Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 21
November 3, 2013
Savor the short, gray gifts of November
Most of you probably remembered to set your clocks back one hour last night before shutting out the lights, and thus scavenged an extra hour of sleep. I have always liked that bonus hour.
Here in the center of Lincoln, the end of daylight saving time means that the sun is going to fall behind the hills to the west right around lunchtime. That’s an exaggeration, of course, unless you eat lunch around 3:30 in the afternoon. But you see my point. The days, which have been growing shorter since the last third of June, are now the size of those “fun size” candy bars we all gave away earlier this week on Halloween.
But here’s the thing: There is something oddly comforting about the combination of the chill in the air here in Vermont and the reality that days everywhere now start late and quit early. This time of year nurtures our need to cocoon.
There are a lot of reasons for this. As the Mamas and Papas observed decades ago, all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray. The ground is growing hard: Already there is little give beneath the grass in my front yard, despite the fact there are more moles living there than there were twerking teddy bears backing up Miley Cyrus at the Video Music Awards. There has also been snow across the higher peaks of the Green Mountains. We had houseguests from New Jersey the other day, and after visiting us they drove on to Stowe. Father and son showed us photos of the two of them playing in the snow in the woods atop the Lincoln Gap. My daughter’s birthday falls in the middle of November, and when she was little I was often shoveling the driveway before the festivities could begin.
The reality is that even if we ski or snowshoe or hunt, for the next few seasons most of us here in northern New England will be spending more time inside than out. We will be making hot soup. We will (finally) wade through the detritus that has grown inside our homes this summer like the Freedom Tower at One World Trade Center: Books and photos and magazines. Old clothes. We will be reading in front of the wood stove. I am always very content on Sunday afternoons in November, the sun almost set, when I am lying on the rug in my den with a fire in the wood stove and a cat asleep on my back.
But it is the encroaching darkness that makes this sort of domesticity permissible. After all, what alternatives do we have? It is because the sun has set before dinner that we allow ourselves these moments of well-earned quiescence. I can watch a lot of football inside in November. But I can’t imagine being inside on a summer Sunday. There is too much to do outside the house: Too many walls to paint or gardens to weed. There are too many roads to bike.
Moreover, in weeks there will be the wondrous chaos that marks the December holidays: Christmas and Hanukkah. This year, the joyful madness will descend upon us fast. Hanukkah commences in three and a half weeks – on the day before Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving arrives this year on the 28th, the latest possible date on which it can fall – which means the holiday shopping season could not possibly be any shorter.
Have I stressed you out? Not my point. My point is this: Savor these days in November, the sunlight scarce and the daylight brief, the Vermont sky likely to be spitting snow. Reward yourself with your family. Reward yourself with the chance to slow down. Take advantage of the fact that the world once more is giving you a moment to breathe.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published earlier this year.)
Here in the center of Lincoln, the end of daylight saving time means that the sun is going to fall behind the hills to the west right around lunchtime. That’s an exaggeration, of course, unless you eat lunch around 3:30 in the afternoon. But you see my point. The days, which have been growing shorter since the last third of June, are now the size of those “fun size” candy bars we all gave away earlier this week on Halloween.
But here’s the thing: There is something oddly comforting about the combination of the chill in the air here in Vermont and the reality that days everywhere now start late and quit early. This time of year nurtures our need to cocoon.
There are a lot of reasons for this. As the Mamas and Papas observed decades ago, all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray. The ground is growing hard: Already there is little give beneath the grass in my front yard, despite the fact there are more moles living there than there were twerking teddy bears backing up Miley Cyrus at the Video Music Awards. There has also been snow across the higher peaks of the Green Mountains. We had houseguests from New Jersey the other day, and after visiting us they drove on to Stowe. Father and son showed us photos of the two of them playing in the snow in the woods atop the Lincoln Gap. My daughter’s birthday falls in the middle of November, and when she was little I was often shoveling the driveway before the festivities could begin.
The reality is that even if we ski or snowshoe or hunt, for the next few seasons most of us here in northern New England will be spending more time inside than out. We will be making hot soup. We will (finally) wade through the detritus that has grown inside our homes this summer like the Freedom Tower at One World Trade Center: Books and photos and magazines. Old clothes. We will be reading in front of the wood stove. I am always very content on Sunday afternoons in November, the sun almost set, when I am lying on the rug in my den with a fire in the wood stove and a cat asleep on my back.
But it is the encroaching darkness that makes this sort of domesticity permissible. After all, what alternatives do we have? It is because the sun has set before dinner that we allow ourselves these moments of well-earned quiescence. I can watch a lot of football inside in November. But I can’t imagine being inside on a summer Sunday. There is too much to do outside the house: Too many walls to paint or gardens to weed. There are too many roads to bike.
Moreover, in weeks there will be the wondrous chaos that marks the December holidays: Christmas and Hanukkah. This year, the joyful madness will descend upon us fast. Hanukkah commences in three and a half weeks – on the day before Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving arrives this year on the 28th, the latest possible date on which it can fall – which means the holiday shopping season could not possibly be any shorter.
Have I stressed you out? Not my point. My point is this: Savor these days in November, the sunlight scarce and the daylight brief, the Vermont sky likely to be spitting snow. Reward yourself with your family. Reward yourself with the chance to slow down. Take advantage of the fact that the world once more is giving you a moment to breathe.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published earlier this year.)
October 27, 2013
The embarrassing ghosts from Halloweens past
Halloween is but days away, that night of the year when the streets are filled with children dressed up as ghosts and goblins and John Boehner. (Trust me, you won’t be able to schedule five minutes at a tanning salon between now and November 1.) It is also, alas, that evening when many of us are scarred for life. Here are a few of the embarrassing moments that some of my readers recalled from Halloweens past.
* Kat Nemec (who is also my immensely talented cousin – which means this is actually a story about my aunt, a woman who has always been like a second mother to me): “I’m eight years old. My mom learns that my cousin and his friends have a gorilla suit. She asks to borrow it so she can scare trick-or-treaters. She looks totally scary and real when she’s in it. A bunch of sixth-graders ring our doorbell. My mom is hiding behind the big tree in our front yard. She jumps out to scare them, howling ‘hoo hoo’ like a monkey. They turn around and yell ‘Get it!’ and attack her with shaving cream and eggs. She starts screaming, ‘Stop, I’m Mrs. Muench! I know your mothers, stop!’ But they’re a mob by now. Unstoppable. She gets chased down the block and comes home a mess.”
* Barbara Brown-Potter: “Our neighborhood in Essex Junction used to go all out on Halloween. One house in particular gave our daughter and her friend a quickened heartbeat as they approached the door. Dead bodies hung from trees and littered the lawn. Eerie sounds were pumped through hidden speakers. The girls, dressed as devils, would not go any further. ‘They’re all fake,’ I reassured the children. I grabbed one of their plastic pitchforks and thrust it into what I thought was a shirt stuffed with leaves – a ‘dead’ body. The ensuing scream of surprise from the resurrected corpse gave us all a Halloween moment to remember.”
* Cati Montgomery: “In fifth grade, I had a great costume: Green scrubs, green makeup, green hair paint, and a cardboard box decorated to look like a book cover. At every door, I had to explain what I was. No one understood. I was a bookworm. Yup: A fifth grade nerd in a not so clever disguise.”
* Natalie Hagopian: “Halloween, 1984. I was 10 years old and living in the suburbs of Detroit – Motown. My two best friends and I dressed up as the Supremes. We worked on our costumes for weeks and spent an enormous amount of time choreographing a routine. On Halloween, instead of the usual ‘trick-or-treat,’ we sang ‘Stop, in the name of love.’ The only problem was that it took us so long to go through the act that after nearly two hours, we had only made it to six houses. We had very little candy and started home feeling a little defeated. Just then, a teenage boy sitting on his parents’ porch called us over. He was passing out candy for his folks. We did our routine for him and he nearly fell off his chair laughing. ‘That was the coolest,’ he told us. Then, he dumped his entire bucket of candy into my bag. I nearly fainted. ‘No biggie,’ he winked. ‘I was really sick of handing out the candy and you girls just made my night.’ He made my night too!”
