The Lion in Winter by James Goldman (BCT 2022)

Bakersfield Community Theater has been on a roll this year, with a number of great productions. I haven’t been able to see all of them, but found I had one day I wasn’t playing a gig to go see this one. 

 

Ah, the Henrys. Everyone knows Henry VIII, of course, and any Shakespeare fan likely has a fondness for Henry IV and Henry V. Henry VII is in Richard III, and Henry VI gets a whole three plays. 

 

But what about the other Henrys? Specifically, how about Henry II? Everyone knows two of his kids, of course, because of the Robin Hood stories. Good old King Richard the Lionheart, and weasly little brother Prince John and all that came with them. 

 

But who was Henry II? Well, some quick history here. The English monarchy kind of got going in the 9th Century, with Alfred the Great uniting much of what we now consider England (not including Scotland or Wales), but it didn’t really hold together until the 11th Century, and the Norman Conquest. 1066 and all that. William centralized power, and started the feudal system going in England, which really counts as the first true united England. William the Conqueror was succeeded by his two sons, first William II, then Henry I. Then came trouble. Henry I had only one child - a female, Matilda. He named her his heir, to great scandal, and much pearl clutching about women in power (and also the problem that she had married the future Holy Roman Emperor, so political complications.) A grandson of William the Conqueror asserted precedence, and this led to anarchy for a while, before he and Matilda compromised by putting her son, Henry II on the throne. 

 

Henry II was a forceful and ruthless ruler, bringing Wales into his sphere of influence, but eventually feuding with the Church (and getting Thomas a Becket murdered) and France - remember that the Normans still ruled parts of Frances as well. 

 

Oh, and Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine - at that time, queen of France - having stolen her from her husband, Henry VII of France….this is getting complex, isn’t it? In any case, he had a bunch of kids with Eleanor, including Henry (who died before his father), Richard, Geoffrey, and John. At various times, the sons were at war with their father, and Eleanor along with them. Ah, you think your family is dysfunctional?

 

Which is what this play is about. The entire drama takes place in Henry’s castle in Chinon, France, where the family has all gotten together - in part so that Henry can name his successor. 

 

This means that Eleanor is allowed to leave her imprisonment in London (can’t have wives trying to murder their husbands on the battlefield, can we?), the three surviving sons, and Alais, who is….um, this gets complicated too. 

 

So, after Eleanor left Henry VII of France, he married Constance, who died giving birth to Alais. So that makes Alais Eleanor’s stepdaughter. And also, Alais is betrothed to Richard, to help cement an important political alliance. This contract was entered when Alais was age 8, and she went to live with Henry and Eleanor pending her coming of age. While not definitively established, it was rumored that Alais was being bonked by Henry, and even had a child by him. For purposes of this play, it is assumed that she is Henry’s mistress, but that they do not have a child. 

 

There is also one more person present: Phillip II, king of France, who has come to insist that Henry fulfill the contract, and marry Alais to Richard. And Phillip is Alais’ half-brother, a younger sibling by Henry VII’s third wife. Got all that? And one more thing: there is some evidence suggesting that Richard was gay, although the speculation that he had an affair with Phillip is unlikely to be true. The play assumes it is, though. 

 

That’s one heck of an awkward Christmas. 

 

And that’s before you get to the core dispute in the play: Henry wants Richard to succeed him, while Eleanor wants John to be the next in line. And poor Geoffrey….nobody even mentions him. 

 

To unpack the plot from there would be impossible. There are two and a half hours of scheming by literally everyone involved, plots and counter plots and constantly shifting alliances. 

 

And the repartee - the wit is hilarious. Just a few lines:

 

John: "Poor John. Who says poor John? Don't everybody sob at once! My God, if I went up in flames there's not a living soul who'd pee on me to put the fire out!"

 

Richard: "Let's strike a flint and see.” 

 

And this one: 

 

“Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians!” 

 

And this one:

 

Henry: “I've plotted and schemed all my life. There is no other way to be a King, fifty and alive all at once.” 

 

And:

 

“I'm vilifying you, for God's sake — pay attention!”

 

Too much fun, for sure. 

 

This production was particularly fun because I know several of the people involved, and the rest are all veterans of the local stage - truly an all-star cast. 

 

Let’s start behind the scenes: Jan Hefner has been a friend for several years now, and she is always a pleasure to see on stage. This time, she was directing. The set was created by Ronnie Warren, another long-time actor, director, and designer. 

