Bi-Weekly Topic for July 1, 2004
True Grit...
By Older and Growing
We sat uncomfortably on whatever horizontal surfaces we could find - mostly hard, angular, and the wrong shape and height - or stood and fidgeted uneasily. A dozen or so of us had taken the lift to the twelfth floor, then through a normally locked door and up a single flight of stairs to the very top level of the building, picking our way along unfrequented corridors, past office flotsam and jetsam abandoned and tossed here on the waves of successive office rearrangements. Through a heavy metal door we found ourselves in this confined space surrounded by machinery that from time to time would spring unexpectedly into whirring, clanking life - the lift machine room.
This particular odyssey had begun several weeks earlier. Posters had appeared in shop windows and public places around town, advertising a charity abseil event. Raise a minimum of £100 in sponsorship by daring to abseil from the top of the town's only high-rise building. At thirteen storeys including the uppermost services level, it may be a mere stump by city standards, but it's by far the tallest building in our little town and a well known landmark, sat squarely on the highest piece of land for miles around.
Those posters stirred different feelings in different people. For me, I’ll own up that my prime motivation wasn't to raise money for charity, or to face a personal challenge, it was simply to have fun and to see the town from a novel and usually inaccessible viewpoint. Others' feelings though may have been very different. The poster that appeared one day in the canteen at a small local factory attracted only limited casual interest. Bill, late middle aged but wiry and energetic, was attracted by the challenge, but it never occurred to Lottie, his colleague and close friend, that she might take part in such a daring event. At first she scoffed at the idea, but Bill was persistent; maybe he saw something in Lottie that she couldn't see herself, or maybe he was just throwing down a friendly gauntlet. But whatever was behind his challenge, to her own surprise, once she actually stopped to consider it Lottie found herself accepting, and as word spread around the factory her sponsorship total shot way past the minimum necessary, eventually reaching many times that amount.
We heard this story sitting together packed into that tiny room, breaking off every now and again as, behind it's safety cage, the lift machinery whirred into action. Lottie was full of excitement - nervous excitement to be sure; her words tumbled out, tripping over each other; a simple, almost superficial description of events in that canteen and the subsequent disbelief - shock almost - of her colleagues. But in her eyes was something much deeper and clearer - a pride in herself for what she was doing. Almost hidden under the words that seemed to be expressing fear and doubt was a voice also saying "Yes! I CAN do this!" Hearing her talk, seeing her determination and sensing the drive which propelled her, I had the impression of someone who was able to face this apparent adventure into the unknown because she saw that, beneath the alien paraphernalia of abseiling, really this was no more - and no less - of a challenge than those she faced daily as a mother, and as carer for her own ageing mother.
In the corner of the room a fixed ladder led up through a trapdoor onto the roof. Lottie struggled rather with the unfamiliar dependence on hand and arm strength needed to climb the vertical ladder and with the awkward sideways step off the ladder, over the high rim edging the void of the large trapdoor opening, down onto the roof. There were two abseil ropes fixed, allowing two people to descend at once. The instructors had asked her and Bill if they wanted to go down together but Lottie was adamant she didn't want that - I guess she was worried in case she flunked it, and felt she'd rather not have anyone she knew watching her that closely. So it happened that I followed Lottie out onto the roof. The view was stunning; unlike the flat two-dimensional view you'd get from a window at a similar height, the three-sixty degree panorama was intensely vivid, something real and present and involving. However there was little time to admire it - the organisers had several dozen people to get down during the morning, and there wasn't time to hang around, metaphorically or literally.
I had to wait for the person ahead to reach the ground, so Lottie was already some way down when I started down the rope a few feet to the side of her. She was letting herself down very slowly, inch by inch. As I caught up with her I could see the tension in her body – her shoulders hunched, arms drawn in, hands in heavy protective gloves gripping the rope tightly, the upper half of her body curled almost into a foetal crouch whilst her legs stretched straight out to maintain contact with the wall in front of her – the nearest equivalent in this vertical world of terra firma. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of intense concentration and determination on anyone’s face, every part of her being focused on following the instructions she'd been given when we practised on the ground. Eyes wide and staring intently at her hands on the rope inches from her face, lips drawn tight, illustrating perfectly why the adjective “grim” so often precedes “determination”. If she saw me at all as I drew level with her, she gave no sign, and I said nothing, sensing that any intrusion would be at best unwelcome, and at worst might destroy the focus on which she was probably depending to take her mind off the drop beneath her.
