As the story goes—
 
to achieve a long life and a peaceful death,
walk inland until the oar on your shoulder
 
becomes, not an oar, but a winnowing fan.
Only then will you understand: your lifetime
 
of steering is over. You’ll have no choice
but to acquiesce to what’s ahead. You’ll be
 
tossed up, into the winds where what happens
to you is not yours to determine. Your fall
 
will seem an eternity, during which time
you’ll further understand that what happens
 
to you is no longer you, and whatever
god you thought was yours to appease,
 
that task is complete now, your purpose
achieved. Even now—
 
                                    as your story goes.

Sena Jeter Naslund: My mother, Flora Lee Sims Jeter, born in 1901, and I, an early teen, lounge on the summer bedspread as the attic fan draws in cool (for Birmingham) night breezes; we’re reading our separate books (Dickens, David Copperield for me, again), she chuckles, and I ask her, “What’s so funny?”

And she answers, “Virginia Woolf.”

I hold out my hand, and she hands me the book, Orlando. I read a bit: hmmmm.  I hand it back, without even a smile, and burrow back into Dickens.

Now I’m a senior in high school, and the ballet-dancer high-school friend James tells me he’s reading Virginia Woolf, The Waves, and it’s beautiful, he says. Turns out my mother is also reading The Waves, from the library. “It’s beautiful,” she says. I try it.

It makes me angry: it is NOT beautiful; it tries to be beautiful; but it doesn’t make it: it is a failed attempt at achieving something like poetry: I can’t even keep the characters straight, they sound so much alike.

In graduate school, at the University of Iowa where I am a fiction-writing student in the Writer’s Workshop, and in a Ph.D. literature seminar on Bloomsbury writers, in the first session, I dodge Woolf to some extent by choosing to give my seminar paper on E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.  I’m afraid of Virginia Woolf.

But I read her novels and join discussions, and her Mrs. Dalloway  and To the Lighthouse  liberate me from the Victorian novel.

I see one can write a novel with virtually no plot; a novel that catches, perhaps, more authentic aspects of life: like Mrs. Dalloway.  How we live, moment by moment, that can be the stuff of fiction. Our little days do matter; they are the stuff of life.  That’s not all.

In my psyche, Mrs. Dalloway  has an ending-note of pure magic. Woolf has a character turn to Mrs. Dalloway, the last sentence before the blank space of the book’s end being: “For there she was.”  Well. There she was for me. I had identified with the point of view of the character, so that when he turned to see her, whom he knew well and loved, I turned with him. And saw her.

Not the blank space that signals the end of a book.  “For here she was.”

I am astonished. There are no further words, and yet I see. She, Woolf, makes me see without words.

(Yes, as a writer myself, of course, I’ve analyzed how that effect was achieved.)

 But when I read Lighthouse, the earth moves. It’s mid-book, and the main character dies! How is that possible in Fiction? I am deeply shocked. For me, the  narrative form of fiction opens into a larger darkness. The ground under my feet disappears.  What to do with this new knowledge about fictive form? As a would-be writer, I feel both unbound and tossed into the sea.

             *      *      *

Flora K. Schildknecht: Death, parties, marriage, experimentation, time. I’m thirty-seven years old, wrapped in a down blanket on a chilly Kentucky evening, and these are the words I find, on a piece of hotel stationary, tucked inside an aging copy of Mrs. Dalloway and written in my mother’s looping, forward-leaning hand. These are not, by far, the only notes in the book—there’s a handwritten index of these and other topics (women and men, love of life) and copious margin notes. I ponder: Perhaps it’s finally time to read Virginia Woolf.

It’s not that I don’t respect Woolf—but her literary ghost has loomed large, and, in rebellion, I’ve avoided her. For years. Would I read a friend’s decidedly, delightfully queer, original novel, Mr. Dalloway? Of course! Would I watch Tilda Swinton in a sci-fi, art-house cinema version of Orlando? With delight! But I’d imagined that all there was to be said about Woolf had been said—what need could there be for me to read her? I was wrong.

Now a few days have gone by, and I’ve devoured Mrs. Dalloway, its pages brittle and showing signs of age, their contents anything but. I’m on a run through a park with oak, sycamore, and bramble alongside the paved path, and the waving of each leaf, the caw and trill of each bird, even the slap of shoe on wet pavement seems worth recognizing—worth living—in light of how Woolf writes of thought and of the sensual, experiential life.

I push to the top of the hill, and then down, the walloping impact of each footfall rolling through my gut. Is this what it means, to “look life full in the face?” I’m still reeling from reading Mrs. D: Wolf’s characters have been made real for me (by their immersion in the sensual world, their candid, often unlovely thoughts) to such a degree that I feel their consciousness. As a reader, it’s pure magic, as a writer, it’s a revelation—a call to reach for the limits of what one thinks prose can accomplish in terms of aestheticizing human subjectivity—and then reach farther.

Now I read my mother’s copy of To The Lighthouse. To my delight, my mother’s thoughts often align with my own (yes, I agree, Mr. Ramsey, in his insatiable need for sympathy is rather comic). Like Mrs. D, this volume is heavily annotated, different colors of pen and pencil pointing to multiple readings. And what I find is that these characters, Lily Briscoe and old Mr. Carmichael, Mr. Ramsey and Mrs. Ramsey and all her children, are not alone in the pages—my mother is here, too. Our shared appreciation of Lighthouse creates a bridge in time and space.

 Such bridges matter since, reading, and writing, for that matter, are often solitary pursuits. Sometimes as a writer—particularly as the artistic achievements of women are slow to be recognized or ignored—one can feel some of the discouragement Lily Briscoe feels, as the world and those in it constantly admonish her that “women can’t paint.” So, I read again to one of my mother’s final notes in Lighthouse, one that could be directed to Lily Briscoe, or to me: Turn to the consolation of art. And although I’m alone, by the magic of the written language, there she is, my mother, saying the words.

             *      *      *

Best known for her critically-acclaimed, best-selling novel Ahab’s Wife, a finalist for the Orange Prize, Sena Jeter Naslund is the author of nine works of fiction, the most recent being The Fountain of St. James Court or Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman. Her books have been translated into Spanish, German, Danish, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese. She is working now on a historical novel titled Before the War, about the childhood and early adulthoods of Frederick and Anna Douglass, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, and Jefferson and Varina Davis.

Flora K. Schildknecht is the author of Megafauna: Stories and Screenplay. Her short fiction has appeared in various journals and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She serves as Associate Editor of The Louisville Review, and she has served since 2016 as a part-time instructor for the English department at Bellarmine University where she taught courses in creative writing including Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Playwriting. She received an MFA from Spalding University, where she studied fiction and dramatic writing, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville.

See, honey, how your long bones lengthen,
how your flat hip sends the sap
down through the marrow to the square knob of knee –
that’s your daddy’s leg bone:
he planted the notes for that bone
deep inside me on the leather couch
while your brothers dreamt their own dreams
and the stars whistled a clear October tune
over the Berkeley hills.
 
See when he walks by on his way to mow the lawn
in his ragged shorts, how his heavy bone drops down
just so.
 
             And see how your mouth turns down at the corners
making you look stern when you’re only thinking
of which dress to wear tomorrow
or rotating a math equation in your mind.
That’s Grandma’s mouth, carried in the secret program of an egg
that waited in my left ovary for forty years
in case there was a chance to send you rolling down
the dark blood tunnel and push you,
huge and sleepy, out into my waiting arms.
 
