The Sidewalk Psychotherapist - David B. Schwartz

The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

2010-02-12T15:02:00.000-08:00

The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

(Illustrations deleted: if you want an illustrated version write me and I'll send it to you by e-mail)

David B. Schwartz, ‘66

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds…As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin.

In the Aboriginal world view, every event leaves a record in the land. Everything in the natural world is a result of the actions of the archetypal beings, beings whose actions created the world.

-Ellie Crystal

We sat on the wall, old friends, just as we had done in the sixties when the Palm Court and New College were new. Except that now we were in our sixties ourselves, our deep familiarity and sense of ownership of this place conflicting with hesitancy over intruding upon the commons of the students who now made this home. There were forty entering classes between our time and theirs. The complete student body had changed ten times; ten generations from us. Many of us had children older than these students. Yet sitting on the wall it was still undeniably our home, the soil from which our original tribe had sprung, and all generations of the tribe since that time.

When I drove into the funky old Lido Beach resort that was our reunion base, my heart leapt at all of the familiar faces sitting around the second floor balcony, outside the room with the keg that John Daugherty had set up. My closest friends, of course, were immediately familiar. We had spent the intervening years in close contact, getting married in each other’s houses, being informal aunts and uncles to each other’s kids, holding each other as we went through traumatic divorces. It’s been that movie The Big Chill, on a larger and longer scale. When our old friend Roger Peters was dying of melanoma in Durango, Colorado, John Hart and I flew from the Northeast into Albuquerque and rented large motorcycles, so we could blast up his driveway just as we all used to do at his place at the North end of Longboat Key. It was, he said later, as if his New College youth came, kicking gravel, back into his life.

There in the Palm Court we dedicated a memorial brick to him, with an injunction he had once directed at a campus cop who objected to him pulling his Volvo P118 into the walkway between the wall and third court: “Touch that car and I’ll call a real cop!” We toasted him with Slivovitz, a Yugoslavian plum brandy/airplane fuel for which we had once shared considerable enthusiasm. I forget why.

Other friends and classmates I didn’t recognize initially, until the first word was out of their mouths. Our gathering out on that Lido balcony was an instant re-tribalization of the group who had arrived when there was not much college to speak of. Sitting there feeling a blissful and complete acceptance greater than anything I have known in the intervening years, it was clear that pretty much everyone was feeling the same thing. I leaned over to Charity. “What is this that we are all feeling?” I asked her. She looked back at me and replied simply. “It’s unconditional love.”

The Creation Myth

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What astonished me as we sat on the wall that once was ours was that the current students actually wanted to talk with us. They were keenly interested in who we were. In fact, we could connect immediately. We spoke the same dialect. It was clear that I could connect with an 18-year-old first-year student more readily than I can connect with 98 percent of all of the people whom I meet. We had a common language, a common culture. And the students were deeply curious about the origins of that culture. They were full of questions:

Did you have Walls and PCP’s? (Palm Court Parties)

Is it true that you went to class naked?

Is New College as good now as it was then?

And, finally, and movingly: “Are you proud of us?”

All tribes and cultures have their creation myths. Margaret Mead herself had visited and pronounced New College not a college, but a tribe. It was, in fact, more than a little Samoan. I realized that here an extraordinary event was happening. While the ancestors of aboriginal tribes are lost to the mists of time, here we ancestors of the tribal village of the Palm Court were stepping out of the mists solid and alive. We were the ancestors, come to earth. They could ask us about the creation myth and we could tell them how it actually was. We were there.

We could remember when the palm trees were young, and so were we. We recalled when the Pei dorms stood as an island among scrub and old WWII barracks, when we walked or raced our Honda 50s over to College Hall for dinners, watching the sun set through the windows as dolphins swam along the shoreline. We remembered the first-year “core” program, which everybody had to take. Back then the academic year was eleven months long, and you graduated in three years, except if you were male and could be rewarded for early graduation by being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

I suppose I knew in retrospect that we students had in fact co-created the academic philosophy and structure of the college, along with the founders and the faculty. But it had not occurred to me until I talked with students this time that we alone had founded the unique student life of the college. We had come up with a certain way of living together, imaginatively unique, that has reached full flower today. It could have been different: we could have been dropped into those Pei dorms in the middle of sleepy Sarasota and come up with Lord of the Flies. But it didn’t happen that way.

