Archive for August, 2010

The Olivier House in St. Martinville...a plantation home

This gulf oil spill has been more traumatic than I thought, but I’m a Cajun. I love clear blue skies, fertile productive soil, and pure seas full of God’s unsullied bounty. I even love the challenge of a gathering hurricane, the test of ingenuity and resolve it carries in wind and fury. They’re all essential in my life…part of my being, really. Somehow, my lady knew it from the beginning and tried to shield me, a little desperately as the news got steadily worse. I love her for that…even though she failed.
She knows I can’t escape the world I was born into…except in my mind. When I’m troubled like this, I tend to look for happier places, and sometimes I find them in the past. The other night while I watched it on TV for the hundredth time, I found myself unconsciously clicking my reading light on and off. When it was on I was bathed in Edison’s garish light, but when it was off…when it was off, I sat there wishing there were candles, maybe lanterns in the room, friendlier light…like our ancestors had.
Looking to forebears can be tricky. Some of them did horrific things…but not mine. Not one of my ancestors exploited the land, stole from people…or owned slaves. After they were kicked out of Nova Scotia, they mostly worked their asses off right next to those pitiable Africans, only a hair’s breadth away from their lot. It was only by luck and God’s good grace that they weren’t whipped back to their quarters at night…and they knew it.

Cajun Farmhouse circa 1800

Cajuns are a friendly lot, even to black slaves, and they shared things, mostly recipes…for gumbo, grilled ribs, backbone stew…all the stuff massa wouldn’t eat…and most importantly perhaps, the secret of slow cooking on a dying fire. In the morning before leaving for the fields, they all lit roaring fires and put everything they needed into a covered pot, leaving it enveloped in flame. When they returned after a day’s drudgery, the food was cooked and waiting for them…and it was delicious. I know; I’ve done it that way.
Once when we were camping, I was preparing to cook a gumbo when a history professor wandered by and told me that story. It seems historians are everywhere…it’s weird…but it happens. He almost begged me to try it, but at first I considered the whole idea a little too off-the-wall. Still, he was so impassioned I thought I’d at least give it a try one time…and by far, it was the best gumbo I’ve ever eaten. Build a big fire, throw everything you need into a covered pot, put it on the blaze, and forget about it until the fire is only ashes. It’s amazing!
Like the charm of candlelight, that technique has been lost in history…like a lot of things, I suspect, but candlelight brings up a good question. What the hell do we want to see with such clarity after the sun goes down? That part of the day is for peace, and it should be a little indistinct, shadowy….and beautiful. Work is done, and sleep will come soon enough. Evening is for good food, relaxation and intimacy…and nothing says intimacy quite like firelight.
I’m a romatic at heart. I know that…hell, EVERYBODY who knows me knows that. They know I’d prefer to live in soft light, gentle company, peace, and a kinder world with my lady next to me and my dog at my feet. The question stuck in my mind is why we had to get rid of EVERYTHING after that horrible war, necessary though it was. Even bad people sometimes have good ideas. Maybe we should learn from them…while winnowing out the nightmare they clung to so tenaciously.
We gotta think of something; we’ll be running out of oil soon enough…and we’ve all seen the damage it can do. Nuclear power? France likes it, and it sounds good at first…but what do we do with all those radioactive leftovers? They’ll be lethal for hundreds of thousands of years, and they’ll accumulate a lot faster if we abandon oil…as perhaps we should. We could always bury it, I guess, but stuff we plant in Mother Earth has a funny way of popping back up to bite us in the ass.
If you really want to see things so precisely at night, if you insist on MURDERING the delight of evening, I vote for solar power, maybe with water-driven generators augmenting it. They’re free and clean, and the planet is overflowing with sunlight and liquid water. Actually, having watched waves crashing in many times, I’ve always wondered why we haven’t worked harder to harness the power of the open sea. It’s free, too…and clean until recently.
Huge banks of silicon cells might screw up the view in places. Those people in California won’t like it…you know how they are, but I suppose we could hide them if we were really serious. I’ll leave those decisions to people who think they know better than the rest of us…while I dream of soft nights, gentle breezes, good suppers, comfortable fatigue, feather beds, and those I love lying next to me in the dark. My requirements for happiness aren’t complex, or even difficult to achieve, but they always include love, warmth, shadows, and candles. I can’t help it…there’s just something wonderful about candlelight.

