The Trouble with Hippies

A couple evenings back I took in some live music in a roadhouse not far from my home.  A good friend of mine moonlights on mandolin with a four piece acoustic roots ensemble, and they’re good.  An interesting side effect of their occasional performances in our area is the attendance of every left winger in this extremely conservative Pennsylvania county.  The heads are often grey, but peasant skirts and tie dye are in evidence, the sweet smell of funny cigarettes is noticeable in the parking lot, and the political talk is pretty lefty, and sometimes pretty far out there. For example…

I was sitting at a small table with two friends, one of them the mandolin player’s wife who is an Emergency Room nurse, enjoying dinner and watching the band sound check, when we were joined by another old friend who’s been visiting from his home in New Hampshire.  He’s my age (mid-50’s), a carpenter and general handyman.  He’s wound up real tight, and pretty fringe, but he’s a really nice guy.  Having recently completed the sad duty many folks my age are called on to perform, and nursed his mom through her final illness, he took some time and completed the Pacific Crest Trail.  Now he’s starting to sniff the wind, and figure out what comes next. We talked about that.

“So what now?”

 “I don’t know, but I’m really feeling like I maybe should think about simplifying even more than I have been, you know? I have no debt, no young kids.  If I sell my place, then I have nothing tying me down, ya know. I can live in my van, and visit with folks, camp and hike, and work on a project when I need a little cash.  Ya know, strip it down to just the important stuff.”

“Health insurance?”

“Well, ya know, I’m thinking I can do just fine without that. I mean, if you hold your income down low enough, they have to treat you for anything catastrophic, right?”

 At this point, our friend the nurse agreed that below the poverty line patients get help from the hospital in applying for public assistance or the hospital just writes the treatment off. Wonderful. His hippy-ass isn’t paying for his trip to the emergency room. I am, and so are you, with higher health insurance costs.  This country is full of people who develop opinions without a lot of facts or consideration for others. I am reminded of the tea-bagger I watched last year shrieking into the face of a legislator that she wanted “…the government to keep its goddamned hands off my Medicare!” 

“Well, what about preventative care?”

“I don’t know, I mean I’m pretty fit and healthy.  I did actually have a physical at a doctor’s office this year, but what a ripoff! I mean he just listened to my chest and asked me a few questions and he was outta there in less than 10 minutes!”

“Really?”

“Well, he did check my prostate, but ya know, it seemed like he was only in there for a second. I mean, what could he possibly learn from that? I don’t think he took enough time.  Actually, I think I could probably check my own prostate with some instruction and do a better job than that!”

At this all ears at the table perked up.

“So how do you suppose you could do that man?”

“Well, there must be a way.”  Turning to my friend across the table he said “You’re a nurse, couldn’t I just check it myself?” 

He’s been staying at her place the last week or so, and she’s probably a little tired of him (as you’ve guessed by now, he’s a large personality), so she just chewed her pasta for awhile and looked at him. Then she said, “I don’t know man. You seem pretty determined though, so maybe.”

“Well, I mean how hard could it be? Women do self examinations of their breasts, right?”

In unison the rest of us at the table blurted out “It’s different than that.”

One of us observed that access might be difficult, but he was undeterred.

“Well, I wipe my backside each morning, how different could it be from that?”

Several of us again responded “It’s probably different from that too.”

We brought up the issues of professional experience, diagnosis and interpretation of results, and useful recommendations, but he went away undeterred.  I assume that, as of this writing, he has probably made at least one attempt…maybe more. Good for him.

Believe it or not, I kind of understand.  I spent 6 months living out of a backpack on the Appalachian Trail in 1981.  The experience left me with the secure and rock-solid understanding of what is important and what is not important in this world.  Clean water is important. A warm dry place to sleep is important. A healthy and fit body is important. Sufficient and wholesome food is important. The affection of other people is important. Everything else is not that big a deal.  My thinking has of course evolved to allow for the significance of civic life, for my profession, for the appreciation of creature comforts and good books and music, but I haven’t forgotten. You can do without a lot, and still be happy in this world.

I’ve always treated this as the great epiphany that has guided my adult life, but maybe not. I am reminded of a conversation I had with an editor friend of mine the previous week in which he opined “Sometimes when you see a bright flash of light and hear a loud ‘pop’ it’s not an epiphany. Sometimes it’s just you pulling your head out of your own ass.”

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Urge for Going

When I was in my twenties I worked what seemed like an endless string of seasonal jobs with various government  agencies that saw me laid off in the Autumn with money in my pockets.  Thus began a lifelong custom of running around in the woods in the Fall.  Backpacking, fishing, travel, big mountains and rivers, bottles and other things passed around campfires on the first cold nights: the ceremonial and often raucous wake for the recently expired Summer.  

The early trips were to New England, then the Northern Rockies, lately the Adirondacks.  There have been a few one-time-only locations too, but mostly I’ve flown North in the Fall.   I seem to need the sting of the first cold nights, the fire of the Maple leaves, and especially the sweet smell of Balsam and Spruce.  I have had a long string of companions on these trips, fell in with others along the way, and have done some of them solo.  I’ve been gone on some of them as long as a month.  Since I’ve been employed year-round (something that thankfully didn’t happen to me until I was in my thirties) these trips have also given me one of my most pleasurable annual exchanges with management.

 

I explain to them that in my absence, should they require my advice or assistance with absolutely anything, at any time, I’d be happy to oblige.  The only caveat is this: Since I won’t be anywhere with cell service, you’ll have to find me. Start by asking around in the bars in, say, Pinedale Wyoming, Gardiner Montana, or Saranac New York.

Good luck with that.

By now this annual hajj is instinctual.    In August I start to become restless without clearly knowing why. The next thing you know, my living room is littered with books and maps.  The pulse of my year is most palpable as Fall begins, and is best taken along a steep brook or on a trail in the forest.

