Reflection – R. Newell Searle

Day of the Dead

Today is All Souls Day when the dead are remembered and prayed for. In México it is Day of the Dead—Día de los Muertos—a celebration when distant family members return home as fully as they do for Thanksgiving in the United States. Mexican families gather to decorate their graves, share pan de muerto and mole, and recall the deceased. The ofrenda or home altar is adorned with flowers and articles reminiscent of the deceased. Gifts of food, tobacco, liquor, and other items are given to guide the decedents’ spirits back to the family.

Today is Day of the Dead—and there are so many dead this year. More than 230,000 have died already, nearly 1,000 each day and rising. Many have died needlessly. Their certificates may list COVID-19 as the cause of death but official indifference is the real culprit.

The virus is rampant because to many believe in the libertarian fantasy that no one is responsible for anyone except himself; that each person is sovereign, and government must not compel anyone to act for the common good. That must be voluntary. Over and over, its practitioners oppose mandating masks to stem the spread; oppose the use of science to guide public health policy, and claim that any restriction on individual activities is a form of tyranny. This cult is killing us. It’s a terrible fever dream.

Like it or not, we all must live together. And we may all die together as well. The virus has decimated sparse rural villages as easily as densely-packed cities. It is indifferent to politics and religion. It touches everyone. Those who wear masks, and practice social-distancing try, with good grace, to accept the need to sacrifice some of their liberties, careers, and freedom of movement as the price of saving lives.

Unfortunately, too many governors and mayors have capitulated to the undefined notion that “individual responsibility” alone will guide citizens to take appropriate actions; that undefined “common sense” is a better guide than medical science, and any restrictions on personal liberties for the common good is utter tyranny. They are abetted by the hyper-religious who claim their faith will protect them and, if they die, that’s God’s will.

Claims of “personal responsibility,” “common sense” and “God’s will” are all excuses to evade one’s responsibility to one’s neighbor; it’s a child-like desire to treat the virus as a personal inconvenience and not as an existential threat. The certificates death will indicate COVID-19 as the immediate cause, but that simply masks the criminally negligent indifference that puts personal convenience ahead of the social good.

Anyone who truly accepts “personal responsibility” sees how his welfare depends on fostering the welfare of others, and limits his freedoms in order to promote the well-being of others. Unfortunately, much of the political prattle about “personal responsibility” is merely self-justification for doing little or nothing to protect one’s neighbors. So, as the number of dead add up, every day will be a day of the dead, and their spirits will haunt us for a generation.

Green is the Color of Hope

Planting is my antidote for the enervation caused by the grim daily news. Green is the color of rebirth, regeneration and new life. Green is the color of hope. Planting is a restorative act of faith. Yes, I will enjoy what I plant, but so will others. Putting the common good above my immediate convenience makes the world to come better as it also makes me a better person for it.

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“Always leave a place better than you found it.” Dad said it often and it was a guiding principle during his long life. It was more than a maxim; it was a spiritual guide to practical living. I first heard it at the age of six when he and I planted pine seedlings on a clay hill. Waseca County in southern Minnesota is not pine country, but he liked pines and that tiny corner of our farm was too small and steep for corn.

We set out one May morning with a space and a flat of red pine seedlings packed in sphagnum. He jabbed the spade deep into the soil, inserted a pine, spread its roots and sealed the slit with his foot. The process took only seconds. Then he asked me to do it. Satisfied, he went ahead with the spade and cut more slits. I followed, slipping the seedlings into the ground.

Planting trees became an integral part of the spring. We planted trees on damp days when we couldn’t seed in oats, corn or soybeans. As the years passed, and Dad rented the fields to a neighbor, he concentrated on planting more trees. Trees had permanency. They were beautiful as well as useful.

Clipping - trees As the neighbors correctly pointed out, he wouldn’t live long enough to harvest the trees. That didn’t matter, he said. Someone in the future, his children or grandchildren or someone else would cut them. Meanwhile, they would add beauty and a habitat for wildlife. The neighbors just shook their heads. Farming was hard enough in 1950 without fooling around with trees that didn’t make money. When Dad died in 2014, the first pines he planted were 65 years old and stood 50 feet tall with seedlings coming up.

