The story close to home

 Maybe you can be too close to a story. Hunter Kay’s “The Fifth Generation” was set in East Texas.

The protagonist, a recent high school graduate named Charles, is from Palestine, a small town about 30 miles from my grandfather’s farm. A spectacular fight takes place in the pool hall in Jacksonville. The pool hall was about 3 miles from grandfather’s farm.

I read the story seeing places that I know. I’m not sure it would be the same for you.

Charles is a rich kid who doesn’t know what to do with his life and so he goes to a bar, where he gets gloriously drunk and falls in with Gary, a young worker on a drilling rig. The two become partners, hauling pipe for the rig operator, and doing things that young men do when they are just intent on living life, rather than thinking about it.

 

What has been bred out of us? “Takes five generations to make a gentleman,” my grandmother used to say.

 

Charles finds himself changing — in some ways for the good. But life on the rig is a vacation for him. It’s not for Gary.

It’s a troubling, haunting story. Kay wrote it when he was in his 20s, working on a master’s thesis at Vanderbilt. The story was admired and anthologized. I never saw another story from him, and I’d have liked to have read more.

He was the kind of fellow I tend to like. He did a bit of gardening and liked to talk about literature. I was glad to hear that had hadn’t stopped writing and was working on a book when he died. I hope someone publishes it.

• Sources: Hunter Kay’s “The Fifth Generation” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 183-206. The quotation is on p. 183.

E. Thomas Wood, “Hunter Kay, 1948-2020”; Medium, June 20, 2020. It’s here:

https://medium.com/@ethomaswood/hunter-kay-1948-2020-e3b833bbcdf2

John Aubrey, notetaker

 Peter Davidson reminds us that this month is the 400^th anniversary of John Aubrey’s birth.

In Davidson’s telling, Aubrey was a patron saint of observers, collectors and notetakers. If you’ve read Aubrey and visit a place he wrote about, you think about what he saw and how he saw it. Davidson says that Aubrey’s writings “enchant the township.”

A writer who does that is a good writer.

I’ve read little of Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Davidson convinced me that I’ve not read nearly enough.

I caught Aubrey’s love of gossip and anecdote. I missed his interest in archeology, antiquities and what we’d now call anthropology.

Davidson paints him as a fellow of endless curiosity. If Aubrey were alive today, he’d probably be collecting notes in notebooks and publishing a few online.

• Source: Peter Davidson, “Speaking Through the Ages: John Aubrey at four hundred”; The Literary Review, March 2026. It’s here:
https://literaryreview.co.uk/speaking-through-the-ages

Aubrey was born March 12, 1626, in Wiltshire. I don’t know him well as a writer and missed marking the day. The month will have to do.

A chronic state of mind

 Edith Wharton, describing American and British expatriates, said: 

they lived in a chronic state of mental inaccuracy, excitement and inertia, which made it vaguely exhilarating to lie and definitely fatiguing to be truthful.

 

That’s from The Mother’s Recompense, published in 1925. Though it’s more than 100 years old, I think that “a chronic state of mental inaccuracy” is a phrase for our times.

• Source: I found the quotation when I stumbled across the engaging blog Old Geezer Re-Reading. It’s here: 

https://oldgeezerrereadingblog.wordpress.com/2025/10/21/reading-an-edith-wharton-from-1925/

You sometimes find astonishing things while looking for something else.

A demanding writer

 Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray” reminds me of a Tolstoy story.

You could say that it’s about a little boy going to the dentist or that it’s about a little boy growing to be a man. Maybe it’s a retelling of one of the parables found in the gospels.

With Gaines, as with Tolstoy, you can’t rush through the story and get to a point. You have to take your time, read slowly, go on a journey. Along the way, it’s necessary for you to feel cold and hunger. It won’t do to just note that cold and hunger are features of the world. You must take time to feel them.

Gaines is a demanding writer in that way.

There’s a story within a story about the little boy, James, who is 8, having to kill red birds so the family will have something to eat. His father is in the Army, and his mother is doing farm work, trying to feed the children.

James traps and kills game, but he can’t bring himself to kill the red birds. He cries and pleads. His mother beats him. In exasperation, she kills one of the red birds in the trap before making him kill the other. 

 

Suppose she had to go away? That’s why I had to do it. Suppose she had to go away like Daddy went away? Then who was go’n look after us? They had to be somebody to carry on. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. Auntie and Monsieur Bayonne talked to me and made me see.

 

Relatives and neighbors socialize little boys in the hard lessons they must learn. You might wonder about some of the lessons that we, as a society, make some children learn. 

The story has many wonders.

I had never realized the spiritual significance of the word “Stop!”

