Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

The summer reading series continues this week with a review of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray. The book was published in 1999 by Milkweed Editions, and was recently brought to my attention when Ms. Ray was the keynote speaker at a conservation meeting that I attended recently. Ray is a naturalist and activist who grew up in southern Georgia and now resides in Vermont.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is equal parts memoir and tribute to the longleaf pine forest that once dominated the landscape of Georgia. Ray grew up as the child of a deeply religious patriarch who owned a junkyard along Highway 1 in Baxley, Georgia. Ray recounts her family history beginning with her great grandfather. Her family were "Crackers," the hard-drinking, hard-fighting Scottish immigrants who settled in Southern Georgia. Ray's grandfather was an enigma, prone to bouts of violence and lenghty disappearances into the forests. Ms. Ray portrays her grandfather as inseparable from the wildlife that populates the forest, and therefore sees herself and her people as one with the landscape. It is upon this foundation that the story is built.

The longleaf pine forest is largely a thing of the past in Georgia. The trees have been heavily logged and subsequently converted to slash pine forest or development. The resultant impact on the entire ecosystem is profound, even where the land remains forested. Longleaf pine has been replaced with slash pine, which grows more quickly and therefore generates more income than it's slow-growing cousin. However, the slash also grows more thickly than the longleaf and chokes out the understory. Sections of the forest that have been developed have fragmented the landscape. Ray walks us though how these developments have endangered the flora and fauna associated with the longleaf forest. Wiregrass and pine savannahs, Indigo Snakes and Gopher Tortoises, Flatwoods Salamanders and Bachman's Sparrows, all are evolved to live among the longleaf pines. Human greed and gluttony, the impulse to cut and sell every last tree in the forest, imperil these living things and many more. Ray's compassion for the survival of the forest invoked the New York times to consider her the Rachel Carson of the Southeast forests. (See my sidebar, below.)

While the discussion of the longleaf forest is compelling, it is Ray's recounting her family history that sets this book apart from what one would expect from a "nature" book. Ray speaks frankly about the violent nature of her father, grandfather, and other ancestors. She also speaks frankly about the mental illness that gripped many of these same men. Her grandfather, Charlie Ray, is consumed both with illness and violence, and he proves to be the most fascinating character in the book. Charlie Ray was essentially a feral man, posessing a violent streak and a communion with wild animals that evokes the image of a man raised by wolves. His stories are the most entertaining, but it is Ray's father who is the most dominant personality in the book, the one who seems to have had the greatest impact on the young Janisse.

Frank Ray was a devout man, a strict disciplinarian who did not allow a television in his house. He dealt in scraps, running a junkyard and making a living bartering for items that many people simply throw away. It was a struggle to provide for his four children, and they were quite poor, though never without food on the table. Frank Ray did not shy away from using a belt to discipline his children, and he also had a bout with mental illness. Janisse Ray recounts these facts without judgement, and she makes a point to ensure the reader that she knew that her father loved her and her siblings profoundly. It's an honest reflection of real life, but the relationship feels unresolved in this book. Perhaps this is by design, as most relationships are not lent to simple resolutions, and regardless, Frank Ray is still alive. I'm sure that the relationship continues to evolve.

It is the descriptions of Ray's childhood that were most challenging for me as a reader - not due to the content in any way, but in my personal relationship to the era. Because Janisse Ray had such a rural upbringing, with no television and with a junkyard as a playground, the stories evoked mental images of the 1940s. However, Janisse Ray is a direct contemporary of mine, having been born just three years before me. We grew up at the same time and in the same country, yet the stories seem quite distant to me. It is doubtless, however, that my reality and hers crossed paths. Ray may have gone to school in dresses sewn by her mother, but she certainly had classmates who wore the ghastly polyester fashions that were in vogue during the 1970's. She may have grown up without a television, but she attended school with kids who spent lunch hours discussing the prior evening's episode of Mork and Mindy. It's a challenge to me, because I don't believe that my personal experiences are worthy of a memoir, but I find Janisse Ray's to be a very interesting story.

Ray's concern for the forests, and her deeply personal memoirs, are enough to make this book a recommended read. One other aspect that truly sets the book apart is Ray's writing style, which at times evokes heartfelt emotion and, at it's best, waxes into pure poetry. Consider this passage as Ray describes spending a night in the pine savannas:

At evening in a Southern coastal-plain savanna, chuck-will's-widows call from the piney flatwoods a quarter mile upland. Not a rustle or hoof fall punctures the peace, except one moaning howl a mile a way that might be coyote or wildcat. Half the moon, like a broken dinner plate, poises directly overhead and the stars begin to appear, first in the nimbus of moon, then one by one across the lit sky. Soon a canopy of purple velvet is sewn with diamond flecks above the thick and hillocked grasses.

The dreaming is deep.

In the morning, a strip of pink pools through the slash pines in the lowland east. The fog is a garden wall made both of stone and imagination. In the garden a million million spiderwebs are spun of strands of dew - dream catchers, wind nets, hammocks of dawn. There are thousands of them, a revolution of spiderwebs in an anarchy of fog. It is like an ocean of webs, every tussock slung with a diaphanous nightcap.

The words are rich with imagery, and draw the reader into this beautiful part of the world that bears preserving. While the subject matter isn't always a pleasant read, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood never fails to compel.

Sidebar: The Rachel Carson Comparison

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood has a snippet from the review by the New York Times prominently displayed on the front cover:

"The forests of the Southeast find their Rachel Carson."

