Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard

Published in 2021, this fine book details the research of a Canadian woman whose family were foresters, and who in working with the Canadian Forest Service, conducted scientific experiments to determine why the seedlings planted in clearcuts were dying. Her studies led her to mapping the mycorrhizal (fungal) networks connecting root systems, helping her to see how the trees communicate, share nutrients, warn each other of disease – diametrically opposed to the notion of competitive growth, the zero-sum game, that the forestry old guard believed, which they have used to justify clearcutting and monocropping policies. 

Simard’s experiments and reports gained some attention, though the entrenched patriarchy gave her little credence. But she found unexpected allies, and the further she explored, the deeper her conviction grew that a forest is a network: cooperating, nurturing, protecting its members. And the Mother Trees are the great matriarchs of the forest, their mycorrhizal networks ranging furthest, their seeds scattered by birds and animals, by wind and water, nourished where they fall. 

In the face of climate change, with increasing stresses on plant communities, it is more important than ever to let the Mother Trees flourish, to retain old growth areas, to recognize their wisdom and awareness, their equality with humans. We assume we are superior to nature, which gives us the hubris to “manage” it – in many cases, to death – without needing to comprehend its capacities and vulnerabilities. Those days must end. Simard documents how forests heal, but that process cannot begin until we acknowledge the harm we are doing. 

She founded https://mothertreeproject.org/ to encourage broader understanding of these remarkable trees and the communities they anchor. It’s high time we fit ourselves into the web of life, rather than viewing it as something to be conquered. With a little humility, we just might learn from beings that have been around for centuries, and in preserving them, give ourselves a better shot at survival.

Tribute to Edwin Forrest Ward

Edwin Forrest Ward – a Tribute 

By NC Weil 

In every community, at its heart 

Is a person who either made it start 

Or took it on as their own commitment, 

To grow, sustain, to care what it meant. 

For writers and songsters in Denver here 

The man who stood in the middle is clear – 

Ed Forrest Ward set up a venue, 

Inviting us all to be on the menu – 

Stories, Stories spread the plate 

To write, to tell, to captivate. 

You and Marcia reserved the Merc 

And Imagemaker got to work 

To craft the invites to us all:

“Fourth Tuesday – heed the siren’s call 

Of voices varied, come and share. 

Creative sparks will fill the air!” 

So many have, for ten fine years 

Embraced assembly with our peers. 

Leading off with a Philly tale 

Or seventies Denver: he’d unveil 

A place we maybe thought we knew, 

But from Ed’s unique point of view: 

Gone in a Taxi to the Dark Side 

Or with Lucia on a Pow-wow ride, 

Or a ghost from a bygone neighborhood 

The man in the attic lonely stood 

And watched cops puzzling in the street – 

Where can he be? He’s got them beat. 

All through life your stories rose 

Insisting to you: Stop! Compose! 

Share your thought and incidents, 

Steep them in your eloquence. 

An impresario is one 

Who trades in the phenomenon 

Of gathering, and drawing out 

The storytellers round about – 

The songs, the memoirs, and the fiction 

Made us richer through depiction – 

The deadline looms to stand on stage 

Painting us all another page. 

Thank you, Ed, for the groups you founded, 

Those magic nights we sat astounded. 

And we remember, by the way, 

That aphorism you liked to say: 

“A contract with the muse is a contract for life” 

You kept her happy – she’s been your midwife!

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

The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich

This complex 2008 book has more characters than a Tolstoy novel. It is not one story but multitudes, with narrators of different generations, whose experiences intertwine and haunt and goad each other. Some are Native Americans, some are German or French immigrants, in a lonely section of North Dakota where reservation land borders failing small towns. Family trees interlock and divide and plunge skyward and earthward in a confusion the reader could either diligently list, or just flip back through to see which maimed branch this orphaned brother, this obsessed banker, belonged to. 

Or you could just read it for the stories, as rich and abundant as any Salman Rushdie could conjure – a violin that saves a hell-bent young man; a grandfather with many versions of how he lost half an ear; a baby that survives the murder of her entire family in an act that reverberates through the book; a preacher so swelled with spirit that none can withstand him – and more. Love affairs and vengeance and waywardness, the whole range of humanity with our fixed notions of the world, who cannot recognize what we’re doing even as we push it to its dreadful end, crowd its pages. 

