And for the moon,
We have measured phases,
Until it returns to a tiny crescent
                                                                                            the Quran

                        I spent the morning monitoring the world in the newspaper, on radio, on television, and online. The anniversary media pressure was suddenly becoming too much to bare, so Janet and I fled the whole mess by bugging out to the country for the night. Just packed up the cats in their cat boxes and drove off to Lone Star Lake.

        Our cabin on the lake, like Camping Zeeburg in Amsterdam during the jets of September, is a primitive and remote place protected from harrowing views of the messed up world by having no television. And as I fled along the miles of Kansas farm roads to the lake, I bird watched as I always do. Calling the species I saw out to Janet who wrote them down in the bird-watching journal I keep in the glove box --- while Ozzie purred and Bernie slept in their cat boxes in the back.

        The bird watching skies in Douglas County have been as listless as they typically are during the hot blast of an August-long heat wave in Kansas . High temperatures have been hovering near and sometimes above 100 degrees since the end of July. It’s gone on so long with only a trace of rain that the countryside went into a full-blown brownout for the third year in a row. The fields are brown. The weeds along the roads are brown. The poor corn crop is brown. Everything but the trees along Washington Creek and surrounding the lake is brown. And even they looked wilted and sickly compared to well-watered years.
        The extreme weather has kept birds close to the ground lately, many species in hiding from the heat. Last week when I drove home from the cabin, around the west side of nearby Clinton Lake , I did get to watch a half dozen Great Egrets on the water there. But lately with the extreme heat, I’ve only been recording an occasional Great Blue Heron or Yellow-shafted Flicker to break up the monotony of common omnipresent species like swallows, doves, vultures, starlings, and crows.
        The people on the Weather Channel of the CNN Breaking News Box tell me that the heat and the drought has something to do with el-Nino, but I don’t care. I’m as much a helpless bystander (just a rider on a bus that someone else is driving...) when it comes to the weather as I am when it comes to geo-politics. I sit back on the couch at my home and I pretty much take whatever the bus driver feeds to me over the CNN Breaking News Box intercom.

                        Janet and I planned to spend a quiet evening tonight going about our funk at home watching badly made television programming and obsessing about the war --- but then suddenly a Special Weather Bulletin popped up in the middle of all that TV garbage. A sight for sore eyes. The weatherman telling me that, “The Northern Lights were out and out in grand form.”

            Bam!

            I jumped out of my chair and I issued immediate orders. “We have four choices,” I started, “We can either stay here and keep watching this badly acted TV movie about the brutal Warsaw Uprising of World War II; or we can turn the channel and be bloodied again by the brutal Vietnam War fiasco watching that disturbing old Platoon movie; or we can turn the channel to CNN and watch today’s brutal World War III coverage from Afghanistan; or we can abandon the goddamn TV altogether and flee on out to the country to see an Aurora Borealis?”

            It was a rhetorical question!

            Janet had never seen the Northern Lights before, and as it turned out I’d only seen one Aurora more memorable than this badly needed gift ---given to us by the powers of nature that be in our most disturbing season of funk.

            I may have issues with the gods and governments and medias of men (like just about everybody else on Earth), but in nature I always trust.

            It was spectacular!

            We drove west into the countryside outside Lecompton (population 602) and parked.

            The northern sky was lit with a great big splotch of fiery rust-colored red, like the glow of a forest fire in the sky. Stars were barely visible at the edges of the rust cloud and it was impossible to see through the Aurora , so bright and bold was the hue of the thing. To the west of the red was a horizon-hugging streak of blue-green. A surrealistic teal highlighted at the bottom in a white glow. The rust would come and go, and when it faded at rural Lecompton we motored through Perry (population 901) to a spot just north of Midland Junction (population 5) where we stopped again.

            The rust-colored red cloud had reappeared and was even thicker than it looked at Lecompton and now ranged from the horizon to about 30 degrees up in the sky. The teal streak had also enlarged and intensified and the two areas were now joined by a third smaller (yet even stronger) white glow separating the fiery red from the bold teal just off the northern horizon.

