March 2023
Books read:
- Indignation by Philip Roth
- The Human Stain by Philip Roth
- When Montezuma Met Cortes: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History by Matthew Restall
- Heart to Heart by His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Patrick McDonnell
- Passing by Nella Larsen
- Valley Loop at Bobcat Ridge near Loveland (March 23rd)
- South Boulder Creek trail in Boulder (March 28th)
Song(s) of the month – Jackson Browne and David Lindley:
- I’m Alive
- El Rayo X
- Take it Easy
- Your Bright Baby Blues
- These Days
- Running on Empty
- For a Dancer
- Before the Deluge
Scientist Spotlight – Five women of science changing the world
March Summary:
So remember last month when I told you that a village came together to help support the arrival of our new grandson? Well that village was decimated by a nasty virus that I’m calling the NEMV: Never Ending Mucus Virus. This made the end of February and the first half of March really rough. I think the virus was feeling left out because we had been wearing masks and isolating for so long. It took out its vengeance on us. But, like winter giving way to spring, the virus finally gave way to health and my first hike of the month finally took place on the 23rd and it was wonderful. The good news is that it didn’t impact my reading much.
I’ve been thinking again about kindness, especially after reading the short sort of prayer book by the Dalai Lama called Heart to Heart. I was thinking about it as I was watching our local city council meeting via video. Each week the council allows members of the public to speak for a maximum of three minutes each on any topic they’d like. Based on some of the viral YouTube videos around the country that make the news you’d think that there would be a lot of anger out there, but I honestly haven’t seen it. People are generally respectful. I especially enjoy two gentleman who are sort of regulars during this part of the meeting; Strider and Steve. Strider is a social justice warrior who survived a bad beating on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama 50 years ago. Steve is a conservative business owner in town whom I’ve talked to about climate change at a tabling event once (while he was wearing his ‘Make America Great Again’ cap). Both men consistently bring up great points and have presented some potentially good ideas. You would think that Steve would be angry as a conservative in a very progressive county; but he consistently is respectful and calm in laying out his views of how things need to change. In my conversation with him about climate change we had a great discussion and listened to each other’s views. This is how democracy was envisioned so many years ago. Engaged people exchanging differing views on important topics. Granted, our city council leans pretty much to the left, so I imagine conservatives will never be quite satisfied until that changes. But my suggestion is to show up at these meetings and respectfully present your concerns and possible solutions. We need good ideas from both conservatives and progressives to make our city, our state, our country, and our world a livable place for all members of our community. I encourage everyone to attend a local council meeting wherever you live, and then to respectfully contribute to those meetings if you can. It’s a great way to be part of a democracy.
Oh, another school shooting this month. Nine-year-old children gunned down. One of the quotes by the Dalai Lama in his book I read was: "Good wishes alone are not enough; we have to assume responsibility." There really is only one answer to this uniquely American problem. But that solution will never happen, so brace yourself for more shootings as it is just part of our landscape. I wrote in more detail about this in the summary section of my May 2022 blog after the Uvalde, Texas massacre so I'll just stop here. It's too incomprehensible.
This month I read two more novels by the great Philip Roth, a revision of the history I thought I understood about the Aztec encounter with the Spaniards, a book on kindness and connectedness, and a book written by a Black woman in the 1920s about the subject of passing (passing as a White person when one is genetically Black). Not too much hiking this month, but it made me appreciate getting out even more than usual. Enjoy.
Scientist Spotlight: Five women of science changing the world
March is women’s history month and I thought that this UN Environment Program article best exemplifies how women of science around the world are taking responsibility for changing history and making our planet a better place. I couldn’t describe them any better than the words and videos in this article (I had previously included Katherine Hayhoe in my scientist spotlight in my August 2021 blog):
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/meet-5-women-who-are-using-science-help-save-planet
Song(s) of the month: Jackson Browne and David Lindley
David Lindley sadly died this month after a long illness related to long-Covid. He was an incredible musician, playing slide guitar, fiddle, cello, viola, and a whole bunch of Middle Eastern instruments. He had a decent solo career but is probably best known for his session and concert work with Jackson Browne. He co-wrote songs with him and really provided the sound that made Jackson Browne, well, Jackson Browne. He also played with Linda Ronstadt, Rod Stewart, Warren Zevon, Ry Cooder, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
I’ve seen Jackson Browne in concert probably 10-15 times. His songs form part of the backdrop of the lives of my wife and I from college days through the year 2000 when he used to play a yearly autumn benefit concert in Sedona, Arizona. Every year we would make it a weekend of music and hiking in those beautiful red rock formations. He stopped doing those shows after 9/11. He’s an incredible songwriter with perfect hair. Here are a few of his (and David Lindley’s) songs that I enjoy.
I’m Alive: Possibly the best breakup song written? Hard to say, there are so many great breakup songs. I love this version from the Love is Strange live recording done during a tour of Spain in 2006. Sample lyrics:
Yeah, now I'm rolling down this canyon drive
With your laughter in my head
I'm gonna have to block it out somehow to survive
'Cause those dreams are dead
And I'm alive
El Rayo X: This is a David Lindley song, in Spanish, and it’s just fun. And you hear that voice of his which sang the really high part in the Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs song Stay which he and Browne played many times in concert.
Take it Easy: Browne wrote this as part of his southern California collaboration with Glenn Frey. The Eagles had a big hit with it. Winslow, Arizona has a sort of monument to this song that was set in that town. I love Lindley’s fiddle playing on this.
