December,
2003
Greetings.
In our personal lives, the first half of 2003 was
entirely unremarkable.
Krystin was accepted at the University of Minnesota,
Morris (UMM), for the 2003-04 academic year.
She was excited about going; her parents were thrilled. Krystin had a rough couple of years in high
school, when her diabetes was not under the control it should have been. When blood sugars are high, people with
diabetes have headaches (Krystin had migraines), blurred vision (because of
pressure on the retina), and an inability to concentrate. As you can imagine, anyone with those
conditions will not be a good student.
In her senior year, however, Krystin recovered and demonstrated that she
can be a very good student indeed. It
appears that her significant improvement was sufficient for the admissions
people at Morris to be persuaded she was a good candidate for becoming a
successful college student.
High
school graduation ceremonies are somewhat different than when I graduated. Ours was “dignified” (i.e., boring). At Krystin’s, there was a lot of hootin ‘n
hollerin as kids went up across the dais (not a stage; it was in the Augsburg College gymnasium) to pick up their
diplomas. Many were also wearing
flip-flops on their feet, or sneakers, and many were in jeans or even shorts
(underneath their graduation gowns, many of which did not fit too well). But they still do wear a cap with tassel, and
the gown, and the band still plays “Pomp and Circumstance” by Edward
Elgar. It was interesting to me that
they didn’t play the national anthem; they played “America the Beautiful”
instead. The end result, after all was
said and done, is the same. I have no
idea if they are as well-educated, or better-educated, or less-well-educated
than my high school class from 30+ years ago. (The suspicious old fart in me says they are
not, but I can’t document that belief.)
After
working all summer, full time, at the Department of Pediatrics in the Medical
School (to earn her spending money for the next year), Krystin went off to
college at UMM in late August. For those
of you not from Minnesota,
I can tell you that UMM is a very small campus (about 1800 students,
significantly smaller than her high school) in far western Minnesota, near the South Dakota border. It is exclusively undergraduate, unlike the Twin Cities
campus, which has many research programs as well as graduate and professional
degree programs. So the Morris faculty
are focused on their undergraduate students--it is all they have--and it is a
wonderful teaching institution. So far,
three months into her first semester of college, she really likes it. (She was very uncertain about going from the “big
city” to the small town and rural Minnesota,
but she seems to have adapted.)
* * *
I do not like it when I must have repeated interactions
with the medical establishment. I also
do not like it when I am intermittently and uncontrollably in pain, which I was
for the first quarter of the year. I won’t
dwell on aches and aging, but I did something (no one knows what, least of all
me) to one of my rotator cuffs; whatever I did, it caused me recurring pain for
three months. I tried quite a variety of
pain-killing medications, none of which worked particularly well for me. I also saw physical therapists for
awhile. But when my doctor said the
problem would resolve itself in 12-18 months, and the physical therapist told
me that I needed to exercise the shoulder an hour a day in order to heal the
joint within 6-12 months (rather than 12-18 without exercise), I decided that
rather than spend an hour a day, I would just wait for the 12-18 months to
pass. So far it’s passing and I’m doing
fine.
* * *
A couple of years ago I extolled the virtue of Bill
Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, his travel book about Australia. He has since written another very different
book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is both history and
explanation of the modern natural sciences, including cosmology and astronomy,
chemistry, physics, biology and the life sciences, genetics, meteorology, and geology,
to name most of them. It is such a
well-written book, from the point of view someone (me) who has had no formal
training in the sciences since high school, that I am reading it aloud to
Elliott. (Although I have always been a
lay reader of science, so to speak.) Elliott, of course, is perfectly capable at
age 13 of reading it himself, but my reading it to him lets me explain terms
that he would not know and lets us talk about some of the things Bryson writes
about.
Our next book is Dune by Frank Herbert, the great
science fiction classic. It may be a
little too complex for Elliott, but we’ll give it a try.
* * *
I sent to Pat’s Dad this year an article from the
American Psychological Association reporting research suggesting that as people
get older, they tend to retain memories of positive things in their lives and
forget (or blot out or repress) less pleasant memories. Pat’s Dad agreed with the research but said
it was, in his opinion, a defense mechanism:
When one doesn’t have that much time left, most people prefer to spend
it thinking about positive things rather than the negatives of one’s life.
I can see this phenomenon already at work in
Elliott. Two years ago I had to go get
him from Camp Ajawa, from which he had written me an
imploring note asking that he be brought home.