            There was no shimmering to the lights, and no instantaneous color or illumination changes as there had been during an earlier Aurora I’d been lucky enough to have witnessed 15 years before from the Helena city hills high up in the Montana Rocky Mountains. But the bright pastel rust, teal, and white illuminations of tonight’s Aurora were spectacular. This precious bright thing in the sky provided by nature, the first thing in a while that dulled the grief of the September 11 aftermath for us and channeled our funks to a mindset more awesome, more centered, and more real than the monotonous folly-of-man TV funk we’d been trapped in for more than a month on the homefront.

 

            Distracted.

            If only for that hour or three ...

5
August 31, 2002
Seasons

                            Seasons.
        That’s what makes a year go round.

        I put down last year’s journal and went out on the cabin deck to watch the lake in the starlight and to listen to the howling of distant coyotes and the continued haunting call of the Barred Owl. I began reminiscing about all the other memorable nature that the bus I was on came in contact with this past year. Because between September 2001 and September 2002 all the regular seasons of nature came and went in Lawrence , Kansas as scheduled despite September 11. And (as usual) some of those seasons brought unexpected awe and some brought unexpected fury and some came with unexpected inconvenience.
        The late fall migration season in 2001 was as spectacular as it ever was. Skies thick with Canada Geese, Snow Geese, and White Pelican. Farm skies darkened with 10,000-bird swarms of European Starlings and Cowbirds gathering for the trip south.

November had a blue moon!

        The loud squawking crows came flocking around the neighborhood like clockwork last Thanksgiving, and the annual pair of Loons spent a few days in mid-April at Lone Star Lake, resting for awhile midway through their long spring migration back north, just like they always do.
        And in January 2002 (just like every other January) the seasonal flock of 200 Bald Eagles took over the Cottonwood Trees down at the boiling open waters below the Kansas River dam to winter fish in ice-free waters.
        We shoveled through a decent snowstorm in early winter and later on (just before Groundhog Day) we had to chop our way out of a killer four-inch ice storm that blew up electric transformers and ripped down thousands of trees, leaving Lawrence a beautiful mess. The unexpected and the awe of nature, happening right outside our doors. Just like every other year ...
        And year in and year out (no matter what frame of mind the people of the Earth are in) this dependable natural cycle of change --- especially in its fury and its awe --- has a way of grabbing our attention. Distracting us from our troubles or the boredom of our everyday lives and wowing us with spectacular expressions of spirit.
        And I like it when nature freaks me out with its most outstanding furies.
        There to distract me from my anger and hate and there to make me forget for a moment why I was so inconsolably sad. Because of the attack and the consequences of the attack. Because of the war. Because of all the death. Because I couldn’t find it in my soul to summon up a single ounce of sympathy or forgiveness for the terrorists.
        And because I wanted them all dead. Truly wanted them all dead.
        Their bodies mangled with shrapnel.
        Their heads up on sticks.

        Yup. The seasons just keep going round and round ...

         Since we got to the cabin, trying to deflect our mood with nature, I’d come to that conclusion for the tenth time --- this time wrapped around the disarming and brutal mind’s-eye vision of heads on sticks. I knew the war repellent had warn off altogether again and I became morose thinking too much about the messed up world out there beyond Lone Star Lake. Sad for the 3000 victims of September 11 and their families. Sad for the heroes of flight 93. Sad for the loss of security and for the loss of a civilized post-Cold War idealistic vision of the possibilities of a unified world, tolerant and at peace with itself. A vision we thought for awhile (from our cushy Western perspectives) might be possible. And sad for so many other reasons ...
        Unable for weeks last year (aside from those couple of hours in Paris, drunk on wine and stuffed with gourmet mussels and chocolate crepes) to think about anything other than what had happened and what chaotic global streets the horrible TV-terror-war show was inspiring me to fly off to.

