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The Legacy of Luna, Julia Butterfly Hill, Harper Collins, 2000.
I was sitting in the fog one day, unable to see past Luna’s
branches, when I noticed that the needles at the top part of the tree are
knobbier than the needles lower down. Up high they looked like gnarled fingers
raking in the moisture from the fog and the rain. The water, drip by drip,
gathers until it starts swirling down the trunk to the ground, over the smooth
bark at the tip of the tree toward the increasingly shaggy bark down below,
which absorbs more and more of the meandering flow. Toward the bottom of
the tree, the needles become flatter and smoother. I imagine that’s
because they don’t need to gather as much moisture. Instead, they act
like a sprinkler system for the forest floor.
Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, 2000.
Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright
between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind.
Heel touched down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the
ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight
of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step
and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum
to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure
thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion,
philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.
Giovanni’s Gift, Bradford Morrow, Penguin Books, 1997
“
The way we are going about dismantling the world, “Henry was saying, “turning
timber to boards, rivers to dams, ore to metal, and so on and so forth, is
just like a cancer working its way across a system of healthy cells.”
Women of Discovery, Milbry Polk and Mary Tiegreen, Clarkson
Potter, 2001
From the selection on Mary Henrietta Kingsley 1862 - 1900
“
I would much sooner wade through a swamp up to my neck in mud or climb the
peak of the Cameroon, than go through the treadmill life of a society lady
in London.”
Mysteries of Terra Firma, James Lawrence Powell, free press, 2001.
“
Imagine that a video camera mounted in space had photographed the earth during
each moment of its 4.5 billion year span, and that we can play back the entire
history in one hour. Viewing the vastly speeded-up video, we would see the
Hadean eon close and the magma ocean cool. Elephantine continents would emerge
and dance clumsily over the surface, colliding to throw up mountain ranges
and splitting apart to form ocean basins, all the while accreting steadily
along their margins. But something else would be evident that has left little
trace: the steady rain of comets and asteroids into the earth, each throwing
up a blaze of light that hardly has time to dim before the next flashes.
Most of the impactors would strike in the ocean basins and disappear; all
but the largest that landed on the continents would have their craters worn
away by erosion, or covered by sediments, in a few seconds. If we happened
to see, out of the corner of our eye, the crater Tycho form on the moon 100
million years ago, a moment later we would witness a large blast on Earth.
It would be all too visible, for it blazed with the light of a million suns.
This impact would cause a wrenching change in the direction of evolution,
allowing a group of small, hamster-sized creatures to superseded the giant
reptiles that had dominated for the previous few seconds of hypertime. An
instant before the tape ran out, too fast for us to glimpse, the descendant
of these lucky mammals would leave the trees, stand erect, make tools, and
speak.
The incessant flashes of impact-generated light would be apt to be the most memorable
feature of the video. They would remind us that the earth is not isolated in
space, but is part of a planetary system. The viewer would know, having seen
it, that an entire process has gone unnoticed because or our allegiance to that
fleeting, uncapturable moment called the present.
Weather, Arthur Upgren and Jugen Stock, Perseus Publishing,
2000.
It may be natural for many to regard such adverse conditions as the ozone
hole and the greenhouse effect with skepticism. The oceans and the atmosphere
have always seemed to be of such immensity that they are beyond our ability
to alter them for better of for worse. But the explosive growth of human
population in the present century and the ability of recent technology to
create devices that consume the resources of this planet at an ever faster
rate have proved otherwise. The depletion of resources that took millions
of years to form occurs so rapidly that we must reevaluate our present actions
and their consequences for the world; such a reevaluation requires a complete
understanding of the natural processes that affect the planet, especially
its atmosphere.
Trial by Ice, Richard Parry, Ballentine, 2001.
Chester calculated that the turning tide would draw the pack ice back out
to sea and ordered camp made to wait out the rising tide. The men pitched
tents, preparing to stay the night, and lit fires. Soon tea boiled over
the portable tin stoves. Worn out by their efforts, the men ate a hasty
meal and turned in.