 

The royal couple was played by Xian (as Henry) and Julie Gaines (one of my favorite local actors in any role, this time as Eleanor.) The two of them had incredible chemistry, and so inhabited their roles as a couple in love and in hate with each other. 

 Eleanor of Aquitaine (Julie Gaines) and Henry II (Xian)

Josh Evans simmered his way through the role of Richard, the son who is so good at war and so frustrated with intrigue. He knows he is the best of the bunch, but only his mother can see it. Josh is a member of our book club, and I think I may have seen him in something else years ago, but this was my first time seeing him since our discussions of drama and literature particularly during Covid. 

 

Perrin Swanson, who acts everywhere around town, and does lights, sound, and design on everything he isn’t in, as far as I can tell, played the much ignored Geoffrey. He nailed the sense of frustration that nobody takes him seriously or thinks of him as having any value. He is invisible no matter what he does. 

 

Jordan Fulmer, after a recent run of playing good guys, returns to his typecasting (just kidding!) of playing the villain. Although everyone is a villain in this play, with the possible exception of Alais, who mostly wants to get to the end of the play alive and unmarried. (At least to Richard or John, both of whom she despises.) He simpers and whines his way through the role, complete with a very unfortunate bowl haircut and even less fortunate whimper. 

 Richard (Josh Evans), John (Jordan Fulmer), and Geoffrey (Perrin Swanson) with their mother (Julie Gaines)

 

Rounding out the cast are Brian Purcell as Phillip - he has grown into a wide variety of roles over the years we have watched him - and Maya Blackstone as Alais. 

Henry VII of France (Brian Purcell) and Alais (Maya Blackstone)

As I said, an all-star cast. Every role was excellent, and the ensemble chemistry notable. This last season at BCT has really been outstanding, from Blithe Spirit to The Importance of Being Earnest to 20th Century Blues. Bakersfield punches above its weight when it comes to the arts. 

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. It also happened to be one I nominated. After a few years of having my choices barely miss out, I have had no fewer than three selected this year - presumably random variance. I nominated this one because I enjoyed Lauren Groff’s short story collection, Florida. Also, it was President Obama's favorite book of 2018, and his book lists are excellent. (Arguably our best read president - and certainly of the last 100 years.)

 

Fates and Furies is nothing like Florida, although there are some characteristics of the writing that are recognizable. I’ll do my best to explain what the book is like, but it isn’t easy to describe. 

 

Groff originally conceived of writing two books containing the same story, one from the man’s perspective, and one from the woman’s perspective. Her publisher convinced her that it would be better to combine both into one book, which is what she did. 

 

The first half of the book, entitled “Fates,” is from the point of view of Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite, a man born into some wealth, but cut off by his mother after he marries Mathilde Yoder, a tall and striking woman without a cent to her name. She supports him while he tries to make a go of it as an actor. He fails at this, but manages to write a play, which Mathilde encourages him to market. He becomes a famous and successful playwright, while Mathilde retreats into being the perfect wife behind the scenes. 

 

The second half, entitled “Furies,” picks up after Lotto’s untimely death of the same aneurysm that killed his father. Told from Mathilde’s point of view, it upends much of what we thought we knew from the first half. The supposedly perfect marriage is not so perfect, but also Lotto has been completely clueless about a great many things, from the way his little sister supported them with her allowance, to all the strings Mathilde pulled behind the scenes to make him a success. 

 

Because of this format, reading only the first half of the book will make no sense. One will get an impression of Lotto as a bit of a narcissist, a lousy husband (although sexually faithful), and not a particularly likeable sort. Not a compelling book, if that were where it ended. But the revelations in the second half change everything. In a way, Lotto even becomes more likable despite his faults, because we understand more of the nuances of the relationship. 

 

Online reviews have hinted at the underlying mythology of the book. The title is no accident, of course. The Fates are the three goddesses who weave the stories of human lives, for good or ill, and they are so powerful that even Zeus himself cannot change their decrees. The Furies are goddesses who carry out the vengeance of the gods. For Lotto, his life is characterized by fate - he seems fated to success, no matter how much he bumbles. Mathilde, on the other hand, is, to a significant degree, a Fury. In the second half, we discover how she eventually wreaks vengeance on those who have wronged her, from the parents who abandoned her to Lotto’s friend Chollie, who betrayed her secrets to Lotto, perhaps hastening his death. 