Right now I’m waiting out a storm in a hotel somewhere in the Adirondacks.  More photos and observations to follow…  

Bread

The culinary interests of my mom’s family to some extent dictated that I would become a serious home brewer, vintner and baker as an adult. My mom made the best pizza crust imaginable, and used to feed the entire neighborhood at times. When I was a little kid, my grandfather made 25 gallons of red wine every September. I would peer over the lip of the barrel and listen to the cake of skins and stems hiss and fizzle with the working of the yeast, then close my eyes and inhale deeply the giddy perfume that overwhelmed the entire house. Fermentation still seems miraculous to me, a continuous wonder.

As a college kid I brought a loaf of home-made bread to my dear Aunt Nicky’s for a holiday dinner. I was bashful about placing it on the table in front of the whole family. She broke off a piece of crust and tasted it. She said “This is good! Slice it and put it on the table.” I remained reticent, and she finally put her hand on her hip as she did when she was a little put out and said “Honeybunch! You know what good food is! Cook to your own taste! For God’s sake don’t worry about THEM!” Here she pointedly indicated most of my male relative ensconced in front of a football game in the living room and pretty well down in their cups. “THEY’LL eat nails!”

What follows is a recipe and some general observations on making bread. It is also a response to a highly automated, frenetic, and demanding pace of life that, I think, kills people and robs them of some pleasures they don’t even know they’re missing.

Making bread at home takes some time. The most common excuse people give for buying their bread is how long it takes and how complicated it is. But think about it: isn’t most of the time required to make even the most complicated artisan breads simply spent waiting for something to happen? Your active participation is not required for yeast to proof, for dough to rise or for loaves to bake. You can be doing something else, and keeping half an eye on the clock, can’t you? In other words, any self-respecting 21st century multi-tasker ought to be able to juggle the elements of even a busy modern life around making real, honest bread.

Baking also requires some simple tools. None are more important than those protruding from your shirt sleeves. No machine has ever been invented that can adequately substitute for the grace, sensitivity, warmth and precise strength of human hands. Wheat breads have to be kneaded to break down the gluten and provide durability and strength to the rising dough. How long does this kneading take? Until you can feel the building resistance in the dough. This can be 3 minutes or 30; it all depends. Your hands can be taught to distinguish among very fine increments of resistance, the difference between a very light, crusty baguette and a dense and chewy rye. My point is; your hands and only your hands will tell you when you are done. Throw the damned bread machine away.

There are other benefits to hand kneading. There is an old Italian folk tale that involves the strong warm hands of the village baker and the wives of some frequently absent and inattentive merchants. I think the title was Un Pane Francese…

But I digress…

A solid ceramic bowl, a heavy wooden spoon, a bread board and pin, and some measuring cups and spoons make up the rudiments of your tool kit. I would also lobby for a few other items.

A baker’s peel is essential for Pizze and Foccacie, and damned handy as a place for loaves to rise. They come in wood and metal. I like wood.

A baking stone is one of the real secrets to great crusty bread. The best stones are large 5/8 thick rectangles of fire brick that cover most of a rack in a standard oven. They run about 50 bucks. The only thing better is a real brick lined oven. They start at 3 grand, last time I checked, so I’d stick with the stone.

Some metal racks to cool loaves on are a good investment, as is a small spritzer bottle to help generate some steam in the oven, and a metal scraper to clean your bread board.

I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff out there that’s fun to use and helpful, but I don’t own any of it.

Flour, water and leavening with a few minor ingredients make bread.

Only wheat flour possesses sufficient gluten to rise to double its volume. These days they sell high gluten flour just for making bread, but I find it unnecessary. I’ll use any decent unbleached white flour and/or whole grain flour for my baking. I have my favorite brands, but there are many good ones. Watch that it’s not too old. Whole grain flour can go rancid after awhile, and all flour will eventually get weevils if it’s not stored in the fridge. In general, white flour responds to kneading more quickly and rises more quickly than whole grain.

Water is water, but watch out for too much chlorine; it’s hard on yeast!

While active dry yeast works well and is best for sweet breads, sourdough is certainly the best and the oldest leavening. Sourdough is a living colony of yeasts and bacteria that form a symbiotic relationship with each other. Certain sourdoughs are endemic to certain parts of the world and have highly distinctive characteristics. It is unruly, not terribly predictable, and not terribly fast. It also produces bread with indescribably good flavor and character. King Arthur flour has a great procedure for making your own starter!

There’s much more to say, but this dissertation is close to a thousand words already. Here’s the recipe. Mangiare bene!

Pane della Campagna (Country Bread)

Note: This is my basic pizza and bread recipe. A great many friends and family seem to enjoy it! I will give the dry yeast version here with some end notes on the sourdough version.

For two loaves or two pizze

2 cups warm (about 105 degrees Fahrenheit) water
1 cup whole wheat flour
Approximately five cups of unbleached white flour
Two tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Two teaspoons of seasalt
One tablespoon of raw unfiltered honey
Coarse cornmeal
Two tablespoons of dry yeast or
¼ cup of sourdough starter

Proof the yeast for about ten minutes by blending it with the warm water, honey, and a couple tablespoons of the whole wheat flour and setting it aside in a warm place. It is ready when it is foamy.



Add the oil and salt, and the rest of the whole wheat flour, to the proofed liquid and blend with a heavy spoon. Start adding white flour and continue blending. At some point, maybe around four or five cups, the dough will get too stiff to stir with the spoon. At that point turn it on to a heavily floured breadboard, and start kneading. Push your hands into the dough, fold it over on itself, and push in again with the heels of your palms. Add flour whenever it seems sticky, and keep kneading. Eventually (five to 10 minutes max) you will feel the dough becoming more and more resistant yet still elastic (a chef friend describes it as the feeling of the dough “fighting back”). At this point the dough should be very smooth and springy. Roll it in a ball and place it in a bowl well greased with good olive oil. Use your fingertips to make the sign of a cross on the fresh dough. Whether you are religious or not, it’s a great little trick my mom used: when the indentation is invisible (about an hour), the dough has doubled!

