Ancient Neighbors

It was really the simplest thing, a grayish square, maybe a quarter of an inch across, lying against the 1/8-inch screen. A little flake of chert, what most of us would call flint, though it’s not.

I picked it up and dropped it into the palm of my right hand. It is Onondaga chert, found from an area that stretches from Albany, New York, west to Detroit. But not here. It is a flake left over from resharpening a spear point, a knife, or a hide-scraper.

I was there to write about an archeological team from the state museum, working on the first exploratory dig of a site discovered in the 1930s.

In the early 1950s, a man named Witthoft combed the surface of the 40-acre site and found more than 400 tools, 53 spear points and approximately 1500 chips from sharpening and making tools.

I got the tip from Brad Miller, one of the volunteers, who emailed me a photo of himself holding a stone hide-scraper.

“Somebody made that,” said Brad, pointing at the flake. “Somebody sat right here and chipped that off a piece of stone, 11,000 years ago.”

Stone tools are sharper than razors when first chipped, but they become dull with use, or break. The archaeologist in charge, Kurt Carr, said he went through about six blades one time when he skinned and butchered a deer. He said it takes about five minutes for an experienced knapper to recreate a new scraper or knife blade.

The theory is that these people were nomadic, following the game, the deer, elk, and possibly caribou.  They seem to have traveled in a circuit from near Buffalo, through New England and south until they reached this place between the kinked and rugged landscape of central Pennsylvania.

I wonder who these people were, and what became of them. What did they look like? Who were their gods? Were their lives as Thomas Hobbes  (1588–1679) said,  “nasty, brutish, and short” as we must imagine they were? In whose veins does their blood now run?

I stood for a bit between interviews, trying to imagine the place as it might have been. It would have been cooler, there at the end of the last ice age. The hardwood forests now covering Peter’s Mountain would have been spruce and hemlock. The glacier’s edge came no closer than a couple of counties north, but I would bet that with the wind blowing from the north, you could smell the ice.

These were modern humans, Carr said. Probably bug-infested, I would imagine, and dressed in hides, but inside, and between the ears, where it counts, it’s you and me, with poorer personal hygiene. Give them all Harleys and they would look like the cast of a 1970s biker film.

So long ago, I thought, and then thought again. Is it really? 11,500 years, that’s fewer than 500 generations. Standing side-by-side, holding hands, they would be about three feet apart. That would make a line only a quarter of a mile long, give or take.

A quarter of a mile. A distance you can cover in a couple of seconds in a fast car. A little shorter than the distance from my little gravel-and-asphalt lane to the main road. On a good day, with a still wind, you might be able to holler loud enough and make the folks at the other end of the line hear you. Maybe not understand what you’re yelling, but at least know you’re there. And at least give a wave.

Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. And it makes me want to go back to that field, to be very still and quiet and listen. Well, you never know. A quarter of a mile isn’t too far for neighbors.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,
Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Fragments, cuttings, and shards: A bolt out of the blue and the House that Amoeba Built

The meeting ran a little late. By the time I filed my story and placed something on the paper’s website and made it home, it was around midnight.

I stretched out on a recliner, thinking wryly that the coffee I had drunk to stay awake on the way home was likely to keep working until one or two in the morning. I cranked up the laptop, watching music videos, and replying to emails.

Kitten Kaboodle chewed on my hand, the one that had been keeping time to the music. She’s at that age, when anything that moves is prey. It’s like having an animated cactus for a pet.

She got crazier and crazier and when she started drawing blood I had to slow her down. Not an easy thing with a cat. She spent the next hour boinging and pouncing all over the house, killing furniture, terrorizing the dust bunnies.

In a way, this is my favorite time of the day, after midnight, when the world shrinks to the reflections on the inside of the library windows, and the big ceiling fan whooshes overhead. The world is somehow, briefly, manageable, a bubble of light rimmed with books and a cat or two, my bloodied hand tap-dancing on the keyboard, words, changelings all, stuttering out past the fatigue and caffeine to the world.

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A blistering hot afternoon on U.S. Route 15, heading north on an errand. In the sky, innocuous, puffy white clouds drift in the hazy blue air.

Suddenly, straight ahead, a bolt of lightning, bright blue-white, cracked the sky and tore the air with its incandescent sound and was gone.

I blinked. Did I just see that?

I looked all around…not a storm cloud in sight.

