When Heroes Change

Thinking of Jane Fonda, makes me consider what happens when heroes change. Are they still my heroes? The eighties in general was a decade for fallen heroes. It was dubbed the Decade of Me, a moniker incompatible with a basic tenet of heroism--selflessness, or at least putting others before the self. As my favorite Vulcan, Spock, would say: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." How can heroism survive a decade of selfishness. It can't and in 1991, Jane married Ted Turner. What did that union imply, at least to me? I looked at my political activist aerobics diva and saw a wife hanging on the arm of her husband, cheering on a baseball team that wasn't the Oakland A's, wasn't even Western Division. My devotion was definitely rocked. Wasn't Jane a Socialist? How could she affiliate herself with a man who owned more land than anybody in the nation? Who owned more things than most anyone alive, whole baseball teams, whole television networks (granted only cable). It seemed the socialist had turned socialite. What was I to think?

I could still do aerobics. That much was in tact. But what of speaking out against oppression, inequity, nuclear proliferation. . .what happened to Jane's hollery voice? I missed the raspy indignation. Her shift may have been a decade later than many who rose to fury in the late sixties, who gave me the long list of things to be against, only to descend into human self-absorption, but Jane's descent bothered me more. I really didn't care that Joan Baez was taking some me-time in the eighties. I didn't feel let down. But Jane was different. Her retreat into the arms of capitalism and her embrace of the role of doting eye-candy wife gave me pause. Maybe hollering just gets your throat sore. Maybe there was a kinder and gentler way to save humanity from itself? Or did Jane just give up?

I learned that heroes change and they don't always change into another kind of hero. Jane changed and forced me to consider my own convictions, since holding up the wife of Ted Turner on a heroes stool was out of the question. While she bought up Montana, I had time to search my own soul and take personal responsibility for what mattered most to me, since it could never be the Atlanta Braves.

Another Jane

When I was seven, I moved to Berkeley, California. It was 1968. To describe the move as mind-blowing would barely begin to render a picture of what it was like. Before Berkeley, I had lived in the Santa Barbara mountains across a creek from a dirt road and then for a year on the edge of a San Joaquin Valley small farm town where my dad was growing beans. My best friend there owned a bull. I had a stink bug collection. Life was quiet, comprehensible, and noncontroversial. Then I moved to Berkeley. My parents had divorced and my dad had custody of all four of us kids. We went from a nuclear family living on beans to. . .an unemployed dad trying to get food stamps from a system designed to accommodate single moms. Social uproar all around me. A new girlfriend/stepmom who did yoga, was vegetarian, and believed in the occult. A friend/stepsister from New York City who knew swear words.

But in Berkeley in the late sixties, I didn't know Jane Fonda. During all the social unrest and resistance to the Viet Nam War, I missed the controversy surrounding Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi. I experienced the war locally, peace marches through the streets, chanting "1 2 3 4 we don't want your stinking war!,” the renaming of the park near my sister's Junior High to Ho Chi Minh Park (Ho Ho Ho chi Minh, Viet Nam is gonna win!). Riots in the streets, tear gas, road blockades, officers in combat gear aka the Blue Meanies, everything seen from the height of a scrawny kid not even a decade old. My world view didn’t come from celebrities like Jane. It came from my dad and his girlfriend, from home. War is wrong; peace is better. Power to the people. The End. I had no idea why there was a war in Viet Nam, no idea why Americans were there. I didn't know who Ho Chi Minh was. War was just wrong and we could say so: "saying it loud, saying it proud!” Being opposed to the war in Viet Nam was all lumped in with being against racism, against traditionally-taught American history, against gender discrimination, against capitalism, against Republicans, against Nixon, against oppression, bras, chain stores, shopping malls, conformity, artificial fabric, food processing, beef, veal, deforestation, killing whales, clubbing baby harbor seals, littering, garbage, lying, plastic, pollution, wasting water, Religion, dresses, panty hose, ruffles, Florida orange juice, gay bashing, California grapes, Safeway, commercials, public schools, Barbie Dolls, nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants, cities, commuting, oil companies, hunting, guns, greed, competitive sports (except baseball, especially except the Oakland A's)…

As a child of a liberal hippy dad and his live-in girl friend, my life was constant lessons in restrictions. I couldn’t shop at Safeway because they sold California grapes which in turn defied the cause of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union. I couldn't drink Florida Orange Juice because Anita Bryant, the OJ Queen, hated queens. I couldn’t eat meat because it was a dead animal. I couldn't flush after peeing because it wasted water and destroyed the environment. I couldn't play with Barbie Dolls because they promoted a bad image of women. I couldn't attend regular public school, because it was too institutional and didn't nurture free thinking. And through all this, I lacked the guidance of Jane.

