The Seventeen Traditions

by Ralph Nader

  FIRST, THERE WERE SOUNDS…

  A child does not take sounds for granted. Especially nature’s sounds, emanating from unseen or mysterious sources. Repetition never dulls their music.

  An old-timer down at the school ballyard once told me that no creature in the animal or insect kingdoms makes a sound without a purpose. As a child, I challenged myself to separate one sound from the next, distinguishing them as birdwatchers do. On summer nights, it was nearly impossible to pick out the strands of the cacophony that drifted in from the fields, bushes, and trees—so many creatures were engaged in their ritualistic recitals. But I listened as the peepers and crickets talked with one another. I even tried to hear the lightning bugs, the fireflies, though they remained silent in their inscrutable luminosity.

  Other sounds were harder to ignore. I never enjoyed the barking of the neighborhood dogs, the neurotic domesticated canines whose incessant yelping interrupted the feral sounds of the outdoors. But the most perceptibly urgent and haunting sounds were the high-pitched snarls of the cats at mating time. Before the birds and bees were explained to me, I knew what these tomcats were up to. They kept me awake more than a few nights. I much preferred the sounds of the primeval woods and fields, especially the long howling winds as they swirled through hills and valleys, swaying the trees and bending the tall grasses.

  There were other songs that rang true to my ears. The daily mooing of cows on the hilly outskirts of town reminded us that soon the dairy farmers would deliver their fresh milk. The splashing and gurgling of nearby brooks and streams seemed as though it had been ongoing for thousands of years. As I sat by these flowing waters, waiting to see a fish here and a tadpole or frog there, my schoolboy’s patience paled in comparison with those eternal waves.

  THEN THERE WAS THE MAPLE TREE…

  Directly in front of the stairs leading to our house stood a magnificent maple, more than sixty-five feet tall. Its branches spread before my bedroom window, and they were my four distinct seasons, my wildlife menagerie, and my mystery forest, all in one. In the springtime its leaves sprouted and matured quickly, inviting squirrels to climb and leap around with abandon. Its interior spaces hosted birds of every variety—imperious crows, friendly chickadees, stately blue jays, motherly robins, hardheaded woodpeckers, frequent sparrows, even the occasional cardinal. I watched them flitting about on the smaller branches and twigs, and wondered about the meaning of their calls to one another. The effusive crows would wake me up with their insistent territorial sparring. When it got too loud, I would slam the window shut.

  With the coming of the New England autumn, the leaves turned dazzling colors, and when they fell, they turned the road, lawns, and sidewalks into a carpet of leafy beauty. I loved walking through their ankle-deep drifts, kicking the fragrant, starchy leaves into the air or collecting the best ones to place in my schoolbooks. Our street was full of large maple trees, so the fall produced a canopy of brilliant hues high above the street where the trees meshed with one another across both sides of the road to form their protective ceiling. Even today, just the crunch or rustle of fallen leaves underfoot kindles within me a nostalgia for those days of bonding with the ebb and flow of the seasons.

  Yet nothing could quite match the beauty of this maple a few weeks later, when wet snowflakes clung to its bark in the early morning hours after the season’s first snowfall. The maple in wintertime became a sound tunnel for the symphony of wind, as it fluttered and whistled, then growled and howled. It synchronized nature’s forces into a veritable orchestra for my young ears. The maple was so strong and deeply rooted that no winter wind or hurricane gust ever stripped anything more than an exposed twig from its mooring. We never named the tree, but for me it had a personality nonetheless; I associated it with a cluster of mysteries I imagined while lying in bed next to my outdoor companion. In my eleventh year we grew closer, once I was tall and strong enough to latch on to the lowest sturdy branch and swing back and forth. The following year, still taller, I learned how to climb this giant, scrambling ever higher into its skyward reaches—while my mother stood below, reminding me to respect the law of gravity.