        Suddenly, I heard the call of the Barred Owl again out the windows of the cabin and I realized that I’d been drifting back and forth again between the furies of nature and the follies of man. So I bore down and focused and continued reminiscing about my year in nature. Like that isolated thunderstorm I saw in July that put off only one single bolt of lightning that was one of the fiercest I’ve ever seen. Spidering out white from a center point in ten or twelve directions. Colored red, blue, and peach during the after-flash reverberation of the thing. Disappearing in a split second as lightning does -- -- -- into the thin air of my memory. And then I remembered how when I saw the bombers of Afghanistan straight over my head and bearing down to eviscerate the enemy at Tora Bora last December, how I’d felt so audaciously at peace with myself.
        Redeemed.
        My breath taken away by war and pride in my country. Not like the way I felt sick watching other bombers I’d been under in other wars I’d been in.

        I was spiraling down again --- so I re-focused and I remembered last month when Janet and I were crossing the Mississippi River bridge next to the St. Louis Arch on Interstate 70. When a vicious thunderstorm fired off two lightning strikes to the bridge in front of us as gale-force horizontal winds and rains slowed us to a blind crawl and threatened to blow us off the bridge and into the Mississippi River. And I remembered that night last spring here at the cabin at Lone Star Lake when nature sent a fierce thunderstorm system training our way that pounded us with about three or four dozen lightning bolts per minute (non-stop!) for six straight hours.
        I remembered the nature that Janet reported to me by word of mouth when she heard over the telephone from her company’s home office in Evansville, Indiana (on June 18 at 12:37 p.m.) When the Ohio River town was hit with a 5.0 earthquake that shook up the September 11 recovery of many edgy Hoosiers. One of her people there called and told her that when the building started shaking he immediately thought (as he bolted for the front door) that the building had been hit by an aircraft --- the vision of September 11 horror video clips probably flashing across that poor man’s damaged mind’s eye ...

        I laid down on the couch and tried to go to sleep.

                        But instead of sleeping, I somehow settled on obsessing about that bloodlust topic that’s troubled me since late last fall (troubled me because of the fact it never really troubled me), coming to a climax as I stood there in December on the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan . As I watched wartime life on the streets of Peshawar, Pakistan and wandered down the dirt roads of the Afghan refugee camps where I ended up photographing the enemy Taliban escaping the fray as I stood on the streets on the edge of hostilities where I watched from nearby as the heads of the September 11 terrorists were figuratively put on sticks.

            I laid there on the couch at the cabin on the shores of Lone Star Lake and I thought about where I’d come from and how all my experience over my lifetime had affected my viewpoint and what bloodlust had meant to me before September 11. And how when my world changed for good I had to personally (just like every other regular American) confront my dark side. How I had to make room for the concept of bloodlust in a brain matter already crammed for the glory of good.
            Bloodlust.
            Before last September I hardly knew it. But now committing it unremorsefully --- I can only conclude that it’s simply part of the nature of anger and hate. No matter how civilized we think we are.
            I’d seen others practice bloodlust out on the streets of the world, and I guess that made me more informed than most. I’d seen it in Northern Ireland and in El Salvador and in Nicaragua and in Guatemala and in other places here and there as I’ve gone along my way about the streets of this world. I’ve seen it in the faces of soldiers on the front lines who’d either find a way to get in touch with their bloodlust or die. I’ve seen it on the faces of politicians on TV who’d use the notion of bloodlust to questionable ends. And I’ve seen and photographed it first hand, the very bloodlust image expressed in the whole new world (in the media and in our darker moments alone) as the poster image of our anger, the heads-on-stick frame of mind we’d been bushwhacked and mangled into. Photographed it on the faces of El Salvadoran farmers who in spring 1982 had their heads chopped off their bodies and stuck up on sticks in a farm field, each with his hacked-off penis stuck in his mouth --- as a warning to the living not to question the evil.

