Shaking hands with John Kerry

Even though I'm living less than a 15-minute walk away from Tattered Cover, my favorite bookstore in Denver, I sometimes have to rouse myself out of my evening settled-in state at home. Besides offering thousands of books, excellent coffee and a warm atmosphere, TC also has author talks. Last Monday, the eve before the election, John Kerry was scheduled to speak. I almost skipped it, but at the last minute, threw on my coat and walked over. I'm glad I did.


Listeners line up at Tattered Cover after John Kerry's talk Nov. 5

The last time I looked carefully at who John Kerry was and is was in 2004, when he ran for president.   Bush Jr. was up for reelection, a year after he defied international protests and warnings, and invaded Iraq, that costly conflict which is still continuing today. Surely the country was ready for a change, my friends and I reasoned.  I was living in Japan then, a participant in the Japan chapter of Democrats Abroad--a group for American ex-pats around the world who want to stay part of the political process. A year earlier many of us had been in the Tokyo anti-war march opposing any invasion of Iraq. Kerry was not the favorite with this group; the more left-of-center Howard Dean was. Kerry, after all, had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq two years earlier. Later, he later came to see the error of his vote on that, just as he came to change his views on Vietnam. He went from military hero to antiwar activist in the 60s--this man of honor who had the courage to reflect and change. Dean's campaign derailed, Kerry won the nomination, and Democrats Abroad continued with it's major task of helping overseas voters get their absentee ballots in.

As with so many past moments, my emotional memory of the 2004 election stands out above the circumstances and facts. As the votes were tallied, I was watching the returns online in my living room with two friends. As Kerry's loss appeared certain, my friend Louise phoned. "Oh, Louise!" "Oh, Kathy!" is my memory of that conversation before all the parsing of what went wrong. It was an election Kerry should have won.

Kerry's visit to Denver last week led me to revisit the factual details of the election. Chief among them was the GOP-led "swiftboating" attack. Kerry was a decorated war hero in Vietnam as a result of his service on a Swiftboat crew, running against an incumbent who had dodged military service. An ad appeared challenging his record--an ad that was later discredited, but not before major damage was done. (Read more about it here.) Other problems--voting irregularities in Ohio, the selection of the later-disgraced John Edwards as running mate--took their toll as well.

Kerry visited Denver as part of a book tour for his 600-page memoir, Every Day is Extra. A review of the book in the New York Times says one of Kerry's lingering regrets is that he didn't stop his campaign cold to address those unfair and damaging attacks. Yet his talk before a packed house at Tattered Cover did not dwell on regrets, but rather on the seriousness of problems facing us and what can be done about them. Talking on the eve of the election, he opened by asking us all if we had voted. Of course we had. And then he talked about climate change and the importance of the Paris Climate Accord which he helped negotiate as Secretary of State under President Obama. He talked about the importance of leadership and the problems created in its absence. He talked about his friendship with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and John McCain and the importance of having bipartisan relationships in Congress.

Listening to Kerry last week, I remembered how we once took a presidential candidate's ability to explain and inspire for granted. How sorely I miss it today--though I know it exists in the campaigns of so many of the Democratic victors in the midterm elections. I wanted to thank Kerry for his lifetime of work and his continuing service to democratic process, but book-buyers were lining up to have him sign their copies, so I left the room, pleased that I had attended. Being a confirmed library user, I did not buy the book; actually, at 600 pages, I decided I'd read this one in review. I wandered upstairs to browse new titles before walking home.

Some time later, standing near a shelf of new releases, I became aware of a familiar voice next to me. Kerry was talking with store staff, standing less than 2 feet away. He was asking if there was a restaurant nearby, and I felt slightly annoyed on his behalf. (Don't book talk arrangers think of attending to their guests' creature comforts anymore? Did they ever?) I trust someone took him out to dinner. For my part, I waited to catch his eye. I put out my hand and said "Thank you"--for everything". A firm handshake and smile ensued from this man, a man of courage and honor.

Breaking up is hard to do

For quite some time now I've been thinking that it's time for us to call it quits, but I kept pushing the thought away. After all we've been together a long time--about 10 years now. And like so many long-term couples, I've grown accustomed to your features, you almost make the day begin.

