Fishing Yellowstone

 

Yellowstone! Fly fishing in the park with a group from Atlanta; I couldn’t wait. The drive from Bozeman was a Disneyworld, a fantasyland of blue sky, green mountains, and the brilliantly clear Gallatin River. We stayed in the little village of West Yellowstone, almost quaint at the time. Only the major road from Bozeman, running through town to the park entrance, was paved. Our motel was nothing to write about, but who cared?  Actually I did.  The two guys I was with snored, so that first night I asked to be moved.  I was given a room next door to myself, separated by an open alleyway. I could still hear them snore.

I thought I knew something about fly fishing. All the stories around fly shops in town about fishing the park left the impression you had only to hold your net out, and the fish would jump in. What a humbling experience. On Hebgen Lake my float tube, low on air, got me stuck in the mud. The Gallatin and Yellowstone Rivers produced nothing. Not even slam-dunk Cutthroats, the easiest trout to catch. On Henry’s Fork I could look down and see monster fish, which paid no attention to my fly.

One guy in another Atlanta group saw my plight and moved over to subtly instruct me on some of the basics, and eventually I caught a few fish. Together we worked the second level of Slough Creek where we needed the finest tapered leaders we had to avoid spooking the fish. On to a bend in Soda Butte Creek which we had to ourselves, we floated irresistible grasshopper patterns over native cutthroats. We became friends and fished back in Atlanta.

It was at least 3 years of annual trips before I finally learned to fish those western rivers.  My epiphany came one frustrating day on the Madison in a braided, tumbling stretch of water several miles downstream from the park. I had been blanked, and as I worked my way out of the river I tossed the fly in front of me to keep it from dragging. It settled in a shallow riffle just in front of the bank. Instantly, from an undercut, a 16 inch rainbow flashed and took the fly.  What had I been doing in the swift current of the river? The fish weren’t there wearing themselves out, I was.

The rivers were each different, and I had to learn them on my own, all the more satisfying when I could read them successfully. Tumbling runs of the Madison River outside the park gave way to quiet, slow water in the caldera of the park. One September morning I pulled up a fish in a lovely meandering section in a meadow, the translucent water a garden of aquatic plants. As I brought the fish in I heard the bugle of a bull elk behind me. He was a regal sight, standing with uplifted head, balancing his enormous rack of antlers. Then another stood to answer on the other side of the river. Visitors lined the road to watch as the two big bulls challenged one another with dueling calls. Humans don’t belong in that scene; I returned my catch to the water and quickly left.

On my last trip, my partner and I had pulled into the parking area of Slough Creek. As we walked over a slight rise to the well-worn trail I looked down to see a number of fisherman headed to the creek, and more coming back out. The only thing missing was a turnstile. I knew then I was almost to the end of Yellowstone fishing.

It is important for the uninitiated to understand that fly fishing for trout is an ancient sport and has always retained an air of elitism about it. Change is fiercely resisted by its disciples. And it is not always about the number of fish caught, not even close. It is as much about an unblemished wilderness, the scent of clean forested air, and how clear running water, and the solitude of the moment are important components of the experience. To feel like you have to take a ticket to get on Slough Creek, to see a newbie fashionista in a fuchsia fly vest on the Madison, to float the Green River in Utah, only to encounter a mile of fishermen standing a rod’s length from each other, and to witness the blatant monetization of the sport, well that sucks.

I once knew a secret about Yellowstone’s waters that tourists did not, and a privileged length of a North Carolina mountain river where John and I fished for nearly 30 years. I keep them close even now. There are gems that many dedicated fishermen have worked years to find and keep to themselves. Ladies and gentlemen, hold your secrets tight, it will not get better.

Grebe Lake in Yellowstone, A Cautionary Tale

There was a time when I was all about fly fishing, particularly in Yellowstone National Park. In the late 1980s you could book a room in West Yellowstone on short notice, and drive into the park with no delay at the entrance.  I was hooked after my first visit and soon found that I preferred to go alone rather than compromise my stay with others. But that led to a chilling experience.

In much of the park you can walk 100 yards from a parking lot and feel that you are in an unexplored wilderness.  Not many visitors were in the park in September in those days, and it was worth paying attention to your surroundings. In Grebe Lake, 3 miles in from the trailhead, Arctic Grayling had once been stocked, one of only a few places they were found in the lower 48 states. On the easy hike to the lake I counted numbers out loud to keep from surprising a grizzly bear. (Highly recommended.) One thousand is a lot of numbers to repeat, but it was a layer of security.

Grebe Lake was one of the few places I have had the pleasure to experience absolute quiet. A Raven did not just call, the sound pierced the air, clean and clear and it lingered. The lap of water at the edge of the lake was distinct, I didn’t have to try to hear it.

My goal for this trip was to reach the outlet to the Gibbon River, about ¾ of a mile around the lake. No sooner had I started to walk than I was shaken by the sudden movement of something very large to my left.  My first thought was grizzly, but an immense bull moose had been lying unseen, not 50 feet away. This enormous, humped creature rose, staring at me with eyes too small for its large equine head, supporting wide plates of massive antlers. I was frozen in fear. There would have been nowhere to go if 2,000 lbs. of muscle and bone had perceived me as a threat. I have always felt in that still world I could audibly hear my thumping heart from that near encounter.

The rest of the way around the lake was without incident, but my goal proved to be an impenetrable soggy marsh, and my fright had extinguished my interest in fishing for that day. I turned to retrace my steps. But on the other side of the lake, knee deep in the water near the trail, were now two bull moose, vying over the rights to a cow standing between them. It was September, the rutting season, and I was trapped, uncomfortably alone and vulnerable to these huge, excited animals. All I could do was watch this fascinating display of aggression by these bulls until, as quickly as it started, it was all over, and each went its own way. Timidly, and with a fluttering gut, I made it to the trail, so rattled I forgot to signal my presence to any bear as I hurried back to the parking area. It seemed to take forever to feel safe once again. Grizzlies, rutting moose, Yellowstone is not my backyard. The experience taught me a new lesson of respect for our place on this planet of dwindling wild lands.

