Trinity University Press Best of 2015

Excerpt from The Jane Effect © 2015 by Dale Peterson and Marc Bekoff Excerpt from American Venice © 2015 by Lewis F. Fisher

Excerpt from The Luck Archive © 2015 by Mark Menjivar

Excerpt from Maximilian and Carlota © 2012 by M. M. McAllen Excerpt from Getting to Grey Owl © 2015 by Kurt Caswell Excerpt from Hail of Fire © 2015 by Randy Fritz

Excerpt from Song from the Forest © 1993 by Louis Sarno; foreword © 2015 by Alex Shoumatoff

Excerpt from Words without Walls © 2015 by Sheryl St. Germain and Sarah Shotland Excerpt from San Antonio © 2015 by the San Antonio Express-News

Excerpt from Crossing the Plains with Bruno © 2015 by Annick Smith Excerpt from Delayed Legacy © 2005 by Conrad John Netting IV

Excerpt from Enchiladas © 2015 by Cappy Lawton and Chris Waters Dunn

Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness © 2014 by Rebecca Solnit

Excerpt from The World According to Coleen © 2015 by Coleen Grissom Excerpt from A Muse and a Maze © 2014 by Peter Turchi

Excerpt from Moral Ground © 2010 by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson Copyright 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design by DVS Design 978-1-59534-772-5 ebook

The Jane Effect is an anthology of testimonies by Jane Goodall’s friends and colleagues honoring her as a scientific pioneer, inspiring teacher, devoted friend, and engaging spirit whose complex personality tends to break down the usual categories. Goodall is the celebrity who transcends celebrity. The distinguished scientist who’s open to nonscientific ways of seeing and thinking. The human who has lived among nonhumans. She is a thoughtful adult who possesses a child’s sense of immediacy and wonder. She is a great scientific pioneer, and yet her work goes far beyond producing advances in scientific knowledge. The more than 100 original pieces in this inspirational anthology give us a sense of Jane Goodall’s amazing reach and the power of the “Jane effect.”

Learn more *** “Jane the Teacher,” by Dale Peterson

I first met Jane in June 1989, at the home of Geza Teleki in suburban Washington, DC. Geza

had once been a student at Jane’s research site in Africa, and I had earlier sought him out as a well-known chimp expert. I wanted to write a book about chimpanzees and conservation, and I had asked Geza if he would provide expert advice. He agreed to help, but then he

surprised me by offering to introduce me to Jane Goodall. He said she might be interested in coauthoring such a book. I thought, Terrific!

When I met her, she seemed smaller and less dramatic than I had expected. She was

quiet, in a thoughtful sort of way. Or was she just tired? Geza and I jointly advanced the idea of a coauthorship. She seemed reluctant, saying, “Wouldn’t it be just as good if I wrote an introduction to a book you wrote?”

“No,” I said, “it wouldn’t be the same.”

She said, “Let me think about it.”

We continued talking, and then, after several minutes passed, she said, “All right. I’ll

do it.” It was characteristic of Jane, I later realized, to make quick decisions about people.

Her quick decision about me was the start of a twenty-five-year relationship I’ve had with

one of the world’s great primatologists and chimpanzee experts. That relationship would

include, for me, the writing or editing of . . . how many books? I’m not sure. We coauthored

that first book, but I also wrote or edited several others in which she had an important role, as subject or collaborator or muse.

My brother, who lived and worked in the area, often doubled as my chauffeur when

I was in town. After that first meeting, my brother showed up at Geza’s house to give me a

ride back to his place. Jane was on her way to the National Geographic offices just then, and my brother offered to drive her there, since we were headed in the same direction. On our

way there, though, she started talking about suffering chickens, hens in battery cages, freerange eggs, and so on; and I remember looking over at my brother to exchange a furtive glance. I don’t know what he was thinking. I was thinking: Is this lady a little strange?

I was interested in conservation and primates, but chickens? Only gradually, over

the next few months and then years, did I begin to absorb and appreciate more fully Jane’s lifelong sensitivity to animals and animal suffering. More immediately, though, this

“strange lady” began to teach me other things. For starters, she taught me a good deal about how to write about animals: how to appreciate and express their potential for subjective experience, even when you don’t know exactly what it is. She clarified for me the logic of accepting animals as fellow creatures, ones deserving the respect conveyed by personal

pronouns identifying him and her instead of it, who and whose rather than that or which—

and so on. Animals are not things, and we should stop using language that implies they are.

She also taught me about wild chimpanzees: introducing me to those at Gombe and

sending me off to find other chimp communities elsewhere in Africa, thereby giving me the opportunity to see for myself what chimps are like when they’re wild and free. It was

during those travels in Africa that I also began to understand some of the powerful forces

that are pushing all the great apes and most other primates toward extinction. These forces include the bushmeat trade—the commercial hunting of chimps and gorillas and all other wild animals for meat. Thus, another part of my education for the book brought me, in

places across the continent, face to face with baby or juvenile chimpanzees chained to trees and junked cars, hidden away and starving in tiny cages, or being cared for in people’s

houses and in orphanages. Research for that first book with Jane also led me to find chimps

outside Africa—behind the bars in biomedical laboratories, for instance, or under the control of Hollywood animal trainers.

After that coauthored book, I turned to a couple of other projects before returning in

1996 to Jane once more. This time, though, she served as both collaborator and subject. The meaning of subject should be clear enough: I had decided to write her biography. She was a collaborator in the sense that she gave me free access to everything, including a lifetime’s worth of personal letters, roomfuls of filing cabinets bursting with documents and loose

papers, a world filled with friends all ready to be interviewed, and family (mother, father,

sister, aunt, son, niece, grandchildren, first husband) all grist for the tape recorder. Possibly

the oddest thing I noticed, in my ten years biographicizing this one person, is that she never once asked to see what I was writing. When the typescript was finally done and ready for publication, I thought it would be a simple courtesy to let her have a look, and so she did

read it at that point. She asked for a few corrections of factual errors. Nothing else. So what I concluded about Jane is that she is among the least controlling people I have ever met.

Jane has taught me so many things. But by taught, I really mean something more

subtle and yet more effective than the word usually connotes. I’ve never had the

impression that she was actually teaching me or instructing me about anything. No, she

taught without teaching. She taught through example. She enabled discoveries to happen.

She alerted one to possibilities. She altered an opinion through a few words thoughtfully expressed. And it has been through her quiet teaching that I came to think about animal suffering in broader terms. Her example was an important part of my becoming a

vegetarian, and her influence and inspiration have helped keep me writing about animals and animal issues over the last quarter century.

“My Friend Jane,” by Mary G. Smith On a rainy street corner in Nairobi in 1962, I met Jane Goodall for the first time. She and I, two young women both born in 1934, had no clue then how intertwined our lives would

become. Jane had recently begun her chimpanzee project at Gombe under the direction of

paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Shortly after her astonishing discovery of tool-using by

the chimpanzees, she was given a small grant by the National Geographic Society to

support her fieldwork. I was a National Geographic magazine editor on assignment in East Africa, meeting with the Leakeys to plan a photographic coverage of their monumental

work at Olduvai Gorge. Before I left our headquarters in Washington, I’d also been told to size up the young blonde working with chimpanzees in Tanzania. Perhaps, went the

thinking, her project might eventually amount to something of popular interest for the magazine.

Jane not only became the world’s best-known primatologist, she is also a living

symbol for the preservation of our natural world and its animal populations. Her energy

and tireless dedication to these very best of causes are legendary. . . . But to turn back for a

minute to our first meeting fifty-two years ago: As Jane and I shook hands it was sprinkling rain. She was wearing a blue and white cotton dress with a sash tied in back. She wasn’t

much interested in talking to me, I recall, and I wasn’t particularly fascinated by her either.

I sent a letter to a close friend back at the office in Washington saying that Jane seemed nice but sort of frail and that she probably wouldn’t last. So much for my ability to read the future!

To this day, when people learn I worked for National Geographic, a question I can

count on being asked is, “Gosh, did you ever meet Jane Goodall?” Well, gosh, I certainly did.

I directed the production of her illustrated articles for the magazine and alerted our

television and book divisions to take a hard look at this unique scientist. The result? Three National Geographic books and four television films. Jane and I became close friends. One

day she asked me to serve on the board of the Jane Goodall Institute, created in 1977. Later I became its president. Long ago, I asked Jane why she felt the way she did about animals,

why she was adamant we should be kind to them. Her answer has always stayed with me: “We should be kind to animals because it makes better humans of us all.”

So what’s Jane Goodall really like? She’s extraordinary, one of the few world-class

celebrities who without question fully deserves all the respect and adulation she’s received.

Jane is a superb scientist and a genuine hero in a world crowded with hero wannabes. But then I suspect her legions of friends and supporters already know this.

In American Venice, Lewis Fisher uncovers the evolution of San Antonio’s beloved River Walk. He shares how San Antonians refused to give up on the vital water source that provided for them from before the city’s beginnings. In 1941 neglect, civic uprisings, and bursts of creativity culminated in the completion of a Works Project Administration undertaking designed by Robert H. H. Hugman. The resulting River Walk languished for years but enjoyed renewed interest during the 1968 World’s Fair, held in San Antonio, and has since become the center of the city’s cultural and historical narrative.

Fisher shares stories about the River Walk’s evolution including information about the Museum and Mission Reaches, two expansions of the River Walk that are vital to San Antonio’s continued growth as the eighth largest city in the country.

Learn more

*** Chapter 9: Reaching North and South

Quintupling the length of San Antonio’s River Walk borrowed lessons from the Roman Empire.

During his successful campaign for mayor in 2004–05, Phil Hardberger recalled mentioning the river in each of his sixty-eight debates and working it into every speech. “Cato the Elder ended every single one of his speeches to the Roman senate with ‘Carthage must be destroyed,’ ” said Hardberger, whose credentials included six years as chief justice of the state’s Fourth Court of Appeals and four as secretary of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy administration. “It’s persistence politics.”1 The payoff a decade later was two vastly different new sections equal in quality to Robert Hugman’s original River Walk, with the same emphasis on ever-changing vistas, unexpected flourishes, imaginative landscaping and unique bridges.

Since completion of a federally funded River Corridor Feasibility Study in 1973, a succession of committees had been proposing major changes along the river beyond Hugman’s River Walk.

“There were good planners who were hired to make plans and give ideas,” said former mayor and longtime parks advocate Lila Cockrell. “However, we really didn’t have any money.” Planning came into focus in 1998 when Bexar County, the City of San Antonio and the San Antonio River Authority created the San Antonio River Oversight Committee, co-chaired by Cockrell and architect Irby Hightower. Members included twenty-two representatives of businesses and neighborhoods along the proposed route.2 With governmental bodies committed to the project and a committee of stakeholders in place, the San Antonio River Improvements Project began to take shape. The section north of the original River Walk, nearly four miles long, was named the Museum Reach after the two major museums along that part of the river. It was subdivided into the navigable Urban Segment, about a mile and a half in length and protected by the flood tunnel, and the more bucolic upper Park Segment, some two and a half miles long, with walking trails.

The nine-mile section to the south, named the Mission Reach after four Spanish missions along its path, would emphasize recreation and ecosystem restoration, to help that section function as it did prior to a flood control project a half century earlier. The first mile south of the end of the River Walk at South Alamo Street was designated as the Eagleland Segment, a transition

The new fifteen-mile-plus San Antonio River Walk extended in both directions from the original River Walk, shown as the Downtown Reach. The four miles northward were termed the Museum Reach. To the south was the one-mile Eagleland Segment Project and the nearly eightmile Mission Reach.

zone between the manicured, urban original River Walk and the restored natural stretch of native growth of the Mission Reach.

No longer could a single architect like Robert Hugman be expected to plan such a project and carry it out through one or two public entities like the city and the WPA. Now federal funding required the project to be directed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which, noted River Oversight Committee co-chair Irby Hightower, “wanted a project that measurably functioned like a riparian habitat; the community wanted a linear park that looked like a river.” The challenge for local officials was “how to persuade the Corps to adapt its criteria-based approach to the design-oriented goals of the community.” They succeeded.3 Chosen in 2000 for concept design was SWA Group, Houston-based landscape architects, planners and urban designers, who would be aided by a team of civil and structural engineers, architects, economists and environmental scientists.

Museum Reach architects were San Antonio’s Ford, Powell & Carson—whose Boone Powell, like Hugman, drew most of his design not by computer but by hand. Mission Reach architects were the San Antonio office of Carter & Burgess, which before the project ended joined the Jacobs Engineering Group.

Initial coordinator would be engineer Steve Graham, the San Antonio River Authority’s director of watershed management. When Graham was promoted to assistant general manager, he was replaced as project manager by Authority engineer Mark Sorenson. Preparing a master plan for sidewalks, artworks and other amenities would be Seattle’s Lorna Jordan Studio in association with San Antonio’s Bender Wells Clark Design.

A long series of public meetings and presentations began. As plans firmed up, the Oversight Committee managed to keep the direction in place through three mayors, four city managers, two county judges and three River Authority general managers. Then came Phil Hardberger.

Once elected, Mayor Hardberger took a direct approach. “It had been planned, and there was this committee and that committee. . . . I said, ‘We’re going to stop planning and start digging.’ ” He found ready support from Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff—a critical ally, since counties in Texas collect the dedicated flood control tax and Bexar County would be the majority funder. As momentum swelled, the $384.1 million project drew joint funding from the City of San Antonio, Bexar County, the San Antonio River Authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

In addition, private funds were raised by the new San Antonio River Foundation.

The San Antonio Water System contributed funds when water and wastewater lines needed to be moved.4 “There was the usual hue and cry and people saying this is costing too much money,” Hardberger recounted. “My answer to that was, ‘Yes it’s going to cost us millions, but it’s going to bring back billions.’ And so we are going to go forward and we are going to get it done.”5 Hardberger’s optimism, however, was challenged by federal deficits and harder times. Construction bids were higher than anticipated. Washington delayed full funding of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ share and the city, facing its own financial problems, would not increase its promised share as costs rose. “The city said to us essentially, ‘This is it, make it work,’ ” said San Antonio River Authority General Manager Suzanne Scott.6 A creative funding solution resulted. It enabled construction on the Museum Reach’s Urban Segment to begin on May 8, 2007, despite a construction bid that came in $18 million over budget.

Scott and City Manager Sheryl Sculley noted that while the River Authority’s tax revenue could not be used for capital projects, it could be spent on operations and maintenance. City bond funds were originally to include long-term River Improvements Project operations and maintenance costs. The city agreed to use its funds originally earmarked for operations and maintenance to instead cover the $18 million shortfall. The Authority, in turn, agreed to use its annual tax revenue to assume the operations and maintenance responsibility. Bexar County, the segment’s primary funding contributor, was satisfied that operations and maintenance assurances protected its investment, and a final agreement in April 2007 assured the funding.

In addition to the funding arrangement, a catalyst to begin the Museum Reach was acquisition of the abandoned Pearl Brewery by former picante sauce magnate Christopher “Kit” Goldsbury, according to the River Authority’s Suzanne Scott.

Its riverside site was near the key intersection of Interstate 35 with U.S. 281 and Broadway. The brewery had opened there on twenty-two acres in 1881 and by 1916 was the largest brewery in Texas. Its centerpiece was a seven-story brewhouse with arched windows and a mansard-roofed tower that was San Antonio’s tallest building when built in 1894. Goldsbury planned an imaginative multi-use development

Completion of the first segment of the Museum Reach took a broad range of participants.

The Pearl Brewery’s brewhouse, below, was the tallest building in San Antonio when completed in 1894. At lower right it remained on the skyline as Hotel Emma in the mixed-use Pearl complex, near the turning basin at the northernmost point for passenger barge navigation on the Museum Reach.

known as Pearl that fit well with plans for the extended River Walk. Its focal point would be the old brewhouse, renovated and enlarged to become Hotel Emma, a boutique hotel named for the widow of Pearl founder Otto Koehler. She kept the brewery open through Prohibition.

The Pearl was conveniently located a block south of the flood tunnel’s intake facility on Josephine Street. It was thus within the tunnel’s flood protection zone, and the river past it would be fed by an ample supply of water from the tunnel’s recycling system, leaving that part of the river no longer, as Irby Hightower described it, little more than “a trapezoidal ditch with a trickle of water.” Since the river plain upstream rose slightly, the Pearl was the logical site for a dam marking the northern end of navigation on the Museum Reach and thus the Urban Segment’s northern boundary. Below the dam could be a turning basin for riverboats. Banks below the Pearl could be landscaped for a small amphitheater and walkways up to restaurants, shops and offices. But, first, the problem of the fall of the river had to be resolved.

Below the low dam at Lexington Avenue and on past the Great Bend to the higher dam at Nueva Street, the river was level enough for riverboats. But from Lexington Avenue up to the Pearl the elevation rose nine feet, too steep for boats. There was general agreement that the low dam at Lexington Avenue could be replaced with a higher one two blocks upstream at Brooklyn Avenue. But how to deal with navigation was another issue. One idea was having separate upstream and downstream boat services that passengers would transfer between. Another option was a dam

with a sloping face that boats fitted with wheels could crawl up. Others suggested a dam with a lock system that would raise and lower boats.

The ultimate solution was the simplest, if the most expensive: a dam with two locks. “Ours is just a recreational lock and dam,” explained Mark Sorenson, the River Authority’s manager for the River Improvements Project.

“It’s one-tenth the size of a commercial lock, but it operates in the same way.”

Locks would measure 13 by 30 feet to accommodate 11 by 27 foot boats, raised or lowered to the appropriate level in five minutes. Work was by the Museum Reach’s prime contractor, San Antonio’s Zachry Construction. Operators in quarters atop the structure would run the computerized operating system daily from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Nearby went an observation gazebo and a ticket office next to public restrooms. Of the dam structure’s $6.5 million cost, $5 million was contributed by AT&T, which had a major building nearby.7 Two years after ground was broken in 2007, the Museum Reach’s Urban Segment was completed on schedule. Opening ceremonies were held at the new locks on May 31, 2009, one day before Mayor Phil Hardberger was term-limited out of office. Already the master plan for the area had been chosen as one of the best urbanist projects in the world by the Congress for the New Urbanism.

In addition to historic buildings at the Pearl, the Urban Segment was anchored by another set downstream at the original 1884 Lone Star Brewery, its centerpiece a crenellated five-story landmark built in 1904 as the brewhouse. When renovated

Flexible pipes carried the river’s reduced flow south to join the river where the original River Walk began at the Hugman Dam, below center in top left photo. Construction of a dam and two locks at Brooklyn Avenue, top, opened navigation upstream. North of the Pearl, channel construction continued through rundown neighborhoods, above, to link the Museum Reach’s Urban Segment with the Park Segment past the Josephine Street Bridge, center.

At opening ceremonies for the first section of the Museum Reach were, from left, Irby Hightower, River Oversight Committee co-chair; Sally Buchanan, San Antonio River Authority vice chair; Mayor Phil Hardberger; Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff; and Edward E. Collins, chair of the San Antonio River Foundation. Afterward, far right, Mrs. Cockrell and Hardberger took a hand at piloting the first barge through the lock. At top left sat the River Authority’s project manager, Mark Sorenson.

Nine tiles with Shang Dynasty designs that were part of Taiwan’s pavilion at HemisFair ’68 were reinstalled along the River Walk across from the San Antonio Museum of Art.

in 1981 as the San Antonio Museum of Art, the iron bridge used for rolling barrels from one tower to another was replaced by a glass-enclosed walkway. The bridge was left to molder until donated to the San Antonio River Foundation to become a nearby pedestrian bridge across the revived river. A similar iron conveyor bridge between the Pearl Brewery’s brewhouse and its full goods warehouse was relocated to become an eighty-six-foot pedestrian bridge across the river at the Pearl.

Years before, the Museum of Art had purchased land on the other side of West Jones Avenue, and now found that its 15 acres included 1,200 linear feet along the river that made it the largest owner of downtown riverfront property. For the riverbanks behind its main complex, the museum raised $5 million to replace chain link fences and uproot overgrown banks for improvements centering on a 4,000 squarefoot open pavilion with river views. The River Foundation installed in the River Walk wall across from the museum—which includes a noted collection of Asian art—a donated set of nine metal tiles with characteristic Shang Dynasty designs that were part of Taiwan’s pavilion at HemisFair ’68.8 A block down the river, at the end of Tenth Street, was Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 76, in a three-story columned Classical Revival home built by lumberman Van A. Petty in 1897. When riverside overgrowth was removed, VFW members found themselves occupying one of the signal landmarks on the Museum Reach. Below the post, construction crews enlarging the riverbed uncovered remains of a stone dam built for the 1870s Alamo Mill/Crystal Ice Company, which

The San Antonio River was imagined as a broad, distant stream in an early drawing, left, of the Lone Star Brewing Company and its 1904 brew house, now the San Antonio Museum of Art. The museum replaced the iron conveyor bridge between the brew house’s two towers with a glassed walkway, shown above left in the cold December of 2008 as construction continued in the riverbed and the museum’s riverfront was being upgraded. The conveyor bridge was installed across the river, above, as a pedestrian bridge.

drilled the first artesian well into the Edwards Aquifer. Much of the dam was preserved and an interpretive marker was prepared.9 But nowhere was transformation more dramatic than in the once dilapidated blocks at street level on either side of the Museum Reach. Headlines termed the project “a developer’s dream.” Long before ground was broken, savvy developers were buying up dilapidated homes and bars and drug-infested motels within a 377-acre neighborhood designated River North, on either side of the river from

The neighborhood of VFW Post 76, at top in photos, improved dramatically from the dismal view in February of 1966, top left, as riverbanks along the Museum Reach were cleared in 2008, right, and finished, above, the next year.

downtown to Interstate 35. Its master plan integrated planned Museum Reach stairways with the neighborhood street grid above and recommended changes in the area’s existing commercial and industrial zoning. When development was finished, neighborhood population was expected to grow from a few thousand to 50,000.

By the time Museum Reach ground was broken in 2007, land appraisals in the area had risen eighteen percent, from $260 million to $309 million. After AT&T and the San Antonio Museum of Art, the property owner with the highest valuation was developer Edward Cross II, who with his partners already owned 32 properties valued at a total of $16 million. City officials were delighted at the anticipated $1 billion economic “jolt” the River Walk extension was generating as new hotels and high-density housing projects got underway in an area once all but written off as having no potential.10 A year after the opening, Rio San Antonio Cruises reported overall riverboat ticket sales up fifty percent, riverside joggers caused a spike in sales of running shoes at a Pearl sports outlet and beer sales at VFW Post 76 had doubled. Dramatic works of art began adorning walkways and bridges. Benches were installed for spectators at an unexpectedly popular event, the nightly flight of Mexican freetailed bats from beneath the Interstate 35 overpass. Five years after opening day, annual economic benefit of the Museum Reach was pegged at $139 million. The

As the view south from Brooklyn Avenue was being transformed by Museum Reach construction, above, a flurry of apartment construction was underway north of Jones Avenue, far left and center left.

Two blocks south, a hotel was being built on one side of the Ninth Street Bridge while an office building, at bottom right, was going up on the other.

The extended River Walk’s lock and dam structure was decked out with holiday lights at Christmas, while, upstream, dozens of colored lights glowed from beneath the water.

area had gained 1,260 new housing units and fifty new companies.11

By Christmas 2010 the Museum Reach was aglow with holiday lighting not just at the locks but, upstream, with underwater lights, in green, pink, white and blue.

Beyond the Urban Segment, river channel restoration would be limited to erosion control and removing invasive plants. New pathways northward along the Museum Reach’s Park Segment would skirt riverbanks through the Brackenridge Golf Course and Brackenridge Park and follow to their east a route along the formerly concrete-lined drainage channel to be restored as Catalpa-Pershing Creek. They would link with existing paths into 343-acre Brackenridge Park, where the river was already lined with rock walls, many built by the WPA at the time of River Walk construction downtown.

Some channels had been lined with rock since the World War I era, both in the park and in the adjoining San Antonio Zoo. In addition to a variety of low bridges spanning the river were the two nineteenth century iron bridges removed from downtown and reassembled in Brackenridge Park after the flood of 1921. Near the park’s northeastern edge, the Witte Museum installed a small riverside theater below its new South Texas Heritage Center. Nearby, excavations turned up the 1719–20 channels where the Alamo Acequia drew its water from the river.

Across from the end of the Museum Reach at Hildebrand Avenue, on the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word, the Headwaters Coalition, directed by Helen Ballew, was at work on a 53-acre sanctuary to restore the sort of urban forest that once surrounded the originating springs of the river at the Blue Hole, usually dry.

Completion of the four-mile Museum Reach cost $84.8 million, $71.2 million for the Urban Segment and $13.6 million for the Park Segment. It produced immediate, tangible results. Extension to the north dovetailed with the older River Walk’s ambience of a narrow passage between high banks. Width of the Museum Reach’s public right-of-way averaged eighty feet, and was bordered

primarily by private property in neighborhoods continuously evolving since the city’s founding. Banks on either side were ripe for private commercial and residential development.

The eight-mile Mission Reach, however, was a more long-range and complicated project, with cost estimates nearing three times higher. Its right-of-way sometimes neared four times the width of the Museum Reach and it carried three times more water, making the Mission Reach highly susceptible to periodic flooding. Most of it had been scraped in the 1950s into a broad, open flood channel that destroyed habitat and isolated the river from its surroundings. Recreating

The Park Segment of the Museum Reach would pass the Brackenridge Golf Course, shown at top in the 1920s when a suspension bridge reached the third tee. To the west, a natural section of the river, above left, would be reached by a side trail. Near the Park Segment’s northern end, blocks lined in semicircles formed a riverside theater by the Witte Museum’s South Texas Heritage Center, above.

Much riverside rockwork connected by trails to the Museum Reach’s Park Segment predated the original River Walk. Above, a pond held sea lions in the early days of the San Antonio Zoo. At top right, the river was dammed in Brackenridge Park for swimming and boating near the early Koehler Pavilion.

At right, the still-popular low water crossing bridge was partly straddled in March 1921 by Vaudeville actor Bob Carleton, in town to perform at the Majestic Theater. In 1940, far right, the WPA added sidewalks around the 1877 Water Works pumphouse, then in use as a bathhouse for swimmers.

that habitat and restoring the balance of nature would be the primary thrust of Mission Reach work.

Much of the Mission Reach right-of-way adjoined public land, meaning that private developers could not contribute as much to the ambience as they could along the Museum Reach. But the southern reach did adjoin lands of four of San Antonio’s five Spanish missions, dating from the 1720s and 1730s and incorporated into San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Portals to these missions would be major design elements.

Otherwise, since most new development did not extend far south until the turn of the twentieth century, there were few landmarks to restore. The only major mill along the southern stretch of the river had been the briefly prosperous four-story frame Mission Mill near Mission San Juan, built in 1879 by brothers Louis and Henry Berg to clean wool and manufacture fabric. Upstream, across from Mission San José, was the first movie studio in Texas, the 1911 Star Film Ranch, which took advantage

of the missions and riverside brush lands as settings for a host of silent movies. It stood near the Hot Sulphur Wells Hotel, a spa complex built after an artesian well drilled near the river in the 1890s struck mineral water. For four decades the spa drew celebrities ranging from Will Rogers to Douglas Fairbanks to Cecil B. DeMille.

Mussels thriving in the warm mineral waters flowing into the river were found to contain freshwater pearls. This discovery led to a pearl rush “reminiscent of Klondike Days.” Prospectors found up to three dozen pearls a day until the mussels were gone.12 Aside from periodic plans to revive ruins of the Hot Sulphur Wells Hotel and the ongoing restoration far upstream of the warehouse-district-turned-Blue Star

U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in 2011 raised the gate to allow water back into Mission San Juan’s acequia, severed by the 1950s flood control project. Behind her are Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, center, and San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro and his twin brother Joaquin, soon elected to Congress.

The Mission Reach was designed past four eighteenth-century missions and their churches and chapels near the river, including, clockwise from immediate left, Espada, San José, Concepción and San Juan.

Vanished landmarks along the Mission Reach included a woolen mill at Berg’s Mill, top left, and the bathhouse of the Hot Sulphur Wells Hotel, top center.

Remaining was the Lone Star Brewery complex, at center in above view, opened in 1933 and closed in 1996. The original convoluted course of the river was changed in 1954 by a straightened and greatly widened channel, top right.

Arts Complex, as the Mission Reach was completed the vacant Lone Star Brewery buildings were drawing the greatest interest from developers. The brewery had opened upstream from Mission Concepción as the Salinas Brewing Company when Prohibition ended in 1933, was renamed Lone Star Brewing Company in 1940 and closed in 1996. Hopes for Museum Reach-style development along the Mission Reach were buoyed with plans for the $50 million Big Tex Grain Company urban residential project south of the Blue Star Arts Complex.