Punch the dough down and knead again for about a minute. If you are making bread, divide it in half, and roll each half into a smooth ball. Place them on a wooden peel liberally dusted with cornmeal. After they double (about 40 minutes) score the top with a razor blade, and transfer them to a preheated 375 oven on top of a well preheated baking stone. The oven should preheat for at least a half hour. Just before you close the oven door, spritz the loaves, oven walls and stone with the spray bottle of water and quickly close the oven door. The steam will ensure a real crust. The loaves will be ready in about 40 minutes.

Per Pizze: If you are making pizze, divide the risen dough in half. Dust a breadboard heavily with cornmeal. Flatten, dust the top of each half with flour and roll out to a roughly 18 inch pie. Bake about 10 minutes on the stone PRIOR to adding toppings (or cooling and freezing for later).

Sourdough: Combine the room temperature starter with the warm water, honey, and a quarter cup of the whole wheat flour and setting it aside in a warm place. It should proof in an hour or two, at which point it will have a very foamy appearance and sharp smell. It may take several hours, or it might be ready in 15 minutes…it’s funny stuff. After it proofs, mix and knead as above, and set aside to double. I frequently allow the dough to rise overnight in a coolish place. Allowing sourdough to rise slowly is the key to a real sour flavor. If you like a milder flavor, accelerate the rise by placing the dough in a warmer location. Punch down, but don’t do a lot of secondary kneading (makes for a nice irregular crumb with lots of big holes) and form into two round loaves as above. Proceed with the second rise and baking as above.

Enjoy!

A Note to Charlie

Lotta water under the bridge since the funeral. I was only 13, and it was a huge punch in the gut. But time passed, and I cobbled a life together with the usual mix of good and bad. I am now about the age you were when you left us, and I can’t say I don’t have any regrets. I’m like everyone else Charlie, I have lots of them. But I have arrived at a place where I am beginning to understand them, and they don’t burden me as much as they used to.

So this is a thank you note. When I reach back 40-odd years, I find a man who loved his wife and kids unconditionally and took great joy in them, even when they weren’t so loveable. I remember a guy who worked his ass off to provide for his family, then volunteered his free time to help people he didn’t even know. I smile at a great laugh and sparkling eyes and a fully functional sense of humor, a person whose reaction to trouble would always begin with an explosive string of expletives and end with a rueful chuckle and a deep appreciation of irony. I see a guy in a dark bar, nursing his 2 beer limit and telling stories and surrounded by other men who respected him and valued his friendship. I remember bear hugs that lifted me into the air and left no doubt about how deeply and profoundly I was cared for.

So you were the model I had for what a man is; my guide for what to become. I’m sure there was a lot more to learn, and I know you weren’t a saint, but while I might have asked for more, I simply could not have asked for better. We are very different men Charlie, but in ways large and small, you remain the standard I hold myself to.

Muddy Waters threw his head back, closed his eyes, and shouted “I’m a MAN!” a deep roaring howl into the night. I sometimes feel that howl way down, a declaration that I am here vital and alive, shoving death and darkness in the chest. I owe you Charlie. I will see to it that your great-grandkids know who you were.

A short life can still be a great big life, a life that rings loud for years and decades and even centuries, a deep roaring howl into the night.

Happy Fathers Day.

Ancestry

A couple weeks ago, I did a lunch time lecture for a room full of local folks on my family story. You can watch it here. It was a followup to a feature in CommonGround Magazine that came out a year ago. I am fortunate to be a first generation American (my Mom was born in Italy) and to know a lot about my Mom’s family. Following the lecture, things got interesting.

To make a long story short, all kinds of people popped out of the woodwork to either ask me questions about my family or, much more commonly, to tell me about theirs. The same thing happened when the magazine feature came out. The experience was a little overwhelming, even surreal. The cake was taken by a ditzy but very nice lady who pinned me in my cubicle at work and asked me innumerable detailed questions about every Italian-American cultural cliché imaginable:

“Now, aren’t they all good cooks?”

“Was your family in the Mafia?”

“They eat a lot of garlic, don’t they?”

“Aren’t they all stonemasons?”

“Don’t they drink a lot of wine?”

“Why do they talk with their hands?”

…and so on. Mercifully we didn’t get to personal cleanliness or to the size of reproductive organs, but we pretty much covered everything else. I was trapped in my seat, and cringed until I thought I might crawl out of my own skin. It was a little like being in a scene from “Borat”.

Most of my other encounters were poignant and emotional; reflections on beloved ancestors now long gone, and the circumstances of their lives. These stories came not just from Italian Americans, but from all kinds of people. They just wanted to talk about their families and about where and who they came from.

Both my feature article and my talk seem to have struck an unexpected nerve. People, including those who express almost no interest in history, are powerfully affected by and interested in the stories of their own families. I think I know why.

As I’ve peered under the rugs and in the attics and basements of my own family history, I keep running into reflections of my own life and personality and those of my living or recently departed ancestors. A love of good writing and nature is reflected in some little notebooks my Grandfather kept in the 20’s, as well as in the course of my own life. My Mom’s kindness, my Aunt’s calm wisdom, my Uncle’s joie de vivre, not to mention all of their personal demons were visible in their parents and can still be seen in their children. There are instances when you hear a revealing family story from a cousin, a story that is 50 years old or more, and you look in the mirror as you brush your teeth the next morning, and you stare into your own eyes and think “Ahh-hah!”

Discovering your ancestors is a personal encounter with the past; your own past. History isn’t dusty and remote when it cuts so close to the bone. Those people staring out at you in the black and white photos can impart considerable and weighty insight, if asked the right questions. They can tell you who you are.

