A Walk Among the Turkeys

Out for a Sunday morning walk, I headed for nearby Wirth Park and saw a white-bearded man sitting on a lawn chair reading a book. His chair overlooked a copse of oak trees and white pines. A nice spot, I thought, as I passed him, heading for the copse. I wondered what book he was reading, then my mind drifted to other things as it often does.

Fortunately I came out of my reverie to notice that I was walking in the midst of a rafter of wild turkeys. They kept their distance, maybe 25 feet, but otherwise seemed unperturbed by my presence. I was tempted to stop but I knew that would actually would alarm them. I just slowed my pace a little and enjoyed the moment of peaceful coexistence. My hunter's instinct intruded with the thought that if I'd had a weapon, even a slingshot, I could be roasting wild turkey on the Weber that night. Though I suspect if I had been hunting, the turkeys would have sensed it and been more wary.

Cornell University

Theodore Wirth Park, Minneapolis' largest, has many miles of official trails and many more miles of unofficial ones. During the 2020 pandemic summer of solitude, I took the opportunity to explore them thoroughly. On these walks, I bring with me a water-bottle carrier with a pouch for my phone and other odds and ends, plus a pair of binoculars, just in case there's some bird watching to be done. It's been a luxury to live so close to the park and over the years I've seen a considerable variety of animals -- coyotes, foxes, snapping turtles, bald eagles, harrier hawks, coopers hawks, falcons, blue herons, green herons, egrets, orioles, goldfinches, wood ducks, starlings, chickadees, pileated woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, killdeer, nuthatches and others.

The park runs along Bassett Creek, a stream that originates from Medicine Lake out in the western suburbs and flows through downtown Minneapolis and into the Mississippi River. Unlike the more famous Minnehaha Creek, most of Bassett Creek is invisible, flowing under the infrastructures of modern civilization. But in Wirth Park, its meanderings are visible as it passes through wooded hills and marshes.

A typical walking route takes me east of the park, passing through old neighborhoods along Upton, Vincent or Washburn avenues before I enter via a back way across a little-used railway. This hooks me up with a paved trail that passes a pond, then goes under the Plymouth Avenue bridge.

The creek narrows as it passes under the bridge and forms a short set of rapids. This is a favorite lingering spot for hikers and bikers. For a while, on a concrete abutment, there was a kind of shrine composed of candles and various bric-a-brac. Among the items was a note stuffed into a mason jar. One day I pulled it out and read it.

The note was a vague but sad lament of a mother who had lost a child. She had created the little shrine as a memorial. I felt the sadness, yet, for some reason, the skeptic in me doubted it was really a true story. But what does it matter? Maybe the story was true enough in the sense that it conveyed a genuine sadness that couldn't be put to words in any other way.

I think that may have been the same day I looked up and noticed an inscription etched into the concrete of the bridge -- a quote from the poet, Mary Oliver:

"Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us."

Going south, the trail moves into an area of scattered trees overlooking a marshy pool. It's a good spot for birding and I've actually chatted with a couple of bird enthusiasts who like to lurk there. A ways beyond, a side trail cuts through an area of tall grass toward a copse of scraggly trees.

In this copse I found one of my favorite places, a small clearing transformed into a kind of natural temple by who knows who. I get the impression that the person, or people, who created it and once tended it are gone now. It's basically a trail of stones leading to a circle of stones around what was once a flower bed. Wild plants intrude now but the flowers are still hanging on. A well-used fire pit outside the circle tells of youths out on nighttime adventures.

An old, decaying stump serves as an altar. Placed upon it are many doodads that I can only assume are offerings. Offerings to whom, I'm not sure. There's no references to any specific religion, so I imagine the offerings are to the spirit of the creek, who, except in the park, must feel quite neglected.

I decided to make my own offerings when I come by -- something found, usually, and nothing plastic: a colorful pebble, a rusty wheel nut, a coin, a shot glass, and so on. These things are sometimes there when I come back; sometimes they're gone. I complete the ritual by walking around the circle of stones three times. Then I'm on my way.