 

But the central myth is, in my opinion, that of Jason and Medea. The book is not a retelling so much as it is a re-imagining. The events are not the same, the sequence of parallel incidents is not correlated, and there are a number of significant differences. 

 

However, I think the core of the myth is the core of the book. When we remember the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, it is easy to remember him as a great hero, the conqueror of his destiny, and a Great Man™. But what really happened?

 

Well, Jason meets Medea, who is the niece of Circe, and a sorceress in her own right. But, patriarchy being what it is, she gets to serve as the “helper-maiden” to the hero, then fade into the background once his success raises him to the pantheon. 

 

Nothing Jason did could have been done if Medea hadn’t given him the cheat codes. Nothing. His bones would still be bleaching in the desert. She did it all for him, and all he had to do was be “great” and succeed. 

 

And then, as Euripides tells it in his powerful drama, Medea, the great badass helper-maiden is relegated to wife and mother while Jason gets all the glory. And, as Great Men™ tend to do, he discards her as soon as she becomes inconvenient. Needing a political alliance, Jason decides to marry another woman, and disinherit his sons with Medea. She does not take this well, poisoning her rival, then killing her own children. She eventually finds other adventures, although she will always mourn the loss of Jason. He, on the other hand, never entirely recovers, and dies when the remains of the Argos crumble and land on his head - he is done in by the memories of his prior glory. 

 

While not an exact duplicate of the myth, the story of Lotto and Mathilde does largely parallel it. Lotto succeeds because of Mathilde, but she is increasingly relegated to the role of “wife.” (Instead of murdering her children, she gets an abortion and her tubes tied - before Lotto’s success, at a time when neither could afford a child.) Lotto, for his part, is so clueless that he takes Mathilde for granted, eventually letting loose at a conference with the kind of sexist tripe that is the core belief of the Cult of Domesticity: that women are not really creators of art, because they pour their creativity into making children instead. This in turn leads to a shattering of the relationship in a way that Lotto never quite understands - they never divorce, but it is also never the same as it was. 

 

So, that is at least an idea of the book. As with all of Groff’s books I have read, her writing is excellent, with often unexpected descriptions, savage parody, and a real skill at getting inside the heads of unpleasant characters. 

 

The book is rather sex drenched - it is one way of explaining why Lotto and Mathilde remain together. As the Eagles put it:

 

He was a hard-headed man

He was brutally handsome, and she was terminally pretty

She held him up, and he held her for ransom

In the heart of the cold, cold city

He had a nasty reputation as a cruel dude

They said he was ruthless, they said he was crude

They had one thing in common

They were good in bed, she'd say

"Faster, faster, the lights are turning' red…

 

It also fits with the over-the-topness of the story. Groff is going for myth here, and the Greeks certainly wrote their heroes as demigods, not mere mortals. So don’t go into the book expecting true realism, or full plausibility. This is how a golden fleece and dragon’s teeth would be written in a post-supernatural world, perhaps. 

 

There are also a whole lot of other myth references in the book, and I suspect I didn’t find them all. For lovers of mythology, from the Greeks to the Norse and Arthurian legends, there will be plenty of easter eggs. (The fact that there are characters named Lancelot, Gawain, and Gwenevere is merely one of them.) 

 

I will also note again that the book works as a whole, not as mere parts. It is easy to get discouraged early on, because Lotto isn’t likable, and his early life seems to be a never-ending parade of privilege and fucking. But this is stage setting. The story has to unfold in a certain way to make sense. So stick with it, and the reward at the end will, in my own experience, be worth it. Your mileage of course may vary. 

 

As usual, there are a few bits that stood out as zingers. The first one comes during Lotto’s teen years, when acne ruins is perfect face, and he suffers from the usual lack of knowledge that comes with growing up without a father and with a mother who has buried herself in fundamentalist religion. When Lotto is offered the chance to have sex for the first time, he sneaks out - but is caught. And this unexpected line:

 

He had a bottle of WD-40 in his pocket. Lube, the boys at school had told him, was important.

 

That was a total ambush, something I was not expecting at all.

 

Fortunately, Lotto gets better at sex with experience. Ultimately, great sex becomes the foundation of the marriage. Here is an interesting passage that takes place at one of the annual dinner parties that Lotto and Mathilde host for their friends. 

 

“What’s it like?” Natalie said quietly. “Marriage, I mean.”

Lotto said, “A never-ending banquet, and you eat and eat and never get full.”