* Susan Nussbaum: “One year, the weather on Halloween was cold and rainy, and our mom wouldn’t let my twin sisters and me go trick-or-treating. The following day, the weather was better, so she sent us out then. People were a bit puzzled to see us standing on their doorsteps on November 1 and didn’t have much to give us. I still recall – forty years later – an older woman asking why we were a day late. Can you say humiliating?”
* Angela MacDonald: “Our daughter was about five and she was dressed as a pink Crayola crayon for Halloween. When she rang the bell at one house, the woman who answered the door yelled for her husband to come quick: There was a little person dressed as a penis!”
Happy Halloween. And if a gorilla pops out from behind a tree, be kind: It might be my aunt.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 27, 2013. Chris’s most recent novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.)
* Kat Nemec (who is also my immensely talented cousin – which means this is actually a story about my aunt, a woman who has always been like a second mother to me): “I’m eight years old. My mom learns that my cousin and his friends have a gorilla suit. She asks to borrow it so she can scare trick-or-treaters. She looks totally scary and real when she’s in it. A bunch of sixth-graders ring our doorbell. My mom is hiding behind the big tree in our front yard. She jumps out to scare them, howling ‘hoo hoo’ like a monkey. They turn around and yell ‘Get it!’ and attack her with shaving cream and eggs. She starts screaming, ‘Stop, I’m Mrs. Muench! I know your mothers, stop!’ But they’re a mob by now. Unstoppable. She gets chased down the block and comes home a mess.”
* Barbara Brown-Potter: “Our neighborhood in Essex Junction used to go all out on Halloween. One house in particular gave our daughter and her friend a quickened heartbeat as they approached the door. Dead bodies hung from trees and littered the lawn. Eerie sounds were pumped through hidden speakers. The girls, dressed as devils, would not go any further. ‘They’re all fake,’ I reassured the children. I grabbed one of their plastic pitchforks and thrust it into what I thought was a shirt stuffed with leaves – a ‘dead’ body. The ensuing scream of surprise from the resurrected corpse gave us all a Halloween moment to remember.”
* Cati Montgomery: “In fifth grade, I had a great costume: Green scrubs, green makeup, green hair paint, and a cardboard box decorated to look like a book cover. At every door, I had to explain what I was. No one understood. I was a bookworm. Yup: A fifth grade nerd in a not so clever disguise.”
* Natalie Hagopian: “Halloween, 1984. I was 10 years old and living in the suburbs of Detroit – Motown. My two best friends and I dressed up as the Supremes. We worked on our costumes for weeks and spent an enormous amount of time choreographing a routine. On Halloween, instead of the usual ‘trick-or-treat,’ we sang ‘Stop, in the name of love.’ The only problem was that it took us so long to go through the act that after nearly two hours, we had only made it to six houses. We had very little candy and started home feeling a little defeated. Just then, a teenage boy sitting on his parents’ porch called us over. He was passing out candy for his folks. We did our routine for him and he nearly fell off his chair laughing. ‘That was the coolest,’ he told us. Then, he dumped his entire bucket of candy into my bag. I nearly fainted. ‘No biggie,’ he winked. ‘I was really sick of handing out the candy and you girls just made my night.’ He made my night too!”
* Susan Nussbaum: “One year, the weather on Halloween was cold and rainy, and our mom wouldn’t let my twin sisters and me go trick-or-treating. The following day, the weather was better, so she sent us out then. People were a bit puzzled to see us standing on their doorsteps on November 1 and didn’t have much to give us. I still recall – forty years later – an older woman asking why we were a day late. Can you say humiliating?”
* Angela MacDonald: “Our daughter was about five and she was dressed as a pink Crayola crayon for Halloween. When she rang the bell at one house, the woman who answered the door yelled for her husband to come quick: There was a little person dressed as a penis!”
Happy Halloween. And if a gorilla pops out from behind a tree, be kind: It might be my aunt.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 27, 2013. Chris’s most recent novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.)
October 20, 2013
Big brother watching me? Nope, I'm watching him.
This is a story of sibling rivalry, and it begins with a confession: I’m an NFL junkie. This surprises people. Let’s face it, I’m supposed to be a bookish sort of guy. A writer – and not even a sportswriter. Moreover, I’m a stage dad of an only daughter. There are not a lot of guys whose presets on their car’s Sirius radio are the National Football League station and the Broadway channel. But that is indeed the case in my car.
How profound is my football addiction? I’ll even watch those Thursday night games with the Jacksonville Jaguars. For a long litany of reasons, I’m not proud of this obsession. The most important one, certainly, is the connection between the sport and traumatic brain injuries. But there are others: Football’s gladiatorial self-importance. Its needless sideline sexism. Its celebration of violence.
Now, I happen to be a diehard New York Giants fan. That means I’m spoiled. Two Super Bowl victories in the last six seasons. Most years, the Giants are in contention. This fall? Not so much. It’s almost November and they haven’t won a single game. So, if there has been a silver lining in the unwatchable ineptitude that has marked the current Giants’ season, it is this: I am no longer as tightly tethered to my television set most autumn Sunday afternoons.
As a result, my home will be winterized before Christmas. This old house’s old windows are already caulked, the storms yanked and tugged into place. The hoses have been brought inside and the gardens have been put to bed. The piles of dead cluster flies in the attic have been vacuumed.
Yup, these days it’s more pleasant to vacuum up cluster flies than it is to watch the Giants.
But here is why this season has been particularly frustrating for me and here is that sibling story that vexes me like a hangnail: Many of the Giants’ failings have been the fault of their quarterback, Eli Manning. He might shatter the barometer of quarterbacking ineptitude by setting a new record for interceptions. Now, unless you have been living on Mars, you know that Eli is the younger brother of Broncos quarterback, Peyton Manning. While Eli is having the kind of year that gets a person parodied in the “The New York Post,” Peyton is savoring the sort of season that athletes have in Xbox videogame recreations. He is unstoppable.
Peyton is roughly five years older than Eli. My brother is five years older than me. Consequently, I have always had a younger brother’s loyalty to Eli. I won’t burden you with all of my sibling demons, but when I am staring up at a shadowy bedroom ceiling at three in the morning, I see all sorts of parallels between these two brotherly relationships. I contemplate the inexorable brisance of birth order, subjecting my personality flaws and professional failures to the sort of armchair psychology that makes sense only to an insomniac. I hear once more in my mind my mother’s voice when she would call my brother, “Perfect Person.” She was, in all fairness, being sarcastic. But the truth is I spent the first quarter-century of my life trying to be him.
I know lots of little brothers who, like me, love their older brothers so very, very much that they wobble like those weighted, inflatable toy clowns between abject veneration and lionesque competition. It’s Shakespearean. The younger brother may win the occasional battle, but he never wins the war. Never. Even if he takes a tennis match (which I never did against my brother), there remain all those comparisons from when one of you was five and one was ten. Moreover, toppling the king brings its own tectonic tremors.
And so this autumn I have watched the Nascar flameout that is Eli and the Formula One perfection that is Peyton.
Meanwhile, my brother? As the older sibling, he is all but oblivious to the parallel. The other day he sent me a short text when we were talking about Eli and Peyton that exuded wisdom and decency and perspective – and that zeroed in on the family dynamic that as the little brother I’d conveniently managed to disregard: “How’d you like to be the Manning parents watching two sons this season?”
Trust me: The next Manning family reunion will be filled with love. But it will also be awkward.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 20, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.)