The major challenge for Mission Reach work was overcoming a massive flood control project done sixty years earlier. While that may have succeeded in speeding floodwaters out of the city, straightening the winding river and bulldozing its banks destroyed much of the surrounding environment. Now 113 acres of aquatic habitat needed to be restored, with systems of riffles, runs and pool sequences and 13 acres of embayments or side channels to shelter aquatic plants and fish. Another 334 acres were designated for woodland habitat restoration, with plantings of more than 23,000 young trees and shrubs of 44 native varieties. More than 10,000 pounds of seeds of 60 species of native grasses and wildflowers would also be planted.13 Rather than re-digging the river’s precise original convoluted path, the new, gently meandering channel was to reclaim the functioning of the river, reducing erosion, drawing back wildlife and restoring the balance of nature. The channel’s base of concrete rubble would be returned to a soil base. Planners observed that

the channel “is not currently a place where most people find recreational opportunity,” adding dryly of the concrete rubble base, “the public has expressed a negative reaction to this application.”14 Difficulties could be expected, given the newness of the science of fluvial geomorphology, which studies the evolution of rivers and watersheds. As the district commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Col. John Minahan, said at the Eagleland Segment groundbreaking in 2004: “Twenty-two years ago, if you’d told me I’d be standing here in San Antonio taking a perfectly good flood-control project and putting it back the way we found it, I’d probably [have said], ‘That’s not possible.’ ”15 The $13.6 million Eagleland Segment bordered a former industrial area being converted to a mixed-use arts district. It was a mile long, from South Alamo Street past the Blue Star Arts Complex to the flood tunnel outlet on Lone Star Boulevard near Roosevelt Park. It was designated after nearby Eagleland Drive, named for the Eagles of adjacent Brackenridge High School. Ecosystem restoration techniques were tested along the Eagleland Segment for future use on the rest of the Mission Reach. Seventeen acres along the river’s right-of-way were cleared of invasive plants and re-planted with natives. Its first hike-and-bike trails opened in 2007, with additional amenities completed in 2012.

The nine miles of the Mission Reach were divided into three phases.

Groundbreaking for the first, on June 2, 2008, launched a $25.2 million mile-long construction project by Laughlin-Thyssen Inc. from Lone Star Boulevard to the confluence of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek. Some 360,000 cubic yards of soil were relocated during construction of a pedestrian trail, two footbridges across the river, picnic areas, a new channel, grass and wildflower seeding and restoration of 34 acres of native vegetation. Among speakers at its opening in June 2011 was U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.

Similar work on the second phase was begun by Zachry Construction in February 2010, south from the confluence of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek to Mission Drive. This $22.7 million, mile-long project involved moving 800,000 cubic yards of soil. It was opened along with the first phase in June 2011.

Down the mile-long Eagleland Segment, walkways wandered through surroundings broader than the River Walk downtown, and crossed the river on a new hike-and-bike bridge.

The start of one stretch of Mission Reach channel restoration south of the old Lone Star Brewery, left, concluded with completion of a colorful bridge designed by Mark Schlesinger.

The largest and final phase, covering nearly six miles from Mission Road to just beyond Mission Espada and costing $99.3 million, was begun by Zachry Construction in October 2010. Within three years more than two million cubic yards of soil were relocated, 260 acres of native vegetation restored and more than 18,000 trees planted, in addition to new elements similar to those in other phases.

In the meantime, work continued on links with the major attractions along the Mission Reach, the four Spanish missions themselves. Hikers and bikers as well as nearby residents would be drawn to the mission complexes by four distinctive portals, designed by teams of artists, architects, landscape architects and historians, financed by Bexar County and the San Antonio River Foundation and overseen by River Authority engineer Robert Perez and Mike Addkison and Stuart Allen, project managers from the River Foundation.

Already begun was the foundation’s $10 million Confluence Park, managed by Stuart Allen. Its three acres at the confluence of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek were designed by Ball-Nogues Studio of Los Angeles—succeeded

by Rialto Studios—and irrigated by water collected and stored in an underground cistern.

Reworking the river allowed restoration of the connection with the eighteenth-century San Juan acequia severed in the 1950s flood control project. Rewatering of the acequia in 2011 permitted development of a Spanish Colonial era demonstration farm using some of San Juan’s old mission fields.

The Mission Reach project was not without setbacks. In early 2007, before construction started, it was clear that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would not get federal funding in a timely manner to do its part of the project. In May 2008, Bexar County voters approved a visitor tax providing $125 million to more than cover the federal shortfall. With sufficient local funding guaranteed, the next year U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison helped Congress authorize sufficient funding for the remainder of the Mission Reach project.16 By then, the original cost estimate had soared from $127 million to $233 million, which officials of the project manager, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, acknowledged “came about as engineers and designers realized just how complicated this project really is.” Using authority included in the Congressional funding bill, in June 2010 Bexar County commissioners succeeded in having construction administration responsibility transferred from the Corps of Engineers to the San Antonio River Authority, which soon issued the construction contract for phase three, the largest. Estimates of savings by bringing the project under local control ranged as high as $24 million.17 Less than three years later, as the Mission Reach neared completion, effects of a massive storm were mitigated north of Lone Star Boulevard by the flood tunnel,

The three-acre Confluence Park, below left, marked the meeting of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek. Nearby, the Mission Concepción portal, below, was one of four designed to signal nearness to the nearby missions.

A flood in May 2013 caused the curved weir at the confluence of the river and San Pedro Creek to be redesigned and filled with rocks, right, to better slow future floodwaters. A paddling chute was added.

but effects to the south devastated some of the newly finished work. The May 2013 deluge, which dumped up to fifteen inches of rain on parts of the city, caused $3 million in damage to the Mission Reach. During more than two weeks of cleanup, 10,000 pounds of debris and 7,000 pounds of garbage were carried off. Newly planted vegetation was uprooted and rock piles and sandbars intended to improve aquatic habitat were swept away. Significant damage at the confluence of San Pedro Creek and the river resulted in a redesign to withstand future floods. The work would minimize erosion and slow floodwater with large rocks on the confluence’s east bank and near an existing curved weir, a dam built across the confluence. In addition, boaters gained a paddling chute through the weir. The project’s grand opening was held on schedule four months later, on October 5, 2013.18 Official completion of the $271.4 million Mission Reach left more than 16 miles of hike-and-bike trails, 12 of them paved along the river and the rest, along the San Juan acequia, left unpaved. There were also 89 benches, 137 picnic tables, 5 overlooks with shade structures, 9 water edge landings, 6 foot bridges and 4 pavilions.

But there was more to come, as the San Antonio River Foundation raised funds for new amenities and enhancements to the four mission portals. Progress of habitat restoration would be measured not in years but in decades, as trees and unmowed vegetation matured and made the Mission Reach landscape appear more natural.

As the San Antonio River Improvements Project was completed, predictions made a decade earlier about the anticipated billion-dollar return on investment

proved prophetic. A River Walk Impact Study concluded that the River Walk— including the recently opened Museum Reach and Mission Reach—directly supported more than 21,000 jobs and indirectly nearly 10,000 more. It estimated that each year 11.5 million people made the River Walk a primary destination. Its annual economic impact was estimated at $3.1 billion annually, a number expected to grow substantially as the Museum Reach and Mission Reach change and mature.19 Indeed, the entire San Antonio River Walk remains a work in progress, one forever precarious and unfinished yet standing before the world as a triumph of enterprise and human imagination.

Recreation along the Mission Reach includes kayak races and springtime jogging past acres of bluebonnets and other wildflowers.

Mark Menjivar has spent hours and days engaging people in airplanes, tattoo shops, bingo halls, international grocery stores, public parks, baseball stadiums, and voodoo shops— and out on the streets and in their homes. Along the way he documented his findings to create a physical archive that contains hundreds of objects (rings, underwear, food items, clovers, horses, pigs, herbs, rainbows, lottery strategies, seeds, day trader insights, statues, patches, crystals, spices) and the stories and pictures that go with them.

Through photographs and first person accounts, The Luck Archive takes the best of these ideas, thoughts, and objects and gives readers a glimpse into the cultures and superstitions of a colorful array of humanity.

The Luck Archive is not a book about being lucky or unlucky. It’s an exploration of belief and the wondrous ramifications that settle in our lives. It’s a book about the truths and the lies we tell ourselves to feel safe, a story of the hopes and dreams we carry, and an archive of the things that connect us and make us elegantly human.

Learn more *** [Excerpt] A few years ago I was thinking about starting the Lady Luck Challenge. I was going to invite people to break mirrors and stay in correspondence with me for seven years to see if it had a negative effect on their lives. But I didn’t want to be someone who perpetuates bad luck in the world. I wanted to try and find ways to create new luck narratives for people, so I

began leading four-leaf clover hunting trips. On the first trip Karina found a four-leaf clover after about twenty minutes. A few people on the trip were pretty skeptical about whether they really existed.

“In The Old Man and the Sea I read what seemed to me an appropriate definition of luck: a

fluid, elusive force that could come right up to us and still go unnoticed. Luck is often a matter of perspective, and it seems to have this way of evading us too, because our circumstances and our wishes are also fluid.”

—Zach

Aric is a motivational speaker and has spoken to thousands of young people across the

country. Each time, he wears a pair of his lucky gray underwear. He estimates he has given over nine hundred talks in this pair alone.

While I was eating dinner with a friend who is a chef, we began discussing the objects

people carry with them for luck. The conversation eventually turned to rabbits, and my

friend said he got them for his restaurant from Sebastian, a French guy with a small farm in the Texas Hill Country. I wanted to know what happened to all the rabbit feet, so I called Sebastian to schedule a visit. The day I arrived he was in the process of harvesting

hundreds of rabbits for delivery. The feet, along with the fur and organs, were being burned in a small incinerator. Sebastian believes that you can always help luck along.

Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl chronicles over twenty years of Caswell’s travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through Iceland’s wild Hornstrandir Peninsula. Caswell travels through wild and urban landscapes, as well as philosophical and ideological vistas, championing the pleasures of the wandering life.

In the final piece of the collection, Caswell returns to the American West, not far from where he grew up, and accompanies three Peruvian sheepherders, their dogs, and 4,000 sheep. They trek across a mountain to seek shelter as a storm approaches. Along the way Caswell wrestles with the burden of carrying a lamb out of the storm and comes to the realization that while the object of love may be transient and fleeting, love itself endures.

Learn more *** “Crossing Over the Mountain: Idaho, 2006�

But all the waters of the world find one another again, and the Arctic seas and the Nile gather together in the moist flight of clouds. The old beautiful image makes my hour holy. Every road leads us wanderers too back home.

—​Herman Hesse, Wandering

Dawn. A few rain drops on Lookout Peak. I woke to the sound of the plink, plink of the rain against the rain fly, and the bloodstain on the mesh wall of my tent from the border collie pup that now slept in my vestibule. The night before, I had only just crawled into my tent in the dark when I heard Rambo, a border collie/heeler mix as fierce and violent as his name, savage this little pup that had dared approach the food bowl. Rambo had little interest in the sheep, and little interest in people, as he had warned me away several times when I approached him to remove the ticks that ringed him like a necklace of grapes. But he was hell on coyotes. His only mission, it seemed, was to chase coyotes, or kill them if he could. And the pup, savaged in the night, his ear a torn and bloody rag, came sadly to my tent. I knew that Hector and the other sheep herders, Edwin and Freddy, would laugh at me if they knew, as a dog that can’t make it on its own out here isn’t a dog at all.

We packed and loaded and left without coffee or breakfast as storm clouds came careening in and the rain came down with thunder and lightning. Today we had to cross over the mountain, Lookout Peak, and descend onto the west side of Cascade Lake, near Cascade, Idaho. I’d become used to this routine: an early, fast

wake-up, heavy labor for an hour, and a hasty departure on a hard stomach. It was cold, colder than any morning I’d been out with the sheep, and the air was wild and high. As thunderheads settled in over the top of us, Hector mounted his horse—​the horse with no name—​and rode ahead pushing the band of sheep up over the mountain. He sang an old Peruvian song as he went: Hoy estoy aqui Mañana ya no Pasado mañana por donde estaré [I am here today I won’t be tomorrow Who knows where I’ll be the day after tomorrow.]

Hector Artica is one of about twenty Peruvian sheep herders working for the Soulen Livestock Company, a third-generation Idaho sheep and cattle outfit. I was traveling with him this summer, as I had last summer, for three reasons: to see wolves, which had recently been reintroduced to the mountain West after about one hundred years following eradication; to get a story; and to live out my romantic vision of the shepherd’s life.

The Soulen ranch consists of about fifty thousand deeded acres, with another sixty thousand acres of grazing allotments with the BLM, and other allotments with the Forest Service and the state of Idaho. These allotments have dwindled in recent years due to a number of pressures, especially concern for bighorn sheep, which contract a deadly pneumonia-like disease carried by domestic sheep.

Phil Soulen; his daughter, Margaret; and his son, Harry, share management of the ranch. Margaret focuses her efforts on the sheep operation (between 10,000 and 14,000 sheep divided into five to seven bands, depending on the time of year), while Harry mostly works the cows (about 1,000 head). Each sheep band is assigned a herder, charged with the safety and health of the sheep; and a camp tender, charged with the safety and health of the herder. The camp tender takes on the tasks of cooking, camp setup and takedown,

and moving camp on a mule and horse pack string. The sheep graze a vast expanse of country, making a long loop from their winter range on the Snake River south of Nampa, Idaho, to their summer range in the mountains near McCall, Idaho. As spring turns to summer, the sheep follow the grass into the high country. Every mile between these distant points, the sheep must walk. The lambs are born on that range, the ewes live and die out there with the guard dogs and the herding dogs, and the shepherds, too, live on the range year-round with the eagles and trout, the coyotes and bears.

Hector’s Idaho driver’s license claims he is five feet tall, but I wager he is sub four-eleven. He comes from Lima, the capital city of Peru, but has spent much of his adult life with his wife and young son in a village on the Altiplano, the high plains of the Andes, which average about 12,000 feet elevation. His family is there still, and he has not seen them in a couple years. Working through the Western Range Association, the herders contract with the ranch for threeyear work visas, with an option to renew after returning home for a few months. Hector is near the end of his second contract cycle.

The herders are compensated with a salary of $750 per month, with all other expenses paid—​food, shelter, supplies, transportation, health care. This may not sound like much to Americans who love, above all things, to consume, but living a modest life without expenses, the herders are able to send most of their money home, where the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is $5,600 per year. Compare that to the per capita GDP in United States: $40,100.

The pattern here, the relationship between herder and sheep and dogs, is as old as the hills, even those hills rooted in the mythic past and first grazed by Abel’s sheep, born out of Eden with his brother Cain, who slew him. The story goes that Abel was beloved of God, and in his jealousy, Cain rose up against him. Imagine, though, the tension between these two men, one a bondsman to the land, devoted to it, imprisoned by it, unable to live a single day that the land did not need him. The other, a man as free as the bully winds that blew in over the fallen world, who roamed from place to place

with his sheep and dogs, from good grass to good grass, from good water to good water. First there is the tension between bondage and freedom, and then, would not Cain defend his fields from the insatiable hunger of his brother’s sheep? When Cain says to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he means that he is not, and he means that in fact his brother is a keeper of sheep, and he is the keeper of his fields, which must be kept even at the expense of his brother.

The tension between Cain and Abel, and the deed that was inevitably to come, is seeded in the men’s names, too. “Cain” is rooted in the Hebrew word kanah, meaning “to possess or acquire,” and koneh, which means “to create, shape, or form.” Cain is the created man, having taken shape in his mother’s womb. He commands space and identity. He acquires and possesses the material world.

This is precisely what he does in his occupation as farmer: he owns and controls the land, takes dominion over it. “Abel” is from the Hebrew word hebel, which means “vapor, breath, or breath that vanishes.” As a shepherd, he is a creature who roams, drifts, floats, and may be nowhere and anywhere at any time. He is a wanderer, a transient, a vagabond, which mirrors the fleetness of his very life, taken from him by Cain, the possessor.

After Cain murders Abel, God issues his punishment. He is to be “cursed from the earth,” which opens “her mouth to receive [his] brother’s blood from [his] hand.” Now when Cain tills the earth, it will not yield “her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt [he] be in the earth.” The earth is explicitly female here, so that among Cain’s crimes (murder, betrayal, lying) is the violation of the feminine, of the creative power of procreation, even the violation of Eve, Cain’s mother. God commands that the source of Cain’s identity and power (his ability to bring forth fruit from the feminine ground) will be denied him. The strength of the earth, and so the strength of the feminine, will not be known to Cain again. It will be known to Abel, however, who is accepted by the feminine earth as she opens her mouth to receive him. The fertile soil accepts Abel and rejects Cain. In effect, the two brothers exchange roles: Abel as farmer (or, more literally, he becomes the farmed land), and Cain

as wanderer. Yet Cain will be a different wanderer than his brother, for Abel was at home with his flocks in the wild lands, and Cain will remain a drifter, always out of place wherever and whenever he is.

To compound this eternal state of exile, Cain will be forever pursued by the guilt of his crimes, and only a state of continual wandering will allow him to atone for his brother’s murder.

Cain departs the only home he has known, traveling “out from the presence of the Lord” and dwelling “in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” The name “Nod” corresponds with the Hebrew word for “wanderer,” so Cain dwells in the land of wandering, which is to say that he lives everywhere and nowhere, where Abel once roamed free before him. Cain is truly alone, lost, without support or anchorage of any kind, and what he does next is remarkable.

Cain fathers a son, Enoch, which begins the ages of humankind.

The story continues as a genealogy of who begat whom, alongside the construction of civilization, a civilization based on an economy in agriculture, which will prove intolerant to a nomadic way of life, to Abel’s way of life. Later, along Cain’s line is born “Tubal-cain, the master of all coppersmiths and blacksmiths.” As metallurgist, Tubal-cain possesses the power to fashion the tools that drive the agricultural machine and shape the weapons of war against nomadic raiders. Metallurgy is a dark art, a sacred art, one which, during the Iron Age, was both honored and feared. The metallurgist does not perform his art alone, however; he requires the miner and the blacksmith.

In his three-volume series A History of Religious Ideas, Mircea Eliade writes, “Mines [were] assimilated to the womb of Mother Earth,” where metals were thought to grow and change. Mining metals from the womb of the earth is a process of interrupting the gestation period. The immense spans of time required to transform metals and make them perfect, it was believed, could be hastened in the forge. This is why miners practice “rites involving a state of purity, fasting, meditation, prayers, and cult acts,” writes Eliade.

Together, the miner, blacksmith, and the metallurgist—​three parts of one process—​assume “responsibility for changing nature,” by

taking “the place of time.” What would have taken Mother Nature “eons to ripen in the subterranean depths,” writes Eliade, “the artisan believes he can obtain in a few weeks; for the furnace replaces the telluric womb.” Such powers were considered both “sacred and demonic.” Metallurgists and smiths “[were] highly esteemed but [were] also feared, segregated, or even scorned.” Like Adam and Eve before him, Cain’s desire to master nature and so master time will play out in a cycle of violence and subjugation of those peoples who live by the will of nature and time, the nomads and pastoral nomads, whom Abel himself embodies. It is the farmer, and the civilization built on that economy, who seeks mastery of the weathers and seasons, who amasses wealth to fill a spiritual emptiness that comes with the subjugation of nature, who is obsessed with youth and immortality and so disgusted by the limitations, humors, and pleasures of the body. Ironically, it is Cain, not Abel, who is a slave to time, who falls prey to the very thing he wishes to control.

I hurried along on foot behind Hector’s horse, as lightning gave us the tree-lined horizon in flashes. Hector, I knew, hated lightning.

He feared it. I’d heard it told that during a storm, Hector would not go near his rifle, and sometimes he would leave it a long way out of camp, thinking it would attract lightning. He has good reason to fear. A few years ago, a bolt struck the stovepipe of a herder’s tent and blew him out of his shoes. Hector once visited a Forest Service fire lookout and noticed the glass insulators on the legs of the chairs and the bed. Later, he happened across such an insulator lying derelict on the forest floor. He wore the insulator around his neck as a talisman against a blue bolt from the heavens. Under the flash and boom of this storm, he looked possessed, driving those sheep on, hard and fast, to get over the top of the mountain before God struck him down.

“Lightning no no good for me,” Hector said.

We came upon a bag of dog food in the trail that must have fallen off one of the mules in the pack string ahead of us. Freddy, the camp tender, had gone on ahead with the camp hoping to set up

near Cascade Lake on the other side before we arrived with the sheep. Edwin pushed his band out ahead of us, and Hector and I followed up the rear with his band. Our camp, a tidy kit packed on five horses and mules, consisted of one canvas wall tent, a woodburning cookstove, four wooden boxes for storing the kitchen and food, four five-gallon water jugs, and various bundles of other gear: bedding for the men, their clothes and personal items, a rifle and a shepherd’s crook for each herder, the dog food, a couple small folding stools on which to sit. Food was resupplied by the foreman, Cesar Ayllon, when the camp’s location allowed road access.

Everything we needed to live comfortably was here, and not much else. The herder’s kit has changed very little since Abel’s time.

The dog food was safe inside its sack from the rain, but even if it had gotten wet, we couldn’t afford to leave it. The dogs needed this food, as hard as they worked. They were so footsore, so beaten down by the mountains, that when we hit camp at dusk, they ate hurriedly, then crawled up into some quiet shelter alone to sleep off their fatigue like the dead. I hefted the bag onto the back of Hector’s horse, tied it down, and we went on.

We trailed the rear of the band now, Hector mounted and me on foot, and we followed behind a little lamb, limping, its left front leg spattered with brown ooze. It dragged that little leg helplessly with each step. I recognized it then, the same lamb that Hector responded to so tenderly the day before. The rain came down harder, and my Gore-Tex raincoat was shiny and slick with the rain.

Lightning flashed all around us, and Hector’s eyes were wild and afraid.

“Stupid bitch!” Hector yelled at the lamb and the storm and his fear.

The little lamb just could not do it today, could not, after all these days, push on so smartly as before with its useless leg. It stopped.

Hector rode up on it with the horse, and frightened it. It bolted forward, moving along a little farther over the mountaintop. Soon it slowed and sputtered and stopped again. Hector rode up on it with his horse, which pushed it on a bit farther. This went on for half a

mile or so, until Hector dismounted, shoved the reins of his horse into my hands, took off his coat and used it to whip the little lamb to make it go. It woke from its stupor once again and ran, a burst of surprising speed, before it realized the leg didn’t work, and it stumbled and fell, as tired as it was. It rose again with all its might, got up, wanted to move on with the great band flowing out in front of it, the ewes and lambs baaing and bawling, a tremendous force of sheep in a fluid grace pouring over the mountain. But the lamb could go no more. Its front legs buckled and down it went onto its knees, its nose just touching a bit of soft moss to hold it up. Hector took up his coat again like a mace and beat the little lamb. It started and ran. He whipped it, yelling “Stupid bitch!” as the lightning flashed and the rain wetted us.

But that whipping, that rage, that ferocious abuse was not enough, was not more frightening than the fatigue and pain and destitution the lamb must have felt, for it stopped again. It was done, this lamb, finished with dragging its broken body over this great hump of Idaho. If we did nothing more, surely it would die. It would lie down and wait to die, wait for the coyote that would surely come, or the wolf, for we were now in wolf country. But what more could we do? I doubted we could bring the lamb in to safety. How could we carry it all the distance we had yet to go? And why not let it go? What’s one lamb in a band of two thousand? Let it go, I thought. I can’t stand watching this poor thing struggle against death anymore. The rest of the sheep are hitting the crest of the mountain and are maybe even headed down the other side. We’re getting soaked to the skin.

It’s cold. The lightning is close, and these great tall pines surrounding us are sure to attract that fatal flash from heaven you fear so much. Let it go. Let it die. Let’s go on.

“No good,” Hector said, calmer now. “No good, this little lambs.”

The lightning didn’t seem to bother him now. The lamb needed him, and I think, somehow, he needed the lamb.

Hector moved the dog food bag forward onto the saddle, picked the lamb up, and laid it gently over the horse just behind the cantle.

He took hold of the front feet, set them side by side, and tied them

down with the leather saddle strings. He came around the rear of the horse, set the lamb’s back legs side by side, and tied them off tight with the saddle strings. He moved the dog food bag, all fifty pounds of it, up behind the lamb now, pressed it in over the lamb to keep it in place, and tied it off with the horse’s lead rope.

“You go the horse,” Hector said. “I push the sheep.” Then he left me, vanishing down the trail.

I stood awhile in the downpour, the reins in my hand, the horse standing with one hind leg bent, the little lamb laid over its body. I looked down the watery surface of the path through the rain, which ran out before me and then angled sharply down. I coveted a dry shelter and the simple indoor life that came in reading and studying books. I no longer desired to be a lone shepherd on a distant promontory, staring into this wet and boundless forest. Yet I had only one choice, and that was to lead the horse and lamb on and to embrace the lonely roads, which in his optimism Wordsworth claims are an “open [school] in which [he] daily read / with most delight the passions of mankind.”

Our species, mankind, evolved out of a nomadic economy. Agri­ culture does not appear in a meaningful way until about ten thousand years ago. Before that, all the way back to Homo habilis and Homo erectus (2.5 million years ago), we were nomads, foraging for plant foods and hunting the great beasts of the veldt. Most of our species’s past (more than 99 percent of it) has been spent living as nomads, in “small-scale, highly egalitarian groups who shared almost everything,” writes Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá in Sex at Dawn. And that economy, that way of life, encouraged a very different kind of social structure than the American way, which is based on the individual (the hero, even), based on consumption, based on the “every man for himself” principle. “Foragers divide and distribute meat equitably,” write Ryan and Jethá, “breastfeed one another’s babies, have little or no privacy from one another, and depend upon each other for survival. As much as our social world revolves around notions of private property and individual

responsibility, theirs spins in the opposite direction, toward group welfare, group identity, profound interrelation, and mutual dependence.” Because sharing everything was at the heart of our ancestors’ lives for so long, the authors’ maintain, this practice “extended to sex as well.”

This is not New Age idealism, a hippie utopia, or even socialism, Ryan and Jethá assert, but rather the only system that made sense.

In a nomadic economy, a reliance on the group, as opposed to the individual, made life possible. An early human would not have survived alone for very long. He faced far too many dangers: predators, injury, starvation. You are better off sharing what you have gathered or killed with others, who will in turn share what they have gathered or killed with you. In this system, everyone eats a little all the time, instead of eating a lot some of the time. Think of sharing in this system not as altruism, but rather as a means of distributing risk.

In this light, such community-mindedness was not idealistic, but highly pragmatic.

The agricultural revolution that came later is generally regarded as a great leap forward, but according to the American scientist and writer Jared Diamond, it was the worst mistake in human history.

While it does make civilization and all its wonders possible—​especially beer—​it is also the genesis of slavery, class divisions, largescale warfare and genocide, the rapid spread of epidemic diseases, habitat destruction, species extinction, and the divorce of human beings from nature. In an article in the May 1987 issue of Discover, Diamond reports that the quality of life in early agricultural communities decreased dramatically from that of nomadic cultures.

Early farmers faced increased malnutrition and anemia, infectious disease, and degeneration of the spine, probably due to heavy labor. By about 4,000 BCE, the average height of peoples adopting agriculture fell dramatically, along with average life expectancy: twenty-six years before agriculture, and nineteen years afterward.

Most nomadic peoples were reluctant to adopt farming. In his book The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond writes, “Agriculture advanced across Europe at a snail’s pace: barely one thousand yards per year!”

But advance it did: slowly, slowly, farmers outbred and overpowered nomadic groups, because, as Diamond writes, “ten malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter.” Even so, as Diamond asserts, agriculture brings with it a world of ills, and it has delivered us to our present state, here at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Growth of the world’s human population is out of control, and we are fast consuming the very planet on which we depend for life.

Like a plague of locusts in a crop field, most of us will perish when the crop is gone.

I started down the watery path over the rocky mountaintop, leading the horse with no name and the lamb. Down, down, down, picking my way among the boulders and rocks, I was “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone,” to use Wordsworth’s words. There wasn’t much more to do, and there wasn’t much of a path either, just an open track of land where the sheep had traveled year after year, for the past one hundred years. The clouds were almost within reach, they were so low and we so high. The lamb lay there with its eyes open, blinking, helpless either way—​walking or being walked, it had no will, no way to choose what would become of it. I put my hand on its little head. There, there, little lamb.

With the advent of agriculture come property rights and the ability to amass wealth. When you have wealth, you need an army to protect it from those who don’t have wealth, and you need an heir to pass it on so the poor landless people (in some cases, nomads) remain poor and landless. Class systems, patriarchy, and monogamy are all products of agriculture, as men appropriated reproduction rights through marriage and essentially took ownership of women’s wombs.

Since sex was readily shared among early humans, so was parenting, according to Ryan and Jethá. Children were raised by the village, not solely by the biological parents, and one of the reasons is that men did not really know who had fathered which child. In a world without monogamy, it didn’t much matter. Everyone was a

member of the community, and so each child was everyone’s child.

There are in fact zero “monogamous primate species that live in large social groups,” and “adultery has been documented in every ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied,” write Ryan and Jethá. It’s nice to think we’re monogamous, but our behavior proves otherwise. Monogamy is not even present in human societies in which anything but monogamy is a crime, especially a crime for women. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus have all punished adulterous women with death, and even that threat is not enough to change our behavior. “Think about that,” Ryan and Jethá write: No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied—​ including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. . . . It’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—​even presidential legacies—​for something that runs against human nature? . . . No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.

Hector had melted into the band of sheep, somewhere below.

I could hear them bawling a hundred yards ahead, and now and again, I caught sight of sheep emerging from beneath the pines.

We fell farther and farther behind, me, the little lamb, the horse with no name. Where was camp tonight? Where were Freddy and the pack string? Where were Edwin and the other band? Where was Hector? I did not know. The rain fell steadily now as I led the horse on. There was only one way to go: down, down to the lake, which spread out before me as I caught glimpses of it between the trees.

From there, I might hear the four thousand sheep in a meadow nearby, and find the welcome shelter of the tent.

The horse stepped down into the slick muddy steep, slid forward, and rode up on me. I leaped out of the way as the horse caught himself and stopped. It angered me to be frightened this way by that huge animal almost toppling over me. We walked on, and the horse fought to keep his feet in the rain-slickened mud as I struggled to

keep out of his way. We made a quarter mile, maybe a bit more, when I looked back at the lamb. It had slid over the horse to one side, and hung from its four feet like a sacrifice, helpless, its head lolling dangerously up and down as if it might come off with the horse’s rhythm.

