The long history of hiding in the forest



Deer in the Forest. Painting by Eugen Krüger, Germany, 1832-1876. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

I’m about three quarters done with William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

On April 9, 1940, Hitler’s armed forces started their attack on Denmark and Norway. Tiny Denmark fell quickly. Norway had the means to fight, and forests in which to hide. With Oslo under attack, the King of Norway and the members of Parliament left Oslo on a special train for Hamar, 80 miles to the north. Twenty trucks headed north with the gold of the Bank of Norway, and three more trucks with the secret papers of the Foreign Office. “Thus,” writes Shirer, “the gallant action of the garrison at Oskarsborg had foiled Hitler’s plans to get his hands on the Norwegian King, government and gold.”

The Norwegian Parliament actually met at Hamar, with only five of its two hundred members missing, writes Shirer. But when they heard that German troops were approaching, they moved again, this time to Elverum, a few miles from the Swedish border. The Germans sent a negotiator to talk with King Haakon VII. The king received the negotiator, but the negotiator was told, “Resistance will continue as long as possible.” Hitler was angry. On April 11, the German air force was sent “to give the village of Nybergsund [where the king was hiding] the full treatment.”

Shirer writes:

“The Nazi flyers demolished it with explosive and incendiary bombs and then machine-gunned those who tried to escape the burning ruins. The Germans apparently believed at first that they had succeeded in massacring the King and the members of the government. The diary of a German airman, later captured in northern Norway, had this entry for April 11: ‘Nybergsund. Oslo Regierung. Alles vernichtet.’ (Oslo government. Completely wiped out.)

“The village had been, but not the King and the government. With the approach of the Nazi bombers, they had taken refuge in a nearby wood. Standing in snow up to their knees, they had watched the Luftwaffe reduce the modest cottages of the hamlet to ruins. They now faced a choice of either moving on to the nearby Swedish border and asylum in neutral Sweden or pushing north into their own mountains, still deep in the spring snow. They decided to move on up the rugged Gudbrands Valley, which led past Hamar and Lillehammer and through the mountains to Andalsnes to the northwest coast, a hundred miles southwest of Trondheim. Along the route they might organize the still dazed and scattered Norwegians forces for further resistance. And there was some hope that British troops might eventually arrive to help them.”

On April 29, Shirer writes, they were taken aboard a British cruiser and were moved to Tromsö, far above the Arctic Circle, where they set up a provisional capital. Eventually German troops got to them, though, and on June 7 King Haakon and his government were taken to London, where they remained in exile until the end of the war.

I wonder if there is a movie about this. If not, there ought to be. The idea of a King and a parliament hiding in the woods to escape a burning village, then fleeing through a rugged valley and mountains, is exceedingly dramatic. These images stuck in my head for days, and, as I thought about it, I realized that there is a long history of hiding in the forest.

Sometimes it is good guys hiding from bad guys. Sometimes it is bad guys hiding from good guys. In reality as well as in stories, forests are a refuge and redoubt (think Robin Hood). But also in reality and in stories, forests are a dark place of danger (think Mirkwood, or Hansel and Gretel). This polar tension between forests as refuge and forests as dark and dangerous places makes them a powerful idea in the human psyche.

Very few newspaper articles stick in my mind for years, but this one did. It’s from the New York Times, with the headline “Why We Fed the Bomber.” The bomber the headline refers to is Eric Rudolph, a North Carolina (!) terrorist (anti-gay and anti-abortion) who planted a lot of bombs between 1996 and 1998. For years, he hid out in North Carolina’s Nantahala Forest, by, according to Wikipedia, “gathering acorns and salamanders, pilfering vegetables from gardens, stealing grain from a grain silo, and raiding dumpsters in Murphy, North Carolina.”

Or consider the Russian family that lived in the wilds of Siberia for 40 years, unaware of World War II. Or consider the Vietnamese soldier who hid in the jungle for 40 years. Or Barry Prudom, a murderer who hid in Dalby Forest in northern England.

