Urban Nature: That Rarest Bird

the elusive pie-eyed bluefarb
(click image for larger view)

This morning, not twenty feet from the kitchen window, a pie-eyed bluefarb (PEB) sat preening in our pear tree.

Why it picked our yard, I can't be sure. In a fair world, a just world, a visitation like this would only fall upon the a lifelong ornithologist with a passion for this bird, not some mid-town schmuck like me, whose bird-savviness ends with "robin" and "hawk," and who only happens to know anything about the PEB vicariously, through snips and scraps of someone else's bird-lore.

Maybe the rumor's true that the PEB is part sprite, and fond of irony. Any rate, this time the irony was in my favor, so I don't plan to raise a stink about it.

And I sure won't complain that I manged to come away with the photo above. Imperfect as this shot certainly is, I'm happy with it. Having just looked online, it is thrilling -- if perhaps a little presumptuous -- to think this might indeed be the clearest image of the pie-eyed bluefarb in existence. At any rate, nothing much has come up after several Google queries.

This much, though, is sure: while regrettably I wasn't able to get in any closer, or pull off a completely unobstructed shot (damn that leaf!) , it's clear that this is, indeed, the Bird Itself. Nothing else comes close to that remarkable shade of indigo, that seemingly translucent sheen. I was able to snap the shutter only once more before the bluefarb was gone, and frankly it's a terrible shot -- just a tiny blur of blue glass as that mysterious bird, startled by my intrusion, took wing and shot out eastbound across our neighbor's garden.

Nature Photography

Human Nature Photography

Where there's a trail, there's always a Pringles can.

Then, the perfunctory gripe.

To that extent, yesterday was no exception.

And yet, yesterday, as in recent years, something of the fervor was gone. Or, more to the point, my griping lacked the drama it once had. As a teen and early tween, I was ready to respond at hair-trigger speed whenever the beast encroached upon beauty.

Simply put, lately the hell is gone. I'm novacained.

Walking past a whole nest of garbage at the trail head yesterday, I felt no theatric indignation at all. Instead, there was only a thin, dull ache, and a mental note to self that yet another processed corn product has proclaimed its flavors "Extreme."

Environmentalist Bill McKibbon has written about this dull ache before -- though to McKibbon's credit, his own is clearly sharper, deeper, and more ubiquitous than mine. To illustrate this ache, he recounts the experience that most of us have had at one time or another. Remember: you sat on a mountainside; everywhere you turned, you saw a vista unmarred by human hands; above, a hawk idled; the only sound was wind and stillness.

Wind, stillness. And the distant grumble of a chainsaw, somewhere down the valley.

Ache.

However perfect and otherwise "pure" this mountainside moment may have been, however far our minds ached to drift across an untouched landscape beyond (that is, prior to) the curse of human ingenuity, there is always that faint, chuggering whine from down the valley. For McKibbon, there's hardly a place left on earth where we can escape that sound. Now that the Wise Species has marred even our climate, the Arctics themselves are dwindling safe-havens from the sound of ourselves.

Put a Pringles can up to your ear like a conch. Can you hear the motors droning?

My own Ring of Mordor, Mama, you are mine. How I ache to lick your teeth, your gums, the insides of your nostrils! Though you tease me in our lover's game, feigning rapt attention to the noisy picturebox, my little fawn, even now you must confess it: your restraint is overtaxed, and like my bladder at four a.m., you will soon hold back no longer. Kiss me. How I love your captivating breath,

your slender, snack-dispensing fingers, your wails of protest when the Competition oafishly demotes me to the foot of your bed. Someday he and the Big Black Dog will leave us at last, and then I will have you; yea, I will rest upon your bosoms like the Beloved Disciple of Christ.

The Loves: Courting Sloth, pt.1

Sloth has been a love of mine: deep, secret, and racked with codependency.

I'm not proud of the fact. I've been trying to break free for a year now, but it simply hasn't been easy. "It's over," I say, after hours on the phone. Sloth, on the other end of the line, says nothing.

