The Garden of American History: When the "Men on Boats" Are Mostly Women

            How do you write a play about some historical event important in its time, of interest today because of its time, without the naive celebratory tone of the history textbook or a neo-Marxist condemnation of the entire enterprise on ideological grounds? And also without limiting your cast of characters to the brave, occasionally squabbling 19th century white men who did the deed?

            The SpeakEasy Stage Company's production of  "Men on Boats" by Jaclyn Backhaus meets all those challengers. Directed by Dawn Simmons, the production fills the play's boats -- manned in 1869 by army veterans, adventurers, a lone English tourist (in over his head, so to speak) and led by a one-armed river-running specialist and Civil War casualty John Wesley Powell -- with a racially mixed cast of young actors and, mainly (eight out of ten), actresses.

            This bold casting choice means that the play is not merely a tale of what happened when Americans first succeeded in exploring the length of the Colorado River from Wyoming through the magnificently walled Grand Canyon. It's also a tale of who we are today, with women and African-Americans (and immigrants from everywhere else) doing their share, and then some, of rowing our boats and keeping us all afloat.

            The Powell expedition was a product of particular moment in American history. The four boats were carried by train from Chicago to a convenient disembarkation point in Wyoming in May of 1869, just two weeks after the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. Seven members of the expedition were Civil War veterans. Most of the crew was recruited by Powell among the mountain men he encountered en route to his starting point. Powell lost his right arm after being shot in the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. A professor of geology, he had explored rivers from childhood, rafting the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

            A scientist with a youthful sense of adventure that struck playwright Backhaus, who draws on Powell's journal for her play's factual basis, as remarkably and rather wonderfully childlike in a man who has seen and suffered from that worst of adult inventions, war. Her play's playful tone "sprung from a place of childhood" she discovered in his journal, the only preserved acciubnt of the expedition. "He taps into that kind of role," Backhaus states in an interview that appears in the SpeakEasy program notes, "because there's a natural childlike curiosity to wanting to know more about the world."

            When, as playgoers, we think of what to expect from a play about a historical event, we are likely to picture a few drawn-from-life figures in the role of the play's main characters, whose differing ideas or ambitions or world view or other conflicts will carry the plot toward some sort of crisis and resolution.

            But in "Men on Boats," the occasions of conflict between Powell and navigator William Dunn, are a secondary element, though they lead to a dramatic confrontation before the

river journey's triumphant conclusion. Instead, the piece's principal action and much of its charm lies in the crew's vigorously theatrical confrontation of a river we cannot see. Its spirit, humor, and the expression of that youthful wonder Backhaus found in Powell's journal lies in the cast's ability to make their characters transparent and their embrace of the challenge of riding a wild river play as a species of life-threatening fun. They are, in some sense, though danger threatens at every turn in the river, and hunger sticks in its own oar, kids on an truly excellent adventure.

            Interestingly, "Men in Boats" has been compared to "Hamilton," the interview tells us, because the racially mixed and mostly female casting raises the question of who gets to tell our country's stories. Backhuas says her play raises the question "What men and women and people do we want as part of our collective history?"

            Her play also provides for an encounter with local Native Americans, giving those who suffered from a white nation's drive to explore an entire continent -- their home before the Europeans came -- an opportunity to cast a cold eye on the "government" that sponsors this expedition. 

            The chief take-away for the audience, to my mind, is the pure pleasure of experiencing a brilliantly imaginative theater piece delivered by a lively and talented young cast that manages to convey that childlike sense of wonder in a spectacular, death-defying journey.

The Garden of the Seasons: Last weeks of Summer Still Do Their Best to Keep Us Outdoors

Warmer today, nearly the middle of September, than most of August was. Balmy here, catastrophic in Florida. That's the short-term of weather. Meanwhile the long-term march of climate shortens our days, brings apples and pumpkins to market -- and causes us to brood about the implications of a pair of unusually fierce storms.

            We brightened up the late summer flower garden this year with a Datura plant, whose intricate layered shades of deep purple and white-tending violet begin opening from the bud only after dark. By next morning the blossom is mostly open. The blossom opens more fully, revealing more of the internal layering over the next day or two at most, then swiftly decays.

              It's an event. The round, alien-looking seed pods left behind are striking as well. You can see a couple of them a little in the photo at the top of the page. I'm pretty much going to leave those seeds alone because they're poisonous, as are the flowers. Maybe that's why they're also called "devil's trumpets."
              I suppose things with attractive surfaces and hidden dangers get that sort of name.

