Going Out With Peacocks and Other Poems by Ursula Le Guin

Source of book: I own this. 

 

Ursula Le Guin was primarily known for her science fiction stories and novels, four of which have made it into this blog:

 

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Dispossessed

Gifts

The Lathe of Heaven

 

Less known is her poetry, although it appears that it was well respected during her lifetime, and seems to me to have held up quite well. Although she wrote poems at the beginning of her career, most of what she published came late in life, with nine collections published after age 60. Going Out With Peacocks was published in 1994.

 

This volume is one my wife found for me recently, a used former library hardback. 

 

The poems in this collection cover a wide range of topics, from nature to aging to feminism. Many take classical mythology and put a bit of a twist on them - one where Ariadne and the Minotaur are actually friends, and she hides him from Perseus, for example. There is plenty of wit and a bit of an edge to Le Guin’s writing, even more so than her novels in a way. Because she can “say things slant,” she puts just a hint of the razor behind the wit. 

 

Here are my favorites from this collection:

 

Last of August

 

In what meter does the wind blow on a river?

Can I know the clear feet of the water?

And older measure, longer yet suddener.

Boulders under the bright flood mutter

of the mountains, imitating thunder.

A dead tree on the other short falls in one slow drumbeat.

 

Le Guin lived much of her life in Portland, Oregon - The Lathe of Heaven is set there - and hiked and explored a lot of the west coast. This shows up in many places in this book, with descriptions that feel very familiar to me. I love the above poem for its tying of nature and poetry in rhythm, not mere description. 

 

This next one reminds me a lot of my kids, who, where it is permitted, have tended to collect rocks. 

 

Keeping Rocks

 

Rocks hold down my flying

papers, my worktable,

my house. I hold me down

with the rocks I put in my pockets.

I keep away from rivers.

Weighty little chunks

of my country

hold me to it

ever more nearly.

 

Le Guin was a cat person, and wrote a number of poems about cats. One new development of the last year is that my little Toffee, who likely was abandoned and found her way to our house, has gone from house cat to lap cat. (Having previously gone from barnyard cat to house cat - she’s ambitious and moving up in the world…) So this poem seems a good bit about her. 

 

Sleeping with Cats

 

In smoothness of darkness are

warm lumps of silence.

There are no species.

Purring recurs. 

 

One of my favorite places in California is Prairie Creek Redwoods, a state park within Redwood National Park. We have camped there a couple of times, and will be returning later this year. 

 

The Klamath River runs just north of the park, with its mouth flanked by cliffs covered in trees and wild beaches often shrouded in fog. There are little springs all down the cliff. Recently, the dams along the river were removed, returning the salmon to its historical range. Oh, and they have been releasing condors here too. It’s pretty magical. 

 

Mouth of the Klamath

 

The month of the river

sucks at the springs in the mountains.

It is her thighs that open here

wide among sandbars to the sea.

She lies down long, the river, and her salmon

swim up her and breeding die, and she 

gives herself and all her children to the sea,

the sea that likes down long and wide

to nurse the sky with rainy milk

that the mountains are sucking

from the soft breasts of the fog. 

 

The next one is political, and I think it fits our present moment and my feelings about it really well. 

 

Processing Words

 

I want to dream out words of anger

on this machine that states my mind

in this late summer night that leans to fall.

 

Kind and stately buildings lean to fall,

the Libraries, the Public Schools; the dream

of a republic of the mind is undermined.

 

The hunger of poverty is hunger,

the hunger of satiety is anger.

The state of war is a machine

 

that holds a lien on minds and words.

The kind republic that we dreamed

of building falls to night. 

 

Also related are the words of D. L. Mayfield, in an essay published today. Many of us dream of creating a “kind republic,” a society that cares for everyone, not one based on dominance, violence, and hate - the kind MAGA dreams of creating for us all to suffer in. 

 

I was raised by people who have no real wisdom, and no sense of a future that is based in anything other than white male grievance politics. The older I have gotten, and the more my parents have claimed that I have become brainwashed by the left, the more I have come to understand that they have been telling on themselves this whole time. They have willingly consumed decades and decades of white supremacist patriarchal Christian propaganda, and are angry and heartbroken that it did not work on me like it did on them. 

 

Like Le Guin, I sit here at my machine that processes my words, and I am angry at what is being done to undermine schools, libraries, and freedom of thought. We could and should be building a better republic, not tearing it down. 

 

This next one is a bit lighter, to take the edge off the bitterness. 

 

A True Story

 

My friend got Vachel Lindsay into her computer

and couldn’t get him out. He’d hide but not delete.

She’d be bringing up a spreadsheet

and up would come the Congo, gold and black,

or in the middle of a catalog of rare editions

there’d be General Booth entering heaven

and the drums beating, or that prairie bird singing

sweet - sweet - sweet -

 

Try WordPerfect, people said, try Microsoft Word.

But she was afraid

she might get Whitman, maybe even Milton.

She guessed she’d stay with Vachel

and the prairie bird. 

