All Fall Down...

     The chill has come with the announcement of fall, and with it the changing colors of the trees.  Friends tend to ask me what the best time of year is to "catch" the colors and it is truly a crapshoot.  This was again a year of drought in my area, so the trees, which somehow tend to know far more than our weather folk, appear to have begun the change early.  Why hang around looking for that extra bit of moisture when you can simply retire for the winter and hope that next year will be better (sort of like so many voters around the country).  And at this point, I must inject this side note that what used to be a 26-year cycle of drought is now projected by some to be a longer 50-year cycle; indeed the forecast is for a warmer and drier winter as well.  If things don't improve, archeologists may have their answers as to why once-thriving cultures such as the Pueblo of Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly and others simply up and left.  But wait, what about the Anasazi?  Wrote the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center: The term “Anasazi” was established in 1927 through the archaeological Pecos Classification system, referring to the Ancestral Pueblo people who spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, including Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Canyon De Chelly, and Aztec.  The term is Navajo in origin, and means “ancient enemy.”  The Pueblo peoples of New Mexico understandably do not wish to refer to their ancestors in such a disrespectful manner, so the appropriate term to use is “Ancestral Pueblo” or “Ancestral Puebloan.”  

     Okay, back to those fall colors, that chlorophyll in the leaves now withdrawing and revealing all that is hidden underneath (politicians, take note*).  When we had finished our first hike of the year about a month ago (late start and mentioned in an earlier post) I overheard someone tell her friend, "be sure to check for ticks."  What?  I had never heard this in "our" part of the West because those nasty lyme-disease carrying suckers (for ticks are indeed blood suckers) were mostly back east, or way up north.  Or were they?  Certainly we didn't have ticks here in snow country, did we?.  So I brought this up to my very active neighbors who go camping or mountain biking or head out hiking, pretty much every week.  Had they ever heard of this?  And their answer (along with a surprised look as if I was asking in jest) was, of course!  Ticks are everywhere, they told me, from those bigger East coast buggers to the ones that are no bigger than a black dot about the size of a sesame seed.  Yes, they said, always check for ticks (something we have never done in our 40+ years of hiking).  Lucky (or careless) us..

     The arrival of ticks and other disease-carrying bugs is indeed moving northward as both ocean currents and temperatures change...even mangrove forests, wrote Scientific American.  Wait, entire forests moving?  Throw in those Asian hornets, kissing bugs (that come while you sleep and could be bad news all around if you get infected, wrote Newsweek), and now Valley fever?  Ah well, no worries as the CDC is right on top of things, reported Robert F. Anasazi (just kidding...about both, really).  What can one do?  Just give up?  Now, while our hikes were a bit more difficult than we anticipated, my wife and I are not the type to give up, or quit.  Granted, we do tend to now know when to keep going on, but also when we should stop and head back because our legs are tired, because going down over uneven and rocky terrain is asking for trouble when your legs are tired.  So even though we were close to the end (we'd hiked these trails to the end many times in years past), we turned around.  But here's the thing, one thing i seem to have given up on is trying to end the use of plastic.  Wait, what?

     So that lead in you just read was originally meant for my post on our use of plastics, a post that was titled "(plas)Ticked Off" (my friend told me to stop using puns).  When I was writing it, the words flew onto the page because there seemed to be a lot of things to be ticked off at these days, how plastic is everywhere and yet, as with all that is happening in Washington, we just seem to shrug it off as if it is no big deal (microplastics are now found worldwide, including at both the Arctic and Antarctica...and nanoplastics now appear able to cross our blood/brain barrier).  The entire post had blended in nicely with my last piece which was on children, and how we adults try to do our best (or do we?) to make the world that children will face, a better one.  But just as with the hiking trail, the post veered off as I finished the pages of Tim O'Brien's book to his children (Dad's Maybe Book).  Not having children of my own, I didn't expect to identify with many of his thoughts, other than that of his beconing older, feeling more tired, and feeling that he needed to start jotting down batches and batches of thoughts and memories he wanted to pass down.  As the Vietnam vet noted, Vietnam had become more of a tourist destination than a war (for the most part)...but not for him.  And perhaps because of that confrontation we had encountered on an earlier hike, and my friend nearly being beaten to a pulp, O'Brien's idea of facing such "surprises" and its consequences (albeit in his case, facing those in a war), and perhaps because he was writing about the "leaden numbness in my feet and thighs...the endless march [of] one step and then another and then another," his words somehow hit home and caused me to delay the plastics piece.  The big difference was that I was hiking for pleasure, enjoying the beautiful colors and not at all worried about a sniper or being ambushed as I walked, and not wondering how on earth did I end up being "stuck" here. 

