On Doing What You Love

        In 1957, American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders (creator of the stories behind the Apple Mary cartoon strip whose fictional protagonist was Mary Worth) wrote these words: “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” This brilliant observation didn’t become famous until the late super-Beatle John Lennon  borrowed and paraphrased it in “Beautiful Boy” a couple of decades later, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate or any less introspective in nature.

I often remind myself of this maxim when I find I’m getting upset because things aren’t “going according to plan”, or when I start getting anxious about “reaching a destination”. I mention this because I think I’m pretty typical in this sense and have to make (and do) a conscious effort not to be. I’ve occasionally come across—and quite possibly envied—people who weren’t. I’m talking about people who hear a different drummer, and take heed, from the outset. I mean, we all conform to a certain extent, if we live in anything like civilized society, but these are individuals whose plan seems either to be “no plan” except to live the moment, or to be such a spectacularly great plan that I ask myself how they get away with it. I usually try to placate myself—as do most people, I would guess— by choosing to think that these people have had better breaks than I have, that they’ve been afforded a better destiny, that they’ve had stronger contacts, wealthier families, better jobs, and so on. But if I’m honest with myself, that’s not true, or at least not entirely so. They’ve just made better choices and picked better timing for those choices. Moreover, they’ve been more focused and their focus has been  guided by their heart and their gut more than by their so-called obligations and duties, and surely more than by their fears.

But, as Pablo Neruda said—and despite my inhibitions and self-imposed obligations and endless excuses—“I confess that I have lived.” Not like Neruda, admittedly, and perhaps not even frequently. But then again, not always like my duty-bound and otherwise often pent-up self either. Occasionally, I have busted out, as it were, and when that has happened, it has, as that other great poet, Robert Frost, once wrote, “made all the difference.”     

I recently read a statement that Paul A. Toth—a wonderfully non-mainstream, non-conformist writer with whom I recently became Internet ‘pen pals’—had written about “self-actualization”. After reading it, I realized that I wasn’t quite sure what self-actualization really meant, so I decided to bone up.

Caption: Abraham Maslow (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

It seems that the best known theory of self-actualization is attributed to American social psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970). Maslow theorized that all human motivation resulted from a hierarchy of needs. In other words, people started out with their most basic psychological needs—safety, a sense of belonging, self-esteem—and once these were gradually satisfied, continued seeking to satisfy ever more complex psychological needs, culminating in what he called “self-actualization”. Maslow said, in a nutshell, that each level of accomplishment directed an individual’s behavior toward another level that was not being adequately met. The further the individual progressed, then, the more difficult it became to fulfill the needs of the next, higher level. This, in short, became a lifelong process with few individuals ever reaching true self-actualization.

The idea seemed simple enough. If true, it could explain a lot about both ambition and frustration. But it also got me to thinking, not so much about the process of self-actualization as such, but more about the process of getting to the point at which you can even think about self-actualizing. Seen from today’s perspective, when you read Maslow’s theory, if you are a normal, everyday working stiff, you tend to think, “Okay, the guy’s not talking about me or about people like me.” Why? Because self-actualization has the ring of some higher order to it: like, right, this is for somebody who has his/her life together and now, with the free time I don’t have, can think about seeking out a form of life on a higher plane. This is not about “life in the anthill”, but about a real life of truly free choices.

Truth be told, Maslow was writing in a very different time, considering that he died in 1970. A lot has happened since then. Admittedly, some of it has been good, like the fact that I can write this blog and instantly publish it and send it out to all of you, no matter where in the world you and I happen to be, or that guys like me are able to use this technology to make a living in the international marketplace without ever having to leave the house. But along with this brave new world have come a number of social and economic changes that can only be seen as undesirable side-effects: like the ‘globalization’ that they sold us as a cure-all for poverty, unemployment and manufacturing quality, but that has resulted in globalized poverty, extreme concentration of wealth, cruel competition for too few jobs, poor working conditions, ephemeral job security, poor pay and ever lower standards at all levels. The fact that people have to work harder and longer in order to maintain some semblance of their former living standards, means that “personal self-actualization” keeps getting left “for when I have more time”.

I should note that I’m just thinking out loud here—spitballing, as they say. And I certainly don’t pretend to be speaking for everyone. I’m sure there are lots of people who feel that they have come quite close to achieving their potential and are at least marginally content with their jobs, their careers, their social standing, and with the level of personal success they’ve had in reaching their self-imposed goals (all of which, as I understand it, has a lot to do with self-actualization).

And I should also point out that writer types, like myself, tend to be sort of permanent malcontents, who always seem to think that allowances should be made for their ‘condition’ and that somebody should be kind enough to cover for them—at least for the time being—so that they can get down to the only thing that they consider their real work and the only thing that really matters to them: namely, writing! This is why a lot of writers have spent years trudging from one awful job to another by the time they finally break into print, refusing to take on anything complicated or even enjoyable enough to make them lose focus on their craft.

There are some rather famous examples of this that range from the pathetic to the hilarious.

For instance, Stephen King talks, in his non-fiction work, On Writing, about how he wrote at night after working days in a laundry that washed hospital bedding and how the sheets crawled with maggots that fed on the blood and gore that stained them in the summertime and how he once found a full set of human teeth in the pocket of a surgical tunic. But he still considered himself lucky because he was making an extra piece of change riding the crest of the first alternative girlie mags that sought to compete with Playboy and, for a while, carried short stories—some of which he was able to sell them—before they dropped all literary pretenses and started showing a lot more skin (and other stuff) than Playboy did.

Caption: William Faulkner, 1954, photo by Carl Van Vechten (U.S. Library of Congress)

There is a delightful anecdote—though I have no way of corroborating its veracity—about a time when William Faulkner briefly worked at the University of Mississippi Post Office. By all accounts he took the job because he needed the paycheck but was worse than terrible at it, spending most of his time on the job drinking whisky, playing cards and writing. One day, so the story goes, a post office official came in to find a line of people at the counter and no one there to attend them. He found Faulkner at a table in the back, hard at work on a piece of writing. The official angrily asked what Faulkner thought he was doing, when people were lined up at the counter with no one to wait on them. The author responded just as angrily that he wasn’t about to interrupt his work “every time some sonuvabitch wants to buy a two-cent stamp.”

