annual courtship amongst fireflies.

Crystal structure of the bioluminescing enzyme lucerferase

Firefly displays intrigue anyone who has ever witnessed them on hot, humid nights in the eastern seaboard and also here in the Midwest. The mesmerizing blinking is due to cool temperature chemistry called bioluminescence, and is used to attract mates in the sex-crazed high summer nights of July and August. Roaming males of the genus Photinus use one pattern of flashing, recognized only by females of its species, and those of the genus Photuris use another. The male recognizes the correct duration of the interval between his flashing and the female’s single blink response, and zeros in on her where she hides with her expensive cache of eggs.

Unfortunately, Photinus males often zero in on the consummate femme fatale. The carnivorous Photuris females have evolved to use the same duration pattern. When crooning Photinus males reach these females, they’re lunch. That’s because Photuris females can use a defense chemical that male Photuris fireflies make. This molecule, lucibufagin, proves an effective chemical defensive against certain spiders and other enemies.

Such trickery, committed during a perfectly innocent attempt at a romp in the grass, is common in the insect world. Still sounds like a solid basis upon which to make a complaint. “But officer, my alleged date ate me when I went to pick her up!” After I told this tale of woe to one group of fascinated folks on an evening’s stroll, they stood in stunned silence before finally offering hesitant applause.

Lest it appears that the natural world is the only culprit concerning conspired means to lunch on unsuspecting others, I list below a running tally of terms I’ve compiled for similar occurrences in our world.

Billed, infected, charged, arrested, fined, tricked, stalked, interrogated, ambushed, investigated, ripped off, targeted, sued, assaulted, held liable, put under surveillance, burgled, suspected, wire-tapped, gypped, broken into, penalized, foreclosed, stung, fired, sneak-attacked, drag-netted, dismissed. The list can be extended.

We all have our stories. Administrators do things that impinge on others. Lovers do it. Politicians do it. Revenuers do it. Even children in their sandboxes do it. Interactions between living entities in any world are often just plain hostile.

For instance, I pay a hefty annual “wheel tax” to the city in order to park on the street in front of my own residence. But I better not forget to go out to the curb to move my car. Street sweeping occurs on the south side of the street on Tuesday, and the north side on Wednesday. The parking Gestapo likes to cruise immediately after 9 AM for easy pickings. It’s the city’s Department of Revenue to whom the parking police answer. The street sweepers often don't even show up. I’m sure that the steady rate of income from parkers who just can’t always remember where they left their car is built into their budget. I’d swore that this summer I wouldn’t get hit. But I did, once. Happens to the best of us. So add ticketed to the list above. I wouldn’t put it past the city to deliberately hire administrators with a background in Biology.

Hubert

2010-06-27T02:31:00.001-07:00

Everybody stopped what they were doing when Hubert came to town. Memories of my meeting this cavalier German in Corvallis, OR, and a crazy road trip I took with him to New York City are fixed like ants in fossilized amber and just as visible through the yellowed years.

Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main

Hubert was a graduate student at the University of Frankfurt at the time, studying the ways the artist Edward Hopper captured the alienating forces of modernity that were reaching their zenith in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. And, like many young transcendental romantics from crowded Europe who imagine wearing cowboy boots and ten gallon hats, Hubert was smitten by the American West. Its wide open spaces, lacking in Europe, offered decompressing relief from the constipating effects of post industrial consumerism in the modern western nation states. “Howdy, podner,” he began a letter to me once.

My friends became Hubert’s mentors of American culture when he attended Oregon State University as a foreign exchange student. Helping to fuel his dry wit, they taught him the meaning of American colloquialisms. He would ask about the expression “such and such ‘got screwed,’” for instance. He would then add a postscript to this deprecating remark, “only slightly though.” My friends adored him.

Inside the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt

Meanwhile, I was adventuring in the wilderness camps of North Carolina, a sort of Huckleberry Finn, with my Jim being emotionally troubled boys, riding down rivers on the rafts I and fellow co-counselors helped them build to facilitate their passage to a more liberated state of mind.

The picture below is of me visiting Corvallis on furlough for a few weeks before returning to North Carolina. I had just met Hubert, who is in the picture but off to the side in order to sort of help maintain his privacy. Some time after that, he finished his academic exchange experience and returned to Germany.

Hubert visited a few years later during a time of tumult and general disaffection in my Corvallis crowd. Old cohabiting couples were breaking up. My friends in Iron Rose, a loose confederation of anarchists, were pamphleteering patrons of the coffee counter cultures at Sambo’s and the Big “O” restaurants to rally behind waitresses and other oppressed wage slaves, but were growing disillusioned with the lack of public response. Others belonging to the “lumpen intelligentsia” were feeling growing pains and spoke of trying out new intellectual and artistic horizons in Portland and New York City. But Hubert’s arrival forced a freeze frame in the film followed by a frolicking free-for-all party that lasted two weeks.

Toward the end of his stay, Hubert described to us over beer at Squirrel’s Tavern in downtown Corvallis how he had found a way to get to the east coast for free before boarding a plane back to Germany. He was going to drive a VW bug belonging to a professor who was soon moving, along with his family, to Princeton, New Jersey. The owner had just given him $300 to pay for expenses, beginning with, I suppose, the cost of a round of beer as Hubert announced his intentions. I stopped and stared at the bar table, the conversation becoming a dim rumble in my ear, in my sudden realization that I was going to get into that car with him. I had incentives. The degree in science education I had returned to Corvallis to earn wasn’t producing any job offers that fall. And, like the protagonist played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting, who leaves job prospects in Boston for Palo Alto, California, I had “to see about a girl” in Illinois with whom I had been corresponding.

Playful mockery of bland mainstream status quo society quickly became the modus operandi of our cross-country boondoggle. We decided to document our journey on yellow legal pad paper at rest stop coffee counters, which quickly received copy write status,

HUBERTANTICS ©

For instance, we cut up the ticket a cop wrote when he busted Hubert in a Safeway parking lot for peeing in the bushes, and pasted its parts into our travel log to especially document the number of people the citation stated Hubert had offended with this behavior. The officer had "reasonable grounds for believing that said offense against ordinance 841.7-1, Urinating in public, was committed by the Defendant against the peace and dignity of the City and County of Denver, and the people of the state of Colorado.” The demand for justice on the part of that many people necessitated in no uncertain terms that the rights of the Defendant be protected. So we checked 846.5-4, Unlawful to give false information, and role-played the following scenario.

“Seeing a strange looking foreigner wearing a red bandanna around his neck, Levi’s, and leather boots (‘Howdy, podner’), the cops, on inquiring as to the identity of said person, were told he was Hunter S. Thompson. Defendant then pulled rank by shoving a card into their faces, which said, ‘Bonzo Journalist.’ Defendant stated that his partner was his attorney, who told both cops that they would be turned over to the governor if they didn’t clear out pronto.”

Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main

“We continue to journey into the core of the Great Amerikan Mistake,” Hubert wrote. “There’s Dwight D. Eisenhower’s boyhood home. He symbolizes the ’50’s, the enormous decade of monstrosity revisited, which leaves us helpless, helpless, helpless, of course....starry night auf der Autobahn and sticking human bodies into that metallic apparition dependent on combustion. Corn, corn, prairie, cattle, gas station, billboard, irrigation madness, grain elevator reinforced by church without steeple, rising to the point of burnt eyes, burnt stomach, burnt cigarette, you betcha.”

Lawrence Kristina Dodge building Kansas City Art Institute

Hubert wanted to hang out with the painters who were pulling an all-nighter in their studio at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Ironically, 27 years later, my recollection of such an intense commitment to their art, and recognition of that same intensity in one of my students at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, helped get her accepted there. “I watched students at KCAI in all night studio marathons. She'd fit right in,” I wrote on her behalf.

In Columbia, MO, our bonzo journalist bought a tape recorder. At a local diner, he orally observed the following.

“The tension has risen to the point where the employees keep dropping the china and overreact by madly polishing the chrome stools. The hostess has just started to take off her clothes. We are determined not to take such bullshit, and give her that ‘Hey, that’s kind of you’ grin, which makes her considerably nervous. She starts punching absurd codes into the cash register only to make it spit out coins, and yells, ‘Jackpot! Jackpot!’ Amused, we munch on the half-and-half containers like jelly beans until the creamy drooling is all over the place, and try to figure out the relationship between chrome, jelly beans, and the presidency.”

On the campus of the University of Missouri, Hubert introduced himself to a group of art majors painting watercolors on the lawn, and gave a lecture. One of them, “Lisa,” reluctantly mentioned that she had a boyfriend. “Sad Lisa. Oh Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa...”

On the way to St. Louis, we discussed the popular genre of literature about heroic post-apocalyptic survivorship, and retold on tape the stories of some pretty good examples, H. G. Well’s The Time Machine, The Road Warrior with Mel Gibson, and A Boy and his Dog.

St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri

Hubert’s left-leaning eye triggered a litany of one-line commentary. Seeing the St. Louis Arch, Hubert suggested that, “There’s got to be more,” because, like the Golden Arches © in our consumer culture, “Two is better than one.” Visiting the St. Louis Art Museum, he remarked on seeing a cherub holding a compass, a protractor, and a plumb bob, “Yes, implements of the technocratic imperative.” Gaudy paintings of Americans clad in flowing folds of Greek garb symbolized “Manifest Destiny.” Hubert quoted a bumper sticker clandestinely stuck to a trash can in the hallway, “Death to Corporate Capitalism.” He was quick to notice a statue of Siegfried of the great Nordic myth, who represents the human (er, German super) race, which, at the dawn of history, is just coming into its own in ascendancy over the gods. Later, commenting on a skewing of class identity, Hubert remarked that soccer in Europe is a sport of the lower classes, while, here, he noticed suburban middle and upper class youth everywhere playing the game.