In Googling for this post, I found a huge amount of material — more than enough for a book, a book that I would very much like to read, if someone would write it. It seems that the Germans, in particular, have preserved a fascination with the forest. This article, “The Myth of the Wild German Forest,” contains some excellent bits of history:

“Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a famous Roman senator and historian, was the first to write about the forests in the land of the ancient Teutons, a Germanic tribe. His brief study Germania founded the myth of the eerie forest that housed barbarians and robbers alike — a forest so dense that it helped the Teutons keep the Romans off their backs…. The forest is still today regarded as a symbol of German identity, celebrated over the centuries by poets, writers and painters. Other European cultures that also have dense forests have a more distanced relationship to their woodlands.”

I would quickly become disheartened if I wrote here about the American attitude toward its forests. But certainly we do still have them, if we can keep them. A book that I reviewed here a few years ago, Ramp Hollow: the Ordeal of Appalachia, mentions that the early subsistence settlers of the Appalachian Mountains very much depended on the forests for their survival. From that book I learned that you don’t necessarily have to have a pasture to keep a cow. You can keep a cow in the woods. In fact, this article from Cornell University recommends keeping cows, sheep, and ducks in the forest. The article calls this “silvopasturing.”

When I was looking for land, before I bought the abbey’s five acres of woodland, I did not at first realize how much I wanted woodland. Anyone who has had supper with me out on the rear deck, when the wind is blowing, has heard me say: “Just listen. The wind in the trees sounds just like the sea.” The sea and the forest — both deep, dark, vast, mysterious, and dangerous — are closely connected ideas in the human psyche. Think of the magic of a path in the woods, especially if you don’t know who or what made the path, and you don’t know where the path is going. Tolkien invokes this idea, with great effect. I don’t think I’d be able to live in a place without either the sea or the woods.

I very much feel here that tension between the two faces of the forest: the forest as an eerie, dangerous place; and the forest as a place of refuge, where one can even find food and water. I confess that, those few times that I’ve had to venture into the woods alone at night (to look for a chicken who didn’t show up at bedtime, for example), I’m scared, and I have to buck myself up for it. Even inside the house, the nighttime noises can be scary: the alien hooting of a barred owl, or a pack of coyotes on the ridge, the snorting of a buck, or — worse — the sounds you can’t identify. My friend Ken, who doesn’t like herds of cows much more than he likes grizzly bears, has written about the primal importance of living in a place where there are things that are a bit scary. And yet, in the light of day here, when the birds are singing, I’m like the raccoons and deer: the woods make me feel safe.

It took me a while to realize that, because of my last and very difficult year in San Francisco, I developed a genuine case of post traumatic stress. It was a number things: a house fire in an old Victorian (the San Francisco fire department saved my dog, and I subsequently moved), some middle-sized earthquakes, the lingering uneasiness of feeling that cities were under attack after 9/11, the backstabbing and dirty dealing that accompanied the merging of the staffs of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, and, probably worst of all, a water accident that occurred in my fancy fifth-floor apartment that flooded the apartments below me all the way to the basement. There was a huge fight over insurance, and not until the statute of limitations ran out did I finally feel safe from the threat of having my retirement destroyed by lawsuits (and probably bankruptcy). During that last year I had a recurring dream in which I had to cross the entire United States from west to east, skulking through the woods — always the woods — traveling only at night, and keeping away from the yellow lights of settlements and barking dogs. Eventually, in those dreams, I came to an abandoned house deep in the forest. Sometimes the place was almost grand; sometimes it was a hovel with a rotting roof and rotting floors. It was the refuge that I was looking for.

And now, this is that place.

If I built enough fence to surround four acres of woods, I could even have a cow.


Update: Ken has emailed me with the names of two movies, one about the King’s flight through the forests of Norway, and the other about a similar winter journey during the same period.