Caption: Henry Miller, 1940, photo by Carl Van Vechten (U.S. Library of Congress)

One of the most famous self-actualization decisions in contemporary literature is, perhaps, that of Henry Miller. He didn’t decide to be a writer until the 1930s, when he was nearly middle-aged. But after that, he refused to retreat a single pace from that decision, living the artist’s life from then on, surviving more on his charm and his wits than on any serious attempt to ever hold any job other than that of writer again. He symbolizes this in Tropic of Capricorn, when he describes the decision of his main character and narrator—who shares his name in what is a semi-fictional, partly autobiographical work—who walks out on his surreal job as a manager at the ‘Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company’ (Miller worked briefly in such a job for Western Union), never to return.         

In On Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver recalls how he “tried to learn to write fast when I had the time”, while doing a variety of menial jobs that never seemed to pay enough to get him and his family to the end of the month. This is a genuine case of not being able to focus on self-actualization from the outset since Carver found himself a husband (to a sixteen-year-old girl) and father when he was barely nineteen. He supported his wife and newborn daughter, and the son who was born the following year, by working as a janitor, in a sawmill, as a delivery man, a hospital porter, a library assistant, an encyclopedia salesman, a textbook editor, and a service station attendant, among other low-paying jobs. His difficulty coping with this life led to his ever-worsening alcoholism.

Despite “writing fast” it took Carver thirteen years to turn out a slim—but absolutely incomparable—volume of prose called Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?  He was, then, a writer for whom, one might argue, self-actualization really ended up being postponed by the stricture of his self-inflicted guilt, responsibility and feeling of inadequacy, that kept him focused on finding one ‘nowhere’ job after another to keep family, body and soul together, while a gradual decline into alcoholism ended up defeating the purpose of that focus too. But the writing lived on and—despite his not having his other more basic psychological demands under control—triumphed. Born in 1938, it wasn’t until this first book of short fiction was published in 1976 that he took stock of his life and gave up drinking, which had been largely responsible for the recent breakup of his marriage.  

Now living with poet Tess Gallagher, Carver created a new life for himself that bore no resemblance at all to the former one. This provided him with a brief but prolific eleven-year run in which he reached the level of recognition that his work deserved before dying at age fifty. In that single decade, besides teaching English at Syracuse University, he also wrote and published four volumes of short stories and three collections of poetry, being awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award for his efforts. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, the last year of his life.

This past week, I had a running Web dialogue with some other writer friends and colleagues. I don’t know how we got onto the subject, but what was striking about our childhood memories was that none of us could recall when he or she hadn’t wanted to be a writer. Writer/editor Jessica Morrell remembered, for instance, how her mother had told her that the first word out of her mouth wasn’t ma-ma or da-da, but book! Poet Carl Grimsman recalled creating his first storybook when he was four. It was a study in blue called Castles and once he had created the content, he got his mother to act as bookbinder and staple it together for him. Writer Yolanda Fivas remembered knowing how to write a handful of words as a pre-kindergarten infant and wanting to tell a story inspired by the trees, but being frustrated because she didn’t have enough words to do it. Novelist Fara Spence and I shared separate memories of pre-school days when both of us invented symbols to represent the stories in our heads and were content to scribble those and then “read” our stories to others until somebody deigned to teach us the ABCs.

Okay, don’t despair, I’m coming to a point here…

And I guess the point is that perhaps Maslow doesn’t have it quite right, or at least not for some of us. True, maybe some people are born clueless and sort of stumble from one level of self-actualization to another until they get interested in something and then get excited about it, and then get ambitious about it. But maybe there are also people who don’t have to go through nearly so many stages of development before knowing precisely what it is that they want to be and do and accomplish. And maybe the strength of those urges is very nearly equal to what Maslow refers to as basic psychological needs. I talk about writers and artists and musicians because they’re what I understand best. But I’m sure this must be true of other human endeavors as well, of people who seem to be born knowing what it is that they want to do—indeed, that they might almost feel they have to do.

In The Teachings of Don Juan, anthropologist and writer Carlos Castaneda describes a scene in which his Yaqui mentor, don Juan Matus, tries to dissuade him of his white man’s attachment to meaningless priorities. In few words, the message of the Yaqui brujo—as I interpret it, at least—was that nothing that Man can do has any real importance whatsoever, but at the same time, everything that one does is of the utmost importance. This may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, but in reality, it holds an important and highly liberating message. The message is that, within the scheme of infinity, Man, and even the earth itself, are a mere blink of an eye, part of a vast experiment. Within that context what we as individuals do or don’t do with our lives is about as important, in a cosmic sense, as the life goals of an ant might be to us—just before we poison, drown or step on it.

Depending on your mood on any given day, this thought might seem singularly depressing. But seen from a glass-half-full viewpoint, it is truly liberating. What it means is that there is nothing more important, there is no greater priority, than whatever it is that you want to do with your life, or with this year, or with this day. Nor can or should anyone else be permitted to set your priorities for you. There is no authority higher than your own heart, your own drives and your own true—as opposed to learned—convictions. The message is, be whatever in the world you want to be, and be the very best at it that you can be. You hold the key to your own achievement and happiness. No one and nothing can give you that, nor can they take it away, unless you let them.    

The fact that you fail to do what is expected of you is of no importance whatsoever—or rather, it only garners the importance that you lend it. What is important, to you as an individual, is to do what fills you with happiness, to do, as the expression goes, what you love and to love what you do.

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

The best-laid schemes o' mice

an' men / Gang aft agley
Robert Burns

As Robert Burns has frequently been paraphrased, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Writing is, by far, the most important thing  that I do in my life. Or at least it is to me, personally. And although for much of my adult life I have, indeed, kept the lights on and put bread on the table with the written word, it is also true that the most creative kind of writing that I do hasn’t always been what paid the rent. Especially when, like now, I’m involved, whenever time permits, in creative writing projects of my own that take a long time to develop and the future success of which is anything but certain.