Your Bright Baby Blues: His great opus about self discovery, depression, and the healing power of love. There is so much packed inside this great song. And Lindley on the bouzuki and slide guitar on this live version is terrific.... Sample lyrics:
'Cause I've been up and down this highway
Far as my eyes can see
No matter how fast I run
I can never seem to get away from me
No matter where I am
I can't help thinking I'm just a day away
From where I want to be
Now I'm running home, baby
Like a river to the sea
These Days (featuring Luz Casal): Browne wrote this song about loss and regret when he was 16 years old. 16! I like this version, sung by Luz Casal who is a famous pop singer from Spain, where this live version was recorded. And there's Lindley’s fiddle…Sample Lyrics:
These days I sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten
Please, don't confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them
Running on Empty: This turned out to be his rock anthem in the late 70s when I probably saw him 3 times. I’m pretty sure he wrote this as he was approaching the age of 30 and looking back on where his life had brought him. Shows off Lindley’s slide guitar. Side note on the video: The male backup singer reminds me of the Will Ferrell character in the "More Cowbell" skit from Saturday Night Live. Sample lyrics:
Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive
Trying not to confuse it, with what you do to survive
'69, I was 21 and I called the road my own
I don't know when that road turned into the road I'm on
For a Dancer: My favorite of all of Browne's great songs. Here’s what he said about it: "I wrote this for a friend of mine who died in a fire.. Besides being a great dancer, he was an ice skater - he had a job in the Ice Follies. And he was a great tailor… He was a Renaissance man. When I wrote him the song - it's a song I've sung many times, other times when people have died - but I was making a metaphor out of the dance. Just the idea that your life is a dance. And there's a line in it, 'In the end, there is one dance you do alone.' That's one of the songs I've sung all through the years, and for me, it's like going to that place, and dealing with the fact that life will end. It's a sad song, but at the same time, it feels good to sort through that reality and touch base with it, and then go on." Sample lyrics:
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you'll never know
Before the Deluge: I had to include this incredible environmental anthem by Browne with its haunting fiddle by David Lindley. It is part prayer and part history of the Baby Boomer generation and all of our hypocrisies. I suppose Browne had in mind nuclear annihilation when he wrote it, but you could easily insert any of our latest issues: apocalyptic storms brought on by climate change, pandemics, political divisions…I have no idea how a 25-year-old produced lyrics like these:
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
Indignation by Philip Roth – The list of awards Roth has attained is mind boggling. He won national awards for books he wrote 50 years apart. He’s won multiple National Book Awards, multiple PEN/Faulkner awards, multiple WH Smith Awards, a Pulitzer (for American Pastoral), the Man Booker International Prize and the National Humanities Medal. That’s just a few. I’ve read maybe 10 of his 30 plus novels. I can’t remember one that I didn’t enjoy in some way (although Sabbath’s Theater was tough to read, but still amazing). I may have already pointed this out in a previous blog post, but the May 21, 2006, issue of The New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'" SIX(!) of Roth's novels were among the 22 selected: American Pastoral, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. In 2005 he became only the third living writer (after Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty) to have his books enshrined in the Library of America. OK, enough about the author, on to the book.
Indignation was published in 2008 and tells the story of Marcus Messner, a Jewish kid from Newark who transferred from the local Newark college to Winesburg College in Ohio to escape the suffocating grip of his father, the kosher butcher. The timeframe is during the Korean War and part of his reason for going to college is to escape the draft and avoid being brutally killed by “thousands of Chinese soldiers entering his icy cold foxhole with bugles blaring and bearing bayonets.” His descriptions of his time at college seem so familiar, and that’s one of his great skills; depicting everyday life and evoking the reader’s own memories. His dust up with roommates, awkwardness with girls, and his fierce rejection of the school’s antiquated rules. His conversations with the college dean are priceless and in one scene he’s quoting from Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am Not Christian” to support his refusal to attend the required weekly chapel services. That scene ended with him throwing up all over the dean’s athletic trophies. Priceless stuff.
About halfway through the short novel you are informed that the protagonist (Marcus) is already dead and these are just his recollected memories that keep running though his mind for eternity like a newsreel. And then the novel goes on as it was before and you wonder, wait, is he really dead? He tries to focus on his studies but is hounded by fraternities cajoling him to join, unruly roommates, and ”the girl” who changes everything. A damaged girl with a history of mental illness and suicide attempts, but who is intelligent and quirky in the best possible ways. There is awkward college sex and all the awkward feelings afterwards. SPOILER ALERT: So in the end, he gets expelled for sending a substitute person to attend chapel services and we see him dying in a Korean foxhole torn up by Chinese bayonets. The whole story was a dream or a recollection. And his worse fears were realized because of his indignation at having to attend a Christian Chapel service as part of his academic requirements. The word indignation was also part of the Chinese National Anthem (at least it was in the book). Just classic Roth here. The family issues, World War II deaths remembered, the Korean War, young male angst and anger. All of it put together in a sometimes funny, sometimes poignant novel. Maybe one day I’ll read all 30 of his books.
Here are some lines:
That was not the way it went between a conventionally brought-up boy and a nice well-bred girl when I was alive and it was 1951 and, for the third time in just over half a century, America was at war again.
I knew that when Olivia came I would have to introduce the two of them and that my mother, who missed nothing, would see the scar on Olivia’s wrist and ask me what I was doing with a girl who had tried to commit suicide, a question whose answer I didn’t yet know.
In a nonkosher slaughterhouse they can shoot the animal, they can knock it unconscious, they can kill it any way they want to kill it. But to be kosher they’ve got to bleed it to death…(he) takes the head of the animal, lays it over his knees, takes a pretty big blade, says a bracha—a blessing—and he cuts the neck. If he does it in one slice, severs the trachea, the esophagus, and the carotids, and doesn’t touch the backbone, the animal dies instantly and is kosher; if it takes two slices or the animal is sick or disabled or the knife isn’t perfectly sharp or the backbone is merely nicked, the animal is not kosher.
(It's) what Olivia had tried to do, to kill herself according to kosher specifications by emptying her body of blood. Had she been successful, had she expertly completed the job with a single perfect slice of the blade, she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law. Olivia’s telltale scar came from attempting to perform her own ritual slaughter.
Olivia’s having lasted in the room with my mother for twenty minutes was a heartbreaking feat of gallantry and strength.
"This is a girl full of tears. You see that the moment you look at her. Inside she is all tears. Can you stand up to her tears, Marcus?”
The Human Stain by Philip Roth – Well I took one more step towards reading all of Roth’s books. And what a book. I’d say it’s maybe his 2nd best book that I’ve read, after American Pastoral, and just above A Plot Against America. It won the WH Smith Literary award in 2001, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2001, and the New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2000, among others. I gave a more full list of Roth’s accolades in the above review for Indignation.
The Human Stain begins as a professor, Coleman Silk, has resigned from his position at Athena University two years after being accused of voicing a racial slur about two African American students and after his wife has died due, in part, to the two years of stress following this accusation. The time frame is 1998, right in the middle of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. He’s begging his neighbor, the author Nathan Zuckerman (also the narrator of the book), to write a book about this injustice. And it really does seem like an injustice. He was calling role in class, and for the last several weeks, two students hadn’t shown up. He had no idea of the race of these students, just that they never showed up to class. So he asked out loud, are these people real or are they “spooks?” Well, spooks was/is a derogatory epithet towards African Americans, so the absent students, who both turned out to be Black, filed complaints and were supported by a young and ambitious French Professor at the school. But it gets even better…and better…and better. Coleman Silk is actually African American himself, however, since the age of 27 he has been “passing” himself off as white and Jewish since his light skin allowed that possibility and he didn’t want his race to hold him back from all his goals in life (this was in the late 1940s/early 1950s when he made this decision). The backstory on Coleman’s early life could have been made into a separate novel. Academic and athletic excellence in high school, class valedictorian (whose father was bribed once by a Jewish doctor who asked that Coleman tank his last few classes so that the Jewish doctor’s son could be valedictorian). His father was an ex-optician who lost his license and was now a train steward; his mother was a nurse.
