The stories which
follow stem from the past twenty years I have spent studying and relating to
the people and the land of Arkansas.
They are mostly factual although a couple have fictional twists - the
angelic in Fallen Angel and the suicide in Harmony. Some are geographic and environmental and stem from years of work
with the state’s Pollution Control agency.
Three of them are prizewinners and five them were published locally in
other collections. Two are from a
series of columns I wrote on environmental issues for the local press. The rest appear here for the first time.
Tales
from a Yank in Arkansas
in
the Clinton Era
by
Ralph
Desmarais
Contents
Chapter 1 - Fallen Angel............................................................................................................................................................ 5
In one of my
all-time favorite songs, Willie Nelson sings about the mending of an angel that
had flown too close to the ground and broken her wing. Whenever I heard it, I
felt that Willie somehow knew my ex-wife Martha and was singing about her.
Martha was the closest thing to an angel I had ever met and she was always
flying too close to the ground. She had crashed into me once on a flight back
to Arkansas and, in my own alcohol-fueled, depressive style, I had stripped off
her feathers and grounded her for a few years.
I had always wanted
to talk to Willie about this, find out when he knew her, how he met her-stuff
like that. I had this image that someday I would be sitting in a bar and Willie
would walk in and sit down beside me and I would ask him about Martha. And he'd
say, "Sure, I remember Martha. She came to one of my concerts in Little
Rock. Sat right in the front and cried during the whole thing. Little
strawberry-blond angel. Cute, Sweet, and kind. Had a special spiritual quality
about her that came out whenever something sad happened. Too sensitive for this
world. Tore me up to see her cry like that, so I had one of the boys invite her
backstage. Seems like her husband had left her, and I reminded her of him~ I
saw that angelic quality in her and that's what made me write that song."
Then Willie would take a big swig of whiskey, wash it down with a beer, and
he'd ask me how I knew her. I'd order us both another round and tell him what I
knew about our favorite angel.
I found Martha
behind this big watermelon. It was at one of those single parents' picnics. She
was sad then too, just like that time with Willie, and when that happened,
Martha turned to guys like me and Willie, or if we weren't around, to small
children and animals. Martha sensed this part of me that's healing to fallen
angels, and I hardly ever left her side for the next three years.
When I lived with
her, Martha had a dog named Ralph, which, by coincidence, is my name too. This
led to a lot of bad jokes about Ralph-dog and Ralph-person1 their
relative roles in the family, and their place in Martha's heart. (To me, the
jokes were not all that funny, since I distinctly felt I ranked somewhere
between the cat and a neighbor's dog that had attached himself to Martha's
family.)
As, I assume, with
most misplaced angels grounded on earth, Martha had difficulty accepting the
unfortunate habit most living things here have of dying~me at inappropriate
times without any apparent reason. Ralph dog, for example, met his untimely
demise after a long war with the mailman which ended with Ralph under the
wheels of the mail truck, having for once misjudged the speed of the truck and
his own ability to stop just in front of the mechanical monster driven by his
nemesis. The dog's death devastated
Martha, and she vowed never to get so attached to another dog. Eventually, she
pulled herself herself together, helped along by time and the realization that Ralph's fate, though untimely, was
appropriate for the nature of the beast.
Ralph had died as he had lived - a
proud and valiant warrior defending his turf against a known enemy (Ralph was a small Beagle, but he never knew
it - in his heart, he was as big as a Great Dane).
Despite her vow to
not become attached to other earthly
beings, for they would, as both Ralph-dog had and Ralph-person soon
would, ultimately leave her, Martha
turned, as always, to other living things to mend her wounded heart. I became the focus of her angelic devotion,
giving up ever bigger parts of myself in compensation fo0r the loss of her
dog. As we merged, it seemed at first
like heaven on earth, but it did not last.
Martha and I drifted apart, partly because it is so hard to watch an
angel get battered so frequently by the realities that hardened earth creatures
tend to take for granted. I often tried
to explain to her why the earth was so messed up; why the rich got richer, the
poor starved, animals were tortured
for science, and minorities were shoved into ghettos. But it seemed as though whoever made angels, had not given them
the same capacity for serenity in the face of evil that humans develop.
Martha just
would not see why the world had to be
this way or that it always had been
so; indeed, by fixing her vision on butterflies, children and animals, she managed not to see much of the more sordid part of the world. That made it even harder for her for her to deal with human
frailty - that those you loved could be lost through death or
departure was just not an acceptable
tenet among angels. Although I left,
or tried to leave several times, I
never got away - angels never say
goodby forever.
Like Willie Nelson in the song, over the
years I had spent with Martha, I had gotten pretty good at patching angels, and
she knew she could call on me for repairs.
We developed a mutual support system for I found that nothing soothes
the spirit like the presence of angels - no easy admission for a
died-in-the-wool, Marxist-atheist, as I claimed to be in those days, and I
needed her as often as she needed me.
All of which is necessary to understand the
importance of Roary. I guess the same folks who make angels, make
dogs for angels trapped on earth. That's the kind of dog Roary was, "a lovin' dog" Martha called
him - a big, beautiful,
highly-spirited, good-natured Red Setter with a deep, vibrant bark that was evident even as a pup
- hence the name, Roary. Normally,
I'm not a dog lover. I don't have
anything against them, but I always
felt that unless you were a shepherd
and needed one to help with the sheep, dogs are just more trouble than they are worth. Roary was an exception.
Roary didn't "do" anything.
He was just a "lovin' dog"
and that was enough. He went
through life loving everyone and you
couldn't help loving back - even us Marxist-atheists.
Roary was always
around when I visited Martha. He
would bound out to greet me with that
big silly grin of his and that roaring
bark he used to greet everyone. He
seemed to like it best when the three
of us went for walks, especially if it
were near water and one us could be
persuaded to throw sticks for him to fetch. He was a joy to watch as
he emerged with stick-in-mouth; his
wet, shining, red coat gleaming in the
sun. His energy was as boundless as his
good nature. The only times I ever
got irritated with Roary were when I
wanted Martha's total attention.
Roary was willing to share Martha but would not tolerate being
ignored for long, especially if he
sensed there was some loving going on that
he was not party to. On these
occasions, Roary would barge in with
his cool, wet nose or paw, followed with a whine and, if these did not get him in on the loving, his
ultimate weapon - that roaring bark - was used until he was either let in or chased away.
It wasn't much use getting mad at Roary - he
didn't seem to understand that emotion
- and, with all that good-natured energy and determination, he wore me down every time and ended up with at least his share
of whatever affection and attention was being doled out. Fortunately, angels are good at giving out that stuff and both Roary and I came away happy. The years passed, Martha went away to school and I got married again. I didn't see much of Martha but we kept in touch.
She wanted me to take care of Roary while she went to school, but my job kept me away too much
to give Roary the care I felt he
deserved. Martha's parents ended
up caring for him, until she returned -
just in time to console me as my new
marriage crumbled away.
Before I had
recovered, Martha was given the crushing news
that Roary had developed an incurable form of bone cancer and would soon die. The vet advised having Roary put away before the pain got bad or the sickness
became debilitating. The decision as to exactly when this
would be was left up to Martha. My role would be to assist in the earthly details of grave digging and
pall bearing, for Roary had to be
carried from the vet's office to his final resting spot behind Martha's house -
and, of course, tending to the
assorted angel parts that were sure to
break, I thought, during an ordeal of this magnitude.
I was not sure that in my own weakened
condition, still grieving over my lost marriage, I would be up to the emotional demands that the situation
seemingly would require, but I agreed
to stand by and do what I could while
hoping that Roary would hang in there long enough for Martha's magic to work its course on the
sadness that enveloped me. But that
was not to be. Only ten days after
the vet first broke the news, Martha
called early in the morning, upset and crying. Roary was bleeding badly
and there was no choice. We had to
"bring him to the vet's"
that very day, and "would I come?"
I choked up over the phone, a
sure sign that my normal Yankee cover
was not fully in place as I used to think it should be, but I agreed to come.
Fortunately,
Martha's earthly family was also on alert and
the full burden of support was not to fall on my somewhat shaky shoulders. Her daughter was there when I arrived followed by a brother, mother and father. Plans were laid amidst much crying, and for me, Martha had a special request.
We were to take Roary on a final walk down to his beloved creek. I knew the creek to be polluted from
a nearby bauxite mine and numerous
residential cesspools - but, for now
at least, that didn't seem to matter. Roary didn't care as long as the water still sparkled and was cool. To Martha, both the water and the trees along the bank were beautiful and so it was close to
heaven.
Roary perked up some
when he saw what was happening. On the way to the creek, he stuck his head out
the window, as usual, and if one didn't
notice the flecks of blood that
spattered the side of the car, he looked almost like his old self. For me, what was worse than the
blood was the silence, for the cancer
had choked him and stifled his magnificent bark. He was totally quiet that final day except for one feeble yelp when he got to the edge of the creek
and felt the water. We thought about
throwing one final stick for him to
fetch but were afraid the effort might cause him pain. So Roary had to settle for a bath that
would wash the blood from his still-glistening
red coat instead of the usual
frenetically paced stick fetching.
Even that tired him and he was
content to come up on the bank and lie next to us.
It was there on the
bank that I realized that angels are
sent to teach us about the spirit of love and how it remains even when
the physical manifestations are no longer
present. For now that Roary was
leaving, and was too weak to physically
participate or disrupt the love between his
angel Martha and Ralph-person, Martha invited him to share in spirit. It was as though Martha was
getting both of us to focus on the
feeling of love in this ritual on the bank
of the creek, and it worked; I felt enveloped in love and mentally invited Roary into that space. He lay quietly, his wet fur still sparkling when hit by the
occasional rays of sunlight that
filtered through the trees. Martha
looked at the heavens and said she wished I could see their beauty above the trees, and for once I could see the heavens - they were reflected in her
eyes. Roary never murmured nor did he nuzzle - he seemed
content for once merely to be in the
presence of the angel he loved so dearly and merely to share in spirit this
final loving on the bank.
I like to think that
the heavens opened up for him too,
although my old materialistic instincts revolt against such spiritual
transferences from human to animals.
Yet, who knows, he was, after all, an angel's dog.
Later, that afternoon we took Roary to the
Vet's. He dragged his feet a little on
the way in as if he knew what was in
store for him. But it was a feeble
protest and he lay quietly when the
vet stretched him out on the table.
I was alright up to the point
where the needle went in and Roary
nodded off. Then tears blinded me and I
struggled to do my duty and console
Martha. But Martha was handling this
farewell superbly; utilizing the
reserves that angels must have for emergencies of the spirit. Although the
tears were streaming down her face, she was sending Roary out in style, with
his innocently beautiful head cradled in her hands.
I couldn't help
thinking that I would like to die as Roary did, cleanly bathed, held, loved and
given a glimpse of heaven by a loving
angel. I reached out and stroked Roary
on the top of his head, a place I knew he liked to have scratched, as a way of
saying goodby. Then the drugs took
affect and Roary was gone. Martha's
father and I carried the big dog out to the grave we had dug earlier.
Water had seeped into the bottom of
the grave and we offered to scoop it out, but Martha thought it only appropriate that since
Roary loved water that he be buried
with some. I held Martha briefly
after, but she seemed calm. Her mother got busy digging flowers for me to
transplant in my yard, and it seemed like the world was back to normal - minus one "lovin" dog.
I felt strangely
restored as if somehow Roary's spirit
had landed in me. While I don't feel
any great urges to leap after sticks thrown in the creek, I do feel a lot more
like loving almost everybody. And,
when I think about it, I guess Martha wanted me there for both of us. The angel
in her knew that it would help heal me
to say goodby to Roary.
In the movie filmed
in Arkansas called Bootleggers Slim Pickens reaches down for a handful of thin
mountain soil, lets its trickles
through his fingers and says to his son,
"That's why we're bootleggers, son. This here soil ain't fitten for
nothing better than to grow enough corn to make whiskey out of. You can't make a liven off the land
alone." And so it has been in the
Ozarks, as it was in the Appalachians
from whence many of the original settlers came; generations have tilled the rugged land and supplemented its meager returns in anyway they could - some
legal, some not. The Appalachian hill
people brought to Arkansas strong
feelings about the need to be independent, self-reliant and proud that had been cherished back east. In
their value system, loyalty to family came
first, relatives and neighbors second.
The government was, by and large, an alien force to be avoided if at all possible; to be fought if avoidance proved impossible. As their ancestors had
fought Alexander Hamilton who had been
sent by President Washington to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1793, so too
the contemporary Ozarkians occasionally
do battle with government narcotic
agents who come to seek out and destroy their carefully tended marijuana
plots which have replaced the omnipresent
stills as the main source of illegal supplementary income. The overwhelming concern of the hill people
has always been with surviving on that
thin, rocky soil. Cotton was the cash
crop in the South and there was no way the hill people could compete in quantity with the delta
planters on their thick, rich Mississippi
soil.
Some hill people,
however, stubbornly continued to plant
a few acres in cotton on the creek
bottoms until the mechanization of cotton production in the 1950's ended the meager profitability of
such efforts. While the railroads were
being built and the demand for timber
was high, work in sawmills provided supplemental employment. But, by the turn of the century, most of the major lines had been built and the sawmills
began to close down. Apples and peaches
could be grown until the late 1920's
and early 1930's when St. Stephen's scales wiped out the orchards. The illegal production of corn liquor or
"white lightnin'", had traditionally been used as a cheap way to take
some of the pain out of the poverty of
the hills. Bootlegging became a source
of quick cash until Roosevelt ended prohibition making it less profitable. It became a lot harder to make ends meet in the hills. So when the war came
in l941, a lot of folk began to move
into the cities. A hard core of people
did remain and eked out a living
planting a little corn, grazing cattle and raising hogs and chickens. They sold eggs and milk to the
local grocer and slaughtered a hog or
sold a cow when the mortgage was due and
thus managed to survive until the growth of the poultry industry provided a needed boost to the
local economy.
While the means of
survival for the hill people has
shifted, they continue to maintain their lifestyle and the values of self-reliance and independence
that are at the ethical core of their
culture have not changed over the
years. This is the lifestyle, adorned to-be-sure with a strong dose of romantic idealism from
superficial readings of Whole Earth
magazines, that has charmed many of the young
people who make up the ranks of the so-called "back-to-the- earth" movement. Dependent on their
parents for most of their lives, these
young, largely middle-class people see in
the life style of the hill-dwelling subsistence farmer a chance for true independence and a way out
of career traps that ensnared their
parents. Traditional jobs, they argue,
foster a dependency on corporations or government, both of which were condemned by the radicals in the
l960's as repressive and immoral institutions.
Rebelling against the soft, corrupt life of their parents they, in essence,
chose to trade that kind of existence
for the purer, harder life of the hill
farmer. That the reality of a life without indoor plumbing and electricity has driven a number of them back to parents and traditional jobs should come as
no surprise. Yet, some survived and
even established bonds with the natives
who had been there for generations, no small feat considering the instinctively hostile attitude of the locals and the lifestyle of the invaders. Generations of viewing all newcomers with
suspicion as possible agents of the tax
collector or the Revenue Office has
built up a residue of hostility in the makeup of the average hill-dweller that has to be overcome before his or her innate friendliness can shine through.
With the uprooting of people that has
been so much a part of modern life even
in the hills, a sense of community rarely develops even in places where this built-in resentment towards newcomers by natives does not exist. Most
people have difficulty learning to
respect the cultural preferences of
others. The traditions of the hill people made the process of assimilation even more difficult for the
wave of refugees from the turmoil of
the sixties. One area in northwest
Arkansas where these two divergent cultures met and came close to developing a workable synthesis was
called Chimes.