Mathilde said, “Kipling called it a very long conversation.” 

 

Both can be true - and often are in a good marriage. But the different responses are telling. As we find out as the story unfolds. 

 

The first part ends with a rather beautiful account of Lotto’s experience of dying, but right before that, Chollie takes what he sees as revenge on Mathilde for her taking Lotto away from him. He reveals that Mathilde was [gasp!] not the pure virgin he believed she was, but had an “arrangement” with a sugar daddy to pay her way through college. That Lotto finds this devastating would be amusing if it were not deadly serious to him and to the future of the relationship. Indeed, he dies soon afterward. 

 

Honestly, though, despite the crap that patriarchal sorts feed us, there is nothing magic about a virgin. (Which is why no one has actually seen a unicorn, right?) There is nothing special about the first time a woman has sex - it can be special, but only when the partners make it special. This is actually a positive thing. The sex I had most recently with my wife is every bit as special as that on our wedding night. And, to be honest, we both are a bit better at it than we were then. All of it has been special, from the first to the last. Even the “we are both too tired from small babies to care that much, but we are also horny and need some release and reward for all the literal shit we dealt with today” sex. It ultimately would not matter to me whether I was the first. What matters is “does she actually love me now?” 

 

Lotto, on the other hand, is a prick, so he freaks out. Later, in the death sequence, he has a vision of his parents, and his now dead mother finally accepts Mathilde, and gives Lotto a bit of a rebuke. 

 

“Huge thing’s your ego. Awful that you weren’t the only man for her. Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren’t around.”

“But she lied,” he said.

“Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.” 

 

And this is true. And, to a large degree, the lies are true too. The lies we tell our spouses in this sense represent the deeper truth, and are more true than the passing thoughts that would crush our partners. 

 

After the catastrophe of Lotto’s death, Mathilde goes into a bit of a spiral for a while. The thing is, even as she was deeply hurt by Lotto’s insensitivity and chauvinism, she still loved him. It is, shall we say, complicated. I think this is what eventually made me realize which myth this was. Medea’s fury is driven by her love for Jason and her pain at her abandonment. Mathilde has her own epiphany, which gives her knowledge, but can never ease the pain. 

 

That was when she knew, with existential bitterness, that her husband had understood nothing of her. Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. 

 

The second half contains a lot of flashbacks to Mathilde’s earlier life, interspersed with the events after Lotto’s death. One interesting line comes when she decides to go ahead and become Ariel’s mistress - a purely business arrangement, as he insists, and so it remains for her. She remembers her brief unpleasant life with her grandmother, who had three men as lovers. 

 

Mathilde had listened from her closet and thought: Never. Never for me. I’d die first.

Never’s a liar. 

 

Particularly harrowing for me were the passages where it becomes clear what Lotto’s mother has done. She offered to throw a million dollars at Mathilde to go away and let her son marry someone “acceptable.” Which, in this context, probably meant “fundamentalist” and meek and mild. Mathilde refuses the offer, and determines to make sure she never sees her son again. And keeps that promise. The story is, as with everything, a bit over the top. But there is a core of truth, and a lot of resonance with my own experience. My mother never liked my wife, and eventually drove her away from the family, which has had profound consequences. It is the biggest elephant in my life, and one that my parents have not, and likely will never acknowledge, let alone try to repair. Like Lotto, I hoped for many years that things would be better. But I think my wife knew, like Mathilde, that they never would be. Because there is no possible compromise in this situation. One side or the other “wins.” 

 

So transparent, her husband, how he believed that if only he could show his mother how right his choice was to marry Mathilde, everything would be all right. 

 

Yep, that was me, naively thinking that if my mom could only see what a wonderful person my wife was, and how perfect she was for me, that things would be all right. It took a decade and a half to understand that the good things about my wife were precisely what was hated. And also that there never could have been any woman I could marry who would have been accepted. 

 

I also have to quote a line that is unforgettable. 

 

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.  

 

This ties in with the central trauma in Mathilde’s life. As a four year old, she had let her infant brother - just learning to walk - out of his room, and he proceeded to tumble down the stairs, a fall which killed him. Her memory is muddled as to exactly what happened, but she was so young, she could not have been morally responsible. 

 

All that remained were the facts. Before it all happened, she had been so beloved. Afterward, love had been withdrawn. And she had pushed or she hadn’t; the result was all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her. But she’d been so very young. And how was it possible, how could parents do this, how could she not have been forgiven? 

