D.C.: Cherry Blossoms and Heartburn

First view of the U.S. Capital from aboard the Palmetto.

I'm arriving in our nation's capital for less than 24 hours as I train my way back up the eastern seaboard. I'm feeling sad, somewhat disassociated, which is odd as I'm on my way home from a terrific visit with one of my oldest and best friends.

It's the capital building itself. It sends a direct current through my heart, creating a sharp burn from the moment the crown of its dome pops into view.

The cherry-lined shore of the Potomac.

From Fredericksburg to Alexandria, VA, Amtrak's Palmetto line runs up the Potomac. It is a big river, wide and throaty brown, but not as long as Virginia's famed James River. With its headwaters in the western Appalachian Mountains beyond the Blue Ridge, the James -- originally the Powhatan, like those who lived here for thousands of years pre-colonization -- brought in ever increasing numbers of British colonialists and took out tobacco, the labor intensive and soil killing export that made the settlements, with the labor of enslaved peoples, economically viable. The James dumps into the Chesapeake at the large, protected harbor of Newport News/Hampton Roads: a place I've never been but know as the primary competitor for the New England sub- and ship-building Navy towns around which I grew up and still reside.

D.C.'s fabulous cherries are in bloom along the Potomac, the Tidal Basin, and every street. Yet just as in my previous post about the desert, the burning pain in my heart vies with all this beauty for my attention.

I'm a product of the school of American Exceptionalism: I was taught to believe and accepted as reality that the U.S. is different from other nations, that our values and political systems are unique in history such that it is our destiny to lead.

A magnificent old cherry propped up outside the Library of Congress.

I believed it about our country and, as a citizen of this country, about myself as well.

I took off the rosy glasses about myself at 14, about the time when many, teetering on adolescence, do.

My first muse and champion, my Grandmother Mary, had died several years earlier. Fourteen was the age at which I first quit the Catholic Church and understood myself to be a lesbian. None of this fit the radiantly perfect image of who I was intended to be.

By 1975 I'd also had to adjust my rosy lenses in regard to the country. I wore a leather peace sign around my neck and had completed my high school prep watching the Watergate trials and Nixon's resignation.

Yet still, my "city on a hill" syndrome of romantic nationalism persisted. Once it gets its barbed hooks under your skin, removal can be difficult and painful.

In 1978, on our junior class trip to D.C., my first views of the Capital Rotunda, the Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington Memorials, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court awed me with their grandiose aesthetic portrayals of our "uniquely" American values.

Even the first Presidential election in which I was able to vote in 1980 -- with an apparently rigged Iranian hostage crisis, devastated cities and rampaging inflation working together to sink President Jimmy Carter, the most moral politician I knew -- didn't manage to put the final nail in a coffin that was almost but not completely sealed for me.

There have been thousands of nails added since. And still, I held onto something -- can I call it hope? -- until January 6, 2021 and the assault of armed citizens on the Capital building in an attempt to overturn a legitimate election.

Let's not kid ourselves. While the coverup of and gaps in the teaching of American history are very thorough, at some point most of us are forced to accept that a nation built on genocide, land theft, and enslaved labor is rotten at its core.

What some of us keep hoping for -- followers of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others -- is that our efforts for change will create opportunities for redemption.

I'll keep working for #justice, for #love. But the sight of the capital dome, and the memories of armed hordes assaulting Capital police desecrating symbols of our democratic ideals, is now a shot of direct current that burns my heart.

The rear of the Supreme Court: "Justice the Guardian of Liberty."

#americanexceptionalism

#powhatan

Beauty and Suffering, Starsky and Hutch: Matches Made in Heaven

A velvet creosote bush two miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Deserts are miraculous places. Constant reminders of how much suffering exists within and alongside beauty.

The southern borderlands' dry clear light and relentless winds tattoo us, exfoliating potential tears and sweat from skin. Sitting quietly, we become the busyness of acorn woodpeckers, yellow-rumped warblers, lesser goldfinches, Mexican jays, a whole host of diverse hummingbirds. Jumping chollas, saguaros, flowering yuccas and creosote create vast expanses and palettes of color.