He had never been so glad to see someone in his life as he was when I
drove up to the camp to pick him up, a week early. But this past winter, only 18 months after
the fact, he was already saying that there were good things about the
camp. I couldn’t believe it. That camp is the touchstone of his life on
what he hates and what can be bad in life.
* * *
More on the nature of Minnesota, a discussion I inadvertently
started a couple of years ago. I had two
more observations. One, a follow-up from
someone who was raised in the South but has lived in Minnesota for over 50 years.
Some differences take longer to smooth out than
others. The last election results in Minnesota will accelerate
the process. Let’s check at the end of the legislative session the status of
the following: 1) Choice for women; 2)
Concealed carry of hand guns; 3) level of services, particularly for the least
fortunate among us, offered in Minnesota.
These are not superficial issues. They
tend toward the cultural. My bet, though
I’d be happy if I lost, is that at the end of the session we will look more
like the South. (Ugh! That’s why I
left!) But that’s what happens when
mobility rules. [The ban on] capital
punishment will be the last to go and perhaps we might even be able to preserve
it. The effort would be worth it.
The other was from a native
Californian who spent a number of years in Minnesota and who is now in Virginia.
I think your Louisiana
transplant friend might have had it backwards. It seems to me that superficial
regional differences have about vanished. All the news anchors sound
alike, McDonalds is the same everywhere, nobody talks quite like Lena and Ole (or Abner and Daisy Mae) anymore, etc.
But there are some serious differences left, at the cultural
level. What reminded me of that was a news story pointing out that
virtually all the states that carry out significant numbers of executions (as
opposed to giving out death sentences but not really killing anyone) are
southern. Virtually all the truly low-tax, low-service states are
likewise southern. Most of the socially and politically progressive
states are northern--and the ones with lots of Scandinavian and Northern German
heritage tend to lead the pack. Sure, you could wake up in Fairfax County, VA
and think for a while that you had landed in Edina (or Jefferson Parish, LA, or Thousand Oaks, CA).
But below the surface, those places still aren’t the same. I’ll concede
that there’s probably a trend toward homogenization, but it ain’t all the way
there yet.
Y’know, I have ambivalent feelings about Ol’
Virginny. The people here are warmer and
easier to know than Minnesotans. More
like the Southern Californians I grew up
with. On the other hand, there is a
harshness about the place, too--especially when it comes to public policy. This may be a legacy of slavery in part, but
it extends to treatment of the poor, the handicapped (mentally and physically),
the punishment of wrongdoers, etc. Part
of what keeps the government small and cheap is a minimum of general concern
for those it might help most. I have
read that part of what makes it that was is the Scotch-Irish heritage--they are
to the Southeast what the Krauts and Scandahoovians are to the Upper Midwest.
Apparently the Scotch-Irish brought a hierarchical and relatively
violent subculture to this region, full of touchiness, readiness to engage in
duels over “honor,” religious beliefs that tended to endorse punishment and
revenge, etc.
On balance, I would say that Minnesota is becoming more like the South.
* * *
I was taken by two articles in The Atlantic in May
of this year. One was about apatheists
(a term the author made up): people who
don’t feel that the beliefs of others infringe on them and who don’t really
give two hoots about what other people believe.
The other was about triumphalist religion--people who are extremely
interested in what others believe.
Apatheism--a disinclination to care all that much
about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about
other people’s--may or may not be something new in the world, but its modern
flowering, particularly in ostensibly pious America, is worth getting excited
about.
Apatheism concerns not what you believe but how. In that respect it differs from the standard
concepts used to describe religious views and people. Atheism, for instance, is not at all like
apatheism; the hot-blooded atheist cares as much about religion as does the
evangelical Christian, but in the opposite direction. “Secularism” can refer to a simple absence of
devoutness, but it more accurately refers to an ACLU-style disapproval of any
profession of religion in public life--a disapproval that seems puritanical and
quaint to apatheists. Tolerance is a
magnificent concept, John Locke’s inestimable gift to all mankind; but it
assumes, as Locke did, that everyone brims with religious passions that
everyone else must work hard to put up with.
And agnostics? True,
most of them are apatheists, but most apatheists are not agnostics. Because--and this is an essential point--many
apatheists are believers.
In America,
as Thomas Byrne Edsall reported in these pages recently, the proportion of
people who say they never go to church or synagogue has tripled since 1972, to
33 percent in 2000. Most of these people believe in God (professed atheists are
very rare in the United
States); they just don’t care much about
him. They do care a bit; but apatheism is an attitude, not a belief system, and
the over-riding fact is that these people are relaxed about religion.
