A Rain of Frogs ~ Aldo Leopoldand the Bristleheads

A Rain of Frogs ~ Aldo and the Bristleheads
Odd Cowgirls Get the Reds
by Rob Hunter

Aldo as in Aldo Leopold, a naturalist who celebrated the forgotten places where small animals live their lives. And the Rush Limbaughs and the Glenn Becks, the Pat Robertsons that country wives frighten children with in the 21^st Century—those small scampering things that likewise live and quiver in their dark places, the gatekeepers filtering and defining popular taste—here there be bimbos. The thought came this morning that I had survived both childhood and Wisconsin: America as a police state, albeit flatulent and forgetful. And the zeitgeist of my childhood, grinning pitchmen slavering through the etheric sleet of the family cathode ray tube, lived on in our Brave New Millennium.

As I struggled with Latin, algebra, zits and nocturnal emissions, Wisconsin was discovering TV pundits: not the overstuffed bristleheads of the 21^st Century, but Bishop Sheen, Arthur Godfrey, Lawrence Welk and Ed Sullivan as our spiritual guides, the gateways filtering and defining popular taste. Joe McCarthy was the senator and Mel Laird ², later to be Dick Nixon's Secretary of War, was our congressman. Tailgunner Joe was a loudmouth and a drunk, but Mel did his homework and became the yardstick with which I would measure future politicians. I worked as a teenage pin boy at the alleys behind Antigo's Hotel Quigley and took a shortcut to work through the aisles of the occupied rooms. Mel would be there, packing up after his regular constituent hours at the Post Office. His door was always left open—a congressman must be above reproach—and he made his own bed before housekeeping got there. He used it to spread out the daily newspapers for clipping. “Hiya, kid,” from Mel.
“Hello, Mr. Laird,” from me.

[Author's note: There was no Fox News in 1955, television hardly at all north of Green Bay. However, we enjoyed the blessings of Joe McCarthy, Bishop Sheen and HUAC all the same.]

“[...] Montague Stevens saw only the surface of the land he hunted over. His active days afield coincided with the advent of erosion in the cow country, but he did not see it. The better to keep up with his hounds, he practiced riding his horse across the cavernous arroyos which were then invading the fertile valleys, but he did not recognize the invasion as something new in history, nor did he perceive its cause: the terrific overgrazing practiced by the early cowmen. Small wonder, then, that less intelligent men still fail to perceive that something more important than bears is departing from the western range. New Mexico’s grizzlies succumbed visibly to trap, gun, and poisoned bait, but New Mexico’s fertile valleys slipped down the Rio Grande in the night. Neither will return.

“The University of New Mexico has done well to preserve this saga of how the state was made safe for cows. How the state is to be made safe from cows is a saga yet to be written...”

I became aware of Aldo Leopold by misadventure. Not my death, but my father’s. Bob Hunter went out for dinner with Claire my mother in 1952 and never came back again. He choked to death, strangled on corned beef and cabbage; those were the days before the Heimlich maneuver was popular knowledge. The popularization of the Heimlich was based upon the premise that if enough people heard about this simple life-saving riff, that someone really important might be saved. Just in case they had something to say. For posterity? Westbrook Pegler said so in the Hearst papers of the day. It was in the paper; it had to be so. Pegler was a bristlehead of the 1940s. If Bob Hunter had anything weighty on his mind, his posterity—me—never got to hear about it. The last, best, biggest thought Bob had shared with the family was about the New South. He died there and we were now stuck in Pinellas County, Florida. We packed ourselves in the back of my Uncle Julius’ great big pink Cadillac—potato farming had its perquisites—and Antigo, Wisconsin was the next stop.

In Antigo I would finish high school, enroll in the Langlade County Normal School, a two-year teacher’s college, endure eight weeks of practicum in a one room school and eventually drop out and run away to Chicago, then New York. That leaves a lot of lonely years marooned in Wisconsin unaccounted for. Scratch lonely. Science fiction paperbacks from the corner grocery and church rummage sales rounded out my social calendar, plus hiding out after school in the Carnegie endowment library when there were chores to be avoided. There I discovered A Sand County Almanac and its wondrous line drawings. The next year I would live in a sixth floor walkup on Ave. B of NYC’s Lower East Side, strange turf for a prairie boy. There I read Sand County and everything Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote.

Flashback. The same year that my pop announced the future of the New South, Aldo Leopold died. Bob Hunter would outlive him by four years.

Flashback. The same year that my pop announced the future of the New South, Aldo Leopold died. Bob Hunter would outlive him by four years.

Nationwide, the wingnuts flourish. “Like other prophets who have appeared over the centuries to answer disordered times with disordered visions, Beck promotes a patchwork of internally inconsistent beliefs that defy definition.” [Todd S. Purdum, “Beck and the Beast” Vanity Fair 12 April 2012]

If I could choose, I guess H. V. Kaltenborn ¹ would be my bristlehead of choice. I was a kid in the 40s and who you hear first, as with Mel Laird, defines the rest as Johnny-come-latelies. Kaltenborn had those rare commodities Rush and Glenn lack: courtesy, brains and grace. I can’t help notice that through the years, the quality of bullshit has declined.

I wish we could afford all of them, these gatekeepers—the gentlemanly farmer-ecologists and the discoherent broadcast bristleheads, but we can’t, despite the high entertainment value of the wingnuts—America is broke and running out of time.

“Every July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event.

“It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840's. Heretofore unreachable by sythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

“This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July.

“When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch.

“The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have ‘taken’ what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have ‘taken’ what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book?

“This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of the floras of the world. Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.”

Here in Washington County, Maine I feed the wintering-over birds, wonder at wandering wildcats, bears, beavers and seals, moose and deer who acknowledge me, when they do, with a passing nod. My kitchen vegetable patch on the banks of the Pennamaquan gives the lie to any strictly held allegiances. Yes, I fertilize and when threatened by invasion have been known to apply lime sulphur and the occasional spritz of poison. There is this story of mine starring a race of heritage tomatoes, Cherokee Purples: An alternative past leading to a benign present where virtue is rewarded with flowers and tears, fabricated memories to paper over a shabby reality:

“... a sliver of land, tiny but important when you consider that a railroad track connected to each side of the ten-foot swath, a contested bit of Cherokee territory uncontested, then forgotten and obscured by the Civil War. The tomatoes—the Cherokee Purples—are kind of shy when it comes to publicity, and I’m not a Faulkner or a Fitzgerald. But those damned tomatoes have been dogging my life ever since I met up with them. See, people will have their little dramas that seem pretty important at the time. But the Cherokee Purples, while not indifferent to human suffering, have their own agenda. Who’s to know what’s important to a tomato? So I’ll just tell my story and let the tomatoes look after their own business...”

If we love an old-time tomato, how bad can we be... actually? Then I think about the bristleheads and return my viscera to its customary grim, tight knot.

¹ Walter Winchell had none, a man out of place who would have been right at home here in Century 21. Perhaps the reason Damon Runyon fictionalized him with a gussied-up alias, Waldo Winchester.

² Why should an aging hippie, beatnik, whatever, have any nice words for a Republican congressman from Wisconsin's potato plains? Well, a funny thing happened to Mel Laird on the way to Armageddon: “During Richard Nixon's first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South's ability to defend itself. The result was a success—until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly...”