Into the Woods – Page 104 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Publix

Until today I had never been inside a Publix store. A new store opened last week in Winston-Salem, across the street from Whole Foods. I decided to check it out.

It’s a nice new store and all that. It reminded me of Safeway stores in San Francisco. But it seems to sell pretty much the same generic products that other grocery stores sell, and I couldn’t see any particular reason for shopping there and dealing with the slow-moving, indecisive throngs who also had come to check it out.

So I just left and went to Whole Foods as usual, appreciating Whole Foods’ product line even more.

In search of environmental justice

Since 1974, the people of the Walnut Tree community have lived in the shadow of Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station, Duke’s largest coal-burning power plant in the Carolinas. Not until 2008 were scrubbers installed on the plant’s stacks. For all those years, people in Walnut Tree were at Ground Zero for the plant’s emissions — fly ash, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and all the extremely toxic heavy metals that are found at trace levels in the wastes from coal combustion.

Unsurprisingly, people began to get sick. Also unsurprisingly, the official response was that the steam plant had nothing to do with it.

It would be difficult to overestimate the political and economic power of Duke Energy in North Carolina. Working largely through the Republican Party, Duke Energy (along with other fossil fuel fortunes including the out-of-state Koch brothers) helped engineer the Tea Party takeover of North Carolina in 2010. North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, worked for Duke Energy for 28 years. McCrory and the right-wing legislature have moved with terrifying efficiency to try to protect Duke Energy’s interests, to bring fracking and offshore oil drilling to North Carolina, to slow the state’s investment in renewable energy, and to weaken environmental regulations and the state agencies that enforce them. Part of the purpose of North Carolina’s so-called bathroom law is to distract people (and the media) from the rest of the right-wing agenda in North Carolina.

In February 2014, a massive coal ash spill into the Dan River near Eden focused the nation’s attention (at last!) on what Duke Energy and the politicians they own were trying to do in North Carolina.

Back in 2012, when I and a small group of sassy (and very smart) Stokes County citizens started the organization that we call No Fracking in Stokes, we had no idea how the fracking issue would play out or how it would end up connecting with the coal ash issue. There is much local history here that needs to be written, but by 2015 a powerful coalition had formed to fight not only for the environment but also for environmental justice in our obscure little county. Among these organizations are No Fracking in Stokes, Appalachian Voices, Clean Water for North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the NAACP. I sometimes refer to these organizations as the cavalry that rode in to help us.

As readers of this blog know, Stokes County is a rare piece of largely unspoiled earth in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The beautiful Dan River winds down out of Virginia, through Stokes County, and back into Virginia again. North Carolina’s most popular state park, Hanging Rock State Park, is here. Climb to the top of the Hanging Rock promontory and look around. You’ll see what we’re protecting. But because the county is controlled by Republicans, and because many of the people are poor and are too busy just trying to get by to pay attention, outside interests would like write the county off as an environmental sacrifice zone.

Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has gotten involved. That group held a hearing in Walnut Cove last month, specifically on the question of environmental justice in the Walnut Tree neighborhood. Last year, the Rev. William Barber, who has led North Carolina’s powerful Moral Monday movement, spoke in Walnut Cove. He also brought the resources of the NAACP to the struggle.

It seems quite possible that, in the larger statewide struggle to hold Duke Energy accountable and to expose the corruption of the Republican Party’s protection of Duke Energy, Walnut Tree will be Duke Energy’s Waterloo, because in Walnut Tree the legal questions relating to environmental justice become crystal clear.

These photos are from a cookout last Saturday in the Walnut Tree community. They’ve gotten organized. They have plans to build a community center. They have a legal strategy for getting the Walnut Tree community annexed into the little town of Walnut Cove (Walnut Tree desperately needs Walnut Cove’s water, which comes from deep wells that are a safe distance from the coal ash impoundments).

As someone from Appalachian Voices said, this is what winning looks like. It has taken 40 years, though we’re still not done.

Stokes County terrain at its best

Click on image for high-resolution version

Given enough time, Americans can ruin just about any landscape. Suburbanization is one of the most popular methods.

Suburbanization requires major expenditures on roads. We don’t have those roads here in Stokes County. Our roads are narrow and crooked. Suburbanization also requires population growth and money. We don’t have that either.

