Continuity

The Fenimore Art Museum, one of the surprising jewels of Cooperstown, has held a series of zoom lectures focusing on different parts of their collection.  The last one I attended was less about the collection, focusing instead on the life of Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James.  One of Susan’s many gifts to posterity, and especially to the future inhabitants of Cooperstown, was a book, Rural Hours, published in 1850 when she was 37.  She was an ardent naturalist, and the book is a year’s diary of her observation of the natural life around her.  A modern day naturalist, Will Walker, is now publishing a daily blog with quotes from Rural Hours and his own observations and photos of the same subjects. It’s a lovely dialog between the past and the present.  Today the focus was on two beautiful wildflowers, Starflower and Cool-wort.

Many things have changed here in Cooperstown since Rural Hours was published, but what’s most hopeful are the things that have not changed. Perhaps the most important thing that hasn’t changed is that there are still people who love the natural world here, and that there’s still plenty to observe, learn about, and document. Reading Will’s blog you can feel the continuity.  The ways we respond to the seasons hasn’t changed.  The ways we respond to the amazing variety of life hasn’t changed.  For all the other things that fill our lives in new ways, there is still room for delight at finding a flower and hearing a bird, writing about it and sharing our observations.  

The saddest change is the great decline in the bird population.  Over the last 50 years the bird population in Eastern forests has declined by 27 percent – one out of four birds is gone. Because there are so many avid amateur birders like Susan, and such dedicated professionals, we have quite complete and distressing data on birds.  The birds, so many of whom are migrators, remind us of the need to protect not only our own habitat, but all the habitats in the hemisphere they depend on.  The stunning Baltimore Orioles and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks which light up our summers spend half the year in Central and South America.  These birds remind us how connected we are, how the politics and economy on one side of a line drawn by humans affects the creatures who don’t need visas to cross it.  We are stewards physically of our own little habitats, but we’re stewards politically and economically of a broader terrain. I can’t read Rural Hours without feeling what a poor job we’ve done of protecting the diversity and the plenty of the world Susan wrote about just 175 years ago.

It’s Memorial Day today, a day for memory and a sense of our place in the stream of history.  I think of my mother’s uncle Melach, the World War I veteran I grew up with.  Melach visited two or three times a year, more often when we lived nearby in The Bronx, but still faithfully even when it meant a bus trek for him to Mamaronck after we moved.  He came every Veterans’ Day with a cake in a pink bakery box.  He was childless, and most of his family was in Israel, but for reasons I never knew he stayed in The States, in the country he had served.  He never lost his heavy Yiddish accent, and his dress and his ways were old fashioned, so he was mostly a source of humor to us kids.  I wish I could go back now and tell him that I’m grateful for the connection he gave me to that generation and the struggles they faced.  I grew up with plenty of WWII vets, my father included, but Melach was the only veteran of that earlier war I knew.  This day was still called Decoration Day when Melach visited, a day when people decorated the graves of veterans from the Civil War onward, a day spent in memory and gratitude.

I have plenty to be grateful for, this day and every day.  I’m deeply grateful for the men (only men in our circle) who risked their lives in WWII.  My Dad didn’t risk his life, serving safely in Canada.  But when he joined up he had no way of knowing that he would have a safe war, and most of his friends, the grown up men of my childhood, did not have the luxury of safety.  I knew that Marty Swirsky, who came home from the war with our adored Marcelle, had fought in France, but I knew little else about their service.  Perhaps if those men had talked more about the realities of war we would have stayed out of Korea and VietNam, Iraq and Afghanistan.  To some extent their willingness to talk about the war or any of their history was frozen during the McCarthy Era, as so many of them had been party members before the war.  Our parents were honest with us about their political history, and we learned about the histories of their friends from them.  But we also learned to not talk about any of that outside of home.

At what was to become the end of McCarthy’s reign of terror, the great journalist Edward R. Murrow said, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.” It’s horrifying how relevant that quote is on this Memorial Day.  But if the evil persists, so does the good.  As we are not descended only from fearful men, neither are we descended only from people who thoughtlessly trashed the natural world.