One more thing; Coleman (who was 71 at the time of the novel’s opening) was seeing a 34-year-old woman who was a janitor at the school and was deemed illiterate. Their relationship was portrayed as an honest one between two damaged souls, but word got out and his reputation took another hit, thanks in large part to the French professor who outed him on this mistress. Oh, and the 34-year-old, Faunia, was partially responsible for the death of her two young children in a fire, and her ex-husband was an angry Vietnam Vet with PTSD, and she had been sexually abused by her stepfather. Long backstories were written on the French professor, Faunia, and her ex-husband, the Vietnam Vet with PTSD. Each of those backstories could also have been novels.
So, you have all these fascinating characters intermingling with the topics of race, political correctness, PTSD, romance, family ties, sex, and reinvention of one’s self. Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer for The Atlantic said of this book, "Roth achieves something here that is very difficult to imagine his mostly domesticated descendants even attempting: He steps fully out of his own backyard and dares to imagine what he cannot possibly know by means of his own personal identity. I came to this gem late, as a 33-year-old 'mixed-race' black man who'd just become the father of a blond-haired, blue-eyed 'black' daughter who could pass for Swedish. Flipping through my paperback now, I smile as I reread the dog-eared pages, their margins overflowing with comments to the effect of: How can he possibly know that? There are many ways to display brilliance through narrative, but one of the most difficult — and courageous — is to render the I-who-is-not-I as vividly as one can render the self."
This is the skill of most great writers; they can write great stories on just about any topic. Here are some lines:
Thirty-four years of savage surprises have given her wisdom…Aside from the ashes of the two children that she keeps in a canister under her bed, she owns nothing of value except an ’83 Chevy.
The objective was for his fate to be determined not by the ignorant, hate-filled intentions of a hostile world but, to whatever degree humanly possible, by his own resolve. Why accept a life on any other terms?
The Silks had been in their one-family house since 1925, the year before Coleman was born. When they got there, the rest of the street was White, and the small frame house was sold to them by a couple who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them.
"I had two kids. They’re dead. If I don’t have the energy this morning to feel bad about Monica and Bill, chalk it up to my two kids, all right? If that’s my shortcoming, so be it. I don’t have any more left in me for all the great troubles of the world."
Veterans Day, when the flag is flown at half-mast and many towns hold parades—and the department stores hold their sales—and vets who feel as Les did are more disgusted with their compatriots, their country, and their government than on any other day of the year.
the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop. I don’t know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate.
All of life was there in East Orange. And when? Before. Before urban renewal. Before the classics were abandoned. Before they stopped giving out the Constitution to high school graduates. Before there were remedial classes in the colleges teaching kids what they should have learned in ninth grade. Before Black History Month. Before they built the parkway and brought in 280. Before they persecuted a college professor for saying “spooks” to his class.
'They just popped me from Vietnam onto a C-41 air force jet to the Philippines, then on a World Airways jet to Travis Air Force Base, then they gave me two hundred dollars to go home. So it took me, like, from the time I left Vietnam to go home, it took about three days. You’re back in civilization. And you’re doomed. And your wife, even if it’s ten years later, she’s doomed. She’s doomed, and what the hell did she do? Nothin’.”
Valley Loop at Bobcat Ridge near Loveland – My first hike in nearly a month after a nasty virus. I’ve passed by Bobcat Ridge Natural Area a couple of times on my way to the Poudre Canyon area hikes. I finally got a chance to explore it a bit. Managed by the City of Fort Collins, it’s part of a network of public lands connecting the eastern plains to Rocky Mountain National Park. There is a 10 mile loop that I would like to do, but 10 miles was not in the cards after not doing any physical activity for so long. So I opted for the easier hike called the Valley Loop. The drive up included a stretch along one of my favorite roads, County Road 29 northeast of Carter Lake. There are lots of rolling horse ranches with beautiful homes spread far apart in this little valley. As a bonus, I encountered 2 huge herds of elk wintering up here on this day. If I were a horse rancher, this is where I’d want to live.
The parking area is around a half hour drive from my home and there were a few horse trailers and maybe 6 other cars up here on a Thursday. There are some nice informative signs at the trailhead along with some old late-1800s ranch buildings that are fun to explore. I headed west to the Valley Loop and was immediately surrounded by meadowlarks larking; a sure sign of spring (plus the day before it was snowing while the sun was shining…another sign of spring here evidently). About a mile and a half in there was a sign for a cabin which was built in 1917. It’s been set up inside as though folks still lived there. Interesting to see how small this place was that housed a large extended family. A group of horseback riders passed by around this point and with the blue skies and snowy hills it looked like a scene from the TV show Yellowstone. I headed further up along the loop which provided nice views of the valley after about a 400-foot climb. I saw lots of bluebirds here; they hang around the foothills in spring before heading up to the high mountains for the summer. On my way down I took a small detour because a sign was pointing to “tipi rings”. I had no idea, but I guess these are stone rings left over from when the Arapaho and Ute tribes would winter up here. The ground was too hard for stakes, so they held their "tipi" (teepee?) hides down with a circle of stones.
It was a perfect spring day and I hope to complete the big loop in the near future.
When Montezuma Met Cortes by Matthew Restall –
You wanna know the history behind the Marine Corps hymn that includes the line “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli”? Read on…
The author is currently Professor of Latin American History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies at Penn State University. He has a BA in Modern History from Oxford and an MA and a PhD in Latin American History from UCLA. He speaks English, Spanish and French; and writes Yucatec Maya, Nahuatl, Latin, and Portuguese. This book won the 2019 Conference on Latin American History's Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize for best book or article "judged to make the most significant contribution to the history of Indians in Latin America."
So the guy’s qualifications are first class. But other than the last few fascinating pages, this was a hard book to read. It read more like an academic paper, and that combined with the Mesoamerican names (Quetzalcoatl, Cuauhtemoc, Matlatzincatzin…) made it seem more like a really hard college course than just reading a book. Give me Doris Kearns Goodwin or Jill Lepore any day for reading history. But I stuck with it because the topic is fascinating to me and has been since I was a kid. I remember when I was a grade school kid, I would invent games and competitions in my backyard between Coronado, Cortes and a rotating mix of other “heroes”, such as Yaz (for Carl Yastrzemski) and Muchacho (don’t ask). Educated in New Mexico, I had an oversized education in Spanish American history and in the 1960s, Cortes, Coronado, Columbus, and Pizarro were seen as heroes. Of course, like much of history, it has evolved with further research and more diverse historians.
