Southern Summer Reading List

I'm not here right now. I'm taking a journey into the heart of the American South -- through literature, if not by body.

1. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (set in the Smokies, NC side)
2. Zora Neale Hurston: Complete Short Stories (Eatonville, Florida, mostly)
3. Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God (FL)
4. Cormac McCarthy: The Orchard Keeper
5. Cormac McCarthy: Outer Dark
6. Cormac McCarthy: Child of God
7. Cormac McCarthy: Suttree
[Those four McCarthy novels are all set in East TN roundabouts where myself & McCarthy grew up outside of Knoxville is how come I'm agonna read em. A synopsis of all McCarthy's novels is provided at this website here: http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/works/Default.htm]
8. John Berendt: Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil (Savannah, Georgia)
9. William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (Mississipp)
10. Gloria Naylor: Mama Day (South Caroline)

... I didn't cover Alabama, West Virginia or Kentucky (altho my mom would say Kentuckians is Yanks). Any suggestions?

Say No to GMOs

I have been opposed to GMOs since I heard of them. I believe it is a plan by major corporations (Monsanto, etc.) to take over the world's food supply. GMO seeds cannot be saved, and thus must be bought each farming season. This is a way for companies like Monsanto to use food as a weapon, an idea first presented by Nixon's secretary of Ag. It is indicative of the world's corruption that the very basis of life, food, is in danger of becoming a corporate trademark that will benefit the world's richest and most powerful corporations (exploiters) at the suffering of the world's most poor, hardest-working people (producers/nurturers).

This has been the major global trend for many generations, but globalization is making the issue of food more dire and frightening. Saving seeds, the magical givers of life, is a human right. As a human rights issue, we must protect our food sources from genetically modified seeds.

Vandana Shiva is one of the major world activists who advocates seed sovereignty. Her writings are great food for thought on the issue.

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine has just called for a moratorium on genetically modified foods. Let's stand behind them and call our political reps to tell them that we oppose the takeover of the world's food systems, and thus GMOs.

Dos Lobos

We lay in our tent, which was set under the tall ponderosas of the forest, and breathed crisp air through the small holes in our mummy bags. The last of the fire burned quietly and the hot coals broke apart in the cold night. Two long howls broke out – the wolves? – followed by two packs of coyotes that went yelping and yip-yipping down the ridge to the north and east sides of us. We are here to hear the San Mateo Pack, “Alpha Male 1114” and “Alpha Female 903.” Two lone wolves of the Mexican Wolf Blue Range reintroduction program. These two wolves have a lengthy history of capture and re-release, mostly due to wandering outside of the reintroduction area. Recently, though, AM1114 depredated his third cow in the National Forest and received a life sentence for it.
I want more than anything to see this wolf, to have some chance at witnessing its beauty before it meets its inevitable death trap. Throughout the day we walked the ridges above watering holes where the cattle gathered, looking for those silver jaws, ready to snap. We found nothing but we know they are trying every day to kill it. I am hoping it will come to me in the night.
George Frederick Ruxton, a Brit, traveled the American West in 1846 and camped along a tributary of Colorado’s South Platte River.

The night, once again, was cold and snowy, a wet snow that weighed heavily on the ponderosa pine boughs and forced them downward until the burden became too great, and with a ‘whoosh’ of collapsing snow the branch sprang upward. Ruxton loved such nights. ‘With a plentiful supply of dry pine-logs on the fire, and its cheerful blaze streaming far up into the sky,’ he watched the flames illuminate his picketed mules, the white fairyland coming down, and the curvature of the mountains beyond. As Ruxton lit his pipe and sat cross-legged under a makeshift tent of supple willow boughs and stretched deerskins, the blue smoke curling upward would take his thoughts to other nights and the conviviality of hearty companions.
This night, stretching out inside his blanket, Ruxton was satisfied that the great pile of wood on the conflagration would survive until morning. But in the middle of the night the cold awakened him, and turning toward the fire, still burning brightly and cheerfully, he was astonished to see a large gray wolf sitting quietly before it, ‘his eyes closed and his head nodding in sheer drowsiness.’ [i]