 

I’d be willing to risk Milton, although I suspect Whitman would never shut up or come to the point. 

 

Several of the poems are dedicated to Le Guin’s children. This one is interesting. 

 

Song for Caroline

 

Near can be turned to far,

Sea can be turned to land.

You will not turn from what you are

            For any man.

 

Where your heart goes, go,

Where your soul is, stand.

Do not be moved from what you know

            By any man.

 

Le Guin’s relationship to males is interesting. She was married, apparently happily, for most of her life. However, she hinted that she resented not being able to pursue her doctorate due to following her husband, and the demands of motherhood. In the end, she had the last laugh, as her career eventually overshadowed everything else. 

 

She also kept her hair cut short, and explored androgyny in various ways throughout her writing. An advocate for feminism, she certainly did not think women should order their lives around catering to men. A bit like my own wife in that way, for sure. 

 

Perhaps the reimagining of the legend of the Minotaur fits with this idea. 

 

Ariadne Dreams

 

The beat of sleep is all my mind.

I am my rhyme. I wind the ball

deeper and deeper in the maze

to find the meeting of the ways, 

to find before the hero finds

the prisoner of the Labyrinth,

the horn-crowned horror at the end

of all the corridors, my friend.

I lead him forth. He kneels to graze

where the grass grows thick above the tomb

and the light moves among the days.

The hero finds an empty room.

I seek my rhyme. I dance my will,

vaulting the wide horns of the bull.

The waves beat. What woman weeps

on the far seacoast of my sleep?

 

Let’s end with this one. 

 

The Hard Dancing

 

Dancing on the sun is hard,

it burns your feet, you have to leap

higher and higher into the dark,

until you somersault to sleep.

The mountains of the sun are steep,

rising to shadow at the crown,

the valleys of the sun are deep

and ever brighter deeper down. 

 

Good stuff - I’d love to find more of her poetry in the future. Definitely read her books and stories, but don’t overlook the poetry. 

 

What the HELL Happened to My Parents?

“I am who my parents raised me to be.” ~ Me. And tens of thousands of frustrated children of parents who have gone MAGA. 

 

For those who haven’t picked up on it from other posts, I am estranged from my parents, and have been for five or six years, depending on how you count it. 

 

I haven’t had a non-hostile interaction with my mother since 2019, before the pandemic. I haven’t seen my father in nearly five years, and the last time, he was clearly angry with me. 

 

It’s not like this came out of the blue. I haven’t had a functional relationship with my mother since I hit puberty, and it got much worse once I got married. She hated my wife from the beginning, and spent years antagonizing her and trying to control her and our lives. 

 

My relationship with my dad had been on the slow decline for some time as well, both because of his refusal to acknowledge, let alone take action regarding my mom and sister and their abuse of my wife, but also because of the way he changed politically, religiously, and morally over the past couple of decades. 

 

Looking back, I have been mourning the death of the good people who raised me for a long time, and the break was just the culmination of many years of growing apart in our core values.

 

As I noted above, I literally am who my parents raised me to be. The good values they taught me as a child are now the ones they have rejected and, in essence, have chosen to punish me for retaining. 

 

***

 

For many of us who grew up in the Fundamentalist Evangelical subculture, we have found ourselves with broken family relationships. As we have looked back, many have realized that the problems were always there. 

 

For example, many, while shocked that their parents embraced Trump’s white supremacy and misogyny, realized that their parents were always like this, that they just used dog whistles rather than saying it openly. 

 

Actually, that is NOT my own experience, which is why I have found the present to be so incredibly disorienting. 

 

My parents changed a lot over the years, and not at all in a good way. And I am not entirely sure what happened. 

 

That is why I truly feel that the good people who raised me are in fact dead, in the way Obi Wan explained to Luke. This is why I feel I have been mourning them for so many years. 

 

Don’t get me wrong. Looking back, our family was always somewhat dysfunctional, and my parents did practically worship Ronald Reagan. Yes, there were issues. But on many things, my parents are literally 180 degrees different from what they were and what they taught and modeled for me. 

 

Note: much of what I will say here could apply just as much to the Evangelical faith I was raised in, or to the United States of America. Both have, to a significant degree, changed in the direction of evil over the past several decades. I truly feel like I do not recognize either for what they were when I was a child. The good is mostly or entirely dead, and a monster has taken its place. 

 

***

 

I was taught the values of anti-racism.

 

Let’s start with this one, because it is the one that eventually finished off my relationship with my father. 

 

Back when I was a kid, my parents made sure that I had an education that was well-rounded, and full of perspectives outside the jingoistic pablum that often passes for history curriculum. (The A Beka textbooks we had - that was the best you could actually obtain in the 1980s as a homeschooler, not nearly as bad as Bob Jones - were pretty racist, but a lot of public school texts of the era were whitewashed too - I’ve seen them.) 

 

Part of this was making sure that we learned the truth about race in America. My mom read us Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry and the other books by that author. So we learned about lynching and Jim Crow. 

 

She read us To Kill A Mockingbird, and we discussed the ways racist stereotyping was used to justify violence against minorities. 

