My Own Walden

Well, Dad's 80th Birthday Party was a smashing success. The setting for the celebration was the family Cabin up in upstate NY.

Back before 9-11, from a trail close to the camp, one could see the Twin Towers in the distance. The camp was originally created by my grandparent's generation from the German Fatherland in the 1950s (my Father's parents immigrated from Germany in the aftermath of WWI) as a place to come to escape the non-AC summer swelter of some big city. Close enough to get to for the weekend, far enough away to feel like the city was left behind. Very German to have a small place in the country to relax away from the maddening pace of modern life. I have been coming to the Cabin since the early 1970's and have many positive memories of the place.

The lake has been decreed by the powers that be to be pristine. People are not allowed out on the lake period. So, rather than being over-run by yahoos drinking beer and jet skiing, the lake is unperturbed. Occasionally, one sees a scofflaw out on the lake illegally but typically the lake is sans boats and watercraft.

I took this picture from the porch of my Uncle's Cabin. He, in the term of my Dad, is part of the "Lake People." Our Cabin is about as far away from the lake as possible, and it is in the domain that my Dad has labeled the "Forest People." There is some class conflict here between the leisure class and the working class. My Dad fashions himself as "Yukon George" (actually has a sign posted stating this). Yet, although the Cabin is rustic, it has electricity, heat, and yes, finally, a flush toilet. My Uncle's cabin, more aristocratic than ours, even has a shower.

My buddy Rob who spent two years in Alaska has pretty much buried my Dad's claims to be a mountain man.

I really love the Cabin. It is just too far away from my home to make it a practical place to head to for over a weekend. It takes about three and a half-hours to drive there, which is out of range to inculcate the relaxation response. The stress induced from the packing and driving, would not be offset by the chilling. It is a loss scenario in the final accounting. My Dad harps on me to come on up more often, where one of his goals is to get me to help working on the roof. I demure by stating that I am a bad son and leave it at that. I find agreeing with him about me being derelict in my duties and then self-denigrating, to be really useful in getting him off my back.

The Good Son Steve from Pittsburgh did step up and  help my Dad with some roof work which probably saved Pop 6 months of labor. Steve is a quick-mind with agile skills. Unlike me, dull of head and slow of hand. So, it was like warp speed with Steve on-board. My Dad has been working on the Cabin longer than Jefferson had his Slaves work on Monticello, deconstructing and constructing. His work at the Cabin has been some ode to Oma and Opa, not letting their legacy, sacrifices and struggles, to rot in the soil of yesterday.

When I retire, which is 5 to 7 years away (hard to fathom that I am now an AARP key demographic). I could see myself heading up to the Cabin like Henry David Thoreau and write, gazing upon the calm waters of the lake and cooling off from many years of being a deckhand in the boat of adolescent angst on the ocean of high school. It can be amusing at times, and other times, really awful. And a lot of in-between. A great career though.

To row back to Thoreau for a bit, there was a recent essay in the New Yorker by Kathryn Schulz titled "Pond Scum" about the "hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy" of Thoreau. Frankly, it comes across as an erudite hit job. You'd think she was writing about Hitler. I took the time to download the book Cape Cod written by Thoreau where she starts off her screed quoting some of his sentences recounting him (Thoreau) responding cruelly to the loss of life of a boat of Irish immigrants off of Cape Cod.

One of the skills I developed in earning a Ph.D. is the inclination to distrust isolated quotes divorced from context. In a sound-bite age where we have the attention spans of gnats flying from one rotten piece of media fruit to another, serious investigation into the intellectual underpinnings of an argument and thesis is seriously lacking. So, we have a lot of snarky and clever jackasses snorting about, trying to outdo each other. I don't know what Ms. Schulz's credentials are, but when I read the entire section where Thoreau weighs in on the tragedy, several truths arise from the deep:

- Thoreau is very imaginative and talented writer. That is kind of a "duh" insight but when pondering why he and his writing is so cherished, we must grant that his skill as a man of letters is truly exceptional. He was no hack blogger. So, he was a hypocrite, self-contradictory, and etc. He and 100% of humanity. My theology informs me that everyone is a sinner and fall short of the glory of God. It would do well for our civilization to reread the Book of Romans carefully. We are the modern Romans and making the same mistakes. The Gospel saved a dying civilization of the Greco-Romans. If we lose the Gospel, it will not be long until the Pantheon is vacated by the gods.

- Specifically, when speaking of the tragic shipwreck, Thoreau observes that almost everyone interacting with the event is practicing a form of numb disengagement to the scale of the loss. To put this same dynamic on modern waters, think about what is going on in Syria. Have we in the U,S. lost even a wink of sleep over it? We are more worried when Taco Bell makes us wait for its latest Frito-Frankenfood at the drive-thru. A quote from Cape Cod aptly states, "It is the individual and private that demands our sympathy." We will cry a ton of tears for those we have loved, but nary shed a tear for those who we choose not to care for, as if our indifference is an valid excuse.

- Irish immigrants were treated like disposable humanity by the WASPs of New England and elsewhere. They were literally a dime a dozen and once worked to death, were discarded like an empty whiskey bottle on the rocks of apathy. So, to see a shipwreck of these people in a concentrated time and space only framed a larger panorama of how they were treated by American culture as a whole. It would be very useful in our narrative about America to note that the oppressed also had freckles, pale features, and light hair.  Schulz is using a modern lens to critique Thoreau for his seemingly hardened view of the loss, when in fact, it was the collective response of a culture. I am 1/4 Irish ancestry so I know that this yawn of indifference impacted my ancestors. I am not excusing Thoreau but we also must remember than his Transcendentalism held as a tenet, in his words from Cape Cod, "The strongest wind cannot stagger a Spirit."  Tragedy in this world, its lack of permanence, would heal all wounds. Death itself dies in the eternal nature of the human spirit. None of this is explained in her essay. I found this omission to be most suspect in her postulations of Thoreau's dark side. It was his light side, right or not, that created this seemingly lack of grief responsiveness. I don't want to call her approach dishonest but just lacking the seasoned wisdom maturity.

The New Yorker gives writers a lot of space to explain their ideas. So, this is not the case of she not being able to buttress her thoughts with some historical and cultural context. When I was married, we used to get the weekly New Yorker for free due to my wife's marketing position at a well known local corporation. I began to dread the weekly washing ashore of the magazine because of the sheer volume of words. It felt like another doctoral program by mail. So, I stopped reading it and just looked at the cartoons. It began to feel at some point  to read the New Yorker was an exercise of futility, the art of writing a lot about so little. Perhaps well-executed but ultimately a beating of the wind of words. So little wisdom, so much information. And very Liberal, which again, is only half of the story.

Schulz does point out that Thoreau didn't drink alcohol or coffee. Now, that is unforgivable.