Frederick Anthing, the seaman who described himself as “born in Russia,
on the Prussian border,” took the first watch atop a saddle of ice facing
west. Chester and Meyer stretched out on India rubber sheets about twenty yards
from the whaleboat. The other three sailors crawled into a tent pitched beside
the grant.
No sooner had Chester closed his eyes than a warning shout jarred him awake.
“The ice is coming!” Anthing cried in alarm.
Chester sprang to his feet and his crew spilled out of their tent to see an advancing
wall of pack ice rising above them so high that it appeared to block out the
sky. The crowded wedge struck the iceberg sheltering them from the sea with a
deafening roar.
The Inuit call this rapid and deadly attack of pack ice evu, and they fear it
above all else. Sudden storms rising tides, and current shifts will drive hundreds
of tons of pack ice ashore with awesome power-no warning. Tumbling like dominoes,
twisting, and sliding over one another, enormously dense plates advance like
an army. Nothing at sea level is safe from destruction. Even camps atop the windswept
bluffs lining the coast fall prey to ice rafted and stacked until it towers more
than one hundred feet high. Like colossal shears, the slabs scythe and crush
everything standing before them.
Where Rivers Change Direction, Mark Spragg, Riverhead Books, 1999.
When I was twelve one of the older cowboys I worked with gave me a cheek
of sugary and long-stringed chewing tobacco. He held open the red and white
pouch, and I pinched out a ball of the stuff and loaded it into my cheek.
I smiled. The man turned and walked toward the tackshed. I felt the hot seep
of the juice pool under my tongue. I turned to spit, and when I looked back
to thank the man, found that he staggered; that the ground heaved against
him as he walked away. I laughed. The air sparkled. Gagged, stumbled, and
remarkably managed to swallow the wad. I fell to my hands and knees. The
temperature soared. My clothes soaked through, and I fell to my side and
vomited. I opened my mouth to call fro help and vomited again. The strings
of tobacco stuck in my throat and I pulled them out, one at a time, and snapped
them away from me. I wanted to get to the bunkhouse. I wanted a drink of
water. I crawled in circles in the corral. I rolled in the manure. I bumped
my head against the bottom rails. I could have flattened out and crawled
under, but it did not occur to me. I was looking for the gate. I was no longer
a boy. I ws in trouble, a sick colt, trapped. The man found me, and dragged
me to the creek. He held me while I finished puking and washed my face. He
asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him I thought I was a horse,
and he smiled, and said I sure as hell smelled like one.
What Shape is a Snowflake, Ian Stewart, Freeman and Company, 2001.
Sometimes, then, we can learn about nature from mathematics. This is the
subject’s way of repaying a huge historical debt. Mostly, mathematics
ahs learned from nature. In 1970’s Benoit Mandelbrot, then a scientist
working for IBM, became aware that there was a common thread running through
his work.
He had been studying all sorts of apparently disconnected problems-the stockmarket,
the amount of water in rivers, interference in the electronic circuits. The common
thread, he suddenly realized, was that each problem had intricate structure at
all scales of magnification. If you graph price movements in the stockmarket
on a monthly basis, you get a rather irregular curve with lots of ups and downs.
If instead you look on a weekly basis, a daily one, an hourly one, or even minute
by minute, you still get a rather irregular curve with lots of ups and downs.
The same goes fro water flowing in a river, or the changes in the current in
a noisy electronic circuit. Mandelbrot decided that this kind of structure needed
a name, and he invented one-fractal. A fractal is a geometric shape that has
fine structure no matter how much you magnify it.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, Wings Books, 1980.
Lana Lee was on a barstool, her legs crossed in tan suede trousers, her muscular
buttocks pinning the stool to the floor and commanding it to support her
in perfectly vertical form. When she moved slightly, the great muscles of
her nether cheeks rippled to life to prevent the stool from leaning and tottering
even an inch. The muscles rippled around the cushion of the stool and grabbed
it, holding it erect. Long years of practice and usage had madder her rump
an unusually versatile and dexterous thing.