Walking has become a centerpiece of my life. I'm drawn to it more than, say, jogging or riding a bike, which certainly have their merits. But with walking I can do two things I enjoy very much -- thinking and seeing.

A toad on the trail. Would you notice it if you were riding or jogging? Or, if you did, would you stop to look more closely?

New Book Coming

Moonlit Shipwreck by the Sea, Thomas Moran

Update: There have been some delays. Publication is now planed for January 2023.

I have a new book coming out soon: Dark Waters: The Voyage of the Bar Jack.

The plan is to publish mid November if all goes well.

The book is an alternate-history sailing adventure with horror and paranormal elements, much of it inspired by Mayan mythology. The work sprang from a fantasy role-playing game that my brother and I are developing called Dark Trails. The novel is intended to help create a world ripe with possibilities for adventure.

I've been describing it as "flintlocks and sorcery" with pirates, monsters and ESP. I plan to write more about the book's origins and development in later posts.

In the meantime, here's a look at the opening passage:

 

*********

Chapter 1: A Fool's Errand  

 

 

 

17 February, 1819, London

 

With a degree of nervousness, I stepped out of the carriage and beheld the imposing edifice of Newgate Prison, made more ominous by the chilly winter drizzle. The gloomy interior of gray stone, heavy banded doors and iron gates did little to lighten my mood, nor did the stench. The Keeper ushered me down a corridor and into a small visiting room.

“Wait here, sir, if you please,” he said. “We'll bring the prisoner shortly.”

The door clanged shut. I removed my gloves and top hat, put them on the rough-hewn wooden table, sat down and checked my pocket watch – ten o'clock. As I idled the minutes, my nervousness verged on trepidation. I was about to meet a pirate.

The pirate had been the sailing master of the notorious Vipere, a French-built corvette that had dared to prowl the waters off England's coast, plundering many valuable cargoes. Its crew even once brazenly pillaged a seaside village, murdering two of its men and raping several women. Despite the war and the threat of invasion, the Admiralty had to act. Piracy in the remote corners of the world could be overlooked pending other priorities, but piracy so close to home could not be suffered.

A squadron was dispatched but the Vipere kept eluding its grasp. Eventually a timely bit of information led the squadron to the West Indies and, after a lively chase, it cornered the Vipere and battered it into submission. The surviving crew members were hauled back to London, tried and sentenced to hang. However, after last year's colossal naval battle at Guernsey, the King suspended the hanging of pirates, such was the need for men to refill the depleted ranks of the Royal Navy.

The door opposite me opened and a guard escorted the shackled prisoner into the room. Though I am loathe to admit it, my nervousness edged toward fear when the prisoner sat in the chair across the table. There was a disturbing fierceness in the eyes of the pirate before me, the eyes of Ann Rackham.

...

*********

The Power of Boredom

Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine? Ukraine was no threat to him or Russia. The risks of invasion were great and the cost, even for the rosiest scenario, was going to be high. Maybe Putin really believed Russia had legitimate security concerns. Or maybe he believed the nationalistic notion that Ukraine is an inherent part of Russia and never should have become a separate country. 

 

Or maybe he was bored.

 

Putin had gathered all the reins of government in Russia to himself, winning all the power-plays and crushing all viable opposition. But, the problem with winning is what do you do after you've won. Attempting to resolve complicated internal economic and environmental issues is tedious and slow and successes are hard to come by. Rarely does tackling these problems result in glory, cheering crowds and the thrill of winning. But conquest can. Invading another country is anything but boring. Isn't it?

 

Ever since reading the book, Either/Or, by *Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian, I've kept boredom high on the list of drivers of human actions, both small and big. The book, published in 1843, is written from two perspectives. One is that of an irreverent hedonist who asserts boredom is not only the root of all evil but the great repulsive force that drives history:

 

People of experience maintain it's sensible to start from a principle. I grant them that and start with the principle that all men are boring ...

 

... We can trace this from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. From that time boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of the population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored in union, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored as a family, then the population increased and people were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of building a tower so high it reached the sky. The very idea is as boring as the tower was high, and a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand.