From our rude scratchings back then, a vibrant jiva culture had taken root, winding around and up the palm trees for generation after generation of students. No, we didn’t have “PCPs;” we didn’t even know what the term meant. In the beginning, we had just hung out and danced in the Palm Court. Maybe somebody would put some stereo speakers in the window of the corner third court room. There weren’t many of us back then. These early spontaneous gatherings had grown into the Walls and PCPs: the major and minor tribal feasts around which the seasons revolved.

Like aboriginal landscape, each element of the campus, especially the Pei dorms, was etched with the communal life of the first inhabitants. Around this symbolic topography the tribal rituals of New College students have continued to flourish. The vibrational residue of our life together so long ago still persisted in this place.

The students’ question: “Is it as good now?” stuck in my mind. We are used to the nature of creation myths, which can so often point back to a simpler and purer time than the corrupted present. The sixties and the early years of the college were a heady and exciting time, it was true. It is one of the great blessings of my life to be part of it. But the romantic way we can tend to view the past can obscure the fact that, for pioneers of any new activity, life by definition is hard.

The first class hadn’t even the Pei dorms. The college was yet unaccredited. Just outside the bubble the administrators maintained for us the school was on the verge of going broke. We thought of ourselves as liberated, but in fact we were children of the fifties. So, like the 1967 “Summer of Love,” the New College experience for us was as unimaginably distant from our prior experience as an acid trip is from a martini lunch. In this vast sea change some of us just didn’t make it. There were a lot of casualties – probably many more than in current times, when there are so many safety ropes and staff guides to keep students away from the deeper crevasses. We had the Moolah of the Vietnam War hanging over our very lives. Friends got sucked up and perished. The country approached the beginnings of what felt like incipient civil war. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” the saying went then.

We were twice thirty now, but the students seemed to somehow trust us.

The morning after sitting on the wall with the students, we talked about what we had seen. Somebody pointed out that the students seemed to have a lot of self-confidence. “How different from our own experience! We had zilch in that department, “ somebody said. I also noticed that every conversation had been initiated and led by women. It seemed natural, and good. But the women gathered with us at this reunion pointed out how different it was from our own time. “They take for granted things we couldn’t even imagine” said Kathy, a feminine force who played second banana to no man, even in 1964. It was all true.

When students asked us if the college was still essentially as we remembered it, I asked them: “Have you ever seen a multiple-choice test at New College?” They all laughed. What a ridiculous question! And there was another event. Emeritus professor Dr. Knox, upon spotting John O’Neill, who had dropped out without finishing his thesis in the late sixties, practically grabbed him by the lapels and demanded, “John, when are you going to get that thesis in?” Everyone laughed. Then somebody asked Dr. Knox – “”Hey, they wouldn’t still take it after 40 years, would they?” “Sure we would,” Dr. Knox replied. Where else could such a thing even be possibly true?

The most memorable moment for me came when a knot of students – clearly close friends – came up to a group of us ancestors, friends since the Creation. “The wonderful thing,” I explained to them, gesturing to our little group, is that we have remained close friends for all of the years since we were here.” I reached out and gave John Hart a one-armed hug. They all looked at each other. “Do you mean,“ a young woman said hesitantly, that we might all still be friends in forty years?” “Yes,” I replied. The students almost trembled with the thought. They all hugged each other excitedly, and ran off to whatever adventure might be next. I could just guess.

How can we be ancestors? I still feel about twenty years old in the core of my being, truth be told. Especially when I’m around my fellow grey-haired ancestors. There is a line from Coleridge I have kept since I left New College for the “real world:”

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Ay! And what then?

