Anatevka

Two months ago I wrote a short post about the history we imagine that we understand.  Two generations of moviegoers thought they knew about plantation life because they saw "Gone With the Wind."  Who knows how much longer people will think they understand Eastern European Jewish life because they saw "Fiddler on the Roof"?

Brody, Ukraine was -- at the turn of the twentieth century -- a small city (roughly 20,000) on the border between Austria-Hungary and Russia.  It was easily over 80% Jewish, which is a very large proportion.  We picture muddy streets and leaning, wood-framed structures in the "shtetl" but Brody's streets were paved with stone blocks and many of the downtown buildings were stone or brick and quite substantial.  The main synagogue, in particular, was an imposing stone building.

And what about the community of Jews in Brody?  The whole range of schools and conflicts was present.  There were Hasidim and Misnagdim.  There were Maskilim.  The well-known Yiddish writer Joseph Roth, author of "Radetsky March" was from Brody.  The Baal Shem Tov lived there for a time, too.

But Brody was a commercial town, important for its position on the frontier.  Most of those Jews weren't rabbinical scholars or mystics or advocates of the Enlightenment.  They were business people, doing the business of border towns.  I think if we imagine ourselves having devolved dramatically from the piety of our grandfathers, or having evolved dramatically from their ignorance, we fail to understand both them and ourselves.

And a sidenote for readers of Stones from the Creek.  "Brody" in Ukrainian means "fords".  "Vado" in the name San Miguel del Vado also refers to the ford, in that case of the Pecos River.

Lynyrd Skynyrd

I indulged myself in two Lynyrd Skynyrd moments in Stones from the Creek.  Rock and roll fans will know that Ronnie Van Zant, Gary Rossington and Allen Collins named their band after a hated gym teacher, Leonard Skinner, who acted as a dean in their Florida high school (Robert E. Lee… really) and enforced the rule against long hair.  They used a sign from his realty agency for an album cover which resulted in his having to change his phone number after a slew of hate calls from total strangers.  He, meanwhile, had become friendly with the now-adult musicians.

I have two repellent sheriffs in my stories.  The first is Raymond J. Hearn of Barnwell County, SC.  He sends Mingo Sanders to a work gang at a privately-owned phosphate mine without so much as a hearing.  His grandson is a conservative Republican congressman.

The second is John Edack of Lyon County, NV.  He also made his living arresting people in order to provide free labor for local employers.  In his case, the arrested (I won't say "convict" because there was no legitimate charge or conviction) were Pyramid Lake Paiute Indians.

Neither of these is a historical character.  They are names I assigned to characters who were performing the vicious and exploitative work that sheriffs, in fact, did in those two counties and many more at that time.  But their names, while not drawn from the historic record, were also not made up.

Raymond J. Hearn was the assistant principal of the junior high school I attended.  John Edack was assistant principal of my high school.  I have unpleasant memories of both.  They seemed to me to dislike teens and all-to-happy to punish students unfairly.  When I was myself and assistant principal, other teachers and administrators were astonished that I had such stories.  After sharing one in a graduate seminar once, I heard the hushed whisper, "And he's and assistant principal!"

The truth is that educators like that drove me to become a teacher myself.  I kept feeling, "It shouldn't have to be so bad."  And I tried hard to be a different kind of person, I think successfully.  I was surprised when old classmates started reading Stones from the Creek and did not recognize the names.   I guess my friends were able to shake them off over the last four-and-a-half decades; they had an unforgettable effect on me.  But I will not thank them.

Trust

I often say that we get to choose the stories we tell about our lives.  A bunch of stuff happens, but we choose which parts to remember and how they fit together.  So what is the story of this morning's walk through (very) snowy woods with my GSD, Prophet.

He did totally pull me off my feet.  He really did lunge at his friend Chapman, a black Lab, while on leash and while I was off balance with one foot in a calf deep hole in the snow.  And he did this only two days after walking off when I took a bad spill on a damaged steel grate in a sidewalk.  I felt some kind of way that he didn't come and check on me then and it came right back today she he just forgot about the leash because he felt like playing.