I found you as I was getting ready to leave Japan and return to live in the US. You were like a lifeline to my past and bridge to my future. You helped me find others from my past--old friends and former colleagues and students--in this world of lost emails and phone numbers. When I made new friends, you were involved then too. Over time, you took on even more roles. You became my de facto social secretary. You gave me a nudge when friends were having a birthday, kept me current with births, marriages and deaths, the slow but sure growth of friends' children, reminded me of upcoming events I was interested in, helped me stay current with favorite groups and organizations, amused me when all I really needed that day was a funny cat or dog video. You made life not only more efficient and organized but interesting as well. I came to rely on you for news stories too, via links posted by friends. And you didn't charge me a cent! I thank you for that, I really do. I'm going to miss all of those things, truly.

Things have changed, though. The first time I really understood that there was a price to be paid for all of this service. You had sold my data to third parties without my knowledge. And even worse, it became apparent that your lax controls had allowed bad actors to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, leading to an unexpected outcome, tragic for me and so many others. Earlier this year, your chief representative Mark Zuckerberg, apologized to Congress. He promised to do better. He said his team had been "slow" to see the threats and was now taking steps to remedy problems. I believed you, perhaps mostly because I wanted to. I rationalized it all by saying that there are no secrets that can't be found on the Internet, regardless of whether one was partnered with you or not.

Then last week--another jolt. I watched the two-part Frontline program, The Facebook Dilemma. It was then that I realized that "slow" was a euphemism for "refused to listen". People in the Middle East, The Philippines, The Ukraine, and Myanmar, had tried to tell you--repeatedly. Tried to tell you that fake accounts were flooding users' pages, exploiting fears, and the worst elements of tribalism. People died because of this. You could even say it led to genocide and the subversion of peoples' movements for justice.

Were any significant controls attempted during those years, Mark? That's unclear from the program, but what is clear is that the problems continue. Steps have been taken, I learned. More checkers around the globe, fluent in local languages, for example. Yet, chillingly, one of your current representatives said flatly that the problem cannot be solved, not at the scale your organization operates. It can only be contained.

In all fairness, I have to look at my own role in this relationship--my readiness to take shortcuts. I've been spending way too much time scrolling through stories--stories I usually soon forget because there are so many. Some say you designed it this way as an addictive process. But I'll let that go for now, as this paragraph is about me. The fact is I willingly let you take charge of things for me, and now I'm about to be on my own again. I'm looking forward to that, actually. To making better connections with friends--beyond "like" or "sad" or "angry". I plan to reactivate this blog, dormant since January, as a place for exploring ideas and sharing stories about my past, present and future. I hope any of you who wish to connect with me this way will subscribe or check in from time to time. You can use this encrypted link: https://kathyintransition.blogspot.com.

As for Facebook, I'll keep my account open for awhile. You, my friends, can send a personal message about the best way to stay in touch with you, if you wish. At some point, I plan to deactivate and then delete the account. Apparently the latter is not easy to do. (For a step-by-step guide, go to this link.)

I look forward to keeping in touch with you, my Facebook friends--and to doing something interesting with the 10+ hours I formerly spent every week scrolling through the Facebook screen.

In search of Maggie Book Riley, my grandmother

I never met her, but I still remember the one photo I saw of her: a young woman, circa 1910, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, serious expression, eyes very much like John's--my father and her son. She was my grandmother, and she disappeared from family life so long before my birth that she may as well have been a remote ancestor. Her name was Margaret (Maggie) Riley, nee Book. Born in 1878, she was no more than 34 when she left her husband and kids, never to be heard from again. I no longer have the photo, but the hat I remember was something like one of these.

Maggie left her home in Kansas City in 1912, when my Dad was only nine. She had three other children, ages 7--13. As my father told the story during my childhood, she came to each of the children, asking them if they wished to leave with her and a male companion or stay with their father. They all elected to stay with their father.

She was only 16 when she married, shockingly young by the standards of my generation and by the same standards, still young when she left. My Dad never blamed her. "She could have drowned me, but she didn't," he used to say before launching into quasi-Dickensonian stories of his life with the uncle and aunt who subsequently took care of them while his father, a carpenter with the railroad, was at work.

I continued to wonder about Maggie from time to time and still do. The basic facts are still unknown: Where did she go? How did she make her life? How and when did she die? Then there are the deeper questions: Why didn't she try to communicate--or did she try and the kids weren't told? Was she happy? Did she make another family or create a different kind of life? What kind of independent life was even possible for her in early 20th century America?