The King’s Choice (2017)

The Twelfth Man (2018)


The other pandemic: Trumper psychosis



Hitler in Nuremberg, 1935. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Two pandemics are at present raging across the United States. Both are particularly severe in the West and South, where, for similar reasons, people are particularly likely to be infected. One pandemic, of course, is a biological pandemic, Covid-19. The other is what Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee has called “the mental health pandemic.”

Lee published a book about this in 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She also has an article this week at Salon:

Yale psychiatrist: Trump’s psychosis has infected his followers. Here’s how to get them better

I think it must have been Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who originated the concept of psychic epidemics. Jung frequently mentions psychic epidemics in his writings, and, as I recall, Freud and Jung frequently discussed psychic epidemics in their letters. I’m aware that everything about Freud and Jung is now in dispute among the intelligentsia. But even if you dispute whether Freud’s and Jung’s psychological theories are good science, there is no disputing the fact that both of them were brilliant and well-placed cultural observers, at a dangerous time in world history. Jung is famous for having said (in 1936), “I saw it coming. I said in 1918 that the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany. No psychologist then understood at all what I meant…” [See footnote at end.]

What Jung was referring to was what he called an archetype. Jung was claiming that his psychoanalysis of German patients in 1918 found similar, and pathological, stirrings in his patients’ minds. He called that “the blond beast.” If that was true in 1918, then surely today, I would argue, Donald Trump is feeding a similar archetype in the minds of his “base.” I thought for a while about what we might call it, and the term I ended up with is “the white barbarian.” The American white barbarian is way beyond stirring in its sleep, though. It’s in the streets. This morning I was shocked by the news that a Democratic Party headquarters in Arizona was destroyed in an arson attack. If you’re on Facebook and haven’t removed all the right-wingers from your feed, then it’s easy to see that Facebook is a key trolling ground for white barbarians. Images from Trump rallies have captured white barbarian faces for history. Hordes are their most hospitable habitat, but they also operate individually, as in the photo below, or as with the pathetic “pizzagate” gunman who fired his AR-15 inside the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, where he was told that Democrats were holding children as sex slaves. He subsequently was sentenced to four years. White barbarians in a state of psychosis seem capable of believing anything they’re told.

In her Salon article, Bandy Lee says that, to keep their followers psychotic, an “influential figure” with his “severe pathology” must create and maintain an atmosphere of psychological contagion. Hitler used rallies for that, as does Trump. One of Trump’s biggest political problems at present is that he can’t hold his rallies because of Covid-19. Covid-19 also has forced the Republican Party to cancel its national convention, which Trump desperately needed to keep his base of white barbarians in a state of psychosis. During the Bush-Cheney administration, Bush and Cheney brilliantly and diabolically deceived the media into getting almost the entire country into a state of war fever, as preparation for invading Iraq. In March 2003, only 17 percent of Americans strongly opposed invading Iraq. I was among the 17 percent. It is a terrifying thing to see such a large majority of one’s country deceived into a state of madness in support of violence. Republican politics is now completely dependent on public psychosis to achieve its ends — and has been since Newt Gingrich (1995) and Fox News (1996). An irrational, uncaring, authoritarian and anti-democracy politics that provides no benefits to its voters but only to its richest contributors can’t do things any other way.

A big topic with the rational intelligentsia at present is whether conditions will get better after Trump goes down. Many argue that things will not get better, that the Republican Party will just find new ways to keep its base in a state of rage and psychosis. At present, I’m more optimistic. I think that the period between now and Nov. 3 may be very dangerous, but if Trump goes down in a landslide — as it appears he would if the election were held today — then I think the Republican Party will have to conclude that its politics of rage and deception and keeping its base mentally ill won’t work anymore, as demographic change leaves them behind and as people see through their deceptions. Still, it’s a very dangerous party machinery that can lie and deceive its way to war with only 17 percent (of very well-informed people, I might add) resisting the contagion. Why are some of us immune? Why are some so susceptible? What can be done to improve the odds of recovery for those who have gone mad? There is much to think about there, but it will have to be a post for some other day, after Trump is turned out of the White House.