It can be the first word spoken by someone who is paying attention to the plight of a poor woman and her son when everyone else is distracted or indifferent. It’s what you say when you want people to slow down enough to let you help. It can be a wonderful word.

• Source: Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 103-31. The quotation is on p. 109.

Some Irish folk in Georgia

 On Jan. 10, 1734, a sloop limped into Savannah in the new colony of Georgia. Sloops are small ships, and this one was bringing indentured servants from Ireland to New England. The ship had been battered in storms. Food ran out. When the ship landed, only 40 servants — 34 men and six women — were alive.

In a letter to the colony’s trustees, James Oglethorpe, the colony’s founder, told about the Irish survivors:

 

As they were likewise ready to perish through misery, I thought it an act of charity to buy them, which I did, giving five pounds a head.

 

Oglethorpe was not writing social history. He was explaining expenses to his board.

Accounting for the 40, Oglethorpe said that he gave one to each of the widows in the colony to do farm work. Others went to build a sawmill. Some contracts were sold at sweet rates to magistrates who were so busy with public service they were behind in improving their own lands.

In 1734, slavery was illegal in Georgia. Labor was in short supply. Neighboring South Carolina was the wealthiest of the North American colonies — its wealth built of the exploitation of enslaved Africans. From the beginning, wealthy people in Georgia lobbied to make slavery legal in Georgia.

The indentured servants were not the first Irish to arrive in Georgia. A few were among the original settlers who claimed land in 1732. But most Irish immigrants came as laborers. When Boston and New York took steps to limit Irish immigration, Savannah remained an open door.

The history books say later generations of Irish laborers helped build the canals around Augusta and the railroads that made Atlanta a city.

But I’m new here and still learning this place.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Habermas’s notion of a ‘public sphere’

 I guess you heard that Jürgen Habermas died. The New York Times said he was best known for his notion of a “public sphere.”

He theorized that democracy emerged and could continue to exist in a healthy form only if there was a space that was outside the control of the state, where deliberation and the exchange of ideas could freely occur.

 

Habermas was a fan of coffeeshops. He could go on at length about their history in contributing to the development of civilized thought. He thought that coffeeshops were a kind of model for what a public sphere could be.

Through my working years, I thought that newspapers could be — and should be — another public sphere.

When I tried to explain that idea, I didn’t start with a discussion of investigative reporting but with something simpler: the problems of editing letters to the editor.

In the old days, someone who was known in a community acted as a referee of the public arguments. If he or she did it well, the Sunday paper would have at least two pages of letters offering heated but reasonable discussion of the public’s business.

In more modern times, editors have been dismissed as useless gatekeepers, something that the Internet has proved we can all do without. I find the new way of doing things as enjoyable as watching a basketball game without a referee — an experience that is lacking.

I like the new technology. But I don’t think we’ve learned to use it correctly.

It seems to me that if you define “technology” broadly, you are not talking solely about new machinery and new methods of accounting for profit and loss. You are thinking about features that encourage deliberation and the free exchange of ideas.

Shiny new machinery and shiny new business models don’t necessarily do that.

• Source: Gal Beckerman, “Jürgen Habermas Dies at 96; One of Postwar German’s Most Influential Thinkers”; The New York Times, March 14, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/books/jurgen-habermas-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TVA.yUxm.bCnRGVCQUcDZ&smid=nytcore-ios-share

The public service of sapsuckers

 Several yellow-bellied sapsuckers visit our feeders. They play a role in the ecology of our homestead and the neighborhood.

Sapsuckers drill holes in trees, making little wells of sap. The wells provide nutrients to sapsuckers and to other animals, including hummingbirds, warblers, corvids, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, voles and all kinds of invertebrates. The biologists call those other animals “secondary consumers.” Deer lick sugars from the wells.

Sap is not exactly nectar, but it does contain sugars. Hummingbirds rely on the sapsuckers’ wells before the flowering plants start blooming.

The Wise Woman and I are waiting on hummingbirds, which usually arrive in March. While hanging the feeders, I wondered what other sources of nectar hummingbirds could find in early spring.

I found a paper in Ecology and Evolution that strikes me as a model.

Researchers from the University of Idaho and the U.S. Geological Survey staked out sapsucker wells in Colorado using three methods: direct observation, camera trapping and environmental DNA analysis.

They compared the methods. As you’d expect, the technology is a big step forward. Camera trapping involves motion-activated cameras that can record images day and night. Environmental DNA analysis involves swabbing the area around the wells and running the samples through an automated system.

The researchers’ list of animals that visited the sap wells in Colorado was interesting. I wish researchers in Georgia would do a similar study.