But there was a lot more to this morning.  While he was off-leash in the park with Chapman, Prophet ran headlong up and down the trail; Chapman in hot pursuit.  They wrestled with each other and played tug with sticks.  And this all gave me a great deal of joy.  We took our off-piste detours into the ravines and down to the Metro North tracks, too.  Even two days after the most recent snow (and there have been so many storms) we were breaking trail there.  And Prophet also lured me into playing tug with his sticks once Chapman went home.

But the story I want to choose is that Prophet got a small piece of stick lodged deep in his throat.  The distress is unmistakable: he shakes his head, mouth open, and tries to insert a paw.  Once I saw I reached into his mouth and down his throat.  On my third try (!) I got that twig and pulled it out.  Now the temperature was in the mid-teens and having my hand coated with saliva in the wind was no great pleasure.  But I helped my friend.  More, he let me.  How much trust must it take for him to allow me to reach into his throat, especially when he is frightened and in trouble?  Not to speak, I suppose, of my trust that he won't take my hand off at the wrist.

I don't know what he remembers about this six hours later.  But I know that I can choose to remember.  Just as I can choose to forget that he yanked me off my feet.  Because I choose to value our mutual trust over his momentary loss of control in the face of the joy of play.

Goldfield, Nevada

On December 4, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sent 300 Federal troops into Goldfield, Nevada under the command of Major General Frederick Funston, the butcher of the Philippines.  The mine owners of the district had informed Roosevelt that the area was in a state of anarchy and that martial law was required.  When the troops arrived they found Goldfield quiet, with no civil disorder or unrest at all.  But the mine owners took advantage of the presence of troops -- as they had planned -- to cut wages and declare that no union member would be allowed employment.

Roosevelt concluded that, although the troops had been brought in under false pretenses, he could not now remove them.  With the wage cuts and the move to break the union, he felt, there now would be civil unrest in the absence of troops.  The result: a non-union camp.

This is class warfare.  It doesn't matter that the President wasn't part of the plan from its inception.  It matters that he allowed the US Army to be used to destroy collective bargaining and to back the owners' play even when he realized that they had tricked him.  Goldfield was another exclusive camp, like Cripple Creek in the collection Stones from the Creek.  But neither the bosses nor Roosevelt were opposed to the union because they opposed discrimination.  We needn't make heroes of the miners in Goldfield to understand that the owners conspired with the US government to reduce them to interchangeable parts.

The owners have often created a multinational work force in a desire to divide their workers.  This shouldn't stop us creating a multinational resistance against them.  If we do not, we condemn ourselves to a continuation of the very one-sided class warfare that they have been waging for decades.

Separate Universes

Certain revelations have to be repeated daily for me.  It doesn't matter how big or forceful my "Aha!" is:  if I didn't truly get it before I will probably have to be bludgeoned over the head with this realization again.  I think the AA phrase "One Day at a Time" best captures my need to discover important things over and over.

One of these epiphanies is the separate universes inhabited by us and our dogs.  I have known this for years and have read about it, but I still have light and music when I see it again as if for the first time.  This morning Prophet and I were coming over the top of Spuyten Duyvil Hill when I saw the red light of dawn on the New Jersey Palisades and the entire thing reflected below in the momentarily calm Hudson River.  I looked at Prophet to see whether he was sharing this magic moment, but he was otherwise occupied.  For a short moment I wondered whether dogs were denied awe and wonder.

Then I remembered the moment we left the house.  There is still a dusting of snow over the two-inch crust of ice and the few inches of snow below.  Prophet dashed up onto an intact surface, snatched some up in his mouth, and then rolled on his back in ecstasy.  I stood watching.  Had he wondered whether humans are denied awe and wonder?