I had read about “bolts from the blue,” but never seen one before. They’re real enough, and can be deadly, particularly to golfers, who might be standing on a hill ready to tee off, hear thunder in the distance and figure they’re safe as long as the storm is not overhead. And then they raise their driver over their heads and the next – not to say last - thing they know…ZAP.

A “Bolt from the Blue” is a regular, General-Issue lightning bolt with a case of wanderlust. The National Severe Storms Laboratory says that the peripatetic bolts come out of the rear end of a thundercloud and can travel up to 25 miles horizontally before it turns earthward and smites something or someone, rather like an afterthought.

Intellectually, I reject anything that hints of the supernatural, from the Jehovan to the impish. Still, lightning out of a clear, blue sky seems rather like a dirty trick, if you ask me.

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A good friend who is always making my mind stretch sent me a photo of an amoeba’s house.

Don’t be fooled by the photo. The real thing is the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

This kind of stuff tickles me cross-eyed.

This particular variety of amoeba surrounds its little shapeless body with tee-tiny pebbles and squats happily indoors, doing whatever amoebas do when they’re not eating bits of organic material by wrapping around it and reproducing by splitting in two. Maybe watching Sponge Bob Squarepants re-runs.

Anyway, the little house has a little scalloped doorway and little projections sort of like fins in the back. It’s shaped sort of like a cartoon rocket ship.

This is what Liz said:

“I loved the description of what happens to the second generation - one gets the house and the other gets the pile of building materials that the “parent” saved up to start a new one. It just seemed so humble and simple and fair - and yeah, flabbergasting. It also made me think we probably make too much of our own achievements. We may stack ‘em higher, but I’ve never seen anything cuter or sweeter in a house. Just the right size, safe and cozy, mobile, home-made (I almost said “handmade”), a real masterpiece of folk art by some teeny tiny folk.”

No, there’s nothing random about it.”

The “random” remark came about because we both know that Creationists would point at this little house as somehow “proving” that life is way too complicated to have occurred by chance, which is how they misconstrue evolution. But evolution is not a crapshoot. It is perfectly logical – and demonstrable – system of thought. The Creationists might as well argue that the fact that bees wear stripes rather than paisley is proof that god wove the fabric himself.

The little house is a delight, plain and simple, because over billions of years of life on earth, it’s just one of those wonderful surprises that evolved along with the rest of us. And every gasping, wriggling one of us is a freaking miracle.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

The Cellist of Sarajevo

I’m afraid that we’ve had so much war in recent years that we have forgotten that heroism comes in many guises.

Sometimes the greatest acts of heroism come not from the use of weapons and force, but rather in acts of beautiful defiance that are simply breathtaking.

Only recently I learned of Vedran Smailovic, the cellist of Sarajevo.

It was 4 p.m. on May 27, 1992, two months into the three-year war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nasty war involving more than a half-dozen factions that changed objectives and allegiances several times during the conflict. In short, it was a dog-pile of a mess, and there were no winners. Not there ever really are.

Smailovic, then in his mid-30s and principal cellist with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, was watching from his apartment window as an artillery shell landed amid a bread line in front of The National Library. The explosion killed 22 people, scattering stone, bone, blood and body parts.

The next day, Smailovic, dressed in his tuxedo as though preparing for a performance in one of Europe’s great halls, took his cello and an old stool and sat in the center of the shell crater and began to play. It was exactly 4 p.m.

He played Albinoni’s Adagio in G, music that can make you believe in angels.

He finished playing despite continued shelling and gunfire nearby. And then he left.

The next day, he was back, and played the same piece, paying no mind to the mayhem around him or to the risk.

And the next day. And the next. Until he had played 22 times, once for each of the 22 who had died before his eyes.

He played, not to cheering crowds in their finery, but to cratered streets, rubble, to bone fragments and terror and the smell of smoke and decay. He played for more, I think: To that in us that is better than our familiar role of angels of death, of harrowers of the innocent. He played, perhaps, for what is possible, for what Lincoln called “our better angels.”

A journalist at the time asked him if he thought he was crazy, playing on a battleground.

Smailovic reportedly replied: “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?”

He was right, of course. By the end of the slaughter, more than 100,000 were dead, and nearly 2 million had been displaced.

