Five Blasts of the Horn

        Five blasts of a ship's horn this morning by the mouth of the Canal, in the early lambent light after the thunderstorm: danger or distress.

Living the Finnish Dream; or, How to Stop Worrying and Leave Academic Unpleasants Aside

     Well, it's been a long, fierce winter here on the western shore of Buttermilk Bay -- trying, even for me, who does love winter like a lost sibling, alive to all its wildness..... But even still, it was a long one. But with its long snows, its near-daily skis through wintry pines, its fishing in ponds and trout streams, and now, the skis are traded for a canoe -- I have been living, in short, the Finnish Dream.

    

     The snow was real this year. We had frequent and heavy snowfall, most famously with the Great February Blizzard of 2013 (what some children of  the postmodern digital empire have taken to calling "Nemo" -- a frivolity to which I shall never stoop!), but with several more storms and snows besides. I cannot remember them all. There must have been a dozen. Most recently, about two weekends ago, we were forecast to have two to four inches here in southern Plymouth County; instead, 9 inches fell in my yard. At the height of the storm, three to three-and-a-half inches were falling per hour, driven savagely by the northeast winds as they howled over the pine-clad hills of Plymouth. It was a very fine kind of night. The storm ended by about 2 o'clock in the morning, the stars came out, and the next day dawned sunny, warm, almost Spring-like. I had left my skis back up at my parent's house, thinking them done for the winter. But this last burst of snow surprised me, band after band rushing up Buzzard's Bay and whipping into the March-battered shingled cottages; so my Father was kind enough to bring down the skis to me, and we went for a fine drive among the Plymouth Woods on Bourne Road, where he'd never been. The emptiness of the country, and the snowy fullness of the pine hills like something from Dr. Zhivago, enchanted him greatly.
     

      For this is a feature of the Plymouth Pine Hills -- being elevated several hundred feet above the sea on two sides, they form a kind of topographic trap for snow. Thus, in this particular storm, as I mentioned, nine inches fell in my yard on a mound of land beside Buttermilk Bay. Across Red Brook Road, in the woods where I skied that afternoon, themselves the southernmost extension of the vast Plymouth Woods, at least 13 inches seemed to have fallen (judging by my ski pole), and in places more like a foot-and-a-half of snow covered the hardy low-bush blueberries beneath the pines and oaks. And this within a half mile! This proportion was fairly typical throughout the winter. If a foot fell in my yard, then two or more feet would lie in the woods. During the Great Blizzard, when I had about 22 to 24" in my yard, 3 or 4 feet covered the woods, with more snow as you get farther from the coast.

         

     But now the days are warming; in fact, today was the first positively warm day of the year so far, and tomorrow is forecast to hit 70F. Fine! I spent all day today up at my Folks' house, getting the canoe ready, and drove it (slowly) down here late this afternoon. The hour was late and the chill was coming on, so I elected to take it out tomorrow rather than this evening. Even so, I took a walk by Buttermilk Bay, where the swans were friskeing and the first striped bass (I do believe, I do heartily hope) jumping, out on the gloaming waters. The great blue herons standing sentinel for the first alewives swimming up the brooks. Life is returning to the world.

    And it's in this sense, of resurrection, that I've been cutting down on life-denying things, that I'm learning to leave Facebook and its bland, repetitive, self-congratulatory group-think behind. I will also say that the format of the FaceBook Empire is well-suited to those who use words, especially written words, for a living; and, as such, it tends to attract more than its fair share of attorneys, and, in my circle at least, academics.

   The latter don't come off well. Instead, they seem animated by a combination of several unpleasant urges: they seek to "perform" their work publicly, a highly competitive action. They seek also to enforce a certain intellectual uniformity -- the subject matter is unimportant compared with the enforcement. Thus, one day it might be the desirability of a certain extracurricular academic program that ALL RIGHT-THINKING PEOPLE MUST AGREE TO! And the next day, it might be a universal injunction that VIRTUE SUBSISTS IN HATING BOOK XYZ because its author, more than forty years ago, did not anticipate scholarly trends current in the early 21st century. Or, when all else, fails, they'll just make fun of the place you come from. Lastly, though not finally, academics on Facebook are prone to a kind of hypocritical outrage -- OUTRAGE! -- at the world. They will complain for years about the hierarchies of our society and then cheer like trained seals when one of their own* advances up the greasy pole. (When I say 'their own', we should not confuse the brassy public celebration of a colleague's success with the existence of true community or even true sentiment or feeling; after all, there is the infinite audience out there, waiting.... A generation of extroverted braggarts, devoid of spirit, desperate and hollow and -- sad.) They are negative in a very determined, I-will-find-the-bad fashion, like teenagers. They find good cheer, as well as Nature, quite alien.

        But what is most intolerable about them is the combination of a professed leftism with an absolutely cloistered, sacerdotal innocence of life among the People. They are as about as divorced from American society, and about as useful to it, as was the Church of Rome from the life of Europe on the eve of Reformation.

       And they had best worry -- for there are now legions of radical parish priests -- to continue our analogy -- out among an immiserated and grumbling populace; and who do the cardinals and bishops of the department meetings think these latter-day John Balls** will side with when the great revolt comes? With them?

      Ha!

** John Ball, (d. 1381), English priest instrumental in the Peasant's Revolt.