Tiadaghton

I wrote the essay below last October, and I shopped it around to a variety of non-profits and news outlets, but none of them would touch it. In some cases they felt that the environmental benefits of the switch to domestic natural gas from dirtier fuels simply outweighed any localized environmental effects. In other cases they were simply afraid of pissing off the Governor’s office or certain legislators, to whom they were beholden for grant money and support. Given that there is now a push to lease even more public acres to gas exploration companies to balance yet another grim state budget, I’ve decided to release the essay here in the hope (probably vain) that I get heard.

I would hasten to add here that I am not opposed to gas exploration and procurement on public land. I am opposed to doing it in an unsustainable and blind hurry. The current plan for leasing Commonwealth land for gas drilling is so large in scale, so cursory in planning, so overheated in implementation, and so thin on oversight, that appalling environmental damages are almost certain. These ghastly results will be most severe in the state’s most rural areas, where few voters live; a fact that I am sure has been included in the cynical political calculations that hatched this policy.

In my opinion, we are not very well led.

Slate Run

It was a long time ago. My guess is 1966 or so, but at this point I can’t really be sure. I’m thinking it was early May, because I remember that the morning was still chilly, but that the air was redolent of damp earth and things growing. I was a boy squatting along the banks of a trout stream in the forest, and there were two men in their 50’s peering over my shoulders. My uncle Art was a fisherman of some repute in Lycoming and Clinton Counties, Dad wasn’t much of an angler, but he loved being outside with his kids. I had one of Artie’s fly rods in my hands, and its heft and great and unfamiliar length made me feel clumsy. There was a gaudy fly, red and white, knotted to the leader, but I have no idea what pattern. Like as not, they didn’t bother to tell me its name.

Artie said, “Don’t try to cast. Just reach out there and try to drop that fly behind the rock, right into that pocket below the quickwater.” It was harder than it sounds. The rush of the stream created a breeze that pushed the fly and leader around, and the rod was eight and half feet long and unwieldy. I missed a couple times, then the fly settled in the pocket. There came a flash and I jerked involuntarily, which by dumb luck was exactly the right thing to do. I stood up and there was a small brook trout, maybe five inches long, wiggling around at the end of the leader. The men squeezed my shoulders and laughed. Dad unhooked the little fish, and put it in my hands. For a moment the trout and I regarded each other nose to nose, then he spasmed into a furious bid for freedom, slipped from my grasp, landed at the water’s edge, and was gone. I may have cried at this, I don’t remember. I do remember that Artie tousled my hair and Dad hugged me. More clearly than anything else about that day, I remember that I was happy beyond expression. I will likely recall it on my deathbed.


Slate Run hasn’t changed that much in the 40-odd intervening years. Floods, beavers and so on have moved things around. I think there are more brook trout and fewer brown trout than there used to be, but that’s just an impression. Small cascades still pour over ledgerock and boulders, and there are still pools over ten feet deep. You can still encounter a bear, deer, coyote, or even a bobcat almost anywhere along it, particularly if you are quiet and the light is low. In spring the canyon is still mantled in a soft and radiant green that looks best in rain. In the fall the maple and oak leaves still blaze with heartbreaking color on mornings that break with frost on small purple asters and goldenrod. It is like that throughout the West Branch Country where I was taken as a boy to fish and hunt by them who raised me. It seems timeless and primeval, but that’s illusory.

By the turn of the 20th century loggers had stripped nearly every stick of timber from the entire region. The industrial scale logging left enormous piles of slash in its wake, and huge fires followed. You can still find charred stumps from the epic 1910 blaze that famously jumped the Clarion River and burned up much of northern Pennsylvania. The logged and burned slopes unleashed devastating floods, and millions of tons of topsoil washed away. Most animals of any size were extirpated by meat and market hunters. Chestnut, the second most common deciduous tree in the woods was completely eradicated by blight in or around 1919. The enormity of the destruction, the public outrage over it, and the foresight of visionaries like Joseph Rothrock and Gifford Pinchot led to the creation of forest reserves, which eventually became Pennsylvania’s State Forest system. Trees were planted, trails built, game animals and fish re-introduced. When veterans returned from the Second World War, they went to these “people’s woods” to heal themselves, and they brought their boys with them.

By now there are three generations of those boys, and more recently girls, who spent important parts of their childhood in the West Branch Country. When we stare at a map of Pennsylvania north of Interstate 80, the names on the map are a potent incantation. They conjure the magic of wild country, of trout lilies and striped maples, of dark nights without city lights and shot through with stars, of icy water, of grouse and woodcock and whitetails and elk, of old hemlocks, of some of the best parts of our lives. They fall in consecrating rhythm: Tiadaghton. Tioga. Young Woman’s Creek. Cedar Run. Hammersley Fork. Kettle and Cross Fork. Algerine, Black Forest. Wolf Run. Tamarack, Beech Bottom…We remember fish caught, our first backpacking trip, paddling a canoe, cross-country skiing at night under a full moon, drinking from a spring, seeing a bear, deer camp, our Dads. It is sacred ground.

The Wolf at the Door

I have pulled over along the highway just south of Milton, and taken a close look at the geologic map on the passenger seat. I drove up here today to meet the enemy face to face, and this appears to be the spot. I get out and walk up to the outcrop. The rock is austere but very handsome, a deep and uniform grey with many fine strata like the pages of a book, and shot through with the occasional white vein of pure quartz.

I’m a little shocked. The Marcellus formation is much in the public consciousness right now for its potential for both good and evil, and there are innumerable feature-length articles and websites and radio and television news reports devoted to it. None of them mention that it is, in its way, quite lovely.