Hold my hand so I don’t feel this terrible lightness,
so I remember how you are the link beyond me
in this long strong chain in which I stand,
past the center of my life,
childishly clutching the link behind.
 
Grandma talks to her invisible long-dead father
all day behind the thin walls, worried neighbors.
Her stern-looking mouth, telling me this, goes slack
with surprise and sorrow.  She is letting go of me
like a forgotten balloon from the hand of a distracted child.
She wanders uncertainly down a long road,
her eyes fixed on a distant point I cannot see
but feel as fear. 
 
                             I am left here bobbing and floating,
unattached to the earth, looking back for her,
looking forward for you, my long tall sally.
I am beginning to drift.  Take hold of the string,
my perfect rose, my reason, my serious girl child:
take my hand.

In response to this issue’s call for submissions, the statement “we invite authors to reflect on how the influence of previous generations shaped your identity” set me thinking about a key moment of conversation with my father. This would have been about 1955, when I was twelve.

My father was a sawmill man in Mississippi, who had been raised by a sawmill man in Arkansas, who had been raised in the woods by a logger. My father loved everything about his work, from the forests to the milling to the lumber. I was in awe of him, and of our family’s stories about generations in the woods.

My grandfather, Luther Wallin, Sr., eventually known as “Mr. Luther” and to me as “Papa,” reclining on his logs in a suit, about 1910. Notice the size of the logs on the ground near his shoes. Mules would pull box-wheeled wagons through the mud. In the foreground Papa’s horse is saddled and waiting. The man riding the mule carries a shotgun for squirrels to feed the crew.

I grew up with the smell of fresh sawdust and the sound of the bandsaw. I listened to the way men spoke to my father, and he to them. He was calm, even-tempered, fair, and enjoying himself.

When I was nine years old my dad introduced me to old school hunting. That is, the main thing is being in the woods, being alert to every sound and movement, and when you take an animal such as a squirrel, make sure you will personally clean, cook, and eat that creature. Never kill any animal you don’t plan to eat, and never leave a wounded animal behind.

Although he hunted occasionally, mainly quail, he wasn’t very interested. He just wanted to show me the right way forward. I’m sure my parents were surprised by how immersed I became in two things, hunting and religion. I was raised on Baptist sermons about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac in the wilderness. Prophets would appear from out of the wilderness to accuse a king of misbehavior. And Jesus, after his baptism, went into the wilderness to fast for forty days and forty nights. After that time he was hungry, and the devil appeared and said, “If you are the son of God, turn these stones into bread.”

At the age of seven I was thinking about these things in my parents’ garden. In addition to flower beds and fruit trees there were large oaks and the tallest pines you could imagine. And just beyond our garden there was a hardwood forest of about 25 acres which someone had bequeathed to the town as a park. I studied the wildness of bees, the battles between streams of red and black ants, and I hid to watch long lines of quail pecking along in the grass. There were two oaks almost identical, and I tried to form a question about this: how could there be two things that somehow were the same? When I asked about this my parents “looked at me funny.” I would have to wait until I reached college to discover that Plato was interested in that question, 2500 years ago.

I was that kid who believed what his parents told him about the Bible, and who tried to imagine events involving Abraham and Jesus, Satan and Angels, taking place in the woods—overwhelming to a child—behind my house. A lot of hunting also took place in the Old Testament, which I read every night.

By college I had worked in the logging woods and the sawmill, and with two friends I had built fences through the swamp to mark land lines.

It was while hunting alone in our forest in the Tombigbee River bottom that I wrestled with whether I had a call to preach. Wilderness had two different spiritual dimensions, one just the magic of nature, the other conjuring the nearness of the Garden of Eden, of Noah’s Flood, of Isaac’s sacrifice, and of the hunter Esau’s deception of his father by using a freshly killed deer.

In the woods I watched otters rolling in play, foxes running up trees, a turkey vulture laying her giant egg on the ground inside a hollow tree, a pair of does following bobcats, and other wonders hard to believe.

Another of my father’s lessons was about Native Americans. “They were treated mighty badly,” he would say. “They hunted to survive, not for sport.” This statement was powerful medicine for me. Hunting was normal in our culture, as well as in the Bible. Nobody in the 1950s in Mississippi said it was wrong to kill an animal. Yet my father implied not only that it must be done with minimal suffering, and that one must always eat one’s kill, but also that there was something wrong with sport hunting.

I appreciated my family’s forestry and sawmilling activities, yet I didn’t want to follow that path. One day my father said something to me that—in retrospect—seemed to magically open a door of understanding. We had been discussing the widespread practice of clear cutting a forest. “Clear cutting is wrong,” he said, “because the animals need a home, too.”

As a parent, you never know what will change the course of a child’s life. A single negative remark can leave that child struggling for years. My father practiced something called selective harvesting, in which all the trees of a certain size (or smaller), say 24” in diameter four feet above the ground, are spared so that the forest can recover relatively quickly. Of course if you love a forest “relatively quickly” means long miserable years. Yet this is infinitely better than clear cutting.

It wasn’t the technical aspect of this matter than meant so much to me. He was saying there was something ethically wrong with the way his entire generation was treating both forests and animals. These two issues were linked. And he was speaking as one who made his living from the forest.

If we could question such things, and make our own ethical decisions, and change practices within our local, humble, domains, then we could apply critical thinking and ethical change to issues and events on a larger scale.

I don’t think he meant for me to go that far. And maybe it was his actions through time more than a single statement that allowed me to break some generational expectations.

Having a progressive thought about forests was one thing; being able to do something to protect them was another. I entered college in 1961. That was before the conservation writing of Rachel Carson, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold had made its way into Philosophy Departments. And it was six years before Wilderness and the American Mind by Rodrick Frazier Nash was published.

During college I worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho, fighting fires, clearing brush from fire-prone mountainsides, and I spent one glorious summer in a lookout tower.

Later I would be told that the U.S. Forest Service was guilty of the worst clear cutting imaginable. I wanted to go back and visit those mountains covered in tall Douglas Fir trees. One of my buddies had done that. He said, “Don’t go back. They cut every last tree.”

When I went to grad school in Philosophy, Ecological Ethics were not yet taken seriously.

When I studied fiction writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I began to write about my woods experiences, and ten years later published my first novel for young people, The Redneck Poacher’s Son. This took on deer hunting, family violence, and characters who treated the forest badly indeed.

I was coming to terms with the fact that wilderness could be felt as authentically wild, while at the same time having meanings that were cultural inventions. This applied to hunting, or course, but also to one’s understanding of Native Americans whose forest homes had been perceived as a “wild frontier” by whites. My ancestor Thomas Walling had taken part in King Philip’s War in 1675 in New England. In the 1700’s several ancestors had been market hunters for deer hides in Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

Elisha Wallin II, The Longhunter, was my 3rd Great Grandfather John’s brother. The brothers and their father, Elisha I, were all longhunters but Elisha II became famous for leading others including Daniel Boone on hunts up to 18 months-long in the wilderness.

There were many conflicts with Native Tribes. Family stories say Elisha I, as an old man, was the first white “scout” scalped in Harlan County.

