Retirement in the Mix: Resisting "Gone": September 2014

Monday, September 22, 2014

Golden Copper

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Just click on the title “Golden Copper.”

This past weekend, a conference of the Colorado Psychological Association drew us to Copper Mountain. Typically, this weekend would have been about a week too early for the aspen and other foliage to be in full autumn garb, but the season change seems to have come early this year.

So, after snapping a few photos along various roads and trails around Copper, I took some time before we headed home for a hike up Mayflower Gulch on nearby the road toward Leadville, home of the legendary Unsinkable Molly Brown, the famous “Leadville 100” endurance run (100 miles, all above 10,000 feet) … and, thanks to lots of abandoned mines, more toxic waste sites than you can imagine.

The Mayflower Gulch trail is very close to the huge Climax molybdenum mine, and some gulches in this area used to be tailing ponds. By my recollection, a couple of decades ago, they were designated for reclamation as part of the cleanup from this mine. If this gulch is one of those, they did quite a job, because the valley is filled with a dense stand of willows, turning shades of gold even as I hiked. A couple of miles up the trail I found a collection of old mining ruins, the remnants, I learned, of the Boston Mine. Mayflower Gulch, Boston mine ... hmm ... maybe transplants from the East coast seeking wealth in the Rockies. The combination of these ruins, the proximity of Climax, and the presence of the mining town of Leadville just over the hill reminded me of Colorado's "boom and Bust" economy. One after another resource extracted from the land promises instant wealth. Colorado has had a lot of these: gold, silver, and molybdenum among them, and now oil and natural gas removed from deep beneath the earth by fracking. Each cycle of booming wealth enriches a few, and when it all goes bust, each leaves behind assorted messes. Evaporative ponds and abandoned mines, polluted streams and poisoned land, poverty among those who were unable or unwilling to cash in. And these old buildings ... what stories do they hold?

As I continued climbing, I drew nearer to the top of the valley. The gulch descends from a glacial cirque, a hollow carved into the solid rock eons ago by one of the glaciers that filled these mountains. Often, these cirques are home to small lakes, fed all year by the runoff from snowfield high on the slopes. I located the telltale stream—enough hint of a lake to inspire me to climb up the old mining road all the way to the cirque. I’d hoped to have lunch by the lake, but found instead a flat plane of alpine tundra with more old mining structures near the cliffs. Most of the tundra has already gone dormant, so I saw only dried traces of the alpine flowers that would cover this area in the summer.

Nevertheless, lake and flowers or not, it was a totally lovely climb on a totally beautiful Colorado fall day. On the way down, I took in the view back toward the trailhead, down the long valley of willows. The afternoon clouds were rolling in as I headed downhill, delighted at having caught the colors before fall slipped into winter.

Folks in Colorado, take note: next weekend is likely the end of the fall colors. Go! Quick, before they’re gone for another year!

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Thursday, September 11, 2014

The Civil War (ours), re-viewed

This past weekend, I went to a “CU on the Weekend” class. This program sponsors weekend mini-courses, usually a half day long, taught by CU faculty and free to the public. I’ve been to a couple of them before–one on musicals (which was a total kick!) and one on healthcare discrepancies due to race (not exactly a “kick,” but really excellent). The title of this one promised to make the Civil War “much more interesting.” I arrived with high expectations and came away totally delighted with having spent a Saturday morning sitting in a school rom. Here’s what was so interesting … well, part of it anyhow.

Brief background: Back in the day, one of my favorite courses to teach was on the history of psychology. I loved it for a lot of reasons, but particularly in the later years, I especially loved teaching it as a “new” history course. It’s remotely possible that there are still folks out there who still believe that history is a simple telling of facts, but most people figured out along the way that it’s more complicated than that. Questions like “whose’ facts’ are taken as true?” and “who picks what stories get told?” and “why this perspective and not that one?” sort of change the game. For instance, we might ask, whose story is it when we talk about “the winning of the West”?

So, “new” history asks questions like that, questions that pretty quickly turn the old views on their collective head. The result is a history that looks for what’s missing, who’s silenced, who made the choices about what counts as important. Howard Zinn called this "People's History." It's also been called "revisionist history" because it "revises" the simplistic dead-white-men version of the story. Others call it "contextual history" because of the focus on the broad contexts of history instead of the narrow events that typical make it into text books. Whatever it's called, this approach leads to a totally different view of any topic—from the evolution of psychology to the nature of the Civil War. Fun to teach back then, still fun to think about today.