But you keep on writing, because that’s what writers do. We can’t help it. We might torture ourselves for years, asking ourselves why we do it. But that won’t stop us. It’ll just make us impossibly neurotic and hell to get along with, until we finally come to terms with the fact that what isn’t worthwhile is not the writing, but asking ourselves the ‘why’ question.

If we writers had no other place to do it, we would write in the dust, on rocks, on the back of our hand, all the way up our arm until we got impossibly lost in our own armpit, or perhaps we’d just write on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal, Abe Lincoln-style. Our legacy was bequeathed to us by those first primitives who sketched pictograms of the things they saw on stone overhangs and in caves. They too were different from the others—crazier, the others probably thought, just as they still think now. Those ancient scribes couldn’t help themselves either. They just had to make a ‘written’ statement, communicate what they observed. Others must have shrugged and said, “Why bother? The antelope’s standing right over there, bozo! We see it! What do we need a symbol for?” And our writer ancestors might well have said, “Ah, yes, you see it, friend, but do you see it?”

But I digress. I was talking about plans going awry. My plan, since I started blogging a couple of years ago, has been to get to the place where I’m organized enough to be able to give my readers (whom I thank from the bottom of my heart for their patience and loyalty) a specific day on which each of my three different theme blogs will come out. Say like, Translator’s Handbook every Monday, A Yankee at Large every Wednesday and The Southern Yankee every Friday. Or some other, perhaps less demanding arrangement, but something that readers could count on.

I realize all too well that this is the only way to build a respectably large and loyal readership. Because, in the end, when you decide to write for the public—no matter what you write, be it print, electronic, daily, monthly, quarterly or what have you—you make a tacit commitment to your readers (even if they number no more than a handful) to produce. This said, I also realize that no matter how much I beat myself up over not ‘normalizing relations’ with my readers and providing them with a specific blog on a specific day, thinking that I can may well be a case of operating on the strength of my own vivid imagination.  

And here’s where Robert Burns and his mice come in. My failure, so far at least, to be able to make this kind of regular commitment as a blogger has been a matter of survival. I’ve had the extraordinary good luck of having been able to make my living as a wordsmith, in one capacity or another—reporter, editorialist, op-ed writer, feature writer, translator, style editor, etc.—ever since I decided to turn my writing from a hobby into a profession, thirty-six years ago. For two decades, I did this as a staffer and stringer for a variety of magazines and newspapers, while also translating on the side. Admittedly, there was a certain security in this because there was always a paycheck at the end of the month.

Free-lancing is tougher. Whether or not you work (and eat) depends entirely on you. You can decide to take the day off, the week off, the month off. But ultimately, if you don’t circulate, if you don’t promote yourself, if you don’t actively seek out clients and consistently prove your expertise, you’re dead in the water. But having made my living this way for over a decade and a half—actually, more like eighteen years, now that I think about it—I would never want to go back to working for someone else. I sometimes have nightmares where that’s precisely what happens, where I’m back in an office working for somebody else and everything is going wrong, and even though none of it is my fault, I know I’ll be to one who is blamed because I’m in charge. Actually, in real life, that was pretty much how things used to work. So the dreams come as no surprise. However, once I sit bolt upright, wet with sweat and heart pounding, I can always reassure myself that, yes, it was a just a nightmare and, no, that’s not happening again, ever. I’ve been my own man for eighteen years and will continue to be until my shadow sets me free.

But, admittedly, this freedom thing has its ups and downs. One of the downs came recently, in the wake of the worldwide economic crash. Weeks, months went by, with nothing much but the sound of the crickets to accompany me. But for once in my life, I didn’t worry. I spent the time well: writing, reading, what else? And that included trying to turn out better- and better-quality work for my blogs.

Then suddenly, one morning everybody seemed to get up, open the window, look out at the sunshine and say, okay, enough of this depression crap. Let’s get to work! And in a matter of a week, I, all of the sudden, had numerous projects for which to post bids. And one of the two best ones immediately came through: working as part of the research team for an author with whom I had already worked previously as a translator. The job consisted of reading books, lots of books, and reporting on them. I could do the hell out of that job!

But no sooner had I started on that assignment, than the other best option came through: the translation of an important book for a major international publisher. Let me just say that, despite how lackadaisical I might appear, with respect to my blogs at least, I’m a workhorse. From the time I was very young, workaholism has often been one of the vices I have fallen into. And although I no longer have the sustainable energy to make a steady diet of it, I do tend to go on rampaging binges from time to time. These last few months have been one of those times, since I blithely told myself, “I want both of these jobs. Relax, everybody,” I said, “I’ve got this!” And I did and do have it. And, in fact, have completed one of the jobs—the book translation—and can now take a deep breath and continue, much more serenely, with the other one.

But this is precisely what brings me to my point about best laid plans. Professional that I am, I have been conditioned to believe that whatever I am assigned  or contracted to do should take priority over everything else (even including weekends, holidays, normal workdays schedules…literally, everything). This said, what I want you, as my treasured readers, to know is that priority is one thing and importance another. And when I’m writing a blog entry, I don’t figure there is anything more important in the world than making that the best piece of writing I’m capable of at the time. Nor is anyone more on my mind at those times than the reader, whomever he or she might be, and no matter whether my readership numbers one or a thousand and one.

This, by way of explanation—and apology—for my long absence. I’ll try hard to reserve a bigger chunk of myself for both of us in the future. 

    

Memorial Day 2010 – The War We Were

Today is Memorial Day in my native United States. The day when we honor those who died fighting in our nation’s wars.

When I was a kid, it was hard to think of it as anything but a holiday – the day after the last day of school, the day we hoped and prayed it would be warm enough for the public swimming pool to open, a day for picnics with the family or when Mom would drive out to the greenhouse to buy some flowers to set out. It was a day of parades with brass bands playing stirring patriotic marches and with middle-aged and old men dressing up like soldiers once more to join uniformed National Guardsmen and other troops in carrying the colors to the Veterans Monument at the Courthouse and then out to the cemetery in tearful remembrance of their fallen brothers.

But for us, as kids, it was just the first exciting small-town event to kick off the wonderful, lazy days of small-town summer.