These two white barbarians, by the way, have been charged with felonies for pointing their guns at dark-skinned protesters. Note that her finger is on the trigger, an absolute no-no for anyone who has been trained to use guns.


Note: The quote from Jung comes, I believe, from the Tavistock lectures a year before World War II. I believe the quote is accurate, and much has been written about it. The “blond beast” probably refers to Nietzsche. See more here.


Update: For a long time, no matter what the right wing in America was up to, comparisons to Germany were out of bounds in public discourse. That taboo has fallen. Here is yet another piece in the New York Times drawing comparisons between Hitler’s Germany and Trump’s America:

American Catastrophe Through German Eyes: Trump says he wants to protect law-abiding citizens. In 1933, Hitler issued his ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.’


I wore out my first copy


It was 1976, I believe, when I bought a copy of the 1943 edition of Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking at a junk shop. I am not hard on books, so I’m sure that the book was in fairly rough condition when I bought it. Over the years, though, the fabric peeled off the spine, and the covers came loose. Recently I found another copy of the 1943 edition on eBay and bought it for $28.

Why the 1943 edition? The 1943 edition is the wartime edition, which emphasized frugality and cooking from scratch. There have been many editions of The Joy of Cooking (see the Wikipedia article). According to Wikipedia, the 1936 edition emphasized meals that could be made in 30 minutes or less, using frozen and canned foods (yuck). The 1951 edition sounds interesting, though I have never seen a copy. Later editions, as far as I’m concerned, are probably poor references for truly traditional home cooking in America, which is what this book is good for.

In the 2009 film “Julie & Julia,” there is a funny scene in which Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep) encounters Irma Rombauer in a publisher’s office. Rombauer is presented as dowdy and a bit of a hick. Compared with Julia Child, no doubt she was. But, in my opinion, though learning to cook other nations’ cuisines competently is a skill greatly to be desired, there is no shame in honoring, loving, and preserving one’s native cuisine. The 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking is the best reference I have ever seen for traditional American cooking.

I rarely follow any recipe exactly. But I do consult many, many recipes, just to get a concept before making my own version. My modifications are usually about making things healthier, with a bias toward California cuisine and Mediterranean cuisine. Though just about every recipe in The Joy of Cooking 1943 is made from scratch, she does use pantry staples that we all still use — tinned tomatoes, tinned salmon, and cracker crumbs, for example. (I don’t keep crackers in the house because I like them too much, but I recently bought some Ritz crackers — for the first time in my life, as far as I can recall — to make a traditional squash casserole.)

Part of the value of The Joy of Cooking 1943 is its completeness. You’ll find a reference for just about everything your grandmother (or great-grandmother) used to make. I was shocked a few months ago, though, when I discovered that there is no recipe for pimento cheese, which is an American classic.


Click here for high-resolution version


Click here for high-resolution version

The German election of 1933



The Reichstag burns, Feb. 27, 1933.

It’s impossible to read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich without making comparisons to Donald Trump. To risk an unattractive analogy, to compare the two is like comparing a hot little pustule ripe for popping to a deadly case of gangrene. Donald Trump is stupid, lazy, cowardly, petty, and gratuitously cruel. Whereas Hitler was a political and military genius, and a total psychopath. Hitler had a plan — a diabolical plan that he had the discipline and nerves to execute.

At present I am 450 pages into the 1,250 pages of Third Reich. I’ll have more to say about this impressive book later. But the German election of 1933 is on my mind now because the next American election is just over three months away. We already can see that Trump’s strategy for Nov. 3 is a crummy, timid imitation of the German election of 1933.