So, I was delighted when the person teaching this class, Peter Wood, was of the new, people's history school of thought. He was far less interested in the dates and locations of military campaigns than in the experience of the country as a whole during the war, the lives of everyday folks, the submerged political machinations beneath the “brother-against-brother” narrative. And he was especially interested in the experiences of African-American people during the war–which was, after all, about their enslavement and the possibility of their freedom. As he talked about this, I realized how little I’d ever read or heard about the thoughts and reactions of slaves and newly “emancipated” African Americans to the war. I know a bit about Black soldiers–that there were some African-American soldiers, that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in part to free slaves so that they could enlist, that they got paid less than White soldiers. But what about the folks left on the plantations in the South? What about those in border states who regularly saw the armies of the North and South fighting, marching through, commandeering land and crops and homes, burning land and crops and homes. Why have they been silent in history–or silenced by history, I wondered. And so did this teacher.

So, rather than attempt to write Cliff notes from the whole morning, let me share with you the substance of the final segment of the class, the culmination of the earlier hours. During the last part of the morning, Wood talked about an apparently simple painting, not of a battle or a politician, but of a lone African-American woman. Let me share the thoughts he raised about this painting, a sort of exercise in "new" art history.

The picture, called “Near Andersonville,” was painted by Winslow Homer–best known for his landscape paintings, but also one of the most important visual chroniclers of the war. Here’s the painting:

Now, the very fact that Winslow painted this picture is already an illustration of his own “new history” bent. His other pictures of the war, some of them very famous, were different from the usual glory, battle, and death themes. But this particular picture stands out in a whole new way. The central figure is a woman, standing in the door of her home. Not a man, as the central figures of paintings—especially war paintings—would typically be, and not in a glorious setting. Then, as if that weren’t iconoclastic enough, she’s an African-American woman, a slave. Twice removed from the predictable “mainstream” society subjects of art. And finally there’s the broader picture surrounding this moment: if you look at the background, you’ll see a passing line of soldiers. They’re carrying a Confederate flag. The title, “Near Andersonville” is crucial.

Remember the emphasis in “new history” on context: no historical event, however small, happens in a vacuum—and here’s the context signaled by the painting’s title. When African-American soldiers entered the war, the South decided that any Black soldier who was captured was, in effect, a runaway slave and was subject to execution. So rather than being held as prisoners of war, Black soldiers were simply murdered. The North decided to respond to this egregious violation of the laws of war by refusing to participate in prisoner exchanges. (If you kill our soldiers, we won’t return yours.) The South was thus forced to hold thousands of Union prisoners of war. And the largest, most desolate and deadly POW camp was at Andersonville, Georgia.

So, Wood pointed out, the Black woman in this picture is watching a line of Confederate troops pass by, marching Union soldiers to the POW camp at Andersonville. She is not an irrelevant “bystander” in this war machine, powerless though she may be. She is well aware of where they are going. She is also aware of what this might mean for her: a Confederate victory, one that historians can identify from the timing of the painting as a deadly and dangerous moment in the war, when the Union appeared to be foundering. Look at her face and see if you can’t imagine what she’s thinking, feeling as she watches the column pass by. Watching a moment that might signal the end of her hopes of freedom, recently raised by the Emancipation Proclamation.

Then, look again and see whether you think she might be pregnant. Maybe yes, maybe no … but imagine that she is. What does her face say about her thoughts for her child? And on yet another level, imagine who this child’s father might be. Her chosen partner? If so, what will continuing slavery mean for him, for the child, for them as a family? Or might the father be the plantation owner, a not uncommon scenario. This simple picture, and so many questions. So much feeling: hopes raised and dashed, fear and uncertainty, perhaps anger and revulsion, doubt, depression … all read on the face not of a general or a president presiding over a battle or a cabinet meeting, but an African-American slave woman standing on the wooden stoop of her cabin. That’s new history in a painting.

I can’t possibly do justice to this thought-provoking, mind-stretching class in a few paragraphs, but maybe you get the picture. And hopefully you get the great challenge that this approach to history raises for us all. “History” as written is always just one story of many possible ones. The joy of this class was its challenge to the story of the Civil War that most of us so uncritically absorbed somewhere in our youth. And the same sort of critique can be brought to all other “stories” of how it was, how it is, how it must be.

