Country Life

I first read ‘Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ when I was in high school. It sent me into a depression. I went to a crap high school and of course there was no internet back then. We skimmed across the holocaust and WWII. But no details. Same as American History — no serious investigation of treatment of Native Americans.

So the book really educated me on the brutality of humans. I later read ‘Trail of Tears‘ and about Pol Pot and his atrocities. Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi, Mugabe, Kim Jong-un, the South African Apartheid government etc. The list goes on. We are a supremely unqualified species to be put in charge of a pretty darn special planet. It seems as if the situation is destined to self-correct over the coming decades.

I’m just finished with ‘Rise and Fall‘. Spoiler alert–Hitler dies.

Reading many of the passages made my chest tighten up and old anxieties I’ve mostly put behind me rose up to remind me that life is not all martini’s and cigars. It’s difficult to meditate away the mind print that emerges when reading detailed accounts of intentionally inflicted horrific suffering.

Shirer goes into gruesome detail on the tortures and medical experiments the Nazi’s subjected Jews, Pols, Russians, Hungarians and a few French and American soldiers to. The worst stuff challenges our ability to believe—although the details are set down in permanent record, mostly from the Nuremberg trial and documents recovered soon after the war.

One experiment involved deliberately freezing hundreds of people to death by making them lie on the ground in the middle of winter and monitoring their bodily functions while they slowly died. Usually it took hours and of course immense suffering. They killed people in pressure chambers to simulate high altitude flights. And this….Isla Koch, the wife of the Buchenwald Camp Commander, took a fancy to lamp shades made of human skin. She especially favored skin from people who had decorative tattoos. She began a trade in that business which claimed the lives of hundreds of people. People targeted and killed from either the camp or in some cases from Jewish neighborhoods based on their skin condition and tattoos. 

There’s more of course. No one knows the final numbers, but somewhere between 10M and 15M people executed and a great deal of those after torture or horrific internment. It’s tough reading, but I think important. It would be easy to just acknowledge the atrocities at a surface level and call ourselves informed. But the depravity that humans descended to in those circumstances can inform the veracity at which we must resist any future dictators who somehow have an irrational hold over their followers. It’s foolish to think that something that happened 80 years ago could not happen again under the right circumstances. We can look around today and see evidence of people mesmerized by a crazy old man, and in many cases, willing to kill and go to jail, on his command.

As the Ian Kershaw quote goes ‘The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved with indifference’. Or, if you prefer a more modern interpretation, Tom Morello recently quoted an old unattributed saying ‘If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi without protest, there are 10 Nazis at the table’. Which is more in line with my thinking. If you vote for a racist, sexist, mysognist — then you are a supporter of those things. And if you are a supporter of those things then……well, perhaps you need to take a long hard look at your core values.

That sentiment has gotten me in some trouble with family and friends. But so be it. Truth to power baby.

I occasionally, in an off-hand and casual manner, mention to Martini that Black Dog Ridge is named after another great dog I once knew. I do this just to keep a bit of leverage over an animal that is adorable and magnificent. I don’t push it too hard, for it’s a lot of weight for a little dog to carry. But it helps keep some balance in our relationship. 

I suspect she’ll grow into the title, but I will hold that leverage a bit longer. It gives me the illusion of control.

I think about the difference between how Kenny and I get through each day. Kenny executes 100% of his work-related activities himself. He lays and nails every board. Sets every window. Pulls every foot of wire. Connects every plumbing joint. Slowly, board by board and brick by brick, a house emerges.

I do almost nothing on my own. I work with others to design a system of software applications and then coerce others into doing all the necessary things to make it tie together to allow a hospital to operate. I take some pride in what I do, but it is a very soft skill compared to what Kenny does. And ultimately, very less useful in tangible terms. 

Kenny’s the guy you could parachute into Alaska and in a few months he would have a homestead and be happily living off the land. I would he dead within days. Probably single digit days. One day we took a short walk through the forest. Kenny pointed out names of a couple of dozen trees and plants. He observed which ones are invasive and a nuisance and probably need to be dealt with. He casually pulled small twigs from a Greenbrier shrub which we chewed and that tasted delicious. He knows which mushrooms can be picked and eaten and which will leave you lying on the ground in agony. I told him I had not found any morels on my mountain and he said he would be surprised if I had. Morels like a basic soil and my soil is acidic. How does he know the soil here is acidic? Because he’s seen loads of wild blueberries and they prefer acidic soil. The Autumn Olive tree is a nuisance but has amazingly sweet berries for about 3 weeks each year that are good to eat and really great on salads. 