 

She read us Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and we talked about racial slurs and blackface and a bunch of stuff - and we were really young too: I was in elementary school. 

 

I’ll talk about more books later. 

 

My dad was an active advocate against racial prejudice. We had people of every race in our home, we put people up for the night when many other white doors were shut in their faces. My uncle used is position with the LAPD to fight the Klan after it burned a cross on his neighbor’s yard. I really felt like my family was sort I could be proud of for our anti-racism. 

 

Even in the Trump Era, occasionally my dad would revert to that good side, trying to patronize minority businesses, becoming angry when he saw someone denigrate an immigrant. 

 

Speaking of immigrants, I grew up being taught that immigrants were the hardest working people you will ever meet. That if you wanted help with a project, the workers outside the hardware store were the way to go - and be sure to pay them more than they asked, because everyone should go home with enough to eat. 

 

I was taught that taking in immigrants and refugees was not just a core American value, but a core Christian value as well. That our strength as a nation and a faith was in our diversity. 

 

I grew up in a mostly minority neighborhood, with a lot of undocumented neighbors who we lived in peace with. (Fresh chicharrónes cooked in a metal drum over charcoal? Heck yes, I ate that!) Literally, I was raised to understand that undocumented immigrants weren’t criminals, just impoverished people trying to make a better life for themselves. 

 

So it was a horrible shock to watch my parents follow the Republican Party (and I suspect Fox News) in its descent into open racism, white supremacy, and xenophobia. 

 

The time in 2011 that my dad complained that there really wasn’t any place left in the US without “those people” and their culture. The complaint in 2016 that the problem with our country is that we kept letting refugees in - “we should shut that whole thing down.” The steady trickle of “lazy black people” tropes. 

 

And the big one, that would eventually lead to the end of our relationship:

 

“I don’t like Trump’s style, but at least he is finally doing something about the Hispanic problem.” 

 

By the way, the reason my parents cited for cutting me out of their lives was that I repeated that line on social media and called him out for it. (There are other, unspoken reasons, though, so it wasn’t just this.)

 

What the HELL happened to my parents?

 

I literally would have had my mouth washed out with soap if I had said that kind of shit as a child. I was raised better than that. 

 

***

 

My parents raised me to consider women the equal of men.

 

This was done in a variety of ways. Again, we were read books that were from a female perspective. I was encouraged to read the rape scene in Christy, and to understand how groomers work. Ironically, my parents later failed to see that Bill Gothard was a sexual predator using similar means to that in the book. 

 

While my parents weren’t feminists exactly, they used to be closer than they are now. In practice, my father has never believed in “women’s work.” All of us kids were trained to be competent at housework. We did our own laundry as soon as we were big enough to get our clothes out of the top-loading washer. 

 

All of us pitched in when company was coming. My dad is a great cook and did all manner of housework when I was a kid. When he retired and my mom went back to work, he took over the cooking and cleaning. 

 

This is literally how I was raised! 

 

When I was a kid, my mom tried to work part time for a while. Unfortunately, I was a sickly kid, and it didn’t work for her. I understand how she ended up being a stay-at-home mom, and why she leaned into that as her identity. 

 

That said, she did go back to work after we kids left home. And we had other friends and relatives where the mother worked, and I don’t remember that being seen as an issue until later, when my parents started their embrace of Gothard and other patriarchists. 

 

But man, did things change then!

 

I have multiple witnesses who remember my dad saying that the worst mistake America ever made was giving women the vote. What the hell?

 

I have written plenty of times about my mom’s rejection of my wife, in significant part because she has continued to work after having kids, so I won’t go over that again. 

 

I will add that the fact that when my LGBTQ kid came out to my parents, my mom clearly blamed my wife for not modeling gender roles strongly enough. 

 

Now there seems to be a constant barrage of anti-feminist sentiment. Which just so happens to track with the Republican Party’s war on women. 

 

Again, though, what the HELL happened to my parents? Why did they change so dramatically about this issue?

 

***

 

I was raised to live in peace with LGBTQ people.

 

I’m not going to claim that my parents were great on this issue. It was the 1980s, and most people were homophobic and transphobic. Casual slurs were normal, as was the limp wrist used as an insult to fellow males. 

 

But I can tell you my mouth would have gotten washed out with soap if I had done any of that. No doubt. 

 

Yes, of course they believed that gay sex was sinful, because they were Evangelicals. Although I suspect I never found their explanation as to why particularly convincing. I always had difficulty understanding why God was so obsessed with genitals. (Spoiler: he/she/they isn’t.) 

 

And they also held some outdated beliefs about why people are gay. They still do. 

 

But I was taught that we don’t mistreat or avoid LGBTQ people. 

 

I feel like I have always known LGBTQ people. In one neighborhood, there was a lesbian couple across the street. I didn’t realize they were a couple, exactly, until later. But they were our friends - Mary and Virginia if I am recalling correctly. We would go over to their house and pick loquats. 