The photo is of Younts Wine Farm near Walnut Cove.

On letting grass go to seed (follow-up)

When I check the logs of this blog, one post that I find is frequently read (by people searching Google) is “On letting grass go to seed” from May 2009. I owe my readers a follow-up on that post.

In May 2009, I was so busy finishing the building of the abbey that I didn’t have time to mow my grass, even if I’d wanted to. Also, I had reasoned that it couldn’t hurt to let the grass run wild in its first year.

But in the spring of 2010, I bought a lawn mower, and since then I have been mowing (though I don’t mow nearly as often as most folks or cut the grass as low).

Each spring, there is still an opportunity to let one’s grass go to seed and get a free seeding. The timing is tricky. The seed needs to be ripe, but it wouldn’t be healthy to let the grass get too tall and then mow it down. It’s hard on grass to cut too much of its growth at once.

I am not a horticulturist. But I am a careful observer, and I do know horticulturists who can give me advice when I need it. So, with your own grass, use your own judgment. I am more experimental than most folks. I love my grass.

One of the things I notice is there are many kinds of grasses in my yard. I tend to dislike monocultures. I have spread many types of seed based on the assumption that the happiest grass, the grass best suited to a particular area, will eventually dominate. And in any yard, grass will volunteer, though I have no idea where it all comes from.

To decide when to mow, you need to be confident that the seeds have ripened and matured and then dried out. Look closely!

I put some samples under the microscope. I was greatly surprised by what I saw. Grass looks like little corn plants! Each grass seed looks a lot like an ear of corn. If I’m not mistake, the seeds flower out the top through tiny silks, like corn, at least on some types of grass. I may be wrong about this, and I’ll need to ask a horticulturist. But upon seeing the resemblance of corn to grass under the microscope, I did some quick Googling. For example, Scientists Trace Corn Ancestry from Ancient Grass to Modern Crop.

In the microscopic photo below, notice what appears to me to be a little corn-like tassle at the top of the seed.

A visit to Rag Apple Lassie vineyards

One of my favorite wineries in the Yadkin Valley is Rag Apple Lassie. It’s near Boonville in Yadkin County. Many of the Yadkin Valley wineries are hobby operations, typically started by rich CEO’s intrigued with the idea of making wine. Rag Apple Lassie, on the other hand, started as a true agricultural enterprise by former tobacco farmers who wanted to reinvent themselves in the modern world. The land has been in the Hobson family for more than a hundred years.

“Rag Apple Lassie” was a favorite dairy cow for whom the winery was named. Jenna Hobson, the matriarch of the Hobson family who presides over the business, gives everything a feminine touch, including the names they give their wines.

To a wine lover with Californiafied tastes, many of the Yadkin Valley wines are less robust than the sassy Sonoma wines that I prefer. I do like Rag Apple Lassie’s chardonnays.

The mountain in the background is Pilot Mountain, which is part of the little Saura mountain range that connects the Yadkin Valley with the Dan River Valley.

Jenna Hobson in her tasting room

I have no theory for this injustice (yet)

When Ken came through on book tour a couple of weeks ago, I gave him a copy of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. Later on his book tour, while in Houston, his rental car was parked outside the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Someone smashed a window of the car and took Ken’s laptop bag.

His laptop computer wasn’t in the bag, nor was his iPad. There was, however, a copy of Ken’s new book, Trespassing Across America. The thief took Ken’s book but left the copy of A Theory of Justice.

There must be some meaning in this. Ken is just the man to figure out what it is.

The white working class is lost. Let’s move on.

Mark Storms, accused of killing a man in church (with a gun) over who would sit where

As a liberal and as a Democrat, I am predisposed to being sympathetic to the plight of the white working class. But I’ve just about gotten over it.

While the low-end media that serve low-information white voters carry on with the usual anger and distraction, the media followed by more-intelligent Americans is trying to grapple with a serious issue. How did Donald Trump happen? Andrew Sullivan worries that America has never been more ripe for fascism. Many intellectuals have accused the Democratic Party of abandoning the white working class. In the elite right-wing media, the problems of the white working class are attributed to moral failure — white working folks just aren’t honoring anymore the “moral” regimen that the high church and their social betters have rammed down their throats for so long.

