The Blandair Review

Volume 2, Number 1

Against "Escaping Our Own History and the Damage We've Done"

Barn swallow, wood pewee, northern cardinal. Wood thrush, mourning dove, and red-bellied woodpecker. Carolina wren, perhaps a white-eyed vireo, or maybe even the brilliant scarlet tanager. Blue jay, of course, and, inescapably, the American crow. I don't know if all the above were there in the woods that recent July morning on Al Geis's farm, but according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey for nearby Olney, Maryland, they were potentially there in some measure. As Al revved up his tractor, Joe Tassone, a former student of Al and current Director of Comprehensive Planning for the Maryland State Department of Planning, pointed to a small nest wedged between two barn joists above the tractor as if to verify my thoughts. "Wood pewee," he said, and turned to follow Al's tractor down the rutted farm lane to the pond below, where the two of them would ponder more pressing things: how to attract a greater diversity of wildlife to the farm and also what to do about storm water runoff, this latter a problem that suburban sprawl is making increasingly difficult to handle, here, on Al's farm, and everywhere in America where farms threaten to disappear.

For Al Geis, a retired wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, his twenty-acre farm on the fringes of Clarksville, Maryland, a sprawling, luxury development, is a sanctuary of eco-diversity. But it is a diversity that must be continuously fought for under the ever-simplifying, zero-culture onslaught of spacious suburban lawns, strip mall parking lots, access roads that spread like the roots of a rapacious weed, and, naturally, the prolific SUVs and minivans that race along those roots like so many ants from here to there and back again. While, within the tender reaches of preserves like Al's, nature weighs its delicate and daily balance of what will remain and what will simply disappear.

In one attempt to nurture this balance, next to his tractor shed and again by another outbuilding, Al has assembled a pile of rotting fruit to attract fruit flies, which in turn will hopefully attract the birds that feed on them.. They were there by the hundreds already, these fruit flies, on this early morning. This was essentially compost not for the soil, but for the air itself, compost for fruit flies, compost for birds that eat the flies and pollinate flowers and spread their seed.

It quickly struck me how much of a "working farm" this is, though Al raises no crops. The "work" to be done is rather a matter of sustaining what is already there. And beyond this, it is a matter of re-building whatever nature has come to be, unbalanced and intruded-upon as it is, and far from the natural cycle of life and decay Robert Frost calls in "The Oven Bird" "a diminished thing," one season shedding its prolific petals and buds for the full leaf of mature summer and the old age and spindly twig of winter, to be reborn the following spring. For if Al's farm is a microcosm of what is happening to America's farmland, then just beyond the early morning mist of stream and pond, barn swallow and Carolina wren in the maturity of this July, is what is happening in a cascade of potential ruin all across America, the cemented culvert and cereal bowl, hole-in-the-ground of hasty storm water management pond that development brings. For just beyond Al's farm is the denuded landscape of suburban lawn, where rain will wash the land bare of nutrients like the crumbs on a dinner plate down the kitchen sink. And with the nutrients will come a whole host of effluents that reads like a garbage disposal inventory of contemporary culture. According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, "When water from rainfall washes across the landscape, it washes soil particles, bacteria, pesticides, fertilizer, pet waste, oil and other toxic materials into our lakes, streams and groundwater." This "nonpoint source pollution . . . comes from a diverse number of activities in our daily lives including fertilizing lawns and farm fields, driving and maintaining our cars, constructing buildings and roads, plowing our fields for crops and maintaining our roads in the winter."

And none of these "nonpoint source pollutant" activities is likely to stop soon, of course. The engine of American conquest of land is still in full gear, and the finger of blame must itself point toward a "nonpoint source" of long centuries of multi-cultural sins against the land. What began with the Spanish Conquistadors' invasion of Meso-America in the 16th century and their brutal slaughter and removal of indigenous, earth-tending cultures, continued through the 17th century invasion by European colonial powers, the English, French and Dutch, who saw in the vastness of the American continent a world for the taking, where to step one's foot upon the land was to claim it, and to see Iroquois or Sioux, Seminole or Cheyenne was to see unworthy, subhuman vestiges of an earlier earth not so far removed from Cro-Magnon sensibility, where to be is only to survive, to live is to kill, with nothing recognizably human in the way of fidelity, love, and love of place.