Later that week I was standing in the Firehole River fishing a nice riffle when I noticed a migrant thrush on a riparian shrub. I couldn’t pick out the species at that distance, so I returned to the riverbank, laid down my rod, and picked up my binoculars - for the rest of the trip. 

Being 17

 

When I was 17, and had graduated high school, I had a girlfriend named Yancey.  She lived in an apartment with her mother, a nurse, who worked the day shift, so Yancey was home alone for the summer. I visited every day for most of the month of June, and I behaved. I am not sure Yancey wanted me to, but I did anyway, even though I didn’t want to either because she had big boobs. And when you’re 17 that is a big deal.

My parents were distraught over these visits, and one day a friend of my brother inadvertently dropped a rubber from his pocket on the floor at our home. Naturally I was blamed in spite of my vigorous protestations of innocence. Dick actually set the record straight and I was absolved of the crime. Nevertheless the wheels were in motion, and I was to be packed off at Mother’s expense to live with my uncle in her childhood home of Newport, Vermont for the rest of that summer of 1960. I was driven one morning to Columbia, South Carolina to catch the train north. We said our goodbyes and I climbed aboard. The interior of the rail car was dark, and I could see only eyes, all staring at me standing in mortified confusion. Shortly, the porter, seeing my problem, pointed me to the ‘whites only’ car and the train left the station.

I was given a down pillow to sleep on that night, but there was a hole in it, and feathers got everywhere. Sleep for this teenager, on his own for the first time, was out of the question.  When we finally pulled into Grand Central Station, I gathered my bag and found a sign that said ‘Information’.  I approached the clerk behind a window, busy reading a newspaper, and asked on which track the next train for Stamford, Connecticut would be found. He pointed to a train schedule on the wall behind him and went back to his newspaper.

In Stamford Uncle Wesley picked me up in his 1954 Ford Woody Wagon and delivered me to his home in time for dinner with my aunt and him, after which I promptly fell asleep. In the morning I was taken to yet another train. This one was a Budd car, a connection of three or four diesel self-propelled cars.  We rhythmically clacked and swayed our way north through rural and green New England until we reached the last stop on the line, Newport, where Robert and his wife Betty were waiting.

That was undoubtedly the best summer of my youth.  I was quickly guided to a warehouse job at Robert’s employer, Canadian Pacific Railway, for $2.17 an hour (union wages) unloading freight cars. No sooner was I there than I was taken under the wing of Armand Bergeron.  Armand was not one for civil discourse, often given to coarse expressions like  ‘shit on a goddam’ and colorful ones such as ‘balls on a heifer’. Pretty good for a native French speaker. I quickly forgot about Yancey and fell in love with a Canadian girl who was going into her junior year at McGill University in Montreal. We went swimming in the lake at night with Robert and Betty, and I took her to summer stock theater more than once.

In early August Robert, Betty and their two boys went on vacation camping in parks around the state. I moved over to my grandmother’s house for that week. My grandfather was not well at the time, and one night I woke to hear a thud in his room.  I looked in to find him under an open window.  He had gotten up to use his bed pan, dressed only in a nightshirt, and in his weakened state he had fallen. I called to my grandmother, and together we lifted him into bed. At 5:00 A.M. the doctor came and told us he needed to be in the hospital, a place he had never been in his life. I went to Robert’s home to get his bathrobe, but before I left my grandmother looked in on him, and he called to her: “Alma, I’m okay”.

Robert’s home was less than a mile, but I walked quickly and was back within 20 minutes. She was clearly upset, wringing her hands, and asked me to check on him. Upstairs, with trepidation, I went in and spoke to him; there was no answer. I lifted his arm, it was rigid, and his skin was cold. I had never seen a dead person before, and now I was staring at my own grandfather. He was 78.

In his retirement, during summer, John Wesley Wyman liked to putter in his ‘victory garden’, sit on his screened porch, smoke his Lucky Strikes, and listen to baseball. That day, Thursday, August 4, 1960, his bottom-of-the-standings Boston Red Sox won a double-header, but he missed it.

Yancey quickly recovered from the loss of my attention and eventually married Jack Jackson, from Jackson, .... Yes, really.  

Why I like E.B. White

He was an essayist in the earliest days of The New Yorker, but probably best known for his children’s books, notably Charlotte’s Web. He also published extensively in Harper’s and The Atlantic.  Andy, as he was known to his friends had no love for his first name, Elwin, which is why he is formally E. B. His nick name, bestowed upon him by his fraternity brothers at Cornell, channeled the president of Cornell at the time, Andrew White. You probably came across, or will, in college, the little volume of English instruction, The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White.  Strunk is the professor, White is E.B.

I am fond of telling people E.B. was my neighbor.  That’s really a stretch. He did own an apartment in Turtle Bay across 2^nd Avenue at 48^th Street from mine, but he had long since sold it, and passed shortly after I got there in 1984. One of his books, The Second Tree from the Corner, while academics have parsed deeper meaning from the title, is a reference to a tree in the courtyard of his apartment building. A leaf falls; a quiet, exact and natural event.

I think the thing that draws me into his world most is his farm on the coast of Maine. Here, with his wife Katherine and their son Joel, he found inspiration for many of his letters and essays. But it is as much the cast of characters around them; his dogs, farm animals, the mailman known to all by his first name, the little library, the foibles of a New Yorker adapting to rural farm life, and the empty boathouse where he escaped to write. No kids, no phones, no interruptions, no heat.

His body of work is comfortable, easy to read, and humorous, at times laugh out loud funny, like “Death of a Pig” for one. If you have read Faulkner or Joyce, both of whom can seem Sisyphean in difficulty, White is like coasting downhill. He uses plain English, well placed, and would never use a word like Sisyphean.  That is his gift; plain English, with each word perfectly placed, each sentence a puzzle he has solved.  Of course, like any author with a large body of work, some are are going to fall flat, and some will feel dated. Katherine, herself an editor of children’s books, would often get on him for neglecting deadlines in order to answer letters from readers, a vice in her eyes, contentment in his.

