Lessons Learned about Self-Monitoring?

On Saturday of this past weekend, my husband, son, and I traveled to Franklin, Louisiana, to attend the Franklin Black Bear and Birding Festival. On the banks of Bayou Teche,venders had set up booths of local products and crafts, various conservation groups had prepared displays and games for children in a nearby warehouse, and musicians were scheduled to play for a street dance. We took a pontoon ride into the Bayou Teche Wildlife Refuge managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was a beautiful day, clear and cool, and on the trip up a canal dug over one hundred years ago for logging, we saw several alligators sunning on the banks as well as several species of egrets. The particular area of the refuge near Franklin that we boated into is closed to motorized vehicles from September 1st to April 15th. That area had just been opened for motorized vehicles, and the gate was open, as the picture at left illustrates.

As we motored slowly down the canal, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee steering the boat and directing the tour mentioned that there were no old-growth trees here because the area had been intensively logged at the turn of the last century--that is, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Historical records indicate that from 1890 to 1935, timber companies removed virtually all of the cypress from Louisiana; any old growth remaining was few and far between. The trees one sees now are ones that have regenerated since then. The canal we were traveling on was also left over from the timber industry's work. Canals were dug in the swamps in order to get to the trees and then to drag the trees to waterways where they could be then be floated to timber mills. If you pull up a Google Earth map of Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain, you can still see straight canals radiating out from the places where cypress had been harvested, dragged into the canals by pullboats, and "cribbed up into booms and pushed like barges" to mills.  [Frank B. Williams: Cypress Lumber King, by Anna C. Burns]

Timber industry supporters today complain about the restrictions on harvesting the cypress that has regenerated since 1935 when Louisiana was just about completely stripped of cypress. But the past history of just about any industry that pulled its resources from the natural world--or just about any industry, for that matter--indicates that industries are unable to monitor themselves. It doesn't matter if it's an industry that harvests the resources of the natural world or the banking conglomerates that sell derivatives.  Management and employees live high on the proceeds until they have exhausted the resources that provide those proceeds--or until the financial enterprise threatens to go bankrupt and take the country down with it and is bailed out by the government. Frank Williams "celebrated his fiftieth year in the lumber business by distributing $100,000 in bonuses among his employees" [Burns]. A few short years later, the cypress industry had exhausted its resources. Other timber industries began liquidating their assets in the 1910s, but the company that Frank Williams established managed to branch out into oil and real estate and thus operates to this day.

In 2006, Goldman Sachs paid "its employees a total of $16.5 billion in compensation," bonuses that, if distributed evenly, would mean "$623,418 for every" one of its 26,467 employees. ["The Goldman Sachs Premium," by DealBook, 18 December 2006] By 2008, it was clear that Goldman Sachs and other financial industries had almost brought the U.S.--and the world--to financial disaster. Millions of Americans have yet to recover. But taxpayers bailed out the financial industry, and those "titans" got to keep their bonuses.

But have we learned this lesson: that industries must be vigilantly regulated for the health,  safety, and welfare of not only ordinary people but the planet? It seems that a lot of us haven't. More on that in another post.

More on the logging of cypress in Louisiana:
Jacobs, David. "Logging Off." Baton Rouge Business Report. BusinessReport.com. 10 September 2007. http://www.businessreport.com/news/2007/sep/10/logging

Cypress Logging in Louisiana, circa 1925 (Part 1 of 2)   YouTube. Archival footage provided by Krantz Recovered Woods, Austin, TX. http://youtu.be/HF3-0NISvs4

Cypress Logging in Louisiana, circa 1925 (Part 2 of 2). YouTube. Archival footage provided by Krantz Recovered Woods, Austin, TX. http://youtu.be/FxSP08zJ5tE

Pruning

As I try to shelve my books here in our 120-year old cottage, with its sloping wooden floors and lack of storage, I discover that I still have way too many books for the available space.  It's time once again to prune back the overabundance of reading material that still remains from previous thinning. I did some serious pruning in 2007, when my family and I moved from Texas to Georgia, then again before packing up for another move to Louisiana, and now, soon after, another attempt to corral my books to fit the available space.

It's a difficult task, for even the books that I know I will probably never read again provide a service for me: they remind me of the different interests I cultivated during certain times of my life--hence the volumes of Walker Percy non-fiction. Some remind me of particular people, for there are inscriptions inside that reveal relationships, expectations, promises. On the inside cover of a slim volume of Nikki Giovanni's poems--Happy birthday, Anita. I love you. Always, Marie, written by a once-close college friend from whom I am now separated by years of sporadic--and then failing-- communication. On the inside cover of Michael Shaara's novel of the civil war, Killer Angels, a student from my first years of teaching at Louisiana State University thanks me for providing him with a better insight into reading. He tells me that he enjoyed the class very much. How unappreciative I am in not having yet read this novel. I'm putting it on my bedside table right now. (I've done this before, but because this yellowing paperback novel has survived several "thinnings," it seems that I continue to believe that someday I will follow through with my resolution.)