Her body had always amazed her. She had received it free of charge, yet she had
never bought anything that had helped her as much as that body had. At these
rare moments when Lana Lee grew sentimental or even religious, she thanked God
for His goodness in forming a body that was also a friend. She repaid the gift
by giving it magnificent care, expert service and maintenance that was given
with the emotionless precision of a mechanic.
Colony Girl, Thomas Rayfiel, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999.
I felt for the back of the apron, where the string was. I hated cooking.
She had gotten me interested again, but only for a few minutes. Now I wanted
to get out. I hated the Meeting Hall. It smelled. Even under the odor of
baking pies it smelled. I’d had a revelation here once: If you wanted
to get to Heaven, you never would, because just wanting to get there was
so selfish. A sin in itself. So the only way to Grace was Not to Give a
Rat’s Ass. That was the title of a sermon I worked on in my head
for a while. But it never really came together.
Red, Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Books, 2001.
There is a man in Boulder, Utah, who buries poems in the desert. He is an
archaeologist who knows through his profession that eventually his words
will be excavated, that although they may not be understood now by his
community, at a later date his poetry will be held as an artifact, mulled
over by minds that will follow his.
This man is alone, walled in by the wilderness he loves and neighbors who don’t
understand him. They say he spends too much time with the dead, that his loyalties
are to bones, that the land could be better used for the planting of corn than
the digging of corpses. They say he talks too little and thinks too much for
a town like Boulder.
He has lived among the locals for decades, but he is still an outsider. It is
the Anasazi who keep him here. They are his neighbors, the ones who court his
imagination. It is their echoes reverberating through the canyons that hold him.
All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, Larry McMurtry, Pocket
Books, 1972.
Houston was my companion on the walk. She had been my mistress, but after
a thousand nights together, just the two of us, we were calling it off. It
was a warm, moist, mushy, smelly night, the way her best nights were. The
things most people hated about her were the things I loved: her heat, her
dampness, her sumpy smells. Those things were her substance, and if she had
been cool and dry and odorless I wouldn’t have cared to live with her
three years. We were calling it off, but I could still love her. She still
reached me, when I went walking with her. Her mists were always a little
sexy. I felt, in leaving her, the kind of fond gentleness you’re supposed
to feel after passion. It was the kind of gentleness I never got to feel
with Sally. Its expression might be stroking a shoulder, or something. I
had had such good of Houston, she had dealt so generously with me, always,
that I walked and stoked her shoulder for an hour or two, in the night. Then,
when she was really sleeping, I went home. I wanted to be gone when she woke
up.
Perfume, Patrick Suskind, Vintage International, 1986.
He was as tough as a resistant bacterium and as content as a tick sitting
quietly on a tree and living off a tiny drop of blood plundered years before.
Tao Te Ching
Undertake difficult tasks
By approaching what is easy in them;
Do great deeds
By focusing on their minute aspects
Desert Notes, Barry Lopez, Avon Books, 1976
To begin with, the crow does nothing alone. He cannot abide silence and he
is prone to stealing things, twigs and bits of straw, from the nests of his
neighbors. It is a game with him. He enjoys tricks. If he cannot make up
his mind the crow will take two or three wives, but this is not a game. He
crow is very accommodating and he admires compulsiveness.
Crows will live in street trees in the residential areas of great cities. They
will walk at night on the roofs of parked cars and peck at the grit; they will
scrape the pinpoints of their talons across the steel and, with their necks outthrust,
watch for frightened children listening in their beds.
Put all this to the raven: he will open his mouth as if to say something. Then
he will look the other way and say nothing. Later, when you have forgotten, he
will tell you he admires the crow.
Basket Case, Carl Hiaasen, 2002.