While living through WWII on his salt farm at Allen Cove (he had no interest in reporting from Europe), he fashioned himself a ‘foreign correspondent’ – reporting to New York readers from the coast of Maine. Even while suffering guilt at not being more involved with the war effort, he was deluged with grateful mail from troops overseas, anxious to read about life at home. He did play a role early on as part of a team that came up with Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”, which were introduced in his State of the Union address in 1941, preparing America for the inevitability of entering the war.

As I read over some of his work once more, I realize how presumptuous of me it is to write an essay about this master essayist, so if you will follow this link I will let his words speak for themselves.

https://gwarlingo.com/2012/writer-e-b-white/ (Read the PDF version.) 

Corporate Greed - A Primer

         In a New York second, after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in a New York courtroom, CNN and MSNBC producers were hard at work on new content speculating on his appeal, and would it be upheld, blah, blah, blah. The legions of TV lawyers arrayed across a set are as clueless as they were about predicting the trial itself. The true value of all this is, of course, useless, but that isn’t the point, viewership is, and satisfying corporate advertisers.  It matters not a whit how disgusted you and I are, or how intellectually insulted we might be about wall-to-wall cable coverage of Trump, it draws viewers, and advertisers must reach an audience. Forget morality, social welfare, news we need to know, it is all about earning a buck and satisfying the expectations of ownership. Such is the world of a market economy, and corporate greed in the sphere of public companies.. 

The term ‘free market’ is easily tossed around, but that is a misnomer because economies exist within a regulatory framework. And that framework permits corporate greed in spades. Of necessity. Meanwhile well-meaning individuals, and like-minded groups push back, usually to little avail.  Here’s why: There are two fundamental categories of business, private and public. Private business organizations are owned by one or more individuals and those principals make the decisions. If they don’t want the moon, they don’t have to try.

Successful ones, which wish to grow and prosper, get new financial capital for that growth organically (earned income), by borrowing from a lender, or by bringing in new partners. Good companies with great ideas often outgrow those sources to continue growth and make the decision to go ‘public’. After meeting stringent requirements and accounting methods, these businesses hire investment bankers to take them public. That is essentially raising new capital by issuing shares of ownership to new investors, and importantly creating a board of directors if one does not exist. This major change in strategy results in shifting the focus on future performance to the demands of these many new owners, which must be met - or else.

         Do you have an IRA, 401k, 403B or other retirement account, or a mutual fund, or own shares (or stock) in the company you work for?  If so, you damn well want the value of those shares to grow, don’t you? If one company doesn’t meet your demands, you can shift your money to another manager or other investments, thereby punishing the laggard by selling your shares on a stock exchange and maybe pushing the value of the underperforming shares even lower. Enough investors doing that, and the management team can get the axe – even original owners. That is the way public companies work. The bottom line for public companies then is maximizing shareholder value. Investors put there own money at risk, and rightly expect an opportunity at a return.

         Wall Street is the seat of the financial services industry in the U.S. and serves the vital function of providing buyers and sellers investment capital. It is often the punching bag for activists when there is a movement to push back against greed. I can assure you that social good is not an element of business plans. And when it comes to corporate largess for social good, it most often comes from a corporate foundation, not the operating funds of the entity.

Corporations must often exist in a highly competitive, ever changing market economy and need to do all that is legal to make every last dime to satisfy owners – of which you may be one. Otherwise an element of your future such as buying a home, educating your kids, or retiring, could be in jeopardy.

         My take on corporate America is ignore the stupid ads we are bombarded with, consider the new jobs that are created with economic growth we experience in the U.S. - unparalleled anywhere on Earth, the generation of individual wealth - which often funds our schools, colleges, pioneering health care research, and human dignity initiatives.  But, always demand corporations toe the line on their climate impact. With no excuses for the corrupt and narcissistic Trumps of the world, forget about the underbelly – greed.  The corporate glass is half full, not half empty. 

Killing Barred Owls

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed killing 470,000 Barred Owls over 30 years in three Pacific states in order to protect the Spotted Owl. Killing birds on purpose is a tough call. We have grown up in recent generations in which we protected birds. There are sanctuaries and laws, less hunting overall, and hopefully many fewer rogues caught up in illegal meat hunting, in superstition and rumor. I read over the blog ‘Conservation Sense and Nonsense’, a January 2024 treatise defending the Barred Owl’s invasion of the Pacific Northwest. I have to say I disagree with the premise that territorial expansion is Barred Owls is normal, ergo the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should not be killing Barred Owls. I think they should be killing the invader, and quickly.

Barred Owl range expansion

I do agree that territorial expansion is a natural state. Successive generations of members of the animal kingdom will expand their range into suitable habitat as a method of perpetuating the species. And that is fine as long as each species occupies its own niche.  But what happens when two closely related species use the same habitat, the weaker of the two is a threatened species, and the more aggressive of the two has no natural predator to keep its population in check?

 Spotted Owls are not the only species at risk. There appears to be little research, and therefore it is almost unknown to the public, of the impact the owls are having on a cast of small owls: Eastern Screech Owl, Western Screech Owl, and perhaps Northern Saw-whet Owl. All of these owls can be found in habitat that is suitable to Barred. (Note that Barred Owls are not found in arid or scrub regions of the country, so those populations of small owls are safe.)

Each ring indicates a Barred Owl
territory  with a 1 km diameter

I can attest to the decline of the eastern species through my own work over five years surveying Eastern Screech-Owl populations in my home county. That was complimented by a master’s candidate working on her thesis at the University of Georgia, along the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area of Fulton and Cobb Counties. Barred Owls are the only ones now to be found in otherwise compatible habitat for the screech-owl. They still exist here in Chatham County, but only in habitat such as second-growth pine forests, where Barred Owls are not found. They are even absent from the uninhabited barrier islands. Transient screech-owls in winter are occasionally caught by trail cameras, but they otherwise visit undetected since they don’t vocalize, and in my experience, don’t respond to playback.