The gusher in the gulf has been stopped, but it doesn’t feel like it around here…or on the beaches of the gulf coast. People are avoiding our seafood and refusing to swim in the surf, and I understand. I’m not eating seafood either…even though I love it. Actually, I’m lucky in a way because I’m allergic to shrimp…and calamari, but I can devour crabs and oysters in complete safety.
Think about it for a second. What I can eat are BOTTOM DWELLERS…living way down there where all the oil is settling. Louisiana oysters are particularly wonderful, but they’re filter-feeders, immobile, unable to escape. They stay alive by taking in stuff floating by, including microscopic oil droplets and whatever toxic chemicals were in all those tons of dispersant they used when they bombed the gulf. It was bad enough when we had to worry about viruses, but this…this is an abomination.
Oysters live down there with crabs, luscious, fat, delicious blue-point crabs. They’re scurrying around in the muck right now, but at least in their case, it isn’t theoretical any more. Crab larvae have already been shown to be attached to microscopic oil droplets. True, they’re little bitty droplets, but we have no idea what harm they might cause, even in those tiny amounts…not to mention stuff you can’t see, potentially dangerous stuff like those chemicals.
A few years back, there was a lot of concern about toxic bacteria and viruses in the oyster population. One guy, a really prominent, media-savvy guy, decided to PROVE oysters were safe to eat, and he ate several dozen, raw on the half shell. He died about a week later. The ever-spinning media machine kept saying there were other reasons for it, but we knew. Those oysters had killed him.
Nobody ate raw oysters for a long time after that. I still don’t…well, that isn’t completely true. About a year ago, my lady and I were at a seafood restaurant, and at the table next to us diners were noisily enjoying platters of raw oysters. You gotta understand…I LOVE raw oysters…with a little hot sauce, horseradish, and a drop or two of ketchup. I ate a dozen.
They were wonderful, just like the oysters I enjoyed out in the gulf when I was a boy, sweet, salty, and delicious…eaten with bland crackers not to blunt their taste. That meal awakened long dormant memories for me, and the next week when my lady suggested we dine out again, I knew where I wanted to go…back to those raw oysters. When the waitress came, I ordered them, but she answered, “I’m sorry. We can’t serve them any more. Last week, they made a lot of people sick.”
Last week? LAST WEEK? I was THERE last week…and ate raw oysters! Great God, I had dodged a bullet I didn’t even know was looking for me! Since then, I’ve only eaten cooked oysters…and I even worry about those a little. Things are changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up, and I sure as hell don’t blame the rest of the country for not sharing our pain.  They don’t really understand.
Oysters and crabs remain fairly localized, but fish and shrimp go all over the place. They can be swimming through oil one day and in clear, unpolluted water the next. The only way to be completely sure they’re uncontaminated is to test each and every one…and there are millions of them. It’s impossible. The only way around it is to say that the oil is all gone, and that’s why there’s such a big argument between academics and politicians. Professors tell us there’s a lot of oil still in the gulf, as much as seventy-five percent, but our elected officials tell us it’s all gone…magically, like a miracle. I know, I know…miracles happen, but in this case, I don’t really think so.
It’s interesting, even kind of amusing in a macabre sort of way, to watch government people on TV assure us everything’s SAFE. Really? What crystal ball did they get that from? That guy who ate those raw oysters thought so, too, but we’ve learned to be a bit more cautious. You can’t believe everything you hear…especially from government people. I mean, what does a death or two mean to them? It’s collateral damage while they’re trying to kick-start an economy, but while I appreciate it, I wonder about their judgment.
Maybe there’s no judgment involved. Maybe it’s all SPIN, and that’s the painful crux of it all. WHO’S TELLING THE TRUTH? To me it seems like it’s nobody, and I think a lot of people are beginning to feel the same. We aren’t blaming you, guys; we just want an honest answer, but we’re beginning to understand we won’t get anything even close from carefully parsed, precisely worded statements…mostly designed to protect you in your next elections.
Truth is a funny thing…IT’S REAL. You can lie if you like, but if you buck truth, it will come back and bite you in the ass…like I said, it’s unusual. That’s something I don’t think politicians will ever learn…but the rest of us live by it. You guys in Washington and Baton Rouge may spin it, distort it, even try to dispel it, but if you only said it like it is, we’d respect you. You might lose an election now and then, but we’d RESPECT you!
Respect? What the hell am I thinking? They don’t want respect…they want POWER. We’re screwed.