I reached the ground long before her and had to move out of the way to make room for the next participant, so I missed seeing her expression when she finally landed. In any case there were many of her friends and colleagues waiting to congratulate her, and a pat on the back from me, a stranger, would have gone unnoticed amongst so many. So I looked up, silently saluted her courage, and went on my way.
// posted by andy @ 2:59 PM permalink Source: http://olderandgrowing.blogspot.com/2004/07/true-grit.html
Courage and Place
By Hoarded Ordinaries
Thursday on my way to other business, I stopped for a short walk at the Minute Man National Historical Park in Lexington, Massachusetts. For all the years we lived in an around Boston and Cambridge, I’d never actually set foot on this protected portion of the “Battle Road” where American militia clashed with British soldiers on April 19, 1775. I didn’t have enough time to walk the five-mile Battle Road Trail, but I did take a quick stroll around Hartwell Tavern, the 18th-century home of Ephraim and Elizabeth Hartwell. The Hartwells’ home and tavern are surrounded by rolling pastureland snaked with stone walls and wide-spreading maples: quintessential New England countryside that makes for good sun-dappled walking.
In high school, I was never interested in history: in fact, I think I slept through most of my American history classes. But walking the dusty road leading to Hartwell Tavern gave me a different perspective on the events that preserved its place in history. This, as I mentioned, is quintessential New England country, just about the prettiest and most peaceful place you’d ever imagine. Walking this road in 2004, you can clearly imagine what it might have been like to drive cattle along this same road in 1775; the pastured sheep I saw as I drove down Route 2A could just as well been grazing there centuries ago. This sun-dappled path with its fringe of trees and rock walls seems to exist outside of time: it’s a place where you’d feel content to live the rest of your days and then ultimately, in the fullness of time, come to lie down beneath a different sort of stone.
Realizing how peaceful and literally pastoral this landscape is, I began to realize what it was that those early militia, the so-called Minute Men, must have been fighting for. The Revolution surely wasn’t about abstractions such as taxes and tea; instead, the Revolution was about this lovely land that those long-dead fighters had come to call their own. Walking down that quiet sun-dappled path, I couldn’t imagine it beaten by the tramp of British soldiers’ boots; for an army to despoil this quiet would have been an abomination. The men who raised their hand from the plow to take up arms were fighting for “country” in its most primitive sense: they were fighting so the tramp of British boots would no longer haunt the dreams of their sleeping babies or startle the cows who lay chewing their mid-summer cud in tree-fringed pastures.
It took great courage, I suspect, for farmers, merchants, and common laborers to take up arms against an organized army of their native countrymen. And yet strolling these paths among towering trees and snaking stone walls, I realize where they found such courage: they found it in these rocks, these trees, and these rolling hills which had stood for so long, even then, in mute testimony to nature’s all-enduring power. Like a mountain that can’t be moved, those Minute Men stood firm, rooted in their adopted country, defending their right to home and hearth with a persistence that could not be denied. Some things (and some places) are worth fighting for: a peaceful home, a humble hearth, and one’s own quiet corner of God’s green earth being among them.
This entry is my contribution to the Ecotone biweekly topic Courage and Place.Comments
Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/07/page/3/
Misplaced courage
By Via Negativa
Before the monitor's blank screen I bow my head, waiting for the words to come. The hum of this machine of mine keeps me steady, like the upper cable of a makeshift bridge across a river. And I'm picturing that time on the cable bridge across Hammersley Fork, at the end of a long day's hike.
Perhaps those watching from the bank were thinking, "How brave!" But it's much more likely they were saying to themselves, "Better him than me!" And they each took off their shoes & rolled up their pants' legs, grabbing sticks to steady themselves against the current.
If you take a close look at bravery, it almost always turns out to be something else. Firemen enter the burning building out of a sense of duty, out of love. Soldiers rush into battle to save their comrades. A woman gives birth because she has to, because she wants a child. People do what they have to do. It's their actions that are courageous; their hearts are full of trepidation.
