Mountain Laureate

Hard times, come again no more

2009-03-08T10:35:00.005-05:00

I’m sitting in my home office with the window open because it is, for once, warm enough to have it open.

The intermittent drum of an unseen woodpecker drifts across the woods in back as if from a construction zone. Finally, I catch sight of a small black, white and red bird moving in a big sweet gum tree. I raise the binoculars I keep on my desk and confirm, as I suspected, it is a downy woodpecker.

He’s an industrious little fellow, and I admire his efforts.

As I fight the morning fog (in my head, not out my window), my thoughts drift until they finally land on another hard worker.

That’s my sister, Debbie. But right now, my sister isn’t working, except in the very real sense of the unemployed scrambling to find a job.

She was a vice president for a group that puts on a world-class sporting event each year, and she bore most of the effort of getting that event off the ground each year. But when that group, the Breeder’s Cup, merged with the National Thoroughbred Racing Association a few years back, the Breeder’s Cup employees began to be cut. My sister was the last of them. Her job was eliminated last year.

She found interim work in Washington, D.C., for six months, but now that that gig is up, and she is lost.

Used to a salary double to triple mine, now she is having to make due on unemployment. Like many others out there, she wonders if she will lose her house. And like so many, she’s already lost much of the money she put aside for her retirement.

There’s an edge in her voice when I talk to her these days.

She is considering dropping her high blood pressure medicine because it is an expensive, name-brand kind. It’s the same one I take, because, for us, the generic ones we’ve tried have had serious side effects and weren’t effective.

In phone calls, I beg her to stay on it. Without it, I think, the pressures she is under could kill her.

I have also quietly let my niece, my sister’s eldest child, know that Debbie isn’t in as good a shape financially as she may be letting on. My sister is a proud woman who will be angry if she finds out what I’ve done, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Being the youngest of the two of us, I’m used to being a thorn in her side. But I also have that younger sister’s love and admiration of my oldest sibling.

I remember when she was young and still married to her ex. There were times when he was laid off from his construction job, and she would work three jobs to make ends meet. One of those jobs was to pay for child care, because her then-husband couldn’t be bothered to watch their two small children.

That’s the kind of worker my sister is.

I share all this with you, even though I’ll never share this column with my sister, because I think it is important to put a face on this economic downturn. Recession. Depression. I’m sure many of you have different faces you could substitute.

That there are people even worse off than my sister, of that I have no doubt. More are slipping into the ranks of the unemployed every day.

At the race tracks in Kentucky where my sister used to set up big events, they often play a popular Stephen Foster song, “My Old Kentucky Home.“

But is another well-known Foster song that has been playing in my head more often, just as it is this morning.

“Hard times, come again no more.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_Come_Again_No_More

I'm back!

2009-01-09T09:04:00.001-05:00

It's been a long dry spell. Have patience with me, but I'M BACK!

And now Cecil

2007-02-03T22:51:00.000-05:00

My first job was in a small town in the Appalachian coalfields, on the Cumberland Plateau where Kentucky, Tennessee and Virgina jealously elbow each other.

The newspaper didn't pay much and went through journalism school graduates quickly. I expected to be one of them. I was a native Kentuckian, but here I was a stranger in a strange land.

My home was a two-room furnished apartment on a busy street where heavily laden coal trucks rumbled by. The furniture was mostly vinyl and duct tape and every day, no matter how much I wiped, a fresh layer of coal dust would sift under the windows.

My first few months there were like a bad pregnancy. At night, my restless mind would race, and I'd get back out of bed, get dressed and drive until I was tired enough to sleep. Many mornings, I'd wake up with a sour stomach and sometimes get dry heaves before I could get out of the shower.

But slowly, I adjusted.

The hills and the people that once seem to shrug in indifference began to gather protectively around their adopted daughter.

I never had it easy there, but even on a salary barely more than minimum wage, I had it better than many. One of those I had it easier than was Cecil.

I got to know this quiet, rusty-haired man through the cause he'd taken up -- saving Yellow Creek. For Cecil, it was a dual cause. His son had leukemia, as did an unusual number of other children up and down the banks of the creek. Teams of doctors, medical students and environmentalists had linked the cancer to a tannery that for decades released toxic metals into the creek.

When I met Cecil, the tannery was still spewing forth black effluent that was linked to fish kills on a regular basis. He was one of a group of hickory-tough mountain people who decided to take on the world

Their group was called the Yellow Creek Concerned Citizens, only they pronounced it "yallah."

Cecil wasn't a leader; he didn't talk much period. But he always showed up for meetings, late night strategy sessions and the moonshine-fueled Bluegrass jam sessions that helped keep everyone together when frustration threatened to unravel the group.

His boy, a paler, mop-headed version of Cecil, often accompanied him to the tamer functions.

I remember once Cecil's family invited me into their home. Even after several years of getting to know the people around there, I was shocked at the poverty of the place. Holes gaped in the walls and floor, but I dared not let my eyes stray. Cecil was as proud as he was poor, and I would not shame him.

I learned a lot from the people of Yellow Creek: how to pick and prepare poke and where to find morels and wild grapes. Later, I learned from them that underdogs really can win.

I like to think of those as simpler times, but I'm not good at lying -- even to myself.

One thing that was simpler, though -- the way we communicated. Only some of us had phones and e-mail and cell phones were unheard of then. We shared the important news of our lives face-to face. often as we were passing in our vehicles.

On paved country roads, we'd just stop in our lanes and talk until another vehicle wanted to pass.

Dirt roads, especially one in particular, were different. Old Cross was scraped out of a ledge and followed one of the prettiest stretches of Yellow Creek. For the adventurous, and I was among them, it was a favorite shortcut between communities. On summer Saturdays, wonderful impromptu parties would spring up in wide spots on the road, usually involving someone who had just picked up a case or two of beer at nearby Cumberland Gap or had recently been to see Kaintnor, the community's preferred moonshiner.

I'd often pass Cecil on the road, although I don't remember him at any of these parties. He had more serious things on his mind.

I stayed at that newspaper for nearly five years in a place I once saw as godforsaken, but grew to love.

The battle for Yellow Creek still raged after I left. The odds were seriously stacked against those who fought it, but lawyers for the Sierra Club joined them in a lawsuit and won. A huge sum was awarded but never seen, but the tannery was shut down.

The creek runs clearer these days, although residents are well aware of the chromium, lead and other toxins that lie in the sediments.

Cecil's boy grew up to be a man, I'm proud to say, and times got better for the family.

But I got an e-mail this week, and now it is Cecil who has cancer.

This is a battle friends say Cecil is not likely to beat, and if he falls, I will go back there to stand in respect with the hardy people who knew and loved him.

And then, I expect, we'll drive down to Old Cross and stop in a wide spot. Someone may have a bottle, but most of us are older and wiser. It won't be a party.

We'll probably just stand around and talk. Me, I imagine I would do a lot of listening, and not just to the people I have long been separated from.

I'll listen to the creek as it murmurs its tales of triumph and tragedy, knowing that Cecil will weigh in on both.

Resurrecting Abbey

2006-05-10T22:04:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I just need a pacifier.

"Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: You will outlive the bastards."

In need of heros?

2006-03-06T08:16:00.000-05:00

Below is an excerpt from a story about Times Picayune journalists efforts, but read the whole thing here: http://www.sptimes.com/2006/03/06/Worldandnation/A_paper_presses_on.shtml

It's worth your time.

"The enthusiasm for the paper is unparalleled. ... I've never felt it in my 26 years running this paper," said Phelps, who wears a watch with a replica of the Spanish coin from which the newspaper got its name. "It's been our lifeline ... and a reaffirmation of the newspaper as a basic information source."

The paper's newfound scrappiness has not gone unnoticed. The staff just won a George Polk Award for metro reporting. Amoss was named Editor of the Year in January by the trade magazine Editor & Publisher . And there is widespread hope for a Pulitzer Prize.

"I don't think there's any member of my staff who wouldn't trade all of it to get our city back," Amoss said.

No recreation in Arizona this year

2006-02-23T07:39:00.000-05:00

Forest Service officials have launched the earliest fire restrictions ever for Arizona's national forests along the Mogollon Rim. (That's pronounced muggy on)

Concerns about wildfire, highlighted by one of Arizona's earliest major fires ever, prompted the restrictions in four national forests. The "February" fire started at an abandoned campfire atop the Rim on Feb. 6, and it burned more than 4,000 acres before it was brought under control 10 days later.

Officials are worried that drought conditions, lack of rain and snow and an abundance of dry fuels could result in the worst fire season in memory.

Banned are campfires, charcoal fires and smoking except in specific developed campgrounds.

The restrictions affect the parts of Arizona's forested high country that receive the earliest and heaviest recreational use. Look for even more restrictions as spring draws near, officials say.

Mansions -- and smarter public officials

2006-02-22T08:22:00.000-05:00

From USA Today:

"Even Aspen, Colo., is tiring of mega-mansions.

The super-affluent ski resort town, where the average home sold for $3.1 million last year, is moving toward a ban on houses larger than 15,000 square feet.

One of the 17 houses in Pitkin County, Colo., larger than 15,000 square feet is the 55,000-square-foot mansion of Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, former ambassador to the U.S. That's roughly a third of an acre.

'It's a question of growth management,' says Cindy Houben, head of community development for Pitkin County, which includes Aspen. Supersize homes, she says, require supersize staffs - everyone from maids to pool cleaners - and the county has too little affordable housing and too much traffic.

'There's no more land to put the housing on. There's no more road space to put the cars on. ... There has to be some limitation,' she says."

A shot at the Veep

2006-02-12T17:38:00.000-05:00

"Whittington 'came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," Armstrong told the Associated Press in an interview.

'The vice president didn't see him," she continued. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good.'"

Aren't you supposed to be quiet while hunting? And isn't it the shooter's job to make sure his shot is clear?

A must read

2006-02-12T10:22:00.000-05:00

Lost Mountain. Erik Reece. Read it and weep over mountaintop removal.

Reece himself may have found the power to move mountains.

Fire on the mountain

2006-02-11T19:47:00.000-05:00

Pine is burning. It's a small community near Strawberry in Arizona. Both are rim communities -- on the edge of the Colorado Plateau.

I spent several years living below the rim -- looking up toward Strawberry and Pine.

Fire has been common in Arizona the past six years or so. The area has been going through a drought of epic proportions. I left there, in part, because of the threat -- and because of the drain on resources I figure every person adds.

The pronghorn were what really got to me. Between my community and Prescott, herds were common. But as water sources dried up, the pronghorn began to die in increasing numbers. Part of the problem were fences. Pronghorn don't jump them. They attempt to crawl under them. And modern fences along the highway are constructed so that they are too taught to crawl under.

Bears really suffer, too, especailly 2-year-old males. This is the age mother bears shed all ties with their young, and the males suffer the worst of it. The problem is more mature male bears fight them off their territory -- especailly when food is scarce. It's usually the 2-year-old males that end up around dumps and in towns and gardens. Then they are labeled nuisance bears, and shot. It's a tough lot in life.

The drought itself is one thing. Groundwater pumping is another. It is prolific in Arizona. It is so bad that land sinks as underwater lakes drop dramatically -- leaving big fissures and screwing with foundations and highways. Recently, a new law was passed in Phoenix requiring you to mention any subsidence from groundwater pumping when you sell your home there.

So back to Pine. Why am I bothered by yet another fire in this desperate land?

Because fire season begins in May and it is only February. This is the time of winter rain -- or used to be.

These are hard times in Arizona. Stay tuned.

Snow it is

2006-02-11T08:53:00.000-05:00

From the sky, snow is still falling. One the ground, it is melting.

For now, the falling is faster than the melting, and it's a winter wonderland out there. Especially impressive is the white tracery in the woods at the end of my lot.

This early Valentine from the elements is welcome, even if I won't blow up my snow tube and take it to the nearest hillside. (I would if the snow would linger longer)

Instead, I'll focus on life's many chores: laundry, the kitchen (every room, really) changing the car battery which is no doubt dead again -- fourth day in a row.

But large clumps of snow are dropping straight down, and the pale gray of the sky is nearly the same as the soft white of the snow. I'll tackle my chores with a little more enthusiasm because of it.

The last time I went sledding was Flagstaff, January 2001, a mid-40s woman with her 20-and-30-something friends, all of us cavorting with the college kids at the NAU campus. The best sled run was steep with three serious "jumps" built on it. Many people avoided it. We did not. On my turn, I forgot about the last jump in the series until I was unexpectedly airborne again and struggling to stay upright on the tube. I came down extra hard and was relegated to the sidelines for a while. Eventually, we all were -- until, moaning and groaning, we loaded ourselves into Jeeps and hauled ourselves to a nice warm bar for medication. We were prone to overmedication.

Next week, I turn 48, and today I ask myself if I will ever find myself on a sled looking down a steep slope again.

The answer comes from my heart and is a little easier than I expected: Hell yes, you will, if there's ever again enough snow on the ground.

It's not Florida, but ....

2006-01-15T10:03:00.000-05:00

It's mid-January, and the snow I'd hoped for did not materialize. Not here anyway.

The snowbirds across the street flew the coop right after Christmas and will stay in Florida until the tulips emerge up here.

Me, I'm good with winter. But I do have a travel dream of my own this time of year and it does involve a warmer place. It's a place I think of now not because I want to escape the cold, but because January and February are about the only times you can go there and be sure the soles of your boots won't melt.

Really.

Pinacate is a volcanic field in Mexico just across from Arizona. I've been close -- to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument -- and while it is a special place in its own right, it's no Pinacate.

Pinacate is a stark, black volcanic field with perfect craters and cones. It is named for a beetle that, if disturbed, rears up and lets loose a fearsome stench. People in the Desert Southwest may tickle tarantulas and poke at scorpions, but they tend to let this little fella be.

Black sand dunes rise from the pumice soil around Pinacate, but in years when there has been enough winter rain, spring blooms in pinks and gold made all the more beautiful by the dark backdrop.

Pinacate, or as the Mexicans know it, Reserva de La Biosfera de El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar (Pinacate and Grand Desert Biosphere Reserve), is a place of extremes. Temperatures at the bottom of Crater Elegante are said to reach 150 degrees in the summer, and yet scientists have documented 560 plant species, 56 mammal species, 43 reptile species, 222 bird species, and -- get this -- 4 fish species in the 600-square-mile reserve.