We walk through the same spatial coordinates of latitude, longitude and altitude but we inhabit separate universes that have only some intersections.  For days, Prophet has been walking on top of that icy crust, only occasionally breaking through.  Every step I take off trail has me plunging through the crust ankle deep (sometimes calf deep.)  I am much less willing to go on off-piste adventures under these conditions.  For me they are trudges, focused on my feet.  For Prophet, even the skidding on slippery surfaces seems to be fun.

And then there is all that urine.  We walked on an errand later in the morning and I managed to control my goal orientation with the memory that I had no particular time limits.  That meant that I could allow myself to wait each time Prophet absolutely had to stop to study some other dog's urine.  Does he analyze it?  Does he reflect on it?  Is it an aesthetic savoring?  Is it all of these?  Or is it something else beyond my imagination?  At this moment I have no way of knowing.  I just know it doesn't interest me.

And then, as I have mentioned before, occasionally Prophet stops to sign the guest book himself.  Why that time and not the time before?  Is it an enemy who he has to dis?  Is it a friend who he has to say "hey" to?  All I can do is wonder:  be filled with awe and wonder.

The Tempter

Several of the recurring themes in the collection Stones from the Creek were initially surprises to me.  I had not set out, for example, to discuss the persistence of evil, yet there is the devil: in "Turning Water Into Gold," in "Passion Flower" and ""The Sun Shone So Brightly," in "Warrior Princess," and in "Who Could Have Foreseen It."

In the two stories that reference the fictional Cerrillos Strike, he materializes as el tío, a figure to whom the Bolivian miners offer tobacco and liquor in return for their safe return to the surface after the shift.  He is a kind of master of the underworld who they have to propitiate.  But his presence here is more than a nod to a truth about Bolivian miners that was too good to ignore.  It was  a way of referring to a much larger point made by Michael Taussig in his The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.

The title already suggests that there is more here than the magic of petition.  As Taussig explains: "Magical beliefs are revelatory and fascinating not because they are ill-conceived instruments of utility but because they are poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the innermost course of the world."  Much of his book addresses the challenge that has faced capitalists everywhere in trying to motivate people to do as much wage work as possible.  He points out, for example, that doubling wages was tried in some places to put a greater value on this paid work than on other work.  But the result (paradoxical only in the eyes of economists) was to halve the amount of time people put in!  They simply needed less time to gain what the money they wanted.

Taussig points out that the devil (or "uncle") of the Bolivian mines has European features.  He opposes both the Pachamama (earth mother) and the Virgin (if they are, indeed, separate entities) in his insistence on plunder and in his threat to remove the resource that is now keeping the people alive!  If he is not propitiated, the mineral will disappear from the rock.

There is more to this argument, and I recommend his book highly.  I have been preoccupied now for decades about the mechanisms that impoverish independent and autonomous people and drive them into wage work.  In Stones from the Creek there is a repeated theme about the seizure of the common lands from the communities of New Mexico.  It is an obvious violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which secured property rights to the people of the northern half of Mexico when it was taken by the United States.  But it may be less obvious to people who believe that land and labor are commodities and who take those ideas for granted.  In "The Giant Believed Her," the genius of Alchesay is to recognize that this is the entire intent of the Dawes Act and to find a way to trick the Giant into allowing the people to retain their communal work and identity.  "Scars" addresses the same question about compelling people to do dangerous work, but shows how the industrialists of the "New" South solved it by enslaving young men by charging them with specious crimes and sentencing them to open-ended, unpaid work for the capitalist fertilizer mines.

I have tried as hard as I know how to strip the actual stories of all this didactic stuff.  I was not interested in presenting one-dimensional characters spouting social-studies speeches.  But I also hoped that the reader would discover these ideas at the same time as being moved by the struggles of fully human characters.  My success remains to be seen.

Mayim Chayim

Mayim Chayim is Hebrew for "living waters."  It is the technical requirement for water in a mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath.  Like most things involving the laws of observance it is hedged about with restrictions and technicalities "too numerous to mention."  And since, in this case, they all involve plumbing, suffice it to say that in some cases that phrase "living waters" is honored technically.

