Fog in the holler

Chilly rain all last night. Gray light this morning; we were socked in with fog and stayed that way all day. Tree bark black and wet, the leaves dripping. Forecast says we probably won't even break 60 degrees tomorrow at our elevation.

Nevertheless, I've always like gray, chilly, wet days. It's not autumn yet, but it feels like it. Leaves of poison ivy and Virginia creeper and staghorn sumac, also dogwood, beech and walnut reddening, yellowing, falling to the ground.

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

--Robert Frost, "My November Guest"

You can't say that because it's true

I am amazed and gratified that the Internet has allowed people like Steve Sailer to reach an audience that would otherwise never know of him. He is one of a tiny handful of individuals speaking truth about the immigration situation today, and about the relevance of intelligence and its heritability to public policy.

Not the same country we were born in

I interviewed Joan Mellen about her book "A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History." In it, she mentioned Garrison's remark that he got obsessed with the Kennedy assassination because he was under the illusion he was living in the same country he was born in.

Don't know what to make of that book. I think he and Mellen may well be on to something. Certainly it looks as if higher-ups in our government were covering up something. The case attracts so many cranks, you don't know whether to trust a writer who comes along with the latest theory of what happened.

I know the feeling Garrison spoke of, however. I felt it--like a blow in the stomach--the day the feds burned down the Branch Davidian compound at Waco. I remember seeing it on TV at work. I was the only one at the public radio station where I work who was horrified by it. The consensus was that the Branch Davidians were a bunch of religious kooks who deserved whatever they got. That opinion has never wavered since then here in the media, through the days of the transparent government cover-up and the pathetic hearings the Stupid Party organized to "investigate" what happened. We are paid, after all, to be mouthpieces for Power, and God forbid that anybody should step out of line and ask inconvenient questions.

When I saw those burning buildings, I felt it in the pit of my stomach: this isn't the country I was born in and grew up in. That feeling of alienation, of being a stranger in a strange land, has only increased in the years since.

Welcome Boreas

Winter arrived officially, as the astronomers calculate it, at about 1:35 this afternoon, EST. But since we've had snow and hard ice on the ground for nearly three weeks, the event was anticlimatic. So far as I'm concerned, winter is here when snow and ice falls and sticks around.

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

Christina Rossetti, "A Christmas Carol"

Winter in the Wild Wood

Usually by this point in the year I'm already well in to re-reading "The Wind in the Willows." It's nice to read the "Dulce Domum" chapter in the week or so before Christmas.

Not this year, for some reason. But the long seige of cold weather reminds me of this:

"It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, til they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering-even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away; and with great cheerfulness of spirit he pushed on towards the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea."

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, "The Wild Wood."

Here we are

The Roy Helton poem pretty much tells the story of me and these mountains.

I'm a public radio producer. No, Larkin Hardy is not my real name. Keeping this anonymous to lessen the odds that the Thought Police will punish me for uttering speech deemed subversive here in the elite media and academia. Although I'm sure they could sniff me out if they put their minds to it.

The Nativity Feast approaches. I think of a poem a friend sent me years ago:

"Christmas at the Tang Court"

change and the changeless being confused
things and nothingness were both destroyed
travelling far there was no arriving
not arriving there was no returning
achievements failing the dark increased
and the dark increasing the tao was lost

the tao lost there was no advance
not advancing all stood still
when things were still heaven approached
and
the receptive being found receptive
the way of silent spirit was renewed

a star appearing communication was restored
proclaimed by light
one of the triune shaded the brightness of mystery
and being announced from above
was born of a virgin below

--Dom Pierre-Sylvester Houedard, after the text of Dom Ching-Ching, cut by Lu Hsiu-Yen on the Stone of Luminous Religion, erected AD 781.

Drank lonesome water

Lonesome Water
Roy Addison Helton, b. 1886

Drank lonesome water:
Weren't but a tad then
Up in a laurel thick
Digging for sang;
Came on a place where
The stones was holler;
Something below them
Tinkled and rang.

Dug where I heard it
Drippling below me:
Should a knowed better,
Should a been wise;
Leant down and drank it,
Clutching and gripping
The overhung cliv
With the ferns in my eyes.

Tweren't no tame water
I knowed in a minute;
Must a been laying there
Projecting round
Since winter went home;
Must a laid like a cushion,
Where the feet of the blossoms
Was tucked in the ground.

Tasted of heart leaf,
And that smells the sweetest,
Paw paw and spice bush
And wild briar Rose;
Must a been counting
The heels of the spruce pines
And neighboring round
Where angelica grows.

I'd drunk lonesome water,
I knowed in a minute
Never larnt nothing
From then till today;
Nothing worth larning,
Nothing worth knowing.
I'm bound to the hills
And I can't get away.

Mean sort of dried up old
Groundhoggy feller,
Laying cold out here
Watching the sky;
Pore as a hipporwill,
Bent like a grass blade;
Counting up stars
Till they count too high.

I know where the grey foxes
Uses up yander,
Know what'll cure ye
Of ptisic or chills,
But I never been way from here,
Never got going:
I've drunk lonesome water.
I'm bound to the hills.