Recently my interest in Maggie's life was rekindled when I got an email from Carol S., with the subject line, "We're cousins!" She had taken a DNA test via Ancestry. com, as did my sister Joan and I, and  our names came up as genetic matches. Carol's great-grandfather, Theodore Book, was Maggie's father. Carol traces her family line back to the family Theodore created with his second wife after Maggie's mom died.

With an intermittent interest in genealogy, my sister Joan and I had already found records from Maggie's early life in rural Missouri, near Odessa. Theodore married Ella Boucher, who died in 1890, at the age of 28 after giving birth to 6 children, including Maggie. Six months after Ella's death, Theodore remarried. Four years later, still just a teenager, Maggie married Hugh Riley. My sister Joan and I speculate that she may have had difficulties with her stepmother or home life in general. Theodore and his new wife, Almedia, went on to have 15 children--for a total of 21 for Theodore. Perhaps there was just no space or peace for Maggie or perhaps she became an unpaid nursemaid to her younger siblings. Or perhaps her father was the problem.  My new cousin Carol's research turned up that Theodore was a "mean" one--so mean that Almedia refused to be buried anywhere near him. (Her children honored the request and put her at the other end of the cemetery.) In any case, Maggie left for a new life.

It could be that the ever-growing database of genealogy tools will help shed light on Maggie's fate. Yet with the huge time gap--more than a century since her disappearance--and the lack of oral or written records, I'm not optimistic. We may well have to settle for remembering her with kindness and compassion, and reminding ourselves that every single advance in women's rights over the past century has been well worth fighting for. Rest in peace, Maggie.

A mystery almost solved: what happened to the Anasazi

In 1976 I moved from Chicago to Colorado in 1976, and I still remember the feeling of wonder, that a landscape so different from the flat Midwest was in the same country. I started learning to backpack almost immediately, hiking at altitude among trees and rivers, breathing the dry, crisp air, wondering at the temperature extremes between night and day. Within a couple of years, I had branched out to a different landscape: the red rock formations of western Colorado and Utah, archeology-rich Northern New Mexico, and the cliff dwellings of the Four Corners region, home to Mesa Verde National Park. Here I am in two pictures from the late 70s on a trip to Utah. The first includes my dog, Sophie. The second shows something of the human/landscape scale that fascinated me.



On a later trip to Mesa Verde, I was fascinated by the structures that were home to the Pueblo people for 700 years. There were about 25,000 of them in the area in the mid-1200s, and then suddenly they were gone. Called the Anasazi (Navajo term for "ancient foreigners"), they disappeared; by the 1280s, no one remained. The prevailing speculation was that a drought period had forced people to move. But where? How to know centuries later? I confess I rather liked the mystery. It was part of what still seemed exotic to me--a world so different from what I had known.

Today, I find that I like the solution even better than the mystery. Recently going through back issues of one of my favorite magazines, High Country News, I found an article by Krista Langlois, which explained how much of that mystery has finally been solved.  (Click here to read the full story.) The reasons were rooted not only in science, but in the stories of indigenous people today, specifically  origin stories of Native Americans speaking the Tewa language in Northern New Mexico.

The science was not surprising, given the data-crunching powers of modern computing. In 2001 a multi-disciplinary team of scientists formed the Village Ecodynamics Project. For the next 13 years, they analyzed population history at thousands of sites in the Southwest. The next step was  analyzing soil data and estimating natural resources and agricultural yields. Next came a computer simulation of human and environmental history, a kind of "Sim City for the ancient Southwest," Langlois calls it. They ran it 500 times, tweaking the data each time, and finally patterns emerged.  The patterns cast doubt on the dominant drought theory, as the Anasazi were already gone by the time the drought hit full force. Still, mystery remained.

Another line of inquiry turned to the social fabric of this ancient world. One project researcher, archeologist Scott Ortman, developed a theory that inequality was at work. Between 900 and 1200 the population tripled. Yet each family was still farming its own plot of land, living around a family-sized kiva. Over time those plots of land got smaller, creating a community of haves and have nots. There is evidence of violence and sudden departures. Perhaps this is not surprising either. As I read, I thought of many places in rural Europe in the 19th century, when mass emigration ensued for the same reason.

What did surprise me, however, was learning that Ortman's work is also rooted in listening to the oral histories of Tewa people, stories that told them that they were descended from the Anasazi. Instead of dismissing them as myth, Ortman started looking for clues connecting them to their ancestors at Mesa Verde. He found them. DNA analysis was involved, but more interesting to me was the linguistic connection: a word for a kind of roof found in ceremonial kivas, a work for pottery derived from older words for woven objects typical of Mesa Verde pottery; and other words and stories.