I stopped the horse, made him stand, and rescued the little lamb, lifted it up and back over the horse, repositioned the dog food sack to hold it there, and we went on. The trail steepened and the horse slid and arrested itself, slid and arrested itself, me walking alongside it now as it drew out the reins in front of me until I was walking near the rear of the saddle near the lamb that had slid down again into a little sling, slinging that way, its head lolling like it was barely attached. It looked unaffected, poor thing, blinking at me, helpless, hardly aware of its body, detached from any knowledge of having a will of its own, waiting for whatever cruelties would befall it. I set the lamb back up onto the horse, and it just lay there, that position as good as the hanging position, I suppose. It didn’t seem grateful at all. I felt awful, though, terrible in letting it suffer this way. I stood there in the rain a bit, listening for the band down the mountain.

I looked back at all my troubles, the little, innocent, helpless lamb.

High up on the horse now, the lamb craned its neck back to browse the green leaves of a mountain alder where a branch came down over it. Christ, I thought, what was it doing browsing the leaves as if this were an ordinary day? Didn’t it know it couldn’t walk, that its leg and its body were broken? Didn’t it know that it was a lamb on its way to the slaughter? That its life wasn’t worth more than the going rate of a few pounds of meat on the supermarket shelf? Didn’t it know that it was a prisoner, not only on this horse’s back, but in this world, its being locked away in this lamb’s body, hardly a body of its own, a body owned by a world apart, like a carrot in the ground, an apple on a tree, a loaf of bread on a kitchen counter? Does it not desire to break free of its prison and run and bound through the boundless world, to face its life and death on its own terms, to face the coyote even, its jaws and teeth, so long as it were free? Still, it went on nibbling the leaves, impervious to my questions, my pains, the way I ached for it, the fucking lamb.

Not far from where humankind was born, the Tuareg, one of the great nomadic Berber tribes of North Africa, regard agriculture as “an occupation for slaves and the lower classes,” writes Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress in The Berbers. “Even today, no noble will willingly take up a hoe.” The basic property of a Tuareg family consists of a few mats and maybe one precious rug, as well as the tools of their work and a tent to live in. As in so many traditional cultures, women in such nomadic communities possessed a great many freedoms. The tent belongs to the woman, and a new husband would move into her tent for “as long as the marriage lasts.”

Despite their “extremely simple material culture,” writes Brett and Fentress, “the Tuareg possess a social culture of great complexity.”

And it includes, among other highly articulated and rigid rules of behavior, an enduring love for poetry.

Things went on this way with the lamb for some time, for a life-age. I went on, leading the horse as before, trying to stay out of its way as it struggled to keep its feet in the slick mud where the sheep had trammeled the ground between the rocks. The rain came down. The sky flashed and I waited for the thunder to shake the mountain. Wham!

It was beautiful and terrible too. Wham! I hated it. I’d never leave home again. Wham! I loved it. I’d never go home again. Then the horse lurched forward and slid on all its feet, its back legs splayed out and then back under it. I leaped to the side to save myself. Soon we gentled out onto the next little flat into the taller grass. I had not yet looked back to see what I knew I would see: the lamb hung loosely again over the side of the horse.

I stopped and made the horse stand. I hefted the little lamb back up, pulled its front feet over, positioned it just so, and dropped the dog food into place against it. What an impossible situation. I walked alongside the horse now, the lead rope in my left hand, and my right hand on the lamb’s backside to keep it there from falling.

We ambled on through the grassy swale and the rain. It worked, at least for now, to lead the horse and hold the lamb, and we made up a little ground because I could hear the sheep again out in front.

Farther on I saw a ewe, its broad back exposed where its head was inside the branches of a pine. Hector must be somewhere nearby, I thought. Then I felt something warm and comforting, but I couldn’t place it. I didn’t know where or why I was having this sensation. I looked up at the sky and into the wet clouds hung low above me, and across the horse into the green treetops. And then at the lamb, which was pissing over the top of my hand and down the side of the horse.

Who knows what words issued forth in that moment, but I also felt for that little creature that had not even the dignity of its body’s functions. Of course it would need to piss. Of course it couldn’t help but piss. And where was it to piss? Right where it was, strapped down like a sack of dog food half under a sack of dog food, probably dog food made from lamb meal. I stopped then and stood beneath a great pine out of the rain. I shook my hand off and held it out to let the sky clean it. Where was Hector, anyway, and why, why, why had he left me with this lamb and his horse? Why didn’t he take the horse and let me push the sheep? There wasn’t anything to it. They knew where to go. He’s out there walking free, or sitting under a dry tree while the sheep mosey down the mountain to camp. I scanned the mountainside and the sheep scattered here and there, and back up behind me, all around, everywhere. No Hector.

I pushed back the dog food bag, untied the lamb’s feet on both sides, lifted it up and off the horse, and set it down. It crumpled into a little pile. Now not one of its legs worked. It couldn’t move at all. What a pitiful sight. I picked up the lamb and walked with it up to the base of that great pine. There I set it, positioning its legs so as to make it comfortable. What was I doing? I couldn’t abandon the lamb this way. I couldn’t leave it here to the coyotes and the turkey vultures. Would this terrible sin hang on my soul? Would guilt consume me and nightmares trouble my sleep in the coming days, in the long cold nights? Would beasts appear from the darkness to mete out reparations? If I walked away now, the lamb’s fate would no longer be tied to mine. I would be free. I wondered again what I was doing. I could not abandon the lamb this way.

But I did. I turned and walked back to the horse. The band of sheep had moved on, and, now unencumbered, I took the lead rope and, with the horse, chased after them.

As I made my way to the band, I consoled myself. You’ve done the right thing. You’ve done the right thing. Hector would have abandoned the lamb, too. He had already abandoned that ewe a couple days back, her wool mostly gone, her face gaunt and tired, her last moments upon her. What was that night like for her, I wondered, the dark coming on, the temperature dropping, alone among the silent trees as the band moved farther and farther away, she calling out with no one listening, no one coming for her except the coyotes now, barking and calling to each other with excitement, one appearing out in front of her, another behind, a few more coming down off the hill, coming in on her from all sides. What was that moment like as the first coyote determined the ewe was alone and it was safe to come in. So in it came, circling a little and then circling back, just to be sure, because to be cautious is to be alive, and then when it was so close it had to, the coyote rushed in taking the ewe’s throat in its teeth, holding her in its bite, turning her neck back, twisting her until she went down onto her side. And once down, she waited to die, the teeth deeper in her neck where now she bled into the coyote’s mouth while other coyotes arrived, some pulling on her legs, the young ones leaping up around her in excitement and confusion. She made no sound at all, her throat clenched tight until the bleeding weakened her and weakened her, waiting for it to end, her breath slowing and slowing until it stopped and her eyes went stone cold black.

Where was Hector? He wasn’t anywhere. I walked down, descending with the horse into the sheep. Closer and closer now, the ewes and lambs calling out in the wet rain, until one appeared in front of me, and a few more, and I came to the edge of them. The great pine in front of me, dry beneath, looked like a good place to tie the horse. I wasn’t certain why I needed to find Hector now, except that I wanted him to acknowledge my choice and tell me it was the right thing to do, that no shepherd would have kept on with the lamb,

that it was done for, and this is the way of things on the sheep trail.

Some lambs don’t make it. Some ewes don’t make it. The dogs die out here, from time to time, the mules, the horses, the herders. But where was Hector? He wasn’t anywhere, and I became worried that now I too, like the lamb, had been abandoned in the rain, here under a great pine, the camp surely down the mountain by now and the tent erected there in a green meadow at the lake edge where Freddy and Edwin and Hector now relaxed near the stove with coffee and cheese and crackers. I turned off to the north, scanning the trees and the sheep band, then to the west, the south, and the east.

I looked down for a moment, watching the rain run from my hat brim. I looked up, and there Hector was.

“The little lambs?” he said. “You bring the lambs?”

I pointed up the mountain.

I have been a wanderer too, a nomad, journeying out of Eden with the first man and the first woman, dying into the ground with Abel, and walking the pathless wastes into the cities with Cain. It is easier and stranger to love and yearn for home when I am wandering in the wet woods in a lightning storm with Hector, Edwin, and Freddy, two bands of sheep, a dozen dogs, and all the wild predators of the West. But this life, the life of the nomad, is mostly gone now, replaced by getting and spending, replaced by the city, which is built on an agrarian economy; and yet the world is full of wanderers, or people with wandering hearts. So what is a wanderer?

In his book Wandering, the German writer Herman Hesse writes, “I belong to those windy voices . . . who love only love.” Then, in the next paragraph, he offers the baseline of his being: All of us wanderers are made like this. A good part of our wandering and homelessness is love, eroticism. The romanticism of wandering, at least half of it, is nothing else but a kind of eagerness for adventure. But the other half is another eagerness—​an unconscious drive to transfigure and dissolve the erotic. We wanderers are very cunning—​we develop those feelings which are impossible to fulfill; and the love which actually should belong

to a woman, we lightly scatter among small towns and mountains, lakes and valleys, children by the side of the road, beggars on the bridge, cows in the pasture, birds and butterflies. We separate love from its object, love alone is enough for us, in the same way that, in wandering, we don’t look for a goal, we only look for the happiness of wandering, only the wandering.

So the wanderer’s condition is a love for the world. The bliss of being “lightly scattered” completes wanderers because it allows many places and experiences into their lives. An object of beauty in the wanderer’s path is not the object of love, but rather a reminder of the passion of love empirical that may be expressed in so many ways, among so many features in the land, among so many small pleasures, so many small freedoms. Whereas the farmer concentrates his love in one field, one place, one life, the wanderer leaves a little love in many fields, in many places, and lives many lives.

On looking at a small rectory, Hesse imagines becoming a priest.

He imagines what kind of priest he would be, what kind of life he would have as a priest, and how he might live that way, content. He imagines it but then confesses a deeper truth: he will always be a wanderer. His fantasy of becoming a priest is the fantasy of a wanderer who steps into and out of possibilities, into and out of lives. It is not the priesthood that allows him to tremble, but the excitement he feels in its possibility. “I feel life trembling within me,” he writes: in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.

In these possibilities, in the many forms of love and of the self, Hesse feels most alive. Indeed, he knows that he cannot live unless he is free to feel so.

I expected some kind of judgment—​I did. I still do. I expected that in every situation in the sheep herder’s life there was a right way and a wrong way. There was a protocol, or a procedure, or a system in place to determine what to do. Instead I think there was only what was possible and what was not possible, and what was possible for Hector was not necessarily possible for me.

“Show me,” Hector said.

We trudged up the muddy path in the rain, up the steep mountain to the tree. The lamb lay there still, curled into a shivering ball.

Hector knelt there in the mud and whispered something to it. An apology, perhaps? He took it into his arms, cradling it like a child, then lifted it over his head, draped it around his shoulders like a shawl, and carried it down the mountain.

Through the rain and mist of that big blow, I saw smoke in the trees: Freddy and our camp. He had the tent set and a fire glowing in the woodstove. The rain continued to fall, and I saw a warm light from the flap door as Hector and I approached.

“You go in,” Hector said.

I went in, and inside it was warm and dry with the glow of the fire in the stove, and Freddy handed me a cup of hot coffee. Water streamed from my raincoat and fell onto the wet grass that was our floor. I lifted the cup to my mouth and drank, then stood at the open flap of the tent with the coffee in my hands and watched Hector work in the rain. He set the lamb down in the grass not far from the tent. Its legs would not work, and it lay there, unable to get up. Hector knelt beside it, put his hand on its head and then on its hindquarters, as if transferring some vital energy or offering it a blessing. Lifting his hand now, he rose and came away to the tent.

“It can’t get up,” I said to Hector.

“No. No walk,” he said, taking a cup of coffee.

“So it will die?”

“Maybe die,” Hector said. “But maybe live. Slowly, slowly, it can get up.”

We needed to be vigilant, Hector warned, please keep an eye out,

because the lamb, if it gets on its feet again, might wander back up the trail to return to our camp of the night before, and then back up the trail farther still, back to where it came from, wander into the dark wood where the wolves were surely waiting. All the ground we gained today, all that distance we traveled these past days crossing over the mountain, Hector cautioned, the little lamb might undo.

“This lambs maybe want to go home,” Hector said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Go home where?”

“Go back to where born.”

Standing out of the rain with the hot cup in my hands, I imagined the homing instinct in that lamb, as broken and feeble as it was, the power of its desire to return pushing it beyond its body’s function, beyond its knowing of the way, a desire to retrace the route to its origin place. I thought then that this might be the expression of all living things, a journey back to one’s origin place, to the center, or to the edge, or to the end. I felt a surge of love for the day, for this day more than other days, for the day of hardships and trials and curses, for the rain and the storm and the little lamb, and the difference in being out of the rain and the storm with the little lamb: a shepherd’s life. I thought of the meal we would soon cook in the shelter of the tent, a dish of rice topped with a hash of carrots, potatoes, celery, garbanzo beans from a can, garlic, and Spam, salt and pepper to taste, as much as we wanted to satisfy who we were and who we would become. I loved the day, and I thought of those effusive lines of love from Wordsworth, those lines from a lost world from a poet who is the master of effusive lines from lost worlds, but what better lines with which to end a day?

I loved, Loved deeply all that had been loved before, More deeply even than ever.

“Now,” Hector said to me. “Freddy cook the lunch. I go in the sheep. You drink the coffee.”

“You don’t need help?”

“No,” he said. “You drink the coffee.”

Freddy filled my cup, and I stood in the flap door of the tent watching Hector on his way to the sheep in the rain and watching the little lamb just there, tottering on its weak legs in the wavering grass of spring.

Hail of Fire: A Man and His Family Face Natural Disaster is an intimate story of the third worst wildfire in modern U.S. history, and the most destructive in the history of Texas. It’s a memoir of what happened to Randy Fritz, an artist turned politician turned public policy leader, and his family during and after the Bastrop County Complex fire in 2011. Combining a searing description of the fire as it grew to apocalyptic strength with universal themes of loss and grief, Fritz gives a first-person account of the emotional turmoil that comes with rebuilding one’s life after a calamitous event.

The wildfire itself was traumatic to those who witnessed it and suffered its immediate aftermath. But the most significant impact came in the months and years following, as families grieved, struggling to adapt to a new world and accept the destruction of an iconic forest of internationally acclaimed great natural beauty—the Lost Pines. Neighbors once close worried for each other, while others discovered new friendships that transcended the boundaries of race, class, and family lineage.

Learn more *** Chapter 1 September 6, 2011, 6 a.m.

It was still dark when I gave up on the nearly worthless sleep that finally came to me an

hour or two earlier. As I put my feet on the floor, my head throbbed, my neck was stiff, and my stomach felt acidy and tight. During the middle-of-the-night hours that I stared at the low motel ceiling or fidgeted on the bed, I had won and lost a dozen debates with myself about whether our home and property had escaped again.

“The answer machine doesn’t pick up. The house is gone.”

“No, it just means the electricity is out.”

“The thermal maps on the Internet say it never got to our neighborhood.”

“Nobody in their right mind would believe anything online at this point.”

“It’s impossible that we’ve lost everything. It simply can’t have happened.”

“Oh, really? What about our friends who got burned out in the first hour?”

“The wind never shifted in our direction.”

“How would you know?”

Enough was enough. I couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to go back one more time,

even though the fire continued to rage and grim-faced law enforcement officers were ready to thwart me at every entry point.

After I put the toilet seat back down—the reflex of a man who lives only with

females—I caught a glimpse of myself in the small, rectangular mirror over the bathroom

sink. The half-moon flesh under my bloodshot eyes was wrinkled and loose. My hair was unpresentable, not that I cared.

I tried to slip out without waking my wife, Holly, or my youngest daughter and

birthday girl, Miranda, who were sleeping side by side on the other bed. But my bed

squeaked as I sat on its edge to lace up my tennis shoes, and Holly lifted up her head, her voice quiet and scratchy.

Her objections didn’t work. I was too determined and she was too groggy. A minute

later, I was walking across the overflowing parking lot. It was very dark except in the east, where a thin wash of light painted the sky dark gray.

Highway 71 was closed a mile away, and vehicles from the direction of Houston

were being rerouted northwest. It was too early for traffic to be backed up, and I quickly faced a young officer with a flashlight in his hand.

“Good morning sir,” he said. “Where are you going today?”

“To Austin,” I lied.

“Follow this road. You’ll come to Highway 290 in a half hour. Turn left and you’ll be

there before you know it.”

“That’s what I figured from my phone’s GPS,” I said. “Any idea what’s happening

with the fire? Can’t see anything except for that orange glow.”

“It’s been like that since my shift started. I dunno any more than you. Our job is to

keep people safe, and that’s what we’re doing.”

“God’s work, I guess.”

“You got it,” he said and nodded to his uniformed companion, who waved me

through.

It was hard to believe that they would watch where I went, but I wasn’t taking any

chances. I drove out of their sightline. Then I shut off my lights, made a U-turn, and turned

west on the county road that eventually intersected with Park Road 1C, the narrow and

curvy ribbon of asphalt connecting the two state parks that form the eastern and western boundaries of the Lost Pines.

I kept my lights off for about a mile. The western firelight and the increasingly pale

eastern sky were enough for me to keep my car on the road.

My business was urgent. But I stopped at an overlook several hundred feet above

the highway. I needed to know if I was about to drive into the fire’s maw.

The last time I was here—early afternoon the previous day—cars and pickups were

parked at cock-eyed angles. The conversations I joined or overheard over the wind’s moan were a mixture of resignation and threadbare hope. Nobody knew for sure what was happening on the ground, but there were a lot of theories.

I was certain some of my overlook companions were already burned out, like my

friends at the motel, or about to be. Others would be fine by the time it was all over. I

couldn’t imagine how the lucky, including me, would fight back their guilt or the unlucky their anger and bitterness.

From our vantage point, the fire took on two forms. The main one was a vast and

heaving cloud of smoke towering many thousands of feet above us. It filled our entire

western and southern visual horizon. While it was mainly white, there were dark streaks and blotches in it and lighter spots where the blue sky behind it was almost visible.

The other form was a yellow curtain of flame hanging and writhing over the ground.

Within it, sharp bursts of light appeared and almost immediately vanished. Each one was

like a tweet from the fire informing us that another home had been claimed and the secure future of another family forfeited.

While we were a small community of collective ignorance, there was one thing we

knew: this fire was vastly more dangerous and destructive than the one two and a half

years earlier that took three helicopters, two airplanes, and twenty-two fire departments to contain.

That one worried us. This one terrified us.

That one threatened dozens of families. This one was a predator of hundreds, if not

thousands.

That one surrendered in a week. This one looked like it might never give up until its

gluttony expired for lack of food.

Labor Day 2011 was the first day of a new era in Bastrop County, one in which its

most prominent and beloved feature—the Lost Pines—would be ugly and desolate for many years. For those of us in middle age or beyond, our deaths would precede the

rejuvenation of the forest into the bounty of life it was when we built our homes and started our families.

Eighteen hours later, with dawn breaking, I was alone at the overlook. Perhaps I was

the only person sneaky or defiant enough to go where the highway patrol and sheriff’s

office insisted I shouldn’t. Or maybe my fellow scofflaws were just getting dressed and plotting their way in.

Just as the weather forecasters had predicted, the hysterical wind had died down

overnight. A mild breeze made the 80-degree temperature pleasant, almost balmy. I leaned

against one of the large circular wooden barriers at the edge of the bluff and stared at the fire.

Low, clean eastern light illuminated the smoke cloud, giving it an ethereal, almost

hypnotic quality. It was beautiful and humbling.

But it was also awful and confounding. As a matter of science, the fire was easily

explained: a record-breaking drought, tropical-force winds, and decades of fuel untouched

by the natural fire events that keep a forest healthy. But physics and biology couldn’t

explain why the rules of normal life could be repealed in such an arbitrary and irrevocable way. Or why so many loblolly pines at the zenith of their slender elegance had to come to such a terrible end.

My eyes followed the line of the highway into the pale, yellowish, billowing wall.

There were no more flares, perhaps because there were no more structures left in the neighborhoods west and south of mine.

While the fire was far from contained, the entire scene felt like the last stages of a

great battle, the smoke signifying immense destruction and a future reckoning of sorrow

and despair. I was heartbroken for the forest and sad for the friends and acquaintances that were already starting to hunker down in the face of a bleak future. But I didn’t count myself among them. I had won the nighttime debate with myself because there was clear sky in

the direction of my home, trees, and land. In less than a quarter hour, I would confirm what my gut already knew.

Suddenly I noticed a man standing in the middle of the road, facing me. I didn’t

recognize him. He was calm and almost smiling.

“Morning,” he said.

“Howdy,” I said. “Where are you coming from?”

“Down the park road a bit.”

“I was just getting ready to go that way myself. Any reason I shouldn’t?”

“None that I can think of.”

“So it’s safe?” I asked.

“You’re looking at me, aren’t you?”

I described where I lived. “You know where I’m talking about?”

He nodded.

“Well, how does it look?”

Finding the Lost Pines In 1979, my new wife Holly and I relocated from Chicago after gutting it out through one of the worst winters on record. We chose Central Texas because rumor had it the Austin area

was one of the most promising places in America for a young couple with artistic ambitions (I a potter, Holly a dance teacher), a tiny budget, and a desire for beautiful, open spaces.

Many people who move to Central Texas to live a self-sufficient life default to the

area west of Austin. So that is where we started driving around, looking for cheap land and pleasant surroundings.

But having spent all of my childhood in a Wisconsin community where it is usually

green or white, I didn’t know what to think about rocky and brown landscapes with

scrubby trees and gnarled undergrowth. The charms of the Texas Hill Country, which are

considerable for those who take the time to see them, were lost on my eyes, accustomed as

they were to tall trees and lavishly green alfalfa fields. With each day, the sense that we had

made a big mistake grew a little larger until my sister-in-law, Laura, suggested we try our luck east of Austin.

We drove for almost an hour and saw nothing to calm our anxious minds. And then,

true to its name and reputation, the Lost Pines appeared out of nowhere and without warning, like a dream that couldn’t possibly be real. Twelve miles later, it abruptly disappeared.

Within hours, the decision practically made itself. This is where Holly and I would

live, because it felt like home. With the help of my father-in-law, we bought five acres in the heart of the Lost Pines where we intended to build a small pottery studio and equally modest house.

The Lost Pines circa 1979—when the highway between Austin and Houston was

undivided and development was spotty and primitive—was a dense forest of mature

loblolly pines, some of which soared nearly a hundred feet, with four-foot diameters. Along

the highway on the southern edge of the Lost Pines, the land went up and down like a low-

grade roller coaster. While there were oaks sprinkled among the pines, the dominant image from the high point where the Lost Pines began was an overpopulated city of loblollies: impenetrable, and as green as a major-league outfield.

As I grew to love this beguiling forest, I savored a fanciful idea of how it came to be.

Eons ago, I imagined, a group of East Texas loblolly pines skipped out on their siblings,

made a wrong turn to the West, and decided to stay put in a place where they didn’t really belong. Over time, they grew stronger and more resilient than their eastern ancestors,

facing down periods of drought and excessive heat by drilling taproots deep into Bastrop County sand and clay.

There is a haunting image from the Terrence Malick movie Tree of Life that looks

steeply upward through several large loblollies in what was, before the fire destroyed it, Bastrop State Park. It is easy to see why Malick wove this view into a movie about the

biggest themes imaginable. The trees that tower over Jessica Chastain are primordial and spiritual.

The Lost Pines are—or were—almost everything the popular, Wild West image of

Texas isn’t. Before the fire, I could drive Park Road 1C—the barely two-lane road

connecting Bastrop and Buescher State Parks—and crane my head upward and wonder how I could be in the middle of Texas while feeling like I was nearing the Big Trees of Northern California.

On cloudless and crisp fall or winter days, with windows and sunroof open, I felt like

an actor in a car commercial in my revved-up five-speed, fighting the urge to look around and upward rather straight ahead. Summer days brought trips to the Bastrop State Park pool, a lovely artifact of the Civilian Conservation Corps, my girls strapped in and their stomachs sloshing about with every hairpin curve.

The road insinuated itself through mile after mile of mature pines and oaks. It rose

and fell, dipping over low-water crossings, and almost kissing the edge of ephemeral ponds that would overflow with heavy spring rains and then fade to nothingness in the summer.

Park Road 1C was where, like many other biking enthusiasts in Central Texas, I

would go for rides on hills whose verticality injected fire into my lungs, surrounded by trees that provided shade throughout the day, with part of my ride hugging a cliff with vistas that stretched for miles to the south.

Over more than thirty years, as our family grew to include three daughters, my wife

Holly and I occupied four houses within a three-mile radius, deep in the forest and a brisk walk from the park road. Each was much more than the sum of its foundation, studs, roof, plumbing, and electrical wires. Our family took root in these homes and grew strong like the trees that surrounded them. Then the fire came.

In this new telling of Mexico’s Second Empire and Louis Napoléon’s installation of Maximilian von Habsburg and his wife, Carlota of Belgium, as the emperor and empress of Mexico, Maximilian and Carlota brings the dramatic and tragic story of this six-year-siege to life.

In a bid to oust Juárez, Mexican conservatives appealed to European leaders to select a monarch to run their country. Maximilian and Carlota’s reign, from 1864 to 1867, was marked from the start by extravagance and ambition and ended with the execution of Maximilian by firing squad, with Carlota on the brink of madness. This epoch moment in the arc of French colonial rule, which spans North American and European history at a critical juncture on both continents, shows how Napoleon III’s failure to save Maximilian disgusted Europeans and sealed his own fate.

Maximilian and Carlota offers a vivid portrait of the unusual marriage of Maximilian and

Carlota and of international high society and politics. A largely unknown era in the history of the Americas comes to life through this colorful telling of the couple’s tragic reign.

Learn more

*** excerpt from the Introduction: “Mexicans, You Have Desired My Presence” At Veracruz, May 1864 Waiting to disembark, Carlota viewed the Mexican seaport rather cheerfully, writing to her eighty-two-year-old grandmother, Marie-Amélie, the former queen of France, “We are leaving early tomorrow morning for Mexico City and will be en route for a while. I am

infinitely pleased with the appearance of Veracruz. It reminds me of Cádiz, but a bit more oriental,” recalling her view of the ancient seaport on Spain’s western coast.

A short time later, French admiral Auguste Bosse and an aide rowed out to the royal

steamer, climbed on deck, and Bosse proceeded to lambaste the captain for mooring in

what he considered the most contagious waters at bearings so close to shore. People had died, he said, after only one night in port. Maximilian himself, a former admiral in the

Austrian navy, had ordered the ship’s captain not to anchor near the French vessels but

south of the fort, occupied by Napoléon III’s army, to thwart the impression, ironically, that he entered the country under French protection. He wanted his arrival to demonstrate he arrived at the invitation of the people of Mexico, who, he was assured, had voted for a monarchy. Bosse also grumbled on about guerrillas lying in wait along the long and

treacherous route to Mexico City. He said that the French military commander-in-chief, Marshal François Achille Bazaine, remained too busy fighting in the field to personally

escort the sovereigns from Veracruz. Maximilian tried to view the mix-ups lightly, while others stood aghast.

Finally, in the evening, Almonte and his wife, Dolores, along with Gen. Mariano Salas

and other members of the Imperialist delegation arrived from Córdoba and rowed out in a few small skiffs to the Novara. Almonte, a longtime Mexican diplomat having served in

France, England, and Spain, had assisted in constructing the conceptual Mexican Imperial

government, ruling as chief of the regency until Maximilian’s arrival. He and the assembled Monarchists boarded the Novara, the deck illuminated by torches and lanterns, and formally welcomed Maximilian surrounded by officers and midshipmen.

The emperor stood tall at six feet in height, a slender man with expressive blue eyes.

He had very pale skin, almost pink some said, and silky, blond hair and a short beard that he parted in the middle in Austrian fashion. On this evening, he dressed in a black frock coat, white vest, and white pants, with a black cravat. He greeted the Mexican legation

warmly and drew the party into the upper deck salon, where they exchanged welcomes

and pleasantries. The imperial prefect of Veracruz, Domingo Bureau, addressed Maximilian as the savior of Mexico, heralding his arrival as a new era under a “benign scepter.” At this historic moment, long anticipated by partisans ready for a Mexican monarchy, everyone gathered marveled at Maximilian, their sovereign, thanking God for a return to solid leadership at last.

I view with pleasure the arrival of the day when I can walk the soil of my new and

beautiful country, and salute the people who have chosen me,” said Maximilian. “May God grant that the goodwill that led me toward you may be advantageous to you; and that all good Mexicans uniting to sustain me, there will be better days for Mexico.”

Maximilian then introduced Carlota to the committee. A pretty and tall but delicate-

looking woman with dark and flashing eyes, she commanded attention without having to

utter a word, accustomed as she was to being understood, the only daughter of the king of Belgium. In conversation, she had the habit of squinting as though trying to focus. She

smiled, laughed, and usually conveyed a pleasant demeanor but transmitted the attitude that she was not in the habit of putting up with anyone’s trifling.

Joaquín Velásquez de León, the newly appointed secretary of state, made a sincere,

welcoming speech to the imperial couple and then addressed Carlota. “The Mexicans,

Madam, who expect so much from the good influence of your Majesty in favor of all that is noble and great, of all that bears relation to the elevated sentiments of religion and of

country, bless the moment in which your Majesty reached the soil and proclaim in one

voice, ‘Long Live the Empress.’” In slow but good Spanish, Carlota thanked the delegation,

saying how happy she was at arriving in her new country. Afterward, during the reception, Almonte’s wife, Dolores, spontaneously embraced Carlota in customary Mexican fashion.