There's a spot known as the "Bomb Wall" where slugs of molton lava were blasted from one of the exploding cones, cooled in midair and piled up in one place.

I lived in Arizona for several years, but never made it to Pinacate. I had some friends who tried from the Arizona side, but the road was too rugged for their 4-wheel-drive SUV.

"Maybe if we had a Hummer," they said disappointedly. (These are not people who are into gas-guzzling and conspicuous consumption.) Those who go also risk running into coyotes (the human smuggling kind) and drug runners along the way. Once there, they are generally safe, as long as they don't break their necks, run into scorpions, rattlesnakes, gila monsters, black widow spiders and the like, stay well hydrated -- all water must be brought in -- and be careful of the extremes of temperature. Deserts can turn quite cold at night.

I'm told Pinacate is one of the quietist places a human being can go these days. I admit that is one of the strongest draws for me, although I have always been drawn to oddities and extremes of nature. (This is intended as no reflection on my choice of boyfriends in the past.)

Let other people dream of pina coladas and palm trees swaying in warm breezes.

My mind will drift to the solitude of a black moonscape with lava caves, cholla cactus and blissful silence.

Someday, Pinacate.

Just when you think the world has gone mad ...

2005-12-20T17:32:00.000-05:00

You find someone with some sense:

This from an AP story on the so-called "Intelligent Design" ruling.

"Jones decried the "breathtaking inanity" of the Dover policy and accused several board members of lying to conceal their true motive, which he said was to promote religion.

A six-week trial over the issue yielded "overwhelming evidence" establishing that intelligent design "is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," said Jones, a Republican and a churchgoer appointed to the federal bench three years ago."

Black Ink Monday

2005-12-13T06:03:00.000-05:00

Did you see it? Probably not.

Editorial cartoonists all over the country made their stand yesterday against their opressors -- their own employers. At least, those of them who still have employers.

Black Ink Monday's spark was a cut of local editorial cartoonists at various Tribune Co. properties -- most notably the L.A. Times.

Cartoonists all over the country captured their sentiments as only editorial cartoonists can. How many were actually printed in newspapers, I cannot say. But 102 were placed on the editorial cartoonists association Web site.

Black Ink Monday

I looked at all 102.

Many took direct hits at the Trib Co., but others painted in broader strokes at the obscene profit expectations by Wall Street owners on newspaper conglomerates.

They called it a nonviolent protest, but many of the cartoons are hard hitting.

I've never been so proud to call newspaper cartoonists my brethren.

Now what can reporters and editors do to stand up in the face of the disassembling of all that is good and right in newspapers and the news business?

The pen is mightier than the sword. Are Wall Street's balance sheets the mightiest of them all?

Year of the Woodpecker

2005-12-11T08:17:00.000-05:00

Forget the Chinese calendar -- 2005 was the Year of the Woodpecker.

The discovery of the ivory-billed in Arkansas was cause for celebration all over and champagne was broken out under this roof.

But woodpeckers of all kinds are interesting. So says the pile-driving pileated that has been my alarm clock the past few mornings. I don't begrudge him. I rise and look for him in the woods below my lawn. I don't have to look far for that tall, rosy-cheeked redhead hammering busily away.

He's easy to spot, but some woodpeckers are harder to see, like the diminutive downy -- North America's most common woodpecker. But there's one on my woodsy horizon now, pecking away on a locust snag.

When I lived in Arizona, one of my favorite birds was the acorn woodpecker -- a bird that lives in colonies of a dozen or more.This noisy, boisterous bird behaves like juvenile delinquents, but with their white eyes and distinct, clown-like markings, they remain on my list of favorites.

The downy has flown, the pileated has gone quiet, a jay is complaining and the mourning doves are aligning like musical notes in the large white pine on my property's edge.

It's such a nice way to start the day.

I think I'll find some nice homemade suet recipes.

Before I start singin'

2005-12-10T21:53:00.000-05:00

And I'll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin'

_______

We all need more Dylan

That's my kind of revival

2005-12-10T08:29:00.000-05:00

Could a revival of the environmental spirit come from an East Tennessee church?

One house of worship wants to test the theory.

A Knoxville-area Christian church is making mountain-top removal its social justice issue for 2006. (YES, they're opposed)

"We believe that if enviromentalism is going to move into the mainstream in the South, the churches are the entry point," says a friend who is on the church's committee on the issue. "We are going to try to bring it as a spiritual issue to churches all around Knoxville and get people informed and active."

AMEN! (And more on this later)

Harry Caudill, old friend, you can rest a little easier.

City News Service RIP

2005-12-02T08:43:00.000-05:00

Here's to the hardworking stiffs at City News Service (formerly City News Bureau) in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune is doing away with the service. The Trib bought what was then City News Bureau in 1999.

The bureau was where the real media grunts worked hard and long, with little pay, round-the-clock schedules and only begrudging recognition.

City News Bureau was where the likes of Mike Royko and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. got their starts. These were journalists' journalists. I knew a few of them and I respected all of them.

If news was breaking, you knew City News staffers would already be at the scene when you got there, no matter how cold and miserable or late or early. They saw some awful things. Vonnegut incorparated one of the things he saw -- somebody being crushed in an elevator, into one of his works.

Accuracy was paramount. The famous phrase from the City News Bureau in Chicago was, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

The closure comes because the Trib realized that the service, subscribed to as a tip service by nearly every media outlet in Chicago and some in the suburbs, was helping Trib competitors compete against its Web site.

Here's what one of the best-known City News Bureau veteran said about work there:

"We got to know the whole damn city and how to move around in it," Vonnegut said."It was something to be proud of -- like being in the infantry."

Something to be thankful for

2005-11-21T18:23:00.000-05:00

The cancer has NOT spread to my father's kidneys. He'll need surgery -- but not for that.

AMEN.

Where's the clicker? Not here

2005-11-21T05:51:00.000-05:00

I'm starting week 4 of my TV-less experiment. My record is one month -- June, 1995, in Chicago -- one month before the heat wave there that killed about a thousand people. Of course, then the Internet was not as advanced, but there was also never a shortage of things to do in the big city.

Me, I'm trying to recover blocks of time that had eroded away in front of TV. I haven't really missed television, although my living room now seems rather poorly laid out and has no sense of purpose.

I have no set time goal here except to complete a month without turning my TV on. (I even kept it off the two nights I was out-of-town and camped in a hotel last week.) I'm starting to see the benefits, although I'm still digging out of projects and haven't yet found long hours to spend reading, writing, sketching or hiking. But I have more time, and I'm tackling those projects. I can see the light.

Can I go a winter without TV? The answer is a definite maybe.

Exit stage, uh, right

2005-11-20T21:38:00.000-05:00

History's highways

2005-11-20T04:58:00.000-05:00

I've been traveling for a few days -- off to Greensboro, N.C., for some training at a much larger sister newspaper. All went well. Stayed in a cozy downtown hotel with hardwood floors and tall ceilings. They encourage you to have a glass of wine with them in the parlor-like lobby (no extra charge), and will happily send you up to your room with a glass if you cannot linger. (It's the Greensboro Biltmore Hotel on Washington Street, if you are wondering.)

I also enjoyed their elevators -- the old fashioned kind that you have to open the doors to yourself. As a child, I rode these to my grandmother's New York City apartment and was petrified of them. You can watch the floors go by from inside the mesh gate and the contraption has the same smell I remember -- of oil and dust, even though it was well maintained.

It was my second trip to Greensboro in a couple of weeks. I sometimes think of I-40 as my life's highway because I've traveled so much of it so often. I worked in Wilmington, N.C., on one end of the highway, and near Flagstaff, Ariz., on the other end. I have traveled it on into California, but just barely.

Mileposts are also memory posts for me. The exit at Black Mountain reminds me of meeting an old friend there after a writing conference and seeing the Nashville Misfits at a little music hall.

Canton is where I stopped once to get gas and realized I'd left my wallet several hours drive away. Had a call a friend from a place only a couple of hours away to come bail me out with gas money.

Hickory is where one of my colleagues at The Evansville Courier landed. The business writer had landed a job at one of the furniture trade magazines. I remember the excitement on his face when he confided in me that he had an interview, although I have forgotten his name.

Major history lies along this roadway, as well. I pass Yadkin Valley, once the home of Daniel Boone. Asheville, the hometown and subject of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel. Greensboro is a major civil rights site. The Greensboro Four fanned the flames of the civil rights movement when they bellied up to the whites-only side of a segregated lunch counter a lunch counter at the F.W. Woolworth's there on Feb. 1, 1960. One of the streets by the Woolworth's has been renamed February One and efforts are underway to turn the store into a museum.

Closer to home, just off of I-40, is another little-known piece of social justice history. At the Deep Springs exit in Dandridge is a 160-acre place called the Highland Research and Education Center. Many years ago, when it was known as the Highlander Folk School and was in Monteagle, Tenn., it was where founder Myles Horton helped empower the likes of Martin Luther King and Rosa Park. He also crossed paths with Ella Baker, founder of the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee that launched its efforts nonviolent change at the F.W. Woolworth's in Greensboro.

The Highlander Center keeps a low profile. My parents live a few miles the other way on the same Deeps Springs exit and have never heard of the place. I only know it is there because 20 years ago, as a fledgling journalist, I went there with a group of people who were fighting pollution from tannery that was befouling Yellow Creek in Bell County, Ky.

Further west just off of I-40, perched on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, is a tiny community called Ozone. It is there where Myles Horton developed his taste for helping the downtrodden and righting the wronged when, as a college student, he directed a Presbyterian Bible School in the community.

Residents who had sold their mineral and logging rights to industrialists for a fraction of their value had seen the resources depleted and were looking for answers on what next. Horton did not have the answers, but once the people came together to ask those questions, they began answering them for themselves. It was a lesson Horton never forgot. It launched his efforts, which eventually resulted in the Highlander, which -- noticed or not -- continues its work today.

Best lyrics yet for these times

2005-11-16T07:50:00.000-05:00

These by Chuck Brodsky:

Dangerous Times

There's terror in our midst
They could be one of us
Behind you in the line
Beside you on the bus
Wearing camouflage
They might be wearing suits
The terrorists among us
Might be wearing army boots

These are dangerous times
People are afraid
No looking back at history
To see how enemies were made
Some dictators are bad
Some dictators are good
That's a hard one to explain
But I wish somebody would

So let us all agree
Let us not dissent
Let us not ask questions such as
Where our freedoms went
We'll just fly fly the flag
Sing G-d Bless America
Question people's patriotism
Who don't join in the hysteria

These are dangerous times
And so we lose our rights
While these terrorists among us
Do their dirty work at night
There isn't time to read
The contents of the bills
That Congress votes for anyway
Up there on The Hill

There's terror in our midst
It wears the good disguise
Fools alot of people
They seem like such regular guys
Rewriting all the rules
You don't have any say
In fact they even count on you
To look the other way

There's terror in our midst
All over the tv
It's what's behind the words
That scares the daylights out of me
The twisting of the facts
The stretching of the truth
The terrorists among us
They manipulate the news

So let us all agree
Let us not dissent
Let us not ask questions such as
Where our freedoms went
We're going to build them schools
We're going to build them banks
We're going to build them pipelines
From their fields to our tanks

My heart goes out to Johnny
Sent off into war
They convince him it's for freedom
That he'd lay his life down for
My thoughts are often with him
I pray he comes home safe
And I pray for every innocent
Laid early in the grave

These are dangerous times
You might be overheard
Using one of whatever they've defined
As being a dangerous word
What if they don't like your songs?
What if they don't like your books?
What if you fit a profile
Based solely on your looks?

They listen to us talk
They read the things we write
They watch us all on cameras
They know where you were last night
They know where you stopped for gas
Which magazines you bought
Back in 1984
This was all just crazy talk

So let us all agree
Let us not dissent
Let us not ask questions such as
Where our freedoms went
Let's have a look inside those pockets
Let's have a look inside that purse
Let's have a look inside that glove box
Or someplace maybe worse

And who was in your house
While you weren't home
And looked in your computer
And through everything you own?
What did they want to know?
Which websites do you visit?
What have you learned about them?
They want to know - what is it?

So let us all agree
Let us not dissent
Let us not ask questions such as
Where our freedoms went
We'll just fly fly the flag
Sing G-d Bless America
Question people's patriotism
Who don't join in the hysteria

One for the road

2005-11-15T19:01:00.000-05:00

I'm going on three weeks without TV -- trying to get the clutter out of my brain and redefine my priorities. (I'm posting more -- there's that!)

I'll be a road warrior -- heading to the Piedmont for the next few days. May or may not have time to post.

Here's one last thought for the road -- partial lyrics from Greg Brown's song Homeland (I Want My Country Back). You have to hear it Brown's deep, rich gravel to best appreciate it, but you'll get the drift:

Homeland of Sojourner Truth
and Chief Joseph before,
Many quiet words of wisdom drowned out by TV
and I don't feel at home here anymore.

Blind engineer, war train on the track,
many many a heart is sore.
We want our country back;
we want to feel at home here once more.

The Tragedy of the Commons

2005-11-13T23:47:00.000-05:00

"Much of man's world is treated as a "commons" wherein individuals have the right to freely consume its resources and return their wastes. The 'logic of the commons' ultimately produces its ruin as well as the demise of those who depend upon it for survival. The commons relationship between people and their environment was noted by Garrett Hardin in a 1968 paper published in the journal SCIENCE."

