Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Friday, October 10, 2003 CASTOR CANADENSIS
I was trying to find more information about beavers today ("beaver" is, ahem, quite an interesting word to search on the internet) and came upon this concise description of beaver life. Among other facts, here's a mini-primer on beaver reproduction and development:
Beavers are monogamous usually but if one mate dies, the other will "remarry". Family groups consist of two adults, several two year olds and the young of the current year. They mate first at about three years old. Gestation is 128 days. Litters of 2 to 6 are born in April and May. Kits can swim when a few hours old; weaned at one month. The mother carries the kits in her mouth supported on her front legs while walking upright on her hind legs and tail. Young leave or are forced out of the colony by two years of age. Large lodges may have several family groups. Family life is cooperative, all help with the hard work of gathering food, building and repair.
The site also has two short video clips on beavers from the Toronto Zoo. The first one shows an orphaned baby beaver being encouraged to swim by the zookeeper, who hand-reared it.
The beaver is the official symbol of Canada, appearing on its very first postage stamp, the current 5-cent coin, and in many other stamp, coin, and heraldic contexts. The shield of the famous Hudson Bay company has at its center a cross and four beavers:
When Charles II granted the Hudson's Bay Company charter to his cousin Prince Rupert and 17 gentlemen in 1670, he asked that whenever the king visited the H.B.C. area, Prince Rupert should receive as a tribute the furs of one fox, two elk and four beavers. These seven animals make up the heraldic design.
Those of you who follow this blog may know by now that I love animals, but also love whacky animal humor. One of my favorite cartoons, by Charles Addams, showed a group of boy scouts crossing a stream - all of them with buck teeth - with the title "Beaver Patrol". Real life has also offered some bizarre beaver memories. Close to where I grew up, there was a woman known as "The Beaver Lady" whose home was built over a running stream with a beaver dam. The beavers regularly came up into her house, where she fed them. I never went there, but I knew someone who knew her, and I've seen photographs of her, in this house, with beavers sitting on her lap.
I have arctic on my mind; we're halfway through the film "The Fast Runner" and my mind is spinning with images of real people living in a way I still cannot quite imagine: a quite brutal existence of nomadic hunting, igloos, tents, clan rivalries, yapping dogs, seal meat and whale blubber, ice, fur, whiteness. Have any of you seen it? I am never going to romanticize Inuit art again. A great film: beautiful but not easy to watch.
Today I went on a small hunting expedition of my own: a late afternoon walk/clamber down to inspect the beaver dam in the river. I'm quite certain no one has been there before me. The place is quite inaccessible, at the foot of a very steep, overgrown bank, nearly impossible to reach ether from the river edge or from the road above. I decided to try the lower route first, not wanting to fall down the bank and lie there for hours with a twisted ankle, and although it was hard going, I made it through the tall grasses, the stands of wild "bamboo" and the thicket of honeysuckles and fallen branches that grew along the bank. There are tall mature trees here: the grove of thorny locusts I can see from my window here; a huge sycamore whose peeled bark lay in shreds under my feet, making a silent approach impossible.
I wanted to see if the dam was still active. As I got close, I saw fresh, green saplings laid on the top, and stalks of the thick, sharp bamboo. There were three beaver "slides", the muddy access areas the animals use to get in and out of the water, but I couldn't see any beavers. It was hot, midday, and I stepped back into the shadows under the sycamore. Then I saw movement under the water. It was a huge beaver, one of the biggest I've ever seen, swimming completely submerged in the pool above the dam. He circled warily under the surface, two, three times, brown fur glistening in the sunlight, big flat tail black and powerful. Then he disappeared beneath the bank. Had he heard my footsteps above, or sensed the vibration? Probably. I stepped away, remembering a friend who had been charged by a beaver further up the river a few years ago, and sat down near one of the slides to watch. I opened my backpack and took out an apple and ate it, thinking of my old wilderness mentor, Herm, who always advised me "never go off on an adventure without a ditty-bag". I had packed light for this journey, a block and a world away from my house: the apple, binoculars, a small sketch pad, sunglasses. But ditty-bags, Herm's army-talk for olive green, military-issue field bags with pockets and multiple uses, were as much for carrying things home as carting your lunch, field guide, and hand-lens: I rarely come home without some rocks or lichens, nuts or leaves to identify.