How profound is my football addiction? I’ll even watch those Thursday night games with the Jacksonville Jaguars. For a long litany of reasons, I’m not proud of this obsession. The most important one, certainly, is the connection between the sport and traumatic brain injuries. But there are others: Football’s gladiatorial self-importance. Its needless sideline sexism. Its celebration of violence.
Now, I happen to be a diehard New York Giants fan. That means I’m spoiled. Two Super Bowl victories in the last six seasons. Most years, the Giants are in contention. This fall? Not so much. It’s almost November and they haven’t won a single game. So, if there has been a silver lining in the unwatchable ineptitude that has marked the current Giants’ season, it is this: I am no longer as tightly tethered to my television set most autumn Sunday afternoons.
As a result, my home will be winterized before Christmas. This old house’s old windows are already caulked, the storms yanked and tugged into place. The hoses have been brought inside and the gardens have been put to bed. The piles of dead cluster flies in the attic have been vacuumed.
Yup, these days it’s more pleasant to vacuum up cluster flies than it is to watch the Giants.
But here is why this season has been particularly frustrating for me and here is that sibling story that vexes me like a hangnail: Many of the Giants’ failings have been the fault of their quarterback, Eli Manning. He might shatter the barometer of quarterbacking ineptitude by setting a new record for interceptions. Now, unless you have been living on Mars, you know that Eli is the younger brother of Broncos quarterback, Peyton Manning. While Eli is having the kind of year that gets a person parodied in the “The New York Post,” Peyton is savoring the sort of season that athletes have in Xbox videogame recreations. He is unstoppable.
Peyton is roughly five years older than Eli. My brother is five years older than me. Consequently, I have always had a younger brother’s loyalty to Eli. I won’t burden you with all of my sibling demons, but when I am staring up at a shadowy bedroom ceiling at three in the morning, I see all sorts of parallels between these two brotherly relationships. I contemplate the inexorable brisance of birth order, subjecting my personality flaws and professional failures to the sort of armchair psychology that makes sense only to an insomniac. I hear once more in my mind my mother’s voice when she would call my brother, “Perfect Person.” She was, in all fairness, being sarcastic. But the truth is I spent the first quarter-century of my life trying to be him.
I know lots of little brothers who, like me, love their older brothers so very, very much that they wobble like those weighted, inflatable toy clowns between abject veneration and lionesque competition. It’s Shakespearean. The younger brother may win the occasional battle, but he never wins the war. Never. Even if he takes a tennis match (which I never did against my brother), there remain all those comparisons from when one of you was five and one was ten. Moreover, toppling the king brings its own tectonic tremors.
And so this autumn I have watched the Nascar flameout that is Eli and the Formula One perfection that is Peyton.
Meanwhile, my brother? As the older sibling, he is all but oblivious to the parallel. The other day he sent me a short text when we were talking about Eli and Peyton that exuded wisdom and decency and perspective – and that zeroed in on the family dynamic that as the little brother I’d conveniently managed to disregard: “How’d you like to be the Manning parents watching two sons this season?”
Trust me: The next Manning family reunion will be filled with love. But it will also be awkward.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 20, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.)
October 16, 2013
'The Luminaries,' by Eleanor Catton -- reviewed in today's Washington Post
by Chris Bohjalian
On Tuesday, when 28-year-old Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to win Britain’s Man Booker Prize, she acknowledged that “The Luminaries” was a “publisher’s nightmare.” At more than 800 pages, it’s a reviewer’s nightmare, too. I say this not because I didn’t like it; trust me, I did. You will, also. But it is astoundingly complicated and almost defies explanation. Moreover, I can’t recall the last time I read a novel that left me so baffled. In the end, however, I was awed — as were the Booker judges, who chose “The Luminaries” over Jim Crace’s “Harvest,” the bookies’ favorite for the $80,000 prize.
Still, I needed to create my own Cliffs Notes to keep straight the cast of 19 breathing characters, the corpse (whose name one of the living occasionally commandeers), the location of five dresses filled with gold, the source of yet more gold discovered in a dead hermit’s cottage, why a lovely young prostitute has nearly overdosed on opium, the different owners of a boat named the Godspeed, and the motivations of the dozen “luminaries” who have gathered together in the smoking room of a second-rate New Zealand hotel when the novel opens to discuss a few of these curiosities.
Actually, there’s more. A lot more: an evil ship’s captain with a C-shaped scar, a brothel madam who conducts a seance, a blackmailed politician and a riveting courtroom scene. And let’s not forget the phantom aboard the Godspeed, “the dead man rising, his bloody throat, his cry,” that greets Walter Moody on his way to New Zealand, a mystery that one might presume is the heart of the novel but is actually all but forgotten for the vast majority of this tome. And then there’s the astrology. And the 12 parts of the novel that wane like the moon: Each part is roughly half the length of the section that preceded it. Part 1 is 358 pages long. Part 12? Two.
Catton’s tale is set largely in the fast-growing gold-rush town of Hokitika in 1865 and 1866, a world where “the men were bronzed and weathered in the manner of all frontiersmen, their lips chapped white, their carriage expressive of privation and loss. . . . The glow of youth was quite washed from them.” Throughout the novel, Catton shifts perspective among the dozen luminaries — as well as her other characters. She has created an erudite, omniscient 19th-century sort of narrator fond of such pronouncements as this:
“The interruptions were too tiresome, and Balfour’s approach too digressive, to deserve a full and faithful record in the men’s own words. We shall here excise their imperfections, and impose a regimental order upon the impatient chronicle of the shipping agent’s roving mind; we shall apply our own mortar to the cracks and chinks of earthly recollection, and resurrect as new the edifice that, in solitary memory, exists only as a ruin. We begin, as Balfour himself began, with an encounter that had taken place in Hokitika that very morning.”
Catton provides descriptions of her characters that are meticulous and precise. Here is politician Alistair Lauderback: “His beard . . . protruded almost horizontally from his jaw, giving his face a regal aspect; beneath his brow, his dark eyes glittered. He was very tall, and his body tapered, which made him seem even taller still. . . . His hearing was slightly defective, and for this reason he tended to bow his head, and stoop slightly, when he was listening — creating the impression, so useful in politics, that his attentions were always gravely and providentially bestowed.”
As Byzantine as the plot is, at one point in this novel I found myself thinking of “All the President’s Men.” I recalled that pivotal line of the Watergate investigation, now a classic catchphrase: “Follow the money.” Everyone in “The Luminaries” is hoping to get rich quick, and it’s a dog-eat-dog world where almost no one can be trusted and almost no one is telling the truth. At least not the whole truth. But the key to following the story is to try to follow the money.
The result is a finely wrought fun house of a novel. Enjoy the ride.
* * *
This review appeared originally in the Washington Post on October 16, 2013. Bohjalian is the author of 17 books. His most recent novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.
On Tuesday, when 28-year-old Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to win Britain’s Man Booker Prize, she acknowledged that “The Luminaries” was a “publisher’s nightmare.” At more than 800 pages, it’s a reviewer’s nightmare, too. I say this not because I didn’t like it; trust me, I did. You will, also. But it is astoundingly complicated and almost defies explanation. Moreover, I can’t recall the last time I read a novel that left me so baffled. In the end, however, I was awed — as were the Booker judges, who chose “The Luminaries” over Jim Crace’s “Harvest,” the bookies’ favorite for the $80,000 prize.
Still, I needed to create my own Cliffs Notes to keep straight the cast of 19 breathing characters, the corpse (whose name one of the living occasionally commandeers), the location of five dresses filled with gold, the source of yet more gold discovered in a dead hermit’s cottage, why a lovely young prostitute has nearly overdosed on opium, the different owners of a boat named the Godspeed, and the motivations of the dozen “luminaries” who have gathered together in the smoking room of a second-rate New Zealand hotel when the novel opens to discuss a few of these curiosities.
