Monthly Archives: August 2006

No better day

It got cold enough this morning for me to awaken and pull a blanket up over me. The night was just changing from dark to gray. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up, ate breakfast, and decided to go walk at Great Meadows. It was five forty-five; I kissed Carol and left.

The moon, a couple of days past full, hung bright in the blue sky. It was higher than the sun. I stood on the dike in between the mud flats and cattails and pools of water looking at the swarms of sandpipers and plovers. Everything — mud, plants, birds, trees in the distance, one small puffy cloud, moon — could be seen with utmost clarity in the early sunlight and the cool dry air. Nothing seemed far away, not even the moon, which faded and sank towards the horizon as the sun rose higher. I turned my attention only to what was there, no stray thoughts or nagging memories of things I had to do, nothing existed but for marsh and birds and sky above and trees in the distance.

By nine, other people appeared, some with binoculars and some with cameras. Two men carried big cameras mounted on tripods, with huge lenses mounted on the cameras. They stopped to photograph a snipe that was less than a hundred feet from the path, poking its long bill into the mud. I talked idly with another birder. He said he wished he had worn long pants. I said it had been downright cold when I first arrived, even when I was standing in the sun, and there had been a chilly breeze from the north-northwest.

I walked along the old railroad embankment through the woods, and heard a the plaintive whistle of a Wood-Peewee: pee-ah-wheee. Back in the sun along the mud flats and cattails, the land had warmed up enough that anything seen through binoculars at a long distance shimmered from rising heat. But it was still chilly in the shade. Birds started up and flew madly in all directions, a dark shape twisted and turned just above the tops of the cattails: a Northern Harrier cruised over the marsh, hunting for breakfast.

On the way out, I ran into Dad. We went and got sandwiches and sat outside on a bench overlooking the river to eat them. The shadows moved around us, and finally I said I had to stand up. We had been sitting and talking for the better part of two hours, not conscious of the time going by. There can be no better kind of day than that.

Heaven or hell?

The writer Eileen Chang (also known as Zhang Ailing, birth name Zhang Ying) was born in Shanghai, and emigrated to the United States in 1955. At some point after she left China, she wrote an essay to explain Chinese religion to English-speaking foreigners. David Pollard translated portions of this essay in his book The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia University, 2000) under the English title “The Religion of the Chinese.” I offer the following excerpts from Pollard’s somehwat clumsy translation:

The Chinese have a Taoist heaven and a Buddhist hell. On death all souls go to hell to receive judgement, so in contrast to the Christian subterranean fiery pits, where only bad people go to suffer for their sins, our underworld is a comparatively well ventilated place. By rights ‘The Shades’ ought to be in everlasting twilight, but sometimes they are like a perfectly normal city, the focus of interest for tourists being the eighteen levels of dungeons. When living souls escape through an aperture and drift down to hell, it is quite routine for deceased relatives and friends whom they meet there to take them around sight-seeing.

…

Actually the Chinese heaven is superfluous. Hell is good enough for most people. Provided their conduct is not too bad, they can look forward to a limitless succession of similar lives, in which they work out predestiny and unknowingly sow the seeds of future relationships, conclude old feuds and incur new enmities — cause and effect are woven closely together, like a mat made of thin bamboo strips; you get dizzy trying to pick out the pattern.

…

…the greatest obstacle to Chinese people being converted to Christianity is rather that the life to come that it depicts does not appeal to Chinese tastes. We can leave aside the old-style Christian heaven, where there is perpetual playing of golden harps and singing to the glory of God. The more progressive view of the earth as a kind of moral gymnasium where we limber up in order to go on to display our prowess in a nebulous other world, is also unacceptable to the self-satisfied and conservative Chinese, who regard human life as the center of the universe. As for the saying that a human life is but an ephemeral bubble in the tidal flow of the Great Self, such a promise of eternal life without individuality is not very meaningful either. Christianity gives us very little comfort, so our native folklore can still stand up to the high-pressure proselytizing of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity, though it has not counter-attacked, though is hasn’t the support of big capital, has no propaganda literature, no splendid peaceful sets, not even a bible — for since almost nobody understands the Buddhist sutras, it is as if they do not exist.

Actually, Chang’s description of the Chinese hell does sound better than the perpetual playing of golden harps.

Day hike: Mt. Wachusett

The huckleberries were no more than 100 feet from the broad, trampled parking lot on the summit of Mt. Wachusett. Not just a few huckleberries, either, for the low bushes were loaded with them. I bent down and tried one. It was a little dry, maybe a few days past its prime, but it had an excellent flavor. I started eating greedily. I must have gotten lost in the pleasure of eating, for I didn’t hear the man until he had come around the bend of the trail. You never want to give away the location of a good berry patch to anyone, so I quickly stood, but he had already seen me.