Why is it so hard to see which of those two actions – the destruction of a city and the lives within it, or a sole man defiantly standing up to the insanity and horror – is the act of madmen.

If Vedran Smailovic is crazy, then I say God bless the lunatics, and give us more.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

The soul of where you live

A few weeks ago the library in a town I used to cover had to close. There had been a problem with an ancient water heater, and the resultant water leak had forced the Dillsburg Area Library to close while cleanup was begun.

It was like learning that an old friend had fallen seriously ill.

I did not spend a lot of time at the Dillsburg Library. But there is something, for those who love them, which makes every library home.

When I was a kid, our community library lived in the old granite former home of some wealthy hot-shot from long ago. It was a wonderful place with creaky staircases and deep windowsills where the sun poured in on long, tall wooden shelves packed with books.

Here and there stood heavy oak reading tables, dark with age and use.

I read a lot. Not always the very best stuff, but constantly, especially through summer vacations. I tore through almost every book in the science-fiction category, sometimes at the summertime rate of five or so books a week. In there among the aliens and faster-than-light travel I managed to read people like John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe, and others.

In the summer of my 12th year, I tried to check out Kerouac’s “On The Road.”

You have to understand that at the checkout desk at our library was The Bird Lady. I called her that because she was thin, angular, beaky of nose, unpleasant, and the last bastion of morality in the modern world. She always dressed in black. I’m sure she was only trying to prevent an impressionable mind (mine) falling under the spell of an artistic, free-thinking, poetic loser (that would be Kerouac.)

She wouldn’t let me check it out.

“You’re not old enough,” she said, snatching the book away and clutching it to the sooty black, nubbled fabric that covered her bosom. “You will have to bring a note from your parents.”

I slouched dejectedly back to the vast beige Dodge where my mother waited. I plopped down on the seat with the measly two or three books I had been permitted to check out.

“What’s the matter?” my mother asked.

I hesitated. What if “On The Road” was (gulp.) A Dirty Book? Not that I minded the idea, of course, but I certainly didn’t want to admit to my own mother that I’d wanted to check out ADB right there in front of her, God, and the vulturine librarian. I’d be exiled. Grounded. Forbidden to read anything unless it had passed muster before every beady-eyed old lady, pastor, and parent from here to yonder.

I sucked it up.

“The lady at the desk said I couldn’t check out a book I wanted to read,” I said. “She said I wasn’t old enough.”

What book, she wanted to know. I told her the title and said it was about a guy and some of his friends that just sort of traveled around the country learning stuff. That really is all I knew.

“Come with me,” my mother said, and marched me up the gray stone steps and into the dark, musty rooms and to the librarian’s perch.

I have to mention here that my mother was a SPAR during World War II. SPARS are like WACS in the Army or WAVES in the Navy. SPARS were the women’s branch of the U.S. Coast Guard. For part of that time, she was the equivalent of a drill sergeant.

Getting sassy with Mom was not a good tactic.

The biddy of the books looked up as Mom moved at flank speed up to the desk, me bobbing apprehensively in her wake. Mom asked to see the book.

The librarian handed it to her. Mom looked at the dust jacket, read the blurb, or at least scanned it.

She dropped the book on the desk and pointed at me.

“This is my son Terry. As far as I’m concerned, he can read any book he finds in this library. He would like to check it out now,”

I was trying hard not to grin like a monkey. The librarian looked as though she had bitten into a piece of bad fish, but checked the book. I think she used a bit more force than was necessary to stamp the due date on the little card inside the back cover, but maybe I was just imagining things.

Funny, but the incident made me read a lot more “serious” literature after that. It was as though with that freedom came more responsibility. This was serious stuff, this reading business.

That old library is long gone now. The stone building is now offices for something. My hometown library is now an ultramodern affair with computers, recessed lighting, modern tables, all that. But they still have Kerouac, Steinbeck, Wolfe, and writers who have come along since then, adding their own voices to the conversation that a culture holds with itself, age after age.

A library is a lot more than a warehouse stuffed with books and electronic media. Maybe it’s the collective memory of a people, its soul, even. A place where the ideas and passions lie, dormant, like seeds that will sprout over and over, for as long as we choose to go to the trouble of looking for them.

I rarely ever used the library in Dillsburg when I worked in town. But it was so good knowing it was there. A community without a library is sort of like one of those characters in the classic horror film “Night of The Living Dead,” moving around but with no real inner life.