I am not alone in trying to draw attention to this issue.  A correspondent of mine on Bainbridge Island just off Seattle has documented the precipitous decline of the Western Screech-Owls since 1990 – when the Barred Owl arrived. His paper can be found at:

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259928248_Recent_Trends_in_Western_Screech-Owl_and_Barred_Owl_Abundances_on_Bainbridge_Island_Washington

As of 2021, according to my personal correspondence with the author, it was rare to find this once relatively abundant little owl anywhere in King County during the annual Christmas Count.

Since populations of the little owls may appear otherwise stable no one is spending time or effort to study these pockets of decline - yet. There is also a lame argument that eventually screech-owls will find ways to adapt.  When? I do have some reports of both screech and Barred Owls being found on the same territory, but that point-in-time is not very telling. It isn’t indicating which way the populations are trending. Even though this problem has evolved from a natural North American species, as opposed to an introduced invasive species like the Burmese Python, with no natural predators, one must arise.  That higher order predator, for better or for worse, must be man. 

Eastern Screech-Owl Nestling - 2008

Note: May 26

I heard back from the writer of the referenced blog post. A little snarky, suggesting the invasion of Barred Owl on the west coast was really natural selection. Of course USFWS doesn't see it that way at this point in time.  The writer also suggested that the years of experience those of had witnessing the decline of screech-owls was 'speculative'. So I found what I could about this individual, looking for credentials. I found nothing. Simply an ardent preachy conservationist. 

Everyone Needs a Pewee

I have this fear of losing interest in my cherished pastimes and then having nothing I want to do; a sure sign that depression could take hold of an aging brain. My go-to activity for 45 years has been birding, but this spring has been the worst neotropical migration I can remember. I can count the number of transient migrant species I have seen on one hand. In short, migration has been a bummer.

An important component of birding for me has been immersing myself in the peace of a morning. I get up just before the sun, pour coffee and drive up to a one mile stretch of road, which at that hour is free. Free of the invasion of lawn blowers, motorboats, traffic, and other forms of noise pollution. After turning off the A/C fan in the car, I lower the windows and just listen. By stepping on the brake and engaging idle-stop there is only the woods and me. I now clearly hear the dawn chorus, the songs of the mix, and newly arrived birds. As a recordist I thirst for that now threatened free environment.

I may still be the only one in my state who regularly records bird song, and over the years I have accumulated all the right gear. When I traveled I used a lesson I learned from photography, standing on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, trying to get a decent shot of Half Dome. First visit, take in the whole scene. Go back again and work on your shot or your recordings, but only after you have soaked up the visual or auditory experience, and know where you want to go and when to be there.

Birds don’t sing to attract a mate during fall movement, so spring is the recordists’ moment. And there is one in particular that I need to hear; the simple up, then down-slurred song of a nondescript gray flycatcher, the Eastern Wood-Pewee. I don’t know why this bird, of all the others, is my tonic.  Bald Eagles, for all their majesty, have a rather wimpy call. Tiny, iridescent hummingbirds simply squeak. Thrushes, masters of beautiful song from deep in the green woods, are contenders to be sure, but when Pewees return, all is well. For me they are a jolt of adrenalin, a renewed spirit that gets me back in touch with a pastime I have had for almost half a century. I get my microphone and recorder ready to capture that sound, how many times now I do not remember. It doesn’t matter.

 

A Way of Life and the Times

 

I had some cockamamie idea after reading Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman that I would make some lucid comments about the book. I was only nine years and many thousands of words too late. However, in the several reviews and academic commentary, laboriously comparing it with To Kill a Mockingbird, many pontificating in overwrought prose, I think most of them missed the real theme. Wring their hands over early writing style and the characters as much as they would like, the real story of Watchman is Brown v. Board of Education, the impact that had on a way of life, ordinary people, and how it changed them.

         I was there as a witness to those times as an immigrant to the South, fresh from under the shadow of the Empire State Building. On the surface all was well, unchanged for generations, but the Jim Crow south of separate but equal was only on paper. In truth, the local high school serving blacks, Lucy Laney High, in Augusta, was deplorable. I can only imagine the lack of resources and teaching skills available to students. The separate public drinking fountains and bathrooms in some stores were shabby at best, and blacks often had to enter through a back door – if they were allowed in at all. Blacks lived in one particular area of town, and the roads were the only ones not paved. Public conveyance did accommodate them, however; how else were they going to get to their jobs as maids and yardmen for white homes?

         But like Maycomb, there was enormous resistance to the concept of integrated schools, complete with the same fears Harper Lee described. For many white people, spoken only in trusted circles, they wanted blacks kept down, in their place. For others, the benevolent ones, the common theme was ‘they are not ready yet’. The fact is they had a point. The counterpoint was, if not given a chance, would they ever be ‘ready’?

         The truth is many of that generation would never be ready, and in some communities there would not be a leader to step up. Allow me to digress for a moment. When Lyndon Johnson was crafting his legacy legislation to be presented as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he turned to his good friend, the highly influential Richard Russell of Georgia, to help him bring in the southern votes in the Senate. Russell couldn’t help.  His comment: “They are not ready yet”.  

An objective reading of Sherman’s act of giving ‘possessory title’ of 40 acres and a mule under “Special Field Orders No.15” to newly freed slaves on the coast of Georgia, and South Carolina is instructive. The program was a dismal failure, even though much of the land was rich and fertile. Freedmen had no experience whatsoever in making their own decisions, let alone the right ones to make a farm pay. Andrew Johnson put a stop to it anyway. But the point is things did not get better for rural folk. If they left the land and moved to town there were no services to provide for them, schools to instruct them, jobs to pay them beyond being cooks, cleaners, and yardman if they were lucky. They had no skills other than the ability to tend a crop. There was no leadership, no conception of a democratic process, and without money, no financial wherewithal.  Worse, if the vote were available to them, they voted as a bloc. In Harper Lee’s fictional account of the Maycomb Citizens Council, as in real life in the rural south, there were frequently more blacks than whites in a community. That alone caused angst. Now the Supreme Court had ruled that schools nationwide were to be integrated.        

