I fell for what seemed quite a long time, and I even remember seeing the pee that splashed out of the jug floating in midair, as if in the zero gravity of a space capsule. Eventually the handle of the jug was released from the grip of my fingers, and it too turned slowly in midair, as if it would remain spinning there forever. And then, at last, came the splintering crash of my body as it landed on my children’s beautiful fourth first garden, taking down fences and netting and stakes and cages as it did and crushing the plants that by now had assumed a symbolic significance very different from what I had originally intended. As I looked up through my bleary stink tears and through the fragments of the garden in which I now lay, I could just make out a matched pair of sisters in the distance, both of them pinching their noses with one hand and waving at me with the other. And they were smiling. As always, my little girls were smiling.
I scrubbed until I had about peeled my skin off, but Eryn still made me sleep out on the deck that first night. In the weeks that followed I couldn’t get near enough to the Superfund site that was my first children’s fourth first garden to initiate remediation, though we diluted the terrible pee stench by hosing the garden down from about thirty feet upwind, an ablution that I performed twice each day in order to make it tolerable for the girls to play outside. Five weeks later an early frost hit, and the cold snap knocked the stench down enough that I could approach the wrecked garden to clean it up before the first snow. When I pulled away the broken fences and cages, I found that a few plants had actually survived, unmolested because the not-quite-empty Jug O’ Doom still rested openmouthed near their stems. One of these was a tomato plant, and while its tiny yellow flowers were now burned by frost, it had set some fruit, and a single tomato looked pink enough that it might ripen off the vine. I harvested the little tomato, washed it well, and gave it to the girls to put on the sill of their bedroom window. Over the next few days that tomato ripened, and so our family huddled around the kitchen table to celebrate the ritual of the first fruits—well, fruit—of the season, even as a snow sky gathered outside. Caroline took a bite, wrinkled her nose, and said “Thanks for the tomato, Daddy. I don’t like it. Can we have a garden again next year? Let’s plant pineapples!”
In parenting and in gardening we risk failure every moment of every day, and how could it be otherwise? Through these daily practices of love, humility, and humor we just keep trying, not because our success is certain, but because it certainly is not. We hope, and yet we fail; we fail, and yet we hope. I have promised the girls that we will plant their garden in the spring. And it will again be their first garden, just as every garden is a first garden, just as every day with those we love is a chance to start over, to plant something again.
Chapter 11
11. The Hills Are Alive
My grandmother’s highest compliment for a natural landscape was to say that it was “as pretty as a picture.” Even as a kid I remember thinking that this aesthetic was upside-down, that the loveliness of art should be judged according to the inimitable standard of natural beauty rather than the other way around. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, well-heeled European travelers scoured the countryside looking for views that would be as pretty as a picture—or, to be more precise, as pretty as a painting. Because they had a certain kind of painting in mind as embodying their standard of natural beauty, these early eco-tourists often carried with them a “Claude glass,” a small, convex, tinted mirror that was nicknamed for the seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain. When a picturesque landscape was encountered—say, for example, the snowcapped Alps—the tourist would first turn his or her back to the mountains, then whip out the Claude glass, holding it up so as to frame the mountains. The peaks appeared reflected and also color shifted to a tonal range that made them look more painterly. Voilà! Actual Alps not only become pretty as a picture but become a picture, as the pleased eco-tourist stands admiring, not the mountains, but rather an image of them that he or she has created. But why must we turn our backs on the land in order to see it in a way that we find aesthetically pleasing? Have we so lost a sense of humility before nature that we’ve come to love our own representations of the world more dearly than we love the world itself?
It might be fair to say that the Claude glass of the nineteenth century was photography and that the twentieth-century Claude glass was film, since these technologies of representation have profoundly conditioned our landscape aesthetics. They have allowed us to frame the world. As with the Claude glass, there is a sense in which cinema’s stylized, controlled, and color-corrected depiction of nature has thoroughly mediated our relationship to the physical world, reshaping our environmental aesthetics and implying that a representation of nature is an improvement upon nature itself. Cinema has the power to show us the environment in remarkably dramatic fashion, but to see the land in film we must temporarily turn our backs on the land itself. To climb into the bright mountains of the screen we must first descend into the dark cave of the theater.