            In an effort to play at peacekeeping, a part of me has always wanted to somehow understand how one human being could do that kind of violence to another human being and to the victim’s family who’d have to come to the killing fields to fetch their loved one’s heads and penis’ off the sticks. Understand so I could somehow impact the cold blooded to channel their hate into a more productive mindset before it ever got to that point.
            I grew up in a hawkish-prone family who all worked for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation building the ships that won World War II and the tall buildings that won the peace. But I also grew up amongst the Amish on a farm along Saucany Creek in Berks County , Pennsylvania . Raised around a legacy of people who aid and abet bloodlust on one hand and around a legacy of neighbors who practice peaceful coexistence (even if one has to go so far as resorting to the radical indifference of the practice of shunning as an alternative anti-violent defense against evil) on the other. I learned to shun the few things in life that might needlessly do me in, but I couldn’t shun the world all the time --- it just wouldn’t let me. I saw the value and safety in being indifferent to TV politics early in my life. But every once in awhile (due to the magnitude of events and due to a clear and present danger) I’d been drawn into one of these socio-economic political battles.
            By September 10, 2001 I believed that clear and present danger (and the last resort of self-defense it justifies) was the only reason to ever go to war and that there had thus never really truly been a justifiable American war in my 47 years here on the planet. But the nature of bloodlust is a real gray area --- a gray haze that crept through me during last fall’s season of war between light gray and dark gray --- between anger and hate. All the way from Amsterdam to the homefront to Ground Zero and then over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan . Where I stood and watched American war jets thrash the murderers from only a few dozen miles away, watched them put al-Qaida heads on CNN Breaking News Box sticks for all the civilized world to see.

            In fall 2001 there was a detectable bloodlust oozing out of the streets and oozing thick from the TV culture as well. Flags waved from houses and cars and flew at half-mast on every flagpole. We were enraged, and soon rage became appropriate and was encouraged by TV politicians and accepted by a civilized world. The option of a fierce self-defense suddenly wasn’t only a choice --- but now an unavoidable responsibility (an obligation) for the survival of America and the Western World.
            A calculated bloodlust after the magnitude and audacity of September 11 was inevitable. Natural, I supposed now ...
            Sure, the government spun our response to the horror. Calling it, “justifiable self-defense.” Referring to our response as “resolve”. And the press reported it as such. And the preachers and politicians danced around the bloodlust issue --- also posing our all-out reaction as “resolve” and “justice”.
            But don’t kid yourself folks.
            It wasn’t just “self-defense” or just “justice “ or “resolve”, or even just “bloodlust”--- it was Revenge.
            Pure bloodlust revenge.
            And if it wasn’t, whatever was?

            Before September 11 I’d typically have abhorred the option of vengeance, considering it a weakness. I’d especially have abhorred anyone I came into contact with who took any kind of comfort in practicing vengeance. For that kind’s rarely so justified in their hate as to rise above their own stink. But then three months and three days later I stood at the end of my season of hate under Tora Bora skies. Trading cigarettes with armed Afghan tribal guides who were supposed to be fasting for Ramadan, contentedly watching all those fighter jets and bombers go in over the horizon for the kill. At peace with myself and with the bloody deaths of the cowards who were cowering in caves just up the road from me. I believe in courtesy, manners, and good will toward my fellow man, just like I did last September 10. But now a year later (after having been forced to chose the anger, brutality, and violence of self-defense over the enslavement of tyranny and terror on two fronts --- push coming to shove at the hands of both the rude noise terrorist newbies of Lawrence, Kansas and the evil Fascists of Islamic extremism --- I’ve concluded that when push comes to shove I will unremorsefully defend myself every time.
            Even if I had to go all the way to Afghanistan and all the way through the heart of the bloodlust of last year to do it ...
            I guess that’s the nature of self-defense.
            I guess that’s the nature of mankind. To be forced once every so often (whether we want to or not) to endure seasons of confounding hate.

            Probably just the nature of things.

            Part of what makes the world go round, I recon ...