 

Getting into classical music as a child definitely put me around a lot of LGBTQ people - the arts generally are a means of expression for those who don’t fit gender or sexual binaries, and many of our most beloved artists were gay or trans. (Seriously. This has always been true.) 

 

I’ve talked elsewhere about my journey away from bigoted beliefs about sexuality and gender, so I won’t repeat that. However, as I have become more liberal on the issue, my parents seem to have become increasingly bigoted, which is one reason my adult kids haven’t continued relationships with my parents. 

 

My mom in particular has been vicious about the issue, using the announcement of my wife’s grandmother’s death to make a public dig at my wife and kid. And last year sending me a thinly veiled threat of hell on my birthday - I apparently am not “walking in truth” because I won’t condemn or disown my own child. Sigh. 

 

I was raised to treat others with respect, and never saw my parents mistreat LGBTQ people like they apparently choose to now.

 

What the HELL happened to my parents? 

 

***

 

I was raised to believe that poverty was complicated, and that we should never look down on the poor.

 

One of the books my mother had me read was The Octopus by Frank Norris. She thought I needed some balance to the capitalist ideas in our curriculum. And the book certainly does illuminate the way railroads and banks manipulated politicians to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers. 

 

At the time, I didn’t really understand all of the things in the book. Clearly the government was part of the problem - and it certainly can be. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I really “got” what Norris was describing, which was the unholy alliance of big business and big government. And wow, it is relevant today. 

 

Frank Norris was a communist, in that era before Stalin and Mao made it authoritarian and totalitarian, when the US actually teetered on the brink of its own revolution. The fact that my mother encouraged me to read stuff like this is astonishing now. 

 

It was good for me, and turned out decades later to have been hugely influential. My mom used to read broadly many years ago, but that stopped, for reasons I don’t understand. She instead went down the rabbit holes of “alternative medicine” and religious nuttery, and we lost that connection of literature. 

 

The irony is not lost on me that now that I am an adult, I understand my parents’ more nuanced views from their 30s, and yet they have abandoned all of that in favor of a hyper-partisan social darwinistic view of politics. 

 

All of this to say that I was raised also with an understanding that wealth and poverty were not governed by karma, but by forces beyond the individual. I was taught that systemic injustice was real, that it was difficult to rise out of poverty even with hard work, particularly if you lacked social capital. (They didn’t use these words, but the meanings were still there.) 

 

We were taught not to look down on our neighbor. Hell, when we were poor (and we were for a while), we utilized the government medical clinics and got food however we could. It wasn’t until later, as my parents’ wealth and income rose, that they increasingly started talking about the poor (and brown skinned all too often) as lazy and sexually incontinent. You know, all the anti-black stereotypes. 

 

These days, even a conversation about why we need affordable higher education and universal healthcare so that everyone has a chance to rise - hardly a communist position - it always meets with “we can’t afford that.” 

 

What the HELL happened to my parents? 

 

***

 

I was raised to believe that “love your neighbor” was the greatest commandment. 

 

I really was. And I felt like our family used to live it. We took people in. We helped people out. We listened rather than lectured. 

 

Somehow, somewhere along the way, my parents changed. 

 

I stopped engaging with them politically because it seemed to have become nothing more than a litany of excuses for why we shouldn’t love our neighbors. Why we should deport them, cut them off from medical care, charge them more than they could afford for basics like housing and education. 

 

I still believe in loving my neighbor. 

 

What the HELL happened to my parents?

 

***

 

I was raised to think critically.

 

This is actually one of the most common complaints of my generation of homeschooled kids. We were the first ones, the pioneers. It was the heady days of “teach your children how to think, not just memorize facts.” 

 

And my parents did!

 

They enabled my voracious reading habit, took me to the library regularly, encouraged me to read broadly. 

 

And yes, they taught me critical thinking. They did a damn fine job of it. 

 

Now, they and their generation are all, “But not like that!!!!” when we use our critical thinking skills to challenge their political beliefs. 

 

There are so many elements to this. 

 

I was taught how to recognize propaganda. And I do. Which is the problem, because I started calling out Right Wing propaganda when my parents were parroting it. (It was shocking in the last decade or so that my dad started reverting to Reagan and Thatcher era slogans as if they were reasoned arguments, or worse, evidence that refuted my carefully vetted statistics.)

 

I was taught how to recognize bullshit, both in source and substance. And I have a darn good and active bullshit detector. Which is the problem, because I have called bullshit on my parents, and they can’t handle it. 

 

I was taught to look at evidence, not mere claims. I was taught to look beyond the headline, beyond the article, and look at what was underlying it. Anyone who follows this blog knows that I do my best to support my claims with evidence, and that I often find primary sources. 

 

This became a particular problem during the pandemic, because my parents went fully down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, from “vaccines will kill you” to “ivermectin is a miracle cure.” In the meantime, my wife literally worked - and often was in charge - in ICU through the pandemic, and was part of the data collection process for various treatments and best practices. She cared deeply about the evidence and thoroughly educated herself and her staff as the evidence about best treatments rolled in. She saw firsthand the way vaccines were an absolute gamechanger on death rates. Yet my parents ignored all that and chose to believe the charlatans. Sigh.