It was years later when I was starting college that Jane Fonda reached my radar screen. I was at U. C. Davis, fast becoming disillusioned with my plan to major in math. I had loved math in high school, but my first college math class was dull as dirt. I already knew the calculus and my teacher looked like Santa Claus. The room was filled with engineering students who didn't care about the beauty of math. In truth, I made that fact up, since I was too nerdy to talk to anyone. Then one day, Jane Fonda was speaking on campus at the exact same time my math class convened. I was saved! I cut class, because I had finally found a reason that my over-active conscience would accept, and headed off to the Quad to hear Jane. She was married to Tom Hayden at the time and hollered about important things I knew I should care about, but I don't remember any of it. I was just enjoying not being in math class. I changed my major to "Undeclared" and didn't set foot in another math class for a year. Jane helped me to acknowledge that I could be doing something better than what I was doing--studying math just because I liked it. Math for math's sake, no social or ecological benefit in mind. I didn't actually do anything better, but she showed me that I could.

At Davis, I was also going the way of typical freshmen who study all the time, because they have no social life and are over-acheiving perfectionists: I lived on bagels and ice cream and began to look like like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. Luckily I was at Davis, exercise zealot central, and took up running, roller skating, swimming, jazz dance, and gymnastics. Those last two were disastrous, but I  still became an exercise fanatic. The kind who goes on a five-mile run at midnight because I ate a snickerdoodle.

And then, in 1982, Jane Fonda's Workout tapes started rolling out. She had such a great body and that hollery voice. She sounded just like she had that day on the Quad, except this time she was yelling about my glutes burning. I paid more attention this time. I began to wear leg-warmers and black leggings. I did everything in eight counts. I think I got thinner, but I had a warped body image, so I didn't see it. I identified with Jane, her struggles as a child, losing her mom (mine was still alive, but not present in my life), feeling unloved, thinking she's fat when she's not, general low self-esteem. It was totally lost on me that she was born into extreme privilege and our life experiences were incomparable. My dad was an unemployed bean-farmer who played classical harpsichord on the street, hers was Henry Fonda. My mom ran off to New York City to explore not being a mom, hers committed suicide. It didn't matter. She hollered and I did leg lifts.

My early impressions of Helen Keller, filtered through my sister, stayed with me like a good childhood memory, as if Helen had been a playmate joining in on our afternoons of make-believe. She stayed a child to me even though she had died an old woman the same year we moved to Berkeley and my sister started haunting the library at the School for the Deaf and Blind up the hill from our house. And of course she looked more like Patti Duke in my mind than the real woman. Despite my flawed sense of the true Helen, the core of her heroism remained with me. She managed to find her way in the world and seemed joyful to be alive. If she could do that without eyes and ears able to help her, I should do fine. All my parts seemed to work fine. And her passion for discovery comforted me.

Heroes both inspire and shame us. With Helen, her joy in sensing things, the color of a flower by the feel of its petals, reminded me to cherish small things, cherish the fact that I can feel them, smell them, hear them, see them, taste them, watch them change through time. Inspiration. Yet to also know I do so much less with so much more than she had. Shame. While she devoured every scrap of life, I give considerable effort to blocking out sensory input. I can't handle it. It overwhelms me. This seems a waste of perfectly good eyes, ears, and nose.

When I feel closest to understanding how Helen might have perceived the world, especially after reading her tiny autobiography The Story of My Life, is when I'm in the garden. She had an intense love of nature, of learning about life--"The loveliness of things taught me all their use."--especially at an intimate scale:

"Sometimes I rose at dawn and stole into the garden while the
heavy dew lay on the grass and flowers. Few know what joy it is
to feel the roses pressing softly into the hand, or the beautiful
motion of the lilies as they sway in the morning breeze.
Sometimes I caught an insect in the flower I was plucking, and I
felt the faint noise of a pair of wings rubbed together in a
sudden terror, as the little creature became aware of a pressure
from without."

I feel that kind of intimacy when I take photographs with my macro lense, leaning in so close a flower or bug are revealed as if for the first time, like this flower shot I took last spring. The world opens up anew (and yes, how my heroes write can spill into my own writing if I think about them too much or have just reread their words, so I'm going with anew)

Sensing Helen

Have you ever played the game "would you rather. . ." with your senses? If you had to give up one of your senses, what would it be? When I've been plagued by noise, small sounds, Styrofoam squeaks or a drippy faucet, I give up my ears. If the world has been particularly smelly, men's cologne, a cigarette, fabric softener, the nose goes. When the tags on my shirts or sock boogers seem unbearable, touch wins. If I'm feeling morose and food goes bland, I sacrifice the tongue.