Like many liberals, I was appalled at the right-wing media blaming white working people — blaming the victim — for global factors that are shutting them out of the economy and robbing them of their pride and dignity.

But a friend pushed back. They did bring it on themselves in many ways, he said. The more I have thought about it, the more I think my friend is right. The white working class has become mired in hatred and racism. It is proud of its ignorance. Its preferred religion — the low-church glorification of the rich, glorification of the military and war, vilification of the poor, gun worship, overt hatred of anyone who isn’t just like them, its dreams of theocracy with crushing power over the rest of us — this religion is so vile that I don’t hesitate to call it evil. Don’t miss this recent piece in the Washington Post which says that there have been 626 violent deaths in “houses of worship” since 1999. Most of those deaths occur in Baptist churches. Yet white losers are so deluded about the nature of the real world that their terror-de-jour is fear of transsexuals in bathrooms. That is moral insanity. I do believe that, as a whole, the white working class has become morally insane.

I am chairman of the Democratic Party in my county. Of course I have asked myself whether we have abandoned these white working class voters and whether there is anything we can do to win them back. But now I am pretty much persuaded that such a thing would be completely impossible. Nor is this the fault of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party thought that it could go on harnessing white resentment. Elite Republicans thought they could control white losers and inflame white losers with the right-wing propaganda system and keep on using white losers and their hatreds to win elections. But white so-called conservatives (I don’t think they’re conservatives at all — I call them right-wingers, or losers) were smart enough (though just barely) to catch on to the bait and switch. They figured out (or Donald Trump explained it to them with one-syllable and a few two-syllable words) that the Republican Party was only bilking them for votes while screwing them economically with the true agenda of the Republican Party, the billionaire agenda.

If the Republican Party couldn’t contain these people and actually is being destroyed by them, then who is crazy enough to think that the Democratic Party could do any better? White haters have simply become unfit for the modern world. They know nothing. Their skills are mostly obsolete. They lack the intelligence to adapt. They’d rather go down in angry flames and celebrate their hatreds than join the rest of us in the pluralistic modern world, with our arc toward justice.

Republicans are pretty much all alike, except that a very few of them are rich. Whereas we Democrats are a diverse coalition. Could any coalition possibly contain the white working class? No. They don’t do coalitions anymore. It took them 35 years to destroy the Republican Party. But the fragile Democratic coalition wouldn’t be able to handle these holy folks for even a single election cycle. They truly believe, from their trashed enclaves in the interior of America, that their god hates the same people they hate, that God is on their side, and that they are entitled to dominate the world, even though they and their preachers don’t know a thing about the world and the nature of the change that is destroying them.

Let’s admit it. White working people think very highly of themselves and their morals, but the truth is that they are morally degenerate and dangerous. The right-wing propaganda system, with its hate radio and fake news, which bilked them for decades to win elections by pumping up their anger and hatred, made these people far worse than they already were. Remember how nice they were during the Civil Rights era?

I don’t see a solution. We just have to hope that the United States of America can survive these people without the tyranny and fascism that Andrew Sullivan describes in the link above. We need to do everything possible to save their children from becoming just like their parents and grandparents. But all we can do now is try to contain them, anesthetize them with bread and circuses, and wait for them to die off — which they are doing at an accelerating rate, not least because of their own self-destructive behavior.

Further reading:

God tells tow truck driver to leave woman stranded on the highway because of her Bernie Sanders sticker. “The conservative Christian, 51, from Travelers Rest, South Carolina, said he felt proud that he ‘finally drew a line in the sand and stood up for what I believed.’ ”

Small solutions for light pollution

The new LED fixture, aimed in such a way as to limit its coverage to 180 degrees.

Acorn Abbey is near the end of an unpaved private road. The abbey feels remote and isolated, but there are other homes on the road. Luckily the other places are closer to the nearest paved road than I am, so there is no daily traffic past the abbey. The closest house is across the road, though that place is out of sight down a steep hill. But I have been bedeviled for as long as I’ve lived here by a so-called security light by the roadside across from me. Its light washed into the abbey’s bedroom windows, lit my house so starkly that the only real shadow was behind the house, ruined the night sky, and all too often tricked a mockingbird into singing in the dead of night.