      Here's a small part of what he dealt with as he stared at the body of a little Vietnamese girl in a muddy ditch: She had been caught in the middle of a two-or three-minute firefight.  Moments earlier, during that short exchange of gunfire, I had fervently intended and hoped to kill, mostly because I was terrified, mostly to stop people from killing me, but as always there had been no visible enemy, only trees and bushes on the far side of a rice paddy, and so I had fired without aiming --without so much as the thought of aiming-- just hosing down the whole green world before me.  When the firefight ended, no one in my company had been injured.  We found no enemy bodies and no blood trails.  There was only the dead little girl.  For a while I thought nothing.  Then, after a second, I thought: Well, the world must be a better place.  Because that's what wars are for, right? That's why we kill one another.  To make the world a better place: "madness made of logic, principle turned frenzy" (Sophocles again).  These thoughts were in no way cruel or callous.  They were bitter thoughts.  I hated myself.  At that instant, as I looked down at the dead girl, the world did not seem any freer, any happier, any more democratic, any more just, any more tolerant, any more civilized, any more decent, any more loving, or any less endangered than it had seemed a few minutes earlier.  The world felt evil.  And I had made it more so.  I had gone to the war and participated in the war out of the purest pride.  To safeguard my reputation as a good son of America.  To avoid small-town censure.  To avoid ridicule.  And so I had hosed down the green living world, and a little girl lay dead in the sunlight, and now my reputation-loving, ridicule-fearing pride was intact for some future Fourth of July.  How can I, or we, celebrate such evil?  How can the tubas keep playing?...Is not war the large-scale equivalent of one man saying to another man: "I am so civilized, and you are so barbaric--I am so virtuous, and you are so evil--I am so God-loving, and you are so devilish--I am so rational, and you are so irrational--I am so right, and you are so wrong, that I am going to kill you?"

      He then asks (and stay with me since this hard dose of reality is almost over): Who grieves for --who celebrates-- the estimated 30 million dead during the Mongol conquests?  Who gives a passing thought to the 25 million dead during the Qing conquest of the Ming Empire?  Who has ever heard of the Taiping Rebellion and its estimated 20 million dead?  For that matter, who knows a single objective fact about the Dungan Revolt (around 8 million dead), the Reconquista (5 million dead), the An Lushan Rebellion (13 to 36 million dead), the Huguenot Wars (about 2.8 million dead), the Moorish Wars (about 3 million dead), the Yellow Turban Rebellion (about 4.5 million dead), the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (800,000 dead), the Second Sudanese Civil War (1 to 2 million dead), the Panthay Rebellion (800,000 to 1 million dead), the Paraguayan War (300,000 to 1.2 million dead), the Cambodian War (410,000 to 850.000 dead), or the Kitos War (440,000 dead)?  If we know nothing about these and other wars, how can we care?  And if we, the inheritors, cannot care, what is the lasting moral outcome of an estimated 488 million wartime deaths over the recorded history of our planet?  As Edwin Starr sang: War, what is it good for?...Absolutely nothing. 

     Like those millions of soldiers and innocents caught in the crossfire, that was me.  Even without children, I would before long simply become a forgotten uncle, then grand uncle, then great uncle, then gone, a speck of life now as microscopic as a piece of nanoplastic, jostled among the millions and millions of others lost to war (and life)...and for what?  As O'Brien wrote, nothing had changed...the grass would regrow, the trees would bloom, the landmines would stay buried and waiting, other humans would return to do it all over again.  So why would I write about something like this when there is already so much depressing news in the world?  Perhaps because I had also read in the London Review about the recent weapons fair in the UK, an annual carnival of the newest ways we've devised to create destruction and death.  Wrote the piece: The Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) describes itself as the ‘flagship event for the UK’, relied on by ‘the world’s leading defence organisations and most influential stakeholders...to bring the right people together’.  900 protesters were arrested, to which the mother of a protester awaiting trial yelled out, "You are protecting the real terrorists."  Castles tall, houses small, left alone, all fall down, wrote the duo Howard/Petersen.

