How Can I Make It New -- For You?

This is my third (nonconsecutive) southern Arizona winter, once again in the Sulphur Springs Valley of Cochise County, in our little ghost town cabin between Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains and Apache Pass in the Chiricahuas, and once again the Artist and I find ourselves making expeditions through rocky, jaw-dropping Texas Canyon to the west or up north through the equally beautiful and blessedly much longer Stockton Pass. The winter’s Junior Rodeo season took place over the past weekend, again giving me opportunities to relive childhood dreams as I identified with young cowgirls weaving between poles on horseback and thundering back to the finish line. But in this third winter, sharing scenes that have now become familiar, how can I hope that what I continue to find so thrilling will evoke the faintest echo of first-time glamor for you who read Books in Northport? How can I make it new for you, these events and sights that never grow old for me?

Because, for the Artist as well as for me, it never does get old, the daily drive from Dos Cabezas past the playa to Willcox. Every day is different — different light and shadows, variations in atmosphere and in our sightings of wildlife and livestock along the way — and so, too, the trips through the mountains and down among neighboring sky island ranges. A year ago, we were only arriving for the winter in Dos Cabezas on the first of February. This time around, as January nears its end, we are beginning our seventh week here. Would five months feel too long? I wondered. Well, it doesn’t seem too long at all. I look forward to spring’s new leaves in the wash and blooms along the roadside but am not at all impatient for the weeks to pass: for now I bundle up each morning for the first dog walk of the day and shed layers as the sun climbs into the sky. The cactus wren’s morning greeting is nothing new, but that little bird makes me smile every day. And how could a sunset ever grow old?

The ordinary, the everyday, is a joy to me here, as it is back in Michigan. To take my breath away and make my heart leap, I have never needed the Grand Canyon. Back in Leelanau County, Michigan, too, the daily scenes are ever new, and we are grateful for each day we are there. “We live in a beautiful place,” the Artist often remarks. He knows I haven’t forgotten. We don’t remind each other of beauty around us because we think the other has stopped noticing it but simply to bring a moment into focus and share it more consciously. 

Right now we are here, and here is a good place to be. As the days and years race by, we make frequent stops to look around and appreciate being alive. We’re here now. It’s good. Can you see it, too?

Disloyal — or Accommodating?

Oak tree, Arizona

The extreme contrast between the two centers and the two influences became itself a blessing: it rendered flagrant the limitations and the contingency of both. …In each of these places there was a maximum of air, of space, of suggestion; in each there was a minimum of deceptiveness and of the power to enslave. - George Santayana, Persons and Places: The Background of My Life

The passage above introduces the chapter called “Avila,” the center and influence of Santayana’s life in Spain, as it contrasted with his American life in Boston. He describes Avila as an ancient country town, dependent for its sustenance on the surrounding agricultural lands, which it can never shut out or forget.

The town walls, for all their massiveness, do not shut out the country from the eye. At every turn, through one of the city gates, or over some bastion, the broad valley remains visible with its checker-board of sloughed fields and straggling poplars lining the straight roads, or clustered along the shallow pools by the river; and at night, in the not too distant mountains, the shepherds’ fires twinkle like nether stars. Or if the townspeople are too busy and nearsighted to remember the country, the country every Friday morning invades the town, and fills the market place with rustics and rustic wares. At dawn they ride in from their villages in groups, on their trembling little donkeys….

As a confirmed country mouse, I am most enchanted by Santayana’s descriptions of his home in Spain and his walks taken from the town out into the countryside. The world of Boston, even the limited world of Harvard, one can find in so many other books of the period, and, in any case, it is not the world that attracts me. Similarly, I lose myself in the first volume of Proust, wandering with him through the countryside surrounding Combray, but lose interest in the second volume, with the country left far behind and all focus placed instead on human relationships in a limited social stratum, where the actors have little to do but obsess on one another’s words and looks and gestures. Yes, of course, human psychology is endlessly fascinating, but so is the rest of the world, and “society,” for me, without a wider focus in which to view it in natural and historical perspective, fast becomes suffocating.

Michigan field and trees

Give me open spaces! I have, however, found enchantment in Proust’s final volume, where he “refinds" the past living on, but that is another story.