“Ha!” he said. He was an older man with a white beard, sensibly dressed with a bucket hat and daypack. “Don’t eat all the berries!”

“Look at them all,” I said. “These bushes haven’t been picked over at all. Tells you how far most people get away from their cars. And look how many there are!”

“Yes,” he said as he bent over to pick and eat berries. He looked up at me. “It must the all the rain we’ve had.”

“They’re a maybe little gone by, and they’re kind of dry,” I said, “but then huckleberries always are.”

“That’s because huckleberries are all seeds,” he said. He left soon after that. I don’t think he liked them as much as I did. They were a little dry, but they tasted so good; –not good enough to stop and pick a bucketful to take home, but good enough to stop for ten or fifteen minutes to pick and eat them on the spot.

***

I came up the steady incline of the trail to the top of High Meadow, breathing pretty hard because I was pushing myself pretty hard. But I wasn’t walking too fast to notice the black raspberries. I picked one and ate it, and it was so good, but then I had to stop to catch my breath before I could eat more.

I was most of the way back to the parking lot, and thirsty because the Audubon sanctuary didn’t have any drinking water available. The black raspberries had been well-picked over a few days before, probably over the weekend — you could see the empty stems where people had pulled berries off — but quite a few more had ripened since then. The ones I picked were perfectly ripe, and because I was thirsty, they tasted especially good. In among the black raspberries I came across some blackberry canes, and they too had ripe fruit on them. Blackberries used to be one of my favorite fruits, but now I don’t like them nearly as well as black raspberries; now I think they have a funny almost-dusty taste. I ate some more black raspberries to have a good taste in my mouth before I walked on.

Nine miles, four hours, total elevation gain about a thousand feet, lots of sore muscles.

Quiet in the city

It’s been so quiet at night here in Cambridge. The crickets sound louder than usual. The traffic is lighter, and I’ve been seeing far fewer people on the street than usual. It feels as if a large percentage of the city’s residents are away on vacation. The only places where the city has felt as busy as usual have been in the usual tourist traps: Harvard Square, the Freedom Trail, Faniuel Hall.

Day hike: Lughnasa at Great Meadows

Dad and I decided to take a walk in Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge this afternoon. We didn’t walk very far or very fast, though. The recent cold front brought a big wave of fall migrants to Massachusetts, and we spent less time walking than we did looking at sandpipers, plovers, egrets, and heron.

We strolled slowly down to the Concord River along the dike between the upper impoundment and the lower impoundment. I’m sure the slanting light of a perfect, golden summer day made the marshlands look especially beautiful, but I was too busy looking at the birds. While Dad was busy taking a photo of a Solitary Sandpiper feeding in the mud close to the trail, I watched a Spotted Sandpiper bobbing and pulling loose molting feathers out of its breast.

On the way back up the dike, a pleasant woman asked us if we would stand behind that camera over there because they were filming a segment for the Nova public television program (I had thought the two men were just another pair of wildlife photographers), or if we wanted to be in the shot when the joggers came along she’d ask us to sign releases. We stood where she told us. Dad found another bird to try to photograph. I got into an animated conversation with a woman about shorebird identification and migration. After ten minutes, all three of us forgot about the cameramen, and the nice woman from public television had to ask us again to step back, which we did. Apparently one of the joggers they were filming was some famous woman marathoner, but I never did get a firm identification on her.

Someone had a Wilson’s Snipe in his telescope, and Dad and I got a good look at it. The light was absolutely perfect, but Dad and I were getting hungry so we strolled on back to the car and went to dinner. I dropped Dad off at his condo, and as I was driving home I realized today is Lughnasa, halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox, the time of year when you really start to notice that the sun is setting earlier in the evening. The excitement of watching the first big surge of the fall migration makes the loss of daylight a little easier for me to accept.

Less than a mile in two and a half hours.

Teaching kids how to be religious, part nine

Part one: Link

I began this essay by saying that the very title of this little essay is an absurdity, because you don’t teach kids how to be religious, because they already are religious. Yet at the same time we all know that we do indeed have to teach kids how to be religious. They may be inherently religious, but we know that we also have to teach them how to be religious. I think I can be a little more precise in that statement: Children, all persons, are inherently religious; but children, and all persons, can only be fully religious within community.

To say this flies in the face of common beliefs in the West, particularly in the United States. Here in the United States, we trumpet our idea that each human being is an individual unto himself or herself; we proclaim that like the cowboy gunslingers of our national mythos we can only rely on ourselves; we say that like the free-market economics which motivate us that individuals, not families or communities, are the primary unit of our society.