Some of Erdrich’s work has plot. This one focuses on a place and its people; as with lives anywhere, plenty happens but not in furtherance of a tale so much as spinning out events and years, creating deep impressions of prairie and its inhabitants. As readers of Erdrich would expect, her characters span the spectrum of bigotry, intolerance, and delusion while tottering on the edge of absurdity, slowly releasing their secrets onto the page.

House of Rain, by Craig Childs

House of Rain is an archaeological journey through the American Southwest, starting with Chaco Canyon and ending in the northern Sierra Madre in Mexico. Childs, not himself a credentialed archaeologist, is a man driven by curiosity and imagination who, rather than bowing to the accepted narrative of ancient peoples, looks for himself at the ruins, the pottery patterns, the feathers and burials and architecture, and reaches his own conclusions. He works with and discusses with many bona-fide archaeologists his ideas, his finds, and his questions. 

Some discount his theories, others offer bolstering evidence. By examining not only maps but the land itself, he makes connections, observing for example the ruler-straight meridians connecting Chaco Canyon with other population centers, and standing on heights where signal fire remains are visible, communicating across distances to other groups. His writing is detailed and lovely as he conveys the inhospitality of the landscape, chronicling visits in the depths of winter, the scorch of high summer, in pouring rain and parching drought. He spends a lot of time climbing in and out of precipitous canyons, and the safety-maven in me is often annoyed by his lack of top-ropes, communication devices, and other rudiments of preparedness for dangerous climbs. But the people he is learning about surely made these same climbs and descents, sometimes supported by holds carved into rock or wood ladders, but other times likely using methods similar to his, to reach their destinations. 

Childs’s overarching question is about the Anasazi (a misnomer which he uses as representative of a vanished culture without applying further definition to it) – why did they “disappear”? The archaeological record suggests that they abandoned Chaco Canyon and its outposts in the twelfth century AD. Looking at the layers of use in ruins, he concludes that they were migratory people, moving in response to conditions, especially drought and the absence of game to hunt. He sees that groups left a particular site in cycles of several centuries, their descendants returning as conditions improved, then after a few generations, moving on again. 

It was not abandonment but a shifting – they took their culture with them into territories of greater abundance – of water, of game. In some cases they strongly influenced the groups among whom they resided – occasionally dominating, possibly enslaving, the inhabitants; in other cases they built their structures in the very midst of the locals’, as if thumbing their noses at what they considered lesser cultures. 

He goes out on a limb, making the case that the Anasazi culture and its successors extended from Chaco Canyon into the Sierra Madre, citing trade in tropical birds from Mesoamerica, turquoise, and pottery designs to support his thesis. Some archaeologists agree with him, but the prevailing narrative separates events and groups in Mexico from those in what later became the US, as though the boundaries we maintain now have always existed. 

I am struck by the respect with which he treats these sites: often he finds burial areas, pottery shards, weavings, feathers and other artifacts. He handles them with care and respect, then returns them to where he found them. This conforms to modern field practice, but it is also a choice we feel he would make anyhow: these things should remain where their makers left them.

The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future, a film by Francisca Alegria

Somewhere in the South American jungle, a river deposits thousands of dead fish on its banks. And a woman in a motorcycle helmet and muddy clothes emerges, gasps on the bank, then makes her way into town. She is Magdalena. She committed suicide decades before by riding her motorcycle into this river, but here she is. The only clues to her otherworldliness are the energy she emits that interferes with electrical objects, and her muteness. 

The family she left owns a dairy near the river, run by her hapless son Bernardo under the critical eye of her former husband Enrique. When Enrique glimpses her through a shop window he collapses and is hospitalized. Their daughter Cecilia, a doctor, collects him, her trans teenage son Tomas and younger daughter, and off they go to the dairy farm. Magdalena appears to her grandchildren, who seem comfortable with her. Cecilia, who witnessed her ride off the pier, screams at her to go away. The old woman servant who looks after everyone takes note of her presence, undisturbed. 