Mary, the first wife of my 3rd Great Grandfather John, was killed and scalped at the spring near their cabin in Virginia. The following year John married Elizabeth Roberts, probably Mary’s sister. One morning a Cherokee raiding party knocked on their cabin door. When Elizabeth opened it they fired and wounded her. She slammed and barred the door. Her husband jumped out of bed, took his rifle down, and killed one of them, probably firing through holes between the logs. He killed two more and the raiders left.

Their leader had been Bob Benge, celebrated as a hero of the Cherokee resistance, and described by the whites as a “forest bloodhound.” Elizabeth was my 3rd Great Grandmother. One of her and John’s sons, Jessie, took part in the removal of Creek Indians from Georgia during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s.

My fourth novel, In the Shadow of the Wind, explored this tragic period in American History.

In an article in Educational Horizons, James Briggs discusses these two novels in detail, and reports on using them in his history classroom. That essay is on my website, here: https://www.lukewallin.com/reviewyan.htm

Writing books for children and young adults I explored many versions of wilderness. My father had pointed to the difference between indigenous subsistence hunting and sport hunting, and I came to realize how deep this divide can be. In my fifth novel, Ceremony of the Panther, I explored a 1980s case in which a shaman sacrificed a Florida Panther in order to obtain healing medicine. My fiction imagined the conflict between traditional Mikisuki medicine and the government’s wildlife biology approach to understand what a panther is, and what a human being is. People speak of Native American history as if it were past. But it’s a set of 10,000 year-old cultures that are alive today. My book follows 16-year-old John Raincrow as he tries to find a way between the science he respects and the father he loves.

For myself, the day came when I never wanted to kill another living creature. Just as love of the wilderness and of hunting came upon me mysteriously as a child, just as mysteriously a renunciation of all killing came upon me as an old man. However, there was a sharply rational component to this. It was not killing an animal for food that I rejected, it was enjoying the killing. This is the secret at the heart of hunting that dare not say its name. My friends and I had tried to minimize the significance of killing within our hunt, by keeping to one-deer-a-year, and carefully field dressing, packing out, and eventually cooking the venison for our families. We had emphasized tradition, love of the forest, camaraderie, woodcraft, our simplicity of technology, and the fact that we protected the woods through using it as we did. Still.

This kernel of the matter had been there all along, but in the generations of my ancestors men were expected to kill in socially approved circumstances, such as war, and hunting was often seen as psychological preparation for young men or even children. In the 1960s war resistance produced large numbers of young people who espoused conscientious objection to all killing of human beings. This effect was amplified by demographics. Young people in the U.S. had the numbers to embolden standing up against the draft, and conscientious objection became a respectable philosophical foundation for this. This generational change put old assumptions about killing animals under a new spotlight.

None of my children or grandchildren ever wanted to hunt. My family said “no more venison.” Sport hunting in recent decades has become, instead of an unchallenged quiet practice, a gross spectacle of TV shows featuring trophy bucks being slaughtered on camera, sponsored by companies that sell feed and feeders (to make wild deer tame), portable shooting towers (to make wild hunters tame), and that valorize “hunting ranches” where anyone for a few thousand dollars can fly in, be placed in a tower with a guide, and allowed to use binoculars to pick and choose among bucks especially bred and fed to produce massive antlers. Where is the sense of accomplishment or “fair chase” in this? Corporate hunting culture feeds a mania for large racks, with magazines featuring what one of my pals calls “antler pornography.”

But lest I be too hypocritical: every style of hunting involves some play acting, some pageantry, and some self-delusion while performing. We pretended to be mountain men. For a while I even hunted with a Hawken Rifle like the one used by Robert Redford in the film Jeramiah Johnson. Most hunters have adopted a style that came to them through culture, and most of them value being out in the woods with friends, having an intense goal, getting away from the constraints of life under late capitalism for a few days a year, and having a set of antlers on the wall to remind them of these good times.

My father was more progressive than I about hunting, from the beginning. But things are never linear. He was the sawmiller, while I pursued conservation as a professional writer and teacher. I hunted, but in managing for the lightest footprint, I protected an ecosystem for half a century.

Doing the solitary work of writing novels I researched environmental and anthropological questions on my own. Then one day I learned about a grad program nearby, a master’s in Regional Planning.

In this program I learned much about how to work toward conservation goals with others.

My account of one memorable project was published in Sisyphus:

A Secret of Ecological Planning: River of Silence

To recap my family story: my father gave me the opportunity to form a generationally different way of thinking about wilderness and conservation. But how was I to apply it? Most often through writing and teaching. I wrote Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture, and with Irish geographer Anne Buttimer, I contributed to and co-edited Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective.

But how about actual protection of living creatures, forests, lands, and rivers?

Since I wasn’t a professional manager in those areas, I took volunteer opportunities as they came along. I helped several people in achieving selective harvests of their timber, in other words, no clear cutting. I worked with a land trust to help donors of development rights through political headwaters. With other community members I spoke up to pressure a city toward restoring a neglected urban stream, and to desist from creating inhumane traffic flows. These were modest achievements to be sure, but with conservation work every day, at every scale, counts. The developer only has to win once, in order to wreck nature. A conservationist has to win every time. A wild area is only saved for now, and remains vulnerable.

My wife Mary Elizabeth Gordon has been my partner in all this, from writing books to boots on the ground in the field. This summer we let our grass grow into meadows, surrounding our wildflower gardens, to offer more habitat to songbirds, bees, dragonflies, and bats. The creatures are busy out there every day.

I was more than seventeen hands above the ground
when Tiny’s black neck and ears suddenly rose
and the world broke from its rhythmic walk
to possibility of flight and fall
even as I stayed steady in my father’s grip,
my legs barely long
enough to bridge the saddle.
 
I swear it was my brother’s idea
to blotch our father’s saddle
with apricot paint–the can, the furtive giggling–
worse than the fireplace ashes we spread
across the living room. We were animals
free of past and future.
 
My father kept the saddle
long after his horse and mine. Perhaps
we thought we’d ride again. Sixty years on,
the saddle’s astride the back of my couch,
the scrapes and shadows of my defacement
still visible, the cantle worn through,
skirt edges curled and girth cracked
but still a piece of work, of stitch and nail,
cut edge and curve.
 
In photos moved from his study wall to mine,
man and horse jump for trophies,
my brother and I not yet born or imagined.
My father’s hair dark like the horse, mane
and coattails flying, every plane and muscle
of Satan’s Holiday as glossy as boots and saddle,
supple, unblemished, for one second all
above the earth with unbroken time ahead.

July 12th, 2022

Today, I released my first monarch butterfly. It was a male I named Prime because he was the first caterpillar I had found this summer.

The Beginning: 2017 Caterpillar

My monarch butterfly journey began when I was babysitting my grandchildren. On July 24, 2017, my grandson asked me if I wanted to go hunting for monarch caterpillars. Walking past the corner field two houses west of my home, we found a very large monarch caterpillar.  He was munching away on a milkweed plant. We brought Chris home on his milkweed leaf and put him in an empty peanut butter jar with some fresh, washed milkweed. My grandson went off to play and I spent the time watching and listening to the caterpillar munch away on its milkweed.

That year, I raised and released ten butterflies. I was hooked! I have been a Monarch Waystation since June 14, 2019.