The author set out to roll back the 500 year mythistory of the famous meeting in 1519 between Cortes and Montezuma. For most of those 500 years, the history has been based on only one source: Cortes’ letters to the king and the subsequent documentation of them by his biographer, Francisco López de Gómara. This book used many more sources from other Spanish writers, indigenous writers, and archeological evidence from the past few years.
The mythistory was (is) basically: Cortes was a heaven-sent, benevolent warrior who expanded the Spanish Empire by quickly conquering millions of heathens with only a handful of men. And the heathens (Montezuma) basically surrendered to the conquistadors because the Aztec prophesies told of Gods from the East coming back to claim their land.
The real history is very different and much more complicated. Cortes was just one of several conquistadors that were searching for gold and glory, many of them fighting with each other the whole time. Montezuma never surrendered (the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs created this confusing narrative). Thousands of Mesoamerican natives sided with the conquistadors in order to gain their own advantages. And most of the indigenous during the war likely died from diseases brought from the Spaniards and their Caribbean island slaves. Cortes, like most of the other conquistadors was brutal, killing all the men of some villages, enslaving the children and raping the women, and even, likely, murdering his own wife. This happened throughout the Americas during Spanish, English, and French colonialization.
I did love reading one section of the book. Near the end, he took a tour of modern day Mexico City and walked to all the major places mentioned in the book (in the 1500s, Tenochtitlan was the name of the city where the current Mexico City resides). That is yet another reason why I want to visit Mexico City some day.
Here are some lines:
(Tenochtitlan) was a massive island-city floating on a lake, surrounded by volcanic mountains. It was possibly the most stunningly beautiful combination of the natural and built environments in human history.
Seville was one of the largest cities in Europe in the 1510s, it only contained about 35,000 people; Tenochtitlan was a staggering twice that size.
The story of Montezuma’s surrender was repeated so often that it acquired the timbre of truth, the way that statements uttered over and over or made in print again and again tend to do.
Over the last two centuries, Mexicans have sought to come to terms with the Conquest and Spanish colonialism as part of the process of forging a national identity. This process has been a complex political and cultural one, and is still very much ongoing.
In 1548 the Spanish king Carlos V issued an extraordinary edict. The edict effectively condemned Cortes posthumously, not only for enslaving indigenous people but also for his role in the five massacres that accompanied the seizures.
The massacres at Cholollan and My Lai (Vietnam) happened centuries apart…in both cases, the lack of closure or accountability, the lack of a satisfying explanation, has allowed community scar tissue to permanently form.
In wartime atrocities, from the Thirty Years’ War to World War II to the Vietnam War, violence was committed by men who became “numbed to the taking of human life, embittered over their own casualties, and frustrated by the tenacity of an insidious and seemingly inhuman enemy.'
That corner of the Zocalo (main plaza in Mexico City) is also one of the ways whereby US troops entered the city’s center on September 14, 1847—as conscious then as they had been throughout their march from Veracruz that they were walking in the footsteps of the conquistadors. Here at last, were “the halls of the Montezumas.”
..the flight of Santa Anna and the surrender speech of Montezuma validated and legalized the Spanish presence in the city in 1519 and the US presence there in 1847.
The phrase “the Halls of Montezumas” persisted through to the twentieth century…from the Philippines to the Caribbean to Central America; and back to Mexico, with the occupation of Veracruz by the US Navy and Marines in 1914. A few years later, the new battle hymn of the Marine Corps was written with the opening lines “From the Halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli,…."
The Mexican-American War is both “the forgotten war” and one of the United States’ most controversial, because its justification remains elusive. As long as Mexico and the United States exist as nation-states, that war will not go away; just as the Spanish “Conquest of Mexico” will not go away as long as the descendants of Spaniards and Aztecs and other Mesoamericans live together in the lands once ruled by Montezuma.
Aztec seems to have been an 18th century invention. Mexica (pronounced “mesh-EE-ka”) refers to the people of the city of Tenochtitlan or Mexico (in Nahuatl, -co is a locative, so that Mexico means “the place of the Mexica”). Note that the Mexica were not a distinct ethnicity; they were part of the larger (and very much still surviving) ethnic group of the Nahuas whose language was (and is) Nahuatl, and who have for many centuries lived throughout central Mexico and in some regions to the south.
Heart to Heart by His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Patrick McDonnell – I had heard about this wonderful little book from reading The Marginalian blog by Maria Popova which is a great source of artistic and philosophical inspiration. The book is beautifully illustrated by Patrick McDonnell who is known for his Mutts comic. The sparse words are from the Dalai Lama and they speak about kindness and the importance humans have in protecting the land and the animals and the connectedness of all beings. It’s almost like a small prayer book filled with advice on how to live in harmony with the planet and all its beings.
Some lines:
Human use, population, and technology have reached that certain stage where Mother Earth can no longer tolerate our presence with silence.
..we all seek happiness and do not want suffering.
Forests are good for our soul
We need life around us that grows, flourishes, and thrives. Because we all want to grow, flourish, and thrive.
Destruction of nature and natural resources results from ignorance, greed, and lack of respect for the earth’s living things.
Real change in the world will only come from a change of heart.
If you want to change the world, first try to improve, change, within yourself. Creating a more peaceful world requires a peaceful mind and a peaceful heart.
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Good wishes alone are not enough; we have to assume responsibility.
South Boulder Creek trail in Boulder - South Boulder Creek pours into the city of Boulder from Eldorado Canyon (it originates at Gross Reservoir) and melds with Boulder Creek in Valmont about 2 miles north of this trailhead. Boulder Creek joins the St. Vrain River just east of Longmont and the St. Vrain then drains into the South Platte River by Platteville. The South Platte joins the Platte river in west central Nebraska which then joins the Missouri River near Omaha. The Missouri empties into the great Mississippi River near St. Louis which then empties into the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans. So, when I spit into South Boulder Creek today, that spit will eventually end up in the Atlantic Ocean. Cool.