Holding my flower tightly, I boarded a jet home for Ithaca, that oasis of the sixties where old hippies rule and where I feel most at home, save one vibrant Palm Court in Sarasota, Florida. For there is where the ancestral tongue is still spoken and the dreamtime periodically surfaces out of the creation myth and treads at night on Welch tiles under an orange-juice sky.

Seymour Sarason Eulogy

2010-01-31T14:07:00.001-08:00

Dear Fellow Friends of Seymour:

I have learned of Seymour's death too late to be with you at his funeral today. I see, looking at the clock, that the service is just starting now. A have appreciated reading the various memorials to him, as I think of this extraordinary, wonderful, man who touched us so deeply that even the third time we always laughed at the joke; "What does it feel like? It feels like talking to the wall!" because we just wanted Seymour to talk just a little longer, wanted him to be happy for a moment, wanted to be with him.

In reading other's thoughts, I began thinking about what made Seymour so special, why he might have inspired such feelings of love and devotion, and his final moving out of this world kindles such keen feelings of loss for me, and for all of us together.

There are many extraordinarily intelligent people around, some of them in universities. There are a number of professors who take genuine personal interest in their students. But Seymour was different: if you worked with him in any way, you eventually came to the realization that there was only single reason that Seymour was helping you: because he loved you. And because he loved you and loved to help you to grow and flourish, the entire breadth of his mind was at your disposal. He had no other consideration than you, and you felt it.

A couple of months ago, Seymour told me that the hardest thing about his existence was that "I don't have anybody to care for now."

Beneath the rough exterior that only served to make him more endearing, this was the guy who cheerfully told me once that he was a really good psychotherapy supervisor. "Have you ever practiced psychotherapy? I asked?

"Oh, no," he quickly replied, almost shuddering. "I'm way too sensitive for that!"

It seems like there must be a good ironic Jewish joke in there somewhere.

Just like his mentor Henry Shaffer-Simmern, Seymour's care for you would most often be expressed in giving you a blank sheet of paper. "Artistic creativity is life, he said. For some of us, Seymour's blank sheet of paper was the charge to write a book. It was his medium: when he was teaching, he seemed to regularly turn one out a year. After he retired, I think it went up to two. "He writes them faster than I can read him!" my friend Hank Bersani complained. You'd go see Seymour, and he would tell you to write a book, and two weeks later there'd be a letter from a publisher asking of if you were interested in a book contract.

Well, I wrote that book, and just as Seymour had no doubt planned, now I don't seem to be able to stop. The next one, I dedicated to him with these words of Seneca, My guess is that is what we all experienced.

What would you think of a memorial symposium that brings all of us together to talk about Seymour's influence on us and the world, so that we can all get to know each other a bit? Maybe somebody could write a book. Seymour would like that.

Suppose, again, that the other endured labor and weariness in teaching me; that, besides the ordinary sayings of teachers, there are things which he has transmitted and instilled into me; that by his encouragement he aroused the best that was in me, at one time inspirited me by his praise; at another warned me to put aside sloth; that, laying hand, so to speak, on my mental powers that then were hidden and inert, he drew them forth into the light; that, instead of doing out his knowledge grudgingly in order that there might be the longer need of his service, he was eager, if he could, to pour the whole of into me – if I do not owe to such a man all the love I give to those to the most grateful ties, I am indeed ungrateful.

Sincerely,

David B. Schwartz

The Dream Analysis Stand at the Farmer's Market

2009-08-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

Cartoon: Bare feet with hairy lower legs sticking out on a couch beyond the curtain of a stand at the Farmer’s Market. Hanging Signs: “Dream Analysis $15. The Doctor is “IN.”

Finding the analytic couch upstate was the hardest part. Psychoanalysts never made it much further North from New York than Westchester County. (I know they call Westchester “upstate” from Manhattan, but from Ithaca it is a long ways downstate. ) Finally I found a couch in Philadelphia, where each obituary of a psychoanalyst sends another couch to the used furniture store. Gus, who had been keeping his eye out for me, called me up. “Got one here that just came in, doc,” he said in his South Philly staccato. “Fifties style, but it belonged to a Jungian, so it’s not too rigid.” It sounded good to me. Although I don’t usually use a couch myself, I had tried one out that had been owned by a Freudian. It was no use: everybody’s dreams were both sexual and rigidly interpretive. I mean, how many bicycle masturbation fantasies can there really be? Besides, rigidity isn’t big in Ithaca, except among certain vegans, and I’m not. So I jumped in the pickup and by that Friday night I was backing up to my new stand at the market.