The problem is that this childhood Memorial Day illusion is only that. And since it appears impossible for the United States to get through a single generation without a war, each generation has its own. And as the realities of those wars end up touching us as a generation and, indeed as individuals, no matter how hard we may try to ignore them, Memorial Day eventually takes on a new and sober meaning.

CAPTION: Gravestones of the American Fallen in Arlington National Cemetery. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

My grandparents’ generation had World War I, my parents’ generation, World War II. My parents’ younger siblings had to face the Korean War. My generation’s war was Vietnam. The current generation is embroiled in combat on two fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sixty million combatants are estimated to have taken part in the First World War. In the four years that the fighting lasted, 16 million people died and nearly 35 million suffered some form of permanent physical disability. Those figures don’t include the millions who suffered permanent mental or emotional trauma. Despite the Great War’s having supposedly been the “war to end all wars”, a quarter-century later we found the world at war again, and this time as many people died (62 million from 55 nations) as combatants that took part in the First War. And there are no accurate figures to calculate the millions upon millions of people injured, disabled or mentally traumatized in this second modern instance of wholesale worldwide butchery.

In just the two major conflicts that the parents and grandparents of our current generations lived through (…or not…), then, approximately 100 million people died. Think about it: That’s more than three times the size of the total population of Argentina or Canada. Imagine every man, woman and child in those countries slaughtered, and pile another twenty-five or thirty million mutilated cadavers on top of those. Imagine one out of every three men, women and children in the United States dead, every two mourning the tragic death of a third. That’s how many people were ground up in the gnashing cogs of just those two world conflicts, not to mention the thousands upon thousands and millions upon millions who died in other “minor” conflicts that many of us have no idea ever took place.

One such “minor conflict” was the Korean War. For many years this war was referred to, especially by the United States, as “a police action.” In the three years that this “police action” lasted, somewhere between, 1.2  and 1.5 million people were killed. (Imagine the city of Cleveland, say, or La Plata, wiped out entirely). The United States alone lost 33,686 combat troops, as well as non-combatant personnel numbering 2,830.       

Then there was my generation’s war. Official figures in the Vietnam War place direct American casualties at 58,148 dead and 300,000 wounded. But this doesn’t take into account the thousands upon thousands of conscript soldiers who returned with broken hearts, broken spirits and broken minds to a life of chemical dependencies, chronic depression, severe mental illness, neurological trauma from chemical agents and other conditions that kept them from ever recovering control over their own destinies or caused them to die young from any number of unnatural causes. Just among my immediate circle of acquaintances, I can think of several who died in combat before their 21st birthdays, one who came home and hanged himself in his garage and another who came home in 1970 and to this day remains incapable of facing life without the dulling effects of severe alcohol and drug abuse (to such an extent that the last I knew of him, he no longer was getting out of bed to drink and “get high”…if you can call it that). People can say that he and all the others should have gotten over it, gotten on with their lives. But that’s like saying a person should “get over” child abuse, rape or other forms of severe victimization.

Yet, nothing compares to the ravages of war. Because, let’s not kid ourselves, in dirty wars such as these – wars like Vietnam, like Afghanistan, like Iraq, wars of attrition against a scarcely identifiable enemy, where the lines between friend and foe are patchy and guerrilla fighters work the no man’s land between uniformed combatants and civilian populations – nothing, no amount of gung-ho training, no amount of psychological readiness, no amount of discipline, can prepare these men and women for what they will see, what they will be ordered to do and what they may well do on their own as a result of the in-combat stress and trauma they suffer. Already, in these latest wars in the Middle East, well over a million American soldiers have had to face this.

Nor do the cold figures that measure the effects on our own troops take into account the tidal wave of suffering left in their wake. Our South Vietnamese allies in that other conflict lost five times as many troops as the United States did and their number of wounded was never determined. But more tragic still is the fact that, the number of South Vietnamese dead, including the nearly quarter of a million troops killed, came to an estimated two million (men, women, children) in a country with a total population of just over 5 million.  A conservative estimate of deaths among the Chinese-backed North Vietnamese in that war comes to something like 2.8 million, with two million of those also being civilians. Less conservative estimates claim deaths on both sides were more like 7 million, with another two million people being injured or mutilated. 

Beyond tragic and into the realm of horrifying are the 7 million tons of explosives that the United States made use of during that war, or the chemical, biological and bacterial agents that the United States liberally rained down on the Vietnamese people in clear violation of the Geneva Convention that Washington has so often cited in criticizing the inhuman behavior of other nations. This was over 3 times the quantity of explosives used in aerial attacks on all sides during World War II. 

In Iraq, despite the US military’s frequent boasting about the effectiveness of its technology and the possibility of “surgical bombing” with its joystick-operated, camera-carrying weaponry, in the last estimates I saw, somewhere between 90,000 and 105,000 civilians had died. No matter how much we want to debate the “human shield” theory, there comes a moment when somebody has to punch the button or pull the trigger that murders non-combatant men, women and children. And no matter how professional a soldier may be, only a heartless, mindless mercenary (e.g., a sociopath) could go home and sleep well after doing that. So the vast numbers of returning veterans who now require and will continue to require treatment for not only their physical but also their mental trauma should come as no surprise to anyone.

And with all of the experience that the United States has in the scars that wars leave, it should really be prepared to deal with this phenomenon. But indications are that we have learned little from the tragic experience of Vietnam. Conservative estimates indicate that beyond the tremendously high numbers of mutilated soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US can expect at least (and this is a conservative estimate) half a million veterans of these two latest wars to return suffering from post traumatic stress disorder before the combat ends. And there are also telling indications that not nearly enough of them are getting the help they need.  In wars such as these, in which the causes are hazy and the methods questionable, no matter what one’s view of the war itself may be, the post-combat support system is clearly lacking.

The US custom of honoring its fallen on Memorial Day is a noble one. But perhaps we Americans and people everywhere should start looking at war from a different angle.

We need to honor these dead by rejecting, rather than embracing and glorifying war. If we re-read the statistics above, it becomes clear that what we should be looking into is not more effective ways of waging war, but rather, the most effective ways possible of avoiding and preventing it. Perhaps this will mean a revolution in diplomacy or witheringly preemptive multinational action. Anything to keep two sides from dignifying their conflict with false patriotic fervor.