How easily the line blurs between "unwillingness to accept it's over" and "stalking." There is, for instance, the issue of Sloth and the missing house key. More than once, Jen and I have come home to find the door left wide open, a glass on the counter still reeking of scotch, and a prized book or two discretely missing from our shelves. Some old Alanis Morissette record or another -- not ours, I promise -- still quietly hiccups in the player. I get the funny feeling Sloth has walked out wearing one of my shirts.

It's unhealthy. I know that. Hell, the relationship started unhealthily, a reactionary fling. Prior to Sloth, I spent my early twenties as a shameless soap-boxer: I opined and pontificated, spewed forth imaginative ditties on the backs of napkins, carved rants into my desk. I was a virtual whore of expression: anything was worthy of ink. Looking back on this time, I am especially thankful that most of this gushing went straight to paper, and not into one-sided "conversations" with unsuspecting party-goers. Regardless, I lived in a constant state of exhale.

By my mid-twenties I was oxygen deprived. And lo, how the pendulum swung.

That first bit of oxygen is what did it --- some accidental, shallow breath of Saint Augustine or Annie Dillard. It's not as if I hadn't read them before -- as and English major, I'd read my share. But never before had I felt the need so deeply to escape from my own chatter, and draw in what others had breathed into being. One shallow breath, and I couldn't stop. The Long Inhale had begun: Inhale, every night and weekend for a long year in Vermont: Bonhoeffer, Augustine, Niebuhr, Steinbeck, Hemmingway, forgotten "fundamentalists", forgotten "liberals." Inhale, as I moved to British Columbia to study theology and question faith, drawn to Vancouver's air.

Here, at last, enters Sloth. I met Sloth for the first time at a coffee shop in Kitsilano, poring over Irenaeus. And while, yes, I know that Clark Kent is just Superman with glasses, I'm ashamed to say I was far more easily rubed by Sloth, who came in disguised in a pair of large, light pink plastic glasses strikingly like those Humility used to wear in the '80s. It was a bad disguise. Lord, I know that now.

But still, for a while, our deepening relationship seemed right. Counseling has since taught me that Sloth (pseudo-Humility) was pathologically jealous and a "dominator." I, for my part, accept that I was an "enabler." Slowly, at Sloth's behest, I discarded whatever would come in our way. I stopped writing. Stopped playing music. We just spent every hour together, breathing in, in. Sitting cross-legged at whoever's feet we could find. Inhaling till we were dizzy, then falling asleep in each other's arms.

The Loves: Spidey's raw emotion, in those rare moments when he lets down his guard, gives up the tough guy act, and succumbs to his trembling awe of the beyond

The Loves: Vancouver #2

In the city, the beach seems so small. And vise versa.

By Monday morning, on our way out of town, Jen and I were ready for big beach, small city. Forsaking buses that might make us wait, we raced on foot, southbound on Seymour, knowing that our last free hour in the Glass City had risen to the urgency and sweetness of ice cream: eat it quick, or watch it melt.

By the time we turned westward on Davie, it had all begun to trickle down our arms to our elbows: melting French vanilla, Kitsilano cherry, Vancouver marmalade. Whole scoops splattered on the sidewalk in our wake, just missing the feet of street vendors and gawking tourists; dogs broke free from their hipster owners and lapped it up, then followed in a small and feral parade.

Then, at last, after four days of gorging on artscape, cityscape, rich food and friendship (not to say rich friends), the two of us and our eighteen new pups finally sprawled out, contented, belly-up on the sand, and stared slack-jawed at the world's largest ocean.

For my money, it's melted ice cream -- spilt from six billion cones and counting.

The Loves: Vancouver #1

Tomorrow, Jen and I leave on a plane out of Kansas City, bound for Vancouver, our old stomping grounds. Why Vancouver B.C.? Why now? Is it just that we love and miss this incredible city?

I think it's safe to say that's part of it -- we are thrilled to visit the 'Couve again.

But this time, the truth is, it's all about The Weed.

No, we're not by any means that cool. "The Weed" is the favored nickname for our buddy David Aupperlee. And lest you think otherwise, he's not that cool either. At least, not "that cool" in pothead hipster vernacular.