"Uh oh. Dave's getting nervous," Hubert said. The “girl” I had to see about lived in Urbana, IL, and the road sign said it was near. We were to stop by before she and her date were to see a movie. “Her date?” asked Hubert. “Sounds like her fruit. Hey, don’t worry about the trauma of crashing her date. See, over there? Trauma Center.”

We sat on her living room floor. She eyed me as I recited the time I gave Dave Foreman, co-founder of the radical environmental group Earth First! a ride to Eugene, Oregon for a recruiting lecture, and continued politely to sip her wine with her date. Little did either Hubert or I know that I would eventually be married to her for twenty years.

On the way to Chicago, Hubert suggested that I acquire a little “patina” by downing some Jack Daniels we got when leaving Urbana, which smoothed the way out of the “trauma” of interrupting her date, and helped facilitate the distracting relief of a half hour drunken recitation of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.

For Hubert, going to see Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks at the Art Institute of Chicago was like embarking on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

An American friend of his attended the Art Institute. We crashed the place that she and a rabble of international roommates literally were crashing themselves rent free, an old, abandoned warehouse with broken windows that somehow never had the heat turned off. So they weren’t paying for the heat, either. They had no furniture, slept on the floor, each separated by walls that were just two-by-fours without drywall, and ate out of electric frying pans on the floor. We all went shopping after midnight to prepare an elaborate international meal that we ate at 3 am. German, American, Irish, and Scottish partiers laughed, drank, and told stories, reminding me of Kierkegaard’s The Banquet in his great treatise of a proposed sequence in character development, Stages on Life’s Way.

It was my first time visiting New York City as an adult. We stayed with Corvallis acquaintances, a couple consisting of an Oregon State English professor on sabbatical to write novellas, and his wife, a student at Pratt Institute. Their apartment was over the Good Luck Grocery along Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. I quickly learned that the bustling streets there can be dangerous places when I pulled out my buck knife to punch open a pop can with a broken tab. People on the street froze and stared. Even the coin laundries had burly changers who were there actually to guard the change.

Over a period of four days, we migrated between Manhattan and Brooklyn, each day ending with a hard crash at 5 am. We hung out at St. Mark’s and Washington Squares. Hubert and I wandered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum, home of Hubert’s beloved Hopper. We drank Rolling Rock at the Red Bar near Cooper’s Union, admiring the early ‘80’s new wavers with their Hitler cuts or swept back long hair, shaven on both sides, and peg legs. We waited until 1 am to hear the main act at the Peppermint Lounge, The Jim Carroll Band. People sported t-shirts with the logo of the band The Dead Kennedy’s. The sound system’s base capabilities made us resonate down to the nuclei of our molecules.

But you better get ready
If you're going to Freddy's
If you're going to Freddy's store

We saw the film Badlands on the upper east side, starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, and attended opening night of a Sam Shepard play, True West, starring John Malkovich, at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village.

Hubert saying goodbye en route to his plane ride home saddened me. I too left that day, taking a bus far enough west into New Jersey so that I could start hitch hiking back to Oregon by way of, again, Urbana for a visit that would foreshadow the next 28 years of my life.

I’ll blame it all on Hubert.

Penance in a Two-Room Carriage House

2010-06-25T10:05:00.001-07:00

Saturday January 31, 2004

The kids are with their mother, and I am in a two-room carriage house, separated, alone. The pipes have frozen in the winter chill. I wash my face with cold running water and ease back into the chair, draping my Denali expedition sleeping bag with its three pounds of down over me.

I think this is it. I’ve hit rock bottom. I can do nothing but pop another dollar rental video from the library into the VCR for the third night in a row. Such addictions of escape are in the making because there’s nothing else that I feel like doing.

WHERE ARE YOU? I suddenly cry out, like I did on a hike at that state park along the Illinois River, alarming her in front of our kids. What good are you towards whom I scream prayers only to be met with dispassionate legal steps in the drawn out continuum of divorce…and silence?

I give up. I am sorry. I really am. All she had to do was forgive me. But she couldn’t.

I think of the wonderful places I’ve been, the events I’ve witnessed, the thoughts and feelings I have had, and try in desperation to have these remembrances mitigate my feelings of loneliness and despair. There was a soothing bath, for instance, in the hot spring leading up from Kaweah Canyon below Mt. Whitney during a contiguous five week solo journey from Giant Forest to Yosemite without leaving once to replenish provisions. There was the refreshing spray on my face from Multnomah Falls along the Columbia River Gorge and puffy white clouds banging into Mt. Hood up from Camp Howard in which I taught high school kids to interpret nature for sixth graders at my soil resource station. Oh, and there was that bubbling creek sending sparkling drops flying below Mt. Goddard in the terrifying “terre incognita” of the south fork of the San Joaquin River. And I remember late night epiphanies at coffee counters in Sambo’s and the Big O Restaurant during my town freak days in Corvallis, Oregon, such as during an eight hour stretch reading Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript for the first time.

It is winter, and it is dark. So I think of light, waiting for the light. I think, for instance, of the “aha” light of sudden understanding in the faces of so many students over the years. Then what occurs to me is a centuries-old corn cob I found lying on a floor in an unexcavated Anazazi granary in Canyonlands and the heart-stopping sunlight striking the deafening silence of the canyon bed below it. I remember details of the light reactions of photosynthesis that only a fitful dream while sleeping beside her in my early years as a teacher could piece together correctly for the benefit of my Biology students. There are also the brilliant washes of pthalocyanine blue and alarizon crimson on the 100% cotton rag of my watercolors, now in storage.

We all have an innate understanding of the difference between right and wrong. Do not steal, for instance. Everybody knows that. But the penniless will steal to feed their families. The true oppressor that must be vanquished is hunger. So it is right to steal, sometimes. Forgiveness depends on the case. The movie Magnolia I am watching tonight, for instance, depicts a cop who judges the fitness of each case for forgiveness on his beat, letting some people off, even helping them make restitution, and busting others. The law, both secular and divine, is not black and white. Becoming one flesh that no one is allowed to tear asunder, for instance, cannot be taken at face value.

You call everyone to yourself. You are relentless. If nudges don’t work, then you use a two-by-four, a friend in Oregon told me recently. The stronger is the temptation, the blunter is the two-by-four. “Knock, knock. Do I have your attention yet?”

You came to seek the lost, those who would become as children and would respond like children of a parent. A child is helpless, weak, lost without the parent, rather, a guiding Teacher, as Kierkegaard wrote in that treatise. Failure can conjure up in men and women the teachable child at their center. So you do lead into temptation, situations involving right and wrong that demand a choice, in order to carry out your divine purposes, don’t you? My Oregon friend told me I am being tested. You are testing my soul, aren’t you? She said I have been called to a graduate seminar.

My friend spoke of an acupuncturist/healer who takes in internists. To work with him is a privilege, she said. I told her of the student teacher who, after observing me, said that she had yet to observe a teacher “of my caliber” in any other classroom. So I was an excellent teacher. I treated teaching as a calling. I loved it and used everything to achieve success at it. But my church challenges me to consider that there are only two divine callings: ministry or marriage. My calling had really been my marriage. Teaching was an interesting way, a way of "right livelihood" that made use of my interests and talents, to effectively put food on the table in order to feed the object of my true calling.

So here I am In my little hovel in despair, reaching rock bottom, not knowing what to do with myself. I can’t read. So I feel. I cry. I write. It’s the heart that keeps count, not the mind, right? Wait and watch. Lord God, heavenly king, the father, the almighty. What are you going to do now?

Strength Made Perfect in Weakness

2010-03-31T14:08:00.001-07:00

CINCINNATI March 31 Judge Charles J. Kubicki, Jr. pronounced sentence this morning on Anthony W. Kirkland in the capital offense case involving the murder of Esme Louise Kenney and three other women. As recommended March 17th by the jury who convicted him on all counts March 12th, Kirkland received from the court at 9:33 a.m. two death sentences, one for aggravated circumstances involving the death of thirteen year old Esme and the other for same involving the death of fourteen year old Casonya Crawford. He also received two 70 years to life sentences for counts that included the murders of the two other women, along with Tier III Sex Offender status. The trial started on the 1st, so the month of March, 2010 resolves this horrific story, at least in the legal sense. Since the news of Esme’s death a year ago, I have sensed tremendous power in the story’s unfolding.

It began with a conviction about the power of Esme to astonish people when she was alive, based on the many reports and pictures taken of her that testify to her kind, gentle, and all-loving embrace of everyone near her. Esme’s beloved nieces and nephew “delighted” in her. Her older siblings “adored” her. Teachers, friends, and strangers gravitated to her. She gave everyone a hug. No longer is it any wonder to me that she is being remembered in event after event, so many, in fact, that members of her family are hoping for a break.

“I think sometimes we hear of another tribute being put together, and we just think, 'I can't take another memorial service,’" says a family member. "’I just need to let it be, or even ignore it all for a little while.’”

Something else has struck me lately, however, something about Esme that is no less astonishing and which keeps me from being able to "ignore it all for a little while"…until it is said. And that is the transcendent power of Esme’s spirit during the passion of her excruciating ordeal at the hands of her assailant, a power that continued to influence events with far reaching consequences after her death.

Even as Anthony Kirkland was attempting to rape her, she did not resist. "That's what was surprising about it,” Kirkland told detectives. “She was calm. I don’t know. She didn't fight me.” In one of the most dramatic displays of the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek that I have ever heard, she instead quietly asked him, “Do you have any children?” She thus appealed to his conscience, his sense of fatherhood. And it made an indelible impression on her killer. "What did you tell her?" asked the detective. He replied, "I looked at her, and I told her, 'yeah.' Then I stopped." As it turns out, Anthony Kirkland had a three year old son, Anthony Kirkland, Jr.