Wherever I am, I plant seedings in the spring, just as I did 70 years ago. It’s an impulse that comes when the ground thaws and the air warms. Spring hasn’t happened until I plant something. The number of trees or shrubs planted matters less than the act of adding something new to the world. It’s almost sacramental.

I recently spent a few days opening our cabin north of Lake Superior. Walking the woods, I found half-a-dozen seedlings under the only white pine on my 40 acres. The mother tree is easily 80 feet tall and her seedlings struggle for light and nutrients beneath a thicket of maple saplings. I transplanted two badly-chewed seedlings closer to my cabin where I can nurse them toward maturity. If I survive this pandemic, I may yet see them reach ten or twelve feet. My children and grandchildren may see them reach 50 or 60 feet. By then, they will be shedding cones.

Planting for the future is an antidote to the pandemic’s dark overcast. The nightmarish clouds seem darker as each state and family fumbles forward for a way out. Meanwhile, our president fears defeat in November and abets rabid groups that demand an end to social distancing and equate social restraint with tyranny. The most dangerous ones say that “personal responsibility” is the surest way to stem the pandemic.

If only that were true. Medical experience shows otherwise. Like it or not, we must think and act as one, though it cramps our individualism. Obeying orders to keep distance, restrict movement and limit business requires disciplined responsibility. I haven’t fully discharged my responsibilities if I simply protect myself from the virus. My responsibility includes actions that protect others from contagion. A lone tree on a plain is vulnerable to the winds but it grows secure in a grove.

Planting is my antidote against the enervation caused by the grim drumbeat of the daily news. Green is the color of rebirth, regeneration and new life. Green is the color of hope. Planting is a restorative act of faith. Yes, I will enjoy what I plant, but so will others. Putting the common good above my immediate convenience makes the world to come a better place and, in the process, makes me a better person for it.

Why do they call it Good Friday?

Now, looking back from a half-century on, I know our differences in ancestry, ethnicity and prejudice blinded us to what we shared in common. Maybe that’s why it was a good Friday. In those three hours, we were of one spirit in reverence for something we held in common even if we refused to recognize it. These days, three hours of publicly shared and reflective silence could help us all see some greater good we share lying just beyond our immediate prejudices and passions.

Janesv41[1] — Janesville, Minnesota, 1950

Good Friday? As a boy, I wondered why they called it good? What was so good about getting killed? As a ten-year-old in the 1950’s, I took certain things for granted because adults didn’t encourage questions about basic assumptions. And besides, we lived on a farm and I had other, more immediate things to do—like feed the chickens. That’s just the way things were.

Our family shopped in the Minnesota village of Janesville, population 1,100. It had a stoplight, a town cop, a volunteer fire department, a public school and one of every necessary commercial service: grain elevator, drug store, coffee shop, gas station, furniture store-funeral home, hardware, dentist, doctor, veterinary, butcher, beer joint, five and dime, feed and hatchery. There were three active churches: Trinity Lutheran (Missouri Synod), St. Anne’s Roman Catholic and St. John’s Episcopal.

In those days, your particular denomination defined you and your associations socially much more than it does today. Your church reflected your ethnic origins, beliefs, state of spiritual salvation (as seen by others) and whom you might marry. The German immigrants and their children attended Trinity Lutheran, the children of Irish and Polish immigrants went to St. Anne’s and the Yankees, like my family, belonged to St. John’s Episcopal. Ecumenism wasn’t in anyone’s lexicon and a “mixed marriage” was an anathema, a kind of cultural treason that could get your exiled from the family.
The Missouri Synod church was a particularly strict and conservative sect. When boys were invited to join the town Scout troop, the Lutheran pastor said “no!” because—God forbid—his boys might come into contact with Catholics! To keep the children faithful, the church had an elementary school (grades one to eight) conveniently located across the alley from the public school. We farm kids lived adjacent to each other and rode the yellow buses to our respective schools.

During recess on winter days, we public school boys took on the ‘Dutchies’ (for their ancestry) in epic snowball wars across the alley. We organized. Those with the strongest arms threw and the rest of us packed ammunition. It didn’t matter who threw first. The tribal response always came in force and dense salvos of hard-packed snowballs flew back and forth. Sooner or later, someone laced snowballs with pebbles. Tears and blood followed. When the bells rang, the day’s war ended and we returned to classes gloating over our victories. Later, we boarded the buses and sat with the foes we fought so viciously earlier in the day. No one held a grudge.