That the natives of
this "community" (the extent to which this area became a community is still unclear) was able to, at
least briefly, shake off the residue of suspicion towards newcomers and
overcome cultural differences is primarily due to the efforts of one man, Jerry
Friedberg. "I just looked for
the largest blank area on a map of the state of Arkansas and this was
it." Such was the selection
process that brought Jerry Friedberg, the charismatic leader of the new wave of
settlers, to the community of Chimes.
Jerry, like many of the new residents of Chimes, was moved by the
literature of the "back-to-the- earth" movement and wanted to get
away from cities, people, and the problems of middle-class American life. He was not greatly concerned with where he
got away to, as long as it promised a degree of rural isolation and the living
was cheap. Chimes promised to deliver
both. Unlike many of the others,
Jerry was not "burnt out"; he was not escaping from a deadend job that
had sapped his vitality. It was just
his style to move from one adventure to another. He brought to Chimes the same active interest in life and
politics that had made him a leader in the radical movements of the 60's. The strategy was different but the tactics
were similar. They were based on the
premise that unless the people of Chimes were organized, paved roads and
electricity would come to the area.
People in large numbers would follow and with them would come all
the problems that they had come to
Chimes to get away from. "Preservation politics" he called it to
distinguish it from the "liberation politics" of the sixties. Still,
he claimed, "You have to organize to preserve as well as to
liberate."
Jerry's first
organizing venture was a food cooperative. By purchasing whole grains and dried
fruits from a cooperative warehouse in Fayetteville in bulk, and then
distributing them to members in Chimes, Jerry soon got to know most of the new
residents and many of the old-timers. His monthly price list was peppered with
commentary on political events that impinged on rural life in any way and the
gospel of preservation politics according to Jerry was spread through
Chimes. It was through the accidental
acquisition of this price list-newsletter given to me by a friend that I became
aware of Jerry's activities. Armed with
a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, I had embarked on a quest to find out
what was happening in rural Arkansas. I
tracked Jerry down and first found him directing the efforts of several of his
neighbors in raising the support beams of a new resident's house. I was immediately placed on one end of a
beam with instructions to heave along with others upon command. It was my
baptism in the cooperative ethos of the new community Jerry was building.
Coming from similar
backgrounds (we had even studied the same period of British History while
writing our dissertations - his in Political Science, mine in Political
History), Jerry and I felt an immediate rapport. He opened his home to me and allowed me to tag along while he
immersed us both in a crash course, self-taught, on rural politics and
culture. He was especially concerned
with county politics for, in Arkansas, that is where crucial decisions about
which roads get paved are made. His
Harvard Ph.D. was of little use in this work, and, with the old-timers and the
more nihilist of the new settlers, any hint of intellectual arrogance could be
an impediment to conversation. So
Jerry, the radical ex-professor, became, once more, a novice. This time the classroom was a local general
store and the teachers were the owner and some of his older customers who
gathered almost daily to swap stories.
At one of these sessions, a discussion between Jerry and a grizzled old veteran of the hills turned from a
shared appreciation of the warmth of the morning sun and of the beauty of the
hills in the early light to a disagreement over the relative merits of a
possible paving a road leading into Chimes.
The old man and Jerry both agreed that the beauty of the hills needed to
be protected, but they disagreed over whether the roads should be paved. After a lifetime of fighting ruts and mud,
the old man could not resist the attractions of a ride into town on a paved
road. Jerry feared that with the pavement, would come all of those things he
had fled to the hills to get away from.
It was an interesting role reversal,
"progress" being supported by the old and fought by the young.
Jerry listened with
respect as the old-timer recounted the number of his vehicles, mainly used
pick-up trucks that had met an untimely death on the ruts and holes that were
unavoidable on the gravel roads. It was
either dust that filled the lungs and all other cavities or mud that made the
roads impassable. When the old man was
through, Jerry agreed with his description of the difficulty that faced the
traveler on the roads as they existed.
He then briefly stated his own concern that the paving the road would
bring in the trucks of the chicken processors
linking Chimes with corporate America, a development that the old man
simply had not assessed. Since the l930's
the poultry business had blossomed into the major industry in the
northwest. It had also changed from a
relatively easy way for the family farmer to earn a few extra dollars, in the
era that the old man remembered, to a viciously competitive industry that
exhibited most of the worst features of modern agribusiness. Jerry wanted jobs
for the hill people also, but the price to be paid in terms of loss of
isolation, pollution of the environment and the influx of people and technology
was too high for him.
Through talks like
this one, Jerry was getting a course in local culture. The main requirement for passing the course
seemed be to patience combined with the art of skillful questioning.
Fortunately, Jerry had an abundance of the former and had developed a good deal
of skill at the latter. The old timers
were masters of evasion and never told a short, illustrative anecdote if a long
one could be remembered. Through
careful listing and patient questioning, Jerry had been able to piece together
a history of the area as well as obtaining a feel for local politics which he
transmitted in his newsletter. A side
benefit of these sessions was that the hostility between the oldtimers and the
newcomers that plagued Chimes was considerably reduced. Jerry was no hippie. He had worked hard on his house and land in
addition to building up the cooperative. This the oldtimers respected. They didn't fully understand why he was
there, but they liked his genuine
interest and concern with their community. Jerry, in turn, had developed an understanding and respect for
them that was rare in "back-to-the-earth" circles. Through Jerry, the two groups began to talk
to each other and to socialize. A
barnwarming for the cooperative's new building provided the occasion for an
old-fashioned hoedown with the oldtimers and newcomers alike joining in the
dancing to music provided by a group of locals. The newcomers contributed their bit by featuring a jazz trio with
Jerry on drums. By the end of the
evening, each group understood the other a little better.
Communication with
the locals was not the only barrier the newcomers faced. Keeping in touch with each other in the
hills of rural Arkansas was a real task.
With no paved roads, no electricity, or phones, getting together is
difficult. Such isolation can also be
dangerous. One woman who lived back in
the woods in the Chimes area with her two children had, as her only recourse in case of emergency, a shotgun which she could use to fire
distress signals. Many of the newcomers
resolved the problem by installing CB radios which they kept in their homes and
used like phones. As a dedicated
communicator, Jerry's CB was one of the most active in the area. Some of the more dedicated "back-
to-the-earth" types argue that CB radios are part of what they came to
Chimes to get away from and will not have them in their homes. But others feel, as Jerry does, that
communication is important enough so that they are willing to compromise their
purity in order to maintain contact with others. But the problems that concerned most of the newcomers even more
than communication is that of earning a living, or staying alive without a
steady job.
Jerry figured that $
200.00 a month was all he and his wife need to exist comfortably. As the cooperative manager, he was paid a
small salary which, barring emergencies, was adequate. He had a garden and a few chickens which
helped keep his food costs down. His house was heated with a wood stove, the
fuel for which he cut himself. Water
came from a gravity - flow, spring -fed system that he hooked up to his
house. So, except for an occasional tank of butane which he used as a backup
for his wood stove and batteries for his CB, he had no fixed expenses. But Jerry was better off than many who
came to Chimes. He had enough money to buy forty acres and the materials he
needed to build his houses. He had the
energy and the initiative to build the cooperative which helped support him. In
addition to being a skilled mechanic, carpenter, and nutritionist, he knew a
lot about life and people. Others came
to Chimes less prepared. Some came with
just the clothes on their backs. Others
were well-educated but had no skills: a liberal arts education is not worth
very much in the hills of Arkansas where staying alive requires an ability to
cope with the elements. Occasionally,
there are a few teaching jobs available in some of the local schools and some
of the local farmers use hired help, but other than that, there are very few legal
ways to make money in Chimes. Some of
the newcomers work at seasonal jobs elsewhere, picking fruit, planting trees,
ginning cotton, or whatever work they can find to earn enough to get them
through another year in the woods. Some
of the women with children end up on the county welfare roles, and that of
course, is one of the reasons the locals resent the newcomers. That combined with the dope smoking,
sexually-promiscuous hippie life-style of some of the newcomers, made some of
the natives hostile to all outsiders.
But, because life in the hills is difficult at best even for those who
manage to earn a living, most of the hippie types did not last. They drifted back to the cities and
universities they came from where the living was easier. Some, however, stuck it out. They learned how to work and to farm.
In fact, they have introduced a new industry
to northwest Arkansas, marijuana growing.
Despite the combined efforts of local and state authorities to combat
the cultivation of the weed, it has become, unofficially, the second largest
money crop in the northwest Arkansas (right behind poultry and ahead of
cattle). The growers have become
masters at disguising the marijuana fields they tuck away in various
out-of-the-way spots throughout the Ozarks.
There are just too many growers and too much territory for the police to
catch everyone. Many of the law
officers either smoke the stuff themselves or are unwilling to mess around with
a business that is both profitable and popular. Busting a local grower could
mean defeat at the next election. At
least as long as marijuana stays illegal, the growers and the
"back-to-the-earthers" have a mutual interest in keeping the Ozarks
free of more paved roads and people, or anything else that would make it easier
for their fields to be detected.
Chimes has its share of pot growers, welfare mothers, and other people
who have found ways to survive in the Ozarks without a traditional job. What was unusual about Chimes was that, through
the efforts of Jerry and his supporters, there was a growing sense of community
in the area that included both oldtimers and newcomers. Jerry and his friends worked with the local
folks to try to preserve something they both valued, a rural way of life. In order to do this, each group had to learn
to tolerate the different life styles of the other. To the extent that they have done so, they have avoided the
excesses that have taken place in towns like Eureka Springs where the locals
created a battle plan to rid the area of hippies (one of the slogans of which
was, "fight long hairs on food stamps").
In the fall of 1977,
the community seemed to be prospering both culturally and economically. Under Jerry's inspired leadership the food
coop was growing. There were plans under
way to start a birthing clinic and a Sunday afternoon discussion- meditation
group was becoming a tradition. But in the spring of 1978, the community faced
a crisis - Jerry was leaving. His house had burnt to the ground and he had
taken this as a sign that he had perhaps been there long enough. There were
rumors that the burning of Jerry's house was no accident. "Burning out hippies" is not
uncommon in northwest Arkansas. Support
for this theory was fueled by the fact that just before the burning, Jerry had
uncovered some evidence of corruption in the county government, and, because he
had vowed to publish it, the county Judge had, it was said, ordered his hired stooges to "get
Jerry". But, for whatever the
reason, Jerry's departure raised a number of questions. Could the community continue to grow without
him? No one was sure. The food cooperative, especially, was in
danger of folding. It had been largely Jerry's creation and his energy kept it
going as the nerve center of the community. As kind of grim foreboding of what
the future might hold, two hari-krishna
types who had been helping out at the cooperative, ran Jerry's pick-up truck
too long without water in the radiator and burnt out the engine.
In the years
following Jerry's departure the cooperative did die and so did many of the
projects that had blossomed under his leadership. But a hard core of people remained and new leaders emerged. Movements, such as, the northwest Arkansas
Greens, have taken on some of the issues left unsettled by Jerry's
departure. New causes have emerged. The
struggle against the nearby Pindall
landfill which threatened to pollute the Buffalo River brought some of the
communities of the northwest together in a common effort that proved
successful. The economic and cultural
problems that Jerry faced are still there, but so are the methods that he
developed to deal with them. Increasingly, the new leaders have come to see
that the main struggle is not so much a matter of life style preservation,
although that still is important, but an environmental struggle to prevent the
pollution of their water and land.
Faced with problems of the magnitude of acid rain and the placing of
missiles in their midst, they have had to turn back to the broader political
scene that Jerry and others like him had fled.
The illusion that there now exists anywhere on earth that is free from
the environmental problems that plague mankind
has virtually disappeared as awareness of the greenhouse affect and the
expanding hole in the ozone layer have increased. With these problems in mind,
the new, emerging, community leaders will not only have to complete the
synthesis of the best of the old values of the hill people with the creative
enrgy of the new settlers in a revitalized system of communities in the Ozarks,
as Jerry had envisioned, but they will also have to deal with the problems of
the world as well.
The old man dug in
his pocket and the dog looked up expectantly.
A biscuit appeared and the dog sat and his tail moved. The biscuit was not a reward anymore - it
was part of long established ritual where the man gave to the dog as part of
their being. It had once been a reward
to encourage the puppy to return to her master, but there no longer was any
need for that.
The two were joined
by long years of living and of taking pleasure in the company of the
other. Dog and man were well-matched,
each content in their maturity and each resigned to a pace that reflected a
contentment with where they were. Each
had been through phases where rushing about seemed to be profitable - but no
longer.
The man spoke to the
dog as to an old friend, praising the dog's appearance and his behavior,
"Good, old Dandy-dawg," he said quietly, stroking the dogs head and
chest while the biscuit was being chewed.
"And a pretty dog, too!"
These words, every bit as much a part of the ritual that man and dog had
gone through for years, seemed to evoke no response from the dog. It was as if she were getting no more or
less than what she deserved; although, no dog-show judge would find any thing
especially good or pretty about this beast.
She was like thousands of other dogs, some kind of Shepherd mix,
probably Australian rather than German.
It was, indeed, the kind of dog many would find ugly, small head,
rounded, medium-size body, ragged-black fur with only a splash of white on her
chest that gave beauty to her otherwise nondescript appearance.
All that mattered
little to the man. He had neither
selected nor named the dog - she had come as a pup as part of an unsuccessful
marriage that included a wife and stepdaughter who had been the pup's rightful
owner. The girl had neglected the pup
more and more as it grew into maturity and the man had taken over the dog by
default. As a pup, it had started to
join the man on his morning runs, at first straining to keep up, but gradually
calling on its Shepherd heritage to roam rapidly ahead and off to the sides, as
if checking the area for potential predators, but always returning to the man's
side. As the dog grew the man was
forced to seek mechanical help to ensure that both of them got a workout. He trained the dog to run alongside his
bicycle on the streets and turned the
dog loose when he biked over fields or deserted trails in the woods. The dog seemed to know instinctively where
the man would go on his bike and would find shortcuts that would allow time for
her own exp-lorative forays and still do the Shepherd thing - protect her
master from predators.
Their rides on the
neighborhood streets attracted some attention from local residents who looked
with amusement on this crazy, bearded old man with his ugly Shepherd dog. Others shook their heads and made
disparaging comments about how some men just never would grow up. Mothers worried about the old man falling
and the loose dog attacking their children, but gradually fears subsided as
people got used to the spectacle and when, indeed, the man did fall - yanked
off as the dog was spooked by an approaching truck or pulled suddenly after a
nearby squirrel - nothing happened except the dog returned to the man's
side. The man, shaken and sometimes
bruised, managed to get up and continue.
Man and dog even
garnered a little fame as word spread that teen-age burglars had been chased
away by the approach of the two, apparently mistaking them for a new, police
bike patrol using trained attack dogs.
The dog also got credited for chasing a coyote out of some nearby woods
from which it had making raids on neighborhood houses making off with small
cats and dogs. So with those two minor
triumphs, the old man and dog became an accepted feature of the neighborhood.
The old man's
favorite ride was on the golf course on a moonlit night. There were actually three courses separated
by wooded areas, and the man could get to all three on his bike. It was beautiful in the moonlight,
especially down where the moonlight reflected off the creek. The scars of human abuse were hidden by the
night and there was usually no one else around to disturb their enjoyment. The dog, Dandy, was nearly invisible in the
darkness unless you could catch a glimpse of the white blaze on her chest as it
glistened in the moonlight. Otherwise,
the dog's presence could be detected only by the slight tinkling sound her dog
tags made banging against her collar as she raced through the night.