Like my winter base in Dos Cabezas, Arizona, my Michigan home in Leelanau County is blessed with “a maximum of air, of space….” Suggestion? Yes, that, too, I suppose. Also, in Northport (as Santayana observes in Avila), one can never forget the fruit orchards or Lake Michigan, while here, in like manner, whatever Cochise County town one visits the range is never shut out but always visible on the streets. In Northport in summer, tractors and cherry shakers make their slow way through town traffic, followed in turn, in their own time, by heavy trucks hauling cherries to the processor, a sequence replaced in fall by the apple harvest parade. Here in Arizona, besides the weekly livestock auction in Willcox, there  are on every road and in every town livestock trailers hauling cattle (and often saddled horses), along with pickup trucks carrying bales of hay and huge bulk water containers. 

Cattle on open range

Dandelions in cherry orchard

But reminders of country sustenance are not the only outside reality always present in the towns. Beyond what human beings bring into being and provide for one another, there is what nature has long ago formed, remaining into the present. So always, every day, on all sides, except during hours of snow or fog or blowing dust that temporarily obscures their outlines, the mountains are present to the eye and soul. They are to this part of the country, to my winter eye and heart, what lakes are to Michigan.

“We’re surrounded by mountains,” the Artist observes on one morning drive from ghost town to cow town.

“Like Shangri-La,” I hint mischievously, for the night before we had watched watched the old movie “Lost Horizon,” based on the James Hilton novel.

The Artist snorts. He finds my comparison absurd, and yet I am prepared to argue (“You would argue with St. Peter himself!” my mother used to say in exasperation) that Dos Cabezas is better than Shangri-La in many ways. For one thing, Dos Cabezas is a real place, and we’re here. It isn’t a book or movie that’s going to come to an end and dump me back in someplace I don’t want to be. And — how many of you have seen the movie? Do you remember that there is no jealousy in Shangri-La, because the men are so “generous” that they willingly share “their” women with anyone who desires them? Believe me, that did not escape my notice! The women seem to have nothing to say in the matter, and it is not they who are “generous,” but the men! Shangri-La? No, thank you!

Desert view, Cochise County

Water view, Leelanau County

Well, nothing on earth is perfect, and no one on earth is perfect, but we human beings (like other animals) make homes for ourselves, and over the course of time most of us develop feelings for the places we live, even if they are not places into which we were born. One of my friends, born in Rhode Island, has been married for decades to a Brazilian, with the consequence that they divide their lives between the eastern U.S. and Sao Paulo. (Sorry, Jeanie, this program lacks many of the accent marks I would otherwise employ.) Another friend lives half the year (winter) in northern Michigan and the other half (their winter) in southern Australia, while still another maintains dual U.S.-Irish citizenship. As for me, I have few if any memories of my infant and baby life in South Dakota, only snapshots and ephemera carefully saved by my mother.

Northern Michigan and southeast Arizona. I love them both. Is a divided loyalty a lesser loyalty? What do you say? 

I used to think so, but now I think“divided” is not the right adjective at all. It is a dual loyalty that people with two home places feel. And if that is not possible, how would it ever be possible to love equally more than one child?

At home in Michigan

One road home in Arizona

Mystery! Just Where Is That “Cat-Who” Country?

What's going on out there?

We met a few of the high desert ghost town neighbors the other morning for coffee, cinnamon rolls, and homemade biscotti when one of them at the other end of the table from me leaned forward to ask, “You know the ‘cat-who’ books?” I nodded. I have a bookstore, after all, and I started out selling only used books (though I have carried a pretty good selection of new titles for some time now), and the ‘cat-who’ books are murder mysteries. I always say that if you had a store of used books and sold only history and mystery, you’d have nonfiction and fiction covered for the majority of your customers. It would be a good name for a used book business, too: History and Mystery. 

So, yes, of course. Though at that very moment the author’s name didn’t leap to my mind, naturally I was familiar with the series, having always one or two of the books in my shop at any given time. And my mother had read all of them. But had I ever read one myself? That’s what stopped me in my tracks when the questioner informed me that the stories were set in my Michigan backyard. Really? “Out in Seattle, they call where you live ‘cat-who’ country.” Really? “Are you kidding me?” No, he wasn't.

This is not Michigan, any part of it

Later that same day we stopped at the Friendly Bookstore in Willcox, one of our regular stops, and I went directly to the mystery shelves, where there were two paperback books by Lilian Jackson Braun. I selected the slimmer of the volumes and went home with The Cat Who Sniffed Glue, determined to find out if Traverse City — “or, really, Northport,” the Arizona neighbor had said — were indeed the setting for the stories.