Despite our sectarian prejudices, Lutheran, Catholic or Episcopal, we reverenced Christmas, Holy Week and Easter. That said, we had no ecumenical services until after Vatican II, and then only on a limited basis. Instead of ecumenism, and despite the narrower opinions and preferences of that time, we gave each other space to observe holy days and ceremonies without interference or criticism.

Everyone celebrated Christmas in a cheery and quasi-secular way but Good Friday felt different. It passed as a subdued afternoon, as if a storm brooded, and adults said little and children were shushed. Whether by custom, ordinance or informal agreement, Janesville seemed to shut down between the hours of noon and three o’clock. The bank, drug store, five and dime, grocery and even the bar closed to observe the hours when Jesus suffered on the cross and darkness covered the land. Many of us sat in our respective churches, our altars bare, the crosses draped in black veils and listened to the Gospel lesson about betrayal, death and forgiveness—the same Scripture in each church. During these hours of sober self-examination rose the prayers asking forgiveness of our sins.

At Times Like These

The Scarlet fever outbreak of 1889 in Mule Pass Gulch likely induced as much dread as the coronavirus does today. Doctors then knew little about scarlet fever, there were no treatments beyond home remedies, and death often followed. Although we aren’t as isolated as Ella was, and medical technology is vastly better today, we still face an unknown illness that has no cure as yet. At times like these, we, like Ella, are thrown back on ourselves with disciplined isolation as our best, perhaps our only solution.

Social distancing and long term isolation are inconvenient. Limiting our movements runs counter to our gregarious sense of liberty. The country faces a disease we know little about. And, as a people accustomed to certainty, we find the uncertainty unsettling. This moment is more difficult because we have no collective social memory of similar pandemics to guide us. The Spanish flu didn’t mark my family but a scarlet fever outbreak did. At times like these, there is value in looking to our forbearers for hope.

My great-grandmother, Ella Newell Searle, was a a pious, gentile woman from Rochester, New York, who married Herman Searle, a promising young man just out of the Army. When the depression of the 1870’s wiped out Herman’s fledgling business, he left Ella and two infant sons with her father in New York while he bought silver claims in Arizona Territory and organized a mining company. After five years, the family reunited in 1881 in Oro Blanco (now a ghost town). Their youngest son died of typhoid in 1882; my grandfather William was born there early in 1884. Little went right after that. Herman caught the tail of the silver boom just as its price began falling and the ore veins petered out. His and other mines failed. While Herman looked for work, Ella taught school as several friends died in the last Apache raids.

Two years of disappointments followed the family until Herman found work as the railway express agent in the copper-mining town of Bisbee. Thanks to the invention of alternating electrical current, copper ore was more valuable than silver or gold. The family arrived outside the boom-town at the end of track in Mule Pass Gulch in December 1888. Ella described it as “a wild place one mile high” at the bottom of a rocky gulch with a few flimsy shacks crouched along the railroad embankment.

Bisbee had no houses so, for nine months, the family lived and worked in a railroad car that inched toward the town as rail construction advanced. To improve their mobile living quarters, they lined the car with new cloth and hung pictures until Ella said, “it looks real cozy.”

Bisbee, 1889.4 — Bisbee, Arizona Territory, 1889

A scarlet fever epidemic struck during the spring of 1889. This highly contagious disease was the leading cause of death in children until the rise of antibiotics in the twentieth century. Prevention, then and now, relied on frequent hand-washing, not sharing items and maintaining isolation from others. Three-year-old Willie, my grandfather, became one of the 253 cases among Bisbee’s 1,500 residents.

Ella and Willie were quarantined in the rail car and she dosed him with aconite and belladonna, homeopathic medicines to reduce his cough and fever. The Phelps-Dodge Company doctor gave him medicine for the throat. Ella kept him in bed for ten days, read Sunday School books to him and taught him to write letters and spell. He often drew locomotives on her blackboard. After two weeks, the doctor lifted their quarantine and Ella took to her bed with a terrible headache and sore throat. “I am weak yet and cannot be on my feet much,” she wrote Herman’s mother. “I hope George won’t get the Fever. I don’t know how I could take care of him in the car.”