Marcellus Shale contains natural gas, and this has been known to several generations of American geologists. It has never been exploited to any extent because of the expense and difficulty inherent in its extraction. In the last decade or so events and technology have conspired to generate considerable commercial interest in it. The world’s stock of fossil fuels is beginning to decline, making the remaining sources more valuable. The world is becoming a more dangerous place, making the production of domestic sources of energy critical to our security. It is also becoming a dirtier place, and natural gas is the cleanest burning fossil fuel available. These considerations have spurred technological change, and extraction methods based on hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have evolved from interesting experiments to a viable approach to energy production. That technological change was developed and perfected in the American West.

I spent most of my twenties in extremely rural parts of the Northern Rockies. I went to see the mountains, and I saw them. I also met and lived with the people who lived there, and I learned a lot. Energy development, timber production, precious metal and coal mining, and other kinds of large scale extractive industries are woven through the environmental and economic history of the West. Any Westerner can tell you that this legacy is complicated. No poverty is so harsh as rural poverty, and a job as a gas driller or logger or gold miner bestows dignity and can be the antidote to running a meth lab, subsisting on food stamps, or burning the furniture for heat. Those same jobs have produced cancer, birth defects and silicosis, biblical-scale erosion, dead wildlife, poisoned rivers, and immense superfund sites that will never be cleaned up. Economies tied to resource extraction are economies that are bound just as tightly to real trouble.

The hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies about to be applied to the Marcellus Shale were pioneered in places like the Upper Green River Basin in West Central Wyoming, on land owned by the BLM. I have been making the long desolate drive between Rock Springs or Kemmerer and Jackson off and on for almost 30 years, and I am an eye witness to the development of this gas field. It is high desert country, the wind is constant and carries the perfume of sage. There are always antelope visible from the road, and as one approaches Pinedale the jagged massif of the Wind River Range rises like a wall on the Eastern horizon.

First there was one gas pad on the horizon visible from US Routes 189 and 191. The next time I passed through, a handful had appeared. A couple years later, there was a forest of drilling structures and a spiderweb of gravel roads and pipelines. It looks like a First World War battlefield now. The problem is much more serious than simple visual pollution. It is a land forsaken.

Both gas company officials and regulators say that gas drilling can be done with little permanent effect to the environment. In theory I’m sure that’s true. In fact, gas exploration and extraction is done by people. I believe most of those people to be decent and conscientious. They know that high desert like the Green River Basin doesn’t have much water in it, so they must be very judicious in its procurement for use in drilling. They know that the millions of gallons of water they pump into the bore holes to fracture the shale (AKA frac fluid) has additives in it that make it extremely toxic and must be contained. They know that the resulting waste water must be held in a secure pond, protected from wildlife access, trucked away, and properly treated. They know that the well pads must be restored to as close to natural conditions as possible when they’ve finished their useful life. They know all these things, but they’re human beings working with a relatively new and complicated technology in a harsh and unforgiving environment, and sometimes things don’t go as planned.

If you wander around those gas leases in the Green River country, you’ll find wildlife fences with big holes torn in them. You’ll find dead critters nearby. You’ll find small tributaries and irrigation ditches that lead to the Green River that have been poisoned dead by frac fluid which somehow seeped through the groundwater or flowed over the surface. Most of these were full of trout not that many years ago. You’ll find erosion channels left by all the new roads and pipelines that allow sediment, and God-knows-what-else, into the stream channels. You’ll find trash flung out the windows and blown out of the beds of trucks that service the gas pads and pipelines. You won’t find so many antelope, mule deer, or other former wild residents. You’ll find the serenity of the desert landscape long gone. I doubt anybody wanted these things to happen, but they happened anyway.

The gas companies created a place of utter destruction that covers many square miles. The destruction was accepted by the good people of Wyoming and by the BLM because a sacrifice was required to procure relatively clean, home grown energy. Some of Wyoming’s chronically under-employed native sons and daughters got good, well paying jobs out of it. The Federal Government got some much-needed lease revenue. In part the sacrifice was acceptable because the Upper Green River Basin is not in the fashionable and popular back yard of Jackson or among the shining mountains where the tourists go. It happened in a well hidden backwater of one of the big square states that straddle the Great Divide.

The briefest glance at a map of the US will reveal that Wyoming is more than twice the size of Pennsylvania.

Riffle and Pool

It is at this point in the essay that I am supposed to offer economic and tourism-based arguments against the proposed wholesale leasing of public land in my home state to the gas companies. I am supposed to bring up the problem of community drinking water as well. I am supposed to cite the pitfalls of the boom and bust economics that attend the energy business. I am supposed to discuss the example of the early 20th century desolation of the woods by extractive industries and the decades and millions spent in their reclamation. I should mention the potential for harm to the Commonwealth’s sustainable forestry program, and the probable damage to endangered species and wetlands. I am supposed to propose a pause or moratorium in the permitting process to allow for the development and implementation of thoughtful safeguards to help minimize the environmental effects. In short, I am supposed to protest or moderate the coming desolation on the solid and immutable grounds of its effects on our collective pocketbooks or our health or other empirically defined and no-doubt critical aspects of the public good.

No thanks.

I usually approach the Frying Pan hole at Slate Run on my hands and knees because the fish will see you and scatter if you walk up. Dignified it ain’t, but it helps. So does kneeling there in silence once you do get in place to make a cast, and quietly observing the water. It helps the trout calm down if they did spot you moving in and it helps you to see what they’re up to and decide how best to fish to them. It provides contemplative clarity. It conveys perspective. Here is mine.

I think the large-scale exploitation of Marcellus Shale gas deposits on our public lands will degrade and destroy many square miles of them. I think that the economic, environmental, security and technological conditions that make this exploitation viable and attractive are entirely engendered by the presence of too many of our own kind on the tired old planet. I think that reducing our rates of consumption and waste are infinitely more important public concerns than finding more ways to (literally) squeeze blood out of rocks. I think there is value in open, public, wild land that is not measureable in dollars or BTU’s. I think a generation of kids who aren’t dragged away from their Gameboys , taken to the woods and shown trout lilies and black bears and swimming holes and bright stars in a black sky is a generation profoundly lost. I think that my Dad’s ghost is out here, and I would speak with him undisturbed in a quiet forest by a clear trout stream many miles from a gas well. I think that a government that elects to sacrifice public land and water gold-rush style as an easy financial fix for a budget shortfall is performing the civil equivalent of turning tricks, and as with all forms of prostitution there will follow a consequent, permanent and ugly loss of virtue. Kneeling here along Slate Run I think that I am in the center of something important, something we can’t and shouldn’t live without.