2021 and 2022: Very Different Years

The summer of 2021 was going well. Monarch butterflies had arrived, and I found the first egg on June 5th. My greenhouse was perfect for monarch eggs and caterpillars, which I housed in an assortment of critter cages. On August 10th, everything changed. There had been a severe storm during the night. I woke to find my 8′ x 10′ greenhouse had been torn apart, scattering the critter cages throughout the yard. The monarch rescue began. Most of the chrysalides had survived. Some needed to be tied to the tops of the critter cages, some had damage to their wings when they emerged and couldn’t fly, and some chrysalides turned black and the butterflies never emerged. I rebuilt the greenhouse, secured it to the ground, and released my last monarch butterfly on August 28, 2021.

The last week in May 2022

Even though I hadn’t seen any monarchs in my gardens, I began turning over milkweed leaves looking for eggs. Female monarchs lay a single egg that looks like a tiny iridescent football on the underside of a milkweed leaf. A female monarch can lay between 100 and 300 eggs during her lifespan of from two-to-six weeks. This is important because I live in Michigan and receive the third generation, or the grandchildren of monarchs that left their winter home in Mexico. The first generation mates and lays eggs in March and April in the southern USA. Their offspring wing their way north and lay their eggs in April and early May in the midsection of the USA. Their grandchildren arrive in Michigan in late May, mate, and lay their eggs until August in the northern USA. In August, the daylight hours change and the milkweed becomes old and yellows; this changes the chemistry of the caterpillars, and they go into reproductive diapause. These monarchs make up the 3000-mile south migration. They will not reproduce until they become the first group to head north and the next northern migration begins. 

(“Neurobiology of Monarch Butterfly,” Annual Review of Entomology, 3.2016).

Indoor Habitat and Responsibility

Habitat is important. I use a greenhouse because the monarchs experience the same changes in light and temperature but are safer from insect predators. They also eat clean milkweed.

If you choose to raise a few monarch butterflies, they need a safe environment and a food source free from pesticides and predatory insects. Rinse the milkweed to get rid of Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE), which is a protozoan parasite that infects monarch caterpillars. In addition to potentially leaving them unable to pupate, they may have deformed wings when they emerge so they cannot fly or hold onto their chrysalis or a branch or leaf, etc. To help prevent the OE infection, rinse all milkweed before feeding it to the caterpillars. If you have a sick caterpillar or butterfly, isolate it in another cage and remove all the other caterpillars, as well as the monarchs in their various stages, from the infected area. Sanitize the empty cage or aquarium with a bleach solution of 10% bleach to water. Rinse the habitat several times to make sure that the bleach has done its job and that the container no longer has any bleach residue.

I, myself, cannot euthanize a butterfly that I have raised. The saddest part is that they will never get to flutter, flap their wings, or glide through the air. I make sure that the butterfly has a variety of cut nectar flowers or butterfly nectar on a non-scratch plastic scrubber. The scrubber will give them an easier access to food. I also put plastic netting on the walls of its living area so that it can move about as freely as possible. When it passes, I bury it in the yard.

As a monarch develops from egg to butterfly, we need to be responsible keepers. That means to be pesticide-free and grow a variety of milkweed and nectar flowers such as cone flowers, zinnias, cosmos, and lantana. Also raise them in a setting as close to nature as possible.

It is important to raise only a few monarch butterflies. The homegrown ones are less ready for the journey to Mexico. Sunlight is an important part of their navigation. If raised under artificial lighting, they may become confused and not adapt to the position or movement of the sun.

Do not plant tropical milkweed; it stops the reproductive diapause, and they will be sexually active and not make it through the overwintering in Mexico.

(“What’s Wrong With Butterflies Raised in Captivity,” NYT 4.8.2020)

Counting Milkweed and Monarchs: Monarch Blitz 2022

This was the first year I participated in the count that took place between July 29th and August 7th. It was conducted by Journey North, who sponsor the establishment of Monarch Waystations. This year, the International Union of Conservation of Nature has red-listed the migratory monarchs as endangered, which means that they are two steps from extinction. I decided to participate in the count and had 340 milkweed plants of four different varieties. In addition, I found three first instar caterpillars and one male monarch butterfly, no eggs, and no chrysalides. The saddest observation was that the milkweeds were covered with ants and very few leaves had the telltale crescent-shaped chew marks, the sign of a baby caterpillar leaving its egg. It had become food for another insect. I posted my results online. The response was the same from small and large monarch habitats: Very few sightings of monarchs and the milkweed remained untouched.

(Journey North Tracking Migrations and Seasons)

The Miracle

It is a wonderful opportunity to raise a monarch butterfly from egg to butterfly. Mother Nature was not kind when she created this creature. Its skin does not stretch, and it goes through five instars. The instar is the time between each skin molt so that it can continue to grow. The final instar is when it pupates. During this process, it weaves a knot on a branch or leaf, anchors its hind feet or anal claspers in the knot, and hangs in a J form. After 24 hours, its antennae, which were long and thin, begin to wrinkle and twist. The colored bands on its body begin to move up and down, and then its skin begins to split between its antennae. The old skin works its way up, revealing the new green skin underneath. It looks very alien.

The pupa dance helps the monarch fling off the old skin as it swings and twists its body around. It must tighten the knot to make it secure because the emerging monarch butterfly will need to hold onto the empty chrysalis as it emerges.

The beautiful jade green with gold dotted chrysalis will hang there for about ten days. On about the tenth day, the chrysalis darkens. Slowly, over the hours, it brightens and reveals the bright orange and black lines of its wings. The chrysalis opens, and the monarch hangs onto the fragile remains of its former home. Its belly begins pumping fluid into its wings as it holds on and swivels back and forth. If it falls  and cannot fill its wings, it will never be able to fly. It is important to allow the monarch to dry its wings for three hours. When you see it walking back and forth on the top of the critter cage you know it is time to release your monarch butterfly to the world. Check the weather and keep it inside if storms are predicted. Add nectar flowers in a vase if the storms last more than a day. They usually don’t eat that first day. For me this never grows old. Each and every monarch butterfly is a miracle. The loss of the monarch butterfly will be the loss of one more pollinator and the loss of great grace and beauty.

Monarch Summer 2022

2021 life cycle from egg to monarch butterfly

Let what comes come. 
Let what goes go. 
Find out what remains.
― Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)
 

I told you the beans needed weeding,
and while you’re at it,
pick the ripe okra.
 
Marvin deserved his beating,
I know he weeded all the Johnson grass,
but he also chopped down all the corn.
 
Well, maybe I was wrong
about the whipping.
But he got over it.
 
Your brother is hard-headed,
he won’t listen. I know
you got upset, always the sensitive one.
 
Nobody ever cut me any slack.
I built the house.
I poured the foundation by myself.
 
Your beautiful mother was ill.
I went to work,
I paid the bills for all eight of us.
 
You were lazy, a dreamer,
a college degree
one of your crazy schemes,
 
sitting around,
sitting in,
avoiding work.
 
In spite of the fights,
we had good times,
vacations, white beaches,
 
Panama City,
we played on Gulf Shores,
rubbed lotion on the sunburn,
 
we took care of each other.
Just know that I loved you,
and I loved your mother.
 
Remember
when you left us to go West,
back to school, you betrayed us.
 
But I was the one
drove the forty miles
from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa
 
to give you
the hundred dollars,
to say goodbye.
 

What I hide from myself
I have begun to know.
Like an umbrella
left behind in the rain.
A blossoming azalea
bends its new December flower
against the basement window.
It grows inappropriately pink,
suicidal in unseasonable heat.
 