My neighbors at the goat cheese stand and Micro Mama’s on either side of me helped me carry it in. Then I had to only hang the curtain on a rope, stick in a folding chair for me and a box of Kleenex, and I was ready to hang my sign. People could lie down on the couch and couldn’t really be heard against the hubbub of Saturday mornings, while their feet sticking out signaled those in line that there was somebody in the stall – like a bathroom stall, only you didn’t have to duck to see.

Of course I had to address the concerns of the board of directors in the beginning. It is not like I would be in competition with anybody. But some members remembered the problems when they had psychotherapists there before. Behaviorists didn’t really fit the ethos of the market, and various new-age practitioners were disruptive: complaints about the primal scream stand had been particularly vocal. (They moved on to city planning board meetings.) A moratorium on therapists had been declared after the unfortunate incident with the shock therapy stand, when a confused patient wandered off the end of the dock with a full backpack of rutabagas and sank like a stone. Even though the practice was both ecologically correct and sustainable (the electricity was generated by stationary bicycle) the legal liability was judged just too great. Jim Hardesty took back his custom-made Tesla coil to sell to some museum, and the sign: “Zap your worries: Real Brief Therapy,” kicked around until somebody recycled it as a garlic shelf.

Psychoanalysts are the Amish of the mental health professions: they never bought in to the technology, and so remember how to do things in the “old school” way. Dream analysis, a cornerstone of Amish practice, is as potentially illuminating as an MRI, with the advantage of being more portable and a lot cheaper. Of course, it depends upon what you are looking for: if you are searching for brain damage, it’s the right technology. If you are trying to identify sources of persistent and recurring personal suffering, though, a dream can be just the thing. All sorts of people lie down on my couch for a few minutes while shopping, like getting a quick massage on the Commons: people with emotionally-based physical illnesses, depression occurring in Ithacans other than during January through March, the ever-expanding sea of human troubles that are diagnosed as psychiatric illnesses (for these I use de-diagnosis) or the myriad manifestations of hopelessness, even in doctoral students. For these, dreams are just the instrument.

It is true that the preparation of a competent dream analyst takes vastly longer than that of a radiologist. In the Philadelphia psychoanalytic community, where I learned my trade, there is a saying that “It takes 25 years to know what to say in an analytic session.” You can’t really use a dream analysis book. That only tells you the associations of the person who wrote it, along with the usual collective unconscious material. To be competent at reading dreams requires long practice in developing a certain inward focus, an ability to grasp the person’s associational network or personal cosmology as separate from one’s own, and the opening of certain intuitive capacities. When you get it right, you can feel the illumination ripple through the person (this is where the Kleenex is often useful) following which their wings open just a little bit more. If you keep this up, eventually you can fly.

Just before the market opens, a short, weathered potato farmer from Newfield pulls the drape back and plops down on the couch. “Had this nightmare last night, shook me up,” doc, he starts. I was planting potatoes, but all that came up was marijuana.” “You farm organic?” I asked him. “Yeah: biodynamic.” As I suspected: it’s another dream about money, a common theme among organic farmers. I lean back, drawing in on my briar. “I see,” I say, leaning in attentively. “Tell me more.” I suspect that for this one I’m going to be paid in potatoes.

David's home sidewalk is in under his usual table in front of Gimmie Coffee on Cayuga Street.