Kirkland left the scene of Esme's murder, but returned right afterward, because he felt an unusual compulsion to do so. "I was actually called there to go back," he said. "Don't misunderstand me, it was like ... a thought that came into my mind that said...that said 'go back to her, go back to where she is.’ When I got there, I sat up under a tree, and something told me to, just to relax, sleep.”

Kirkland was apprehended because they found him asleep under that tree just a short distance from Esme's body, her possessions on his person, presented as if on a platter to the authorities for indictment.

I agree with those who say Esme's spirit was responsible for the instruction that Kirkland return to her, which he obeyed. He obeyed despite the lack of lighter fluid he had intended to procure that was necessary to render the evidence untraceable. Not only did he come back without it, he came back bearing on his body all the DNA evidence required to tie him to the crime. During past investigations, police had asked him about shaving his body hair and bathing in bleach in order to obliterate evidence. During this investigation, however, even his usual denials, lies, and crafty games to elude the detectives failed him. He broke, giving a full, detailed confession.

Kind, gentle, even in the face of death, Esme’s power proved greater than Kirkland’s, so much greater that it apparently began to trouble him and take from him the desire to live. In the realization of what he had done to her, he tried to induce his captors to pull their guns on him. “I need to keep my word to her,” he told the detectives. “What was your word to her?” a detective asked. “That, uh, well, hell, my word was that I’d be joining her. That was what my word was.”

The result of all these things is that Kirkland, with this sentence, will never kill again. Esme's sacrifice, and the strength of her spirit during her ordeal and afterward, save future lives, and bring justice to three other women who Kirkland is convicted of killing.

Where does such a powerful spirit like Esme’s come from? I believe it comes from God. Perhaps there is a higher purpose for her to which we ought to give our assent. Perhaps Esme is an example of the paradoxical power of God’s love, best exemplified, not in lordly pomp and circumstance that elevates the beloved to some lofty station and status befitting God; rather, in lamb-like weakness, such as the gentle love of a young girl, even in the lonely and terrifying face of her death.

I can’t help but see a message in Esme's life and death, the message with which she herself was “smitten,” so her mother says, and that is the message of Christianity, that God reveals himself through suffering love. I believe that this is her life and legacy, God’s love extending way beyond her immediate world, reaching out to many, many people. My desire is that Esme’s example of hope and love spreads ever farther afield to those who needn’t have known her when she was alive.

A friend of hers remarked at a memorial, “It can’t be her. Esme was going to save the world.” To all who have eyes to see, it is her; it’s Esme, a saint in my eyes, who is indeed going to save the world.

Unsung Achievements

2010-03-21T13:41:00.001-07:00

This past Friday, I attended a talk sponsored by Fermilab National Laboratory in Aurora, IL. Speaking that evening was a 2008 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Martin Chalfie.

Chalfie’s demonstration of the use of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria earned him the prize, shared by Osamu Shimomura and Roger Tsien.

A model of Green Fluorescent Protein

Normally proteins in cells are not visible, but they can be visualized by means of GFP. Blue light shined on proteins of interest to researchers that are linked to GFP absorb the light and reradiate it as green light. They fluoresce, becoming visible. This allows researchers to observe how these proteins function and where they go in cells. As a biological marker, GFP is quickly becoming the microscope of the twenty-first century.

Proteins marked with GFP glow green under blue light.

Noticeably absent at the podium at this talk was a man named Douglas Prasher. It was Prasher who was first to isolate the gene for the glowing jellyfish protein. Dr. Prasher, at the time of the Nobel prize announcement, was driving courtesy vans for a car dealership in Huntsville, Alabama.

Trained as a biochemist, Dr. Prasher was interested in the chemistry of how certain animals are able to glow. In the late 1980s, he applied for a five-year grant to track down the gene. Dr. Prasher said his proposal included investigations on how the fluorescent protein might be used as a beacon to light up structures in cells. But the application was turned down. An application put elsewhere proved successful, but it gave Prasher only two years of financing, enough time to isolate the gene, but not enough time to pursue any applications. When time was up, he went looking for another job. Before he left, Dr. Chalfie and Dr. Tsien independently contacted him, asking about the jellyfish gene. Prasher generously shared the gene with both of them.

Experiencing dissatisfaction with employers to whom he transferred his work, he eventually landed in Huntsville, where he worked for a NASA subcontractor that was developing mini-chemistry laboratories, used during potential human flight to Mars. Dr. Prasher loved that job, but NASA eliminated the financing for the project. For family reasons, he stayed in Huntsville, which restricted his opportunities. After a year of unemployment he went to work for the car dealership.

In a self-effacing and generous gesture, Prasher gave tribute to the three Nobel winners, saying that their harder work over their entire work lives made them more deserving of the prize. (Rules stipulate that no more than three persons can share a single prize.)

I think I understand Dr. Prasher’s attitude. I have found over the years that those in my line of work, high school science teaching, regularly give away discoveries of innovative methods for conducting traditional lab experiments and the like. We are more than happy to share “shop secrets” with interested colleagues in school departments or at conferences. The reward for us is not professional recognition by our peers, job promotions, or more money. It’s usually just the thrill of finding better ways for students to better understand science concepts. The “aha” light turning on in student’s eyes is my reward.

A special thanks to Bryan Bacon and The Huntsville Times

On the One Year Anniversary of Esme’s Passing

2010-03-07T15:11:00.001-08:00

The man who killed Esme Kenney precisely one year ago this hour is on trial for his life. Meanwhile, there is a memorial service in the Quaker manner this evening at her old church in Cincinnati.

Bereavement is ambiguous and unique to each carrier of grief. Powerlessness and the sense of loss are usually constant companions. Esme’s absence will forever mark the passage of time. She will live forever in the consciousness of her loved ones. The living telling their dead how much they are loved is a communion of the highest spiritual form.

The only question is will her killer get the death penalty? Past deaths cannot be rescinded. Future deaths would be prevented.

I did not know Esme when she was alive. My knowing her now cannot pass for possessing empirical accuracy. But I will say the following. From my distant perspective, you could not pick Esme out in a lineup. There was nothing particularly special at first appearance. She tried rather garish shades of nail polish, for sure, and various types of dangling earrings, but she wore little makeup and let the hair dye of 2007 grow out. She was unpretentious. Hollister and Abercrombie sold little by way of Esme. Simple hoodies and sweatshirts seemed to suffice. She wore the same purple pajamas for years as well as the same white-striped, gray running pants, even on the last day of her life. Though her style of dress was unique and informal, printed tops over t-shirts and jeans and the like, Esme blended right in.

She YouTubed, blogged, skyped, and rocked with ear phones behind outdated styles of sunglasses. Though she didn’t have a cell phone, she certainly knew how to program one. She was known, as most tweens and teens are, as a “tech head.” Through this modern consumer technology, Esme entertained the interests of tween American culture along with her friends. On her YouTube account were Carrie Underwood, Jordin Sparks, Denni Lavato, Taylor Swift, Jonas Brothers, a Twilight trailer spoof, and lots of Ali and AJ. Esme swore by tart and sassy Avril Lavigne. It is said she listened also to JoJo and Fall Out Boy. She was listening to Hilary Duff on her IPod when she ran into her killer. If she had entertained a secret crush on Robert Pattinson or Daniel Radcliffe, then I wouldn’t be surprised.

But what would you say about her after even one conversation with her, one shared moment? Would you say that here is someone special, maybe even a Saint, seamlessly and unconsciously integrating God’s business into her daily interactions with people? Not having met her myself, I still have good reason to wonder.

I can be certain, however, of one thing, the juxtaposition of extremes. This extraordinary young person, lit like an alter candle by the testimonies of others and the stories her pictures and videos tell, makes a claim on me when I think of the improbable and extreme circumstances of her leave-taking from this world. The jury this week will hear every word of her killer’s confession of what happened on that fateful day exactly one year ago. How many vulnerable young women lived in her neighborhood, and what were the chances of them leaving the security of their homes that afternoon? What was said at the time was, “that she did an unusual thing for her: she went for a jog…” What were the chances of anyone being there, let alone him? Never should a violent predator be randomly lurking in the woods near a child's home. "This is a once-in-a-career experience,” Cincinnati Police Chief Tom Streicher had said. “This is not the rule. This is the rare exception to the rule."

This is also shock therapy as higher calling. I am wide awake. Like her namesake in the story by J. D. Salinger, For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, Esme has restored my faculties to keen receptors of what goes on around me and distilleries of precision in separating the important things in life from those that are not.

The dead claim the living and tell us how to live. The loss of her corporeal love teaches us to love on a higher level. It is imperative that we listen and adhere to her sanctions. We are required to work as though this lost loved one is still here with us. It is a call to duty that proves efficacious over time. We send messages to a spirit and get no material answer. There is, however, the compelling assumption that she is there, and we are here, and we must not falter at our task. There is no human horror that the persistent application of love and devotional consciousness cannot transcend.

Esme Kenney will not return to Earth as a 13-year-old girl. Her role now is to impart courage in her invisibility. The brilliant light of her fragile, ephemeral spark so quickly doused must become the enduring afterglow of community love she built with everyone she met. Esme offers us a survival manual, written in her own blood. We are urgently charged to honor her and seek the perpetuation of her gentle kindness.