The empress recoiled with uncertain awkwardness, unaccustomed to this sort of greeting, against the protocol and formality of the Belgian court.

From the Novara, Maximilian issued a written statement to the people of Mexico:

“Mexicans: You have desired my presence. Your noble nation, by a voluntary majority, has

chosen me to watch henceforth over your destinies. I gladly respond to this call. Painful as it has been for me to bid farewell forever to my own, my native country, I have done so, being convinced that the Almighty has pointed out to me, through you, the mission of

devoting all my strength and heart to a people who, tired of war and disastrous contests,

sincerely wish for peace and prosperity; to a people who having gloriously obtained their independence, desire to reap the benefit of civilization and true progress.”

Soon the French soldiers at Fort San Juan de Ulúa and on shore lit saltpeter torches

known as bengalas, the blue glow stretching lambently across the water and illuminating

the night sky. French sailors, anchored at the nearby Isla de Sacrificios, hung lanterns from their ships’ riggings and lines, and the troops fired petards and cannon salutes from the

fortress. No one slept that night. Maximilian and Carlota eagerly waited for the moment to disembark and begin the trip to the capital and see their new country.

The next morning, at 4:30, Maximilian, Carlota, and their entourage of ministers and

attendants attended mass. Afterward, the sailors rowed them to the breakwater, a mephitic smell rising from the gulf water. The boom of cannon saluted the royals’ arrival. A

delegation of officials greeted them as they disembarked, welcomed them to Mexico, and presented them with a key to the city on a silver tray. Despite the sincerity of the town

council, lady-in-waiting Paula Kollonitz described the reception as “chilling,” mostly by the absence of people. After the brief ceremony, Maximilian, Carlota, and their entourage

climbed into carriages and traveled through the empty streets under French and Mexican

military escort. They passed through a few arches erected to celebrate their arrival. At the perimeter of the town, military officials helped the entourage onto a narrow-gauge train waiting to take them west to the cooler, upper plateaus of Mexico. The unadorned rush seats and rickety condition of the cars unnerved some members of the entourage, accustomed to much grander modes of travel.

The rail line, improved hastily two years earlier by the French military to move their

armies out of the pestilent climate of Veracruz, ended only a short way inland. At the small

village of Loma Alta, the royal party transferred to carriages, some vehicles in better

condition than others, to complete the three-hundred-mile trip. It was difficult finding

space, not only for the passengers but also their five hundred pieces of luggage. The large entourage had to divide into several parties, given the impracticality of traveling in one

long caravan. Those assigned to set up the royal household went ahead in order to reach

Mexico City before the sovereigns. Many rode behind in cramped phaetons or mule-drawn covered diligences or simple wagons, and some, like William Heide, the conductor of the royal orchestra from Vienna, rode most of the way with his wife, Kate, on the back of a burro. Although their destination of CĂłrdoba lay not far, the rugged terrain that one

diplomat called a “sketch of a road� remained little more than heavily rutted, muddy trails.

Maximilian and Carlota rode in elaborate English traveling carriages, solidly built, but for paved roads.

The Mexican escorts repeatedly apologized for the condition of the road; however,

Maximilian and Carlota assured them they did not mind, having traveled to tropical and rugged places in the past. The lush mountains with their rivers, ravines, and waterfalls astonished the emperor and empress with their beauty.

The royal couple now had their first glimpse of rural Mexico, comprised almost

entirely of indigenous peoples living in poverty except for the riches of their gardens,

which were bountiful. They had few possessions and lived plainly. The children, only halfclothed, kicked around coconuts playing ball games, while women offered the travelers bananas and mangos.

Members of the entourage worried about the narrow, slick roads and the steep

ravines, known as barrancas, where guerrillas or highway bandits frequently lurked. Often

the guerrillas worked for regional caudillos, or for Juárez, against the empire. The drivers kept the carriages steady on the mountain trails. Skilled drivers were paid extra if they went a hundred days without overturning a coach.

Stopping on the twisting route, they ate a hurried supper at the military post of Paso

del Macho and resumed their trek to the next town of Córdoba. A storm erupted, and as

sheets of water fell over the entourage, a wheel broke on Carlota’s carriage, forcing her to

change vehicles. The gloom of night brought new worries of possible attacks by guerrillas.

Carlota, remembering the warnings of Admiral Bosse at Veracruz, imagined gunmen at every turn but tried to remain calm. “Things looked so odd that I should not have been surprised if Juárez himself had appeared with some hundreds of guerrilleros.”

As the party approached Córdoba, the local priest sent a number of local people

down the road to meet them. The natives carried torches to guide the carriages. They

passed through one section known as Sal si puedes (get out if you can), named for the deep

mire requiring all the energy of the mules. With sixteen reins in one hand and a whip in the other, the drivers whistled, called, and hissed, while a young assistant threw stones at the

mule’s rumps and flanks, some animals under harness for the first time. Kollonitz thought the drivers picturesque with their short leather jackets, hairy goatskin leggings, and

sombreros. When carriages turned over, Carlota later wrote that it required all their “youth and good humor to escape being crippled with stiffness or breaking a rib.”

Early on June 2, the royal party resumed its travels over the plateaus, through farm

fields of corn, coffee, and fruit trees on the way to Orizaba, a short distance of about fifteen miles. Along the road, the sovereigns saw that people of every little village built arches of welcome over the roads, and most citizens wore a token of their arrival on their hats.

As they reached Orizaba, known for its loyalty to JuĂĄrez, thousands of native

clansmen came forth from the town to meet them. They surrounded the royal coach to get a look in the carriage at the emperor and his young, beautiful wife.

After a mass at the cathedral and a hymn of welcome and thanksgiving, or Te Deum,

they toured the town looking at the panoramic views and the towering snowcapped cone of Mount Orizaba, the officials explaining its Nahuatl name, CitlaltĂŠpetl or Star Mountain. A group from the Naranjal community, an ancient and somewhat isolated region, had

descended from their home in the mountains to hold a presentation for the royals and their attendants. Maximilian and Carlota were delighted and fascinated by their ceremonial

attire, the men in silver embroidered tunics and short pants, machetes in their belts and

heavy gold earrings. The women presented Carlota with a diamond ring said to be from the family of Montezuma, which she placed on her finger, with a promise to remember them

always. They toured the nearby villages and heard speeches both in Nahuatl and Spanish.

Thrilled with the frenzied greetings, Maximilian then spoke to the natives in Spanish while interpreters repeated the words in the native dialect. The empress presented 300 pesos to the municipal prefect for the local hospital and the poor. Later, during a tour of local

convents and factories manufacturing paper and cotton products, they passed a group of unwelcoming but curious Liberals. Maximilian tipped his hat to them and they politely

raised theirs in return. Those predisposed not to accept the royal couple could not deny their magnetism and charm.

The next morning, Carlota appeared in her riding habit, or traje de amazona, along

with a sombrero, since she had chosen to cross the rugged mountains on horseback. For the ascent through the cumbres, they left Orizaba with an escort of French and Mexican

imperial cavalry and other military numbering over a thousand men. Maximilian and

Carlota admired the skill and finery of the Mexican riders accompanying them with their

embroidered attire and silver saddles. After stopping at the village of Acultzingo for their

first Mexican-style breakfast of tortillas, various sauces of mole and chile, along with pulque to drink, they continued to wind upward through the Sierra Madre to La Cañada (Morelos Cañada). Here the party learned that guerrillas had been lying in wait for them, but that they had been dispersed.

One carriage bearing the imperial staff took a detour, and the passengers saw the

bodies of dead guerrillas killed by the imperial guards. The entourage climbed slowly

through the cordilleras, and in the early evening the troops lit torches to see the narrow

road. Everyone sat silent in their carriages as they bumped up the mountain path, listening for any attackers. Fireflies twinkled in the dense vegetation. Hours passed until they

crossed the cumbres and arrived at La Cañada, most of the party exhausted. The next

morning as they made their way through Palmar de Bravo, they could see in the distance

for the first time the two volcanoes of Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl with their snowy peaks of 17,000 feet towering on the western horizon.

On June 5, as they approached the major Catholic center of Puebla de Los Angeles, a

cavalcade of riders in full regalia, with silver saddles and bridles embroidered in metallic

thread and tassels, rode out of the city to greet them. Many of the men carried their small

sons with them on horseback. In the city, women and children in their finest attire cheered in the streets and from balconies. Banners fluttered from buildings and enormous arches decorated the streets. Bells pealed from the city’s numerous churches. Their enthusiasm reassured Maximilian, who was greatly moved by the passionate greetings and gladly

returned their joy. The people of Puebla, a strong center of Conservatives with a population of 70,000, remained intensely curious about the royal couple, many feeling that Maximilian and Carlota would bring peace and prosperity after a decade of civil war. Priests, who only

a year earlier hid from Juárez’s Liberals, joyously welcomed the monarchy, expecting a new era.

They were to stay at a lavish home in Puebla, with separate festivities planned for

the men and women. Carlota, with her attendants, attended a dinner party at the home of city prefect, Juan E. de Uriarte, but curiously, as she entered the house and was escorted into the dining room, the rest of the guests remained in the drawing room, staring

expectantly. After a few awkward moments, someone explained that the empress must invite the guests to join her at the table, which she proceeded to do. During the meal,

language difficulties strained conversations, with Carlota’s limited Spanish skills and only one woman knowing a little French. At the end of the meal, “we sat looking at each other

after supper for a long time before the company gave signs of departing,” Paula Kollonitz explained. Carlota seemed unruffled, knowing such tensions could be expected with the arrival of the royal couple.

The next morning, June 7, Carlota marked her twenty-fourth birthday. The day

began with a splendid celebration in Puebla with mass at the cathedral conducted by the

bishop. Carlota gave 7,000 pesos to repair the local hospital, and Maximilian gave another 1,000 to found a maternity ward. That evening a large dinner at the presidio preceded a grand ball at the Alhóndiga, the old granary refitted as a place for public events. For the

occasion, Carlota wore a white silk dress and a crown adorned with red and white roses

encrusted with enamel, emeralds, and diamonds, the colors of the Mexican flag. A necklace

of large white diamonds completed her stunning outfit. From the street, the royal couple walked over a carpet of flowers to the building’s portal.

As the royal couple entered the building, they could see in the corners of the

courtyard pyramids of crystal vases, built to look like the Aztec monuments, emitting

various prismatic lights. Maximilian and Carlota seated themselves at two thrones built for the occasion. The guests participated in a quadrille, dancing until dawn, although the

sovereigns retired at midnight, their usual habit of leaving well before a celebration’s end.

The next morning, the royal couple bid town fathers adieu and donated additional funds to repair the almshouse. Carlota thanked them for “a welcome, which on my birthday, makes

me feel that I am among my own people, in my own country, surrounded by loving friends.”

Moreover, this overland journey to Mexico City revealed to Maximilian, and

especially Carlota, the great disparity in wealth and privilege that plagued Mexico.

“Everything in this country has got to be begun all over again; one finds nothing but nature, whether in the physical or in the moral order. Their education has to be undertaken down to the smallest details,” Carlota wrote Eugénie, empress of France.

For twenty-five years American Louis Sarno has been recording the polyphonic and hypnotic music of the Bayaka people in Central Africa. His book is a first-person narrative of his life among a hunter-gatherer people and an account of their culture’s extraordinary beauty. Sarno recounts his efforts to protect the Bayakas’ fragile existence in an increasingly destructive world.

Song from the Forest inspired a major documentary film in spring 2015 that the New York Times called “a deeply captivating visual and sonic exploration of the strange, music-driven life of Louis Sarno, an American ethnomusicologist who was lured to the Congo River basin in the 1980s by recordings of pygmy songs.” Over the decades Sarno has recorded more than 1,500 hours of unique Bayaka music, most of which are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University.

Learn more *** Foreword, by Alex Shoumatoff Louis Sarno and I have taken similar spiritual and musical life journeys. In some ways I feel

that he is my soul brother, my alter ego living a parallel existence in the magical rainforest at the southern tip of the Central African Republic.

I met Louis in 2011. The previous year I had traveled to nine countries on three

continents to report a story for Vanity Fair on elephants and the ivory trade. The last one was the Central African Republic, home to one of the largest remaining forest elephant

populations. I made my way to the southern tip of the republic, where there is a tri-national park and World Heritage site—the Sangha River Tri-national Protected Area—and where some 4,000 elephants, though never more than a few hundred at once, come to a clearing where they do most of their socializing and suck up clay to neutralize the alkaloids in the

leaves they eat.

The forest is also home to thousands of lowland gorillas and Bayaka Pygmies. The

local subgroup is known as the Ba-Benjellé, and they live in dome-shaped huts of thatch

phrynium leaves on the outskirts of Bayanga, the park’s main trading center. This is where Louis Sarno had been living with his wife and son since l990, in the Ba-Benjellé suburb of

Yondumbé. I found him in his adobe metal-roofed house. At age fifty-five, he was taller than

I had pictured him, an average-sized Westerner, but there is an exotic feline quality to him.

A sophisticated intelligence, in fact. He is eccentric, yes, definitely an original—how many people would reinvent themselves as a Pygmy (to the extent possible)?—but he is not a kook.

He explained that one cold winter night in Amsterdam, where he was getting a

doctorate, he heard a song on the radio unlike anything he had ever encountered—“voices

blending into a subtle polyphony, weaving a melody that rose and fell in endless repetition, as hypnotic as waves breaking on a shore,” he writes in this book. He began listening to

tapes of African music in his university’s library and discovered that it was Pygmy music.

He was so captivated that he dropped everything, landing in Bangui a few months later with his worldly possessions in a suitcase.

Louis made the break. This is where he lives. The Ba-Benjellé are his family, his

people. He told me that he is kind of the godfather of Yondumbé. He stands up for the BaBenjellé when they are being abused by the Sangha Sangha, the local amalgamation of

Bantu people who regard them as chattel. He pays their medical and hospital bills—“T.B. is rife here,” he tells me—and when one of them dies, he pays the expenses for the funeral, which usually involves an ejengi dance. Ejengi is the chief forest spirit, and the dance

happens whenever the villagers feel Ejengi needs to be fed. For all of these expenses, Louis must come up with $300 a month, and he has his own family to take care of. Given his own tenuous relationship with the modern cash economy and the difficulty of getting funds from the West to Yondumbé, it isn’t easy.

Some of the women drift in to Louis’s place, along with a man who plays the forest

harp. I take my guitalele out of its case, and we see what music we can find in common. This is my first foray into Pygmy music, and the women are eager to hear what I will come up

with. I play a couple of numbers, Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and John Lee Hooker’s

“Boom Boom,” which they like. But we really connect on “Wade in the Water,” an old gospel song, particularly the chorus, “God’s gonna trouble the water,” which goes from F to A

minor to E to A minor in seven notes. The women carefully watch my mouth moving and

imitate the words, singing in sympathetic blended polyphonies. This bluesy sequence is in

their melodic wheelhouse. We sing that line over and over, the women slapping cross-

rhythms and other people stopping in to rattle off quick beats on pots with sticks, sending

up a dense rhythmic field like insect din.

It is heavenly. We are down, with each other, with the life of the forest we’re in.

These people, I realize, are saturated with music. They are ready to burst into song and to

break out dancing at the drop of a hat. Music is the main way they interact with the world.

The man who plays the forest harp shows me his instrument. Six strings of nylon

fishing line are stretched on a frame, three for the left fingers to pluck and three for the right. The resonator is a metal pot that the frame is stuck in. It is an extremely subtle

instrument. The left-hand strings are tuned to FCG and the right-hand strings to GDA—the Dorian pentatonic. The same as the six-string hunter’s harp in Mali and the five-note box

that B. B. King does most of his improvising on. The melodic and syncopative possibilities of these five notes are endless, and each harp player has his own style. The next morning a

younger man will play a more modern-sounding style than the one this man launches into now. The forest harp is played in the forest encampments only from midnight to three in

the morning, Louis tells me, so the music will enter the dreams of those who are sleeping.

In the days that follow I visit with Andrea Turkalo, the American woman who has

been looking after the bai, the clearing in the forest, and its elephants since 1990. Another remarkable person, she can identify 4,000 individual elephants and tell you what their

personalities are like. Three Ba-Benjellé men tend to her camp, which is ten miles into the

forest from Bayanga, and they do a gano animal fable song for me, similar to a just-so story.

One man impersonates the animal, a second backs him up with answered choruses, and the third beats out the rhythm on a plastic jerry can. The song is about a child who is crying

because a monitor lizard eating fruit in a tree has just beaned him with a pit. Why are you

crying, child, his parents say, it’s just the monitor lizard.

Back in Yondumbé I find a circle of kids doing Fulani drumming on empty plastic

water bottles. Each takes a turn jumping into the center and dancing as wildly as he or she can, in a kind of forerunner to breakdancing. One of the villagers has died, and that

afternoon there is an ejengi dance. The spirit is portrayed as a whirling mop of straw (with

one of the men inside). Women and kids sidle up to Ejengi, their butts out sideways, and do

a collective lurch toward the spirit, shrinking back in mock terror. Laughing, they walk back to where they started and do it again.

I return to Montreal and realize that the park in the Central African Republic, with

its elephants, Ba-Benjellé, lowland gorillas, and countless other species, is the closest to the Garden of Eden I have been to in half a century of traveling. I practice the five notes of the

forest harp on my guitar, I put in my 10,000 hours, and I am still discovering their endless

possibilities. I’m not even on first base in terms of understanding this music.

I embark on another reporting trip, this time from Maine to Borneo, to explore what

we can learn from the animals. I spend a morning with two marmosets in Maine, playing

riffs on my guitalele and seeing if we can find some music in common. They are torn

between fear and curiosity and keep running to their outdoor enclosure and back. After an hour, I discover that playing the notes B-flat A on the first string—actually G-sharp G, the

guitalele being tuned four steps up (other octaves don’t work; it has to be this one)—has a

mesmerizing effect. The marmosets lean out over me from a branch and rock back and forth with glazed eyes of rapture as I play the two notes again and again.

In Glen Ellen, California, I spend a day with Bernie Krause, listening to his amazing

recordings of the soundscape, as he calls it. Krause, now seventy-three, began as the last

member of the 1960s folk group the Weavers, replacing Pete Seeger. Then he got into the synthesizer and started composing movie music, including the score for Apocalypse Now. Then he decided to become a bioacoustician and study the vocalizations of animals. He

started with whale songs and spent the next eighteen years recording birds, insects, frogs,

mammals—the biophony, he calls it—as well as wind, water, thunder, and other sounds of

the geophony and the people whose “anthrophony” resonates with them. Krause went to

the Bayaka and made some great recordings with Louis’s help. The Bayaka, he tells me, are basically doing karaoke with the sounds of the forest. The moment he says this I realize he is right. All of our music, he adds, comes from the animals. He has just published a book,

The Great Animal Orchestra, explaining this. The groundbreaking work, which I have since

read, is as important for understanding the soundscape as Darwin’s Origin of Species is for understanding natural selection.

“What about the blues?” I ask.

“Want to hear a bird sing the blues?” Krause says. And he goes to the website xeno-

canto, an online repository of bird songs, and plays me Richard C. Hoyer’s recording of the

common potoo. And danged if the potoo isn’t singing in the blues scale, C B-flat G F. It’s one

of the scales the Bayaka do cascading polyphonic quadruplets of. In fact, all of the virtuoso songsters—the thrushes of North America, the musician wrens of the Neotropics, the

nightingales of Europe, the bulbuls of Asia—sing in the pentatonic scale. It occurs in the

music of every culture, because that is how the human ear, and also the mammalian and the bird ear, organize sound. The pentatonic comes from the cycle of fifths in the twelve-note

octave (although Krause cautions that some Pygmy octave scales have thirteen notes).

Pygmy music is pure pentatonic in endless intricate rhythms and melodic blends. It has

been called the ur-music—along with the similar polyphonic yodeling of the San people of

the Kalahari, which they have been doing for 75,000 years.

Now that I’d learned all of this, I had to get back to Yondumbé and Louis and the Ba-

Benjellé.

We make plans, but in the beginning of 2013 the Central African Republic explodes.

Seleka rebels sweep down from Chad and take out the government in Bangui and install themselves, going on a looting, raping, and killing spree all over the country. At the last

possible moment Louis and Andrea escape by boat on the Sangha River to the Republic of Congo, and from there to Cameroon, where they fly to the States. The Seleka in Bayanga

haven’t been paid and help themselves to the storekeepers’ goods. Andrea’s camp, with its expensive recording equipment and satellite dish, is looted and trashed, and in April

several truckloads of Seleka with AK-47s kill forty-some elephants from Andrea’s platform and hack off their tusks. A few weeks later Mike Fay, Andrea’s ex-husband, who did the famous 455-day Megatransect walk across Africa that resulted in Gabon’s creation of

thirteen national parks to protect its forest elephants, goes to Bangui and negotiates with

the new president for Gabonese soldiers to come to Bayanga and guard the bai, but in the summer the president is overthrown and the republic descends into even more horrible chaos and mayhem.

Louis waits for six months in New Jersey. Finally he can’t take it anymore. “I’m going

home to be with my family,” he tells me on the phone. “That’s where I belong. Not here.”

Against everyone’s advice, he goes back. The moment he arrives, a Seleka colonel

appears at his hut and relieves him of everything he has brought—his new Olympus field

recorder, his meds, his money, of course, and even the notebooks containing a novel he has

been working on for four years. It is unsafe for him to travel to Bayanga, he emails, so he goes deep into the forest and camps for six weeks with his family and some relatives. He gets very sick and almost dies. But he recovers.

These days Louis has his own Facebook page, and we communicate frequently.

Hopefully my TV show, Suitcase on the Loose, will find a channel that will send us to

Yondumbé. The Seleka are gone, but now the Christians are slaughtering the Muslims in retaliation for their killing sprees. The way to come in is through Cameroon, Louis says.

This could be the year I return.

Louis Sarno is one of the greats, with one of the greatest life stories I’ve run into. I’m

delighted that the book Song from the Forest is getting new life, along with the release of

the documentary by the same name, in which Louis takes his son to New York on his first

trip out of the forest.

Louis is getting the recognition he deserves—which I know he doesn’t care a jot

about. What he cares about is doing what he can and getting recognition for the wonderful human beings he has devoted his life to.

Words without Walls is an anthology of more than seventy-five poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers that provide models for successful writing, offering voices and styles that will inspire students in alternative spaces on their own creative exploration.

Created by the founders of the award-winning program of the same name based at Chatham University, the anthology strives to challenge readers to reach beyond their own circumstances and begin to write from the heart. Each selection expresses immediacy— writing that captures the imagination and conveys intimacy on the page—revealing the power of words to cut to the quick and unfold the truth. Many of the pieces are brief, allowing for reading and discussion in the classroom, and provide a wide range of content and genre, touching on themes common to communities in need: addiction and alcoholism, family, love and sex, pain and hope, prison, recovery, and violence.

These inspirational pieces act as models for beginning writers and offer a vehicle to examine their own painful experiences. Words without Walls demonstrates the power of

language to connect people; to reflect on the past and reimagine the future; to confront complicated truths; and to gain solace from pain and regret.

Learn more

*** “Coming into Language,” by Jimmy Santiago Baca On weekend graveyard shifts at St. Joseph’s Hospital I worked the emergency room,

mopping up pools of blood and carting plastic bags stuffed with arms, legs and hands to the outdoor incinerator. I enjoyed the quiet, away from the screams of shotgunned, knifed, and

mangled kids writhing on gurneys outside the operating rooms. Ambulance sirens shrieked and squad car lights reddened the cool nights, flashing against the hospital walls: gray—

red, gray—red. On slow nights I would lock the door of the administration office, search the reference library for a book on female anatomy and, with my feet propped on the desk, leaf through the illustrations, smoking my cigarette. I was seventeen.

One night my eye was caught by a familiar-looking word on the spine of a book. The

title was 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures. On the cover were black-and-white

photos: Padre Hidalgo exhorting Mexican peasants to revolt against the Spanish dictators;

Anglo vigilantes hanging two Mexicans from a tree; a young Mexican woman with rifle and ammunition belts crisscrossing her breast; César Chávez and field workers marching for

fair wages; Chicano railroad workers laying creosote ties; Chicanas laboring at machines in textile factories; Chicanas picketing and hoisting boycott signs.

From the time I was seven, teachers had been punishing me for not knowing my

lessons by making me stick my nose in a circle chalked on the blackboard. Ashamed of not understanding and fearful of asking questions, I dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

At seventeen I still didn’t know how to read, but those pictures confirmed my identity. I

stole the book that night, stashing it for safety under the slop sink until I got off work. Back

at my boardinghouse, I showed the book to friends. All of us were amazed; this book told us we were alive. We, too, had defended ourselves with our fists against hostile Anglos,

gasping for breath in fights with the policemen who outnumbered us. The book reflected back to us our struggle in a way that made us proud.

Most of my life I felt like a target in the crosshairs of a hunter’s rifle. When strangers

and outsiders questioned me I felt the hang-rope tighten around my neck and the trapdoor

creak beneath my feet. There was nothing so humiliating as being unable to express myself, and my inarticulateness increased my sense of jeopardy. Behind a mask of humility, I seethed with mute rebellion.

Before I was eighteen, I was arrested on suspicion of murder after refusing to

explain a deep cut on my forearm. With shocking speed I found myself handcuffed to a chain gang of inmates and bused to a holding facility to await trial. There I met men,

prisoners, who read aloud to each other the works of Neruda, Paz, Sabines, Nemerov, and Hemingway. Never had I felt such freedom as in that dormitory. Listening to the words of these writers, I felt that invisible threat from without lessen—my sense of teetering on a

rotting plank over swamp water where famished alligators clapped their horny snouts for

my blood. While I listened to the words of the poets, the alligators slumbered powerless in their lairs. The language of poetry was the magic that could liberate me from myself, transform me into another person, transport me to places far away.

And when they closed the books, these Chicanos, and went into their own Chicano

language, they made barrio life come alive for me in the fullness of its vitality. I began to

learn my own language, the bilingual words and phrases explaining to me my place in the universe. Every day I felt like the paper boy taking delivery or the latest news of the day Months later I was released, as I had suspected I would be. I had been guilty of

nothing but shattering the windshield of my girlfriend’s car in a fit of rage.

Two years passed. I was twenty now, and behind bars again. The federal marshals

had failed to provide convincing evidence to extradite me to Arizona on a drug charge, but

still I was being held. They had ninety days to prove I was guilty. The only evidence against

me was that my girlfriend had been at the scene of the crime with my driver’s license in her purse. They had to come up with something else. But there was nothing else. Eventually

they negotiated a deal with the actual drug dealer, who took the stand against me. When the judge hit me with a million-dollar bail, I emptied my pockets on his booking desk: twenty-six cents.

One night in my third month in the county jail, I was mopping the floor in front of

the booking desk. Some detectives had kneed an old drunk and handcuffed him to the

booking bars. His shrill screams raked my nerves like a hacksaw on bone, the desperate

protest of his dignity against their inhumanity. But the detectives just laughed as he tried to rise and kicked him to his knees. When they went to the bathroom to pee and the desk

attendant walked to the file cabinet to pull the arrest record, I shot my arm through the

bars, grabbed one of the attendant’s university textbooks, and tucked it in my overalls. It was the only way I had of protesting.

It was late when I returned to my cell. Under my blanket I switched on a pen

flashlight and opened the thick book at random, scanning the pages. I could hear the jailer making his rounds on the other tiers. The jangle of his keys and the sharp click of his boot

heels intensified my solitude. Slowly I enunciated the words . . . p-o-n-d, ri-pple. It scared

me that I had been reduced to this to find comfort. I always had thought reading a waste of time, that nothing could be gained by it. Only by action, by moving out into the world and confronting and challenging the obstacles, could one learn anything worth knowing.

Even as I tried to convince myself that I was merely curious, I became so absorbed in

how the sounds created music in me and happiness, I forgot where I was. Memories began

to quiver in me, glowing with a strange but familiar intimacy in which I found refuge. For a while, a deep sadness overcame me, as if I had chanced on a long-lost friend and mourned the years of separation. But soon the heartache of having missed so much of life, that had

numbed me since I was a child, gave way, as if a grave illness lifted itself from me and I was cured, innocently believing in the beauty of life again. I stumblingly repeated the author’s name as I fell asleep, saying it over and over in the dark: Words-worth, Words-worth.

Before long my sister came to visit me, and I joked about taking her to a place called

Kubla Khan and getting her a blind date with this vato named Coleridge who lived on the seacoast and was malĂ­as on morphine. When I asked her to make a trip into enemy

territory to buy me a grammar book, she said she couldn’t. Bookstores intimidated her, because she, too, could neither read nor write.

Days later, with a stub pencil I whittled sharp with my teeth, I propped a Red Chief

notebook on my knees and wrote my first words. From that moment, a hunger for poetry possessed me.

Until then, I had felt as if I had been born into a raging ocean where I swam

relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a shoreline I never sighted.

Never solid ground beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived with only the desperate

hope to stay afloat; that and nothing more. But when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more

words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The

island grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived.

I wrote about it all—about people I had loved or hated, about the brutalities and

ecstasies of my life. And, for the first time, the child in me who had witnessed and endured

unspeakable terrors cried out not just in impotent despair, but with the power of language.

Suddenly, through language, through writing, my grief and my joy could be shared with anyone who would listen. And I could do this all alone; I could do it anywhere. I was no

longer a captive of demons eating away at me, no longer a victim of other people’s mockery and loathing that had made me clench my fist white with rage and grit my teeth to silence.

Words now pleaded back with the bleak lucidity of hurt. They were wrong, those others, and now I could say it.