I won’t beat around the bush or lead you on. As far as I’m concerned Pickax is not Traverse City, and it isn’t Northport, either. It has features of many different Michigan towns, but it is definitely U.P., that is, the Upper Peninsula. Your clue, sleuthers, is the phrase “Down Below.” 

No one in the Lower Peninsula uses that phrase to indicate they’ve been traveling south, because the Lower Peninsula is “Down Below.” It’s below the Mackinac Bridge, the Mighty Mac, the bridge that spans the Straits of Mackinac and joins the two peninsulas. (And Mackinac is pronounced Mackinaw, by the way, even when there’s a ‘c’ rather than a ‘w’ on the end of the word.) On that much I brook no dispute. 

Perhaps, however, another word of explanation is in order for those unfamiliar with Michigan. The neighbor here in southeast Arizona who brought up “cat-who” also loaned us a couple of books set in southern Michigan, and that’s yet another distinction. Northport and Traverse City are in the Lower Peninsula, but they are not “southern” Michigan. To everyone but Yoopers, they qualify as “Up North.” Are we clear now?

As to which is the “big lake” in the Braun books, we could argue it different ways. Where I live, in Leelanau County (i.e., “Down Below”), the “Big Lake” is Lake Michigan, but the Upper Peninsula has Lake Michigan to its south and Lake Superior to its north, so where is Pickax? At one point in the story, someone mentions that Pickax is the “only harbor of refuge” on that side of the lake, but are we to take the statement literally? Is it possible there is only one harbor of refuge on Lake Michigan’s north shore, or only one on Lake Superior’s south shore? That seems unlikely, though of course there are long stretches, especially on Lake Superior, where a sailor is far from a harbor of refuge. And now, checking further, I see that there is not a single federal harbor of refuge in the U.P., and even Northport and Leland, harbors of refuge in Leelanau County, are not federal harbors of refuge. But perhaps this is muddying the waters too much.

Out West -- horses and cows

Anyway, another element that confounds literalism has to do with restaurants. — But wait, let me back up a bit. 

All the mining history in the book points to the Keweenaw (confusingly pronounced KEE-wuh-naw) Peninsula, that rocky, jutting antenna projecting in a graceful curve from U.P. into cold Lake Superior. The number of mansions strengthens the case for the Keweenaw, too, since the kind of fortune brought by mining allowed for mansion-building. So, too, there was an ethnic diversity in the history of the U.P. that would go some way toward explaining the number of interesting restaurants available to characters in the cat-who story, restaurants that would seem wildly out of place in most parts of the U.P. (though perfectly reasonable in the Traverse City region). I mean, come on! No one mentions a single Cornish pasty in the whole book! There are also a lot more farmhouses and barns than I associate with the Upper Peninsula. So where does that leave us?

I guess I could just do an online search and find the answer to my question instantly, but where’s the fun in that? After all, I could have skipped directly to the final chapter of the book to learn the identity of the murderer, too, and not read the story at all, but why? Isn’t it more fun to enter into a story and search for clues? The journey, not the destination….

If you know Michigan and if you’ve read Lilian Jackson Braun’s books, where do you think the stories are set?

One thing is certain. As I was reading The Cat Who Sniffed Glue, my mother was not far from my thoughts but always there, just across the room, smiling at me. Here I was, reading another book I knew she had read and enjoyed. And I was reading it right after reading another book, one sent to me by my sister, a book she had bought and given to my father — so that in reading that book I was constantly reminded of “the Colonel.” Reading is so much more than escape, so much more even than education. A solitary activity, yet it unites us with other human beings, even those who have passed on.

As for my Western images today, several of them represent what is for me a cow country mystery: Can horses round up cows on their own, without cowboys or cowgirls, and take the herd back to the ranch at the end of the day? If not, what was going on in these scenes we witnessed out near the Willcox Playa on Saturday afternoon?

Horses at work?