The dog's
instinctive sense of direction seemed to operate as well at night as it did in
the day. The man had experimented with
alternate routes and dodging through the woods to see if he could lose the dog,
and he only accomplished this once. And
that was because of a chance encounter with a skunk that temporarily disrupted
the dog's senses. Even with eyes
burning and reeking with the stink of skunk spray she made it back to the man's
house where she waited patiently at the door for the man to come to her aid.
For the man, the
dog's company helped to fill a deep gap in his relationships with the members
of his own species, especially females.
There was a sense of inadequacy about him that he never fully shook, but
the dog with its constant loyalty and unfailingly genuine pleasure in just
being with him helped ease the pain that stemmed from the lack of human
closeness.
Once the dog was
over her puppy stage the man worked out a rhythm with her. It was hard for the
man to remember who had adapted to whom; the process seemed mutual, each
blending with the other's pace and personality - the dog eager to please, the
man hoping the dog would take pleasure in his company for it seemed no human
would. He had tried four marriages and each had failed. There had been live‑in lovers along
with casual sex partners ‑ all had eventually distanced themselves from
him, or he from them. He was never sure
which happened first and he never fully understood it.
Each failed
relationship seemed to have a different set of facts defying an recognizable
pattern. He had invested a lot of money
in analysts and got many of the usual answers; communication failure, seeking women like his mother and then
resenting them as he had her, immersing himself in self‑ absorbing
depressions with no room for others...none seemed to adequately explain his
plight or allow him to structure a cure.
The dog never seemed
to mind his non-verbal ways. She
knew that when he appeared with leash,
it was time to go either for a run, walk, or a bike ride, depending on the time
of the day. Whichever it was, she was
ready ‑ she read the signals from the man and adapted. The man, for his part, watched and listened
to the dog - he heard her panting and paced himself so that the heat would not
exhaust her and he kept her away from the streets where cars were a menace or
where noises frightened her. This they
did for each other in silence.
Since dog had
experienced rejection from her first owner, the daughter of the man's last
wife, who, with the irresponsibility that seems to come with some adolescents,
had wanted the puppy but not the duties of dog ownership, man and dog had
bonded as outcasts. The man's rejection
was far more subtle as it was caused by something he was not fully aware of
happening in his marriage. The two, man
and dog, were each bound by circumstances beyond the control of either. Although it was hard to tell from outward
appearances if either were suffering, it was obvious that each found pleasure
in the company of the other, and, hence, they helped each other heal the pain
of rejection.
The man felt himself
become estranged from human companionship, but since that involvement had
caused him so much pain, he did nothing to end his estrangement. He related increasingly only to his dog, his
writing, his books, and his music. His
wife seemed entranced by television; the soaps, the sitcoms, stuff that made
the man cringe and walk off with the dog in bewilderment at the capacity of
humans to amuse themselves with such drivel.
He knew it was judgmental of him and in the vast scheme of things, what
did it matter how one spent one's time?
The shrinks, too, had warned him of the dire effects such judgments had
on relationships, but he could not help himself and his wife felt his judgment
and sought comfort and escape in the television, and later, after their
separation ‑ in the arms of a red-neck friend of her brothers ‑ but
this was kept from the man. He was
aware only of the estrangement and the feeling of rejection he shared with the
dog.
The man had retired
in the first flush of optimism about the positive nature of his new
marriage. No longer having to work, his
days went by in a blur, each much like the other. There were the early morning runs, morning divided between
reading and writing, afternoon bike rides, more reading and writing, evening
rides followed by reading until sleep came.
When his wife left with her daughter, his routine continued. It was
remarkable to him how little of his life had been taken up with her
presence. Still he missed her body in
the bed beside him at night, and, even more, their increasingly rare sexual
encounters.
Most of all he
missed the hope that had been there that somehow their relationship would
become intimate. Just when that hope
ended he was not sure, but he knew for sure it was over when he was told about
the lover.
In his younger days,
to ease the pain from the loss of other relationships, he had danced...and that
was how he had found each wife after the first. He had danced them into bed and to the altar. Now he understood why. Dancing required little communication other
than the physical. Hence, he never knew
the mind of the woman he married. As
with the dog so with each new relationship,
each woman followed instinctive signals from the man as he led them
through the dance and then through the sex that inevitably followed ‑ a
guiding hand to indicate what gave the other pleasure with the man leading but
eager to give pleasure as well as receive it. The pain came when that pleasure
was insufficient to maintain the marriage ‑when the relationship demanded
a spiritual union to bolster the physical ‑ then something in the man
froze ‑ this territory beyond the physical was unfamiliar. something deep
within him rebelled and would not continue ‑ hence the marriage stagnated
as the man withdrew and the woman was left hanging wondering what went
wrong. Eventually she withdrew too.
The dog never
withdrew, never left, was always eager for the man's presence. What spiritual needs existed were never a
barrier to the relationship between the two ‑ hence neither made demands
on the other that could not be fulfilled.
It was a kind of harmony that is perhaps not available between humans
because of the everlasting imperfection in communication that keeps
dissatisfaction always a factor between man and woman. The man felt his isolation and realized the
dog's company could not by itself fill the hole that he felt as a constant
companion since his wife had left.
But he could not
bring himself to make the effort to replace her. His spirit was depleted.
He had tried and failed so many times,
he no longer was able to go back to the dances to seek someone else who
might fill the hole. He no longer
believed that it was possible to ease his misery. His few forays back to the social scene had convinced him that he
could no longer excite himself or any women with his skill on the dance floor
or in the bed. The whole ritual just
made his hole seem wider and deeper and he longed to get back to his dog. For a two years the man did not leave the
neighborhood except to purchase food and other necessities. Otherwise he only left the house to walk and
bike with the dog.
His life was
tranquil. He was saddened by the lack
of human companionship, but the sadness became like an old friend ‑ a
part of life that one endured because there was no way that he knew of to end
it. Then, one day, the dog faltered as
they biked and began to cough. The
cough grew worse, and the man began to fear he would lose his only
companion. He consulted with the
nearest vet and the verdict was as he had feared. It was heart worm, so bad there was little hope for the dog was
too old to live through the cure. The
vet chastised the man for failing to give the dog the regular medication that
would have prevented the disease. The
man pleaded ignorance, his isolation had prevented him from taking care of his
own health, let alone that of the dog...he had just assumed that they both
would remain healthy.
For a week after, neither man nor dog left the house. The man seemed not to eat or sleep...he merely sat with the dog
close by...only stirring to let the dog out or to get it food or water. Several times he called to the dog and
looked deeply into her eyes while he repeated his comforting phrase, "Good, old Dandy-dog---and a pretty
dog, too!" Then, at the end of
the week, the man left the house by himself and returned with a paper bag.
The man called the
dog and they walked into the woods behind the house as they had done a thousand
times before. The man had carved a
trail through the brush so that he and the dog could walk without disturbing
neighbors or their dogs. The trail led
to a small lake occasionally used by local fishermen. As a pup, the dog had irritated the fisherman with his mad dashes
and barking so that she had to be put on a leash as they approached the
lake. But as she aged the men grew to
know the dog and she them and the leash was no longer necessary.
There was a special
spot at the end of the lake by a creek
that joined the lake where the man had usually waited for the dog to end her
investigations in the adjoining woods and to finish her greetings to whatever
fishermen were present. The man would
read while the dog chewed on a biscuit or a hot dog from the man's pocket. They both would enjoy the day in silence.
Today, there was no
need to wait for the dog's return for
she could barely keep up with the man's slow pace. The man reached in his pocket and the dog managed an expectant wag
of her tail. Here was a rare treat,
for, in place of the usual hot dog, was a steak cooked rare and wrapped in a
slice of bacon. The man placed the
steak on a stone close to the creek and the dog lowered her head to eat. The man then reached in the bag that usually
contained his books. The man drew out a
large pistol and fired it quickly into the dogs brain as she chewed happily on
the steak. The man then kneeled by the
dogs body, carefully reloaded the pistol. Then muttering his apologies to the
dog and giving the dead body a final stroke, he placed the pistol in his mouth
and fired.
Throughout history,
caves have provided refuge for many different
types of earth dwellers; humans, bears, apes, wildcats, birds, insects,
reptiles and fish have all dwelled there at
one time or another. Some stayed
and made caves their permanent
homes. Unfortunately, nature inflicts a
penalty on those who remain too long in
the dark ‑ blindness. Blind
cavefish, crayfish, salamanders,
isopods and amphipods reside in the dark in and around the pools
that are found fed by springs on the
floors of many caves. These "troglophiles" or "cave
lovers" spend their entire lives in total
darkness. Some, like the blind
crayfish, have lost their color in
addition to their sight and have become albinos; color as well as sight becomes
useless in the dark.
Cavefish, alone in
the dark with no natural enemies, have not learned fear and are easily scooped up by marauding intruders. Depending on the dark to hide them, and conditioned to respond to the stirring
of water as the likely entry of a
potential meal, the fish have no instinctual flight responses to use to avoid
the human spelunker aided with artificial light. The Ozark blind cavefish
is, then, not surprisingly, an endangered species; its refuge no longer the safe, womb‑like habitat
it had been for millions of years. A similar fate has fallen on its companion
in the dark, the blind crayfish. The crayfish's ability to swim backwards is
of little use when it is uncertain as to the direction from which danger is
approaching. The plight of these
strange and harmless, if not useless, creatures has stirred the imagination of most who have come to know
them. How did they get there? What purpose do they serve? What do they tell
us about evolution? Like the flightless Kiwi bird of Australia,
the hapless quality of their existence
stirs the caretaker impulses in the
human heart. Even in Arkansas, a state
not noted for its striving to protect
endangered species, a major highway was curved some twenty miles to the east at great expense to avoid
disturbing the recharge area of a cave
containing about half the known population of the Ozark Blind Cavefish.
The caves in which
these creatures are found are the most dramatic features of the karst terrain
which dominates much of the landscape of the Ozark Plateau Province of northern Arkansas. This area is
underlain by carbonate rocks consisting mostly of limestone(CaCO3) and
dolomite(CaMg(CO3)2) which are subject
to the solutional and sometimes mechanical action of water which results in caves, sinkholes, and fractures
of varying size and shape. Streams flow
freely through thin soils from springs, sometimes disappearing through cracks and crevices and beginning
the work of cave formation.
Except for those caves that have been
remodeled to accommodate tourists with
stairs, rails, and artificial lighting, the caves are uncomfortable and potentially dangerous places for the
novice. Those containing the fish, bats
and other creatures, are cool, damp,
slippery, and vary from extremely cramped tunnels to larger rooms with pools deep enough to drown in. Bumped heads
and knees are the most common and least
serious hazard. Getting lost or trapped
by flooding is the most feared
possibility. Despite these
unpleasantries, the caves continue to
attract and intrigue all manner of people who seem not to be satisfied with the tamer offerings of the
commercial or U.S. Park Service caves
that have been opened to the public.
Tales of injuries
and near deaths as the result of cave
exploration abound. Almost as
common are recollections of the use of
the caves as hiding places. One commercial cave in north Arkansas advertises
as the "Civil War Cave" in reference to its use as a hide‑a‑way
by rebel troops during the Federal
occupation. In Calico Rock, AR, one of
the arguments used against building a
prison in the area was that escaped prisoners would be able to use the caves in the area to hide from searchers (an
argument that did not hold up since, once tracked to the cave, an escaped prisoner would have merely exchanged
one prison for another).
Because of the
relative ease with which contaminated surface water may enter groundwater
through solution channels in limestone areas, concern over declining water quality has worried state agencies
charged with protecting endangered
species. The sensitivity of the
cavefish to pesticides motivated state
and federal officials to propose limits on
pesticide use on the entire
Springfield Plateau. Just how this could be done is still under discussion.
Nitrates and
bacteria from human and animal wastes are also matters of concern since
Arkansas is the number one poultry state in the union and caves are located in areas where both the human
and animal population is growing
rapidly. Statewide, Arkansas produces about a billion chickens a year. Benton and Washington Counties, where many
of the caves are, have the highest rates of poultry production in the state
(Washington County is first with 119 million birds marketed in 1991 followed by
Benton County with 113 million). They
are also the two counties which show the highest rate of degradation in both
surface and groundwater in the form of nitrates and bacteria. One investigation conducted near the
caves showed that 80% of the wells
sampled had significant bacterial contamination.
Nitrates are
nutrients that affect surface water by contributing to the growth of algae and
create a significant biological oxygen demand thereby affecting the development
of aquatic species. Sensitive species are affected at levels above one
milligram per liter (nitrates measured as Nitrogen). EPA has found nitrates to be a possible carcinogen. Above ten milligrams per liter nitrates can
cause methemoglobinemia (the blue baby syndrome) in children. The nitrates usually come from the spreading
of chicken litter onto pastures and getting into surface water as runoff or
into groundwater through leaching into the water table through the soil or
cracks and fractures in the land surface.
Bacteria comes from the chicken litter in the same manner. Both nitrates and bacteria can come from
other animal and human sources.
Three recent studies
that compared intensive poultry production areas with nearby forests found that
wells around the chicken houses showed nitrate levels that averaged ten times
higher than those surrounded by trees. Studies of streams in poultry producing
areas surrounding the caves reveal a similar pattern with higher nitrates
produced by runoff from the fields where litter from the chicken houses is
spread as fertilizer. Normally,
nitrates would be expected to occur at levels less than one milligram per liter
in both surface and groundwater.
The University is
also conducting a geological investigation of the recharge areas of Cave
Springs Cave in Washington County which serves as the habitat for about half of
the known population of Ozark Cavefish, an endangered species found only in the
caves of the Ozarks. Concern over
increasing nitrate contamination of springs in the cave is the primary
emphasis. Nitrate levels in the cave have been fluctuating between 3 and 6
mg/l. Samples taken from nearby Osage
creek within the recharge area of the cave were as high as 19 mg/l
Nitrate-N. A similar study of nearby
Logan Cave conducted showed high levels
of nitrates running through the water during high flow periods. A Federal report on Beaver Lake, the source
of a number of local community water
supplies and a recharge area for springs that feed some of the caves,
revealed that 81% of the nitrogen in the lake came primarily from poultry, hogs
and cattle production.
Fortunately, the
cavefish diet of crustacea and other tiny creatures who, in turn, feed from bat droppings from the creatures
who sleep hanging from the cave
ceilings above them has forced the fish to adapt to relatively high nitrates.
However, more can come with the runoff from chicken farms than just nitrates.
Heavy metals and antibiotics find
their way into the chicken feed and from there into the litter (reports
of arsenic contamination from that
litter have surfaced in at least one
study conducted by the University of Oklahoma). Atrazine and other herbicides are widely used on pasture
against thistle growth in the cave spring
recharge areas. All these add to the
risks of cave life.
The fish are
relatively small, attaining only a maximum length of slightly more than two inches.
While they do not have normal eyes, they do have remnant eye stalks.
They are carnivorous and live on cave
creatures such as salamanders, crayfish, amphipods, and their own young.
These creatures in turn live on bat guano and other organic matter that seeps into the caves from the
surface.
The fish have always
been objects of curiosity because of their unusual habitat and their adaption
to it and have even played a small role in the controversy between the American
and the old Soviet view of
evolution. In a sophisticated version
of the "use it or lose it" approach to genetics, the famous French
theorist Lamarck used the blind cavefish to bolster his theory of
evolution through acquired characteristics.