     Editor Krista Langlois of bioGraphic wrote: One of my favorite nature essays ever was written by the late Brian Doyle.  It’s called “The Creature Beyond the Mountains,” and it’s about the white sturgeon, whose scientific name, Acipenser transmontanus, translates to “sturgeon beyond the mountains.”  In the essay, Doyle describes a small boy encountering one of these giant, ancient fish at a hatchery.  Upon seeing the massive creature swim past a glass window, the four-year-old says, “Holy shit, Dad.”  The boy, Doyle writes, had seen “a being he never dreamed was alive on this planet, a being he never imagined, a being beyond vast, a being that rendered him speechless with awe until he could articulate a raw blunt astonishment that you have to admire for its salty honesty.  He saw wonder, face-to-face.  Maybe wonder is the way for us with animals in the years to come.  Maybe wonder is the way past the last million years of combat and into the next million years of something other than combat.”  I thought of these words while reading Hannah Nordhaus’s latest bioGraphic feature, which is about a different kind of sturgeon—the Alabama sturgeon (Scaphirhyncus suttkusi), one of the rarest fish in North America. This sturgeon hasn’t been seen in two decades...“Alabama sturgeon don’t matter to most of us,” she writes. “They aren’t ecosystem engineers, shaping habitat for other species; there’s no argument suggesting that we need them to improve our lives or watersheds. They simply glide along the river bottoms as they have for hundreds of millions of years.”  It’s a point that too often gets lost.  In arguing for the rights of nonhuman species, journalists and conservationists often find ourselves focusing on how a particular species benefits the broader ecosystem, or offers people an economic or medical benefit.  But what about those species whose value can only be measured in wonder?  They matter, too.  As author Doyle told his children: If you can't make a new ant, don't kill an old one.

     So apologies all around for writing a not-so-uplifting piece, and for usurping the piece on plastics (it'll come eventually).  And a big thank you for getting through this.  After walking through such a beautiful palette of forested beauty, it made me again take note of how fortunate so many of us are, not only to still have such areas publicly available, but to be able to actually walk in them and to notice that nature doesn't care a whit about our changing politics or our quest for more gold, or land, or Bitcoin, or whatever some politician of the day is wanting.  It was easy for me to see, and to let you see by peppering this beautiful scenery throughout this post, if only to show how calming and comforting it can be to see such wonder happening year after year.  Hiking through these trees at any time, but especially now when they grace us with their slow retreat from the coming cold, reminds me that they provide us with that childlike awe, and reminds us that they matter.  If only we could put an end to the nonsense of fighting and squabbling, and instead just gaze and sit down among this beauty.  We may just learn a thing or two...

*And it was here that I was really tempted to note that while the vibrant oranges and yellows are spectacular this time of year, they are nowhere near as bright as those same colors on a certain nearly-80 year old political leader.  But I refrained from doing so because I didn't want to offend anyone who attended the United Nations summit.  And despite Trump's funding cuts to our national parks (and ordering the removal of so much history in such parks), the parking lots were full to the point of being almost overfull (our forests and parks have had to introduce paid parking to try to offset those cuts).  My own state's legislature wants to allow more off-road vehicles through similar areas such as these forests, and luckily their introduced bills keep getting thrown our by the courts.  It gladdened my heart to see so many people willing to pay the parking fee to see the fall colors, and to see so many people of all ages out on the trails, just enjoying their being --their human "being"--out in nature.  Our country, our planet is beautiful and has a lot for us to see...and fortunately, few seem to be listening to world "leaders" telling us the opposite.

