The Garden of the Trees: Catching the Leaves (and a Leaf) on a Favorite Fall Weekend

            Somewhere on one of the handful of woodlands trails Anne and I hiked in our three-day Columbus weekend in the Berkshires, I caught a leaf.

            A breeze blows, and those autumn leaves at the very end of their seasonal tether come floating, swaying, riffling, picking up speed and pulling back, sometimes lurching off in new directions as currents of agitated molecules shove them this way and that -- just as they do in the cartoons -- and eventually landing.

            This happened on a path in Williamstown; and I turned a palm up and extended my forearm a little ways in front of me, and kept walking without moving my hand, and one of the smaller, maple leaves detached itself from the consensus of a somewhat numerous squadron and landed squarely on my palm.

            That's how you catch a leaf. It catches you. You can't really try to catch one. The mere motion of throwing yourself around, leaping after the flock, lurching one way or another in those last minute course-corrections in a futile attempt to respond to the many little twists and turns leaves experience from invisible, but commanding airflows -- your own motion, that is, creates another distortion in the airflow sending the leaves off course.

            You push them away by seeking. 

            Just be there. If a leaf has your name on it, it will find you.

            It may not happen at all. Wind currents are pretty erratic. The answer is not always blowing in the wind (regardless of the Nobel prizewinner's famous lyric). Still, when it does happen you can't help feeling a little bit, well, good about things. In the context of the religion of pagan nature worship it may perhaps feel a little bit like being -- to appropriate an idea from an entirely different religion -- "sealed in the Book of Life."  

            In Williamstown, in the Northern Berkshires, where this cheerful moment possibly took place, a series of walking paths in the woods and pasture land can be found directly behind the justly celebrated Clark Art Museum. The photo at the left is the Stone Seat, marking the favorite destination for a woodland walk by German-born, retired professor George Moritz Wahl, who died in 1923. His name is carved into the stone. I don't know anything more about the back story, but our trail guide calls the series of trails that lead to this site "Williamstown's favorite walk."

            According to Williams College, numerous trails on Stone Hill can be combined for hikes ranging from 0.7 to 4.0 miles in length and offering the hiker "dense forests, massive rock outcroppings and, at the trail's end, "a great view" of the town of Williamstown and the Green Mountains of Vermont. Which I don't think we knew about because we certainly didn't find it.

             We followed one of those busy trail maps complicated by numerous intersections of helpfully marked trails, arriving at the Stone Seat. Then started off in one direction, encountered a posted map, and reversed course back the other way. We followed a lovely quiet woodland course along leaf-filled paths, encountering not a soul while sending a score of tiny chipmunks racing to escape our ogre-ish presence.   

            We did bump into crowded parking lots and human multitudes in the retail streets around Williams College, one of the few such encounters on an otherwise subdued three-day October weekend in the Berkshires. Little traffic to speak of on Route 7, a road we've been locked up on during other Columbus Day weekends. Maybe everybody else knew the weather was going to be clouds the first day, followed by rain the second. The third day, the day we had to leave, was in true Berkshire fashion crystal clear and absolutely stunning.

            Our next site, after leaving the college (and parents weekend?) crowd, proved to be one of the best rural picnic spots we've ever found. It was right on the farmyard of the Sheep Hill farm (farm photo below), now a preserve owned by a local conservation foundation. A picnic table is surrounded by the steeply graded pasture on one side, and a view of thickly wooded ridges (across Route 7) rising up to Mount Greylock, the highest point in the state.

            We had the place completely to ourselves. No one else in sight. The 50-acre former dairy farm was purchased by the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation in 2000. Art and Ella Rosenburg and their son moved here in 1933 and owned a milking herd for more than 50 years, according to the group (see http://wrlf.org/sheep-hill/).

            The property was originally called Sunny Brook Farm, and the landscape named Sheep Hill because sheep were raised here in the late 19th century.

            I took some photos of the strikingly furrowed tractor-cut patterns of the hayed meadow (above, left)The contours are more prominent and the gradient steeper than the camera is able to show. From a path along the top of the pasture I took photos of the foliage on the ridges, and one of the observation tower on top of Greylock.

      

Under the Shadow of History: Four Dates for "Suosso's Lane" Before the Election

            Given the attention to terrorist attacks and political unrest both internationally in the US, added to the hateful election season targeting of immigrant groups, 2016 is growing remarkably similar to the year 1920 when Nicola Sacco and Plymouth resident Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested in a climate of violence and political repression.