The theory was subsequently taken over by the
Russian biologist Lysenko because of its political affinity with Marxism
as opposed to the western, or Mendelian
theory of genetic inheritance as the primary vehicle for the transmission of
the characteristics of individuals among species. The existence of the fish as
a living example of backward evolution
continues to place a degree of stress
on biologists who are called upon to explain it. Simply put, Lamarck's
"use it or lose it" analysis and the loss of sight through generations of cavefish, the young acquiring
the sightless characteristic of the
old, seems to prove the Lamackian-Lysenko theory.
The two theories
currently in vogue in America are material compensation and pleitrophy. The first sounds remarkably like Lamarck in
slightly new dress. It blames the sightlessness of the fish on
the energy taken from the vestigial eyes by other rapidly developing organs
that are being used by the fish, in
much the way our own appendix remains in the body although largely functionless.
Pleitrophy refers to gene coding for more than one trait and buttresses
the theory of material compensation by allowing for the indirect effects of the
loss of one trait on the occurrence of
others. Random mutation in the cave environment allowed the progressive adaption of this rare
species to its dark and aqueous
habitat. In this case, the
blindness was not so much an advantage
leading to the survival of the fittest, but a condition which
allowed the fish to expend scarce
energy on those characteristics which were
more important to survival in the darkness of the cave. If you are left
with the feeling that not all questions have
been sufficiently answered, that is only appropriate and is an integral part of the intrigue that the
cavefish exercise on most all who come to know them.
Left undisturbed, cave life is a naturally
complete and stable cycle with each
link being dependent upon the other.
The bats, as we have seen play a crucial role in this cycle by bringing into the cave the main source
of nutrients upon which the creatures
living around and in the water on the
cave floor depend for their existence. Three of these bat specimens are listed
as endangered species; the grey bat, the Indiana bat, and the Ozark big‑eared
bat. Arkansas bats feed almost
exclusively on insects and are voracious
eaters consuming up to one third of their body weight in insects each evening ‑ which amounts to 3,000
insects per bat. Multiply this times the thousands of bats in typical
colony and the benefits to those within the foraging radius of a bat colony are
obvious.
Females roost in a
special maternity cave separate from the males during the spring brooding period. The females activate sperm left behind
during earlier mating to ensure
appropriate timing for rearing young who
might otherwise be devoured by hungry males. The environmental
attributes that attract the bats to the caves on a regular basis have allowed
the cavefish to live well over twenty
years on the average, an indication that their food supply has not been seriously disrupted. Bats have been known to live even longer ‑ up to thirty years.
Disturbance by man, however, is a
serious threat to the longevity of both bat and fish. In still
unprotected caves, vandals and insensitive spelunkers can cause damage by catching the fearless fish or disturbing the
bats. A single arousal during hibernation can cause the bat
to expend the equivalent of two or
three weeks food energy; hence, making it more difficult for it to make it through the winter. Mother
bats may drop their young if disturbed
while roosting in the summer.
Pesticides used to kill insects may accumulate in the bats and in
their droppings and then to the
crustaceans that are eaten by the fish.
Pesticides from bat droppings
may add to that which comes with surface penetration raising havoc among the sensitive crustaceans and fish in the
cave. Other contaminates from leaking
underground storage tanks and spills near the caves is a constant concern; especially with those caves near towns.
In Arkansas, a
cooperative effort to offer the caves some protection is being developed by a Protection Planning Committee
composed of members of several state,
private nonprofit and federal agencies involved in pollution control or
wildlife protection. Cave recharge
areas have been roughly mapped, water
quality samples have been taken, and local officials have been alerted. Still, despite these efforts,
the fragile ecology of the karst area
may not be able to survive the ever‑increasing demands placed upon it by growing numbers of people
and animals. The cave creatures may ultimately join the ranks of
the thousands of species that have
become victims of "progress".
Most evidence
suggests that there is still time to save the caves and their residents. Water samples taken from
several of the caves in Arkansas showed no pesticides and, with the
exception of relatively high nitrates in one cave, water quality was good. The citizens have shown in the past that they stand ready to put
their money where the fish are, so
there is hope that they will do so again.
Carol Thompson was
my first love, puppy love though it surely was. It was a crushing blow when she moved across town. She may as well have moved out the country,
because for a ten year old, across town was foreign country, an inaccessible
and remote area. But even later when the elementary students from all over town
were joined in one Junior High School, I found a new barrier in addition to the
geographical one that made Carol inaccessible ‑ she had moved in terms of
class as well. She had joined the
wealthy WASPS in the west end of town, and left me immersed in the poorer,
French Canadian section where I was born and stayed throughout my school years. Carol was lost forever and it tore at my
young heartstrings and no one seemed to understand or care. I just had to tough it out, even though, at
ten, I wasn't very tough ‑ still am not.
It was hard for me
to understand. Carol had been the most
attractive girl in my class and she was recognized as "my girl". It was not something I planned. It just happened. Then, Just as mysteriously, she was gone. The lesson was quite clear. These things were a matter of fate and quite
beyond my ability to control. I began
to drift towards a succession of Carol replacements, none of which quite
measured up to the original although each helped ease the pain of the loss that
I carried with me.
That image of Carol
has stayed with me, mostly in an unconscious way, and I have used it as a
yardstick by which to measure other girls and then, as I grew older, other
women. Their names and faces have
blurred over the years, Ruth, Muriel, Beverly, Toppy's sister, Bob's cousin,
Avis. Some of their names I can't
remember at all. There was the Queen of
the Junior High School dance that I dated until the past King beat my
time. There were those neighborhood
girls whose bodies we explored in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of
sex. Then the inevitable loss of
virginity in the bushes of nearby park with an older, more experienced sister
of a friend followed by heartbreak when her regular boyfriend came home on
leave from boot camp and I was cast aside.
I could have returned when he left again, but my pride wouldn't let me.
Then there were
those long dry spells in high school and in the Air Force in the early 1950's
when I had no steady girl. Strange how
that worked. In the period of my life
when my biological sex drive was most intense, I had no woman to ease my
frustration, only the occasional, hurried, uncomfortable liaison in the backs
of cars, living room sofas, deserted beaches; wherever sufficient privacy could
be obtained to relieve the constant pressure of screaming hormones. No wonder discretion was tossed to the
winds. No question here of applying the
Carol Thompson screen. Relief was what
was sought. Anything else that was
gained in the process was welcome but largely secondary.
In those days, the
greatest danger came from unwanted pregnancies and the shotgun marriages that
resulted. No one that I knew ever came
down with a "social disease" ‑ I never worried about it except
in the whorehouses of Korea and there I came through unscathed even after some
dangerous, unprotected encounters.
Maybe I was just lucky, but it seemed like the statistics were on our
side. The majority were as lucky as I
was. It was only those unfortunate few
whose encounters resulted in pregnancies or disease.
Why marry,
then? It was a legitimate
question. Love seemed even more remote
than pregnancy and social disease. To
me, love seemed to be something that happened in the movies and had happened
once to me over Carol Thompson but seemed unlikely to happen again. No woman seemed able to past the test. I could overlook their inadequacies as long
as my hormones were screaming and fueled with enough alcohol to make the whole
thing fuzzy. But when sexual relief
combined with sobriety, I wanted out,
at least until the hormones kicked in again.
But the game got
old. All around me, single folks
dropped off. The pool of Carol
replacements grew smaller. In addition,
graduate school loomed on the horizon.
For the poor like me who were not scholastic whiz kids, one of the
established routes through graduate school involved a working wife. A year spent as a bachelor in the cold
expanses of northern Wisconsin teaching high school and trying to save money
convinced me that it was time to give up, get me a working wife, and get into
graduate school.
It was not hard to
do ‑ there were lots of women around who were willing to help their mate
through school. The hard part involved
the sacrifice of dreams of love and finding Carol. I also was only dimly aware of the kind of pain this tradeoff
would cause my wife. I think she realized right from the beginning what the
trade was about and what was in it for her (to ease my guilt, I offered to work
on alternate years so that she could get an advanced degree also), although we
never verbalized the emotional part of it.
We did a minimum of pretending and settled rapidly into a cold, career‑oriented
deal, moderated only by occasional forays into drunken hormone release.
It was on one of
these releases that fate finally caught up with me. Always sloppy about birth control because I had been so lucky in
the past, my wife became pregnant.
Neither of us let the pregnacy interfere with our career plans, but it
played hell with our social lives and extended our marriage considerably. Suprisingly, I really got involved with
fatherhood and became a house husband while I worked on my Ph.D. thesis. That experience gave me a taste of intimacy
with another human quite unlike any I had ever experienced before. It awakened untapped reservoirs of love and
tenderness that I hadn't realized existed.
Some of this spilled over into our marriage, enough to stretch it out
but not enough to save it.
Over the years,
since our marriage was virtually love less, my wife had taken on a string of
lovers. After I graduated and was no
longer dependent on her, to put me through school, I began to do some serious
searching for someone else. We
separated and I drifted off to Arkansas to take a teaching job in a small
college.
One would have
thought that given the passage of years, my hormones would have cooled
considerably and I would have stayed
out of relationships based on mundane sexual or economic attractions. Not so.
I embarked on a series of unsatisfactory relationships with a number of
women who relieved my loneliness/horniness and even married a couple of them,
but was unable to achieve a lasting relationship. I guess I was still searching for the virgin Carol in a field
fogged with lust, alcohol, and the insecurity left behind by years of near
poverty.
By this time,
however, I was not completely oblivious to the fact that something was
wrong. I quit drinking and became aware
of an increasing problem with depression that seemed to follow every failed
relationship. I began to seek help,
drugs for the depression and therapy for the relationship problem. But changing my behavior proved to be a slow
process. Getting rid of the accumulated bad habits of the previous half century
has not been easy. In addition, there
were painful lessons about learning to value my own being and behaving in a
manner consistent with my new self image.
I have learned a lot
about the consequences of not achieving an equal and intimate
relationship. Each failed relationship
carried with it its own peculiar pain.
The first divorce was the hardest since it involved leaving my son as
well as my wife. Then there was the
humiliation of my first affair with a young woman who ultimately ran off with a
truck driver. This was followed by a
marriage to a woman who was enmeshed with her mother and daughter and would not
let me in. Then I found a an addict
(alcohol, nicotine, marijuana). Then I
married a perfectionist followed by an affair with a food addict.
Since they were all
so different, it was hard for me to see a pattern until I stopped blaming them
and looked for what it was in me that caused me to try to relate to these
unavailable women. That's when I
discovered I was still carrying around this image of mother/Carol and they all
in some way reminded me of that image.
Have you ever
wondered why most gurus are old men?
There are occasional exceptions as in the Beatles famous spiritual
leader, the fourteen year old Maharishi Marijuana. But he was a flash in the
pan ‑ most gurus are your typical, 60‑plus, old geezer. I always assumed that this was because as
one grows older the body dissipates, one approaches death and affairs of the
spirit become more important. Also
earthly distractions are less evident ‑ the kids are gone, the hormones
no longer course through the body in the same abundance, retirement brings the
leisure to contemplate the world of the
spirit. Naturally, concerns about an
afterlife begin to assume a higher priority as the grim reaper begins to dog
your tail.
I watched my father
go through this process. He kept busy
enough for most of his life to avoid thinking much about his spirit. When finally forced to quit working at the
ripe age of 83, he confronted his
spirit and decided the Catholic church of his youth still had the most
correct answers. The priests helped him
along with this thinking and a friendly Catholic funeral director sold him a
package deal that would ease his way into the hereafter. He got a casket, a mass, grave‑side
service, two wakes in the funeral home along with some additional open casket
praying by the priests thrown in, and a free lunch for those grievers that
stuck it out all the way through the services.
The price for this deal just about equaled the sum total of the old
man's remaining savings. The priests
clinched the deal by reminding him that his prepayment would prevent him from
being a burden to his heirs.
Or, at least, that
was the story that was passed along to the relatives. My own theory was slightly different. I had never known the old
man to unload any extra dollars in the direction of the church. Nor had he ever been too concerned about the
"burden" factor. My suspicion
about what had turned the old man on was the idea of control ‑ he
intended to take advantage of whatever feelings his death inspired among his
heirs to put them through one last round of ritual reminding them of his power
and that of the church. Only by
appealing to this primeval guilt over the death of the father could he get his
atheist son and various other strayed and straying nephews and nieces to attend
all these services. Herded along with
the remaining "believer" relatives,
these wayward travelers would once again be corralled into a final
performance of Catholic ritual. No
doubt such contemplation was of great comfort to him in his final hours, for he
certainly had enjoyed inflicting that ritual upon us when we were young and he
could personally herd us into church each Sunday. Now we were all in for a final round of parentelly‑inflicted
religious instruction in how to go out Catholic style.
It turned out to be
not as bad as I had expected. The wakes
were like cocktail parties with the alcohol kept under cover. Old friends and relatives wandered in, gave
the coffin where the old man was perched in the front almost submerged in
flowers the once over lightly, and then proceeded to engage in the sort of
banter people engage in at gatherings the world over. The only difference I detected is that some made an effort to be
more reflective and were generally more subdued than at a normal party. I managed to avoid most of the formal
praying at the wakes, sneaking out for coffee with like‑minded relatives.
Only at the funeral
mass itself did things get a little difficult.
Our family had been well‑known at the Irish Church that my mother
had insisted on attending. But after
she died my father had married again to a woman who shared his French‑Canadian
heritage and so he switched churches.
The result was that few of us had ever been in this French church before
and neither the family nor my father seemed to be known to the priest who
conducted the service. The priest
proceeded to deliver a painful and irrelevant sermon that made no connection to
my father and only served to alienate still further those of who had long
before stopped believing in the Catholic version of salvation. The priest had no idea who he was addressing
and had made no effort to find out.
I had to bring out
all the coping methods I had developed as a kid for enduring similarly long and
boring rituals inflicted upon me by sadistic adults; twisting my fingers, ears,
and hair and studying the pained reactions of others. Somewhere in the this period while I was involved in these
diversionary efforts, my older sister reached over and grabbed my hand ‑
something she used to do when we were kids and my twisting was about to be
disciplined by irate nuns who sat at the end of pews just waiting for kids like
me to let their boredom be reflected in their behavior. I smiled at my sister and gave her a hug
which, I think, helped both of us through the agony.
It had been thirty years since I had sat
through an entire mass. Not much had
changed. The altar had been moved off
to the side and priest used a table out in front‑center stage to perform
his body‑blood transubstantiation.
It amazed me that I had ever believed in this stuff and I found it even
more amazing that any one still did.
The only other change was that the priest was assisted by an old man and
a old woman. In my youth, priests were
assisted by altar boys. I had even
flirted with the idea of becoming one under the encouragement of the nuns who
taught us Sunday school and were always on the lookout for Catholic boys who
were bright enough to memorize the required Latin. Apparently the pool of such boys had dried up and the priests had
to revert to the old‑timers. This
guy at least offered some amusement as he spent most of the service engrossed
in picking his nose ‑ much to the disgust of my sister.
At communion time,
the split in the family between believers and non believers became dramatically
evident as the former lined up to receive the host and we rebels stuck firmly
to our seats. I noticed that for those
who took communion, the old lady assistant offered a drink of wine out of the
communion cup ‑ something that was never done in the old days. My
recollection was you had to get that dry unleavened bread down as best
you could ‑ not an easy task for a dry‑mouthed kid who really
thought he had the Lord's body in his mouth and it was a sin to chew it. Couldn't help thinking the new church was
getting soft ‑ no more Latin, professional altar assistants, and wine to
the communicants!
In the communion
line the geezers were certainly in the majority although a surprising number of
the younger generation still participated.
