The Ballad of the Grand Traverse, by NC Weil

The Ballad of the Grand Traverse

 By NC Weil 

I'll introduce our hardy team, 

Training for this since 2018: 

Page and Josh, equipment geeks, 

Skiing and suffering endless weeks. 

They’ve never made it all the way 

Crested Butte to Aspen, night then day,   

Forty miles of ice and snow, 

Hoping frigid winds don't blow. 

First attempt, turned back by weather, 

Then Page must pause to be a father, 

His son born the day of the second try, 

He had to let the race go by. 

In 2020 Covid hit, 

Every gathering stopped by it. 

 

So of this Grand Traverse I’ll tell: 

It didn’t start so very well: 

Early on, a ski pole breaking, 

Then Page’s hands commenced to shaking, 

Legs soon cramping – are we finished? 

Electrolytes those spasms diminished. 

Now to the slog they bend their wills, 

Up the dark and towering hills 

While moon peers down and pairs spread out, 

Spandex and plastic round about, 

Five hundred headlamps up the climb 

Laboring to make good time – 

The Brush Creek cutoff’s coming soon – 

Steady striding is your tune. 

Climbing more, up to Star Pass – 

Scarf those snacks, step on the gas, 

Make it to Checkpoint Number Two, 

Up on top with a moonlit view – 

High above the Taylor River, 

What a sight – it makes you shiver! 

A leg-burning grind to Taylor Pass, 

Knowing the Mutants are hauling ass, 

Up and over 12,000 feet, 

Lungs a-throbbing, thighs dead beat 

And mercifully, a downhill slope 

With sunrise greetings – sign of hope! 

Skiing across the top of the world, 

A vista of peaks in snow unfurled 

Down and up to Barnard Hut, 

The last check-in for your weary butt. 

Well past halfway – you’re going to make it! 

Not the record – you won’t break it,

Except the one you’re aiming for: 

Your body’s strength you must explore 

Why else be in this crazy race, 

Not just the distance but the pace? 

Eighty teams are turning back, 

Not fast enough where slopes might crack 

And avalanches take them down – 

Reversed, their path leads back to town. 

But you are fast enough to pass 

So on you go for your final gasp. 

Aspen Mountain, here you come, 

Having earned encomium – 

Wittiest team name convergence – 

You’re the Forty Year Old Virgins! 

Prize in hand, your bottle of rum,

On to a meal and beer you come.

But now that you’ve gone all the way, 

“Experienced” is yours to say. 

Way to go, you hardy mensches, 

Wowing those of us warming benches. 

Witnesses to long rehearsal,

We laud you for your Grand Traversal!

April 2, 2023

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson

What a beautifully-written exquisitely-felt story this is! Jack, ne’er-do-well son of Iowa preacher John Boughton, is living in St. Louis in the 1940s. He is past middle age, solitary, with some genteel aspects alongside his troubling ones: he has read widely, poets and novelists, and plays piano, is naturally courteous. Alongside these qualities he is a petty thief, inveterate liar, a drunk and a bum: a man on the run from responsibility in all its forms. He scrapes by, pawning items he has stolen, finding marginal jobs – shoe salesman, dance instructor. His brother, who has his address, sends him money sometimes. 

He meets Della Miles, a younger black woman, English teacher at the good colored high school. One night they are locked in a cemetery – she came to leave flowers, and before she realized, the gates were locked. He came there to spend the night, as he sometimes did when he was too broke to rent a shabby room. Through the long chilly night they have a conversation as they walk around stealthily, not to draw the attention of the guard. 

Their fathers are both preachers: Jack’s Presbyterian, Della’s a Methodist bishop. Despite strict segregation and the disapproval of society, this pair find in each other kindred spirits. And they fall in love. This is the love of two people who know they only trouble each other’s lives, yet cannot keep apart. The God they may or may not believe in holds them in the palm of his hand, where they share loyalty and comfort in the face of a world of opposition. 

Robinson’s profound insights and well-crafted sentences bring us into the heart of their lives and predicaments. “She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.” 

“Downstairs were a barbershop, a failed lawyer’s office, a dentist’s office, the office of an accountant. Jack knew, because he knew such things, that there was hardly anything worth stealing. The dance studio was an empty room, in which even determined malice could hardly be up to much.” 

She writes so gently about them. Though it’s clear the world is poised to slap them down, you feel how blessed they are, this unlikely love their bulwark against an unkind future. I need not say more. Any thoughtful person will deeply appreciate reading this book.