When I was a kid, my eldest sister became obsessed with blindness. Her own sight challenged by extreme myopia and a hatred for her horn-rimmed glasses, she spent most of her time in a blurred world and sought refuge in the clarity of her thoughts. She had what grown-ups used to call an "active imagination." Meaning she dreamed more often than she didn't. She lived in a land of make-believe and as her kid sister I tagged along whenever she would let me. When she was obsessed with witchcraft, I had to prick my finger and eat lemon peels in order to join her coven. We tried to conjure the spirits of dead relatives in seances, read Tarot cards, and asked the Ouija board about our future. But the blindness obsession seemed to last the longest. We spent hours wandering the backyard with our eyes closed, feeling the textures of plants. She'd run her fingers gently over my face to try to tell me from my other older sister. And she made us watch The Miracle Worker, the 1962 version with Patti Duke as Helen Keller and Anne Bancroft playing her teacher Anne Sullivan. All I remember of the film was the scene at the water pump, Helen's ah-ha moment. We felt a lot of spilling water in our hands after that, making awkward cries for "Wa."

My sister went on to teach herself braille, she even got a little braille punch, and she taught me how to read the tiny bumps with my finger tips. She taught me sign language, spelling words into my palm. I learned to cherish every sighted moment. Helen Keller and my sister, through their faulty eyes, taught me to really look at the world. So later on, when I'd play the "would you rather" game, I'd never offer up my sight. There is always something beautiful to look at. Even when I'm standing in the middle of a mall parking lot, surrounded by ugliness, I can look up at clouds in the sky or find a beautiful face in the crowd marching to buy something unnecessary. By playing at blindness, I gained stronger perception.

I'm a person often described by others as "sensitive." In another game--which Star Trek character would you be?--I'm always Deanna Troi, the ship's counselor and half-betazoid empath. I lead with emotions, feel too much, making me difficult to get along with. Or at least that's how it feels. So I wonder what it would be like not to be so hyper-sensitive, or to lack sensation. I joke from time to time with my husband that we need to build a sensory deprivation chamber for me. A nice quiet, dark place for me to go when the world is coming on too strong. Maybe I was just born this way, lacking adequate sensory filters to block out incoming signals. I'd like to be able to block out the itch on my arm right now that makes me pause every few moments to scratch. Or the hum of the computer fan, the cat crying in the other room, an airplane flying over head, my itchy scalp, the dog jumping at the back door, refrigerator knocking, a drip, somewhere a faucet drips. Sight is the only sense I can never get enough of. So today, I offer up my ears and I'm keeping the eyes.

In Rachel Carson Country

When I travel I like to stop in local bookstores, see what treasures I might find. On my first solo trip from home after having my first child, presenting at a conference in Vermont on women nature writers, I took a few extra days to toodle through New England visiting dead relatives. I had a great great great. . .great uncle buried in Peacham (Vermonters say Peck-em, not Peach-Ham like I did when asking directions). He served in the Revolutionary War.

After spending the afternoon haunting  the Peacham cemetery, admiring the lovely view of hills and trees, I drove on through New Hampshire and into Maine, a state chock-a-block with my dead ancestors. My family on my dad's side came over on the Mayflower, so we've pepper New England with our bones. I made one stop in New Hampshire for lunch and a bookstore browse. I still can't get over how tiny New England states are. I drove clear across New Hampshire with plenty of time for lunch and bookstore browsing! And the states are jam-packed with trees, or treelettes. I'm more accustomed to western states, big open landscapes, places that simultaneously let you breath and make you feel like a speck on the ass of earth. In New England, it felt like if I stood still too long a forest of tiny trees would swallow me up. In California, my home state, grow the tallest, fattest, oldest trees in the world: redwoods, giant sequoia, and bristlecone pines respectively. So these Blair Witch species are more like thick shrubs than trees, or the hedge maze in The Shining. No wonder so many horror films are set in New England. The landscape has an alluring beauty coupled with claustrophobic creepiness, especially when your on a cemetery tour. Very "They're coming to get you Barbara."

So I'm in the bookstore, and yes it's raining, and I find an old textbook-looking copy of Carson's The Sea Around Us, bland green cover with limey swirls like a screen saver pattern, three bucks and it's mine. Okay, honesty time. I tried to read it, like I had tried to read Silent Spring, feeling an obligation to actually read the work of a woman who had been so pivotal to the environmental movement (the one in the seventies that gave birth to Earth Day and saving the whales). But I need to be transported when I read. It's all about the old creative writing adage "show, don't tell." I need a book to let me snuggle up in its lap for story-time. Neither of her two later books did this for me. I appreciated the information they provided and genuflected to their influence in waking up the United States' collective conscious to our deprecating impacts on the environment, but the writing didn't move me. There I was in Carson Country, holding her book-of-the-month club best seller and I couldn't read it. What did I feel? Guilt, pure recently-baptized Catholic guilt. What kind of impassioned environmentalist was I? What was wrong with me? I kept the book, a souvenir of my shame, and finished my tour into Maine, the home state of my great grandmother (another blog coming for her), and then returned to the West.