My super‑religious oldest brother (for years I had referred to him
as the "pope"), sister and oldest niece went. Everybody else that had my mother's blood
sat it out. In this ritual at least,
most of my family had strayed with me and I felt less isolated and closer to
my mother, for I remember it was from
her that I learned that it was alright to sit out some rituals (she often
stayed home from church) and to be tolerant of other people's religion. In this respect, she had encouraged our
questioning if not our rebellion.
Try though I did to keep from being hooked by
the priest and his doctrine of fear, I
could not help getting a little angry at both him and my father to the extent
that I sensed neither really believed in what was going on but they both were
ready to inflict these painful rituals on others. In a feeble attempt to find inspired words, the priest
periodically scanned the rafters of the church ‑ he never looked at his audience. But the skyward searching failed him for his
oratory seemed stale and was without noticeable effect as both the audience and
God seemed to ignore him. For, if God
is defined as the spirit of life, surely this exercise was in violation of what
funerals are supposed to be about. The
priest was not honoring the life of my father ‑ he knew nothing about
it. He was wallowing in death,
implicitly threatening us all with damnation unless we believed him and
followed his ritual to salvation.
It was only by
focusing on the absurdity of it all; the nose‑picking, old geezer, altar
boy, the toothless ramblings of the has‑been priest, the plaintive
manipulations from the grave of my wily old man ‑ defeated but still
giving it his best shot ‑ that I was able to keep the anger from spilling
out rebelliously as it used to.
Instead, I smiled and hugged my sister and took comfort in the knowledge
that I wasn't the only one squirming in their seat. More than half this gathering was there as I was ‑ a
captive audience to a dead man's hired mourners who neither knew nor cared why
his life had been worth living.
It saddened me that no one had placed any mention
in the service of how the old man, with only an eighth grade education himself,
had motivated his offspring to get an education and they all were successful by
most of the usual measures ‑ an engineer, a business man, a
schoolteacher, a college professor, a chief bookkeeper. They, in turn, had raised large numbers of
bright, creative, successful children.
To do this, surely my father and mother had
shared some knowledge of how the spirit of life was fostered for they had
produced good citizens, good workers, good people. Out of poverty in the middle of the Great Depression, this family
had emerged, held together, and, ultimately, prospered. Without exception, they had all pushed
America and the world in the right direction.
It was how the system was supposed to work.
This priest with his
focus on death had no awareness of the value of that creation. God as the spirit of life was present but
not acknowledged. How the old man had endured all that poverty, the years of
labor, the lack of personal accomplishment or material reward for his own
efforts, and still never succumbed to bitterness or alcoholism was the
unrecognized mystery that should have been the primary focus of the funeral
service. His chief accomplishment was
that he had nurtured a spirit in himself and the members of his family. That spirit kept him going for 93 years,
generally in a direction that leads to what a consensual diagnosis would call
beneficial for both himself and the world.
That spirit he had passed on to his heirs.
It is that spirit
that I would have called upon had I been conducting the service. And, I would
have asked all who were present to join me in honoring both the man who was
with us and his spirit that is still here with us. For we can say of him that his spirit promotes life and, in that
sense, it does God's work.
Johnny Warrington
was the first of these that I can remember. He lived across the street and was
three years older than I was. For me he was an entry into the world of sports
and friendship. I idolized him. I had
older brothers but they rarely paid any attention to me. They, like my father, were too busy for the
likes of me. Johnny wasn't. He had things for us to do. Scrub football in the street. Baseball in nearby fields. Games on the radio to listen to; the Boston
Red Sox and the Braves. Johnny and I
were unusual in this French Canadian neighborhood where I grew up. Neither of us spoke French like the others.
We were outcasts and thrown together because of it. Despite the gap in our ages, I had a certain usefulness for
Johnny. I was pliant, cooperative, and
completely at his service. I would
catch for him for hours as he practiced his pitching. I would chase fly balls, field grounders, or whatever else he
felt the need or desire to focus on. I
acquired some skill in the process as well, but left to my own devices I
probably would not have bothered. Pleasing Johnny was my interest and the game
was only secondary. Throughout this
period, it was like my father did not
exist. I only saw him at mealtimes and
we never talked except for a ritualized, "How did it go at school
today?" To which I had an equally ritualized response, "O.K."
Neither of us removed our eyes from our plates during this empty formality. I never thought anything about his non‑existence
‑ I assumed all fathers were like that.
Once, to my amazement, the old man suggested we take a trip to Boston to
see the Red Sox play. In addition to
being amazed I was also somewhat distressed ‑ What could we possibly have
to say to each other during the trip down and back and during the frequent
pauses in the game? I solved this (to
what I think was our mutual relief) by inviting Johnny to come with us. I always felt guilty about the solution
though and suspected I may have hurt his feelings. Naturally, neither of us ever said anything and we continued to
ignore each other. Nor did I realize
there was anything wrong with my almost total devotion to Johnny. I guess Johnny did and he was preparing to
end it. Although I wasn't aware of it at the time, my eyesight was failing and the difficulty I had seeing a
baseball began to limit my performance.
My usefulness to Johnny diminished and he began to seek out others
closer to his own age and skill levels.
I, in turn, found a
collection of losers, kids whose interests were in things other than sports ‑
pinball machines, smoking and girls ‑ to hang out with. That is how I stumbled into Duke. He was older too. Duke seemed to have the kind of skills the girls admired. He had a certain macho flair that they
liked. I'm not sure why Duke wanted me around except that he was confident that
he could outshine me with girls and I was so loyal he never had to worry about
me. I was always there ready to go
wherever and whenever he wanted to go.
I let him do the thinking and I just followed along for the ride ‑
to keep him company when the girls were unavailable. I fell for some of the girls, too ‑ the less attractive
ones that Duke claimed no interest in.
Duke always made fun of my girlfriends, calling them names and putting
them down. I usually joined his games
and even adopted his names for them.
Like most of the other losers, Duke quit school as soon as he could and
went to work. I couldn't wait to join
him in the factory, but my mother had different ideas. She wanted me to finish school. So Duke and I drifted apart. I learned things from Duke about how to
relate to girls but it wasn't very positive.
I learned how to put them down verbally and to relate to them
physically. It took me years to learn
that this was not a productive way to relate to women. I also learned how to drink from Duke ‑
a habit that would plague me for most of my adult life.
I drifted for a long
time after Duke without a male rudder. There was no "Iron John" in my
life to take the place of my ineffective father. There were no elders to initiate me into the life of an adult. I was no one's apprentice and no vocation
beckoned. I limped through high school in a semi‑catatonic state,
depressed and lost. I drifted through
four years in the Air Force in much the same fashion. College started out that way,too, until I met Earl. Like my other
mentors, Earl was a little older. We
fit like Duke and Johnny had earlier ‑ he needed a follower, I needed a
leader. Earl took over my intellectual life ‑ told me which courses to
take, books to read, and how to lead a studious life. Since I didn't have a life, I lived his for a couple years. And, it worked ‑ I eventually became a
student and began getting good grades, high enough to carry me into graduate
school.
Earl drifted away
like the others into a career in Mathematics where, though I tried, I could not
follow. I drifted into History which is
where I met Steve. Steve's father had
been a Communist Party member at some point and had lost his teaching job
because of it. As a "red
diaper" baby, Steve had assumed the leadership of what little radical
activity existed on campus. I began
getting my assignments in life from Steve.
I had been impressed by Ray Ginger's book on the life of America's
greatest socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. Steve seemed to me to be living out
that tradition. It was with Steve and
his friends that I took part in my first demonstrations, and tasted the thrill
of rebellion.
I was hooked. Even
without Steve to guide me I began confronting authority. I was fired from my first teaching job for
taking part in a peace demonstration. I
was then thrown out of the Peace Corps for psychological rebelliousness. Then
it was on to the University of Wisconsin in the sixties where rebellion was the
major activity. The action there was
centered on two fronts; one in opposition to the burgeoning war in Vietnam and
the other in support of civil rights. I
was involved with both and so was Brian.
He was pure rebellion when I met him.
He was fresh from a sojourn with the Civil Rights advocates who had
marched into the heart of racism and wrestled mightily with the evil giant
during Mississippi summer. After the
deaths of Goodman, Cherney and Schwerner, many had left Mississippi happy to be
alive and licking their wounds.
Not Brian. He went to North Carolina to work for the
Congress of Racial Equality in the city of Greensboro where the sit in movement
had started. I had come down from
Wisconsin, escaping a bad marriage and a graduate school career that seemed to
be going nowhere. I was also unhappy
because the revolution seemed to be leaving me in its wake while I wasted away
in meaningless pursuit of a Ph.D. Brian
was just what I thought I needed. We
moved into a dormitory room together in the local all‑Black college where
we were to act as part‑time teaching assistants while we worked at our
main role of pushing the revolution forward.
Just living in that dormitory was a small revolutionary step in itself
for we were the first and only white residents of that enclave of
segregation. Since the rest of the
dormitory residents were Black freshman and sophomore males, many of whom were
registered for the Western Civilization courses that we were teaching, we were
objects of a mixture of fear, curiosity, and some loathing. What were these white guys up to,
anyhow? And why were they living in our
dorm? The administration had intended
our stay there as only temporary until we found suitable quarters on the white
side of town. However, for Brian and I, the dorm had two main virtues; rent was
free and it offered an ideal opportunity to seek out cadre for the revolution ‑
or so we thought. Anyway, we stayed
there the whole academic year, despite some attempts on the part of the Blacks
to make us uncomfortable. The room was
one of those classic 1950's ten foot by four foot cubicles, designed I guess
for monks and adapted for college students.
We were on the second of five floors and each floor had a community
bathroom at each end. Our room was not
far from one of these and we soon learned that this was not the advantage that
it appeared for the bathroom served as a practice room for doo‑ wopping
quartets practicing the Motown sound at all hours of the night. Also, we found
it was considered great fun to stop up the commodes and basins and cause a
flood of water to flush out the white guys in the middle of the night. We also woke up one night to find one very
drunk Black Freshman urinating in Brian's closet ‑ he had been steered
into the room by several of his not‑quite‑so‑drunk peers who
were giggling in the hall. Brian had
only one real leg. His other had been lost in a childhood accident and he
normally got around just fine on an artificial one which he took off and laid
by his bed at night. The difficulty
with it was that it took some time to attach it properly. When I awoke on this night Brian was already
shouting at the drunk pissing in his closet and finally hopped up on one leg
and beat him out of the room with his artificial leg. It was a bizarre apparition for me and it caused much merriment
in the hall once the drunk urinater's companions caught sight of the enraged and hopping Brian swinging his leg
with great gusto.
Some of the
expressions of discontent with our presence were not funny. The uglier
incidents grew out the students increasing displeasure with our attempts to
impose white folks' grading standards in our history classes. This was, after all, a student body that
consisted primarily of the disadvantaged, many from rural schools that had not
changed much from the period after the Civil War when the segregated systems
were formed. Traditionally under‑
funded, the neglected Black schools generally had lower standards that catered
to the lower expectations that was forced upon them by a society that had never
allowed them to advance. I had had some
experience in white high schools and tried to grade about the same as I always
had. But even with that not very high
standard, I ended up giving a large number of D's and F's.
Despite his
rebellious nature, Brian was a tougher grader than I. He insisted that Blacks should not be coddled and the need to
develop cadres involved weeding out the natural leadership. This was a fine theory but the result was
that we became the target of a lot of hostility from kids who thought we were
picking on them by unfairly imposing an alien standard. Rocks crashed through our window at night
and the tires on my old station wagon were slashed. Trips to the bathroom were reduced to the bare minimum required
by nature and we never ventured above the second floor which was as far as the
influence of the dorm resident‑ police‑person counselor
extended. The fact that we stood our
ground, were as fair as we possibly could be, and had an open door policy for
anyone seeking help, gradually won over a measure of support from both the
administration and a portion of the student body. Many of the students heard of our work with CORE in the Black
community and approved of that.
They had never
experienced white people that worked and lived among them and were seemingly
always on duty at the school or in the community. That we did all this for practically no pay ($3,000 for the year)
made it even harder to understand ‑ but they did respect what we were
doing. And we did find talent ‑
not many who were willing to become revolutionaries, but we found a number of
kids with ability that we placed in special sections and encouraged to stretch
their academic wings. Some of these, we
were able to place in our parent university in Wisconsin where most blossomed
and went on to successful careers.
Brian later talked with disgust about how we had helped fill the quotas
for Blacks in racist corporations that were opposed to all the principles that
guided our actions, and generally he was right.
The students were
receptive to Marxist interpretations of history since these fit their life
experiences as part of America's oppressed race, but to carry that intellectual
recognition into the sphere of action was beyond all but a very few. And, you couldn't blame them. The rewards for becoming a token Black were
quite high while the revolutionary road offered little but sacrifice. Most had sacrificed enough just by growing
up Black in America. Our calls for
action in support of CORE's neighborhood work fell largely on deaf ears. Often, as Brian and I and these few trudged
off for voter registration work or manning picket lines in support of some
local protest, I felt depressed and lonely because of the lack of a mass
movement here in the birthplace of the sit‑in movement.
It was the beginning
of a gradual recognition on my part that the cause of racial justice was not
going to go very far beyond the legal boundary to which LBJ had pushed it. This feeling of exposure was made worse since,
as the only whites involved in these protests, we were singled out for special
abuse from the inevitable white hecklers who always assembled where ever we
maintained a picket line. Of all the
Black leaders of the period, only Martin Luther King could draw a crowd and he
was busy in other places. Organizers from other Black organizations including
Stokely Carmicheal's Student Non‑violent Coordinating Committee stopped
by and held interesting week‑end workshops but nothing seemed to affect
the massive apathy that permeated the college and the Black Community. We
visited other colleges and other communities in the state and they all suffered
from the same malaise. Recognizing our
impotency, Brian began to spend more
time studying Russian and I began writing a lot of letters to my wife trying to
patch up my married life. The final
episode in our organizing career came on a Saturday afternoon voter
registration work day when only three people showed up ‑ Brian, myself
and the President of the local CORE chapter.
We made a half‑hearted door‑banging tour of one neighborhood
and then squandered some CORE expense money on a six‑pack and quit,
convinced that the revolution was not coming to Greensboro in the near
future.
Still, I had learned
a lot from Brian and the whole experience even if we had not brought the white
capitalist power structure to its knees.
We had taken a long look at that structure from the vantage point of the
oppressed minorities and gathered a lot of respect for its power and a great
deal of empathy for its victims. I took renewed interest in pursuing my history
degree to explore further this question of how power is obtained and the masses
are restrained. I eventually wrote a
long manuscript based on my Ph.D. dissertation on the "Politics of Social
Control." It never got published
although bits and pieces of it showed up as articles in academic journals. My left‑wing friends considered it too
pessimistic for their presses and the traditional presses didn't think it would
sell well enough. I had hoped it would
serve as a guide for future movements; pointing out what to expect and
hopefully giving some indication as to what could be done. By the time it was
finished there were no movements to guide.
I did manage to prop my marriage up for awhile. Brian got married, too, and it looked like
we were both off to quiet bourgeois careers as college professors. We both took part in anti‑war
demonstrations and continued to refine our class analyses of the revolutionary
process but we both knew there was not much hope.
What the nation
settled for was Nixon, Reagan and Bush ‑ the rich white guys had won and
Brian and I had to face lives of restrained disgust with frequent episodes of
complete nausea. But the spirit of the
sixties never completely left us. We
both did what we could to keep our own spirits alive and to nourish the demand
for justice in others. In this we
joined Abbie Hoffman in not accepting the proposition that there will be rich
and poor for all eternity, but unlike Abbie, neither of us saw suicide as way
out of the dilemmas posed by the triumph of the conservatives.