Special Thanks to James Ellroy

Tracing the History of Civilization to a Pair of Bumps on a Bone

2010-03-07T14:33:00.001-08:00

The plan for a lesson is often written in the heat of the moment right before delivering it. I’m a science teacher who teaches in a high school that specializes in the creative and performing arts. This year I have four different classes, including a freshman science course that I developed only last year, Biology, AP Biology, and Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body. There are days when prep time just runs out. All I knew was that it was Musculature of the Arm Day for the Anatomy class. Students had seen the muscles in the dissecting tray of the white rat. Today they would turn in the coloring page based on the chart of names, origins, insertions, and actions of these muscles. And today I was going to work up a quiz. As students stumbled into class, I noticed that two bone markings were listed three times each, the medial and lateral epicondyles of the humerus or upper arm bone. Aha. It occurred to me right then and there that these two places were the key to my impromptu lesson plan.

“Yes, Mr. DePrez, I see the flared end to the upper arm bone. So?”

“It’s called the humerus, remember?” I retorted.

“Oh, yea.”

“Now think about it, people. You dancers can’t do pirouettes without the solid floor underneath your feet. The Olympic figure skaters this week can’t do those fancy axel jumps without leverage. They need the ice to launch those spin jumps, don’t they? In other words, dancers and skaters need a foundation against which to push off.”

“Yeah, yeah,” came a response from the back of the room.

“Now consider flexion and extension of the wrist and fingers. If you’re going to curl these bones and bring them back to their original position, don’t you need a similar launching pad? Look down the list of muscle origins where the forearm muscles are anchored by their tendons. How many times do you see epicondyle of the humerus? Lisa, read them for us, please.”

“Origin of the flexor carpi ulnaris: the medial epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the flexor carpi radialis: the medial epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the flexor digitorum: the medial epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the extensor carpi ulnaris: the lateral epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the extensor carpi radialis: the lateral epicondyle of the humerus. Origin of the extensor digitorum: the lateral epicondyle of the humerus.”

“Well! Just one pair of sites provides the origins for the muscles that work the hands, huh? Humans are tool makers. Ever since the Neolithic Revolution, during which they domesticated plants and animals for a steady food source, humans have grasped and manipulated their world with their hands. The one anatomical feature that provides the foundation for grasping and manipulating, and thus has enabled our fine minds to work their magic in making things with tools, is a pair of epicondyles on the humerus. The means of empire-building boils down to a pair of bumps on a bone. Now what I want you to do is pull out a sheet of paper, number it one to six for listing the six flexion and extension muscles of the wrists and fingers, and, oh, skip a space so I can ask you what bone markings provide the leverage for these actions.”

Not one student failed to state every time the epicondyles of the humerus.

The Self-Reciprocating Power of Happiness

2010-02-28T12:41:00.001-08:00

Readers of this blog know about thirteen-year-old Esme Louise Kenney who was murdered March 7, 2009 by a convicted killer and sex offender while she was jogging near her Cincinnati, Ohio home. As the first year anniversary of her death approaches, and the trial of her alleged killer begins officially Thursday, March 4, I ponder her story, which has been one of overwhelming positivity. More and more people rally to celebrate her spirit through songfests, memorials, and dedications. In her parent’s words, the explosion of love and light in the wake of her passing is indeed imbedding shards of goodness and kindness in hearts everywhere.

Esme’s power to touch lives, a godly power, follows a pattern. I see in her the same power that was exhibited in the life of Anne Frank. This power is manifested paradoxically in weakness. Young, innocent, vulnerable, vibrant, cheerful, precocious, and so full of life, both Anne and Esme outlive the random, senseless, and brutal forces that vanquished them. I think that the power to do this is rooted in the happiness they felt through meeting and interacting with others. This infectious happiness, a refreshing alternative to an attitude of cynicism and despair in an age that seems to have lost its way, was no accident in their lives. That is because happiness is self-reciprocating. What follows is an excerpt about the nature of happiness and how to acquire it from a book by Andy Andrews, entitled The Traveler’s Gift, copyright 2002. The protagonist in the story meets the persistently bubbly and talkative Anne Frank who tears out two pages from her diary and gives them to him.

“Today I will choose to be happy. Beginning this very moment, I am a happy person, for I now truly understand the concept of happiness. Few others before me have been able to grasp the truth of the physical law that enables one to live happily every day. I know now that happiness is not an emotional phantom floating in and out of my life. Happiness is a choice. Happiness is the end result of certain thoughts and activities, which actually bring about a chemical reaction in my body. This reaction results in a euphoria that, while elusive to some, is totally under my control.

“Today I will choose to be happy. I will greet each day with laughter. Within moments of awakening, I will laugh for seven seconds. Even after such a small period of time, excitement has begun to flow through my bloodstream. I feel different. I am different. I am enthusiastic about the day. I am alert to its possibilities. I am happy.

“Laughter is an outward expression of enthusiasm, and I know that enthusiasm is the fuel that moves the world. I laugh throughout the day. I laugh while I am alone, and I laugh in conversation with others. People are drawn to me because I have laughter in my heart. The world belongs to the enthusiastic, for people will follow them anywhere!

“Today I will choose to be happy. I will smile at every person I meet. My smile has become my calling card. It is, after all, the most potent weapon I possess. My smile has the strength to forge bonds, break ice, and calm storms. I will use my smile constantly. Because of my smile, the people with whom I come in contact on a daily basis will choose to further my causes and follow my leadership. I will always smile first. That particular display of a good attitude will tell others what I expect in return.

“My smile is the key to my emotional makeup. A wise man once said, ‘I do not sing because I am happy; I am happy because I sing!’ When I choose to smile, I become the master of my emotions. Discouragement, despair, frustration, and fear will always wither when confronted by my smile. The power of who I am is displayed then.

“Today I will choose to be happy. I am the possessor of a grateful spirit. In the past, I have found discouragement in particular situations until I compared the condition of my life to others less fortunate. Just as a fresh breeze cleans smoke form the air, a grateful spirit removes the cloud of despair. It is impossible for the seeds of depression to take root in a thankful heart.

“My God has bestowed upon me many gifts, and for these I will remember to be grateful. Too many times I have offered up the prayers of a beggar, always asking for more and forgetting to give thanks. I do not wish to be seen as a greedy child, unappreciative and disrespectful. I am grateful for sight and sound and breath. If ever in my life there is a pouring out of blessings beyond that, then I will be grateful for the miracle of abundance.

“I will greet each day with laughter. I will smile at every person I meet. I possess a grateful spirit. Today I will choose to be happy.”

Andrews simplifies who in fact was a complex, multifaceted teenager coming of age in order to outline his recipe for happiness. Esme herself exhibited a complexion of sometimes contradictory personality traits. Who doesn’t? But one of Esme’s traits stands out in my estimation, a spiritual one that allows us to realize a higher calling in being human, and one that aligns with that of the totemic figure of the Holocaust, a deliberate optimism about others and a desire to share with them the simple joy of living, a joy that is self-reciprocating.

In Defiance of Entropy: Lessons from Coyote

2010-02-14T22:08:00.001-08:00

I was aghast. My roommate had just returned from a summer night on the town in Flagstaff with an implement used in Navajo religious practice. It was a coyote skull with feathers atop a two foot-long wooden staff. Quite a character, he must have used his considerable charismatic charm and entrepreneurial powers of persuasion to obtain it from one of the shamans at the evening’s public drumming ceremony. To celebrate his acquisition, he proudly recounted how a man exiting a bar saw him with it and recoiled in fear. Coyote is a sacred totem in many Native American cultures. Coyote represents the archetype of godly trickery, meant to teach lessons in humility to humans who tend toward hubris over their creative achievements. My friend obviously stood in need of such a lesson, I remember thinking.

He and I were among thirty teachers attending a three-week, all expenses-paid workshop on advanced placement biology at Northern Arizona University. One of a number of free “education vacations” for teachers I have enjoyed over the years, it was an outreach to the general education community as a stipulation of a university research grant. I remember that the labs and lectures helped cement an important principle that I bring to every class I teach, that biological systems are in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, called the law of entropy. Take a living cell, for example. It is a system that imports energy from outside itself and uses it to become more organized. Increasing organization in living systems is counter to entropy, the natural tendency for the bits and pieces that make up matter to spread apart, losing the energy of organization, until all of them are uniformly distributed in the space they are allowed to occupy. This defiance of the law continues as long as there is an outside energy source that can be harnessed to do work.

In such an important case as this, religion informs science. Coyote in Navajo mythology is a destroyer of order (thus, an entropic force) as well as a creator of order out of chaos (in defiance of entropy). He is a composite of characters known as Ma'i, which includes the actual animal in the wild, the symbolic character of disorder in the myths, and the personification of Coyote power in life (trickster, creator, and buffoon). Ma'i is not a composite but a complex, and the Navajo do not distinguish between his separate parts.* I can see how our creative triumphs invite lessons in humility from time to time. Coyote visits in ways we cannot always predict.

*(Ma'i Joldloshi: Legendary Styles and Navajo Myth in American Folk Legend, 1971)

The weekend following my roommate’s hi jinx, I rented a car and headed out with camping gear for Wupatki and Hovenweep National Monuments. They protect ruins of the pre-Columbian occupation of the Colorado Plateau, the former on the wind-swept flatlands south of the Little Colorado River, and the latter along shallow canyons of a broad plateau north of the San Juan River.

Wupatki is thought to be the result of a real estate stampede that occurred after Sunset Crater to the south blew in the eleventh century. The volcanic eruption spewed ash across the landscape, providing the Sinagua dry farmers with a moisture-preserving cover for bumper crops of corn, squash and beans. Wandering over the landscape pocked with unexcavated ruins, I fell, hurting my foot.

Undeterred, I continued on to Hovenweep just across the border of Utah in Colorado in view of the Ute Mountains to the east. There is an interesting fortress along a shallow canyon rim with peep holes that allowed the occupant views up and down the canyon without being seen. It is thought that a drought in the late twelfth century put pressure on the Kayenta Anasazi to build stone fortresses, which, in the case of Hovenweep, may have been to protect scarce water springs at the heads of the canyons. In-fighting amongst related clans over scarce resources might have been a reminder by Coyote of how the forces of destruction go hand in hand with those of creation.