I decided the beaver wasn't going to reappear and headed straight up the nearly-vertical bank, hauling myself up between saplings, marveling at the depth of leaf-mould making new soil underneath the thick canopy, enjoying the dry fall warmth on my back and the sweat running down inside my shirt. I stopped and looked back down toward the dam, hidden behind the trees. "He's safe," I thought. I hope so.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
We always used to laugh when walking down the hall in my mother-in-law's retirement home, betting each other how far from her door we'd begin to smell the frying. She lived in a pretty wasp-y place, where hardly anyone even cooked an onion - perish the thought that you might make your neighbor's carpet smell! We're making a belated birthday dinner with J.'s family tonight, and sitting here at the computer while I take a little break from an afternoon of cooking, I can smell that familiar scent on my clothes, skin, and hair.
I rarely deep-fry anything, but on special occasions we make a few ethnic favorites. Tonight, along with grilled butterflied lamb with a mustard and rosemary marinade, I'm making eggplant slices fried in batter, and little zucchini fritters - an Armenian recipe using grated zucchini, drained and mixed with egg, a little flour, and green onion, and then fried quickly so that the strands of zucchini on the edges are brown and crispy. I love these, and tried to make them for years, until I once asked my mother-in-law to watch me and tell me what was wrong. Oh! she said. I think you're using a grater with too-small holes. That was it: the zucchini was too wet because the pieces were too small. But what recipe, oral or written, would tell you this? Some things you can only learn from a master.
Tonight there is also J.'s famous Armenian pilaf: rice cooked with vermicelli, green onions, currants, and garnished with pine nuts. Cucumbers with yogurt and mint; parsley-dominated taboulleh; and a plate of sliced tomatoes and black olives...maybe a little arak to begin...I feel old and a little incompetent when I cook these things that have always been cooked for me by an elder and an expert, and in true Middle Eastern fashion I already hear myself deprecating the food: the eggplant isn't cooked quite enough, the zucchini is a little wet, the lamb is a little overdone. In my case it may be true, and everyone will chime in with their own commentary and suggestions, but in the end the food will disappear. Wish you were here.
5:47 PM
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Tuesday, October 07, 2003
It's a beautiful fall day here, a little on the chilly side (32 degrees when I went out for my walk early this morning). This afternoon I went out and surveyed the garden: dahlias black with frost, tomatoes on the ground, but sedum and asters blooming pluckily. I sat on a warm rock in the garden wall and ate a fresh apple, watching the red squirrel terrorize its grey cousin in a screeching, chattering chase up and down the maple trees.
Now, just after teatime, I'm working on the couch while sunlight streams in the south-facing windows of our library/living room. The gold afternoon light falls on each tiny leaf of the big rosemary plant, back indoors after a summer on the porch, and softly illuminates a bowl of velvety peaches. There's a vase of drying hydrangea blossoms, rose and off-white; the open world atlas; books on the coffee table; the worn oriental rug - and except for two boys outside, passing the house occasionally on their skateboards, it's silent here, and peaceful.
I'm getting rested, adjusting to new realities as well as resuming my routines and changing a few: I've made a fresh resolution to exercise every morning, and, inspired by my parents' immaculate housekeeping - a trait I definitely did not inherit - I'm making a pass at cleaning up some of the clutter here. It feels good to be writing and working again, and to be reading your words again, too. Thanks especially to all of you who've written with encouragement and concern for me and my family; it's very much appreciated.
Monday, October 06, 2003
In a comment on the previous post, Miguel wrote:
"I was debating with myself whether to include one side reaction I had to your story... I don't want to say the wrong thing, but the feeling was so strong and marked. While I read of the tranquility and the richness of trees and flowers, of clear running water and birds free to come and go, I suddenly imagined what was happening in Iraq and a great sorrow overcame me. When was the last time any of us outside all that turmoil ever read anything about what a walk in the Iraqi or Afghani or other beleaguered place's countryside must be like? When do we hear of the joy in a walker there coming upon morning dew on a wildflower? There are so many places around the world crying out in pain as their inhabitants are flushed from the bushes."