Passing by Nella Larsen - Reading The Human Stain, with its Black professor choosing to pass as White and Jewish, got me interested in this topic. A movie based on this 1929 novel came out in 2021 and won several awards. I haven't seen the movie yet, but wanted to read the source material which was this novel written by Nella Larsen. Larsen was a light skinned Black woman like the characters in her book. She was a librarian, nurse, and writer. But her writing career seemed to only last through the 1920s. She wrote two novels and a few short stories and then, poof, she gave it up and became a full time nurse. Some speculate that she suffered from depression after her divorce and the death of her ex-husband shortly thereafter. But nobody really knows why she stopped writing. Both her novels (this one and Quicksand) were critical successes, if not financially successful. I think that it's just a fact that some people have only a few great pieces of art inside them. They burn bright for a bit and then they're gone, like so many one-hit-wonders in the music world.
This month I read two more novels by the great Philip Roth, a revision of the history I thought I understood about the Aztec encounter with the Spaniards, a book on kindness and connectedness, and a book written by a Black woman in the 1920s about the subject of passing (passing as a White person when one is genetically Black). Not too much hiking this month, but it made me appreciate getting out even more than usual. Enjoy.
Scientist Spotlight: Five women of science changing the world
- Dr. Purnima Devi Barman – Wildlife Biologist
- Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka – Wildlife Veterinarian
- Nzambi Matee - engineer, inventor and entrepreneur
- Xiaoyuan Ren – Environmental engineer
- Dr. Katharine Hayhoe – Climate scientist
March is women’s history month and I thought that this UN Environment Program article best exemplifies how women of science around the world are taking responsibility for changing history and making our planet a better place. I couldn’t describe them any better than the words and videos in this article (I had previously included Katherine Hayhoe in my scientist spotlight in my August 2021 blog):
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/meet-5-women-who-are-using-science-help-save-planet
David Lindley sadly died this month after a long illness related to long-Covid. He was an incredible musician, playing slide guitar, fiddle, cello, viola, and a whole bunch of Middle Eastern instruments. He had a decent solo career but is probably best known for his session and concert work with Jackson Browne. He co-wrote songs with him and really provided the sound that made Jackson Browne, well, Jackson Browne. He also played with Linda Ronstadt, Rod Stewart, Warren Zevon, Ry Cooder, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
I’ve seen Jackson Browne in concert probably 10-15 times. His songs form part of the backdrop of the lives of my wife and I from college days through the year 2000 when he used to play a yearly autumn benefit concert in Sedona, Arizona. Every year we would make it a weekend of music and hiking in those beautiful red rock formations. He stopped doing those shows after 9/11. He’s an incredible songwriter with perfect hair. Here are a few of his (and David Lindley’s) songs that I enjoy.
I’m Alive: Possibly the best breakup song written? Hard to say, there are so many great breakup songs. I love this version from the Love is Strange live recording done during a tour of Spain in 2006. Sample lyrics:
Yeah, now I'm rolling down this canyon drive
With your laughter in my head
I'm gonna have to block it out somehow to survive
'Cause those dreams are dead
And I'm alive
YouTube Link
El Rayo X: This is a David Lindley song, in Spanish, and it’s just fun. And you hear that voice of his which sang the really high part in the Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs song Stay which he and Browne played many times in concert.
YouTube Link
Take it Easy: Browne wrote this as part of his southern California collaboration with Glenn Frey. The Eagles had a big hit with it. Winslow, Arizona has a sort of monument to this song that was set in that town. I love Lindley’s fiddle playing on this.
Your Bright Baby Blues: His great opus about self discovery, depression, and the healing power of love. There is so much packed inside this great song. And Lindley on the bouzuki and slide guitar on this live version is terrific.... Sample lyrics:
'Cause I've been up and down this highway
Far as my eyes can see
No matter how fast I run
I can never seem to get away from me
No matter where I am
I can't help thinking I'm just a day away
From where I want to be
Now I'm running home, baby
Like a river to the sea
YouTube Link
These Days (featuring Luz Casal): Browne wrote this song about loss and regret when he was 16 years old. 16! I like this version, sung by Luz Casal who is a famous pop singer from Spain, where this live version was recorded. And there's Lindley’s fiddle…Sample Lyrics:
These days I sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten
Please, don't confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them
YouTube Link
Running on Empty: This turned out to be his rock anthem in the late 70s when I probably saw him 3 times. I’m pretty sure he wrote this as he was approaching the age of 30 and looking back on where his life had brought him. Shows off Lindley’s slide guitar. Side note on the video: The male backup singer reminds me of the Will Ferrell character in the "More Cowbell" skit from Saturday Night Live. Sample lyrics:
Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive
Trying not to confuse it, with what you do to survive
'69, I was 21 and I called the road my own
I don't know when that road turned into the road I'm on
For a Dancer: My favorite of all of Browne's great songs. Here’s what he said about it: "I wrote this for a friend of mine who died in a fire.. Besides being a great dancer, he was an ice skater - he had a job in the Ice Follies. And he was a great tailor… He was a Renaissance man. When I wrote him the song - it's a song I've sung many times, other times when people have died - but I was making a metaphor out of the dance. Just the idea that your life is a dance. And there's a line in it, 'In the end, there is one dance you do alone.' That's one of the songs I've sung all through the years, and for me, it's like going to that place, and dealing with the fact that life will end. It's a sad song, but at the same time, it feels good to sort through that reality and touch base with it, and then go on." Sample lyrics:
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you'll never know
Before the Deluge: I had to include this incredible environmental anthem by Browne with its haunting fiddle by David Lindley. It is part prayer and part history of the Baby Boomer generation and all of our hypocrisies. I suppose Browne had in mind nuclear annihilation when he wrote it, but you could easily insert any of our latest issues: apocalyptic storms brought on by climate change, pandemics, political divisions…I have no idea how a 25-year-old produced lyrics like these:
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
Indignation was published in 2008 and tells the story of Marcus Messner, a Jewish kid from Newark who transferred from the local Newark college to Winesburg College in Ohio to escape the suffocating grip of his father, the kosher butcher. The timeframe is during the Korean War and part of his reason for going to college is to escape the draft and avoid being brutally killed by “thousands of Chinese soldiers entering his icy cold foxhole with bugles blaring and bearing bayonets.” His descriptions of his time at college seem so familiar, and that’s one of his great skills; depicting everyday life and evoking the reader’s own memories. His dust up with roommates, awkwardness with girls, and his fierce rejection of the school’s antiquated rules. His conversations with the college dean are priceless and in one scene he’s quoting from Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am Not Christian” to support his refusal to attend the required weekly chapel services. That scene ended with him throwing up all over the dean’s athletic trophies. Priceless stuff.