As Langlois explains, Ortman speculates that as Mesa Verde's people realized their world was unraveling, bringing changes in the food supply, overcrowding, and violence, they decided to migrate to the Northern Rio Grande, a place they knew about from traders. Oral stories say it took them "12 steps" to travel from their ancestral home to their new one; this could refer to the 12 days it may have taken them to walk the 250 miles between the two sites.

Ortman's research suggests that while the Anasazi moved to various places across the Southwest, the six Tewa-speaking tribes are the "most direct cultural descendants." Here's a map of their probable journeys:


Still, the mystery hasn't been completely solved and may never be with so many centuries separating us from that culture, but the complexity of the solution is much greater than the simple explanation I once accepted. And it's satisfying. Knowing some of the pathways these communities took builds a bridge to our time: the very common story of migration, of seeing a new place for the first time and making a life there. It's also a bridge in the sense that equality and inequality played a role for the ancients as well as for moderns. Droughts are cyclical, Langlois points out, yet the descendants of the Anasazi in the Tewa Basin did not flee. She writes, "The societies and traditions that developed were so strong they persisted through waves of colonization and through industrial development and the large-scale mining of the earth....Puebloans in the Northern Rio Grande structured their communities around a central plaza where work was shared, ...rituals held, and the harvest was inequitably distributed."

Happy to let go of the simplistic explanation I once casually accepted decades ago , I look forward to another visit to the Four Corners region some day, this time with a deeper perspective.

The crumbs of one woman's year: 2017

"Slung as though in a hammock, or a lull, between one Christmas forever over and  a New Year nearing full of relentless surprises, waywardly and gladly I pry back at those wizening 12 months and see only a waltzing snippet of those topsy-turvy times, flickers of vistas, flashes of queer fishes, patches and chequers of a bard’s eye view….

‘Look back, back, the big voices clarion, look back at the black, colossal year,’ while the rich music fanfares….(but) I can give you only a scattering of some of the crumbs of one man’s year, and the penny music whistles."  —Dylan Thomas in The Crumbs of One Man’s Year

Sitting here in front of my window this warming morning, in this lull between Christmas and New Year’s Day, I see the last melting patches of snow in City Park, as I try to channel Dylan Thomas. I think I have. Though the news feeds are full of “best of’s” and “most importants” of 2017, I sit back and see, as Thomas did, a few “waltzing snippets” that stay in memory. Start with a memory, any memory will do.

I’m near Mudbiscuit, my cabin in Florissant, one June morning, walking down Ranger Station Road with Linda and her two dogs, Belle the Border Collie and Hop the Corgi, breathing the crisp, high altitude air, grateful that I can still return to this beautiful place every summer. I’m watching the dogs, sniffing the history of the night with the focus of a rookie detective. I’m distracted by Hop’s butt, long white and gold hair swaying in the wind. An icon of my country life, like the hummingbird feeders, always my first task when I arrive to open the cabin, filled with a vague anxiety that these tiny birds, having made their home in a nearby cottonwood tree, altitude 8,800 feet, will not survive if I stop providing a daily ration of sugar water. Here's Hop and Belle with their human, Linda, that morning.

Then it’s  time to check the greenhouse. Linda planted early and the greens are thriving. Sunlight on the red-stemmed chard, the park choi, lettuce and peas. Back to the cabin to wash, chop, serve, eat. The day passes: I putter, read, answer email, all a blur until the sky colors change, the great magnificent sky, that surprises me every season I return after being away.

Is it any wonder that the Japanese word for nostalgia, natsukashii, has the root, natsu or summer—where memories wander first? But I have winter memories too, this winter of our resistance following the 2016 upset and deeply upsetting presidential election in the US. So many of us then were frightened, disoriented, still disbelieving.

Jump to Jan. 21, the day after the inauguration of the Divider in Chief, and I’m about to join thousands of Coloradans at the Denver Civic Center for the Women’s March. We don’t know yet that it will become the largest protest in US history, with nearly 5 million taking part around the globe. It’s early, I’m anxious, as full buses pass us at the stop near home. A neighbor gives us a lift and within the half hour we’re walking toward the 16th Street Mall. Then I see it—a steady stream of pussy-hatted women, men pushing strollers, kids, a stream of signs, and I can feel the energy and anticipation of the day. I’ll soon see many more that day. But it’s that first glimpse, as the sun appeared over the heads of those early arrivals, that brought both a thrill and sense of relief. We’re all in this together….