Trump wants as much disorder in the streets as possible between now and November. The hot spot at the moment is Portland, where noisy and naive protesters, probably with inexperienced leadership, are up against heavily militarized police and uninvited federal agents. Trump will continue to call for “law and order” to stop the “violent Marxist thugs,” saying that only he can make us safe. Nancy Pelosi, who knows her history and is more inclined toward understatement than overstatement, makes the comparison to Hitler: “Unidentified stormtroopers. Unmarked cars. Kidnapping protesters and causing severe injuries in response to graffiti. These are not the actions of a democratic republic. Trump and his stormtroopers must be stopped.”

Trump cannot win — or steal — the November election without treachery in some form. The question is: How far will he go?

The complete story of the Reichstag fire is still in dispute. Hermann Göring once boasted that he had set the fire, though Göring denied that at Nuremberg. Whatever happened, the Nazis wasted no time in blaming a Communist conspiracy and using the Reichstag fire to try to swing the election, which came six days later. The Prussian government declared:

“Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to be burned down…. Women and children were to be sent in front of terrorist groups…. The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection and civil war…. It has been ascertained that today was to have seen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, against private property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of general civil war.”

The election was March 5, 1933, and it was the last democratic election in Germany during Hitler’s lifetime. The Nazis got 44 percent of the total vote.

FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, as of July 16, shows Trump with 41.2 percent. To take control with 41.2 percent support, a level of treason and treachery would be required that I don’t think Trump is capable of even conceiving, let alone carrying out. (We should keep in mind, though, that Putin, who owns Trump, is much more competent.) Nor is the American democracy as weakened and exhausted as Germany’s was in the years after World War I. Trump has goons (many of whom have already been brought to justice), but Trump has no Göring.

Just listen to the sadistic voice of Göring, in Frankfurt the day before the elections:

“Fellow Germans, my measures will not be crippled by any judicial thinking…. I don’t have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more! … Certainly, I shall use the power of the State and the police to my utmost, my dear Communists, so don’t draw any false conclusions; but the struggle to the death, in which my fist will grasp your necks, I shall lead with those down there — the Brownshirts.”

In comparison with that, Trump and the even the sadistic Stephen Miller are feckless amateurs. But they will try to keep their power, and their only possible game is a dirty one.

The protesters need to learn some history, too. To march in great numbers and to make as much noise as possible is perfectly good protesting. But to break things or to make any use of fire before such a dangerous election is very foolish.


Update 1: From the Washington Post (be sure to watch the video, which went viral):

A Navy vet asked federal officers in Portland to remember their oaths. Then they broke his hand.


Update 2: Heather Cox Richardson’s Facebook post last night makes the same point that I made in this post yesterday morning. As she puts it: “It seems clear that the Trump campaign — which got a new director last Wednesday — is going to make its case for reelection on the idea that there is violence in America’s cities that must be addressed with federal force, and that only Trump is willing to do so.”

Heather Cox Richardson on Facebook


Update 3: New York Times:

Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun: Protesters are being snatched from the streets without warrants. Can we call it fascism yet?


What’s blooming at the abbey, July 6


By the time summer leaves us, most of us are tired of summer. But would we ever tire of summer mornings? I think not.

These are iPhone XR photos. The XR camera is so good, and so handy, that I think I will trade it this fall for an iPhone 12, partly to get an even better camera, and partly to get support for T-Mobile’s low-band (600Mhz) 5G, which sounds very promising for rural areas without a lot of cellular towers. The 600Mhz band of 5g uses frequencies that formerly were used by broadcast television. Propagation at those frequencies is excellent. I still use my heavy Nikon D2X camera, by the way. The Nikon is still best for more formal and more carefully composed photos, especially when the camera is on a tripod. But the newer iPhones are astonishly good at snapshots (and video).

Food departments



A screen capture from the Washington Post web site

When a newspaper is prospering and newsroom budgets are growing, that newspaper can have itself a food department. When revenue is sliding and newsroom budgets are being cut, the food department is the first to go.