5/28/09

The Angel in the Dining Room (2002)

2008-12-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

The Angel in the Dining Room
David B. Schwartz

Dedicated to the memory of Hubert Zipperlen, 1911 - 2002

To us, as students of Rudolf Steiner, the child -whatever his mental condition may be -is more than his physical appearance may indicate. He is more than his body, more than his emotions, more than his spoken or unspoken words. He is even more than his achievements. In his appearance he is merely the outer shell of an infinite and eternal spiritual being.”
- Karl Köenig

We were getting ready for dinner when Bob saw the angel in the dining room. We were at Camphill Village, a community where people with mental retardation and others of us with less visible disabilities live together. Susan was at the stove when Bob reached out and touched both of us. He gestured mutely toward the corner, by the window overlooking the woods. He pointed toward the angel.

Bob is what I consider an intuitive, which is at the root of his uncanny ability to make contact with deeply disturbed autistic children. But I had come to recognize him as something even more unusual than that - a mystic. He was so sensitive that he picked up things out of the ether. I had a patient like that. As psychologically disturbed as she was, there were certain experiences and perceptions of hers that simply could not be explained by psychology. She simply “saw” them and they were there.

Bob was trembling and his words were caught on his tongue. He looked like a man who had not so much as seen a ghost, but was seeing one at that very moment. She was tall, he whispered slowly, describing what he was seeing as he averted his eyes and looked back for another frightening glance. She filled the corner to the high ceiling. She had long yellow hair, was gowned in flowing robes, and held a scroll in her hands. She looked beatifically and protectively over the scene of the people with disabilities setting the table. Her presence had something to do with them, he knew -the scroll with Susan and me, and our being in that place. I felt something -was it simply psychological contamination, or true mysterium tremendum?

For it seemed that I almost sensed the rustle of the angel’s wings, that sound in the old testament that brought unbelievers to their knees. “My Lord!,” I said to Bob, later, walking him down to the front door. “I sure am glad that I don’t see angels. I’m quite frightened enough as it is!”

After fifteen years of visiting Camphill Village, the closest of a hundred sister intentional communities around the globe, I had finally come to stay for a whole two weeks. Instead of just being a visitor, Susan and I were houseparents. We had a family: not just our own children, but Mike and Michael and Ben and Posey. It was around their table, become temporarily ours, that we gathered for meals. We recited grace, a blessing from anthroposophy, the transcendental philosophy created by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner almost a century ago. Our daughter, Stephanie, eight, spoke:

Sun, earth, water, and air,
Have wrought with God’s care
That the plants live and bear:
Thanking God for this food
In truth live we would
Bearing Beauty and Good.

We reached out and joined hands around the table and pronounced the final
ritual together: “Blessings on the meal.”

Then we ate. The vegetable dishes, carefully prepared by Susan despite the heat of the kitchen in the July heat wave in a village without the modern industrial comfort of air-conditioning, were savory. We had walked down to the garden barns with our cart just that morning, to pick up our allotment of just-picked vegetables from the biodynamic farm along the slopes of French creek. We passed clover fields luxurious with grazing cows, each with their names. Other villagers and co-workers like us tended the cows in the dairy.

The cows, unlike on most farms, retained their horns. This was because of biodynamic farming. Biodynamics was another fruit of Steiner’ s work, like the Waldorf school across the creek and its thousands of sisters, like anthroposophic medicine, and architecture, and other fields. In anthroposophic farming, cows kept their horns. The horns, I was eventually to figure out, had something to do with the unseen world, in which such beings as angels were said to reside over something as earthly as a cow-pasture.

Our family and work were not about any unseen world. They were about the seen world -the world of gardens, and cows, and houses between which one could walk. And a large part of the seen world, although in a quite different way than anything I had encountered in my thirty years in the field of developmental disabilities, were the people with disabilities themselves. At Camphill, there was no apartheid between such people and those who cared for them.

Here, as in all Camphill communities, no-one was paid. One simply made a life together. Early each morning, Mike, who rose early, walked down to the cow barn to bring back our freshly-filled pail of milk. Michael went down to the front step of our old mansion to bring up his Philadelphia Inquirer and read the scores of his teams, legs crossed on the couch, looking very much like an ordinary man reading the sports section before work. It was Susan who told me, eventually, that he could not read.