Reading in Place

The roadrunner has a rather drab dress of indiscriminate pattern. The feathers are dark brown laced with white, and the tail has a greenish tinge. His wings are stubby, their principal function being to increase the speed of his running should he be in a hurry. His eyes are encircled with rings of an orange color. When he pauses to look at you, he opens his mouth, the crest atop his head rises; the impression is left that the sight of you has brought upon him a condition of great astonishment and shock. Then, recovering quickly from his near collapse, he will go jauntily on his way. -  

- Herbert V. Young, Water By the Inch: Adventures of a Pioneer Family on an Arizona Homestead

Despite several excellent books begun and not yet begun, recommended and picked up on impulse, it is books having to do with the Southwest that take priority right now. I vowed to get back to The Frontier in American History, waiting for me on the little table between our two reading chairs (finally finished that book, begun many weeks before in 2018, two weeks into 2019), and then was seduced at the library by Water By the Inch, with its memories of the desert around Phoenix before urban and suburban development, tales of moving cattle on horseback, digging and falling down wells, close calls with rattlesnakes, and a happy family with five children living in a two-room shanty without running water. Before that there was Voice of the Borderlands, poetry sometimes sweet, sometimes harsh, but always evocative, vignettes narrating the lives of cowboys and horses, rodeos, cattle drives, drug runners, desert deaths, and the dying of old ways. My gratitude for the sun’s warmth I found contained in the Mexican description of “el sobre de los pobres,” the overcoat of the poor,, and I alternated my reading of Drum Hadley’s soul-searing poetic narratives with a novel by Phyllis de la Garza, Railroad Avenue, set on the familiar streets of Willcox, long before those streets were paved. One of the winter’s first temptations, however, had come with My Heart Lies South, irresistible to me not only for its Mexican setting but also for the author’s signature on the inside front cover, along with an indication that one of the book’s previous owners had been Helen Riggs, from an important ranching family down Chiricahua way. You’ll see that book listed in my 2018 Books Read list.

And now, continuing my latest Arizona desert reading, I am deeply grateful to have discovered the nature writing — and much more — of Ken Lamberton. 

I look to the stars for confirmation that I’m not stuck in one place. From one hour to the next I can tell by marking the counterclockwise motion of Ursa Major that the earth moves beneath my feet. I’m spinning with it at 700 miles an hour. From season to season I can feel the earth coursing against a backdrop of constellations, summer’s Scorpio and winter’s Orion. I’m circling the sun at 66,000 miles an hour, a million and a half miles a day. I am not in prison; I am a traveler. I am a galactic tourist, visiting the sun and moon and gas giants. I watch the universe pass by from the window of this fenced plot of ground. I should have motion sickness.  

- Ken Lamberton, Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment (2007)

In fact, Ken Lamberton was in prison, serving a 12-year sentence as a convicted sex criminal. In his late twenties, a veteran five-year teacher and married father of two (with a third on the way), he had fallen for one of his eighth-grade students and run away with her, presumably to “start a new life,” according to fantasies governing the relationship — on both sides — at that time. Lamberton coped with prison by continuing to read, write, and teach. He was remorseful and desiring of forgiveness but understood that his remorse could never change the past and that forgiveness might never come, especially from his wife, the person he had hurt the most and by whom he most desired to be forgiven. 

In the pages of this, his third book written and published during his incarceration, it seems almost as if his wife, Karen, suffers more from being married to a convicted sex criminal than Ken does from being in prison. Karen also found productive ways to cope with the consequences of her husband’s betrayal, going back to school and earning a paralegal degree, as well as a B.A. in political science. She was hired by a Tucson law firm. She sued the Department of Economic Security and won not only her initial class action lawsuit but prevailing over the six years of appeals against her by the State of Arizona. She visited her husband regularly, bringing their daughters as often as possible. His relationships with the girls seem good, despite the odds. 

And yet, prison exacts a grievous toll on the marriage. 

Readers new to Lamberton’s work, as I was, may be surprised by how much of his life in prison focuses on nature and wildlife, though it was nothing new for him. His book Wilderness and Razor Wire was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing in 2002. In Time of Grace, he notes carefully and almost compulsively the annual visitations of various courting and migrating birds and insects and the blooming and leafing-out of trees, emergence of ground plants, sightings of tadpoles (after the rains), a brooding mother duck, many bats, and once, excitingly, a ringtail. Snakes, butterflies, even flies or a broken eggshell — nothing in the natural world is beneath his notice, and everything in his walks around the perimeter of the yard contributes to his sanity.