I wanted especially to sit in a strange house on a boulder in Holly Ruins. To get to it required a four mile hike up one of the canyons. I found that without a wool sock, just the liner, my swollen foot withstood the hike just fine. I reached Holly and climbed up into it. Hours of sitting inside it sent me to lofty reaches of my intellect that from time to time requires a visit from Coyote.

That visit was to occur over twenty three years later.

By that time I had a son, now seventeen. My sister organized a "car-capade," driving with a daughter from her home in Massachusetts to pick me and my son up in Chicago on her way to San Diego where our mom lived in a retirement community. The journey included what was an immensely personal pilgrimage for me, a return to Holly. I thought of it as a metaphor for mythic return, outlined by Mircea Eliade's thesis of the "myth of the eternal return," periodically coming full circle in important cosmic creation events.

My son and I hiked the trail late at night, arriving after midnight, with a full moon shining overhead. I sat with him inside the musty ruin in a pile of desert rodent droppings. I was out of shape and feeling painfully tired, which reminded me of the pain in my ankle years earlier. Undeterred, I was hoping to transfer to my son the significance of this revisit to an odd fortress built out of desperation so long ago. However, Coyote was to have the last laugh. My son thought me peculiar and just couldn't understand what I was getting at.

Passing down traditions, by means of ritual reenactments of past events, once an important act of "world maintenance" for our ancestors, is harder to achieve today in a culture that discredits the past as obsolete. Modern generations are eschewing the past, putting a premium instead on new ways of thinking and acting. But I know that despite my failure to instill in my son a respectful regard for these ancient puebloans' struggle for existence that took such an interesting form in these ruins, wandering up that sliprock canyon for half the night resulted in cool kind of father-son "bonding" experience.

Nick Toombs

Coyote dropped in again recently in the guise of a friend of mine in Cincinnati. I have learned that this woman possesses the wisdom of the ancient ones regarding simple domestic rituals of field, family, home, and hearth. I remembered again about sitting in the Holly ruin thinking about lofty concepts, such as those that explain the modern mind, which include abstraction of social functions, greater importance of the future as opposed to the past, the individual as more important than the collective, liberation from past constraints, and secular values as more ideal than sacred ones, and not about the truth of simply living on the land that, with hard work and a little luck, bequeaths its bounty in support of family and community. This truth was posited by a delegation of Hopi elders, descendents of the ancient ones of the cliff dwellings, to the “Washington Chiefs” in 1894.

“…The family, the dwelling house and the field are inseparable, because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest with her...”

My friend in Cincinnati, who bakes, cans, garnishes meals with herbs from her garden, and harvests eggs from her hen Henrietta, all with clay crockery she makes herself, wrote me last summer,

“…I find the spiritual in everyday life as ultra grounding. I trust what I know. I find the domestic rituals humble and restorative. I am fine holding the mystery and don't need to find all the answers….”

She admonished me in regards to these things,

“The biggest obstacle is knowing everything! Get a mentor. I suggest a Buddhist.”

Or, perhaps, a Hopi tribal member, such as Rina Swentzell of the Pueblo Santa Clara, who says,

“...for us life is shrouded in mystery, and the world defies explanation...humans do not need to know everything there is to be known. The human past, we feel, is a universal past. No one can claim it, and no one can ever know it completely.”

Paul L

I did learn a lesson on that journey I will never forget, one that I can now attribute to Coyote. The lesson took place during the last weekend while at Walnut Canyon National Monument. Sensitive to how it was once the home of some four hundred Sinagua pueblo families eight centuries past, I carefully defied the rule of staying on the designated trail in the name of public ownership, tip-toeing down Walnut Canyon off trail in order to view unexcavated ruins. Many had graffiti from the days of discovery and vandalism in the nineteenth century. I stopped to contemplate one cliff dwelling, sitting and musing while fiddling with two potsherds found lying in the darkened interior. Just like at other sites on my wanderings, the ancient ones here in the Walnut Canyon community grew crops at scattered plots in the surrounding forest, raised children, made stone tools and other implements, talked, laughed and played, and followed the ceremonial cycles that had been passed down for generations. And then it happened. The two potsherds in my hands suddenly fit together along the crack that entropy had caused between them eight hundred years earlier. Waves of emotion rippled through my being. I felt an overwhelming sense of humility as I realized how this chance reconstruction out of simple earthen shards was a revelation from the ancient ones regarding simple domestic rituals of field, family, home, and hearth. They might have just been pieces of hardened clay from a simple water pot for washing or drinking in this household centuries ago forgotten. But for me their coming together was an epiphany, a gift with a divine origin, a lesson Coyote means to teach, that each of us is temporarily granted a life in defiance of entropy, one which my friend suggests ought to be lived through humble domestic rituals in the service of family and friends.

Absolution Under a Winter Full Moon

2010-02-06T22:18:00.001-08:00

Photo copywrite R. King Used by permission

It was six weeks past the solstice, and the distinctly brighter light shining from higher in the sky during the sunny trip down from Chicago granted him the hope of eventual summer. But the sun had dropped low in the sky by the time he arrived in the old and well-worn city district near the Ohio River. The winter chill enveloped him as he emerged from his car. There appeared a distinctly Bohemian quaintness to the wooden houses along the street. “Need a marrying minister?” queried a makeshift sign in front of one of them. “Inquire here.” Brightly painted quarter moons adorned another. Others shown colorful pastels like those in the social realist murals of Diego Rivera. A sign across the street next to the chiseled stone and mortar of a church read, “Jesus is Alive!’ but it just made him add, “So is Esme.”

He was surprised that the doors to the tavern where the benefit to raise money for the memorial to her kind and gentle nature would be held were not locked, because it was two hours prior to the start time, and there appeared to be no one there. He sat on a bar stool and let the seconds tick away in the eerie silence.

Silent auction contributors and display organizers began to show up by means of the back door. Knots of early arrivers mingled in corners. Within time, the benefit was in full swing. More than 500 well wishers and supporters of the cause were packed into the back room before the stage. Local vocalists and instrumentalists were gracious and generous in their outpouring of lively, tuneful reverie for this sainted child’s insuppressible spirit. “Yes, Esme lives,” he thought.

Feeling like a votary in veneration, he got his play bill for the event autographed by the sculptor of the memorial that would eventually hang in the new school for the creative and performing arts where Esme had attended. She knew Esme when a baby.

Of the silent auction’s offerings, only one stood out in its explicit expression of her name. “For Esme” had been carved as part of the wooden block print by a lion of the local arts community. It depicted a bedeviled pilgrim with the air of a medieval crusader who ascends a path that spirals to the top of a pointy mountain with a cloud hovering around it. With mischievous disdain, a cocky figure beating on a snare drum comes down the spiral path in an eventual juxtaposition of inexorable intent and futile resistance. Which figure represented which attitude was unclear, but he identified with the pilgrim. He wrote his name on the form that would claim a $250 copy of the print, one of four. Mission achieved, he returned for the last set of the gig for Esme.

Afterwards, he pointed out to Esme’s mom how the spiral path up the mountain in the print is identical to the way a silver wire spirals up around a quartz crystal and explodes into a tightly coiled sun in the pendent he had won at auction to help fund a scholarship in Esme’s name for an arts program at a Ohio university and had given to her. “I see it as a sign,” he told her.

The music ended, but the party went on. He went out for some air. When he returned, he ran into a relative of Esme's. Polite greetings over, the relative fastened onto him, eyes riveted onto his only inches away. The relative's steely question, “Why are you here,” reiterated his very own question, which had resounded deep within for months. The question was a fair one. The visitor was not a local. He had not known Esme, her kin, or her acquaintances before she had been murdered while jogging near her home the previous March. He was, ultimately, a stranger. His appearance could easily be mistaken as an interloper, an awestruck rubbernecker in the company of legitimate mourners in the community that was reaching out to embrace the grieving family and celebrate the extraordinary young person who had been one of their own.

He mutely stood there for the longest time searching for an answer. Later he would recall a weary, sorrowful comment the narrator in the movie Titanic makes regarding the yearnings of survivors in forlorn life boats bobbing on the high seas on the morning after the sinking, “They waited for an absolution that would never come.”

He tried to list plausible reasons but finally replied that none of the listed credentials mattered. That he might be a sympathizer angered by the loss of an only child in so cruel a manner, a teacher in an arts academy similar to the one she had attended who was trained to understand the vicissitudes of emerging adolescence in a young artist like Esme, a father of a daughter of his own who could theoretically experience a similar fate, a believer who had come to face the threat her death was having on his faith, did not matter at all. He was just simply there. He was forced to admit that he had nothing to offer the relative that could help members of this community mourn the loss of Esme except that he too loved her. The steely look slowly began to soften. “I get that,” the relative replied, especially when seeing tears appear in the visitor's eyes. The relative reached out to embrace him.