After breakfast dishes were washed, people, including me and Stephanie, went off to our day’ s work. I pulled out my tools and started installing a ceiling fan to stir the hot air in the dining room. Stephanie helped her new friend Alexandria pull a wagon around the village ªgatherª up all the little children from their houses for a morning’ s babysitting in the yard of Oberlin house, down the woods path from our home. Herbie showed up to chop the fresh vegetables for Susan for lunch. Sandy went right to the sink and began to energetically wash the breakfast dishes. Ross pulled out the vacuum cleaner and set about vacuuming the stairway inch by inch, just as he had done yesterday. And Jean, semi-retired but ironing a tablecloth, filled Susan in on all important events of everyone in the village since the day before. Sooner than we had imagined possible, we settled into the rhythms of an ordinary life. More rhythmic and more ordinary, in fact, than anything we had ever known.

Friendship

As days went on in that hot July, we came unexpectedly to feel as if we had found a home. Susan slipped into being a happy housemother at the center of a large home so beautifully that she started to glow, like a plant finally rooted in nourishing soil. I felt happy myself. I was living again in my life fully on foot, living in community, which I have pursued all of my life. We fell in love with the “villagers” there -and clearly, they with us. Every morning, as I rose early, as Mike appeared with the milk pail, making strange remarks to the air and wandering about outside, as Michael assumed the posture of the sports-reading businessman, Ben wandered in rubbing his sleepy eyes.

Ben was the quintessence of a man with Down’s syndrome; sweet, affectionate, acutely emotionally sensitive to rejection or anger at him, with the typical enlarged tongue of Down’s syndrome which made his speech thick and difficult to comprehend without practice. Down’s syndrome, the great founder of Camphill Dr. Karl Köenig said, was a fairly recent phenomenon in the world evolution. On a planet ever more self-destructively estranged from feeling, people with Down’s syndrome had appeared as an attempted corrective. They were all feeling . Now, of course, there was amniocentesis and abortion, and people with Down’s syndrome were disappearing. This comment of Dr. König was typically anthroposophic, in suggesting the largest possible view of a seemingly immediate phenomenon. Maybe he was right.

Surely Ben was a most positive influence on our often-challenging and
difficult to understand Stephanie. Stephanie, like the modern world, seemed a kind of a fascinatingly bright child version of Bill Gates. We presumed she would be very successful, but hoped that she would be able to enjoy relationships with others as an adult. We had tried constant explanation, exhortation, punishment -it was sometimes as if we were explaining human feeling to someone from Mars. In a week, Ben changed all that.

Ben and Stephanie immediately struck up a friendship. In many ways, they were at a similar level of emotional maturity. Soon our very “un-touchy” girl was hugging. They hugged good morning, they hugged goodnight, they played pretend games with Susan’ s stuffed animal, Buster, who became the house scapegoat for all trouble and bad behavior. They were inseparable, they were joyous. I had never seen Stephanie like this, and it was good.

Much to our astonishment, this change extended to us. This little girl who always wanted to be at a distance even from her mother, who objected to her mother even walking her into nursery school at three, began to crawl into her lap. She even started crawling into mine. Crucially, she seemed to penetrate the mystery of others’ feelings. Perhaps this was because Ben, with his fluid, open face, was as expressive as a mime. When he was happy, he smiled broadly. When he heard something that displeased him, he cried -real tears. In him maybe Stephanie could see what people felt.

Soon Susan made a close friend, a woman named Susie who came to help in the house. At first glance, I thought her to be quite cognitively impaired. She seem to say much. But then Susan started telling me of the many sotto voce observations Susie made over the course of a day. She was acutely observant, it turned out. She missed nothing, whether it was the peculiarities of our visiting friends, who somehow seemed far more impaired in the ability for human sharing and civility than the members of our new family. And all were related with a sympathetic, dry wit that made Susan, who has a similar sharply-observant but forgiving temperament, feel that she had found a friend.

One night Susan was talking on the phone with her mother, and her mother asked what she thought Susie’ diagnosis” Perhaps Susan should find it out and read up on it, so that she could best help her. Maybe I knew. After all, I was supposed to be a psychologist and developmental disabilities specialist. Putting her hand over the mouthpiece, she turned to me in bed, where I was reading. “ What did I think Susie’ diagnosis was?” she queried. “
Susie? I asked, looking up. “Humorist.”