 

One doesn't have to ponder too long before seeing the potential corrosive effects of boredom. Marriage can get a little dull so an affair will add zing and drama to one's life. Driving safely can get boring, too, so speeding and running stoplights generates some excitement. (I would say impatience and boredom are closely linked.) Drug and alcohol abuse often are ways of staving off boredom (or at least that's how they start). It's clear people will go to great lengths and take significant risks just to avoid boredom.

 

Fortunately, folks in the technology and entertainment industries are keenly aware of the boredom problem. They are here to help (and rake in huge sums of money). With all the smartphones, devices, social media, computer games and endless streams of video content, we're closing in on the time when a person will never have to pass another moment being bored.

 

In fact, I'd say, with all the resources being devoted toward anti-boredom solutions, the effort may very well be the primary driver of human evolution. The pinnacle of this evolution will occur when we've transformed ourselves into pure entertainment absorption organisms. All the tedious tasks of existence will be handled by machines.

 

Actually, I'm not so optimistic. Boredom finds a way. Nothing is so interesting or so engaging that it doesn't get boring sooner or later (even the war in Ukraine).

 

The truth is, naturally, that boredom has its role. It's the flip-side of exciting and you can't have one without the other (kind of like life and death). Recent neurological research suggests boredom is good for brain function and people should get, at least periodically, a healthy dose of it. 

 

Buddhists have known this for two thousand years or so. Buddhist meditation can be seen, in part, as a way of embracing boredom: Let's just sit still and be quiet for a while and do nothing. Buddhists don't have a monopoly on this wisdom; others have picked up on it, too. Meetings of Quakers, for example, are often nothing more than the group sitting silently for a time.

 

I typically watch an hour or two of television a day, but when the show is over, I turn it off in the hopes I'll move onto something more creative or worthwhile (like reading a book or writing one). However, when the the television goes off, I'm usually beset by a hollow feeling. It's a hollowness that wants to be filled with another episode or show. But this hollowness, or boredom, passes and I move on to something less exciting but ultimately more worthwhile (like simply thinking).

 

In Either/Or, the other perspective is that of a judge who believes, instead of endlessly pursuing excitement and diversion, one needs to embrace routine, calmness and stability (i.e., stuff that's boring) as a means of experiencing life in a way that's ultimately richer than the experience of the hedonist striver. I believe Kierkegaard himself lands somewhere in the middle, but he acknowledges that the middle ground can be hard to find.

 

Perhaps, paradoxically, boredom is not as boring as it seems.

A Question of Loyalty

Events lately in the realm of politics and culture wars got me thinking about loyalty. It seems much of the trouble we're seeing is, at root, a matter of where people put their loyalties, or, rather, how they order their priority of loyalties.

I like to play board games and I'm an enthusiast of one called Advanced Squad Leader, a game that depicts infantry combat in World War II. It has a binder full of rules and a small but devoted following of mostly military history buffs. I play in tournaments and, while there's no cash prizes involved, the competition gets pretty intense. There's a rating system like with chess and a handful of top players dominate the tournaments (I'm not one of them). Cheating, however, is rare. Tempers can flare and things can get testy but, by and large, the competitors help each other with the rules because there's a lot of rules to remember.

So while mulling the subject of loyalty, it struck me that in the case of players of Advanced Squad Leader, their loyalty is to the rules and the spirit of the game. That loyalty has to take priority over winning. Without that loyalty the game breaks down and winning becomes meaningless. The same can be said for sports like football or basketball. However intensely loyal players may be to their teams, their higher loyalty has got to be with the sport itself and its rules.

Thinking along those lines, it becomes clear that the same can be said for democratic government. For it to function, a citizen's loyalty has got to be first and foremost to the principles of democracy. If it becomes so important to people that their favored party, ideology or leader wins that the rules of democratic society become secondary, then democracy itself is threatened.