From a very early age I’ve held the deep and unwavering conviction that musicals—especially movie musicals—represent the most intolerable and misguided aesthetic form in the checkered history of human civilization. In addition to being uniformly hokey and boring, musicals are also cloying and saccharine, which is even more offensive. I make it a policy never to trust a person who would spontaneously break into song for no reason, especially when he’s about to begin a knife fight (West Side Story), he’s adopting an orphan as a publicity stunt (Annie), or she’s confessing her unwanted pregnancy (Grease). It is not simply that the suspension of disbelief required in such cases would daunt Hercules, it is also that it is so obviously inappropriate to croon about things like gang violence, homeless waifs, and bastard children. The world would be a better place if the urge to sing of such things could be soundly repressed—if this upswelling, confessional, tuneful emoting could instead become a stoical moment of shutting the piehole good and tight.
If I sound testy about this issue of movie musicals, I have good reason. As the father of young daughters, I have been subjected—wholly against my will—to musicals too numerous and nauseating to be enumerated. The most frequently repeated of these abominations is the much-beloved 1965 “timeless classic” The Sound of Music, whose perennial popularity confirms every curmudgeonly thing I’ve ever said or written about my fellow human beings. Indeed, the National Association of Misanthropes might consider screening this gem at its annual convention, if only to reassure members that they really are on the right track. Despite my personal aversion to the picture, The Sound of Music not only bailed out a sinking 20th Century Fox in the mid-1960s but, adjusted for inflation, has gone on to net more than a billion dollars. That’s “billion” with a b, just like the b in “blockbuster,” or “banal,” or “bullshit.”
So much beloved is this appalling movie—which, by the way, won five Academy Awards and was nominated for five more—that the first-ever reunion of its nine principal actors had to be held as part of the final season of Oprah. The film was even ranked number 55 on the American Film Institute’s centennial “100 Years . . . 100 Movies” list of the most important American films, where it was judged superior to actual “timeless classics” including The Third Man and Vertigo, Stagecoach and The Searchers, The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times. Can there be any doubt that Carol Reed, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Charlie Chaplin—the directors of these amazing pictures—are spinning in their graves? Among the few people ever to tell the truth about The Sound of Music was the film critic Pauline Kael, who called it “the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat.” “We have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles,” wrote Kael, “when we hear ourselves humming [this film’s] sickly, goody-goody songs.” In a simultaneous blow to free speech and good taste, Kael was fired from McCall’s Magazine for the heresy of making this astute opinion public.
I’ve meditated at length on what disturbs me so much
about this awful film. It isn’t simply the gratuitous singing, which is endemic to the form, or the appalling sentimentality of the characters, which I might have predicted, or even that I’m asked to believe that a guy with seven children could be happy instead of insane, even were he not on the run from the Nazis—which, as you’ll recall, he is. No, the problem runs much deeper, and it is this: The Sound of Music is an expression of my own values. First, there is an emphasis upon the centrality, resilience, and importance of family, which is a principle I hold dear. Then there is, in the romance plot, an assertion of the power of love to pull down interpersonal barriers, including those related to class. This too I believe. And the good guys in this movie seem to feel that the Nazis are bad guys, which I have no difficulty going along with.
But what is the core value at the true heart of this film? It is the protagonist’s deep love of nature. You’ll recall that the Julie Andrews character, Maria (soon to become Mrs. Maria von Trapp), is from the beginning an irresponsible and negligent nun in training who fails miserably at her religious duties. Why? Because she is so busy spinning around flowery mountaintops in implausibly orgasmic nature reveries. Here we recognize the oldest of the tricks in the book written by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Beethoven and Schubert, Bierstadt and Cole, Emerson and Thoreau: indulge orthodox rejoicing and piety, but while your parents aren’t looking just swap out the divinity of God for the divinity of nature. Maria isn’t a bad nun. She is a good transcendentalist. She believes deeply in grace and in the divine, but for her the locus of divinity is the Alps rather than the abbey. So moved is she by nature that, well, damn it, she just has to “climb every mountain.” And she’s none too quiet about it.