 

This kept arising over and over through the last few years of our relationship. “Trickle Down Economics” doesn’t work. Vaccines do not cause autism. Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born. Human-caused global warming is real. State college tuition was free when my dad went to CSUN, and costs have skyrocketed. Hence, my kids cannot simply pay their way through college on a part time job. 

 

The list goes on. And on. And on. 

 

I have come to realize that I literally live in a different “reality” than my parents. I live in the world of evidence-based belief. They live in an epistemological delusion, where only people who share their political beliefs can know truth. 

 

What the HELL happened to my parents?

 

***

 

I was raised to respect and desire education.

 

And I am sore as hell about this issue. I was raised to look forward to going to college. In particular, to have the chance to explore, learn, and choose my path. To not have to declare a major at first, perhaps, but to find what I liked to study. 

 

I was on track to go to college - I had excellent grades, scored in the high 90s in percentile on the ACT, and was really looking forward to that experience. 

 

Then Gothard. 

 

Fuck. 

 

That was the end of my college aspirations. Because Gothard was against college. He was selling a pipe dream of “apprenticeships” that would apparently mean great jobs for people with “good character” - which mattered more to employers than training or education, right?

 

What really was going on was that Gothard expected parents to pay him money so that their kids could work for him for free, building his empire. 

 

Yeah, wasn’t that nice. 

 

I ended up taking most of a gap year after high school, because I literally had nothing else to do with myself. I taught my siblings science and math (that’s a whole other story…) and waited. 

 

When Gothard’s law school opened up, I went for it, despite not really wanting to be a lawyer, because it was literally my only fucking ticket out. I didn’t get much support from the school, so I ended up essentially putting myself through law school and passing the bar on my own hard work and determination. And a really good study group of fellow students, all of whom passed the bar on the first try. 

 

(Note: after he retired, my dad tried OBCL, only to quit and switch to a different school because it was so unhelpful. My brother and I had to suffer, because that was our only option…) 

 

I don’t hate law, at least the niche I found for myself. But it wasn’t my choice. I really enjoy teaching - I teach adult classes for our community college, and Wills and Trusts for our local law school, and even my law practice is all about educating my clients. 

 

I am particularly sore, though, because my sister got to go to college in the normal way. I am glad she did, even though she hasn’t done jack shit with her degree, but wish I had been allowed the same opportunity. My kids are definitely going to have what I was denied. 

 

How the HELL did my parents go from pro-education to denying their children the chance?

 

***

 

I was taught that most decisions in life didn’t have a right or wrong answer. They were just choices.

 

I literally remember having this conversation multiple times. Most of life isn’t about right or wrong. It is just about making a choice. 

 

Do I buy Nikes or Asics? (Asics fit my feet better.) Do I live in this town or that town? Which job do I choose? What do I want to do with my life?

 

My dad was entirely correct about this. Yes of course there are moral decisions to be made, but most of life doesn’t have a one right answer. 

 

I grew up believing this. And I grew up believing that my parents still thought that. 

 

I was expressly told that, while I had to obey my parents while I lived in their home, I would eventually move out and start my own life, and could do what I wanted.

 

It turns out, I was wrong. Starting in my teens - again with Gothard - more and more choices ceased to be available to me. More and more things became “moral” issues, with only one acceptable answer. 

 

I mentioned college already - a deep loss that I still feel to this day. But also marriage. Rather than “find someone you love and want to be with,” the field was narrowed in practice to “a girl from another fundamentalist family who will agree to live that lifestyle.” 

 

When I married, then became a parent, I increasingly realized that all those choices that I intended to make for myself and my family were not free. I could either make the choice my parents wanted me to make, or I could endure their constant disapproval. (This is classic “bounded choice.”)

 

I made choice B, obviously, and that is the root cause of why we are estranged. My wife and I decided that it would be better for us and our family if we split breadwinning. (A choice that kept us from going bankrupt during the pandemic.) We chose to split childcare and household duties as well. 

 

We decided to eschew the paranoid approach to culture for our kids. (“Everything we don’t like will give you demons!”) 

 

We rejected Authoritarian Parenting, right wing politics, and the racist and misogynist culture wars that are tearing our country apart. 

 

And for that, we have been rejected by my parents. It turned out that political affiliation and cultic religious beliefs mattered more to them than I did. 

 

***

 

I was taught that morality mattered more than political party.

 

While our parents were “Reagan Republicans,” I was raised with the knowledge that political parties change, that issues change, and that therefore a Christian should not be yoked to a political party. Instead, morality should determine one’s political choices.

 

I have done my best to follow that advice. Yes, it is difficult to see one’s own blind spots, tribal affiliation is a strong drug, and inertia is real. So yes, it has taken work and thought and wrestling. Which is what I was taught. 

 

I can look back and see that in many ways, our two major political parties have switched places on many issues. Just the biggest one: in the 1980s, Republicans were pro-immigration, while Democrats were mostly against it. Even in the 1990s, it was Clinton who militarized our border, a bad decision that still is causing problems today. 

