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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: September 2018

My Last Summer Here

14 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by Tom Cooper in Seasons

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Maybe some big cities are better at tending to the plants and planted areas in their care. In St. Louis, things often seem to run to ruin. When I run several mornings a week, I follow the River des Peres Greenway, a landscaped, paved path for runners, walkers, and bicyclists. I run about a mile and turn around in a section of the path I call Cypress Hollow, because it is a quiet, recessed area lined with several cypress trees. The cypress has been my favorite tree for a while, probably since there was one in the front yard when I lived in the country. I had been unfamiliar with the species, and found it fascinating that there was a deciduous pine tree. I understand that some of the landscaping along the Greenway is ‘prairie reclamation,’ meant to seem like wild nature taking over. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for letting vines and weeds grow thickly through these beautiful cypress trees, strangling their growth.

In the town where I work, which is only a stone’s throw from here, there is a lively discussion going on in the local paper about whether kudzu or bush honeysuckle is the more invasive weed. That paper’s letters to the editor section is always a forum for know-it-alls, and now someone has written to suggest two more alternatives—­raccoon grape and wintercreeper. I am not sure what vine it is choking the cypresses down in the Hollow; I only know that no effort is made to clear it out. I worry that these trees will eventually die, swallowed whole by kudzu, wintercreeper, or whatever.

It has gotten worse since I came to live in my flophouse apartment in late winter, 2016. I have been through three springs here, and am now in the death throes of my third summer. It will be my last summer here. For three summers have I watched the prairie grasses and wildflowers along the Greenway grow and bloom and attract bees and butterflies, goldfinches and cardinals. This spring I began to notice an unusual number of bunnies hopping in and out of the tall grass, which is heartening: but I also notice more hawks about. I also see that the invasive vines are creeping ever higher and thicker in the cypress trees. Now my personal affairs are getting back in order, and I am looking for a new place to live. Barring some misfortune, I am living my last lease at the flophouse.

There are things I will miss. One of them is having a running path practically in my front yard. I will miss watching the artificial prairie grow, and especially my cypress trees. As I pass them in the cool mornings of late summer I think that wherever I move, I will come back sometime to see them, see how they’re faring. But you know what? I won’t. That’s not what Americans do. We move on, we move ahead. The seasons are cyclical, autumn follows summer, winter follows autumn, but we are restless, always moving on, always imagining that we are moving ahead: we do not like for the new season to find us exactly where we were last season.

Am I comfortable where I live? Mostly. But there is something about the flophouse that does not represent who or what I am as an American man, and now that I am able to move on, I will move on, because that’s what we do. And I may say that I can always come back and see my stand of cypress trees, see if the ducks still gather in the pools of the Hollow in spring, see if anyone has taken steps to protect this area from invasive weeds; but I know I won’t. As I leave the Hollow on my way back home, I cross the bridge over Watson Road—which is, by the way, the local name for old Route 66. I already feel it like a countdown, the number of times left that I will cross this bridge, until at last I cross and never look back, leaving cypresses, bunnies, and the recent past to be swallowed whole.

The Indignities of Travel

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by Tom Cooper in Seasons, Travel

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Deadwood South Dakota, Grammar, Restaurants, Servers, Travel

I am finally home after a long vacation, 4,500 miles through the Great American West. I’ve been on the road, sleeping in hotels so long that I keep checking under my door in the morning for a receipt and checkout time, wondering why the bed is not made up when I come home in the afternoon. Some things are taken care of for you when you travel, you pay for that, probably too much. That’s what credit cards are for, and vacations, like Christmas, are periods of rationalizing debt. I am happy to spend money to do the things I did on vacation: but I’ll bet I could be just as happy on half the expense. Though travel can take you to places that are wonderful and unique, it is rarely an unalloyed pleasure.

I grow tired of eating in restaurants. It’s always a crap shoot, especially for someone who is carefully attentive to his own home-cooked meals. Only in the best of restaurants do I experience meals better than my own home cooking, and reading menu prices for foods I know will be indifferently prepared from frozen ingredients makes me shiver. Everything, from a nice chicken entree to almost any sandwich, comes with melted cheese on it. Everything comes with fries, from a cheeseburger to a gyro sandwich. That lack of culinary imagination, of effort, is emblematic of eating in most restaurants.