It’s sad and incredibly discouraging, but a lot of authors don’t achieve recognition until they’re cold stone dead. Take Jane Austen for example. She worked her ass off on her stuff to very little acclaim, but now that she’s dead, she’s highly respected…and I agree; her work is wonderful. It seems Emma Thompson does, too. I can’t wait to see how she interprets the next Austen novel they make into a movie. Maybe someday she’ll play Jane herself, but they’re going to have to jazz her life up a little to make it intesting.
Emily Dickinson is another one, but I can’t decide whether she saw through the bullshit from the start or was just being a New England lady who was proper for the time. Like Jane, her life was kind of dull, one of unrelenting sameness it seems, but there was fire inside, a soul screaming to escape. Her poetry smolders with it, even when she writes about the most mundane and commonplace things imaginable. Emily is one of my favorites, suffering in rhyme and beauty.
We writers are like ants at a picnic, uninvited, intrusive, often resented, and best squashed when discovered. People know ants don’t really matter all that much, and they seem to feel about the same when it comes to authors. They don’t usually kill them. They let them wither on the vine, relinquishing all judgment until history…or critics, those awful people…decide which ant was worthwhile and which was only an ant.
I’m not a patient soul like Jane and Emily…or even ants, but there is urgency in what I’ve been writing about…and endlessly talking and blogging about. It’s happening RIGHT NOW…and right here. I wonder how long it will take before people realize things are changing…in a lot of ways…and mostly for the worst. One cold winter does not erase the possibility of a dangerously warming world. Look at the average temperatures for the past few months and tell me honestly it hasn’t crossed your mind once or twice. Walk outside and tell me everything’s like it always has been…I dare you.
Jules Verne would tell you to pay attention. Attuned to what was going on in his world, like I try to be, he turned out to be prophetic. Like Jules, I don’t enjoy writing about the unimaginably distant future, even though I did that…a little…in Kukulkan, the sequel to Dawn on Earth. I had to; one guy lived a thousand years, but as a writer, I much prefer the dramatic possibilities imbedded in looking back from the near future to the recent past…to what’s happening now…with regret.
Old Jules knew the future was hopelessly vague, unpredictable, and not a little scary, but he dared to take a shot anyway. I know, I know…he made a couple of dumb guesses, but we writers forgive him. Maybe an agent was pressing him a little too much, or more likely, maybe he was frustrated and pushed a bit too hard trying to get attention. A writer, any writer, has to do everything he can to get his ideas out…even Jules. We ants understand that sort of thing all too well.
He will remain my guidestar, Jules…whatever happens. For me, things set too far in the future are impossibly unrealistic. Who knows what our world will be like millenia from now? Not me, for sure. When I try to go too far into the future, I usually find myself describing a beautiful watery planet, lush with vegetation and myriads of new creatures…but no people. I try to keep the vision of Earth as a dead, dry world like Venus away from my thoughts, but sometimes that creeps in, too.
How about that, Jules? Pretty heavy, huh? I know you lived in a different time, one we now consider naively simple, but you did your best to tell the future it wasn’t really like that. Deep down, I hope you understand what I’m trying to say…and maybe approve. I like to think you do, but we’ll never know, will we? You’re dead, too…like all those other important writers. Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to play the hand you’ve been dealt, but what else can a body do?
Jules, someday I hope to meet you, and I’ll show you all the respect and admiration I can muster…if that’s possible where you are. Maybe Jane and Emily will come by in the afternoon…if there are afternoons wherever you are. People from their era were like that….I expect they still are. I’d love it…and pay them the homage they’ve earned, too, but in the end, more than any of you could possibly imagine, I hope you’d be welcoming to the latest, tiredest, most frustrated ant you’ve ever met.