And while any student of Native American history has come upon innumerable accounts of indeed quite "savage" behavior in both tribal warfare and in hunting practices, as where Ian Frazier notes concerning the latter in Great Plains such appalling occurrences as that of the Crow Indians killing a buffalo and sometimes raping it, there is also abundant recognition of reverent spirituality among Native American tribes. Frazier, for one, tells us how "Cheyenne men, as an exercise in spiritual devotion, sometimes stood on a hill from sunrise to sunset without moving except to keep their faces to the sun or stood in water up to their necks all day." Or, how "The Kiowa, when moving from a campground they especially liked, would leave strings of beads or pouches behind, as a 'gift to the place."

How many sins against the land wrought by today's blind and avaricious developers might be ameliorated, if not forgiven, if they showed any awareness at all of the destructive impact they are wreaking upon the land?

It's ludicrous, however, to envision a developer pausing amidst the flow of money to be made in order to offer a "gift to the place" he or she is destroying largely in the name of white-family America. "Oh, yee sacrosanct land that I pave, bird sanctuary, and ancient hunting ground of Algonquin and Iroquois that I destroy, may I still be pure, clear of conscience and memory of the loss that I bring."

Alex White Plume, a current-day Lakota Indian, pricks the conscience of our culture and its thirst for land destruction, emphasizing how agonizingly slow the process is from deep hurt to forgiveness.

"... with the killing of our relatives in 1890 at Wounded Knee, here we are in 1993, 103 years after that happened. The U.S. 7th Cavalry today want to come down here and apologize for what they did. As Lakota people we've only had contact with the white world for 163 years, that's all. And it takes centuries and centuries to develop forms of government, to develop a way to live. And we have not yet developed a ritual to forgive the white man for what he did. We have a ceremony to forgive enemy tribes, Tokoklah, ceremony, but that was developed after millions of years of living here. But like I said 163 years is just a blink of the eye, it's just been a short time. And we have not yet adjusted to this way of life. And we have not yet come up with a ritual to forgive the white man for what he did. He can't just come out here and apologize. First he has to "wipe the tears of our nation."

This is a haunting notion, the idea that forgiveness must take time, sometimes a long, long time, and that there must be a heart-felt sense of retribution offered by the offender, the white man, before the victim, the Indian, can even begin to find a ritual, a vocabulary, for forgiveness. It flies directly in the face of our own current culture where, wracked as we are by divorce and alienation from love, for instance, we are urged to "let it go," "let the anger go," because to remain angry is seen as self-defeating in our desperate need to remain always happy.

The website for the World Wide Forgiveness Alliance confidently lists seventeen steps to forgiveness. Step two states: "Recognize that to continue to dwell on the anger and resentment involved in the hurt will literally destroy your physical health and cause you great mental suffering. New studies clearly show that anger and resentment doubled the risk of myocardial heart attacks in women with previous coronary problems. Other studies indicate cancer and other deadly illnesses are also caused by anger and resentment."

Few can deny the emotional turmoil and its effects so apparent in our "divorcing age," but danger may lie in conditioning ourselves to always and forever forgive. We learn to forgive an ex-spouse and renew our sense of self, but do we in the process also learn that anger is indeed always bad and forgiveness always good? Do we too easily learn to forgive ourselves for wrongs we have done so there indeed will be no discomforting anger at our own foolishness and greed? When the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the Cherokee River (the Little Tennessee River) and flooded, as Peter Matthiessen describes it, "the buried ruins of the Seven Towns that two centuries ago were the sacred center of the Cherokee Nation," for the sake of a pleasure lake, does American culture mandate that the Cherokee Indians necessarily forgive the transgression? Or does the American conscience need to listen to the Lakota admonition that anger is righteous until adequate restitution has been made, or at least, as Alex White Plume says, until the white man "has wiped the tears of our nation."

The Lakota Indians, Peter Matthiessen notes in his book, Indian Country, use the word wouncage, the Old Way, "our way of doing," which, he says, "is consistent throughout the Indian nations, despite the great variety of cultures."

"The Indian cannot love the Creator and desecrate the earth, for Indian existence is not separable from Indian religion, which is not separable from the natural world. It is not a matter of 'worshipping nature,' as anthropologists suggest: for to worship nature, one must stand apart from it and call it 'nature' or the 'human habitat' or the 'environment.' For the Indian there is no separation."