I understand the Dillsburg Library has recently reopened, with new carpet, and the damage repaired. I hope to stop by for a visit soon. I hope the people who live in the area do the same. I hope they realize what they have.
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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,
Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Waiting for Batman

When Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town debuted in 1938, it was of the first Broadway plays to use hardly any stage scenery, forcing the audience to imagine the world in which the characters lived.

Wilder said, “Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind — not in things, not in ’scenery’ … [a play] needs only five square feet of boarding and a passion to know what life means to us.” (Quote taken from the online version of Writer’s Almanac.”)

Yesterday several of us went to see Iron Man, the latest in a spate of films based on comic book heroes. Most of what I was looking on the screen was generated by a computer. The actors playing the characters stood on marks on the floor in front of a blue screen and (having, presumably, read the script) went through the motions of, oh, fighting giant robots and whatnot.

In effect, we’ve come full circle, transferring the task of imagining from the audience to the actors.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed the film (Maybe “movie” is a better term. ‘Film’ is probably best used for serious intellectual cinema, pictures with complex story lines, deep emotions, and in-depth dialogues. You know….chick flicks.)

Just kidding. I like serious art films as much as the next guy. OK, maybe not THAT much, but most the time if I’m going to spend the bucks to go to a real theater and put up with all the hassle and expense that entails, it’s because I’m looking for some entertainment and escape. And I like to see the bad guys get stomped instead of elected. And I don’t want to see a lot of hand-wringing. I’m a guy. Blow something up.

On the other hand….

Now that we’ve got this whole computer graphics thing down, can we please stop relying on it so much? We get it: studios can make dinosaurs gallop down a city street and guys in leotards fly through the air. Yay. Now, how about paying attention once again to stories? To writing? To whether your actors can actually act? Stop, please, making the movie about the stunts and the whiz-bang already. Within about a minute of the beginning of Iron Man, it was pretty obvious who the main bad guy was, that he was the trusted advisor who was really a traitor, and at the end of the film there was going to be a battle royal. We knew the hero would triumph against impossible odds. And get the girl. And that the bad guy would lose because his armor was butt-ugly and Iron Man’s armor was just too cool.

Give us more depth, please. Just because we like to see stuff blow up doesn’t mean we’re idiots who can’t follow a plot or empathize with a complex character.

Thank you. Now, I’ll prepare myself for the next Batman movie.

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Marks on the cavern wall

It was in an email exchange with a friend, a fellow writer, about some crises in her life. We were talking about how such things affect one’s life ever after.

“I don’t break down in the midst” of the crisis, she wrote, “but once the crisis is over….well…it leaves its mark.”

She is right, of course. We are each of us the sum and more of the things that have happened to us. Writers and other artists, perhaps shamelessly, make a living, or at least a habit, of giving guided tours through the galleries of our “marks,” a sometimes ghastly show-and-tell.

Living is sort of all about the marks it leaves. That’s our calligraphy, and what we write about it is our own individual Lascaux cavern. The beasts our ancestors left in soot and earth pigments on the walls of Lascaux and other caverns around the world may have been part of hunting rituals or as acts of admiration, passion, or even expiation for the deaths of the creatures they were meant to represent.

But is not that what we do when we write poems or essays? We scrawl clumsy representations of the beautiful and terrible beasts from our hearts onto the cavern walls for all to see. Every joy and terror leaves its mark, forever lending its own pigments to our ink, and come out, in their own ways, as the horses, bison, mammoths, and so on leapt from the hands our ancestors 15,000 to 17,000 years ago.

Everybody has nightmares slumbering fitfully beside happier memories; that’s the price of the ticket for a journey through a life. There’s on old quip about life that “nobody gets out of here alive.” True enough. But nobody gets out unscathed, either. At the end, we’re all scuffed and weathered, inside and out.

At present, for reasons too complex to explain here, I am spending time reading my own cave walls, poking gingerly at sleeping dragons. Some of the discoveries have been good ones; others have left me shaken and afraid. But it has not been dull. I don’t know how I would deal with that, the very worst fear of all, the voyage, after all this, should have been boring.

What a waste that would have been.

© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

A giant in the rain

Time is a slippery thing, and the least little bit of inattention on my part, and I never know when I’ll find myself.