I’m reminded of a line from a song that was popular during Bush 43’s second term “When they own the information, they can bend it all they want.” I took it as a commentary on the Bush administration, but the very same can be said of any rendition of “history.” Whoever “owns the information” can bend it all they want. Our job, should we wish to accept it, is to try to work out the kinks and see what’s been squeezed out in the bending.

You can call it revisionist history, contextual history, people's history, or new history. I call it fascinating, overdue, and mind-changing. A good antidote whenever we think we have the single, true story about virtually anything.

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Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Loving less, more

The other day, I got an email from a friend describing her recent retreat to a quiet, secluded cottage where she spent many days just being, calmly being. Among her insights on this trip was the realization of how little she actually needs. She took only a few outfits and not much else. Her pleasure came not from extravagance and the “stuff” that frequently adorns vacation time, but from quiet walks, conversations with citizen conservationists, cooking local food, watching birds, sleeping on the porch wrapped in the sounds of her surroundings. She came home committed to cutting back and paring down.

Her comments reminded me of a recent conversation with another friend, who had a similar experience while rafting earlier this summer, being struck by how simple the days were and how fulfilling without the collection of things that fill our daily lives. And it reminded me of two experiences of my own. One was our recent trip to Ireland, for which (as I mentioned here before) we each took one carry-on with everything we needed for a two-week trip. And we managed fine, not even unpacking several of our bulkier items. I thought at the time about what a good lesson that was: How much do we really need, after all, I asked myself, and how much is just excess—decoration, maybe waste.

The other experience that came to mind is much older. A couple of decades ago, I was on a backpacking trip in Southern Utah with three other women. The four of us had backpacked often as a group, and we lived well together in the wilderness. It was our last morning, and we had just packed up our gear to hike out of the canyon where we’d spent the past week. Standing in the shade of an overhanging cliff, I saw our four backpacks lined up, waiting to be hoisted for the climb out. I stood there for a minute, held to the spot by the view of these four compact packages, realizing that these small bundles could hold everything we needed—all the clothing, all the bedding, all the shelter, all the food, all the cooking, cleaning, and first aid equipment, all the water we needed. And we could carry it all on our backs. I had similar thoughts during and after other backpacking trips—in the mountains, in the dessert, in Alaskan tundra—but none was as profound as that moment at the bottom of Dark Canyon. That spot is still the stuff of meditation for me, partly because it is so peaceful and partly because it’s associated with such calm realization of how simple life can be.

This theme has been floating in my mind since I read my friend’s email, and it brought to mind a flock of research studies in recent years that speak to this very lesson. Happiness, it turns out, comes not from possessions, but from experiences. When people are asked what makes them happiest, it’s not the things they’ve had that make them feel happy, but the experiences—the adventures, the relationships, the moments of profound beauty and profound peace

This seems easy to believe, but not so easy to enact. The immediate gains of gathering stuff are so great: it’s fun to have new stuff, some things are hugely convenient, some enhance our status or appearance, some may even promise to improve our connections with other people. And the distinction is not as simple as it may first appear. Sometimes getting stuff is really about getting experiences. That moment in the desert, for instance, required that we have the equipment to be there, comfortably and safely. Maybe the distinction lies in the question of means and ends. If the goal is to get stuff, we’re in for some serious disappointment when it comes to the happiness scale. But if the purpose of the stuff is to create opportunities for rich and fulfilling, memorable experiences, then we’re in a different position entirely.

I think there’s an age component in this matter of amassing possessions vs. paring down. It seems like young adulthood and midlife are more about gathering stuff, at least among those who have sufficient discretionary funds to do it. Old age, in contrast, is about cutting back, simplifying, paring life down to what’s essential. Partly, that’s a matter of necessity. Finances and physical limitations can make the things of younger years superfluous or even troublesome. I don’t need a backpack any more, and a huge multi-floor home is increasingly not a good idea (not to mention I’m way over housecleaning by now). But I think there’s something else at work, too. It seems that old age brings a new perspective to things—partly because everything is recognized to be so transient now. And as we age, I think, we can see better what has mattered and what hasn’t in making our lives what they are. I can only think of a handful of things that have any particular salience in my best memories, but the experiences I recall with great joy are legion and often come to mind spontaneously.

We’ve probably all had experiences where we realized how little we truly need in the way of things to be happy. And then we come back to “reality” and resume the style of life we’d come to enjoy. Which is fine, I guess.

But somewhere, I’d like to hold the realization that much (most?) of it doesn’t matter much in the long run. If I’m busier collecting things than creating joy, then I’m seriously short-changing my life.