The Other Side's Gateway

We never did get over to Portal three years ago when we were here, and this year the Artist very much wanted to see it, having heard so many alluring tales of the place. Whichever way you go, unless you’re a hawk, it’s a long way to Portal from Dos Cabezas. The options are to (1) retreat to Willcox, get on I-10, cross the state line into New Mexico, and take a paved road south and back west; (2) head straight for the mountains and then brave a winding unpaved road full of switchbacks to the other side; and (3) drive south to Douglas and then backtrack northeast, eventually entering by the same road west you would have reached in option (1). 

As trail boss, it was my call to make, and I called the New Mexico route. As I said already, it's a long way around. But it's also a beautiful drive, and we had no schedule to keep. 

Other than birding, the main action in Portal is the Portal Cafe and Lodge. We were there in what was still jacket weather in the mountains, but we could see that there would be a lively outdoor scene in weeks ahead, apparently including live music. The Lodge has been around for 90 years, and the setting could not be more lovely, filled with trees and nestled below towering rock faces. 

There isn't a lot more, but we liked what we saw -- in addition to the cafe and lodge and a few houses, a post office, a little library, and even a bookstore! Amazing! Sadly, we were there on a day when neither library nor bookstore was open. 

Contemplating the road leading back by way of the mountains, this sign about mileage gave us pause. Only 36 miles back to our side if we braved the challenging road? Was there still snow that high up? Would we be able to negotiate the road without 4WD? After questioning locals, we decided to return the same way we'd come, but we were encouraged to follow the mountain road for as far as it was paved before turning around for our return: that way we would be able to visit the ranger station, enjoy the views along Cave Creek, and also see parts of the Southwest Research Station, operated by the Museum of Natural History on land formerly owned by Sky Island author Weldon Heald and his wife. I was especially keen to see where the Healds had lived, having read Weldon's book three years ago and again this year.

The road along Cave Creek was magnificent! Mountains were breathtaking at every turn, cool shade refreshing, running water in the creek bed a pure delight! We were smitten! The Artist was particularly smitten, thinking it the most beautiful place he had seen anywhere in Arizona, and he began fantasizing about spending a winter in Portal. Those who know us will not be surprised, realizing that we have a rich fantasy life...

A few days later, I happened to be in line at the grocery store in Willcox behind a woman who had traveled over from Portal to do her food shopping. Did she say it was a 100-mile trip -- one way? I asked about the mountain road, and she said that, while the distance was shorter through the mountains, the time it took was the same as the longer way around via New Mexico and the expressway. I felt vindicated in the decision I'd made as to our route the day we made the trip, and I also wondered how long the Artist could possibly be contented in the isolation of Portal, given that he thinks our ghost town cabin is already in the "middle of nowhere," and here we are only 14 miles from a town with a big grocery store, a movie theatre, and numerous gas stations. Though they do have the charming little cafe and library and post office, there is no gas station anywhere near Portal. No grocery store. It's a one-hundred-mile, one-way trip to doctors' or dentists' offices or pharmacy, too. 

I like living out in the quiet of our ghost town, but even I would be difficult to spend the winter months in Portal's much more extreme isolation, despite the beauty of the area. A more appealing alternative, to my way of thinking, would be to spend a few days in rental accommodations on the Southwest Research Station grounds. Three meals a day are included with housing (so the trail boss wouldn’t have to be cookie, too), and it would be a lark to spend between-meal time hiking along Cave Creek looking for birds, without a care in the world. 

Or, we could simply do again as we did that one time -- go over for a day and come back home again. Really, that worked out just fine, as far as I'm concerned. 

Book Review: WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, SISTER?

My books in Arizona

My reading year started off slowly in January. All a-flutter over a trip to the Yucatan with an old friend, to be followed by the cross-country trek with Artist and dog to our winter quarters in the high desert, I could hardly concentrate on books and think I only read the first three on my “Books Read 2018” list that month. Even once we were here in Arizona, all the business of getting settled in and reacquainted with our surroundings and meeting new neighbors and, in my case, studying Spanish meant that it was quite a while before I could settle down to books. 

As it has turned out, much of my reading this winter and early spring has been history and economics (though that fat volume of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations got shoved aside rather abruptly by more reading I found compelling in the moment) — the world, the Southwest, and Mexico. And now, for a couple of days this past week, I found myself completely immersed in a different side of the European World War II experience, thanks to Dennis J. Turner’s What Did You Do in the War, Sister? How Catholic Nuns in Belgium Defied and Deceived the Nazis in World War Two. 

Book in focus

Dennis Turner, professor of law at the University of Dayton in Ohio, is a summer resident of Leelanau County, where he and I met (no surprise!) at Dog Ears Books. Lately we have had quite a bit of e-mail correspondence about his book. The subject intrigued me, and equally intriguing was Turner’s approach to writing the story. 