I mean “when” in memory, I suppose, the real thing, at least as we understand it, being so damned linear. If it weren’t for memory, after all, everything would always be “now.” Boring. I guess it works for cows and chickens, which is probably for the best, since who would want kine and fowl to imagine that there will a tomorrow for them involving Mickey D’s and The Colonel?

Anyway, maybe it was the wine and the food or the sound of the rain, but I slid back half a century, and several hundred miles, to the night I saw the giant.

But perhaps I am too abrupt.

Saturday night I went out for dinner with friends, a celebration of the birthdays of two of this little clique that travel around alarming people at various restaurants.

There were six of us, and, gas prices being what they are, we carpooled in Sal’s van. I am hardly ever a passenger, so this was a treat. Sal, a bonafide Italian from New Jersey, had his GPS on and set to speak Italian, but we got there anyway.

Then there was dinner, as a real boomer of a thunderstorm stomped around outside. Since I wasn’t driving, I relaxed my rule against having more than two glasses of wine.

By “relaxed,” I mean, basically, tossed, shredded, and totally ignored it. I may have had as many as eight, but I won’t swear to it. I was very calm. Maybe that’s when I lost my grip on time, in the back seat of Sal’s Chevy beating its way back home through the rain in the inky dark.

I closed my eyes, and suddenly I was in the back seat of our family station wagon, a tan 1958 Dodge Sierra the size of an efficiency apartment.

We were somewhere between western Pennsylvania and our home in north Georgia, back when most of the highways were still two-lane affairs, with mom-and-pop restaurants and motels and gas stations. The trip from hither to yon was a good 20 hours or more. Today, you can do it in 12 or less.

My father and mother loomed, vague shadows in the front seat, now and then outlined sharply by headlights from oncoming traffic, or less sharply by the occasional neon sign coasting by in the rain.

My brother was asleep in the seat beside me, and had sprawled to take up most of it. I leaned against the door, looking out, but not looking at anything. Staring, not watching.

The hour was around 3:30 a.m., and little traffic on the road. My dad almost always drove straight through, to save time and money. We were in Virginia, probably, because Virginia went on forever. I drifted in and out, restless and unable to fall into a deep sleep. The tires hissed in counterpoint to the tick-tick of the expansion joints on the highway, the thwapping of the wipers and the steady rumble of the big V8.

Somewhere in there I saw the giant. Just a huge outline, black against black, striding down the Blue Ridge right along beside us. Not close, but far, up against the horizon. Yes, I know it was just some figment of my bored mind. I even knew it then. But I pretended it was real. It never stopped, just strode on and on, not threatening, not paying any mind to me in my little bubble of warm, dry air, just a force, like the world itself, barreling on without regard to these little sparks and wheels rolling through the endless night.

Somewhere along there, amongst the mountains where my ancestors settled so long ago, I finally fell asleep. When I awoke again, it was daylight, and we were pulling into some diner for breakfast. I looked at the ragged ridges to the west, but there was nothing there. Even as I remembered that it was a figment, I still pictured the giant striding along, dragging the night and the rain along with him, unconcerned with lesser things.

Sal hit the play button on his CD player and Luciano Pavarotti, a giant of another kind, started belting out some aria or another. I blinked my way back from my time travel. Sal, for reasons best known to him, had reset the GPS unit to speak French, which he does not understand.

But we found our way home anyway.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Horror becomes commonplace

One of the inevitable consequences of getting to be a certain age is that one finds it irresistible to notice the differences between what things were like “back in the day” and say, right now.

I saw a T-shirt recently that encapsulated these phenomena succinctly with the slogan “The older I get, the better I used to be.”

Everybody does this sort of thing as they age. A guy might remember the day he picked up a V-8 engine block and wrestled it onto the bed of a pickup truck. He does not remember that he spent the next few days moving very carefully and whimpering.

A funny thing happened the other day. I was at home, not planning to go into the newsroom until later in the day because I had a night meeting to cover.

My editor called my cell phone, and said to prepare myself. A high school in the district I cover was reportedly in lockdown. One of the students had text mailed his or her parent, who works for our company. Said parent called the school, but didn’t learn much, and also called the newsroom.

“You might have to drop everything and get over there,” Janet said. “I’ll call you when I know more.”

I said, OK, let me know and I’ll be on my way. I got everything together because I didn’t want to waste time…the school is more than an hour away from where I live.