These dualities seem even greater here in the U.S.-Mexican southwest, what Gloria Anzaldúa identified in 1987 as Borderlands/La Frontera. Subtitled The New Mestiza, this book was and is iconic to me as a queer, adopted person. It is a layered work of prose and poetry, dream and theory and identity, built on Anzaldúa's life as a Chicana, lesbian, activist and writer to remap the ways we understand false physical "borders" of nation into the psychic and cultural worlds in which we are alive together (see the new critical edition released in 2021 by Aunt Lute Books. I was lucky to interview Gloria in 1989 when I wrote about this book for a special edition of TRIVIA, A Journal of Ideas I co-edited with Lise Weil.).

First day in the borderlands, driving our rented gray Dodge Challenger "muscle car" we call "The Ghost" and jokingly referring to ourselves as Starsky and Hutch, we were pulled over by Border Patrol. The car does have a certain "look" that might in some minds contradict our own "look" of old lady white privilege. Our GPS had us turning in circles as we emerged from a birding preserve in a canyon where, it turned out, BP had been running an "immigration operation" for a couple of weeks.

They searched our trunk. 

My generous partner in crime (Hutch) with "The Ghost."

This beautiful, painful, arid place, where the Sierra Madres meet the Sonoran Desert, is a good place to find myself mid-Lenten season. According to the christian bible, Lent represents the part of the liturgical year in which Jesus fasts in the desert for 40 days, at the end of which, starving, he is tempted by the devil. Satan does his best to lure Jesus with the rewards white America loves best: reputation, power, possessions.

Birdwatching in the desert during Lent: intentionally stripping away distractions from suffering and reflecting on the beauty of our connections. What are your primary distractions? Social media? Food? Love and affection and sex? Work? Wealth? Privilege? Accumulation?

Like the vermillion flycatchers darting ceaselessly above the San Pedro river to feed themselves, or the hummingbirds who eat all day long, work is both my primary distraction and connections.

A vermilion flycatcher, one of many perched along the San Pedro.

It's as impossible to ignore the green-striped border patrol trucks at the mouth of practically every wash, the proliferation of state troopers in the medians, as it is the brightly colored birds. Law enforcement is heavy here, where the U.S. has built walls and fences across the frontier over which indigenous peoples once migrated freely. Where we attempt to keep out those suffering from the violence and starvation of our own banana republic policies and actions.

Nationalism, punishment, greed, a lack of mercy -- these are the sins of our national culture against the world we've been given to steward and to share. As a nation, have we failed these crucial tests?

And still, like birds: how can we keep from singing. For justice. For love.

#vermilionflycatcher

#riparian

#lafrontera

#borderlands

#newmestiza

#newblogpost

The Northeast Regional, Part II: Freight Trains and Junk Yards

American automotive wasteland, as seen from the Palmetto.

"The consequence of the projection of national sins, and specifically racism, onto one region is a mis-narration of history and American identity. The consequence of truncating the South and relegating it to a backwards corner is a misapprehension of its power in American history."

--Imani Perry
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

It's still dark in NYC when I board the Palmetto for South Carolina.

The light emerges almost painfully slowly over the New Jersey marshes and petroleum plants.

By the time we hit Philadelphia, the car fills up. I am one of a small handful of White people on this train of 90+ souls headed south.

It's a 14 hour trip. I chose the railroad over flying for several reasons, the most important of which is that, simply put, flying has one of the biggest negative impacts on our environment.

Commercial air travel accounts for 3 to 4% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing demand for flights is outpacing efficiencies.

Yet still we feel, as White Americans do about so much, that our time is more valuable than the planet.

Off the soap box and onto the train! I'm on the train. I'm on the train. I'm still on the train, 15 hours later. Georgia O'Keefe said about her paintings, "Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time."

I'm on my way to see friends. Traveling, like all else, suffers from (White American) demands for immediacy.

We are delayed outside of Richmond, first by a freight train -- Amtrak runs on heavy rail lines for this route -- and then a medical emergency, requiring a wait for EMS services before resuming. Again north of Charleston by a second freight. Freight owns these tracks.

American freight, Richmond, VA.

Another reason I chose the train is that flying swiftly over landscapes has always felt to me like an unnatural way to travel. My body misses participating in the geographical changes in color, topography, and climate that occur when we move across hundreds of miles.

The differences between Maine and NYC, or NYC and Charleston, SC are significant both geographically and culturally. They spin out on the other side of the glass as well as on the inside of the train. Freight trains marbled with graffiti. Flat, rolling farmland already dressed in bright spring green. Shadbush in bloom. Richer, warmer skin and vocal tones.