Well, maybe. Maybe not. This is in no way meant as a criticism of Ms. Ray's book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm just not sure that the Carson comparison is apt. Then again, I'm not sure that it isn't appropriate, as I've never read Rachel Carson's work.

You see, I also recently read Suburban Safari by Hannah Holmes. Prominently displayed on the front cover is this snipped from the review by Entertainment Weekly:

"Holmes is a Rachel Carson for 21st-century suburbia."

Having read these books just a few weeks apart, I can easily say that they are so vastly different that it is very unlikely that both authors resemble Rachel Carson. Yes, all three are concerned about humanity's impact on the other inhabitants of this planet. All three are also female. With Ray and Holmes, the comparison pretty much ends there. Holmes is witty, whimsical and scientific. Ray is poetic, introspective and emotional. Ray spends a lot of time talking about populations, while Holmes dedicates many pages to discussing individuals.

It is quite possible that more appropriate comparisons could be made to Audubon, Muir, Thoreau, or any of a host of other people who have written about nature. (Unfortunately, I haven't read a ton from these guys either, so I can't suggest who best fits with whom.) These writers need not be compartmentalized based solely upon their gender. When Rachel Carson's name is thrown about so liberally in these reviews, it begins to appear a bit trite.

Montpelier has the Blues

It's been awhile since I wrote about my travels in this space. I've been to Portland, Oregon in recent months, and I've had several trips to Vermont. Most have been whirlwinds and I haven't found the time to write about them, unfortunately. However, tonight I was back in Montpelier and ready to soak up the culture. As I've noted in this space before, Montpelier is a pretty small town that shutters most of its windows at 5:00 pm. That's the case during the winter months, anyway. This was my first bonafide summer trip to Montpelier, and as the sun is up longer, so are more people out and about.

Because my actual work-related plans changed at the last minute, I decided to check out the calendar for the Langdon Street Cafe. The Langdon Street is the local communist (I mean "cooperative") foods/arts project in the heart of Montpelier. I've been told that the music and beer are good, and the people watching is unsurpassed in Montpelier. And so it was that I found myself making my first venture there, despite the fact that the place is two short blocks from my hotel.

Montpelier's Langdon St. Cafe, on Langdon St. in Montpelier

New at the Langdon Street is the Wednesday night blues happy hour, featuring Dave Keller and Jan Shultz. This is a gig that Keller started just this month, and thus far seems to be attracting a small but enthusiastic crowd. Keller's main band is a six-piece R&B outfit, but the event at the Langdon Street was a blues jam featuring four musicians (Keller on guitar, Schultz on bass, Nick Kirshnit on trumpet, and presumably Brett Hoffman on drums). I think this is the "Blues Trio" plus the trumpeter. I didn't recognize the songs (Robert Cray, Junier Wells, etc.), but I did recognize the groove, a funky blues punctuated by occasional guitar and trumpet solos. The set was appropriately loose, almost to the point of being sloppy (in a good way), with Keller announcing songs and instructing the rest of the band as to which chords to play. We were told that this was Kirshnit's first time appearing with the trio but he proved to be a consummate professional, stepping in with seamless solos as soon as Keller gave him a nod. We were even treated to a tune sung by the bartender, who had requested the opportunity to show off her vocal talents with the rest of the band, and who sounded like she had been performing with the rest of the musicians for quite some time.

I always enjoy watching musicians perform live, and a jam session always carries a spirit of freedom that effervesces through the music. These guys were performing for the love of music (and whatever meager donations were dropped in the bucket at the front of the stage), and the lack of structure to the show lent it a refreshing air of sincerity. The Langdon Street Cafe proved to be a worthwhile venue to sit back, enjoy some Wolaver's Orgainic Ales and listen to some back-to-the-roots blues. Yet another hidden treasure from Montpelier.

Mainers Support Higher Taxes

Once again, Mainers have shown that when given the choice between lowering their taxes and maintaining "local control," they'll take local control every time.

The most recent example comes from Livermore Falls, a mill town about 30 miles up the Androscoggin River from Lewiston/Auburn. According to this story, Livermore Falls residents voted at the end of June to not fund several town services (including police and emergency services) in protest of plans to close the local transfer station and switch dispatch services to a regional rather than local service. These moves were designed to save taxpayer dollars. Ultimately, it took restoring the "local control" over dispatch and the transfer station to gain approval for reopening the rest of the town government.

The town decided to keep local dispatchers and continue to pay for the transfer
station. But in order to do so, they will have to raise the property tax levy
limit.

Time after time we in Maine are beat about the head with the fact that the state carries the highest tax burden in the country. In fact, according to The Tax Foundation, Maine's State/Local tax burden has been highest in the country every year since 1997. This leads to periodic support for potentially destructive tax-reform legislation.

Yet every time we are given the opportunity to consolidate services to save money (for example school districts, which are extraordinarily inefficiently organized), Mainers squawk. "We want our local control," they say.

Well folks, you can't have it both ways. You can't have neighboring towns paying full-time wages to duplicate services for a few thousand people, and also save money.

Personally, I'm all for paying a few more tax dollars and making sure that Sally down at the clerk's office keeps her job. I see it as akin to shopping at Grand City instead of Wal-Mart. Keep the dollars in the community. Then again, I'm not complaining about my tax rate, though it is undoubtedly too high. Other Mainers do complain about their taxes, but are apparently incapable of seeing the connection between their choices for local governance and the tax rate. So Livermore Falls, you've officially lost your standing to support TABOR this fall, though I've no doubt how the vote will go in that town.