Chapter in book PICKING UP THE FLUTE, by John Elder

Leslie Marmon Silko, reflecting on the myths and chroni­ cles adhering to boulders, buttes, arroyos, and other stony land­ marks of northern New Mexico, has remarked how in an oral tradition one version of a given tale often corrects or fi.Ils out another way of telling it. lt is inevitable that in a long-settled landscape like Ireland or the desert around her own people’s home at Laguna Pueblo, a community’s foundational tales will differ in dramatic ways depending on the identity and agenda of the teller. But as long as the story-telling remains a collec­ tive enterprise that focuses on enduring elements of the shared landscape, such varying accounts can combine to reinforce the people’s sense of identity. As Silko writes, “The ancient Pueblo people sought a communal truth, not an absolute. For them this truth lived somewhere within the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points, outright contradictions tangling with old feuds and village rivalries.” In the Burren, similarly, walking up in company to inspect those mysterious marks by Colman’s cave unfolds the map for a widening conversation.

Two days after our outing to the cave, Moya and I were both heading to Galway to participate in a  celebration  of Tim Robinson’s writing and maps. lt turned  out  to  be the first of several such programs, during the four years covered by this memoir, that marked the completion of his remark­ able Connemara trilogy and also surveyed Robinson’s projects leading up to that achievement. Professor Jane Conroy of the National University of Ireland at Galway was a lead organizer of the entire sequence of events. Though Rita was not able to

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join me on this occasion I still wanted to make the trip because of the ways Robinson had deepened my appreciation for the affinity between the whipsawed beauty of western Ireland and that of the Green Mountains.

Both regions experienced dramatic depopulation in the middle of the nineteenth-century, with emigration setting the seal, in one case, on famine and starvation; in the other, on heedless deforestation followed quickly by the American Civil War. In this part of Connacht and in Vermont alike, settlements and farms languished in the second half of the nineteenth cen­ tury and the first half of the twentieth. In their quiet, old-fash­ ioned character, though, both regions also came to symbolize a refreshing alternative to the rapid pace of modern life. This was the surprising upshot of large-scale abandonment. Robinson’s writing insists, as noted earlier, that western Ireland should continue to be understood as a wounded landscape as well as a beautiful retreat. lt is this perspective on the mysterious align­ ment of loss and recovery, suffering and compassion, that has most illuminated kindred realities in the ecological and cul­ tural topography of my Vermont home.

Much of the program  celebrating  Robinson  took  place

within the thick stone walls of the Druid Theatre in Galway’s historical center. As writers, artists, and scholars rose one after another to talk about how his work had enriched their understanding of Ireland’s land and culture, Tim and Mairéad sat decorously in the fron( row-holding their famously dry humor on a short leash and restraining their fidgets amid what must have sometimes seemed an interminable swell of praise.

Finally, when it was his turn to stand  up, he delivered  a talk

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called ”A Land Without Shortcuts:’ While his books on the Aran Islands and Connemara had asserted that loss and dislo­ cation needed to be incorporated into any authentic affirma­ tion of the landscape’s meaning, Robinson was not focusing now on relies or memories. He was concerned, rather, about immediate dangers to fragile rural beauty from renewable-en­ ergy projects motivated by the dangers of global warming. I was especially struck by his talk, and challenged by it, because of its connection to controversies over wind power that are currently rending the environmental communities in both Ireland and Vermont.

I have long been, and continue to be, a passionate advocate of substituting renewable energy for fossil fuels. But Robinson’s way of addressing the costs of such an approach helped me open my heart more fully to the concerns of Vermont neigh­ bors with whom I disagreed about the installation of twenty-one wind turbines on a ridge in northern Vermont. His attention to loss in our rural regions’ present and future as well as in our past also offered a more encompassing outlook on these wounded and recovering landscapes. Such a broad perspective suggested the possibility for respectful commu­ nication between what might have seemed sternly fortified counter-positions. Furthermore, coming so soon after the walk to Saint Colman’s cave, his talk reverberated for me with the conflicting versions of Moya Cannon’s story.