If this film reflects so many of my own values, why then do I find it intolerable? You know that feeling that comes over you when you discover that some bloviating asshat is a huge fan of your favorite baseball team or an ardent admirer of your favorite band—when the purity of your ineffable love for something is sullied because it must be shared with an obnoxious knothead? The Sound of Music is so incredibly trite that I can’t help but resent its superficial dramatization of my own beliefs—particularly my core faith in the spiritual value of nature. Is this how I appear to others, a self-indulgent, dirt-worshipping, gushy, feeble-witted tree hugger who twirls around in fields bursting forth in earth-loving song?
Inspired by their immoderate affection for Maria, Hannah and Caroline propose that we climb our local hill and reenact the opening scene of The Sound of Music. As a man who despises musicals and is deeply suspicious of Chautauquans, Civil War reenactors, and department store Santas—all of whom I consider not only counterfeits but also drunkards and pedophiles—I am a poor choice for this mission. But here’s the thing: I’m their dad. Among the many blessings of being the father of daughters is the constant opportunity to operate entirely outside my comfort zone. What choice do I have, especially after Eryn, with a wry smile, tells the girls how certain she is that Dad would love to be a part of this project? “Daddy even teaches film classes,” she says enthusiastically. “I’m sure he can help you understand why this movie is so great!” This is my punishment for having married someone with a sense of humor, which now seems less charming than it did during our courtship.
“OK,” I finally assent, “but if I help you reenact the ‘hills are alive’ scene, then I get to choose another scene that someday y’all will help me to reenact.” When the girls agree, I reveal my choice: the scene in which the dad, a grumpy sea captain, imposes martial discipline upon his children, controlling their every behavior through a series of coded orders tooted out shrilly on a dog whistle. This promises to be a refreshing change from my usual domestic life, in which my agency has been reduced to running the chainsaw and hoisting IPAs.
As we screen the opening sequence of the film in order to observe every excruciating nuance of the “hills are alive” scene, I’m reminded that the movie begins with a montage of lovely establishing shots of the snowy Alps and verdant Salzkammergut foothills—helicopter shots that are plenty respectable for sixties cinema. Just as I begin to enjoy these rich images, however, the aerial camera makes the unhappy discovery of Julie Andrews doing those orgasmic hilltop pirouettes, after which she promptly destroys the moment by bursting into song. It is the kind of cinematic moment that, rescreened a few times, could make spies talk. I find it difficult not to fantasize about some way—any way—to make Julie stop. I imagine that the studio helicopter is in fact a helicopter gunship, its sweeping descent toward warbling Maria accompanied by the satisfying rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun strafing. Or perhaps that she might be skewered by the chopper skid, a chirruping Maria-kabob rising joyfully into the clouds. Maria’s song, “The Sound of Music,” turns out to be a kind of environmentalist anthem, replete with natural images including hills, birds, lakes, trees, breezes, brooks, and stones. The degree to which Oscar Hammerstein’s gift as a lyricist has been exaggerated is made evident by the line in which Maria’s heart wants to sing “like a lark who is learning to pray.” This is a moment so insufferable that we ourselves might pray, along with the hapless lark, that Maria would just shut her von Trapp. But there it is again: my personal belief in the divinity of nature, being expressed in the most saccharine and clichéd manner possible. Of course Hannah and Caroline absolutely love it.
The girls and I make our plans for the reenactment, and Eryn costumes them to look suitably Maria-ish. I fill a day pack with snacks, water, and sunscreen, and we begin our afternoon ascent of Moonrise, the nearby hill that we’ve so named because it’s an especially fine spot from which to watch the rising moon on summer nights. These Great Basin foothills could not be more different from the lush hills of the film’s Austrian Alps. Here we push through high desert scrub, including thorny desert peach and scratchy bitterbrush, an unbroken carpet of big sage and rabbitbrush rolling out before us to the distant horizon. It is a desiccated and brown landscape in which we must guard against sunstroke, dehydration, and Great Basin rattlesnakes, which are common on the rocky slopes of Moonrise. Here are no babbling brooks to meditate beside, no azure lakes into which to dip our oars, no trees to stroll romantically beneath, no emerald grass to loll upon. Nothing here is green, save for the yellowish green of an ephedra bush here and there. The glare of the high-elevation sun is intense as we push up the dusty slope of Moonrise and into the hot blast of the Washoe Zephyr. This is not the land of the Claude glass but rather the land of the emergency signal mirror—not a place for twirling but rather for hunkering down in order to survive.