Then there are the necessary kind words of the poetry workshop leader. To Anita, Margaret Gibson salutes me on the title page of Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems; with warm wishes and respect for your work. On the title page of Recovered Body, my poems go from achieving "respect" to "beauty." For Anita, Scott Cairns has written, well-met at the Glen. Here's wishing you the best as you continue with your beautiful poems. Barbara Crooker's volume of poetry, Radiance, reminds me of a workshop I had attended the year previous to the date of this note: For Anita, In the pleasure of your company (missed you this year) & in the great pleasure of your work. Well, I must keep these books to cheer me in the dark hours of the night when the muse is MIA, and I am afraid I'll never write another poem again.

Other books recall the ghosts of emotions I felt when I first read them, like the recollection of passion long past spent. This morning as I was sitting in the old recliner in my study, looking at the piles of books on the floor, I spied the tattered cover of John Graves' narrative of his canoe trip down the Brazos River in Texas, Goodbye to a River. For a fleeting moment, I was in my mid-twenties once again, newly aroused to the fecundity of meaning in the natural world that a poet could delve and develop. That much younger me bracketed the first sentences of chapter seven with these words: read in English 103 class. I suspect I was teaching descriptive writing to English freshmen at Texas A&M University at the time and thought of using Graves' words to coax my students toward specificity. And an asterisk beside the following words suggest that I identified with the author's sentiments:

Origin being as it is an accident outside the scope of one's will, I tend not to seek much credit for being a Texan. Often (breathes there a man/) I can work up some proud warmth about the fact that I indubitably am one. A lot of the time, though, I'd as soon be forty other kinds of men I've known....If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But, if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.

In these books I see the roots of what I once was, the evidence of how and why I have become who I am. To subvert a line from Tennyson, "I am a part of all that I have read." But there is just not enough room in this house for all our stuff and the stuff we've been dragging around from previous generations of my husband's family. Time again to prune. Maybe someday soon I'll get the courage to do the same with my journals and letters--only instead of pruning, I'll build a bonfire to my vanity.

The Old Recliner

If anything represents how we cannot seem to divest ourselves of stuff, this old recliner does. The first time I met it, it was at my in-laws' house, with the stuffing pooching out. The recliner had belonged to my husband's grandfather, who was a lawyer in Houston, Texas, and I guess Sam Tom's (first and middle name--Samuel Thomas) daughter kept it not only for sentimental reasons but for practical reasons as well. Eventually, my mother-in-law had the chair recovered; what you see is her choice of fabric, circa 1980s.

My husband loves this chair. I have stuffed it away in sad corners, but it always manages to make its way to a more public and useful place. I have threatened to sell it or to give it to Goodwill, but I have decided that I value my marriage more. This time I made a place for it right away, in my study, where my husband can read, rest, watch, or comment while I blog or work on my latest craft project. And so I celebrate compromise, resilience, and a long marriage by allowing this chair in my own space! Now if I can only convince Tom to have it recovered!

Maybe we hang on to these things because life itself is so unpredictable. We thought that our move to Atlanta would be our last move until retirement, that we would have a cool, urban place for our college-age children to return to and to call home. But our married life of almost 33 years has been one move after another, moves which we have decided to take upon ourselves, seeking better prospects or more amenable accommodations and surroundings or moves that have been forced on us by circumstances, such as layoffs, budget crises, and uncertain economic times. However, there is no exceptionalism in these experiences; American society has been a mobile one since its inception. My husband often reminds me of an article he read the year he finished his Ph.d. at Louisiana State University. The author predicted that college graduates of that year would move an average of seven times over the course of their working lives. We have met that average. Our experience is not uncommon, particularly in these unsettling times. Though the unemployment rate has recently dropped below 9%, millions of Americans are still seeking jobs, and college students can't find jobs comparable to their skills and education. Again and again, I read of college students who graduate with huge debts, who expect to spend the rest of their lives paying off the debt they incurred in order to achieve that degree. Is it worth it?

We face this question--is it worth it?--as our oldest child heads off to graduate school and our youngest child begins her second year as an undergraduate in the fall. Our son was admitted to all four aerospace engineering schools to which he applied, but it looks like the choice he will make will be the one that's less expensive. The school he has chosen--the one he attended as an undergraduate--is a great school, ranked in the top 20 aerospace programs; at least one of the other, more expensive schools is ranked in the top 10. Does that difference matter? Is it worth it to shackle one's future to a huge debt? We think not, but only the future will determine whether or not our son has made the right decision. And isn't that the case for every decision that we make? We just do the best we can with the cards we've drawn from the stack.

What I do know is that we're not ready to make that recliner our permanent seat in our new home. For our generation and generations to come, retirement will be pushed further and further away unless one belongs to that lucky 1% of Americans who own 40% of the nation's wealth. The recliner will just be a respite from life's difficulties, not a permanent refuge. 

But today I read an article in which a doctor describes research that suggests resiliency is the characteristic we most need in order to achieve a healthy old age. He has patients who are over 100 who have full mental capacity. What characteristics seem to have served them well? The ability to overcome serious setbacks without whining, to face those difficulties with a deprecating sense of humor, and to move on. These we can all practice to achieve. And life does seem to be providing us with plenty of opportunities to practice!

And so I welcome this change even though it was not one of my making or choosing.