Want to learn more? You should:

The Tragedy of the Commons

Ain't afraid

2005-11-12T21:40:00.000-05:00

This is a pretty good song and appropriate these days:

I Ain't Afraid
Words and music by Holly Near

I ain't afraid of your Yahweh
I ain't afraid of your Allah
I ain't afraid of your Jesus
I'm afraid of what you do in the name of your God

I ain't afraid of your churches
I ain't afraid of your temples
I ain't afraid of your praying
I'm afraid of what you do in the name of your God

verse
Rise up to your higher power
Free up from fear, it will devour you
Watch out for the ego of the hour
The ones who say they know it
Are the ones who will impose it on you

I ain't afraid of your Yahweh
I ain't afraid of your Allah
I ain't afraid of your Jesus
I'm afraid of what you do in the name of your God

I ain't afraid of your churches
I ain't afraid of your temples
I ain't afraid of your praying
I'm afraid of what you do in the name of your God

verse
Rise up, and see /find/ know/ hear a higher story
Free up from the gods of war and glory
Watch out for the threats of purgatory
The spirit of the wind won’t make a killing off of sin and satan

I ain't afraid of your Bible
I ain't afraid of your Torah
I ain't afraid of your Koran
Dont let the letter of the law
Obsure the spirit of the your love--it's killing us

I ain't afraid of your Yahweh
I ain't afraid of your Allah
I ain't afraid of your Jesus
I'm afraid of what you do in the name of your God

I ain't afraid of your churches
I ain't afraid of your temples
I ain't afraid of your praying
I'm afraid of what you do in the name of your God

Money
Culture
Choices
I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your God

Sunday
Spirt
Teachers
I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your God

Sabbath
Borders
Dances
I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your God double

Children
Music
Stories
I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your God

Rise up to your higher power
Free up
Rise up to your higher power
Free up
Let's try to be highly evolved
I aint afraid

Copyright 2000 Hereford Music (ASCAP)

Letter to Millie

2005-11-11T09:51:00.000-05:00

Dear Aunt Millie,

Sorry it's been so long since I've written.

We were all crushed when Uncle Larry died.

Then when you lost Scott, your only son, I knew you were dealing with the unimaginable. After that, things fell apart. Mom and Aunt Elaine said you'd lost your mind to grief. Your own daughter said you were just being selfish, and that you wanted all the sympathy when others were hurting, too.

They gave you sedatives, and then they said you were addicted. They kicked you out of one assisted-living home after another for calling ambulances all the time. Then there were the series of stays in THAT hospital. The suicide attempts. The nursing home you escaped from. (I was impressed that you scaled that 5-foot wall at your age, Millie, but you always were athletic. I remember the pictures of you, tanned and strong, cross-country skiing in that deep Adirondack snow.)

Now they finally have a diagnosis and it is Alzheimer's. I wonder if they've told you.

I do know there's still some glimmer of your own mind left, and it's heartbreaking to know that you are moving in and out of confusion. I've wanted to call, but even if I could figure out what to say, I'm pretty sure tears are all I could squeeze out.

There was that one note of humor -- them taking your cane away because you were trying to trip people with it -- but otherwise, Millie, we're sharing your pain. You're all cooped up where you can't get out, and you were such a fresh-air woman.

Mom got that letter you finally were able to scratch out. She read it aloud over the phone last week. She wept at the part where you wrote, "I don't want to die here." Me, I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

Now and then, Millie, the warrior in me rises up in full ferocity and wants to rescue you, and that part of me is so hard to beat back. I do because I have to. No cavalry is coming for you, dear.

The hardest part, the absolute hardest part of all is I feel like I should be saying some sort goodbye to you. I owe you that much.

Instead, well, I can't even compose a letter fit to send.

Half moon

2005-11-08T19:18:00.000-05:00

I took the dogs for a walk on the ridge tonight. The moon was near halfway lit, with cirrus clouds around it like wispy, silver hair. Think of a Van Gogh sunscape in opalescent. I wore no jacket. Here it is a November night, and it's T-shirt weather.

I live in an old peach orchard that was developed in the 1950s, when they built a little less house on a lot more yard. The neighborhood suits me. There's a loop on top of the ridge, and the lower portion is a narrow little lane with a steep lower side where no houses have been built. The woods on that section attract the ocassional owl, fox and deer. I hear steps in the fallen leaves below me and wonder which critter it is. My dogs pay no mind, sniffing and peeing with no real sense of urgency.

We sift through moon shadows -- not just silver on black, but multiple shades of gray like a monochromatic watercolor. In contrast, the reds and greens of stoplights from town twinkle across the lake below.

I feel safe, for the most part, but the shadows are just enough to conjure the delicious edge of fear. I tighten my grip on the dogs' leashes and pick up my pace almost imperceptibly.

I circle up the hill by the empty house halfway down the street from mine. White pine perfumes the air and the lawn has holly, cedar and dogwood trees. Last Christmas I was tempted to clip a little greenery from there, but the vacant, black windows are daunting. The man who lived there died in a tragic accident shortly before I moved into the neighborhood. And before then, someone else was troubled enough to take his own life under that roof. The blinds are raised inside, but I fear the blackness has the power of pain, so I avert my eyes. I simply inhale the sweet scent of pine and move on.

At home I step into the light and slip the harnesses off of the dogs. They try to poke their heads back through the nylon straps, ready to go again. No deal.

Perhaps to them, like me, the light inside feels harsh tonight.

I remember years ago, when I was in high school, and we moved away from the only community I'd known. I was a junior -- halfway through the school year. Many's a sleepless night I slipped out into the yard on another ridge and looked out across the sky toward the Ohio River and whatever lay beyond. The world seem smaller at night. Old friends seemed closer.

I decide to shun the brighter golden light and return to the liquid silver. Turning out the lights inside, I pull up a chair on the deck, knowing there won't be any more nights like this one -- not for many months.

I listen to the sounds of the neighborhood: The hum of traffic below the ridge. The nervous yip of a dog -- or maybe a fox. The chirping of crickets, one of them near.

I watch as a jet passes silently under the orange glow of Mars, and I search my heart.

I come up empty.

Sunset with a twist

2005-11-07T07:07:00.000-05:00

I was publications chair for the Chicago Audubon chapter for a couple of years until I moved away. One of my friends (the chapter president) recently shared some photos from an autumn field trip to see the sandhill cranes. This one, taken at sunset, was among my favorites.

The darker side

2005-11-06T23:17:00.000-05:00

One November weekend.

Six dead (four kids) in a house fire the next town over.

Two dozen killed in a tornado in one of my old home towns.

Learned of the suicide of someone I knew in Arizona. She hanged herself in the same garage where her 13-year-old had hanged himself three years before.

And now a call from my mother: After a battery of tests and a clean bill of health a couple of weeks ago, my bladderless father is peeing blood again. Has been for a few days at least. Just thought he'd mention it today.

This warrior is weary tonight.

A merry band

2005-11-02T08:12:00.000-05:00

Waxwings on high -- in one of the old locust trees on the edge of the woods. Haven't seen these clowns since August. Friend Flicker doesn't seem as happy to see them. There he goes!

Winter games

2005-11-01T05:43:00.000-05:00

Every year, about this time, I begin a game with my mother.

This is a woman who straps on solid armor against life's gloom and upsets.

"It's the power of positive thinking," she used to say, dancing to Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass on high volume as she dragged a turquoise blue Electrolux canister vacuum along with her.

It was almost more than a teenager could stand.

Even now, she only plays "happy music," no matter how beautiful the alternatives may be. She was diasappointed years ago when Emmy Lou Harris, at a concert I took my
parents to, veered often into the high, lonesome.

(I love to wallow in the stuff)

Every year, about this time, holes begin to appear in my mother's rose-colored armor.

When people like me are enjoying the peak of autumn -- a time some (me) consider the most wonderful of the year -- my mother begins to dread the dark, cold days of winter ahead.

Thus begin our games.

"Mom," I say, "You've got Thanksgiving and Christmas to be thinking about, and once you get to Christmas, the days are already growing noticeably longer."

I make sure to point out how close the winter solstice is -- "Just another month now, Mom" -- and when it passes, I comment on how the days seem to be growing longer and longer.

I encourage her to go out and walk in the daylight on the warmer days, even if the sunshine is limited.

By January, flocks of robins start moving in.

In February, the crocuses are coming up.

In March, the daffodils are everywhere and we've just about turned the corner.

Me, I've seen the extremes of winter and summer and have learned to live with both of them. I remember one Chicago winter -- '93, I believe it was -- when spring seemed nonexistent and summer finally broke in June. That winter, Lake Michigan froze so solidly the ice breakers couldn't get through.

I also have lived in Arizona, where summer is the enemy and people there don't honor daylight savings time because they have plenty of sunlight all year round, thank you very much.

And on the longest days of an Arizona summer, when dawn begins to break around 4:45 a.m., it's not a good thing.

I try to keep that in mind as I snuggle deeper under my blankets this time of year.

Then I say a little prayer for a short winter.

Trumpets and gold

2005-10-30T09:50:00.000-05:00

Two years ago, on a morning very much like this one, I was the better part of a continent away in Flagstaff, Ariz.

I was on the second floor of a Red Roof Inn, in a non-smoking room that smelled of cigarettes, which did nothing to speed my recovery from a case of food-poisoning that, two days before, I thought would kill me.

My trip had been a homecoming of sorts. I'd left Arizona voluntarily (kicking and screaming inside)to get closer to my family in the Southeast and to take a job that paid more than the subsistence income I'd grown used to in the resort community I'd in which I'd been living.

I connected with fine old friends, made a few new ones and sucked in as much high desert air as I could breathe. Despite my illness and very shaky legs, a friend and I had gingerly scrambled over fallen basalt pillars to go three-quarters of a mile into a lava tube at the base of the San Francisco Peaks. It's an odd thing -- being underground and suffering from the effects of high altitude.

But now was my last day, and all that was left to do was to drive down to Gomorrah (Phoenix) to catch my flight out. I could't sleep, in part because of the smell of motel and the sound of trucks and trains, and in part because I'd never quite adjusted to the difference in time between coasts.

I tossed a few times, then threw off the covers and started throwing my belongings in suitcases. It was 4:45 a.m. and my Phoenix flight left around 1 p.m. It was too early for breakfast, and I wasn't hungry (food poisoning has its advantages). All packed, I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute and pondered what to do next. Darkness still had a firm grip outside.

I decided to drive into the Peaks, the misnomer for an immense, old volcano that sits outside of Flagstaff. The whole thing had cataclysmically blown thousands of years ago, leaving a jagged rim that some mistook for separate mountains. A cauldron or inner basin was left inside, and it had filled in nicely to form a meadow surrounded by ponderosa and aspen forests. The inner basin was called Lockett Meadow.

It was cold, and I pulled on my heavy, denim jacket before I picked up my bags and headed out the door.

My head cleared as I sought out the unpaved Forest Service road that climbed Humphreys Peak to the meadow. I turned left from a trafficless highway and began the climb to the often snow-capped heights where the Kachinas spend the winter. There was no snow that morning.

The elk where thick, it being rutting season, and I saw small groups of them just on the edge of visibility in the mist illuminated by the headlights of my rented pickup truck.

I still felt weak from my earlier bout with gastrointestinal hell, but otherwise, I felt good. I have a thing for unpaved roads anyway.

Finally I reached the top -- an area where I had to ditch the vehicle and go on foot. It was dry, and even in the dampish chill of a deep autumn morning, I kicked up dust as my boots scuffed the trail.

It wasn't trail I wanted to be on, though. I walked a ways down and found a spot in the aspen and turned off. It was still dark, but the sky was taking on that deep purple color that insomniacs and third-shift workers know precedes dawn.

I went about a hundred yards off the trail -- any more and I risked getting seriously lost or falling down the side of the mountain -- and found a stump. At that point, I needed to sit. I was well over 10,000 feet up and had lost any acclimation to altitude I'd had when I left the West.

I sat still in the cold, trying to control my heavy breathing, as I waited for nature to close in around me.

It didn't take long.

It wasn't the delicate rustle of rodents and ground birds I heard, but the solid drum of quarter-ton creatures trotting boldly over forest floor duff centuries thick. My heart raced, and now it wasn't from the altitude. Elk were all around me. I could hear their breath puffing and imagined I could even feel the warmth of the steam from their nostrils.

These were bulls and they were enraged. The bugling began as they taunted each other for breeding rights to the elk cows that roamed in bands through the forest.

Elk bugling can sound like braying, but it can also take the drawn-out form of the song of the right whale. I listened to a haunting concert -- never actually seeing one of the angry males around me -- a situation over which I was both relieved and saddened.

The purple sky grew paler and I could see the aspen leaves, gold, over my head.

A breeze began to stir, signaling an end to my private, primal concert.

It was only then that I knew it was OK to leave Arizona again.

Charlotte's legacy

2005-10-11T23:20:00.000-05:00

My Aunt Charlotte died last month. What I say next may sound cold, but her death was a fitting end to summer.

Charlotte was really my great aunt. My generation followed our parents’ example and called her aunt, probably out of laziness. It saved us a syllable.

She was the youngest of five Swiss sisters who immigrated to the United States with their parents early last century. A much-doted on brother came, too, but he never made it out of his teens. He was, quite literally, the victim of a rapidly changing society. He was one of the first people in the world to be killed by the then-unusual motor car. I’m pretty sure he never knew what hit him.

The aunts grew up in farm country around Albany, New York, married and lived abnormally long lives -- each of them chalking up more than 90 years.

As a young woman, Charlotte married an outdoorsman named Lester Turner. While they were never rich, they did well enough to buy a small summer cabin on a lake named Sacandaga in the Adirondack Mountains.

The Adirondacks are in upstate New York, and are filled with clear streams, deep woods and the perfectly blended perfume of rich woodland soil and balsam fir. The smell is similar to that of the Smokies, but without the automobile exhaust.

Charlotte’s sisters visited the cabin often, and later, two of them bought cabins of their own up there. One of these sisters was my own grandmother. We spent a few weeks at my grandmother’s cabin -- Camp, we called it -- every summer until the last decade or so. Some of the happiest times of my life were in the thick of family there.

Life had an easy stratification at Camp.

The grownups gathered in the kitchen or out back around the fire pit, unless they were down at the lake.

We kids, and there was always a pack of us, were granted the screen porch as our own turf and given access to a full and fascinating collection of National Geographics that dated back to, I believe, 1948.

More likely we could be found outside, running barefoot, full throttle, on sandy paths that gradually turned to granite as they climbed high mountain meadows. I remember choking on chokecherries and savoring sweet, wild strawberries with the same abandon.

We spent plenty of time in and on the lake, too. Each of us graduated from playing with pebbles onshore to dog paddling in our orange life vests to diving off the small, wooden dock. As we grew older, we allowed to take the rowboat out on our own, and then the small motorboat. One of my uncles had a sailboat, but it was strictly off limits unless he was onboard.

The high-mountain air could be cool even in the heart of summer, but the sun still warmed the skin in a way I’ve never experienced since. I remember the goosebumps that arose when I’d get that confusing warm-cold feeling. The lake water was cold, too. I’m still able to swim in waters too cold for many people because I grew up splashing around a lake fed by snowmelt..