My own deepest friend became Michael, the day he showed me his basement workshop. It was clear that he was both hesitant and very much wanted me to see it. The hesitancy only came of his fear of being rebuffed, that I would tell him I was too busy. “ Maybe tomorrow?” he asked me, while I was up on a ladder hanging a ceiling fan to at least move around the stuffy air. “ about right now? I replied, climbing down the ladder and setting down my electrical tools. I followed him into the basement. What I saw there in Michael’ s workshop was almost enough to make me cry. For I had entered into my grandfather’s workshop, and my uncles’ workshop. Even, to tell the truth, my own.

Everywhere Michael’s beloved tools hung in exquisite order. Screwdrivers ranked in racks. Saws hung from nails. Hammers of all sizes and types ranged across the walls, below sections of scrap wood carefully sorted by size. Wooden boxes of carefully straightened out and rusty used common nails were tacked to the front of his bench within ready reach. There was not a bit of dirt, or disorder, not a thing out of place. Among this sublime order I felt like a child in my grandfather’ workshop, my grandfather who also would never throw away a nail he could straighten. I still use his tin nail-boxes soldered out of discarded Prince Albert tobacco tins, although I could not claim such grandfatherly order as Michael. Were my grandfather to appear, it would be Michael’ s workshop, above my own, that would win his silent acknowledgement that all was as a workshop should be.

Against the power of this setting, there was only one thing missing: the ability to know how to use these tools to build something. Michael was painfully aware of this lack. It was that that he needed me for, he told me. To help him figure out what to do. In the center of the space was a recently-attempted project, a new workbench. It leaned down precipitously at one end. Michael knew that something hadn’t turned out quite right, but couldn’t put his finger on exactly what. He hadn’t a clue.

I had spent the last weeks -and years -dealing with the countless people without mental retardation who cross one’ s path in the world who didn’t have a clue, either. But what they lacked clues about were elemental things that were central to the knowledge of my well-raised, profoundly ethical friend. Someone who knew, also, what it to be a friend; what it was to subsume one’s own egotistic strivings freely to concern for the loving well-being of the other. To take one’ s greatest pleasure in life not from narcissistic self-gratification of all the tedious types; power, money, sexual conquest, and the pleasures of murder: personal, spiritual, environmental, global -but in “ seeing the other grow more beautiful, because we were together.”

My sickness with the latest of disappointing human beings spread across the surface of the earth in this latest, only minimally successful incarnate learning opportunity, had succeeded in opening my heart and eyes. Michael and I stood in the tidy workshop and I realized that in truth he was becoming beautiful to me and that unquestionably - he did not hide himself behind some persona - I was becoming beautiful to him. It was clear that we both sensed in each other qualities of honesty, and of faithfulness. We had been disappointed. And, happily, we had something to give each other. I took a tape measure and quickly determined the height discrepancy of the sides, pieced and marked an extension, and handed Michael the nails to bang into place. Then we rocked it on its side. It was perfect. We celebrated. You’re pretty smart, Michael Bernstein! ”he exclaimed happily. “ Yes, you are,” I agreed. Then we went upstairs to dinner.

Many years ago, I first puzzled over why Camphill afforded better lives to people than any lavishly-funded professional program I had ever seen. I read somewhere a founder pointing out that Camphill was not created as a service program for people with mental retardation. It was a community for everyone. The Camphill founders wished to live in community, and realized that it would be necessary to have people with mental retardation present in order to have it. I at last understood this.

At this time, we slowly became aware that the villagers that we had gotten to know and who had become our friends were recruiting us. They were straightforward: “ You have to move to the village and be our houseparents.” when you move here, I’ m going to work in your house.” They asked about school for Stephanie, and for Nate. With the immediacy of people with mental retardation, some people were packed up and ready to move. In with us. When we left, Michael told me that he was going to go down into his workshop and cry. All this made us pause to wonder if what we had conceived as a summer working vacation might be in fact a call to a new life. This possibility was as unsettling as seeing an angel in one’s dining room.