         Are things better today? Maybe. Certainly at the civic level blacks are very active, and in cities and towns across the south they are competently running political subdivisions at all levels. Savannah’s black mayor is outstanding.  He is in his second term, and many wish he could continue on.  As entrepreneurs, corporate, professionals, and national political leaders, and in academia there are no doubt growing numbers. That is a far cry from my time in graduate school in the early 1970s, where there was only one.  In a business law class, he turned in a final paper with the title spelled incorrectly.  It was overlooked by the professor.  That happens even today, as I can attest from my own experience as an academic. No one wants to fail a black student. I remember clearly trying to convince one young black lady, one of my best students, to leave our less than rigorous academic environment for a challenging school. She needed it. She deserved it.

         Today in the south, in polite company, African Americans are spoken of as blacks, or African Americans. Behind closed doors or locked in a private mind, a distinction is often made between those blacks which are respected and liked on an individual basis, and niggers.*  Fuel for this fire is a massive culture clash, and many whites cannot relate.

Although it is always overlooked in these discussions, poor whites, (a.k.a. ‘white trash’, ‘rednecks’, ‘crackers’) indigent sharecroppers and tenant farmers, shared much with poor, illiterate blacks, and their participation in civic life would be unwelcome, and barely tolerated, if at all. That, of course, does not justify racial discrimination, but it does suggest that these biases, so clearly hinted at in Watchman, were, and still may be in some ways as much about class as about skin color.

 

Coda

For the uninitiated, Watchman predates Mockingbird as a literary effort by Harper Lee. It was rejected by her publisher, and she was urged to develop the characters in accordance with flashbacks to a youthful Jean Louise (Scout). Unlike her masterpiece, set in the 1930’s, Watchman was in the moment, placed shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case to desegregate schools; one more nail in the states’ rights coffin. The turmoil and angst of the time was real. And the ‘Dixiecrats’, as they were known, began a unified flip to the Republican Party across the southern tier of states. The lasting impact of that political shift is another story.

In addition to my 68 years of personal experience in this part of the world, there are some books from which I further derive the right to comment on this touchy, complex subject. For those who wish to learn more from experts rather than an observant octogenarian I have listed them below in no particular order. They cover the times and the plights of both poor whites and blacks. Finally, it goes without saying, if you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird yet, what the hell have you been doing?

 

Non-Fiction

·      The Promised Land – Nicholas Lemann (the great migration)

·      Now is the Time to Praise Famous Men – James Agee and Walker Evans (sharecroppers)

·      Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 – Eric Fromer (academic)

·      Caste and Class in a Southern Town – John Dollard (academic)

·      Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era – James McPherson

·      The South and the Southerner – Ralph Mc Gill

·      The Humane Propagandist – Roy Stryker (extraordinary photograph of the Great Depression)

·      The Great Depression Photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans – Library of Congress online

·      The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson (the great migration) - Sloppy and poorly written. The Promised Land is significantly better.

 

Fiction

·      The Sound and the Fury – Willam Faulkner

·      Their Eyes were Watching God – Zora Neal Hurston

·      Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin

·      Tobacco Road – Erskine Caldwell

·      The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

 

* The word ‘nigger’ was not originally a pejorative term.  It described a job, a field hand. In Britain, prior to WWII, its use was not uncommon. Two examples: Joseph Conrad titled a story The Nigger of the Narcissus, and Agatha Christie wrote Ten Little Niggers.  When this last book was released in the U. S. it was rebranded Ten Little Indians, but in short order that was deemed politically incorrect as well, and dropped for And then there were None.

Two Community Newspapers

 

This year’s order of maple syrup came recently. I order it directly from the producer in Newport, Vermont, as I have for many years, and my mother before me. When I unpacked the shipping box I took out the Newport Daily Express, wadded up to prevent shifting. It was from a Tuesday, and it was ten informative pages. That caught my attention, published in a town with just over 4000 residents. With a few keystrokes I learned that the primary service area, Orleans County, has a population of 27,500, and this apparently thriving daily print edition of a community newspaper serves 3,000 subscribers. Contrast that with the fragile bones of Savannah Morning News in Chatham County with a population of 303,000, where daily print circulation has been in decline since at least 2006, and as of 2022 stood at under 17,000 (10.9% vs. 5.6%). On a hunch I did a dive into the demographics of the two counties looking for answers.              

Other than the obvious differences in population everything else was close except one major factor. In terms of high school education, they are identical. Chatham has a greater percentage of college educated residents, and they are similar regarding households with computers, access to broadband, and household income. The exception was race. Orleans County, Vermont is 96% white and Chatham County, Georgia is 52% white. The difference has to be cultural.

 Another dive took me to the pages of ETS (formerly Educational Testing Service) where a study commissioned in 1972 on reading differences between blacks and whites revealed that blacks read significantly less of all printed material, particularly newspapers, at all educational and economic levels. That apparently has not changed over the intervening 51 years. A 2023 survey by Pew Research found that blacks get their news today primarily from television and social media, and they don’t trust white reporting on black matters.

As an observer, which is all I qualify to be, I see these biases preventing many black families from fully assimilating into the American economy. This is a roadblock to not only upward mobility for so many in the community, but for meaningful participation in a multicultural and pluralistic society. African Americans have been significant contributors to American life with music, art, fashion, and athletics, but not economically or professionally in significant numbers. Hopefully, change is underway. As we know, many more underrepresented minorities are now attending college.

An online non-profit newspaper, The Current, serving our 100 miles of coast, is making inroads. Editors recently announced that one third of a growing readership is black. In spite of my amateur analysis one thing I do know, however, these readers black and white, are not a representative cross section of the Georgia coast. There is still a long, long way to go.

Graduation

 

This past weekend our family drove the three hours to the impressive main campus of Mercer University in Macon for our granddaughter’s graduation from medical school. Mercer Medical School was originally founded to train physicians in family medicine, with the intent to return to practice in their rural communities. It has since morphed to prepare new physicians to practice all primary care specialties, but retains those rural roots, and that was much in evidence at commencement.