If the Washington Post had a notable food department ten years ago, it never caught my attention. In the last few years of my newspaper career (at the San Francisco Chronicle), there were two outstanding newspaper food departments in the U.S.: the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times in those days poached a writer or two from the Chronicle. (To have your staff poached by the New York Times is a high compliment to a secondary newspaper.) If the Chronicle still has a food department today, I’m sure it’s tiny. Mostly the Chronicle now writes about restaurants. (Secondary and tertiary newspapers these days cover restaurants better than they cover city hall.)

A newspaper food department requires spending some capital. You have to provide a well-equipped test kitchen. You need a special studio for food photography. You need some sort of dining room for tastings and sharing and an assortment of photogenic serving vessels for photography. On the expense side, you’ll be buying all sorts of expensive groceries every week. You need a staff with special training and food-world credentials. I always found the food department to be the happiest department at the paper. I loved to drop in on them and see what they were cooking.

The Washington Post, of course, and the New York Times are now rolling in money. Life has been hell at every other newspaper in the country, but fortunately this country has two strong newspapers left. Even if I didn’t know that the staffs and budgets are growing at the Times and the Post, the work of their food departments would reveal that they’re rich.

Another thing I notice about the Washington Post’s food department is that they are doing superb food photography, as good as the New York Times. It’s a safe bet that, when the Post expanded its food department, they aimed to beat the New York Times. It doesn’t matter to me who is winning. They both are doing beautiful work.

The Fellowship of the Ring


I first read The Lord of the Rings almost 50 years ago. Subsequently I have reread it at least twice. I often have wanted to do another rereading, but as Bilbo is preparing for his birthday party, I realize that I can quote many of the next lines before I turn the page. It could almost be a parlor game: What does Gandalf say next? Having failed yet again to find a good novel that I haven’t read, I’ve embarked on my fourth reading of The Lord of the Rings. I just finished the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring.

I still know the story by heart, of course. We all do. But this is the first time I’ve reread these books since my retirement more than 10 years ago. In those 10 years, I’ve read more about Tolkien including a book about the Inklings, I’ve read some of Tolkien’s letters, I’ve read a good bit on linguistics and prehistory, I’ve written two novels and part of a third, and — most important — I’ve hiked in remote places in the British Isles. It even helps to have visited Oxford last year, since that’s where these books were written. I’m finding that this fourth reading is rewarding for new reasons — savoring Tolkien’s use of language, admiring his scholarship, and marveling at his imagination.

One thing that has surprised me, though, is how much I’m enjoying the walking, walking, walking. Tolkien’s descriptions of terrain, sky (including the night sky), and weather are extraordinary. Having now hiked in moor, bog, and woodland and having ascended long, rocky, heather-covered ridges to the rainswept tops of wild mountains, I can now appreciate what previously was lost on me. It’s a travelogue, and it’s Tolkien’s descriptions that make Middle-earth so real. I never found the perfect pub (I hope to keep trying), but the provincial hotels of Scotland (such as the Royal Hotel at Stornaway) are almost as much fun as the Prancing Pony inn at Bree would be.

Before I start volume 2, The Two Towers, I am going to read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which Ken recently finished and highly recommends. It’s a big tome, 1,250 pages. It’s the sort of book that will be kept on a prominent shelf for reference, so I bought the hardback 50th anniversary edition, which was released in 2011. Ken wrote a good comparison of Trump and Hitler, on how they’re alike and how they differ, which I would like to reproduce here later, with Ken’s permission. These three evil characters occupy the same dark space in our minds where we store our dreads and icons of depravity — Sauron, Hitler, and Trump.

Speaking of Trump, each day we learn something new and horrifying about his criminality and treason. I haven’t felt that I have anything to add by posting about politics here, though, because I think that the responsible media and the responsible commentariat are getting it right. I still don’t understand, though, why Republican senators don’t talk Trump into resigning so that the Republican Party can try to save itself, and its hold on the Senate, by putting up another candidate. But then again, it is with Trump as it was with Hitler (and Sauron). To good people (and good hobbits) who are working with good information, such depravity is incomprehensible.