Even regular churchgoers can, and often do, rank quite
high on the apatheism scale. There are a
lot of reasons to attend religious services: to connect with a culture or a community, to
socialize, to expose children to religion, to find the warming comfort of
familiar ritual. The softer
denominations in America
are packed with apatheists.
Finally, and this may seem strangest of all, even
true-believing godliness today often has an apatheistic flavor. I have Christian friends who organize their
lives around an intense and personal relationship with God, but who [are also]
exponents, at least, of the second, more important part of apatheism: the part that doesn’t mind what other
people think about God.
I believe that the rise of apatheism is to be
celebrated as nothing less than a major civilizational advance. Religion, as the events of September 11 and
after have so brutally underscored, remains the most divisive and volatile of social
forces. To be in the grip of religious
zeal is the natural state of human beings, or at least of a great many human
beings; that is how much of the species seems to be wired. Apatheism, therefore, should not be assumed
to represent a lazy recumbency, like my collapse into a soft chair after a long
day. Just the opposite: it is the product of a determined cultural
effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined
personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement.
[B]est of all would be a world generously leavened
with apatheists: people who feel at ease
with religion even if they are irreligious; people who may themselves be
members of religious communities, but who are neither controlled by godly
passions nor concerned about the (nonviolent, noncoercive) religious beliefs of
others. In my lifetime America has
taken great strides in this direction, and its example will be a source of
strength, not weakness, in a world still beset by fanatical religiosity (al
Qaeda) and tyrannical secularism (China).
Ronald Reagan used to insist that he was religious
even though, as President, he hardly ever entered a church. It turns out he was in good company. Those Americans who tell pollsters they
worship faithfully? Many of them are
lying. John G. Stackhouse Jr., a
professor of theology and culture, wrote recently in American Outlook
magazine, “Beginning in the 1990s, a series of sociological studies has shown
that many more Americans tell pollsters that they attend church regularly than
can be found in church when teams actually count.” In fact, he says, actual churchgoing may be at
little more than half the professed rate. A great many Americans, like their fortieth
President, apparently care about religion enough to say they are religious, but
not enough to go to church.
The
next article in The Atlantic was about triumphalist and relativist
religion, and more specifically Christianity, Islam, Judaism, with reference to
some others.
Christianity and Islam are the two religions that
define civilizations, and they have much in common, along with some
differences. . . . To what extent is a
religiously defined civilization compatible with pluralism--tolerance of others
within the same civilization but of different religions? This crucial question points to a major
distinction between two types of religion. For some religions, just as “civilization”
means us, and the rest are barbarians, so “religion” means ours, and the rest
are infidels. Other religions, such as Judaism and most of the religions of Asia, concede that human beings may use different
religions to speak to God, as they use different languages to speak to one
another. God understands them all. . . .
These two approaches to religion may conveniently be
denoted by the terms their critics use to condemn them--”triumphalism” and “relativism.” In one of his sermons the fifteenth-century
Franciscan Saint John of Capistrano, immortalized on the map of California, denounced
the Jews for trying to spread a “deceitful” notion among Christians: “The Jews say that everyone can be saved in
his own faith, which is impossible.” For
once a charge of his against the Jews was justified. The Talmud does indeed say that the righteous
of all faiths have a place in paradise.
Polytheists and atheists are excluded, but monotheists of any persuasion
who observe the basic moral laws are eligible.
The relativist view was condemned and rejected by both Christians and
Muslims, who shared the conviction that there was only one true faith, theirs,
which it was their duty to bring to all humankind. The triumphalist view is increasingly under
attack in Christendom, and is disavowed by significant numbers of Christian
clerics. There is little sign as yet of
a parallel development in Islam. [But
the triumphalist and sometimes messianic language used by the U.S. government
in recent months, and the popularity in this country of televangelists and
revivalist preachers of various stripes and sects, makes one wonder how true it
is that triumphalism is under attack in at least the American part of
Christendom.]
For those taking the relativist approach to religion
(in effect, “I have my god, you have your god, and others have theirs”), there
may be specific political or economic reasons for objecting to someone else’s
beliefs, but in principle there is no theological problem. For those taking the triumphalist approach
(classically summed up in the formula “I’m right, you’re wrong, go to hell”),
tolerance is a problem. Because the
triumphalist’s is the only true and complete religion, all other religions are
at best incomplete and more probably false and evil; and since he is the
privileged recipient of God’s final message to humankind, it is surely his duty
to bring it to others rather than keep it selfishly for himself.
Now, if one believes that, what does one do about it?