Juan is waiting at a pre-arranged location a half-mile away, by a drainage
culvert below the levee. He slips into the bow and conceals himself beneath
the yellow tarp. Without a breeze the August heat is strangling; the lake
steams like a vast tub of gumbo. It’s not so bad after I goose the
throttle and the boat planes off, creating its own breeze. Soon no other
fishermen are in sight. Juan partially emerges from under the tarpaulin and
intently begins working the keypad of the GPS, talking to satellites high
in space. Flawlessly they divulge our latitude, longitude, ground speed and
direction, as well as our lengthening distance from the marina. The only
drawback of this astounding technology is that it enables virtually any knucklehead
to blunder into the deepest wilderness, with little or no chance of getting
lost. So much for natural selection.
Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis
It is customary to thtink of Madison as Jefferson’s loyal lieutenant,
the junior member of what has been called ‘the great collaboration.” Certainly
in later years, when Madison served as Jefferson’s political point
man in the party wars of the 1790’s, then as his secretary of state,
then his successor as president, there is much to be said for his characterization.
The later pattern was for Jefferson to provide the sweeping vision while
Madison managed the messier particulars. (If God was in the details, so the
saying went, Madison was usually there to greet Him upon arrival.) Even then,
however, Madison’s habitual shyness and his willingness to remain within
Jefferson’s shadow probably concealed the extent of his independent
influence on the partnership. The fairest assessment is that the collaboration
worked so well because questions of primacy never occurred to Madison. Or,
as John Quincy Adams described the seamless character of the partnership,
it was “a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of
the magnet in the physical world.”
Castro’s Curveball, Tim Wendel, Ballantine Books, 1999
When I was a kid, most families hunkered down when a full-fledged blizzard
roared in off Lake Ontario. Everybody’s cellars were stocked with
jars of cherry preserves, Indian corn, green beans-canned in the last days
of fall, just for nights like this one. In the houses across the flat farmland
where I was raised the fireplaces were roaring, maybe a guitar or fiddle
taken down off the wall, and these household parties, glowing ebbs of light
in a nightmare of weather, kept burning into the wee hours.
In our family, after my mother and sisters had gone to be, I would wait to hear
my father still up and about. When I heard him pulling on his rubber boots lined
with gray felt, I would scramble to get into my long underwear, then corduroy
pants and a thick wool sweater, so I could go with him. He would waiting for
me at the foot of the stairs. Without saying a word, he would size me up and
then nod. I had passed inspection. Before anyone else woke up, we hurried to
the barn.
My dad kept the tractor in fine running condition for nights like this. With
him astride the wide spongy seat, revving the pedal accelerator, I would swing
open the barn door. As the tractor puttered out into the blizzard, Dad would
offer me a hand, pulling me up alongside him.
Out in the wind, the snowflakes flew horizontally and I hung on for dear life
as Dad gunned the engine. Back then, when I was maybe ten years old, I imagined
that all those flecks of white, dancing in the light of our lone headlight, were
knights or cowboys or Indians. Time after time they charged down at us. But we
were huge and mighty and could take whatever the world dished out.
It was easy to imagine myself as a hero back then. You think it and somehow you
become it. That’s the magic of being a child. In my daydream of long ago,
nothing held me back. Nobody told me I wasn’t good enough to play or man
enough to fight. The world was as it should be-all spread out in front of you,
waiting to see what you can bring to it. I remember laughing at all the snow
flying in my face. Laughing at how fair and reasonable the whole proposition
of being alive promised to be.
No Great Mischief, Alistair MacLoed, Vintage Books, 2001.
Once at an orthodontist’ conference in Dallas, a man noted my name tag
and said to me, unexpectedly and improbably, “Who are these Ukranians one
is always hear about in Canada?”
“They’re people from the Ukraine,”I said. “That’s
where they’re from.”
“No,” he said. “There’s no such place. They’re
Russians. I looked it up on the map.”
“No they’re not Russians. The map changes.”
“When I look at a map,” he said, “I believe those lines. I
believe it like I believe an X-ray.”
“But an X-ray shows you more than the obvious lines,” I said rather
pointlessly. “It shows you what is beneath.”