Beginning with a wealth of source material, including letters and journals written by a group of nuns in Nazi-occupied Belgium, the author made the decision to create a fictional nun to serve as his narrator and then wove together various strands of history — troop movements, bombings, strictures of wartime civilian life and in the life of different religious orders — to show the war in Belgium and France through the eyes of his fictional main character, a young American nun from Ohio, sent by her order shortly before the war began to a convent and girls’ school in Belgium.

This is one book that compels the reading of every page, including sections preceding and following the main story. Turner begins by giving a timeline of events beginning in 1932 and 1945, an extremely helpful historical review. The preface then tells his own personal story — his initial introduction to the Belgian nuns’ story, his own experiences with Catholic education, the atheism he now espouses, his role on the faculty of a Catholic university — as well as background on the particular order of nuns whose experiences inspired his book. His acknowledgements section (“Author’s Reflections”) serves in part as a continuation of the preface, his expressions there truly reflective and grateful for experiences that made his book possible and indicative of learning that, while it did not convert him, enlarged his perspective on religion.

Of course, it is the story that is primary. We first meet Sister Christina in December 1944. The town of St. Hubert and the nuns of Our Lady of Namur had thought the Nazi occupation was over when American soldiers arrived in September, but now they are enduring a second occupation by German troops. Sister Christina recounts her struggle with fear of death, likening it to that experienced by a soldier in battle. Her religious training had schooled her in acceptance, and she had done well in difficult circumstances for several years; however, when she is wounded and a fellow nun beside her killed in a bombing raid, she is gripped by fear. Not wanting the  bravery of the Sisters of Our Lady to be forgotten, should they not survive the war, Sister Christina resolves to write the story of their wartime life and activities, relying on the detailed diary she had always kept. 

Sister Christina speaks German as well as French and, as an American, is a native English speaker, so her linguistic abilities repeatedly make her a logical choice for special responsibilities. When the nuns become active involved in the Resistance, for instance, and men claiming to be downed American pilots come to the convent seeking shelter, it is Sister Christina who is asked to determine whether they are genuine Americans or German imposters. Here she faces a moral dilemma she never expected would be hers in a life of strict obedience, since judging a man to be an imposter meant sending him to certain death.

The convent had not prepared me for these kinds of choices. If any decisions needed to be made, my Sister Superior made them. I naively assumed that if I were somehow given the power of choice, it would simply be a matter of choosing the obvious good and rejecting the obvious evil. The options were black and white, like our habits. Thus, it was a distressing surprise to discover that having freedom of choice drops you into a world of moral ambiguity. Evil may be wrapped in goodness, and good may have evil buried inside.  

… Of course, I might let Sister Ursula carry the entire moral burden of choice. I could escape responsibility by claiming that … I was just obeying Sister Ursula’s orders. I am sure, however, such a rationalization would not have eased my troubled conscience much.

The nuns sheltered and concealed many kinds of fugitives behind their walls. Some were other Resistance fighters, others American pilots shot down by German guns.

In the fall of 1941, persecution of the Jews increased. As a result, Sister Ursula quickly agreed with [Father] Cyril’s request to give refuge to Jews. 

In addition to those Jews literally hidden in the convent, there were Jewish girls “hidden in plain sight” as regular Catholic students of the nuns’ school. These girls were given Christian-sounding names and taught basic prayers and responses. They had to eat whatever was served, including non-kosher pork; they were to speak only French at all times; and their identities were to be kept hidden even from one another. They were not, however, to be baptized or in any way pressured to convert, and a complicated system was developed whereby the Jewish students lined up to receive communion were given an unconsecrated wafer from a secret portion of the ciborium. Their own religion was respected at the same time that they were disguised as Catholic students.

We had built a delicate house of cards based on complete silence, and it would entirely collapse if the Abwehr heard we were knowingly sheltering even one Jewish girl. A mere rumor could trigger a full-scale invasion of the convent and school by Abwehr agents. 

Sister Christina thought when initially sent to Belgium that she would remain in the one sheltered convent, but war shattered that expectation. Neither German nor American bombs spared civilians or those in religious orders. Villages, homes, farms, churches, and convents were equally at risk. (Sister Christina says that she and the others, irrationally, did not have the same fear of American bombs as they did of the Germans, because they realized the Americans were there to liberate them from Nazi occupation.) When their convent home is destroyed, the sisters have to take to the road with other refugees, and throughout the story they are given refuge as often as they give refuge to others.