A season of protests reminding us of our unity across race, gender, class and generations. On Valentine’s Day, also known as V-Day--observed by the global activist movement to end gender violence--I was again on the Mall with friends and celebrants, dancers, chanters, and speakers--all pledging to work for justice. Images of red and movement and words, but the image that stays is this one of the young STEM women, remembered partly because I learned what STEM meant that day. We’re all in this together....

The year moved into spring, and I see more images of actions: The silent procession around the State Capitol on International Women’s Day, Climate Action on Earth Day, also a March for Science, notable for its creative signs and the youth of many of the participants. A march and rally in support of “our Muslim neighbors”. In my senior building here in the city, we’re writing postcards to our representatives. Having just moved in the previous October, I’m getting to know my neighbors. So much to resist and encourage. Yes, we’re all in this together….

Delicious moments—cooking being the most ephemeral art, its appreciators also its destroyers. Sitting at a long table at The Mercury Cafe with dear friends on my birthday, eating a pagan vegan plate (greens, tofu, veggie green chili, fried cornmeal), perhaps my 100th plate of it, the menu item I order there  most often….An exquisitely expertly-prepared plate of sushi, a birthday gift from a friend, at Denver’s premier sushi restaurant….Another dinner treat from visiting friends in August at a local artisan restaurant, probably my prettiest food picture of the year.

Summer also brought disillusionment. I watched the Rachel Maddow Show nearly every evening with country or city friends, the stories flowing by, marking the damage this hobbled and flawed democracy brought about by electing the current president and Congress. Then one evening, I was sitting with neighbors in the lobby of my apartment building, not distracted by the slivers of visible sunset, and realizing that there can be no giving up. Maybe it was after 45’s insulting speech at The Boy Scout Jamboree or after his refusal to support more safety measures for football players, saying they  would ruin the game. Not the worst he had done, but the gratuitous cruelty and ignorance struck me viscerally. Remembering, I feel again that shiver of fear, then a calmness, a resolve. We simply cannot give up. Elections are coming in 2018. We’re all in this together….

Moments of joy: that’s what my laughter yoga friends call those moments when we look around us, fully present in the beauty that presents itself, perhaps always there if we just bother to notice. Burying my face in a blossoming tree in City Park across the street from me here in Denver; handing out water bottles to exhausted and grateful marathon runners in City Park, probably my most rewarding volunteer experience.

In October, gazing at a sea of student faces at Metro State University. I was on a panel with 5 other women who had worked on Big Mama Rag, a feminist newspaper published in Denver in the 1970s--more than 40 years ago. We were talking to students in the women's studies department, telling them so many important things--about our passion, our mistakes, what we tried to do and what still needs doing. I remember the expression of the transgender youth in the 2nd row who was really listening, as many others listened impassively or took notes; never doubt the importance of the audience's role in a presentation. We hoped they were listening too--not enough time for Q & A before their next class. Afterwards, as we panelists sat around a table in the student center, I remember a relaxed pleasure and pride: remembering this time we shared and our gratitude for being a part of what is now history!

Death made itself visible to me this year, not exactly a next door neighbor, but more like a silent and solemn newcomer who has moved in down the block. In the spring two women died, members of one of my groups (OLOC), one suddenly and one from cancer. Both were honored at one of our monthly meetings in a ceremony led by another member--who herself passed away later in the year from cancer. In early March a former neighbor turned friend—Joanne, age 85—died from complications of cancer and an accident. A day earlier, Gerry Starbuck, my first employer in Denver in 1977, passed away. Later, a good friend from my days in Japan, Kim Oswalt, passed away. Not long afterwards I was telling a neighbor about these deaths. “ It will be more and more like this,” she told me matter-of-factly but not without sympathy. She didn’t need to explain how aging brings knowledge--the sense of one’s own vulnerability accompanied by increasing losses. The image I call up most often is the one below from the Day of the Dead exhibit and celebration at the Denver Botanic Gardens in early November. I paused for several moments before this altar where the artist explained her story and art to a group of children. In the past few years I’ve seen this holiday grow beyond its Mexican roots into a developing North American holiday, with numerous events around town. We need it to recognize the role of death in human life and honor the lives of those no longer with us.