I sat and thought about how I would cover the event; talk to neighbors, parents, cops and so on….

It turned out to be not much. Two former students were found to be hanging around and, these days being these days, the administration tucked everybody away until the two youths could be gotten off campus.

I relaxed and went back to whatever I had been doing. And then something hit me.

My reaction.

I think it was pretty professional. No panic. Getting my ducks in a row and bracing myself, knowing I might be dealing with some pretty distraught people.

But no shock. No surprise that something like that could happen here.

After Columbine, after Virginia Tech, the first anniversary of which was only a couple of days away, after too many other school shootings, we already know that it can happen. Something like that can happen “any-here.” Any time.

My mind was occupied with the mechanics of getting there, who to talk to, how to cover it. I felt no horror, though that would surely come as I went through the process.

The idea of a mass shooting at a school has become so commonplace in the pantheon of tragedy that it has become, in a sort of freakish way, commonplace. We know how to cover them, as we know now how to cover airplane, auto, and train crashes, building collapses, violent protests.

I spend a little time trudging down the hallways of public schools. I always marvel at how young the students are. I was married for the first time a year after I left high school. I felt mature enough. Everybody told me we were too young. They were right.

The schools today are bright, comfortable, with technological stuff I couldn’t even have imagined back then. Walking in my high school was like entering a crowded, sweaty cavern, dim and noisy and reeking of whatever colognes and perfumes were in vogue, usually applied, judging by their intensity, with a ladle.

I walk through these new schools and I want to go and do high school all over again. Except this time I would skip the bullies and the pimples, and have better luck with girls and math. Or so I like to think.

Our halls 40-some years ago were dark and crowded, but you didn’t worry about being killed at high school. Stomped in the boys’ room and humiliated, yes, called “Chubby” by the P.E. coach, who was the last vestige of the Neanderthal race known to exist, and called worse things by the jocks, but not killed outright.

Artsy bookworms like me could stew about revenge all we wanted to, but we never heard of any victim of bullying coming to school armed to the teeth, murder in his soul.

Keep in mind this was in the semi-rural South. If you’d look in the trunks or on the floorboards of most of the boys’ cars in the parking lot, including mine, you might well find rifles and/or shotguns, in case we decided to go out plinking cans or hunting small game.

So, I go to open houses at schools, see the shiny technologies and the bright rooms and feel a certain envy. And then I remember that I was not stunned at the idea there could have been another senseless tragedy at that high school, or anywhere, and I am not so certain at all that I’d want to be there, under that additional worry, ever.

© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Mountains in my shoe

So, I am standing on sand that once formed the Appalachians, back when they were bigger than the Rockies. The temperature is 45 or so, the wind hitting 30. A mist of powdery sand rips along the tide-line, around my legs, and keeps racing south, as though late for an appointment. Bits and pieces of me: The dander, the odd loose hair, assorted molecules of the kind that would allow a bloodhound to track me, tear away and scatter downwind. I am disintegrating, bit by bit, as is the world around me.

I am not especially worried about this. In fact, at the moment I am trying to get the goddamned pipers to stand still enough to be photographed. But the one I’m trying to get twitches and fidgets, darts his sharp little bill into the sand, ending the life of some wriggling bit of protein.

I am not worried because I am fairly used to the idea of mortality. Not looking forward to it, I hasten to add, but I know it’s there.

I can’t say the same for the piper, or the little bit of life it just speared out of the sand. I doubt either has given the matter much thought. They’re probably the better for it.

That same day, I managed to get a photo of a Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel. Now, I’m no nature photographer; you’re not going to find me on my belly communing with leeches in an attempt to capture an image of the Great Crested Whosis. But I like to keep my trusty digital camera at hand when I’m out poking around the more civil fringes of The Great Out-there and see what I can stumble onto.

The fox squirrel – the largest squirrel in North America, is another victim of our energies. Unlike his much smaller and more adaptable cousin, the gray squirrel, the fox squirrel needs old growth forests for habitat, and we have cut down most of them. His original range stretched from central New Jersey south through eastern Pennsylvania and down the length of the Delmarva Peninsula.

The squirrels are now found only in a few places, like here, in the loblolly pine forests of Chincoteague Island on the Virginia coast.

The squirrel was introduced, or re-introduced, to the 14,000 National Wildlife Refuge here in the 1970s. There are about 150 or so of them here now.