Yes, I still use the word ‘restaurant,’ even though it appears to be passé. Today, a place where one buys prepared meals is likely to be called A Dining Establishment, or An Eating Company, or, most pestiferous to me, An Eatery. A what? Who coined that awkward bit of pompousness? It is used a lot, and given Americans’ penchant for gorging, I wonder if we will soon see An All You Can Eatery?

 Servers struggle with the language. Some are perfectly charming and helpful, but they almost universally share the inability to accept that English ‘you’ is both singular and plural. A table with more than one person seated must be referred to as ‘y’all,’ ‘youse,’ or ‘you guys’—it depends on the latitude—when ‘you’ would be perfectly grammatically acceptable. In St. Louis we fret over the misuse of the word ‘working,’ as in, ‘Are you still working on your dinner, or should I remove your plate?’ I have had some cuts of meat that took work to cut, but usually I do not work at my meals. Even more pernicious though, is the habit of grabbing things. I say, ‘May I have a straw with my soft drink?’ and the server says, ‘Sure, I’ll grab you one.’ ‘Is there any horseradish?’ ‘Yeah, I’ll grab that.’ ‘May I have the check?’ ‘Let me grab it.’ Everyone’s grabbing everything. When I ask the busboy if he has seen my waitress, he promises to grab her. Youse better not.

I tend to be a stickler for correct language and spelling, what is referred to these days as being a ‘grammar Nazi,’ usually by the same people who blamed their teachers when they did poorly in school. As one gets ever deeper into tourism territory, the misspellings increase, even on otherwise professional-looking signs. That’s where my tolerance breaks down; I accept that everyone does not have impeccable spelling ability, but if you paint signs for a living, that’s kind of your job. Buy a dictionary, for Pete’s sake.

Finally, there are the places that are not all they’re cracked up to be. I visited Deadwood, South Dakota, the town where Wild Bill Hickok was sheriff, and had his famous liaison with Calamity Jane, and was finally shot to death. The town was running downhill until several years ago when they approved limited stakes gambling. It is now a seedy little Las Vegas, with gaming in every hotel and restaurant, and busloads of doddering seniors shoving their walkers towards slot machines. I paid for a tour of the town’s historic sites, and sat on a bus while the guide told us that Wild Bill Hickok was never sheriff, only spent a few weeks here, and never had anything to do with Calamity Jane, a drunken, crude woman who looked nothing like Doris Day; Hickok’s murder was the only true part of the story. The guide beamed as he told us all this, though he played at being distraught at having to break it to us. When the bus stopped in the cemetery, giving us all a chance to photograph their graves, I remained in my seat.

The high-point of my trip was Yellowstone National Park. Let me say first that Yellowstone is a marvel, with natural and geographical wonders to be found nowhere else. But . . . it is huge. The park is larger than several states, with parts of in three states. I arrived at the east entrance to the park, from Cody, Wyoming, and got to the west Entrance in Montana days later. We had to eat the dogs on the way. Seriously, ninety-nine percent of what you do in Yellowstone is drive. Old Faithful is fifty miles from the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Yellowstone Lake is fifty miles from Artist Point. Gibbon Falls is fifty miles from the Roosevelt Arch. These are the kind of drives that make standing in line at Disney World sound fun. Add in another five percent of your time spent seeking a parking place, and that leaves only a few minutes every few hours to look at one of the dozens of attractions. And another thing—do not be fooled by the legends of bison, elk, and bears picturesquely wandering about. You will see little wildlife, if any, and that mostly ravens, which are a kind of obese crow whose diet consists wholly of smoking roadkill. I know, someone reading this will cry out, ‘I saw lots of wildlife!’ It’s not that it never happens; but heading to Yellowstone with the expectation of seeing bears is just setting yourself up for heartbreak.

I do not regret visiting Yellowstone, any more than I regret the whole trip, which set me back financially for the next several months, and left me bone tired and ready to get back to work for some richly deserved relaxation. The aforementioned natural wonders are things that will stay with me for life, as will the legendary streets of Deadwood and other things I saw. I have been home for several days, back to work most of a week, and I’m starting to think about my next trip.