…I adjust my calendar to the metronome transgressions of birds. For now, they cue me to after summer’s ebb: shorter days as the desert gradually cools and dries. Grasses beyond the perimeter fence bleach and go to seed under scattered cholla cacti, tiaras of light caught among their blond spines. 

But Lamberton is no disembodied angel behind the razor wire. Acutely aware of his own sins, he is no less blind to the sins of others, whether they be wardens, prison guards, wealthy and politically powerful unpunished criminals, or American society at large. It would be difficult to read this book and not be angry at the widespread injustice Lamberton recounts. Not, I add, that he feels his sentence was unjust. No, he says he deserved it. But he sees that the system is not geared basically toward justice at all. In his “Author’s Note” at the book’s beginning, he writes:

Like many people, I believed the justice system was a vehicle for truth. I discovered that truth is irrelevant and politics is not, that our adversarial system favors the affluent, that judges have become redundant, that a plea bargain is not a compromise but a surrender. That justice is a contest with winners and losers…. I also discovered that prison is a society  with a caste system based on the types of crimes committed and those ranked a the top — murderers, drug offenders, gang members — prey on those at the bottom . . . and I was at the bottom. 

And yet, as important as the revelations of injustice — is it wrong of me to see it this way? — are the author’s views of the natural world around him and the beautiful language in which they are expressed. So whether your interest is in law, prison reform, natural science, or literature, this book will command your attention from the first page to the last. I’ll go further and say that this would be an excellent choice for a book club, particularly if members of the group come to discussion with some diversity of experience.

Please Explain It To Me

Good morning. I've had some thoughts percolating since December and have decided today is the day —

Letter To My Conservative Friends: 

Or should I say “To Those of My Friends Who Call Themselves ‘Conservative’”? Because I’m having a hard time understanding what you believe and what you want. Maybe it will help if I tell you what I see as “conservatism,” and you tell me where I’m wrong. This is how I see it -- not a definition, by any means, but some important features:

True conservatism defends freedom. Conservatism worthy of the name would stand firm against tyrants around the world, not roll over for them, wiggling and peeing and showing a soft underbelly. I’m not talking about aggressive empire-building — going out and taking over other people’s lands — but standing against those who would do so to others. Are we on the same page here or not? If not, what am I missing?

I also see true conservatism as fiscally responsible. So conservatism would invest in and maintain a strong military but would not send them on pointless, expensive domestic maneuvers or half-heartedly pursue unwinnable, endless foreign wars, squandering public investment and digging an ever-deeper national deficit to prop up private (perhaps unwise) corporate investments. Or do you see protection of private corporate investment overseas and defense of freedom — our own and others’ — not only compatible but inextricably intertwined? Please explain. What policies would you have our country pursue, and how do you see them fall under the umbrella of conservatism?

True conservatism builds for the future. It respects precedent and draws lessons from the past but never forgets that the object of government policy is long-term stability and security and prosperity in the future. In short, a true conservative is not a gambler, and true conservatism would not take foolish risks with our national future for short-term gain, either financial or political. Perhaps this relates to my paragraph above, and one answer will serve to explain my confusion on both points.

True American conservatism stands by the Constitution and the rule of law. Thus conservatism would respect not only a partisan interpretation of the Second Amendment but the entire Constitution. Furthermore, a conservative president would respect (not demean) the office of president, as well as Congress and the judiciary, and would respect freedom of speech and freedom of the press, however violently he might disagree with opinions sometimes expressed. One-man rule would not be conservative, would it? Would it?

(“The law is no respecter of persons” does not mean disrespect: it means that no one person, even the president, is above the law.)

True conservatism is not anarchy. Does this need to be said? Apparently it does. The current Administration in Washington, D.C., would do away with government protections for ordinary citizens at every level and in every department by appointing to office the least-qualified individuals with the strongest short-term self-interest in destroying rather than fulfilling the trust those offices require for their continued operation. The only way I can understand this as part of a conservative agenda is if conservatism believes the missions of these departments is illegitimate exercise of government’s power. That these departments should never have been established. But then, where does conservative respect for precedent begin and end? Is there some historic line in the sand, before which precedents are respected, after which they are undeserving of respect? Or — as I fear — is the label ‘conservative’ merely shorthand for a party line? If your party does it, it’s good; if the other party does it, it’s bad? Respect and conserve the one, disrespect and destroy the other? Can you understand why it’s hard for me not to see what’s happening as essentially partisan?