Here in the United States, religious education has been reduced to developmental psychology; it has been reduced to “lifespan faith development.” In this reductionist model, we have one primary method for teaching children how to be religious: we separate them by age, and teach them from a curriculum based on their “developmental stage.” We have become extreme followers of Jean Piaget, assuming that children are like little scientists who figure everything out on their own; and if they fail to live up to our expectations, we label them “developmentally delayed” and imply they are somehow less than fully human.

I find it sadly ironic that religious liberals bemoan the evils of development — housing developments that drive out family farms, economic development overseas that kills off local economies, etc. — while in our own congregations we “develop” our children. No wonder our children do not return to our congregations when they get older:– the contradiction is too much to stomach.

Years ago, John Westerhoff asked the question, “will our children have faith?” in his book by that name. Today, we have not yet learned how to teach our kids to be religious, and we are still asking that same question. If we are going to answer that question, we have to get beyond our limited, reductionistic models and methods for teaching kids to be religious.

And when I say “we,” I mean you and me:– not denominational officials, not ministers or professional religious educators, not parents, but everyone who considers herself or himself a person of faith. We have to abandon our overly individualistic notions of what it means to be religious, acknowledging that religion has to take place in a community that includes human beings and the transcendent (and probably other living beings too, but that’s a topic for another essay). When you say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual, and that’s why I don’t go to church [or to temple, or whatever]”, you are being overly individualistic, you are maintaining an attitude that will diminish the human community that nurtures individuals into faith, and therefore you are indirectly but in a very real sense preventing children from learning how to be religious — to be blunt, you are being selfish and you are killing religion. You and I cannot delegate the teaching of religion to someone else, hiding behind the insights of psychology in order to do so:– “Children learn best in Sunday school classes, taught by paid teachers, so I don’t need to get involved.” The very fact that you and I are religious (or spiritual, if you prefer that term) means that we are teachers of religion, and we had better shoulder that responsibility.

Teaching kids to be religious is a complex task, one that cannot be reduced to one sentence. Yet when we look at how and why we are failing our children, maybe we can sum that up in one sentence: We are not taking responsibility, as a whole community, for our children. Fortunately, you can change that situation: show up, take responsibility, learn how to teach our kids to be religious.

End of series

Day hike: The Freedom Trail and the Charles River

Carol and I decided to be tourists for a day and walk the Freedom Trail in Boston. We set off from North Cambridge at 11 a.m. Since we weren’t in a hurry, we took the long way to Boston and walked there via Union Square in Somerville. As we walked up to Union Square, Carol that this would be a good place to consider living:– not too expensive yet, no subway but good bus service, pleasant houses, a real racial and ethnic mix.

We turned from Union Square towards Kendall Square in Cambridge, and crossed the Charles River via Longfellow Bridge. Lunch at the Sevens pub on Charles St., with mediocre food but good atmosphere — and an old sign saying “The Real Paper Best of Boston 1979, Best Neighborhood Pub, Beacon Hill.” I asked Carol if she remembered the Real Paper, the best of the underground newspapers in Boston in the 1970’s, but she didn’t.

We started on the Freedom Trail at the Massachusetts State House, at the top of Beacon Hill. This first stretch of the trail gives you lots of interesting buildings and sites for not too much effort: the Granary Burying Ground, King’s Chapel and its burying ground, Old South Meeting House, the old State House. We didn’t go into any of the buildings because we were really out for the walk.

Next along the Freedom Trail was Fanueil Hall, which was dreary and overrun with tourists and touristy things. Then through Haymarket, which was still open. All the vendors were down to the cheapest, most bedraggledy fruits and vegetables but that point in the afternoon, but it was fun to walk through the scene. Carol saw a bag of Bing cherries for a dollar and a half. “Are they any good?” she asked. “They’re as good as any you’ll see here right now, hon,” said the woman selling them. Carol decided to pass on the cherries.

Walking through Boston’s North End might be the best part of the Freedom Trail — lots of great old buildings, windy streets, and really good people watching. I noticed an older man walking towards us because he was neatly dressed in a fitted blue short-sleeved shirt and neatly pressed chinos; no un-tucked shirt or flipflops for him. When he passed us, I could hear he was speaking Italian, one of the older generation who holds on to the old ways. I stopped briefly to admire the facade of St. Stephen’s church, “the last surviving Bullfinch church in Boston” according to the plaque on it. Old North Church is more impressive because it’s older and larger, but it is not as beautiful.