I'm glad he wrote this. In fact, this very morning I said to my husband, before we got up, "Somehow I feel that the past two years have been one continuous episode, starting with September 11th. I've been unable to escape the sense of being surrounded by suffering, and it doesn't really matter if it's personal or on a world scale."
Thinking of what Miguel wrote, I'm reminded of the fact that what we hear of other cultures tends to be filtered through a political lens. It's rare, except in blogs, to read of a person's own ways of coping, the shape of daily life, the ways of finding comfort and solace in the midst of great difficulty. I think we can count on humans being human, though. Food, sex, companionship, nature, beauty, music, color: these are all universal ways of preserving life despite external circumstance. One reason I like Iranian film so much is that it shows glimpses of beauty -- a flower in a vase, a spot of bright color, a spontaneous song -- and this reassures me that people everywhere are alike. In fact, I sometimes think we are the aberrant ones, thinking that technology and money can fix every problem or deficiency, and losing the ability to find solace in nature, realtionship, and simple living. My friend in China wrote once that older people in her culture "sometimes say things were better during the years of hardship". By that she meant that the new focus on technology, financial success, and upward mobility has obscured and changed basic values and family relationships, and has failed to create greater happiness. We are so much further along that path, but I don't think it's too late to think about these questions from an individual perspective.
There's a good discussion going on over at Ecotone about "Ancestral Place" - what is it, does it still exist, and did the recent group of place blogger contributions actually address the topic or not? In our transient contemporary society, how does "place" figure in our sense of identity - if at all?
I know I'm unusual in that I've only lived in two places in my whole life: the central region of New York State, and this general area of Vermont and New Hampshire. I've lived in only five different houses in my 50+ years, counting one Ithaca apartment but not my dorm rooms. Well, there were a few sojourns with various boyfriends in different places, but the "permanent" residences only number five. My childhood was divided between a house in a small town and the house on the lake where my parents still live. And for the past 24 years, I've lived in the house from which I'm writing now.
That's neither good nor bad; I refuse to assign any superior value either to staying put or moving around. But where we fall on that scale of stationary or transient does affect us, and it affects the degree to which a particular place figures in our sense of personal identity. (Of course, there are people who stay in one place all their lives and never think much about it.)
In writing to the topic of "Ancestral Place", then, what do we really mean by that term? My family came originally from England, but so long ago that my idea of "roots" is here, on this side of the Atlantic, and in that corridor between the early New England colonies and the "frontier" of central New York where my family eventually settlted.
In travelling to England over the years, I've definitely felt at home in ways I don't always here, but that is cultural, not physical: my female forebears kept alive a certain sense of connection through their interest in books and the book arts, history, gardening, music and art, Anglicanism. If anything, I'm the one who has stepped outside that pattern. But my rootedness to a particular physical place is very much centered beneath my feet and on the horizon - a horizon that is lower and more rolling than the one I see outside my New England window. I wonder, though, if I'd feel as connected if my family hadn't been in love with the land and the creatures and plants, hadn't talked about it as a living thing, hadn't told stories of the old farm or my circuit-riding preacher grandfather, hadn't felt completely contented right there. Except for one cousin, I'm the only person on the maternal side of my extended family who has left a ten-mile radius of upstate New York.
Living with someone who feels rooted in this place, but who comes from a totally different culture, has been wildly expanding for me. He's travelled more than I have, but together we've gone many places and I feel comfortable in situations I never would have imagined, growing up where I did.
Without this perspective, I'm not sure I could look back at the place I came from and write anything coherent about it other than description. Before the past two weeks, I hadn't spent as long a time there in many years, and it got me thinking about the way a place seeps into your bone marrow and flows in your blood, largely unseen and unfelt until you face it again with a gasp of recognition: yourself, reflected in a mirror of water, land, sky.
Spam Filter Enabled: I've had it with 100+ spam emails per day, so I just put a spam filter on my e-mail accounts. Mail sent to me via this blog should get delivered without a problem, but if by any chance you do have trouble and receive a "challenge", please either reply to it or send me a note in the comments. Everyone who is in my address book already will be passed through without question, and, as I said, new mail from readers of this blog should NOT be subjected to a filter. If you are, please let me know.
4:34 PM
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CASTOR CANADENSIS