I have never been brave like that. I'm lazy. I want to stay dry.
The others made their way downstream and crossed at the ford, shouting and laughing. I kept the lower cable tight against the heels of my boots and crab-walked slowly across. At its highest point the drop was less than ten feet, I said to myself, so what's the big deal? But right in the middle I looked down and my heart skipped a beat.
The water looked so inviting, all of a sudden!
__________
Submitted for the July 1 Ecotone topic Courage and Place. Hammersley Fork is both the name of a large stream and a State Forest Wild Area in northern Pennsylvania, over 30,000 acres of virtually roadless, recovering second-growth forest.
ecotone topic: courage and place
by alembic
This post is my response to ecotone's (July 1, 2004) biweekly topic: Courage And Place
I suppose with Canada Day and Independence Day looming so large on North American calendars at this point in the summer, it seemed only natural, if not exactly inevitable, that the topic for the July 1 ecotone pieces should be courage and place.
July 1 has come and gone, and the same will be true of July 4 in a day or so, and I still can't seem to get a grip on this topic. I have three drafts already for this post, each trying to work itself into the discovery of that perfect fit of narrative and description that will give a unique picture of how some courageous act or person came to be shaped or ended up shaping some place.
I grew up in a place where you couldn't take a step without being reminded of some grand historical act or other inscribed in the ruins that spanned across a wide arc of centuries. You would think it would be easy for me start rhapsodizing about a pile of stones on a bucolic hill in Transylvania and how once it was house and home to a fearless (and megalomaniac) knight or count (I forget what he was) who fought off the Tartars. But I don't live there anymore ' and haven't for what amounts to a lifetime now. What I would write about that place of ruins would be descriptive of the province of memory.
What about this place then ' what of Marin, where I now live? Where are the ruins or the monuments that act as bookmarks in the process of the history that shaped this place? The people who lived here for centuries, the Coastal Miwoks, have left no buildings, nor ruins. Nor did they mark the landscape in irreversible ways. It is as if they had never been here. It wasn't until this ecotone topic came up that I was reminded, once again ' this time more consciously ' that the name of this county, Marin, is a vestige of courage from a man who once lived here and whose people have called this place home for centuries.
I wonder how many people who live here in Marin realize that their county is named after a Miwok Indian chief who resisted the Spanish back in the days when the Missions set the standards of what could be called courageous behavior? Or, that the prison, in which executions go on regularly to this day and which is less than a mile away from a shopping center with a hopping singles bar, and upscale shops, and movie theaters, and yoga and hair studios is named after another Miwok 'troublemaker' from the past? This one, Qintin, was captured at what is now called San Quentin Point, home to San Quentin prison.
I am not sure what passes for courage nowadays here in Marin. So many of us here spend most of our energies insulating ourselves from the troubles beyond the ridges of our hills that shape the larger world out there. We are too busy landscaping or remodeling, or redecorating to consider acts of courage as somehow if not redemptive, at least capable of shaping the place we call home in ways undreamed of by architects and regional development committees.
So what of courage and place then ' here and now? The portrait of courage and place that follows may not be as historically grand as fighting Tartar mercenaries of old or the Spanish missionaries of more recent centuries, but it is, in some sense, in the fine tradition that marks July 4 as the celebration of Independence Day in that peculiar and indomitable way Americans have made liberty not just an individual right, but also a universal and transcendent value for so many of us in the world.
The place is Marin, where BMW stands for 'Basic Marin Wheels.' Incredible as this may sound, it takes courage not to drive a BMW (or Porsche, or Hummer, or ... you get my drift) when you have the means to buy one, or even two, provided you don't want the latest model. So, I want to dedicate this ecotone post to the two Marin men I know who drive, without a care and with indifferent pride, their 1980s Volvos, which are decorated with scratches and dents, like so many badges attesting to their owners' conviction that cars are a means of transportation, and not a vehicle that is meant to transport their image across class lines.