 

 

The Sacred and the Profane

02 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Tom Cooper in Big Horn National Forest, Medicine Wheel, Mt. Rushmore, Native American Spirituality, Presidents, Seasons

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Big Horn National Forest, Medicine Wheel, Mt. Rushmore, Native American Spirituality, Presidents

The Medicine Wheel in Wyoming is not much to see, if one is expecting spectacle, a monument, a marvel of human ingenuity. You must prepare yourself to understand it for what it is, an ancient site of spirituality, a sacred place, one that is still actively used by Native Americans. It is maintained by the U.S. Park Service, and a ranger greets you before you start the mile-and-a-half trek up to the monument (uphill both ways, I heard someone joke), to advise you that the walk is not easy, that you should not hurry, you should hydrate and rest when you have to, and most of all, that this is still a site of religious observance—accord it the same quiet respect as you would any place of worship you visit. Photos are permitted, but not of worshipers.

High in the mountains and deep inside the Big Horn National Forest, the drive to the site is long, though beautiful enough to make it worth the time. There are clear coursing streams, vistas into forest passes and wooded hillsides that quite literally take your breath away—if you have any breath left at this altitude (about 9,500 feet). The day I visited was cloudy, but after a half hour’s drive you are high enough in the mountains to stand above the clouds, an irresistible photo op.

There were no worshipers when I was there, but it was nice that the half dozen visitors that morning maintained a respectful quiet. The Wheel consists of a circular rim of loaf-sized stones, divided by 28 spokes, which are usually seen as the days in a lunar month. There are seven stone cairns within, and these were the focus of prayer activity. They were adorned with many small objects, such as beads, feathers, colored strips of cloth, and animal skulls and teeth, some deeply weathered, but some clearly of recent placement.

Questions swirl in the mind about why this spot, why this particular mountain peak among hundreds in the vicinity. The monument was old before Columbus set foot in the New World, and nobody knows who built it. It is much used by the local Blackfeet Indians, but they will readily insist that their ancestors did not build the Wheel.

Two days before visiting Medicine Wheel, I was at Mount Rushmore, which embodied all the spectacle not present in the older site. It is a little surprising, seeing it for the first time. The sculpted heads are much higher than they appear in most photos, and hard to take good pictures of without professional equipment. Also maintained by the National Park Service, there were hundreds of visitors present both times I went in. I assume they were mostly Americans, but I heard many accents and languages spoken, many mothers calling after scrambling children in words I did not know. While one need not prepare oneself, as with Medicine Wheel, to understand Mt. Rushmore as a sacred place, I think it is best understood that way.

Each evening, people gather in an amphitheater facing the monument. A video plays on a large screen which describes the building of the monument, and details why each president who is represented has his place there. From George Washington’s leadership in the Revolutionary War and his creation of the presidency as we know it, to Thomas Jefferson’s stirring formulation that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; from Abraham Lincoln’s stewardship of the Union through the Civil War, and his appeal to the ‘better angels of our nature,’ to Teddy Roosevelt’s vision of the American Century, and his creation of a National Park System, we have been often blessed by those we chose as leaders.

And yet I was a little heartsick as I watched the program. A little while before, in the park’s gift shop, I saw a young man wearing a Make America Great Again hat. It was the first time I had actually seen anyone wearing one. He didn’t look very intelligent, but perhaps that’s just my view of anyone who would wear such a thing. Maybe he is a brilliant student, studying for his PhD. I doubt it, but it’s possible. As I sat in the bleachers listening to the stories—perhaps more mythical than historical—of our greatest presidents, I found myself hoping that this young man was taking it in, that he was hearing how great presidents talk, what great presidents do, and how, regardless of political differences, they strive to unite us as a nation, rather than create further division and enmity. Mt. Rushmore is also a sacred place, dedicated to those American ideals which have made us a great nation, and the presidents who have embodied those ideals: not only will some presidents never earn a place among them, there are those whose names ought not to be uttered in their presence.

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