Moments of auditory joy: sitting on the stage of the Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago, listening to a young woman play Bach’s cello suite No. 5 on her viola, the lights of Millennium Park behind her.
The Sound Circle a cappella chorus, singing beneath the stained glass windows of a Boulder church.

This fading year of 2017 will always be the year I discovered song. In September I joined my first flash mob where more than 100 of us sang Holly Near’s "Singing for Our Lives", as we peeled off jackets to the surprise of onlookers at the DCPA. Yet the scene that returns is the short concert we gave on the Mall afterwards, becoming celebrities of the hour to passersby. One solitary older man caught my eye, watching silently and then finally, slowly joining in on a song. World Singing Day came a month later, and I was there, on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, where anyone who came by got a lyric booklet with tunes ranging from "Uptown Funk" to "Imagine", and where we sang our hearts out, in one big outdoor karaoke session. Instead of an electronic screen, we had various small choirs lead us, and instead of a room, the sunny, chilly outdoors. In December I was back on the 16th Street Mall in Denver, singing “alternative lyrics” to popular Christmas carols, all aimed at mocking the GOP tax bill, It  passed the Senate the following day, unfortunately, but the singing helped sooth and energize.  I think we’re on to something as we head into Resistance Year #2.

And then Christmas and the company of friends, and some slow easy days with time for reflection.

“And one man’s year is like the country of a cloud, mapped on the sky, that soon will vanish into the watery, ordered wastes, intro the spinning rule, into the dark which is light.” —Dylan Thomas

Ode to The Western, then and now

I’ve often wondered if my childhood fascination with Westerns led to my eventual move to Colorado. Some unconscious imprinting of Western landscapes made me far more inclined to look west rather than east for a possible new home. The answer, which is no doubt more complex, will probably stay lodged in my unconscious. Last week, when I went to see the newest exhibit at The Denver Art Museum (DAM)—"The Western: An Epic in Art and Film"—I didn’t discover an answer, but came up with more questions. The central ones: What cultural and aesthetic ideas shaped my generation as we grow up, and how do movies and TV shows reflect the times during which they’re made?

I enjoyed the exhibit, especially as my friend and film buff, Gayle Novak, joined me for it. She’s an excellent film historian, starting in childhood, having grown up with a movie theater just down the street and no in-home TV to distract her. My experience was opposite—no nearby theater, but a TV set in the living room from my earliest days. Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, got a TV show in the 50s and I was a devoted fan. Writing this, I detoured to youtube, and sure enough, this clip turned up, accompanied by photos from another favorite, Little House on the Prairie.

Along with the Gene Autry Show, I loved The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show, The Lone Ranger, Broken Arrow, The Range Rider, Wagon Train and others, none of which are in this exhibit, though I remembered them all as I went through the museum.  All together, they offered me a kind of time travel, set a half century or more earlier, in a very different environment from the one I had in Hammond, Indiana. Of course they reflected 1950s-era mythologies of the Old West and family life. They must have shaped my early understanding of gender roles—with men doing the exciting stuff and women left back at the ranch. Unconsciously I absorbed the idea that the population was essentially white. There were “noble Indians” and “dangerous Indians” in those early days, a mythology masking the taking of the West from Native Americans.

As Gayle and I walked through the exhibit, it was the video clips the drew most of our attention, especially the films of the late John Ford.  In childhood, while I sat in front of the TV, Gayle was in the movie theater, watching his films. There’s a retrospective of Ford’s films in the DAM exhibit. A well-deserved one, both for the magnitude of his work (5 decades, 100 films), but also for his artistry. As the museum program notes, “Ford was inspired by the landscapes, characters, and dramas of nineteenth-century painters. In part by studying classic western American artists, Ford developed an artistry that elevated him to what he termed a “picture maker.’”

At the beginning of the exhibit, 19th century paintings were the focus, and Gayle was quite familiar with that genre as well. Our attention was drawn to George Catlin’s 1832 painting of Four Bears, Second Chief in Full Dress. Catlin claimed to be the first white man to paint Plains Indians. We might guess there are fewer cultural stereotypes in his work than what we see in the work of later generations, yet he was also viewing “the other”, the “exotic” ceremonial dress of Native chiefs. He painted hundreds of portraits, many of which are now in The Smithsonian.

C.M. Russell, a prolific late 19th century painter, is also represented in the exhibit, and a museum guard, noting Gayle's knowledgeable comments to me, advised us not to miss the colors in his painting in the next room. Yes, wonderful color, and it clearly shows the hazards of travel in the Old West, though I found myself idly wondering how they got so many people in one stagecoach. 