It’s a vacation home over there; the owner lives in Florida. I’ve tried over the years to persuade her to get the light removed, but she wouldn’t do it. She believes that so-called security lights actually provide security, though some studies have found that increased lighting actually increases crime.

Not until a week ago did I learn that electric companies actually have reflector shields that can contain at least some of this light when neighbors complain. Also, electric companies are in the process of replacing the old mercury vapor lights with LED lights. The LED lights are much more directional. The direct light from them can be limited to 180 degrees.

As soon as I learned that reflectors existed, I called our electric company. The electric company here is Energy United, a small (and very friendly) co-op company. They sent an engineer to see what could be done. The engineer proposed an LED fixture mounted on a S-arm aimed across the road, away from my place.

What a huge difference that has made! Now no direct light falls on my side of the road. I can’t see the neighbor’s place anyway, because it’s down a steep hill. So all I see now is light falling on an oak tree across the road. The oak tree glows a little and shimmers like the ghost of an oak tree. But I don’t mind that, because I don’t get any direct light anymore. The sky is dark again. No light glows through the abbey’s front windows.

If more people complained about light pollution from those infernal “security” lights that can’t be turned off, then electric companies would be forced to come up with even better solutions to keep the light from trespassing.

Tiny lives

Click on image for high-resolution version

While getting laundry off the line this evening, I noticed this tiny egg shell in the grass. Its diameter is not much greater than the diameter of a pencil. An ant was checking it out. I have no idea what hatched out it.

I don’t get to travel as much as I might like. I would like to point my camera at grand Ansel-Adams landscapes — or, even better, at rocky seascapes. But for now I must make do with pointing my camera at smaller and smaller things. A macro lens — not to mention a microscope — is a very good thing to have when you’re stuck in one place. The photo of the egg shell was taken with a Nikon 28-85mm 1:3.5-4.5 lens in macro mode. In macro mode, the lens will focus as close as five or six inches.

Whatever the tiny thing is that hatched out of that egg, I hope that it is safe and thriving in the back yard.

Two takes on Handel’s Largo

Earlier this evening I had an email from a friend asking if I ever played the Largo from Handel’s opera Xerxes on the abbey organ. “Ha!” I replied. “I haven’t played the Largo since I was a first-year organ student.”

My friend caught my offhandedly rude dismissal of the Largo. He’s a trained musician and former music reviewer. The Largo is considered a bit of a cliché. But if you return to the Largo with fresh ears, it’s actually a stunning piece of music that deserves its eternal fame. After my friend mentioned it, I went to YouTube looking for interesting performances on the organ. I ended up — naturally — with Diane Bish.

Diane Bish is so flamboyant and Liberace-like an organist that one is prejudiced against her on sight. But after listening to some of her superb playing, one realizes that she is one of the greatest of living organists. I only wish that I could adequately point out some of the details in her playing of this well-known piece. For one, she uses the organ’s crescendo pedal, which is considered a no-no for most sorts of music, as a matter of musical taste. The crescendo pedal pours on the stops as you press down on it, all the way up to everything the organ’s got. When she looks down to her right at 1:09, she’s looking to make sure that her foot is on the crescendo pedal, because she’s about to let loose with the organ’s power (she starts pulling back on the pedal at about 1:29). At the dynamic peaks of the piece (around 2:35 and 3:40) she has arrived at ff approaching full organ courtesy of the crescendo pedal. Pulling back on the pedal, of course, permits the smooth and rapid fading. The crescendo pedal is one of the pedals that looks like the accelerator on a Mac truck.

The next thing to notice is her use of rubato. Rubato playing is a violation of strict, metronomic tempo. At 2:08, notice how she delays the notes and is a tiny fraction of a beat behind the beat on some of the key notes of the melody. Rubato playing is quite usual for later romantic-era music, such as Chopin. Or even Brahms. To play rubato for a composer who was born in 1685 is dangerously heretical. But Bish flawlessly pulls it off.

Xerxes is an early opera. The Largo, though literally about a tree and its shade, is a love song about displaced and hopeless love. It ought to be sung by a castrato male. Sometimes it is sung today by a female soprano. But probably a more historically accurate sound can be gotten by a countertenor, as in the performance below.