Off-kilter, in my father’s house,
the present is not my own.
His idle lawnmower
smells of oil and gas,
his red tool chest still locked.
 
I stand in the window, thinking
of this false Spring’s offerings,
Don’t believe it. Oh, go back. Wait, wait,
and the wind moves
through the blossoming trees, whispering
to the leaves to be still, quiet,
in words like dreaming and sleep.
 
Sound of rain accumulates
and the gutters overflow,
water drips past me,
the confused sounds of a world
crying out like croaking frogs.
 
Pine, oak, ironwood, birch, apple trees
and the ground still wet
spongy, umber brown.
Last year, a sudden freeze,
dead red leaves lining the ground,
a clean winter kill.
It is time for me to go.
 
 

My son, Mark, built a wall. Rock by rock, he moved twelve tons of granite, to create a thing of rugged beauty. The granite, blasted into chunks at a local quarry, came back together again by the toil and hands of someone I love – a person whose lineage includes veterans who had to deal with walls of another sort.

My two grandfathers both fought in World War II. One was an American soldier. The other was a German soldier. They each served their countries on opposite sides of the war.

Family legend has it that my American grandfather, Joe, served as a driver on the Red Ball Express, a truck convoy system created in 1944 to support Allied forces battling Germany after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The French railway system had been destroyed by Allied air power to deny the railway’s use by German forces. The truck convoy became a critical means to move supplies during the war.

Early in the war, my German grandfather fought on the Eastern Front. Of the 70 million deaths attributed to World War II, 30 million were sustained on the Eastern Front, many of them civilians. Later in the war, Opa fought in France. The retreat from France back to the doorstep of Germany was brutal and bloody. Along with being a foot-soldier, my grandfather’s job was to care for the horses who were used to pull artillery and supplies to the wholesale carnage taking place at the front lines.

Years later, when my father, Joe Jr., enlisted in the Army, he was sent to serve in post-war West Germany. As far as Joe Sr. was concerned his son was being sent into enemy territory. As these things sometimes happen, Dad met a lovely German girl. When he made my mother his bride, the notion of bringing a “Kraut” home to meet the folks must have been awkward, to say the least. Of that union, however, came three daughters of which I am the oldest. Both of my grandfathers loved their children and their grandchildren mightily. I remember Grandpa churning homemade ice cream on the patio of their Texas home, teasing me about being strong enough to turn the handle. I watched as his working hands took over the task when my skinny arms gave out.

I remember Opa in their small German apartment, cutting up “butter-brot” in small pieces and feeding them to me as though I were a bird. His eyes brimmed with tears, and I knew even as a child that this heart was big and broken by unnamed things.

As I watched the rock wall take shape in my backyard, I thought of my sons, both of them products of my two grandfathers. They never met Joe Sr. and were too young to remember my Opa. But they each carry in them both of my grandfathers’ courage and generosity of heart. My two grandfathers never met each other, which to this day I find amazing. I have often wondered whether they needed to uphold some concept of “enemy” to rationalize the horrors they experienced during the war. I thought about the walls between countries, differing political persuasions, even the invisible walls within oneself. As my son built a granite wall, I thought about all the walls that need to come down.

Opa never imagined that his war-ravaged country would ever be re-unified after all that had happened. Sadly, Opa passed away just months before the world beheld a spectacle. In 1989, 27 years after the Berlin Wall was built during tensions of the Cold War, the East German government at last allowed its citizens access to the West. It wasn’t enough for the gates to just open and people to pass quietly through. Germans from both sides of the wall – families, friends, and sweethearts who had been separated for decades – rushed to bring down the 96-mile-long barricade. With sledgehammers and picks, among tears, sweat, and shouts of jubilation the concrete wall crumbled. Its destruction marked a seminal moment of healing and change in the terrible gash that World War II inflicted on history.

The rocks in the wall that my son built were heavier than we realized. It took two of us pulling a sled, straining side by side, to move the rocks up to what would become the wall face. (We eventually took up a friend’s offer of a tractor.) Mark puzzled the pieces together, wrestling to stack them carefully and solidly into a curved row. My three grandchildren did their part by putting smaller rocks and pebbles in the spaces between the boulders. Such good helpers.

The wall covered a raw embankment carved during the construction of my home. It symbolized something of permanence and beauty following several years of personal upheaval and loss, a time when the entire world seemed raw and wounded.

 As I watched my son and my grandchildren working on the wall, I could not help but think of my grandfathers who went through their own struggles, both on and off the battlefield. It is impossible to know what they thought about meeting each other; I do not believe the effort was ever made. Yet all these years later, watching their children’s children working together, surely they both would have agreed. Love extends beyond walls of every making.

AT THAT TIME 

We were body surfing a wave of public rage
attempting to swim   it was terrific   thrilling  
hate sprayed us on the left and on the right  
we wondered    would it smash us into a reef
 
the tyrant threw tantrums   lies from his lips like eels
it was a good moment for cartoonists and journalists
and billionaires and lovers of guns
a good moment
 
for poets    poets thrive on disaster
born as we are within the wound    
 

PANDEMIC

 
In the air   on the breeze
masked
the virus attacks
 
the bereaved submit to destiny
in tears   
Mama Gaia will be avenged
      
friends
bow your heads
beware a mother scorned
             
 
 

EVENING IN PLAGUE TIME

 
We hand ourselves over to the media
The media hands us over to profit
 
            we are not what we were
            we will not be what we are
 
we are possessed
we do not even cry out
at the news
 
 

SOME DAYS

 
Some days I feel
I am turning to plastic
We all are
becoming inorganic
the next stage
for us sapiens
for us experimental subjects

My frame of mind creating financial plans centers on understanding the ability of money to create resonance on the eternal thread that connects our lives to the legacy living beyond our mortal flesh and blood.

The markers of our legacy – kids, foundations, good works, or great ideas – share a goal of life-affirming spiritual survival. The hope is that these initiatives, imbued with the spirit of their creators, will live on, and reflect their character learnings and contributions to bettering and improving society. 

For most of humankind the length of a generation was relatively fixed at around 30 years. In the 20^th century, it expanded closer to 75 years. Presently we are experiencing a radical leap through which human beings are expected to live far beyond 75. Google’s futurists posit that if you are alive in the year 2030 then you can expect to live to be 130 years old. This is the receding horizon such that every year you live, scientific advancement adds more than a year to your life expectancy.  Yes, we see the articles that talk about shortening aggregate life expectancy but for those who maintain a certain minimal standard of mental and physical health the prospect of increasing longevity ages is increasingly likely.  

Normally financial market cycles move in roughly seven-year waves. Conveniently, retirees used to live about seven years from 65 to 72 years old. Consequently 20^th century financial (and pension) planning simply required us to identify where we were in the 7-year wave and make sure that the person wasn’t retiring into the trough.  If that trough happened at the end of their life, when savings were low, it wasn’t that important.

But what are we to do with the retiree who lives through 4-5 big waves?  At the same time, we have young people who are asking the question, how can I live through 4-5 waves if I reduce my expenses enough that I can retire early?  These younger people started the movement called FIRE (an acronym for Financial Independence Retire Early) devoted to a program of extreme savings and investment that aims to allow them to retire far earlier than traditional budgets and retirement plans would permit. 

To address the needs of FIRE clients, we developed a special type planning methodology focused on surfing successive waves. It’s much more complex and technical but the upshot is that they can do it with surprisingly small amounts of money.

