The Last Page of the Novel

THAT NOVEMBER, long after the killing frost, a yellowjacket stung me while I was cutting firewood. Next day, at the spring, I found a ripe blackberry, and red ones still ripening, months later than blackberries could ever be picked in Virginia. In early December I was standing in the garden amid dry cornstalks, dill heads, and the dead tomato plants still hung up in their cages, when a blue-green dragonfly cruised by at an altitude of about eight feet, serene as midsummer.

All the while, I tended Jamie as she continued to recuperate. I became expert at convincing TV producers and would-be publishers it was pointless to call, she would never consent to tell the story of her journey in the whale, except as I’ve related it here. They could believe it, or not. They would have to deal with how she was seen swimming away from the beach at Haifa when she went under, and the next week washed up at Hatteras, asking for a phone. The message she carried from Gaza, her detailed accounts of the miracle at Alexandria, and the end of the war, and the beginning of peace, these were all that mattered, she said.

The way things had turned out, I could easily forgive her taking the CNN assignment, even though she’d kept it from me she was on the trail of the network news-fixing scandal. She knew they might never let her come home. Just as well I never knew.

Almost every day during that December, I was able to bring her another piece of news that seemed somehow to have grown from her journey and its revelations. The spontaneous healing of the ozone layer was the biggest of these, of course, until the morning of the 21st. That day, around the world, people woke to find their village, town, or city had regrown around them while they slept. Buildings were no longer manmade, but organic structures of translucent shimmering minerals, as it seemed a new kind of partnership between humankind and the elements had begun.

On New Year’s Eve, she was able to walk outside for the first time. We held hands and watched the aurora borealis display that visited every continent that night and remained visible even in daylight.

After that, we still slept, because we had to, but always at the risk of missing something wonderful.

Coal and the Power Lines

The ominous, vaguely bituminous look of last night’s sky inspires me to add this as a note here.

Today I was happy to find, up in the branches of a black cherry tree, a few wild blackberries ready to eat, along with just-ripened black cherries. It reminded me of one of the most frequently asked questions in American life: “Would you like to try our combo today?” Finally, I was able to say yes.

But the scarcity of blackberries around here, which I have previously attributed chiefly to the land-clearing activities of crews under contract to Rappahannock Electric, also reminded me that I had just received a most unfortunate mailing from that utility.

REC urged me to call my Senators and urge them to oppose the climate change bill already passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill, REC warned, might make electricity more expensive.

Well, I guess so! Any time you can’t just burn any old cheap dirty coal you want to, anywhere you want, something’s gotta give. (On the subject of coal and climate change, this article from The New Yorker is worth registering in order to read, and I believe this blog item doesn’t require signing in.)

As a customer-member (incredibly tiny minority shareholder) of the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, I was not happy to see my money being spent in this lobbying effort. If electricity’s going to become more expensive, let’s not waste funds now on futile efforts aimed at halting human progress.

And despite the importance of coal to the economy, I thought I would register my dissent partly in the name of my grandfather, a Czechoslovakian immigrant who was a coal miner in Pennsylvania. I think working in the mines was probably not the primary cause of his very unpleasant death from throat cancer, but I doubt that it helped. I’d like to think that Grandfather Bezilla would be on my side of the climate change issue today.

After the blackberries and cherries, I saw something on my walk that made me feel a little better about this year’s aggressive land-clearing. Along the track we call the Power Line Road, growing out of the Nagasaki-like devastation, two bright green paulownia trees were shooting up like rockets – already some eight feet high, with enormous healthy leaves as big as the ear of a young elephant. Despite their rapid rate of growth, these paulownias could not come close to endangering the lines if they grew another 150 years. That may not save them when the crews come through again, but in the meantime – and regardless of how botanists may feel about them as an exotic species – their beautiful attempt to flourish is the best revenge.

Sunset, Tuesday, 28 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

In Which iPod Exposes Music Theft

No, not illegal downloads – songwriters stealing from each other. I’ll say at the outset I think the song that contains the arguably stolen material is probably even better, overall, than its model.

(Which I think is pretty unusual. For example, was Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” really worth rummaging through Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto?) (That’s O.K., Eric, we’ll always have The Raspberries.)