 

This comes near the end, as a series of twists of the knife. Including the ending of the book, which is, well, I can’t even explain it. One early scene in the book is the moment when Lotto and Mathilde have their moment. She, coming to the end of her contract with Ariel, meets Lotto at a party. He is stunned, and asks her to marry him right there. The memories differ between Lotto, Mathilde, and others. Did she say yes? No? Or Sure? (That was literally the way one older groom at a wedding I played at responded to “do you take this woman?”) In looking back, did she marry him for his money? (Which he never got until just before his death.) Or for love? Or for escape from being unloved all her life? Or all of the above in a complicated way that only got more complicated in the twenty-three years of their marriage? In any case, she is left with regret that she protected her heart more than she should have, at the expense of true intimacy. 

 

He offered not only his whole laughing self, the past that built him and the warm beating body that moved her with its beauty and the future she felt compressed and waiting, but also the torch he carried before him in the dark, his understanding, dazzling, instant, that there was goodness at her core. With the gift came the bitter seed of regret, the unbridgeable gap between the Mathilde she was and the Mathilde he had seen her to be. A question, in the end, of vision. 

She wished she’d been the kind Mathilde, the good one. His idea of her. She would have looked smiling down at him; she would have heard beyond Marry me to the world that spun behind the words. There would have been no pause, no hesitation. She would have laughed, touched his face for the first time. Felt his warmth in the palm of her hand. Yes, she would have said. Sure.

 

This reflects Medea, of course. And, ultimately, the problem of regret at a relationship that fails at some level. Mathilde isn’t entirely in the right here - had she given fully of herself, it may never have led to Lotto appreciating her. Her regret is thus more that she was unable to truly appreciate what she did have with him. In the context of the myth, this is the regret that Euripides highlights, just as he highlights how serious Jason’s betrayal was - rather progressive thinking for 2500 years ago in a deeply patriarchal society. Groff’s re-imagining preserves the best of the emotional landscape of the old myth, but brings it into a modern era of a more equal society, and one in which the supernatural isn’t assumed to be behind everything. But also an era in which love remains complicated, relationships not guaranteed, and one in which the fates and furies still embody the forces of time and chance. 

 

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This book is kind of an unofficial (and late) selection for Native American Heritage Month. I didn’t finish my previous audiobook soon enough to start this one in November, but did take advantage of all the commuting for holiday music gigs to listen to this one pretty quickly. 

Where the Dead Sit Talking is a pretty dark book, centering around the suicide of a troubled teen girl. It also examines the trauma of foster care, and the difficulty of fitting in as a Native American in a very white town. 

 

Sequoyah is a 15 year old boy who ends up in foster care when his mother is sent to prison on drug charges. By the time the story begins, he has already been in a shelter, then a series of homes that didn’t work out for various reasons. 

 

Then, he is sent to a small rural town in Oklahoma to live with the Troutts. Harold and Agnes are an older couple who seem pretty nice, and they have already taken in two other fosters: George, a kid who is probably on the autism spectrum, and Rosemary, a 17 year old girl who is also Native American. 

 

All of the kids have their own secret traumas. Since the story is told in the first person by Sequoyah, for the most part we do not learn what these were. George is unable to talk about his past, and Rosemary gives only hints of what she has gone through, before her depression and other issues lead to her suicide. It is no spoiler to say this, because the book reveals it on the first page. 

 

The experience of this book is really disorienting, because of the way the author wrote it. His intent, I believe, was to reproduce the feeling of alienation, disorientation, and weirdness that is Sequoyah’s experience of life, and I think he succeeded. 

 

For example, there is a fundamental question that is never answered. Is the small town just a normal place, or is there a dark underbelly to it? Sequoyah hears hints of orgies and strange parties and dark deeds in the past, but nothing is ever really revealed to be true. Other than the fact that Harold moonlights as a bookie, just like his father did. But that is hardly anything sinister. There is also a guy that might be a predator, but that isn’t any surprise for any town. Those people exist, and some of them end up running cults. And, like pretty much everywhere, there is a homeless encampment. None of this is as weird and sinister as the stuff in Sequoyah’s head. 

 

And man, Sequoyah has stuff going on in his head. He is clearly struggling with years of trauma. His dad walking out, his mom’s troubles with the law, his removal from his family and the sequence of rootlessness that has followed. This has manifested as physical symptoms, from recurring headaches to sleeplessness to nausea and vomiting when he is stressed. 