Actually, there’s more. A lot more: an evil ship’s captain with a C-shaped scar, a brothel madam who conducts a seance, a blackmailed politician and a riveting courtroom scene. And let’s not forget the phantom aboard the Godspeed, “the dead man rising, his bloody throat, his cry,” that greets Walter Moody on his way to New Zealand, a mystery that one might presume is the heart of the novel but is actually all but forgotten for the vast majority of this tome. And then there’s the astrology. And the 12 parts of the novel that wane like the moon: Each part is roughly half the length of the section that preceded it. Part 1 is 358 pages long. Part 12? Two.
Catton’s tale is set largely in the fast-growing gold-rush town of Hokitika in 1865 and 1866, a world where “the men were bronzed and weathered in the manner of all frontiersmen, their lips chapped white, their carriage expressive of privation and loss. . . . The glow of youth was quite washed from them.” Throughout the novel, Catton shifts perspective among the dozen luminaries — as well as her other characters. She has created an erudite, omniscient 19th-century sort of narrator fond of such pronouncements as this:
“The interruptions were too tiresome, and Balfour’s approach too digressive, to deserve a full and faithful record in the men’s own words. We shall here excise their imperfections, and impose a regimental order upon the impatient chronicle of the shipping agent’s roving mind; we shall apply our own mortar to the cracks and chinks of earthly recollection, and resurrect as new the edifice that, in solitary memory, exists only as a ruin. We begin, as Balfour himself began, with an encounter that had taken place in Hokitika that very morning.”
Catton provides descriptions of her characters that are meticulous and precise. Here is politician Alistair Lauderback: “His beard . . . protruded almost horizontally from his jaw, giving his face a regal aspect; beneath his brow, his dark eyes glittered. He was very tall, and his body tapered, which made him seem even taller still. . . . His hearing was slightly defective, and for this reason he tended to bow his head, and stoop slightly, when he was listening — creating the impression, so useful in politics, that his attentions were always gravely and providentially bestowed.”
As Byzantine as the plot is, at one point in this novel I found myself thinking of “All the President’s Men.” I recalled that pivotal line of the Watergate investigation, now a classic catchphrase: “Follow the money.” Everyone in “The Luminaries” is hoping to get rich quick, and it’s a dog-eat-dog world where almost no one can be trusted and almost no one is telling the truth. At least not the whole truth. But the key to following the story is to try to follow the money.
The result is a finely wrought fun house of a novel. Enjoy the ride.
* * *
This review appeared originally in the Washington Post on October 16, 2013. Bohjalian is the author of 17 books. His most recent novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.
October 13, 2013
Years before 'The Hangover' there was. . .the hangover
Once upon a time on this date, I was alone in a Brooklyn apartment so pathetically hungover that I was calling my mother and father – who knew a lot about hangovers – and asking them for the quickest way to unscrew the vise grip that was squashing my skull. I vaguely recall whispering (yes, whispering, because even the sound of my own voice was too loud), “Whatever the cure, it can’t involve eating or drinking anything because I think I’m going to be sick. Again.”
Why had I drunk so much the night before that I was sending out this mayday to my hard-drinking parents? Because I had been at a bachelor party. My bachelor party. I was calling now because I was getting married in about six hours and I wanted to be sure that I could proceed up the aisle of an aristocratic Manhattan church without depending upon a walker. Without begging the organist to shut it down because already my head was going to explode.
Yup, today is my lovely bride’s and my wedding anniversary.
Now, what had transpired the night before was not precisely a bachelor party. No strippers. Just drunks. I had told my brother – my best man – that I didn’t want a bachelor party. But at the end of the rehearsal dinner, my groomsmen rebelled at the idea of going home, and insisted we find a bar and have a drink. So, we went to the sort of dive on (I believe) Third Avenue where the other bar patrons were ensconced in their newspapers – and I mean that literally. They were using their newspapers as pillows and blankets. According to my brother and my friend, Adam, some hours later they poured me into a taxi and paid the cabbie a little extra to make sure that I got home safely to Brooklyn.
I don’t recall what my parents recommended as a hangover cure, but it worked. I knew I could depend on them: For years my father had played tennis every Sunday morning with a group of guys whose perspiration, like his, could have been bottled and sold as 100 proof alcohol.
When I look back on our wedding – and the miracle of my recovery – I am struck by my bride’s spectacular equanimity and good cheer that day. She hadn’t a bridezilla cell in her body. Didn’t flinch when the photographer confessed sheepishly that he only discovered he’d forgotten to put film in his camera halfway through the service. She merely shrugged when the wrong wedding cake arrived in the ballroom – a cake that lacked the porcelain and fabric feline bride and groom she had meticulously crafted herself for the top. (We never did learn which lucky couple got the cats she’d made.) And she only laughed when, during our first dance, we discovered that the Lester Lanin Orchestra – the sort of tuxedo-clad New York society band that you never see twerking on MTV’s Video Music Awards – had no idea how to cover “our” song, Rikki Lee Jones’s “We belong together.” The band squeaked like third graders at their first music recital.
My point? I am a very lucky man.
That night when we were flying to Boston for our honeymoon, I told her how hungover I’d been when I had awoken that morning. She already suspected as much because some of the groomsmen had confessed they had been terrified the night before that I was never going to get home. It was an indication of how hammered they were that they thought it had made sense when they were packing my corpse-like body into the backseat of the cab to use twist-ties to attach the morning suit I had rented to the clothes I was wearing. She was. . .unflappable.
And while I’ve never drunk anything like that amount ever since, one thing hasn’t changed. I am as in love now as I was the day we were married – even more if that’s possible.
Once again, happy anniversary to my lovely bride.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 13, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.)
Why had I drunk so much the night before that I was sending out this mayday to my hard-drinking parents? Because I had been at a bachelor party. My bachelor party. I was calling now because I was getting married in about six hours and I wanted to be sure that I could proceed up the aisle of an aristocratic Manhattan church without depending upon a walker. Without begging the organist to shut it down because already my head was going to explode.
Yup, today is my lovely bride’s and my wedding anniversary.
Now, what had transpired the night before was not precisely a bachelor party. No strippers. Just drunks. I had told my brother – my best man – that I didn’t want a bachelor party. But at the end of the rehearsal dinner, my groomsmen rebelled at the idea of going home, and insisted we find a bar and have a drink. So, we went to the sort of dive on (I believe) Third Avenue where the other bar patrons were ensconced in their newspapers – and I mean that literally. They were using their newspapers as pillows and blankets. According to my brother and my friend, Adam, some hours later they poured me into a taxi and paid the cabbie a little extra to make sure that I got home safely to Brooklyn.
I don’t recall what my parents recommended as a hangover cure, but it worked. I knew I could depend on them: For years my father had played tennis every Sunday morning with a group of guys whose perspiration, like his, could have been bottled and sold as 100 proof alcohol.
When I look back on our wedding – and the miracle of my recovery – I am struck by my bride’s spectacular equanimity and good cheer that day. She hadn’t a bridezilla cell in her body. Didn’t flinch when the photographer confessed sheepishly that he only discovered he’d forgotten to put film in his camera halfway through the service. She merely shrugged when the wrong wedding cake arrived in the ballroom – a cake that lacked the porcelain and fabric feline bride and groom she had meticulously crafted herself for the top. (We never did learn which lucky couple got the cats she’d made.) And she only laughed when, during our first dance, we discovered that the Lester Lanin Orchestra – the sort of tuxedo-clad New York society band that you never see twerking on MTV’s Video Music Awards – had no idea how to cover “our” song, Rikki Lee Jones’s “We belong together.” The band squeaked like third graders at their first music recital.
My point? I am a very lucky man.
That night when we were flying to Boston for our honeymoon, I told her how hungover I’d been when I had awoken that morning. She already suspected as much because some of the groomsmen had confessed they had been terrified the night before that I was never going to get home. It was an indication of how hammered they were that they thought it had made sense when they were packing my corpse-like body into the backseat of the cab to use twist-ties to attach the morning suit I had rented to the clothes I was wearing. She was. . .unflappable.