Across the Charles River, Charlestown felt deserted, with none of the lively street life of the North End of Boston. Except for the tourists, we saw very few people on the streets. One boy, about ten years old, sat at the corner of Adams and Winthrop Streets. When someone following the Freedom Trail approached him, he would intone, in a surprisingly loud clear voice: “Ice cold lemonade, seventy-five cents, best deal on the Freedom Trail.” His voice followed us Adams Street as we climbed the hill to the Bunker Hill Monument.

The National Park Service is renovating the monument, so it was closed to visitors. We left the Freedom Trail there, and crossed back over the Charles River via the locks. We saw three pleasure boats in the locks, heading to and from Boston Harbor. Then through what used to be the old West End to Charlesbank Park, where we sat watching toddlers play in the wading pool (and where Carol got her feet wet, too).

As we walked down the Boston side of the Charles River, at first there was lots to look at. We saw people lying on the grass and bicycling and rollerblading and walking. We saw sailboats and windsurfers and kayakers and even a Venetian gondola in Storrow Lagoon. But for a long stretch there’s just the bike path, which is too narrow, between the highway on one side and the river on the other. We would have been better off on the Cambridge side of the river.

We crossed the footbridge over to Cambridge, and walked up to Harvard Square to get Carol some bubble tea, and me some iced tea. By this time, we were a little footsore, so we sat on a park bench outside Harvard Square and watched the people go by. From there, we walked straight back home for dinner; for it was after seven o’clock by the time we got home.

Approximately sixteen miles.

Fishing Guide to Middlesex County Rivers

If you want to know about a river or stream, and you can only ask one person, best to ask an angler who fishes it regularly. Anglers will know what fish live in the river, and a good angler will know what those fish feed on. A good angler can tell you about water quality, vegetation, and the extent of annual flooding as well as how low the river gets in dry months. Best of all, an angler will know how to access the river or stream: where you can put in a boat or carry in a canoe, where you can walk along the bank or wade.

David S. Kaplan has fished every river in Middlesex County himself, and talked to experienced anglers who really know certain parts of each river. Even you you’re not an angler yourself, his book, Fishing Guide to Middlesex County Rivers, can tell you things you should know about the Assabet, the Charles, the Concord, the Merrimack, the Mystic, the Nashua, the Nissitissit, the Shawsheen, the Squannacook, and the Sudbury.

Take the Sudbury and Assabet Rivers, which I was canoeing on just a few days ago. “The Sudbury has fertile, brown water stained with tannin from decaying vegetation,” Kaplan writes. “Water transparency averages about 2 to 3 feet but varies from 1 foot over muddy bottoms after a rain to over 8 feet at the stony headwaters.” I was canoeing over muddy bottoms in the Sudbury, and could see barely a foot into the water. Turning into the Assabet from the Sudbury led to a distinct change in the water: stained more heavily with tannin, but because of the sandy bottom the water was fairly clear and I could see down as much as six feet.

I paddled up the Assabet towards Spencer Brook, and passed the outlet from Macone’s Pond. In one of his rare errors, Kaplan misspells it “Macoun’s Pond,” like the apple — Peanut Macone, who used to live next to the pond, probably would have been amused. Kaplan says this about the river at this point: “Fish-holding cover includes deadfalls, islands, a brush island, some big midstream boulders and undercut banks.” The water level was high enough that I had a hard time seeing the boulders and deadfalls, but I knew they were there, not just from years of experience but from the turbulence disturbing the surface of the water. I had to dodge several downed trees and submerged logs, and circled the one main island in the Assabet. Even though I wasn’t fishing that day, Kaplan’s 16-word description covered much of what I saw, although it missed the Kingfisher who flew within twenty feet of me, and the two kayakers beached in a backwater, and the deer fly. A little further upstream on the Assabet Kaplan describes as “lightly fished,” and indeed I didn’t see another soul although I spent a quarter of an hour pulled up to the bank of the river.

Kaplan also describes things I couldn’t see. Larry Thorlton of Billerica once caught a Northern Pike which weighed in at 18 pounds and 2 ounces. I never caught one that big, but once I did catch (and release) a big pike in the Sudbury that I knew was a solid 36 inches long because it stretched from gunwale to gunwale of my old canoe, which had a 36 inch beam. Its teeth were impressive, and you bet I used long-nosed pliers to release the hook from inside its mouth.

Worse things than ferocious Northern Pike lurk in the Sudbury’s waters:

Water chestnut infestation grows more severe every year, as in so many of our local rivers. Boaters must inspect trailers, boats, and motors to avoid spreading the nutlets of this plant and small pieces of fanwort that could introduce these virulent, exotic plants to other waters.

Water chestnut has gotten so bad that it has to be removed periodically, or it would choke out the entire ecosystem of the river.