Those summer evenings had a comforting predictability. We built a campfire every night, either at the lake or in the fire pit behind the cabin. If the great aunts were there, they’d sing -- often stoked by a sip or two of schnapps -- in the best Andrew Sisters harmony they could muster.

But life moves on, and the sisters began to die, one by one. With each death, I found it harder to get back to Camp. Too many friendly ghosts.

The last time anyone from my immediate family went back was a couple of years ago. The eldest of my cousins was dying of colon cancer, and he wanted one last big gathering at the place he loved best. I couldn’t go because, at the time, I had health problems of my own.

They chose Labor Day weekend because it was the unofficial end of the season. Every year, those with summer homes on the lake would build one last big campfire on the shore. The annual Labor Day event became known as The Circle of Fire.

Charlotte was in a nursing home at the time, but to her delight, my parents were able to take her for the evening. By then, she was the last of the Swiss sisters and it was the last time any of them would lay eyes on the lake.

Charlotte lived a good life. I’ll miss her oversized smile and twinkling eyes. And in reference to my original statement, I never knew her in any season other than summer.

Her death comes even harder because it marks the official end of a long, wonderful chapter in my life. And as far as lifespans go, perhaps it marks the end of my own summer.

Life‘s little ripples are funny, though. Charlotte was the last of my great aunts, and just a few months from now, I’ll become a great aunt myself for the first time. The ultrasounds show my niece’s baby will be a boy.

Will he ever know the fresh air and freedom my siblings and cousins had in those long-ago Adirondack summers?

Chances are he will have a pretty good taste of it.

This year, one of my brothers bought a cabin in the woodsy hills above Cave Run Lake in my own native Kentucky. I made my first visit there this past Labor Day weekend, not long before Charlotte died.

Charlotte’s legacy has taken a southern turn, and it appears it will be handed down to another generation. Number 5, by my calculations.

She’d be damned proud -- we’re already call the new place Camp.

September Sunday morning coming down

2005-09-18T08:45:00.000-05:00

The trees in the woods behind my house are alive with motion this morning. It's not just the gentle breeze that always seems to send just one of the sweet gum leaves spinning wildly. (Every crowd has its alarmists)

The trees are alive with birds, and more of an assortment than usual. I believe they are relishing the morning coolness as much as I am.

There's a sapsucker plucking berries off of the Virginia creeper that has run its flag up an old, dead locust. Mr. S. Sucker stops at a bare section of tree and appears to sun himself, sitting quietly for a few moments with his back facing east.

The gang of blue jays (Crips?) are still finding a few apples on my neighbors' tree. Rowdy as they are (the birds, although the neighbors act up occasionally) they politely seem to take turns between their usual post in the big poplar and sweet-tart offerings in the nearly empty fruit tree.

As steam rises from the dew-dampened roof of one of my sheds, I spot a hummingbird moving between the cornflower blue morning glories and a smaller, more delicate red hummingbird vine below. The flowers are backlit, and in the center of the tangle, a garden spider sits in its silver home.

I'd thought about clearing some of the growth around that shed this weekend, but I banish the thoughts.

On the other side of my property, from a neighbor's old mulberry, a clear song erupts. Carolina wren. Big song for such a little bird.

It's otherwise quiet in my neighborhood. It's Sunday morning and most of my neighbors are at church; another worships on the NASCAR circuit. Either way, the birds and I seem to have the ridgetop to ourselves.

This is my favorite time of year.

I prefer the rum-punch smell of asters to the sweetness of spring flowers.

I appreciate the been-around brassiness of goldenrod, the toughness of ironweed and the big-haired, top-heavy Joe Pye weed to the more delicate spring maidens.

I like feeling the goosebumps of coolness in the morning, knowing full well that I might be sun-burnt later in the day.

Either way, I feel comfortable in my skin.

Scenes from black canyon

2005-08-31T21:01:00.000-05:00

An amazing place. Photos don't do justice.

More from vacation

2005-08-31T20:51:00.000-05:00

The first picture is of the Gunnison River at one end of the Black Canyon. The streamside was filled with American dippers -- look them up if you are not a birder.

The second is looking back on the San Juan Mountains from just beyond Montrose. Click to enlarge if you really want to appreciate them.

A few vacation pics

2005-08-31T20:34:00.000-05:00

Here's what I did for my summer vacation:

The first scene is the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. Be sure and click on the picture to enlarge it.

The second is from a Forest Service pit toilet near a pretty stream in Colorado. Someone knocked out the window -- and judging from the view from the pot, apparently for good reason.

More to come.

A note from Louisiana...

2005-08-31T20:07:00.000-05:00

My Baton Rouge friends Dave and Natalie (above at Chaco Canyon) and I saw each other last month at a wedding in Colorado and a few archaeological side trips.

Dave is a classic New Orleander -- all his family is there.

I talked to Dave briefly as Hurricane Katrina moved in. His lovely and pregnant wife, Natalie, is about ready to pop. She is due in a week or so. Dave was losing power in in his cell phone so our conversation was short, but he caught up by e-mail after the storm.

Here's how they're coping:

"Hello, everyone.

Baton Rouge is safe, and we have one of two houses in our neighborhood that did not lose electricity when Katrina hit. I guess that's one benefit of living next to a transformer station and high voltage power lines.

Nearly my entire immediate family on my mother's side has been with us since Sunday. They're OK, but their houses in New Orleans are probably underwater. My family is trying to lease a house in our neighborhood to wait out the devastation because even when the waters recede, there will be no electrictiy and no drinking water for weeks, if not months.

Gallows humor prevails at the house because there's not much anyone can do be but be glad we all survived.

On the bright side, the cocktails have been flowing each night, martinis and Negra Modelo for everyone over card games and conversation.
Drink one for us.

Also, I got on with the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate in a suburban bureau recently. Kind of missing the action on the hurricane but got some good evacuee stuff today. There are so many people without a home or the means to find a temporary place to stay. Some camped out at a gas station where the pumps were being powered by a generator turned by a John Deere tractor."

Cheers Dave. This one's for you.

Union at 10,000 feet

2005-08-21T15:12:00.000-05:00

Ahhh... it was lovely. Click on the pictures to see a larger version.

Breaking radio silence to say goodbye

2005-08-08T16:30:00.000-05:00

"I'm fascinated by everything. There's just too much going on in too many places"
-- Peter Jennings

radio silence

2005-07-18T23:28:00.000-05:00

I will be maintaining a short period of radio silence -- in part in protest of the tragic jailing of a journalist and in part because I'm going to be where no computers should ever go for a few blissful days.

Y'all behave.

Waxing over fresh eyes

2005-07-16T19:35:00.000-05:00

My eyes have always been my greatest strength. And my most serious weakness.

They are my weakness because my vision is bad -- very bad. Without corrective lenses, my vision falls easily into the legally blind category. (Can one be illegally blind?) My vision is so poor that I have odd, but generally suppressed, fears such as the one about getting thrown out of boat at night and not being able to see the shore to swim to it.

It's because of my visual shortcomings that my eyes have become my greatest strength. How? I'm observant. I look harder. As a child, I made games of studying scenes I was familiar with until I would find something I'd never noticed before. That practice has served me well as a writer.

Still, I appreciate real visual acuity when I, um, see it.

I've been seeing it a lot lately.

I finally broke down and bought the new binoculars I have been telling myself I'd get for nearly eight years. My new Nikon Monarch ATB 8x42s are just a moderate pair -- on the low end of good birding binoculars. But they blow the old pair of compacts I've been making do with out of the water.

The first day they arrived, I pulled them out of the box, went to the deck and aimed them at a small silhouette in the upper branches of a dead honey locust in the woods. My jaw dropped as a cedar waxwing came into focus. I'm sure these birds have been in my realm of vision before, but this was the first one I'd ever actually 'seen' outside of a book.

I've seen waxwings in the tree every day since.

Other things are coming into focus, too, so to speak. One of them is bird song. When you can see the bird that is singing, it's easier to identify the bird and associate it with the call later.

It's more fun watching bird behavior with clearer eyes. I practised today. After an afternoon downpour, I studied a variety of birds that looked somewhat bedraggled after the rain.

All of them went to work preening, but one damp mockingbird was the most energetic in the task. He made a comical series of abrupt flights, each time stopping to preen and spread his wing feathers. I guess this is the mockingbird equivalent of a wet dog shaking off the H2O.

I'll be taking my new binoculars out West soon. I'll be exploring new places in Colorado and New Mexico. Fresh eyes and new ground. This promises to be a vacation I can really focus on.

Jeb throws humor to the wind

2005-07-10T14:19:00.000-05:00

There is no humor in Hurricane Dennis. Well, almost no humor.

I did have to smirk on this one statement making the rounds in the storm coverage:

''I think there is a legitimate feeling, 'Why me? What did I do wrong?''' Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said.

RIP, Mr. Earth Day

2005-07-10T11:16:00.000-05:00

Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, died this July 3 of this year at age 89.

My old friend and writing buddy Jim Bishop from Sedona, Arizona, wrote this eloquent testimony to the former U.S. senator from Wisconsin's significance in the environmental movement. It ran in Friday's Arizona Republic. Jim is a former Newsweek correspondent and wrote a book on Edward Abbey called "Epitath for a Desert Anarchist."

If that isn't enough, he served as an advisor on energy policy to Jimmy Carter. Bishop and I spent many an afternoon talking about writing, our love for the land and watching birds and butterflies under the generous shade of his front porch.

Read and enjoy....

Sunday, July 10, 2005

THE FATHER OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

Gaylord Nelson

R.I.P.

Back in the 1960’s, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson and fellow Senate Democrat John Stennis of Mississippi never had much to say to each other. Nelson was chairman of the poverty subcommittee, had been an environmental activist since the early ‘60s, and was the leader in the attack on the perils of the internal combustion engine. For his part, the conservative Stennis ran the Senate Armed Services Committee like a doomsday machine. But just before Earth Day in 1970, the two lawmakers had a rare meeting. “I’ve been thinking Gaylord,” drawled Stennis, “you know you are right. I am getting concerned about the environment, too. We’ve been lax. It’s time to do something.”

To be sure the time had come for action. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so overrun with volatile industrial discharges that the river caught fire and burnt two railroad trestles. A study revealed that American women carried in their breast milk three to ten times more of amounts of DDT than federal regulations permitted for human consumption and the air in Los Angeles could be cut with a knife.

“Progress—American-style-,” he told me in an interview in 1969, “adds up each year to 200 million tons of smoke and fumes, 7 million junked cars, 20 million tons of paper, 48 billion cans and 28 billion bottles.” A few years before he died on July 3, 2005, he told a reporter, “all across the country, evidence of environmental degradation was appearing everywhere, and everyone noticed except the political establishment.”

What transformed that apathy into action was Nelson’s brainchild, Earth Day, a nationwide protest shaped by the campus “teach-ins” against the Viet Nam War. On April 22, 1970 , more that 20 million citizens turned out to clean up rivers, march on their state capitols and pick up refuse for recycling. President Nixon, no environmentalist he yet always the astute politician jumped on the bandwagon. Besides creating the Environmental Protection Agency, he soon signed all the major bills which are the foundation of our environmental regulatory structure today—The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. In the president’s next State of the Union address he declared that “this must be the decade when America pays it debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and our living environment. It is literally now or never.”

No one summed up the new movement better than Jesse Unruh, then the Democratic leader of California’s Assembly. “Ecology,” he said in 1970, “has become the political substitute for the word ‘mother.’” But it also triggered the debate over growth V. no growth which continues to today. Nelson, believing that that debate was a false one was adept at arguing that a cleaner environment and strong economic growth were compatible. He liked to point out that the world ecology derives from the Greek word oikos, means house and the study of houses or environments. The word economy, which has the same root, means the management of houses or environments.

No one knows what Nelson thought of the current decline in congressional bipartisanship that made all those first laws possible. However, he likely noted that the current Republican hostility to environmental protection was ironic given the fact that Republicans had every reason to claim that that their party’s record –until the 1980’s at least was no less distinguished than that of the Democrats. After all it was President Theodore Roosevelt, a staunch Republican if there ever was one, who set aside the first wildlife refuges and national monuments, a legacy that Richard Nixon proudly carried on.

The betting here is that he might have found a sliver of hope in the words of California Governor Schwarzenegger: “Pollution reduction has long been a money saver for businesses. It lowers operating costs, raises profits and creates new and expanded markets for environmental technology.” Similar words roused the nation in the 1960’s when they were uttered by Gaylord Nelson, the true father of the modern environmental movement.

By James Bishop, Jr. the author of Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist, the Life and Legacy of Edward Abbey. He is based in Sedona, he was a Newsweek Correspondent in D.C. from 1966-77.

more condors

2005-07-07T18:48:00.000-05:00

Biologists have confirmed a California condor hatching in Arizona -- the fourth to hatch in the wild in the Grand Canyon area since the birds were reintroduced in 1996.

Makes my heart soar on a 10-foot wing span.

Free Judith

2005-07-07T07:02:00.000-05:00

"If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press."

Judith Miller, New York Times, July 5, 2005

Ideally, I wouldn't be an idealist

2005-07-02T06:54:00.000-05:00

I'm in the midst of tying up the details of a vacation in the Southwest.

This retreat has emerged around the wedding of a friend I consider nothing less than a brother. I'll be exploring new ground in Colorado and New Mexico, yet reconnecting with an assortment of old friends. It will be good medicine.

I love the open spaces of the West. When I am there, my thoughts expand and roam as freely as I do. My spiritual beliefs have never fallen easily along the lines of organized religion, but there is one Biblical account I can relate to: Jesus's need to collect himself in the desert.

I have found many truths there myself.

One is that I can't choke back my idealism. It won't stay down. It would be as difficult as choking down the fine, dry silt left behind after a dust storm erases the Superstition Mountains.

Idealism, I have come to believe, is a character flaw. I don't know where mine came from. If it is genetic, I see no hint of it in my family tree. If it was planted, by whose hand and when? Shouldn't I be able to answer that question?

It is a crippling trait, and it has brought me down more than once. Although I am still walking, the old injuries flare up and ache.

Many of the friends I will see on my Western adventure are idealists.