P.S. While I felt that author O'Brien had a lot more to say, adding more of his words to the body of this post would have made the post lop-sided.  Even with all the beauty of the fall colors, his words of reality was a dark cloud that needed some balance, thus my adding this bit down here.  So a few things of note since so many of my liberal friends are feeling a bit of despair or submission, a feeling of "what can you do?" about what is happening in today's world.  On the other hand, many of my conservative friends feel that all is right in the world and that all of this is proving a nice, welcome break from that era of "corrupt Biden."  Really? (their words, not mine)  It only takes a glance to see that getting the two sides to meet seems daunting and improbable, if not impossible for now.  Many have alluded that there may well be another civil war.  O'Brien stepped further back and viewed things almost from a different scale, writing that this was a mirrored feeling at our nation's birth: I was trying to say something about my own war, and about the ordeal of foot soldiers in any war.  Even without much detailed knowledge, I identified with those British troops.  The parallels seemed obvious.  A civil war.  Faulty intelligence.  An enemy without uniforms.  A distrustful, often hostile rural population.  A powerful world-class army blundering through unfamiliar terrain.  A myth of invincibility.  Immense resources of wealth and firepower that somehow never added up to a happy ending.  A sense of bewilderment and dislocation.  Cultural haughtiness.  Overconfidence gone sour.  Smugness replaced by terror.  A tough, homespun, ragtag enemy that for years had been grossly underestimated.  Growing frustration and rage at guerrilla tactics -- the constant sniping, the deadly little ambushes.  Looking at things in that manner, you can almost see both sides being described...those words of "overconfidence" vs. "underestimated," "smugness" vs. "homespun."  Was O'Brien talking about the far right or the everyday silent majority smack in the middle, the people who wanted order but not in the way it was now being applied.  Then O'Brien wrote about the British standoff at Lexington: ...a single shot rang out.  In quick succession, without orders, British troops fired two sharp volleys.  One colonist was bayoneted to death.  Others were killed or wounded as they sought cover.  At that point, although Pitcairn [Major John Pitcairn] signaled for a cease-fire, the dawn was full of gunfire.  According to one eyewitness, the British regulars "were so wild they cou'd hear no orders."  Altogether. it lasted only a few minutes, but a terrible inertia had taken hold.  One volley led to the next.  Ordinary field discipline collapsed.  In various measures, the first bloodshed of that day can be traced to the rawness of the troops, to the hodgepodge composition of their units, and the to unfamiliar leadership of Major Pitcairn.  Ultimately, though, the causes were pedestrian.  History is made not only by plan or policy, but also by fact and fatigue and adrenaline.  It was at this point that I pictured Kent State, or today's National Guard units sent to blue-state cities.  Would a stray pop somewhere, even if not a gunshot, set off a similar cascade of fire, releasing that same tension and unfamiliarity of being in an American city or town where your "enemy" is one of you, or someone you went to high school with, and that last night you were working in your garage or having dinner with your family or walking your dog, and now you're wearing a crisp military uniform and carrying a high-powered rifle?  In the end, O'Brien writes that many of his war details are vague --his running to reach the other end of a bridge without being shot, the trudging through muddy rice paddies, the vision of a monk or one of his buddies picking up a body.  He wrote: ...I don't remember my voice or my words or where I was or who needed each dust-off or how I was able to speak at all.  I can't see much.  I can't feel much.  Maybe erasure is necessary.  Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, poisoning those malignancies that would otherwise destroy us...Maybe that's what history is for.  Maybe that's why people started writing things down two thousand years ago.  To remind us.  To give us back our lives.  O'Brien added that a bullet can both kill and make an enemy; but a bullet to a child can make many enemies.  Somehow, despite all the mist and fog trying to blanket our hope, I do sense a crack in the armor, a feeling that except for a few hardcore hardliners, the yahoo all-in conservatives are feeling a slight quiver or questioning of whether they've gone a bit too far, their gilded empire perhaps now revealing an end way off in the distance.  The money has been good, the greed seemingly rewarded without end.  But there's a slight crack in the vase, one overflowing and ever-so slightly out of reach.  It's as if they've heard: you can mess with us, but threaten our children --our children's health, our children's education, our children's welfare-- now that's a whole 'nother ball game.  And the stands are full...

Of note, this arrived this morning: An analysis by the Center for Western Priorities found that over 99 percent of the over 600,000 comments submitted to regulations.gov opposed the Trump administration’s plan to repeal the 2001 Roadless Rule.  The Roadless Rule currently protects over 58.8 million acres of national forest land from road-building, logging, and other industrial activity. “Across state lines and party lines, Americans spoke with one voice to tell President Trump to stop this attack on America’s forests,” said Center for Western Priorities Deputy Director Aaron Weiss.