Imagine if we apply the FIRE planning methodology in which we deal with the challenges of a very long retirement to the case of the older person realizing suddenly that they too might have a retirement spanning four or five big waves.  The result:  the older generation is learning from the younger movement.  In this way the legacy of the younger generation is being paid “backward” to their foremothers and fathers.  And what is the payoff?

The old idea of school → work → retirement has been bent such that retirement leads back to school again.  This is because “retirement,” even at 65 means there might be another 65 years of time left.  Many retirees are finding that with longevity, the retirement goal of vacationing gets stale and the grandkids grow up. At the same time, work has ceased to be only about income and more often provides non remunerative meaning in our lives.

Raymond Catell was a British-American social psychologist who, during the 1960’s and 1970’s, argued that we all have two intelligences; one that blooms early (fluid) and one that blooms later (crystal).  The basic idea is that you’re good at something when you’re young and skilled at something else when you’re older.  Fluid intelligence peaks sometime in our late 30s or early 40s before it starts declining.  Crystallized intelligence, based on all the things we know combined with knowing when and how to use them, increases through our 50s or 60s and stays high into our 80s or 90s.  What does this mean for an individual who quits their job and retires at 65? They’re just getting started at exercising the expanded wisdom, communication skills and teaching ability sorely lacking within the leadership of society.

Instead of idly retiring, imagine a class of people who decide to bolster their crystallized geniuses with new educational insights – the multiplicative benefits to society could be amazing.  Accordingly, we are finding that many older people are setting up educational accounts, not for their kids, but rather for themselves! They realize that with a modest amount of education they can re-enter the workforce and find meaningful gainful employment that is very much welcomed by employers.

Buddhists often talk about the circularity of living energy and hint at a notion of a long continuous thread that is embedded in our spirits.  In this spirit, we are seeing circularity with old giving back to their families’ and societies because of guidance from the younger generation.

A hug, a closed door
and you wave to your parents
from the backseat of the recruiter’s silver Escort,
Black and white government plates,
while your mother,
Who will be sad you left for the next thirty years,
Feigns a smile as the car rolls down the driveway,
 
Heads towards 7th Avenue,
Past the bakery and dime store
And towering cement silos,
Past the girl’s house you rode by
For a whole summer, hoping for her attention,
Past corn fields and soybean fields
And lakes and rivers you fished
With your grandfather on early summer mornings,
Riding west to the Twin Cities on I-94,
To MEPS in Minneapolis
Where the marine will ask if you’re gay,
Where the doctor will press against your testicles
As you pose military silence
Alongside other future sailors and soldiers,
Still in civilian shoes and shirts,
Still anticipating the barber’s chair
Where the military will attempt to wipe away
The last remnants of personal identity.
 
You haven’t heard the man from the Bronx
Screaming from the top bunk
In the middle of a barrack’s night,
Or the bleeding soldier stumbling
Into McDonald’s drunk, or the call to a war
That you never fully understood other than
This is your duty, this is what you trained for –
A war your future wife would march against.
 
The reveille bugle has not sounded
You out of your childhood clothes:
 
You’re still in that back seat,
I-94 humming below you,
The radio station playing light pop,
The recruiter talking to another recruit,
As the Escort spins scenes
You’d seen a thousand times
But will never seem the same again.

The hem of my satin princess costume caught fire one Halloween night when I stood too close to a smiling jack-o’-lantern on the front porch. The flame ignited the fabric like a torch. I screamed and ran down the steps out onto the lawn, trying to outrun the yellow blaze – the exact wrong thing to do. But I was only seven years old and didn’t know better.

From out of nowhere a tall man appeared, scooped me up, pulled me to the ground, and stomped out fire. I lay there sobbing, my bare legs and white cotton panties exposed to the world. “Don’t ever run from fire,” the man said. “It only feeds the flame.” The incident left a searing reminder on the back of my right thigh of how quickly a renegade flame can bite in and devour its prey.

Sixty-two years later, on an August day in 2020, thunderstorms moved across Oregon starting multiple fires in the Santiam Canyon east of where I live. On September 7th, powerful winds blew across the Pacific Northwest, reaching speeds of over fifty miles an hour causing the fire to explode in size as they raced westward. On September 9th, the fires destroyed most of the towns of Gates, Mill City and Detroit. On September 10th, I stood at my living room window and looked out at a layer of fine gray ash that blanketed the leaves of the rhododendron and camellia bushes. Gray-brown air rated “hazardous” turned the daytime sky an apocalyptic red. The forty-foot trip from my front door to the garbage can left my eyes and throat burning. Not one bird appeared at the feeders.

Alone and panicked, I drove myself crazy checking the online fire map every ten minutes. I finally called my son, Bill, on the East Coast. “We have wildfires raging just east of us. We haven’t been told to evacuate yet, but I’m getting really nervous.”

Bill, ever level-headed and steady, reassured me there was plenty of asphalt and cement between me and the fire. “You’ll be okay, mom,” he said. “They aren’t going to let the capital of Oregon burn.” But his reassurance didn’t stop the feeling of impending doom and the incessant pounding of my heart against my ribs. I laid the phone on the kitchen counter, reached down and touched the old scar on the back of my right thigh, still palpable more than six decades later. Instruction not to run from the fire saved my life back then, but that advice didn’t hold up against a wildfire that had already ravaged thousands of acres of forest and hundreds of homes.

When I could no longer stand the grinding in my gut, I packed up essential papers and a bag of clothes, and fled south to my daughter’s house. Eugene had fires raging in the east, too, but at least if something horrible happened I would be with my family.

The fire burned for days, taking out one-third of the Santiam Forest and destroying most of my favorite hiking trails. When I heard news of the damage, I doubled over and wept. I wept for the plethora of plants and wildlife being destroyed – trees that couldn’t run away, insects sizzling into oblivion, and deer leaping over red-hot simmering terrain looking for a way out. I could run away from the fire, other earthlings couldn’t.

Many of my most treasured memories of living in the Willamette Valley revolved around the Santiam. Like the rainy day I counted 83 fire-bellied newts along the Shellburg Falls trail, or the time my hiking companion reminded me, just as I was turning to bolt, not to run from the black bear we met face-to-face at Duffy Lake. I cringed at the thought of charred and devastated old-growth forests that had once brought me so much peace and happiness. Would fire eventually ravage all our beloved wild places?

Anyone who is paying attention has heard it over and over – humans are causing the unraveling of life on earth as we know it. We have overused and under-loved our planetary home. The result is hotter days, rising sea levels, ocean warming, species extinction, and a rise in the number of devastating fires. If this becomes the norm, how do we learn to withstand and stand with fire? I can’t run away from the reality of what might lie ahead.

As far back as I can remember nature has always been my respite, my church, my holy communion. I wondered what the future would be like for my three grandchildren, my four great grandchildren, and all those who have yet to join us in this beautiful place. What legacy are we leaving for our beloved heirs?

The questions burned in my heart, like the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue in my childhood church, with the flame in the middle of his chest signifying the transformative power of divine love. I spent many long Catholic masses studying that statue and hoping Jesus could somehow fix my father’s alcoholism. In those days I took all my sadness to the creek in the ravine across the street and spent hours catching pea-sized pollywogs, watching them swim in the palm of my hand, then releasing them back into the murky water.