             Along with the Datura we grouped some other annuals in pots in a flat, stonedust-covered space we call the patio extension; petunias, vinca, marigolds, cosmos, scaveola, whatever looked good in the garden centers (pictured in the fifth photo down).

            Among the perennials that bloom this time of year are anemone (second photo down). They put up with a lot of shade and keep blooming year after year. Having computer searched for pictures that look like what we're growing, I conclude that we have the Japanese Anemone, a "hardy, late summer to fall-blooming perennial."

               Not all of the plants we have bloom in the delicate pink color pictured here. Some have a classic robust pink flower. Others bloom almost completely white.

             Here's a grower's description of the Japanese Anemone: "Pale rose to mauve, 5-petaled, slightly cup-shaped flowers with distinctive yellow stamens rise on long, narrow, branching stems above basal growth of dark green foliage. Flower stems grow 2-3 feet tall by bloom time Prefers full sun to part shade and well-drained, fertile soil." (monticelloshop.org)

            This plant grows well in our region probably because it was found in China. Plants from North Asia do well in North America because the climates are similar. It was probably given the name "japonica" because that was the brand of choice among Western plant hunters in the 19th century. This flower came to the US in 1844.

            A plant authority from early in the last century, Harriet Keeler wrote, “the autumnal equinox comes and goes, but the Anemones bloom on, careless of threatening skies or pinching cold.”

            Actually some of our anemone plants started blooming in the middle of August. Usually our plants take turns blooming, extending their season, as our commentator noted, some weeks into official autumn.  

            Other bloomers that bright up late summer are the red-flowering Sweet William, the third photo down. The Rose of Sharom (fourth photo), blooming pinkly against our flimsy fence. The garden fence plan (not "a wall") calls for a living fence of various shrubs filling in all interior and undoubtedly getting in each other's way. Two kinds of tall phlox are pictured in the sixth photo down. The plant with two-toned flowers is definitely a favorite. 
The last photo yellow tansy flowers, a native wildflower in these parts. Behind it is the vegetable garden.

                 

The Garden of Verse: Matthew's Great Teaching on Charity and Hospitality, in an Age of Plastic

My poem on the difficult issue of living charitably and hospitably, as moral authorities such as the writers of the New Testament say we should, is appearing in the September issue of the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual.

            The poem is titled "Food, Drink, Love" and responds to the often cited and beautifully phrased verse from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament. Here's the verse:

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me." Matthew 25:35

             I'll post the first four stanzas of my poem here:

Food, Drink, Love 
If I were one for food and drink,
I'd never stop to mull and think
But fill the pail up to the brim
And bid good cheer to her and him

Now I keep nought of drink and food
For a plastic card is just as good
Its heart lies on a printed sheet
Accept this page, it's good to eat

Somewhere, my lad, your face I've seen
Perchance about the cash machine,
An oasis and a landscape green
With dates and palms and hands so clean

I knew you, Matthew, long ago
Your hair was long, your speech was slow
One of love's tribe, an innocent
Whose glory now is long since spent

If I were giving food and drink
I'd never have the time to think
For urchins with their empty cup
Would line my door to fill it up

             To read the rest of this poem and other work by the 55 poets in this issue, see  http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

 

            The September 2017 issue of Verse-Virtual also includes one poem from my chapbook "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty," published in May.

            Here's the poem:

Waiting for the Perseids
 
No stars, but fire
And a guitar,
knock-knock-knocking on the soft diplomacy of clouds, visibility poor

A surge of smoke lunges like a ghost,
then twists back to the lake's black mirror
The weather worker builds a tapered temple of wood,
an offering,
draws flame from his hand

An instrument is procured for the master
The strings wind upward, songs
A few syllables hummed, rise to the diminished sky
From the dark below to the mottled cushion of the stars

The loon calls to the morning light
 

            That chapbook, my first book of poems, is available from Finishing Line Press at

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/gardeners-do-it-with-their-hands-dirty-by-robert-knox/

 

The Garden of Science: Climate is a Long-term Issue, Human Disaster a Short-Term Probability

            Don't look now, but it appears likely that the human race is doomed. Having read "The Uninhabitable Earth" an article by climate-change explainer David Wallace Wells in a July issue of New York magazine, I am now able to put everything in perspective.

            Start with this so-called 'late summer' weather. A little cool, isn't it? Not my idea of real summer weather. Down in the sixties much of the time over for the last two weeks. And now that we're into mellow September, still three more weeks of summer technically according to the standard astronomical divisions of the solar-calendar, and I'm already looking around for key essentials in my winter wardrobe.