“Look,” he said, “lines are lines, right? Either they’re
there or they’re not. There aren’t any Ukranians. They’re Russians.”
“Its not that simple,” I said pointlessly again.
“I hear the communists are taking over the medical system in Canada,” he
said. “That’s why I asked the question.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not that simple either.”
“You keep saying everything’s not that simple,” he said. “To
me there’s a right way and a wrong way and medicine is free enterprise.
I bet I make triple what you do.”
“Probably so,” I said. “But I make enough.”
“You should come to Texas,” he said. “In our business, you’ve
got to go where the money is and now the money is here in Texas. This is where
the rich are, and they’re willing to pay to be beautiful.”
The Music of What Happens, John Straley, 1996.
Jane Marie did not speak much, but when she did, it was never sad or angry.
She always looked me straight in the eye, which was something my family
never did, so I couldn’t hold her gaze. I remember once putting straws
up my nose and shooting raisins out of them to impress her. This was not
a pleasant memory.
Blood Will Tell, Dana Stabenow, 1996
With a disbelief rapidly succeeded by the increasing disgust, Kate decided
that if Jack had had a tail, it would have been wagging hard enough to power
an electric generator. What was it with men and Marilyn Monroe? Even in retreat
from the world on her homestead, just from the magazines she subscribed to
Kate couldn’t help being aware of the cult surrounding a woman who
had, let’s face it, screwed everything in pants on both sides of both
oceans, only to kill herself at the age of thirty-two because, everyone to
agree post-mortemly, she felt used and lacked self-esteem. It was Kate’s
opinion that Monroe would rather have been a dead legend than a live, faded
ex-beauty queen any day. The only thing tragic men saw in Marilyn Monroe’s
untimely demise was the chance they’d missed to lay her.
The Best American Mysteries Stories of 2001
Lobster Night, Russell Banks, Esquire
“
You ought to either get a bigger tank or else just don’t buy so many
of them,” Stacy said.
Noonan laughed. “Stace,” he said. “Compared to the cardboard
boxes these guy’ve been in, the fish tank is lobster heaven. Four days
of swimmin’ in this, they’re free-range, practically.” He draped
a heavy hand across her shoulder and drummed her collarbone with a fingertip. “They
don’t know the difference, anyhow. They’re dumber than fish, y’know.”
“You don’t know what they feel or don’t feel. Maybe they spend
the last few days before they die flipping out from being so confined. I sure
would.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t go there, Stace. Trying to figure what lobsters
feel, that’s the road to vegansville.”
The Control of Nature, John McPhee, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1989
It was astonishing to see what an essentially liquid body of rock would carry
on its surface. As lava moves, under the air, it develops a skin of glass
that is broken and rebroken by the motion of the liquid below, so that it
clinks and tinkles, and crackles like a campfire, which, in a fantastic sense,
it resembles. In Hawaaii, I have been close enough to the flowing lava of
Kilauea to ladle some out and carry off a new rock, but when I visited Vestmannaeyjar
the eruption had been over for a decade and a half, needless to say, no lava
was moving. Steam was still rising from the lava field, though, and grew
to heavy mist under rain. If you reached down and put a hand on the ground-on
loose ash-the new surface felt cool. If you rubbed away as little as a third
of an inch, the ground was so hot you had to pull back your hand. The ash
was such an effective insulator-not to mention the layers of solidified basalt
underneath it-that the interior of the 1973 flow was still molten. During
the eruption, when the pumping crews first tried to get up onto the lava
they found that a crust as thin as two inches was enough to support a person
and also provide insulation from the heat-just a couple of inches of hard
rock resting like pond ice upon the molten fathoms. As the crews hauled and
heaved at hoses, nozzle tripods, and sections of pipe, they learned that
it was best not to stand still. Often, they marched in place. Even so, their
boots sometimes burst into flame.”