  THEN THERE WERE THE FRUIT TREES…

  The maple was only the largest of the many trees in my childhood landscape. The green apple tree in our yard was easy to climb, easier to sit on, but the apples bordered on mangled. Worms got them, bugs got to them. Only a few apples at a time were good enough to eat, but the scarcity had its own appeal: To find an apple that was edible was a treat, all the more enjoyable because it was a surprise.

  The pear tree, just a few feet from our kitchen, was something else. This wasn’t a tree for climbing. It had more serious business, which was to produce a regular crop of delicious pears every year. To this day I can taste the juices of the pears I plucked from its reachable branches or picked up from the ground. During the winter, my mother let us savor the preserves from the tree’s overflowing harvest. It was such a sweetie of a tree, demanding nothing but some sun and rain and producing in return its wondrous fruit for some forty years before it gave out. As a young Yankee fan, I couldn’t help likening it to the “old faithful” of my team, the clutch-hitting first baseman Tommy Henrich.

  We even had a Concord grape arbor. Its output was erratic, but when it ripened, the large purple grapes were both very juicy and very sour—far better to look at than to devour.

  THEN THERE WAS THE GARDEN…

  Near the large field behind our street was our garden, where my parents planted an assortment of vegetables in our very rocky New England soil. The pebbles and stones were countless; I knew this firsthand, because one of my chores was to clear them out to make room for the tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, string beans, rhubarbs, radishes, parsley, and squash. I learned to admire farmers whose families had to care for so many acres of planted furrows and orchards when I realized how much work it took to manage our plot, which was the size of a large living room.

  One summer, when I was nine or ten, a mysterious unseen creature took a keen liking to the lettuce plants in our garden. I was appointed the lookout for whatever omnivorous beast was raiding our crop. Soon enough I spotted a rabbit happily chewing away in our little plot, and I gave chase. The rabbit took off, but I gamboled off after him, holding a large rock in my hand. When I finally overtook him, the trespassing herbivore suddenly froze and looked frightfully at his towering assailant. I lofted the stone in the air, aiming at him from less than four feet away. For a few seconds I just stood there, breathing hard from the run, my hand suspended overhead. I saw those wide open eyes, and the crouching bunny to whom they belonged. But something held me back.

  Finally, I put down the rock and turned back. The rabbit scampered, then hopped away. I could not explain what had happened in my mind, except that it had a lot to do with the image of a dead rabbit, its eyes closed. Looking back on that moment today, I know that that’s when I realized I would never be a hunter—perhaps seeding my interests in safety, health, and conservation. I learned something about myself on that day of no regrets—among other things, that there were ways to defend a lettuce patch without destroying an innocent rabbit nibbling its meal.

  THEN THERE WAS THE ROCK…

  Not every friend I made in childhood could be found in my yard. One unlikely companion was just a few minutes’ walk away—a boulder I came to think of as “the rock.”

  I discovered the rock as a boy of four, and immediately felt a kinship with it. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, it had been placed within the spacious grounds of the Soldier’s Monument in the town of Winchester, where Winsted was located. Built to memorialize three hundred soldiers, including several dozen who died in the Civil War, the monument was an imposing, three-story, sixty-three-foot Gothic Revival structure on a two-acre hilltop spread donated by a local benefactor.

  The rock sat near the circular dirt road that rounded the monument. More times than I can remember, my mother would give me a sandwich or an apple, and off I would scampe
r to eat it on my rock. It was some four feet high and about as wide; to a boy of four it seemed larger. But clambering up to the side of the rock was easy, and at the top was a comfortable seat. All kinds of insects seemed to love to crawl over the rock, and I took great joy in following their trails, noting their amazing variety and knack for coexistence. On a clear evening I could look up at the stars from that perch, wondering what was out there. When it was cool on a sunshiny day, I would hug the rock for warmth.

  As a ten-year-old, I flew kites from the rock, unleashing hundreds of feet of string as my brightly colored kites soared in the brisk breeze high above the woods and houses in the eastern part of town. Sometimes I couldn’t control the pull on the kite, and the string would leap from my grasp or break clean off. When I finally got it stabilized as high as it would go, though, I would tie the string to an iron tether ring—driven into the rock during the horse-and-buggy days—and watch it fly.