Dawn on Indian Creek Lake

I fell in love with astronomy when I was only a kid, about ten or eleven I think, and I saved my money from odd jobs until I had enough to buy a five-inch reflector telescope. It wasn’t much by modern standards, with a brittle bakelite body and a small starfinder scope that never really worked, but I loved it…and the hours of enjoyment it provided. Because I never had enough money to buy a sidereal mount, I had to search for stellar objects in an enlarging spiral then try to track them while they tried equally hard to glide away from my telescope’s little mirror.
I remember so many nights up there on an unused outdoor stairway, the highest place I could find, breathlessly discovering, endlessly asking myself questions I’ve carried with me ever since. I remember the first time I saw the Andromeda Galaxy…billions of stars, and not all that far away, but when I turned the telescope to a field of galaxies, I was stunned. There were billions of those, too! That’s heavy stuff for an eleven-year-old.
One night, a friend joined me at the top of the stairs. He seemed really interested, and while I was trying to find something to show him, the sky suddenly glowed brilliant bluish-white. I even heard a sizzling sound coming from above. “It’s a nuclear attack!” he yelled. “No! It’s a meteor…a HUGE METEOR!” I answered. We watched it streak across the sky, finally breaking up and tumbling as glowing orange embers into the gulf far to the south.
Living in town, constantly fighting unwanted light, I tried hard to get into the darkest corners I could find, but there was always a sort of fuzzy haze in the air. It made the soft glow of the Milky Way majestic and friendly, but once when I was visiting in rural Texas, it showed a very different side. On an exceptionally clear, moonless night, I went outside to see my old friend and was startled by what I saw. The Milky Way seemed closer there, almost threatening.
I could see brilliant stars, but instead of soft, bright clouds, hard-edged masses…millions of small points of light. It seemed as if my hand would be burned by nuclear furnaces if I reached up even a few feet, poised as the sky was that night, ready to crash down and envelop me. It was too immediate, too detailed…too immense. I was seeing it the way the ancients had, and it was a little scary…small wonder they found gods clothed in those masses of dust, gas, and unchanging light.
In that moment of epiphany I learned our real address, not on Earth but in the company of stars…near the edge of a gigantic galaxy. A lovely place to be, it allows us to see almost the entire sweep we’re part of, even if it is a little lonely. Closer in, say where the stars are tightly clustered together, we’d have a better chance of discovering we’re not alone, but we’d lose a lot, like the beauty of the Milky Way as we see it and our black nights…not to mention the fact that we’d be a lot closer to an immense black hole.
The one celestial phenomenon I could never spot was a comet. I poured over pictures and drawings of them, with their fuzzy, bright tails, some visible across the entire night sky, but I wanted to see the real thing. Sometimes, comets were described on the news, but I could never find them. I went to the darkest places I knew, but they were never far enough from security lighting and street lamps. It turned out comets were kind of hard to see in the modern world…but then Hale-Bopp came along.
I went camping just to see it…and took my canoe. For a week, every night I slid into Indian Creek Lake and paddled out to the middle to see the marvel in the western sky, photographing it, contemplating, trying to imagine myself in space only a few thousand miles from it. I thought it was pretty, but I wasn’t as impressed as I expected…I guess that humongus meteor had jaded me a little. A fuzzy glowing object in almost the same place night after night was no match for the sizzling, massively glowing, beastly thing my friend thought was a Russian attack.
These days I don’t do as much stargazing. I’ve seen just about everything any telescope I could afford would show, and now we have the West Nile Virus to worry about. I tried once, smothered in repellent, but mosquitoes joyfully attacked me in droves. I kept waiting for the headache and blurred vision, but they never came. Now, I only pop out on clear, moonless winter nights. If I’m lucky, I see the Milky Way almost like I did that night in Texas, and once again its power, extent, and immediacy comes flooding to me in an uneasy tingle.
It’s almost pointless to argue where it all came from. Either way, you come up with an imponderable. If God made it, He is eternal, without beginning or end, as described in the Bible, but we can’t understand that. If He didn’t, it has always been, maybe contracting periodically and Big Banging out again, but eternal. We can’t understand that either. Of course, there’s always the possibility that everything we see and know came into existence out of nothing…with no causal event. Some people actually say that, but to me at least, that one is too silly to try and understand.
As regular readers probably know…or anyone who’s read my book, I vote for God, but I realize every person has to work it out for himself…and in the end, I’ve come to think understanding isn’t really important. Maybe our confusion should only bring us closer to our ancient brothers who studied the night sky…a little fearfully, I suspect, and tried their best to make sense of it just like us, and I hope the gods they saw up there gave them comfort.
Maybe we’re only supposed to look in awe, feel wonder and a little discomfort about how tiny and insignificant we really are. Flying around on a watery rock tethered to a dim yellow star, the middle-aged son of an ancient supernova, and out almost at the end of one arm of a massive, starry spiral, we gain perspective only when we look into the night sky…and if you do it right, it’s astonishing. I’m not eleven any more and not nearly as innocent, but it doesn’t matter. I still feel the tingle…I think I always will.