The basic requirement of ritual baths is that the water be flowing from a spring or well, or from a lake of river that has a spring or well as its source.  Leviticus 15 refers to several causes of impurity and requires bathing in living waters to wash some of them away.  Leviticus 11, in the midst of lengthy lists of animals that are not kosher, explains that spring water and cistern water remain clean even after contact with dead animals that cannot be eaten.

Growing up I heard the worst things about the mikvah.  At that time and in that community it was an embarrassing place where women had to get naked in order to prepare for marriage.  And it was associated, too, with bathing after one's menstrual period.  The women I knew, who were deeply observant, did not like the mikvah and thought of it as a backward, humiliating and male supremacist practice.

I was happily surprised when visiting Jerusalem at the age of 17 to discover that it was a large, clean tank filled with cold water.  A thorough shower was required before immersing, and the facility also had a sauna and a schvitz.  It was a place to prepare for the Sabbath, and the physical act of bathing in living water served, not only as the performance of a commandment, but also as a physical metaphor for the spiritual act of shedding the mundane cares of the work week.

So I wrote about Mingo Sanders's transformative experience in the waters of baptism without having shared that experience myself.  But I shared a parallel experience in the living waters of the mikvah.

Cañones

In the summer of 2011 we visited friends at their summer rental in Taos.  I had a few stops in mind to help my thinking about Stones from the Creek, especially the village of San Miguel del Vado, which has figured prominently in these postings.  But I had also been thinking about the village of Cañones, near Abiquiu.  As the crow flies, the trip from Taos to Cañones is about fifty miles, but by road it is more like eighty.  And since the morning included a trip to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert there was a lot of driving: that monastery is at the end of an unpaved road thirteen miles along the Rio Chama canyon.

I had been reading about Cañones in a monograph by Paul Kutsche and John Van Ness.  Its very remoteness had kept it going.  Up until a few decades ago the road in was unpaved and frequently impassable and the people had waged a long struggle regarding the school bus their children had to ride on that road.  I also read a really good piece by Paul Kutsche and Dennis Gallegos on the role of the lay Catholic brotherhood in keeping the community together and viable.

I have heard people say that the mountain villages of New Mexico are not very welcoming.  I don't really know what they are talking about.  Stopping for a cold soda and a snack I have several times found the shopkeepers very friendly.  Other times I haven't.  That's pretty much my experience everywhere.  I know that people in the hospitality business are expected to be… well, hospitable.  But a bodega -- whether in the Bronx or in Truchas -- is not really the hospitality business.

All of which is to say that I had no expectation that I could arrive in Cañones, New Mexico and have a bunch of people anxious to share their life stories with me.  Except that there is a monastery there, the Orthodox Christian Monastery of the Holy Archangel Michael.  So we had a reason to go.  The Brother showed us around and we were invited to the evening prayer.

I was interested to see among their icons and image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is most definitely not a saint of the Eastern Church.  The Brothers explained that it was a way of being welcoming to their neighbors.  And, sure enough, a neighbor arrived.  She lived up the road in the village and taught elementary school nearby.  She explained, though, that even though she is married to a villager, and has lived there for some time, she is not really one of them.  She was a Northern New Mexico hispano, but she wasn't born in Cañones.  She found the worship at the monastery restoring and welcoming.  I wondered whether her outsider status made it easier for her to join these outsiders.

The village is there because of the water of Cañones Creek.  It is drawn through a variety of acequías to the land of the local farmers.  Whatever sheepherding goes on requires permits from the National Park Service.  In my dreams the valley is just one garden after another.  Of course the reality is that it is still dry New Mexico.  But the trees along the ditches make all the difference in the world.