• Source: Rick Clawges, Shannon Blair, Jan Eitel, Leona K. Svancara, Lee Vierling and Kerri Vierling, “Sapsucker Wells as a Keystone Nutritional Resource: Evaluating Methods for Detection of Secondary Sap Consumers”; Ecology and Evolution, Oct. 9, 2025, 15(10):e72277. Doi: 10.1002/ece3.72277. It’s here:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12509469/

 

Composing with notes

 Jillian Hess, a scholar who is interested in notes and notetaking, says that Susan Sontag used notebooks to compose in two ways.

First, Sontag used her notebooks to compose her essays. She collected and sorted materials on subjects that intrigued her. She collected pages of quotations she wanted to use and lists of points she wanted to make. She had lists of words to use and avoid. (Some writers pay more attention to diction than others.) By the time she sat down at the typewriter, her materials were in hand. At that point, she was almost making a collage.

Second, Sontag used her notebooks to compose herself, to make the personality she wanted to be. Hess says Sontag wanted to be the person who was interested in everything. I think some of us are generalists by temperament. We couldn’t specialize in any one field without doing violence to our psyches.

Sontag liked to read the notes of other writers. In 1949, when she was a student, she noted that reading André Gide’s Journals helped her compose herself.

 

They affect me in the same magical way; for immersion into an order and a discipline is the only thing that can soothe me….

 

Immersing yourself into someone else’s order and discipline is immersing yourself in another person’s mind. I love to do that, tramping around in the mind of someone whose order and disciplines of thinking are not like mine. Like Sontag, I like reading other people’s journals, notebooks, diaries and blogs.

• Source: Jillian Hess’s “Susan Sontag's Playground of Ideas” is in her Noted on Substack, March 2, 2026. It’s here:

https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/susan-sontags-playground-of-ideas?utm_medium=email

A sense of home

 Returning from South Georgia, we went to Arabia Mountain to see if the elf-orpine plants had painted the granite outcrops red.

They had.

These primitive little plants, which had been green the last time we saw them, change colors in February or March. It’s one of the signs of early spring.

Knowing that, the Wise Woman and I made it a point to get out of the house and look. Without saying much about it, both of us came in from the hike with a little firmer sense that this place is indeed home.

Millions of years ago, Diamorpha smallii adapted to live on the granite. As the little plants die and decay, layers of soil build up in the crevices of the rock. Lichens and mosses appear. Larger flowering plants follow. Eventually, you might see trees.

Biologists call this concept “succession.” I’m fascinated and am prone to go on about it.

Among the blooming plants at Arabia Mountain:

• Dimpled trout lily, Erythronium umbilicatum.

• Wooly ragwort, Packera dubia.

• Yellow jessamine,  Gelsemium sempervirens.

• Violets, Viola sororia.

Soon, it’ll be time for cross vine, Bignonia capreolata. The yellow and maroon flowers remind me of Indian blankets of Texas. I’ll be watching.

Blip, a conjugation

 I blip, you blip, he, she and it blips.

Chris Wright, energy secretary, said that after the United States and Israel struck Iran last year, markets stayed steady. His words:

 

Oil prices blipped up and then went back down.

 

This time, the average price of gasoline in Georgia has gone from $2.78 to $3.22.

I am blipped, you are blipped, we are blipped — all of us.

Orchard country

 The trip to Albany took us into a part of Georgia we hadn’t seen. It’s orchard country.

People know about Georgia peaches, but there are as many pecans as peaches. The orchards tend to alternate — perhaps 20 acres of pecans and then 30 acres of peaches.

A few varieties of peaches were blooming. Most were not. I was surprised that in some orchards the trees had been heavily pruned — almost espaliers. When I asked a native, she patiently explained that sunlight is vital to a ripe peach, so the trees are shaped to let in light.

The native was Sally, who runs Grandeur Farm Retreat, a bed and breakfast in Marshallville. Sally’s farm was set up to raise horses — surrey racers. Grandeur was an early winner. The breakfast was superb, and so was the conversation with Sally and her other guests. The couple we talked to visit repeatedly. The “retreat” in the name is more fact than marketing.

Marshallville doesn’t have enough traffic to have a stoplight. But it does have Massee Lane Gardens, with a collection of a thousand varieties of camellias. It was lovely in early spring, loud with the voices of birds and children.

A few notes on publishing

 Scattershooting, while wondering about the book publishing biz:

• The crowd at the Georgia Indie Book Fair was diverse. We had all races and ages, but we also had diverse interests and tastes: fantasy, mystery, romance, crime. Most of the people I talked to were serious readers. They had developed and refined their own tastes. They were at a fair featuring independent publishers because they wanted something different. People who read a book a week said their genre had become predictable and repetitive. The book they wanted to read hadn’t been written.