And while I’ve never drunk anything like that amount ever since, one thing hasn’t changed. I am as in love now as I was the day we were married – even more if that’s possible.
Once again, happy anniversary to my lovely bride.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 13, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.)
October 6, 2013
Burpee Road alpacas the spitting image if a well-mannered herd
The other day I was telling a friend about my new pals, the alpacas on Bristol, Vermont’s Burpee Road. I see a portion of the small herd of ten animals almost every time I bike past them. Now they’re so familiar with my arrival that they stroll over to the wire fence and say hello when I stop. They are friendly and curious and feign interest in me even though I don’t share my Gatorade with them.
“But do they ever spit on you?” my friend asked.
This was the first I had heard that alpacas spit. I’m pretty much a cat and dog person. But I didn’t think an alpaca could possibly spew anything more grotesque than the stuff my cats shoot and spray from different orifices almost every day of their lives. I have one cat that insists on marking every book in my library. I have no idea how he reaches some of the shelves that he does.
In any case, I was really interested in this spitting thing, in part because I have the emotional maturity of a six-year-old boy, and in part because I couldn’t imagine these unfailingly polite sweater factories spitting. So, I decided to meet their owners, Peter and Gail Cousino.
“Oh, alpacas spit,” Gail told me, smiling. “It’s their only defense. Spitting and running. It’s a deterrent.” I asked if they could kick since, after all, they have hooves. She answered that being kicked by an alpaca is nothing compared to being kicked by a horse. And she would know, since she has had horses for years – as well as rabbits, pigs, Jersey cows, cats, dogs, and now the ten alpacas.
But the alpacas are new. This month marks two years since they brought home their first ones. “We got them as pets,” Peter told me, though this spring they had them sheared for the first time. Also this year the herd grew from eight to ten with the birth of Snapple in June and Sherlock in August. Astro, a white alpaca male who towers over the mostly cinnamon-colored females, was dad to both. The moms were Sugar and Sasha. The Cousino family finds their alpacas among the most low-maintenance animals they’ve ever had. “They’re beautiful and they’re quiet and they’re neat,” Gail said. An alpaca will usually grow to about four feet in height and live for 15 to 20 years.
“But does this spitting thing work?” I asked her. “I mean, spitting and running are pretty solid defense tactics if you’re in preschool. But if there’s a real predator after you, I would think spitting only goes so far – unless, maybe, you’re spitting radioactive sludge.”
Nope: Alpacas don’t spit radioactive sludge. Sometimes they spit air; sometimes they spit some seriously malodorous green slime straight out of “Ghostbusters.” And mostly, Gail said, they spit at the guys who are trying to shear them. Nevertheless, Alpaca expert Lennie Foss of Rochester, New Hampshire told me, “We need to be aware of their natural predators. In the case of farms with large pasture areas, there may be guard llamas that help as well as guard livestock dogs.” But alpacas are protective of each other: Gail has noticed that after Snapple and Sherlock were born this past summer, the mothers would surround the newborn alpacas to shield them whenever she or her husband got anywhere near the babies.
Peter told me that my interest in their alpacas is common. Some days he has seen people drive by and set up their tripods to photograph them. Visitors invariably park by the fence for a moment to watch them on weekends. And why not? They’re the spitting image of a well-mannered herd. They clearly don’t mind the paparazzi – or even a bicyclist who has filled his iPhone with pictures of them.
* * *
If you want to learn more about alpacas, visit the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction later this month for the Green Mountain Alpaca Fall Spectacular. It runs Saturday and Sunday, October 19 – 20. There will be roughly 200 alpacas there, presentations about the animals, and vendors selling sweaters, blankets, and hats. Admission is $6. Children under 5 get in free.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 6, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published this summer.)
“But do they ever spit on you?” my friend asked.
This was the first I had heard that alpacas spit. I’m pretty much a cat and dog person. But I didn’t think an alpaca could possibly spew anything more grotesque than the stuff my cats shoot and spray from different orifices almost every day of their lives. I have one cat that insists on marking every book in my library. I have no idea how he reaches some of the shelves that he does.
In any case, I was really interested in this spitting thing, in part because I have the emotional maturity of a six-year-old boy, and in part because I couldn’t imagine these unfailingly polite sweater factories spitting. So, I decided to meet their owners, Peter and Gail Cousino.
“Oh, alpacas spit,” Gail told me, smiling. “It’s their only defense. Spitting and running. It’s a deterrent.” I asked if they could kick since, after all, they have hooves. She answered that being kicked by an alpaca is nothing compared to being kicked by a horse. And she would know, since she has had horses for years – as well as rabbits, pigs, Jersey cows, cats, dogs, and now the ten alpacas.
But the alpacas are new. This month marks two years since they brought home their first ones. “We got them as pets,” Peter told me, though this spring they had them sheared for the first time. Also this year the herd grew from eight to ten with the birth of Snapple in June and Sherlock in August. Astro, a white alpaca male who towers over the mostly cinnamon-colored females, was dad to both. The moms were Sugar and Sasha. The Cousino family finds their alpacas among the most low-maintenance animals they’ve ever had. “They’re beautiful and they’re quiet and they’re neat,” Gail said. An alpaca will usually grow to about four feet in height and live for 15 to 20 years.
“But does this spitting thing work?” I asked her. “I mean, spitting and running are pretty solid defense tactics if you’re in preschool. But if there’s a real predator after you, I would think spitting only goes so far – unless, maybe, you’re spitting radioactive sludge.”
Nope: Alpacas don’t spit radioactive sludge. Sometimes they spit air; sometimes they spit some seriously malodorous green slime straight out of “Ghostbusters.” And mostly, Gail said, they spit at the guys who are trying to shear them. Nevertheless, Alpaca expert Lennie Foss of Rochester, New Hampshire told me, “We need to be aware of their natural predators. In the case of farms with large pasture areas, there may be guard llamas that help as well as guard livestock dogs.” But alpacas are protective of each other: Gail has noticed that after Snapple and Sherlock were born this past summer, the mothers would surround the newborn alpacas to shield them whenever she or her husband got anywhere near the babies.
Peter told me that my interest in their alpacas is common. Some days he has seen people drive by and set up their tripods to photograph them. Visitors invariably park by the fence for a moment to watch them on weekends. And why not? They’re the spitting image of a well-mannered herd. They clearly don’t mind the paparazzi – or even a bicyclist who has filled his iPhone with pictures of them.
* * *
If you want to learn more about alpacas, visit the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction later this month for the Green Mountain Alpaca Fall Spectacular. It runs Saturday and Sunday, October 19 – 20. There will be roughly 200 alpacas there, presentations about the animals, and vendors selling sweaters, blankets, and hats. Admission is $6. Children under 5 get in free.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 6, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” was published this summer.)
September 28, 2013
Seeing – and hearing – that voice behind bars
The other day I was thumbing casually through a brand new collection of poems, observations, and very brief essays by incarcerated Vermont women, “Hear Me, See Me,” when I found myself sitting upright, unexpectedly moved. I had just read a brief essay, “Junky Mom,” and saw this parenthetical beside the author’s byline: “Deceased 2012.” Last year. The author, KH, had ended her piece, “There is only time left to care about my children and not myself, and that means doing what it takes to keep my family together.”
I called Marybeth Christie Redmond, who edited the collection with Sarah W. Bartlett, to ask about KH. Redmond told me that she had died of a heroin overdose soon after her release from prison.