            Despite my desire to wind the seasonal clock back to the middle (or even beginning) of July and take these last two months over again, the worry is not that we've enjoyed (or tolerated) a cool summer, but that most of the world can look forward to warmer winters.

            In other words, warm is not good.

            This is counter-intuitive.

            I want to sit in nature's garden, sip something cold, and stare at the plants. Watch the sky. Track the many seemingly pointless (to us at least), patternless zigs and zags of the birds. Listen to the trees think. An occasional light breeze keeps the annoying insects off. The valuable, and intriguing insects, such as the honey bees are very welcome. I get photos of them every summer hopping in and out of big fact echinacea blooms and brushing against tiny bluish protrusions from the tips of the wild mint that joins the late summer crush around here.

            On my personal calendar August cannot have too many days. Quietly blessed and blooming afternoons slip into the hush of forever like a quiet nap. But too precious to sleep through. The cricket and cicada soundtrack of the early-starting evening. Not the songbirds calling end of day, but the humming appendages of largely invisible insects slipping into our consciousness from their undetectable hideouts. As the poets of Africa remind us: The grass is singing.

            But I'm living in the past. August serenades? Whoops, gones-ville.

            Now it's time for September songs.

            But apparently I am lamenting the wrong losses.

            The bigger story is that, temperature-wise, we're going up, up, up. And faster, and sooner, than we think.

            Wells's "The Uninhabitable Earth" has been fairly described as analyzing "worst-case scenarios," i.e., what is likely to happen to human life on earth if we do do nothing dramatic to contain our current greenhouse-gas emissions trajectory -- and, perhaps, even if we do. The article answers the question: how bad could it get?  

            The answer: Bad.

            The issue for the continuance of human civilizatin, or mere survival of some fragment of the species, is the time-clock -- or time bomb -- that operates in the planetary system of which we are a mere jonny-come-lately.

            Here's my favorite quote, the fact I will try to remember, on taking the long-view of climate change on Planet Earth:

             The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating.

            Earth abides; people not so much.

            I'm listening to Peter Kater's "River," a musical piece evoking continuity, as I read this piece over. Frankly, I need the solace.

            The part about how "carbon warmed the planet by five degrees (celsius)... and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead" particularly got my attention.

            Because as Wells goes on to point out, a five degrees elevation -- in an accelerated time frame because human beings are supplying the big oomph to the 'natural' forces that control climate by sending temps up and down -- is well within the possibilities of our very own here and now 'rapid climate change' super-crisis.

            If we have been following the Paris climate change agreement story, even distantly, we may know that the goal of the international treaty is holding global warming to a 2 percent increase. Wells's article analyzes the consequences of 4 percent and 8 percent increases, arguing that climate scientists offer the general public only the most modest estimates of their current global warming projections because they don't want to freak people out -- or governments -- and frankly they don't want to face the backlash of climate-deniers.

            So, in fact, the idiot know-nothings who currently possess the White House and most of the US government are already succeeding in keeping the true picture of what climate scientists thing may be in store for us from the vast majority of non-scientists. Here is some of that truth:   

Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with permafrost melt...[The reports show] that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.

            Well there's another fact I may try to keep a grip on. Humankind may, relatively soon, be facing ocean levels "hundreds of feet higher." Yet in another part of his essay, Wells tells us that us rising sea level is merely one of many serious threats (such as "the end of food") humanity can expect to face.

            Here's where you can read the rest of this "worse than you think" analysis:

            http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

             I'll indulge in only one other scare-fact -- we're all familiar with 'scare-stories' (that's how certain 'media' manipulate consumers such as the little-brained thing in the White House). But here's another 'scare-fact' about climate:

             Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before. But the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history.

             That is to say, through most of Planet Earth's history, temperatures on Earth's surface have been too hot, or too cold, to allow for the presence of human beings dwelling here.

            In terrestrial terms we were always here on a short lease.

            Suddenly I find myself more interested in those seemingly wacko proposals to set up artificial living environments on other planets. The climate science projections Wells presents here are:   

 what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years.

             Mars? Some other so far undiscovered off-planet 'home' for humanity to inhabit?

            Some other living space, that is, from which our descendants can remember us. Or try to forget.

If you're interested in hearing other voices on this subject, here's an article that takes issue with some of Wells's conclusions.

... https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallace-wells/

And here's an article that says he got his worrying forecast right:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/7/11/15950966/climate-change-doom-journalism