Back in 2004 or so, I was at a large gathering where we watched a documentary about the failed coup attempt in Venezuela meant to overthrow Hugo Chavez. Many of the attendees at the gathering were pretty far left socialists and saw the film as demonstrating how the people of Venezuela rose up to defend Chavez's socialist revolution. I saw it differently. To me it was clear that many of the people opposing the coup attempt weren't doing it because they liked Chavez so much; they were doing it because he was the lawfully elected president. They opposed the coup because of their loyalty to democratic principles and the rule of law, not because of their loyalty to Chavez.

 

I mentioned this to a few people at the gathering and met with disagreement and suspicion. I wasn't on the team.

 

~

 

I didn't have to ponder the idea of loyalty for very long before things started getting fuzzy and complicated. Are there loyalties that are higher than democratic principles? Democracies have done their share of bad things: The internment of Japanese Americans during W.W. II is one example among many and far from the worst. So how do we determine what takes precedence over democratic principles?

 

Thomas Jefferson, however flawed in actuality, was probably on the right track with the phrase, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Here he lists the things that need to take precedence over majority rule. The ordering of the phrase is apt. Liberty is important but it shouldn't come at the cost of others' lives. Pursuing happiness is important but it should impinge on others' liberty.

 

With this in mind I tried to come up with a priority list of loyalties:

 

1. The Earth and its ability to sustain life 

 

I can't think of any logical reason something else would take precedence over this one. It would take belief in unearthly spiritual realms or dogged faith in the possibility humans could populate other planets in order to even start making a case the Earth was secondary to some other priority. Without the Earth and its ecosystem, the first of Jefferson's triad is absent: There is no life.

 

2. Natural rights, human rights, the right of living things to live their lives

 

A old coffee shop buddy of mine used to laugh at the idea of "natural" rights. "The only natural right I can think of is you have the right to be eaten," he quipped. Probably true, but, however difficult to ground natural rights empirically, they're pretty deep set in my bones and my experience tells me they're the right way to go -- they're the just way of treating others and being treated in turn. If this loyalty is not prominent in a culture, then liberty is essentially absent.

 

To me the great silver lining of American history is the growth of the perception that human rights apply to everyone.

 

3. Democratic principles and the rule of law

Here's the loyalty to the rules of the game that I discussed above.

4. Family, loved ones and friends

Here we get to instinctual loyalties that can get quite visceral and can easily overwhelm abstract loyalties like 1, 2 and 3. As social animals, it's clear we're geared to be loyal to the ones we're close to. Conflicts between these loyalties and, say, loyalty to the law are grist for creating dramatic tension in our stories and shows.

5. Groups, organizations, nations

Like 4, these loyalties are less abstract than 1, 2 and 3. Team loyalties can tap deep emotions. The potential for constructive endeavor is great, but so is the potential for destruction, particularly when team loyalty trumps loyalty to the rules of the game and human rights.

Side Note: America was founded on the ideas referenced in 2 and 3. To me, being a "loyal American" means loyalty to these principles. If your loyalty to Team America or America the Nation trumps your loyalty to human rights, democratic principles and the rule of law, then, by definition, you're not really a loyal American.

6. Ideologies and charismatic leaders

An extension of 5, these may be the most problematic loyalties. When loyalty to an ideology or to a leader becomes the top priority, then things can slip into real horror. People doing nasty things because of their loyalties to loved ones is probably inevitable, but it generally happens at a small enough scale that it can be contained. A society has mechanisms to deal with them and the whole is not threatened. But history shows that fanatical devotion to demagogues like Adolf Hitler or ideologies like communism can lead to carnage, destruction and suffering on a massive scale.

~

The question of loyalty is a big suitcase to unpack. What I've said here I can't claim to be anything more than a starting point for thinking about the subject.

 

I should note that religion can certainly fall into the category of ideology. I should also note that the ideas of a religion or ideology are not necessarily bad. Marx and Lenin had their insights, as did many religious prophets and leaders.

At the risk of contradicting myself, I believe that ideas -- whether religious, political, economic, scientific, or otherwise -- are best seen as tools that help us understand and cope with the world. We owe them no more loyalty than that. When our loyalty to ideas grows into unalloyed devotion, the ideas become ideologies. They stop being tools and become our masters.