Tragically, environmental clean-up of the Sudbury cannot boast the success of the Charles or Nashua. Toxic chemical pollutants still leach through the south bank at the infamous Nyanza site in Ashland. Despite enormous efforts to clean up this toxic mess, dangerous levels of mercury continue to contaminate the water…. The remaining 25 miles of the Sudbury suffer mercury contamination that makes their fish unfit for human consumption.

And there is not much that can be done about the toxic chemicals: the rivers may be permanently damaged.

The book is now ten years old, and has become outdated in places: for one example, when I went canoeing a few days ago I found the Town of Concord had upgraded the Lowell Road boat ramp with hard-packed stone dust, the ramp about which Kaplan writes: “During low water or when rain has softened the bank, you may need a 4WD tow vehicle to take out a trailer.”

Nor is this book any literary marvel. If you’re not an angler yourself, you won’t buy or read this book. But for those of us who are anglers, we can travel the entire length of a dozen small but remarkable rivers and streams in our imaginations; I’d rather read about the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in this book than in Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Day hike: Blue Hills Reservation

Rain in the morning, so I drove down to New Bedford to water the plants and pick up the mail. On the way back, by two o’clock the looked to be ending; right after Route 24 ended at Interstate 93 I got off the highway at the Houghton’s Pond exit, parked by the pond, and went for a walk in the Blue Hills. I started walking at two-thirty, having smeared sunscreen on, but also carrying an umbrella just in case.

From Houghton’s Pond, I headed up the Massechuseuk Trail, cut over on one of the innumerable smaller trails to the Skyline Trail, and climbed up Tucker Hill. By the time I got up to the open ledges on top of Tucker Hill, the sky was blue and clear except for a few small puffy white clouds overhead, and a line of grey clouds to the south. The observatory tower on top of Great Blue Hill to the west stood out over the intervening tree-covered hills. The intersection of Route 24 and Interstate 93 sprawled through the woods south of me, busy with hundreds of tiny cars bustling back and forth.

The north branch of the Skyline Trail from Tucker Hill to Great Blue Hill turned out to be fairly challenging. It was steep enough in places that I had to use my hands, particularly in Wildcat Notch. In other places, missing or badly placed blazes meant I should have been paying full attention to picking out the route; but I wasn’t paying full attention, and went down the wrong trail in one or two places. While none of the hills is particularly high, the Skyline Trail goes over as many hills as it can and the cumulative effect was that I got a pretty good workout.

I climbed Eliot Tower on top of Great Blue Hill, and spent a few minutes up there cooling down — the woods were still humid from the morning’s rain and I was drenched in sweat. The view to the east was worth more than a few minutes: the skyscrapers of Boston, Boston harbor and its islands, the rolling hills between. But I hurried on.

At the base of Great Blue Hill, there was no crosswalk to get across busy Washington Street. I walked along the edge of the road to the traffic lights at Royal St. and managed to make my way across to Dunkin Donuts, where I got a large iced decaf coffee. Hundreds of breast cancer walkers, mostly dressed in pink and white and black, were coming down the sidewalk along Washington Street, and I had to walk against them for half a mile in order to get to the start of the Red Loop Trail up Great Blue Hill. Mostly they ignored me, or almost ran into me (there were no other pedestrians or hikers out); except for one woman who, conscious that she was engaged in a virtuous and purposeful activity and I was a mere idler, said, “Hey, you’re headed the wrong way” — half humorously, half challenging me.

The Red Loop Trail, wide and well-worn, is supposed to be the most popular trail up Great Blue Hill. A man and a woman and three children came down the trail towards me. “Excuse me,” said the woman, smiling, “but there is a pond?” I told them they were far from the pond. I don’t know what their native language was, but they clearly didn’t follow what I was saying, even though we kept trying for a while.

At the top of Great Blue Hill, I went up Eliot Tower again, and this time managed to see Mount Wachusett off in the west. I wanted to spend more time looking at the view, but the sun was getting low, and I was getting tired. I set off back down the North Skyline Trail, veered south on the Houghton Trail towards Houghton’s Pond — but when I got to Royal Street, there was no crosswalk and I didn’t dare cross the heavy rush hour traffic. Up over Houghton’s Hill towards the crosswalk at the Reservation Headquarters. But the hill was pretty steep, and on the way down my left knee started to hurt and warn me that I was in too much of a hurry.

By now it was quarter to seven. The picnickers and swimmers had mostly left Houghton’s Pond. The sun, setting in what was now a clear blue sky, sent a golden summer light through the trees. By the time I got back on the Interstate, rush hour traffic was mostly gone.

Eight miles.