KH was one of about 150 female prisoners with whom Redmond and Bartlett have worked on their writing over the last three and a half years. The pair meets weekly with a dozen or a dozen and a half women at a time at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington. The purpose of the evening exercise isn’t to turn the prisoners into award-winning poets; rather it is, according to Redmond and Bartlett in their introduction to the collection, “empower voice and celebrate change.” The pair hope the collection will help readers “to hear, and therefore truly to see, the real person behind the rap sheet.” In other words, although these women are doing time for assault, drug dealing, robbery, theft, and even murder – they are indeed criminals – many have also suffered greatly from domestic violence, rape, incest, substance abuse, and mental illness. Many were victims before they victimized others.
But if the book has pieces in it that will leave you devastated, such as that essay left behind by the mother who died soon after her release, there also are poems that will leave you inspired. When Redmond told me her favorite poem in the collection, I realized it was the very same one that I had marked with a Post-it note because of the writer’s utter capitulation to her God: “I am here, broken before you,” begins the second verse.
“It was a powerful moment in which this brash, in-your-face Vermont woman I had known for three years faded, and before me stood a humble woman calling out to her God for mercy and healing,” Redmond said, recalling when the prisoner first shared the poem in the support group. “In that moment, I saw her complete surrender, an understanding that she needed to let go and ask for some kind of larger universal help. The writing exercise and then reading aloud her words had a profound change on her. She wasn’t the same after that.”
The writer, a woman named Tess, has now been out of prison for three months and works as a landscaper. Redmond and Bartlett still meet with her weekly – these days at a Winooski café – to check in and offer advice.
Redmond said that she and Bartlett never planned for their work with prisoners to wind up in a book. But a publishing friend read some of the inmates’ writing that the pair were sharing on their blog, www.writinginsidevt.com, and told them he would champion the idea – and thus the book was born.
“The project was never about going in and helping wounded women,” she added. “It was about learning from each other and growing in strength and voice – and as a community of women together.”
Indeed. The work isn’t always polished; some of it skirts precariously close to cliché. But then there are those pieces that accomplish everything Redmond and Bartlett wanted: They give voice to a population that, more times than not, has been silenced behind bars.
* * *
“Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write”
Edited by Marybeth Christie Redmond and Sarah W. Bartlett
Orbis Books. $25.00
235 pp.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on September 29, 2013. Chris’s new novel “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.
I called Marybeth Christie Redmond, who edited the collection with Sarah W. Bartlett, to ask about KH. Redmond told me that she had died of a heroin overdose soon after her release from prison.
KH was one of about 150 female prisoners with whom Redmond and Bartlett have worked on their writing over the last three and a half years. The pair meets weekly with a dozen or a dozen and a half women at a time at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington. The purpose of the evening exercise isn’t to turn the prisoners into award-winning poets; rather it is, according to Redmond and Bartlett in their introduction to the collection, “empower voice and celebrate change.” The pair hope the collection will help readers “to hear, and therefore truly to see, the real person behind the rap sheet.” In other words, although these women are doing time for assault, drug dealing, robbery, theft, and even murder – they are indeed criminals – many have also suffered greatly from domestic violence, rape, incest, substance abuse, and mental illness. Many were victims before they victimized others.
But if the book has pieces in it that will leave you devastated, such as that essay left behind by the mother who died soon after her release, there also are poems that will leave you inspired. When Redmond told me her favorite poem in the collection, I realized it was the very same one that I had marked with a Post-it note because of the writer’s utter capitulation to her God: “I am here, broken before you,” begins the second verse.
“It was a powerful moment in which this brash, in-your-face Vermont woman I had known for three years faded, and before me stood a humble woman calling out to her God for mercy and healing,” Redmond said, recalling when the prisoner first shared the poem in the support group. “In that moment, I saw her complete surrender, an understanding that she needed to let go and ask for some kind of larger universal help. The writing exercise and then reading aloud her words had a profound change on her. She wasn’t the same after that.”
The writer, a woman named Tess, has now been out of prison for three months and works as a landscaper. Redmond and Bartlett still meet with her weekly – these days at a Winooski café – to check in and offer advice.
Redmond said that she and Bartlett never planned for their work with prisoners to wind up in a book. But a publishing friend read some of the inmates’ writing that the pair were sharing on their blog, www.writinginsidevt.com, and told them he would champion the idea – and thus the book was born.
“The project was never about going in and helping wounded women,” she added. “It was about learning from each other and growing in strength and voice – and as a community of women together.”
Indeed. The work isn’t always polished; some of it skirts precariously close to cliché. But then there are those pieces that accomplish everything Redmond and Bartlett wanted: They give voice to a population that, more times than not, has been silenced behind bars.
* * *
“Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write”
Edited by Marybeth Christie Redmond and Sarah W. Bartlett
Orbis Books. $25.00
235 pp.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on September 29, 2013. Chris’s new novel “The Light in the Ruins,” was published in July.
September 22, 2013
My best work? Sometimes it’s along for the ride.
The biking season here in Vermont is winding down – at least for me it is. I’m not a rider who climbs on a bike in the snow or pedals intrepidly when the temperature is flirting with freezing. The latest in the year I have ridden is the second week in November.
I do some of my best writing while riding my bike, so the end of the season is an occupational hazard of sorts. Someone – I don’t recall who – once observed that the most important tool a writer can have is a walk. For me, it’s a ride. When I am alone on my bike somewhere between the Lake Champlain Bridge and the top of the Lincoln Gap, I am invariably thinking about whatever book I am writing.
Like many adults who log serious mileage on their bikes, there was a long period in my life when I never went near one. I rode a bike on occasion when I was 14 years old and living in Miami, Florida, and not again until I was in my late-thirties and living in Vermont. I resumed riding because I thought it would be good for me. It is. I had no idea it would also help me write.
There are a couple of reasons why I have found my bicycle such an important tool as a writer. One is the shower principle – a term I learned from the fictional Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock.” It has less to do with sweat than it does with clearing one’s mind. “The shower principle is a term scientists use to describe moments of inspiration that occur when the brain is distracted from the problem at hand – for example, when you’re showering,” Donaghy explains. I have no idea if this is a real term that any scientist outside of TV Land has ever used, but we all know there’s a certain truth to it. On my bike I have figured out how books will end and determined whether characters will live or die. My 2007 novel, “The Double Bind,” was born on a bike.
I always carry a small pad and a pen in my bike jersey pocket so I can scribble an idea or a rough draft of a scene.
But there is another reason why I believe bike rides have become so beneficial for my work: the tether that keeps me attached to the digital world is not quite so tight when I’m riding. The reality is that the Internet is largely inescapable, although many writers do try to escape it: I know one novelist who writes only on computers without functioning Wifi. I know another who has gone back to composing on an electric typewriter. I always have my phone with me when I ride and occasionally I tweet or post photos on Facebook or Pinterest. But I am less likely to check my email or see what other people are doing on the social networks when I’m taking a breather by the side of the road. As a result, my bike is one of the few places in the world where I am capable of dialing down my connection to the sound and fury and digital cacophony that marks the rest of my life.
Now, obviously I continue to write in the winter. My work is not a perennial that grows dormant. But over the last decade, I have felt a decided change in my seasonal rhythms. I tend to start more slowly in the morning in the winter; it takes longer to pick up speed and regain my narrative momentum. I miss the quiet that marks my rides and the fact I am so alone.
Yet I can’t imagine I’d ever move to a warmer climate just so I could extend my riding season. I love biking in Vermont. On any given day, I will see deer, alpacas, dairy cows, osprey, great flocks of Canadian geese, and even the occasional moose. Almost every road is two lanes. And there are general stores with wooden porches and great benches on which I can rest – and write.
Somehow the books will get finished. . .even in winter. Who knows? Maybe one December I’ll actually go for a walk.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on September 22. Chris’s new novel, ‘The Light in the Ruins,’ was published in July.)
I do some of my best writing while riding my bike, so the end of the season is an occupational hazard of sorts. Someone – I don’t recall who – once observed that the most important tool a writer can have is a walk. For me, it’s a ride. When I am alone on my bike somewhere between the Lake Champlain Bridge and the top of the Lincoln Gap, I am invariably thinking about whatever book I am writing.