We were invited to stay the night, but we returned to our friends in Taos.   A few months later we sent the Brothers a DVD of a documentary movie on the Jesus Prayer, which showed visits to Orthodox monasteries in Sinai, in Russia, and elsewhere.  They said they enjoyed it.  I would really like to return, but I don't think they welcome visitors' dogs.

Turning 62

Yesterday was my 62nd birthday.  The forecast was for a dusting of snow overnight, but when the sun came up there were two or three inches on the ground and it was still snowing heavily, on the way to eight inches when it finally stopped around sundown.  I was delusional enough to get in the car with my GSD Prophet, but when I couldn't go more that three feet, I changed plans.  It took twenty minutes to get the car back up in the driveway.

So we set out on foot.  The woods we go to are only three-quarters of a mile away anyway.  We took the long route, though, hoping to run into some of Prophet's friends in Henry Hudson Park.  No luck.  We headed down toward the river and then I realized that my birthday gift was right there in front of me.  It's always just out there.  All you have to do is look up.  Last year it was a bald eagle sitting in a tree: not something I see everyday in the Bronx!  This year it was the untracked snow on the ground, the snow in the branches, and the ecstatic GSD running with abandon through the stuff.

Blessings like this seem to always be there, just within reach.  I try to remember to find them and to be grateful.  This photo is from today.  The sun is out, there are tracks from other people and other dogs.  And I was frozen: not with cold, but with appreciation.

More on San Miguel del Vado

Just before Christmas, in a post titled "Enclosure in New Mexico" I discussed the fate of the village of San Miguel del Vado after the case Sandoval v. US was decided against the villagers by the US Supreme Court.  In 1983, Victor Westphall's Mercedes Reales: Hispanic Land Grants of the Upper Rio Grande Region concluded that San Miguel was reduced to "nothing at all."  In that earlier blog post, I cited a 1991 article by Emlen Hall which came to a very different conclusion.  He wrote that the people simply made formal claims to their common land through the land office, and then, in order to secure those claims, started living on out there in the country instead of in the village.

In 1989 I wrote an unpublished paper titled "Alienation of Ejidos:  A New Mexican Ley Lerdo?  My main point was that the seizure of the common lands of the New Mexico community grants was ideologically driven and intended to turn land into capital and people into workers.  In my story "White Caps" the conversation between Surveyor General Paterson and Territorial Assemblyman Herrera is an attempt to bring this conflict to light.

But their next confrontation, in the story "Warrior Princess" has few words and the immediate possibility of massive and deadly violence.  It takes place during a procession for the village's feast day, the Fiesta de San Miguel.  Magdalena, the wife of Assemblyman Herrera, has refurbished the church's small hand carved statue of the Archangel Michael and she feels possessed by the warrior angel to confront the marshal's posse and prevent the violence.  What is unsaid is that the very procession itself, and the continued existence of the church, serve as a way to perpetuate the community.  In an era in which the villagers have moved to their grazing lands and an Anglo government in Santa Fe is usurping  the local Brotherhood's power, the allegiance to their saint may be the strings collective obligation they have left.

That statue was lost to collectors around the same time.  But the village bought a newer one, seven-and-a-half feet tall.  It was in a style unlike what their grandparents had admired, but one must conclude that they found it more powerful and more compelling.  When the current parishioners noticed it in a storeroom in 1998, they called on well-know religious artisans to restore it and to return it to a place of honor in the church's sanctuary.

The procession of the small woodcarving of San Miguel in the story "Warrior Princess" takes place on the Feast Day of St. Michael: September 29.  In 1906 that fell on a Saturday.  In 1999, when the giant woodcarving was processed and returned to the church, it was done on September 25, a Monday.  There was no armed conflict.  But the number of people show that the community has survived and is something indeed; not "nothing at all."

The information regarding the 1998-99 restoration and procession comes from Peter Eller, "Restoration of the Church Statue in the New Mexico Village of San Miguel del Vado" in the Summer 2000 issue of Tradición Revista.  The photo shown here is by Peter López.