Frogs

 I first heard the frog chorus the last week of February. I’m not talking about solos or chamber choirs. The chorus I heard was made up of a gazillion frogs in the marsh where a branch runs into Alexander Lake. The frogs weren’t as loud as a jet engine — but they were close. The peace and quiet we seek is not always quiet.

The chorus reminds me that spring comes in dribbles. Frogs are always early. They start before the lawnmowers do.

The chorus always reminds me of Roy Bedichek’s remark that frogs don’t so much eat to live as live to be eaten. Frogs are so prolific and nourish so many predators that Bedichek saw them as symbols of the food chain.

As I was thinking about it, a great blue heron moseyed up the lake toward the chorus.

Edward Hoagland said the frogs say jugarum. I don’t think that’s quite right, but I can’t do better today.

What strategy requires

 Good strategy presumes good sociology and good anthropology.

That’s a maxim of Bernard Brodie, sometimes called the American Clausewitz. Brodie got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago just before the United States entered World War II. His point was that you can’t control your adversaries without knowing something about them.

Brodie was among the people who changed the way we think about war — and even Americans do think deeply about war. If you allowed ordinary citizens to tour a fleet headquarters, the big surprise would not be the technology but the number of people who have graduate degrees.

I think the U.S. military has an excellent idea about whether it’s reasonable to expect a regime change from the president’s war against Iran.

But I’m prejudiced. I don’t think anyone at the White House knows enough about sociology and anthropology to conquer Minneapolis, much less Iran.

Independence Day

 Texas was declared an independent republic on March 2, 1836. It was the shameful era of “Indian removal,” when Native Americans were driven from their homelands in places like Georgia to lands west of the Mississippi. It was a defining feature of Jacksonian democracy, which was kind of like the democracy we have today.

The Anglos who settled Texas were mostly Southerners who were filled with the spirit of that day. The policy of the new republic was rid the country Native peoples.

The new republic spent so much money doing that it went into debt. If you’re puzzled by why Texas has so little public land compared to other Western states, it helps to remember it had so much debt it had to sell everything. If you’re puzzled why Texas has almost no reservations for Native peoples, it helps to remember that shameful history.

The stories about Texas are like the myths of the ancient Greeks. Homer says the story of Jason and the Argonauts was popular in his day. But there were problems with the tale even then. If you look at the route Jason and Medea used to return after stealing the Golden Fleece, you see that the tales were invented before the Greeks knew much about geography.

Some of the rivers that Jason and Medea took didn’t run into lakes that the myths imagined. The rivers that connected into a kind of escape route didn’t connect. Rivers didn’t run into the right seas.

Geographers and historians gradually learned better, but they couldn’t contradict the hallowed myths without getting into trouble. So the myths kept splintering, getting ever more convoluted, ever more impossible to believe.

If you’re from Texas, all this might sound familiar. It’s what folks call heritage.

The disappearing bridge

 The Rock Bridge, a landmark in the map in my mind, was gone when we went to check on it. The Yellow River, high and angry, covered the boulders that make up the bridge that the ancient peoples used.

The authorities reported the river crested at 23 feet to the north. That’s a lot of flooding. At the Rock Bridge the river was mainly in the channel, though just barely. Usually, you see steep banks along the river with a drop of perhaps 10 feet. The river was within a foot of the top and spilled over into the bottom in places.

The rains came at night. When people awoke, they awoke to news of a war, rather than to the wonders of nature.

Hoagland: ‘Small Silences’

 When he was 8, Edward Hoagland discovered Dr. Green’s magical pond by following a shallow stream through the woods. The family had moved 45 miles from New York City to Connecticut during World War II. 

I’d lie on my back on a patch of moss watching a swaying poplar’s branches interlace with another’s, and the tremulous leaves vibrate, and the clouds forgather to parade zoologically overhead, and felt linked to the whole matrix, as you either do or you don’t throughout the rest of your life. And childhood — nine or ten, I think — is when this best happens. It’s when you develop a capacity for quiet, a confidence in your solitude, your rapport with a Nature both animate and not so much so: what winged things possibly feel, the blessing of water, the rhythm of weather, and what might bite you and what will not.

 

Hoagland’s essay “Small Silences” is about our connection with the natural world. I think the loss of that connection is behind our penchant for destroying the Earth. It’s hard to abuse something you have a connection with.

The essay has an interesting point that you might not expect to find in an essay on natural history: how some children have to cultivate their interests in secrecy.

Hoagland’s father boycotted the Metropolitan Opera when it invited Marian Anderson to sing. Hoagland’s father fired the maid, fearing young Edward was developing an attachment to a Black woman.

 

I learned from the episode not to betray to a third party affection for anybody who might get fired because of it, or to divulge any passion that might thereafter be denied me.

 

The budding naturalist kept his passion for nature to himself.

• Source: Edward Hoagland’s essay “Small Silences” is in Sex and the River Styx; White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011, pp. 11 and 8-9.

Letting the imagination off the leash

 I’ve mentioned this before, but Montaigne thought that old people should practice wanton thoughts.

When we’re young, we need to hear voices urging us to virtue. But when we’re old, the voice inside tends to deliver one sermon after another. We’ve gone from being unbridled to hogtied.

The cure: Let the imagination off the leash. Not all the time. Once a day is plenty.

You can find many books offering advice on aging, but I don’t think you can beat Montaigne. He enjoyed retirement. He loved to think about what he’d learned about people and about himself.

 

Here, I am in short putting the finishing touches to a particular man, not making another one instead.

 

• Source and notes: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The advice on wanton thoughts is from “On some lines from Virgil,” p. 948.  The quotation is from “On restraining your will,” p. 1143.

For five-year-old note on this topic, see “Practicing wanton thoughts,” Sept. 8, 2021. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2021/09/practicing-wanton-thoughts.html

I’m marking another birthday. Montaigne was born Feb. 28, 1533 at the Chateau de Montaigne.

A writing lesson from Steinbeck

 When I was young and trying to learn about writing, my father told me about the Flesch-Kincaid tests. I wondered how complicated writing had to be to be interesting. I collected some samples from famous authors to see what grade-level each was writing at.

I learned that most of the writers I admired wrote a simpler prose than I had learned to write in high school.

I learned that John Steinbeck had the simplest style. The tests suggested that kids in elementary school could read him.

I was just starting out. I’ve learned to think about writing in different ways. But I still remember that lesson, and I’m thinking of Steinbeck on his birthday. He was born on Feb. 27, 1902, in Salinas, Calif.