             Before the Presidential election takes place, (Nov. 8) I have a cluster of program dates to present "Suosso's Lane," a novel based on the scandalously unjust trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti for a murder for which very little substantive evidence pointed their way. My novel treats the Plymouth, Mass. origins of the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case, and a history teacher's search 80 years later for lost evidence would prove Vanzetti's innocence.
             I'm taking part in a new book program at Milton Public Library on Sunday, Oct. 16, called “Fall Into Reading: Meet Local Authors.” Participating authors will have an opportunity to introduce themselves and their book to the public. And each of us will have a table on which to set up our books, meet with potential readers, offer books for sale, sign them, or just hang around. The event takes place from 2 to 4 p.m.; the library is located at 476 Canton Ave., Milton.

            The next evening, Monday, Oct. 17, I will be speaking on "Suosso's Lane" at The James Library and Center for the Arts, 24 West St., Norwell, Mass. The time is 7 p.m.; it's free.

            Later in the month I'll continue my rounds of Plymouth Country libraries with a program on "Suosso's Lane" at the West Bridgewater Library, 80 Howard St., on Thursday, Oct. 27, at 2 p.m. 
            Finally, one more date before the election, on Wednesday, Nov. 2, at 7 p.m., I will be speaking on the book at Pilgrim Hall, the nation's first public museum, at 75 Court St., Plymouth. I hope to see some friendly faces somewhere along the line
             With the election less than two weeks away on that day, I hope to be able to draw some attention to the lessons of the Sacco-Vanzetti by pointing out similarities in today's politics to those of the 1920s when Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of murder largely because of the unpopular beliefs and their nationality. For "Italians" in the first decades of the 20th century, substitute "Mexicans" or "Muslims" and you'll get the picture. 
             I believe the historical events dramatized in “Suosso's Lane,” while they took place a long time ago, raise questions that are still with us. Do we learn from the past? Can we? Perhaps it helps to remember what social and political condition were like in America a century ago.
             Among the social, political and economic issues important then and are equally important now was the stark disparity between the very rich and the masses of the poor, including those who worked long hours in low-paying, exploited labor. In "Suosso's Lane," Vanzetti's disappointment at discovering this aspect of life in the 'New World' is depicted in a chapter I titled "America Taught Him Who He Was."
               Though he had begun to think for himself in Italy and had been worked nearly to death in pastry factories in Italian cities, Vanzetti was not an anarchist when he reached the shores of the "new world" in 1908. By the time he trudged in Plymouth in 1913, his experience of life in this country, at the bottom of the heap where thousands and thousands of immigrants, as well as native-born Americans, struggled to survive, the still young Vanzetti had committed himself to a cause. His struggle to survive in America (and his observations of what life was like for the man), Vanzetti reflects in "Suosso's Lane," "taught him who he was, even before any of all the other things he was: a man, an Italian, an immigrant, a pastry chef, a reading man, a kind man, even a son. He was an anarchist."
           But simply being that thing was regarded as a threat, an evil, and sometimes a crime in itself by a frightened society in a time of social and political stresses, could prove a danger. Especially when combined with another strand of identity also abhorred by the 1920s American mainstream: Italian nationality. 
            "I am suffering," Vanzetti told a court in Dedham, Mass.,  after being condemned to death, "because I am a radical, and because I am an Italian." 
             In America today some people also suffer simply because of who they are. It's a troubling truth, a dark side to the American character. And it's used by unscrupulous people to seize power for themselves, especially in anxious times such as our own.

The Garden of Verse: Poems in October's Verse-Virtual Shine Like October Skies

            The October edition of Verse-Virtual offers some ravishing poems for a ravishing month. The passion play of the seasons reaches a kind of climax in October, given the sensational blossom/dying fall of the northern woods and the "urban forest" in the midst of which most of Northeastern urban types dwell, side by side with the sturdy stabilizers of a habitat that underlies and enables our earthly existence. It's the month when the fires from the furnace at the heart of earth's rock-clad mantle seem to blaze in the red-giant end of the visible spectrum, flung to the heavens by our deciduous traveling companions.

            October. Winds blow in, frontal waves wash in and out, skies dramatically darken. Then the next day, or the next hour, a silent sky twirls beneath a clear blue bowl, an umbrella of light, in which we see straight to the empty marvel of forever. It's a miracle, it's magic. It's a turn in a cosmic circle game against which we may seek to drag our feet, yet the wheel of the seasons rolls along, large as life, endless as time. The great express train of the cosmos roaring into the station.

            All aboard for October!

            It's also time to kill the wasps, Dick Allen's poem "Hornet's Nest" reminds us, an act both intriguing and sad, and ultimately sacramental:

Hundreds of them, accursed, their papery gray masses
hidden in eaves, in the junctures of two-by-fours,
or hanging in shrubs or behind olive branch foliage,
wait to be opened.