David in the Greek pronunciation?

"Daouid."

Da Weed. Or often enough, just "Weed." Like this: "Hey Weed -- are you actually looking for something in there, or did you just fall asleep with your head in the fridge?" (And without fail, ten minutes later: "Hey Weed -- is that your twelfth bowl of Corn Pops?)

So then, our confession is out: Jen and I both love The Weed. And that alone would be enough to answer "Why Vancouver?" But that still leaves another: Why now? Because over the weekend, the Weed ties the knot. Yes, that knot -- to the Helen of his dreams. We couldn't be prouder, or more Vancouver bound.

Attaboy, Weed.

The Loves: Coal, or, Leaving Harlan Alive

Here recorded by Patty Loveless and the Del McCoury Band:

“You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.”

I first heard this song, written by Darrell Scott about five years ago, in a cabin in the Tennessee mountains, where I spent several rare, treasured days with my old college friends. During the course of those few days, I occasionally snuck out to the car crank up Track #4 on what, then, was just some promo compilation I picked up In Asheville. I listened to this one track over and over, always deep with emotion. I wasn’t sure why.

Par for the course, I lost the CD, and didn’t hear the song again in the five years since.

Then, two days ago, in a car southbound to New Bloomfield, it came on KOPN. As it played, I cried for the first time in months, maybe years. Why?

Forgiveness – that’s my guess. Five years ago, this song forgave me for leaving the southern mountains – forgave me for moving to Maine, Vermont, Northern Ireland, Vancouver … anywhere but home; forgave me for changing so much; forgave me for forsaking bluegrass & backroads to live the city life. Reminded me that I’d really done less changing and forsaking than I’d thought – that home was still home, and would wait. Now, five years later, I was forgiven again; forgiven for being almost thirty; for having a mortgage and a day-job; for losing my “guitar calluses”; for saying “I used to…” almost with no regret. Forgiven again, and welcomed back home.

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky
That's the place where I traced my bloodline
And it's there I read on a hillside gravestone
"You'll never leave Harlan alive"

Oh my grandfather's dad crossed the Cumberland Mountains
Where he took a pretty girl to be his bride
Said "Won't you walk with me out the mouth of this holler
Or we'll never leave Harlan alive"

Where the sun comes up about ten in the mornin'
And the sun goes down about three in the day
And you'll fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you're drinkin'
And you spend your life just thinkin' of how to get away

No one ever knew there was coal in them mountains
Till a man from the northeast arrived
Waving hundred dollar bills
Said "I'll pay you for your minerals"
But he never left Harlan alive

Grandma sold out cheap and they moved out west of Pikeville
To a farm where Big Richaldn River winds
And I bet they danced them a jig
And they laughed and sang a new song
"Who said we'd never leave Harlan alive"

But the times got hard and tobacco wasn't selling
And old grandad knew what he'd do to survive
He went and dug for Harlan coal
And sent the money back to grandma
But he never left Harlan alive

Where the sun comes up about ten in the mornin'
And the sun goes down about three in the day
And you'll fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you're drinkin'
And you spend your life just thinkin' of how to get away

You'll never leave Harlan alive

The Loves: Aloe

There's probably no better way to introduce myself than to introduce my loved ones. And that's what I aim to do over the next few days. You can't know me, and neither can I, without knowing what -- and whom -- I love.

By "loved ones" I mean something broader, and I think more accurate, than the common connotation. Certainly I mean loved friends and family --- I'd be a fool not to love them most. But here I also include loved memories, loved agendas, loved arts. And so on: loved itches, agitations, imperfections, unknowns.

But first things first. To talk about love, we'll need to start with one deep breath: inhaling generosity (big inhale) .... and then slowly exhaling our tendency to find love saccharine and naive until we've triumphantly unearthed its darker complications and thereby reinforced the deep-rooted sentiment of all burned idealists that we should not expect too much because Life Isn't Like That (okay, big inhale again). Good. Now that we're breathing from the diaphragm, I'd like to start with Jen.

Aloe to a burned idealist.