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

Harper Lee completed Go Set a Watchman in 1957, and her agent shopped it to publishers. J.B. Lippincott wanted to know what else she'd written, so she worked on what was published as To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. This earlier-written novel, set fifteen years later, was only published in 2015. Harper Lee died in February 2016 at the age of 89. The merits and shortcomings of this new book have fed an argument about Ms. Lee's state of mind when she agreed to pursue publication - was she senile? Was she pressured by her heirs, who stood to make money off sales of a book sure to be (as it has been) a best-seller?

It is the subject, race, and her approach to it, that have caused this schism: some critics have praised the novel highly, while many others have condemned it sharply. Race, segregation, and inequality are - should be - much on our minds these days. Atticus Finch, embodied for many in Gregory Peck's august, sensitive and upright performance in the wonderful film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, is a man of courage who stands up for right and justice, defending a black man on trial for the rape and murder of a white woman in a small southern town. His lawyerly pleading wins our hearts: "Here," we think, "is a man intent on righting wrongs, unafraid of those who oppose him!"

Spoiler Alert - I'm going to discuss the entire book. If you want to read it without knowing what happens, stop reading this now!

For the first half of Go Set a Watchman, that's the Atticus Finch we see - older now, afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis but still at 72 a lawyer at work, an honest and straightforward man. Then Jean Louise (Scout), his daughter, home on a visit from New York, listens in on a meeting of all the notable white men in the town as they discuss methods of maintaining segregation. And there is Atticus, introducing the out-of-town bigot who leads the way. Atticus stands beside this hateful small-minded man, giving him respect and attention.

Jean Louise spends the rest of the book wrestling with questions not only of justice and race but also, closer to home, of her sense of betrayal at her father's abandonment of everything he taught her to believe. How could he support these rabid race-baiters? How could he lend his imprimatur as a respected member of the town, to this loathsome campaign?

It's hard not to think of William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust, in which a black man is jailed and narrowly avoids being lynched for the murder of an up-county (white trash) man - a murder he did not commit but will not unbend to address his accusers to deny. Faulkner riffs on repudiation, on the bravery of an old white woman and a pair of teenage boys, one white and one black, who save the imprisoned man because they have to, as honest people. They take on themselves the duty to repudiate the lies about Lucas, because he will not come to his own defense but such lies must not stand, must not be allowed to destroy him. Hate and ignorance must be resisted.

Atticus justifies his support of the segregationist cause by claiming that black people in the south are more backward than whites, that the Supreme Court decision (presumably Brown vs. Board of Education) is pushing them ahead too fast, that the NAACP are meddling outsiders forcing their will upon ignorant locals, that black people are not ready to have equal stature with whites. Jean Louise rejects his arguments and rages against him, but in the end Ms. Lee frames Jean Louise's push-back as a step toward maturity: Atticus has been Perfect, and finally she can see he is not, and bash him off the pedestal he's been on all her life. This liberates her, but leaves unresolved the question of whether, if even fair-minded Atticus has joined the lockstep racist movement, it is either acceptable or inevitable to push for a society in which African Americans must remain an underclass.

Harper Lee has pulled a bait-and-switch on us - she lays out the arguments for and against segregation, and racism itself, but at the last minute reduces these to the catalyst by which Jean Louise gains an adult view of her father.  She gives us a southerner's view of the Civil War by differentiating the social structure of the slave-holding states from the rest of this country, and using that to justify - and excuse - racism, Klan activity, Jim Crow.

How you feel about this book will depend heavily on how well you can compartmentalize: writing skill and vivid characters, separate from the world in which they live, and their attitudes. I admired Harper Lee's writing more before I compared her willingness to rationalize the racist structure of small-town Alabama, to Faulkner's solid repudiation of it in rural Mississippi.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot's book should shock you. As the great wheel of America’s attention moves race to the top again, the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman dying of cancer in 1951, whose tumor cells were harvested by the hospital where she suffered and finally died, stands as an explosive example of the power structure’s indifference to Americans whose ancestry is African. Not only was she never asked for consent for the use of her tissues, her family found out inadvertently many years after her death, when portions of her medical records were quoted in news stories. Meanwhile, her cancer cells, of a surreal potency, spawned a multi-million dollar industry as HeLa in medical research.

Her family did not benefit. Indeed, when researchers tracked them down more than twenty years after Henrietta’s death to collect blood samples - curious to see whether any of her progeny carried those unique cells - they never explained their purpose nor followed up.

The enormity of this disrespect permeates the book. To read in magazine articles about the autopsy of your mother, whom you barely remember, is as profound an invasion as one can imagine. And when her children battled to set the record straight - even her name was bowdlerized - they were treated as an obstacle, a nuisance, people incapable of understanding and therefore undeserving of explanations.