As the awarding of diplomas was about to begin the president of the university, as master of ceremonies, politely requested the audience to refrain from applause or cheering until the end of the procession of candidates, so that each name could be clearly heard. Fine, no problem, and our nine in attendance so complied. But not everyone. The Black families, or clans, splendidly dressed for the occasion in indescribable fashion, could not hold back. So as each family member crossed the stage and received his or her diploma, their crowd whooped it up in pride and defiance. They were not alone. Some of the obviously rural families, not quite so dazzlingly attired, made common cause.

It would be smug of us to look down on this breach of protocol, maybe even normal, but there is a flip side to be considered. In four generations of our blended family, we can now count three physicians, two lawyers, plus one in training, as well as a host of advanced degrees. And many of these professional degrees were earned at elite temples of learning such as Harvard, MIT, Duke, Emory, and Johns Hopkins.  For the perpetrators, that young doctor may well be the first in a family to attend college, let alone medical school. And, if they are returning to their roots, they are not expecting to make a boatload of money.  They are there to serve patients with little to no means, or Medicaid. So let them celebrate.

That said we are immensely proud of our own. The doctor doesn’t care about how much she makes as long as she can cover her nut. The lawyer-to-be will be the first to stand in line to provide pro-bono legal advocacy for a distressed family, and the journalist will be unafraid to root out corruption, and speak truth - and fact - to power.

A Bookshop in Atlanta

 

You may not remember the incident of Bill Kovach, editor of the “Atlanta Journal-Constitution” in the late 1980s. During his short tenure from 1986 through 1988 he raised the visibility, coverage, and stature of the newspaper. One of its new staff took home a Pulitzer, the first in 20 years for the newspaper. And then he resigned over irreconcilable differences with management. Kovach was emulating the ‘New York Times’, management wanted a redesign like ‘USA Today’, and old heads grumbled that his vision was leaving Atlanta behind. Worse, aggressive journalists were reporting negative stories on hallowed local corporate institutions. But the rest of the business community at least loved it.

At the news of his resignation, on November 5, 1988, about 300 people, among them luminaries, staged a New Orleans-style wake down Marietta Street in protest, complete with band. Central to the protesters were the highly successful author Pat Conroy and Michael Lomax, an English professor at Morehouse, and Emory, and a candidate for mayor of Atlanta.

I felt a kinship to both these men. They, like me and so many others, were wheel spokes in the hub of Cliff Graubart’s bookshop on Juniper Street. I met Michael there on a couple of occasions, although I would not consider myself an acquaintance, only an admirer. Conroy I never met, but he was a constant there, and besides, he enrolled at The Citadel the year after me. Given my own stature, I can identify with men under 5’10” who played basketball in college. Through Cliff I have two signed first editions of his books.

To Conroy his dislike of the good-ole-boy AJC was personified by the late Lewis Grizzard, redneck funny man and sportswriter, who revered the Old South at a time when Atlanta was emerging as the shining example of the New South. The erudite Lomax ran for mayor twice, but was defeated both times. Although he had the whole-hearted support of the Atlanta white community, Black people considered him an Oreo – black on the outside, white on the inside. Otherwise, his string of personal and academic achievements is exemplary, and today he has been president of the United Negro College Fund for over 20 years. Both men along with Lillian Lewis, wife of Congressman John Lewis, and others, both speakers and marchers, wanted the luster to be restored to the newspaper of Henry Grady and Ralph McGill.

The Old New York Book Shop is still in existence, although it has morphed from the creaky house on Juniper Street to a rare and antiquarian atmosphere in Sandy Springs. The original was packed with all manner of books lining the walls of so many rooms and perfuming the air with a musty fragrance that booklovers cherish as farmers love the smell of manure in a pasture.

During my years in Atlanta used bookshops came and went, and Cliff was also a victim. When he sold the property on Juniper he told me he made a hell of a lot more money on the house than he ever did selling books. The used trade and the rare book business was crushed by the emergence of the Internet as dealers could finally compare notes on value, and collectors could shop with a smartphone.  But even today the industry survives, because any used bookshop is a physical magnet for readers that cannot be matched by digital technology.

Real Humans Win the Nobel Prize for Literature

 

I recently watched an old documentary on the life of Saul Bellow (American Masters, PBS Passport). Along with his literary achievements he had five wives, and no telling how many girl friends on the side, nor how many girlfriends on the side eventually became wives. The last one did; she was 43 years his junior and a student of his at the University of Chicago. She now teaches in Boston

Interestingly, many of our twentieth century Nobel laureates in literature did not lead exemplary lives. Booze and women were constant themes for Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Hemingway, and Bellow. Faulkner had his issues with the bottle as well. John Steinbeck had two wives, but not at the same time. Hemingway, while on safari in 1935, got drunk and screwed one of the native women in his entourage. Today we would characterize his behavior as rape. But he wrote about it in his nonfiction Green Hills of Africa as just another day in the bush.

In his fifties he fell in love with a 19-year-old in Italy and wrote a wretched novel about it and death, Across the River and into the Trees. In fairness, taking a more analytical approach, academics liked the book. Nevertheless, you should read Hemingway’s A Movable Feast, about life in Paris in the nineteen-twenties among the ‘lost generation’ of American writers. (That term was originated by Gertrude Stein if memory serves me.) Supposedly “Feast” is non-fiction. Supposedly. I guess too often human weakness is a price for creative gifts. At the risk of sounding like only horny drunk men qualify for the Nobel, I should also say that Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison had their evenings in Stockholm, as did the poet Louise Gluck in 2020. Enough.

Majoring in the Liberal Arts

 

Last December the New York Times posted its best op-eds of 2023 in “The Morning”. One caught my eye, by Pamela Paul, “How to Get Kids to Hate English” (March 9, 2023). What really rang my bell was her defense of English and history majors, which are losing ground to STEM – training kids for jobs as opposed to educating them. I can’t argue that the job market isn’t different from what it was when I graduated college, nor can I argue that tech jobs are not a critical part of our economy.  But what a dreary, gray, and distrustful world it would be without literature, music, and art, not to mention journalism written by humans (instead of AI), and history to learn from, and live by.