No sooner had she posted the letter than sixteen-year-old “George was taken with the Scarlet Fever and had it quite hard.” He stayed in bed for a week before sitting up and “ached so bad that he could not sleep for a few nights.” Once he was on the mend, Ella knew it would be “hard keeping him quiet for two weeks more.” But George recovered, his quarantine was lifted and Ella stepped outside for the first time in seven weeks. Later, Herman told his parents they were “getting along very well” and had been “very fortunate” that it wasn’t more serious.

The ‘off season’ has personality

Along the northern coast of Lake Superior, the ‘off season’ begins in mid-October and lasts until Thanksgiving. For resorts, it is a slack month or two between the fall colors and skiing. Most cabin owners have closed up for the year but I savor this season at my cabin. Here, only the migrating hawks and birds break the silence. After the leaves fall, the colors shift palettes from intense reds and golds to muted browns and grays. It is a season of wild skies and the raucous weather. The ‘off season’ has personality.

Afterglow on Sawmill Dome – brief and deep.

Intense light as the season of darkness approaches.

Gales of November come blow off Lake Superior.

Autumn skies are like no others.

Low light brings nostalgia. for more summer.

Along the northern coast of Lake Superior, the ‘off season’ begins in mid-October and lasts until Thanksgiving. For resorts, it is a slack month or two between the fall colors and skiing. Most cabin owners have closed up for the year but I particularly savor this season at my cabin. Here, only the migrating hawks and birds break the silence. After the leaves fall, the colors shift palettes from intense reds and golds to muted browns and grays. It is a season of wild skies and the raucous weather. The ‘off season’ has personality.

Before snowmobiles, the ‘off season’ lasted from mid-October to Memorial Day. Now, businesses here have found new ways to draw visitors year-round. From Thanksgiving to Easter, cross-country skiing and snowmobiling go full blast. After the snow melts, hardy anglers fish swollen rivers for steelhead trout. Memorial Day begins the summer rush of vacationers, campers, and cottage owners who come and go. The ‘leafers’ show up for a week in October, and then they go, too.

The season of bare trees brings tranquility, and a kind of nostalgia fills me – a yearning mingled with a little regret. Bright falls day, with bare treetops against an azure sky bring on a feeling like lost love, the end of an affair, and the bittersweet memories of what might-have-been.

The sun’s light affects my moods. On clear days, when the sun hangs so low at midday it scarcely clears the ridge to the south, I know I am in the ‘North’ – a pioneer land. A few backlit osier leaves glow with claret hues. Long, blue shadows lie abed all day in the clearing, keeping the woods in a cool, pale twilight. At sunset, I look through the burnt umber maples silhouetted against the copper afterglow on the far ridge. These days invigorate me. I am outdoors splitting firewood, putting away tools, closing up the sheds. I long for this weather – I want it to last another week, another month. Autumn is like a long, goodnight kiss, and I don’t want it to end.

Like an adolescent, late autumn has a ‘hormonal’ flip side. Sheets of cloud slide in quietly, the sky darkens – pewter to steel to slate – and I know what comes next. Lake Superior’s famous ‘gales of November’ roar the length of the lake, sending huge waves crashing against the basalt headlands, sending up sheets of spume, and wrecking ships – even big lakers like the Edmund Fitzgerald. The wind shrieks through the limbs of barren trees, and drives sleet as hard as pebbles, and even a little snow.

I love these violent days for the satisfaction they give me as I sit in my chair, feet toward the fire, and gaze at the wind-driven rain and fog swirling about the top of the ridge and Sawmill Dome. The nostalgia of sunny days goes away, replaced by warm gratitude for the birch and maple that burns in the stove to produce warmth and joy.

This may be the ‘off season’ for the resorts, but not for me. With its forests stripped of leaves, and the stark limbs against the sky, the rocky coastland lies naked, without pretense – an honest landscape. I take a cue from the land. This is a season for looking inward, stoking the fire of sentiments and emotions, and tending to things I thought I was too busy to do when the air was warmer and the trees greener. During the few weeks of the ‘off season,’ I am most aware of my life.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Off-Season.”