War is not noble, no matter how noble the intentions of those who actually fight the wars may be. Wars are not, as most leaders would have us believe, honorable or winnable in any real sense other than in that of achieving the political and economic ends of those in power. War is hell. War is merely the wholesale slaughter of one people by another for reasons that have little or nothing to do with why we are told we must fight them. And as war becomes more “effective” the number of civilian casualties grows relatively greater all the time, threatening to become exponential.

The best way, then, to honor our war dead, is by seeking to ensure that war becomes the most unthinkable of all means to an end. No society that rejects homicide as a heinous crime should find war logical…and much less, glorious.    

Self-Reliance 2 – In the Forest Primeval

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

-From “Evangeline” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-

Autumn is hard upon us and the days are growing shorter. Less than a month ago I could make my rounds in the forest until well after eight at night. Not anymore.

My rounds are no longer the leisurely walks of summer. No longer contemplative. Or rather, no longer just contemplative. Or perhaps, contemplative in a different, more concentrated, more focused way. Now, I go with a set and urgent purpose: to gather enough suitable, dry firewood to get us through the winter.

Admittedly, I have a good start. There are now eleven pickup-loads of wood stacked under heavy sheets of black plastic along the fence, in a neat pile about twenty feet long by four feet tall by three feet deep. But I’ll need another four pickup-loads to get us through the worst of winter. And unless I’m reading the signs wrong, it may well be a hard one. Twenty loads, then, would make me feel a lot more secure. It’s only mid-April (like mid-October in Ohio, I remind myself, because what I learned as a boy in the rural Midwest is still my yardstick and my standard) and already we’re getting some freezing temperatures in the mornings, even if afternoon temperatures reach levels that my mother, Reba Mae, used to refer to as “sweater weather” – afternoons when a shirt with undershirt and vest are comfortable, but when you can still work up a sweat gathering firewood.

The chilly mornings mean fog and a low cold-cloud cover until almost noon. On days when office work keeps me from going to the woods early in the afternoon, I still hike in through the underbrush on my normal rounds just before sunset and free up all of the windfall fuel I can find, propping it against tree trunks to let it air in the wind. In this season of the year, I never go to the woods without a machete, since I tend to abandon the rude paths and forge headlong into the thicket, watching for signs of fallen branches. The timber lying on the ground is a liberal mix of green and “dry” wood. The beech (coihue) that grows under an altitude of 800 meters (2,625 feet) is “live” – not so the southern beech (lenga) that grows just below the timberline in the snowy upper mountain forest, and that flames scarlet in autumn before it sheds its leaves. Also “live” are the radal and the Patagonian laurelwood (laura). Winter scenes in Ohio were always “black and white” because, there, about the only non-deciduous trees were occasional pines. Snowy winters here are “green and white” and these are the trees, along with the native cypress and the exotic North American pines (mostly Douglas firs), that make it so.

The leafy beech, radal and laurelwood really suffer during the snowiest winters. It’s as if they were from another era, when this was a warmer clime – like the ferns and cane and vines that flourish in the underbrush – and never adapted to the change. Their foliage catches and holds the heaviest, wettest snows that weigh down their branches. Still days and heavy wet snows are these trees’ mortal enemies. The snow’s weight rips the branches from their trunks and sends them crashing to the forest floor. The radal with its larger, rounder leaves suffers the worst, sometimes growing so heavy with snow that its trunk will split open like a book. 

When they’ve turned to deadwood, all of these are good to feed the woodstove – though the dense, hard laurel is the one that will hold a fire for hours and the hardest one to find. The dead dry laurelwood, then, has become my “gold”. I no longer see dead, fallen trees as a reminder of my own mortality, but instead, let my heart soar at the sight of the laurel’s skeleton, which, even in death, remains more useful than I’ll ever be.

I’ve set some rules for gathering firewood in these seventy-four acres:

-No cutting standing timber, even if its dead. It’s only fair game once the wind lays it to rest on the ground.

-No laying bare the forest floor to get to the windfall. Birds and rodents and lizards live in the underbrush and feed on its fruits. A “clean” forest is a fauna-less forest, and the idea is to preserve this natural habitat.

-No cutting green timber to reach the dry. If you can’t get to the deadwood without destroying the live, it’s not yours to have.

-Under NO circumstances will the cypress be considered firewood. This one I imposed because the noble nature of the Patagonian cypress (one of the region’s three main native conifers, the others being the Fitzroya – or alerce – and the monkey-puzzle tree, also known as the araucaria araucana or pehuén) makes it much sought-after for use as outdoor siding and fence posts. It’s not uncommon for local boys to allege that they’re gathering “firewood” when they are, in fact, gathering posts for a fencing or construction job. Nor is it uncommon for them to cut cypress green if they can get away with it. If this rule weren’t enforced by people like me, it wouldn’t be long before there weren’t a single stand of cypress in the forest, except where the rocky crags made it too hard to reach.  

These simple rules were made for others who occasionally come to the forest for fuel. These are now a privileged few, members of families that had “worked” this woodland long before I ever got here – several generations before. Truth be told, they come here little now – some because they now have natural gas piped into their homes, others because it’s easier for them to go someplace else, where the warden isn’t so picky about how they work. Because that’s the other rule: If they want to get firewood from the grounds I care for, they have to ask permission, tell me where and when and show me what they plan to cut. Otherwise, they can expect me to come down on them like gangbusters.

That, in fact, was how I got the job. That was when a rich city slicker showed up in his Cadillac SUV, accompanied by an arrogant foreman, whom he put in charge of “cleaning up” and fencing a half-dozen enormous lots he had taken over, a couple of which were next to mine. From the start, I didn’t hit it off with the foreman (Octavio was his name), whose idea of a forest was a bunch of trees standing in bare dirt. Left to his own devices, when his boss drove that shiny Caddy back to the city, his first mission was to slash and burn the forest floor.

Then it was time to fence, and that’s where Octavio and I clashed head-on, or rather, where I clashed head-on with the leader of his work crew.