Through language I was free. I could respond, escape, indulge; embrace or reject

earth or the cosmos. I was launched on an endless journey without boundaries or rules, in which I could salvage the floating fragments of my past, or be born anew in the

spontaneous ignition of understanding some heretofore concealed aspect of myself. Each word steamed with the hot lava juices of my primordial making, and I crawled out of

stanzas dripping with birth-blood, reborn and freed from the chaos of my life. The child in the dark room of my heart, who had never been able to find or reach the light switch,

flicked it on now; and I found in the room a stranger, myself, who had waited so many years

to speak again. My words struck in me lightning crackles of elation and thunderhead storms of grief. *

When I had been in the county jail longer than anyone else, I was made a trustee. One

morning, after a fistfight, I went to the unlocked and unoccupied office used for lawyer-

client meetings, to think. The bare white room with its fluorescent tube lighting seemed to

expose and illuminate my dark and worthless life. When I had fought before, I never gave it a thought. Now, for the first time, I had something to lose—my chance to read, to write; a way to live with dignity and meaning that had opened for me when I stole that scuffed, second-hand book about the Romantic poets.

“I will never do any work in this prison system as long as I am not allowed to get my

G.E.D.” That’s what I told the reclassification panel. The captain flicked off the tape

recorder. He looked at me hard and said, “You’ll never walk outta here alive. Oh, you’ll work, put a copper penny on that, you’ll work.”

After that interview I was confined to deadlock maximum security in a subterranean

dungeon, with ground-level chicken-wired windows painted gray. Twenty-three hours a

day I was in that cell. Then, just before Christmas, I received a letter from Harry, a charity house Samaritan who doled out hot soup to the homeless in Phoenix. He had picked my

name from a list of cons who had no one write to them. I wrote back asking for a grammar book, and a week later received one of Mary Baker Eddy’s treatises on salvation and

redemption, with Spanish and English on opposing pages. Pacing my cell all day and most of each night, I grappled with grammar until I was able to write a long true-romance

confession for a con to send to his pen pal. He paid me with a pack of smokes. Soon I had a

thriving barter business, exchanging my poems and letters for novels, commissary pencils, and writing tablets.

One day I tore two flaps from the cardboard box that held all my belongings and

punctured holes along the edge of each flap and along the border of a ream of state-issue

paper. After I had aligned them to form a spine, I threaded the holes with a shoestring, and sketched on the cover a hummingbird fluttering above a rose. This was my first journal.

Whole afternoons I wrote, unconscious of passing time or whether it was day or

night. Sunbursts exploded from the lead tip of my pencil, words that grafted me into

awareness of who I was; peeled back to a burning core of bleak terror, an embryo floating

in the image of water, I cracked out of the shell wide-eyed and insane. Trees grew out of the palms of my hands, the threatening otherness of life dissolved, and I became one with the air and sky, the dirt and the iron and concrete. There was no longer any distinction

between the other and I. Language made bridges of fire between me and everything I saw. I entered into the blade of grass, the basketball, the con’s eye and child’s soul.

At night I flew. I conversed with floating heads in my cell, and visited strange houses

where lonely women brewed tea and rocked in wicker rocking chairs listening to sad Joni Mitchell songs.

Before long I was frayed like rope carrying too much weight that suddenly snaps. I

quit talking. Bars, walls, steel bunk and floor bristled with millions of poem-making sparks.

My face was no longer familiar to me. The only reality was the swirling cornucopia of

images in my mind, the voices in the air. Midair a cactus blossom would appear, a snakeflame in blinding dance around it, stunning me like a guard’s fist striking my neck from behind.

The prison administrators tried several tactics to get me to work. For six months,

after the next monthly prison board review, they sent cons to my cell to hassle me. When

the guard would open my cell door to let one of them in, I’d leap out and fight him—and get sent to thirty-day isolation. I did a lot of isolation time. But I honed my image-making

talents in that sensory-deprived solitude. Finally they moved me to death row, and after

that to “nut-run,” the tier that housed the mentally disturbed.

As the months passed, I became more and more sluggish. My eyelids were heavy, I

could no longer write or read. I slept all the time.

One day a guard took me out to the exercise field. For the first time in years I felt

grass and earth under my feet. It was spring. The sun warmed my face as I sat on the

bleachers watching the cons box and run, hit the handball, lift weights. Some of them

stopped to ask how I was, but I found it impossible to utter a syllable. My tongue would not

move, saliva drooled from the corners of my mouth. I had been so heavily medicated I could not summon the slightest gestures. Yet inside me a small voice cried out, I am fine! I am hurt now but I will come back! I am fine!

Back in my cell, for weeks I refused to eat. Styrofoam cups of urine and hot water

were hurled at me. Other things happened. There were beatings, shock therapy, intimidation.

Later, I regained some clarity of mind. But there was a place in my heart where I had

died. My life had compressed itself into an unbearable dread of being. The strain had been

too much. I had stepped over that line where a human being has lost more than he can bear, where the pain is too intense, and he knows he is changed forever. I was now capable of

killing, coldly and without feeling. I was empty, as I have never, before or since, known emptiness. I had no connection to this life.

But then, the encroaching darkness that began to envelop me forced me to re-form

and give birth to myself again in the chaos. I withdrew even deeper into the world of

language, cleaving the diamonds of verbs and nouns, plunging into the brilliant light of

poetry’s regenerative mystery. Words gave off rings of white energy, radar signals from powers beyond me that infused me with truth. I believed what I wrote, because I wrote

what was true. My words did not come from books or textual formulas, but from a deep faith in the voice of my heart.

I had been steeped in self-loathing and rejected by everyone and everything—

society, family, cons, God and demons. But now I had become as the burning ember floating in darkness that descends on a dry leaf and sets flame to forests. The word was the ember and the forest was my life. *

I was born a poet one noon, gazing at weeds and creosoted grass at the base of a telephone pole outside my grilled cell window. The words I wrote then sailed me out of myself, and I was transported and metamorphosed into the images they made. From the dirty brown

blades of grass came bolts of electrical light that jolted loose my old self; through the top of my head that self was released and reshaped in the clump of scrawny grass. Through

language I became the grass, speaking its language and feeling its green feelings and black root sensations. Earth was my mother and I bathed in sunshine. Minuscule speckles of sunlight passed through my green skin and metabolized in my blood.

Writing bridged my divided life of prisoner and free man. I wrote of the emotional

butchery of prisons, and my acute gratitude for poetry. Where my blind doubt and

spontaneous trust in life met, I discovered empathy and compassion. The power to express myself was a welcome storm rasping at tendril roots, flooding my soul’s cracked dirt.

Writing was water that cleansed the wound and fed the parched root of my heart.

I wrote to sublimate my rage, from a place where all hope is gone, from a madness of

having been damaged too much, from a silence of killing rage. I wrote to avenge the

betrayals of a lifetime, to purge the bitterness of injustice. I wrote with a deep groan of

doom in my blood, bewildered and dumbstruck, from an indestructible love of life, to affirm breath and laughter and the abiding innocence of things. I wrote the way I wept, and danced, and made love.

On September 27, 1865, the San Antonio Express-News made its debut. From the beginning, there was plenty to write about. The Civil War had just concluded, and it was only twentynine years after the fall of the Alamo. The Chisholm Trail, the high road of the Cattle Kingdom, began in San Antonio, which was Texas’s largest city and among its most diverse.

Spanish, German, and English were commonly spoken. The politics were lively and sometimes divisive, as the city was full of Unionist sympathizers in a state that was an anchor of the Confederacy.

Today, 150 years later, San Antonio is America’s fastest-growing big city and still making history. San Antonio is a richly illustrated compilation of more than 150 years of coverage on the city’s history and culture, as told in the pages of the San Antonio Express-News. From local politics to news stories on the military, energy, water use, the border, and immigration that reverberate nationally and internationally, to the recent naming of San Antonio’s five Spanish missions as a World Heritage site, the city has always been a place

where the American identity is forged. This book tracks the city’s past from 1865 until 2015 and is full of evocative pictures and compelling accounts culled from the ExpressNews archives.

Learn more

***

H-E-B

$22-billion supermarket chain started as a humble grocery store H-E-B’s Market at Stone Oak features a full restaurant and bar.

Express-News file photo

Company values are rooted deep in history

By Neal Morton STAF F WRI TER

With a nest egg of exactly $60 — a tidy sum in 1905 — Florence Thornton Butt made a big bet on a small grocery store that she opened near

downtown Kerrille.

The C.C. Butt Grocery Store occupied just 750 square feet at the time, sold bulk food on credit and also made deliveries. Florence made $50.60 in sales within the first month, but over the next century, her

tiny store grew into a grocery empire called H-E-B. Today, the company remains a family-owned operation and encompasses hundreds of locations in Texas and Mexico, more than 85,000 employees and an estimated $22 billion in annual sales. It ranks as one of the largest privately held supermarket chains in the United States and is the nation’s

15th-largest private company of any kind.

Now headquartered in San Antonio, H-E-B celebrates its 110th anniversary this year.

“Everything we do and the way we do it has changed, if you look at how the company started, ” said Suzanne Wade, president of H-E-B’s food and drug division in San Antonio.

“But the values are the

same. How we value people who work here and who shop with us, we respect that,” she added. “The principles are so deep and so strong and deeply rooted in history.”

In 1919, Florence handed management of the Kerrville store to her youngest son, Howard Edward Butt, after he returned from military service in World War I. As a boy, he

had delivered groceries in a wagon. He soon discontinued the store’s credit and delivery business, instead favoring a cash-and-carry system.

Seeking to expand, Howard tried and failed six times to open a second store over the next six years. He finally found fertile ground in Del Rio in 1926 and, after purchasing three small stores in the Rio Grande Valley, moved the company’s headquarters to Harlingen.

By 1930, the renamed H.E. Butt Grocery Co. expanded to 17 locations across South Texas, with sales topping $2 million.

A transformational moment arrived in 1936, when Howard acquired the Harlingen Canning Co. and opened a bakery in Corpus Christi. This initial entry into food manufacturing laid the foundation for the 12 factories that H-E-B now operates throughout the state, with most of them in San Antonio.

The plants produce the grocer’s own brand of ice cream, yogurt, marinated beef and chicken, baked goods, snack foods and more.

“No one else can make these products, and they aggressively get better and better, ” said Eddie Garcia, a Laredo native who spent 62 years working with H-E-B at the store level, in its warehouse and general merchandise divisions and more.

“The success of a grocery business is supported by the transportation, distribution and manufacturing of its products,” he said. “The internal control (that H-E-B put in place) required a heavy investment but comes with the ability to operate and respond to issues and changes quickly.”

By 1940, Howard again moved the company’s headquarters, to Corpus Christi.

The bayside city also served as the home of the grocer’s first full-fledged supermarket — a 22,500-square-foot building

Billy Calzada / San Antonio Express-News

H-E-B opened this location at 1601 Nogalitos in 2015. The grocer has been in business since 1905.

featuring a drug department, cosmetics section and lunch counter that opened in 1949.

Over the next two decades, the growing chain offered a consumer trading stamp program, launched in-store fish markets and butcher shops and expanded to 50 locations with a store in Austin.

Howard, meanwhile, celebrated his 76th birthday in 1971, and transitioned control of the company to his son, Charles C. Butt, who quickly set in motion two big changes for the family business: In 1976, the company abandoned its policy of closing on Sundays and started selling beer

and wine.

As president and CEO, Charles also ushered the relocation of H-E-B’s headquarters to the renovated Army arsenal base in downtown San Antonio.

“Look at our stores. They’re very festive and warm, and that’s a direct reflection of San

Antonio,” Wade said. “It’s a warm, warm city and very welcoming.

“I hope it’s like that for the community at their H-E-B: a friendly and familiar place.”

H-E-B operated 148 stores when it moved to San Antonio in 1985, but that footprint now exceeds 350 locations and reaches as far north as Plano and as far south as León, a city in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.

Following the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, H-E-B first expanded its business south of the border in 1997 and now operates 51 stores there.

The company doesn’t just sell groceries in both countries; it contributes 5 percent of its pretax earnings to public and charitable programs.

H-E-B also organizes disaster-relief efforts with mobile kitchens, literacy programs, the H-E-B Excellence in Education Awards, an annual event that gives more than $800,000 in cash prizes to schools and educators, and the H-E-B Food Bank Assistance Program.

Last year, that campaign delivered 29 million pounds of food and nonperishable items worth more than $48.6 million to food banks in Texas and Mexico.

The food bank assistance program, which Garcia helped establish more than 30 years ago, also funds H-E-B’s annual Feast of Sharing dinners, in which it serves an estimated 250,000 meals in 32 communities across Texas and in Mexico.

“The Butt family has always tried to address hunger in the community,” said Garcia, noting that Florence donated all surplus from the original Kerrville store to the poor.

“All of this builds customer loyalty, ” he added. “For HE-B, it’s not just about raking in money. It’s about doing the right thing.”

San Antonio’s food culture

City regaining its historical status as a culinary destination spot Opening of CIA branch, top chefs propel reputation

By Edmund Tijerina STAF F WRI TER Express-News file photo

With a campus of the Culinary Institute of America in full swing, chefs who are gaining national attention for their innovative approaches and a food culture that’s producing new, independent restaurants at a pace unimaginable only a decade ago, San Antonio is reviving a tradition that extends back to the days when Houston, Dallas and Austin were still in their infancy.

San Antonio was already a culinary destination by the 1860s, when visitors who came to town by stagecoach wanted to experience the outdoor plazas and the food vendors, including the now-revered chili queens. They also ate and drank at the nearby Menger Hotel and sampled beer brewed in house, according to “The History and Mystery of the Menger Hotel.” Visitors also came to try dishes such as turtle soup featuring turtles from the San Antonio River and wild game that patrons brought to barter for lodging.

One famous exchange took place in 1895, when a thenunknown O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) was asked where he was boarding.

“I am eating at the largest

The Culinary Institute of America — San Antonio at the Pearl Brewery has had a big impact on the city’s food scene.

Express-News file photo

The CIA’s flagship restaurant Noa presents refined versions of classic Latin American dishes.

restaurant in the world,” the writer said, according to “San Antonio’s Menger” by Ella Ketcham Daggett Stumpf. “It’s a chili stand on Main Plaza. It has the sky for a roof.”

Today’s culinary luminaries are making their mark in a variety of ways, such as a modernist Mexican restaurant that combines high-tech gadgets with pre-Columbian techniques; a chef who sources nearly everything from within 150 miles, eschews machinery in his cooking and draws inspiration from Victorian-era recipes and approaches; a chef who applies modernist touches to barbecue and also serves a stunning Central Texas-style

brisket; and a chef who creates new meaning in traditional approaches to French, Italian and Jewish cooking.

The most recent rise of San Antonio’s food scene arguably began in the mid-1980s with the arrival of Bruce Auden to head the kitchen at the Fairmount Hotel.

“There wasn’t much of a New American cuisine, there wasn’t much of a cutting edge,” Auden recalled. “There were good restaurants but not much that was unique.”

The culinary scene took a big step forward in 1998, when native son and Churchill High School graduate Andrew Weissman returned from

France and opened Le Rêve.

He, and the restaurant received national acclaim within a few years of opening. More recently, he has garnered fans and attention with his Italian efforts at Osteria Il Sogno, casual dining at The Luxury, seafood at The Sandbar Fish House & Market, and Israeli-style falafel at Moshe’s Golden Falafel.

“After 9/11, people were staying home, and that gave us (in San Antonio) the opportnity to show people they didn’t have to go to New York or Paris for great food,” Weissman said.

“You just have to seek it out.”

The most recent wave of prominence took shape in 2006 when billionaire Christopher

“Kit” Goldsbury persuaded the Culinary Institute of America to open a campus in San Antonio.

That project began in 2002, when Goldsbury’s company, Silver Ventures, bought the former Pearl Brewery complex.

Goldsbury proposed the idea of opening a San Antonio campus to the CIA’s president, Tim Ryan. Eventually, Goldsbury sold Ryan on his vision for the campus.

In 2006, the Center for Foods of the Americas opened as an institution affiliated with, but not part of, the CIA. At first, it offered a 30-week certificate.

The following year, Goldsbury announced a $35 million gift to the school, which allowed it to expand to its present size and provided $20 million for scholarships, called El Sueño, or “the dream.” In 2008, the Center for Foods of the Americas officially became the Culinary Institute of America — San Antonio. Its expansion opened in 2010.

Jason Dady is one of the chefs who has made a mark on San Antonio.

Express-News file photo

Bruce Auden’s arrival at the Fairmount Hotel in the mid-’80s marked a turning point in San Antonio’s dining history.

Express-News file photo

The CIA Bakery Café opened in 2011, and the school’s flagship restaurant, Nao, opened in 2012. Students and professionals work in the kitchen and in the front of the house as servers to present an ever-changing menu of refined versions of classic dishes from throughout Latin America. The bakery closed in 2013 but reopened as a pop-up in 2015.

Since its founding eight years ago, the institute’s campus has expanded from 5,000 square feet to more than 30,000 square feet and grown from a certificate program to one that offers associate degrees in culinary arts and in baking and pastry arts.

It’s launched a research arm to allow instructors to travel throughout Latin America and document traditional cooking techniques and created a specialization in Latin cuisines.

“We are very pleased with the way that the CIA's San Antonio campus has developed so far, and how we have been embraced by the city,” said CIA President Tim Ryan. “We look forward to continuing to grow and develop — and to advanc-

ing San Antonio's increasing reputation as a great food city.

We have all made tremendous progress in the past few years.”

How has the CIA’s presence affected the city? Already, graduates are working in kitchens throughout the city. One of them, Diego Galicia, is a partner in Mixtli, the modernist Mexican restaurant that has garnered attention on “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” and at food and drink festivals; and Mezcalaría Mixtli, which combines creative cocktails, a strong mezcal selection and a compact but memorable menu.

Meanwhile, San Antonio’s trailblazing chefs have their own alumni scattered throughout the city. For example, Auden’s kitchens at the Fairmount Hotel, Biga and Biga on the Banks have nurtured chefs such as Mark Bliss of Bliss restaurant, Michael Bomberg of Spice of Life catering, and Luis Colón of Folc.

Weissman’s alumni include Michael Sohocki of Restaurant Gwendolyn (which also received feature treatment on “Bizarre Foods” for its intensely local approach) and Kimura;

Tim Rattray of The Granary ’Cue and Brew and his modernist barbecue; Luca Della Casa of Nosh and Silo restaurants (and runner up on “Food Network Star”); and Pieter Sypesteyn and Chris Carlson of Brigid restaurant.

Other notable chefs who are leaving their mark on San Antonio include Jason Dady of Tre Trattoria, Tre Enoteca, Two Bros BBQ Market, B&D Ice House and the Shuck Shack; and Damien Watel of Chez Vatel Bistro. They also have a roster of alumni who are cooking throughout the city.

One of Dady’s notable alums, Stefan Bowers, is attracting attention with his creative approaches at Feast and his projects at the St. Anthony Hotel. Another Dady alum, Robbie Nowlin, worked at The French Laundry and now has returned to San Antonio and is working on a variety of projects.

To those, add the national notice of Johnny Hernandez and his stylish interior Mexican offerings at La Gloria, The Fruteria and El Machito; Steven McHugh and his Cured

Express-News file photo

Courtesy Johnny Hernandez

Andrew Weissman brought national attention to San Antonio with Le Rêve.

Johnny Hernandez has helped shape San Antonio’s culinary scene.

restaurant; the inspired creativity of Quealy Watson and the Empty Stomach group with The Monterey, Hot Joy and Barbaro; and the Southeast Asian approaches of David Gilbert at the Hotel Valencia.

And now, chefs who have left town are coming back, such as Josh Cross, whose réumé includes working with Auden at Biga and Biga on the Banks, and in New York at Gramercy Tavern and JeanGeorges. Cross is now chef and partner at Toro Taco Bar and plans other projects soon.

But when writers from out of town visit, they want South Texas home cooking such as breakfast tacos, huevos rancheros, puffy tacos and cheese enchiladas, and they’re rarely disappointed.

Together, the traditional cuisine and the chef-driven restaurants comprise a culinary scene that shows no sign of slowing down.

“I don’t know how it can keep going at this rate,” Auden said. “San Antonio is as vibrant as any city that I’m aware of.”

Fort Sam Houston’s Quadrangle

‘Hub of Military Activity’ has a rich and storied past Noted Army leaders worked there; Geronimo most famous prisoner

By Paula Allen F OR T HE E XPRE SS-NEWS

Long before there was a Pentagon in Washington, there was a Quadrangle at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

The design — a rectangle — first was offered unsuccessfully to the federal government for the National Archives, says John Manguso, former director of the Fort Sam Houston Museum and author of “The Quadrangle: Hub of Military Activity in San Antonio,” published in 2009 for the Historic Neighborhood Awareness Program.

The U.S. Army had a long but tenuous relationship with San Antonio as headquarters of the Department of Texas before the Quadrangle was built, occupying the Alamo (and adding the distinctive roofline) during the U.S.-Mexican War, then the Vance Building where the Gunter Hotel now stands.

Federal troops left town in February 1861 and returned after the Civil War to find rental properties costly and flood- and malaria-prone.

Because the city was considered a major supply point for

Courtesty Fort Sam Houston Museum

A place for animals and people to relax in For Sam Houston’s Quadrangle, circa 1918.

the western forts and troops stationed along the border, Army Quartermaster General Brig. Gen. Montgomery Meigs asked Congress in 1870 for “the erection of a fireproof building for the storage of military supplies (and as) a depot for troops on the Rio Grande frontier.”

Once the Army made the decision to stay in San Antonio, despite its lack of a railroad at the time, the city made this important economic generator and defensive force lavishly welcome.

City Council voted to donate

not only free land north of the city but free native limestone from the nearby city rock quarries (where the San Antonio Zoo and Sunken Gardens are now).

Construction began June 21, 1876, on the 749,000-cubic-foot storage unit to be built around eight acres of what became known as Government Hill. A second story was added to be used as headquarters office space. The structure originally had no name but acquired “The Quadrangle” through common usage.

Through the years, some

notable military leaders worked there, including Gen. Frederick Funston, known for his commands during the Spanish-American War and in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; Gen. John J. Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I and of the Mexican Punitive Expedition going after Pancho Villa; and six other general officers who later served as commanding general of the Army or Army chief of staff.

Probably the most famous person associated with the

Quadrangle was Geronimo, the Apache war chief confined there in 1886. Captured with 32 other Apache warriors in Arizona, he was sent to Fort Sam while the federal government decided whether they were to be treated as prisoners of war or turned over to civil authorities.

The Apaches — including the warriors’ women and children — were housed in Army tents along the Quadrangle’s north wall, then home to its blacksmith and wheelwright shops for about six weeks until they were moved to Flor-

Courtesy Fort Sam Houston Museum

A visitor to the Quadrangle pets the deer in this undated photo.

UTSA Special Collections

The clock tower in the Quadrangle at Fort Sam Houston, pictured in the 1890s.

Courtesy Fort Sam Houston Museum

Geronimo was incarcerated with his tribe in 1886.

ida.

It’s not true that the Quadrangle menagerie of deer, ducks, peacocks and other wildlife — a tourist attraction and family-photograph staple while Fort Sam was an open post — were brought in for Geronimo and his band as “a more Native American friendly food,” says Manguso.

The San Antonio Express reported in 1885 that deer had escaped from the Quadrangle’s small herd, and other news stories verify that the peacocks have been there since at least 1898.

“There is no good reason why the animals are in the Quadrangle,” says Fort Sam Museum Director Jackie Davis, “except that having peacocks and tame deer was a popular thing to do in the 1800s.”

Geronimo didn’t jump from the clock tower, either.

It was originally built as a water tower, and its first Seth

Thomas clock was installed in 1882 by Bell and Bros., a local jeweler, at first with faces only on the south and west sides. It was replaced in 1907 by another clock by the same manufacturer that worked for a century. In 2007, says Manguso.

“Problems with the mechanism led to its being disconnected from the hands, and electric motors were installed to move them.” The 1907 mechanism is still in the tower, “as it would be a problem to move that mass of metal down the 103 steps around about 12 corners.”

Though its occupants and purposes have changed since it was completed in 1879, “The Quadrangle has been the home of a major Army command for its whole existence,” says Davis, citing the Department of Texas, the Southern Department, the 8th Corps Area, 3rd Army, 4th Army and 5th Army, now called ArmyNorth, responsible for the security and defense of the northern hemisphere.

Most recently, the east wing of the Quadrangle has become home to the Fort Sam museum. The collection, which traces the history of the post and the units stationed there, had outgrown its former space, says Davis.

“After casting about for a suitable new location, the Army-North command concluded that the only logical place for the museum was in (Fort Sam’s) oldest and most historic structure.”

The museum’s new quarters were refurbished last year for its use, while museum staff worked on presenting new and refreshed exhibits.

“The challenge of the new space is the ‘beads-on-astring’ arrangement (of the exhibit rooms),” says Davis.

“It could have gotten pretty repetitious, except for a good design that breaks the space up and makes a clear path for visitors to follow.”

Gregg Popovich

Spurs head coach enjoys run of success matched by few in game Pop is tops among peers after five NBA championships

By Jeff McDonald STAF F WRI TER

The boos rattled down from the Alamodome rafters on the night of Dec. 14, 1996. Spurs fans were out for blood, eager to vent their frustration during a season gone horribly wrong.

And that was just in pregame introductions.

The struggling and injuryriddled Spurs were facing the Dallas Mavericks that night, marking the home debut of the team’s new head coach.

Or as Gregg Popovich was known around San Antonio at the time, Public Enemy No. 1.

When the buzzer sounded on a 106-105 victory that improved the Spurs’ record to a moribund 4-17, players mobbed Popovich in celebration.

“I thought someone from the stands had jumped down to attack me,” Popovich said jokingly at the time.

Nearly 20 years, 1,022 victories and five NBA championships later, Popovich stands nonpareil atop the coaching world.

He remains on the Spurs’ bench, the longest-tenured active coach in North American professional sports, a lock for the Hall of Fame and

Popovich and Tim Duncan joke on the bench during action against Philadelphia during the 2013-2014 title run.

The coach-player combo has earned five NBA titles since the Spurs drafted Duncan No. 1 in the 1997 NBA draft.

Photos by Edward A. Ornelas / San Antonio Express-News

Steve Kerr douses coach Gregg Popovich with Champagne during the postgame celebration after Spurs closed out the New Jersey Nets, 4-2, in the 2003 NBA Finals in San Antonio.

nothing short of a San Antonio legend.

Nobody — least of all Popovich himself — could have predicted any of it that day back in 1996 when Popovich, then the team’s general manager, fired Bob Hill and grabbed the coaching reins for himself.

The timing looked suspect: Popovich took over at precisely the moment All-Star center David Robinson was set to return from injury.

Fans cried foul.

According to reports at the time, the move was supported by a handful of influential voices in the locker room, including forward Sean Elliott and point guard Avery Johnson.

“We wanted to win this one for Pop,” Elliott told reporters after Popovich claimed career victory No. 1. “We all love him.

I think we’re all happier for him than anything else.”

At the time, Popovich’s only other head coaching experience had come in the 1980s, at

NCAA Division III PomonaPitzer College in California.

He had also served time as assistant with the Spurs under Larry Brown and with the Golden State Warriors under Don Nelson.

At Pomona-Pitzer, Popovich and his young family lived in the dorms on a shoestring budget. He remains a D-III coach at heart.

“I still feel like I’m an interloper of sorts,” Popovich said recently. “I’m a Division III guy, and loved every min-

ute of it. This has been like a 20-year run, and it sounds kind of ridiculous. That’s where Tim Duncan comes in.”

Popovich has long asserted that his NBA coaching career was forged when the Spurs overcame the odds to win the 1997 draft lottery and the right to select Duncan, a once-in-alifetime big man out of Wake Forest.

Indeed, Duncan’s arrival changed everything for a franchise that had been perennially pretty good, but never a champion.

Duncan teamed with Robinson to help the Spurs win their first championship in

Express-News file photo

New coach Popovich and David Robinson confer just before the start of the game in Phoenix against the Suns on Dec. 10, 1996, which the Spurs lost.

Kin Man Hui / San Antonio Express-News

San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich directs players on the court during the second half of Game 6 of the NBA Western Conference finals in Oklahoma City in 2012.

Kin Man Hui / San Antonio Express-News

Popovich waves to the crowd during the June 18, 2014, river parade after the team captured its fifth NBA championship.

1999, and again in 2003.

After Robinson retired following the second title, the Spurs won three more in 2005, 2007 and 2014.

Behind the brain trust of Popovich and general manager R.C. Buford, and the on-court excellence of Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, the Spurs have generated the top winning percentage in sports since 1997.

The Spurs have won at least 60 percent of their games in every full season under Popovich.

Over time, Popovich — a three-time NBA Coach of the Year and one of nine coaches all-time to win 1,000 games — has earned the unparalleled respect of his peers.

Dallas’ Rick Carlisle — a well-thought-of coach in his own right — has called Popovich “the smartest man in the

history of the world.”

“He’s the best at taking a team and saying, ‘This is the strength of this team,’ ” said Philadelphia coach Brett Brown, a Popovich assistant for 12 seasons. “He just embraces the style of the way the game is going as it relates to a particular team. It becomes a nightmare trying to figure out how to guard him.”

Popovich, certainly, has come a long way since being subject to catcalls at the Alamodome. Yet he continues to deflect credit for the Spurs’ accomplishments.

“If you can draft David Robinson and follow that up with Tim Duncan, that’s a couple of decades of very, very possible success unless you just screw it up,” Popovich said. “So it’s hard to take credit when circumstances have gone your way so consistently.”