Skloot is not just a brave and tireless researcher, she is a storyteller, building a narrative about a strong joyous woman, mother of five, whose untimely death tore the stable center from their lives. Through persistence and dedication, Skloot was able to earn the trust of a family who had no reason to trust anyone, especially a white person interested in the medical anomaly that their mother became to the world. She takes us into the volatile heart of a shattered group of people, making us feel the pain they endured, the bitter irony of Henrietta’s cell empire juxtaposed against their poverty and ill health.

What made her different from the other journalists and researchers who interviewed the Lacks family? She was not only bent on telling Henrietta’s full story, she was also determined to be fair to them. She cared. She was swept into their struggles, learning from them as they learned from her. And finally, the truth made healing possible. This should be required reading in high school science classes.

Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust

A year ago, Fred and I took a Faulkner class from a professor at DU, and were amazed to discover this incomparable writer whose work we'd never delved into. Over the ensuing months we bought a number of his books, and recently read (aloud, to each other) his Nobel Prize winner, Intruder in the Dust. It's only 158 pages (11 chapters) but length is relative.

Hanging his ruminations on a simple plot, Faulkner discourses on race, the legacy of the Civil War, the unity of Man regardless of attitudes or external circumstances, time, society, and the actions of the relatively powerless to utterly transform a tense situation.

In brief, the story is that a solitary and dignified old Negro, Lucas Beauchamp, whose grandmother was a slave and grandfather her owner, is jailed as the murderer of a poor white man from the up-county woods. Lucas refuses to defend himself by telling what he knows, and a lynch mob quickly forms outside the jail. A pair of sixteen-year old boys - one black, the other (our narrator) white - and an old white woman go out to the churchyard that night where the dead man has been interred, to dig him up to prove that Lucas' pistol did not kill him.

But things are not as they seemed to be, and over the course of a day, night, and the following day, the boy demonstrates courage, persistence and mettle, learning plenty about his fellow humans into the bargain.

In post-World War II Mississippi, some things have changed while many have not. The country people's poverty and racism have scarcely budged in a century, and white men take it as their right to rise up against any black man who dares look them in the eye. At the same time, attitudes among the townsfolk have evolved, to a degree. Yet none of the powerful will take action until the word of a venerable and proper white spinster requires them to.

Faulkner's sentences (some a page and a half long) can hardly be diagrammed - they are thickets into which you follow a route apparently through, but in a meandering way so compounded with digression that by the time the longed-for period arrives, you just have to stop and marvel that you got to the end (but where are you now?). Just a short sample:

"Charley. Go back and finish your breakfast. Paralee isn't feeling well this morning and she doesn't want to be all day getting dinner ready:" then to him - the fond constant familiar face which he had known all his life and therefore could neither have described it so that a stranger could recognise it nor recognise it himself from anyone's description but only brisk calm and even a little inattentive now, the wail a wail only because of the ancient used habit of its verbiage: "You haven't washed your face:" nor even pausing to see if he followed, on up the stairs and into the bathroom, even turning on the tap and putting the soap into his hands and standing with the towel open and waiting, the familiar face wearing the familiar expression of amazement and protest and anxiety and invincible repudiation which it had worn all his life each time he had done anything removing him one more step from infancy, from childhood: when his uncle had given him the Shetland pony someone had taught to take eighteen- and twenty-four-inch jumps and when his father had given him the first actual powder-shooting gun and the afternoon when the groom delivered Highboy in the truck and he got up for the first time and Highboy stood on his hind legs and her scream and the groom's calm voice saying, "Hit him hard over the head when he does that. You dont want him falling over backward on you" but the muscles merely falling into the old expression through inattention and long usage as her voice had merely chosen by inattention and usage the long-worn verbiage of wailing because there was something else in it now - the same thing which had been there in the car that afternoon when she said, "Your arm doesn't hurt at all now does it?" and on the other afternoon when his father came home and found him jumping Highboy over the concrete watertrough in the lot, his mother leaning on the fence watching and his father's fury of relief and anger and his mother's calm voice this time: "Why not? The trough isn't near as tall as that flimsy fence-thing you bought him that isn't even nailed together:" so that even dull for sleep he recognised it and turned his face and hands dripping and cried at her in amazed and incredulous outrage: "You aint going too! You can't go!" then even dull for sleep realising the fatuous naivete of anyone using cant on her on any subject and so playing his last desperate card: "If you go, then I wont! You hear me? I won't go!"
"Dry your face and comb your hair," she said. "Then come on down and drink your coffee."