About halfway through the short novel you are informed that the protagonist (Marcus) is already dead and these are just his recollected memories that keep running though his mind for eternity like a newsreel. And then the novel goes on as it was before and you wonder, wait, is he really dead? He tries to focus on his studies but is hounded by fraternities cajoling him to join, unruly roommates, and ”the girl” who changes everything. A damaged girl with a history of mental illness and suicide attempts, but who is intelligent and quirky in the best possible ways. There is awkward college sex and all the awkward feelings afterwards. SPOILER ALERT: So in the end, he gets expelled for sending a substitute person to attend chapel services and we see him dying in a Korean foxhole torn up by Chinese bayonets. The whole story was a dream or a recollection. And his worse fears were realized because of his indignation at having to attend a Christian Chapel service as part of his academic requirements. The word indignation was also part of the Chinese National Anthem (at least it was in the book). Just classic Roth here. The family issues, World War II deaths remembered, the Korean War, young male angst and anger. All of it put together in a sometimes funny, sometimes poignant novel. Maybe one day I’ll read all 30 of his books.
Here are some lines:
That was not the way it went between a conventionally brought-up boy and a nice well-bred girl when I was alive and it was 1951 and, for the third time in just over half a century, America was at war again.
I knew that when Olivia came I would have to introduce the two of them and that my mother, who missed nothing, would see the scar on Olivia’s wrist and ask me what I was doing with a girl who had tried to commit suicide, a question whose answer I didn’t yet know.
In a nonkosher slaughterhouse they can shoot the animal, they can knock it unconscious, they can kill it any way they want to kill it. But to be kosher they’ve got to bleed it to death…(he) takes the head of the animal, lays it over his knees, takes a pretty big blade, says a bracha—a blessing—and he cuts the neck. If he does it in one slice, severs the trachea, the esophagus, and the carotids, and doesn’t touch the backbone, the animal dies instantly and is kosher; if it takes two slices or the animal is sick or disabled or the knife isn’t perfectly sharp or the backbone is merely nicked, the animal is not kosher.
(It's) what Olivia had tried to do, to kill herself according to kosher specifications by emptying her body of blood. Had she been successful, had she expertly completed the job with a single perfect slice of the blade, she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law. Olivia’s telltale scar came from attempting to perform her own ritual slaughter.
Olivia’s having lasted in the room with my mother for twenty minutes was a heartbreaking feat of gallantry and strength.
"This is a girl full of tears. You see that the moment you look at her. Inside she is all tears. Can you stand up to her tears, Marcus?”
The Human Stain begins as a professor, Coleman Silk, has resigned from his position at Athena University two years after being accused of voicing a racial slur about two African American students and after his wife has died due, in part, to the two years of stress following this accusation. The time frame is 1998, right in the middle of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. He’s begging his neighbor, the author Nathan Zuckerman (also the narrator of the book), to write a book about this injustice. And it really does seem like an injustice. He was calling role in class, and for the last several weeks, two students hadn’t shown up. He had no idea of the race of these students, just that they never showed up to class. So he asked out loud, are these people real or are they “spooks?” Well, spooks was/is a derogatory epithet towards African Americans, so the absent students, who both turned out to be Black, filed complaints and were supported by a young and ambitious French Professor at the school. But it gets even better…and better…and better. Coleman Silk is actually African American himself, however, since the age of 27 he has been “passing” himself off as white and Jewish since his light skin allowed that possibility and he didn’t want his race to hold him back from all his goals in life (this was in the late 1940s/early 1950s when he made this decision). The backstory on Coleman’s early life could have been made into a separate novel. Academic and athletic excellence in high school, class valedictorian (whose father was bribed once by a Jewish doctor who asked that Coleman tank his last few classes so that the Jewish doctor’s son could be valedictorian). His father was an ex-optician who lost his license and was now a train steward; his mother was a nurse.
One more thing; Coleman (who was 71 at the time of the novel’s opening) was seeing a 34-year-old woman who was a janitor at the school and was deemed illiterate. Their relationship was portrayed as an honest one between two damaged souls, but word got out and his reputation took another hit, thanks in large part to the French professor who outed him on this mistress. Oh, and the 34-year-old, Faunia, was partially responsible for the death of her two young children in a fire, and her ex-husband was an angry Vietnam Vet with PTSD, and she had been sexually abused by her stepfather. Long backstories were written on the French professor, Faunia, and her ex-husband, the Vietnam Vet with PTSD. Each of those backstories could also have been novels.
So, you have all these fascinating characters intermingling with the topics of race, political correctness, PTSD, romance, family ties, sex, and reinvention of one’s self. Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer for The Atlantic said of this book, "Roth achieves something here that is very difficult to imagine his mostly domesticated descendants even attempting: He steps fully out of his own backyard and dares to imagine what he cannot possibly know by means of his own personal identity. I came to this gem late, as a 33-year-old 'mixed-race' black man who'd just become the father of a blond-haired, blue-eyed 'black' daughter who could pass for Swedish. Flipping through my paperback now, I smile as I reread the dog-eared pages, their margins overflowing with comments to the effect of: How can he possibly know that? There are many ways to display brilliance through narrative, but one of the most difficult — and courageous — is to render the I-who-is-not-I as vividly as one can render the self."
This is the skill of most great writers; they can write great stories on just about any topic. Here are some lines:
Thirty-four years of savage surprises have given her wisdom…Aside from the ashes of the two children that she keeps in a canister under her bed, she owns nothing of value except an ’83 Chevy.
The objective was for his fate to be determined not by the ignorant, hate-filled intentions of a hostile world but, to whatever degree humanly possible, by his own resolve. Why accept a life on any other terms?
The Silks had been in their one-family house since 1925, the year before Coleman was born. When they got there, the rest of the street was White, and the small frame house was sold to them by a couple who were mad at the people next door and so were determined to sell it to colored to spite them.
"I had two kids. They’re dead. If I don’t have the energy this morning to feel bad about Monica and Bill, chalk it up to my two kids, all right? If that’s my shortcoming, so be it. I don’t have any more left in me for all the great troubles of the world."
Veterans Day, when the flag is flown at half-mast and many towns hold parades—and the department stores hold their sales—and vets who feel as Les did are more disgusted with their compatriots, their country, and their government than on any other day of the year.
the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop. I don’t know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate.
All of life was there in East Orange. And when? Before. Before urban renewal. Before the classics were abandoned. Before they stopped giving out the Constitution to high school graduates. Before there were remedial classes in the colleges teaching kids what they should have learned in ninth grade. Before Black History Month. Before they built the parkway and brought in 280. Before they persecuted a college professor for saying “spooks” to his class.