Like many adults who log serious mileage on their bikes, there was a long period in my life when I never went near one. I rode a bike on occasion when I was 14 years old and living in Miami, Florida, and not again until I was in my late-thirties and living in Vermont. I resumed riding because I thought it would be good for me. It is. I had no idea it would also help me write.
There are a couple of reasons why I have found my bicycle such an important tool as a writer. One is the shower principle – a term I learned from the fictional Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock.” It has less to do with sweat than it does with clearing one’s mind. “The shower principle is a term scientists use to describe moments of inspiration that occur when the brain is distracted from the problem at hand – for example, when you’re showering,” Donaghy explains. I have no idea if this is a real term that any scientist outside of TV Land has ever used, but we all know there’s a certain truth to it. On my bike I have figured out how books will end and determined whether characters will live or die. My 2007 novel, “The Double Bind,” was born on a bike.
I always carry a small pad and a pen in my bike jersey pocket so I can scribble an idea or a rough draft of a scene.
But there is another reason why I believe bike rides have become so beneficial for my work: the tether that keeps me attached to the digital world is not quite so tight when I’m riding. The reality is that the Internet is largely inescapable, although many writers do try to escape it: I know one novelist who writes only on computers without functioning Wifi. I know another who has gone back to composing on an electric typewriter. I always have my phone with me when I ride and occasionally I tweet or post photos on Facebook or Pinterest. But I am less likely to check my email or see what other people are doing on the social networks when I’m taking a breather by the side of the road. As a result, my bike is one of the few places in the world where I am capable of dialing down my connection to the sound and fury and digital cacophony that marks the rest of my life.
Now, obviously I continue to write in the winter. My work is not a perennial that grows dormant. But over the last decade, I have felt a decided change in my seasonal rhythms. I tend to start more slowly in the morning in the winter; it takes longer to pick up speed and regain my narrative momentum. I miss the quiet that marks my rides and the fact I am so alone.
Yet I can’t imagine I’d ever move to a warmer climate just so I could extend my riding season. I love biking in Vermont. On any given day, I will see deer, alpacas, dairy cows, osprey, great flocks of Canadian geese, and even the occasional moose. Almost every road is two lanes. And there are general stores with wooden porches and great benches on which I can rest – and write.
Somehow the books will get finished. . .even in winter. Who knows? Maybe one December I’ll actually go for a walk.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on September 22. Chris’s new novel, ‘The Light in the Ruins,’ was published in July.)
September 14, 2013
A new leaf? Nope. An old one: Why we love fall.
It’s mid-September, that time of the year when the leaves begin their kaleidoscopic transformation in Arizona and tourists from around the world descend upon the state to savor the breathtaking foliage.
This fairy tale was brought to you by “Arizona Highway” magazine, which boasts in its October issue that autumn in Arizona is better than in Vermont. Make no mistake, I like Arizona. I like it a lot, especially the desert stretch of old Route 66 that links Seligman with the California border. Drive it at sunset.
But just because Flagstaff has sumac and aspens doesn’t mean that it offers leaf peepers a New England caliber fall. I asked readers last week what they love most about the Northeast’s phantasmagoric foliage extravaganza, and here is what they shared.
• Vicky Loven: “It’s the smell for sure. It’s the smell of things ending, yet even with your eyes closed you can inhale and bring the colors into your mind. It’s also a time when life around here winds down a notch. Summer folks leave and we rake our yards under crystal blue skies and wonder when the next smell will be that of snow.”
• Kristen McCarthy Farrow: “I grew up in Stowe and one of my favorite memories of foliage season is this. When I was ten years old, two boys I went to school with decided to make some cash while the leaf peepers were in town. They picked up red and yellow leaves, put them in Baggies, and sold them to the tourists on Main Street. I can’t remember what they charged, but it was maybe a dollar a bag. Hilarious!”
• Cherie Tinker: “Fall is for your secret Linus addiction – dragging out your favorite blanket and favorite flannel sheets and favorite pajamas from Vermont.”
• Jude Bond – who happens to be the Early Arts Coordinator for Burlington City Arts – shared a craft project that intrigued me because it’s colorful and involves rubber mallets: “I like to do this project when the first frost is threatening. I pick a variety of flowers the night before. In the classroom I usually work with one or two students at a time since it is very loud and they need supervision so no one gets hurt. We place the flowers blossom down on paper or smooth fabric (old white cotton bed sheets torn into squares work great), place waxed paper on top of them, and hammer away with rubber mallets. I have the kids wear safety goggles for protection from flying flower parts. The force of the hammering releases the pigment and makes a flower print on the paper or fabric. The children love wielding the rubber mallet and seeing the unexpected results of their effort. It’s loud and magical – two things preschoolers love.”
• Don Gale: “I always look forward to spending time in the woods working the sugarbush – repairing and adding lines. There’s the occasional chipmunk rummaging through the leaves. There are turkeys, ravens, deer, and even seldom seen moose and bears. The winds hint at the approaching winter. It’s peaceful. I feel closer to what life is all about – and God.”
• MaryLou DeCosta – bringing us back to the aroma of autumn: “When I was in the Army in 1979, I was at Fort Hood Texas for my first ever autumn away from New England. I was really missing the sight, sound, and smell of autumn. I received a large box in the mail, and went back to my room in the barracks to open it. Imagine opening a box of autumn in Texas. My father had gathered an entire box full of colored leaves and mailed them to me. As I was marveling over the wonder of it all, there was a knock at my door. When I answered, the young man standing there said, ‘This is going to sound crazy, but as I passed your door, I smelled autumn.’ I brought out the box and shared my New England Autumn in Texas with him. It was a magical day, thanks to my father.”
Now, Arizona has its scents, craft projects, and Proustian madeleines in the autumn, too. But Vermont remains the gold – and red and orange and purple – standard.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on September 15, 2013. Chris's new novel, "The Light in the Ruins," was published in July.)
This fairy tale was brought to you by “Arizona Highway” magazine, which boasts in its October issue that autumn in Arizona is better than in Vermont. Make no mistake, I like Arizona. I like it a lot, especially the desert stretch of old Route 66 that links Seligman with the California border. Drive it at sunset.
But just because Flagstaff has sumac and aspens doesn’t mean that it offers leaf peepers a New England caliber fall. I asked readers last week what they love most about the Northeast’s phantasmagoric foliage extravaganza, and here is what they shared.
• Vicky Loven: “It’s the smell for sure. It’s the smell of things ending, yet even with your eyes closed you can inhale and bring the colors into your mind. It’s also a time when life around here winds down a notch. Summer folks leave and we rake our yards under crystal blue skies and wonder when the next smell will be that of snow.”
• Kristen McCarthy Farrow: “I grew up in Stowe and one of my favorite memories of foliage season is this. When I was ten years old, two boys I went to school with decided to make some cash while the leaf peepers were in town. They picked up red and yellow leaves, put them in Baggies, and sold them to the tourists on Main Street. I can’t remember what they charged, but it was maybe a dollar a bag. Hilarious!”
• Cherie Tinker: “Fall is for your secret Linus addiction – dragging out your favorite blanket and favorite flannel sheets and favorite pajamas from Vermont.”
• Jude Bond – who happens to be the Early Arts Coordinator for Burlington City Arts – shared a craft project that intrigued me because it’s colorful and involves rubber mallets: “I like to do this project when the first frost is threatening. I pick a variety of flowers the night before. In the classroom I usually work with one or two students at a time since it is very loud and they need supervision so no one gets hurt. We place the flowers blossom down on paper or smooth fabric (old white cotton bed sheets torn into squares work great), place waxed paper on top of them, and hammer away with rubber mallets. I have the kids wear safety goggles for protection from flying flower parts. The force of the hammering releases the pigment and makes a flower print on the paper or fabric. The children love wielding the rubber mallet and seeing the unexpected results of their effort. It’s loud and magical – two things preschoolers love.”