Meanwhile I had
found a new leader in a neighbor ‑ Harry. He lived on the other side of a
duplex and taught English in the same University as my wife did. He was a
writer and a weight lifter, and under his tutelage I tried to do both. We published a couple textbooks and a few
articles together before he moved and I was hooked again. I added writing and
weight lifting to history and rebellion as part of my regular life's
activities. I had written historical stuff before but Harry was the first to
alert me to the idea that my writing was good enough to be sold. When I knew him Harry and I, shared a
similar philosophy regarding alcohol; it was to be taken frequently and in as
large amounts as were consistent with good health and career advancement. A corolarly of this basic philosophy was
that extra measures had to be taken to stay in shape if our intake of alcohol
was maintained at a sufficiently high level to meet our standards.
When I think about
Harry, Earl, Brian and all the others, it is usually with a sense of sadness; a
feeling that the relationships were unfulfilled and lacking. Part of it was because I kept trying to turn
each of them into a father substitute and never met them on an equal plain. I guess I wanted something deeper from them
that none of them were able or willing to give ‑ something permanent. I
wanted to learn how to be person but they only gave me things to do. I learned to rebel, to write, to drink, to
run, but I never defined myself except as someone who did these things for
others. None of the relationships lasted.
They all entered my life and left it, never to be seen again. Yet I was far closer to these men than I had
been to my own father or any of my brothers. Certainly they seemed to have more
of a lasting impact. What I took from
them lasted a lifetime. Most everything
that I consciously learned from my father I rejected. I know he spoke with respect of Dale Carnegie and How To Win
Friends and Influence People. I
rejected it on the grounds that it was phoney ‑ a strategy for insurance
salesmen, but not for me.
I knew that we were
Roosevelt Democrats, but so was everybody I knew. It wasn't until my father's
90th birthday that I found out I had a socialist grandfather ‑ a
philosophy that I now shared and that knowledge drew me closer to the family
heritage. The family was exposed to the
rituals of the Catholic faith, but it never took with me. It just seemed empty and irrelevant, like my
father. Until recently, I never
knew what it was a boy is supposed to
get from his father that I had failed to get.
I realized that I had wanted his attention but did not know what to do
with it when I got it. I never had his
attention for very long ‑ both of us were busy doing other things; I was
seeking father substitutes and he was working.
Once we worked together for a day ‑ I pasted while he wallpapered
somebody's house ‑ but he never talked and I have no idea whether he was
happy with my work or not. My guess is
that a son should get some idea about how he is doing in the world from his
father. A father's positive
affirmations build self‑ esteem. Negative one's do the reverse.
I never got either
and so my sense of self had to come from others ‑ that's why these guys
were so important. I borrowed their
sense of how to live, tried it on and incorporated some of it into my
being. Inside, I was mad at the old man
for ignoring me. I never expressed it
consciously but the anger emerged as depression or rebellion. I held a similar attitude towards my mother
although my expectations from her were in the area of love and affection which
I also never got. Since I was never beaten or starved, it was hard to focus on
what was wrong with my upbringing and
it took a long time for the picture that I have described above to emerge with
enough clarity for me to get a handle on what was happening with me in my
relationships with men and women because of this early deprivation.
I have been in three
different men's groups trying to see how much my experience was shared by other
men. And the general thesis that it is
difficult to attain and maintain friendship in American society seems to
hold. Just as I did, other men defined
themselves by what they did. It seemed to me that many more of them were doing
what was expected of them by their parents and few had rebelled against either
their parents or society. Many showed
symptoms of having been dominated by their parents rather than neglected. None
of the men I knew had a very good feel for how to be in this world. If asked
they recited a litany of deeds. Women,
it is said, do a better job of being with someone since they are naturally
nourishing, better listeners and more inclined to be empathetic. However, this
is not true of all women and even though most of them can relate to each other
better than men can, lasting friendships are rare among women, too. Friendship seems to require an enjoyment of
another's presence for its own sake between people who see each other as separate
and equal. This seems to be as
difficult to attain in friendship as it is in marriage, people being far more
accustomed to dominance and submission than to equality. People will merge for all kinds of neurotic
reasons; caretakers finding those who need care, father‑figures finding
daughters, sadists finding masochists.
Friendships are
probably as sick as most relationships.
For just as I have not been able to achieve a lasting friendship, I have
not been able to sustain a lasting marriage.
For in both kinds of relationships I have known only how to be pleasing,
loyal, and dependent ‑ until I became depressed and rebelled. I have not known who I was or what I
wanted. By devoting myself completely
to the other, be it wife or friend, I was able to merge with others for a time,
but it never lasted for, in the process of giving up myself, I gave up my
chances of enjoying the relationship in a healthy way ‑ a time‑tested
route to depression. The primary thrust
of my being in the last four years since this realization about the root of my
dysfunctional relationships has been coming to consciousness has been to
correct it ‑ to bring myself into focus, to find out who I am, what I
want, and how I go about getting what I want.
It has not been easy. Awareness
is not immediately followed by a change in behavior. There are years of conditioned responses to be overcome. And, awareness comes in layers. Big awarenesses such as my becoming
conscious of what was left out of my life by my father's neglect are followed
by smaller steps as the behavioral results of that fact become apparent. At
each stage the behavior under question has to be examined in the light of new
knowledge. And, as awareness of self
has grown so has awareness of others.
Once the old barriers that keep a person from understanding himself or
others fall, when you stop living on conditioned responses and introduce
flexibility and choice in responding to your own emotions and to your contact
with others, the world opens up.
Still, the age old
problem of reach exceeding one's grasp has to be worked in. Do you settle for
what you can get or do you keep on trying until you get what you want? Is there never to be any peace or must life
always be a struggle against the ghosts of our parents? It is hard not to yield to the old solutions
‑ it is easier to find a leader than it is to lead one's self, to place
the responsibility for deciding questions about how to live with selected
leaders. Then there is always the
steady onslaught of old age with its concurrent fears of death or
disability. Who will care for me
then? Should I not hurry up and find a
caretaker before I fall desperately in need of care? Also, as my growing awareness peels back the false images that I
created over the years, I grow afraid that my internal core may be, like an
onion, empty inside. I have had the
help of a shrink and group therapy and have benefitted from the self‑knowledge
and the awareness of others that come with such efforts.
Sometimes I worry
that my shrink has become another leader ‑ that I become a loyal, shrink‑
pleasing, dependent person while I am in the process of learning how to avoid
becoming one. To become authentic, autonomous, self‑ sufficient and to
find another person who would join with me in a union based on mutual growth
and a respect for the other's individuality is my foremost aspiration. Is this what I really want or do I mouth
these goals because I know that is what my shrink wants me to want? Are my past
patterns so strong that they are even working their magic on this
relationship? I'm not sure about the
answers to these questions. Presumably my shrink is paid to understand these
neuroses and work towards dissolving their impact on my life. The job of defining myself and identifying
my choices is largely mine although he stands ready to help. It is a new type of relationship for
me. All my other relationships, male
and female, had for the most part played into my neuroses; used them and me to
meet needs that were part of their agenda.
Sometimes this was to our mutual benefit in terms of accomplishing tasks
or acquiring skills, but it never was an emotionally healthy relationship.
Now, for the first
time, there is at least the hope of a healthy life.
'1That's not a house,
it's a cracker box." That was my
drafting teacher's pronouncement on
my first exercise
in architectural design as part
of our Junior Year High School drafting class.
He was right in the sense that I looked upon the exercise as just one more in a series of futile efforts to
engage my interest in public education.
My response always had been to try to get out of the effort entirely
and; if that was impossible, to proceed
to do the minimum consistent with
getting by. Hence,
I had found the simplest design
around and succeeded in making it even simpler. No one in my family had ever owned a home and I couldn't conceive
of my breaking with that tradition.
Given this economic perspective, it was senseless to put any
unnecessary effort into this "design your dream house" project our drafting teacher was
demanding. I knew that he was trying
to 11motivate'1 us and he drew his paycheck from a system that
operated by fostering
such illusions. I recognized
that his effort, like mine, was a minimum one designed to get us through the
day.
Generally, my instincts were correct and it wasn't
until the ripe age of fifty that I found myself thinking about purchasing a
house for the first time, and
began reviving that
old cracker box mentally as I
began to explore the possibilities of living the "American
Dream." Even then, it was not so
much that I wanted a home, but I sensed that the woman I was courting
considered home ownership part of
married life. Hence, we went after
a home together. We looked
at a number of houses
which passed my "cracker box" specifications but failed her more ambitious requirements. Her
tastes were just too expensive to meet our limited income.
I had about given up the effort when I bumped into an old acquaintance
who had, by chance, formed his own
business building solar houses
and had a
prize-winning design for afford-ability and simplicity that he
was peddling. Here was my "cracker
box" with class, a possible solution to my dilemma.
And it worked; the combination
of prizewinning solar afford-ability with its implication of being on the
cutting edge of a new wave made her overlook
the simplicity that
she had rejected
in the earlier houses. We picked
out a site and told my architect friend to start building.
Unfortunately,
although we agreed to build the house, we agreed to very few things thereafter
and after four months of fueding, we agreed to split. Since she claimed she could not afford to meet the payments, she
moved out and I bought her interest in the house. I was left alone - a
homeowner by default It was a tremendous
strain on my budget. The mortgage
payments alone were over 60% of my income.
The only way I could afford it was by keeping the totalutilities' bill
and other costs as small as possible.
Fortunately for
me, the benefits of having purchased a
prize-winning passive solar home began to pay off. By cutting my own wood and using the wood stove as a back up for
the solar features, I was able to heat the house for the cost of keeping my
chainsaw running. During the worst of
the winter, I moved my mattress in with
the stove and closed off the bedrooms.
I added some home-made passive solar collectors to the existing solar
collecting space. I have since added energy-conserving landscape; deciduous
trees and shrubs placed on the southern side so as to allow maximum solar
income in the winter and providing shade in the summer with wind-breaking
evergreen trees on the northern side.
The savings here are more long term and will not fully pay off for
several years as the trees and shrubs mature.
To save electricity, I packed half the
refrigerator with old newspapers wrapped in tinfoil reducing
the cooling area by two thirds
- more than sufficient for
just me. I
bought super efficient flourescent
life bulbs and turned the water heater down to the coolest level I could
tolerate (I investigated solar water
heaters but was told they were not cost efficient).
I already had low
flush toilets, but to save even more water I collected my urine in a quart jar
and only flushed when it was full.
Major bowel functions I reserved for work where I flushed away on my
state job at tax-payers' expense. By
these efforts, my entire utilities expenses (water, trash, and electricity)
hovered around thirty to forty dollars a month in an all-electric home. I had
recently quit drinking and had quit smoking years ago, so my socializing costs
were minimal. Dates consisted mostly of
dollar movies, bike rides, or dances at the local YWCA. Expensive dinners at fancy restaurants were a rare event, reserved for the
birthdays of special women.
I have continued
this regime fairly consistently for the last ten years and have been able to
keep the house. Home ownership was no
economic bonanza for me as it had been
for some people in the seventies. I
recently refinanced my home and found to my surprise that it had decreased in
value along with the rest of the houses in the area. When the refinancing expenses were added in, I ended up with a
larger mortgage than I had had when I started. I now have difficulty understanding why banks don't make more
money than they do since the major portion of my income was devoted to paying
the interest on my debt. The principle
over those years had only been reduced a trifling amount. It's like that song Tennessee Ernie Ford
used to sing about getting another day older and deeper in debt.
I guess that even
though I have been a committed socialist for years, there was a residual
capitalist down deep inside of me that believed in the American dream. Maybe that high school drafting teacher had
been more effective in selling the dream than either of us had recognized at
the time. Although I hadn't worked
hard (it is almost impossible to work
hard as a state bureaucrat), I had been
a sober, responsible, bill-paying homeowner for years and I was left with
little to show for it. I had done my
part even though as a cynical high school student I had figured out it was
probably all lies. I was right about that, the bankers had milked me dry.
I guess as a
teenager I instinctively knew more about the system than I did as an adult -
even after I had studied Marx and a bunch of other guys that had exposed the
American system. What really surprised
me is that Marx had been so right about the American system where he has been
ridiculed and so wrong about the Soviet system where he has been revered. I had believed Marx about the Soviets, but
had allowed my judgement to be swayed about conditions here. It's hard to be objective about a system
when you are so far away it doesn't have any reality or so close to it you get
sucked up in its dreams.
In any case, the
emotional impact was as Langston Hughes put it many years ago, dreams that are
too long deferred dry up and shrivel
like raisins in the sun.
During periods of stress, food
looms ever larger in importance.
Prisoners of war have reported that their greatest needs
revolved around food. When asked
about their first
requests following release it
was not for a talk with a loved
one or a bath or some other need gratification, but, almost to a man,
their first and primary
interest was in
food. The same is true with
fantasies. One prisoner reported he was
able to drown
out the sounds
of prisoners being beaten
in adjoining cells by pretending he was strolling along
the Main street of his home town with an ice
cream cone in one hand and a box of popcorn in the other.
Even under more
normal circumstances, America's interest
in food is high. Diet and recipe
books compete with the Bible for all time most sales records. Books on nutrition are on the best seller
lists as America's concern with
healthful living increases. Estimates from the National
Center for Health Statistics claim that 60
percent of all women and fifty percent of all men
suffer from food disorders. Food
addictions plague most
Americans sometime during their
lives. Sugar is the prevalent
addiction followed by chocolate, and a variety of other sweets.
Over fifty percent
of all Americans are considered
overweight (15 pounds or
more). Obese men are more likely to die
from colon, rectal, and prostrate cancer than
men of normal weight. Obese women run a higher risk of death from cancers of the
gallbladder, biliary passages, breast, ovaries, and uterus than women of normal
weight. Food related diseases - heart
disease, cancer, and stroke in that order are the top three killers in the
U.S. They far outstrip smoking, and alcohol
related diseases as the all time
killers of Americans (lung diseases are fifth and liver diseases are ninth).
Close to a hundred
percent of American women
are concerned about their
weight - more because of the
fashionable emphasis on slenderness rather than because of health
concerns. Models and fashion
queens today are almost all under fed.
For men and women, thin is definitely in. It wasn't always
so. Fashions change. Gone are the old Ruebenesque, almost rotund, buxom models the classical artists loved so
much. Even Twiggy (who was
really not skinny but perfectly proportioned) appears fat next
to the current crop of models.
Nutritionists, impressed by the
fact that under fed
rats live longer
than those who
answer their natural inclinations, devise diets that
could do the same for
us even though it
has not been proven that people
who follow these diets will emulate rats and live longer.
Some changes were
necessary for the health
of the nation. Most of us no longer do the hard physical work of our
fathers so we don't need the large number of calories to sustain that
level of physical effort.
Most of us need artificial exertion in the form our diets
have been slow
in conforming to our changes in
life style. The staples of bacon
and eggs, meat and potatoes
still appear on American
tables along with fried chicken,
steaks, and ribs. Topped off with pies,
cakes, and cookies, caffeinated
and alcohoic beverages, practically every major holiday
is an invitation to dietary
disaster. And the social pressure to
conform and indulge is almost
irresistible to all but the most disciplined among us. So strong are ties between food and
celebration that to refuse to
partake is to be isolated and alienated from family and friends - the
moral equivalent of staying sober in the
company of drunks.
While the church and
other value transmitters in society
have come around to
supporting sobriety, they are not yet comfortable with encouraging practitioners of healthy eating.