 

He also has periodic violent thoughts, an urge to harm others or himself, although these are more notable because they bother him, not because he feels compelled to act on them. He also finds himself laughing at inappropriate moments, which terrifies George. 

 

I think these are entirely normal responses, but Sequoyah has no real way of dealing with them. His one friend he could talk to is Rosemary, but she increasingly withdraws from him before ending her life. The Troutts try to draw him out - indeed, they are kind people, and Sequoyah notes at the end of the book that he feels they are family - but the kind of rapport necessary for that kind of relationship is really difficult to form, particularly in a short time. 

 

The therapists that Sequoyah sees are not particularly helpful either. Everyone knows he is stressed, and urges him to “relax.” He is urged to do the usual therapy things, but the problem at the root is that he feels bad because bad things have happened and are continuing to happen to him. There is no way to make them better, which is why there is no way to make him feel better. 

 

This is the hard truth at the core of trauma. Don’t get me wrong, I think therapy is often helpful, particularly for changing patterns of thought, but it can’t heal ongoing harm. Talking is not going to fix the fact that Sequoyah has been separated from his family, his friends, and his security. 

 

I also found the acknowledgement of violent thoughts to be interesting. If you were to get honest answers from people, I wager you would find that most - maybe all of us - have occasional weird thoughts along those lines. Thoughts we will never act on, and didn’t consciously summon. I myself have had such things happen - a random, unexpected, suicidal or violent thought that will pop into the head unrelated to anything else, leaving me saying to myself, “what the hell was that and where did it come from.” It’s kind of a similar thing to the way humans generally have shown a bizarre reaction to a cliff - an impulse to jump off it. (This has been studied, actually - it’s really common, and is not considered to be a suicide risk. Most of us never come close to acting on these thoughts.) 

 

Hobson really gets into the head of his character in an impressive way. If you read Sequoyah wrong, you might think he is a budding sociopath at times, but if you take a step back, you find he is the opposite. He is fighting his brain’s response to trauma, and sometimes things misfire. And he is also still a kid, with his brain not yet developed. The whole thing felt very realistic and familiar. 

 

Sequoyah also appears to be struggling with identity on multiple levels. His status as a Native American in a very white place, his lack of family of course. But also, he seems to have gender-related struggles. He wears eyeliner, and wants to wear Rosemary’s clothes. He is somewhat obsessed with Rosemary, but not in a sexual way at all. The book doesn’t dwell on this or ever explain what is going on, but from Sequoyah’s mind comes some indication of ambivalence about gender and sexuality. Hobson has indicated that this was intentional - and back in the 1980s, kids weren’t free or likely to be out to the degree they are now.

 

The book also, without being preachy, illuminates what a total clusterfuck the foster care system is. The Troutts are essentially good, decent people trying to help out. And they are devastated by Rosemary’s suicide, wondering what they could have done differently. (Answer: probably nothing.) But the system itself creates trauma. 

 

Some background here: I do contract work on juvenile cases for a couple of tribes, who have (at least for now) the right to intervene in cases involving children of the tribe, under the Indian Child Welfare Act. So I have seen this up close. To be sure, there are some cases where there are no good solutions, and a child must be removed from the home. But many of these are about poverty and the cascade of failures that result. This is why you will almost never see a child of middle or upper class parents in the system. Between the ability to appear functional, and the networks of relatives and friends able to assist, things rarely get to the point where continued custody is impossible. Overwhelmingly, the children in the system come from impoverished backgrounds. The deeper the poverty, the more likely that a child will end up in foster care. 

 

The cure for this needs to be a shift from punishing “bad parents” to alleviation of the underlying issues: income and housing insecurity, lack of access to mental healthcare, lack of support systems, and the disproportionate consequences placed on the impoverished for any mistake. 

 

In this book, Sequoyah is the victim of the War on Drugs (which Drugs continue to win), and should never have ended up in the system. One can see that the trauma inflicted is going to lead to repeating issues down the road for so many of these foster youth. And the cycle of poverty and addiction and incarceration and trauma will continue. 

 

I should mention that the book is set in the 1980s - my childhood - so there are no cell phones, cassettes are a thing, and everybody smokes. I could practically feel the texture of the faux wood wall paneling. Hobson captures the feel of the era well. 