Ruxton “had never seen or heard of one approaching so close as to warm his body, and for that purpose alone… I looked at him for some moments without disturbing the beast, and closed my eyes and went to sleep, leaving him to the quiet enjoyment of the blaze.”[ii]
And so I built the fire up as large as I could, until the flames were licking up towards the surrounding branches of trees. Scattered thickly under each ponderosa was a collection of dry branches lying on a thick bed of brown needles. Each trip back out under the pines produced an abundant armful of firewood. Soon the surrounding area was lit up brightly in flickering light, to spite the dark of new moon, to drive away bad spirits, I thought, and to draw the gray wolves to the warmth, I hoped.
What were the bad spirits I wished to drive away? The opposition of the wolves collected as darkly as a protuberant cloud over our heads, and I became perhaps overly expectant of its impending release. Passing through Glenwood, we had stopped at the convenient store. Inside were at least six framed photos of a woman named Heidi posing with stuffed mountain lions, deer and bears that she and her husband J.L. had shot and killed. In each photo Heidi wore a smug expression that showed the surety of her dominance over the dead animals. In one particularly disturbing frame, Heidi stood in front of a cabin with twelve taxidermied mountain lions posed around her. All of them had died just for these contrived postures that they would forever be fixed into, as a symbol of man’s dominion over nature.
I stood and shook my head at the photos, although I had promised myself I would reveal no such emotions in the convenient store. We had been warned of the mindset we would encounter in Glenwood and Reserve on our way into the Sand Flat area of the Gila National Forest, and vowed to ourselves to act disaffected, as our mission would suffer greatly from those who might question us.
A group of overweight men sat in the dark store in a circle, talking among themselves. Zak wore a folded bandana wrapped and tied around his head, a green T-shirt with a tree on it that expanded upwards toward his lengthening beard. “How are ya’ll doin?” he offered the men with a respectful nod. None of them looked up. There was an overt silence among them and then some remark about the weather. They would refuse to acknowledge our intrusion. The blonde lady behind the counter rang up our jug of water with a simple “thank you” for the economic exchange, and we walked out to escape the suffocating unwelcome that had oppressed us in the store.
Others in the parking lot looked at us with intimidating stares as they slammed the doors to their monumental pick-ups. Our car was packed full of our only possessions, which we had loaded up in northern New Mexico in order to come south to heed the desperate call of the disappearing wolves. They disappear under these people. They are a protected species under the Federal Endangered Species Act, but most people here know that hardly anyone comes around and their actions can go largely without notice. So they continue to trap the wolves; one of the most genetically rich packs of the reintroduction program has mysteriously disappeared in the last year. Our examining eye threatens everything they do, and so they shun us with a forceful scorn, even a covert violence. As we pull away, one of the men in the store stands up and gives us a hard, prolonged stare through the window.
Now farther north towards Reserve, a small block of private land dead-smack in the middle of the largest National Forest in the country. Most of the private land houses ranchers, who graze their cattle on the surrounding public land. In 1994 a resolution was passed here that urged every household head to own a gun. As far as we could see, Reserve was more welcoming than Glenwood, but as we passed through the door of the convenient store, a young man in camouflage narrowed his eyes at Zak.
North of Reserve we stopped at Apache Creek Store, across from Apache Creek campground. Behind the counter an overweight woman stood firmly in front of several posted signs: “Hungry? Eat an Environmentalist.” “God needed someone to take care of His creation. That’s why he made ranchers.” “Don’t ranchers deserve to have their natural habitat protected too?” And a photo of a wolf with thickly drawn crosshairs over it. The woman greeted us with suspicion. “What are you doing around here?” she demanded. “Just hiking and camping.” We were in the middle of the Gila and Apache National Forests, after all. Enjoying public lands should require no explanation, but here it was seen as trespassing, for the ranchers who were granted the privilege to graze their cattle on these lands somehow convinced themselves and those around them that it was their God-given right to control the terrain and all of its inhabitants, especially strangers who appear without explanation.
