On the One Year Anniversary of Esme’s Passing

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 Past deaths cannot be rescinded.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She YouTubed, blogged, skyped, and rocked with ear phones behind outdated styles of sunglasses.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

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.

Esme Kenney: The Self-Reciprocating Power of Happiness

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

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

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 presence 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.

Therapeutic Wilderness Camping Along the Florida Trail

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.”

© 2002 Steve Baskauf

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

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.”