Express-News file photo

Popovich barks out orders to his team during action against the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 2 of the 2007 NBA Finals. The Spurs swept the series.

Duncan refuses to let Popovich hand him all the glory for the Spurs’ sustained success.

“We’ve been good to each other,” Duncan said. “Being able to be around Pop for my entire career, and this organization for my entire career, we’ve created a heck of a culture. We’re a team a lot of teams want to be like.”

Not bad for a coach who nearly didn’t make it out of his first home game in one piece.

Dogs, like humans, have memories, instincts, fears, and loyalties. But as far as we know, dogs do not get swept up in nostalgia, speculation, or self-analysis. Although they have hopes, they are not driven by regrets. In Crossing the Plains with Bruno, Annick Smith weaves together a memoir of travel and relationship, western history and family history, human love and animal love centering around a two-week road trip across the Great Plains that she and her ninety-five-pound chocolate lab, Bruno, took in the summer of 2003. It is a narrative of linked meditations, often triggered by place, about how the past impinges on the present and how the present can exist seemingly sans past.

Traveling from her rural homestead in Montana to pick up her nearly 100-year-old mother from her senior residence on Chicago’s North Side and bring her to the family’s beach house on a dune overlooking Lake Michigan, Smith often gets lost in memory and rambling contemplation. Bruno’s constant companionship and ever present needs force her to return to the now, reminding her that she too is an animal whose existence depends on being alert to the scents, sights, hungers, and emotions of the moment.

Learn more ***

Preface The poet and novelist Jim Harrison has said he measures the passage of time by the dogs he has had. So do I. “The worst thing about dogs,” Jim also said, “is we outlive them. . . .

Hopefully not much longer.” Having passed the seventy-five-year mark, both Harrison and I are ready for the moment when our pooches will outlive us. If not this batch, surely the next. And being the lost instead of the loser may be a good thing. Let them cry over us!

Writing about animals, said the poet Mark Doty in his memoir Dog Years, is an

attempt “to bring something of the inchoate into the world of the represented.” This is an

impossible task. We who tell stories about the animals we love are trying to bridge the void between beings that live full lives without language as we understand it and those of us

immersed in words. We know the gap cannot be bridged and yet we are compelled to give it a try. It is like writing about love which, Doty says, “is our most common version of the unsayable.”

Dogs may or may not be aware of the fragility of their humans, but we owners of

pets are aware of the predictable mortality of our animal companions. Such knowing does not stop a lover of animals. Loss, we have learned, is the price of love, and love is what we are after, no matter the pain. Which brings me to Bruno, the chocolate Lab who will be a

major character in this book, my traveling companion on the journey that is its core, and one of the loves of my life.

Bruno was four years old when this story began. He weighed ninety-five pounds and

had functional testicles. His head was massive, his eyes yellow, and his muzzle soft and

pink. Russet at the ears with fur colors deepening to chocolate brown, he was tall for a Lab and strongly muscled. Although Bruno could seem fearsome—especially when charging straight at you with his neck fur raised—he acted like a giant pup, and would remain

mellower than any dog I’ve had, to the point of marshmallowdom. Bruno loved people,

especially young women. Also Kevin, our neutered black cat, who he tried to bugger. He

was a talking dog, making moaning sounds high pitched and keening or low and guttural,

which he expected you to comprehend. “Like Chewbacca,” my son Alex explained. I looked blank. “The big hairy creature in Star Wars.” Oh, the lovable monster.

I was always comforted by Brunie’s warmth. He never whined. He barked only at

treed grouse, bears, bulls, and intruding dogs and paid no attention to deer unless they

leapt across the trail in front of him. A scavenger like all dogs, he ravaged carcasses left by hunters and munched on manure. He went nuts over grouse but, oddly for a retriever, did

not like the smell of ducks. Elk interested him, though not enough for him to chase them off the meadow when they appeared at dusk in spring. Cattle were different. Bruno loved to drive them away when they grazed close to our fences. I would yell “no cows,” which

usually stopped him. But if a cow and calf overstepped his boundaries, he charged them, tail held straight behind and ears flopping.

Bruno believed his most serious duty was to chase coyotes. If one dared come onto

our meadow hunting gophers, he took after it in a blur of speed. When the coyote reached the woods, Bruno turned back, but before coming home he had to trace the scent trail backward, zigzagging from rock pile to rock pile until he lost track.

Often, when I let Bruno out in the morning, he’d lift his leg and peer north toward

Bear Creek canyon as if pointing. This was my cue. I’d lunge in his direction. He lowered his

head like a fullback and avoided me easily. Then Bruno sauntered downhill past our log

barn to Allen and Evelyn’s place at the bottom of the canyon, where he hoped to steal the

dog food they left on their porch. If their dogs started barking, Brunie would growl, but the big coward ran off when Evelyn’s tiny terrier nipped at his heels. Then he continued his rounds, hoping to find a female in heat. Usually within an hour, I’d spot his thick tail

swinging uphill through the tall grass. About fifty feet away he would stop and look at me, guilty but not repentant. Then, head lowered, he slunk toward the house.

Although I don’t equate parents with pets, the pattern of loss is similar. To

paraphrase Harrison, the worst thing about parents is most of us outlive them. Having lost my husband, Dave Smith, when I was thirty-eight and my father in my sixtieth year, I felt

lucky as I turned toward seventy to have a mother nearly one hundred years old. I had not always been so grateful.

My mother, Helene Beck Deutch, came from Transylvania. She was petite, vivacious,

and a talented photographer, but intuitive rather than rational, opinionated, hysterical in laughter as well as in anger, and in love with material things. I had no urge to follow her example, for no matter how well she manipulated her husband, all her grownup life she lived in his shadow. “I’m my father’s son,” I told myself. My father, Steve Deutch, was an

immigrant Jew from Budapest. He took me to Cubs games and Progressive Party rallies, and discussed ideas as if I were an equal. I admired him because he was a self-made intellectual,

an idealist with a Marxist bent, passionate and intense. And he was an artist like I wanted to be.

After my father died, my mother moved to a senior residence on Chicago’s North

Side. She was ninety and had embarked on a new life. My sisters and I took her to places

she had always wanted to visit such as Hawaii, the Bahamas, and Los Angeles, but the only place she acknowledged as home was our beach house on a dune overlooking Lake

Michigan near the small southwestern Michigan town of Sawyer. “It is paradise,” she said in her emphatic Hungarian accent. “My paradise.”

During her last years, my sisters and I took turns to visit and care for our mother,

and if weather permitted, we took her to Sawyer. I usually flew from Montana to Chicago, but in May of 2003 I decided to drive. Mother was ninety-seven and still relatively vital.

That journey across the plains and back to Montana is the center of this book, but circles of memory and event ripple from it—continuous—still running. The only companion I had was Bruno, the perfect pal for an aging woman returning to her mother’s house.

Mom died of chronic pneumonia three years after our road trip and one day short of

reaching the age of 101. We buried her ashes next to my father’s in a patch of lily of the

valley and red columbine on the dune overlooking Lake Michigan next to the cottage they had shared for more than half a century.

And Bruno is gone, too. Before this book was finished, his brown snout had shaded

to white and his great paws were also spattered white. He was hip-shot and slow to rise, a condition we shared on dark winter mornings. His backbone stood out, but his stomach was large and hard to the touch. When I took him to our vet, I insisted she examine his

stomach. Only then did we discover he had a huge tumor attached to his spleen. Bruno went under the knife the next week.

The tumor was ten pounds but not malignant. The vet called to tell me Bruno was up

and alert and looking around. That made me happy. A couple of hours later, my phone rang again. “Your dog’s dead,” said the vet.

“Dead!” I shouted. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” said the vet.

“Brunie’s dead,” I screamed. “Dead!”

Bruno is the dog star of this story, and essential to my narrative. While driving

across the vast spaces of the interior West, I often got lost in memory or flights of fancy.

Bruno’s presence and his needs forced me to return to the actual. He reminded me that I, too, am an animal whose existence depends on being alert to the scents and sights and

hungers and emotions of the moment. Through constant company in an enclosed space, I had hoped to inch closer to understanding this dog’s way of being, observing my

mysterious animal as the cave people observed theirs—fascination with animals being as

old as our species and the inspiration for our first and perhaps greatest expressions in art. I only partially succeeded.

I learned that dogs have memories, instincts, fears, moods, loyalties, and hatreds.

They are like us in these ways. But as far as I know, dogs do not get swept up in nostalgia,

speculation, or self-analysis, and although they have hopes, they are not driven by regrets.

Which is why, in a story narrated by a woman beset by the processes of aging and the

imminence of death, the dog who rides shotgun is, like Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, a

reminder of the physical realities outside our imaginations. He is a connoisseur of scent trails that branch sideways or backward, uphill or down, always serpentine from any

straight path. I cannot know what advice Bruno would have offered if he were instructing

me about how to write this book, but I like to think he would tell me to follow my nose. Life, he might say, bounds like furtive, delicious rabbits across every step of our way.

Heading toward eighty it is easy to fall into stories about nostalgia and loss, but the

world I encounter is as new and present as everyone’s. In the pages that follow I have put together a mix of travel and relationship, western history and family history, human love

and animal love that centers around the two weeks I took to visit my mother. It is a chain of linked meditations, often triggered by place, about how the past impinges on the present and how that present can exist seemingly sans past.

Like everyone, I arrange memories, sensations, and thoughts in stories to define

myself and those I love. Then I discover those stories are unstable and changing and filled

with surprises, but there is consistency in them—the singular voice. I speak for myself, but as any character in my stories will tell you, I cannot see life whole or true, so experience

reinvented will have to suffice. One twist of the kaleidoscope at memory’s core causes the shards to fragment and re-pattern, but they are always the same shards. Now I see

triangles and deep blue holes. Tomorrow there may be butterflies. That is how I believe stories work: they must be both startling and predictable, like every day’s dawn.

When the infant Conrad Netting received his late father’s Air Medal in a military ceremony in February 1945, it seemed to close the book on yet another tragedy of World War II. But what appeared to be closure was only a pause.

Katherine Netting became part of the silent generation, speaking little of the deep anguish left by her husband’s death when his fighter plane crashed in Normandy four days after DDay. Married the year before, Lt. Conrad John Netting III had so hoped his expected child would be a boy that he had “Conjon IV” painted near the nose of his P-51. After Katherine died in 1993, a footlocker turned up, carefully packed with wartime records and mementos that provided her son with almost as many questions as answers.

Learn more

***

excerpt from “Conjon IV—A Magnificent P-51” Life was not so exciting for Katherine, nor for most of the young wives left behind to

manage households, pregnancies, children, jobs, in-laws, finances, and emotions. During

peacetime, they handled these elements of family life well, with help and companionship from their husbands, who were there to encourage, support, and, most of all, hold and

caress them. The partnership worked both ways, with husbands needing the same from

their wives. But during war, the couples had to use letters to convey what they would have

said in person. The letters could not substitute for a hug and kiss, the gentlest touch, or the eyes locked in understanding. And without this, war was hell.

Mitigating that hell for Katherine were her pregnancy, her letters to Conrad, an

occasional game of dominoes, and endless rounds of bridge with other ladies-in-waiting.

The bridge games would migrate, when gas was available, from one home to another, with a hundredth-penny a point being the highest stakes allowed. Imagine the scene: four

twenty-somethings, gabbing for hours, speculating on their pregnancies, playing mindless

games of bridge, and, underneath it all, feeling unspeakably worried about their husbands’ futures.

Katherine’s letters reported newsy details of these comings and goings. She

mentioned the dinners she cooked for the family: “meatloaf, glazed carrots, baked eggplant, frozen apple and Jell-O salad, rolls, and pie . . . and for $1.25.” She fretted over finances: “I

won’t be able to save $100 this month as I had planned. But I’ll soon have $800 saved in the baby fund.” She reported on the baby: “Last Tuesday, the baby nearly kicked my appendix

out. Since then, not a move.” And she told or her various handyman projects: “I am going to build some shelves under the sink and drain board. We really need more space.”

Katherine knew that whereas before, when he was in Texas, Conrad might have

called, that was now impossible. Every problem, joy, and bit of news had to be handled by

mail. “I write every day and mail the letters the same afternoon,” she wrote in February. To post the letter, she walked five blocks to the drug store. Conrad wrote nearly every day as well. With the post office delivering mail twice daily, the news rarely got old.

The military’s version of special delivery, V-Mail, took a letter written on a bordered

one-page form, photographed it using an early form of microfiche, reduced it, and sent it through the regular mail system. The intent was to produce smaller, lighter letters, thus saving valuable space and tonnage. Katherine and Conrad soon found that V-Mail was

slower than normal mail, and used the latter exclusively thereafter. Either way, all mail

from England was censored, though from their surviving letters that censoring does not appear to be heavy handed or even consistent.

They wrote about the topics every couple discusses, regardless of the

circumstances.

Money. Conrad wrote: “I want to have plenty of cash in the bank when I get home.

You don’t realize it over there but from here it’s quite plain to see that the fellow who has something to fall back on when this is all over is the man who will be able to stand on his

feet when he gets back home.” Katherine responded, “If you are gone a year—God forbid— I’ll have $800 saved.” She reminded him that the “March car payment is $36.10.”

Faith in God. Conrad wrote, “You said you went to church—keep it up as much as

you can. I don’t as much as I’d like to, but you can help by going.” Katherine responded, “I bless you every night, darling [in my prayers]. I pray for you many times every day.”

Social life. He wrote: “Does Billie still call me a ‘party boy’? I am, you know. Only

know, I hook one arm over the Club bar and hang on. We had free beer again last night

(fifteen or more destroyed on a show).” She wrote back: “We can’t even work up a bridge game because everyone is out of gas. They are putting Texas on the same gasoline ration

schedule as in the east. Two gallons a week on you’re a card, so my gasoline is going to be saved for the doctor and the laundry.”

Shopping. Conrad wrote that he needed Prep, Pepsodent, Wildroot cream oil hair

dressing, and, of course, gum. Katherine would search the Post Exchange at Fort Sam Houston, and many stores on Houston Street in San Antonio to find what he needed.

Abiding by the strict standards for package sizes, she would pack the supplies to get the

most to him in the least space. To keep packages to a minimum, the sender had to show the postal clerk the letter wherein the airman asked for the supplies. The clerk would then

stamp the letter, thus restricting sending another package of the same supplies. Katherine shopped for herself, too. “I bought the first record I’ve bought since last July. ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’ It is lovely and I’ll send you the words.” This became their song.

Her family. Katherine wrote: “[Mama] is mighty fond of you, darling, and talks of her

four boys in the service all the time. Sometimes I have had to explain to people that she

really just has three . . . but that doesn’t stop her.” Mrs. Henderson proudly displayed in her window a service flag consisting of a red border surrounding a white rectangle. Centered

on the rectangle were four blue stars, one for each son in the service. Four-star service flags were rare, as Katherine confirmed to Conrad. “Mom at last found a service banner [at Joske’s Department Store] with four stars on it. She has been hunting for some time without any success.”

Worries. Conrad wrote, “In spite of all the ‘glory stories’ you read of fighter pilots,

the only real glory as far as I’m concerned is getting back after each show, and that’s just what I concentrate on. Amen.” Katherine was no less worried. “O, I hate this war. Why

couldn’t we have lived another time? I’m so lonesome. I do hope the next time I see you will be for keeps, not this eternal separating.” Later she wrote, “I wonder how many times I have read, ‘Do not tell your solider your troubles.’ ”

Convictions. “I [have] a characteristic that I sincerely hope will never change—

certainly it hasn’t changed yet. That is this: speak straight from the shoulder and expect everyone else to do the same; speak honestly and with the very weight of my honest convictions. I won’t waver on that.”

Future plans. Conrad wrote, “Tell you for sure, I don’t want Conjon to be a fighter

pilot. Think he’d make a much better goat rancher.” Katherine had plans, too. “I’m so glad

we are married. Think of all the marvelous years there are ahead. So many more than most

people have. I know that our lives together are a perfect partnership—one that was created

for a lifetime, not a few months. It is only at times that I resent your being taken from me, but, I’m so young yet—and so are you. Later she wrote:

Gosh, darling, I miss not having all the fun so many other couples have had when they are married. I mean, that I’d not trade one minute of any time I’ve ever spent with you, but I do wish it could have been normally, like our folks and older friends had. Like just living in the same town, and having friends over for the first in your own home, and all

that. But perhaps it will be that we’ve had this much extra before we start on that.

Perhaps we haven’t missed a thing, but are on to a lot more happiness than the ordinary couples are. Maybe when the war is finally over and you’ve come home

forever, it’ll be just like starting in for the first time. I’ll like that, I know. Gosh, if you knew all the things I plan for you and me and Conjon, you’d know what I do with all my time. Just daydream about you, that’s all. And when you get home at last! Well, there won’t be a happier person in this world than I will be. Nothing will spoil the rest of my life, after you are here.

Philosophy. He wrote, “Oh, if you all over there could only see and listen to the

British for one hour! That’s all—then you’d see what’s called for when war is right at your

front doorstep.” She thought, on paper: “Although I hate with every part of me the fact that

you are gone, I am still so proud to know that you were willing to do what had to be done . . . Another reason to add to the long, long list of why I married you.”

His job. He wrote: “None of us hold any kind of malice toward the boys back home.

Hell, some guys just don’t want combat, that’s all. We asked for this, and wouldn’t be happy without it. They didn’t and would only be a liability to the group over here. Remember this.” She encouraged him:

Don’t think you did wrong with your decision in McAllen to go over. I’m glad you did, because I knew if I asked you to stay, you would have. But I also knew that you would never be quite satisfied with yourself, and what you were doing. You’ve had wonderful opportunities and I know it. You might have been stuck someplace where there was just no place for me, teaching someone the art of Basic Training. And I know you would have been miserable.

Now that I know you are gone, and that two months have gone by, I know when you get back, we’ll both be completely satisfied that you’ve done everything you could have done without any hesitation. So, don’t regret taking your chance to get over

there. You’ve been so fortunate to get such a swell place, and before Conjon is able to say, “CJN IV,” his daddy will be through and on his way home to us.

And their child-to-be. Conrad’s plans: “About my filling Conjon full of beautiful lies

about my flying—well, he’ll simply have to come with me when the 4th Fighter Group has a reunion—then we’ll really know what it was all like here.” Katherine, though, had the most time to think about her child, and to ruminate on what he (or, just possibly, she) would be like. She wrote:

You can’t tell now what he will grow up to look like, but I know what his mannerisms will be like. I could tell you right now how he’ll stand when he’s deep in conversation with someone. And how he’ll walk like only one other person I’ve ever known walks.

How his nails will look . . . And his teeth, despite braces, will probably get too close together in a couple of places and he’ll eventually have a package of dental floss in his pocket as much as he does gum, which he’ll chew all the time.

He’ll grow up with a Time magazine under one arm and a model of a P-51 under the other. And he’ll let his hair grow down on the left side instead of brushing it back. He’ll have eyes that you can’t quite decide the color of, sort of a cross between hazel and green and blue. And he’ll be sort of hard to handle because he will definitely have a mind of his own. He’ll fall for every pretty girl that walks along, until one day there arrives on the scene some girl he may have known all his life . . . He’ll have enormous feet . . .

And all the years that I can sneak in to look at him when he’s asleep, he’ll look like a little boy to me, and it’ll be all I can do not to take him in my arms and hug him.

He’ll be thin for years and then when he’s married and has a few children, he’ll start to

take on a little weight and begin to get a little less anxious to be on the go. And above all, he’ll be kind. He’ll never be one of the boys that are mean to dogs . . . He will have a wonderful sense of humor, and the only thing he won’t agree on with his daddy is that he will finally be grown and his own boss. Because his daddy will never realize it. His daddy will try for the rest of his life to sort of ease the bumps and steer the cart so there won’t be any catastrophes. His shoulders will be broad and we’ll both worry because he’s just sort of bow legged. And someday, he’ll be the perfect husband to the second luckiest girl in the world. He’ll be thoughtful, and gentle. And she’ll be happy the rest of her life because he will be so fine and wonderful.

I suppose you know how I can tell you so much about him, even though he is still so tiny. It’s because he’s you, all over again. I can’t do anything for you now, but write you every day and try to remind you of what a wonderful happiness we’ve had, and what a much more wonderful happiness for years to come we will have. So instead, I can take care of him. Because he is you. And the only thing he will inherit from me will be the love for his daddy.

Enchiladas: Aztec to Tex-Mex is a comprehensive exploration of one of Mexico’s most historic and popular foods. Illustrated with sumptuous photography, the collection showcases more than sixty traditional and contemporary recipes for enchiladas, as well as recipes for the salsas, salads, and sides that accompany them.

It is a complete guide to enchilada cooking techniques with step-by-step instructions for preparing, assembling, plating, and garnishing each dish, including • making corn tortillas from scratch • fire roasting fresh chiles and preparing dried chiles • dry roasting tomatoes, onions, garlic, and chiles • preparing tender pot beans and savory refried beans • cooking perfect Mexican rice—six different ways • making homemade queso fresco, crema Mexicana, and chorizo

•

preparing chicken, pork, beef, seafood, and vegetable fillings

Enchiladas also provides abundant information about many other key ingredients of Mexican cuisine, including avocados, chiles, tomatoes, tomatillos, nopales (cactus), cheeses, herbs, and spices.

Learn more

***

Mexico: A Culture of Corn and Enchiladas In Mexico, the word enchilada isn’t just for food. When a woman gets angry, it is said she becomes “enchilada”; to say that something is difficult to do, one would say, “no son enchiladas” (“they aren’t [as easy as making] enchiladas”); to request more of something, one would say “enchilame otra.” These examples demonstrate how important enchiladas are in the everyday life of the people of Mexico. Perhaps it is because enchiladas and Mexicans share a common history and culture—a history and culture that began with corn.

Journalist Michael Pollan aptly describes corn as a “miraculous grass.”1 It is nothing short of miraculous that this descendant of an ancient grass exists at all, considering it was developed by the convergence of three factors: nature, humankind, and chance. The consequences of that convergence are equally remarkable.

No other plant has had a greater impact on human life than corn.

Today, corn is the most produced grain in the world, cultivated on every continent except Antarctica.2 This is because corn is an exceptionally adaptable and efficient engine of food production, capable of generating more food with less light, water, and nutrients than most other plants.3 The economic result is that corn, for good and bad, now appears in more food and food-related products than any other ingredient except salt. In recent decades it has even found its way into fuel, plastics, packaging, adhesives, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. But none of this happened overnight.

According to P.J. White and L.A. Johnson in Corn: Chemistry and Technology, corn most likely was derived from wild grasses native to Central Mexico called “teosinte” that were cultivated by the Olmec and Mayan peoples. The earliest archaeological evidence of this dates from 7000 BCE from a cave in Mexico’s valley of Tehuacán. By that time, White and Johnson say it “already had been hybridized to the point of no longer being able to reproduce without human assistance.”

Reciprocally, the civilizations that evolved in Central America became dependent on corn for their own existence. The capital of the Aztec nation, Tenochtitlán (located where Mexico City is today), is estimated to have had a population of over 200,000, making it one of the most populous cities on earth before the Spanish Conquest of 1519–1521.4 And it was corn that made such a large population possible.

To the people of Mexico, corn was both a literal and a spiritual source of life. It was worshipped in the form of several deities, both male and female. According to the sacred book of the Maya, Popol Vuh, man and woman were fashioned out of corn.

Today, corn is still revered by the Mexican people and remains an essential part of their diet. Perhaps their special relationship with this grain is best illustrated by the Tortilla Riots in 2007, when Mexicans took to the streets protesting the rising cost of corn, chanting, “Sin maíz, no hay país” (“Without corn, there is no country”).

Nixtamalization During the many centuries Mesoamericans spent hybridizing corn, they discovered that when the grain was soaked in a heated alkaline solution of slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), a process called “nixtamalization,” the grain became easier to grind and tasted better. The nutritional content also increased and mycotoxins (fungal toxins) in the corn decreased. Once the nixtamalized corn was ground, patted into a flat, round shape, and baked on a clay comal (griddle), it became the staff of life for the Mexican people—the tortilla—which in turn made the enchilada possible.

The Tortilla Most cultures on earth have some form of flatbread, from the chapati of India to the yufka of Turkey and the flatbrød of Norway. Mexico’s flatbread, the tortilla, became the primary source of nutrition for its indigenous people and, in some instances, the only food they had. El Códice Mendoza, written about twenty years after the Spanish Conquest, describes Aztec children living on half a tortilla a day until three years of age, one whole tortilla from ages four to five, a tortilla and a half from ages six to twelve, and after thirteen years of age when they were expected to do adult work, two tortillas per day.5 Despite the harsh lives of most of the native population, especially under Spanish rule, the people survived. Fortunately, corn tortillas contain many of the nutritional attributes of a modern health food—they are naturally high in calcium and fiber, low in sodium, contain no cholesterol, and are gluten-free. (Note that the recipes in this book are gluten-free, with the exception of the Tex-Mex enchiladas made with ancho chile gravy.)

Tortillas are easy to make but difficult to make well. The simplicity of the ingredients—nixtamalized corn and water—is the reason for their complexity. It takes great skill to “feel” when the dough has just the right moisture content, is malleable but not too soft, thin enough to be tender without falling apart, and thick enough to be substantial but not so thick as to be tough. Traditionally, a good tortilla was considered so essential in Mexican culture that a young woman was deemed ready for marriage when she could make a good one.

With the advent of the tortilla, the invention of the enchilada was inevitable. After all, in a society where people ate with their hands, what better way to enjoy mole, salsa, beans, or other fillings than with a rolled or folded tortilla?

The Enchilada The origin of the enchilada predates written history, but the word enchilada is more recent, first appearing in print during the 19th century.6 Enchilada translates as “to season with chile,” or one could say “to chilify” something. For this book, the definition of an enchilada is a corn tortilla, never flour, that is rolled, folded over or flat, filled or unfilled, and sauced (in a few instances, the sauce is incorporated into the dough).

Spanish Franciscan friar and chronicler Bernardino de Sahagún, in his 16thcentury Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, gives an eyewitness account of vendors at a market selling tortillas “enrolladas hechas redondas” (coiled up or rolled around) various fillings. He describes them in great detail: some were yellow, some were white, some were stuffed with mashed beans or with meat and ground chiles, others were “smeared” with a chile sauce, and some were “doubled over or folded.”7 Recipes similar to the enchiladas Sahagún described are still made in Mexico today, along with many other versions that evolved over the subsequent centuries.

As the culture and politics changed and evolved in Mexico, so did the enchilada.

Common pre-Columbian fillings were probably beans, squash, seeds, chiles, bird or turtle eggs, and small amounts of wild game or seafood.

During the Colonial period of the 16th–18th centuries, indigenous ingredients were augmented or replaced with cheese, pork, chicken, and other Spanish-influenced ingredients. And when France invaded Mexico in the mid-19th century, many French culinary influences were incorporated.

The latter 19th century and beginning of the 20th century saw a renewed appreciation for enchiladas made from what Mexicans deemed “traditional” recipes. Local versions of enchiladas, tamales, and tacos became associated with pride of country and patriotism.

Neighbors to the north, particularly in Texas and New Mexico, gave enchiladas their own unique interpretations by mixing elements of Mexican, European, cowboy, and Native American cultures.

Today, diners encounter enchiladas that reflect the entire history of Mexico, from pre-Columbian papadzules and simple bean and tortilla enfrijoladas to traditional favorites, such as enchiladas de mole and enchiladas verdes, as well as modern versions that defy categorization.

Taken as a whole, these recipes reflect the political, religious, and social influences that shaped Mexican culture through the ingredients that were used throughout its history. The enchilada is not only a delicious everyday Mexican food but a historic dish that embodies thousands of years of Mexican life.

Fresh Guacamole * Page 18

Avocados The avocado originated in the state of Puebla in central Mexico, where the small, undomesticated variety “criollo,” with its large seed and black skin, can still be found. Of the many hybrids that have been developed over the years, the Hass is the most popular and accounts for 80 percent of the avocados consumed in the world today. Its heritage can be traced back to a single seedling planted in the late 1920s by a mailman named Rudolph Hass in La Habra Heights, California.

Though avocados are most commonly appreciated for their buttery fruit, the leaves are also sometimes called for in Mexican cuisine, such as in the preparation of frijoles negros (black beans), in soups and stews, or as a bed for barbecuing meats.

The flavor has been described as similar to a mixture of bay leaves and anise. These leaves come from a particular species of avocado grown in Mexico (Persea drymifolia) and are often available at Mexican specialty stores. Leaves from avocados commonly sold in the United States are not a good substitute.

One of the biggest challenges in dealing with avocados is accurately determining when they are ripe. The color of the skin isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of when an avocado is ready to eat—the best way to judge is by feel. Gently press the large rounded end (not the sides or stem end) of the fruit. When the avocado is ready for slicing, the rounded end will give slightly when pressed.

One or two more days ripening may be desirable when making guacamole, but there is a fine line between perfectly ripe and overripe. When in doubt, it is always better to choose a slightly firmer (not hard) avocado than a very soft one and to purchase an extra just in case. It is also a good idea to make sure the avocado has its stem intact and no apparent marks or indentations on the skin, which could indicate bruising.

An uncut avocado should not be refrigerated but can be stored in a wine refrigerator (set no lower than 55°F or 13°C), and it will keep nicely for several days. (This also works for tomatoes and bananas.)

Once cut, avocados are subject to enzymatic browning. In other words, when exposed to air, the flesh will quickly turn an unappetizing brown color. The best way to prevent this is to cut an avocado right before serving it. It also helps to sprinkle the surface of the flesh with lime or lemon juice, which not only inhibits browning but also brightens and balances the avocado’s richness. Commercially available anti-browning agents are also effective.