 I remember very little from my less than distinguished undergraduate years; a little psychology, maybe a bit of chemistry, but I do remember being assigned A Farewell to Arms and J.D. Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor. One classroom experience led me to read and collect most of Hemingway’s and Salinger’s works. I have seared into my memory the surprise of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, and dozens of other characters in dozens of other books spawned by an early love of reading. I was a lucky kid; we didn’t have TV or social media.

 Who doesn’t remember music from their youth, or the first skeptical time you saw a live symphony perform, or being awestruck at the Met, or standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid, or even Rodin’s “The Thinker” at the High in Atlanta? Are systems analysts, important as they are, going to give you those kinds of life experiences? They stick with you, long after you have forgotten calculus and linear programming.          

 Over time we can get all this on our own, but being exposed first will light the fire. Isn’t that what college is about? My granddaughter is set to spend 3 weeks in Rome, between her sophomore and junior years at Emory, with her classmates under the tutelage of a professor of art history studying the art, architecture, and history of this ancient city. Education and memories for a lifetime. Go for it.

 It seems this emphasis on tech training is ignoring the need for not just educating young people, but also threatening graduate and professional programs for which high achieving and hungry liberal arts graduates are eminently qualified. I am sure most of this threat applies to political pressure on state supported public institutions competing for job growth, but it can be existential to smaller private liberal arts colleges. However, Ms. Paul specifically referenced Columbia University, and by definition a university comprises all academic disciplines. I hope we will hear and read many more national voices in opposition to siphoning scarce dollars from a real college education.    

Reading World War II

 I’ll bet everyone who has an interest in WWII has their own reading list.  Me too. But I am deliberately not a big collector of this genre. I have about 85 books on the major events, the journalism, memoirs, and also novels in which the war plays a pivotal role.

My primary interest though, is how Britain withstood the onslaught of Hitler’s attacks, and in particular how England, Churchill, and the English people stood up.  I mean Stood Up, when the odds were so stacked against them that Roosevelt initially dragged his feet on aid, fully expecting the Brits to collapse by the end of 1940. However, it isn’t really possible to read about WWII without considering the ultimately massive, U.S. contribution.

This essay is on a small handful of books primarily about the European theater, but with one significant exception, Hiroshima (1940), by John Hersey. This slim book is considered by some the best piece of journalism of the 20^th Century. It views the immediate aftermath of the bomb from the perspective of several of the city’s surviving residents.  Sticking with journalists, and turning to Europe, William Shirer’s Berlin Diary is an inside look at Hitler and Germany between 1939-1941. When Shirer learned he was being watched, he left Berlin, with his hidden notes safely undiscovered by the Gestapo. Among the hundreds of correspondents covering the war, Ernie Pyle is unforgettable for his columns from the trenches written in a style for everyman, Ernie’s War – The Best of Ernie Pyle’s WWII Dispatches (1986), edited by David Nichols. After spending most of the war on or near the front lines of Europe he opted to go to the Pacific and cover that conflict. It did not go well. During a battle for Okinawa in 1945 he raised his head to look around. His loss caused shock and mourning among his followers at home.  

Surely a standout book of history about the beginning of the war, Britain’s early struggles and Winston Churchill is the third volume of William Manchester’s magnificent biography of Churchill, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm. (2012) by William Manchester and Paul Reid.  I have never read a 1,000-page book where I didn’t want it to end. I think it is time to read it again.  Hitler’s planned invasion of England was profiled in Operation Sea Lion (2014) by Leo McKinstry. But the real value of this book is the fascinating home-brewed barriers the English people prepared for the invasion which never happened, replete with planning fire on the ocean as the Nazis approached the shores of England across the Channel.

As early as 1940, even while England’s very existence was threatened, the government suggested its citizens keep a diary of their experiences during the war. One in particular rises to the top, Nella Last’s War (1981), edited by Broad and Fleming. A humble housewife tells her experience living in Barrow-in-Furness, near a shipyard, of blasted windows, shortages of food, fear for her family, making do with little, and vain attempts to live a near-normal life. Of course, the most famous personal diary needs no introduction, that of Anne Frank, reprinted who knows how many times and read even by school children, Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.

As for the United States contribution I can think of nothing better than Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn (2003), The Day of Battle (2007), and The Guns at Last Light (2013). From the first landing on the shores of North Africa with an army so green soldiers are literally pissing in their pants in fear, through the bloody battles of Sicily and Italy, to the D-Day invasion and ultimately the collapse of the Nazi regime, they are masterfully written.

There are many others worth your time. So, to finish, I will mention five more good reads as the events occurred chronologically:

-  Miracle of Dunkirk (1982), Walter Lord. The story of an incredible escape of 300,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers.

-  Battle of the Atlantic (2016), Johnathan Dimbleby. Hitler’s attempts to sink American aid with his submarine wolfpacks and starve England.

-  The Longest Day (1959), Cornelius Ryan. The D-Day Invasion, a classic.

-  A Bridge too Far (1974), Cornelius Ryan. The thoroughly botched attack on Arnhem, Holland planned by Field Marshall Montgomery, and resisted by Eisenhower.

-  Dresden, February 13, 1945 (2004), Frederick Taylor. The incredible destruction of a beautiful city by allied bombing.  The value of those day and night raids is still debated today.

Palestine

 

“HALHUL, West Bank — Kalila was 14 years old when she married her 32-year-old second cousin. She was also 14 when she became pregnant. Neither her marriage nor her pregnancy were her decision; ashamed and embarrassed, as well as afraid of giving birth, she decided to get an abortion. It was a harrowing decision, and one she told no one about. At five months pregnant, Kalila — whose name has been changed — climbed atop a 9-foot stone wall in this Palestinian city and tossed herself off of it, belly first.” 1

Kalila survived, the fetus did not. At the time this article was published, she was 40-years old with six children. “With her achy joints and wrinkled face…she looks more like 60.” Abortions are illegal under Palestinian law, contraceptives are not.2

I hope it will serve a purpose for me to illustrate some facts I dug up about the Palestinian territories. I will compare Gaza and the West Bank separately where I can. I apologize for the teacher-thing; it’s a genetic defect.