And how does one relate to people of another religion? If we look at this
question historically, one thing emerges very clearly: whether the other religion is previous or
subsequent to one’s own is extremely important.
From a Christian point of view, for example, Judaism is previous and
Islam is subsequent. From a Muslim point
of view, both Judaism and Christianity are previous. From a Jewish point of view, both
Christianity and Islam are subsequent--but since Judaism is not triumphalist,
this is not a problem.
But it is a problem for Christians and Muslims--or
perhaps I should say for traditional Christians and Muslims. From their perspective, a previous religion
may be regarded as incomplete, as superseded, but it is not necessarily false
if it comes in the proper sequence of revelation. So from a Muslim point of view, Judaism and
Christianity were both true religions at the time of their revelation, but they
were superseded by the final and complete revelation of Islam; although they
are out-of-date--last year’s model, so to speak--they are not inherently
false. Therefore Muslim law, sharia, not
only permits but requires that a certain degree of tolerance be accorded them.
. . .
Muslims did not claim a special relationship to either
of the predecessor religions, and if Jews and Christians chose not to accept
Muhammad, that was their loss. Muslims
were prepared to tolerate them in accordance with sharia, which lays down both
the extent and the limits of the latitude to be granted those who follow a
recognized religion: they must be
monotheists and they must have a revealed scripture, which in practice often
limited tolerance to Jews and Christians. . . .
Tolerance was a much more difficult question for
Christians. For them, Judaism is a
precursor of their religion, and Christianity is the fulfillment of the divine
promises made to the Jews. The Jewish
rejection of that fulfillment is therefore seen as impugning some of the
central tenets of the Christian faith.
Tolerance between different branches of Christianity would eventually
become an even bigger problem. Of
course, the outsider is more easily tolerated than the dissident insider. Heretics are a much greater danger than
unbelievers. . . . Muslims were in
general more tolerant of diversity within their own community, and even cited
an early tradition to the effect that such diversity is a divine blessing. The concept of heresy--in the Christian sense
of incorrect belief recognized and condemned as such by properly constituted
religious authority--was unknown to classical Islam. Deviation and diversity, with rare
exceptions, were persecuted only when they offered a serious threat to the
existing order. The very notion of an
authority empowered to rule on questions of belief was alien to traditional
Islamic thought and practice. It has
become less alien.
One consequence of the similarity between Christianity
and Islam in background and approach is the long conflict between the two
civilizations they defined. When two
religions met in the Mediterranean area, each claiming to be the recipient of
God’s final revelation, conflict was inevitable. . . . During this long period of conflict, of jihad
and crusade, of conquest and reconquest, Christianity and Islam nevertheless
maintained a level of communication, because the two are basically the same
kind of religion. They could argue. They could hold disputations and
debates. Even their screams of rage were
mutually intelligible. When Christians
and Muslims said to each other, “You are an infidel and you will burn in hell,”
each understood exactly what the other meant, because they both meant the same
thing. (Their heavens are differently
appointed, but their hells are much the same.)
Such assertions and accusations would have conveyed little or no meaning
to a Hindu, a Buddhist, or a Confucian.
Part
of the problem we face now, in my opinion, is that we sometimes appear to have
a triumphalist Christian administration in Washington, which produces distaste, dismay,
and sometimes violent hostility around the world. According to Paul Harris, writing in The
Observer (London), reviewing The Faith of George W. Bush by Christian
author Stephen Mansfield, the book “depicts a
President who prays each day and believes he is on a direct mission from God”
and that “Bush told a Texan evangelist that he had had a premonition of some
form of national disaster happening.
Bush said to James Robinson: ‘I feel like God wants me to run for
President. I can’t explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me.
Something is going to happen. . . . I
know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.’”
Then
we have Lt. General William Boykin. The Economist
reported that an “American newspaper found him addressing church congregations
wearing his uniform. He told audiences
that terrorists hated America
because it was a nation of Christian believers and that the enemy in the war on
terrorism was Satan. In one speech, he
recalled a Muslim fighter in Somalia
who said he had the protection of Allah against US forces. ‘Well you know what
I knew, that my God was bigger than his,’ said Lt Gen Boykin. ‘I knew that my
God was a real God, and his was an idol.’” This must have been before he took his Dale
Carnegie course on how to win friends and influence people in the Middle East. (One
wonders what he thinks of the Jewish God.
If I were Ariel Sharon or any other Israeli or Jewish leader or thinker,
I would find Boykin as obnoxious as the Islamic community does.)
