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Education

My grandfather was in his late teens when he hid under the straw in railroad car packed with the family’s cattle, farm equipment, and household goods for the trip from Blue Earth Minnesota to Bellingham. The railroad allowed one person to ride in the car to tend to the cattle. That place was taken by my grandfather’s older brother. Grandpa had to dive under the cattle bedding when the railroad inspectors came around. When the railroad car arrived at the siding in Bellingham, they opened the door, and a chicken, seeing Bellingham Bay, flew squawking out into the water and was never seen again.

Schooled enough to survive, my grandfather was not refined. He chewed tobacco, leaving a trail of brown saliva wherever he went. My mother said he never used an indoor toilet, preferring the woods. He seldom bathed, usually smelled of manure and wore overalls for all occasions occasions but church. For entertainment, my grandmother read to him in German.

My grandfather’s father, Gottlieb, was a devout Lutheran who pored over his cherished complete works of Martin Luther. He did not transmit his piety to any of his children except my grandfather, who was the least prepared or inclined toward theology. My grandmother told me the only time my grandfather rested was in church.

From Gottlieb to my grandfather, the family slipped down a notch in culture and refinement. In Germany, Gottlieb was an educated man without a heritage. He built his heritage by emigrating to America and using the skills he gained through education to become a landowner. Even in landowning, Gottlieb exceeded my grandfather. My grandfather owned forty acres. Gottlieb originally owned one hundred sixty acres, some of which he later sold.

It is easy to attribute this slip to the years spent in Minnesota. Gottlieb’s younger brother emigrated a few years after Gottlieb and joined him in the car yards. But the younger brother skipped Minnesota and went directly to Whatcom County. It was the younger brother’s reports of Whatcom County that brought Gottlieb. The younger brother’s children got more than a third grade education, graduating from high school and college, and eventually becoming teachers and university professors.

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Jack London: The People of the Abyss

The People of the Abyss is another non-fiction piece by Jack London that I enjoyed so much, I decided to post it in the Vine Maple Studio.

Winter sunshine
Winter sunshine

Jack London was fascinating and more influential than most people realize. I am not a Jack London fan by choice. In the seventies, I went through a phase in which I collected old paperback editions of London’s books. At first, it was a sort of nostalgia for the adventures I enjoyed as a boy. But eventually, I read one too many of his worst potboilers, and decided to drop the effort.

Now, I approach Jack London warily, but I happened to read The Cruise of Snark about a year ago and enjoyed it. Later, I posted it in Vine Maple Studio. This lead me to look again at The People of the Abyss when I happened to be looking through the Jack London list on Gutenberg, although with much initial doubt.

The book Black Like Me came out while I was in high school. It was popular among the intelligentsia of Ferndale High School, but I was repulsed: the masquerade demeaned both the masquerader and the subject of the masquerade. I was equally unimpressed when fifteen years later, Jerry Brown “spent the night in the ghetto.” Anyone who ventures into an impoverished milieu with a publishing contract or an election in mind is a target for charges of insincerity or worse.

I went through my own immersion experience, made more intense by my naiveté, when I was barely eighteen. I got on a train and rode from the farm that is home to the Vine Maple Studio to the south side of Chicago, staying for seven years. I gained no profound insight into the human condition, but I endured disconnection and bewilderment that came from forced interaction with lives that were constrained and driven by poverty that I could not have imagined without direct exposure.

The People of the Abyss is an account of Jack London’s months long sojourn in the slums of London’s East End at the turn of the nineteenth century. The East End was the most infamous slum of London, the backdrop for Oliver Twist and other Dickens novels, and the location of the Jack the Ripper murders, and a wellspring of crime, vice, and degradation. If there was a worse place on earth, Jack London would have argued the assertion down.

The book was, on one level, a journalistic stunt.

But as a journalistic stunt, The People of the Abyss had good literary precedent. Mark Twain used the same stunt in The Prince and the Pauper and he was preceded by centuries in the Arabian Nights. The idea echoes through literature and folk tales.