How did this mindset not only come about but also dig itself so deeply into so many minds, throughout the generations? As I walked with a friend before leaving northern New Mexico, she reminded me that from the beginning, the West was a frontier that inspired conquest and even total destruction in those who came to it. She tells me of a Western traveler named Edward Gross who shot hundreds of bison across the plains from a moving train, leaving miles of the slain buffalo behind him. With Gross as just one example, so many accompanied him in his total disregard for the ecosystem that thrived before his arrival, and especially in his total disregard for the ancient people that had inhabited those lands with relatively little impact for so long.
Another British traveler to the West, William Blackmore, wrote, “But sad as the fate of the Red Man is, yet, even as philanthropists, we must not forget that, under what appears to be one of the immutable laws of progress, the savage is giving place to a higher and more civilised race. Three hundred thousand Red Men at the present time require the entire occupation of a continent as large as Europe, in order that they may obtain an uncertain and scanty subsistence by the chase.”
Not only were the native peoples seen as a race standing in the way of the progress of civilized peoples, but they also were not utilizing the space of their continent to its fullest extent, according to such white men bent on “the immutable laws of progress.” Rather than exist as one species in a great, healthy ecosystem, as the native hunters did with the great “beasts” such as bison, the European conqueror wishes rather to exterminate the bison – thereby eliminating the need for its habitat, the Great Plains, and in fact crippling the natural cycle of the Plains such that they cannot survive long after the buffalo’s practical extinction – and bring in “improved American cattle” in massive numbers. The Plains will be destroyed in order to farm cultivated crops like wheat and corn, “providing food for millions.”
To the conqueror, the prescription for America’s West seems obvious. But no account is taken of whether millions should be fed, whether the land can sustain the changes, and definitely not whether the native cultures should be pushed out – killed off - without asking for their knowledge of the land or their opinions in the matter.
Michael Robinson writes about the total transformation of the West in Predatory Bureaucracy, naming the “cultural code of the pioneer” as “to kill what couldn’t be dominated.” He says that, “Uncovering the political, social, and biological saga of the wolves in the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, and the Southwest opens up a map to a little-explored West – a political topography of frontier-era institutions riding strong into the twenty-first century. It explains more fully than any other tale why the group for which wolf extermination was accomplished – the livestock industry – continues to dominate western national parks, forests, and other public lands and still all too often determines the fate of their myriad wildlife.”[iii]
Around six in the morning, when it is still pitch-black and the night has reached its coldest, the coyotes come back from their escapades, again to the north and east sides of us, and back up the ridge, their yelps becoming fainter in the distance. A strange screeching whistle shrieks loudly into the silence. It is man-made and unwelcome to my ear. There are hunters who try to call the coyotes this way. Soon, an owl with an unexpected vocal range woos me with its whistle for an hour. I strain my ears, waiting for the pitch to go from low to its ultimate high so that I may again praise the owl’s glorious call. As the sun comes up I feel relieved that no one showed up in the night to club us in our tent.
Banjo runs after a phantom, barking, and as I run after him a gunshot rings through the forest. I’ll never be able to know what fell to its death on a soft bed of pine needles at that moment, but I hope for it that it was a quick and painless death, and that its name was not Alpha Male 1114.
[i] Robinson, Michael J. Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. 4-5.
[ii] Quoted in Robinson, 5.
[iii] Ibid., 3.

re: Appalachia. 4

In his vestments, the priest sat at lunch and joked.
West Virginia’s state flower is the satellite dish.
If you divorce your wife in West Virginia, will she still be your sister?
They totally exploited the region, and raped the land, and trampled the people and their communities, and now they make fun of them for their problems. Bless Appalachia and all of its downtrodden coalminers, coalminers’ wives and daughters and mothers and grandmothers and children. They never wanted the railroads anyway!
We said go away but they wielded their government-issued guns and pushed their way in and wrote home to New York City about the backwards mountain folk. Rail train, turn around and go back from whence you came! West Virginia never wanted you anyway!

The Moore Easter Girls

"We were pictured in the back yard of Grandmother and Grandad McGoldrick’s house in Jefferson City, TN.

Back Row: Left to Right: Mom (Bobbie), Great Grandmother Josephine Hamblin, Grandmother Ruth McGoldrick
Bottom: Left to Right: Carol, Gail, Debbie (Debbie and Carol in tightly pulled back pony-tails)"
--Again, click image for much better quality!!