So, anyway, you know of course how iPod shuffle can get spooky – supposedly random orders producing weirdly synchronous sequences. And sometimes if you have a live track from a CD, at the end of that track you may hear the intro to the next song on the disk – but of course, because you’re on shuffle, that is almost never the next song you’ll hear from the iPod.

So I’m editing client work today, and playing music because the work is fairly low-intensity and it’s after lunch and I’m trying to keep from crashing face-first onto the desk. The song playing is from Concert For George – “That’s The Way It Goes,” done by Joe Brown. Song ends and after much applause for Brown’s fine performance, Eric Clapton announces, “TOM PETTY ... and THE HEARTBREAKERS!”

O.K., place goes slightly ape, but – that’s the end of that track.

To my confusion and surprise, the next song is – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers – except I knew (in the very first instants) that not only was this song not on Concert For George, I did not even have this song.

Then I realized – of course! It’s not “American Girl” – this is the other song with this intro and rhythm track! –  “Last Nite” by The Strokes.

(I realize that not just one but possibly both of these songs will seem ancient to some people. Oh, well. To put things in perspective, today I also heard “Lonely Blue Boy” by Conway Twitty ... and remembered when it came out.)

In Which Bill Saves the Planet ... Slightly

I was leaving the produce section of the grocery store today with a two-pound container of Michigan blueberries, on sale, when I suddenly realized – Wait a minute, I’m supposed to go looking for wild blackberries today!

Back go the trucked-in or flown-in Michigan blueberries, and, later, out into the briar patches go I. WHAT a hero. Off the grid!

In Which Bill Wakes Up ... At Least for a Moment

So I’m walking down the fields toward blackberries, and you know how it is some days, your mind is more or less filled with a whole lot of things you’re working on, many of which are a long long way from working out right, and there’s just a sort of jammed-up, cloudy mix of things, large and small, to think about. Well, maybe you don’t know how that is, but that’s how it sometimes is for me. And it’s a hot, steamy, not very comfortable summer day, I guess you could call it a very average Virginia summer day, more than half cloudy, the sun beating down through three or four shifting layers of thin white and dull blue and soft gray and – just not what you call a stellar, striking sort of day.

And then I stop, or actually I keep walking but I do a sort of tight but goofy-stumbly 360 while I’m walking down the field. And I realize, Man, are you crazy? Look at this! I’m walking outside at four in the afternoon, in a huge green bowl of grasses, the sky’s enormous, everywhere there are gallant stands of oak, there’s the spring and the pear tree, big hot steel blue clouds in the west ... Look at this. This is IT.

Sunset, Sunday, 19 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Adapted from Walden, by Thoreau:

I have no doubt that some of you who read this are unable to pay for all the dinners you have actually eaten and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.

Guess that goes for quite a few of us.

*     *     *     *

My first real foray into my richest blackberry-picking grounds today was pretty discouraging. (While looking for blackberries, very narrowly missed stepping on some ... evidence of our local black bears.) (Sorry!) (Yes, a bear does, in the woods.)

Three factors, concerning the blackberries. The most important would be the assiduous tree- and brush-clearing carried out this winter and early spring by an outfit under contract to the Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. I would like to have seen their manual or their instructions, because I got the impression that if their directive was to cut, say, every tree within 30 feet from the power lines, they liked cutting so much they decided, aw heck, let’s cut another five feet ... or why not another 10. And that included everything clear down to the ground. The third or least important factor seems to be the natural up and down cycles of different shrubs and vines in the margins of the woods. In between, at number 2 like Tom Watson, is the dismayingly conscientious job of field cutting done by the landlord’s freelance crew – the very same guys who killed me in a justifiable homicide back on June 24th. Even though I know they know their employer will never bother to go through the fields and check up on their work, they give it everything. These fellows make Yanqui myths about the Latin work ethic look really stupid.

Update on Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 09:35PM by BVD

My feeling is that Thoreau sometimes doesn’t reach modern readers – and maybe this was also true for his contemporary readers – because some of his most powerful thoughts are either a bit screened or diffused in context. Sometimes little moralistic preachments or ornate curlicues distract. I had read the thought cited above three times before I really saw it.

Here’s the original paragraph:

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

Not that I presume to know how it could have been done, exactly, but I would like to think that a gently edited Walden could have outsold Emerson, back in the day.