Attend any church- sponsored
pot luck and you will understand
why - deserts and other fat saturated
foods are in abundance. Ministers and
priests while condemned for
alcoholism are tolerated if they
are merely overweight like their parishioners.
Gluttony, of course, is still
a sin,
but the definition
of where a healthy appetite
becomes gluttonous is not clearly defined.
And, as nutritionists are finding out, the
old quantity measures for gluttony do not apply today. The percentage of fat in the diet
counts more than
the number of servings - you can
stuff yourself on carrots and lettuce with little damage while limiting your
intake to fried chicken, ice cream, and cookies can kill you.
Armed with this
knowledge as most of us are, we set
ourselves up for a conflict between theory and practice that
just as easily erodes our self esteem as any of
the old classical
conflicts between good and
evil did. We know the roles of
fat surrounding are bodies are evidence of our sins as clearly
as the alcoholic knows that his hangover is the hallmark of his own self
indulgence. The difference is that
while the alcoholic
becomes skilled at disguising both his drinking and his hangovers, it is hard to hide the fat. Our sin is out there for all to see. We can seek
solace in the fact that so many of those pillars of the community,
church, and state, that we see around us also suffer variations of the same
affliction.
Still there is this
nagging question about
our ability to exercise
enough discipline to live up to our full potential - to live
authentic life styles where theory and practice are at one; sound
mind and sound body in harmony with the free
expression of our emotions, creativity, and physical presence. For those
of us who grew
up in the period of
the great depression when mere
survival was always a matter of getting enough to eat, it is
hard to adjust to a world where your biggest enemy may be what is freely
available at the church supper, the local
fast food outlet,
and with your mother's Sunday dinner.
We are enticed almost every time we turn on the TV or drive down the
street. Seemingly everywhere, people want us to eat and drink
what we know may kill us.
Especially, men, for
we are subject to all the macho
messages of our youth
"real men don't
eat kiche, rabbit
food, grass clippings, etc." Real men make mother happy by
polishing off all of mother's pie, they
clean their plate, drink their milk, eat second helpings, etc. Women are allowed to be finicky eaters
as long as they cook what their real men want. Hence women live longer, are thinner and
more alert to the theory of healthy eating even if they aren't always
the best practitioners. Many women have found out that the easiest
way to get rid of an
unwanted husband without losing half the family
fortune is to kill him with the
food he loves so much while she makes do with the soup and salad.
For women, when the
pressure to stay thin is combined with low self esteem and a
family history of psychological abuse, it can often lead to a different
and increasingly common set
of eating disorders, bulemia
and anorexia. The
bulemic stays thin
by vomiting after eating while the anorexic slowly starves herself to death in the effort to stay young and
thin. Both obsess about food to avoid
facing deeper and more painful problems from
their past. They seek
control over food
and their pain
but instead find addiction.
My own relationship
to food was that of a
typical American male for the
first twenty odd years of my life. That
is, like most of my peers, I ate what
was put in
front of me
without much complaint and
without any thought. I didn't like sitting at the dinner table
for any length of time because of the boredom, and if I lied a little my mother would let me grab a sandwich and
skip the worst of the Sunday dinners. I
had no
real greivance with
the food, just the company. It was only during college when I got out on
my own and had a tight budget did I
experiment, mostly with stretching a buck with low cost stuff like macaroni and cheese and chicken
gizzards.
In the late fifties,
most folks were incredibly ignorant
when it came to
health. We still smoked, drank and ate whatever we
could afford and liked. I was
never sick and considered myself immortal. I first heard
the word cholesterol
when I was in graduate school
when a Home Economics major visiting
us commented on all the eggs I was eating. Eggs were real cheap, I liked them, and was
considered a master of the art of flipping
over-easies; a skill I
had nourished over the years
along with a related talent for spicing and flipping bergers (I was
happy to discover
that after a long
period on everybody's
negative list because of cholesterol, eggs have been
making a comeback). From then on, life
was a
seemingly endless series of attempts to eliminate all those things that
had made it pleasurable. First
it was eggs, then
cigarettes, beer, hamburgers
and steaks. Increases
in the availability of sex
through the introduction of the pill
in the sixties somewhat
compensated for these reductions, but the Aids scare of the
eighties cut that avenue of pleasurable
increase off once more.
Mostly, I responded
to each revelation, restricting my vices according to the dictates
of each successive Surgeon
General's Report as was my duty as a parent and a role model for the nation's
youth. But my system rebelled against
the joylessness in my life. Where could pleasure be found once all those things
were gone? My professors espoused
intellectual pleasures and to some extent I was able to find rewards in good
literature and exciting intellectual discoveries, but my body ached
for the soothing embrace of nicotine combined with the sedation of alcohol, and
the wonderful blend of my
famous cheeseburgers. Where
could suitable substitutes be found? I tried soyaburgers and exotic fruit juices,
but nothing worked. Finally
I came up with a cheap recipe, easily thrown together that
contained little that was bad
and much that
was nutritious, and by making
bunches of this at once and packing them in old TV dinner containers, I
could eat without
thinking and concentrate on
finding my pleasure in human relations
dancing, and the world of the intellect - and tried hard
not to think about eating, drinking,
or smoking. It was not perfect, but it was a system
that allowed me to live with myself
in a fairly healthy,
reasonably happy style.
Now, I know that
improvements can be made.
I still allow myself daily doses of
caffeine (I am
working on reducing or
eliminating this most obvious evil from my life but have not yet worked
up sufficient resolve
to do so completely). I throw a
little tuna fish in with my beans, grains and vegetables because I still
am dubious about the vegetarian
claims to be able to supply sufficient protein from those sources alone and I
am not sure that I can live as well without the benefit of
Omega 3. I have stopped buying sweets but
will not turn them down if they
are offered or come as part of a buffet meal.
I also make
concessions to the feelings of my hosts when I
am eating with someone
else who has obviously worked hard to please without knowing what my
exact food requirements are.
There are times, when
driving for example,
where the need to stay alert
outways the health prescriptions against caffeine. If the edge the drug
gives me keeps
me alert and alive, it is worth
the health costs it carries.
This, for me, is
where I have come in my efforts to
balance competing needs - to be healthful, to be thrifty, to be
ecological, and to find pleasure in life, and to operate effectively in my work
and play. My current goal is to
make my eating more pleasurable without giving up the health component. This means
spending more time and effort in food procurement and
preparation. I have found that I have
much to learn from those
who have been
at this vegetarian business
longer than I have.
I have discovered that with little more expenditure of effort and money
I can come up with a far more enjoyable menu.
Still, I have to be cautious, for there is always the need to balance my
pleasure sources so that I do not
become obsessed or addicted..
Also, there are
competing health problems. Some healthy
foods are not grown in a healthy way.
Lettuce is a prime example.
While an excellent source of fiber and the basis for most
salads, it accumulates all manner of pesticides both on its leaves
and in the plant. Tuna fish is a great
source of protein and Omega
3, but the big fish
bio-accumulate mercury and there is no
way of knowing that the tuna you are eating was not the cause of the death of
dolphins who were caught in
the same net
and drowned. To
avoid all meat and fish and go
totally vegetarian involves health risks and these have to be balanced with the
risks and benefits of an occasional indulgence.
An eight year stint
of working in the water Division of
the state pollution control agency has alerted me to the curious role
fish play as barometers of the health of
our nation's waterways. Toxic and carcinogous chemicals
appear in fish flesh in all but the most pristine streams. Some dioxins and
polychlorinatedbiphenols bioaccumulate in fish flesh and internal
organs.
Fruits present both
health and political problems.
Pesticide residues are found
both on the
skins and is the flesh of most fruits.
The Alar (daminozide) pesticide scare in 1990 represented only the tip of the iceberg. Similar pesticides are sprayed both on the
fruit and are present in the soil and water where most fruit are grown.
The science of establishing safe levels is at a low
level even if those doing the testing
could be trusted.
Buying organic fruit and
vegetables is expensive
and not always an indicator that what you are buying
will be pesticide free. Even if
the farmer does not use pesticides on his crops, chances are that the water
he uses for irrigation and the land on
which the crops are
grown contains some
residues. More pesticides may
ride the winds from neighboring spraying practices.
Crops, like bananas,
which are grown overseas are most
likely grown with the help of pesticides like EDB and DDT which are
banned in the United States. Grapes and bananas
are usually grown
on plantations with repressive
labor policies and
are usually boycotted by groups
supporting migrant farmworkers unions on
those grounds. Most fruit and
vegetable crops that are not harvested by machines, are harvested with migrant
labor under conditions of real danger
for the workers.
Not only are they exploited in terms of pay but they often are exposed
to high levels of pesticide residues that are biodegradable and do not affect
the consumer but may still be dangerous to the picker.
Most people who are
sensitive to environmental issues also feel a duty to support farm
workers. The first modern,
inter-racial farm-workers union, The Southern Tenant Farmers Union, was
born and grew to maturity here in
Arkansas. The leaders
continued their organizing efforts among the sugar harvesters in
Louisianna and the fruitpickers of California
long after the
tenant farmers of Arkansas had disappeared. Supporting boycotts of products and the efforts
to ensure the
safe use of pesticides sponsored by these unions is the least one can do
on behalf these most exploited of workers
As the food and
farm person of a major
consumer research organization,
I monitored the ecological and political backwardness of the farmers, and food
manufacturers for years. The rape
of the land by farmers and the
disregard for health concerns on the part of food producers is obvious to any
one who is willing to spend the time examining the facts. Some, like the poultry industry, produce a
product that is relatively unsafe to eat and is a threat to
the water in those areas in
which the poultry is raised. Most
efforts to improve the
situation through legislation
is thwarted by powerful farm lobbies.
Difficult as it is,
however, the struggle must go on because there is no way to ensure a
safe, healthy, nutritious food supply unless all aspects of the system are
addressed.
Recent reports in the news and on
the TV program "60 Minutes"
have revealed that Saddam Hussein and his family have"skimmed" an
estimated $10 billion from Iraq's oil revenues. The reports condemned
Saddam's actions as the "largest skimming operation the
experts had ever seen - far larger than
that of the Philippine's Marcos family
or Panama's Noriega. This kind of skimming is easy to condemn because this
use of political power for personal enrichment is done by tyrants at the
expense of impoverished Third World citizens.
There is, however, a
different kind of skimming of resources that takes place in most places in
America that no one has really addressed
that, for a lack of a better term, I will call eco-skimming - the
taking of excess profits by avoiding the payment of damage to the
ecology. Because eco-skimming may do
irreparable damage to the land and water, it may be ultimately more expensive
to the citizens than the plain, old-fashioned thievery perpetrated by tyrants.
And its results are similar the enrichment of a few industrial owners and
their stockholders at the expense of the entire people.
Ecoskimming results when industries use
their political power to prevent the
enactment or enforcement of environmental regulation. For example, the poultry
industry has fought long and successfully against the regulation of the broiler
industry which is causing widespread damage to ground and surface water in
northwest Arkansas. The industry's opposition of the attempt to restructure the
Pollution Control Commission was but the latest of these efforts. No one has
been able to assess the costs of such lack of regulation on this state. We are
aware of some of its effects since rising levels of nitrates in surface and
ground waters in northwest Arkansas have been measured.
Tyson was sued
successfully by a coalition of citizens affected by its poultry plant
discharges in and around Green Forest, hut the awards granted were hardly scientific
measurements of the damage done. We do know that cleaning groundwater is an
incredibly difficult if not impossible task. Most of the groundwater in the
state that has been cleaned has been on Superfund sites that cost millions but
covered relatively small plots of ground. To clean all of northwest Arkansas
would run into billions.
Because such damage
to the state's waters is not assessed in advance and added to the cost of the
finished product, raising broilers here is quite cheap and Tyson and his
stockholders have been getting far richer through ecoskimming than they would
if the environmental costs were included in the price of poultry.
A similar
eco-skimming analysis can be applied to Sam Walton's billions. If the true
costs of building and maintaining solid waste land-fills were applied to all
the items and packaging that is sold in his stores and ends up as solid waste,
Walton's costs would rise considerably and his profits would diminish
correspondingly. Instead, Walton grows richer and the landfill costs are imposed on city and county governments.
Since the cost of building and maintaining landfills has grown dramatically
along with the mountains of trash, the situation has reached crisis
proportions, forcing the state legislature to pay some attention to the problem
during the last session.
The eco-skimming
analysis may be applied to all businesses that are not covered by regulations
that accurately assess and collect fees that correspond to the damage being
done to the environment by their activity.
Farmers and the poultry industry are among the most obvious political
“sacred cows" that no governor or legislator dares to offend in Arkansas;
hence, they continue to be virtually unregulated. Some states, however, are
beginning to come to grips with the problem.
Taxes on each tire sold to cover disposal have become fairly common.
Some states have fee systems imposed on groundwater discharges to cover
regulatory costs and remedial action. Some cities have experimented with taxes
on' plastic bottles.
But in those states
where agricultural interests are the strongest and legislation is most needed,
there is little being done. Scandals
involving the President and his Secretary of Agriculture have prevented strong
leadership from coming from the central government.Recycling, while commendable does not
solve the problem for it has proved successful for only a relatively small
percentage of the total waste
produced. In the next chapter we look
closely at trash.
Arkansan Jeff Davis was known, briefly, as the
savior of the Buffalo River. As the Hearing Officer that heard the
arguments for and against the Pindall
landfill, he was in a critical position to affect the outcome one way or the other. He chose to side with the environmentalists and the area residents who
were in opposition to the
landfill. Since his boss, then
Director of the AR Department of
Pollution Control and Ecology, Dr. Phyllis Garnett, was in favor of permitting the landfill and Hearing Officers
traditionally were hired to rubber
stamp departmental decisions, Jeff Davis' stance cost him his job. He is largely forgotten now as he works
quietly on his own legal and real
estate business. But, for a moment he
shared the limelight with the citizens
in the Pindall area who, so it seemed, had fought successfully to maintain the purity of the Buffalo River. Appropriate
shots celebrating the natural beauty of the River appeared shortly
thereafter on national television and in the Arkansas Times. Shortly after the publicity died down that
Davis was fired. No one seemed to notice or
care.
The controversy over the Buffalo River had briefly
provided the media with both good copy
and dramatic visuals for television coverage.
The problem that lay behind the
incident, however, the growing concern
with landfills nationwide and theenormous garbage producing capacity of the
American people which has resulted in a
scramble to find a way to unload it was neither visually dramatic nor a welcome subject for polite
dinner table discussion.
Perhaps the most dramatic event of our present
garbage disposal crisis happened two
summers ago when the Mobro 4000,
a garbage barge from Islip, New York, wandered up and down the Atlantic and
Caribbean coast fruitlessly trying to
find a place to unload its stinking cargo.
While affording a certain welcome humorous relief from the summer doldrums, the ship's problem was deadly
serious for the Captain and crew and
for public officials who were forced to deal with the garbage (one beneficial result of the fiasco was the
initiation of new recycling plan which,
when effected, did much to remedy Islip's waste problem).
Most Arkansans found both incidents, the attempt
to rescue the Buffalo River from the
Pindall landfill and the wandering garbage scow, interesting and sometimes humorous diversions that filled the air
waves on dull news nights until they
became aware that their state was being
seriously considered as a fine place to bring "Yankee" garbage. Suddenly the crisis was brought home and the diversion of watching others
struggle with the problem was changed
to one that could affect their lives.
Plots to bring garbage from New
York up the Arkansas River to Chicot County and for filling in the
abandoned bauxite mines in Pulaski County were
uncovered. Visions of the state
awash in a sea of foreign garbage induced a crisis atmosphere into the state legislative
meetings in the winter of 1989.