Nay, skin grafts. The whole nine yards. Mere weeks before Jen first stopped by my basement suite in Vancouver, B.C. – with her lame excuse that she wanted to show me a photo, and my lame excuse that I wanted to show her Dad's weblog “so she could see the Blue Ridge Mountains” – I had decided, yet again, that monastic life was for me.

Or more to the point, I’d decided that the marked alternative – life with another – was NOT for me. My relational record spoke for itself.

1998: Idealist first burned, and badly.

2000: In love again. Idealist again. Burned again.

And really, from then on, a long string of returning the favor: a twice-burned idealist, like a trained specialist, administering burns.

And then came Jen Rice, spring of 2005, just weeks into my monastic idyll, bringing her own lame excuses and accepting mine. That was the last of chants and candles; an hour later we were deep in the Vancouver woods, wandering beachward, two burned idealists playing hooky, and healing.

Nyquil! Nyquil! Alarm ignoring
Thief of yet another morning,
What immoral hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful chemistry?

--- William Blake, 1794. Groggy. Late for work. Like me.

Less Nukes, More Navels

Already I'm letting myself down: reneging on my passion for navel-gazing, this is as close as I think I'll have time to come today: the bit part I'll be playing at tonight's press conference on a proposed nuclear reactor in Callaway County. (To make sure I get people’s attention before “speeching,” I’m trying to come up with a song to play on the kazoo as an intro. Suggestions?) …. :

Over the next year or so, Ameren UE will undoubtedly go to great lengths – I’m sure they will tonight – to convince us that nuclear power is on the right side of our worldwide environmental crisis. In effect, they’re going to pitch this new nuclear reactor as “green” energy – as a viable way to solve the problem of climate change, and thereby make Missouri and the world a better place.

That, friends, will have to be quite a pitch.

Tonight I urge you not to be fooled: recognize a curve-ball when you see one. Another Nuke in Missouri would not be a part of our environmental solution, but a giant part of the problem. Leaving aside our growing – and entirely unsolved – nuclear waste issue, and the fact that nuclear power is increasingly dependent on fossil fuels for its production, we still have the question of nuclear power’s staggering cost – and this may be the greatest environmental concern of all.

In short, the six billion dollars – or maybe seven, or eight, or nine – that Ameren U.E. wants to spend on this reactor would be far better spent toward renewable energy use, home weatherization, and other steps toward conservation. If we’re looking at what is good not for Ameren UE, but for the state of Missouri, for the people of Missouri, and for our fragile climate, nuclear power is simply not the way to go.

As even conservative estimates by Rocky Mountain Institute and others have shown, dollar for dollar, nuclear energy is seven times less effective solving our climate crisis than would be the implementation of simple measures in energy conservation. And heaven knows, with skyrocketing energy costs and climate change looming, this is not the time to let our utility companies spend our money willy-nilly. We cannot forget that we do not answer to Ameren U.E. Ameren U.E. answers to us. And it’s time to take a stand as a state – like we successfully did over 30 years ago – to tell them that here in Missouri, we have our eyes set on renewable energy and sustainable living; not on nuclear waste and wasteful spending.

I’m thinking of a patriotic piece, like “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” My history’s not the best, but I think it was first written for kazoo. Any confirmation on that?

One More Hopeful Beginning, God Help Me

I mean, come on. Law? Suit and tie? Seriously?

It would seem so. Up until a few weeks before Christmas, I hadn’t even known the word existed in bold, much less that Law could graduate to fourteen font, and so quickly.

Then came the ambush: in November, void of warning, law crept up from scant shadows within me, crouched with all that plaque behind my teeth for the opportune time, and WHAM – wildly clawed its way out of my mouth like a genie from some B-grade bottle. And try though I might, no amount of wishes made it go back home again.

And so, for the last eight long months, said genie has pulled up a chair to every dinner, played with the cactus on my desk while I worked, heckled me in my sleep, tangled my sheets.