 

That clearly flipped with Trump, who has made xenophobia and white supremacy the core of his persona. 

 

What has been horrifying is seeing my parents change in pretty much lockstep with the Republican Party - and with Fox News. 

 

Guess what? The teachings of Christ (and the Torah and Prophets and Epistles) didn’t change one bit. There was no grand new knowledge that required a change in ethics. (No Galileo upending the view of the universe…) There was no ethical epiphany, no buring bush moment.

 

The only thing that changed was the official position of the Republican Party. 

 

It is now clear that my parents do not have - and may never have had - any real loyalty to Christian values, or even to basic human decency and ethical thinking. 

 

Nope. Their loyalty was to Republican politics.

 

Which is why I can guess their views on literally everything these days by asking what Fox News says. It certainly works better than looking in the Bible. 

 

And my dad had the nerve to complain that “we can’t talk politics anymore.” Gee, I wonder why not? Perhaps I just don’t want to listen to him air his bigotry and right wing talking points and be expected to affirm them? 

 

What the HELL happened to my parents? 

 

***

 

I was taught that reality mattered, that one had to be willing to change one’s mind given new information.

 

Seriously. I was taught this. And then these days, punished when I changed my mind. 

 

There are so many conversations over the last couple decades with my parents where as soon as I challenged their current orthodoxy, I was hit with accusations of apostasy. 

 

What the HELL happened to my parents?

 

***

 

I was raised with my needs and desires being taken into account.

 

It is difficult to explain this to others, because it seems too bizarre even for fiction. When I was a child, I actually had my needs, desires, and feelings validated and taken into account. I credit this for how relatively emotionally functional I am compared to so many other survivors of authoritarian parenting. 

 

What is most bizarre is that this started to shift as I got older. My needs became less important as I grew toward adulthood, to the point where I was virtually ignored when it came to the most important decisions of my young adulthood. 

 

For example, I did not want to be a part of Gothard’s cult. I was ignored, and told I was being rebellious. 

 

I wanted to go to college. But that was not an option (see above.) 

 

Finally, when, over the last couple of decades, I have expressed that our family dynamics were hurting me, I was at best blown off, and at worst, blamed - it was all my fault because I “said mean things.” 

 

We can’t actually deal with my mom and sister’s mistreatment of my wife - because all that is really just my fault for saying mean things. 

 

I apparently “never take responsibility” - which is both ridiculous (I have “oldest child syndrome” where I was parentified and tend to feel responsible for things I should never have had to take on) and a projection. In reality, my parents do not wish now to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. 

 

It is super frustrating and hurtful. And it came as a shock that things were so different for me as an adult than as a child. I used to matter. Now I do not. 

 

What the HELL happened to my parents?

 

***

 

My parents talked a lot about how they were trying to break the cycle of trauma.

 

And I believe they really did try for many years. 

 

Both of them grew up with traumatic childhoods. Their stories are beyond the scope of this post. And I truly feel bad for them. 

 

When we were kids, I think they did try. They tried to be fair and not play favorites. They tried to look beyond their trauma-informed reactions and do the right thing.

 

Our family actually looked poised to break the cycle for a while. And I am grateful for those formative years because I think I ended up more emotionally healthy than my parents did because of their attempts to break the cycle. 

 

I’m not really entirely sure how and why this all changed. 

 

For my mom, maybe when I hit puberty and was no longer her “itsy bitsy baby boy” and started reminding her instead of her own father? Certainly I have felt a lot of her trauma projected on me as an oldest male sibling. 

 

For both my parents, maybe after my brother and I moved out (and their experiment of having my sister live with us failed badly)? Those extra few years alone with my sister seem to have solidified her position as the Golden Child, the favorite in the family. 

 

Whatever the case, my sister’s behavior eventually became the third rail of our family dynamics, the thing my parents refused to address or even discuss honestly, even as she descended further into what the symptoms and behaviors indicate is an undiagnosed personality disorder. 

 

My attempts to bring up the issue constantly met with a deflection to “you say mean things,” so we could never address the underlying issues. Particularly her constant false accusations of sexual misconduct against my wife. 

 

By this point, my parents rarely see the grandchildren that are not my sister’s kids. They spend most of their time with her, and I have become, as my wife puts it, expendable. Perhaps I always was the expendable child? But I don’t think I was when I was a kid. Something changed over time. 

 

Since our actual break five or six years ago, there have been zero attempts by them to repair the damage, or mend the relationship. My father has been complete radio silence, while my mother has alternated between trying to go behind my back with my kids and lashing out at me with blame for the consequences of her actions. 

 

Going further back, after I made it clear that my mom and sister were driving my wife away from the family - starting in 2011! - there have been zero attempts at fixing that relationship. If anything, my mom chose to double down on the antagonism. 

 

I truly did turn out to be expendable, as did my wife and kids. So much for breaking the cycle of trauma. 

 

What the HELL happened to my parents? 