The story of why I felt this was any of my business, however, starts way before:

When my wife and I first showed up here seventeen years ago, we were stunned by the natural beauty of the surroundings and immediately ended a search that had taken us years of travel and months of house-hunting in Patagonia. This was it. The search was over. After one adventurous real estate agent showed us the place – others had no idea where it was and weren’t really interested in finding out – we came back alone to have another look. As soon as we pulled in under the century-old beech by the dirt track in front of the house and got out of the car, a wiry man with a leathery face and a stubborn jaw appeared out of nowhere and, by way of greeting said, “Did you buy here?”

I said, “Buenas tardes,” and stuck out my hand. He limply took it in his rough paw and gave it a perfunctory shake, but firmly repeated his question.

“Did you buy here?”

I knew the tone well. My grandfather had been just such a tough-as-whet-leather rural type, with the same kind of no-bullshit eloquence. The question wasn’t, “Hello there! So nice to see you. Did you lovely folks buy this place? Oh how nice, we’ll be neighbors and have tea together!” No, no, it was more like, “Did you buy here? Because if you didn’t, you’d best keep right on moving, stranger, ‘cause you’ve got no business here.”

Back home, in a remote rural place like this he might have underscored his question by carrying a double-barreled shotgun loaded with birdshot or rock salt in the crook of his elbow. Here, however, the weapon of choice among the natives was more casual, a machete, say, or an axe. But in this case, all the guy had in his hand was a coligüe cane walking staff, which didn’t look very threatening…not to me, anyway. However, once I got to know this man, don Federico Miranda, I would realize that, had he wished to that day, he could have dropped me like a sack of potatoes, so adept was he with that cane. On more than one occasion since his sixty-fifth birthday (he was now well over 70), he had done so with other men, by means of a swift, smart crack on the temple or behind the ear. (One of his step-grandsons once described him as “the meanest old man I’ve ever known”). But don Federico wasn’t mean, just hardened by his life as a rural laborer and sick and tired of city slickers finding ways to grab pieces of wilderness that they had no right to. Him, he’d soaked this ground with the sweat of his labor all his life. And he’d earned the right to play warden.

I said, “We haven’t bought it yet, señor, but we really hope to. We were here with the real estate agent and decided to come back for another look on our own…if that’s all right?”

So don Federico relaxed and showed us around. When we moved in, he was the one who sold us our used woodstove, the one who showed me the trails and where to find windfall firewood. If I asked him for advice, he gave it and when I didn’t, he sometimes stood by in bewildered amusement, watching me try to figure out on my own how to survive in rural Patagonia. His advice was as laconic as his greeting had been.

“Better gather firewood while you can,” he said, our first autumn here.

“Well, I’ll get what I can now, and if I need more later, I’ll gather it then,” I said.

“You won’t be able to,” he said bluntly. That was his advice. Take it or leave it. When it started raining in mid-May and didn’t quit until the second week in June…when it started snowing, I understood what he meant. That was the last year I left the issue of firewood “for later”.

So anyway, when don Federico decided, after half a century of living “up here”, to move “down closer to the road” where it was easier to get his wife the medical attention she needed at the time, a new self-appointed forest warden was required, and I, as the only man living on the edge of the woods, was “elected”. The “job” didn’t require much – just a love for this spectacular natural area, a willingness to challenge environmental predators, and the self-confidence to do so with no legal authority whatsoever.  I became the one who, when strangers showed up and started poking around in the neighboring meadows and woodlands, would appear out of nowhere and ask, “Did you buy here?” And if the answer was “no”, I would have to say, “Then you have no business here,” and be ready to back my words up.

For years, I protected the surrounding hills and forest on the sole strength of my convictions. That was usually enough. There were a few minor incidents in which the police had to be called in. One in which a judge acted in my defense. But it wasn’t until this foreman called Octavio and his men came along that things came to a stand-off.

At some point during their fencing of the absentee-owner’s land, they decided not to spend any more money on “store-bought” posts and started invading the seventy-four acres of forest adjacent to our home to cut young green cypress trees and use those for posts instead. By my calculations they had already cut over a hundred from deep in the woods before I was on to them.

First I called the police. I was told by the duty officer that if the posts were being cut on private land and used on private land, they couldn’t act unless the owner of the land from which the posts were being taken filed charges. I had no idea who the owner was. For as long as I had known the area the forest had just been, well, the forest. I had never thought of it as belonging to anyone. Only as a natural area that needed protecting.

Then I called the forestry service. They also asked if I was the owner and when I said I wasn’t, seemed to lose interest. They said they might send somebody “one of these days” but that for the moment they had neither vehicles nor men to spare. But then I recalled that the Border Guards (a paramilitary force that often fills the gaps left by other law enforcement and security forces in Argentina) had an Ecology Division, so I called them. I was in luck because the officer in charge was new and, as the old Spanish adage goes, “a new broom sweeps clean.” The officer listened patiently and with interest to my story, asked me a few questions, and finally said, “Maybe I’ll come out that way this afternoon and have a look.”

I never expected what came next. In fact, I was discouraged after the call because I knew I couldn’t go up against this band alone, especially since they were backed by a landholder with money and influence. But that afternoon, the officer arrived…in a Unimog duce-and-a-half, with five heavily armed troops in the back-end, plus a plainclothesman and driver, and two motorcycle troopers for an escort. The officer hopped down from the truck, introduced himself and asked, “Where are they?”

I said, “Get into my truck and I’ll take you.”

He obliged, after twirling a finger over his head at the truck-driver and at the two motorcyclists, and barking, “Follow us!”

Like I said, we came down on them like gangbusters: twenty-five freshly cut green posts, chainsaws, axes and other tools, all impounded, and the work gang’s boss, written up for not having proper authorization or receipts for the posts.

How word got back to the owners of the land, a thousand miles away in Buenos Aires, I’ll never know, but they almost immediately got in touch with me through a local real estate agency – which, it turned out, had an axe to grind with the foreman. What would it take to get me to administrate that forest permanently? My answer: A full power of attorney as its warden.