Believe me, I am not trying to be funny here. Driving old cars may not seem to posses the same level of historical significance that holding back Tartar invaders deserves. Nor does it emanate that aura of courage it took to resist the notions of salvation the Spanish missionaries forced upon a population that was obviously in no need of it. Still, it takes a particular courage ' and a mind of steel ' to resist the invasion of images that tease desires of every kind and promise fresh salvation through the possession of commodities, but which, in the end deliver neither satisfaction nor change.
So, when you understand how dangerous it may be to view cars as, well, nothing more then, cars, you will realize just how courageous these men really are!
Posted by maria at July 04, 2004 11:30 AM
Comments
By the time I got to the end of this post, I could see why it had been difficult to draw together. Courage is a complicated thing - place, time and what people choose to focus on - or blank out. Interesting. Food for thought. Hope you are okay, by the way.
Posted by: Coup de Vent on July 4, 2004 05:13 PMCoup de Vent: Oops.... I forgot to paste in the last few paragraphs of the post. No wonder it wasn't coming together at the end!
By the way, I am better, though still not clear about what happened. Tests and doctors' appointments next week should address that issue, let's hope.
Posted by: maria on July 4, 2004 06:20 PMGood to hear that you are better!
Posted by: Tish on July 5, 2004 10:06 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040921224656/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000379.html
Nerve
By P.
Even in bright sunlight, Cleveland's Civil War memorial looks ominous. Bolt upright, it stands on the southwest corner of Public Square with the air of an obsessive grandparent lecturing a child about how it was in the old days.
Today -- July 4, 2004 -- it is 110 years old. It has outlived almost all its neighbors on the square, and its elaborate, symbolic decorations have been blackened by soot into a permanent, antique mourning. It's a unique expression of Victorian sentimentality, Cleveland's 19th-century prosperity and of veterans' political power -- for it was largely built with tax money, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
Its four major sculpture groups depict the hottest moments of warfare -- close-up fighting around an artillery piece, for example; a horse going down in a calvary fight. The committee that built it consciously chose to depict realistic action instead of the stilted figures of the day. Unconsciously, perhaps, they emphasized the soldiers' courage by stressing the horror of what they survived.
The men themselves are named in the central building, where bronze doors guard a cool, tomblike quiet against the noise of the modern street. The monument is the polar opposite of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, where men and women, not drama, are the focus; the names are outdoors and there is no ornament at all. Even the statuary off to one side that veterans insisted on is subdued.
The Vietnam monument doesn't stress courage, but I think it's taken for granted there.
I have no right to write about courage, not when reservists close to my own age risk their lives to do what they need to under fire in Iraq or Afghanistan. Lucky in my draft number 30 years ago, I have never had to worry about someone trying to kill me, at least not in the immediate sense of the heated scenes on the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial downtown. Indeed, I don't claim to have courage. I think too much. I avoid heights and confrontations, and if my capacity for outrage had anything behind it, I would be working, in poverty, on petitions to send to Washington. Instead I work, in insecure comfort, to send my daughter to college someday.
I think it's interesting to consider that we respect the courage of people with good intentions, even if we don't agree with what they're doing, but not the courage of people with bad or foolish aims. It took courage for a boater to leap to the aid of his friend in the water today, for example, but likely no one will look past the fact that he left his boat to drift away from him, and didn't bring a life preserver. I don't understand why condemned prisoners don't fight tooth and nail as they're taken to the death chamber. Does it take more courage to resist, or not to? And why should anyone care? At least some of them are innocent.
Most likely the bravest thing my wife and I have done was to decide to have a child, after years of insisting we wouldn't. And that leads back to a place, University Hospitals. I will long remember our first experience there, a premature-labor scare in a birthing room decorated like a '70s Holiday Inn suite -- just sitting amid the hardware, sitting, and trying to be calm, and waiting for developments. At one point, down the hall, a young woman started screaming, in a voice that suggested she didn't have any idea what was happening to her or why. But waiting didn't take any courage on my part, really; that was all my wife's, who had to endure the drug they used to calm her uterus. Later, she said she felt as if an elephant had sat on her chest -- and I realized the same drug, potassium chloride, is used in executions.
Still, I know now from experience, it does take some determination to say "no" as needed. And letting go, now -- that will take courage, for sure.