  I never attributed any mystical or animistic qualities to the old rock. In its mute solidity it was simply a place to be, a place to rest, a place to play, a place to dream.

  THEN THERE WERE THE WOODS…

  In colonial times, the woods of northwestern Connecticut were considered nearly impenetrable. In my youth they were still plenty dense, but negotiable in our daily walk to school. Half the fun was getting there, whether I went alone or with a school chum or two. Once we were out the back door, we headed up a flight of steps, through a field, across a pair of small roads, past the monument, and then we plunged into the woods. Downhill we went, over old stone walls, past a small but intriguing cave, through a thicket of trees and bushes, until we reached the residential street that led to the Central School. Wet, dry, snow drifts, butterflies, birds, rodents, birch trees, high grasses, ledges, trails, shafts of sunshine, gusts of wind—it all took a few minutes, but the woods were never tiresome and always engrossing. There was always a piece of wood to whittle, a dead branch to strip and to turn into a staff, a smooth stone to hurl high through the trees, mica to astonish, a snake to slither away at the sound of our footsteps, or a granite foothold to leap from as we hurtled down the wooded slope. It was fun, liberating, and when the snows turned into drifts just a little perilous, our school day was made a little more adventuresome.

  THEN THERE WERE THE FIELDS…

  The fields and the meadows were for romping, just romping, jumping, skipping, and rolling in the grass. They were for inspecting beetles and chasing grasshoppers, marveling at butterflies and plant-circling bumblebees and other pollinators, and staring at the incredible hovering hummingbirds. Meadows were for pulling out blades of stiff grass and humming tunes with them. They were for spotting ants and anthills and crawling closer to watch their amazing, selfless work instincts and drive to bring food or their fallen kin back to their underground lairs. Ants never seemed to get discouraged, no matter how many times they were thwarted—a trait that did not escape my notice, even at the age of seven.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson once defined a weed as a plant whose virtues were yet to be discovered, and in those days before herbicides and lawncare firms, we never gave a thought to the difference between grasses and weeds. Dandelions were beautiful to me, as were a large variety of flowers—daisies, black-eyed Susans, day lilies, jack-in-the-pulpits, whether they were in vogue or not. I made a study of their petals and stems, and of the busy, focused insects that were attracted to them.

  THEN THERE WERE THE LAKES…

  Near our home were two lakes—the recreational Highland Lake, and Crystal Lake, a smaller lake, on even higher ground, that served as our precious drinking water reservoir. Crystal Lake was just to be seen—no fishing or swimming. The town officials wanted to keep it as pure as possible. Highland Lake was another matter, and it was crowded with boats and swimmers, cottages and year-round homes. Polio was the great fear for many mothers of that period; doctors weren’t yet completely sure of how the disease was spread, and many gave stern instructions to keep children away from crowded beaches. So I didn’t swim very often in our lake, but we did motor or, with my two sisters and brother, walk around some of its seven miles of circumference. What excited me most as a little fellow were the spillways. The lake would spill over the road at two points, cascading down to the fast-moving Mad River a quarter mile below. My father would drive through the spillway waters, and to me, those five seconds of spraying water made it feel like we were on a brief ocean voyage.

  Things sure look big when you’re small.

  THEN THERE WERE THE RIVERS…

  The two rivers that crisscrossed our town’s valley, the Still River and the Mad River, were troubled waters of different kinds. The appropriately named Mad River was the longtime source of several Main Street–destroying floods. But for decades it had also been receiving the bulk of the sewage from the towns and factories on its banks. The Still River, in like fashion, seethed with such an assortment of chemical dyes from the bordering textile and other factories that it looked at times like a botched rainbow.

  As a result, there was no fishing to be had in these rivers, no swimming or picnics by their banks. The industries there and upstream had long since taken control, using these rivers as their sewers and dumping grounds, stealing the watery arteries from generations of Winstedites. Back then, most townspeople assumed that rivers were primarily for receiving waste—so much so that few of us seemed to feel robbed of our rivers. Without them, we were told, the plants would have never been built there. Worse yet, the standing pollution from the factories gave the town government little incentive to process its own municipal sewage. The rise of the environmental movement, and the cries of “Hey, these are our rivers,” were still years away.