At the outset of his talk, Robinson described without res­ ervation the crisis of climate change: “The globe is warming; we are facing into an era of floods, fires, famines; little doubt about it:’ Such direct acknowledgement of my own deepest

Foregone Hillsides

fears helped me to be more receptive to his main point. Namely, that renewable energy installations in Connemara were bringing “a great leap forward in the mechanization of the countryside, unparalleled since the Industrial Revolution.” With reference to new modes of energy production being pro­ posed by Ireland’s Green Party, he said that,”Leaving aside the unavoidable pollution caused by their manufacture, trans­ port, installation and decommissioning, they are in operation grossly visually polluting. And where they go, no one else can go. They mean locked gates, culverted streams, barbed wire, foregone hillsides. These are the spoil-heaps of wind-mining.” Referring to climate change and the development of renewable energy at the industrial scale as two “ditches” between which we were now skidding, he asked “… how much of the world do we have to destroy in order to save it?” Robinson’s question was not rhetorical-a salvo launched in order to score  points in a debate. Rather, it described a stark dilemma-neither indulging in polemic nor proposing a solution. Robinson’s talk struck me as being essentially a lamentation for changes in a beloved landscape.

In Vermont, debate over recent wind projects has not always been marked by respectful recognition of opponents’ perspectives. I have been angered as a supporter of wind-en­ ergy by the tendency of some opponents to describe politi­ cians and environmental groups supporting such installations as corrupt, and as complic,ït in the corporate machinations of major players like Québec’s Gaz Metro. But my own hot dis­ agreement with such arguments drew on feelings of distress far broader than the current controversy. Namely, the many

PICKING UP THE FLUTE

visible, and cumulative, changes in Vermont’s climate and for­ ests. It’s equally true, though, that people who object to such installations feel wounded and betrayed by fellow environmen­ talists’ apparent disregard of the ecological and scenic costs of erecting lines of massive wind turbines on largely undeveloped ridgelines. In addition, the alliance of our state agencies with a major Canadian utility company made them feel, as Meliboeus did, that their mountains of home had been expropriated by distant gods. This local story of polarization and regret was the context within which I listened to Tim Robinson’s talk. It led me to speculate about whether, for a community as for an individual, shared grief might be able to offer a path beyond divisions.

One anecdote incorporated in Robinson’s talk particularly struck me:

A few years ago I flew out to the Aran Islands to par­ ticipate in a debate on a proposed windfarm there. On the same flight was a vigorous young enthusiast from an alternative technologies firm. When we extricated our­ selves from the cramped little flying pram of a plane and stretched ourselves in the island  breeze, which  carried a thousand miles of ocean and a million wildflowers to our nostrils, he sniffed it and said with delectation, ‘Ah! Kilowatt-hours!’

That comical but at the same time chilling story recalled a passage from Book X of Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve have fallen and are about to be expelled from the Garden of Eden. Labor, suffering, and mortality are the lot bequeathed to their descendants-which is to say, us. Just at this juncture in the

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story, Sin and Death are following their father Satan into the newly fallen world, travelling on a highway that Death ham­ mers out of the surrounding Chaos with his mace as they pro­ ceed. Like a vulture circling over the field where there is soon to be a battle, Milton writes, the “meager shadow” Death can already smell our unborn generations. We are for him just so many “living carcasses”:”… with delight he snuffed the smell / Of mortal change on earth … / His nostril wide into the murky air, / Sagacious of his quarry from afar.”

A scent in the air today foretells how the seasons and lands of vulnerable rural worlds may also soon be eaten up. Robinson’s talk spoke both to those who are horrified by the impact of industrial scale wind turbines on delicate landscapes and fragile, natural communities and  to  others  transfixed by the evidence of Vermont’s seasons, weather, and wildlife already being impaired by climate change, with the prospect of worse losses to corne. Might we recently estranged Vermonters meet again at this keen edge of grief? The sorrow within Tim Robinson’s talk in Galway helped defuse any impulse I might have had to charge furiously into the Vermont controversy over renewable energy. Instead, it prompted to me to ask whether we might find, if not unanimity, at least something approaching Silko’s web of associated narratives. It rattled my controver­ sial momentum, just as King Guaire’s retainers came clanging to a halt before the hermit’s cave. I returned to Vermont from this brief trip to the Burren and Galway prepared to walk for­ ward quietly into our suffering landscape, in the company of neighbors whose passionate response to the new wind turbines might have seemed the opposite of my own.