He’s a forager, builder, skilled hunter, gatherer, ecologist, botanist, and a fixer of things. Solid and true. So many things I am not. 

Marti is on the deck barking at the two big dogs who live 1/2 mile away— down the ridge and a little to the north. I’ve don’t know if it’s a friendly conversation, like ‘hey stop by and say hello sometime‘, or something more baiting like ‘you’d better keep the fuck off my property‘. I’ve no idea of their language. But it’s been going on a while now so I’m interested. 

There’s something about the west.  I don’t know what it is. I’ve never been able to speak eloquently about my attraction to the Western states, and in particular the mid and northern Western states. It’s not unlike my trying to describe what is so mesmerizing about Africa. It’s special in a way that defies description.

I’ve read stacks of books about the west, by legendary writers, who’ve set down the records so well that I suppose I needn’t worry about finding my own words in this regard. Anyway, Brittany and I had a lovely 4-day trip to Missoula to watch rugby and catch up with friends. Carla joined us for the weekend and we had a grand time. The weather was amazing for Missoula in May. So I got a bit of my west fix for awhile. 

We rented a cute little house not far from downtown. One night we sat outside with wine and cigars at our little picnic table hard up against an ugly alley. There was an decrepit storage building covered in old planks and corrugated zinc . Someone had painted ‘Read A Book’ on the side.

Multiple people came by walking their dogs. We commented on the handsomeness of their dogs and struck up a little conversation. Sweet folks all. They moved on and we stayed.

Later, a lone guy came out of the building next door that looked like an old school that had been converted to section 8 housing. He spoke of a cat that he fancied and like to come out and check on about that time of evening. It wasn’t his cat see, but he liked to make sure it was doing okay. He was a good looking guy. Thin and smart looking, but a little off. He was wearing slippers. He said  to us that if we get in trouble, just beat on that door over there and he would come help. We didn’t consider what type of trouble he thought we might get into that we would need a smartly dressed guy in slippers to come to our rescue. But it was sweet. 

Maybe I overly romanticize the west because I mostly came of age there. 

We spent a few hours at the pitch and I ran into 8 or 10 guys I played against over the years. We didn’t always remember names, but we remembered faces and games.

I came on a passage about Amelia Earhart in some publication or another, which I have memorialized here because I have a sort of fascination with her.

On Earhart’s own wedding day, in 1931, the thirty-three-year-old bride handed her forty-three-year-old groom, George Palmer Putnam, a remarkable letter, which read:

You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means so much to me. . . . In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. . . . I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all the confinements of even an attractive cage.

Go Amelia.

It’s hard to get your mind around how dysfunctional airline ticketing and seating systems are. One morning a few weeks ago, while waiting at the gate for my flight to Boston, I decided to change my return flight to get home a bit earlier. We were just a few minutes from boarding. 

When I hit the button to change my return flight, my seating assignment in first class on the flight to Boston immediately disappeared. It took the gate agent 20 minutes to get my seat back which involved retracting an upgrade she has just given someone else. So by changing a flight 3-days away, the system canceled the record for my current flight which was within minutes of boarding. Crazy shit.

Black Dog Ridge is surely considered finished now. Kenny is tinkering on a few remaining smallish items, which will be done in a week or two. It is a beautiful and comfortable home sitting atop one of the finest views I’ve come across. I feel blessed for having the good fortune to find the property and the means to develop it to my taste. We’ve already had some amazing days and nights there and are now looking forward to having friends and family come around on occasion.

I finally also got moved into the new house in Somerset. That house will be a work in progress for some time, but it is nice to be across the street from mom and dad. Terri is also settled in now and that’s nice.

First real project there is to build a fence so Marti is contained in the back yard. She’s a wanderer, perpetually looking for a squirrel or bird to play with. But she is unaware of the dangers of the roads, so the fence must go up soon. 

As always, the days and weeks have flown by and I have not adequately captured all the key activities and fun and drama and general life observations for this blog. I vow to do better, but alas, life is busy man. I’m now back on the flight to Boston for a few days. Return to OH on Thursday night and then back to West Virginia for a few weeks on Saturday. 

No other news of note.

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