Wallace Stegner wisely observed that we need to “get over the color green.” “You have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns,” he admonished. Stegner realized that our fantasy landscape remains closer to that of The Sound of Music than to the austere geophysical reality of the arid West and that this aesthetic preference has environmental consequences that are all too real. My girls have been raised in this open, windy desert, and they know instinctively that its power lies precisely in its gorgeous starkness, in its effortless resistance to our intentions. This land is sublimely inhospitable, and its grandeur inspires a humility that is the greatest gift it has to offer. Stegner was right. Until we get over the color green we’ll remain doomed to view the West through a Claude glass of our own imaginative construction. We’ll continue to see the world indirectly, artificially framed, color shifted to conform to an environmental aesthetic that is disconnected from the visceral reality of this astonishing place. Here in the western Great Basin, green is the color of the lawns that don’t belong and the money that buys the vanishing water that keeps them that way. The high desert is not the green world of the Austrian Alps, but neither was it meant to be. This is our home landscape, and to us it is far more beautiful than the Alps could ever be.
On the way up Moonrise I ask little Caroline what her favorite part of The Sound of Music is. Without hesitating she replies, “I like the part with those bad guys, Daddy. What are they called again?�
��
“Nazis,” Hannah replies.
I cringe. This is the same kid who, during our earlier reenactment of scenes from The Wizard of Oz, insisted upon playing the role of one of the terrifying flying monkeys, even in scenes where they had no credible reason to appear. Hoping to shift the conversation, I ask Hannah what her favorite part is.
“I like Liesl the best, especially when she’s singing in the rain.”
I wince again. The scene Hannah has in mind depicts the courting of Liesl, the eldest von Trapp daughter, by an Aryan messenger boy named Rolfe—a scene in which Liesl croons the insipid teen anthem “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” This awful ditty includes the girl singing sweetly to her Hitler wannabe beau: “I need someone older and wiser, / Telling me what to do.” As the father of daughters, this is not the sort of thing I want to hear. I note that this antifeminist narrative isn’t much of an improvement over Hannah’s favorite kid flick, Disney’s The Little Mermaid, in which a mermaid girl—basically an aquatic Liesl—disobeys her father, leaves her home place, and relinquishes her own voice, all in order to be with a guy just because he’s human.
“Hannah, do me a favor,” I implore. “When you’re sixteen going on seventeen, remember that I am the one who is older and wiser. Not some boy, me! And don’t forget that charming Rolfe ends up joining the Nazis.”
“Right,” interjects little Caroline. “Nazis!”
At last we reach the summit of Moonrise, where we pause in the shade of a granite palisade to hydrate and snack. We are well above 6,000 feet now, and the cloudless cobalt sky shimmers as it can only here in the high desert. The scat of pronghorn and coyote are nearby, and the faint tracks of black-tailed jackrabbits, and some orange lichen that has eked out a living in a fissure in the rock. Once rested, we choose the site for our reenactment, and I clamber up into the cliffs above in order to approximate the film’s memorable high-angle opening shot. The girls are down below, practicing their lyrics and poised to pirouette. They look adorable in their corny dresses and makeshift aprons. At last I yell, “Action!” and they begin to twirl like crazy, stumbling a little over the rocks, bumping into each other and also into the sage and rabbitbrush. I catch a word here and there as the hot wind sweeps their song away toward Utah. The sere, brown land is treeless and flowerless. In the viewfinder of my camera I frame the little stars of my own life story, spinning in their mountain-top reverie. They are laughing, and dancing, and singing, right here, in this place, among the rattlers and scorpions. It is, I admit to myself, a strange and wonderful kind of musical. In the glare of the high desert sun and the sweep of the scorching wind, the irony of the reenactment suddenly dissipates, and I feel a rush of genuine sentiment. My little girls are dancing in their home hills, and the hills are alive.
Raising Wild Page 19