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Voices of the Northwest
Life on the Northern Range: Spring Metamorphosis
All good things to come must begin with us as one and continue with us as many.
By Kimball Lewis
Posted on Feb 28, 2003 |
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| "Die Kleinen Pferde (Little Horses)," 1912 by Franz Marc thanks to the Franz Marc Gallery, an art and animal advocacy site |
Winter Comes
by Kimball Lewis
How could we know the thorny rose would bloom upon the morrow
And give us through eloquence a smile upon our face
Then turn and flee to leave us want for yesterday's tomorrow
And offer up a useless stem to occupy its space
I live in an area still remote enough that I cannot get cable or a signal from a conventional antenna. This was intentional. I wanted isolation and solitude. No papers to read, no sirens to wail, no more cruelty or abuse. Ignorance is a haven and I am living in her virtual Bed and Breakfast. I have read up on my self adopted hero, Earnest Hemmingway. I visited his old home down in Ketchum, Idaho and attended an annual gathering of authors who posthumously honor the now departed literary master. We all have goals in this life and sometimes they take drastic turns in one direction or another previously uncharted. My goal is to read more Hemmingway and adopt some sense of style in my writing that will do him justice.
Last week I caved in to modern desire. I am not an anarchist nor am I anti social. I am a patriot and a creature of social habit. And so it goes that I decided I missed my Television. I decided to call the folks that bring satellite TV to your home. The man came out and put a dish, just a little larger that a dinner plate, on the side of my house. He smiled and said, "Now you can find out what's going on in the world" and he drove off kicking up mud and snow and old horse manure.
So here I am in my room, by the fire and it is dark and much too cold outside for any practical purpose. I put down a novel I have been reading about the life of Teddy Roosevelt. I have a television once again. I will become informed and up to speed on current events. No longer will I be insolated or isolated from what is happening around me.
It's 9:00 p.m. I fire up the set and sit down with a dog on each side and commence to immerse my mind in whatever the TV can throw at me.
My first stop: A program called the Anna Nicole Show. I sit in utter amazement as some bleach blond idiot dressed is some hideous bed-spread sputters incoherently at anything and anyone that comes within earshot of her. Nothing coming out of her non-stop shrill whining voice makes any sense. She curses and mutters vague obscenities randomly. Most of what she says is edited and so most of the program is a series of bleeps although you don't need the latest edition of "Hooked on Phonics" to see what a hard consonant like F looks like coming off of someone's lips.
Is this what America demands now? According to the TV Guide, it is exactly what we demand. Another channel talks about some people paying homeless drunken men to stage fights with one another. I feel like a time traveler. Surely, I must have accidentally walked through some time warp and wound up in a different place.
Now I am compelled to "channel surf." Channel surfing is a largely male species specific function and one which I had almost forgotten. Thank God for the Television. Now I can surf again. I flip the dial to a program called Star Dates. Here's the guy that used to play Eddie Muster on the Adams Family. They've fixed him up on a date with some totally smart ass Malibu wanna-be transplant from Missouri and their date is at the County Fair. Wow. What have I been missing.
I flip the channel again. I land on the Headline News Network. Hey, this is my chance to see what is actually happening around me. I listen for ten minutes as they recap the latest breaking news. All the while a sign flashes at the bottom of the screen in red letters "Terror Alert High." The anchor starts out with War and Rumors of War. Murder on the Gaza Strip. Suicide Bombings in Israel. Ebola Plague in Africa, Blizzard and then flooding in the Mid Atlantic. Famine for various regions and refugees. Michael Jackson holds his baby from a balcony. ( You have got to be pulling my leg, is this news?) A nightclub fire kills 97 souls at a Great White Concert. Tens, no, hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in protest of a war that may happen regardless of their symbolic civil disobedience. North Korea has nukes and South Korea is pissed. Some former Soviet controlled states cannot account for enough plutonium to make enough bombs to blow up the world. The Space Shuttle Crashed. A woman in California has been missing since Christmas Eve and is due to give birth. Her husband is a suspect. Jeraldo Rivera says the Government is keeping tabs on every library book we check out in case one of us is trying engage in subversive activity. Stone Philips says the Earth will almost certainly be hit by an Asteroid or Meteorite but he can't say quite when. Connie Chung says we all hate each other. Martha Stewart (she was a hottie back in the 70's) is under a federal probe for insider trading. I just knew someone would probe her sooner or later. STOP!
I shut the television off and pick up my Novel. "Teddy Roosevelt, The Last Romantic."I take a sip of good whiskey and it burns the back of my cold throat. Outside the wind howls as the horses huddle in the barn. Inside, the fire crackles and the dogs snore. I see the river running wild and hear the eerie whistle of the wind slashing through bare tree limbs. Looking out my window right now, with the wind chill below zero, and the bleak, stark, cold hard darkness of a winter night, it is hard to imagine that the barren branches will soon be covered with blossoms.
It is hard to imagine the front yard full of green grass and chirping crickets and children riding by on horses as they visit for the summer from who knows where. Itís hard to imagine the picnics and weddings and late night cocktail parties that will spill out onto verandaís and patios of old white farm houses. It's hard to imagine the parades and swimming and ice cream and snow cones. How could any of these wonderful things come to pass when outside all I see is black and white, night and snow, ice and wind, cold and shadow? How could the butterfly wing its way through the summer breeze? How could the lamb see spring or the cow calve or mare foal? What earthly thing of any good at all could come to be in the shadow of such harshness?
Yet I am certain that these things will come to fruition. They will come as they always have and everything will look much different.
No, it is not my intention to hide from all of this worlds ills and pretend they will magically disappear. But I know that I don't need a television to know there are still wrongs to make right and wounds of the soul and of the flesh to heal. There are hearts to mend and mouths to feed and children to cloth.
I know that right here in my little corner of the world, population darn near nothing, that good will prevail and in the end, wrong will be made right. Wars and plagues and floods and other such things will come and go. But humanity in her great strength will persevere and all will be made spring. The man on TV takes 10 minutes to tell me what is wrong with this world and the lives of fools are played out on shows designed to entertain those people too far removed from reality to realize how ridiculous it all is.
Spring will be here and so will I. It occurs to me that there has always been, and will always be wars, plague, murder, famine, fires, blizzards and random acts of good and evil. Maybe it is because we are a community, small and large, local and global, that people in their souls, will always reach out to one another. So long as the masses of good outnumber those of ill nature and intent, humanity will overcome and prevail. There is no thing that can extinguish the lantern of charity and hope. So long as we each remember that all good things to come must begin with us as one and continue with us as many. The man on the TV will be no more than a bearer of bad tidings. We will carry the good news amongst us in our hearts and in our deeds. We will be as spring, renewing ourselves, being hope, being the change we want to see.
Spring is weeks away and the frozen pond down the lane will thaw. The horses will shed their matted winter coats and become shinny and beautiful. The flowers will erupt into waves of endless color and the television will sit in the corner, relegated to its new designation as a tabletop for a Remington bronze
Kimball Lewis is a writer and retired leader of animal welfare organizations. He is always an advocate for creatures, two footed and four footed.
Visit more of Kimball stories:
A Christmas Eve Letter
A Thanksgiving Letter
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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