True conservatism is honest and proud. It is not built on lies and name-calling, blaming, shouting, bullying, and whining. William F. Buckley represented a conservatism I could understand. He did not rely on urging mobs to shout three-word chants but engaged intellectually with opponents and articulated his own views with careful arguments and defense. 

This is why, as I see it, conservatism is moribund in our country today: dying if not dead. Can it be resuscitated? Only, it seems to me, if more than a brave handful of conservatives with spines will once again stand up for its principles. So where do you stand? And where do you think I fail to understand you?

A lot of political mileage has been made of the simplistic and short-sighted idea that government is at the root of every social problem. Is that what you think? Is that how you define conservatism? Think about life in this country without government. Would you really, for the sake of anarchical “freedom,” give up the rule of law and hand over your fortunes and your sacred honor to predatory, unregulated private corporations? Because — follow the money to the power — and you’ll find corporations in the driver’s seat. Where can you see any future security in that scenario? And where, in that picture, is any recognizable conservatism worthy of the name? 

Libertarianism is not conservatism. This, at least, is my opinion, based on considerable reading. Libertarians will tell you that private individuals and corporations will do the right thing because only in that way can they protect their investments and future profits. But the investments of any individual — and thus of any corporation — must be made in the short term for profits to benefit that individual (or those stockholders) directly. In the long run, after all, our generation — like all those before it — will be dead! So if governments around the world do not step into the breach to protect air and water and soil quality, woe betide future generations! Or do you see human nature and the natural human life span differently?

I really want to hear from you. Since I’m opening the conversation, though, I’ll lay my cards on the table and reveal my conclusions here at the start:

Conservatism and progressivism need not be enemy camps. One parent in a family may be stricter and the other more obviously nurturing, but that does not mean children would be better off if both parents always took the same approach or if one’s approach did not temper the other, and it certainly doesn’t mean two parents must engage in continual tug-of-war to raise their children! I’ll go further: sometimes it’s important to listen to grandparents, too, and even the children may have perspectives their elders need to take into account. 

Democracy rests on a faith that something similar is true of government, that we will be better off making decisions together, with more guiding us than the will of a king, more protecting us than the goodwill of the wealthy and powerful. We need justice, and we need understanding and mercy. We need to stand on our own, and a helping hand is sometimes necessary to get us there. 

(If a winner-take-all, Hobbesian “law of the jungle” is your view of freedom, you are an anarchist, not a conservative, as I see it.) 

In any political party, when ideological purity is demanded, ideology gets in the way of practical solutions, but “compromise” does not have to be a dirty word. It doesn’t having no principles. After all, the best way to a given goal may well be a path neither side initially envisioned on its own.

True conservatism looks to its legacy, as does true progressivism. I’m certainly not saying that conservatism and progressivism are “the same” — far from it — but neither wants to leave the country in smoking ruins! So if that isn’t a call for mutual respect and bipartisanship, I’m afraid the danger we face is not to conservatism or progressivism alone but to the very soul and future of our nation. 

We were once the light of the world. American policies were not always right, and I think we all know that. (Don’t we?) Native Americans were massacred and held in concentration camps. Black Africans were enslaved, bought, sold, and treated as less than human. The United States has intervened in the internal events of other countries, sometimes for the good, other times with terrible consequences. Citizens have been denied the right to vote or to have their votes count, and innocent people have been deprived of life and liberty. Through all these blunders and sins, our country espoused right ideals. Have Americans been nothing but hypocrites? I’m not saying that and don’t want to argue the point.

I would say, rather, that from its inception and over its history our country has made periodic and halting efforts to realize its ideals, at times making partial progress and at other times backsliding seriously — as does any human endeavor, individual or group. Acknowledging our national shortcomings is not being unpatriotic, in my book, and certainly I cannot see holding up lies and calling them truths as conservative. Can you?

The conservative may think I am too critical of our history (do you think so?), while the radical will see my picture as too rosy-hued.  The more important question I would put to you is: How does the world see us today? How does it view our national leadership and those who support it? Is a man who shows no respect for the dignity and honor of his own high office conservative? Does “respect” mean nothing more than agreeing with and applauding one man as “the greatest,” even when he forgets he is the highest-ranking servant of the people — all the people — those who voted for him, those who voted against him, and those who didn’t vote at all; those who cheer him and those who criticize him?