Jul 2, 2004 at 12:38 pm
This is a bit off-track, if not off-color, but your post reminded me of a card I gave a girlfriend that had an image of a Minute Man on the front and on the inside it said something like, “Back in 1776, a Minute Man was supposedly considered to be a good thing.”
This morning on NPR (or maybe the local station), there was a report on someone who recently wrote a book on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing during the time he lived in The Old Manse in Concord. I’ve been there a number of times when I’ve been bicycling or canoeing nearby. It embarrassed me to realize I had no idea about the historical/ literary significance of the Old Manse since I only ever went in to use the bathroom!
Jul 2, 2004 at 2:29 pm
Leslee’s loss! because elsewhere in The Old Manse is Sophia’s Window, where Sophia Hawthorne cut her name (and, if I remember right, the year) into the glass with the diamond in her wedding ring. I never saw the Tavern, though, Lorianne–where is it, exactly? How did I miss it, I wonder.
Jul 2, 2004 at 5:51 pm
That park is, yes, a weird experience because it’s such a very peaceful pretty place. I’ve been to battlefields — Little Big Horn, especially — that feel like battlefields. But Lexington feels like the nicest kind of Sunday picnic park, and despite the exhibits and what not I just couldn’t grasp that people ever shot at each other there.
Jul 2, 2004 at 8:17 pm
Leslee, although I didn’t mention it in this post, I *do* usually chuckle with a knowing grin whenever I hear the term “Minute Man.” The fact that *every* quaint New England town has a monument to local Minute Men (each wielding a mighty gun, no less) makes the bawdy association all but unavoidable.
I’ve actually never set foot in the Old Manse, so you’ve experienced it more than I have by simply using the restroom there. I’ve been to Author’s Ridge in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, though, and I’ve visited the North Bridge in Concord (site of the “shot heard ’round the world”), so I’m not completely out-of-the-historical loop, just mostly!
Doc Rock, I’ve heard of the famous window etching, but I’ve never been into the Old Manse (nor Emerson’s house, which I believe you can tour). If I’m remembering correctly, Thoreau helped design the vegetable garden at the Old Manse: it was his practical, down & dirty wedding present to the newlywed Hawthornes when they moved in!
Whereas the Old Manse is in Concord, the Hartwell Tavern is on Route 2A in Lexington, near the Lexington/Lincoln border. It’s one of several parking areas along Route 2A just down from the Minute Man visitor center: you could conceivably walk from site to site, or you can drive along 2A to see each of the “Battle Road” sites individually (in true National Park fashion, there’s plenty of parking!)
Dale, I’ve never visited other battlegrounds, but even pictures of places like Gettysburg *look* serious & impressive: the site of epic struggle. But Lexington feels a little like the Shire from Lord of the Rings: you half expect to see hobbits walking around (especially around that tavern!) You can certainly see where “Concord” got its name at least.
Jul 2, 2004 at 9:52 pm
The grounds of the Old Manse are gorgeous - terraced and landscaped. I’ve picnicked there. And you can see the Old North Bridge from the grounds. Next time you’re in Concord check it out. They also have a good restroom.
Jul 5, 2004 at 6:56 pm
It is so different to hear the British portrayed as oppressors. We Canadians can barely contain our smugness when we say that we achieved independence without violence (unless you count parliamentary debates…)
Jul 6, 2004 at 7:07 pm
Leslee, I (like you) always seemed to end up in Concord while doing something else: going to/from Walden, visiting Great Meadows, stopping by Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, etc. I passed by the Old Manse, though, the one time I stopped (years ago) at the North Bridge, but I’ll definitely have to go back. Now that we live in NH and my trips to Concord are more rare, I’ll have to make a point of taking a day trip to see *all* the highlights (restrooms included!)
Sylvia, how interesting that Canadians are proud of their non-violent revolution whereas we Yanks are proud of our quickness to take up arms: a deep cultural difference, I’m sure. As I wrote this post I was mindful that Native Americans would see this site in yet another entirely different way: *all* the Euro-Americans on *both* sides of the conflict were “oppressors” from a Native American perspective. That land didn’t belong to the Minute Men, after all: they’d foisted it off the Native Americans not many years before.