Boykin
has, however, made other comments that should make one extremely wary. “Because
God put him there for a time such as this,” Boykin on why President Bush
is leading the war on terrorism, and “George
Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States. He was appointed by God.” One worries that people appointed by God do
not typically permit themselves to be defeated in elections or subject to
constitutional term limits.
Richard
Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University,
has described what triumphalist (in this case Islam) leads to. Can one
get
some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going
to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? . . . Given that they are certainly going to die,
couldn’t we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life
again afterwards? Offer them a fast track
to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasting fountains. Harps and wings wouldn’t appeal to the sort
of young men we need, so tell them there’s a special martyr’s reward of 72
virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive.
Would they fall for it? Yes,
testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world
might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next. . . .
If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to
value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a
plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number
of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr’s
death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a
wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous
place. Especially if they also believe
that that other universe is a paradisiacal escape from the tribulations of the
real world. Top it off with sincerely
believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any
wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for
suicide missions?
There is no doubt
that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power
and danger. It is comparable to a smart
missile, and its guidance system is in many respects superior to the most
sophisticated electronic brain that money can buy. Yet to a cynical government, organisation, or
priesthood, it is very, very cheap.
One can imagine Boykin would like to
get his hands on some of these young men Dawkins describes. Boykin could be the sort who actually
instructs them.
I think a number of historians and
political scientists would say that one of the great contributions the United States
has made to the world is the separation of church and state, which was quite a
novelty in 1787. One likes to believe
that that separation is one reason we have managed to avoid the sectarian
strife that manifests itself in so many places around the globe. Now we seem to be backing away from that “wall
of separation.” I see with dismay that
the former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice, who was removed from office for
refusing to obey a federal court order to remove the Ten Commandments display
he had put up in the Alabama Supreme Court, is so popular in Alabama that he
may run for, and be a shoo-in, for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The outcome of this is that we will get the
government they deserve. (And I note
that one does not have to be anti-religious to be a vigorous advocate of
separation of church and state. Many of
the mainstream Protestant denominations support it, as do Jewish church
groups.)
* * *
Pat and I took Elliott to Australia this summer. We went to northeastern Australia, on
the coast in the center of the Great Barrier Reef. We were in transit for 31 hours, door to door
(21 hours in flight, Mpls to LA, LA to Sydney, Sydney to Cairns).
That’s a beastly trip.
We stayed outside the small town of Mossman, which is about 15 minutes north of
the upscale resort town of Port
Douglas. (There
are shoreline lots being sold in Port Douglas for $1 million each; we were told
that Bill and Hilary Clinton have purchased one.) We stayed with a long-time friend from the University of Minnesota, Marion Freeman, who retired
to Mossman after she and her husband Gordy retired because their daughter Pris
and her husband Norm live there. (Sadly,
Gordy died within a year after they moved to Australia.) I should say that we stayed in Marion’s
guesthouse, a concrete “shed” that she completely redid with two bedrooms, a
screened veranda, and artwork on the walls—in the guesthouse—that is far more
expensive than anything Pat and I will ever own. It was an open, delightful residence, made
all the more attractive because of Marion’s
thoughtfulness as a host. Pat and I
concluded that we could live perfectly happily in this shed if we were retired
and wanted a place in tropical Australia.
First we had to learn how to drive on the left side of
the street. Since Marion lives in a semi-rural area (sugarcane
is the crop) and there was not a lot of traffic, we rented a car and figured it
out. Once we got used to it, which was
quickly, it wasn’t that hard. My biggest
challenge was signaling a turn--I had the cleanest windshield in northeastern Australia
because every time I turned on the turn signal I turned on the windshield wiper
instead. But we drove without
mishap. (We also decided we liked their
way of indicating a through street; instead of putting stop signs everywhere,
they put up “give way” signs on streets--so one must look for traffic when the
cross-street has the right of way, but one does not have to stop if there is no
traffic. I still often stopped, however,
because I had to figure out which lane I was supposed to be in when I did get
onto the through street. And when we got
home after our trip, and I drove to the end of our alley, I had to stop AGAIN
to figure out which lane I was supposed to be in.) There was a large sticker in the middle of
the steering wheel reminding American and non-British Europeans to stay to the
left. Elliott also kept reminding me.