Randall Mathis, current Director and onetime head
of trash for the state's regulatory Pollution Control agency, called to testify before state legislative
committees charged with reviewing
legislation designed to keep out foreign garbage cited statistics on out‑of‑state
trash dispersal faster than most evangelists list the seven deadly sins. "Fiftythree percent of of all municipal
garbage shipped between states comes from the New York-New Jersey area - that's
7.9 million tons. Twenty percent of West
Virginia's trash is shipped out of state, 34% of Tennessee's, 18%..." Mind and pen go numb before the onslaught of figures. No matter, the point is made. There's a whole lot of moving going on in
the world of garbage between states,
and all almost all states are both exporters and importers (Arkansas both
imports garbage from Texas and exports some there as well).
All kinds of waste products are moving on the high
seas, also, but the flow tends to be
one way ‑ from developed to
underdeveloped countries ‑ just as traffic between the states
tends to flow from the urban‑industrial
north to the more rural southern and
mid-western states. The
environmental group, Greenpeace, reports
that more than 3.6 million tons of waste were shipped to third
world countries between 1986 and 1988; some of it hazardous. Like Arkansas,
many of these countries on the
receiving end object to being the depositories for other peoples waste.
Why all this movement? "There's money to be
made in garbage,"says former EPA administrator, J. Winston Porter,and the
garbage tends to flow to "where the price is right." Since costs have tripled in the New York
area in the 1980's, it has become cheaper for New York to move garbage than to
landfill it.
But garbage is piling up all over America because
we have become so prolific in its production.
In the mid 1980's Americans generated 1460 pounds of garbage per capita
annually (4 pounds per day). This represented a total municipal solid waste
flow of 180 million tons. North Americans produce 50 percent of the world's
garbage. Even though they represent
only 8 percent of the world's population. Garbage accumulations were much lower
in the other industrialized nations ‑ 950 pounds per capita in Canada,
690 in the U.K., 580 in Italy, 700 in West Germany, and 758 in
Japan.
About 2.4 to 3 percent of North America's solidwaste is accounted for by disposable diapers. They
contain sufficient material to stretch between the Earth and Moon seven
times. Thrown into a landfill, diapers
can take as long as 500 years to decompose. About 180 million razor blades are
discarded every year in the U.S. In 1987 3.4 million tons of major appliances
went to landfills along with each adult's discarded 1,429 pounds of containers,
packaging, clothing, food scraps, newspapers, boxes, yard wastes, and
disposable tableware. All this means
that some gigantic artificial mountains have been created. For sheer size, New York's Fresh Kills
Garbage Dump takes first prize as the largest man‑made object on Earth
and, at 500 feet high, the highest point on the U.S. East Coast.
What goes in a landfill is an ever-more
controversial problem. Besides the mandated distinctions between hazardous and
non-hazardous waste, some communities
distinguish between garbage (that which spoils, usually food residues) and
rubbish (everything else that is non-hazardous). Fees paid for the disposal of each can be different and in San
Jose, California a major war between competing trash disposal companies was set
off as each competed for the more lucrative garbage collection contract.
Increasingly more common are the distinctions made between compostable yard
waste and other forms of rubbish as communities try to make more room in their
landfills for only that trash that cannot be recycled or dealt with
economically in any other way.
For communities who, like New York City, are running
out of landfill space, garbage disposal has become a serious issue. Long Island communities, for example, which
produce twice as much garbage as the national average, have seen waste‑disposal
taxes increase 500 percent since 1975 because of disposal problems. An increasing amount of garbage must be
transported to ever more distant landfills as local ones are filled. Some Long
Island garbage must be trucked 900 miles to landfills in Illinois.
Even export oversees is being seriously
considered. One scheme to get rid of
west coast garbage calls for shipping at least ten percent to the Marshall
Islands for a five year period. To make the natives more receptive to the
forthcoming tidal wqave of refuse, the garbage fees were to be used to help
solve social and economic problems caused by a rapidly increasing
population. A similar scenario was
presented to Latin Americans by a private east coast garbage firm, Scoot
Corporation. It offered to pay Paraguay
$15 million to take between 100,000 and 200,000 tons of New York's garbage
every month for ten years. The Paraguaians are still considering the offer.
U.S. railroads are transporting more and more
garbage to key landfills. One railroad, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe
Railway Co., is planning a joint‑venture to take garbage from LosAngeles to a landfill in the Mojave Desert.
Boxcars filled with New York garbage bound for a landfill in Dewitt, Arkansas
were left stranded and stinking on a siding in nearby Stuttgart while state
officials debated the legality of the permit under which the garbage was to be
dumped. It took the personal intervention of the state Attorney General to get
the garbage returned to its rightful owners.
Americans recycle 8 percent of municipal garbage
compared to only 2 percent in Canada and less than 3 percent in the U.K. As
much as 65 percent of garbage in some European countries is recycled. Some Canadian garbage is exported to New York State to avoid costly recycling and
waste reduction programs in Canada. Japanese municipalities recycle almost 50
percent of waste; Massachusetts is a leader in the U.S. with 10 percent waste
recycling. Studies indicate solid‑waste generated in the U.S. grew 34
percent between 1972 and 1987, but the amount actually discarded grew 28
percent because of developing recycling and recovery programs.
Even some developing nations have much higher
recycling rates than those in North America. The Zabbalee‑Cairo's
unofficial garbage collectors‑recycle about 80 percent of their
collections. Some of this recycling is done because of the abject poverty of
the residents of third world countries such as Guatemala where large numbers of
natives eek out a living sorting through the garbage at the massive landfill
near the capital city.
Normal garbage is expensive enough but hazardous
waste is in a class by itself both because of the menace it poses to humans and
consequent expense involved in its disposal.
As one would expect the problems associated with locating waste sites
are even more complex than with trash. The ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY has
identified 4,300 hazardous waste dump sites in the U.S. 3,400 of those sites
have been designated as "suspected leakers". Of those 3,400 only 43
had "comprehensive cleanup" measures in effect in March 1993
according to the General Accounting Office. Only 12 had completed their cleanup
and another 185 had taken some sort of action such as fencing in the site. The
Council on Economic Priorities says 80 percent of the American population lives
near a hazardous waste site. The Economist reported in 1984 that two thirds of
the rural population of the U.S. drew water from supplies harboring BACTERIA
and trace elements leaking from underground dumps.
Are there alternatives to burying garbage in
landfills or shipping it
elsewhere? Often promoted as a
more convenient alternative to landfills, many cities burn at least some of their
garbage in giant incinerators.
Incinerators reduce the garbage they burn 70 percent by weight and 90
percent of volume; the remainder, in the form of ash, must go to landfills.
Incinerator ash is dumped into the oceans or mixed with cement and sand to
produce a block which is about 64 percent ash. Some of these blocks have been
dumped into shallow oceans to produce fishing reefs. Emissions from burning
garbage include gases which add to the greenhouse effect and acid rain as well
as toxins such as heavy metals and dioxins.
As the price of land and the cost of shipping
rises incineration and recycling become more attractive. Japan, for example, only landfills 30% of
its waste compared with 80% in the
U.S. Their motivation is easy to figure
out ‑ land is much scarcer and
more expensive, too much so to waste on
landfills. While land is still relatively cheap in Arkansas, landfills
and the garbage that comes to them are still unwelcome neighbors, and nothing brings out the
"Nimby" (Not‑in‑my‑back‑ yard) in folks more than a public hearing on a
landfill site especially when the threat of New York garbage is in the air.
The Pulaski County Quorum court hearing on a permit request for a commercial landfill using the abandoned
bauxite pits in Benton that was to bring in out‑of‑state garbage
brought out close to two hundred protesting residents. And, such emotion is not to be confined to
the local level. No less than eighteen
bills outlawing such attempts to blight the Natural State with foreign refuse
came before the state legislature in the
winter and spring of 1989 ‑ almost all are, according to Director
Mathis,
to no avail because they were patently
unconstitutional ‑ clearly in violation of the interstate commerce
clause.
One that wasn't called for a tightening of state
regulations applied to commercial
landfills and an examination of the financial and environmental records of the permit applicant. This would at least slow down that New York garbage. "But, even if the law didn't stop the garbage," commented Joe Doughty, a solid waste
engineer, "look at the bright
side: Would you rather have New
York garbage or New York people?
If you don't take their garbage,
New Yorkers will have to move out from
under their own trash, and they may move here. And, besides, given the
wastefulness of the rich New Yorkers, there was sure to be some treasure in their trash that would provide a
new opportunity for dump‑pickers
and trash collectors in the impoverished Delta." Out of the forty or
so bills that came before the
legislature dealing with all aspects of
solid waste, only three became law.
One of the more naive bills to pass the Senate
(fortunately it died in the House) was
Senator Charlie Chappin's earthworm bill. Senator Chappin was
convinced she had found a panacea for all landfill problems in earthworms who would eat up all
garbage. The Arkansas Earthworm Act would have required landfill operators to keep
"tons of Earthworms" on
site. Solid Waste experts at
Pollution Control, however, were more
than a little dubious about the ability of the worms to do much about the problem since the diet of the
worms consists of organic material that
is bio-degrading in the soil near the surface and that is not the source of the
major landfill problems. Most of the newer landfills are covered and lined so that the material within is inert
and never reaches the stage where it is
digestible to the common earthworm.
Several more serious bills made their way through
the legislature to the desk of Governor Clinton whose duty it was to select the best and veto the
rest. The most important of the three bills he finally signed divides
the state into eight sections; each to
be responsible for its own waste and each restricted to land-filling only that waste generated in its own district.
This, it was hoped would get around constitutional objections involving
the interstate commerce clause.
The second bill provided for a two year moratorium
on the importation of solid waste into
the state. The third called upon each
district to come up with a trash
recycling plan and installed a tax based upon the amount of waste produced in the district to pay for the
planning. This was a relatively farsighted move which at
last addressed the problem of eliminating the source of solid waste and
reducing the need for landfill space
(solid waste people are sensitive about the distinction between a dump and a landfill ‑ the latter being
permitted by the state to accept
defined categories of waste whereas dumps are illegal and may
contain anything).
The threat of New York garbage invading Arkansas,
then, has had some positive effects. Awakened by an irate public and informed
by state officials as to the extent and
breadth of the problem,the previously moribund state government had been
stirred into action. "This
is," Solid Waste Chief Witherspoon had warned them, "just the tip of the iceberg ‑
the first wave of an ocean of garbage waiting to come into the
state." There is a nation‑wide
shortage of landfill space, and, he wisely used the opportunity while he had the legislators attention to point
to an emerging crisis in their own
legislative districts. That problem
would continue to grow even if New York
garbage never entered the state. He
cited specific examples, such as, the city of Jonesboro that had no landfill near the city and had to ship its
garbage some 75 miles to Monroe County.
He was not sure whether these trips would be
outlawed under the the new legislation which forbade the crossing of district boundaries. In
addition, he pointed to a garbage crisis that has been looming over the city
of Fayetteville where a proposed
incinerator which would have disposed of
much of its solid waste, was recently turned down by the voters because of fears that it would contaminate the
air. This left the city without sufficient space to dispose of its accumulating garbage
and would result in more cross‑district
shipments.
The roots of the problem as described by
Witherspoon, were to be found in the
years of neglect suffered by solid waste as the country focused its resources on the more glamorous areas of
hazardous wate. The state closed down
hundreds of illegal open dumps upon which people had depended and made the
price of new landfills unaffordable. Only fifteen new landfills have received
permits from the state since its new code went into effect in 1984 and of the
70 existing permitted municipal landfills, 37 are approaching capacity and are expected to last only 6.4 years ‑
the nine largest landfills in the state
have only an 8.1 year capacity. According to
Witherspoon, the shortage of landfill space has been made even more difficult to overcome with the introduction
of stricter rules laid down by new federal standards that would lead to
closing some landfills and discourage
the development of new ones ‑ the
division estimates that by year 2000 there may be only 12 landfills
in the state unless some special effort
is made.
All this newly generated publicity has increased thesensitivity of the general public to landfills in
their backyard and has made the long and difficult permitting process even more
arduous. The struggle over the Pindall
landfill dramatized the issue primarily
because of the alleged threat to the Buffalo River. According to Tony Morris, a geologist who was closely involved in the event,
the triumph of theenvironmentalists
deprived Newton County of its only
permitted landfill. And, while
admitting that the department made some
mistakes, the basic concept of the landfill was sound and much better than no landfill at all ‑ which
is what resulted. The Director, Mathis,
still maintains that more damage is done to the river by residents who allow their cows to graze in
or near the river than was ever
possible from leachate from the landfill.
Most landfill controversies do not attract
national attention, but they are all time consuming; more so than any otherpollution problem
handled by the state. Most other
public hearings are poorly attended, but hearings over a landfill in Jonesboro
brought in bus loads of people and
ultimately the landfill permit was denied and the city now faces that 150 mile round trip with four
loads of trash daily. Heightened public
opinion has motivated the state to spend more
money on the problem. More
engineers and planners have been hired to
help municipal and county governments meet the stricter regulations for
landfills and to speed up the permitting process. A new task force has been assigned with the job of cranking
out those recycling plans called for by
the new legislation.
Increasing concern with protecting groundwatermotivated the department to require all new
landfills operators to monitor the
groundwater flow around the newer landfills.
Geologists now have to be hired
to verify the suitability of the chosen landfill site design to contain potential leachate. Background water
quality has to be documented and monitoring wells sited and drilled. And, one could, as with the Pindall
landfill, spend fairly large sums of money on planning a landfill only to have the permit turned down
on environmental grounds. Meanwhile
not much is being done to slow down the rate at which Americans produce waste.
Recycling has been highly touted as one
method and some of the larger cities, Seattle and Minneapolis, have achieved great success with that
approach. Because of the small
size of Arkansas cities, it has been
difficult to convince city leaders that
the effort is worthwhile. However, some
efforts have been made, most notably by
the citizens of Fayetteville, at overcoming the size deficit. Unfortunately, as interest has peaked, so has the glut
of recyclable materials and the subsequent
decline in the price of these materials
has hurt those efforts. Most agencies
that once collected newspapers no
longer have a market for them and will not accept them. This has kept many
Arkansas communities from even trying
to do it.
Of all of the nonhazardous materials used by Americans, plastics are among the hardest to deal with in recycling programs. At the same time, more plastic is being used. Peanut butter jars, egg cartons, milk jugs, are increasingly found in plastic. By 1990, estimates are that 90% of all grocery bags may be plastic. The career advice given to Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 hit movie, The Graduate, summed up by an old friend of the family into the one word "plastics" may be more timely now than it was then. Our estimated 15 million tons of plastic discards is expected to double in the next ten years. The light weight of plastic containers means a lot of bulk has to be collected before enough containers are collected to make a ton. It costs around $500 to collect a ton of plastic that has a recycled value of $100. Although they constitute only 7% of solid waste they take up 20 to 30% of landfill space because of there bulk. Some innovations such as equipping collector trucks with shredders can reduce these costs but most cities have found it cheaper to just not bother with plastics in their recycling programs and Minneapolis ‑ St. Paul have banned the use of some plastics outright ‑ giving notice that they are no longer willing to bear the cost of disposing of non‑recyclable products. In addition to its light weight the technical difficulties of recycling plastic are enhanced by the varieties of plastic contained produced (five separate plastic resins).Each must be melted downseparately or manufacturers cannot use them. Distinguishing one type from the other is nearly impossible. Dye tags andnumerical coding is being discussed but is not yet operational. One use of impure strains of mixed resins, conversion into plastic lumber, has been in u