Earth Habitat, Hessel and Rasmussen, Fortress Press, 2001
Introduction by Larry Rasmussen
Present threats to the whole community of life, human and more-than-human,
require different boundaries for our spiritual-moral universe. Moral exclusion
of other persons is sometimes the culprit. Despite Jesus’ example and
command, we don’t habitually place the well being of others in the
same framework as our own. Moral privilege thus treats insiders at the expense
of outsiders. The result is society’s perennial plague of “us” versus ‘them”.
At other times, moral exclusion of other-than-human life is the culprit. Homo
Sapiens lives as though we constituted an ecologically segregated species. The
result is ‘species apartheid.” One ‘race”-the human race-subjugates
the rest of the biosphere for human benefit alone. Moral privilege here can be
severe, so severe that moral standing and rights are denied to other-than-human
life except when its welfare aligns with human welfare. (It is always the welfare
of some humans more than others, we must add. Apartheid comes in many interlinking
forms.)
The Dying Aminal, Philip Roth, Vintage Books, 2001.
Can you imagine old age? Of course you can’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I had no idea what it was like. Not even a false image-no image. And nobody
wants anything else. Nobody wants to face any of this before he has to. How
is it going to turn out? Obtuseness is de rigueur.
Understandably, any stage of life more advanced than one’s own is unimaginable.
Sometimes one is halfway through the next stage before one realizes that one
has entered it.
Stranger in the Forest, Eric Hansen, Penguin Books, 1988.
Mr. Das was watching us. He was seated at a table twenty feet from where
we stood gaping at the former river monster. He waved us over to join him
for tea. Mr. Das was dressed in a pair of freshly pressed blue slacks and
pink rubber bathroom thongs. His white shirt was open at the neck, revealing
a tattooed garden of stars and flowers. He wore a gold wristwatch, and a
black fountain pen with a gold clip stood by in his shirt pocket.
Tea arrived and I asked Mr. Das if he was afraid of crocodiles.
“No,” he replied. “I am safe from crocodile.” He pulled
up his trouser leg to display a large tattoo of a hook on his ankle. “We
Iban catch the crocodile with hook tied to bamboo raft. When crocodile see this
hook-no bite.”
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Joy Kasson, Hill and Wang,
2000.
The Native American historian Vine Deloria has suggested that the performing
Indians had much to gain from participating in shows such as Cody’s.
As he points out, American Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performed
many roles, of which stage villain was only one: they also displayed skills
that reflected positively on Plains Indian culture, such as horsemanship,
and their dances, songs, and games gave audiences a more nuanced sense of
Indian Life. Work with the Wild West offered reasonable pay, a chance to
travel, and an opportunity to interact with a large variety of non-Indian
people. For some, work in the Wild West was, literally, an alternative to
imprisonment, for Cody’s reputation as an Indian fighter allowed him
to get permission to employ individuals who were widely viewed as dangerous. “Many
Indian agents and Army officers would have preferred to see these characters
in the stockade,” Deloria comments. “Touring with Buffalo Bill
probably saved some of the chiefs from undue pressure and persecution by
the government at home.” Furthermore, Cody’s performers were
treated with dignity offstage, and few restrictions were placed on their
movements. The Indian performers were thus able to encounter other aspects
of America-and the wider world-than those represented by the military and
missionary forces they encountered on their reservations. “The freedom
these Indians experienced with Buffalo Bill, and the chance to learn about
the rest of the world, held sufficient appeal to lure many of the chiefs
away from the reservation,” Deloria says, adding that “as a transitional
educational device wherein Indians were able to observe American society
and draw their own conclusions, the Wild West was worth more than every school
built by our government on any of the reservations.”
Eco-Economy, Lester Brown, w.w.Norton and Co., 2001.
To put ecosystems in economic terms, a natural system, such
as a fishery, functions like an endowment. The interest income from an endowment
will continue in perpetuity as long as the endowment is maintained. If the
endowment is drawn down, income declines. If the endowment is eventually
depleted, the interest income disappears. And so it is with natural systems.
If the sustainable yield of a fishery is depleted and the fishery collapses.
The cash flow from this endowment disappears as well.