I thought back to those seemingly never-ending happy days of innocence and wonder in nature. As a kid, I went to nature for comfort, and before the fires I still did. I hoped I still would, still could. I hoped that the heartache of witnessing the devastation left by the burn wouldn’t keep me away.

A week later the fire was partially contained, and I returned home from my daughter’s house. But the online air quality meter stayed red, and I stayed trapped inside for days. Then one Saturday, after a welcome westerly wind cleared the air, the meter finally turned green, and I couldn’t get outside fast enough.  I drove west away from the fires toward a trail I knew well. Time to get back out on the land for healing and respite.

The scalloped edges of green oak trees lined the hiking trail at Baskett Slough Wildlife Refuge. I stopped part way up the hill and gazed out at the dried honey-gold blossoms of Queen Anne’s Lace and the curved arboreal flow of trees under a mantle of cerulean blue. These were joys I had taken for granted – clear views and clean, fresh air to breathe.  

I wove up through the oak savanna, and down onto flat meadowland. Two slim, long-tailed birds of prey glided over the marsh and rode warm air currents high into the air. At first, I thought they were red-tailed hawks, but the shape and color were off. I thought back to my knowledge of northwest birds of prey. The tails were narrow, and there was an unmistakable splash of white on their rumps signaling they were Northern Harriers. The two hawks swooped back and forth across the fields, dipping close to the ground, then soaring up again in an aerial ballet.

I identified one as a male (gray above and whitish below with black wingtips) and one as a female (brown above with a whitish underside). They flew close enough for me to get a good look at their flat, owl-like faces and sharply hooked bills. I watched them hunt the field back and forth, over and over, until they finally soared above the oak-lined hill and out of sight.

In the distant sky beyond where the hawks had disappeared lay a massive mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke, a conflagration of what I imagined to be the charred remains of cedar branches, huckleberries, snakeskin, and beetle juice. All of it tumbling up through the air in a burning inferno. Air – the same element that fed the raging wildfires, had also gratefully filled my lungs with oxygen as I hiked, and lifted the hawks’ wings to soar over prairies and ponds.

I spent hours in the sanctity of the quiet refuge that day. Later, refreshed, and grateful for the hawk sightings, I drove the twenty-five miles back home.  I unloaded my daypack and hiking poles and headed toward my front door. As I approached the steps, a remarkably loud and distinct bird call rang out from somewhere behind my house – Keek-keek-keek. I walked to the side of the house. No birds. Then, a movement overhead caught my eye and I spied what I thought must be an illusion. Out from the tree behind my house, directly over my head, flew a beautiful doe-brown bird with a blaze of white gleaming at the base of her tail. A second hawk, a male, flew over and joined her. They both landed in a nearby cedar and disappeared into the dark green limbs.

Not only had I seen Northern Harriers for the first time that day, but I was seeing them again, flying right over my inner-city bungalow. Could they have been the same two birds? It seemed like a miracle – a gift too good to be true. Why had they come to my house? And why that day? Harriers are an endangered species and are rarely seen in cities.  Refugees from the fires, their normal migration paths had probably been disturbed by the smoke, driving them west. The hawks were adapting, surviving, carrying on one moment to the next.

Early the next morning I woke up to another day of welcome fresh air, and I opened my front door first thing. The street was empty, and the neighborhood was quiet. I sat down by the open door in my usual morning nesting place where I drink coffee and contemplate my day.

Keek-keek-keek. Again? I launched out of my chair and made my way barefoot out onto the cold asphalt. The call resounded again from the tall cedar across the street. I craned my neck and scanned the limbs. My neighbor peered out the window, too, no doubt curious about why I was standing barefoot in my pajamas and terry-cloth robe in the middle of the street, my wild gray hair uncombed and unruly. I waved briefly then quickly set my eyes back on the cedar. “Good morning, beauty” I said. “Are you up there?”

She emerged from the limbs, dipped, and soared over me like a winged messenger from the spirit world. She flew low, close enough for me to catch a glimpse of her reptilian eyes and trace the dark, heart-shaped line of feathers around her face. Her clawed feet were an arsenal of yellow orange knives slicing the air less than fifteen feet above my head. I felt the breeze at dawn with secrets to tell me as she flapped her wings through the morning air – up and out of sight. My grief and fear were gone. Everything was gone except for the exquisite moment of communion with her.

The Northern Harrier reawakened something in me that day – hope. The poet, Wendell Berry, wrote: “To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.” I can’t fix our broken earth, but I can do something – I can whole-heartedly cherish what remains.

Standing barefoot in the middle of the street that morning, I touched the back of my right thigh and made a vow: I will visit the scarred, burned-out places in the Santiam as I would for any dear friend who was recovering from a devastating injury. I will stay true to my childhood love for nature and find a different kind of beauty in the devastation – something wonderful rising up from the ashes. I will go out and look for the beauty in the brokenness.

One of the last that will leave this season,
the big bird still sports tiny tufts of down,
plopped among the lava rocks like a stooge,
sleepy, pot-bellied, drawing the breeze in,
his wondrous wingspan yet to be unfurled.
 
He waits to be invited to the world,
unperturbed, harboring a lazy eye.
Who can judge now what will happen
when he wakes from this immature stupor
to find the vastness of sea, the soaring sky?
 

The waved albatross breeds primarily on Española Island in the Galápagos archipelago.

Albatross images by Andrew Delaney.

When the diabolical term PFAS must be uttered in a formal meeting, the person will often begin with stating the acronym as P-FAS and follow with…or whatever they are called, whatever the term is supposed to be. I’ve never heard P-F-A-S and only the brave presenter will venture into the birth certificate: per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This conversation ends abruptly with a short discussion on whether the “A” in PFAS sounds like the “A” in faucet or the “A” in pass. Whomever wins this last bit automatically knows more about Forever Chemicals: they win.

Pronouncing chemical compounds is distracting. The problem with grasping the concept, effect, and dangers of PFAS persists despite its name or, in part, because of its name. Perhaps the ambiguity of the PFAS haze begins with PFAS representing thousands of chemicals—an umbrella term for an array of forever chemicals all with subsequent varying acronyms of their own. PFAS isn’t any one thing. In this way they are ubiquitous and mysterious. Which one is bad? Which one is where at what time? If the public can’t grasp the name and meaning, we can’t easily dedicate actionable responses to the threat. It would be like shooting a water gun at a moving target blindfolded with a strong wind and the gun only has 10ml of water and the toy is plastic and then you are worried you used well water to fill the toy and it’s a plastic nonstick toy, you’re wearing a waterproof GoreTex rain jacket while fish from the river are grilling behind you in a Teflon pan and then you begin to shriek in horror turning in circles as you see you are dripping in Devil’s Piss—everywhere.

It may have been easier to grasp PFAS if PFAS was instead named: Ubiquitous Plastic Byproducts: UPB. UPB feels good on the brain and tongue, but no one ever said PFAS are plastics and SLUB feels even better so: Slimy Leftover Ubiquitous Byproducts. Here Plastic is left out and so is Forever. SLUB sounds gross, drippy, and like something you don’t want on you…or in you. Now the leap from acronym to name and meaning is a short trek, manageable, and we can go forth on the same page discussing what to do about all the SLUB in our water etcetera. Careful though, in an effort for maximal transparency and optimization we could consider: UPBIEEOTP: Ubiquitous Plastic Byproducts In Everything Everywhere On The Planet. Subtitle: BYWSP, Because You Wanted Slicky Pans; All together: U-BEEP-S or possibly: SLUB BEEPS…which ends up being slightly redundant and poetic and I now see why naming newly formed chemical compounds can create headaches and we end up with PFAS because the original team, probably working for the Navy, just wanted to go home, and be done with it.