Jim, the groom, is one. He calls, sometimes, and we speak in desperation about what has become of our profession, the newspaper business. We discuss whether it is nobler to stay and go down with what appears to be a sinking ship (maybe we can bail it out?), or change careers, which in journalism parlance, is pronounced "selling out."

Then there's Dave. He's another of my journalism brothers. A more fair and loyal man you may never find. Dave knows all too well how to have a good time, but he's also a workaholic. If he finds a story he thinks might save the world or some small part of it, he can't let go. When his current employers called me for a reference, I warned them that there might be times they would have to send him home, to tell him enough is enough. I could almost hear salivating on the other end of the line. They snatched Dave up.

Ahhh, and Phil. Phil is the eldest and wisest of my journalism brothers, although he is equally young at heart. Phil is an Edward Abbeyesque character who lives with an idealist and a cynic in his heart. I think the combination may be poison. It's what I blame for his recent run of ticker trouble.

Phil once worked as a salesman, a damned good one, if such a thing exists. He chucked it all -- including the nice cars and homes that came with it -- and with the blessing of a good woman who knows his heart, became a journalist.

Phil's talents seem endless. He's one of those rare people who can capture a story equally well in spoken and written word. His columns, if he chooses for them to be, are unbeatable. The last time I visited his home, he had taken up painting, and I saw a few samples of his work. The skill he showed amazed me.

My three journalism brothers and I worked together in the high desert for about three years, often ducking the blows of a tyrannical boss with a powerful case of dry-drunk syndrome. We stayed because we loved the land around us, and we were proud, for the most part, of what we were able to accomplish. Making a difference mattered.

But the pay was marginal and the abuse became too much. We gave up gentle lunches in the canyon and rowdy nights in Flagstaff and Jerome. One by one, we each moved on. Phil stayed close, landing a better gig just down the road.

I love these guys. I used to think our bonds were forged of fire, but as the years pass, I realize there was more to it. Now, I think we recognized the hopeless idealist in each other.

We knew we'd found our tribe.

Honesty about Abe

2005-06-28T05:52:00.000-05:00

There's an excellent Time magazine piece on revelations about
Abe Lincoln This stood out for me:

"There's a good reason, though, to take Lincoln seriously: he offers many lessons for our own future. As we stand divided on religion, we can learn from a deeply spiritual man who was also deeply skeptical of religious dogma, who felt guided by a divine will but insisted that every public act be justified in secular language and reason. As we stand divided over a war, we can learn from a man who insisted that conflict in arms raised questions about who we are as a people--and who understood that 'right makes might.'"

In the line of fire

2005-06-24T13:21:00.000-05:00

This is to my brethren (and sistren, to be politically correct) in the news business.

Day after day, they have to fight the influence of car dealers who don't like political cartoons on the Opinion Page such as the one with the XX-sized SUV that is totaled because it ran out of gas. These dealers threaten to pull their own ads and organize a general car dealer boycott. This kind of thing happenes at newspapers regularly.

This is to those reporters and editors who have been kicked around by publishers who are so cozy with the advertising directors (they bring in the money!)that it clouds their judgment on the news end of things.

This is, most of all, for the journalists who stick their necks out, week after week, waking from nightmares that their house will be burned. And for those living with fears that they will be fired because their work, though fair and just, pisses off the influential people who'd rather see a dumbed down newspaper with nothing of controversy inside. To hell wioth the people's right to know.

This is for the people who support those journalists, even when they struggle to find that support in their own organizations.

This is by a journalist who is growing very weary of this fight.

To Dad

2005-06-19T08:58:00.000-05:00

When I was in high school, I played three sports. I lettered in all of them and was most valuable player in two.

There were five kids in my family and my ill-equipped parents had their hands full, so they didn't go to any of my games. I was just happy to be allowed to play and didn't make a big deal out of it.

We had a game the night of the volleyball team dinner. I was surprised to see my father in the stands. I'm pretty sure my feisty coach must have gotten on the phone and shamed someone at home, but there he was, and there he was at the dinner, too.

I received the volleyball team's most valuable player award that night, and the next morning, my father gave me a dollar. That was 1976. With some change, that dollar might have gotten me a meal at McDonald's and not much more, but I accepted the bill graciously. It was my father's way of saying he was proud.

You have to understand my father to appreciate the gift.

I don't understand him, but the little I do know of his own growing up helps. His own father abandoned his mother and their four kids when Dad was 4, leaving the family in poverty. When the Ohio River flooded in 1939, they lost their home in western Kentucky and had to live in a rail car the government set up.

The family stood a chance again when my grandmother remarried Mr. Hooper, a farmer with good bottomland, but when he died young, the farm went to my father's stepfather's sisters. My father's family was on its own again. It was a tough life.

When I first started high school at the big county school, we would sometimes wear overalls as a show of solidarity against our rivals at the city school. Dad hated the overalls and didn't want us to wear them. When I sought an explanation, I found out that he'd had to wear them most of his life and was shamed by the other kids who could afford the more classy attire of the day. I abandoned the overalls.

Dad doesn't talk about the details of his life and the people he knew back then. Although my job is one of asking questions, I rarely press. The subjects are painful to him, and I figure he's had enough of that in his life.

I long ago forgave Dad for not knowing a whole lot about being a father. He didn't have an example in his life, and unlike his own father, he stood by us in the ways he understood.

Dad has cancer -- again. It started out as prostate, and just when we thought that battle had been won, it emerged in his bladder. Now he's bladderless, but the tests still show cancer in his system. He's on a hormone treatment we hope will buy him quality time. We don't know, yet, if it is working.

A few years ago, after a couple of decades of bouncing around the country, I decided I would miss no more Father's Days with my dad. I moved East and even bought a house.

My Dad's father abandoned him. His daughter won't.

Hemlock refuge

2005-06-15T07:01:00.000-05:00

Recently, I walked in a hemlock cove that had been around awhile. The ground was a mix of creek sand and hemlock duff, and had a satisfying thud to it. If only sidewalks felt like this.

My dogs liked it, too. They tore through the area playfully, stopping to wrestle like they do when they're very happy or when I'm on the phone.

I came to love hemlock many years ago. My first job was near Cumberland Gap, and the land there was full of them. On Dark Ridge Road, where I totaled my first car, the giant hemlocks formed a dense umbrella that put the dark in the ridge. They allowed in the ocassional beech or cucumber tree, some rhododendron hedges, but little else.

They grew at the base of Devil's Backbone, a ridge that formed an incomplete bridge between Cumberland Mountain and its great sibling to the north, Pine Mountain.

I used to sit under one especially large hemlock at a place called Old Cross Road. The decaying dirt road flirted with Yellow Creek, but there was little traffic. The waters then were filled with chromium and other chemicals, and the locals knew not to swim in it.

The duff of hemlock needles under the old hemlock was so thick it had formed a peat. The branches created a canopy that kept out all but the hardest rains. It was so comfortable I could have slept there. I didn't though. I'd go after work and sit, listening to the lamentations of the creek and the busy hum of insects. The minutes turned into hours, and I'd dissolve away into the land around me. It was time well spent.

My nights were restless then. Sometimes, when the moon was full and bright, I'd drive on backroads just to wind down. I'd turn off the headlights and the pavement would turn silver and wind between the moving shadows of hemlock. I had the road to myself.

But I digress.

Hemlocks are in trouble. Like the chestnuts before them, they have become embattled by a stranger that has crept into their home and shows no sign of leaving. The tiny, soft-bodied wooley adelgid may take them out just as the blight took out the chestnut. The ecological repercussions are too painful to think about.

Near here, government scientists are releasing a foreign beetle to prey on these adelgids. But some tell me the battle is already lost.

I hope they are wrong.

The hemlock is royalty in eastern forests, a graceful aristocrat who has sheltered and served her subjects well.

God save the queen.

Sandal tan

2005-06-13T20:03:00.000-05:00

I've been working too hard. I realized that after taking five days off recently. It rained pretty much until the last day, so I caught up on my shopping and chores and tackled The Davinci Code. I'd picked up a hardback copy cheap at a library sale.

On the last day of my string of days off,remnants of a tropical depression from the Gulf continued to spin through, but I noticed the gaps of sunshine were beginning to outlast the spells of clouds. I donned my swimsuit, gathered up my dogs and headed to Whites Creek. Some of you may know the gatekeeper of Whites Creek; he has a blog by the same name.

It was with his blessing that I crossed his land to the creek. It being Monday and still looking like it might rain, I had the creek to myself. I found the Blue Hole and basked in the cool water and warm sun. I moved up the trail and crossed the creek in a shallow area, encouraging my heelers to cross with me. It took an escort to get them to dogpaddle across, but watching them run gleefully on the flat-top boulders on the other side told me they were excited by their newly discovered skill. (Wait until I take them canoeing)

We checked out fishes, frogs and turtles. The dogs didn't share my interest in the plants, although they grazed wherever they found anything that looked like grass. Good thing they weren't at Bonneroo.

We climbed an old, rocky road up the gorge and crossed beautiful streams filled with the dropped pink parasols of the mountain laurel flower.

I paused at one of the streams to rest and soak my feet in particularly cold water. As I sat and soaked, I was amazed at how many tiny salamanders I saw -- some of them less than an inch long. One similarly sized young crawdad made play after play for one of the salamanders. His tactics included a series of head on rushes, alternated with poking up from cracks in submerged rocks and then simply trying to sneak up on the tiny amphibian. The salamander sidestepped the crayfish each time. All that was missing was the Warner Bros. cartoon score and the ocassional "meep meep."

The afternoon eased toward a lovely, sunny evening and I gathered up my exhausted dogs and headed back to the car. My female heeler, Lakota, was so tired that she was limping slightly. I lifted her into the back of the station wagaon. Merlin, my male red heeler, is convinced he owns the car and had no problem getting in on his own.

We pointed the vehicle away from the lower edge of the Cumberland Plateau and headed home. We had little to show for our day but damp hair/fur and weary muscles, and in my case, a glorious sandal tan.

Life is good.

Free-play day

2005-05-30T20:33:00.000-05:00

When I was in grade school, most of our gym classes involved calisthenics and learning various sports. But now and then, they'd throw in a free-play day. Why? I don't know. I just know that me and my classmates loved them.

Today was like a free-play day. I didn't have to work (at my workplace, anyway), and the rain that had been predicted was a complete no-show. It was a magnificent day, and I was unencumbered. I puttered inside. I planted and trimmed outside.

I cooked a good dinner and then sat back on the desk as the sky faded and the land exhaled.

I ate apricots and breathed honeysuckle air. I'm pretty sure I'll sleep like a baby tonight.

Life has its structure, but when a free-play day comes along, I don't ask questions. I take the plunge.

Time off and war

2005-05-29T07:45:00.000-05:00

After a three-month crunch at work, I'm finally getting a breather. My biggest change in routine, now that things have eased off, is to not simply come home from work, scrape up some semblance of dinner, throw in a load of laundry and collapse into bed.

To any readers out there, this is my way of apologizing for being a lousy blogger lately. I hope to do better.

I scuttled plans to go up to the family cabin in Kentucky -- land of my birth -- for Memorial Day weekend. The place is on the edge of the Daniel Boone National Forest, tucked between Cave Run Lake and Red River Gorge, so there's plenty to do there. But I hate to travel during the holidays, and I have plenty of chores around the house to attend to. I've removed all the vinyl wallpaper (I inherited it) in the sunroom, and am in the midst of priming those walls, with painting to commence Monday.

I've watered and weeded the tomato patch, and there's still mowing and plenty of inside chores to do. I also have a few freelance assignments to crank out.

I'm not ignoring my fun, though. At some point today, I plan to load up my bike, head to Oak Ridge and take a long ride along Melton Lake.

Monday's schedule is still up in the air. There's painting to be done, yes, but I'll have to conjure something fun for that day, as well. I'm working on it.

Having a long weekend off, finally, I find myself thinking more and more about an upcoming vacation out West. I had no vacation last year -- had to eat up that time off and more when I ended up in the hospital twice -- once for a massive blood clot knee to calf, and the other for major surgery. I missed two months of work in all, but it was no vacation. Mostly, it was a blur.

Anyway, I'll be flying to Albuquerque in July and making a run to Durango for wedding festivities. The groom is like a younger brother to me, and many of those who will attend are part of my Arizona tribe. For me, this will be like a family reunion, but without the pesky cousins.

I'm enjoying making vacation plans. My Baton Rouge friends, Natalie and Dave, who'll be giving birth to Arizona Sky Mitchell in the fall, will join me at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon.

About half of my time will be solo, and I'm good with that. There's a lot more to do in New Mexico than I imagined, so I've chucked going to Utah. With Edward Abbey long gone and buried in some hidden site in the Sonoran Desert, and the Monkey Wrench Gang buried with him, I will have to trust that Terry Tempest Williams will keep the mineral interests from bulldozing the hoodoos until I get there. I know she tries.

I've set aside a part of my weekend to contemplate war and fallen veterans and people close to me who have died.

I'll never forget watching a silver-haired woman visit a grave in the National Cemetery in Wilmington, N.C. She spent quite a while at the grave of someone she obviously had known, perhaps a brother, husband or son. As she left, she stopped at a another grave, bent down and straightened the tiny American flag that had blown over. Then she stood over that other grave, reading the name of the fallen soldier, as if it were important to her to know whom she had helped. I watched from the distance.

The woman seemed small among the row and rows of markers hugging the countours of the land like plow furrows in a hill-county corn field. The tenderness of that moment looms large.

But the harvest of war is not a sweet one.

I will spend a part of my weekend praying (in my own way) for peace. My hallelujah chorus will be the morning chorus --always my favorite backup group.

Star power

2005-05-17T15:04:00.000-05:00

It's been a great day.

Anyone who might have happened across my "Dark Matter" posting (April 30) will know of my love for the starry blankets of the Desert Southwest.

Dark Matter

Two very fine things have happened as a result of the essay, which I had sent around to a few of my desert rat friends. One couple, who now reside in Louisiana, say they are naming this first child (a girl due in October) Arizona Sky Mitchell. They are telling people if they want to know why, read my essay.

I also refined the piece a bit and sent it to High Country News in Paonia, Colo. The publication is one that lives to fight the good fight (Motto: For people who care about the American West. It was one of my favorite places to freelance for when I lived in Arizona. Having moved back east a few years ago, well, I didn't have much to contribute until this essay sprung forth.