My heart has been heavy for over two years now, and that heaviness weighs on me daily. This is very personal. I feel estranged from too many friends on both sides of the political divide. 

I don’t understand my polite conservative friends because I don’t understand how they can call themselves conservative and continue to see the current president (or speaker of the House, when you come right down to it) as a conservative leader. But there are also the not-so-polite ones, people I thought for years were my friends but who have now cast me into a camp they identify as “left-leaning liberal fascists.” I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean, but it doesn’t matter, because no conversation is possible against chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up! Build the wall! Build the wall!” Places that once felt welcoming and homelike no longer feel that way to me.

Both sides, I said, though, and I mean it. There are some men and women with whom I agree politically, to a large extent, some of them friends of long standing, whose company I now avoid because they operate these days on a permanent setting of high dudgeon, their rage matching that of the chanters on the other side. They follow bad news (and there’s plenty of it) minute-by-minute and eagerly pass along each latest outrageous tweet. The worst part I see in this, what breaks my heart, is the wall they, my political allies, are in the process of building against anyone on the other side of the divide. Some of these friends are politically active in productive ways, also, and that I applaud, but others seem to be doing nothing but shouting. 

Then there are those who studiously avoid any discussion of politics. You might think I would be comfortable with that, but no, that avoidance feels so false to everything I know we are all feeling that I can hardly stand it, even as I politely keep my own observations on life’s surface with strangers until and unless receiving a sign that, whatever our politics, we share present heartbreak. Otherwise, while I go about my public business with my public face, emotionally I tend to draw into my shell, my little world. So yes, I avoid, too, and I feel false when I do it, and how many of us are doing it, and how long can we keep it up? I ask not only my friends who call themselves conservative but all my friends and also anyone I’ve never met who may be reading these words. 

This is about so much more than which party won or lost some particular election or office. It goes so much deeper. It is a plague on our historical moment, played out in public but experienced also in private, in sleepless nights and silent, lonely days. 

Every new year brings fresh opportunities to reach out, to touch, to love, to give, to be grateful for the life we have. But I am untrue to myself if I pretend I’m not feeling the deep sadness that has been the emotional background for me of the past year and that now accompanies me into the present. So if you are feeling it, too, whatever your political beliefs and allegiances, please know that you are not alone. In the end (and yes, I’m finally coming to it), that may be the most important thing I can say: If you are sad, you are not alone. Many of us are hiding sadness and depression, some with angry shouting, some with light small talk, some by withdrawing into silence and isolation.

In this new year already underway (as it’s taken me weeks to decide to make these thoughts public), I wish us all calmer, brighter times, opportunities to look at one another with love and respect, and as many occasions as possible to open our hearts and minds to one another. Because we can’t leave everything to the younger, rising generation. As long as we’re here, age 20 or age 90, we have work to do. Together. 

“Reading the Landscape” in Our Different Ways

Sarah puts nose to the ground every day

A recent groundswell of interest in Sarah’s winter doings provokes this post. I won’t presume to speak in Sarah’s voice, as she is a very quiet, nonvocal dog. She gives a single low woof! if she feels the need to alert us to something, and we always pay attention then, or she might whine, very softly, if she wants something and feels we are not paying attention, but that’s about it. So hope a few photographs and brief remarks will fill the bill and make Sarah’s fans happy.

Sarah and I go out exploring the high desert near our winter cabin at least twice a day, morning and mid- to late afternoon. (Her evening sortie is brief, for utilitarian purposes only.) For me, during these expeditions, vision is the primary sense, hearing the second. I can’t present to you the morning song of the mockingbird, the happy cranking of the cactus wren, of the thump! of a vehicle going over the cattle guard at one end or the other of the ghost town, but here is one of the kind of sights that catches my eye. 

It’s different with Sarah. Her nose is #1 sense organ, and she employs it constantly! Sometimes I have a visual hint to tell me what she might be smelling. For instance, I might see a track that she thoroughly sniffs. Or when she applies her nose to the end of a twig or grass stem, I can infer that some animal recently brushed against it. —But what kind of animal? Cow? Coyote? Javelina? Bobcat? Her nose must detect so many distinct scents!

If Sarah were at all verbal, I’m sure she would share her discoveries. As it is, she collects her impressions, and I collect mine, but she and I do enjoy one another’s company while exploring, each in her own manner. 

Wishing you a day of good smells!!!