I got a good photo of the little feller eating an acorn by the roadside. He flashed off into the woods and then sat watching me from within a thicket. He did not look particularly worried about the future. So far as anybody has been able to tell, most animals have no sense of imagination. This explains the lack of worry.

I had read long ago that the sands of the barrier islands here on the eastern seaboard were the pulverized remains of the ancient mountain ranges formed 300 million years ago. Some of those stones had been ancient seashores much earlier than that. And now most of the high peaks of that giant range were working their way into the low-cut shoes I had foolishly worn on this early spring day.

I stand braced against the wind, feeling very temporary.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Tempus fugiting faster

I think my best interviews – using the term broadly – have been with the very old.

I once talked to an old guy named Samuel, whose daddy picked him up one clear night in 1910 and showed him Halley’s Comet. He lived long enough to see it again, and wept remembering that night so long ago. He also said “I saw the first airplane land in Adams County, and I sat in this chair and watched a man walk on the moon.” Neither one of us could say much after that. After all, what could be said?

Just this past week I wrote about a remarkable woman who had died in a Washington, D.C nursing home at the age of 102. Not exactly an interview, obviously, but fascinating.

Frieda was born the year President Theodore Roosevelt begin his full term as president. He had ascended to the presidency on Sept. 14, 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley. The year is regarded as Albert Einstein’s “miracle year.” In 1905, he published four papers. In one of them he developed the theory of special relativity that gave birth to the famous formula E=MC^2. It was the year a little town in Nevada named Las Vegas was founded after the auction of 110 acres of desert, and in Paris, infamous exotic dancer and purported spy Mata Hari made her debut.

Frieda’s grandson sent me a photo of her taken in about 1919, when she was 14 and had just finished the eighth grade. It was as far as her schooling would go.

 Shortly after the photo was taken, her father died, and she had to go to work. She worked for 80 years as a bookkeeper before retiring.

What a century to live through, I thought. Born four years before the introduction of the Model T, she lived to see space shuttle flights become commonplace.

On the other hand, tempus fugits faster all the time. I was born 43 years after Frieda, and I hardly recognize the world from back then. I did some quick research. I was born the year the 45 rpm record was introduced. Today, I have an ipod. I’ll wager that if you show a 45 to somebody younger than 30, they would have trouble identifying what it was.

We had a telephone, a black Bakelite thing with a rotary dial. It was on a party line. Neighborhood gossips on the same line could pick up the phone and learn what their neighbors were talking about. Today, I don’t have a “land line,” but a cell phone that has more functions than I’ve probably discovered yet, including the ability to give me directions on the road.

The first two VW beetles were brought to the US that year. They were regarded more as curiosities than viable transportation. “Too small,” people said. The sedan I now drive, a product of the early 21^st century, looks like some sort of silver aquatic creature giving birth when I get out of it. Too small, yes, but a necessary evil in these days of long commutes and soaring fuel prices.

A few weeks before I was born, a USAF crew made the first nonstop round-the-world flight, covering about 23,000 miles in a shade more than 94 hours.

The aforementioned space shuttle makes the trip in about 90 minutes.

The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August of that year, and whatever innocence might have about how humanity holds its fate in its own hands was gone forever. The USSR is gone, but the specter of nuclear annihilation is still with us. And I can’t help but note, because I live in Gettysburg, that a few months after my birth, the last six surviving veterans of the Civil War met in Indianapolis. That brings into focus the fact that the war was really a recent thing, in historical terms.

That same year Howard Unruh killed 13 neighbors in Camden, New Jersey, using a Luger he had kept as a souvenir from WWII, making him America’s first single-episode mass murderer. There would be more.

In the years since, my country has gone to war a handful of times, with very mixed results. The death count in American lives lost in those conflicts tops 116,000. Just in the latest fracas, we have chalked up nearly 30,000 wounded. Some unofficial sources push the number up to 100,000. And that’s just our soldiers. God knows how many civilians we have wiped out.

So, a very mixed bag. I have been here a tad less than 60 years. There’s no point in engaging in discussions about what was good and what was not. Some of the good and bad was obvious. The jury is still out on the rest. I’m no Luddite, scornful of technology. I confess that when it comes to human nature, I am intuitively a pessimist, which means that all my surprises are happy ones.

I just can’t wait to see what’s next.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/