And so this piece of forest primeval, this piece of nature, this piece of paradise, has become an integral piece of my life. I’ve fenced it, put up gates and put up no trespassing signs along the dirt road that separates the rugged, craggy, north section that borders on a lagoon from the hilly, boggy, south section that fronts on a glacial lake. I walk it and hike it and guard it as if it were my own. I barely open the trails I use for my rounds, keeping them as hidden from and inhospitable to others as possible. I’ve let its perimeters grow over with impenetrable thickets of dog rose and thorn bushes to discourage invaders who might jump the chain-link fence. Where furtive poachers cut holes in the fence, I immediately have it mended and crisscross it with barbed wire to let them know I’ve been there and that I have my eye on them. If they tear down a no trespassing sign, I put one right back up and redouble my rounds of that area until I’m sure the poachers have been discouraged. If I find them, I send them packing. If they hide from me, I look for them. If they run, I give chase. It has worked well. Lately, the only tracks I find when I’m on my rounds are my own. But every now and then, someone will try me, to see if I’m still being vigilant. They keep me on my toes. They keep me from getting lazy.

My gathering of only the driest fallen timber is as much a favor to the woods as it is to me. Clearly, I benefit by having a source of fuel, but so does the forest, because by removing it in the dry season, I am removing a potential fire hazard. This is a place where the wet season is intense, with heavy rains and snows for months on end. But the dry season is equally so, weeks and months when one match, one careless smoker, the sun on a piece of broken glass or a single flash of lightning can trigger a fire capable of consuming the entire forest. The forest needs me like I need it. It needs me to protect it from the exploiters and the uncaring, to protect it from decimation. It’s a job that makes me feel both proud and humble. Mostly, it makes me feel happy and privileged.

This afternoon, I’ve overstayed my welcome. I know the lay of the land so well by now that I dare stay longer and longer. If there were a full moon, I could make my way through the forest by night. But just the words “forest primeval” denote a condition of preeminence. I have delighted to the golden glow of sunset, seen the last rays of light filtering through the trees, as the sun sank behind Mount Capilla. Now, as I struggle to disentangle “just one more” dry fallen branch from the grip of the undergrowth, the fading light is gray. I feel the evening breeze rise and stir the leaves on the bushes. I hear crossed branches creak and groan like the timbers of a phantom ship. The humidity rises like a chilly hand from the forest floor and holds me in its grasp. I pluck my earlier abandoned sweatshirt from a nearby bush and slip it on. A roosting huet-huet (wet-wet) looses a warning shout that stands the hairs on the back of my neck on end. An owl whistles low, then lets out a sardonic cackle. It’s late, these sounds say. Go home. By night the forest is ours. You have no business here.

I swiftly make my way along the trail to the closest gate in the last of the fast-vanishing twilight. It’s new moon and will soon be dark as pitch. I get over the gate and onto the road home, almost at a trot. And I think to myself, “I’m the warden, the forest’s caretaker. Without it, I’m nothing but my everyday identity. The forest doesn’t belong to me any more than it belongs to its deed-holders. We’re only its guardians. The forest primeval belongs to itself. In a perfect world, we should be judged by how we treat it.   

   

Self-Reliance

Caption: Our house in the forest.

Here in the Southern Hemisphere, today is the first day of autumn. Out by the fence, I have three new piles of firewood, each representing the amount of dry timber necessary to fill the bed of my pickup to groaning capacity. Before I’m through, and before the heaviest fall rains begin in late April or May, I hope to have at least fifteen such piles (twenty would be better), lined up and under heavy plastic sheeting, stacked along my fence.

People who have always lived in town will sometimes say, “Oh, so you’re getting an early start.”

Early, ha! I’m already begging the rain and snow gods to hold off until I can get the job done. I recall our first winter here, when, without having any real criterion to go on, I thought I had plenty of firewood to get us through until spring. What a laugh! In the middle of winter, with snow to my knees, I found myself out with a rope, trying to lasso dry branches in the beech trees close to home and jerk them down so as to have something dry to burn in the woodstove and not freeze.

I got a late start this year. Summer was unusually cold and rainy and I kept waiting for the usual drought and warm breezes that would dry out the windfall timber lying on the ground and hanging like snow-broken bones in the thicket, out in the forest. It finally came but just in the nick of time, now at the end of summer. Summer starts in December here in Patagonia, but most of the really summery days we’ve had this year didn’t start until the last week of February.

Some say it’s the Niño current again. Others say it’s global “warming”. Still others say the electro-magnetic grid that holds the universe together has holes in it that make the holes in the ozone layer look like a fairytale wonderland, that Einstein predicted the north and south poles would switch polarity standing Earth on its proverbial head in 2012, and that the Mayan Calendar only goes until December of the year after next for a reason. (So if the world suddenly flips over in 2012, does that mean it’ll be a hot Christmas in the North and a cold one in the South when we all die screaming?)

Caption: Einstein - news to make the world flip.

Me, I think none of us really knows what the hell he/she’s talking about and that, like our ancient prehistoric cousins, we would do well to just watch the signs that presage what’s coming and do our best to react and survive without worrying too much about the best-laid theoretical plans of mice and men.

Last Friday, on my evening rounds of the woods I administrate, I came upon a big patch of anthills. They were not the usual big black ants that you see in the forest, but really tiny red ones. That’s what drew my attention to them. So I stooped down to watch them for a while.

It was a clear, calm evening, not a cloud in the sky, and it had been a beautiful late-summer’s day. There was no sign of rain anywhere and the forecast hadn’t predicted any possibility of rain until Sunday. But the ants were going nuts, hundreds of them, moving from one hill to another, coming out of one hole and going into another, carrying things on their backs, the way ants will when they feel something coming. The latest pile of firewood I had gathered had been left uncovered by our front gate, so the dry breeze could get to it. After seeing the ants, when I got back home, I hauled out a plastic tarp and covered it. Friday night it rained, and it rained all day Saturday too.

Watching the signs is practical. Practicality is twenty pickups of dry firewood stacked along my fence and sawn and chopped in my woodshed.