Her own role is one of increasing complexity, as Sister Christina must wear different masks in the fulfillment of her wartime duties. Her impassive nun’s face at times had to be replaced by a shy, coy flirtatiousness designed to stall German officers so that resident refugees would have time to hide before a search of the convent. With men coming as downed pilots, in order to determine their authenticity she had to set aside silent reserve to engage in lively conversation about American life. And occasionally with stubborn bureaucrats or soldiers it was necessary for her to raise her voice and scold, as if bringing unruly schoolboys to order. 

In the reality of life in occupied Belgium, for everyone concerned, fear alternates with hope, doubt with certainty, and the relief of liberation with the return of occupying forces, occupiers more desperate than ever as their cause becomes more hopeless. At one point the cellar of the convent (serving as bomb shelter) is divided into sections for housing German soldiers, Belgian nuns, and wounded American soldiers who are technical prisoners-of-war. It is a complicated time, and when Sister Christina sees the extreme youth of German boy soldiers she can’t help feeling sorry for them, realizing that “he and his generation would pay the bitter price” for the indoctrination to which they had been subjected. 

While the author carefully notes each instance in the story where he changed or fabricated an event or a conversation, the illusion of reality will not be disturbed for any but the most hidebound literal readers. To read, after all, is frequently to enter into the life of fictional characters. Moreover, not only the background but the majority of facts in this story are documented, making the fictional narrator perfectly believable.

I will bestocking Dennis Turner’s book this summer in my Northport bookstore and hope to have the author on hand at least once to meet a local reading public I know will be appreciative of his efforts and the results. What Did You Do in the War, Sister? is a book that will have have broad appeal and broaden anyone’s historical knowledge of World War II with its page-turning story.

We shall return -- in mid-May!

Beautiful Mornings Not For Sale

On one morning’s drive into Willcox, a song came into my head, and once it was there it stayed for several days. “Who Will Buy?” My first and unforgettable introduction to it came during a high school talent show, when a schoolmate sat alone on a stage and sang her heart out. “Who will buy this wonderful morning?” the song begins. A later verse asks, poignantly, “Who will buy this wonderful feeling?” and the song’s final, plaintive question, “What am I to do/to keep the sky so blue?” is answered only by the desperate, doomed wish: “There must be someone who will buy.” 

We cannot, of course, put a beautiful morning or a wonderful feeling in a box, tie it up with ribbons, and take it out when we feel blue. We know very well that life doesn’t work that way. But having such mornings and such feelings — and remembering them — and holding onto the likelihood that they will come into one’s life again, no matter how bleak a particular present moment might appear — those are the realizations that song has always brought me. And while the idea of buying special moments and feelings is a strange one, something we know to be impossible, at the core of the absurd idea is an essential and crucial knowledge, that of value beyond price. 

A friend sent me The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, by Michael McCarthy, a nonfiction book filled with sobering facts, to put it mildly: The world population of human beings doubled between 1960 and 2000, from 3 billion to 6 billion, while at the same time the world economy was multiplied by a factor of six; we have done away with fully half of the world’s rainforests; twenty percent of vertebrates are threatened with extinction; etc. We human beings have become aware of the problems created by our species, and we see what needs to be done, but our habits and desires and super-monkey ingenuity get in the way of reducing our destructive impact on the planet that is our home. Instead, our impact grows by leaps and bounds, and the natural world of which we are a part, on which we depend for our very lives, is destroyed piece by more and more enormous piece.

One argument frequently advanced to convince us to change our ways is that of “sustainable development.” It’s an idea we can understand, but it demands the sacrifice of self-interest — a tough sell. Another attempt at persuasion is the utilitarian argument, appealing to our self-interest. The second argument relies on the fact that we are dependent on nature, which implies that the value of saving our natural environment far exceeds the quick profits to be made by destroying it. But the utilitarian argument’s recognition of value requires commodifying nature and putting a price on various obviously useful aspects of it, leaving other features without defense. 

Hence McCarthy’s attempt at a wholly different kind of defense of nature, an argument for protecting the air, earth, water, and living species of our world that relies unabashedly on his own personal experiences. 

We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about it, which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services, but a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what it means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy. 

Joy is the feeling expressed in the song that came to my mind as we crossed the desert and drove along the edge of the playa with mountains surrounding us in every direction. Beautiful morning, wonderful feeling. Why do I love this bleak landscape so? It is nothing at all like northern Michigan, with its lush green, moist spring, and yet the same joy that lights so many of my Michigan mornings comes to me here in Arizona. Like the Great Lakes hills and shores, the desert offers a vast expanse and offers room for the spirit to expand. My Michigan eyes, drawn at home to lakes and tree-crowded horizons, here are drawn again and again to mountains. 