I am aware that this kind of thinking is anachronistic, and died with Ed Abbey, and I don’t give a rat’s ass. For all the good things that this place has given me I will not see it poisoned and watch it die without raising my voice, and while I may not be listened to I will, by God, be heard.

There is a trout rising near the head of the pool now, and I think I will try to catch it. Artie and Dad would greatly approve.

Snowbound

I don’t really live in the “north country”. Pennsylvania is firmly Middle Atlantic, and especially in the eastern half of the State, the Atlantic is the most important part of the descriptor. The ocean, just over there beyond New Jersey, typically moderates our winter weather. A “normal” winter here is grey, wet, and miserable, but not very snowy. Ice storms are common, as is plain old cold rain with air temperatures in the high thirties or low forties: considerably less fun than a big ol’ dump of snow.

Maybe once a decade or so, a combination of two weather systems will produce a spectacular winter storm here. Conditions have to be perfect, as does the timing of everything; thus the rarity. Our cold weather comes from the west and northwest, from the jet stream of the continental interior and ultimately from Arctic Canada. Typically these “clipper” systems move fast, sometimes have a modest amount of dry snow, and plenty of cold air. Our wet weather comes from the south, as Atlantic storms run north and eastward along the coast. Occasionally, one of these coastal storms will collide with a western clipper right over Pennsylvania and the other Middle Atlantic states. The head of the clipper system slams into the advancing low pressure coming from the south, and it begins to curl back on itself. This sets up a counterclockwise rotation within the system that brings Atlantic moisture and frigid air into the continent from the northeast as the system itself moves toward the northeast; a Nor’easter. The cold air is dry, and has the capacity to suck up a hell of a lot of water.

To make a long story short, my part of the world had two of these storms in the space of five days. It left the Middle Atlantic region buried in three to five feet of snow. It closed some Interstates. It knocked out power for days in some areas. It drifted into piles 10 feet deep or more in places. Snowplows entombed people’s cars and driveways behind glaciers of plowed snow. The effects were amplified by the general lack of preparedness by regional State and local governments for something like this. In their defense, governments budget and prepare for what is normal and this most assuredly ain’t! Baltimore and Washington were paralyzed.

I spent much of my 20’s in Montana, including seven winters, so I have had to retrieve the necessary adaptive skills from my memory banks. First, I shoveled a series of tunnel-like paths to my firewood pile and the garbage can, and removed the glacier left by the snowplow from the parking spots. I next dug a series of paths for my English Setter to access the backyard, which pleased him immensely. He stands maybe 18 to 20 inches at the shoulder, and his you-know-what therefore drags in the frigid snow.

A little of this goes a long way, apparently.

Following the shoveling, I sat down with paper and pen and began to make an itinerary. The resulting list, a mix of chores and diversions for the next few days, is the key to being snowed in. In deep winter, the mind craves discipline; else it strays to dark places. If you want to see what I mean, pick up a newspaper in Montana, North Dakota or Wyoming in, say, late March or early April, after people have been snowed and frozen in for three, four, or even five months. There, under the State News section, you can read about the quiet ranch wife who, tiring of her husband’s snoring or perhaps his drinking or droning on about her mother, buried the kindling axe in his noggin at the breakfast table. It being too cold to bury his profoundly dead ass, she stacks him in the shed with the cordwood, and drapes a dishtowel over his face. He has perished from what is known in real winter country as “the shack nasties”.

North Country people know all about this and so they meet winter on her own terms. They save certain tasks for winter evenings. They vary their routines. They read good books, and try not to overdo the TV. They make sure to get outdoors every day if possible. They try not to drink too much. They give their partners and children attention, space and respect. They remain self aware. It can be very hard work, but you must remember; you are not just waiting for spring, you are living in winter.

Big winter can force you to remember that behind all of our highly evolved technology and infrastructure, is raw nature, waiting to cut off the electricity and freeze you to death. Humanity does not always run the show. In 1986, I was living in a small logging town in Northwestern Montana. On the Friday of Valentine’s Day weekend, it got so dark at mid-afternoon that the street lights came on. A great storm straight from the Gulf of Alaska made it over the Cascades and the Purcell Range and the dense black mass of low pressure hung on the Northern Rockies. It began to snow. To this day, I have never seen it snow like that, and even elderly locals said the same thing at the time. There was not a puff of wind, and the snow came straight down, inches per hour. It snowed like that without a pause until Sunday afternoon, and it just buried us. Even Montana’s muscular snow removal systems were overwhelmed as the trucks simply couldn’t keep up.

It took me five hours just to dig a tunnel-like path to the likely location of my car, and excavate it. While I was digging, a piece of snow the size of a Cadillac came loose from the metal roof of my rented house and landed on my elderly neighbor who was running a snow blower and didn’t see it coming. His wife and I dug him out, and he was lucky it didn’t kill him. The entire county was more or less shut down for four days or so. The power came and went. People were left to their own devices.

So we hunkered down, and we stayed busy, and we marveled at the huge piles and drifts. Eventually, things went back to normal, spring came, and we forgot the storm. We remembered it again in mid-November however, when the County Hospital set an all-time record for newborns, and even dresser drawers had to be lined with blankets and pressed into service as bassinets as the small birthing center was overwhelmed by the flood of new life.

Funny what people will get up to when it’s cold, dark and snowy, no?