When I got back, I looked up Carson's bibliography. Turns out she had an earlier book, her first,  released in 1941, Under the Sea Wind. Off I go to my local independent bookstore and, redemption time, I find an old water-stained paperback copy, marked down to a dollar, still life with a seagull, driftwood, sea shell, sand and a cork float on the cover. Only 157 pages, including a glossary of sea life in the back pages, illustrated with simple sketches.

"Nereis: An active and graceful creature to watch, Nereis is a marine worm that may be from two or three to twelve inches long, depending on the species. It is found under stones and among seaweed in shallow water, and at times swims at the surface. The usual color is bronze, with a beautiful iridescent sheen. Its strong, horny jaws equip it for its life as an active predator."

Ah, now we're talking.  A woman who can find beauty in a foot long worm with horny jaws (sounds like that old high school boyfriend). I'm hooked.

Rachel Carson: Pelicans, the sea, and DDT

Some women, like Zola, I admire because of their athleticism, others, like Rachel Carson, for their integrity and passionate commitment to healing the earth. Carson is most well-known for her 1962 book Silent Spring, a book that landed in the hands of President Kennedy and became one of the catalysts for the environmental movement. I grew up by the Pacific Ocean, my favorite bird was the brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis), so I am forever grateful to Carson for waking up the nation to the effects of DDT.

Here's how I understand the spiral of DDT effects: bugs are eating crops, so DDT is sprayed on the crops; it rains and DDT residue runs off the foliage and into streams; the polluted water drains into the Pacific Ocean;  fish absorb the DDT from the water; pelicans make their awkward dives into the ocean and scoop up the tainted fish in their huge bills (pause for poetry intermission, a limerick by Dixon Merritt, 1910)

A wonderful bird is the pelican,

His bill will hold more than his belican,

He can take in his beak

Enough food for a week

But I'm damned if I see how the helican!

Then the DDT is absorbed into the pelican and for reasons I don't fully understand, the DDT thins the eggshells, so they break long before the baby pelican is ready to hatch; the brown pelican population drops nearly to nothing. Brown pelicans make the endangered species list.

The happy twist to this spiral of decay begins with Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. She loves the oceans and she is a marine biologist and writer. She compiles evidence that DDT is harming the environment and writes Silent Spring; President Kennedy reads the book (an argument for presidents who read books); he mentions it publicly in reference to pesticide concerns; DDT is eventually banned (a decade after the book's release and after Carson's death in 1964); the brown pelican population creeps up; in November 2009 Pelecanus occidentalis is taken off the endangered species list.

Thank you, Rachel Carson. You're my hero.

Why Zola Budd

Here's how women change my life. . .usually unexpectedly. I don't go out searching for it, well sometimes I do, but rarely do I meet with success that way. Mostly I open up to change and then some woman glances into my life, like Zola. My body sprang into adulthood in high school like an exploding mousse (not moose, though it sometimes felt like that too). It didn't open up like a beautiful blossom. No, I was a tiny hungry bony kid as a freshman and by graduation I had grown 8 inches and packed on 30 pounds. I felt huge and clumsy. I really was the girl with the great personality. Or more accurately, that's what guys said to console me when they admitted they liked my best friend and not me, and they were too chicken to tell me the truth: I was big and scary, more Sasquatch than Cinderella. So I developed a sharp and cutting tongue in high school to keep people at bay while I was busy growing. Like some sort of plant that has giant spines as a seedling to keep rabbits from eating it until its bark toughens. My new big body seemed to lump around, felt awkward in girly clothes. I had been a skinny little Tom-boy and the transition to womanhood happened just when social awkwardness hurt the most: high school.

The one perk to all this expansion was that my new body was strong. I had stopped being a vegetarian and all the beef went straight to muscle, especially in my legs. In high school I got into long distance cycling (another blog post for that later) and then I discovered running as a freshman in college. Zola Budd was like an old me running and I loved that. She was tiny, had a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face. And she ran barefoot. I had gone barefoot for a year or so (vegetarian, barefoot, only wore red, rings on my fingers and toes, scarves hanging from my belt-loops, patches on my pants, me at 12). So I was fascinated that a girl like me (or that I could see resemblance in) could be so great at something. But there she was on TV, running her heart out. Then she supposedly tripped Mary Decker during the 1984 Olympics in the 3000 meter finals. I immediately sided with Zola. Mary Decker's picture had been on my refrigerator so long it was curling at the edges (for yet another blog post), but what I saw on August 11, 1984 was spoiled privilege berating a scared misunderstood me. Decker's picture came down. When I think of Zola, I mostly see those bare feet, her tiny body flying past her bigger, more trained opponents, and the bewildered look in her eyes after the collision with Decker. Of course she lost the battle of public opinion and whiny Mary won. That's how it is with us Zolas.