And, as happens so often in Michigan, smaller details of my desert surroundings gladden my heart. A sudden splash of color along an otherwise muted roadside — “Oh, stop! Go back! What was that?”

desert verbena

One day it was desert verbena, and having seen it once I look for it again and again, even as other blossoms come along to delight my eye, and even as I scour the more distant views in hopes of seeing species of the wild animal kingdom.

golden smoke

penstemon

Mexican poppy

A group of eight to ten deer one morning surprised Sarah and me on our morning walk. (Sarah noticed them first, when one of the animals shifted position.) The group was initially only fifty or sixty feet from us, but as we turned to watch, they began moving slowly back toward the mountains, vanishing silently into the mesquite as if they had never been there at all. I kept looking, however (as did Sarah), and after a minute or two, one at a time, like a Jack-in-the-box, a deer would appear above the mesquite, as if propelled upward on springs! After the third or fourth deer-in-the-air, I realized they were jumping a barbed wire fence. No photographs of that episode in our desert morning, but it’s bright in my memory.

Another morning’s expedition, a walk around the bird-watching lake, brought another wildlife surprise when a jackrabbit ran across the road in front of us. Those ears! Wow! No time to employ the camera, not for that hare or for a second jackrabbit bounding away from the lake and into the tall grass, but seeing them was thrilling. Then there are hawks….

Morning or evening, hawks are easier to photograph, as they are so often to be found, like the verbena, right along the road, and just outside the back door of the ghost town cabin, the little canyon towhee is a frequent visitor. “Confiding,” one of the bird guides calls this species. I might call the bird “brave” or just plain “sensible,” as it seems to realize we pose no threat and that we can happily co-exist in close proximity, and I love to sit out in the sun with my book and camera and wait for opportunities to photograph the sweet little towhee. Such a simple pleasure feels extraordinary.

Here’s something else I’ve realized about my joy in the desert and mountains: The weather right now is as warm as any Michigan summer, but at home in the summer in Michigan, where vacationers will be relaxing on the beach, frolicking in the waves, and hiking woodsy trails, I will be spending most of my days indoors, in my bookstore. Here and now, though, I can be outdoors all day long, if I so choose — feeling the sun and breeze, soaking in the warmth, hearing and watching the birds, and generally drinking in my surroundings with all senses open to the world. It is this freedom to be out in the open spaces and to feel part of the world, rather than apart from it, that makes every ordinary day an adventure and every moment a fresh and priceless joy.

I cannot put these mornings in a box, and they cannot — thank heaven! — be bought and sold, but I will take precious memories home with me, in the words of the song, “to last my whole life through.”

Winter Is Over at Whitewater Draw

At Whitewater, as in other southern Arizona winter gathering places for migrating birds, the thousands of sandhill cranes have now vanished, gone back to northern breeding grounds. (I wonder if birds arriving in northern Michigan the day before yesterday were surprised by the twelve-inch April snowfall.) Arizona skies seem almost empty now, bereft of the cranes’ ecstatic calls and flights, their winter “beach” at Whitewater fallen silent, where only a month ago thousands of stately birds waded and preened in the sunlight. 

March -- birds!

April - birds gone!

The waters are vastly diminished, also. Pools remain in places, but vast expanses formerly covered by water are now only bare, cracked mud, criss-crossed by mammal tracks. 

March mud with birds

April mud with tracks

Looking out across stretches of mud to a distant puddle in the distance, however, I could see a fairly large bird, and the magic of zoom revealed it to be a white-faced ibis. 

Perhaps in a couple of months there will be a flock of hundreds of ibis in this place. Perhaps by then the summer rains will have recharged the draw. And perhaps this solitary bird came early on a reconnaissance mission. Whatever his story, he is the first white-faced ibis I have ever seen in the wild, my reward for our long drive in search of watery landscapes for the Artist’s (Pisces) soul.

Despite the disappearance of so much water, we found enough to make our pilgrimage worthwhile, and it was thrilling also to see trees green-leafed and flourishing, some by water’s edge and others out across the mud flats.

Trees (and birds) in March

Same trees (minus birds) in April

A final unexpected excitement of the day for us — and the best excitement is often that which comes unexpectedly — was seeing a large bobcat padding across an open area between marshy growth, into which it disappeared much too soon to be captured on camera. 

Direction taken by bobcat and, later, owl

It was a quiet day at the draw, two campers near the entrance and no one else at all on the trails. We went purposely in the late afternoon, for the sake of slanting light, and were rewarded by having the place almost entirely to ourselves. As we were leaving, a young couple in search of the great horned owl under the large roofed structure were foiled in their photographic desires (as I had been with the bobcat) when the owl took flight and sailed out over the wilds, but four humans were treated to the sight of the bird sailing through the air, and that had to satisfy. I was happy for the owl and the bobcat. Soon night would fall, and their domain would be exclusively theirs again.