It was two in the morning. The chill air outside the closing tavern told him it was in the teens or lower. The full moon’s light bathed the city. He had come prepared to endure the night in his car, wrapped in a sleeping bag. The only question was where, probably in some church’s parking lot. He drove around looking for one. The road climbed the hill that held the woods behind the reservoir where Esme had been slain. Something overcame him, and he had to stop. He found a place to put the car and hiked into the woods. It was a bramble of silhouettes in the stark moonlight. It was also his ground zero. Holding onto a tree to keep from collapsing, he bawled out loud at the moon, his glasses fogging from the water in his eyes that quickly vaporized in the bitter cold. “There are people, don’t you see?” he just about screamed, “people who matter here, whom you love, who have lost the dearest thing they had.” He stopped to remove the frosted over glasses. “For some there is nothing left. What are you doing!?” came more words. He shuddered, sank down onto the snow-frozen ground, and curled up at the base of a tree. He sat there for the longest time. The stone cold quiet made a deafening impression in his ears. “Just one more resurrection,” he pleaded. “Just one more…She’s cold. I will take her home where it’s warm, which is just over there,” he murmured deliriously. He glanced behind him hoping that there might be a rustle made by someone in the dead, snow-covered leaves. Then he sank into more silence. He felt no chill, probably because of the alcohol in the blood of his arteries and feverish brain. He thought of those back home who figured that this was some kind of personal pilgrimage he was on, one he hoped would hurt no one. Very spiritual people, they had given him permission to ask boldly. But he really hadn’t planned on this.

Adorned mailbox, roadside memorial, and the distant reservoir

The hours sublimated into the silence. The moon made a slow wink each time it slid past another branch above his eye. He realized that it was exactly one month since the last full moon, at which time he had been put up after a birthday party to sleep in Esme’s room a few hundred meters away. Being in Esme’s room that night, consecrated by her things left the way they were last March, had been the most moving event he had ever experienced. He had hardly slept because of waking up to what he felt had been Esme’s presence. He had spoken to her, he remembered. Feeling humbled, he had crawled from his sleeping bag on the floor where her bare feet had trodden over many years to the round window where the reflected light of the full moon shone through, a circle of light in a circle of window. But he felt no presence of Esme this time. Not here, not in this place. Good comes paired with evil, and only God, if anyone other than evil, would be found here. Attempting more prayer, he prayed what they had sung that night, that hard times not come around here anymore.

“Are you all right?” the man asked, his long hair falling from behind his head when he stooped forward in the frigid morning air. The man he questioned had just begun to emerge from the car in the parking lot of a nursery. “Can’t figure out how you made it in this frightful cold. The insides of yer windows are all frozen over,” he said. “But I see you gotcher sleeping bag, so there, I reckon.” Pulling on his boots, the crasher in the car apologized for the man’s concern and replied that he was fine. “Just on a road trip, is all,” he said. “Part of the journey.”

Dedicated to Corey on this eleventh month anniversary of Esme’s passing.

Along the Florida Trail

2009-11-15T23:05:00.001-08:00

Earl faced his alleged tormentors with a look of defiance from his sandy seat in the problem circle. He came from an affluent family in Raleigh. Roughing it on the Florida Trail with nine roustabouts from the inner city of Durham and Raleigh didn’t align with his sense of privilege. But I and his other counselor expected that it would coax him from the self-imposed protection of his dignified bearing to a point where he could face off with his inner demons.

I had returned to the northern Florida region of my birth to find myself an adult counselor in the Eckerd Foundation camping system that utilized wilderness camping, reality therapy, and positive peer culture treatment models to serve severely emotionally disturbed adolescents. How this had happened was an accident. It was the summer after graduating from college. I had no inkling of what to do with my life. The classic panacea for such a circumstance, in the words of John Belushi of Animal House fame, turned out to be “ROAD TRIP!” The open road would become my guidance counselor.

I used a student aid windfall of $700 to fix my ailing little white Fiat and lit out from Oregon for a retreat in Tennessee led by my charismatic professor of religious studies at Oregon State. I was secretly hoping to pick up Kaaren, who was playing very hard to get, from her parent’s home in Chicago and take her there. I called her from a pay phone in Iowa after a hitchhiker helped me drive all night through a grand high plains electric storm over Nebraska and was told she wasn’t interested. So I went alone.

After the retreat, I nursed the lingering hurt on the western slopes of the Smokies keying out plants in a botanical wonderland in full blossom under the June rains squeezed day and night from wet Gulf air over the Cumberland Plateau. After one all night rain, I awoke with my sleeping bag curled around a puddle six inches deep. It could well have been a vale of tears.

Even though I was born in Jacksonville during a particularly sticky hot summer and, as a youth, collected pollywogs and mollies while combing the live oak-lined sloughs and bogs along the St. Johns River, it felt strange after the Smokies to pass through the once familiar sun-drenched loblolly pine flat-woods of Georgia on my way to see my brother in Florida. It was all that sun. I thought of Albert Camus’ depiction of Algiers, blindingly bright from the desert sun high overhead. Similarly bright, there was also the smell of humid, salty air. These parboiled gulf coastal plains of Winslow Homer’s subtropical watercolors, so affected by the sun and sea, were just different.

A rain squall blown in from the Gulf suddenly poured down on my brother and me while I drove my Fiat on the base where he was a lieutenant and I had been born 24 years earlier. I failed to stop in time on the suddenly slick road at an intersection. The huge grill of a Ford LTD wrapped the Fiat around its front end. Stunned, my brother and I contemplated rain spattering on our laps through the shattered windshield. After that the wrecker with the totaled Fiat went looking for a junk yard, and I went looking for a job.

Selling water purification units door-to-door wasn’t working out. Responding to an ad, I found myself in a job interview that included a brutal night sleeping without mosquito netting in a tent built by the counseled youth of E-Kel-Etu, the Eckerd camp in the Ocala National Forest. Romanticized by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling, my favorite novel in high school, I responded viscerally to her adopted Ocala scrublands of northern Florida and said yes to the job offer.

The month-long trip with Earl was the second that winter. It came on the heals of canoeing with another group down the Suwannee River from Georgia nearly to the Gulf of Mexico. This time we backpacked through dry palmetto and pine scrub permeated with dimly lit, closed canopy hammocks of shade-tolerant laurel oak, cabbage palm, and Southern magnolia. “The word hammock,” Rawlings states, “comes from the Spanish “hamaca,” meaning a highly arable type of soil.” She imagined the Spaniards blazing their trails through them. “The piney woods and the flat-woods are more open and therefore perhaps more hospitable, in spite of their poorer soil and dryness, but the hamaca shares with marsh and swamp the great mystery of Florida.”

The enchanted mesic hammocks harbor my favorite flowering tree, Southern magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora, made famous, again, in Rawlings’ writings. “The tree is beautiful the year around,” she writes. “It need not wait for a brief burst of blooming to justify itself, like the wild plum and the hawthorn. It is handsomer than most dressed only in its broad leaves, shining like dark polished jade.”

When it does flower, however, the saucer-shaped blossom is among the largest flowers native to North America, reaching twelve inches or more in width--hence its name grandiflora. “Its perfume,” says Rawlings, “is a delirious thing on the spring air.”

What intrigues me is the magnolia’s ancient pedigree, dating back to the beginning of flowering plants, angiosperms, during the Cretaceous Period over a hundred million years ago. Flowers hold the main clue to the identity of a plant. Southern magnolia’s flower has changed little during all this time. Its primitive characteristics include a large size with numerous petals and sepals that are similar in size and shape to each other and to the leaves from which they evolved.

It has numerous spirally arranged stamens at the base of a receptacle that bears numerous spirally arranged pistils. This cone-like woody receptacle is hardly changed from the twig end from which it evolved.

Along the Suwannee River in Winter

Earl sulked in silence, his lower lip stuck out and his fiery eyes riveting mine and everyone else’s. I carefully traced his interactions with one particular camper, which had eventually led up to the scuffle requiring this problem circle, back to its origin, needling and name calling while collecting wood for the breakfast fire. Robert, an experienced camper who had passed the manipulative and defiant stage that can last months and had reached a point of decision, gently urged that he consider “joining the group and stop holding out.”

The circle was in its second hour. Earl again protested with his usual excuses and insincere platitudes. I threw up some sand into the air, saying, “Smoke. That’s smoke, Earl. No need for it anymore.” I began to sense a turning point in his demeanor. A tear eventually came to his eye. Then came a catharsis. With sobs of anger and sadness he told the group how his father, a lawyer, never approved of anything he did, “hated” him. One of the older campers crossed the circle and put his arm around him. “You’re gonna be alright,” he said.

Springs along the Suwannee

2009-10-11T21:47:00.001-07:00

The Suwannee River empties the great Okefenokee Swamp in southeast Georgia, sending its tannin-stained waters across northern Florida to the Gulf of Mexico. The ambition of Eagles, the primary therapy group of ten adolescent campers that Chief Randy and I led, was to float in canoes from its headwaters to Manatee Springs near its mouth.

At the start, the rivulets were too shallow for the canoes to float free of the sandy sediment through which the rivulets meandered. “You’ll have to get out and pull the bow rope,” someone said to Shane, who reluctantly sloshed into the river in his Vietnam-style canvas army boots. As only a neutral environment insisting on concrete objectives can provide, this latest planned act of “therapeutic wilderness camping” intended on helping our wards who had emotional problems take responsibility for their choices and understand the consequences of their behavior.

Soon the pull of gravity had gathered enough water from the higher reaches of the watershed to fill the Suwannee to an easy floating depth. It was January, and we had left our snow-laden base camp on the Piedmont Plateau near Candor, North Carolina like migrating birds heading south for the winter. We would spend the next four weeks exploring the spring-fed runs that empty into the Suwannee all along its shoreline.

The springs help make Florida famous. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, in her novel The Yearling, immortalized their sparkling waters that burst forth from limestone to fill pools surrounded by sandy hammocks of scrub oak, loblolly pine, and palmetto.

“A spring as clear as well water,” she wrote, “bubbled up from nowhere in the sand. It was as though the banks cupped green leafy hands to hold it… Beyond the bank, the parent spring bubbled up at a higher level, cut itself a channel through white limestone, and began to run rapidly downhill to make a creek.”

The waters of such springs as Blue and Peacock maintain a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit. The clarity of the crystalline water reminded me of the aquariums in the classrooms in which I’ve taught Biology over the years.