  We still had many lessons to learn.

  THEN THERE WAS THE SNOW…

  When I say snow, I mean huge snowfalls—twenty to thirty inches at a time, sometimes piled on top of earlier drifts. I can still feel the swirls of wind-drenched snow filling my ears, neck, nose (I never liked hats, gloves, or scarves), the huge drifts we would plunge into with squealing bravado, and the endless shoveling of walks, stairs, and driveways. Sleds we used in order to go down moderate or steeper hills. But nothing could match up with what we called the “huge jump.” The portal to the Soldier’s Monument was a structure that was made of stone and looked like a giant quadrangular chess rook. It was probably about fifteen feet high. When the snow drifts reached six or seven feet, we would climb up to the top and jump into the drifts, our little bodies nearly disappearing into the deep pits our momentum created. Then we would go back and do it again. Snow, for us, was never something to be avoided. It was to be relished, battled, tackled, and deployed for sliding, plunging, and molding into different forms and shapes.

  Our New England schools almost never closed. Except for the few who came from miles away, most of the students walked to school. Whatever the weather, we were expected to tough it out. Today, two- or three-inch dustings commonly close some urban and suburban schools. But when I was a boy, a good snowfall still brought out the best in us—among the children, who weren’t afraid to trudge through a snowbank to get to school, and among the adults, who felt more obliged as neighbors to shovel their sidewalks—sidewalks that were used back then far more than now. It was a matter of pride.

  THEN THERE WERE THE STARS…

  Today the sight of stars has been abolished from city skies, debauched as they are by pollution, neon, and streetlights. From Winsted’s hills, during the early 1940s, we could see the stars with a clarity that allowed us to identify many of them without difficulty. The North Star, the Big Dipper, and the Little Dipper were familiar sights in our sky throughout the year.

  For me, the stars were replete with fantasy, wish, wonder, with a sense of awe at the vastness, even eeriness, of the unknown. They stirred sentiments that exhilarated me as surely as many people are moved by great music. As I reclined on the rock, lay half-asleep outside on our porch, or just stood on our lawn, I found the stars nearly overwhelming. A
re those stars or planets? I wondered. How far away are they? Do people live on them? Do they really spin around or move at incredible speeds? Could they ever smash into the Earth? Everything around me seemed to melt away at the sight of the stars. Though I was too little to put it into words, I was already feeling a sense of fascination with the idea of infinity, and with the ultimate secrets of the universe. And those ideas were real—not something that could be turned on and off with a remote control, no screen to keep me at a distance from nature’s reality.

  Did living this way—embedded not within a cacophony of electronic visualization and flashy advertisements, but within the natural world—make a difference?

  It did for one little boy growing up in northwestern Connecticut.

  Of course, I didn’t have this landscape all to myself. In fact, as the baby of the family, I was sometimes the last in line to appreciate nature’s wonders. But the embrace of my family, and my status as the youngest, gave me many advantages. I was following a path already traveled by my parents Rose and Nathra, my older brother, Shafeek, and my two sisters, Claire and Laura. As the last in line, I took a lot of ribbing. But somehow that only made me more observant and responsive to my elders.

  My father had come to this country by steamship in 1912, at the age of nineteen. He had twenty dollars in his pocket, but he had confidence in his abilities, and a willingness to work hard. His first job was in Detroit, doing piecework at an automobile factory. From there he worked in one of the large textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a short time after the historic labor upheavals of those years. Then he moved to Newark, New Jersey, where he became a small distributor of groceries in that kinetic multiethnic melting pot. He had always intended to start his own business, and finally started a grocery store in Danbury, Connecticut. But he wanted to live in a smaller town, for he believed that a family would be best served by a place where people knew each other and life was more stable, less chaotic and disruptive.