At some point, original motivations are replaced by the demands of events. Jack London may have begun with a publishers check in mind and a smug desire to flaunt his moral superiority, but in the course of his visit to the East End, he compounded a raft of ideas in a way that contemporary journalists would do well to study carefully and modern politicians, economists and philosophers should be wary of. Within Jack London’s writing, indictments lurk that cannot be dismissed with pleasing phrases about character and initiative.

The People of the Abyss can be found many places on the Internet, but may find the choice of font and spacing on Vine Maple Studio more readable than other versions. Check it out here.

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Telescopic Adventure

The sky was clear with only a few clouds, but an icy ground fog rose to form a haze. Not a good night for viewing. Only a few stars twinkled in the black sky, but those few were enough to try out a Christmas telescope.

Twin astronomers, 2009
Twin astronomers, 2009

Instead of packing the telescope out to the dark fields where the nearest Christmas-light decorated house is a quarter mile away, tired Grandpa, who did not stint on the Christmas turkey with sausage-cornbread stuffing, stayed on the deck where a mercury yard light shines on the farmyard from dusk to dawn, justifying himself that this is only a trial run. Unsure of himself on new equipment, he fusses with false starts before he settles on a location for the telescope. Light bucket, he calls it, although its four and a half inch aperture hardly justifies the title.

Grandpa aims the scope at good old Aldebaran, at least what he thinks is Aldebaran, the only star he can see in the limited sky from the deck. He gets it in view, a pinpoint of light somewhat brighter in the scope than he sees it with his naked eye. He calls the seven-year-old twins, who are working on a lifetime alliance with the Mario Brothers to save the princess. The pinpoint of light is not much to look at, but Grandpa aimed the scope, and that is the something, he guesses. The boys come out into the cold, but in their heads they are still kicking koombas.

Matthew arrives first. He grabs the eyepiece, jostling the scope enough that Aldebaran is out of view.

“Grandpa, I don’t see anything.” he said and started to wipe the eyepiece with a finger sticky with Christmas candy.

Grandpa, who was taught to shed blood before damaging a tool, grabs the grubby and abrasive finger hurling toward a multi-coated lens in a reaction that skipped his cerebral cortex.

“NO. Never touch the lenses. Not the eyepiece, not the spotting scope, don’t touch any lenses.” Grandpa’s voice is straight from the reptile brain fueled by fatigue and frustration of a long day with festive relatives. He regrets his words as he hears them.

Matty, who was up before dawn and has been over-excited ever since, starts to cry. He is not used to Grandpa, who is impatient and demanding, unlike mothers and grandmothers.

Grandpa assures Matty that he is not mad at him, but equipment must always be treated carefully. Grandpa walks the thin line between comforting a scared and tired little boy and being clear that Grandpa will be just as gruff next time. Matty’s brother Chris watches and listens carefully.

Mother and Grandmother appear, glaring at Grandpa, and spirit the boys inside.

Grandpa looks in the eyepiece, adjusts the direction a little and realizes that the lenses have fogged in the cold. Viewing will have to wait for the lenses to cool and the condensation to dissipate. The boys have returned to saving the princess and Grandpa has a moment to mull over his growing despondency.

He walks around the farmyard, behind the old pig yard, giving the lenses time to clear. The grass is crusty with a heavy frost and he stumbles over the frozen ground. He walks out to the field, taking in the full view of the sky without the mercury light and the trees that surround the farmyard. Looking up, the gibbous moon shines in the cold and he realizes that Aldebaran was a bad choice.

He returns to the deck, his fingers stiff and his arthritic knees aching with cold, but he swivels the scope around and aims it at the moon. He fiddles with the direction, the finder scope is not adjusted perfectly, and twists the focus. He gasps slightly. There on the line between lunar day and night, the crater Copernicus jumps out, stark and craggy. He has never looked through a telescope like this before, never seen Copernicus as a stark crater on the moon in the farm’s sky. Suddenly, he possesses the surface of the moon in the way he owned the mountains he once hiked.

He calls the boys out. Carefully, very carefully, they look through eyepiece. “Awesome Grandpa. Awesome,” Chris says. “That’s really cool,” says Matty, and they each spend their minutes looking, then they return to the crusade to save the princess, shouting “The moon is Awesome.” … “I love telescopes.” … “Next time, we’ll see Betelgeuse, right Grandpa?”