It's a pretty grim weather day, sporting heavy, low-hanging clouds that mute these shifting tones. By Fayetteville, NC rain splatters the windows.

You know that old saying about being on the "wrong side" of the tracks? Facts are being alongside the noise, vibration, and detritus of freight train tracks does not make for optimal locations, so when you're on the train you get a good look at the hidden underbelly of American culture, the places we live and work that you don't see on the internet.

If you've never questioned overconsumption and throw-away consumerism in the U.S., take the train south and keep your eye on the landscape.

In North Carolina, acres upon acres of automotive junk yards spool alongside the tracks. I am astonished, a little fascinated, saddened realizing I've not considered the fate of this centerpiece of American consumerism.

We have junkyards in Maine, too. They can be part of the re-use economy. I've prowled several of them years ago, when parts were more interchangeable and accessible to standard humans: gas caps. Doors. Mirrors. Fenders. Rocker panels. It's the scope, the broad expanses of these tumbled fields of our automotive detritus nestled along the tracks that shocks me.

Where will your vehicle end up when you are ready for a new one?

How much time are you willing (or able: still a privilege) to take to visit friends and family?

Will the changes in the ways the pandemic has helped me to see the world more slowly take root more largely in our cultures?

#autohell

#soulofamerica

#imaniperry

#slowtravel

#georgiaokeefe

#newblogpost

The Northeast Regional, Part I: Salt Ponds and Fog

The southeastern CT shore as viewed from
Amtrak's Northeast Regional.

I'm on the Northeast Regional from Boston to NYC. First time in two+ years of pandemic time. The Ides of March. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong and I'll have no rationale -- say, a nuclear war started by Russia in Ukraine -- to run home prematurely.

This train service humps its way down the New England seaboard -- South Station, Back Bay, Rt 128, Providence, Westerly, Mystic, New London, Old Saybrook, New Haven, NYC. It rides the rails of the geography of my youth.

Boarding, I succumb to instinct and get a seat by the left-hand windows. As we run from downeast to southwest, these face the coast and the tracks run right along the shoreline.

I've driven down to Boston from Maine and already, by southern Maine, the coast has softened and by the time we get to to the salt marshes and broad rivers of CT it appears to me to be almost velvety in color, hue, and form. There is something so inviting and welcoming to me about those lengths of salt grass and cat tails and sand, the flat, calm, warmer horizon merging seamlessly into sky without the familiar border of granite teeth.

I get curious around Westerly RI. Even though I grew up on its beaches and in its restaurants and bars, house sitting here for my high school English teacher -- and even though, at 15, I was arrested here -- I realize I know little if any of its meaningful history. What I do know: that Stonington and Westerly high schools have one of the longest-running Thanksgiving Day football games in the nation (Bears vs. Bulldogs) -- that I think we never won during my tenure there?! -- and that there was a large Italian population (of which the cops were particularly comprised, at least in our urban myths).

When I look it up, I'm surprised and even a little delighted. Like where I now live, Westerly was historically a granite town -- maybe thus the Italians, as in Stonington, ME?! Not only that, but Westerly granite is known for its pinkish hue -- just like Deer Isle, famous for its pink tricolor.

Yet even more delightful are the salmon: “The Pawcatuck River flows on the western border of Westerly and was once renowned for its own species of Westerly salmon, three of which are on the town's official seal."

Its own unique species! We knew the river only as a state boundary, one we crossed fluidly and with regularity. It's short, only about 15 miles long, and flows into Little Narragansett Bay.

And the salt ponds. It's a wonder any of us survived weekends as teen agers driving in this area during the 1970's: drinking, smoking weed, driving through the inevitable fog. Driving into trees and cement block houses, going through windshields and losing too many lives.

But those beautiful large salt ponds, three in all, "serve as shallow, reef-like pools whose outer walls form the long, white beaches for which the town is renowned." These carry the names the land's original inhabitants bestowed upon them, and flow from my mouth in a round, familiar way that makes me homesick. Weekapaug. Misquamicut. Maschaug.

White America. Always driving into the fog, crashing, continuing on.

#StoningtonCT

#NortheastRegional

#Westerly

#Mystic