 

As I said, it is a pretty dark book, although there are moments of humor, and the ending is somehow both depressing yet hopeful. Sequoyah looks forward to the future with dread, but it is also clear that he has found a family of sorts, and made peace with some things. 

 

Hobson brings his own experience to this book. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and spent seven years working with troubled children, many of them in foster care. He describes the foster care system as analogous to the Trail of Tears, with children experiencing constant dislocation and the lack of a home. 

 

There is a lot of nuance and perception in this book - Hobson brings a unique voice to life in a way that feels emotionally true and honest. 

 

The audiobook was narrated by Eric Michael Summerer, who does an outstanding job. One of the best I have heard at getting unique voices for each character so that they are instantly distinguishable. The audiobook adds to the experience of this book. 

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Source of book: I own this - a gift from my in-laws. 

 

Aldo Leopold was, along with Rachel Carson, one of the most important founders of the modern environmental movement. Arguably, Thoreau was the philosophical forerunner of both, but the two of them were the ones whose writings really kicked off the focus on the view of the earth as an ecosystem, which we are a part of, rather than separate from us, to be exploited. 

 

That this idea is controversial, is, of course, a whole discussion in and of itself. 

 

 This cover shows one of the original illustrations by Charles Schwartz, 

which are included in the LoA edition.

A Sand County Almanac is a classic, the best known of Leopold’s works. In my Library of America edition, it is the first section, with the others being his uncollected environmental writings, journals, and letters. 

 

This particular book is also divisible into distinct sections, only one of which is about the “Sand County.” The Almanac is a series of short essays about the events of each month living in rural Wisconsin. Leopold bought a failed farm and shack there in the realm of sand and slough and spent his time (as far as I can tell from his essays) in some combination of farming, hunting, and birdwatching. It sounds like a pretty good life. Leopold’s writing is lovely, and he has a love for nature and a sense of careful observation that really resonates with me. 

 

Many of the essays are about birds: the geese, the cranes, the woodcock and his dance. Others are about trees and wildflowers and the last remaining bits of real tallgrass prairie. 

 

Leopold, like me and other lovers of nature, notes that we seem to be in a minority. We need the wild, or we are not healthy in mind or body. We also see, as he puts it, “a law of diminishing returns in progress” - that is, while modern technological advances have benefited us, the increase in standard of living eventually is diminished by the cost to nature, and more stuff doesn’t bring more happiness. This is the theme of the book, I think, the way that endless exploitation of nature destroys us as well as it. 

 

Another bit from the introduction really made me think. 

 

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. 

 

I am not sure the “abrahamic” concept of land is limited to the great monotheisms, but I think Leopold is right. Unfortunately, at this present time, what passes for Christianity in our world is fundamentally incompatible with sustainable living. As Leopold later discusses, the problem is that our exploitative lack of ethics is particularly notable in our treatment of the natural world we are a part of. Ultimately, we destroy ourselves when we devour the natural world. 

 

From the first section, there are a number of passages that I want to highlight. This one is from “The Alder Fork - A Fishing Idyl.” 

 

I sit in happy meditation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook. 

 

Another one I love is from “Great Possessions,” a description of his birdwatching (and listening) at daybreak. He describes his property as if it were an old estate, with tenants - the animals which inhabit his woods. 

 

At 3:30 AM, with such dignity as I can muster of a July morning, I step from my cabin door, bearing in either hand my emblems of sovereignty, a coffee pot and notebook. 

 

I’m not a morning person, although I will get up early for an adventure. And sometimes to go chase birds with my camera. 

 

In “Prairie Birthday,” Leopold talks about the distinct dates of flowering of various prairie wildflowers, specifically in a tiny corner of a graveyard where a patch of wildness still existed. 

 

Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.

 

The second section is “Sketches Here and There,” and continue the idea of small snapshots. In this case, rather than being of a particular time on his land, the essays are about particular places. Wisconsin, of course, but also Illinois and Iowa, Arizona and New Mexico, Chihuahua and Sonora, Oregon and Utah, and Manitoba. These are all places Leopold worked or explored during his years with the Forest Service - he would later serve as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. 

 

One particularly moving moment is in one of the essays about New Mexico. Part of his job with the Forest Service back in the 1920s was to kill bears and wolves. Yes, those were the days, and they pretty much exterminated grizzlies and wolves from the lower states. Leopold at one time killed a wolf, and talked about “"fierce green fire dying in her eyes." He was shaken, and thereafter advocated for the necessary role of apex predators in ecosystems - and he was completely correct about that. Later, Bruce Babbitt, then Secretary of the Interior, talked about Leopold’s influence when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s. 