I was going to be a lawyer. “Do law.” "Try cases," or whatever the hell it is that lawyers do. And for $35k a year (average salary of a starting public interest lawyer), I wouldn’t be one of those lawyers. Not a shiny black BMW lawyer. Not a soul-seller. Nay, I’d be one of those rare gray-ponytailed types who litigated on behalf of God’s Green Earth or refugee kittens. I’d litigate for truth, peace and understanding. I’d litigate that some iconic white person and some iconic black person would hold hands for a photo-shoot, and then I would litigate the photographer into cropping the image down to just the hands and wrists, which, finally on the cover of Reader’s Digest, would shock the world into serenity. This was the kind of lawyer I would be. Granted, what that would look like – you know, on the ground – was fuzzy.

But now, has law too run its course?

It wouldn’t be the first time – it’s most certainly not the first genie. After fifteen years of calm certainty that I was to be, unquestionably, a writer, my twenties have been one carpetbagging genie after another. First I was a writer/folk musician. Then a folk musician/writer. Just a musician. Or maybe a travel writer. No, an English professor. Theologian. Episcopal priest. Grubby activist. …. Public interest Lawyer.

And that brings us back to doe. Or, well, almost.

Four days ago, Jen and her hubby, the lawyer-hero of the underprivileged himself, relaxed in the grass of the newly minted Forrest Rose Park, listening to the Carolina Chocolate Drops and making quick work of barbecue chicken. The only thing that could've ruined this 4th of July was fireworks; all was perfect, good and right. But then, staring into town, Jen lazily asked the bombshell question: “If you could do anything here in Columbia – anything – what would you do?”

My left-field answer surprised us both, but shouldn’t have. “I’d write.”

My dream since I was six years old keeps hanging on. But am I still too chicken to live it out in fourteen font?

Blood Diamonds, Blood Turnips

The death and brutality behind the diamond markets in Sierra Leone (and elsewhere in Africa) have recently garnered their share of public attention. Rightly so: one can hardly hear the phrase “blood diamond” without conjuring vivid images of guns and machetes, red blood on dark skin, mud and murky water, and the silly translucent jewels that (presumably) sparked it all.

The events themselves are horrific. The vivid imagery is a godsend. Such colorful scenes are well suited, after all, to reinforce one salient fact: the price of a blood diamond is never its only – or even its greatest – cost. If the boast of the market economy is true – if the prize really goes to the one who pays the most – then "our" diamonds are not ours after all. The blood diamond belongs, instead, behind with the continent that birthed it: in the ravaged West African hillside; in the blood-palm of the murdered.

For decades, Wendell Berry has reminded us that all goods are blood-goods. Everything we purchase has already been bought through a long procession of transactions, both organic and “through blood.” As usual, Berry himself says it best. “The ‘free market’ … is bad for agriculture because it is unable to assign a value to things that are necessary to agriculture. It gives a value to agricultural products, but it cannot give a value to the sources of those products in the topsoil, in the ecosystem, the farm, the farm family, or the farm community” (Home Economics, 125-26, emphasis added).

When we buy into the “free market,” in other words, the price of a turnip may at first seem comprehensive. “$1.29/lb” on a cardboard sign may seem to say it all. From the produce section, in fact, the turnip may seem altogether devoid of biography. It exists, instead, “as is”: a product – produce – without a past. Pick it up, and you hardly feel the faint tingle of lingering pesticides. Sniff it, and the distant smell of fossil fuels wafts off, unnoticed, to mingle with products in the cereal aisle.

Granted, considering the juggernaut of our “free market” today, we might be tempted to concede defeat. After all, with “pastlessness” so pervasive in our daily exchange with stuff, have we any choice but hopeless complicity?

Not necessarily. The pastlessness of our produce is, after all, really just a well-crafted illusion, and this is why we so desperately need agri-biographers like Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver to bring these pasts back into the light. We need – and we need to be – stuff-sleuths, truth-bound and tenacious. We need to know not only what our stuff is but where it came from, who it came from, how it got here, and how it came into being. The task, in fact, is not only possible, but necessary if we are to care for ourselves, our earth and our children.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” says Berry, and it’s a truth we can broaden to include all consumption. Another way of saying it: every purchase is political. Blood turnips or blood diamonds, it’s not enough just to wash our hands.