Almost every evening TV news brings more death and destruction in Gaza to our family rooms, but what often gets my attention is the number of young men and boys crowded around pancaked Hamas hideouts, gawking at the damage. No doubt some of them are Hamas fighters, or soon will be. A February 2, 2000, article in the New York Times claimed the “high fertility rate of seven children per woman (Gaza) is comparable to Somalia’s or Uganda’s”.  But the survival rate is high, and adults lead a reasonably long life. A Palestinian paper, published in the well-respected English medical journal, The Lancet, found most women employ contraceptives, but don’t really know how to use them. The consequence of this is a population with more than 50% under the age of 20. Depending upon the source, fertility rates vary all over the lot, from 8.12 in 2000, to 4.06 today, with Gaza currently at 4.5 and the West Bank at 3.6. Several U.S. organizations have weighed in on this subject, including previously published data aggregated by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. I remain suspect of the truth of this trend in just over 20 years.3,4

 Before this war the life expectancy of a 20-year-old, according to our own National Institutes of Health figures from 2010, was age 73. That is no great shakes; Gaza ranks #121 in the world by this measure. However, if a person can escape chronic disease – not to mention war, he or she can live well into their 80s. A slowly rising rate in life expectancy in Gaza has experienced significant dips during wars with Israel.  After this one, unfortunately, it’s likely to bottom out.

 In Gaza, as of 2022, less than one in five people of working age were in the labor force, and the unemployment rate was 45.3%. Compare that to the West Bank: the unemployment rate was 13.1%.5 If that is not enough to get your attention, in Israel for 2022, the unemployment rate was 3.8%,6 A factoid, UNRWA is the second largest employer in Gaza with more than 13,000 Palestinian employees in Gaza.7 It is compelling to compare that figure to reports that Israel was working toward allowing 20,000 Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank into Israel for work before October 7.

Over 96% of Palestinians are literate as of 2020, and 20% of the combined population have a college degree. Enrollment in tertiary education (universities, colleges of education or technical schools) in 2020 was 45%.8 The education figures represent Gaza and the West Bank together. These percentages are among the highest in the world. Finally, there is a staggering disparity in economic output. Palestinians with a population of 5.88 million produced a GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in 2021 was estimated at $US27.8 billion.9 Israel, a country of 9.6 million, recorded GDP of $US488 billion.10

Unemployment and restricted movement obviously help explain how radicalization takes hold among young men. However, putting the politics of the region aside, it is bewildering how Israel was able to make an arid land bloom and create a modern economy when a population next door, with remarkable literacy and education rates, is still mired in disarray and poverty, under the thumb of terrorists. Why? It can be summarized in one phrase: lack of good governance, manufacturing, and service sector investment in their economy. (Of course, the siege of Gaza is to prevent the flow of material to be stolen by Hamas.) Then it becomes a web of interrelated reasons, all of which point back to the ‘why’: a fragile, feckless Palestinian Authority.

Palestinians have been receiving humanitarian aid every year since 1948. However, for the period 1994 – 2020 they received $40 billion, mostly from the U.S. the EU, UNRWA, and a host of other acronyms, as well as Japan, Canada, and individual Western European countries.11 The White House even announced a $100 million aid package to Gaza on October 18, 2023.12 Not once did I find a penny directly contributed by Russia, or China.

 Class dismissed.

 If you are interested, here is a short sketch of the recent history of the region.

https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/gaza-strip/

 

Sources

1 Foreign Policy from December 4, 2015.

2 Shahawy, S. in Health and Human Rights Journal, December 2019, appearing in National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

3 Pell, Stephanie, Global Public Health November 2017, appearing in National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

4 CIA World Factbook

5 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IRBD) –       World Bank

6 Central Bureau of Statistics Israel

7 United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)

8 World Bank

9 CIA World Fact Book

10 World Bank

11 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

12 United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

 

Of Old Books and Dead Authors

 

Charing Cross Road in London is famous as the street of booksellers. It is also celebrated in the title of Helene Hampf’s wonderful little book, 84 Charing Cross Road. I bought John LeCarré’s A Perfect Spy on its first day of issue in a store there. Keepers among this writer’s novels are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the Smiley trilogy, and that one. LeCarré’s early spy novels are usually free of violence and gratuitous sex scenes. I think Hemingway did the most tasteful job describing sex between his protagonist, Robert Jordan, and Pilar’s daughter, Maria, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, with the simple phrase ‘he feels the earth move out and away from under them’. Let me add that was probably Hemingway’s most elegant description of the subject among many.

On the subject of American authors, I have recently been reading East of Eden. I’m about halfway through, about 300 pages. I will grind on through the book in time, but for now I have laid it down. I don’t care for Steinbeck’s style in this book, and many of his metaphors are clunky. None of his books have a ‘happily ever after’ ending, and I don’t expect this one to. For example: Rose of Sharon Joad nurses the starving boy at her breast in a barn in the pouring rain to end The Grapes of Wrath. George has to shoot Lennie in the head so he will not be arrested for accidently killing Curly in Of Mice and Men.  Kino throws his precious find back into the ocean in The Pearl, and in The Winter of our Discontent, Ethan takes razorblades on his walk, following his betrayal of a friend and his own principles. Morality and poverty are common themes for Steinbeck.

Instead, I picked up Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I have had a paperback of this classic for probably 50 years and never read it. I am grateful to have been born in an era without TV or, God forbid, social media.  Reading became a natural part of my life from the earliest book I remember, Johnny’s Machines.  I read avidly until I reached puberty, and then I finally rediscovered them in college. When I was about 12, we were assigned to read The Green Pastures, a parody of Heaven’s characters in the Black dialect. (Imagine that in today’s middle schools!) It was written for the stage by Marc Connelly in 1930. I came across a copy in the Strand Bookstore in 1984 for $5.00. I still have it, of course.

I marvel at the ability of some authors to write in the vernacular, whether it is Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn, William Faulkner in his Mississippi novels, James Baldwin in Go Tell it on the Mountain, or Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. They are all classics; they have stood tall over many decades, they are still read, and they will NOT be banned for presenting America as it once was. And if you care, Johnny’s Machines (1949) is still available.