Night of Many Dreams, Gail Tsukiyama, St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Emma often thought about what brought her quiet father and beautiful mother
together. Watching them closely held now answers. Two people couldn’t
be more opposite in nature. Her father’s calmness could settle an entire
room, whereas, her mother’s passionate temperament was catlike and
might flare at any time. In her father’s eyes, they must have added
up to the right equation, like two fractions equaling a whole number.
The Daydreamer, Ian McEwan, Anchor Books, 1994.
As for being on his own, grown-ups didn’t much like that either. They
don’t even like other grown-ups being on their own. When you join in,
people can see what you’re up to. You’re up to what they’re
up to. You have to join in, or you’ll spoil it for everyone else. Peter
had different ideas. Joining in was all very fine, in its place. But far
too much of it went on. In fact, he thought, if people spent less time joing
in and making others join in, and spent a little time each day alone and
remembering who they were or who they might be, then the world would be a
happier place and wars might never happen.
In the Slick of the Cricket, Russell Drumm, Penguin Books,
1997
The mouth of the Hudson River gapes wide at the apex of the arcing shelf.
From the mouth, the Hudson’s prehistoric valleys fan out over the shelf
like deep-penetrating tendrils, toward Cape May to the south and toward Montauk
to the northeast. The entire succulence is known as the New York Bight.
It’s near the mighty Hudson Canyon, the submarine extension of the Hudson
River, which, despite its being 3,000 feet beneath the sea, continues to accept
and steer the river’s abundance of sweet water and nutrients as they cascade
off into the depths.
The valley was born 10,000 years ago, when water loosed from melting glaciers
fell in torrents, scouring its downward path to the sea.
The other river canyons radiating from the feeder Hudson Gorge, all scribed by
rivers unnamed when the East Coast’s largest estuary voided the ice of
eons. It fell in magnificent torrents, first from the continental land mass,
then moving across a shallow continental shelf. The shelf itself rose as it was
freed from the weight of the glacier. The rising sea kept pace as the glacier
melted, adding its water to a sea that was 350 feet lower than it is today. Water
from the glacier’s melt forged a wide valley called the Hudson Channel,
then moved out onto the shelf itself, and finally off the edge to the ancient
sea.
As the glacier retreated and the ocean basin filled, the deepening submarine
canyons ran with sweet water, pushing the rich river silt and minerals into the
water column, feeding plankton, feeding small fish, feeding bigger fish, feeding
biggest.
This was not the rain of 40 days and 40 nights, but the suspended life of thousands
of cold, seasonless days, freed by the hot breath of a beneficent sun. The flood
was terrible in its magnitude, nonetheless.
Walking the High Ridge, Robert Michael Pyle, Milkweed, 2000.
IN Denny Park, Seattle. I’d been thrilled to see a hermit thrush among
foraging fox sparrows on the lawn. Just then, a group of tiny children entered
the park from one side. They paraded through, kept in rigid file on the pavement
by teachers in front and behind. A little boy stooped to pick up a splendid maple
leaf, and rasied it toward his teacher with an excited, “Look!” Blank-faced,
the teacher took the leaf and herded the child along with out reply. I thought,
can that child’s nature wonder survive, or will it vanish like the summer
green of the maple leaf? And when he is grown, will he care if a forest is saved?
Potiki, Patricia Grace, Penguin Books, 1986.
I had other stories too, known stories from before life and death and remembering,
from before the time of the woman lonely in the moon. Given stories. But ‘before
life and death and remembering’ is only what I had always thought.
It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about
our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future, that
all time is now-time, centered in the being. It was a new realization that
the centered being in this now-time simply reaches out in any direction
towards the outer circles, these outer circles being named ‘past’ and ‘future’ only
for our convenience. The being reaches out to grasp these adornments that
become part of the self. So the ‘now’ is a giving and a receiving
between the inner and outer reaches, but the enormous difficulty is to
achieve refinement in reciprocity, because the wheel, the spiral, is balanced
so exquisitely. These are the things I came to realize as we told and retold
our own-center stories.