Back in the World

Once released from social restraints by modernization, however, [Illich claims] a disembedded economy proved to be a relentless force, one that dismantled traditional societies piece by piece. The innumerable and varied ways that people got by and got along were replaced with a life of dependency on commodities...
- Eugene Burkhart

No one takes the trouble to reflect uncompromisingly about the enigma
of a historical situation that is without precedent: the death of all cultures.”
- Ivan Illich

When I got back home from Camp Hill, it seemed as if the dump had caught on fire. Suburban sprawl was steadily expanding, even in the intolerable and exhaust-choked heat. Heavy equipment had leveled what had been a woods only when we left into stripped subsoil ready for an asphalt parking lot. People plowed through the choked atmosphere in air-conditioned automotive bubbles, passing from one cool, bright, windowless big box store to another, a flat sun hanging heavy in the orange sky.
Returning to Hershey after the time in Camphill was like returning to an inner-city tenement after a summer as a fresh-air kid. What was marginally tolerable before now seemed unbearable in comparison.

This is of course the way that change takes place; you get a glimpse outside of your existing situation, and the polarity of experience heightens the contrast so much that it motivates you to take steps toward a new possibility rather than put up with the old. I am always encouraged when I see this with one of my patients. That's when they start moving, albeit with struggle and difficulty. So it was with us: we had left our summer big family and community, the village one walked on foot on paths through the fields and woods, the life so demanding that one fell into bed tired out every night, looking forward to the next day, for a suburban America where one sees faces through the glass of minivans, driving through the blighted landscape of modernity. It was enough to give you the bends.

Dr. Köenig’s vision.

A few years ago I had stood on the site of the first Camphill, overlooking the River Dee on “ Camp Hill” in northern Scotland near Aberdeen, the ancient hill once site to the Northward-thrusting Roman legions. It had been more than fifty years then since Dr. Köenig had come to this place. It was here that he and his colleagues, a group of young physicians and friends fleeing the Nazi holocaust, had made their lonely stand against the forces of darkness by planting “ a candle on a hill.” In company with handicapped children they on that remote hill sought to found a transcendentally -inspired community just as their home Europe was burning in Hitlerian destruction and murder. The
candle lit by those pioneers had burned brightly and had spread throughout the world. Now each stood on their own hills, in contrast to the modern incarnations of evil which were once more gobbling up the world.

It was materialism -the belief that the world was merely matter, a modern form of the ancient sin of hubris, that was destroying the earth. The other six of the ever-present seven deadly sins were, as always, flourishing too. Camphill and anthroposophy’s key contribution, it seems to me, were in trying to break what William James called “ the reign of hardness” in viewing the world. The world was more than “stuff, and people were more than the shells of their exteriors - even people with disabilities. They were a divine mystery. The earth itself was a divine mystery, to be treated with reverence. And there was a way to perceive the divine, to see the world as transcendent and holy, rather than as a site and as consumers for another Wal-Mart.

Bob, when he came into our home and saw the angel, was such a person who could see things -a mystic. But he perceived transcendental aspects of the world with his heart only. He could read the scroll, however. It had to do with me and Susan, and our linked destiny with the people there, he told me. More than that he could not say, he said: such messages are never specific, but rather dropped into one’ s heart to be worked out in one’ s own way.

But he was sure that the angel’s visit and message was about us somehow, and this place. Rudolf Steiner, in contrast to Bob, brought both mystical intuition and a disciplined intellect to the project of seeing the unseen world. The difference was illustrated by my late friend Hubert Zipperlen, who used the example of someone who could perceive auras around people and who said that someone who had a lot of green in her aura, so “he was good with plants.” Just seeing a color in an aura, he pointed out, had nothing whatsoever to do with knowing what that might mean, people at Camphill quietly try to perceive things beyond matter. When Hubert worked in his garden, he talked with the elemental beings who brought growth to vegetables. