Lasso the Moon

A geologist once told me to look for the rabbit in the moon instead of the man. That’s what the Chinese did, he said while pointing up to a gibbous moon from a plateau in the Fort Rock Basin of eastern Oregon. We were at an archeological dig site, and his job was to look at the earth, yet he couldn’t help but stare at the moon.

We’ve been staring at the moon for quite some time, now, and we manage to make of it what we wish. Some cultures see a man in the moon, some see a rabbit, some see cheese or the Roman huntress Diana, goddess of the moon, twin sister of Apollo. The moon has been a symbol of birth and death as it rises and sets, waxes and wanes, going black every month before reappearing. The moon’s gravity controls the tides of the ocean. A synonym for crazy comes from the Latin word for moon, luna, which means “moonstruck.” Lunacy? Lunar Sea? Yes, and I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

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A quarter century ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Buzz Aldrin for an article celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We met at his home in California, where lunar paraphernalia festooned the walls and shelves, including an Andy Warhol silkscreen of him on the moon next to the American flag. If Neil Armstrong had been a bit of an enigma over the years, leaving the astronaut life for academia and not likely to grant interviews, Aldrin became our pop version of the “Astronaut”—with the kind of name that spawned a beloved Disney character in Pixar’s Toy Story movies. (Armstrong may have been the first man on the moon, but it’s Aldrin who’s in all the pictures.)

It’s perhaps unfair to think of Aldrin in this way. When I interviewed him he tended to avoid sentimentality and focus on strategy and mission. “Apollo really was an engineering feat of the greatest magnitude—based upon advanced levels of understanding of science, of mathematics, of computer processing, of information for navigation and autopilot control,” he said while spinning a paperweight globe on his desk.

And, yet, Aldrin seems to have been born for the moon and all the symbolism attached to it. His father was an aviation pioneer and student of renowned rocket developer Robert Goddard. His mother’s maiden name was Marion Moon. In the years since I interviewed him, Aldrin has settled into his image with a sense of humor, appearing on at least four episodes of The Simpsons, and putting a plastic Buzz Lightyear through a battery of tests in a YouTube video with the tagline, “Just remember one thing, I’m the real Buzz.”

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After Apollo 11 reached Earth orbit on July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong’s heart rate clocked in at 110 beats per minute. Michael Collins, who would pilot the command module, Columbia, while Armstrong and Aldrin explored the lunar surface, was 99. And Aldrin? A cool 88.

Three days later, on the morning of July 19, 1969, Apollo 11 reached lunar orbit. Aldrin entered the lunar module Eagle through the tip of the command module. Armstrong followed, and a few hours later, Eagle detached from Columbia. Up to this point all stages had been performed by previous missions, but now Aldrin and Armstrong were on the verge of a novel voyage.

The following day, after orbiting the moon 30 times, Eagle began its descent burn toward the lunar surface. But just two minutes into descent, Eagle’s onboard computer (far less powerful than your smartphone) started blaring. Aldrin announced, “Program alarm. It’s a 12-0-2.” The system was overloaded.

As the alarm continued, Houston’s computer expert and command chief considered the implications. Armstrong asked for a reading. Finally, word came. “We’re go, Eagle. Hang tight, we’re go.”

Eagle eased down toward the surface as Aldrin read off the numbers. In retrospect, he told me, he wished he had spent more time looking out the window. “We were going forward with the landing gear this way, facing down, with the rocket in front,” he explained, using his fist to demonstrate the flight path of the lunar module, his fingers sticking out to form its buglike legs. “At a certain point we yawed around, and shortly thereafter we pitched forward. . . . Earth was in view for just a moment, and then it went high in the window and behind us.”

Aldrin couldn’t spend his time musing about the view, however. Soon it became clear that they were overshooting their target and running low on fuel. “It was as low or lower than it had been in any of the simulations or training,” Aldrin said. Other obstacles also appeared. Huge boulders and craters were strewn about the moonscape, and Eagle needed a smooth surface to land on.

All Apollo missions after 11 used an updated autopilot system that could handle such predicaments. “If you put that into a video game for some kid to play with, it’d be a rudimentary, simple task,” Aldrin told me, “unless something went wrong. That’s why you’ve got test pilots out there.”

And that’s where Armstrong’s experience paid off. Once before, in Gemini 8, he had masterfully righted the capsule out of a wild spin caused by a stuck thruster. Now he needed to bring Eagle down safely, with the constant reminder from Mission Control that fuel levels were dropping. At the time his heart rate spiked to 156.

We know the story well. The Eagle lands. Armstrong takes one small step, mankind a giant leap. Twenty minutes later, Aldrin follows. They plant a flag and leave footprints.

Taking his foot off a bookshelf, Aldrin leaned forward in his chair, describing the brevity of his lunar walk: “It was too short. And it was a very focused time with history-making events like getting on the surface and putting the flag up, talking to the president—things that were somewhat interrupting the normal explorer’s prudent tasks, And it was prudent to get outside and look at the spacecraft you just landed in.” He gave a chuckle. “Really the challenge was to land safely, do a few things and get back in and leave.”

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One of my favorite movies is It’s a Wonderful Life, and I say that knowing how cheesy and sentimental it can be. But it’s George Bailey’s desire to see and do things, to explore the world, to lasso the moon, that moves me more than the tear-inducing rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” at the end. Going to the moon required a kind of buckaroo mentality at a time when America was all about new frontiers. Jimmy Stewart, who played George Bailey, had his share of cowboy roles. And in the early 1960s, just before JFK proposed that we land on the moon before the end of the decade, the three top-rated TV shows were Wagon Train, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke.

Recently, I watched La Voyage Dans La Lune (“A Trip to the Moon”), which was produced in 1902. This silent film is known for it’s iconic image of a spacecraft landing in the eye of the Man in the Moon. What was that spacecraft? A bullet. Look at the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 and you are essentially looking at a giant bullet.

I prefer lassoes, however, perhaps because such lunar wrangling seems more ambitious and heroically absurd, perhaps because a lasso orbits its target before cinching in: Apollo 11 did not shoot the moon so much as circle it until it pulled close enough to secure touchdown.

In La Voyage Dans La Lune, the traveling French astronomers are chased by the local moon people, or Selenites, to the precipice of a cliff, from which they can fall back to Earth inside their bullet. Leaving the moon was considerably different for Apollo 11. During one test of the lunar module on Earth, Armstrong had to eject himself in order to survive a crash. Another test pilot also had to eject. But as it turned out, leaving was not an issue—at least not from an engineering perspective.

Yes, we went back, at least for a few years. We saw astronauts drive a lunar rover that resembled a dune buggy. We saw Alan Shepard, who had been previously grounded due to an inner ear problem, hit a golf ball in low gravity.

And then we stopped going.

There are rumblings of new adventures, of sending the first woman to the moon by 2024, but a lot of that talk sounds suspect given the current political climate. As Buzz Aldrin told me a quarter century ago, it was too short. We landed safely, we did a few things, and then we left.

Scamalot

A lot of people want to give me money.

Just in the last 24 hours, I’ve had an offer from Alexander, who is working under the “directive of Mr. Mikhail Khodorkovsky to source for a partner abroad who can accommodate 50M & 150M USD for investments”; Dr [M]atti [L]ahteenma, minister of finances, who wants me to contact Mr Luis Zima about the $7,500 being sent to me via Western Union as part of the “mandate to transfer [my] full inheritance payment total sum of USD1.4million”; and Kwabene Donkor, the “Branch Manager of a Financial Institution” in Ghana who is writing to solicit my assistance to transfer $12.5 million.

I can add these folks to a list of others: the family members of Nelson Mandela, another branch manager at a financial institution in Ghana, several people from the Benin Republic (one by way of the FBI’s “Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes Division” that takes a kind of meta approach to the art of scamology), and a British-sounding military officer seeking my assistance “On a Project Proposal Worth Millions of Dollars and a box full of diamonds.”

And I thought the chivalry of Nigerian princes was dead.

What’s interesting about these offers is the level of detail they go to and the level of detail they leave out. Alexander doesn’t give me his last name, but he’s willing to give up Mr. Mikhail Khodorkovsky for a price. Dr Matti Lahteenma and others don’t tell me which financial institutions they work for, but they’re awfully precise about the numbers. And Sgt. Andrew Chandler, the supposed Brit, is happy to tell me he’s been assigned to the “782nd Brigade Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division[3]” but leaves that box full of diamonds dangling like a poster kitten.

Sergeant, you had me at “Kindly accept my apology for sending you this email without your consent,” but I want specifics about those diamonds. Are they GIA graded? Could I put them in a pendant or a tennis bracelet? Did you get them from Cartier? Tiffany? Harry Winston?

The ingenuity of these scams is often betrayed by their sloppiness, not just in the lack of pertinent detail (and the overcompensating TMI) but in the typos, as well as the failure to localize their copy for American audiences. Clearly, these financial wizards need copy editors and proofreaders.

Which is why I am hereby offering my services. If you’re in this game, for a small percentage (or a box of diamonds), all you have to do is send me your pitch and I’ll gladly give it the once-over. Just include your SSN, your bank routing number, your passwords, your first dog’s name, and any offshore account information pertinent to this or other business transactions.

In short, there’s simply not a more congenial spot for happily-ever-aftering than here in Scamalot.

Warmest Regards,

The King

Book Passages

One reason I like used book stores is because you can find more than books there. I once found a dollar bill in a book, which paid for half its pages and one of its covers. Another time, I found a receipt from Rhodes Department Store in Seattle, written out to Mrs. Myra Helm, who was living at the Olympic Hotel. Mrs. Helm paid $2.56 for three books, one of which cost 39 cents.

When I turned over the receipt, I came upon the following printed statement: “Rhodes Department Store is owned and financed entirely in Seattle. Rhodes money is deposited exclusively in Seattle banks. Rhodes profits are reinvested in Seattle. Shop at Rhodes[,] where every dollar buys a dollar[’]s worth and then continues to work for you by building Seattle into a bigger and better city.”

In other words, don’t bother spending your money at Sears—or in Tacoma, where Albert, Henry, and Charles Rhodes first established a department store in 1903, before Albert jumped ship and moved to Seattle in 1907 to establish his own store. (Do we sense some passive-aggressive sibling rivalry in this document?)

The book in which Mrs. Helm left her folded receipt is called Northwest Passage, by Kenneth Roberts. Published in 1937, it appears to be a fictionalized account of Robert Rogers and his Rangers, who were real-life frontiersmen during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. I say “appears” because I never actually got around to reading it, and I bought it more than 20 years ago at a cluttered bookshop in Seattle’s Belltown district.

Like Northwest Passage, many books remain unread on my shelves. Here’s a smattering of well-intentioned tome purchases that now collect dust: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace (bought before the author committed suicide); Underworld, by Don Delillo; Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon; Son of the Circus, by John Irving; and, of course, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, by Geza Vermes. My literary ambitions have clearly been outstripped by my laziness.

There are many more. Many, many more. Books on philosophy. Books on history. There’s even a second book titled Northwest Passage, this one by William Dietrich. It’s about the Columbia River, or so the blurb on the back says. And, yes, there’s also a book called Northwest Passages (plural), by Bruce Barcott, which I’ve managed to dip into once or twice because it’s an anthology—and the passages are short.

Just to be clear, I’ve managed to not read plenty of shorter books, as well—poetry, short-story collections, literary journals—none of which would require much of my disposable time. I’ve also managed to not read two books about books: The Book on the Book Shelf, by Henry Petroski, and A Passion for Books: A Book Lover’s Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring For, and Appreciating Books, edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, with a foreward by Ray Bradbury. The ghosts of dead intentions, these volumes on bibliophilia have been haunting me from the bookshelf for far too long, daring me to truly appreciate their contents or the contents of any book on my shelf. (Side note of braggadocio: In the parlance of a certain presidential candidate, Ray Bradbury and I were once “stablemates” in the same edition of The Writer magazine. My short story “Please, Leave a Message” was cheek by jowl with his essay “How to Keep & Feed the Muse.” Well, OK, Bradbury’s piece was actually an article taken from The Writer’s archive, circa 1961 . . . but still. And did I read it? Nope.)

Have I lost the passion for reading? Are my books more about artifact than artistry? I don’t think so. But I do fall asleep more easily when I read these days. A few years back, I came up with a theory about reading and slumber. Reading approximates REM sleep. The eyes move across the page, often rapidly. You’re immersed in a dream state when you read, an alternate world. No wonder I can’t last more than a few pages.

But I’m trying not to feel guilty about it. As was pointed out in several recent articles, the Japanese even have a word for the practice of buying books but not reading them: tsundoku. It’s all about the possibility of reading, the librariness of life.

And so I suppose I will keep on accumulating books, if perhaps at a slower pace. I’ve told myself that I will not buy a book by an author if I haven’t read another book by said author that’s already on my shelf. (Tell that to the three books by Donna Tartt—or, for that matter, Barbara Kingsolver—which I’ve yet to crack open).

Truth is, I’ve always liked surrounding myself with books, even if I only pull them off the shelf for a quick smell and to feel the hefty effort that went into writing them. After all, the potential to read them remains. (My intentions are not fully dead, just sometimes on life support.)

What’s more, I do occasionally turn, serendipitously, to a passage just to discover something out of context—like a dollar bill or a receipt left for my personal archive, creating a story of its own.

Thank you, Myra Helm, wherever you are.

Killer Cat

Recently, the cat left a young weasel on the doorstep. Aside from a puncture wound on the neck, the weasel was intact, with a reddish upper coat and a white underbelly and a long, narrow body and stubby legs. I’d seen a weasel only once before, loping across the road while I waited in the early morning gloom with the kids for the bus to come, and we had to think twice before realizing what it was. I’d heard about weasels since I was a kid but never really expected to see one. Rats? Sure. Rabbits? Yep. But a weasel? In my experience, a weasel was more a derogatory term than a mammal. A weasel was the kid you couldn’t trust, the salesman you couldn’t believe, the politician you knew was talking out of his ass.

But our cat, with the non-menacing name of “Dusty,” had deposited a real weasel on the front porch, and so I was no longer in doubt that weasels—the Least weasel, to be specific (Mustela nivalis)—did exist beyond the realm of insult and connivery. Dusty, in fact, has brought us many creatures over the years: mice, rats, shrews, squirrels, chipmunks, baby rabbits, not-so-baby rabbits, salamanders, newts, frogs, robins, thrushes. Once, he even caught a hummingbird, which wasn’t dead, only stunned, and which lay in my wife’s palm until she took it outside and, after a brief pause in the daylight, it zipped into the shadows of the nearby trees.

Dusty is a hunter on par with Orion or Davy Crockett. Like many cats, he doesn’t always kill. Sometimes he brings live mice into the house and sets them loose because, hey, what else is a cat to do? But he does kill more often than he doesn’t, and he does devour, sometimes from head to toe. If he leaves something behind, it’s usually the odd greenish organ or intestine. This from a cat with soft, camel-colored fur and a “what ya gonna to do about it?” disposition.

Mentor to Dusty was Milo, a 22-pound tabby. Milo lived 14 years before he disappeared one night, perhaps his heart giving out as he roamed the woods or his overburdened legs too sore to escape a roaming coyote. In his prime, Milo was country strong and seemingly unafraid of anything. He was also the Mike Tyson of cats, with a meek meow that must have been imported from another, daintier feline. Milo, in truth, was the sweetest cat I’ve known, a hefty lap warmer, approachable to any carbon-based life form that might pet or feed him and an adoptive father to not only Dusty but also Dusty’s predecessor, Mango, who lasted six months before disappearing.

That’s the nature of cats in the country. They have plenty of opportunities to catch and kill, but they also have plenty of opportunities to be caught and killed. In his first year, Dusty disappeared for more than a day, and we thought he’d gone the way of Mango, his half-brother. I’d walked the three acres of our property, calling his name but resigned to the fact that Milo would once more be on his own. Finally, after another day passed, I walked out to our chicken coop and decided to call one last time, and I heard a distant, plaintive meow. Over in the woods between our house and the neighbor’s property was Dusty, up high in an alder tree, clinging to a few spindly branches. Something had obviously chased him into the woods. I had to borrow the neighbor’s orchard ladder to reach him, my toes on the top rung and one arm stretched out while the other held onto the tree.

Dusty had another brush with death a year or so later, when a vet treating him for toxoplasmosis (a parasitic disease related to eating mice) accidentally punctured Dusty’s lung while attempting to put a feeding tube into him. The vet rushed Dusty to an emergency pet hospital and paid for his care, which included the removal of a lung lobe. But you wouldn’t know what this cat had been through once his belly-length scar furred over. Before long, Dusty was back to his hunting grounds, toxoplasmosis be damned.

And so now a weasel. What was the meaning of this? Like many cats, Dusty liked to make a show of his conquests: “Look what I did! Hey, look. Come on!”

Here was another trophy that required inspection and approval. And yet, because the weasel was something new to me, I couldn’t help but think of it as some kind of symbolic gift. Like many animals, weasels bear significance to many cultures. For the Athabascan tribe in Alaska, weasel tails have been good luck charms and signs of wealth. To the Blackfoot, they’ve been considered part of the cycle of life and death. In Greece, weasels have been associated with the destruction of clothing, especially bridal dresses; if you find one near your house, it’s bad luck, so having a killer cat around might be a good idea. But not so in China, where killing a weasel brings bad luck.

Dusty couldn’t care less about cultural symbolism, however. Hunting is part of his DNA, despite 10,000 years of feline domestication. And presenting his prey, dead or alive, is most likely his way of showing what he can do. It’s what he did for Milo, and it’s what he does for us. It’s possibly even his way of teaching us how to hunt.

I sometimes wonder if Dusty will retire from hunting, as Milo did once he’d trained Dusty. He sleeps about 20 hours a day. You can usually find him on the bed or in the sock basket. But inevitably something else will show up on the doorstep or in the dining room—half a bird, perhaps, feathers strewn like confetti, or a squirrel’s tail and, of course, those bitter, yet neatly bestowed organs.

Such a capable killer he is. So soft and warm and cute.

Ain’t No Cure for the End of Summer Blues

One of my daughter’s favorite words is petrichor, which is the smell of rain after a dry spell. Rain on a dusty road. Rain on withered grass. Rain interacting with the oils on plants and in the ground and, sometimes, mixing with ozone during a lightning storm. You don’t smell rain when it falls from the sky. And you don’t smell it when it’s been raining a while, say in November. But in late summer, after a long dry spell? That’s petrichor—a word that was invented in 1964 by two Aussie scientists who coined the phrase as a combination of the Greek words for rock (petra) and the blood of gods (ichor).

My wife is partial to crepuscular. Your cat is crepuscular. Any creature that becomes active around twilight is crepuscular. In high school, my friends and I were often crepuscular, especially in the summertime once we got our driver’s licenses. To me, the most intriguing time of day at the local fair is dusk, when the lights on the carnival rides begin to take possession of the midway, the air gets thinner and shadows blend into ephemera. Cats on the prowl and riders on the Tilt-a-Whirl are crepuscular emanations in the waning day.

The odd thing about crepuscular is that it seems as if it should be onomatopoeic (another great word), but it’s not. I expect it to describe something tortoise-like, with a hard shell or carapace. I expect it to have an etymology that combines muscular with creep. But really it’s just a Latin derivative for “twilight” (crepusculum). So rather than being onomatopoeic, it’s mostly taxonomic. Whatever the case, my cat doesn’t care.

Recently, I came upon the word serotinal, which means late summer. It can be used for certain kinds of plants that bloom at this time of year. It can also suggest a feeling of melancholy as the summer winds down. A serotinal nostalgia, for instance. And it sounds like a new pharmaceutical you might ask your doctor about. Feeling overly wistful? Experiencing extreme cases of longing? Try Serotinal! (Side effects may include nausea related to the consumption of fair snow cones, a soul-crunching lack of drive to clean the gutters before October, and excessive remembering of one’s halcyon days. If remembering persists longer than four hours, call your doctor.)

No other season ends with such pensiveness. Fall turns to winter right around the time the holidays kick in and the first snows arrive. Winter ends with spring, and the last snow of the year is rarely mourned. Spring turns to summer, and school is out, vacations commence, and shorts and flip-flops rule the day. And summer does what at the end? It falls, and we are booted out of Eden.

There is usually a point, however, at which summer begs us to leave it behind. If the heat has been excessive, the air muggy or filled with the smoke of regional wildfires, it’s time for a change.

And, now, the air is clearing. School has started. Autumn scratches at the door like a hungry cat.

To be sure, green still clings to the trees, as the sun vectors toward another equinox. Summer has but a few days left, and there’s a serotinal feeling in the air, bearing with it a certain trepidation about what the fall might (or might not) bring.

Banding Together

The NFL’s corporate veneer might not require live musical interludes, but it’s hard to imagine a high school or college football game without the sonic lift of a band. Even if the band doesn’t march at halftime, they are there in the stands, providing the soundtrack to your Friday or Saturday entertainment.

Interesting, then, that while you can’t really have a high school football game without a band, you can have a marching band without a football game. I learned as much when my oldest daughter started drumming in her high school band two years ago. Until then, I was hardly aware of marching band competitions, or that preseason band camp would be such an intense experience, with 12-hour days that would put two-a-day football practices to shame. That year the marching band essentially went undefeated by taking first place in all competitions when pitted against bands within the same classification. Sometimes, they even outperformed larger bands. In truth, the band had a better year than the football team.

My youngest daughter joined the squad this year on mellophone, which is a cross between a French horn and a trumpet. Like her sister, she has found a community that might not have otherwise been afforded her. Most of the kids in the band get good grades and are high achievers. Many are transformed from hesitant freshman to confident seniors. Many become leaders in school and in life.

The same might be said about other activities, too. Certainly, football and other sports provide opportunities for leadership, teamwork, and communal bonding. But there’s something about marching band that’s truly remarkable. Unlike, say, art club or the Tech Student Association or the cross-country team, marching band is a large operation, bigger in some respects than the football team. Unlike most football teams, however, the marching band is co-ed. In fact, all three drum majors on our high school band—the quarterbacks of the team—are girls. It’s an egalitarian club that you don’t see operating on such a scale anywhere else in the school system.

What’s more, band competitions are less about conquering a foe (though first-place awards are nice) than conquering your self-doubts among the elements. Scores are not based on taking down an opponent but rather on perfecting your field show. Football players have the advantage of turning adrenaline into a viable force. Twenty-two players on a field can slip and slide and collide in the mud, be blown about by the wind or deluged by rain, but their plays—no matter how well designed—do not attempt the level of choreography that an 80-person marching band requires. Within seconds, a football play becomes improvisational, and then the whistle blows and there’s an opportunity to regroup. Marching band, on the other hand, seeks precision and concentration throughout the duration of a performance. Adrenaline must be checked and channeled into crisply synchronized movements, all while maintaining proper breath control. And the rain can’t be easily wiped from your nose when you’re sliding a trombone.

I say this as someone who has played football and been a football fan most of his life. But I’m also a musician, if on a minor scale, and I’m very pleased that my daughters have become musicians. For music provides food to both the heart and the brain. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitan notes in his book This is Your Brain on Music, music activates “an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes.”

I’d argue that music in a social setting—as an act of teamwork, as an act of community—can be even more invigorating to these organs. The neurons fire, and the social skill set expands in concert. Plus, while marching band (or choir, jazz, and symphonic band) might not be cool to some kids, it’s often the breeding ground for some of the coolest people on the planet—the rock and pop stars who took piano lessons and voice lessons as kids, who spent thousands of hours practicing their paradiddles or scales.

Sure, there are the few raw, untutored talents who come along once in a generation and capture the popular imagination, but for the most part it’s the band kids who write the soundtracks to our lives. And music, unlike most team sports, doesn’t have a shelf life. Tackling someone after the age of 30 is a questionable proposition. Tackling a new song or instrument, on the other hand, has no age barrier.

Webbing Season

Three spiders have parked off the front porch like gillnetters waiting for a run of salmon, their webs strung between the gutter and an azalea bush. They wait patiently—patiently in the human world, at least—for whatever might come their way.

The increased presence of such webs coincides with the changing season. The nights cool, the dew returns to the grass that had baked into a tawny hide during a rainless summer. Just this week the rain returned, yet the land still looks parched. A row of hydrangeas has survived well enough, some of the flowers still the color of Siamese cat eyes. From the porch, you can look at them and the barn, which houses a riding mower and a chicken coop with an attached pen. I haven’t been out there much lately because I haven’t needed to mow in two months, and the chickens are all gone, now. Gone to coyotes. Gone to raccoons. We didn’t replenish them this spring, after losing the last hen to the predatory nature of her egg-bound body.

And yet I know what’s out there in the erstwhile chicken pen, all the weeds that have colonized the ground since the chickens vanished. A butterfly bush has migrated inward, somehow finding its way to the other side of a huge cedar stump. Dandelions, prickly hawthorn stalks, Himalayan blackberries, sow thistle—each has staked a claim in this abandoned space. Once, in midsummer, I hacked down as much as possible with a machete, but it mostly came back.

One could tally a fair census of spiders out in the pen, but I hesitate to go check. For if there’s one thing I can’t abide about spiders in the fall it’s how their sticky polymer filaments seem to find just the optimal height for a surprise attack. Walking into a cobweb, in my estimation, is much more disconcerting than encountering the spider who built it. I hate the sensation that something—some invisible liquid protein spewed from an eight-legged body and acquiring a relative tensile strength greater than steel—has just attached to my nose, eyelashes, upper cheek, and ear.

The webs are more prolific this time of year because their makers have a boatload of eating and reproducing to do before they die. (Don’t we all?) Hatched in spring, these little Charlottes assume more important duties than saving some pig at the state fair. Like bats, they help suppress the insect population, which does us far more favors than we might realize. How odd, then, that as the webbing season continues into October, spiders and bats become the spooky accoutrements of Halloween, when it’s the mosquitoes, carpet beetles, and thrips of the world that cause more damage.

But here we are on fall’s doorstep, not quite ready for frost on the pumpkin. Early fall. Late September. When the sun’s trajectory shifts more noticeably southward, even though the shift has been steady all along. When the equinox levels day and night and the weather is perhaps more amenable to chores. This is a season for taking account, for battening down the hatches—cleaning gutters, clearing the roof of moss, sealing the chimney, washing the baffle on the septic tank. This is the season for projects.

Which is why I feel humbled by the industry of the garden-variety spiders (Argiope aurantia) parked off my front porch. Actually known as garden spiders (or yellow garden spiders or corn spiders or, yes, writing spiders, among other names), they display an amazing facility for engineering. They are project-oriented, writing their webs with the aptitude of coders working thirty minutes away on a different sort of web. Amazingly, spiders can tune their homes with the precision of a luthier. Each sector has a corresponding pitch so they know where to go, can respond quickly, when prey is inbound. Imagine the vibration, the hum, the symphony a spider web makes in the seconds before stinging, bundling, and, eventually, devouring.

Requiem for a housefly (Musca domestica).

Maybe these arachnids could write in human language, with the proper elements of style, if they wished. Maybe they actually could save a pig.

That would be terrific.

Among the Ruins

We’d come to Tintern Abbey because it was located just across the border, just across the River Wye, in Wales, the land of my distant ancestors. We’d also come because of William Wordsworth, who mentions the abbey in a poem that isn’t about the abbey at all but about his ability to remember and contemplate and be inspired by experience. The abbey itself is referred to only in the poem’s title—“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798”—which has to be one of the least inspiring titles about being inspired that has ever been applied to a poem.

But we came because I’d read Wordsworth in college, and I wanted to at least set foot on Welsh soil, even though we had many other places on our itinerary that beckoned to the east: Bath, Stonehenge, the medieval smuggler’s town of Rye, Bodiam Castle, and then, of course, London.

What we found on the sylvan banks of the Wye, much to our pleasure, were the ruins of a Cistercian monastery that Henry VIII had dissolved and plundered (after dissolving a few marriages first and founding the Church of England). The abbey’s roof is gone, some walls and outer buildings crumbled, but the primary structure of the church—its soaring pillars and archways—can stir the soul nonetheless. Instead of stone floor, you walk on grass. Here’s a place where the human endeavor to reach the heavens is pulled back into focus by the surrounding, tree-flush hillsides as seen through paneless windows and doorless doorways and by the verdant growth beneath your feet. The original spiritual activity of Cistercian monks is gone, but a spiritual connection remains and is in some ways magnified by the wreckage.

I sensed this would be the case before visiting, had Googled pictures of the abbey’s Old Red Sandstone remains while plotting our tour, but was not entirely prepared for the effect, especially since I’d seen other ruins in my life. In fact, visiting a ruin (or partial ruin) generally puts me in mind of a different poem—one by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was a generation younger than Wordsworth. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley reminds us how the ravages of time can take down even the most powerful of rulers, including the King of Kings whose monument to testosterone has decayed into “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.” (Fun fact: Shelley, who had a beef with Wordsworth for deserting his nature-loving radicalism and becoming too conservative, wrote a sonnet cutting his predecessor down to size.)

But then I pulled a Wordsworth and started thinking about how I was feeling. In truth, Tintern Abbey inspired me to write a song, though not immediately—only when I returned home and recollected my emotions in tranquility, as was Wordsworth’s wont for poetic discourse. For me, nature’s inclination toward recapturing the spaces once filled by lofty human achievement (sky instead of roof, grass instead of floor) provided a suitable check to human hubris, which is what Shelley warbles about in “Ozymandias.” It also became, in the narrative I was conceiving, representative of the ephemeral, no-promises quality of a traveler’s romance—of a guy who meets a girl at the ruins of a church, travels with her to other places, falls in love, and discovers that such a romance, much like the abbey, has an expiration date.

Things fall apart. Castles, churches, and sometimes love.

But time also provides opportunity for new creation. If time destroys (and doesn’t give a damn about it), it also avails the distance necessary for emotions to be recollected, sifted, sorted, compressed, cooked, cooled, and reheated. Love among the ruins—once ruined—becomes fodder for a poem, a story, a song, or a made-for-TV movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier.

And so I consume my fodder as I glance backward. I think of how we wandered the grounds at Tintern Abbey that day. Took our pictures, saw cows grazing in the nearby field, walked the nave, paused in the transepts, read placards about the night stair and the lavatorium and the presbytery, separated for quiet contemplation and converged for quiet commentary, jumped off stones (at least the kids did), and saw small indications of nature’s continuing impulse to seed new life into cracks and sills.

When we left, we crossed the River Wye and headed for Bath and the Roman times and, a few days later, Stonehenge, where time and human achievement took on yet another formulation in the grass beneath an open sky.

Fandom and the Self

Ask a Bororo tribesman: Who are you? He may reply: I am parakeet. 
(Ask an L.S.U. fan at a football game: Who are you? He may reply: I am a tiger.)

— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

The ticket stub was worth $1.00 off one family-size pizza at all participating Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, but it’s a good thing I didn’t redeem it, or I’d be up one long-forgotten pizza and down a significant memory prompt. Flip the ticket over and you’ll see a graphic of the original Seahawks logo. They played the Los Angeles Rams on August 17, 1978, and this stub from that game represents one of the best birthday presents I’ve ever received. I must have lost the accompanying note my dad wrote decades ago, but I kept the stub, despite the fact that it provided admission to a mere preseason game and we sat in the 300 level of the Kingdome, just a few rows from the top.

Didn’t matter—for I, a native of the Pacific Northwest, was thrilled to not only be attending my first NFL game but to catch my favorite team: the visiting Rams. Why a team from L.A.? The formative years in my sports-fan psyche occurred before the NFL existed in Seattle. The same can be said for Major League Baseball, which found me following the Yankees in the early ’70s until the Mariners came along.

I had pledged my allegiance to the Rams in 1973 because they were good (12-2 that year) and because I liked their uniforms. I memorized the players by position, was a fan of their coach, Chuck Knox. I begged to be allowed to stay up until halftime of Monday Night Football to catch the highlights of that Sunday’s Ram game, to hear the halting diction of Howard Cosell as he described how a team’s comeback was “too little, too late.” If the Rams lost, I cried, which happened only twice that year until the playoffs. (Damn you, Dallas Cowboys and the horse you rode in on!)

After the Seahawks hatched in 1976, I certainly became a fan, but a fan with conditions. It took a while before I could recognize myself in that peering raptor’s eye. It took a few years before I stopped pretending to be Lawrence McCutcheon or Harold Jackson on the playground and identified with burgeoning local heroes such as Jim Zorn and Steve Largent.

I can recall the day my allegiance shifted for good. By 1979, my dad had purchased season tickets, and the Rams were back for a game on November 4 of that year. The teams had similar records, hovering around .500. We were now sitting in the corner of the end zone on the 200 level of the Kingdome, and the Rams proceeded to pummel the Seahawks 24-0. The most depressing stat? The Seahawks had -7 total yards, the worst offensive performance in NFL history.

The fact that I was so depressed belied my changing heart. How dare the Rams do that to us! To us! I could’ve stuck with the Rams, who went on to play in the Super Bowl that season, but I didn’t. (Yes, I still rooted for them when they lost to the Steelers in Super Bowl XIV, but the air had been leaking from my L.A. balloon for quite a while by the time Cheryl Ladd sang the national anthem and Up with People presented the halftime show, “A Salute to the Big Band Era.”)

And so I became a Seahawk through and through. At a certain point, I even started hating the Rams, who had become like a bad ex-girlfriend to me. They found new fans in St. Louis (until they abandoned those fans and returned to L.A.). And, more recently, they’ve been messing with my Seahawk heart like a faulty defibrillator: Think fake field goals and duplicitous punts and devious the-ball’s-over-here-no-it’s-over-there returns.

__________

When Chuck Knox became coach of the Seahawks in 1983 and delivered them to the playoff promised land, it only seemed fitting to me. Coach Knox, “Ground Chuck,” had made the transformation from Ram to Seahawk (by way of the Bills) just like me. We were shape-shifters of a sort, shedding old hide for new feathers. We had taken on new totems, joined new tribes. Such are the rights of passage in the American education system that most of us join new tribes as we matriculate from one school to another. I, for instance, have been a Cougar, a Wolverine, an Indian, a Fighting Missionary, and a Cavalier (or Wahoo). (Two of these mascots have either been changed since my graduation or come under scrutiny; I’ll let you guess which.) Add in Little League teams and miscellaneous intramural teams, and I’ve also been a Jet, a Cardinal, a Smasher, an Eagle, a Red, and a Mercenary, among others. It’s enough to give you an identity crisis.

Of course, sports tribalism doesn’t require you to be an actual attendee of a school or a player on a team or a resident of a team’s city. But it’s only natural to fall for your home squad, to nurture it, to wish it the best, to roar from the depths of your diaphragm when things go well and to weep like your nine-year-old self when things go poorly. The Greeks and Romans figured out long ago that the collective viewing of sports could displace some of the bloodlust of combat. (And often those events included just about as much blood and lust as actual fighting.) Sports can operate as a kind of civic release valve that allows for the tribal inclination toward warfare to be satisfied and settled under mostly safer, more controlled conditions.

What’s more, tribal identity in the sports world is a curious act of self-assimilation. The self becomes part of the collective—and sometimes at an elite level. In Seattle, where the “12th Man” has transmogrified into “12s,” (a somewhat irksome happenstance involving a Texas A&M trademark), fans are not just Seahawks but über-Seahawks. The field of play is not just restricted to the green gridiron. In the stands, Seahawks fans take pride in affecting the outcome of the game by creating so much noise that the opponent jumps offside and Guinness World Records are achieved. (Louder than a jackhammer! Louder than a turbine jet engine!—are the usual decibel-related ejaculations.) That’s not just a Seattle thing, of course, but the 12s seem to be especially good at it.

Still, tribal affiliation can be challenged as quickly as saying, “You’ve been cut.” That’s the business of sports, and sometimes it’s hard for fans to keep up. What, wait, Griffey’s been traded for Mike Cameron and a can of magic Hormel beans? It can be a shock to the system when your favorite player leaves. It can create a temporary displacement of your tribal identity if you really, really identify with the player as much as you do the team.

One solution is to have multiple affiliations, creating a kind of Venn diagram of who you are and whom you’ll root for: I hate the Oklahoma Thunder because they stole our Sonics, but damn if I’m not gonna cheer for Kevin Durant. Another solution is to excommunicate the player: You are nothing to me now. So long, A-Rod.

Selfhood, self-identity, within a collective enterprise is an odd phenomenon to think about (this self, this independent being that I am, is somehow defined by its associations?), but people do it all the time. We are Spartans or Trojans or Yankees or Southerners or Republicans or Democrats or Christians or Muslims or lawyers, journalists, developers, pipe fitters, baristas, magicians, musicians, monks. And usually we are many of these selves at once. Not only are we who we cheer for, but we are where we come from, what we believe, and what we do. It’s kind of like a stew—or maybe a can of mixed nuts.

Which raises a phenomenological question: Is the self an onion or a nut? A Shrek (“Ogres have layers. Onions have layers.”) or an Austin Powers (“This is me in a nutshell.”)? Is my “self” just a series of layers that can be peeled away until there’s nothing, or is there some me-kernel within an outer shell?

Is a 12 an onion or a nut?

I am not just a Seahawks fan, of course. (Nobody is.) I hesitate to even call myself a “12” because I don’t have the dedication that other fans possess. I don’t particularly care to join clubs, churches, or political parties. And yet I love that feeling of being part of a team, especially in an improvisational way. I like the loosely collaborative nature of pick-up games and jam sessions. I like working toward a common goal.

Perhaps I learned when I was a child that too much devotion to your team could lead to too much pain during a loss. So I adjusted my thinking, matured (perhaps), and developed a stoic approach to fandom. If I missed a game on TV and heard that my team lost, I told myself I didn’t want to see the game anyway and had more important things to do. If my team won (unless it was a championship finale), I told myself there’d be another game to watch. I learned to temper my seasonal frustrations by looking to the future. A lot of sports fans resort to this kind of emotional template when the season seems gone: No playoffs? Well, at least we got a high draft pick! “Suck for Luck!”

But there are dangers in cloaking yourself in a carapace of nonchalance. Focus too much on controlling your emotions and soon you realize how much they are controlling you. The self becomes its own battlefield, its own gridiron. The nut becomes mush. The onion diced and confused.

I can never be the childhood fan I was because I can’t truly be a child again. There have been too many seasons for me to feel the newness of it all, the puppy love of being a fan. But I do have the memory of that feeling. I do remember crushing on my team, and every now and then that sense of exhilaration returns (the Seahawks win the Super Bowl in a dominating performance!) as well as that sense of utter despair (the Seahawks return to the Super Bowl and lose on a heartbreaking interception at the goal line!). 

And thinking back on it, I take an odd pride in the Seahawks’ ineptitude during that 1979 game against the Rams. Negative seven yards? Really? Nobody can top that! It’s the self that experiences ineptitude which better understands greatness when greatness arrives. Just ask Cubs fans.

Maybe a fuller version of the self is accessed via an artifact like my ticket stub, stowed away for nearly 40 years, that’s no longer redeemable for its original purpose but capable of being redeemed in another way. Half that torn ticket left my possession on the very day of its use, but the other half is what I keep with me in the field of memory, providing admission to an earlier version of who I am. 

But the Sun is Eclipsed by the Moon

When I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in high school, I was delighted by Mark Twain’s use of a solar eclipse as a plot fulcrum. Hank Morgan, bonked on the head and woken up in sixth-century Camelot, leverages his 19th-century, American-bred knowhow to fend off superstitious Englishmen who would've had him burned at the stake. Not only that, his ability to magically blot out the sun convinces Arthur and his courtiers to make Morgan the king’s right-hand man.

Twain wrote the book as a satire of chivalric romance, and he shows Hank Morgan’s good side in his attempts to democratize Arthurian England and end slavery. But we also find in Morgan, who dubs himself “The Boss,” the mixed seeds of the flimflam man, carnival magician, and Gilded Age entrepreneur—much like the character played by Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.

Four years before Twain’s book was published, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines came out, using a lunar eclipse as a plot twist to the benefit of adventuring Victorian Englishmen. Twain might have been one-upping the British author, but both may have taken their cue from Christopher Columbus, who not only stumbled upon America but also set the tone for a certain strain of flimflammery that continues to this day. Upset that the local inhabitants of Jamaica had stopped providing food to his men (after his men had plundered their villages), Columbus used a lunar eclipse to convince the locals that his god was angry. Now, some might argue that Columbus was only being shrewd in using his greater cosmic knowledge to gain provisions, that the local tribe members on this island were simply being outwitted and outplayed as if they were contestants in an episode of Survivor. But we should remind ourselves that, if knowledge is power, then with great power comes great responsibility. Or so saith Stan Lee.

Know-nothingism is not the alternative, of course. Few people could spot a good flimflam man like Mark Twain, and few people made more fun of gullible mobs than Twain did. To rise above the mob, Twain suggests, we could use more empirical evidence and less romanticized superstition. We need scientific inquiry. Consider, for instance, that it took the study of solar eclipses to discover helium and prove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 

________

I recall two partial solar eclipses from my childhood in the Pacific Northwest. The first was probably the one that occurred on March 7, 1970, when I was in kindergarten. My class marched out of its portable at Sunny Hills Elementary to the playground and lined up to look into pinhole boxes so that we wouldn’t go blind. I felt a bit perturbed that I had to watch at a remove, that what I was witnessing was a representation of the actual thing—a shadow puppet on a wall. Seeing the moon partially fill in the dot of sunlight on the piece of paper was sort of like watching a hesitant student take a multiple-choice test. Of course, today I’m appreciative of the precautions our teachers took in preserving our five-year-old retinas. My middle-aged retinas thank them profusely.

The second partial solar eclipse likely was when I was sitting in 7th-grade math class at Pine Lake Junior High, just across the road from Sunny Hills. The teacher might have made a reference to the eclipse as he taught us how to calculate the area of a rhombus, but for the most part we just sat in our hard plastic chairs as day outside turned to not-really-night and the buzzing fluorescent lights became increasingly annoying. It’s possible that this moment marks the beginning of the end of my mathematical aptitude, but I’m not certain.

If I lost interest in math, however, I did not lose interest in the larger scientific questions that math could help solve—I just didn’t want to be the one performing the equations. What I liked most, and still like most, are the stories related to cosmic events and how people have tried to explain them, use them to their advantage, or simply give in and feel the awe of the moment. Herodotus writes of an eclipse that ended a six-year war between the Lydians and the Medes. Like the stadium lights going out at on a Friday-night football game, the lack of illumination put an end to hostilities. During the Peloponnesian War, Athenian general Nicias (with a little help from his priests) took a lunar eclipse as an omen to tarry around the harbor of Syracuse, only to be routed by the Syracusan fleet. So saith Thucydides.

Even in modern times, people get weird about eclipses. Annie Dillard, writing about a total eclipse in my home state of Washington (one that I have no recollection of but which occurred when I was still in junior high), notes the near hysteria: “From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching.” Dillard was in the Yakima Valley at the time, standing on a hill of wild barley, but where was I on that Monday morning in 1979? Learning to square dance in P.E.? Snoozing, open-lidded, through another math class? Why did this particular eclipse escape me?

Well, I had no choice but to be in school, learning, learning, learning. And maybe I didn’t even care at the time. It wasn’t the sun and the moon that concerned me most that year so much as sports, girls, and hobbits.

The following year I read about Hank Morgan and his exploits among the Knights of the Round Table (probably about the same time that I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Such spoofery helped loosen some of the cataracts of childhood gullibility from my eyes. I was probably also listening to Pink Floyd and The Who at the time and thinking: The Boss? Hmmm. Same as the old boss? . . . We don’t need no thought control. I was, at least internally, starting to question authority.

Fortunately, some authorities have the ability to inspire. My youngest daughter, who had a fantastic 8th-grade science teacher last year, is excited to see the upcoming eclipse, so much so that she’s incredibly disappointed that we can’t travel one state south to experience totality. Marching band camp at the high school has precluded that option. (“Trouble with a capital T!” I can hear a certain flimflam artist singing in The Music Man.) So we will instead head somewhere local on Monday morning, perhaps even our own yard, to see if the world as we know it will end.

Based on what I’ve learned so far, I don’t think it will—but there might be screaming.

And a Rock Feels No Pain

Some distance off the southern shoreline of Pine Lake, about five feet beneath the surface, there’s a rock. It’s a good-sized rock, you might even call it a boulder, but in the grand scheme of things it’s an inconsequential rock, likely one of many glacial erratics deposited here when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet extended down from British Columbia into Washington state during the Pleistocene epoch. When the ice retreated roughly 12,000 years ago, the Puget Sound region was left with a number of lakes, including Pine Lake and its neighbor, Beaver Lake, both now located in the city of Sammamish.

I say “now” because the area used to be rural, unincorporated King County, and back then the name “Sammamish” referred most specifically to the much larger lake down the hill and to the west of Pine Lake. The eponymous Sammamish High School, which is not one of the four high schools located within the city limits of Sammamish, is located many miles to the west in the city of Bellevue.

Well, the names may change, but the stone remains the same. From my family’s dock on Pine Lake, it would take half a minute to swim out to the rock and an area that my three brothers and I referred to as “The Island,” which was not an island so much as a shallow spot beneath the surface. It was amusing to swim out there and stand on the island, water at your armpits, and watch the boaters do double takes. It was even more fun to locate the rock, which by the end of a hot summer could elevate you until the water was at your waist.

One of my favorite times to search for the rock was at night, when the mysteries beneath the lake’s surface became even more pronounced. Who knew what lurked down there when the stars clicked on and the water turned as dark as ink? The lake bottom, coated by a soft, sedimentary muck, never quite prepared you for encountering the rock’s hardness. You’d swim out to the island and walk around, feeling tentatively with your toes. Sometimes you’d find it, sometimes not. Sometimes a fish would brush against your calf. I’m sure there were times when I came within inches of my goal before giving up and heading back to shore.

When I was younger, my dad swam out to the island with us, but he generally preferred to stay on the dock. An avid golfer, he brought home floating golf balls one year, along with a patch of Astroturf. Early in the evening, when most people had gone in for supper, our family took turns whacking balls toward the opposite shore while one of us puttered around in the boat with a fishing net as a scoop. My dad would give us tips on how to swing a club and then stand back to puff on his cigar. When he died in November of 2013, I walked out onto the dock and surveyed the calm, mist-laden water as the sun rose over the trees. Ice crystals had formed on the dock, and they crunched audibly underfoot. Not knowing what else to do, not knowing yet how to process the moment, I took out my phone and memorialized the crystals on the boards and the shroud of mist cloaking the neighboring docks. I needed something to mark the day, a picture of a natural occurrence that would freeze time like those crystals before it melted away. Back in the house, my dad’s cooling body lay waiting for the rest of the family to arrive, and after that, the stoic attendants from Flintoft’s Funeral Home.

_________

During this hot summer of 2017, when smoke comes down from Canada instead of sheets of ice, I find myself comforted by the rock’s presence. Just the other day, while visiting my mom, I located the solitary boulder—not once, not twice, but three times because, well, it’s easy to lose your coordinates underwater. Swim far enough away, and it can take a while to regain your bearings. Every summer day that I visit my mom, now, I wonder if it might be my last chance to find this personal monument to endurance (meaning both the rock’s permanence and the amount of time it can take to find the thing). And I think of all the friends and classmates who used to live on the lake or nearby and whose families may have long since departed, their houses sold, torn down, and replaced by swankier homes with pristine lawns and strong, fortress-like bulkheads along the waterfront.

The shoreline didn’t used to be this way. It used to harbor snakes and frogs. I have not seen tadpoles near the dock in decades. Before I could swim, I used to dig my fingers into the gray clay along the shore, beneath the roots of a fir tree that had been clinging there for generations.

It’s hard not to be sentimental about your childhood home, about summer days spent playing rag tag between docks or winter afternoons playing touch football on the ice when the lake froze over (a rare occurence). The lake was a commons, a byway, a runway, a theater. One of my brothers used to stuff his clothes into a plastic bag and swim to the park at the east end, where he’d meet up with his girlfriend. Somebody at the far corner of the lake owned a floatplane, which would come propelling toward us until it gained lift and cleared a flotilla of mallards. On the Fourth of July, most everyone who had a dock set off fireworks late into the evening, and the next day you’d see the torn, soggy carcasses of Roman candles and Whistling Petes bobbing in the water.

Memories can become nostalgia in a heartbeat, and nostalgia can become a playground for stubborn minds stuck in a halcyon glow. “You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe reminds us. Times change. Municipalities enact laws to help make such changes sustainable, and as a result you’ll no longer see people speeding along Pine Lake in floatplanes or boats with gas-powered outboard motors. I miss those days for nostalgic reasons, but I know the lake’s speed limit was adopted out of ecological necessity. The waves ate at the shoreline, which is why a lot of those bulkheads were first built. Fireworks are no longer permitted on the Fourth for what seems to be an obvious reason.

If I’m being honest, I’m saddened by the changes around the lake less because the big homes and big lawns are an affront to some sense of aesthetic proportion than because these dwellings—most of them—are simply not the ones I remember from my youth. There used to be shacks and cabins, some with wild, unkempt growth along the shoreline. A few of the older homes remain, including my mom’s (once “my parent’s,” once “mine”), but I have to remind myself that today’s lake will be tomorrow’s nostalgia for somebody else.

At nearly 87, my mom is still healthy enough to spend much of her day tending her garden. But I don’t like to think about the day when I can no longer return to Pine Lake as a resident or as the son of a resident. Certainly, I could go to the park, put in a kayak, and paddle around, but it wouldn’t be the same. Somebody else will live in that house, or, more likely, somebody else will tear it down and build a new one.

I’m pretty certain, however, that unless a new ice age arrives the rock will still be in its place, unseen by those on the surface but available to anyone who wants to search long enough to find it.

Shadow Play

Some shadows engulf and some shadows suggest. Some are acts of diffusion, blending into the eaves of a house, say, or into the leaves of a tree, murky and amorphous, unwilling to offer up definition yet capable of playing tricks on the mind. Fairy tales and ghost stories lurk in such shadows—in forests and creaky homes, where shapes become particulate matter and material forms lose their particularity.

Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki laments the loss of shadows when he writes of modern electrical illumination and Japanese architecture: “[O]ur ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.” We are quite a distance from Hemingway’s clean, well-lighted place, here, even though these two writers were near contemporaries. But the difference is perhaps only a matter of metaphorical temperament—for at the beginning of Hemingway’s famous short story, we are introduced to “an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.”

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is but one example of Hemingway’s iceberg view of writing in which only an eighth of a story—like the Titanic’s nemesis—is seen. So, too, are shadows, which obscure space and leave much unseen. Or untold.

Interesting that one of the waiters in Hemingway’s story proclaims the goodness of the light after pondering the reportedly suicidal old man (implying that the reason why the old man hangs out there is because of the cleanliness of the café and its illumination), yet the old man choses to sit in the shadow, not entirely exposed to the brightness.

Interesting, too, that it often takes a bright light to cast a shadow with any definition. From these kinds of shadows, we get more information, we see outlines, we cast puppets onto walls and profiles of loved ones onto paper. We put hands (a rabbit, a bird) into relief, noses and chins and Regency hairstyles. We make silhouettes.

The word silhouette comes from the 18th-century French finance minister Etienne de Silhouette, who was known for being cheap. He also liked to cut portraits out of paper. Compared to the more time-consuming and pricier option of commissioning a painting, silhouette profiles could be traced and rendered quickly with little expense.

Two-dimensional figurative outlines go back at least as far as Paleolithic handprints on cave walls. And, though many succeeding schools of painting have helped change the way we look at the world, we still seem to have an affinity for these images. Go to Instagram, for instance, and type silhouette into the search option and you’ll get more than 7 million posts—half a million if the word is plural. That might not be as impressive as cat (50 million) or love (1 billion and counting), but it’s something.

I think it’s safe to suggest that people are enamored of silhouettes much in the way they are enamored of sunsets, and often the two go together on Instagram. By themselves, sunset photos typically don’t live up to the original, unmediated experience that makes you gasp in delight. How many times have I taken a picture of a sunset over the ocean and looked at it later, only to go, “Meh, let’s drag that one into the trash bin”? But sometimes, when the sky glows yellow or red, a shape appears—a boat near the horizon, a figure on the beach, a lone tree in the desert—that is especially compelling for its sharpened outline and black interiority. We see, in an odd sort of way, the categorical thingness of this figure because we can’t see it fully. We see “sailboat” or “dog” much in the way we see street signs of walking people and crossing deer and rows of ducks. We see, perhaps in a Jungian sense, an archetypal representation.

I once took a picture of a man standing by a chain-link fence. The light was strong behind him, and when I looked at the photo and made a few adjustments for contrast I had a pretty nifty silhouette. I liked the graphic boldness of the image and the angular composition. But what I liked most about it was that you couldn’t tell if the man was leaning back against the fence or standing behind it like a parent at a Little League baseball game. Three dimensions became two, and my view of the world became simultaneously less complicated and more complicated.

Rorschach inkblot tests are often silhouettes (though not always), which serve as purposeful abstractions seeking interpretation. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave posits a thought experiment about what we would believe if all we saw were shadows cast on a wall. With the exception of a prisoner who escapes, Plato’s shackled inmates are not in a position to interpret these shadows because they do not think of them as shadows. But for the rest of us, what we know of shadows is possible because of what we know about light.

Silhouettes and shadows invite interpretation. They ask us to fill in the dark spaces, and when we do that we bring with us all the darkness and light we’ve borne throughout our lives as material for consideration.

For some reason, I find that appealing.

Note Bloody Roots

Marsh’s Free Museum sits just off the main drag in Long Beach, Washington, across the street from what’s purported to be the world’s largest frying pan. Inside you’ll find testament to the collectible soul of oddity, curiosity, knick-knackery, and good-old-American gimcrackery.  

Marsh’s most famous denizen is Jake the Alligator Man, currently mummified and encased in glass. Jake was featured in the Weekly World News, with the headline: “Half-human, half-alligator discovered in Florida Swamp.” According to later reports in the now-defunct tabloid, Jake not only escaped captivity, but he also murdered a man from Miami and gave birth. To what, I’m not sure.

I’ve been visiting Marsh’s since I was a child, and Jake has not been the only draw. Near Jake stands a Seaburg H Model Solo Orchestrion, which is essentially a souped-up player piano. High on the walls, you’ll find a variety of taxidermied animals, including a two-headed calf, an eight-legged lamb, and Morris the Cat, who was named after the feline from the TV commercials and now appears to be in a permanently catatonic state. There are fortune-telling machines; a strength testing machine that spouts off every few minutes in a voice that sounds like Owen Wilson playing the cook on a cattle drive (“Take the True Grip Challenge, right here!); a vintage, coin-operated game of baseball; kinetoscope peepshows such as Back to Nature: The Nudist Colony; and a dancing, singing, rather unsettling marionette clown named Bimbo. There’s also a game featuring a back-lit castle entrance, The Execution, in which “upon the solemn tolling of the bell . . . [t]he full drama of a modern execution is enacted for you”—which begs a very serious question: Just how “modern” can a castle execution be?

These and other items compose the museum part of Marsh’s Free Museum (although they are not all necessarily free). But as with most museums, there’s a gift shop, which amounts to most of the square footage in the building. From Jake the Alligator Man T-shirts to seashells and toys that might not make it past the end of your vacation, Marsh’s would not exist without offering unnecessary things to buy.

When I was a child, the item I coveted most from Marsh’s was a Greek fisherman’s cap. Never mind the salt-water taffy, popguns, or glass floats readily available. I’m not sure whether I told my parents about this desire for the hat, but it seemed to be the missing piece that would establish my sartorial splendor as I entered the second grade. Perhaps I’d envisioned myself sailing the Aegean Sea and casting a net into azure waters, but I doubt I knew what the Aegean Sea was back then, nor did I know the word azure.

We don’t always know what attracts us to the objects we desire—or the objects we find interesting. Which brings me to the thumb wart—or, more specifically, Abdul [sic] Nasser’s thumb wart. I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for a friend saying, “Hey, did you see the wart in the window?” Intrigued, I stepped a short distance from The Execution to an office window in the back of the shop. And there, taped in the lower right of the window, not too far from Bimbo the Clown, was a small piece of paper with the word WART at the top, beneath which was placed a dark tumescence of a thing, approximately an eighth of an inch in diameter. Under the wart was this statement: “BELIEVED TO BE STOLEN FROM ABDUL NASSAR’S THUMB BY AN ITINERANT MALAY MERCENARY, IN RANGOON, MARCH 17, 1954.” And below that was a parenthetical aside: “(NOTE BLOODY ROOTS).” The price was $15.

Now, there’s a lot to unpack from this easily missed piece of paper, which is one of many items taped to the windows in the back of Marsh’s Free Museum. Who, for instance, was Abdul Nasser? And how, pray tell, could the itinerant Malay mercenary have stolen his thumb wart? And why $15? Was that the going rate for black-market thumb warts at the time? Is that in 1954 dollars or 1974 dollars? And isn’t it curious that the note is so specific about the date, yet the wart is only “believed” to have been stolen? Finally, there are those bloody roots, those bloody, bloody roots—because if you were still skeptical about the rest of it, surely the bloody roots might be the clincher.

The name Abdul Nasser vaguely rang a bell, perhaps as someone who had been in the news when I was a kid. Turns out, Gamal Abdel Nasser was the second president of Egypt, serving from 1956 until his death in 1970. Interestingly enough, Nasser was targeted in an assassination attempt in 1954, but perhaps it was only the thumb wart that the attacker could successfully remove.

I don’t know, and I don’t know if it matters anymore. For we now seem to be living in an age in which warts of all kinds (whether real or fake) are readily on display.

Perhaps we should take a closer look at those bloody roots.

Curs in the Kitchen, Curs in the Church

She had transformed me to a curtal dog, and made me turn i'the wheel.

—Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

A few Novembers ago, during a time of year when radio shows are prone to discuss best practices in turkey cooking, I caught the tail end of a discussion about turnspit dogs. I don’t remember much about what was being said, but I do recall thinking: “Hmm . . . Turnspit Dogs. Good band name—or great band name?” (Never mind that I didn’t have a band.)

After some investigation, I learned that turnspit dogs (Canis vertigus, or “dizzy dog”) were used in kitchens during the 16th century to power the spits on which meat or fowl were cooked. Now extinct, these dogs were small and short-legged, possibly related to Welsh corgis. Some were curtailed—that is, these curs’ tails had been cut off. Most interesting to me (and perhaps a reason for the tail lopping) was that they worked inside something akin to a large hamster wheel, which was mounted on the kitchen wall and rigged mechanically to keep the spit rotating.

Turnspit dogs replaced boys who used to crank the spit by hand, but by the end of the 19th century these dogs had been replaced by other mechanisms such as the steam jack or the clock jack. Curiously, turnspit dogs, though considered ugly compared to other canines, often had another function. Come Sunday, they could be found in church, warming the feet of their masters beneath the pew.

I did this research in part because I wanted to write a song for my imaginary band. I wanted the song to be introductory and a statement of arrival—sort of like The Monkees’ theme song. I was, of course, way ahead of myself. Someday, I'll record the song, which for now is a bluesy ukulele number and offers up this sing-along chorus: “Whoa-oh, whoa-oh-oh—curs in the kitchen, curs in the church.”

In the meantime, I’m happy to use Turnspit as the name of my blog, which represents the nature of serendipitous inspiration (what’s on the radio at the moment you turn it on, what you might hear in a snippet of conversation). As often happens, one idea connects to another—and if you keep the wheel spinning, you might just get something flavorful to chew on.

What might such proteins consist of? Music? Tudor-era rotisserie cooking? Who knows? I like to be surprised by the connections that are made. I like to explore how subjects intermingle like guests at a dinner party.

Finally, I just discovered a band from Yorktown, Virginia, called The Turnspit Dogs. They specialize in popular music from the 18th century. There’s also a song called “The Turnspit Dog” by a band called MANKIND.

Oh, well. I suppose if MANKIND had a similar idea, it must be valid.

Cheers! And thanks for your indulgence.