It was the middle of winter when we were there. But we were close to the equator (about
16-17° south—Minneapolis,
by comparison, is about 45° north) in the area of the tropical
rainforests. At night the temperature
got down to the mid-to-high 60s; during the day it got perhaps to the low
80s. Perfect for sleeping and perfect
for tramping around. During their
summer, we were told, it approaches or exceeds 100°[1]
nearly every day and it rains part of every day. (That I would find unbearable. There is a reason beyond forbearers that I
live in Minnesota.) Everything was lush, green, and flowering. The one thing that took us by surprise—which
it wouldn’t have if we had thought about it—was that we lost daylight! Of course!
It was winter. Instead of getting
dark at 9:00 or later, as it
does mid-summer in Minnesota,
it was getting dark about 6:30
or so. But their seasonal variation in
daylight hours is less than ours, a range of perhaps 13-14 hours, rather than
ours, which goes from about 8 to 16, winter to summer.
Each morning about 6:00
or a little after we were awakened by the cacophony of hundreds (thousands?) of
squawking/singing/chirping birds.
One of the great delights of our trip was spending time
with Marion’s
son-in-law Norm, a retired 7th-grade teacher who is also a
naturalist par excellence. He took us on
two ventures. One was a
nearly-three-hour trek in the rainforest (following the exact same path trod by
President Bill Clinton a few years earlier). We arrived about 7:00 a.m. and had the whole place to ourselves. By the time we were exiting, the tour buses
were beginning to arrive. We learned an
enormous amount, only some of which I can remember and won’t bother to bore you
with. At one point, Norm strode off into
the rainforest—the floor of which is remarkably open, because it is so
shaded—and grabbed a piece of a plant to show us. Unfortunately, he brushed part of the leaf
against his skin. It was a burning
bush: When one touches it, even barely,
it injects tiny little “straws” into your skin, thus opening the flesh under
your skin to the air. It causes excruciating
pain. (When we met Norm later that same
day, he had poured battery acid over the part of his skin that had the burning
bush pieces in it—he said it was less painful and the skin would heal faster
from the acid than from the burning bush, which can take 10-12 weeks.) In any event, even in the depths of winter,
the rainforest was wet. And there were a
lot of plants that no one from the upper Midwest
would ever recognize.
Pat
commented, when we were done with our walk, that at least she there weren’t any
snakes (of which she is scared to death).
Norm said, “that’s only because you never looked up.” Pat turned a light shade of green.
The other thing Norm did was take us on tour of the beach
and the mangrove forests. When the tide
is out in front of Marion’s (and Pris and Norm’s) house, one can walk out
literally for miles on the sand. (And it
hurts to walk barefooted because there are small ridges left from the receding
ocean water, which are not soft!) We
found dozens of live starfish and watched them move and flip over, snails,
crabs, and so on. Then into the
mangroves, which was kind of creepy because they have long roots that stick out
from the trunk and curve down into the sand (water when the tide is in). They also grow very densely, so walking into
a mangrove forest is sort of spooky because it is dark. We NEVER would have gone in where we did and
walked through the black muck and undergrowth without Norm—but since (he told
us. . . .) he had taken classes of students in there, we figured we were pretty
safe. Found all sorts of interesting
flora and fauna, some of which Pat brought home and she and Norm ate after he
grilled them on the barbie.
Another great delight of the trip was the wonderful time
we had with Australian friends, Stella and Rowland Evans, with whom we had
spent time in Minneapolis nearly 20 years earlier and had since seen them once
when we visited Wagga Wagga in 2000. We
visited their place in Port Douglas (where Australians with means go to get
away from the awful Sydney/Melbourne winter, where it gets down into the
40s). One night we went out to eat and
then to cane toad races (where one blows one of those unfurling paper birthday
gizmos at big toads on a table to get them to jump). Elliott took second in one race and won a
bottle of champagne, which he gave to Rowland because Rowland bought Elliott’s
ticket to the race. It was pretty
amusing to see these people gathered around a big table (many adults) blowing
this paper doohickey at toads. (Cane
toads were brought into Australia
to eat the cane beetles, which were wreaking havoc on the sugar cane
crops. Unfortunately, the cane toads
neither dug up the larvae or ate the beetles off the plants, so all they have
done is multiply and become a pest without any offsetting benefit. Elliott and I went out every night around the
guesthouse with torches (“flashlights” to Americans) and found dozens of cane
toads.)
Rowland planned an overnight trip for us to Cooktown,
which is the last vestige of civilization on the northeast coast of Australia. We drove up in their SUV one day on the
inland route, seeing some of the interior highlands. En route we stopped at the Lion’s Den Inn,
which is not a place any of us would ever want to stay. It had a bar, a restaurant (of sorts), and
about 7-8 “rooms” that were connected tin sheds, as far as I could tell. It was in the middle of nowhere. (But they were kind enough to have souvenir
shirts in maroon and gold, the University
of Minnesota colors, so
Pat bought one for me for my birthday.)