Nearing Hart Spring, we saw clear water from its run collide with the Suwannee, stained dark with tannin from the bald cypress in the Okefenokee. “Great lunch site,” I had said to the boys earlier. We paddled up the run and beached near the pool that fed it. The water at the sources of many small springs we had seen spouted sand like earthen geysers within an aquatic fairyland fit for characters out of a Disney film. But Hart Spring is a “second magnitude” spring. Its gaping outlet, easily visible through the turquoise blue water, discharged close to 100 cubic feet of water per second.

If done right, swimming down a spring-fed run to the Suwannee is like Tinkerbell twittering through a Peter Pan playground. With back arched and arms outstretched beyond my head, I let the back of my head sink till water covered my ears, blotting out sound. The scary part is letting feet fall and believing that there’s enough buoyancy in the lungs to really keep eyes and nose above water. I hated the grueling training for this skill when earning my Boy Scout merit badge, but now I reveled in the benefit. I held my breath so lungs behaved like a fish’s air bladder and silently, and in silence, floated down the run without effort of any kind, letting the live oak and loblolly pine canopy frame the birdscape of the blue sky above. Enchanting!

To celebrate a successful day of paddling, we found at our campsite what locals call “resin wood,” dead pine filled with sap that has been hermetically sealed in rich bog soil so as to age like fine whiskey spirits. With it we stoked a fire big enough to challenge the one the naturalist John Muir made in 1879 during a rainy gale in Alaska that sent up a pillar of flame thirty feet high. Remembering the hooping and hollering of the boys amidst glowing trees against a jet-black background, I looked up Muir’s words.

“I have enjoyed thousands of campfires…warm-hearted, short-flamed, friendly little beauties glowing in the dark on open spots in high Sierra gardens, daisies and lilies circled about them, gazing like enchanted children; and large fires in silver fir forests with spires of flames towering like the trees about them, and sending up multitudes of starry sparks to enrich the sky…But this Wrangell campfire, my first in Alaska, I shall always remember for its triumphant storm-defying grandeur, and the wondrous beauty of the psalm-singing, lichen-painted trees which it brought to light.”

Esme Kenney: A Photo Essay

2009-08-10T17:24:00.001-07:00

March 7, 2009 CINCINNATI Thirteen-year-old Esme Louise Kenney was beaten, abducted, molested, strangled, and then partially burned by a convicted murderer and sex offender while jogging across the street from her home. Her life was brutally extinguished but not her light. It will shine for an eternity. The following is a photo essay, arranged in chronological order, of this remarkable girl’s life.

You can read further about Esme at the following posts contained in this blog: Dreams of Passion Wide Awake; The Power of Esme; Absolution Under a Full Winter Moon; The Self-Reciprocating Power of Happiness; On the One-Year Anniversary of Esme's Passing; Strength Made Perfect in Weakness; Stacked Spirals of Stardust; Coming Full Circle for Esme, Little Saint of Cincinnati, with Love and Squalor

Esme Louise Kenney is the beloved daughter of Tom Kenney and Lisa Siders-Kenney, sister of Brian, Meghan and Frances, loving cousin, niece, aunt and friend, talented cellist, artist, boating enthusiast, storyteller, caregiver, and explorer.

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio and summer resident of Sioux Narrows, Ontario, she is deeply missed by uncountable friends and relatives across the globe who will always remember the spirit, warmth and love she gave to everybody she knew.

Spring, 2003

July, 2003

Seven-year-old Esme helps facilitate at the wedding of her sister Franny on Whidbey Island. Her piquant and coquettish expression indicates perhaps that she relished her role in the bridal troupe.

While still on Whidbey Island, Esme offers a clam to the photographer along the shoreline, appearing exuberant with her find. Esme was a kid perfectly content at play!

December 18, 2004

Esme appears completely at peace in her embrace of her mom.

June 19, 2005

This numinous picture is perhaps the most important ever taken of Esme. It appears ethereal and saintly, like those seen printed on Bible book-markers. When magnified, her image is slightly out of focus, rendering a spirit-like quality. Esme is raising her eyes toward a Cereus flower, which blooms only at night once a summer. The flower could symbolize heaven. It makes me think that Esme is receiving a blessing from heaven. What is especially poignant is the exposition of her throat, the object of strangulation. So, to me, Esme’s throat is receiving the blessing. I think this picture is a prescient sign indicating the manner of her martyrdom and her subsequent sainthood. After this photo was taken, Esme and her mom built a fire and stayed up with the flower into the night.

August 9, 2005

This picture at the summer cabin in Canada displays the reciprocal love between Esme and the members of her family. What a delightful display of the playful nature of this love!

August 11, 2006

There are many pictures of the “doting aunt” Esme. This one captures very artistically the warm and loving affection she always showed her nephews and nieces.

November, 2006

Esme writes in her first blog, “I'm pretty smart and friendly. I love my family.” What a perfect caption for this first Internet picture of Esme! It would have been even better to put this expression into a cartoon dialogue balloon and superimpose it onto the picture. Arms akimbo, with self-assured imperturbability and aplomb, she seems to be captured at the moment of saying just that!

January 26, 2007

This is the fine portrait on the commemorative placard given out at Esme’s memorial service. On it is the eulogium, “sister :: daughter :: friend :: family connection-maker :: communicator :: musician :: poet :: music lover :: fish catcher :: boat driver :: cook :: water-skier :: dress-up queen :: secret agent (shhh) :: babysitter :: tech-head :: learner :: enthusiastic light-bringer :: smile-giver :: our best family girl”

April 7, 2007

This picture, taken of Esme while she helps paint Easter eggs during a visit to her aunt who is ill in Cleveland, effectively captures the essence of her soul. In it she is the radiant jewel with a clean conscience. She is without the slightest hint of guile. She is a sparkle of purity and innocence. Put succinctly, this is the image of a saint.

April 14, 2007

This is the signet emblem for Lux Aeterna, the site that commemorates Esme’s life. The lighting is superb, eternal. The caring posture and careful handling of the chick indicate her love for innocent, helpless living things, with the exception of daddy long legs! The explosion of light and love predicted by her parents in her passing is reciprocating a love for innocent, helpless Esme.

Summer, 2007

Esme was a summer resident of Sioux Narrows, Ontario where she stayed with family in a cabin on a lake. She had just learned to water-ski during her last visit.

August 12, 2007

Esme holds her niece Harper. They were the best of friends. Her cousin’s children “delighted in her, and she in them…” Esme’s last entry in her blog, The esme Show is, as follows.

“TODDLERS??? HELP!!!!!!!!!

By the title some people may think I hate toddlers. But truth be told I actually love them!!! I think they are adorable, sweet and cuddly. The two Toddlers I am talking about are named Harper and Campbell…There is always a list of things I do whenever I see these two. We have to: Sing the "Who likes popcorn?" song, give loads of piggy back rides, play with Lego's and Barbie's, play hide and seek, and chase them around. Very long list, isn't it? And I am very tired by the end of the day. Thankfully, once I tire them out they are pretty tame. Right now I have a very tired four year old on my lap. YIKES!!!!! I take that back. Make that a very hyper four year old.”

December 22, 2007

Esme wears a mask while visiting her sister Frannie’s family in Washington State. So I found myself writing, “God tried on the face mask of Esme and found it a perfect fit.” Taking the analogy further, we need a face, a holy mask, to put on God who remains otherwise difficult to see. Esme is such a face, a holy mask with which to see God. We too might choose to wear this mask. Choosing Esme’s way, a gentle and kind way, seeing through her mask and being seen as like her, would free us from the constraints of our lesser choices.

January 26, 2008

This picture, taken while celebrating her birthday, captures Esme’s delight in being with her friends. She puts the effect best herself in typical tween fashion, “I am now officially 12 years old. On this day 12 years ago I was as big as my niece Sonja, give or take some inches!!!! Tomorrow at 1:00 I will be on Fountain Square, ice skating with my friends. I'll fall and get up again because I'm 12!!!!!!!! Happy birthday to me!!!!!!!!!!”

July 30, 2008

Esme visits kinfolk on her mom Lisa’s side of the family in Montana. The photograph seems taken from an article in National Geographic that investigates how American families gather in ways that solidify community. It displays Esme’s signature smile, with lips pressed together. It shows too Esme’s love for her mother and the respect she showed her by being best of friends. Most of all it radiates Esme’s grace and beauty.

This photograph completes a pair. Now Lisa gets to reciprocate. This is the look of the proudest of moms. Esme can’t help but smile naturally and authentically in response to her mom’s demonstration of pride and affection.

August 5, 2008

Esme practices cello at the summer cabin. She exhibited extraordinary talent as a musician, double-majoring in cello and voice at the Cincinnati School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

August 12, 2008

This picture of Esme and nephew Cam blueberry picking at the summer cabin in Canada hints at the direction of Esme’s maturation. She is not yet a teenager, but appears as a poised young adult.

This customized portrait captures Esme’s pure heart and unique style in apparel. An 8th grader who sang with Esme in a school choir said her friend, “… had a style of her own that extended to clothing and her sense of humor…”

October 31, 2008

Sisters Frannie and Meghan want to know Esme’s changes in her last six months. What I can offer is the following. Young teens are prone to brooding, such as seen in this photograph taken last Halloween. They feign maturity that is, in reality, merely sophistication. They are of course beginning to hold authority in suspicion as they try to pull away from it. And they seek outlets for hormone-induced restless energy through music. I am a teacher of students just like her in a similar arts academy in Chicago. To me this and other pictures are quite telling. Her apparent mood swings and changing complexion, in both facial skin and facial expression, illustrate how she was indeed beginning to change rapidly, mercilessly. She appears to have been quite normally in the inaugural throes of adolescence, especially the kind experienced by the artistic and creative.