They loved it and are planning to use it as either a back-page essay or, more likely, one of their syndicated Writers on the Range series. More on that later.

High Country News

Anyway, today I feel I have star power.

Existence value has its worth

2005-05-08T20:01:00.000-05:00

I'm not a pack rat, but I cling to a blurry photograph of a porcupine I took at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

Why?

Existence value.

The photo is my flimsy link to a creature I may never see again. Seeing the porcupine did not put money in my bank account, but it did make me richer.

Let me explain:

Many years ago, I minored in economics. Along with the basic laws of supply and demand, I learned about diminishing returns, price elasticity and other economic standards. I followed the formulas, studied the graphs and did well enough in the subject. (It was only years later that I learned what a drill press is)

The equations balanced, but I was always clear that something was being left out.

It wasn't until my last class that that missing factor was revealed to me. It was existence value.

Existence value is the value that people attach to the mere knowledge of the existence of something, as opposed to having direct use of that thing.

An easy example this: knowledge of the existence of rare and diverse species and unique natural environments have value to many people who do not actually expect to ever see them.

Remember the excitement over the ivory billed woodpecker discovery?

That's about existence value.

Wonder why so many of us are staunchly opposed to drilling in the pristine bounds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?

Existence value.

The snail darter?

You got it.

The problem is, people like the president and many of his advisors try to ignore existence value as part of the equation.

It's up to us to educate them. Speak up. Rise up.

We have existence value, too.

Quote of the day

2005-05-04T09:59:00.000-05:00

"It's hard to be a journalist today given economic constraints, not to mention a surging patriotic mandate from a large part of this nation that dictates to be critical of the government is to be Un-American. In my mind, to do journalism well today is a form of heroism."

Those are the words of University of Iowa journalism prof Stephen G. Bloom, who is a minor hero himself after this incident:

The world is full of idiots

Media critics beware ....

2005-05-02T17:44:00.000-05:00

--- You might get what you wish for.

J. Peder Zane of the Raleigh News & Observer spent a month at Duke University examining what is wrong with the newspaper industry. You'll have to forgive him for coming away with a sense of gloom -- and not just for newspapers.

Zane's conclusions are a must-read for anyone who cares about newspapers -- and even more so, for democracy.

It will help reveal why good journalists are giving in and throwing in the towel in droves.

What Zane says:

"In these intensely partisan times -- when the public is split over contentious issues such as war and the meaning of marriage -- newspapers are targeted by all sides because the ways they cover these issues suggest the state of civil society," he said.

Zane talks about newspapers increasing their efforts toward transparency and building trust with their readers, but he doesn't hold out a lot of hope.

"We live in an age of spin, when businesses have determined that denial and obfuscation are best for the bottom line," he said.

"The tone and substance of newspaper coverage remains the essential score card in the culture wars. But if these attacks hasten the fall of newspapers, one wonders what form of mass media can muster the authority and trust to replace them and serve this vital function."

That and a whole lot more below:

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Dark matter

2005-04-30T13:17:00.000-05:00

Today, at mid-afternoon on a rainy day, I looked up at the cloud-burdened sky and missed the stars.

Truly missed them.

I felt the kind of wistful pangs that you might when you remember a long-gone, but beloved grandparent, or a teenage sweetheart who misunderstood you so long ago.

I know they are up there -- the stars, I mean. They'll probably be studding the skies above me tomorrow night; forecaster are calling for a sunny day.

The truth is, it's not just the star-studded nights I'm longing for. What I miss are gauzy blankets and veils of stars -- the very warp and weft of the universe. These are the stars that twist and wrap through the desert skies. These are the skies that are on my mind today.

If you have ever spent the night outdoors in some remote part of the desert, you'll know what I'm talking about. A little-known canyon in Arizona just a stone's throw from Mexico is my remote site of choice.

I slept under the stars there for the better part of a week almost a decade ago.

That's a lie. Who could sleep?

The light from the tapestry above bathed everything in silver. Even though I was bone tired from a day of hiking, I struggled to keep my eyes shut. Even when I was successful, the silver light seeped through.

It was a kind of light that touches you, changes you. Sometimes it calls to you.

I think that's what is happening now.

I wonder what it wants.

I live within sight of one of East Tennessee's primary sources of pollution. The twin stacks of TVA's Kingston coal-fired plant (I refuse to use the description "steam plant") stand like giant goal posts on the horizon.

Their emissions include mercury (the herons can't read or heed the don't-eat-the--contaminated-fish warnings) and deadly microparticulates that clog tiny, but important passages in our lungs.

The coal-fired plant has improved quality of life in many ways, but it is a major contributor to the unhealthy haze that mars the views in and around the Great Smoggy Mountains.

It also is a contributor -- through us -- of another kind of pollution. It fuels the power that we switch on to light up the night and hide the stars. Although this is a form of pollution we can better control, we are reckless in our littering with glare. We are largely ignorant of what we have lost as a result.

I will not pit the beauty of my eastern mountains against my western desert -- lush green hills versus towering red rocks. I love them both. I have chosen both. I've said it before: Geographical bigamy is not a crime.

But when it comes to stars, the West gets the nod. Even small towns in Arizona have taken steps to shield lighting and help keep the starry blankets in sight that comfort people like me.

Out West, the night skies are to be celebrated, and meteor showers are like unofficial holidays. People mark them on their calendars, and when the long-awaited events arrive, they grab their blankets, flasks and Thermoses and head for darkness. They recline in groups -- every head pointed in a different direction, every view different. Sometimes, quiet, thoughtful conversations emerge from the dark. More often, the night simply dissolves into a chorus of ooooohhs and ahhhhhs.

Tired faces give away the most exuberant celebrants the next morning. Even among strangers, we recognize each other.

Today, under cloud-burdened skies, I sat in front of the glow of a computer screen and looked up my favorite major metor showers: the Perseids of August, the Leonids of November. I won't see them -- not this year -- but I find comfort that someone will.

As I read, my thoughts drifted West to my comrades and our simple, starry celebrations. I prayed that they will always have stars in their eyes.

And with the gloom of gray skies as heavy as ever outside my window, suddenly the clouds lifted.

Here's a nonprofit group fighting a worthy but upstream battle

2005-04-24T16:32:00.000-05:00

If you missed it at EarthFest, here's a good group to support. Conservation Fisheries Inc. is a nonprofit group based in Knoxville. It works to save native fish species in Tennessee and surrounding states. Their Web site is:
Conservation Fisheries Inc.

Clean air? Hmmmm

2005-04-23T06:51:00.000-05:00

In a Hemingwayesque, man-against-nature sort of way yesterday, nature came away the hero for many of us at Cades Cove yesterday.

Storms kept President Bush out of the loop, so to speak, and he was not able to stand in the backdrop of the abominated, but still beautiful, mountains and sell his sham clean-air program. It would have been one of the greatest hypocrisies in PR and politics had the president pulled it off.

Old Man and the Sea? OK, that's an exaggeration.

More like Con Man and the Haze.

The gloom and resentment I'd felt since I'd learned of this traveling medicine show cleared with the rising winds and rumble of thunder.

Bush didn't do the Smokies any favors yesterday.

Funny thing, though. I am breathing easier.

The biz side of the news biz

2005-04-16T07:09:00.000-05:00

I'm squarely in the news business. I've scarcely made a dime any other way. However, when the business end of things starts tainting the public interest side of things, I'm going to howl. Here's NPR's David Folkenflik on some reasons we all should be howling:

Perception and Reality

For those who follow the media...

2005-04-13T06:54:00.000-05:00

This item is from Romenesko, originating from

Broadcast and Cable magazine

"The Maryland Department of Labor has denied Jon Leiberman's claim for unemployment benefits, saying he was discharged from Sinclair’s news operation for "speaking to the press/media without permission and sharing of propriety information outside the company." Under the Maryland Unemployment Insurance Law, Leiberman’s behavior "constitutes gross misconduct," says the agency. The political reporter was fired last fall after he spoke out against Sinclair's plans to air a documentary featuring Swift Boat Veterans' allegations against Sen. John Kerry."

I love the nightlife; I like the buggies ...

2005-04-11T06:12:00.000-05:00

Squinted. Scratched my head. Looked real hard.

And confirmed that I saw a handful of fireflies firing off last night in and around the backyard.

What I like most about fireflies: Their flash, of course, and the fact that their larvae feed on slugs and snails.

What I like least about fireflies: As the lightest sleeper in the world, I am awakened several times a summer by the flash of a firefly that has somehow made its way into my sleeping quarters.

So far this year, I've seen more fireflies than mosquitoes at home. I like the odds.

Now at bat

2005-04-10T07:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, after I finished loading and hauling the better part of a dead maple tree from my front yard and walked the dogs, I settled into a chair on my deck to watch what was left of a very fine day dissipate.

As I looked toward the Cumberland Plateau, a fluttering object caught my eye. A bird? No, a bat. I watched it zig and zag, then noticed another one fluttering nearby. I smiled. Bats are good -- especially when there is more than one.

Oddly, I've had some very good times around bats. (This is one of those statements over which I can divide my friends into two categories -- those who share my unabashed love of nature and those who think I'm nuts but tolerate me anyway.)

Right before I left Arizona, I spent a wonderful evening with some naturalists mist netting bats over a creek. The idea was to determine how many species could be found on the national park site that also contained both Sinagua ruins and the remnants of a Papago structure dating back even further. We were a cheerful lot, although I must admit to one concern: I was the only human there that wasn't up to date on my rabies vaccination.

Before I moved to Arizona, I made a few visits. One was to Organ Pipe National Monument. It had taken longer to get there than I'd planned, and I was looking for the campground. I made a wrong turn and found myself driving through one of the park's two loop roads. It was a long one-way affair, and there was no turning back.

It was also a weeknight and I had the loop to myself. I drove slowly, appreciating that my mistake had turned into a gift.

The sun played out over the rock -- the wonderful, warm-colored rock made from the ash of ancient volcanoes -- and one scene in particular stays with me. A large flat rock rose like a movie picture screen near the road and glowed red, and then violet, in the setting sun. I pulled over for my own private showing. A single bat played in front of that screen as I watched. It was wonderful cinamatography and, being sans popcorn, I gave the bat a thumbs up as I nibbled on a tin of ravioli.

Another time in Arizona, I camped for a week with a group of naturalists and geologists in the Catalinas outside of Tucson. It was April, and with the cold sinks coming off the pink granite mountains, you could awake to frost and be stripping down to shorts by 9 a.m.

Ronnie Sidler was our bat expert, and that morning she was talking about the different species in the area. She was still wearing her pullover sweater, but it was around the time of day the temperature made a quick jump from cool to warm. We figured that sweater was getting itchy when she began groping, almost obliviously, under her sweater. We turned our eyes in embarrasment. When she removed her hand from its groping foray, she was holding a bat. It was one injured long ago that she now kept in captivity. She had been letting it cling to her bra under her sweater to keep it warm. Before we were through, she pulled a different species from the other side of her "foundation garment."

I like bats. I'm happy when I see them. I worry what has happened to them when I am in a place where I don't.

I worry about a lot of things many other people wouldn't.

Last night was good, and I'm heading over for a hike in North Carolina and that's good. I'll let my worries rest for the day.

And now I have to fly ....

Sassy little tree

2005-04-09T06:51:00.000-05:00

I'm approaching my first year in the only home I've ever owned. As a 40-something last spring, I wondered if I'd ever be rid of the scourge of landlords.

I have moved around a lot in my career, have a thinly veiled fear of commitment and have suffered the occasional bump in the financial road.

I was sure something would stop the wheels of progress when I stumbled onto the sturdy little house I now own. Instead, everything just fell into place. It's a humble abode in a good ridgetop neighborhood, but its best feature -- to me anyway -- is the woods that border my backyard.

I sleep in the smaller bedroom so I can wake up seeing them. The double window in my office looks out over them. The woods gave me a greater appreciation of winter this year when I realized how much better I could see the birds and wildlife among the bare-naked branches.

Sometimes the woods tries to recover ground lost, first to peach orchards half-a-century gone, and now to folks like me. A redbud sprang up near the front porch last summer. Much as I hated to, I pulled it up. It was one of those roots-and-foundation things.

At the same time, a sassafras tree emerged from the midst of the irises near the driveway.

That one is making my neighbors crazy.

"Better get that thing out of there," one of them said.

"You don't want to leave that growing," warned another.

The truth is, I do want to leave it there, and I want it to grow. If there's a problem, perhaps I'll move the irises.

At some point, I'm going to have to confirm to my neighbors what I fear they already suspect: I don't share their landscape sensibilities. I consider them fine people, and they proved their worth as neighbors last year when I was down for weeks recovering from major surgery. I'm eternally grateful.

But I'm pretty sure they figured then that the giant poke plant in my backyard was there because I didn't have the strength to cut it down. Truth is, the plant, heavily burdened with its dazzling load of dark, purple berries, gave me strength when I needed it. It grew so tall that I could lie in bed and watch the mockingbirds feed and sing without having to prop myself up.

I have special feelings for the sassafras, too. It's not yet as tall as I am, but last year it produced comic, mitten-shaped leaves in the summer and a friendly spot of color in the fall.

I love the lemon-rootbeer scent of its sap, and in general, I'm sensitive to the plight of the understory tree always living life in the shadows.

I also know of one sassafras that broke out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

It's a massive tree that stands at 2100 Frederica St. in Owensboro Ky.

Owensboro, on the Ohio River across from Indiana, is John James Audubon country. He lived in Henderson, Ky., the next town downriver, and roamed the woods in those parts sketching, studying and shooting birds. Audubon may have noticed that sassafras tree. It's now 16 feet around and stands more than 100 feet tall. Experts say it may be 300 years old, and records show people began taking note of its size in 1883.

A Kentucky Historical Society-Kentucky Department of Highways marker at the site says this aromatic giant is the largest sassafras tree in America and, probably, in the world.

On down the street at 1700 Fredrica is another landmark -- albeit only a local one. It's the Likens Drug Co., a drugstore founded nearly a century ago by a great uncle I never knew. The old, brick building and the business within still go by that name, although I understand it has been out of family hands for decades. It thrives, like the sassafras tree a few blocks down, against unlikely odds.

I've decided I'm going to let my own little sassafras tree grow out front and hope my neighbors keep their clippers to themselves.

I'll probably keep quiet on my plans to someday naturalize the backyard.