We
stayed at the small village
of Cooktown, so named
because that is where Captain James Cook landed, the first European to set foot
on the continent. He did so
unexpectedly, because his ship was blown onto the reefs so they had to go
ashore for two months or so to make repairs. We stayed at a very nice hotel (especially for
a small, remote town) and had cocktails by the pool (what else can one ask for
in a trip?). A large marker has been
erected on the shore showing the exact point where Cook (or someone from his
ship) came ashore. How do they know
that?
We
then drove back via the coast the next day on the “Bloomfield Track.” “Track,” no matter how you envision the term,
is a vast overstatement of the conditions under which one travels. The track is perhaps an 8-foot-wide swath
through the rainforest, perhaps created by two passes of a road grader. Maybe somebody threw some gravel down at some
time, but not everywhere. It was steeply
up and down, rocky, ran through streams, and we averaged about 8 miles per
hour. We were glad we were in an SUV;
our rental car never would have made it. We got to see the rainforest up close. The best part of the trip was having such a
good time chatting with Stella and Rowland; after about an hour, the rainforest
begins to look the same when you’re driving through it.
We went to a Rainforest Habitat place (a commercially-run
outfit but one that is instructive and not outrageously expensive) where we saw
hundreds of varieties of multi-colored birds and Elliott got to pet and feed
kangaroos and wallabies. These were
quite used to humans being around, obviously; I doubt they would have been so
friendly in the wild.
Elliott and Pat went parasailing. I wanted to go, but my stomach does funny
things to me when I get to heights that are unprotected (I can eat dinner next
to the window on the 95th floor of the John Hancock building in
Chicago and think nothing of it, but I do not do well on Ferris wheels). I worried that I might not do well dangling
at the end of a 100-meter rope perhaps 60-70 meters up in the air over the
water. But the two of them had a great
time. They told me the view was fabulous.
We also went scuba diving in the Great
Barrier Reef. As
non-certified divers, we had to go through a bunch of rigmarole with
instructors and had to have no more than 4 people to each guide. The first guide that we had kept linking Pat
and me together because I kept floating up (I think my vest wasn’t adjusted
correctly) and we didn’t see all that much (although I can say I have had the
experience of diving). Pat and Elliott
went down a second time and had a much better experience--they got down to the
bottom and looked around and found a sea cucumber (a worm). One thing I noticed was the pressure--my ears
hurt when I was down very far, and although I tried to do what they instructed
us to do to eliminate the pressure, it didn’t work for me. And even though this was the tropics, the
water was not that warm. By the end of
their second dive, both Pat and Elliott had chattering teeth.
One thing Elliott got see to his heart’s content was
crocodiles. We went to a crocodile park
and saw them by the dozens. And a
crocodile show. (We learned that we
could outrun a croc on land, but wouldn’t have to run far because they are
opportunistic predators. In the water,
however, we would lose, because they can drag us under. We can hold our breath about 3 minutes. They can hold theirs about 8 hours.) At the same park they had cassowaries. Unless you have an unusual interest in
tropical orthinology, you would not know about cassowaries. We certainly did not. They are large birds (taller than I am, so
over 6’) with an aggressive female who protects her territory. Their heads are bright blue and red. We cannot outrun them because they can get up
to 35 kph. While aggressive, they (at
least the ones in the park) eat gently--Elliott fed one of the chunks of
fruit. There has been one known human
death from a cassowary attack, in the 1930s, when a young boy ran to protect
his dog from a cassowary, and the claw of the bird ripped his carotid
artery. More recently, however, we
received a newspaper clipping from Rowland, which described a problem in the
parking lot at one of the rainforests around Port Douglas. It seemed that the cassowaries were coming
out of the rainforest into the parking lots--and attacking vehicles that were
maroon or blue. No one had an
explanation for this odd behavior.
Elliott also got to see a lot of geckos, which come out
at night and hang on the fascia boards and the walls to catch bugs. He was particularly interested in these
inasmuch as he has two of them in a large aquarium in his bedroom.
Apart from the length of the transit itself, Australia is a
wonderful place to visit, especially when one has such a marvelous host as Marion and such good
friends as the Evanses to visit. (Elliott concluded that he didn’t care that
much for Australian restaurant food--except the largest hamburger in the
Australia that he got on a little day trip we took to the highlands--but that
he really liked everything Marion made (and she had us to dinner several
times). But for the fact that we have a
lot of other places we want to see before we die, we would go back often.