 

***

 

As you can tell, this post is borne out of years - decades - of pain, hurt, and trauma. I really had been looking forward to having a good adult relationship with my parents. I looked forward to their loving and embracing my spouse. I looked forward to my kids having good relationships with their grandparents. 

 

None of that happened. 

 

And I really do not understand why. All was possible at one point. But my parents changed, and I am not sure how or why. 

 

I am reminded of the poem from my childhood, “Maud Muller,” by John Greenleaf Whittier. Sure, it is a bit of maudlin Victorian bathos, but it also is full of truth. In it, the young judge eschews the pursuit of Maud, who he is in love with, because his bigoted family rejects her as low class. This leads to unhappiness for both of them. 

 

Ultimately, my parents rejected me and my family. For what? I’m not really sure. But the haunting couplet of the poem, which has become part of our cultural fabric, rings so true. 

 

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

 

 

Assembling California by John McPhee

Source of book: I own this.

 

I first discovered John McPhee a half decade ago when my wife’s brother-in-law got me what was then his latest collection, The Patch. At that time, I must have read an essay of his somewhere or other, but wasn’t that familiar with him. 

 

Soon afterward, though, I learned that a lot of his writing was about geology. My next book of his was Basin and Range, which is one of his five books - including Assembling California - about the geology of North America, that he subsequently combined into a set under the name Annals of the Former World. Which is a badass title, I must say. 

 

Coincidentally (or not?), my eldest decided to major in Geology, thus becoming even more of a rock nerd than I am. Who knew? This meant I got him a copy of Assembling California, but hadn’t yet read it myself. Well, now I have, and greatly enjoyed it. 

This book follows a somewhat similar format to the other, but with some differences. In Basin and Range, McPhee and his friend, Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, travel Interstate 80 through the Great Basin, and McPhee talks about what they see before explaining how it got there and when. The personal and the geologic scales come together. 

 

Assembling California picks up exactly where Basin and Range left off: at the California and Nevada border. 

 

However, as Deffeyes tells McPhee in the first chapter, to complete the journey, McPhee will need to find a new geologist: one with knowledge and expertise in the muddle that is California. 

 

Enter Eldridge Moores. 

 

McPhee and Moores travel Interstate 80 from Reno to San Francisco, with a side trip to Moores’ childhood home in the Arizona mining country, an excursion to Cypress, and a longer exploration of the San Andreas fault in the final chapters of the book. 

 

As with the other book, this one is really a lot of fun. McPhee knows how to provide incredible detail and scientific content without overwhelming, and paces the stories and information in a way that it never gets dull. 

 

And wow, what a story this book really is. 

 

There are places in the world where geological history is relatively simple and easy to understand. As any Californian who gets out in the wilderness and looks at rocks can tell you, California is a big complicated, nearly incomprehensible muddle. 

 

It wasn’t until plate tectonics was understood that any sense could be made of California. Sure, the great plutons of the Sierra Nevada are relatively simple. And there are some places of normal sedimentation. 

 

But the layers mostly don’t work. Particularly in the west of the state, everything looks much more like sausage or chunky ice cream - it’s mixed up and ground together and random. 

 

I won’t be able to do it justice, but here is the basic natural history of the place: 

 

Once upon a time, the edge of what is now the Rocky Mountains was the western edge of what would become North America. After the breakup of Pangaea, plate tectonics smashed the edge of the Pacific Plate into the North American Plate. 

 

But it didn’t just come with a subduction zone. Rather, in some cases the ocean plate overrode the continent, leaving vast layers from mantle rock through serpentine to pillow basalts and ocean sediments. 

 

Add to that the island belts that collided with the continent and added on to it, and you have quite the Dagwood Sandwich of geologies. 

 

Very late in geologic time, the subduction shifted to a slip-strike - aka transform - boundary, creating the San Andreas Fault, stretching the great basin into tilted blocks that formed the Basin and Range system and even Death Valley itself. 

 

There is so much more to this than I have condensed into a few paragraphs - and it really is a fascinating read. 

 

If you wanted to know how gold and silver made it to California, this book will tell you. If you, like me, are a Californian who loves to explore, this book will explain so many of the natural wonders you have loved since childhood. 

 

I also want to take a road trip to look at rocks now - preferably with my future geologist kid. 

 

As usual, there are so many great lines in this book. McPhee is quite witty, as are his geology buddies. It is a dry sense of humor - or perhaps as gritty as the rocks that make up the book. 

 

Here is one to start with, a gem from Moores:

 

“If you want to find a fault in California, look for a dam.”

 

This may seem like gallows humor, particularly given the way faults have often caused dam failures. But it is also accurate. The best place for a dam is a narrow crack through a mountain range, right? Well, what causes those? Faults. That’s where the river is able to grind its way through. 

 

Probably the funniest line in the book comes in the chapter on the excursion to Cypress, where mining has been going on for over 5000 years. (Enough wood has been burned in smelting over that time to cover the island several times over with trees.) 

 

The highest peak was Mt. Olympus. In the Hellenic world are enough Mt. Olympuses to suggest tract housing for redundant gods.