March 7, 2009

This is the most poignant picture of Esme, taken on the day of her abduction and murder. A self- portrait, it appears she was alone in her room when she took it. It captures a strange intensity in her bearing, which, along with her isolation, seems to forebode the terrifying and lonely passion of her passing.

Enchantment with the Mysteries of the Mesas

2009-07-26T18:56:00.001-07:00

Expect to be mesmerized when in New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.

I first passed through New Mexico on the way from Virginia to Coronado, California in October of 1965. The Rambler my dad was driving ran out of gas 40 miles east of Albuquerque next to an ethereal windmill that clanked and shuddered as it pumped water in the wind. I will always remember the haunting sense of the mesas and the sound of the creaking pump that accompanied the feeling while the sun went down. I still have the picture I took of it.

Resourceful kid that I was, I dipped a glass into the gas tank under the hood of the Karmann Ghia my dad was towing behind the Rambler, and we limped into a lonely gas station owned by a family of Native Americans. Kachinas for sale lined the shelves. I was just a 13 years old and had no money. The attendant's wife was nursing their child in the back. I felt bad I couldn't buy anything in their store.

Once in Coronado I became a recluse in my parent's rented house, smitten, especially, by the high mesas of New Mexico. I curled up on a sofa in the den, surrounded by books about the national parks in the West, particularly Mesa Verde.

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado y Luján and the members of his party of Conquistadors were the first white men to visit New Mexico. They sought a fancied city of great wealth called Cibola, thought to be made of gold and sitting high on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Since that time, their Latino descendants from Mexico and white conquerors from Europe have struck an uneasy truce with the resident descendants of their prehistoric pueblo ancestors who lived in the high canyons of the Mesa Verde.

Taos Pueblo, continuously occupied for over a thousand years

The event that celebrated the 400^th year of this truce, the Coronado Cuarto Centennial, was held in 1940. I bought the official brochure for the event “400 years in the making” on eBay for $5.

The state got Washington's Bureau of Printing and Engraving to make promotional postage stamps, which commemorated "Coronado and his captains," heads of the military aspect of his "conquest," but the vignette also depicts a friar wielding the weapon of a new ideology, Catholicism.

First day cover with plate block of Scott 898; cachet by Torkel Gundel

Entradas took place all over, which means "a grand entrance into a new land." It seemed as though every town had something special: rodeos, pioneer days, Indian ceremonies- although I question what Native Americans really thought about all this, especially Zuni and Tiguex, descendants of those who suffered either war or privation due to the demands for food that Coronado levied on their fragile economies.

Perhaps the most successful invaders in the state’s long history were the chambers of commerce who jumped on the bandwagon during that celebratory year. To accommodate the throngs of expected tourists with consumer dollars in their pockets, Albuquerque set out to open as many motels as it could. One reporter thought people might have to resort to sleeping in bedrolls and would hand down tales about "roughing it in the wilds of New Mexico." But with Route 66 just rerouted down Central Street and all the motels advertising, along with the brand new 1939 Hilton, its doubtful there was much sleeping under the stars. The El Vado, now in danger of demolition, advertised its tile showers and its "soundproof, fireproof" rooms.

Not to be left out, Santa Fe designed and published its own envelope to be used as first day covers on the commemorative postage stamp’s first day of issue, September 7th. Since the US Postal service had designated only Albuquerque the official first day city, Santa Fe officials must have raced like the Pony Express back with stamps to put on them before the day ended. Today they’re worth more.

First day cover with plate block of Scott 898; cachet by city of Santa Fe

My father met my mother in Albuquerque in 1949. He was stationed there to learn about bomb delivery protocols for the Navy. She was enrolled at the University of New Mexico in a Counseling PhD program. They got married there.

In December of 1972 I headed to the east coast for Christmas, again passing through New Mexico. I drove with Harry Rockwell, a follower of the psychic Edgar Cayce, in his huge, white Chevy Impala two-door, nicknamed The White Whale. I persuaded him to veer off Interstate 40 in Gallup and head to Mesa Verde, the enchanted Green Table, permeated by the ghosts of the prehistoric Anasazi, a term given them by modern Navajo, which means "Ancient Ones," who built the cliff dwellings there.

First day cover hand-drawn by Georges Laffert with block of Scott 759

The vignette of the stamps on another first day cover in my collection, part of the 1935 National Parks series of imperforate issues, shows the queen of cliff dwellings, Cliff Palace. Hand-drawn by Georges Laffert in limited number, the first day covers for this series are rare and command a very high price.

Author mesmerized by the mystery of Cliff Palace, the true golden city

While Rockwell stood across from Cliff Palace that windy December day, I scampered down to where the picture was taken for the vignette. He and I had slept in a pedestrian tunnel the night before during a blizzard. The snow was hard to get through to see the Palace, and I had to jump the fence, since it was officially closed for the winter. But I felt called by the enchantment of the ruins. Alone during those silent moments softened by the snow, I felt the powerful mystery of the mesas.

My girl friend back in Corvallis, Oregon, named Debra, ran off with Rockewell to California the next year. My heart had wandered. I’ll blame it on New Mexico.

While cleaning out some files last week, I found rules for using grammar properly, which date back to the English term paper I wrote as a high school freshman in Coronado. It was about the national parks, especially Mesa Verde. I had written it while that enchanted recluse, steeped in the mesa’s mysteries. I sent the rules to Marissa, star pupil in my freshman science class this past year. She’s an aspiring writer. She’s already written mystical poetry about blood passing through the veins of the bony winter landscape. The mysteries of New Mexico’s mesas and all other sacred landscapes must be transposed from one generation to the next.

On a trip once from Florida to Oregon, I attempted to cross the high valley of the Rio Grand. I had totaled my first Fiat in Florida visiting my brother. He lent me money for my second Fiat. The transmission blew on the ascent of the Sangre de Cristo’s, the Blood of Christ. I limped into Colorado Springs, borrowed money from an uncle to get it fixed, and got to Oregon by way of Wyoming. I crossed that high valley successfully on another trip in the same Fiat after a woman I chased for five years named Kaaren gave me the final boot in Urbana, IL. One must pay dues before entering the Land of Enchantment. I remember that the feeling I got in the valley was palpable.

That same feeling must have infected Georgia O’Keefe as she gazed out the window of her studio at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico in 1930.

And it gave to Ansel Adams one of his most mystical photographs, taken in 1941, of a moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico.

There is just something about wide open, dry expanses a mile high in that land of New Mexico. It got my parents married, without which there wouldn’t be me. And since then that high altitude air over those mesas just seems to mystify my soul every time I breathe it while passing through.

At the bottom of an ocean of autumn air that’s driving a mill a mile high on the short grass prairie, fresh and wind-washed, east of Albuquerque

The Power of Esme

2009-07-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

A continuation of the posts of June 19 and July 1; for questions about Esme go to Lux Aeterna also In Loving Memory of Esme Kenney

Journal writing is usually based on thought that is not refined. The words flow directly from the mind and heart. They are not contemplated beforehand, written carefully, or edited. It is possible then for the words to ring true like the shrill clanging of a bell. My journal states, “Esme commands a power that she herself probably did not realize she had.” Her story indeed commands a power, one involving the collision between a talented, kind, and gentle young girl who goes jogging along the woods near her home and a sinister man who then strangles her to death after attempting to rape her. But does Esme herself command a power today? If so, exactly what is this power and Esme’s role in its ability to cause powerful and ongoing effects in others?

I believe God’s love inhabited this young girl and can live on in the aftermath of her passing if we let it. We need a face to put on God who is unknown, according to Kierkegaard. In Esme’s face, words, manner, intentions, interactions with others, work, and art was the love of God. She responded to its presence quite naturally, without hesitation or examination. That is the power in question. It rings true like the shrill clanging of a bell.

Esme apparently had chosen to call it Christianity. Raised ecumenically Unitarian, she wore the symbol of Christianity around her neck, such as in the picture above. This means that she had personally chosen to identify with the suffering and triumph of Jesus.

I believe what Kierkegaard says, that one can transition from a life comprised primarily of aesthetic experiences through a time of ethical resolve in the recognition of the infinite and arrive at the religious, which is suffering. Esme was too young to know this third critical element. So I believe God allowed it to be given to her. She experienced the passion of suffering on a day otherwise filled with family and fun, including emailing, sunbathing, playing Frisbee, and then the jogging that cost Esme her life. She died because of who she was, an innocent girl living her life to the fullest…and able to be overpowered in the physical sense and brutally and painfully taken advantage of.

Now Esme is a saint proclaimed. Her life is a finished work. It is a triumph. We can examine our own lives through examining it. This I believe is Esme’s role, her ability to cause powerful and ongoing effects in others. The journal’s words continue. “You can sense this power as you read testimonies made by others about Esme. You can feel it when you study her pictures.”

And it is especially powerful because it now includes the critical element of suffering. The journal entry finishes, “And you can know (her power) when praying, now that she is most assuredly in God’s hands.” God allowed the suffering and death of an innocent son, so says the Scriptures, and has also allowed the same of an innocent daughter, Esme.

It may take a leap of faith that Esme has control of this power, but I believe she does in a way that involves a paradox. A paradox is contrary things that belong together in a state of creative tension. Esme died but is not dead. She lives on in a godly love called agape love. This love is selfless and giving. She exhibited it when alive. If the fully funded school in Myanmar is any indication, then she will continue to do so.

God loves this precious child, and God loves us too. So speak to Esme. She is listening. God’s love reaches out to us through her. When anything is going well in life, think of her joy. When anything is not going well, think of her pain. The power of Esme is experienced through identification with the triumph of her joy and love and the passion of her pain and suffering.

The saint with the cross around her neck