• Don Gale: “I always look forward to spending time in the woods working the sugarbush – repairing and adding lines. There’s the occasional chipmunk rummaging through the leaves. There are turkeys, ravens, deer, and even seldom seen moose and bears. The winds hint at the approaching winter. It’s peaceful. I feel closer to what life is all about – and God.”
• MaryLou DeCosta – bringing us back to the aroma of autumn: “When I was in the Army in 1979, I was at Fort Hood Texas for my first ever autumn away from New England. I was really missing the sight, sound, and smell of autumn. I received a large box in the mail, and went back to my room in the barracks to open it. Imagine opening a box of autumn in Texas. My father had gathered an entire box full of colored leaves and mailed them to me. As I was marveling over the wonder of it all, there was a knock at my door. When I answered, the young man standing there said, ‘This is going to sound crazy, but as I passed your door, I smelled autumn.’ I brought out the box and shared my New England Autumn in Texas with him. It was a magical day, thanks to my father.”
Now, Arizona has its scents, craft projects, and Proustian madeleines in the autumn, too. But Vermont remains the gold – and red and orange and purple – standard.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on September 15, 2013. Chris's new novel, "The Light in the Ruins," was published in July.)
September 8, 2013
“Deluge” a riveting story of a shrew named Irene
If you live in the Northeast – especially Vermont and coastal New Jersey – you still remember vividly where you were the last weekend in August 2011, when a seriously dislikable shrew named Irene roared ashore. A hurricane when she hit New Jersey and a tropical storm when she reached Vermont, Irene devastated the two states. The storm pummeled the New Jersey coastline in the early hours of Sunday morning and then brutalized the Green Mountains in the afternoon.
My village, Lincoln, was spared. A swath of the single paved road into the town was destroyed by the surging New Haven River, which runs parallel to the pavement – imagine a giant taking a fifty foot bite out of the asphalt – but otherwise there was little damage. But nearby villages, notably Rochester, were devastated. Whole parts of our state were overwhelmed by some of the worst flooding in state history. (And we are a state with impressively horrific flooding in our past. Exhibit A? 1927. Exhibit B? 1938. Exhibit C? 1998. There are others. You get the point.)
Now Rutland journalist Peggy Shinn has given us a gripping history of Irene’s effect on Vermont in her first book, “Deluge.” And what a story it is. Focusing on a few of the hardest hit villages, especially Rochester and Pittsfield in central Vermont and Wilmington in the south, she captures with you-are-there clarity the spectacular horror of the flashfloods that uprooted buildings and carried away cars, and then, in the weeks that followed, the inspiring ways that Vermonters banded together, took care of one another, and rebuilt the state. It’s absolutely riveting.
What makes the book so difficult to put down is her cinematic recreation of the cataclysm. First, there is her chronicle of the rising waters. It’s not merely the bridges that are reduced to kindling by raging whitewater or the vehicles tossed about like Matchbox cars: It’s the human terror. There is Heather Grev in Pittsfield, waist deep in surging water that minutes earlier had been her front yard, unable to move and hanging desperately onto a rope. Meanwhile, the nearby Subaru is carried away. There are Mike and Mike Garofano, a father and son from Rutland – the father a part of the city’s Public Works Department – driving off to check an intake valve that’s a part of the reservoir and meeting a nightmarish storm surge on their way there.
But there are also the stories of how the state recovered, and accounts of the heroism and selflessness that marked the effort. There is Craig Mosher of Killington on the phone with a state official in the wake of the destruction, planning to use his own bulldozer to start rebuilding U.S. 4 near Mendon. Mosher owns an excavating company. When the official informs Mosher that he is not an approved state contractor, he replies, “I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you what I’m doing.” Then, pure and simple, “he hung up and began rebuilding U.S. 4.”
Assisting him was one of Mosher’s employees, Mark Bourassa of Rutland. How badly did Bourassa want to help? When Mosher asked him how in the world he had reached him – the usual roads, by this point, were long gone – Bourassa replied he had driven south on Vermont 103 (damaged, but not impassable) to Ludlow, turned north on Vermont 100, and then driven until the road ended in a washout in Plymouth. There he left behind his truck, walked six miles, climbed across a second washout, “borrowed” another truck he found waiting on the other side, drove it a mile until the road ended again in yet another river-carved chasm, and finally walked the rest of the way to Mosher.
Shinn’s book is filled with tales just like this. It’s not merely a gripping account of the storm; it made me proud, once again, to be a Vermonter.
* * *
“Deluge: Tropical Storm Irene”
by Peggy Shinn
University Press of New England. $27.95
217 pp.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on September 8, 2013. Chris’s new novel, The Light in the Ruins, was published this summer.
My village, Lincoln, was spared. A swath of the single paved road into the town was destroyed by the surging New Haven River, which runs parallel to the pavement – imagine a giant taking a fifty foot bite out of the asphalt – but otherwise there was little damage. But nearby villages, notably Rochester, were devastated. Whole parts of our state were overwhelmed by some of the worst flooding in state history. (And we are a state with impressively horrific flooding in our past. Exhibit A? 1927. Exhibit B? 1938. Exhibit C? 1998. There are others. You get the point.)
Now Rutland journalist Peggy Shinn has given us a gripping history of Irene’s effect on Vermont in her first book, “Deluge.” And what a story it is. Focusing on a few of the hardest hit villages, especially Rochester and Pittsfield in central Vermont and Wilmington in the south, she captures with you-are-there clarity the spectacular horror of the flashfloods that uprooted buildings and carried away cars, and then, in the weeks that followed, the inspiring ways that Vermonters banded together, took care of one another, and rebuilt the state. It’s absolutely riveting.
What makes the book so difficult to put down is her cinematic recreation of the cataclysm. First, there is her chronicle of the rising waters. It’s not merely the bridges that are reduced to kindling by raging whitewater or the vehicles tossed about like Matchbox cars: It’s the human terror. There is Heather Grev in Pittsfield, waist deep in surging water that minutes earlier had been her front yard, unable to move and hanging desperately onto a rope. Meanwhile, the nearby Subaru is carried away. There are Mike and Mike Garofano, a father and son from Rutland – the father a part of the city’s Public Works Department – driving off to check an intake valve that’s a part of the reservoir and meeting a nightmarish storm surge on their way there.
But there are also the stories of how the state recovered, and accounts of the heroism and selflessness that marked the effort. There is Craig Mosher of Killington on the phone with a state official in the wake of the destruction, planning to use his own bulldozer to start rebuilding U.S. 4 near Mendon. Mosher owns an excavating company. When the official informs Mosher that he is not an approved state contractor, he replies, “I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you what I’m doing.” Then, pure and simple, “he hung up and began rebuilding U.S. 4.”
Assisting him was one of Mosher’s employees, Mark Bourassa of Rutland. How badly did Bourassa want to help? When Mosher asked him how in the world he had reached him – the usual roads, by this point, were long gone – Bourassa replied he had driven south on Vermont 103 (damaged, but not impassable) to Ludlow, turned north on Vermont 100, and then driven until the road ended in a washout in Plymouth. There he left behind his truck, walked six miles, climbed across a second washout, “borrowed” another truck he found waiting on the other side, drove it a mile until the road ended again in yet another river-carved chasm, and finally walked the rest of the way to Mosher.
Shinn’s book is filled with tales just like this. It’s not merely a gripping account of the storm; it made me proud, once again, to be a Vermonter.
* * *
“Deluge: Tropical Storm Irene”
by Peggy Shinn
University Press of New England. $27.95
217 pp.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on September 8, 2013. Chris’s new novel, The Light in the Ruins, was published this summer.