Besides, the woods already seem to know.

Sir, step away from that grocery cart ...

2005-04-08T06:30:00.000-05:00

and start saying the alphabet backwards.

Here's another reason to like Arizona, where you can already buy beer, wine and other spirits, along with your milk and bread.

According to Chip Scutari at the Arizona Republic, "The first major overhaul of the state's liquor laws in nearly a decade would allow shoppers to sample beer, whiskey and wine inside grocery stores ...."

Two plateaus

2005-04-06T06:21:00.000-05:00

I am the product of two plateaus -- the Cumberland and the Colorado.

In Arizona, where I lived until three years ago, the Colorado Plateau loomed large if you lived on the downhill side. It defined the landscape in the part of north central Arizona where I made my home.

People there told each other where they lived based on the plateau. You lived "above the rim" or "below the rim." Anywhere along the rim was, of course, "Rim Country." One of the most magnificent places on the edge was a section known as the Mogollon Rim. Pronounce that Muggy-on, and find it and stand on the edge if you ever get the chance. The wind through the Ponderosa pine produces a roar like what I imagine the ocean produces at Big Sur. But I haven't been to Big Sur, and the pine bark beetles in the West are taking out the pines like the pine bark beetles in the East have done.

Things may have changed.

Go there anyway. Standing on the edge of the Mogollon Rim is like standing on the edge of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and looking across -- but there is no South Rim to catch your falling eyes.

In Tennessee, I look up and across to the Cumberland Plateau, which cuts an imposing figure west to north. I have lived squarely on the plateau itself. Now I live on its knee.

My love for both places runs deep, and looking at one will never cease to remind me of the other.

And so, from time to time, I will share with you bits of news from my other home -- the one in Arizona.

After all, geographic bigamy is still legal in the United States.

All this is to say I do have news from the West today.

Sandy Bahr of the Grand Canyon chapter of the Sierra Club announces an Earth Day and National Wildlife Week Celebration on restoring the jaguar in Arizona. I have literally walked the jaguar's path in southern Arizona. I spent a life-changing week once in Brown Canyon on the back side of Baboquivari Peak (home of the Tohono O'odham god I'itoi) hiking and bushwacking in areas where, a few weeks before, a jaguar had been caught on a camera placed to record the wildlife of the area. That film was one of the most important moments in Arizona-jaguar relations.

Anyway, should you be in Phoenix (God help you)on Thursday, April 21 at 6 p.m., go to the Phoenix Zoo at 455 N. Galvin Parkway. Craig Miller with Defenders of Wildlife and the Northern Jaguar Project will tell all.

My other bit of news comes from my friend, former neighbor and favorite Deadhorse Ranch State Park ranger, Randy Victory. Cool name for a cool guy with the best tattoo I've ever seen. He's the biggest bicycling advocate I know, and Randy has earned "the buckle" at Leadville. You mountain biking fanatics will know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, Randy heads up the Verde Valley Cycling Coalition and writes today about some goings on in Cottonwood, my former home in Arizona.

On April 16, the VVCC is presenting the documentary film "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream."

Here's what he says about it: "If you care about your community, have kids, are sick of paying too much for gas, or are wondering just what might happen if gas shoots up to four bucks a gallon, like some folks are saying it will, then you should come check out this apropos presentation. This could definitely motivate you to start commuting to work by bicycle!"

The Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival will be the weekend of April 21-24 at Deadhorse Ranch -- which was practically my back yard in my Arizona daze.

OK, back to Tennessee.

Knoxvile's EarthFest is April 23 at the World's Fair Park. I boycotted that World's Fair, even when I had free passes, because I wanted nothing to do with Butchers Jake and CH, and because I still had a clear memory of the 1964 World's Fair in New York. I didn't want that tainted.

Anyway, I'm breaking that boycott to go to EarthFest that Saturday. Lots of good bands and exhibits. Be sure and find the Conservation Fisheries Inc. display. Those guys do good work and you'll be surprised at what you learn there.

2005-04-04T16:56:00.000-05:00

Raccoon nest in the sweet gum tree in the back woods

Eddie's grace

2005-04-04T07:32:00.000-05:00

Ever notice how when your path takes a detour, your mind seems to take one of its own?

That happened to me recently. I was driving south on I-75 from Kentucky and stopped at the rest station at the foot of Jellico Mountain. The attendants were warning everyone to get off at the next exit to avoid long traffic delays from work on the interstate.

Me, I'd always rather keep moving than stop, even if the alternative route takes longer. I didn't hesitate to take the detour toward Lafollette.

The alternate route added some miles to my journey, but somewhere along the way, about 22 years disappeared. Each sway in the road on Hwy. 25W -- and there were many -- brought me closer to the mountains I once roamed with a man name Eddie Hunter.

Eddie had springs in his legs. It's the only way I can explain how easily he moved through the rugged country that straddled the Kentucky-Tennessee state line. He could effortlessly lope up the hillsides, often with a rifle in hand. True to his name, he was an excellent shot and could take out grouse that were invisible to me until he came back, bird in hand.

Eddie's father, Ed, was known for two things: old-time fiddle playing and writing angry letters to the editor at the local newspaper. Ed the elder played the fiddle as easily as water tumbled through Yellow Creek, a nearby rocky stream that once crossed into Tennessee until the Cumberland Plateau rose up and sent it packing back into Kentucky to stay. For now, anyway.

Ed's letters were usually about Yellow Creek. A tannery was fouling the water with a thick, black witches' brew that included chromium and a a long list of other toxic chemicals. A cancer cluster -- mostly kids with leukemia -- had been detected downstream, and folks along the creek were putting up a good fight.

Eddie was proud of his father's letters and often brought them to the newspaper to be run. Ed the elder often would return later, waiting out front while the presses rolled, ready to snap up that day's edition and see his work in print.

Ed the elder was proud of his only son. Eddie wasn't musically inclined, nor was he much of a writer. But he was happy when he wasn't hungry, and he was a loving young man who lived to please his father.

I was a reporter at that newspaper. On days when I had night meetings and could cut out early, Eddie would pack a lunch and come by the office. Into the hills we'd go.

In those days, my legs were almost as strong as Eddie's. We'd explore the back country between Middlesboro and Jellico, Frakes and Pruden. It was land destined to be stripmined, and bushwacking through as much of it as we could seemed like the only honorable way to say goodbye.

Eddie was interested the many cultures that had passed through this country before. Sometimes he'd find rock ledges painted black with smoke from centuries of woodfires. Under these he would dig, bringing up arrowheads and other other artifacts. Sometimes I helped. I can't remember if this was illegal then, but it didn't bother me because the land was going to be turned into a moonscape in a matter of time.

Later, Eddie began to dig in other places -- places that weren't slated for mining. That did bother me. I began to shrug him off when he asked me to join him, and eventually, we went our separate ways. We didn't so much have a falling out as a drifting apart.

Later, I moved on and Eddie stayed. I didn't think about him much except when I'd go through old photographs. I had a big back-and-white print of Eddie, rifle slung over his shoulder, holding a big, beautiful grouse. His trademark smile was on his uncomplicated face.

Ed the elder and the folks along Yellow Creek eventually won their battle. Their call to arms had gotten national attention and they shut the tannery down.

Eddie would have burst with pride at the situation, but he wasn't around to see it.

He'd taken up hang gliding, and while I know he must have excelled at it, Eddie's grace came with some glitches.

He had rolled his Toyota pickup once when he closed the sliding window between the cab and the bed and his hand on the steering wheel followed sympathetically.

It was a beautiful day when Eddie took off from White Rocks in Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. I figure an unexpected gust must have caught him, tossing him into some trees. He would have been OK if he'd stayed up there until help arrived, but for reasons no one can explain, Eddie unclipped his harness.

He fell to his death.

I hadn't said goodbye to a then young, strong Eddie when I left that part of the world. I hadn't felt the need to.

But life and roads are funny things. Driving on Hwy. 25W, looking into the hills that he and I once roamed, I took one more detour.

After 22 years, the time for goodbye had come.

I know I'm in East Tennessee, but ...

2005-03-28T17:59:00.000-05:00

if you've ever seen a condor soar against the Grand Canyon skyline or watched the setting sun play its technicolor movie on the Vermillion Cliffs, or if you have any idea what the people who work with these birds go through, you'd know the pit in my stomach right now.

I opened a press release from the Grand Canyon (am still on the mailing list from my Arizona newsie days) and got this: First condor chick hatched in the wild in decades is found dead

The press release is below. Beneath that is a back page essay I wrote about condors for High Country News a few years back.

Sad day.

GRAND CANYON, Ariz. – Biologists have located the dead body of the first
condor chick hatched in the wild in Arizona in more than 80 years. On
Saturday, March 26, the chick’s body was found inside Grand Canyon National
Park.

The chick was just under two years old, having hatched on May 3, 2003 in a
nest cave near the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. The bird had
been doing well since it fledged, or began flying, on November 5, 2003.

Data indicate the chick had been extensively moving around until March 17
or 18, including two trips to the Vermilion Cliffs site where captive
condors are released into the wild. The bird was detected in the area
between Yavapai Point and Yaki Point in the Grand Canyon on March 18, 19
and 20. Then biologists noted that a transmitter attached to the chick had
switched into a mortality mode, meaning the condor’s transmitter stopped
moving, sometime Sunday evening, March 20. Although biologists hoped the
transmitter had simply fallen off, that hope began to fade when the
satellite-GPS transmitter indicated no movement over Monday, Tuesday, and
Wednesday of last week.

“As the first wild fledged chick in Arizona, this bird represented a
significant step forward in the condor recovery program,” stated Chad
Olson, Raptor Biologist for Grand Canyon National Park. He added,
“although not critical from a population standpoint over the long-term,
this bird was important symbolically to the condor reintroduction effort.
I have been personally involved with the study of this bird and am truly
saddened by its loss.”

“This is a sad occasion for the California condor reintroduction project,
but the program will move forward and hopefully see the survival of many
future wild-hatched chicks,” says Ron Sieg, supervisor of the Arizona Game
and Fish Department’s Flagstaff regional office.

*******

Now the essay:

A bird from the past, a warning for the future

My first California condor sighting was at the Grand Canyon. Imagine those huge birds aloft over that incomparable chasm - living gliders on wings that span 9 feet and 40,000 years. Imagine their oversized shadows passing over talus slopes and mesas, clouding the once blood-red, but now blue-green waters of the Colorado. Eclipsing the sun over cliffrose, canyon wren and rock squirrel.

Imagine is what I did, too. The condors I saw never left the ground. They were adolescents doing what adolescents do best when adults aren’t around - loitering.

They were on a ledge below one of the busiest tourist sections of the South Rim. The spot was popular with many of the young condors being reintroduced to the canyon, much to the chagrin of those assigned to protect them. The big attraction? Water dripping from a pipe.

These birds, wearing wing tags 119 and 158, weren’t supposed to be there. For their own well-being, they needed to learn to keep their distance from people.

According to some, the condors weren’t supposed to be, period. A few decades ago, as their numbers crashed, many people argued that the condor’s time had passed in North America. They were Pleistocene remnants, as irrelevant to today’s world as the mastodons, camels and ground sloths they once gorged themselves on. Their time was up.

Nobody had let condors 119 and 158 in on this little secret. These drip-obsessed creatures behaved as if they had all the time in the world.

They walked around on long, flat toes, studying the leak from every angle. When their attention waned, they raised their shoulders and opened their wings to the sun, looking for all the world like conductors waiting for an unseen orchestra to come to attention.

The birds didn’t have to do much to draw a crowd. Many onlookers lowered binoculars from brimming eyes.

"I never thought I’d see one," some muttered.

California condor numbers were falling long before Europeans stepped foot in North America. Their bones have been found as far east as New York, and more commonly, in caves in the Grand Canyon and along the Pacific Coast.

Some scientists believe prehistoric humans nudged the condor toward the edge by killing off the megafauna they fed on.

Then came modern man, pushing them nearer to the brink by shooting them, poisoning their food with lead and chemicals and stringing power lines - with the inevitable shocking results.

Last year, shortly after I was introduced to the world of condors through Nos. 119 and 158, lead poisoning nearly wiped out the whole Grand Canyon group. At least four birds died, many more were treated, and the source of the pellets never was found.

The deaths renewed cries that the reintroduction program is a costly waste that cannot succeed.

The Grand Canyon condor program has taken some serious blows this year, as well. Coyotes promptly killed two newly released condors. Another apprehensive newcomer couldn’t bear to leave the vicinity of the release pen, not even for food. Her wasted body was found beside the pen in February.

Can we bring back the California condor? Will these birds, all raised in captivity by trainers using condor puppets, ever be able to survive without our constant intervention?

I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows at this point.

Should we even try to bring them back? That one I can answer.

Yes. Hell, yes.

In our efforts, we’ve learned a lot about these intelligent, gentle giants who are capable of a life span close to that of humans. Their curiosity is endless. They seem to have a sense of fun, of adventure, even if the world seems intent on their demise.

Condors aren’t just larger-than-life representatives of a long-gone ecosystem. They are a lesson in humility, in the difficulties of bringing species back from the brink.

Thanks to genetics and technology, people are talking about efforts to clone woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and all manner of lost creatures. The prospect is the stuff of Stephen King - a Pleistocenic version of Pet Sematary.

Successes in copying sheep and calves may have lured some into believing cloning may one day prevent the extinction of existing wildlife species.

Cloning, at best, would give us a limited and probably unsustainable gene pool of any given species and would not correct the problems that led to extinction in the first place.

Condors may be a living question mark for a long time to come, but don’t give up on them. This spring, biologists discovered two California condor eggs in the back country of Santa Barbara County, the first intact eggs found in the wild since scientists began a captive-breeding program 15 years ago to save the giant birds from extinction. Some of us will be watching the successes of condors with the same fascination as the adolescent condors watching their water pipe.

The author writes in Cottonwood, Ariz.

The (big) little things

2005-03-26T08:58:00.000-05:00

There's a pileated in my dying sugar maple in the front. No wonder women love men in uniform. He's so handsome in his crisp suit of black, splash of red, touch of white.

There's a bad light

2005-03-26T08:08:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning to find a modified version of the Japanese flag glowing on my wall.

It was the rising sun -- a red ball piercing light-colored fabric. I pulled the curtain away to get a direct look. It should have been a pretty sight, but I frowned.