When we first moved here seventeen years ago, there were only seven houses, scattered as if rolled like dice by a giant, on the hills, and behind the trees and beneath the rocky crags of what had once been a hundred-acre farm on the edge of over 300 acres of natural forest. Except for the summer home of a family from Buenos Aires and a tiny pyramid-shaped weekend cabin of a family from town, our house was the only one in our neck of the woods and the only one whose lot fronted on the lagoon below. What we did when we first moved here was what people here refer to as “doing Patagonia”. That is, carving a place for oneself out of the singularly spectacular, incredibly attractive, yet frequently hostile landscape of the Patagonian Andes.

Like us, the people before us had come here from Buenos Aires. They hadn’t made it. They ran out of money, out of enthusiasm, out of spirit, out of luck. Their misfortune became our dream. We finished the half-completed walls of the barn-shaped cabin they had started and moved in. We came at the right time. Not young, like the couple before us, like so many, who have a fancy more than a dream and the strength of youth and the passion of the moment, but not yet the stamina of persistent survival. We were over forty. We had been through some stuff. We had survived. We had what it took. And we had been visiting Patagonia for twenty years, always dreaming of someday living here. That wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

The first winters were tough. There were things we couldn’t predict. We learned things: You need 500 to 700 cubic feet of firewood to get through a Patagonian winter. If you live in a southern beech forest, expect lots of rain and snow. I've read that they need 2200 mm (about 86 inches) of precipitation a year to survive. So if rainy days depress you and you see beeches, ferns and cane growing where you’re thinking of settling, think again. If you live in Patagonia, expect wind (weathermen call these latitudes the “wild forties”) and lots of it. And if you live above a lagoon, that’s around the corner from a big lake and across the lake is the windward side of the mountains, expect really strong winds. If you live in a place with a street that’s no more than a 600-foot-long rutted dirt track off of a mile-and-a-half-long, single-lane, unpaved, high road, a rear-wheel drive station wagon is not the vehicle you need, particularly in winter and the rainy season. The fact that the calendar shows Patagonian winter as running from June 21 to September 21 is no sign that it will refrain from snowing until June or that it will stop snowing in September (Patagonia’s a lot like Ohio that way). And the fact that the Municipality, twelve miles away through the mountains, claims your area as part of its surrounding township doesn’t necessarily mean that it will provide you with such services as road-grading, snowplowing or gravel replacement. If you’re going to wait around for the City to do the road maintenance you feel you have a right to, you may end up walking a lot of the places you have to go. Get a 4x4 truck, always carry a shovel and a machete or axe and plan on getting out on your own when the snow is up to your bumper.

As constructed when we first moved in, the house was little more than a barn, with thin walls that the wind whistled through and made the heat from the woodstove ineffectual unless you were sitting next to the fire all day. Bottled gas was too expensive to use for heating and the auxiliary kerosene stove was dangerous and smelly. The front windows with a gorgeous view of the lake and mountains leaked wind and water like a sieve into the house when the inclement weather of winter and spring came roaring out of the west over the mountains from the Pacific. The stovepipe ran up the side of the house on the outside and the cold wind hitting it kept it from drawing properly. It took me a while to figure out which woods were the best for fuel and what kind of shape they had to be in so as to be considered good firewood. And while I experimented, I over and over again stopped up the reluctant stovepipe with soot and resin that shoved the smoke back into the house blackening the walls and choking us.

Caption: We finished it and added on.

But little by little we figured things out. I read books about cabin-living, carpentry, home maintenance, basic rural heating systems. I re-nailed, weather-stripped and water-sealed the front windows. I contracted someone to re-install the stovepipe on the inside of the house so that we not only kept it out of the wind but also could take advantage of the heat it radiated. I installed firebricks on the wall behind the woodstove to better reflect and absorb its heat. Lack of insulation was our major problem in winter, so I insulated – polyurethane sheeting over the old walls, 12 mm plywood on top of that, and three-quarter-inch tongue-and-grove pine paneling on top of that. We started making meals that required a lot of cooking time on the woodstove, using gas only for quick cooking and to fuel the tank water heater. I learned by the weight and smell of each type of wood whether it was ready to be used as firewood. I learned to stack wood properly and when and how to cover it. I learned to leave the greenest windfall timber cut and stacked in the rain and snow and wind and summer sun so that it would dry out faster and become proper firewood. We built on, added a carpentry shop to one side of the house and a sunroom/gym to the other. We improved our water system, made it work via gravity, without pumps, piping water directly from a pristine spring into three holding tanks and then into our house. We built a 24-foot diameter water tank to hold an extra 8,500 gallons of water in the dry season, in case of fire. We added a deck onto the front of the house to serve as both a recreational space and a windbreak. We built a free-standing woodshed and a lean-to to keep firewood dry for immediate use. We sold the station wagon and bought a front-wheel drive car and then a 4X4 pickup truck.

Suddenly, it seemed like we had always lived this way. Nothing seemed any longer like extra-hard work or an inconvenience. It all just seemed natural. And the payoff is that we live in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth.

A couple of years ago, some of our newest neighbors (the seven original houses have burgeoned to fifteen today) started seeking “progress”. After a couple of winters as reluctant lumberjacks, they came up with a plan to bring a natural gas pipeline up the mountain to our hideaway.

I was the only neighbor against it. Natural gas would bring “progress”. “Progress” would bring more people. More people would bring noise, streetlights, cleared land. It would mean goodbye to the condor, the eagle and the great horned owl. It would mean a polluted lagoon. Erosion, pollution, deforestation, rules, regulations. It would make this idyllic landscape into a branch of the suburban sprawl. It would make it an interesting neighborhood for burglars and muggers. Thanks, but no thanks.

“But what about the convenience of it?” they asked. And I immediately recalled don Federico, an old settler who had lived here for forty years before we arrived and how he had laughed at me when I saw him one day with a long wrecking bar and wedges, turning over a huge old tree trunk to cut it up for the winter fire and asked if I could give him a hand. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been doing this, Mister?” he asked. “I don’t need any help, muchas gracias. This is what keeps me young.” Don Federico lived to be 90.

So I laughed too and answered, “I’ve been living this way for fifteen years, now. I can’t imagine why I’d want to change my lifestyle, unless it would be in order to be ever more independent. Self-reliance may not keep me young, but it keeps me from getting old.”