Two in the Far North, Margaret Murie, 1957, Alaska Northwest
Books
“
One year, after a particular arduous meeting, we took the members of the
Governing Council of the Wilderness Society to Jenny Lake Lodge. We dance.
A balance of cheerful incidents is good for people. If we allow ourselves
to become discouraged, we lose our power and momentum.”
She face me directly, “that’s what I would say to you, in the midst
of these difficult times. If you are going into that place of intent to preserve
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the wildlands in Utah, you have to know
how to dance.”
Roofwalker, Susan Power, Milkweed, 2002
They’re taking his body home to Fort Yates, North Dakota, on the Standing
Rock Sioux Reservation. I won’t be able to attend the services. It’s
just as well though, because I know Father Zimmer’s “Sermon for a
Dead Indian” by heart. He likes to call heaven “The Happy Hunting
Grounds,” but it is an Anglo heaven that Father Zimmer describes. It sounds
like a great bureaucracy: the most sophisticated filing system in the world,
where all your sins and virtues are entered like tax statements to the IRS. Father
Zimmer’s heaven is exclusive-don’t call us, we’ll call you.
Half the fun of being there is knowing others didn’t make it.
Abraham Bruce Feiler, William Morrow, 2002.
The great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible is also the spiritual forefather
of the New Testament and the grany holy architect of the Koran. Abraham
is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He is the linchpin
of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is the centerpiece of the battle between
the West and Islamic extremists. He is the father-in many cases, the purported
biological father-of 12 million Jews, 2 billion Christians, and 1 billion
Muslims around the world. He is histories first monotheist.
THE NORTH COUNTRY ALMANAC, Anne Brataas, Andrews and McNeel, 1996
Safe in a dark sea of leaves, birds who live in deep forest float songs to
attract mates. But those who live in light woods court more boldly - they
sing with their bodies, declaring their intentions through dance each spring.
First,
forget about the lightness of feathers. One might be light. But if you are
wearing two to four thousand, as most songbirds are, they get heavy
fast. In general, a bird’s feather coat weighs two to three times as
much as their bones-with a third to nearly one-half of that weight on the
head and neck.
HOPE’S EDGE, Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, Tarcher/Putnam
2002
When I left home, I thought I could use Bangladesh to prove somehow that
hope is justified even in one of the world’s poorest societies. But
instead, Bangladesh used me to teach a deeper truth.
It taught me that no one can “justify” hope by proving something
good and positive. Hope is more verb than noun – an action, not a stance.
It is movement. It is jumping into the messiness of it all. It is listening,
learning, trying, stumbling; it is false starts and contradictory evidence.
Winter Range, Claire Davis, Picador, 2000.
His idea was to build a beach, but this was midwinter and the lake was closed
in ice. I was ten. I spent three successive Saturday mornings with him
in our old stake truck at the quarry – a mountain of sand crusted
six inch thick with frost and snow. Pickax first, then by the shovelful
we loaded the truck. Oh, yes, come summer, my father said, we’d wade
to our knees in sand. At home, he backed the truck our onto the ice and
we shoveled it out. He’d day, “you watch, the ice will melt
, the sand will drop and we will wade in our wisdom.”
Purvis’s head reclined against the headrest. His eyes were closed and he
was smiling. It could have been he’d drifted off to sleep, dreaming of
home and bed, or of the good woman he was always pining for, but then he asked, “Did
you get your beach?”
“Come spring the ice melted, all over the lake, except for the hundred
or so feet insulated by sand. And then the winds came up and blew it to the middle
of the lake, a huge dirty iceberg. It sank in sixty feet of water. We watched
it. We were up in the pasture clearing rocks,” Ike tapped the wheel with
his fingers, glanced at his mirror to where the sun had set, now pearling gray. “He
laughed until he had to sit down – right there in the dirt. He laughed
until I thought he’d gone crazy. All they work for nothing. I told him
so. I was a practical child.”
“It’s not every day you catch the Lord jesting,” my father
said.