Blues in E

As late mid-life crises go, this seems pretty benign. Red sports cars, grisly and deplorable drinking binges, and overly young girlfriends are all landmines with the potential to kill and injure people, sometimes in unimaginably hideous ways.

When I walked into the music store four months ago, I intended to leave with a cheap Japanese or Korean guitar. I strummed the two chords I sort of knew on several of them, and they all seemed fine. Then I picked up the Martin (SWOMGT). The same two inexpertly played chords reverberated deep in the wood and hung in the air around me, dissipating with a long and graceful finish like a sip of top-shelf Barolo. The action, i.e. the complicated interactions between the strings and the fret board, seemed perfect even to my unskilled left hand. The strings were neither so high that pushing them down was painful, nor so low that they buzzed against the metal frets when struck. The relatively small size of the sounding box made it easy to caress and to see what my fumbling fingers were up to. And it was beautiful, with the warm spruce and deep red cherry as pleasing to the eye as the sound was to the ear. So instead of the $150 import I had in mind that afternoon when I walked in, a zero was added to the figure, but I left smiling.

Biology is not in my corner. The muscle memory, flexibility and perceptive agility required for learning a new musical instrument is much diminished in a 50-something. The time to learn to play the guitar is in middle and high school. I was prepared for that, but I was unprepared for a great natural advantage I have over the younger me.

In late middle age, I’ve seen enough frustration to temper my anger substantially. This has been an especially interesting transformation to undergo, because my tolerance for bullshit seems to be declining precipitously with age. Even so, my capacity to not react explosively to it has greatly increased. Who knew!?

What this means for the older aspiring musician is a capacity for patience. I play my guitar for 15 or 20 minutes almost every day. Improvement comes very slowly and in small increments, but it comes, and I am satisfied. If I cannot bend my fingers into an odd shape and nail that new chord today, or this week, or this month, that’s fine. At this point, the long view comes readily, and I understand that simply attempting to make that chord guarantees success if I just keep trying and wait for it. It is inevitable. With due respect to Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendricks, I never feel the urge to smash my guitar.

I chose to learn the guitar for reasons both mundane and aesthetic.

At the simplest level is the instrument’s versatility and simplicity. It has frets, thus if it is properly tuned, depressing the third fret on either E-string will give you a G every time you do it, and all you have to do is pluck the string with a pick or your thumb to get that G. The 20 total frets and 6 strings gives you 120 discreet notes (a piano has 88) and God knows how many chords, and that’s just with the standard tuning. A friend of mine currently struggles with the fiddle. The fiddle has no frets, so where, exactly, is that G???? Worse yet, as an expert fiddle playing friend once explained to me “The violin is very loud, and capable of making a great many sounds, but most of them are displeasing. The most important skill in fiddle playing is simply producing a pleasing sound.” So my poor student friend is reduced to practicing his scales in a woodshed to avoid his wife’s wrath. His efforts, pleasing and otherwise, are reserved for the squirrels.

I suppose I also became interested because I have many close friends and family members who play guitar. For years I have accompanied them on harmonica, an instrument with which I am skilled enough to occasionally play in front of strangers, but the harp’s limited range has always frustrated me. Playing music with others is one of life’s great joys, and given my pair of left feet and general lack of physical grace, the only way I am likely to ever actively appreciate live music is as a musician.

Making music and writing well are both expressions of artful creativity, and I simply can’t live without that. Like the man in the cave at Lascaux all of those millennia ago, I am simply driven to create something beautiful and I’m not sure I can explain why.

I’ll try.

I’m sitting in a wooden chair with my guitar in my lap. I have just run through my scales and a few chords, and I begin a repeated pattern of notes on the high E, B, G and D strings. It’s from a blues sometimes attributed to Big Joe Williams. The blues are the deep tap root of almost all American folk and popular music, a root that extends to West Africa, to the bones and to the heart of what it means to be human. It moves within the dark and light of emotion, and frames a painful entreaty…

Baby please don’t go
Back to New Orleans
You know I love you so.

Yeah, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? Down on one knee. And what will she do, how will she respond? God knows…

I strike the last note on the D string, then come back to the G note on that high E and bend it up ending on the open E. Despite the fact that I’m not yet much of a guitarist, I can feel that last note ring down in the core of my body. I let it fade away into stillness, then stand up, put the guitar back in its case, and close the lid.

The Farm Show Explained

In order to understand why 500,000 people would congregate in Harrisburg Pa. in the absolute dead of winter to stare at farm machinery, examine swine and cattle close up, and eat unhealthy things, you begin with the fact that Pennsylvania, one of the agricultural heavyweights of the eastern US, doesn’t have a state fair. It used to. The last one was held in the 1890’s. It was discontinued in response to Victorian-era outrage over the “unwholesome” carny-type tent shows that grew up around it.

Fair enough.

The tent shows continue at other more traditional fairs. When I was in my twenties I attended a large county fair in another state. There was a tent with “dancing girls” which I and my companions entered for five bucks each. Once inside we noted a local fellow who had paid extra money for a place at the edge of the stage. He had on overalls and black plastic frame glasses with welding spots on them, held together with electrical tape. He weighed at least 300 pounds. He did not appear to have spent much time in town. When one of the girls began to gyrate provocatively in front of his face expecting a tip, he lunged forward with surprising speed, buried his face in her g-string and seized her buttocks with both hands. The bouncers laid hands on him, and hit him many times with a shovel handle, but he would not let go. The girl was shrieking, the barker was cursing into the microphone at the top of his voice, and the sheriff and his deputies came running. My companions and I left.

So yes, the tent shows are in fact, unwholesome.