Every sentence in this poem makes you feel again, or truly recognize for the first time, something that you know you've felt attempting this act yourself : "And at the heart of everything, the larger body of sorrow..."

Allen's poem leads us to that heart of things. Every word counts here. To read the rest of them see http://www.verse-virtual.com/dick-allen-2016-october.html

               In his fabulous poem "Cities," Robert Wexelblatt levels his poetic calibrator at cities to evoke, tabulate, and analyze as (his poem tells us), "God levels his great eye on cities to punish or exalt..." In a Whitmanic act of encompassing the world's epic fullness, his poem continues, "[God] aims His huge finger at them as to say  This is what I charge you to build, I want walls, libraries, bodegas, 
ghettos, schoolyards, hot-dog stands, electric grids, trash trucks, 
sewers, playgrounds; I want bullies and brokers, matrons and 
call girls, lawyers and legal heirs."

                 Filled with the wonders of the modern world, the poem finds all the right words to evoke all the right ideas and take us up and down the avenues of the human attempt to accomplish what God -- whatever that word means here -- commands when he human flesh and mortar to combine in the making of a "City." The poem is a recipe for making a poem, as the city is the poem of itself:

Go on, add, subtract, multiply, make a 
city of yourselves spread out like the theory of bodies, like My 
immense Leviathan, make a Behemoth of patiently accreted cells, 
just as I made you..."

                Sonia Greenfield's "Four Ghost Stories" tells us about some of the people who used to live here among us, the so-far survivors of the cities and towns our lives in part enable. The protagonist of Ghost Story (1) tell us she hitched a ride. The results are lyrical: "His radio played songs

on the AM dial. I left a fog on his windows.
The road here is fully blind and mudded to rust
with half-melted snow. I was dropped off
in a brown-leaf ditch."

All the lines in each of these four poems sing like those, as if spirits are singing their beautiful death songs. The speakers of these poems made me think of Plath's famous lines (though without Plath's bravado): "Dying is an art. I do it well. I do it so it feels like hell."             
                  Ghost number 4, a child, recalls "Once, in a public bathroom,
I took the hand of a stranger, but she shook
me free." Between this heart-breaker and the next observation -- "I could bedevil my mother in her room, but there’s no point." -- lies not a single word. The artistry is breathless.

            To read the rest of these poems, and all the others see:

http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

The Garden of Outrage: A "Merciless Abyss of Humanitarian Catastrophe”

            Americans can protest the massacre in the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo Wednesday, Oct. 5, 6:30 p.m., Tremont and Park streets, in downtown Boston. A quarter of a million civilians -- about a tenth of the city's pre-war population -- are trapped in a city the Syrian dictator with Russian help is turning into a slaughterhouse.

            Aleppo, one of Western civilization's great ancient cities is being turned into a slaughterhouse while world leaders shake their fingers and say, "Naughty, naughty."       

             The United Nations calls the ongoing destruction of the great ancient city of Aleppo and the murder of its civilian inhabitants "a Humanitarian Catastrophe." A Syrian-based group (Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution) is calling for a worldwide protest of the massacre in the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo. The Boston demonstration takes place on Wednesday in the Park Street corner of the Boston Commons.

           According to the New York Times, more 250,000 people are still trapped in the city. Medical supplies are running out. Food is running out. Aleppo is the largest in Syria, with a population of 2.5 million people at the start of the Syrian rebellion five years ago. Syrian pro-democratic protestors were forced to take up arms when the country's tyrant, Bashar Assad, told his forces to fire on non-violent demonstrators. The country has suffered under dictatorial rule by the Assad Dynasty for 50 years.

            Democracy Now, one of the few English-language news organizations closely following the Syrian catastrophe, reported on Friday (Sept. 30): "In Syria, Russian and Syrian warplanes continued a heavy bombing campaign in Aleppo, while troops massed east of the city and the United Nations warned of a humanitarian catastrophe. At least 100,000 children remain trapped in the eastern part of Aleppo, where the U.N. says food is nearly exhausted for more than a quarter-million people. U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien told the Security Council that Aleppo had descended into a "merciless abyss of humanitarian catastrophe.”

            The new organization quotes O'Brien stating, "The only remaining deterrent, it seems, is that there will be real accountability in the court of world opinion and disgust. Goodness knows, nothing else seems to be working to stop this deliberate, gratuitous carnage of lives lost and smashed."