• I love the major publishers. I buy their books. But I’ve been writing books because I’ve gotten to that same place as a reader. I wanted to see whether I could write the kind of book I want to read. I haven’t succeeded. I also haven’t given up.

• Small publishers can afford to be more innovative. The larger the company, the costlier the mistake in judgment about what readers want. This is not ideology. It’s just business. The bigger the company, the higher the overheads. Our family business can afford a press run of 40 books. It’s not a windfall if it’s a hit, but it’s not a disaster if it’s a miss. 

• The Wise Woman and I have had a long-running argument. I would like to stay at home and write books. She says we have an obligation to put our work before readers to test it, to see if our judgments about what’s worthwhile resonate with those of others. She retired as an English professor, so she can recite the history of small presses, telling how many innovations in literature came from the little guys. She would win the argument anyway. But it’s nice to hear that history again when I’m schlepping crates of books into the truck. And she’s right, of course. It’s always right to talk to readers, to see what they think.

Writing lessons from Truman Capote

 You can start a story in fewer than 10 words. Here’s the first sentence of Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays”:

Yesterday afternoon the six-o’clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit.

 

We readers learn quickly that Miss Bobbit was 10 and that, though a child, she behaved like an adult. She took over the town. Everything seemed to revolve around her and her plans.

That’s what we learn quickly. What we learn slowly is how such a commanding personality, a personality so composed, could get lost for a moment. It was a little girl, not an adult, that run across the road without looking both ways.

If you start a story by giving away the ending, you have to show why that the ending seems to have been inevitable, given the character of the characters. I think Capote’s story passes the test.

I can admire the artistry, but the story, to me, has a fatal flaw. The flaw is a lack of artistry in handling an ugly episode of racism. A Black child, Rosalba Cat, is abused by white boys who are showing off. Miss Bobbit rescues Rosalba and declares that they are sisters. The point is that Miss Bobbit has such a forceful character that she changes the ways of the town. What was formerly unthinkable is accepted.

Acts of racism, like most other acts of violence, are gratuitous, so they’re tough to handle in fiction. A scene can be realistic and still be gratuitous. The details of the abuse in this story, which seemed fine to book publishers in 1948, seem gratuitous to me in 2026.

• Source: Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 59-76.

Ocmulgee Mounds

 When archeologists were excavating the Ocmulgee Mounds during the Great Depression, they uncovered the floor of a council house. Perhaps it’s something that could have happened only during the era of the Works Progress Administration: the archeologists and their laborers reconstructed it.

They reframed the roof, covered the rafters with wattle and mounded earth on top. The entrance is low — you walk through a tunnel, crouching. When you emerge, the high roof makes the chamber feel like a cathedral.

An earthen bench follows the circumference. In the center is a firepit, and the roof is open above the fire.

You can almost see ancient people sitting on those benches, taking counsel.

Arthur Kelly, another Texan who made Georgia his home, led the excavations from 1933 to 1941. The collection of artifacts is on display at a museum.

I’m still trying to piece together the history of the ancient peoples of Georgia. The site on the Ocmulgee River has been occupied for 17,000 years. The mound builders, people of the Mississippian Culture, didn’t arrive until about 800 of the Common Era.

They came from the northwest — you can tell by the pottery. They built a series of mounds, flat-topped and crowned with temples and the homes of chieftains. Like other Mississippian sites, Ocmulgee was near a river and had a plaza and ballfield. The people cultivated immense fields. The main crop was corn.

The Ocmulgee community covered a square mile. It lasted for three centuries.

When the Europeans arrived 400 years later, they found the Muskogee people, whom the English called the Creek Indians. I would love to know more about how one culture emerged from another.

The Ocmulgee Mounds are about 75 miles south of Stone Mountain in Macon. We climbed the Temple Mound, the tallest at 55 feet, and looked at the Ocmulgee River below and the Macon skyline in the distance. It feels like a sacred place.

But this country has treated its heritage with tragic indifference. During the 18^th century, workers cut two railroad lines through the mounds. If you visit the site, at least one of the emotions you might feel is rage.

• Note: For an earlier note on the Mississippian Culture in Georgia, see “Etowah, Oct. 8, 2025. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/search?q=Etowah

Writers meeting readers

 We were selling books at the Georgia Indie Book Fair in Albany, and the Wise Woman, who runs the family business, was talking about a book that is based on her great-great-great-grandmother Easter.

Easter was a Cherokee woman who was driven off her land in Georgia in the 1830s. Relatives ended up on the Trail of Tears, but Easter refused to be driven and survived by blending into a community of African Americans in Tennessee.