 

Although this one, about a side trip to Napa, is pretty funny too. 

 

The Napa Valley is thirty-five miles due west of Davis - an easy run for a field trip, a third of it flat and straight. The occasions have been several, not to mention spontaneous, when Moores and I have made westering traverses, collecting roadside samples of rock and wine. 

 

This quip, about the sausage of a common formation in the muddled western side of California, is pretty good too. And accurate as well as descriptive. 

 

If the Great Valley Sequence can be compared to regimental stripes, the Franciscan is paisley. 

 

And what is this formation?

 

The Franciscan melange contains rock of such widespread provenance that it is quite literally a collection from the entire Pacific basin, or even half of the surface of the planet. As fossils and paleomagnetism indicate, there are sediments from continents (sandstones and so forth) and rocks from scattered marine sources (cherts, graywackes, serpentines, gabbros, pillow lavas, and other volcanics) assembled at random in the matrix clay. Caught between the plates in the subduction, many of these things were taken down sixty-five thousand to a hundred thousand feet and spit back up as blue schist. This dense, heavy blue-gray rock, characteristic of subduction zones wherever found, is raspberried with garnets.

 

Although California is the focus of the book, getting into the broader plate tectonics often leads to other places, and how they fit in history. For example, the fact that the Appalachians are continued in the mountains of North Africa, Spain, and France. And Florida is a piece that broke off of Africa. 

 

As part of a discussion of these historical events, Moores opines that “Civilization reflects geology.” I do wonder about that. It might be true. Just as one personal example, while I currently live on the North American Plate, I was born and raised on the Pacific Plate. Could some of this be a factor in why the big cities of California are politically different from the inland areas? 

 

Here is another crazy fact:

 

While India was closing with Tibet, it buckled the intervening shelf, raising from the sea a slab of rock more than a mile thick which consisted almost entirely of the disintegrated shells of marine creatures. From the depths of lithification to the rock’s present loft, it has been driven upward at least fifty thousand feet. This one fact - as I noted some years ago - is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some flat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is still the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone. 

 

It is things like this that made it impossible for me to believe in a young earth, or in a literal creation story. It just doesn’t fit. 

 

That isn’t to say that at any one moment we know the full truth. In fact, plate tectonics is barely 70 years old - Moores and McPhee learned the old theories and had to switch as educated adults. But, as the book examines in detail throughout, the old theories were known to be flawed and incomplete. Tectonics illuminated so much that was obscure. But we will likely understand more over time. 

 

There is a great quote (maybe) by Mark Twain in the book that I can’t resist mentioning. 

 

“Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations we shall soon know nothing about it at all.”  

 

As I mentioned, the San Andreas Fault is the subject of the last quarter of the book. This makes sense, as the fault and the earthquakes we experience here are part of our unique geology. 

 

I personally have experienced a number of earthquakes over my lifetime. The two strongest (from where I was at the time) were the Whittier Narrows quake (discussed briefly in the book) and the Northridge quake (which is not.) The most significant quake I felt, however, was the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. It was strong enough to be mildly felt where I lived in Los Angeles. In fact, we didn’t think much of it until the report a few minutes later that it was a major earthquake up north. 

 

Interestingly, McPhee was in the Bay Area the day before the quake, but traveled up to Oregon before the quake hit. The book hints at his simultaneous disappointment and relief. 

 

One interesting fact in this section is that the two reservoirs near San Francisco - the San Andreas and Crystal Springs - were built in the late 1800s. The dams survived the 1906 quake and the Loma Prieta quake (and numerous smaller quakes) intact, despite the fact that the fault runs right up the reservoirs. 

 

I’ll also note the mention of Pinnacles National Park in the book - a favorite place of mine, and one I have written about multiple times.  

 

Also mentioned is the Tejon Pass. During my teens and early 20s, I lived in the mountains a few hundred feet from the San Andreas - it created the series of valleys that towns up there are located in - and indeed built the mountains themselves. The pass is where Interstate 5 goes over the summit, and the faulting is obvious. You can literally see the different kinds of rock on the sides of the fault from the vegetation and erosion patterns. 

 

Anyway, there was a huge earthquake there in 1857, and the sides of the fault were offset by thirty feet. This is an absolutely astonishing amount of movement. The quake must have been some violent shaking. 

 

There is a similar offset still visible at Point Reyes, from the 1906 San Francisco quake. It’s worth visiting. 

 

I mentioned the Whittier Narrows quake, which was the first earthquake I remember. It didn’t cause any serious damage to our house, but it did send some plaster down, broke some dishes, and violently threw me out of bed. As McPhee notes, the fault was previously unknown, but its discovery led to better understanding of the various deep blocks thrust to create anticlines as part of the greater fault zone where the plates meet. The San Andreas is the big one, but the stresses stretch for hundreds of miles on either side. 

 

Well, those are my thoughts. There is so much more in the book, including first-hand accounts from the Loma Prieta quake. It’s definitely worth a read. While it is technically the last book in the series, all of them stand alone. You do not need to read them in order. All are worth checking out.