There's a bad light out. I noticed it yesterday, too.

That afternoon, a reporter came to me with some pictures for the next edition. We pulled them up on a computer and I frowned. "Let me see the camera settings," I said. The pictures were overexposed, but the color also appeared out of whack -- like the old color prints from the 1960s where everything gets a yellow pall as the color fades. These were unusable.

I grabbed a camera and went out myself to get a picture. I needed to leave my windowless cave of an office anyway. Friday normally is a long day for me at work, but on this Friday we were down a couple of people and I'd be doing their jobs, too. It would be long past dark before I'd get home.

The sun was bright outside, but there was a strange cast to the sky and to the light that bathed everything. Inexperience was to blame for my reporter's overexposed photos, but the color problems were from that light. It made me nervous. It's making me nervous now.

I've seen skies get that sickly look before. Sometimes, it's from a forest fire burning in the distance, building a haze that discolors the sky for miles. Out West, Mongolian dust storms sometimes drifted across the ocean, dimming the paint in the Painted Desert.

Mostly, when I see the sky get that tint, its a sign that there's worse to come. Much worse. This light is just the queasiness that comes before the orange-green full-blown roil to come later.

The worst roil I'd seen was three decades ago. Thirty-one years, to be few days off of exact. April 3, 1974. We had a high school tennis tournament that day, and those of us who were waiting for courts to open up were practicing juggling to keep our nerves steady. The match was against Tates Creek, our big rivals from Lexington. They usually clobbered us.

A couple of teammates had driven off to pick up Cokes. They came back and stopped in a squeal of tires.

"The roof has blown off Freedom Hall," one said. Freedom Hall was the arena in Louisville. Louisville wasn't that far away.

"Tornadoes are coming! We heard it on the radio," her companion continued.

We looked around at the sunny sky doubtfully, but at their insistence, we gathered around the car radio to hear the news.

Within minutes, the light began to change. The baseball team came off a neighboring field and our match was canceled.

"Get home, everybody," our coach yelled. "NOW!"

I was in big trouble. My parents barely tolerated my involvement in sports, which meant they never attended the games and I could find my own ride home. I often walked the three miles back to the house after games and practice, and I just felt lucky they allowed me to play.

I was lucky this day, too. A girl from the neighborhood had been watching the baseball team, and she had wheels. She lived a block from me. We tore out of the beat-up student parking lot in her beat-up Ford and raced down the highway.

We barely beat the hail.

It struck with a force, battering and bouncing and breaking up against the ground. My family kept a softball-sized piece in the freezer for months until it shrank and disappeared in its captivity.

We peered out the window at the maelstrom -- me, my mother and three brothers -- and then we heard the rumble.

"Get down into the basement," my mother screamed and heaved us toward the door downstairs. We tumbled through, almost literally, and crouched in a corner -- some of us wide-eyed and others eyes closed.

The sound was classic tornado -- a freight train rumbling by close.

My luck held. That god-awful huge train -- perhaps the biggest tornado in history -- hit on the other side of the hill from us. The deaths were spread across several states and the superstorm's story would be become a Weather Channel staple.

I saw a lot in the aftermath. Too much to talk about.

Despite the cast to yesterday's sky, I managed to get a usable photograph to anchor the front page. It was a happy shot of three people -- two parents and their grown son, I think. I was shooting with a long lens and did not get their names. They were crossing a wooden bridge on the walking trail by the lake. People were out everywhere enjoying the warm sunshine.

Back at the office, I worked on the photo in the computer, making adjustments in cyan and yellow to counter the bad light.

My phone rang; my mother was on the line. Despite the distortion of her cellphone, I could tell her voice was strained.

"Your father's cancer is back," she said.

Owl and pussycat, or Ode to Abbey

2005-03-24T19:20:00.000-05:00

It appears my great horned owl sightings may have taken a sad turn.

My smallest cat, Abbey -- named for Edward, of course -- has been missing for several days. Cats will roam, but Abbey dutifully came home each day. I fear she may be calico owl pellets by now.

As half-grown kittens, she and her brother, Redford (of course), adopted me in the Arizona desert. She was my favorite among my pets, and as pet owners know, those are always the first to go.

I hold no grudge against the owl. And if this is the worst, as I fear it is, for dear Abbey, she went like her namesake often wished he could go.

Edward Abbey often spoke of having his bones plucked clean by the vultures so he could rise with them and keep a keen eye on his beloved landscape. In real life, his friends placed his body in a closely guarded location on public land in the saguaro country he loved. It was his last official snub to the authorities. He may be kettling over the Sonoran Desert even now.

May both Abbeys rest in peace. May the smell of creosote bush after the rain wash over your soul, Edward "George Washington Hayduke" Abbey.

And if you are alive, my own gentle Abbey, come home. Redford and I miss you.

Postscript:

About 15 minutes after I pushed "publish" on this one, I went outside to see what I could of the nearly full moon in the night haze. Redford dashed across the lawn in front of me, tail high like a maverick steer. Abbey was hightailing it right behind him.

Because I give a hoot

2005-03-20T05:57:00.000-05:00

The great horned was back this morning and brought a friend. They gave me a gentle, 5:45 wake-up call.

I eyeballed him this time -- a moving silhouette in the big, goalpost-shaped tulip poplar in the woods in back. Where are my field glasses?

All isn't right with the world, but at times like this, it can seem to be.

Stayed up late to watch West Virginia beat Wake. Go Mountaineers. Go Bubo virginianus. Underdogs can have their day. Cue up the dawn chorus, because I'm going back to bed.

Great horned and barn

2005-03-19T05:38:00.000-05:00

Nature has its other-worldly side.

Take, for instance, the warbling, twisted song of the coyotes out West -- I've not heard them sing like that here. The sound filters in to your deep-sleep psyche and twists and wraps and bends like an aural acid trip. You wake knowing, but not sure, what you heard, and you feel like some unconscious part of you might have been hijacked and misused in the night.

This morning I woke to the song of a great horned owl. I lay in bed listening in the predawn to be sure. Finally, with enough of the fog of sleep cleared, I knew.

The bouncing ball "hoo-hoo hoooooo hoo-hoo" seemed to be coming from the woods in the back, but owls are ventriloquists. My great horned could have been anywhere.

I rose and, barefoot, slipped outside. I squinted into the outlines of trees in the woods behind my house. I could see the shapes of owls everywhere, but doubted that any were real.

The owl called again and got a response -- from the air brakes of a truck passing on Interstate 40 in the distance.

I prayed that the great horned would stay and make a nest -- if it hadn't already. I prayed that it would have successful hunting, but that it might exclude my small, dear, gray tortoiseshell cat.

I remembered other great horned encounters -- most of them at Deadhorse Ranch, a state park just a bicycle's coast from where I once lived in the West. I would go there after hours, when the evening had cooled enough for my friends the rattlesnakes to come out. That was also the time the great horned would leave the cottonwoods near the Verde River for ample meals of jack rabbit and cottontail, and maybe some of the pocket gophers that riddled the land. These they shared with the great blue heron, who seemed as happy plucking the small, fat rodents from the ground as they were snatching frogs from the water nearby.

In those days, I wandered the length of the Verde River -- on public and private land -- usually on foot.

One evening, I followed the river's banks through the national forest and went too far. Darkness was falling fast and I knew it would not be safe to retrace my steps along the irregular river bank.

I was near a ranch, and I did not know the people. I did not want to stir up a hornets' nest of dogs, and maybe humans, by crossing the land in the open, but I had to get back to a dirt road I knew would get me home.

I chose a wash -- deep and sandy -- where I could move in cover. As the light faded, I studied the clay walls that had been freshly eroded by the passing season's monsoon storms. They were pocked with interesting holes, probably left by rocks yanked out by angry waters.

The light of dusk was nearly gone as I passed one of the larger holes. My senses tingled as they always did this time of night, in the outdoors, in the West. You never knew what you might encounter -- rattlesnake, javelina, even mountain lion -- and the land was littered remnants of people who had passed long before.

Just as my eyes were about to shift from that larger hole, I caught a glimpse of motion and turned. Emerging from the hole was a human skull, its eyesockets deeply shadowed. It pushed itself free, and unbelievably, took flight on tawny, desert-colored wings.

My bare legs already were scraped and bleeding from unforgiving encounters with basaltic rock and cat claw acacia. Now my knees were ready to give out, until --

Until I realized that I'd just had a very close encounter with a wash-dwelling barn owl.

It was one of the best walks I'd ever had.

Tainted

2005-03-18T07:57:00.000-05:00

"Any business arrangement that has the potential to erode the trust that the public has in the independence of a news organization is problematic," said Aly Coln, a former business editor and reporter who addresses ethics issues for the Poynter Institute, a national, independent school of journalism.

The Wisconsin State Journal, a normally respected newspaper in the utterly livable town of Madison, made a big mistake recently when it sold advertisers a "premium" package that includes six meetings with the newspaper's editor.

Although the newspaper's brass has tried to blow off the issue, claiming that anyone has access to the editor, the arrangement carries the same implied message as large political donations made to a candidate -- big money buys better access.

Journalism, a proud profession on the whole, has taken a beating lately with reports of fabricators like the NYT's Jayson Blair and other issues.

And here comes the Wisconsin State Journal willfully further eroding the public's trust.

Or perhaps they thought they wouldn't get caught. Kudos to the Capital Times, a competing newspaper which outed the deal.

What happens when ...

2005-03-17T07:01:00.000-05:00

Two oil derricks are elected to lead the country:

With a 51-49 vote, the U.S.Senate put an Artic Wildlife Refuge drilling provision in next year's budget.

"There will not be any damage to the environment and that is a fact,"Senator Larry Craig,an Idaho Republican.

"It is foolish to say oil development and a wildlife refuge can coexist," Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash

"Congress must still pass two different budget measures to complete its assault on the refuge .... That's why, in the wake of this most recent setback, I would urge you to convert your outrage and sorrow into action," John H. Adams, president, Natural Resources Defense Council

How they voted:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=1&vote=00052

Not on streets of gold

2005-03-14T19:20:00.000-05:00

I can't say I ever had a break with organized religion. I was born a free thinker and never fell under its spell.

But I gave it a chance.

My first church experience was of fire and brimstone, and, from a front pew, I bawled as only a 5-year-old fully imagining the flesh-searing stench of Hell can bawl. I think my parents were happy for an excuse to drag me out of there.

Later, there was my neighbors' Baptist church. Its sweeping modern lines intrigued me as I passed it on the walk to school each day. And the neighbor kids were always doing something special there.

I began to wonder what I was missing out on. Then one day, one of the kids next door described their preacher's theory of evolution.

White people, he had told them in his merciful wisdom, were created by God. Blacks, he said flatly, evolved from the apes.

Normally a pacifist, I got into a fight over that one.

Then came college, when my roommate's parents drove in for a visit. They came with the promise of a real restaurant breakfast if I joined them in church.

My mouth watered even as I tried to clear my head and be open to The Word. I will never forget the sermon.

Nothing was said of good will. No words of peace and comfort were uttered. For the better part of an hour, the preacher worked hard to whip the congregation into the same kind of frenzy he was in. Over what? Becoming the biggest church in the city. He wanted everyone to go out and round up 20 new members to bring to the church and each of those 20 would bring 20 more.

Oh, he reminded us toward the end, and be sure to put a little extra in collection plate because he'd be needing a bigger church soon.

Breakfast at Jerry's did not go down easy.

Later, except for weddings and once, after a Saturday night of too much moonshine, when I nearly passed out on the steps of a steepled clapboard structure after a failed walk back over the mountain (I still don't know how the Mickey Mouse pillow got outside), I steered clear of churches.

I have a spiritual side.

I believe it is a deep one.

My church has no roof and my prayers aren't the gimme kind. My heaven, if I could fashion one, would have no streets of gold. Who would want that?

By the age of 10, I knew exactly what heaven should be.

It would have dirt paths, the kind I ran on -- barefoot and full tilt -- as a child. It would have places where, in the cool of a summer morning, the clay had been tromped into a silky dust, and the dust would shoot between your toes and settle slowly, as if basking in the sun of an endless morning.

And with birds singing and working -- all of them, Bachman's warbler, passenger pigeon, ivory-billed woodpecker included -- I would walk with God. It would be a leisurely walk, and I would ask him every question I could conjure.

Why are we here? Who made you? Is it the limestone in the water that makes Kentucky such a strong basketball school?

That morning, in its sweetness, would be as long as the list of questions.

*******

Middle Tennessee State University English professor Charles K. Wolfe specializes in the study of folk and country music. Among Wolfe's areas of study are the atom bomb's impact on those musical genres. Wolfe has turned up some lovely tunes, according to a story in the New York Times. My favorite titles: Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb and There Is a Power Greater Than Atomic.

Nature is nurture

2005-03-13T08:13:00.000-05:00

Mittie Maiden once lived on a ridge near where Kentucky runs into Tennessee.

She was an older woman, a widow, and she lived alone on a pretty piece of land where she raised chickens and cows. Mittie didn't buy much at the grocery. Coffee, sugar and flour were all she needed, she said. The rest she she got from her garden or her animals.

Her house was small and simple and, of it, I remember few details. The steep, hillside pasture where her cattled grazed was ribbed with their paths. It was the woods behind it that gave the place its grace. She took me there once. She called it Magic Holler.

It looked out over the forests of Kentucky Ridge. Two decades ago, they seemed to go on forever. The place was shaded by the lacy darkness of hemlock and smelled of moss and time and earth.

Mittie Maiden led me down springy paths of hemock duff past cucumber trees and soon-to-bloom mountain laurel. We stopped and sat on the biggest stump I'd ever seen.

American chestnut, Mittie said, pulling her fraying, pink, button-down sweater closer over her overalls. Her daddy had cut it down when he was a young man.

We sat in comfortable silence and watched the birds flit and listened to the insects hum.

She invited me to come back, but the place was out of my way, and I had a busy schedule.

Mittie's dead now, I learned last year. I don't know where her body lies, but I do know where her soul rests.

I, too, have returned to Magic Holler in spirit. I have escaped desert heat there, and the coldness of canyons of glass and steel. Today, from a hundred miles away, I walk on hemlock duff and smell spring emerge from the earth there.

Mittie's magic lives on. Nature is nurture.