At night, Magdalena opens the gate of the cows’ enclosure and they escape into a field. The next day they’re all sick and dying. The owners of the pulp mill on the river deny having anything to do with the fish kill or cattle deaths, or for that matter the disappearance of the bees, which occurred after fumigation. She may have been sent by the river to warn people about the toxins, and to press them to action. Her family, with its own disharmony, suffers a sickness of anger and contempt. But her grandchildren welcome her, and accept her presence without hesitation or doubt. 

Cecilia is angry at her return, perhaps because she had no way to call her mother back, to receive an explanation or apology. But Enrique is also angry, with the same intolerance that has crippled his family. He blames Bernardo for the deaths of the cows – their livelihood – and seeing the belittled man’s shoulders slump as he rides away on his motorcycle is truly wrenching. Told he is too stupid to do anything but farm, he is also castigated for not running the dairy perfectly. Enrique does none of the work but finds plenty to criticize. We understand Magdalena better. 

And yet, Bernardo is quite comfortable with Tomas, accepting his earrings, lipstick, feminine clothes. The place is strange, the energy Magdalena gives off is strange – what is she after? Is she a ghost, or…? Tomas goes to a gay bar to dance, and Magdalena joins him. She dances too, and flirts with a man. Later she and Tomas sit on a boat together. He asks about the afterlife – how was it? Wet, she conveys – as close as she comes to speaking. Images appear on his phone from her mind, leaving viewers space to decide what they mean. 

Not every story is rational. Sometimes we just ride along to see where it goes, and take in the sights and sounds of what may be unreal. Why not? A song, woven through the opening and again at the end, is sung by some fluid voice, possibly a cow’s.

An Evening with Mark Mothersbaugh - a Denver Film Festival Event

As part of the 45th Denver Film Festival’s MOFFOM (Music On Film – Film On Music), the organizers invited Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh for an evening in conversation with Jonathan Palmer. Mothersbaugh’s many compositions include soundtracks for TV shows Peewee’s Playhouse and Rugrats, and movies starting with Neil Young’s Human Highway, then later the Rugrats movie, which was so successful that Mothersbaugh became sought-after in film scoring. He did TV commercials, adding subliminal messages to Hawaiian Punch ads saying “Question Authority” and “Sugar is bad for you” which the companies didn’t catch, though kids likely did. 

He met Wes Anderson, who had very specific ideas about the sound he wanted, and they worked together on many movies starting with Bottle Rocket. That movie was previewed for a test audience of spoiled Santa Monica adolescents who came for the free sodas and candy then left in droves – Mothersbaugh said the movie became notorious for having the highest walkout rate of any preview. 

He worked with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who turned the children’s book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs into a movie. Later, Lord and Miller made 21 Jump Street, which he also scored. When he was approached by producers of the first Lego movie, he introduced them to Lord and Miller, and used a combination of synthesizer and orchestral sounds to blend Lego brick noises with the natural world. He has worked with New Zealand director Taika Waititi on What We Do in the Shadows and Thor Ragnarok.

He was asked to score the $150 million documentary This is not a House for which he got to use many fun instruments he’d accumulated, including dozens of bird calls and one-of-a-kind instruments such as his “orchestrium” which forced air through organ pipes and doorbell chimes using a calliope organ base, to produce mechanical natural sound. 

From 40s and 50s radio composer Raymond Scott he was able to rescue an “electronium” along with dozens of acetate recordings from Scott’s many years in radio – Ella Fitzgerald, many other shows, and cartoon music, which wasn’t copyrighted until 1954. Mothersbaugh referred to Devo’s music as “Fisher-Price toy songs” – simple melodies with odd lyrics. 

As a boy he watched old movies on a small black-and-white TV, sometimes capturing soundtracks on his family’s answering machine recorder – when he played them back later, he could re-watch the movies in his head. In the monster movie Island of Lost Souls he heard the mad scientist’s half-animal/ half human creations crying out, “Are we not men?” From Inherit the Wind he absorbed the image of a chimpanzee in front of a poster declaring Devolution Man – but with his head in the way of some letters, the image said Devo Man. 

This humorous iconoclast, whose band has been rejected yet again from induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, says his final wish is to be buried in the HOF parking lot, with one leg sticking up.