* * *
The bedroom in which we stayed at Marion’s was painted a bright yellow-gold
(think of a bright school bus). This is
not a color I would, in the abstract, think would be attractive in a room. But it worked. So we painted two of the walls in Elliott’s
room that same color when we got back.
He was uncertain about it at first, but once it was done, he thought it
was much better than white. (Krystin
commented, after it was done, that it was distinct improvement over the plain
white, which made his room look like any hotel room one had ever seen.) We’ll leave it to the next owners to cover it
up (or wallpaper over it).
And then I got tired of our dingy, 1931 basement. When we first moved in, I painted most of the
cinder-block walls white. After 15
years, they were looking drab, and I had never gone all the way around the
basement or all the way to the floor.
So, since we liked the bright gold upstairs, I bought several more
gallons and Pat and I spent spare time for 6-7 weeks completely covering the
walls with bright gold. We also painted
all the shelving and windows bright orange and all the support and vertical
beams a bright lime green. When we were
nearly done, Pat pointed out that we had done our basement in retro 1970s, the
days of avocado appliances and gold shag carpeting. It’s not what we intended, but at least it is
not dull and depressing. We told the
kids that when we sell the house, and potential buyers shriek at the horrible
combination of bright colors in the basement, we will tell them that our
children painted it.
* * *
As we have done from time to time over the last 20 years,
we visited our friend Christine Grant at the University of Iowa
this fall. We went down for the
Minnesota-Iowa football game, and Christine was kind enough to arrange for us
to sit in the press box. That was
especially nice because (1) it was a crappy day, overcast and about 40°, and
(2) Minnesota
got killed in the game. We at least got
to sample the endless supply of food that is provided. We also began making plans with her about a
visit to Scotland next summer. Christine
is a Scot by birth and upbringing, and told us that she may try to be there at
least part of the time we are, which we would find delightful. So next summer we are going over with our
neighbors for a couple of weeks and hope to have part of our plans determined
by a native.
* * *
On the house and family news front, my Dad is doing fine
at the Kenwood. Elliott is in 7th
grade and doing well. Pat’s and my jobs
continue; we both still very much like what we do. The dog and the cat still don’t get
along. Elliott’s geckos continue to
exist in their aquarium. Pat is
promising to get a puppy later in December, so that when Cody--the dog--is no
longer able to run with her, the younger dog will have grown up enough to be
able to do so. The cat, of course, will
hate it, but since she is 16 years old, one would think she would not be around
all that long to care. At present,
however, she is nearly as springy and lively as a kitten, so she doesn’t seem
to be facing imminent death.
We
haven’t done any more remodeling, although we did build what I jokingly refer
to as “the west deck,” in our backyard. (Of course, we did this on one of the hottest
weekends of the year, over the 4th of July.) We finally took down the big swingset/playset,
after 12 years--the wood was giving way and Elliott, at 12, wasn’t using it any
more. So we had a 12’ by 24’ sandbox,
edged by 4” x 4” boards. What to do with
it. We could have turned it into a
garden, or dug out the boards and the sand and put in grass. That was all too much work. So we bought deck boards and covered the
whole thing over. And then put up a
cloth screen house so we could sit out there on summer nights and not get eaten
alive by mosquitoes. It worked quite
well. (We had over for dinner a group
that included my Dad and some of his friends--long-time family friends--shortly
after we put in the deck. Our carpenter
friend laughed out loud when we told him how we built it. He assured us that the deck would be there long
after the house had collapsed. We
apparently overbuilt it a bit.) Inasmuch
as we have also added a couple of extensions to our gardens in order to plant
more exotic varieties of hosta (which then require little attention), I believe
we have about 3 square yards of grass left in the back yard. Next we’ll see what we can do about the front
yard. (I must say I am astonished at how
expensive some of the more interesting hosta plants are.)
* * *
As
for the situation in the U.S.,
one bumper sticker I saw this fall summed it all up for me: I love my country but I fear my government.
I
wish you all a happy and prosperous 2004.
We are off to Cancun on December 20 for
a week in warm weather, something that appears even more attractive because as
I finish this letter it is snowing heavily and then the temperatures are
expected to head down.
[1] I was
browsing through Krystin’s (American) astronomy textbook one weekend. One of the chapters discussed temperature
scales. The two most widely used are the
Kelvin scale (primarily for scientific purposes) and the Centigrade scale. The authors also referred to “the archaic
Fahrenheit” scale, used only in the United States.