If guacamole must be prepared ahead of time, sprinkle it with lime juice or a thin film of olive oil, press plastic wrap directly against the surface, and refrigerate. (The old wives’ tale of imbedding the avocado seed in the guacamole to help preserve its color is a good story but doesn’t really seem to do anything.)

How to Make Fresh Guacamole Yields 2–3 cups (473–710 ml) Ingredients: * 3 tablespoons (27 grams) white onion, small dice * 1 or more serrano or jalapeño chiles, destemmed and finely minced * Kosher salt to taste * 2 large avocados, skins and seeds removed, large dice * Lime juice to taste * 1 small unpeeled tomato, cored and deseeded, small dice * 2 rounded tablespoons cilantro leaves, or to taste (optional) * 1 tablespoon onion, small dice (optional) * 1 tablespoon tomato, small dice (optional) * 1 tablespoon cilantro, chopped (optional)

Directions: * Place the diced onion and some of the minced chile in a molcajete (traditional

Mexican grinding tool), sprinkle with a little salt, and mash to a pulp.

* Add the avocado, sprinkle with some lime juice, and continue mashing to a

relatively smooth consistency (some texture is desirable).

* Stir in the diced tomato and cilantro. * Taste and adjust the seasoning by adding more salt, lime juice, and/or a little

more minced chile.

* Garnish with onion, tomato, and cilantro (optional).

Notes: Guacamole can also be prepared in a large bowl using the back of a fork or a potato masher.

Don’t worry about mashing the onion and chile—they will lend texture to the finished guacamole.

There are many other flavors that may be added to guacamole. Try using a mixture of citrus juices; stir in some chopped mandarin orange segments; or add a dash of olive oil.

Tips on Slicing Avocados The best way to cut an avocado is to hold it lengthwise in the palm. Place the knife edge parallel to the avocado and cut into the side of the fruit. Without moving the blade, carefully rotate the avocado on the blade until it is cut all the way around.

Gently twist the two avocado halves and pull apart. Set the halves on a cutting board, lightly whack the seed with the sharp edge of the knife, give it a half turn, and remove the seed. Holding thumb and forefinger on both sides of the spine (back) of the knife, carefully push the seed off the blade. (Never try to grab the seed from underneath the sharp side of a knife.) The avocado can then be peeled and sliced, or if is to be diced, the flesh can be crosscut in the skin and scooped out with a large spoon.

Enchiladas Berenjenas * Page 192

Enchiladas Berenjenas (Eggplant) Yields 12 enchiladas / Serves 4–6 Technically this is not a true enchilada, because the filling is wrapped with an eggplant slice instead of a corn tortilla, but the presentation, enrollada y enchilada (rolled and sauced with chile), is similar to many enchilada recipes and a delicious vegetarian option. Corn tortillas still make it into the recipe—they are served on the side.

Ingredients For the eggplant wrapping: * 2 large purple eggplants, ends trimmed

For the sauce: * 1 recipe Poblano Cream Sauce (see page 190)

For the filling: * 1 cup (140 grams) zucchini, small dice * 1 cup (140 grams) yellow squash, small dice * 1 cup (140 grams) red onion, small dice * 2–3 cups (240–360 grams) queso asadero, grated (some reserved for topping) * 1 tablespoon (15 ml) vegetable oil * Kosher salt to taste

For the garnish: * Black Bean Relish (see page 82) * Corn tortillas on the side

Directions Start with the eggplant wrapping: * Cut the eggplants lengthwise into 1 ⁄ 8-inch (3 mm) slices (1 slice per enchilada).

Brush lightly with oil and season with salt. Grill 30 seconds per side, or until slightly soft but not falling apart. Set aside.

Prepare the sauce: * Prepare the poblano cream sauce as directed (see page 190). * If the sauce was prepared ahead of time, reheat in a saucepan over medium-low

heat. When heated, reduce heat to very low, cover, and keep warm, but do not allow to boil.

Make the filling: * Place the oil in a sauté pan over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the

zucchini, yellow squash, onion, and a pinch of salt.

* Sauté the vegetables, stirring occasionally, until tender, about 5 minutes. * Add 1 cup (120 grams) queso asadero. Toss together until the cheese is melted.

Adjust the seasoning, set aside, and keep warm.

Assemble the enchiladas: * Preheat the oven to 325°F (163°C). * Have the garnishes ready and at hand. * Place approximately 2 tablespoons filling on the lower third of an eggplant slice

and roll up. Place in an ovenproof baking dish large enough to accommodate the enchiladas in a single layer.

* Repeat with the remaining eggplant slices. * When the slices are filled and rolled, cover with the poblano cream sauce and

1–2 cups (120–240 grams) queso asadero. Place in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese.

* Garnish with the black bean relish just before serving. * Serve warm corn tortillas on the side.

The incomparable Rebecca Solnit, author of more than a dozen acclaimed, prizewinning books of nonfiction, brings her dazzling writing to the essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness. As the title suggests, the territory of Solnit’s concerns is vast, and in her signature alchemical style she combines commentary on history, justice, war and peace, and explorations of place, art, and community, all while writing with the lyricism of a poet to achieve incandescence and wisdom.

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness proves Solnit worthy of the accolades and honors she’s received. Rarely can a reader find such penetrating critiques of our time and its failures leavened with such generous heapings of hope. Solnit looks to history and the progress of political movements to find an antidote to despair in what many feel are lost causes. In its encyclopedic reach and its generous compassion, Solnit’s collection charts a

way through the thickets of our complex social and political worlds. Her essays are a beacon for readers looking for alternative ideas in these imperiled times.

Learn more

*** On the Dirtiness of Laundry and the Strength of Sisters; Or, Mysteries of Henry David Thoreau, Unsolved There is one writer in all literature whose laundry arrangements have been excoriated again and again, and it is not Virginia Woolf, who almost certainly never did her own

washing, or James Baldwin, or the rest of the global pantheon. The laundry of the poets

remains a closed topic, from the tubercular John Keats (blood-spotted handkerchiefs) to Pablo Neruda (lots of rumpled sheets). Only Henry David Thoreau has been tried in the popular imagination and found wanting for his cleaning arrangements, though the true nature of those arrangements are not so clear.

I got prodded into taking an interest in the laundry of the author of “Civil

Disobedience” and “A Few Words in Defense of John Brown” in the course of an unwise exchange. Let me begin again by saying that I actually like Facebook, on which this

particular morning I had sent birthday wishes to my Cuban translator and disseminated a

booklet about debt resistance. I signed up for Facebook in 2007 to try to keep track of what

young Burmese exiles were doing in response to the uprising in that country, and so I use it with fewer blushes than a lot of my friends—and perhaps even my “friends,” since Facebook has provided me with a few thousand souls in that incoherent category.

And really, this is an essay about categories, which I have found such leaky vessels

all my life: everything you can say about a category of people—immigrant taxi drivers, say,

or nuns—has its exceptions, and so the category obscures more than it explains, though it

does let people tidy up the complicated world into something simpler. I knew a Franciscan nun who started the great era of civil-disobedience actions against nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site that were to reshape my life so profoundly and lead to the largest mass

arrests in American history, but remind me someday to tell you about the crackhead nun on the lam who framed her sex partner as a rapist and car thief. A private eye I know

exonerated him, as I intend to do with Thoreau, uncle if not father of civil disobedience, over the question of the laundry.

It’s because I bridle at so many categories that I objected to an acquaintance’s

sweeping generalization on Facebook that Americans don’t care about prisoners. Now,

more than 2 million of us are prisoners in this country, and many millions more are the family members of those in prison or are in the category of poor nonwhite people most

often imprisoned, and all these people probably aren’t indifferent. In my mild response I

mentioned a host of organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has done a great deal for the prisoners in Guantanamo. I could’ve mentioned my friend Scott, who was a pro-bono lawyer for the Angola Three for a decade or so, or my friend Melody, a

criminal defense investigator who did quite a lot for people on death row. They are a minority, but they count.

Having ignored the warning signs of someone looking for people to condemn, I

recklessly kept typing: “We were the nation of Thoreau and John Brown and the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society when we were also the nation of slaveowners—and slaves.”

Which was a way of reiterating my sense that the opposite is also true of almost anything

you can say about this vast messy empire of everybody from everywhere that pretends to

be a coherent country, this place that is swamps and skyscrapers and mobile homes and

Pueblo people in fourteenth-century villages on the Rio Grande. And 2.5 million prisoners.

Truth for me has always come in tints and shades and spectrums and never in black and white, and America is a category so big as to be useless, unless you’re talking about the government.

The poster replied: “And the nation of Thoreau’s sister who came every week to take

his dirty laundry.” This was apparently supposed to mean that Thoreau was not a noble

idealist but a man who let women do the dirty work, even though it had nothing to do with

whether or not Thoreau or other Americans cared about prisoners, which is what we were supposed to be talking about. Or maybe it suggested that Thoreau’s sister was imprisoned by gender roles and housework. It was also meant to imply that I worshipped false gods. I

have heard other versions of this complaint about Thoreau. Quite a lot of people think that Thoreau was pretending to be a hermit in his cabin on Walden Pond while cheating by going home and visiting people and eating in town and otherwise being convivial and enjoying himself and benefitting from civilization. They think he is a hypocrite.

They mistake him for John Muir, who went alone deep into something that actually

resembled the modern idea of wilderness (although it was, of course, indigenous homeland in which Muir alternately patronized and ignored the still-present Native Americans).

Then, after his first, second, and several more summers in the Sierra, Muir married well

and eventually lived in a grand three-story house in Martinez, California, and ran his father-

in-law’s big orchard business that paid for it all. Even John Muir is difficult to categorize, since he was gregarious enough to cofound the Sierra Club and complicated enough to

labor as a lumberjack and sheepherder in the mountains he eventually wished to protect

from logging and grazing. None of us is pure, and purity is a dreary pursuit best left to Puritans.

The tiny, well-built cabin at Walden was a laboratory for a prankish investigation of

work, money, time, and space by our nation’s or empire’s trickster-in-chief, as well as a

quiet place to write. During his two years there, Thoreau was never far from town, and he was not retreating from anything. He was advancing toward other things. The woods he roamed, before, during, and after his time in the famous shack, contained evidence of

Indians, locals doing the various things people do in woods, including gathering wood and hunting, and escaped slaves on the long road north to Canada and freedom. He traveled with some of these slaves, guided them a little, and they guided him in other ways.

Slavery was very much on his mind during the time he lived at Walden Pond. His

mother’s and sisters’ organization, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, met at least once in his cabin (for a celebration of the anniversary of the liberation of slaves in the

Indies, shortly after he himself spent a night as a prisoner). This is how not a recluse he

was: there were meetings in that tiny cabin that engaged with the laws of the nation and

the status of strangers far away, and he also went to jail during that time, because he was fiercely opposed to the territorial war against Mexico and to slavery.

The threads of empathy and obligation and idealism spun out from those people and

those meetings. The Concord abolitionists chose to care about people they had never met; they chose to pit themselves against the most horrific injustices and established laws of their society; and they did it at a time when they were a small minority and the end of slavery was hardly visible on the horizon.

And the laundry? I did a quick online search and found a long parade of people who

pretended to care who did Thoreau’s laundry as a way of not having to care about Thoreau.

They thought of Thoreau as a balloon and the laundry was their pin. Andrew Boynton in

Forbes magazine observed in 2007 that his mother did his laundry; a cheesy website noted that he “took his dirty laundry home to mom!”; in 1983, a ponderous gentleman named

Joseph Moldenhauer got in early on the accusation that he “brought his mother his dirty

laundry”; a blogger complained that “he had someone else do his laundry”; another writer referred offhandedly to the “women who did his laundry.”

A writer on an environmental website recently complained, “While philosophizing

about self-sufficiency in his solitary shack, he would drop off his laundry at his mother’s place back in town”; even Garrison Keillor got involved in the laundry question— “He

wrote elegantly about independence and forgot to thank his mom for doing his laundry”;

there’s even a collection of short stories called Thoreau’s Laundry, as well as a website that sells a Thoreau laundry bag. Search engines having a genius for incoherent categories: I also learned that Thoreau, New Mexico, a pleasant little town on Interstate 40, has four Laundromats.

The standard allegation—the reader will note—is that Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia

Dunbar Thoreau, did his washing, not his sister, and no one suggests that she had to fetch it first. Besides which, he had two sisters, Sophia and Helen. The sneering follow-up message I got from the person who claimed that Thoreau was a man whose sister did his washing

made me feel crummy for a day or so during an otherwise ebullient period of being around people that I love and who love me back. I composed various ripostes in my head.

Having grown up with parents who believed deeply in the importance of being right

and the merit of facts, I usually have to calm down and back up to realize that there is no

such thing as winning an argument in this kind of situation, only escalating. Facebook’s verb “friend” is annoying, but its corollary, “unfriend,” is occasionally useful.

I decided against unfriending and opted for simply avoiding the person into whose

unfriendly fire I’d strayed. The thing to do was to seek out more convivial company. I had

dinner the next night with my friend Thomas, whom I’ve known almost twenty years and at whose wedding I was best man. A half-Burmese Londoner, he’s only been in this

hemisphere about five years, and he told me that reading Walden recently helped reconcile

him to American individualism by exhibiting it as something energetic and eccentric as well as assertive. We began to correspond about Thoreau, and that dialogue deepened what was already a great friendship. I know two actual Thoreau scholars—one I met in the 1990s in Reno, and another who sought me out via Facebook (before the incident in question) and with whom I’d corresponded a little. I turned to them for more informed opinions on the washing. I wasn’t going to argue about it; but I did want to know the truth for my own satisfaction.

The first acquaintance, Professor Michael Branch at the University of Nevada, Reno,

was tired of hearing about the laundry: “The problem with explaining how much work the guy did is that you end up defending the wrong cause. I’ve stepped into this bear trap

before,” wrote Branch. He listed some of the kinds of labor the shaggy Transcendentalist

performed, including teaching, surveying, and running his family’s pencil factory. But, he cautioned, “once you make this case, you’ve accidentally blessed the idea that paying

attention to the world, studying botany, and writing a shitload of amazing prose isn’t real

work. Better to just say he never did a damned thing except write the century’s best book and leave it at that. Lazy fucker.”

Do we care who did the chores in any other creative household on earth? Did Dante

ever take out the slops? Do we love housework that much? Or do we hate it that much? This fixation on the laundry is related to the larger question of whether artists should be good

people as well as good artists, and probably the short answer is that everyone should be a

good person, but a lot of artists were only good artists (and quite a lot more were only bad artists). Whether or not they were good people, the good artists gave us something. Pablo Picasso was sometimes not very nice to his lady friends, but he could paint. I was friends with the artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner for a quarter century, and his unreasonable

insistence on perfection made his work brilliant and his company exacting and sometimes terrifying.

It wasn’t as though if he hadn’t made those seminal films and assemblages he

would’ve been an uncomplicated good guy; it’s not as though he was giving to art what he

should have given to life; he was putting out what he had, and it was a huge and lasting gift on this impure earth, even if it came from an imperfect man. Thoreau was a moralist, a

person who wrote about what we should do, how to walk, or how to fight the government about slavery; and a moralist holds himself up to a higher standard: does he, so to speak, walk his talk? Or so moralists are always tested, but their premises are right or not

independent of whether or not they live up to them. Martin Luther King Jr. was right about racism and injustice whether or not he led a blameless life. Digging into his dirty laundry doesn’t undo those realities, though the FBI tried to blackmail and undermine him that way.

The second scholar I wrote to was also a Michael, Michael Sims, who was working

on a book about the young Thoreau, and he was well primed for the question. “Thoreau did

visit the village almost every day, and see his parents, and do chores around the house for them,” he wrote. He continued:

While he was at Walden, they were in a house he helped build the year before he

moved to the cabin—he and his father mainly—so he had considerable goodwill in the bank. During his entire adult life, he paid rent while at his parents’ boarding

house, and paid it faithfully, with records sometimes kept on the backs of poems or other writings. He worked in the garden, helped keep the house in good repair, provided foods from his own garden, and so on.

People did drop by the cabin to bring him food sometimes, but people

dropped by each other’s houses with food all the time. It was the most common gift.

He brought other people food, especially melons. (He was legendary for his talent in raising a vast array of melons.) I don’t know if I have an actual record of the family doing his laundry, but I’ll check as I go through some of that over the next month.

But I would bet they did sometimes do his laundry. He was quite emotionally dependent upon his family, especially his mother, but he also contributed

constantly. When his brother died young, Henry helped take up the slack in financial help. When his father died, Henry became not only the man of the house but the

major force in the pencil business (which he had already almost revolutionized with his analysis of better ways to make pencils). So I think what I’m trying to say is that even at Walden he was very much a part of the family in every way.

After looking into the laundry accusations, I opened Walden again and examined the

section where he does his accounts, which, as the historian Richard White points out, were a sort of parody of nineteenth-century preoccupations with efficiency and profitability,

with the pettiness of keeping score and the souls of bookkeepers. He mentions “washing

and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not

yet been received.” It’s not clear if that’s out of his own cabin or his mother’s house, during the Walden era, but it suggests that maybe his washing was done by strangers in a

commercial transaction, or that maybe he thought that the question of who did the laundry was amusing and made an indecipherable joke about a bill his family wasn’t really going to send.

He was, after all, the man who warned us against enterprises that required new

clothes, often wore shabby ones, and was certainly not very concerned about having clean ones. He never married and did little to make work for women and did quite a bit of dirty

work himself, including shoveling manure—of which he wrote, “Great thoughts hallow any labor. To-day I earned seventy five cents heaving manure out of a pen, and made a good bargain of it.” He worked quite hard, often for his sisters’ benefit, though he also played

around with the idea of work, appointing himself inspector of snowstorms and proposing that his employment could be watching the seasons, which he did with such precision,

describing what bloomed when and which bird species arrived on what date in his corner of Massachusetts, that his journals have been used to chart climate change in the present.

We call that work—which was also so clearly a pleasure for him—science.

Intermittently, throughout his adult life, he was also struggling with tuberculosis,

the disease that killed his older sister, Helen, in 1849 and sometimes sapped his strength

long before it killed him in 1862. At the time of his death, he was lying in bed downstairs in a parlor with his younger sister Sophia at his side. Though we talk so much about the

twenty-six months he dwelt at Walden Pond, he spent most of the rest of the forty-five

years of his life at home with his family, as an intimate and essential part of what appears to have been an exceptionally loving group.

Labor was divided up by gender in those days, but it’s hard to argue that women

always had the worst of it in an era when men did the heavy work on farms and often the dirtiest and most physically demanding work around the house (in those days of

outhouses, wood chopping, shoveling ashes and coal, handling horses and livestock,

butchering, water pumping, and other largely bygone chores). Everyone worked around

the home, until they became so affluent no one worked beyond the symbolic femininity of

needlework. In between those two poles was a plethora of families who had hired help with the housework. I don’t think women were particularly subjugated by domestic work in the centuries before housewives in the modern sense existed, though gender roles themselves

deprived them of agency, voice, and rights. Thoreau’s sisters resisted and maybe overcame them without their brother’s aid.

Thoreau’s mother ran a boardinghouse, and yet another writer on Thoreau, Robert

Sullivan, points out that, like a lot of nineteenth-century households, they had help—and that the Transcendentalists were uncomfortable with the hierarchy of servants and

employers (Emerson tried having the maid sit at the dinner table with the family, but the cook refused to do so).

Perhaps Thoreau, his mother, and his sisters all had their washing done by the same

servant, or servants, who Sullivan suggests were likely to be recent Irish immigrants.

Ireland’s Catholics, fleeing the potato famine and British brutality, had started to arrive in the 1840s, and a torrent of desperate Irish would pour into this country for several decades; I am descended from some of them, and my orphaned Irish-American

grandmother used to attribute her excellent figure to doing the washing (by hand, on a

washboard) for the family that raised her. In his journal entry for June 9, 1853, Thoreau

expresses sympathy for an Irish maid named Mary who told him she quit her position on a dairy farm because she was supposed to do the washing for twenty-two people, including

ten men with two pairs of dirty overalls apiece.

The project of liberation is never-ending, most urgent at its most literal but

increasingly complex as it becomes metaphysical. Only free people can care about slaves or prisoners and do something about slavery and prisons, which is why the project of

liberating yourself is not necessarily selfish (as long as you don’t go down that endless solitary path marked After I’m Perfect I’ll Do Something for Others, but stay on the

boulevard marked My Freedom Is for Your Liberation Which I Must Also Attend to Now).

On October 13, 2012, a few weeks after the unpleasant interchange about prisoners and laundry, I went to San Quentin State Prison to hear the prisoners read.

San Quentin was even more prisonlike than I’d imagined, with a patchwork of

intimidating architectural styles: some crenellations like a medieval fortress, guard towers, sheer walls, razor-wire coils, warning signs, and entrance via steel gates that actually did slam shut with an echoing clang. We, the mostly female, mostly white audience for the

reading, had been sent a long list of colors we were not allowed to wear: blue, of course, but so many other colors that finally only black and purple and pink and patterns seemed safe for sure, so we looked as though we were going to a funeral or a punk concert. The

prisoners were wearing various shades of blue, work boots or running shoes, and some

jewelry. One had a Santa beard, one had dreadlocks, and the Latino murderer had a sharp pompadour and thick mustache. Only one of them looked young.

They read in the Catholic chapel, which was cold, low slung, made of cinder blocks,

with a pure white crucified Jesus on the wall and grillwork visible through the fake stained

glass. A lot of the stories were moving; some were unsettling, particularly the ones in which old rages and convoluted senses of causality (as evidenced by the passive tense used to

describe killing a friend) lived on and women seemed more like possessions than fellow

human beings. The category of maximum-security prisoner did not describe the range of

these men. I was most touched by Troy Williams’s straightforward account of weeping

when he told his daughter, via telephone, that his parole had been denied. He was fearful of being seen to cry in a tough place like prison, but someone reached out to him, and he found a little bit more humanity than he expected.

“What kind of a prison have I put my child in?” he asked himself, expanding the idea

of prison to include the way she was tied to his fate and locked out of his life. My friend

Moriah had brought me to the event; she had been the year before and was moved not just

by what she heard but by the fact that the small cluster of strangers from outside was about the most significant audience these guys were going to get. She had heard about it because

her daughter was in school with a girl who lived in the same household as Zoe Mullery, the creative writing teacher who had for six years or more come once a week to work with

these men. One of the men wrote in his biography in the handout we all received, “I picked up a book and was able to depart the brutal confines of the penitentiary, as well as the

margins of my depressed mind. Reading became an escape without my actually escaping.”

Zoe later told me that she had once looked at the history of the word free and it

might interest me. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, free has the same Indo-

European root as the Sanscrit word priya, which means “beloved” or “dear.” If you think of

etymology as a family tree, the dictionary says that most descendants of that ancient

ancestor describe affection, and only the Germanic and Celtic branches describe liberty.

The scholars say that the word may hark back to an era when a household consisted of the free people who were members of the extended family and the unfree ones who were

slaves and servants. Family members had more rights than slaves and servants, so even

though “free” in the United States is often seen as meaning one who has no ties, it was once

the other way around. Which is another way of saying that freedom has less to do with that Lynyrd Skynyrd “Freebird” sense of the word (in which we don’t care about prisoners or anyone else) and more to do with the idea of agency.

It doesn’t actually matter who did Thoreau’s washing, though I remained curious to

see if we knew who that might be. We don’t. But we do know quite a lot about the Thoreau family’s values. The second Thoreau scholar, Michael Sims, had sent me an excellent essay

by Sandra Harbert Petrulionus about the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society that the

writer’s mother and sisters belonged to, along with Mrs. Emerson, and after the laundry

issue was raised on Facebook, I read it again. “The influence they brought to bear on some of America’s most noted antislavery speakers and writers had a pronounced and far-

reaching impact,” Petrolonious declares. “Thanks directly to eight women, six of whom

lived in his home, Henry Thoreau had long been exposed to the most radical antislavery positions during his formative young-adult years.”

The women seemed to find a kind of liberation for themselves in this movement for

the liberation of others; they were able to act independently of husbands and fathers, to take public stands, to become political beings in a new way. The women’s suffrage

movement, the first feminist movement, grew directly out of the abolition movement: they

went to liberate someone else and found that they too were not free. Thoreau’s mother and

sisters were more radical than he was initially; they even publicly supported the “disunion” position that would have had the North secede from the slave South long before the South actually seceded from the North. The Thoreau women were also participants in the Underground Railroad, and Henry David sometimes walked or drove the fugitives

northward toward freedom. These Americans cared about prisoners enough to risk their own lives and liberty on their behalf.

A young abolitionist named Daniel Conway describes one such encounter on July 27,

1853, thus:

In the morning I found the Thoreaus agitated by the arrival of a colored fugitive

from Virginia, who had come to their door at daybreak. Thoreau took me to a room

where his excellent sister, Sophia, was ministering to the fugitive. . . . I observed the

tender and lowly devotion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice bade him feel at home, and have no

fear that any power should again wrong him. The whole day he mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-hunting time. But the guard had no weapon, and

probably there was no such thing in the house. The next day the fugitive was got off to Canada, and I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau.

In this vignette, brother and sister are collaborators in a project of liberation, and by this time, more than fifteen years after the founding of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery

Society, Thoreau was wholeheartedly recruited to the cause. A year later Thoreau wrote, “I endeavor in vain to observe Nature—my thoughts involuntarily go plotting against the

state—I trust that all just men will conspire.” Many just women already had. And so in my

reply to Sims, I said, “Reading that superb piece you sent a month or so ago deepened my

sense that his abolitionist mother and sisters were political powerhouses in whose wake he swam. My position now is that the Thoreau women took in the filthy laundry of the whole

nation, stained with slavery, and pressured Thoreau and Emerson to hang it out in public, as they obediently did.”

This is the washing that really mattered in Concord in the 1840s, the washing that

affected not only the prisoners of slavery, but the fate of a nation and the literature of the

century. Thoreau’s writing helped twentieth-century liberators—Gandhi and King the most famous among them—chart their courses; he helps us chart our own as well, while also

helping us measure climate change and giving us the pleasures of his incomparable prose.

His cabin at Walden was ten by fifteen feet, less than twice the size of a solitary-

confinement cell at California’s supermax Pelican Bay State Prison, though being confined

to a space and retiring to it whenever you wish are far more different than night and day. In a sense Thoreau is still at work, and so are his sisters, or at least the fruit of Helen and

Sophia Thoreau’s work to end slavery is still with us, along with their brother’s liberatory

writings. Though there are other kinds of slavery still waiting to be ended, including much of what happens in our modern prison system.

Continuing my reply to Sims, I wrote,

Thoreau’s relationship to his sisters reminds me a little of mine to my brother, who is a great activist and a great carpenter and builder, a support and ally to me in

every possible way, and someone for whom I often cook and sometimes assist in

other practical ways. (Though of course in this version the sister is the socially inept writer person and the brother the more engaged activist who leads his sibling into

the fray.)

My brother David actually built me a home at one point. In that home in which he

sometimes stayed and often ate (and usually did the dishes after he ate), we held political meetings as well as family gatherings. In it, as before and since, I helped him with activist publications, because for almost all our adult life he has been a political organizer who

seems to end up volunteering for publications. We’ve been through three books of his that

way, and each of these projects for which I am an informal editor has drawn me deeper into political engagement.

David cares about prisoners and has worked on their behalf many times, most

recently Bradley Manning. Sometimes I’ve joined him. He has often been arrested, spent

time in jails from Georgia to Ontario, and is named after our grandfather, who was named after Thomas Davis, the Irish revolutionary and poet. He has provided astute critiques of my writing and ideas, and without him I might have been lost in the clouds, stuck in an

ivory tower, or at least less often called into the streets. Though I am the writer, he taught

me a word when we were building the home that was mine for a while. The word is sister, which is a verb in the construction industry, as in “to sister a beam.” This means to set

another plank alongside a beam and fasten the two together to create a stronger structure.

It is the most fundamental image of the kind of relationship Thoreau had with his sisters and I with my brother: we reinforce each other.

It is what we are here to do, and to raise melons and build houses and write books

and to free anyone who might possibly need freeing, including ourselves and the meanings of our lives in all their uncategorizable complexity. By this, I don’t mean freedom only in

that sense that many Americans sometimes intend it, the sense in which we are free from

each other; I mean freed to be with each other and to strengthen each other, as only free people can.

In a collection of musings that is as much historical record as it is memoir, Coleen Grissom provides a unique view of life on and off an American university campus. As an administrator and faculty member at Trinity University in San Antonio for over five decades, Grissom has seen the feminist movement take hold, the sexual revolution take off, and the tragic deaths of students, friends, and family. Her honest, witty, and acerbic words have urged students, their parents, and the community at large to become lifelong readers and to aspire to a life well-lived.

Learn more

*** “The Magic of Movies�

In spite of rumors to the contrary, I was not alive during the silent film era, and I did not

grow up watching The Perils of Pauline. But it wasn’t much after that period that I began my lifelong love affair with films.

My first memories are not really of full-length feature films but of serials—literally,

cliff- hangers and Westerns. Shown on weekends and terribly effective in drawing the adolescents back for next week’s installment, my favorites starred Randolph Scott or

Sunset Carson until my affections switched almost totally to the Tarzan films featuring Johnny Weissmuller.

In outdoor play, I organized my neighborhood pals and assigned roles: I was always

Tarzan, but the characters of Jane, Boy, and Cheetah would go to friends of whichever

gender I chose to assign that day. We were able to shimmy up trees in a grove and swing back and forth, moving from tree to tree. Not exactly flying through the forest on remarkably strong grapevines, as my hero did, but pretty wonderful.