For American culture, however, there are "nth degrees of separation" that threaten to destroy any notion of conscience and sense of responsibility for what we do to the earth and to life itself. Each other's souls we cut to the core, the ancient and sacred terrain we blithely pave over, the delicate ecosystems we send awash in development's hasty plundering: all point away from a life that can last very long, from age to age, in any sort of physical and spiritual health, on an earth given to us once and forever being diminished.

The ancient Anasazis in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico had as part of their dwellings an underground pit, a kiva, which, according to American Indian scholar, Alvin Josephy, was reserved for "religious teaching and rituals and as meeting places for clans. In the center of the circular kivas was a hole, symbolizing sipapu, the place of origin through which their ancestors had emerged into this world." Here humanity began, an Eden still inhabited and which remained unviolated. To have such a symbolic place in one's world, a place so sacred, so well-worn with the believing touch of one's mother's and father's hands, and their parents, and on and on in one long continuum to the dawn of life and belief itself, is to be more fully human than we of our scattered age can likely know. If we even look in our own attics, or the basement, or the deep corners of some closet, and unearth any kind of treasured object-a plate, a ring, even an old tie our fathers used to wear to weddings and funerals-we might at least be made remotely aware of the nature of faith and continuity in the external world. To touch something our ancestors touched and revered is one essence of identity, and with that identity comes a sense of responsibility to respect the dignity of what has gone before. It is the beginning of a reverence that must be extended to the earth itself. The Anasazis and their reverence for the sipapu are gone. Now these sipapu are seen in a "website museum," existing only in computer-generated re-creations, a cyber memory of the former earth.

Wendell Berry tells us that without some sense of commitment to place, a commitment that engenders allegiance to and reverence for memory, we can't help but be irresponsible. "When you're talking about marriage to a place, you're talking about final commitment. You're not going to leave. If you live in the presence of your history, it's harder to be arrogant. If you're not living in the presence of what you've done, which will always include some damage, it's too easy to be arrogant or silly. That's why some kind of social stability is necessary so that people aren't all the time escaping from their own history and the damage they've done."

And there is no escape, even when we escape. The earth is a limited place into whose confines we must dig in and commit to, however fleeting the Scarlet Tanager or Wood Peewee we pursue to help live in a diminishing wild.

Barbara Kingsolver, in "The Memory Place," remembers roaming the wooded hollows of her Kentucky childhood and how even then those hollows seemed to be "keeping their secret" of untouched nature "between the wide-open cattle pastures and the tobacco fields." The "secret" kept in Al's twenty acres lies between the brutal excavation of land done several years ago for Clarksville's new River Hill High School just above his farm and the compacted housing developments springing up around it in a tight mesh of macadam roads and chem-lawned oblivion. These are the things that threaten the fragile balance, the "secret," the preserve for the song of the shy wood thrush, whose song, says Fred Alsop in The Smithsonian Handbook to Mid-Atlantic Birds, is "one of the most beautiful of thrush songs, a serene, flutelike series of triple phrases given before daybreak and at dusk when the singer perches high above ground and delivers it in leisurely fashion, rising and falling, until darkness silences him."

And the white-eyed vireo Joe pauses to listen to when Al cuts his tractor by the pond, with Joe suddenly still like a blue heron himself, peering off into the thicket I see nothing in, but hear through his ears "the explosive jumble of phonetic sounds and phrases . . . an abrasive chik, ticha, wheeyo, chik, " Alsop's guide tells me I heard when I return to my books at home. Which is where I come to love what I've seen, the learning, the awakening, myself, like so many others, uncaring for what is unknown, until once it is known and the hopeful flush of new awareness and a sense of urgency to protect what is there.

Al Geis on his farm on the outskirts of burgeoning Clarksville is one such caring person. And Joe Tassone, former ornithology student of Al's is another. Two men I walked the day away with on a farm, listening to their plans to preserve its biodiversity, watching them tabulate the damage done by a culture so separated from the consequences of what it does to the earth.

And hearing the words again of the Lakota, Alex White Plume, that it takes a long time to forgive. It will take even longer to learn the wrong we have done.

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