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i:::””‘I So it came to pass, on a morning in May, that I was climbing up to the Lowell ridgeline with Tom Slayton, whose commen­ tary about the wind-controversy there for Vermont Public Radio had recently caught my attention. In calling for a mor­ atorium on further renewable-energy developments on ridge­ lines, Slayton made a proposai with which I strongly differed. But he also conveyed his love of that landscape in a way devoid of scorn or polemic. His central point was that our sense of place in Vermont is inseparable from our unspoiled moun­ tains. Like Robinson, he knew enough to take climate change very seriously; like him, he also feared that attempts to mitigate it might in some cases cause grave damage to the landscape we were trying to save. I have known and admired Tom Slayton for many years, and we arranged to go together to see the changes to the Lowell Mountains through each other’s eyes.

We set out after breakfast from his home in Montpelier and drove to the Nelson Farm in its lovely hanging valley above the town of Albany. The construction areas for the project, on a portion of the Lowell Ridge directly above the Nelsons’ pas­ tures and ponds, are off-limits to the general public now. But the family had flagged a trail up through their sugarbush that still took us to where we could see the graveled terraces being constructed for each of the massive turbines. These were of course much more massive than the foundation for any house or barn. One anti-Lowell Wind activist had described them as looking like ancient sacrificial sites, with the mountain itself as the victim.

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Most visible for residents in nearby towns like Craftsbury are the white, slowly turning blades of the turbines. I myself find them beautiful, a feeling reinforced by an urgent desire to see our state make a more significant turning of its own toward renewable energy. What is by far the more notice­ able impact up on the ridgeline, however, is the gravel being thickly applied at locations that have been bulldozed, and sometimes blasted, level. Two other serious effects can readily be inferred even when not directly observed. One is the sev­ ering of wildlife corridors by these emphatic breaks in the canopy and on the forest floor, while the other is a disrup­ tion of springs feeding into the Black River watershed. These are grievous losses for the natural fabric of  our  region. I must hold them in my mind, balancing my constant aware­ ness that the sugar maples dominating those upper  woods and anchoring its ecosystem will be among the first species eradicated if the next decade brings no substantial abate­ ment of the carbon flowing into our planet’s atmosphere. The lacy hemlocks gracing the ridges’ rivulets will also certainly disappear.

Though the morning began bright and dry, rain was spat­

tering clown on us by the time we hiked back out of those woods in the early afternoon. Such shifting weather created a refreshing breeze that drew up the slope throughout our hike, giving us a respite from the mosquitoes and deer flies that can sometimes make exploring, Vermont’s woods during the late spring and early summer a frantic experience. After arriving at the ridgeline, we had timidly transgressed the heavily marked boundaries, stepping  into  a grey world  across  which trucks

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sped and heavy earth-movers rumbled. After gazing at this activity in silence for a few minutes, we turned our steps down­ hill again toward the Nelsons’ farm.

Because of the recent completion of one cycle of federal funding for such renewable energy projects, we may soon have an economically determined moratorium on more major installations for the foreseeable future. If that happens, lovers of the Vermont landscape must  make of this an opportunity to move beyond our disagreements and assess  the ecolog­ ical and social costs (both here and elsewhere) of petroleum, coal, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear generation, as well as of emerging renewable technologies. Since all of them do have costs, and serious ones, we should also redouble our efforts at conservation and revisit our policies in the areas of housing, education, agriculture, and  transportation  with  energy  use in mind. In order to avoid a fatal skid into either of Tim Robinson’s two ditches, this would be a good time to stop the speeding car and take a walk together as we deliberate about our alternatives. Inhabitants of North America, Europe and the Pacifie Rim, especially, need to reconsider our  profli­ gate ways. Sorne of the most devastating impacts of climate change have corne to impoverished populations, like those in Bangladesh and the mountains of Pakistan, who bear essen­ tially no responsibility for global warming. Bill McKibben, after focusing on such injustices in his book Eaarth, con­ cludes by urging that we learn “to live on the world we’ve cre­ ated-lightly, carefully, gracefully:’