'They just popped me from Vietnam onto a C-41 air force jet to the Philippines, then on a World Airways jet to Travis Air Force Base, then they gave me two hundred dollars to go home. So it took me, like, from the time I left Vietnam to go home, it took about three days. You’re back in civilization. And you’re doomed. And your wife, even if it’s ten years later, she’s doomed. She’s doomed, and what the hell did she do? Nothin’.”
The parking area is around a half hour drive from my home and there were a few horse trailers and maybe 6 other cars up here on a Thursday. There are some nice informative signs at the trailhead along with some old late-1800s ranch buildings that are fun to explore. I headed west to the Valley Loop and was immediately surrounded by meadowlarks larking; a sure sign of spring (plus the day before it was snowing while the sun was shining…another sign of spring here evidently). About a mile and a half in there was a sign for a cabin which was built in 1917. It’s been set up inside as though folks still lived there. Interesting to see how small this place was that housed a large extended family. A group of horseback riders passed by around this point and with the blue skies and snowy hills it looked like a scene from the TV show Yellowstone. I headed further up along the loop which provided nice views of the valley after about a 400-foot climb. I saw lots of bluebirds here; they hang around the foothills in spring before heading up to the high mountains for the summer. On my way down I took a small detour because a sign was pointing to “tipi rings”. I had no idea, but I guess these are stone rings left over from when the Arapaho and Ute tribes would winter up here. The ground was too hard for stakes, so they held their "tipi" (teepee?) hides down with a circle of stones.
It was a perfect spring day and I hope to complete the big loop in the near future.
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| Big herd of elk on the way to the trailhead |
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| Nice informative signs near the trailhead |
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| ...along with some beautifully carved bobcat stones |
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| That's Bobcat Ridge along the horizon |
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| Like a scene from Yellowstone |
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| A red-colored part of the ridge near the cabin |
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| Inside the cabin |
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| Cabin and informative sign |
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| Cabin below the ridge |
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| A "tipi ring" of stones left over from Ute and Arapaho winters |
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| Nice set of stacked rocks with a view |
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| In between the two trees shot |
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| Elk herds were still there on the way home |
You wanna know the history behind the Marine Corps hymn that includes the line “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli”? Read on…
The author is currently Professor of Latin American History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies at Penn State University. He has a BA in Modern History from Oxford and an MA and a PhD in Latin American History from UCLA. He speaks English, Spanish and French; and writes Yucatec Maya, Nahuatl, Latin, and Portuguese. This book won the 2019 Conference on Latin American History's Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize for best book or article "judged to make the most significant contribution to the history of Indians in Latin America."
So the guy’s qualifications are first class. But other than the last few fascinating pages, this was a hard book to read. It read more like an academic paper, and that combined with the Mesoamerican names (Quetzalcoatl, Cuauhtemoc, Matlatzincatzin…) made it seem more like a really hard college course than just reading a book. Give me Doris Kearns Goodwin or Jill Lepore any day for reading history. But I stuck with it because the topic is fascinating to me and has been since I was a kid. I remember when I was a grade school kid, I would invent games and competitions in my backyard between Coronado, Cortes and a rotating mix of other “heroes”, such as Yaz (for Carl Yastrzemski) and Muchacho (don’t ask). Educated in New Mexico, I had an oversized education in Spanish American history and in the 1960s, Cortes, Coronado, Columbus, and Pizarro were seen as heroes. Of course, like much of history, it has evolved with further research and more diverse historians.
The author set out to roll back the 500 year mythistory of the famous meeting in 1519 between Cortes and Montezuma. For most of those 500 years, the history has been based on only one source: Cortes’ letters to the king and the subsequent documentation of them by his biographer, Francisco López de Gómara. This book used many more sources from other Spanish writers, indigenous writers, and archeological evidence from the past few years.
The mythistory was (is) basically: Cortes was a heaven-sent, benevolent warrior who expanded the Spanish Empire by quickly conquering millions of heathens with only a handful of men. And the heathens (Montezuma) basically surrendered to the conquistadors because the Aztec prophesies told of Gods from the East coming back to claim their land.
The real history is very different and much more complicated. Cortes was just one of several conquistadors that were searching for gold and glory, many of them fighting with each other the whole time. Montezuma never surrendered (the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs created this confusing narrative). Thousands of Mesoamerican natives sided with the conquistadors in order to gain their own advantages. And most of the indigenous during the war likely died from diseases brought from the Spaniards and their Caribbean island slaves. Cortes, like most of the other conquistadors was brutal, killing all the men of some villages, enslaving the children and raping the women, and even, likely, murdering his own wife. This happened throughout the Americas during Spanish, English, and French colonialization.
I did love reading one section of the book. Near the end, he took a tour of modern day Mexico City and walked to all the major places mentioned in the book (in the 1500s, Tenochtitlan was the name of the city where the current Mexico City resides). That is yet another reason why I want to visit Mexico City some day.
Here are some lines:
(Tenochtitlan) was a massive island-city floating on a lake, surrounded by volcanic mountains. It was possibly the most stunningly beautiful combination of the natural and built environments in human history.
Seville was one of the largest cities in Europe in the 1510s, it only contained about 35,000 people; Tenochtitlan was a staggering twice that size.
The story of Montezuma’s surrender was repeated so often that it acquired the timbre of truth, the way that statements uttered over and over or made in print again and again tend to do.
Over the last two centuries, Mexicans have sought to come to terms with the Conquest and Spanish colonialism as part of the process of forging a national identity. This process has been a complex political and cultural one, and is still very much ongoing.
In 1548 the Spanish king Carlos V issued an extraordinary edict. The edict effectively condemned Cortes posthumously, not only for enslaving indigenous people but also for his role in the five massacres that accompanied the seizures.
The massacres at Cholollan and My Lai (Vietnam) happened centuries apart…in both cases, the lack of closure or accountability, the lack of a satisfying explanation, has allowed community scar tissue to permanently form.
In wartime atrocities, from the Thirty Years’ War to World War II to the Vietnam War, violence was committed by men who became “numbed to the taking of human life, embittered over their own casualties, and frustrated by the tenacity of an insidious and seemingly inhuman enemy.'
That corner of the Zocalo (main plaza in Mexico City) is also one of the ways whereby US troops entered the city’s center on September 14, 1847—as conscious then as they had been throughout their march from Veracruz that they were walking in the footsteps of the conquistadors. Here at last, were “the halls of the Montezumas.”
..the flight of Santa Anna and the surrender speech of Montezuma validated and legalized the Spanish presence in the city in 1519 and the US presence there in 1847.