Sometimes we don’t know what we want until the market lets us know and so the nonstick pan trend surfaced as a brow-wiping, stress-reducing solution to the annoyance of the need to get out the elbow grease out and scrape. To scrape, a verb. To soak. To burn the scallop. All inexcusable. Truly! Who hasn’t slid a fried egg from a nonstick pan and watched in ecstasy as the whole entity, an orb of a planet, slides cleanly onto the plate and the elation that follows of deciding when you get to pierce the yolk yourself and deciding how the mess will eventuate on your plate and not the pan. It is magic and besides, we like oil and oily things, cue the image of me pregnant while inhaling deeply a newly paved parking lot of asphalt—an ode to oil itself.

The nonstick pan craze, and it was a craze, was concurrently happening during the waterproof military grade outerwear phase, followed by the leggings and all-terrain fabrics-to-make-you-a-Mount-Everest-trekker phase, alongside the take-it-to-go chemical food and sugar product phase…and so on with many of these still surging concurrently.

The market plays on the cultural beliefs of autonomy, freedoms, and individuality to invoke brand loyalty as a severe right and privilege over harder won ethical concepts we will have to fend for autonomously. I love when water droplets collect on a waterproof glove, coat, covering, or accessory when I fish, in essence a form of glee. Ha!…a full hijacking of my evolutionary survival instinct.

More than oily things we like the illusion of autonomy. Of easy. Of toasters. Of coasting. Of our bubbled, separated lives. To summons. To live in our manifest expression is to be away from all other humanity and reach them through a pixel. Ahhhh. But we are not at fault here, not necessarily. Labs are ping-ponged all over the globe spending precious hours mining the human mind, body, and soul to discover how we tick, how we addict. With each new discovery we are marketed to and shown the exact thing our double-helixed bondage desires and low and behold it’s on sale this weekend or in a drive-thru.

PFAS were born in the 1940’s and eventually would unify humanity in a shared trait. PFAS would find us and coat us all in an unescapable blanket of slippery debris. The world is soaked in the devil’s piss, is how John Oliver explains it on HBO’s Last Week with John Oliver, October 3^rd, 2021. He shares an embedded clip of the testimony by Mr. Glenn Evers, FMR. Research Scientist, Dupont: “It doesn’t go away, this is a manmade chemical, we just pass the baton to our generations of kids. In fact, if you were to incinerate and cremate me, I would technically be a fluorochemical hazardous source. The Teflon mesh that’s used in my hernia produces a very toxic gas and decomposes to something called Devil’s Piss, which is hydrofluoric acid. You can’t kill this beast. You can only control it.” In a mythic battle for survival there would be a beast and arsenals would be deployed. Unfortunately, our arsenal is lame. It begins with knowledge, choice, and engagement. That’s no chalice, no sword, no potion.

When I go to ewg.org/pfasmap I find the giant red bullseye on my community. I think of the granulated carbon tanks in our basement. I think of a massive PFAS settlement…of our reverse osmosis filter. I think of the ever-evolving list of cancers and horrid health risks of PFAS. I think we should move. Move somewhere cleaner, but the idea of escape is a misnomer. The idea of clean. We will return to Forever Chemical. PFAS will find me. June of this year saw a new record low for EPA recommended PFAS in drinking water from 2,000 parts per trillion (ppt) down to 0.004 ppt—dare I say negligible.

PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) aka C8 is in my blood and in 99.7% of Americans. We are all here together. It’s time to call it what it is.

and I can hardly refuse. I know
you’ll carry me down to the Rouge
when I’ve grown too frail to walk
but still need to watch a river
spill over rocks. I hear the old
prose unroll, laughing and babbling
as it descends from some mythic Irish
wood to crack its consonants against
those hungry and bigoted days
cramped in a carriage bearing us
from pothole to pothole toward a crypt
and shrinking us with gossip and sideglance
though the music of the telling lifts us
like a kind of horse-paced tonic
offered up to our impervious time
of famine, screeds, and echoing guns.
Healing comes late, when it does,
and always with a voice like water–
water that pummels the stone.

It’s tempting for Western philosophy to categorize democracy as originating in Greece and Rome in 5BCE. But it may have evolved to suit the city-states that made up the Mediterranean in that era. “It is plausible to assume that democracy in one form or another arises naturally in any well-bounded group, such as a tribe, if the group is sufficiently independent of control by outsiders to permit members to run their own affairs and if a substantial number of members, such as tribal elders, consider themselves about equally qualified to participate in decisions about matters of concern to the group as a whole. This assumption has been supported by studies of nonliterate tribal societies, which suggest that democratic government existed among many tribal groups during the thousands of years when human beings survived by hunting and gathering. To these early humans, democracy, such as it was practiced, might well have seemed the most ‘natural’ political system.

Representative democracy, that system the United States is still on a knife edge of losing, is at least partially based on the Iroquois Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace, thought by scholars to be adopted in 1142. In 1988, Congress passed a resolution, “The confederation of the original 13 colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy,” it reads, “as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself.”

In the age of media silos, do we even discuss the philosophies and ideas that are the foundations of forms of modern governments? Communism, Marxism, Fascism? Democracy seems to be in decline. But worldwide, the results of good elections are being graciously accepted—Kenya, Senegal, Angola, Malaysia, Indonesia. “In the Philippines, the losing candidate, Leni Robredo, the former vice president, was gracious in defeat, telling her supporters, ‘We need to accept the majority’s decision.’ Her concession was a model that should be emulated elsewhere, including in the United States (Washington Post).”

As of November 21, 2022, 59.4% of registered voters say the United States is “off on the wrong track,” an ill-defined poll.  What track is that? Fiscal? Policy-wise? Philosophical ideology?

As Plato argues in the Republic, the best government would be led by a minority of the most highly qualified persons.

Thomas Hobbes argued that human nature, likewise, gravitates toward pleasure over pain and, when faced with hardship, the demos will favor an authoritarian leader. An example might be found in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, where the Ukrainians do not only blame Vladimir Putin for the war, but the Russian people for devolving back into authoritarianism after the fall of the USSR.

John Locke’s philosophy, of which so much is based on the concept of social contract and that states that human nature is based on reason and tolerance, truth and morality, even allowing that people can also be selfish. Most scholars attribute some phraseology in the Declaration of Independence to Locke’s ideology in “Two Treatises of Government.”

David Hume “understood feeling, rather than knowing, as that which governs ethical actions, stating that ‘moral decisions are grounded in moral sentiment.’ Arguing that reason cannot be behind morality, he wrote: ‘Morals excite passions and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.’”

Georg Hegel noted that when one idea has reached maturity, the natural inclination of the population swings back to the opposite ideal. “This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm.”

Which do you feel influences today’s struggle of democracy and autocracy, Plato and Hobbes? Locke and Hume? Do you think US democracy is working? What about worldwide? Who should decide? How do we understand personhood in a different way than our predecessors? What is happening to the definition of personhood? Where are we headed? We are looking for poems, essays, ad stories that express your feelings or beliefs about how social groups have influenced your world. Have you ever stood in the minority opinion?