It was a choice rooted in defiance, and it shaped a family’s identity. A Home for Easter begins a series of books about defiant women. The torch is passed from mother to daughter. Each generation finds a way to oppose the bigotry and oppression of the day.

At the book fair, three African American women — perhaps representing three generations — were talking to the Wise Woman and asking questions.

The Wise Woman explained that her books are fiction. They refer to historical characters. But so much information about her ancestors has been lost, she has had to reinvent them — or re-enliven then — with stories.

The older women were interested in that idea, but the younger woman acted as if she’d seen the burning bush. She didn’t know that you could do that — that you could reclaim family identity in that way.

To me, that scene was a pretty good argument for independent presses.

I love mainstream publishers — at least I’ve loved them enough to have bought hundreds of books they’ve published.

But they don’t publish everything that’s worthwhile.

The family publishing business is not exactly a Fortune 500 company. The revenues are modest, but the conversations are priceless.

A story quickly framed

  Alice Walker’s story Strong Horse Tea is a good example of a story framed quickly and expertly. Here’s the opening: 

Rannie Toomer’s little baby boy Snooks was dying from double pneumonia and whooping cough. She sat away from him gazing into a low fire, her long crusty bottom lip hanging. She was not married. She was not pretty. Was not anything much. And he was all she had.

 

The story is not about a baby. It’s about what people will do when they’re desperate. Rannie is contemptuous of Sarah, an elderly neighbor known for her home cures. Rannie wants a real doctor and accosts the postman, begging him to bring help.

Sarah asks Rannie whether she really believes the white mailman is going to summon the white doctor to help.

People say trust is the foundation of all human relationships. I suppose they’re right. Have you noticed, though, that the lack of trust is a theme in a lot of the literature about my part of the country?

• Source and note: Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forker and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 355-62.

An attitude about politics

 Edward Hoagland had a terrible stutter that disqualified him for some positions — including teaching posts, or so he thought. He had to lie to an Army psychiatrist who doubted whether Hoagland was fit to be drafted.

I admire conscientious objectors and am not much of a fan of military service. But Hoagland was thinking about responsibilities to serve the public good and he didn’t want to be excused when others had to shoulder the same responsibility.

Hoagland’s story used to be common. Many veterans I knew had deferments but went anyway. They just didn’t feel right avoiding a responsibility that their neighbors had to bear.

Some people look down on that sentiment. The story of how Commander-in-Chief Bone Spurs faced his own crisis of conscience is well known, and I won’t belabor it.

But it’s infuriating that people who enlisted in our armed forces because they felt some sense of responsibility for the public good are being led by people who prefer personal profit. That’s despicable in peacetime. Something worse in war.

• Source: Edward Hoagland’s essay “Curtain Calls” is in Sex and the River Styx; White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011, p. 113.

A lovely plant and a thorny concept

 I saw a few strands of moss phlox flowering. The leaves of Phlox subulata are shaped like little awls, which you might guess if you’re a Latinist. The plant is a perennial and forms mats that might remind you of moss. The flowers are usually purple or pink, but the ones I saw were mainly white. It was as if a watercolorist had touched the wet petals with a brush and the purple had run.

Is this lovely plant a native or an invasive species?

I’d say it’s an example of what’s wrong with that concept. The experts say the native range covered much of Eastern North America, extending south to North Carolina. But the plant did well in the Appalachians, which spill into northern Georgia. The line between the Piedmont and the mountains is tricky, so maybe part of the Piedmont.

The experts say Stone Mountain is beyond the native range, but close. Moss phlox does well in our rocky soils, so the garden centers sell seedlings.

What of the plant I saw? How did it get there? As a practical matter, I have no way of knowing whether it found its place with the help of wind, bird, squirrel or gardener.

Native or invasive? I don’t know. I don’t see how experts could know.

Scientific concepts are useful to the extent that they provide answers to questions on a case-by-case basis. With moss phlox, I don’t think there are answers on a case-by-case basis.

Timing the seasons

 I have been watching my dwindling woodpile and thinking about my grandfather.

As the days got warmer, my grandfather would go to the barn and look at his dwindling supply of hay. Each year, he would estimate the number of bales he’d need to get his herd through winter. Old hay loses its nutrients, so leftover bales were discarded with sadness. Any waste is mourned on a farm. Grandfather didn’t want to have a lot of leftover hay — but he sure didn’t want to run out of it either. 

It always pleased him when the weather warmed up and the grass came out just as the barn was empty.

My firewood is getting low just as the weather is warming up. There’s an odd satisfaction when things like that work out.

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.