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1:::::’9 As we walked away from the sounds of heavy machinery we stopped from time to time to admire some of the early wild­ flowers in the woods. The dominant color was white-the bril­ liant white petals of bunchberry, the delicate sprays of Canada Mayflower and foamflower. All along our path arose blackberry brambles too with their own profusion of white petals. I was reminded by them of the strong affinity between traditional music in western Ireland and in our part of New England, with “Blackberry Blossom” being one tune cherished in both places. I also thought about another white flower blooming at the edge of our Vermont woods in this season. Shadblow. I had been eying it all spring.

When shadblow blossoms in May, it marks Vermont’s long-awaited turning from the long weeks of mud season toward the delicacy, color, and brevity of spring. A native of our region, shadblow (Amelanchier canadensis) most often appears around here as a leggy tree of twelve to twenty feet in height, growing in sparse woods or beside wet ground. Like those of apples and many other members of the rose family, its flowers have five white petals. But these are so slender and delicate that the crown of a tree in full blossom looks less like a cloud than like a drift of smoke-clinging together for just a moment before dissipating. To a hiker, or to a distracted driver who happens to glance froµi a car window at the right  time, a flowering shadblow is all the more arresting because of its lovely recessiveness. Its emotional impact is less reminiscent of

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remarks that “Island of Woods” is an ancient name for Ireland, though she goes on to add that today a different name like “Land of Green Pastures” might be more fitting. In Ireland,  as in Scotland, almost all the forests were destroyed long ago. Both the ship-building Vikings who settled on that island so early and the British Navy were avid for the famous Irish oaks, while centuries of grazing sheep guaranteed that the razed woods would not be returning.

As I’ve commented more than once, it’s important to press lightly on the names of Irish tunes, many of which seem either whimsical or downright baffling. But in this case, especially given Liz Carroll’s own comments, it’s hard to avoid feeling the relevance of her title to the endangered forests of Vermont. They have recovered strongly both from the clear-cutting that made Vermont an ecological wasteland in the early nineteenth century and from the sheep industry that briefly flourished thereafter. But today climate change ensures that the forests as we have known them will not survive.

Hiking in the Lowell Range with Tom Slayton I kept hearing the echoes of those first three descending notes in “Island of Woods.” Were they a lamentation, a eulogy? What tunes might they flow into next in this landscape of loss so much vaster than the span of human mortality? Though the rhythm of “Island of Woods” seems almost to falter in those opening phrases, it then recovers the stately tempo of a slow reel and the triplets with which it finishes feel defiant. What the music tells us is that those vanished forests may at least still flourish in our hearts, and in this tune.

Music is required if we are to move forward resolutely, in

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the face of challenges that first make us falter, and in order to foster community when disagreements push neighbors apart. How else has Ireland endured such a history? We require, today, an activism that sings of what it loves. When hiking through Vermont’s woods in late fall I have often recalled Frost’s “Reluctance;’ which ends with this stanza:

Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?

I understand that impulse to resist even unavoidable change, lest too  ready an acceptance  seem a betrayal. But,  as the poet himself cornes to affirm over the half-century of his writing that follows this poem, our only choice is finally to move forward into the next season while doing our best to serve and celebrate what we hold most dear.

/;::::””/ Disruption of ecological sequences that were once attuned to what Linnaeus called “the floral calendar” is one of the griefs of climate instability. But beloved flowers do continue to return, offering gauges not on,ly for what we have lost but also for what endures, and what may be restored. Such recovery will neither be quick nor complete but it may nonetheless orient us to a more sustainable vision of community with what David

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