            Here's the link to the full report from Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/30/headlines/un_calls_aleppo_a_humanitarian_catastrophe_as_ceasefire_talks_fail

            According to recent news reports from the New York Times and other media, "the Obama administration is threatening to cut off diplomatic talks with Russia on Syria in the wake of a devastating bombing campaign by the Syrian government and Russia in the city of Aleppo."  On Wednesday (Sept. 28) the two largest hospitals in East Aleppo were forced to close after being hit by airstrikes. These are intentional, targeted attacks by Russian-backed Syrian government planes intended to force the city's last surviving rebel groups to surrender the city by creating unbearable suffering.

            The Russian-backed bombing of Aleppo intensified after a ceasefire collapsed some 10 days ago, according to Democracy Now and other sources.

            UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says that the situation in the Syrian city of Aleppo has become "worse than a slaughterhouse." The UN Secretary-General is the highest official in our so-called international order, but given the self-defeating structure of the UN he is absolutely powerless to do anything to stop the slaughter. That power, diffuse as it is, lies with the Security Council over which Russia -- the prime international villain in this slaughter -- has an absolute and everlasting veto power.

            Here's part of a quoted statement from Ban Ki-Moon on Friday:

            "This morning, we awoke to reports of strikes on two more hospitals in Aleppo. Let us be clear: Those using ever more destructive weapons know exactly what they are doing. They know they are committing war crimes. Imagine the destruction, people with their limbs blown—blown off, children in a terrible pain with no relief, infected, suffering, dying, with nowhere to go and no end in sight. Imagine a slaughterhouse. This is worse. Even a slaughterhouse is more humane. Hospitals, clinics, ambulances and medical staff in Aleppo are under attack around the clock. According to Physicians for Human Rights, 95 percent of medical personnel who were in Aleppo before the war have fled, been detained or killed. This is a war against Syria’s health workers."

            Democracy Now's Amy Goodman reported this: "Video footage from Aleppo has emerged showing Syrian Civil Defense forces digging a young girl out from under the rubble. Five-year-old Ghazal Qasim was reportedly the sole survivor from an airstrike that killed 24 people in the Aleppo neighborhood al-Shaar. Her entire family, including four siblings, were reportedly killed in the bombing. According to aid groups, children in Aleppo have made up a large proportion of the casualties from the bombings. At least 100,000 children remain trapped in the eastern part of Aleppo."

            Syrian freedom fighters, who began non-violent protesting -- think civil rights protests in the USA -- during the Arab Spring five years ago, blame not only Russia but the United States and weak leadership from President Obama.

            Activist Osama Nassar, on the ground in Syria, stated in an interview: "...The U.S. administration did nothing to stop this ongoing slaughter in Syria.... Five years ago, there were only people who are seeking freedom and dignity and demonstrating very peacefully in the street. So the more you delay or the more the U.S. and the international community are late to do something to stop this ongoing massacre in Syria, the [worse] it’s become —..."

            Based on archeological evidence Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, probably since the 6th century BCE. It is mentioned in cuneiform tables, one of Western civilization's earliest forms of writing, in the 3rd millennium BCE, unearthed in Mesopotamia. The city's location made it a key trading center between Mesopotamia ("the cradle of civilization": Babylon) and the Mediterranean Sea. That location placed it on the Silk Road from Hellenistic times through the end of the Middle Ages. Its commercial importance waned only with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

            Aleppo was the largest city in its region throughout the Ottoman Empire. When Syria became a backwater during the long dictatorship of the repressive Assad dynasty -- which Russia is determined to preserve because Putin likes dictators and repression -- the lack of modern redevelopment probably helped preserve the city's medieval architecture and traditional heritage. According to the Wikipedia, Aleppo won the title of the "Islamic Capital of Culture 2006...  and has had a wave of successful restorations of its historic landmarks."

            It's hard to say how much of that has survived the destruction by the country's so-called President.

            America's disappointing President has done nothing to stop the catastrophe. Whether defending non-involvement or truly at a loss, Americans ask, "What can we do?"

            What we can do is to warn the Syrian government and Russia to stop the bombing of rebel-held areas anywhere in Syria or face destruction of its Air Force by superior American military power. And this time carry out the threat if our warning is ignored. Three years ago, Obama failed to carry out his warning that the use of "chemical weapons" by Assad would not be permitted. Syria's government proceeded to use chemical weapons to kill civilians. America did nothing.

            At that point Assad and the Russians knew the were free to do anything they wanted.      

            Now we are faced with protesting the destruction of Aleppo and its civilian population. ... History has shown that protest movements are not ineffective. Massive protests by American citizens ended the Vietnam War, a humanitarian catastrophe for all parties involved in that lengthy conflict. Now we need to protest to press our government to help put an end to a humanitarian disaster in Syria.