As we continued through the exhibit, I remembered how TV eventually gave me access to Ford's work after networks got the rights to broadcast classic films in the mid-50s. The titles blur in memory; no doubt I followed along with the stories, only dimly aware of who the director was and the cinematic genius he revealed in his work. Yet, last week as I watched the clips selected for this exhibit, I saw what a breath-taking scene composer Ford was. In particular, scenes from The Searchers (1956), considered one of the greatest Westerns of all time, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) show this artistry.  I wondered if back in the day, my unconscious also picked up a sense of good picture composition as I watched them. If so, thank you, John Ford. The beginning of this clip from The Searchers illustrates his genius with composition.

Two great morality Westerns with lonely, courageous heroes— High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953), are given their due. This theater marquis for High Noon reminded me of those pre-digital days when we watched everything on a big screen, in relative silence, with hundreds of others.  Gayle and I watched video clips, along with one of Giant (1956), which featured the iconic James Dean just before his tragic early death. This film, based on a novel by Edna Ferber, deals with racism and the politics of wealth and oil in Texas. A foreshadowing of the 1960s, waiting in the wing. 

Ford’s last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964) was his elegy to Native Americans. It was a Hollywood version of an actual event, The Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878-9, in which the Cheyenne, forcibly removed south, attempted to return. I missed this one at the theater, 1964 being the year I graduated from high school and got ready to enter college. During the 60s, the Western genre turned to new interpretations of history. I saw Little Big Man (1970) with college friends and applauded the elevation of Native Americans and critique of the U.S. Cavalry. The Vietnam war was raging, and anti-military critiques found a very receptive audience. 

That same year, 1970, a book gave me my first understanding of the massive injustice done to Native Americans by White settlers—Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. By the late 60s, the American Indian Movement was organized to redress these continuing injustices. One of the founders was the late Russell Means, and you can see Andy Warhol’s famed politicized portrait of him in this exhibit. The magazine covers below ("Return of the Red Man" and "A Choice of Heroes") acknowledge the cultural changes going on with revisionist history and a reframing of heroism. 

The counterculture Easy Rider (1969) used the same landscapes as earlier Westerns, but replacing cowboys with drug-dealing bikers traveling cross country, finding a mix of tradition, communes, free love and lots of violence. I remember seeing this film then, as a young woman who had never traveled cross country, indulged in free love or tried marijuana, probably with the same sense of wonder and puzzlement I felt as a Midwestern child looking at The Old West. The Easy Rider bike, shown in front of a video clip, is enshrined in the exhibit.

The exhibit continues with a tribute to the genre of “spaghetti Westerns”, typified by The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as “Blondie”, the bounty hunter. Leone was noted for his use of violence, tension and stylistic gun fights, and though the genre was disparaged then, this film has stood the test of time it seems. Somewhat stunned by the scale, Gayle and I stood in a circular space, surrounded by large video screens, each with a tough gunslinger, positioned in a Mexican standoff, ready to draw and shoot. Seeing Eastwood, I remembered his award-winning Unforgiven (1992), which he directed and dedicated to Leone. It was probably the first “anti-Western” I saw, one which challenged all of the old myths of heroism and justice, replacing them with a scathing critique of violence and human cruelty.

The exhibit ends with a display of various sometimes-puzzling postmodern works, including a tipi furnished with Victorian furniture and featuring a satirical western skit on video. Perhaps some examples from the sci fi and fantasy genre (Star Wars and The Hunger Games, for example) would have been a better way to finish.  Those films are places where young people today find cultural representations of all the old themes—justice, morality, freedom and their evil dystopian twins—human folly and cruelty--in the context of the early 21st century.

A changing ecosystem: on wildlife small and large

Coming back to my cabin after months away always evokes feels that old John Denver song, Back Home Again. Things seem pretty much the same as I remember from last year, and then I start to notice the differences. There’s always the weather, some years being wetter, others drier, and the result is more or fewer worries about fire. This year Linda and I have been talking about how the eco-system is decidedly different from other years. Top changes are the disappearance of ground squirrels, the fewer numbers of hummingbirds and the proliferation of an animal that rivals humans for domination of the planet: ants.