I thought Gene Autry was corny and sang too much, but I admired the more

handsome Roy Rogers and laughed uproariously at the antics of his sidekick, Gabby Hayes.

As I recall, though sometimes Roy had to rescue Dale, she was occasionally pretty resilient and took care of herself, and I liked that. All these features ended with a duet by the two stars accompanied by the Sons of the Pioneers, and then Roy and Dale, on their lovely,

brilliantly trained horses (Trigger and Buttermilk), rode off into the sunset. I never knew what happened in that sunset, but I felt sure it was swell.

At some period in my childhood, a Grissom family tradition was to attend the

matinee at the Esquire Theater after church on Sundays and lunch at home. (Sunday was

also the only day we had meat, usually the carcass of an unfortunate chicken whose neck I sometimes had to witness my mother wringing in our backyard.)

In spite of the humiliation and embarrassment of my father’s inevitably hawking

and then spitting both on his way into the sanctuary and later into the theater, I cherished these family outings for years.

Then, one spring, having memorized 250 Bible verses, I “won” attendance at a

church camp, where my happiness and confidence were shattered as the pastor used the prop of fizzing Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water to illustrate what happens after death to people who sin—including the sin of going to a movie on the Lord’s Day.

The horror of that cruel image and preachment haunts me to this day. Alas, I don’t

recall my parents’ reaction, but I do know that I continue to take the risk of viewing films in theaters and programs on television every day of the week, and I have an engrained distrust of church camps and ministerial authority.

My teenage years were a period in which I spent most of my allowance on movie

magazines and adorned my bedroom walls with portraits of my favorite stars. I wrote

many fan letters and received in response “autographed” pictures from the celebrities. I

even carried wallet-sized headshots of both John Derek and Cornell Wilde, as if they were

close friends or relatives. (Today my maturity and sophistication are reflected in my “Bette Midler Gallery,” which dominates the walls of my study. Many of these posters and

portraits are autographed, and perhaps my favorite reads, “For Dean Grissom—with aloha and many thanks for all you’ve done for us all, Bette Midler.”)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, my viewing pleasures often coincided with my

reading. Books that fascinated me—those by Daphne du Maurier, Lloyd C. Douglas, Frank

Yerby, Thomas B. Costain—were often made into movies, so I rejoiced in considering them in both interpretations. Just think, The Foxes of Harrow, The Big Fisherman, The Robe, The

Silver Chalice, The Saracen Blade, Rebecca, My Cousin, Rachel, Jamaica Inn—read and then

seen in the theater with surprising and often disappointing changes made, I soon realized, to please nonreaders!

Nevertheless, to hear lines I’d memorized from these fascinating escapes from the

humdrum life of a teenager in the piney woods spoken by great actors or a godlike voiceover, always thrilled me.

In my extended “Lloyd C. Douglas is the world’s greatest novelist” phase, I mouthed

(or, at the very least, recognized) the words from his novels when the actor uttered them in the films: “Last night in a dream I saw the King. He was standing on a high hill, gazing

entreatingly into the far distance, across the mountains, plains and seas. I heard him saying,

in sorrow, ‘You would not come unto me that you might have life.’” And I wept during The Agony and the Ecstasy, as “he felt his soul leave his body, rise upward into the dome,

becoming part of it: part of space, of time, of heaven, and of God.” Less dramatic, I suppose, but equally impressive were lines from Zane Grey films and books that I felt deserved

memorization because of their psychological astuteness, such as “Ah . . . but, Jim, in my fury I discovered my love!”

But after I slowly moved beyond these novelists and discovered du Maurier, both

films and novels obsessed me. How could they not, with such writing as “They used to hang men at 4 Turnings in the old days.” And the scene from her short story “Don’t Look Now,” also a brilliant film: “The creature was gibbering in its corner. The hammering and the

voices and the barking dog grew fainter, and, oh, God, he thought, what a bloody silly way to die.” (I hereby apologize for that spoiler and warn readers there are several more to come.) Or that remarkable opening line of Rebecca: “Last night I dreamt I went to

Manderley again.”

Similarly, during my adolescence books I read in appreciation for their humor were

often “translated” into popular movies. I especially love (and still relish re-viewing) Auntie Mame and seek occasions in which I can quote my two favorite lines from the author

Patrick Dennis: “I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind” and, more useful, “Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death.”

During my high school and undergraduate years, like many others of my era, I fell in

love with romantic, gorgeously colorful Hollywood musicals. Easily star-struck as I was, I

think I realized these films made little effort to capture reality—I’d never seen anyone break into song in the middle of a conversation. But these were influential cinematic experiences, and sometimes, even now, I wish for the beauty and escape of such

masterpieces as Camelot, My Fair Lady, The King and I, The Sound of Music, Carousel, Oliver, and South Pacific. I even miss the likes of Dirty Dancing, Saturday Night Fever, and Singing

in the Rain. It never surprises me that “revivals” of these and other musicals still thrive on the Broadway stage as well as with local and regional theaters.

Although my determination, as an adult, of what turns a film into a favorite is hard

to pin down—I appreciate superb acting, cinematography, special effects, pacing,

suspense/tension, verisimilitude, all the usual qualities—I also seem to place a high value

on good writing in the films I most often recommend to others. I marvel at succinct lines

that startle me with their insights, their capturing of a life truth, their hilarious incongruity.

Glenda Jackson delivers Penelope Gilliant’s observation from Sunday, Bloody Sunday,

a line that occurs to me perhaps too often, “Sometimes half a loaf is not better than no loaf at all.”

Woody Allen offers too many truths to include, but whoever can ignore “The most

beautiful words in the English language aren’t ‘I love you,’ but ‘It’s benign.’ ” And “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

The young Robert de Niro, in Bang the Drum Slowly, utters this bit of wisdom:

“Probably everybody’d be nice to you if they knew you were dying.” But his friend

responds, “Everybody knows everybody’s dying. That’s why people are as good as they are.”

Of course, with my well-known—if not always appreciated—sense of humor and

appreciation of the absurd, many of the films I admire the most offer one-liners that amuse me in or out of context: Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein uttering, “He vas my

boyfriend.” Bette Midler in Ruthless People shrieking, “Do I understand this correctly? I’ve

been marked down? I’ve been kidnapped by K-Mart!” And the incomparable Judy Parfitt as

Vera in the film of Stephen King’s “Delores Claiborne”: “Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman has to hold on to.”

Since I was never a popular girl with the boys (really, who could expect any self-

respecting East Texas boy to find attractive a chubby girl destined to be both valedictorian and “most witty” in the Carthage High School Class of 1952?), my understanding of “living happily ever after” came mostly from films and books. But neither was completely

satisfactory or explanatory. Even D. H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover confuses and baffles with “She gave herself to him.” Huh?

Roy and Dale rode off side by side on their horses—today’s Cialis commercials with

the man and woman in separate, side-by-side tubs seem reminiscent of these films’

conclusions– also baffling. Cary Grant wrapped Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Eva Marie Saint

(one at a time, of course) in his arms, as the camera lens panned to fireworks exploding in the sky.

Finally, though certainly not as graphic or specific as what’s available in today’s

films, television, or websites, during my adult years my reading and film viewing has occasionally made me regret being an old maid.

Each filmgoer surely has his or her own memories of scenes of such passion. Mine

include not only those of the Grant era (especially North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief) but also the film version of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, which offers an

unforgettable (and shocking for its time, 1973) bedroom scene with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, and who could ever forget Kathleen Turner and William Hurt in Body Heat?

Dirty Dancing provided more fodder for resenting my marital status, as did A History

of Violence with Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello on a staircase, of all places! No Way Out put Kevin Costner and Sean Young in a taxi ride like none I’ve ever experienced, and Jon Voight and Jane Fonda in Coming Home created an erotic and beautifully moving sexual moment.

Movies not only provided most of my vicarious sexual adventures, but they also

through the decades—until I became hooked on Dexter and Criminal Minds—taught me

more than I wanted to know about sheer terror. I like to tell people that I appreciate scary films and television programs and read many murder mysteries because in most of them, ultimately, “good triumphs over evil.” My friends don’t always seem to believe this and choose to think I just enjoy gore.

I still recall vividly terrifying film moments, many of which I haven’t seen in

decades: when Simone Signoret reacts to seeing the husband she thought she’d drowned

rise from the bathtub’s water in Diabolique, and when Glenn Close, as Alex Forrest,

performs a similar moment of horrifying surprise toward the end of Fatal Attraction.

There’s also the power of scenes in which violence is left to the imagination, as when Burt Lancaster calls his wife’s bedside telephone and hears a man answer, “Sorry, wrong number,” in the film by that title.

But nicely, often stylized to stick in the memory, haunting acts occur throughout my

movie history—almost any scene in The Lodger as Laird Cregar murders yet another

woman and a light fixture’s swinging casts eerie shadows on the wall; the reflection of the strangling of Miriam in her eyeglasses’ lens as the sounds of a carefree carnival fill the background in Strangers on a Train. And who my age didn’t switch for a while from

refreshing showers to hot baths after Hitchcock’s Psycho? But then we remembered or

viewed Diabolique or Fatal Attraction and wondered if we should just stick to sponge baths.

Thankfully, my life has, so far, been devoid of personal encounters with violence,

and perhaps the vicarious enjoyment of it in reading and film viewing is a safe escape, but

not necessarily a healthy one. The fact that I recall so many such scenes so specifically after many, many years should tell me something.

Since I pride myself on noting even subtle foreshadowing, perhaps my favorites are

those moments that took me by surprise. In The Conversation, just as Gene Hackman is

about to give up his search for evidence of a crime, he flushes the commode and bright red

blood bubbles up. Michael Caine surprisingly and appallingly switches from Elliott to Bobbi in an elevator, much to my dismay and that of his victim, Liz, played by Nancy Allen. That awful moment toward the conclusion of Carrie when I am finally relaxed as Sue (Amy

Irving) visits the plot where Carrie’s home once was, and Carrie’s (Sissy Spacek) hand

reaches up from the grave to grab Sue’s wrist! Ralph Fiennes as SS Lieutenant Amon Goeth simply scans the crowd below his balcony in Schindler’s List, then aims his rifle at a little Jewish girl in the one splash of color in the scene, and shoots her. And just when I (and

most in the audience) are feeling hopeful that Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt) will be saved from his injuries in Alien, that hideous alien creature bursts from his chest!

Even though I had read the du Maurier story “Don’t Look Now,” the movie scene in

which Donald Sutherland corners a little figure that he thinks is his missing daughter, alive and wearing a red cape, is a recurring image of unexpected but foreshadowed horror. Still, in the magic of movies for vicarious experiencing of dreadful, horrific moments, probably

nothing captures this more effectively, because of the combination of everything important in cinema—acting, pacing, writing, filming, music, cinematography—than the entirety of The Silence of the Lambs.

Recalling and cherishing as I do many brilliant films noted for all the qualities that

result in excellent cinema, my mini-obsession also extends to being able to rattle off—as I

ask my students to do frequently after reading a series of novels—the characters I would like to have as a friend and those I hope never, ever to meet.

Since I’m such a fan of “good eventually triumphs over evil,” it should come as no

surprise that those characters I hope never to meet include Mrs. Danvers (Rebecca), Bill Sikes (Oliver), Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs), Annie Wilkes (Misery), Alex Forrest (Fatal Attraction), Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men), or even Rhonda

Penmark (The Bad Seed).

All these are memorable for the evil they portray so vividly that I don’t believe

readers will even have to bother to Google their names to recall them!

Interestingly, the characters from my movie favorites that I’d most like to have as

friends are quite often children portrayed by unforgettable child actors—Elizabeth Taylor as Velvet Brown in National Velvet, Tatum O’Neal as Addie Loggins in that brilliant film Paper Moon, Henry Thomas as Elliott in E.T., Mary Badham as Scout in To Kill a

Mockingbird, Mark Lester as Oliver in the film of the same name, and Lindsay Lohan as

Hallie Parker/Annie James in The Parent Trap. What does it say about me that these child

actors I most vividly recall with such admiration experienced such difficult lives as adults? I think my favorite passage from Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, in which Holden Caulfield

comments on his dream of saving little children before they fall over the edge of a cliff, explains my nostalgia and my lifelong wish to help others avoid the loss of innocence.

Fine and not-so-fine films have enriched my life, contributed to my development of

values, and provided healthy and unhealthy escape and distractions from the vicissitudes of life. Embarrassing though it is to admit, I really love the “magic of movies” and always have.

With his characteristic genius for finding connections between writing and the stuff of our lives, Peter Turchi ventures into new and even more surprising territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle making and its flip side, puzzle solving. As he teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling, he uncovers the magic—the creation of credible illusion—that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians.

In Turchi’s associative narrative, we learn about the history of puzzles and their obsessive quality, and that Benjamin Franklin was a devotee of an ancient precursor of sudoku called Magic Squares. Applying this rich backdrop to the requirements of writing, Turchi reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process. This much anticipated follow-up to Turchi’s bestselling Maps of the Imagination is

a joy for readers (and writers!) of any genre, helping them navigate the fine line between the real and the perceived, between the everyday and the wondrous.

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*** “The Writer as Puzzle Composer—and Something More” While fiction writers and their editors bemoan the relatively meager sales of literary

fiction, and while poets wonder what they’re complaining about, there are other kinds of books that outsell them both, despite the fact that they are never reviewed and rarely advertised. On any given day, in bookstores but also in grocery stores and in airports, hundreds if not thousands of books are purchased which the reader will give the rapt attention that, we’re told, ordinary men and women once gave the installments of

Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop or the latest J. D. Salinger story in The New Yorker.

These books that sell, well, wherever books are sold—and where aspirin, neck

pillows, and beach balls are sold—are books of puzzles: crossword puzzles, double

acrostics, word searches, cryptograms, and sudoku, the puzzle phenomenon that has had

its grip on this country, among others, for several years. While puzzle books might seem to have nothing in common with fiction and poetry, many poets, fiction writers, and readers

of literary work are also puzzle solvers. (Some claim, adamantly, not to be; if you’re one of them, we’ll get to you soon.)

The puzzles and games that intrigue writers take many forms. Some notable fiction

writers are famous for their puzzling interests: Lewis Carroll was intrigued by logic

puzzles, Edgar Allan Poe by cryptograms, Vladimir Nabokov by chess problems, Georges Perec by jigsaw puzzles and crosswords, and Margaret Drabble wrote a combination

memoir and history of jigsaw puzzles. It might be more immediately apparent that poetry requires the concentrated attention to composition, the strategic release of information, the insight thinking, and the economy of means familiar to every puzzle composer.

Years ago, when I became the director of an MFA program in creative writing, and

before email became our default mode of communication, I had occasion to talk with the program’s academic board chair by phone almost every day. During some of our

conversations, I recognized a sound in the background on the other end of the line. I

started listening for it, a sound familiar from my youth: the clatter of cards being shuffled, followed by the soft snapping of a game being laid out.

Finally, one day, I acknowledged that I could hear what was going on in the

background. I said something like, “How are the cards?” My colleague must have been

surprised: she cut off a laugh, and stopped. I never heard her shuffle again. I imagine— though I never asked—that she suspected I might have taken her playing as a sign of

inattention, or distraction. And maybe it was. But I have come to believe there is a clear

link between the habitual consideration of the strategic arrangement of playing cards and the work we did together.

This colleague of mine was a poet, with a ferocious ear for form and music. She was

also quite a remarkable organizer. For instance: for the program’s semiannual residencies, we had to arrange workshops for about seventy students. The students were separated

into seven groups. Each student’s work was discussed once during each residency. Two

faculty members led each workshop each day. Each student participated in one of these multiday workshops five times over two years. Most people would simply divide the

students into groups and pair up the faculty more or less randomly. But my colleague

treated the challenge as a puzzle, for which she created the following rules:

1. At any given residency, no faculty member could lead any particular workshop group more than once.

2. No two faculty members could be paired together more than once in each residency.

3. No student’s work could be discussed in workshop twice by the same member during that student’s tenure in the program.

4. No student would have his or her work discussed on the first day of workshop of the last day of workshop twice during their five residencies.

5. All faculty would lead the same number of workshops. (This had various caveats related to other faculty responsibilities.)

Semiotician Marcel Danesi tells us that puzzles are more than tests of knowledge or

adeptness; to solve them, we rely most of all on “insight thinking,” which he defines as “the ability to see with the mind’s eye the inner nature of some specific thing.” Those rules for the organization of workshops were not arbitrary; the puzzle had a serious purpose. It

seemed unfair for a student to have his or her work discussed on the first day more than once, because on the first day the groups were often just getting up to speed, and on the

last day they were sometimes running out of energy. It seemed ideal for a student to have

his or her work discussed by as many different faculty as possible, so the writer could hear many different perspectives. And so on. Still, most people wouldn’t have bothered, in part because not everyone steps back to see the pattern in a particular problem, in part because the puzzle could be difficult to solve. Underlying the puzzle was a critical

component of my colleague’s pedagogical beliefs: while, as administrators, we couldn’t

control everything, the things we could control would be designed to treat everyone

equally. Her attention to fairness in the organization of the groups helped keep the focus on the work being discussed, rather than on whether someone was being favored or

disadvantaged by the arrangement of the workshops. Rule-bound logic governed the

structure of the discussions, and the clarity of that structure was particularly important because what was being discussed—drafts of poems and stories—was unquantifiable,

immeasurable. Those discussions deserved everyone’s full attention, so we made it our goal to eliminate distractions regarding the organization of the groups.

Is it too much to say that my colleague’s habitual contemplation of solitaire (and, I

later learned, a variety of puzzles in newspapers and magazines) encouraged her to see

administrative challenges as puzzles to be solved? Is it so far-fetched to think that a poet

who would write a book-length series of sonnets might be inclined to see how other kinds of forms might contain and productively shape less poetic material?

The correlation between certain types of puzzles and, say, forms of poetry is fairly

straightforward.

Sudoku—a puzzle that adheres to the following constraints: • • • • • • •

It must be a nine-by-nine grid.

The grid must be further divided into nine three-by-three squares.

Each cell in the grid must be filled with the numbers 1—9.

No number may be repeated in any horizontal line.

No number may be repeated in any vertical line.

No number may be repeated in any three-by-three square.

The puzzle composer omits certain numbers, and those omissions allow for one

unique solution.

Villanelle—a poem that adheres to the following constraints: • • • • • • • • •

It must have nineteen lines.

The nineteen lines must be further divided into six stanzas.

The first five stanzas must be tercets.

The final stanza must be a quatrain.

The poem must have two refrains.

The poem must have two repeating rhymes.

The repeating rhymes must be in the first and final lines of the first tercet.

The rhymes must repeat alternately in tercets two through five.

The quatrain must include both repeated lines and both rhymes.

This isn’t to say that the tasks faced by the puzzle composer and the poet are

essentially identical. The puzzle composer’s only responsibility is to create a functional

puzzle (though some composers are much more ambitious). The poet’s task is not simply to fulfill the requirements of the form but to use it to create something unique and beautiful. The point is that, to the extent the formal poet begins with “rules,” or

constraints, she has a container to work in and against. While fiction writers may not have the benefit of predefined forms (there are no rules for the short story that come near the specificity of the rules for the villanelle), every writer has the option, in every story or novel, to create his own rules, his own form.

Puzzle solvers have their biases. An avid fan of the New York Times weekend

crosswords might speak scornfully of those who attempt only the easier Monday through

Thursday puzzles; Monday through Thursday crossword fans might belittle those who go no further than jumbled words and their cartoon punch lines; jumbled-word solvers can

be heard to speak disdainfully of sudoku fans; and any of the above might heap abuse on those calm, methodical people content to circle “hidden” words. But then, diagramless crossword fans don’t think much of the puzzles with black squares, avid followers of

composers like Thomas Snyder (“Dr. Sudoku”) have no time for the computer-generated sudoku that fill the airport and grocery store shelves, and people who prefer chess

problems know better than to bother with any of them. Peering down on all of this are the aficionados who collect Oskar van Deventer’s mechanical puzzles or who have dog-eared copies of Martin Gardner’s books. This attitude translates as My puzzles offer intellectual

stimulation; your puzzles are childish. But there are also people who think, My puzzles are

fun; your puzzles are work; those who think, While I’m too intimidated to say so, I don’t even know how to start those puzzles you do; and those who feel confident that All of you people are wasting your time.

That last group includes those who claim to be completely immune to puzzles. But

any investment manager, political campaign strategist, teacher creating a test, lawyer

framing a case, carpenter framing a house, baseball manager making out a lineup, chef planning a menu, designer laying out a magazine or website, or busy parent trying to

coordinate children’s school and soccer schedules is actively involved in puzzle solving.

Each task has a goal, elements to put to use (lumber, players, vegetables), and rules or constraints (time, money, left- and right-handed batters who also need to field), and

success or failure is usually fairly clear (either all the children are clothed when they get

on the bus, or not). So that last attitude actually translates as something like, I don’t have

time for those frivolous puzzles of yours; I’m busy solving real ones. The truth is we all

practice for life by solving puzzles of one kind or another nearly from birth. (Who comes

when I cry? How soon? To help, or to scold?) We could even say that each of us represents one solution to a puzzle, a unique combination of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes.

Puzzles focus our attention on a select body of knowledge and a single task. To that

extent—and to the extent that each puzzle has one or more correct answers—they

represent closed systems, and a kind of pure knowledge, a miniature world in which some

decisions are right, others are wrong, and ultimately there can be no question about which are which. It can be refreshing to mentally inhabit, even for a few minutes, a world in

which a goal and the means of reaching it are perfectly clear, and where our reward is

complete comprehension of the whole. Of course, us being us, as soon as we attain that comprehension, we lose interest. We turn the page.

And there we see the crucial difference between fiction and poetry and puzzles.

While composing a piece of fiction is like assembling a puzzle, the finished work is not

presented by the writer as a puzzle for the reader to solve. There may be puzzles within the story, elements of plot or character or imagery or meaning that require the reader’s active participation, but the story as a whole is not a problem with a solution. Like

Ariadne’s thread allowing Theseus to journey into—and safely out of—the mythical

labyrinth, a story means to lead the reader somewhere. But the destination isn’t a

monster, or a pot of gold, or a bit of wisdom. Instead, the destination is something—or several things—to contemplate. The best stories and novels lead the reader not to an explanation, but to a place of wonder.

On June 18, 2015, Pope Francis issued his encyclical describing climate change and environmental degradation as moral issues and calling for swift action in response to these crises. Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, edited by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson, set the stage several years ago for this discussion, including writings of two previous popes and other religious leaders on the need for environmental responsibility based on biblical and spiritual calling, as well as more than eighty other visionaries—naturalists, scientists, elected officials, business leaders, activists, and writers—on our individual and collective moral responsibility to do the right thing for the future of our planet, its animals, its plants, and its people.

Moral Ground provides people of any religion or worldview with reasons—good, powerful reasons—to respond, to take themselves seriously as moral agents, to reclaim the right to live the lives they believe in, to live as people of integrity—conscientious, compassionate,

joyous, and just. In addition to a wide range of compelling writings, the editors of Moral Ground give action points following each section. Their concrete suggestions about what each of us can do to combat climate change and make a positive contribution are wise counsel for everyone who cares about the planet we leave our children and grandchildren.

Learn more

*** “The Call to Forgiveness at the End of the Day,” by Kathleen Dean Moore All those years, the Swainson’s thrushes were the first to call in the mornings. Their songs

spiraled like mist from the swale to the pink sky. That’s when I would take a cup of tea and walk into the meadow. Swallows sat on the highest perches, whispering as they waited for light to stream onto the pond. Then they sailed through the midges, scattering motes of wing-light. Chipping sparrows buzzed like sewing machines as soon as the sun lit the Douglas firs. If I kissed the knuckle of my thumb, they came closer and trilled again.

For years there were flocks of goldfinches. After my husband and I poisoned the bull

thistles on the far side of the pond, the goldfinches perched in the willows. When they

landed there, dew shook from the branches into the pond, throwing light into new leaves where chickadees chirped. The garbage truck backed down the lane, beeping its backup call, making the frogs sing, even in the day.

Oh, there was music in the mornings, all those years. In the overture to the day, each

bird added its call until the morning was an ecstasy of music that faded only when the

diesel pumps kicked on to pull water from the stream to the neighbor’s bing cherry trees.

Evenings were glorious too. Just as the sun set, little brown bats began to fly. If a bat

swooped close, I heard its tiny sonar chirps, just at the highest reach of my hearing. Each

downward flitter of its wings squeezed its lungs and pumped out another chirp, the way a

pump-organ exhales Bach. Frogs sang and sang, but not like bats or birds. Like violins,

violin strings just touched by the bow, the bow touching and withdrawing. They sang all

evening, thousands of violins, and into the night. They sang while crows flew into the oaks and settled their wings, while garter snakes, their stomachs extended with frogs, crawled

finally under the fallen bark of the oaks and stretched their lengths against cold ground.

I don’t know how many frogs there were in the pond then. Thousands. Tens of

thousands. Clumps of eggs like eyeballs in aspic. Neighborhood children poked them with sticks to watch their jelly shake. When the eggs hatched, there were tadpoles. I have seen the shallow edge of the pond black with wiggling tadpoles. There were that many, each

with a song growing inside it and tiny black legs poking out behind. Just at dusk, a hooded

merganser would sweep over the water, or a pair of geese, silencing the frogs. Then it was the violins again, and geese muttering.

In the years when the frog choruses began to fade, scientists said it was a fungus, or

maybe bullfrogs were eating the tadpoles. No one knew what to do about the fungus, but

people tried to stop the bullfrogs. Standing on the dike, my neighbor shot frogs with a pellet

gun, embedding silver BBs in their heads, a dozen holes, until she said How many holes can I make in a frog’s face before it dies? Give me something more powerful. So she took a shotgun and filled the bull-frogs with buckshot until, legs snapped, faces caved in, they slowly sank away. Ravens belled from the top of the oak.

When the bats stopped coming, they said that was a fungus too. When the

goldfinches came in pairs, not flocks, we told each other the flocks must be feeding in a neighbor’s field. No one could guess where the thrushes had gone.

Two springs later, there were drifts of tiny white skins scattered in the shallows like

dustrags in the dusk. I scooped one up with a stick. It was a frog skin, a perfect empty sack, white, intact, but with no frog inside—cleaned, I supposed, by snails or winter—and not

just one. Empty frogs scattered on the muddy bottom of the pond. They were as empty as the perfect emptiness of a bell, the perfectly shaped absence ringing the angelus, the evening song, the call for forgiveness at the end of the day.

As it happened, that was the spring when our granddaughter was born. I brought

her to the pond so she could feel the comfort I had known there for so many years. Killdeer waddled in the mud by the shore, but even then, not so many as before. By then, the pond had sunk into its warm, weedy places, leaving an expanse of cracked earth. Ahead of the

coming heat, butterflies fed in the mud between the cracks, unrolling their tongues to touch salty soil.

I held my granddaughter in my arms and sang to her then, an old lullaby that made

her soften like wax in a flame, molding her little body to my bones. Hush-a-bye, don’t you

cry. Go to sleep, you little baby. Birds and the butterflies, fly through the land. I held her close, weighing the chances of the birds and the butterflies. She fell asleep in my arms, unafraid.

I will tell you, I was so afraid.

Poets warned us, writing of the heartbreaking beauty that will remain when there is

no heart to break for it. But what if it is worse than that? What if it’s the heartbroken

children who remain in a world without beauty? How will they find solace in a world without wild music? How will they thrive without green hills edged with oaks? How will they

forgive us for letting frog-song slip away? When my granddaughter looks back at me, I will

be on my knees, begging her to say I did all I could.

I didn’t do all I could have done.

It isn’t enough to love a child and wish her well. It isn’t enough to open my heart to a

bird-graced morning. Can I claim to love a morning if I don’t protect what creates its beauty? Can I claim to love a child if I don’t use all the power of my beating heart to

preserve a world that nourishes children’s joy? Loving is not a kind of la-de-da. Loving is a

sacred trust. To love is to affirm the absolute worth of what you love and to pledge your life to its thriving—to protect it fiercely and faithfully, for all time.

My husband and I were there when the last salmon died in the stream. When we

came upon her in the creek, her flank was torn and moldy. She had already poured the rich, red life from her muscles into her hopeless eggs. She floated downstream with the current, twitching when I pushed her with a stick to turn her upstream again. Sometimes her jaws gaped, still trying to move water over her gills. Sometimes she tried to swim. But she

bumped against rocks, spilling eggs onto the stones. Without reason, she pushed her head into the air and gasped. We waded beside her until she died. When she was dead, she

floated with her tail just above the surface, washing downstream until she lodged on a

gravel bar. The music she made was the riffle of rib-bones raking water, then no sound at all as her body settled to the bottom of the pool.

I buried my face in my hands, even as I stood in the water with the current shining

against my shins. Oh, we had known the music of salmon moving upstream. When the

streams were full of salmon, crows called again and again, and seagulls coughed on the

gravel bars. Orioles sang, their heads thrown back with singing. Eagles clattered. Wading

upstream, we walked through waves of carrion flies that lifted off the carcasses to swarm in our faces, buzzing like electrical current. Water lifted and splashed, swept by strong gray

tails, and pebbles rolled downstream. It was a crashing coda, the slam and the buzz and the

gull-scream.

Ring the angelus for the salmon and the swallows. Ring the bells for frogs floating in

bent reeds. Ring the bells for all of us who did not save the songs. Holy Mary mother of god, ring the bells for every sacred emptiness. Let them echo in the silence at the end of the day.

Forgiveness is too much to ask. I would pray for only this: that our granddaughter would

hear again the little lick of music, that grace note toward the end of a meadowlark’s song.

Meadowlarks. There were meadowlarks. They sang like angels in the morning.