The Pennsylvania Farm Show as we now know it began in Harrisburg in 1917 and continues to this day, since 1931 in the massive multi-acre Farm Show complex at the north edge of town. Unlike traditional state fairs, the Farm Show isn’t a summer or early autumn affair, but occurs during the second week of January. The original intent of this schedule was to increase farmer’s attendance at the exhibition by holding it during their least busy time of year. By and large that schedule has worked well, but it puts the Farm Show into a crap shoot with the weather. Not infrequently, Farm Show week coincides with a savage winter storm or single digit cold. Surprisingly, it never seems to hurt attendance. Farm Show brings thousands of very rural Pennsylvanians to the State Capitol. They bring their money along, which has pleased generations of the city’s hotels, honky-tonks, restaurants, strip clubs, museums, tourist attractions, shopping emporiums, etc. Visitation is also swelled by many thousands of local and regional residents. It’s a great deal for families; aside from a nominal charge for parking, the farm show is free.

What began as a purely agricultural exhibition has evolved into a combination of the traditional farm exhibits and activities and more peripheral private and public sector exhibitors hoping to take advantage of the enormous crowds. There is also a lot of food. The “food court”, which features several acres of vendors and their clientele, dishes up delicacies and abominations in close proximity to each other. A few years ago, I watched an elderly food vendor from a rural part of Snyder County with tufts of hair protruding from his ears explain to an astonished hip-hop couple from Harrisburg the composition of the pieces of fried scrapple he was offering them as samples. When the actual content of the small grey cubes finally dawned on them, they acted as though he had invited them to participate in an act of cannibalism.

Most years I help staff an exhibit on Pennsylvania Archaeology hosted by several State agencies and non-profits. The exhibit always features a replica dugout canoe some 15 feet long that is a big hit with kids and their parents. It sometimes leads to some interesting exchanges.

Farmer: “What the hell is this?”
Exhibit Staffer: “It’s a replica dugout canoe like the Indians used.”
Farmer: “Make a hell of a pig trough.”

…and so on.

The exhibit also features a flint knapper, reenactor, and all-around astonishing character named Bob. Bob, who is some part Shawnee on his mother’s side, reenacts a Shawnee from the 18th century right down to the war club, breechcloth and scalp lock, and he engages visitors as he patiently produces stone tools. There is no doubt that a guy bristling with weapons and strange decorative items, sans pants, and making symmetrical and beautiful arrowheads draws a crowd. He can hold that crowd with an incredible string of banter that he can instantly adjust to the age and demographic in front of him at any given time. He would have made a superb classroom teacher, excepting the minor problem that he would likely eat the school board and principal and would cuss during parent-teacher conferences (he can be a little hot headed).

The exhibit’s worth doing. We had nearly 500 visitors in an hour, and whatever you’re promoting or selling, if you have a booth at the Farm Show, many thousands of people will see it.

If you’re not staffing a booth, the show is the show. You might see anything. A small child asks her grandmother about the prodigious set of equipment hanging between the legs of a prize Charolais bull. An old order Mennonite boy learns to eat Korean noodle soup with chopsticks from a West Indian kid with a head full of dreadlocks. A straining team of muscular Belgian horses pulls a concrete weight of impossible size across an arena infield before a cheering crowd. An elderly couple whirl through a square-dance competition, smiling and staring into each other’s eyes like they are the only people on earth. A large group of visitors stares transfixed at a multi-ton butter sculpture as though they were looking at David in the Academia.

You really should go.

Opening Day

As traditions go, this one’s pretty odd. For about 15 years now, an old friend and I break in our new fishing licenses on New Year’s Day. We rig up fly rods, and fish for trout in liquid water. By mutual agreement, actual ice fishing is for dilettantes and would not count. This tradition, whose origins are lost to our respective memories despite the inarguable fact that 15 years isn’t a huge gulf of time, has at least a few idiosyncrasies that test our mettle. The idiosyncrasies of our winter fishing might also cause a less dedicated person to question our sanity.

For example…

As any idiot can tell you, New Year’s Day follows News Years Eve. Neither my old friend nor I have ever been mistaken for Mother Theresa, so you may assume that in the course of some of these expeditions one or both of us has perhaps not looked or felt his very best. There is also the immutable fact that the first of January in the northern latitudes is more conducive to indoor activities than to standing in a trout stream in a pair of waders. Finally, consider what awaits the angler. Fish are ectotherms: their body temperature assumes that of their environment. Critters with a body temperature in the 30’s don’t eat much or all that often. The result of this combination is, most years, a pair of uncomfortable and mildly ill men shivering in a bleak landscape for several hours while awaiting an occurrence that is not very likely to happen.

But we do it.

We do it because we are usually the only people on the water. This is a benefit not to be underestimated around here. My corner of the world is blessed with decent trout streams, and cursed with a large and dense population. The crowds during the fine spring weather and mayfly hatches, and the bad behavior that comes with them, are legendary. A stretch of quiet water around here is well worth substantial discomfort.



An accident of regional geology is also in our favor. My house, and the valley in which it is situated, sits atop a huge slab of limestone. From the limestone flows slightly alkaline water in bubbling springs that feed our local streams. This keeps many of these streams well above freezing in the winter, and less acidic than the mountain streams around us. Our fish aren’t as cold as their mountain cousins in the winter, so they’re a little more active and hungry. The higher PH also produces abundant aquatic insects and crustaceans, including clouds of small midges that hatch on nearly every warmer (40’s and above) winter day.

Thus our annual expedition isn’t always fishless, and even if it is, it’s usually relaxed and quiet, and what could be wrong with that? So maybe we’re not so dumb, maybe we’re getting smarter. Our winter fishing is always instructive, since any substantial amount of time spent in nature cannot help but teach you something.

The lesson of time spent in the sere, quiet, and subtle landscape of an Appalachian winter is that nature is not dead now, it is sleeping. The evidence is palpable, if not immediately obvious. In the quiet sipping of a trout taking midges in a slow eddy, in the chipping of a Cardinal in a leafless oak, in the rustling of snow landing on water, you can actually hear it breathing.


Happy New Year