The phrase “the Halls of Montezumas” persisted through to the twentieth century…from the Philippines to the Caribbean to Central America; and back to Mexico, with the occupation of Veracruz by the US Navy and Marines in 1914. A few years later, the new battle hymn of the Marine Corps was written with the opening lines “From the Halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli,…."
The Mexican-American War is both “the forgotten war” and one of the United States’ most controversial, because its justification remains elusive. As long as Mexico and the United States exist as nation-states, that war will not go away; just as the Spanish “Conquest of Mexico” will not go away as long as the descendants of Spaniards and Aztecs and other Mesoamericans live together in the lands once ruled by Montezuma.
Aztec seems to have been an 18th century invention. Mexica (pronounced “mesh-EE-ka”) refers to the people of the city of Tenochtitlan or Mexico (in Nahuatl, -co is a locative, so that Mexico means “the place of the Mexica”). Note that the Mexica were not a distinct ethnicity; they were part of the larger (and very much still surviving) ethnic group of the Nahuas whose language was (and is) Nahuatl, and who have for many centuries lived throughout central Mexico and in some regions to the south.
Some lines:
Human use, population, and technology have reached that certain stage where Mother Earth can no longer tolerate our presence with silence.
..we all seek happiness and do not want suffering.
Forests are good for our soul
We need life around us that grows, flourishes, and thrives. Because we all want to grow, flourish, and thrive.
Destruction of nature and natural resources results from ignorance, greed, and lack of respect for the earth’s living things.
Real change in the world will only come from a change of heart.
If you want to change the world, first try to improve, change, within yourself. Creating a more peaceful world requires a peaceful mind and a peaceful heart.
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Good wishes alone are not enough; we have to assume responsibility.
Oh, the hike. Well I started at the Bobolink trailhead on Baseline Road just east of 55th St in East Boulder. The first mile plus is great. Walking along the creek with nice views of the Flatirons. Very peaceful. The next 2.5 miles takes you under South Boulder Road and under the 36 highway, eventually ending at Marshall Road, not far from where the Marshall Fire started in December of 2021. These 2.5 miles are just so-so. Traffic noise from the 36 highway along with lots of cattle poop made this a less than stellar walk. Next time I would just do the first mile and maybe head over to Baseline Reservoir. I did see a pair of great blue herons taking off from a pond and heard lots of birds today as spring is in the air. I was one of the few hikers on this trail. Lots of trail runners and bikers. The bikers mainly seemed to be using it as a commute rather than for recreation. It was a sunny day in the mid 40s.
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| Nice creek setting with views |
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| Still some snow left from the latest storm |
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| Nice lighting on the creek here |
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| Nice views of the Flatirons |
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| "I left you gift on the trail ahead...several gifts" |
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| Nice shot of this old barn in a meadow |
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| Cattails in the foreground; a bit of snow on the mountains |
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| I liked this cloud formation |
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| Great blue heron |
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| Probably the only homes in Boulder under $1M.. |
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| Prairie dogs not too concerned about me |
Passing tells the story of two high school friends (Irene and Clare) who meet by chance 12 years after last seeing each other. They are having tea at a "Whites Only" restaurant, even though they are both Black. Clare is the lighter skinned of the two and has lived her life as a White woman, not telling anyone about her past. She even married a White man who is a full on racist! Irene is a bit darker skinned but occasionally "passes" as White in order to eat at certain restaurants or shop in certain stores. The conversations between the two and the inner thought processes of Irene are fascinating. I'm not sure how the movie could possibly portray the inner feelings of Irene in nearly every scene, but I guess I'll find out eventually. Throughout the short novel, references are made to actual events that had occurred during this time on the issue of skin tone. Remember this was during the time of the Great Migration of Black people escaping the Jim Crow laws of the south to make a living in northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York City (mainly Harlem). So there was a cultural upheaval in these cities and also an underlying racism, even if it wasn't as bad as it was in the south. Two of these real events struck me: One was the story of Homer Plessy, a light skinned man who was 1/8th Black. He did a Rosa Parks and purposefully boarded a "Whites Only" section of a train which violated Louisiana's separate car act. The case ended up in the US Supreme Court in 1896 as Plessy vs Ferguson in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal." Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter from the Court's decision, writing that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens", and so the law's distinguishing of passengers' races should have been found unconstitutional. The other real life case in the book was the Rhinelander case: A highly publicized 1920s trial involving race, sex, marriage, and passing. Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a member of one of New York’s wealthiest and oldest families, married a mulatto chamber maid, Alice B. Jones, on 14 October 1924, one week after he had received a share of his family’s stocks, real estate, jewels, and cash. After a month of marriage and under pressure from his family, Rhinelander sought an annulment on the grounds that Alice had fraudulently concealed her race. In the divorce trial which had an all White, all male jury, Jones was famously required to show parts of her body to the jury in order to show that her ex-husband actually knew she was Black (can you imagine!!?). In the end, she was awarded a small lifetime compensation but wasn't awarded her fair share of her ex-husband's riches.
OK back to the novel. Irene ends up meeting Clare's racist husband who goes off on a rant about his hatred of "Negroes" (the husband believes that Irene is White). The only reason Irene holds back her anger is to protect her friend Clare who is hiding her true identity from her racist husband. Clare and Irene end up meeting a few more times in Harlem, where Irene now lives. Clare yearns for her Black heritage and goes to meetings in Harlem without the knowledge of her husband. He eventually finds out and it leads to a tragic ending. A really great look into race and class relations in the country during this time between the wars. Here are some lines:
Clare passed for White because she hated being poor, not being Black...All passing narratives are about class as much as they are about race.
“You know, ’Rene, I’ve often wondered why more coloured girls, girls like you and Margaret Hammer and Esther Dawson and—oh, lots of others—never ‘passed’ over. It’s such a frightfully easy thing to do. If one’s the type, all that’s needed is a little nerve.”
“...that’s what everybody wants, just a little more money, even the people who have it."
"I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right. But I’ll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too—too hellish.”
Clare began to talk, steering carefully away from anything that might lead towards race or other thorny subjects. It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.
Christmas, with its unreality, its hectic rush, its false gaiety, came and went.
the Canaanites, the descendants of Ham, one of the three sons of Noah, saved from God’s destruction of a wicked world by flooding. Ham was punished for mocking his father’s drunkenness and nakedness. Ham’s punishment for disrespecting his father fell upon his children who were cursed to become the slaves of his brothers’ children; slave holders in the United States applied this Biblical account to Africans and used it as a justification for slavery.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!