 

In this section as well, there are some moments of gorgeous language. I like this one from “Marshland Elegy” in the section about Wisconsin. 

 

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words. 

 

I agree. I find condors - not the most “pretty” of birds, to be beautiful in that unspeakable way. 

 

Another passage, about the Passenger Pigeons that used to blot out the sky in the Midwest but are now all gone forever, really struck me as profound. 

 

It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live, a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. 

 

There are so many implications of evolution and deep time that a certain subculture (the white, conservative - and especially Evangelical subculture) are resistant to, and this is one of them. The true religious beliefs - capitalism, money, social hierarchy, supremacy - are threatened by the truth that we are a part of nature, and not an exception to it. Which is why “christianity” has become so syncretistic as to be unrecognizable. One of these sorts is described in “On Top,” about an Arizona plateau.

 

The old man was dead now; in his later years his heart had thrilled only to his bank account and to the tally of his flocks and herds…

 

As Wordsworth put it:

 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

 

The last section is four essays on conservation. These encapsulate Leopold’s philosophy, and are outstanding. 

 

The first, “Conservation Esthetic,” examines the question of what benefits and harms tourism causes, and how it can be made better. For Leopold, the endless building of roads is a problem, and even more so, the way that being out in nature has increasingly become an industry, with more and more gadgets to mediate the experience. This is something many of us have noted, even as we enjoy the modern advances that make it easier to be out in nature. In my case, everything from comfortable boots to my trailer that has extended our camping and hiking season dramatically falls in this category. 

 

But how about this conclusion Leopold comes to about what the real benefit of outdoor recreation is - the chance that more of us perceive that we are a part of nature. The advantage is that there is no tradeoff involved here. One person gaining in perspective does not diminish it for others, or for the natural world. This is why, in a later essay, he advocates for a shift in recreation away from hunting and fishing (because of overharvesting among other things) toward a more esoteric hunt - scientific research by amateurs (such as birdcounts) and the kind of hunting I do with my camera. All the thrills, yet no loss to flora and fauna. 

 

To promote perception is the only truly creative part of recreational engineering. 

 

The essay, “Wildlife in American Culture” is fascinating. Even though it was written nearly 75 years ago, already Leopold was seeing the trends that would accelerate into the present. Specifically, the way that media has gone from information and idea based to sales-based. Magazines about nearly every sort of outdoor recreation are pretty much sales catalogs for gadgets now. Infotising. 

 

The sportsman has no leaders to tell him what is wrong. The sporting press no longer represents sport; it has turned billboard for the gadgeteer. 

 

“The Land Ethic” concludes the collection. And it is profound. It starts with the idea that ethics is really no more than symbiosis reduced to thought. “Does this lead to thriving or not?” While the complexity of co-operative mechanisms has increased as populations have grown, the idea is still the same. It is a regulation of behavior for the common good. (This is what the American Right Wing has completely forgotten, making “ethics” into a combination of “might makes right” and “nothing should ever change.” Leopold tells an interesting historical story: the way that we went from considering women and children to be chattel to seeing them as having rights - in other words, as being governed by ethics, not expediency. 

 

During the three thousand years which have since elapsed [since Homer], ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only.

 

And this is the great shift that Leopold sees as necessary for ecological survival. We need to see our relationship to the nature we are a part of in light of ethics, not expediency. We need to see environmental harmony and sustainability not as a matter of “what profit is there to be made” but as an ethical issue. As we would not countenance the treatment of women as property (at least most of us wouldn’t), we should not tolerate the treatment of the ecosystem our lives depend on as something to be bought and sold by the wealthy. 

 

I want to end, therefore, with one final observation. 

 

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what or who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves. 

 

This book is both beautiful and sobering. It is encouraging that Leopold was able to start a movement that many of us are a part of. It is discouraging that the pillagers of nature continue to win. And it is not comforting to know that this will be self-defeating, because self-extermination is the most pyrrhic of victories. I think my kids’ generation understands this better than mine - and a hell of a lot better than most of my parents’ generation, raised as they were on a belief in the inexhaustibility of nature and the imperative to conquer exploit. Let us all hope that the future will be better. 

 

Take a look at this book, both for its beauty, and for Leopold’s true ethic of sustainability and symbiosis.