Below is a photo of a ground squirrel, taken a couple of years ago. Ground squirrels live in burrows underground, sleeping for most of the year. By the time I would arrive in the early summer, the young ones were out of the nest, gamboling in my compost pile and chasing each other through the yard. At one point I worried that they would reproduce in such numbers that my backyard would start to look like those 19th century photos of the American West, the ones showing thousands—no, millions—of prairie dog burrows along train tracks. But the population never exploded, as predators kept the balance. Still, I always had mixed feelings about the ground squirrels living next door to me—enjoyment of their playful antics and annoyance that outdoor gardening was impossible.

Those critters are nowhere to be seen this year, and it’s pretty clear there are two reasons for that: evidence (large holes) of one or more badgers during the winter and the appearance last fall of a family of feral cats. Mercifully, the 3 cats are all male, one the father (presumably) and the other grown kittens. How do you know they're all male? I asked Linda, picturing a future “prairie dog village” of felines. “I know,” Linda replied. “I felt their balls.” Reassured by her confident assertion, I began to appreciate them more. They are actually semi-domesticated, and they have names. Linda, who loves this little family, built a hay fort for them to get them through the winter and supplemented their hunters’ diet with cat food. One of the grown kittens, Buttons, likes to be petted, and all three can be seen napping in the shade on Linda’s doorstep during the afternoon. Here is a photo of Babe, the other grown kitten, looking, well, quasi-feral.

Yet, even with these three, it’s clear how the introduction of a predator species can alter the wildlife landscape. The wild rabbits are gone, hopefully safe and nesting in a neighbor’s woodpile; so are the mice (no regrets there, I confess). There also seem to be fewer flies. Is there a connection in that fewer rodents means fewer insects/fleas for flies? Is there a connection with the drop in the number of hummingbirds, who, contrary to popular belief, rely on airborne insects for food as well as on the nectar I still faithfully put out. At the same time, a male broadtail I call “bully bird” has been guarding my feeder, chasing away others except for one female, presumably his. Perhaps something else is going on in the hummingbird world, something we don’t see. Or, as it’s a dry year with fewer wildflowers than usual, the birds could have found a more hospitable micro-climate. With complicated ecosystems, all we can do is speculate.

Then there are the ants. Plenty outside and sometimes they bite. Not too many inside, but enough to bring out my murderous instincts: too close to my kitchen counter? Swat! Hoping to balance out my ants-as-pestilence attitude, I checked out a DVD of a PBS special on E.O. Wilson, the renowned biologist who dedicated much of his life to studying ants. There are 16,000 species of them in the world—which I find astonishing—and that’s just the number that have been discovered. Professor Wilson, now Emeritus, contends that if you put the weight of all of the ants in the world on one scale and the weight of all humans on the other, the weights would be roughly equal. I confess that didn’t curb my swatting instincts. Since our species seems well on the way to promoting our own extinction, I find myself mumbling to them, “You’ll have the earth soon enough!) Wilson says people often ask him what to do about ant invasions. “I tell them to crumble a cookie on the counter and then watch their behavior,” he advises. Clearly it’s better to ask a scientist about curiosity, not extermination. As for me, most days I just focus on not dribbling hummingbird nectar on the floor, cleaning counters and hoping for the best.

In the years I’ve been coming to stay here for stretches of time, my sightings of larger wildlife have been astonishingly few. A small herd of pronghorn crossing the land at a distance, a discreet coyote near the dry stream bed at dusk, an occasional deer jumping the fence across the road, a few wild turkeys. Neighbors with forested land or rocky outcroppings can usually add bears and occasionally, a mountain lion, but here, on this open former pastureland, they would never pass during daylight. Include the semi-wild mammals, and I can add visiting herds of donkeys that stayed for a day or a few before heading out the always-open gate. Then there are the domesticated llamas, cows and horses seen along the road from time to time.

I miss the donkeys. As a species, they’re the descendants of pack animals used during Colorado’s mining days. They’re legally protected in Colorado, and often something of a tourist attraction. Cripple Creek, a neighboring town, boasts a resident herd and a summer donkey race event. “Our” donkeys stopped coming a couple of years ago after the rancher who supposedly owns them built a better fence (or so we heard), stopping their wanderings in the neighborhood.

I suppose scarcity breeds appreciation. This morning, while walking with Linda and her two dogs through the trees across the road, we spotted a deer, a beautiful young buck, wandering freely through the trees. A beautiful moment it was in a changing and dynamic ecosystem. And as we reached the road, we looked over at the haze above distant mountains. Smoke from wildfires in Utah and Arizona,   where ecosystems will undergo major changes this summer. We're grateful to be spared--today.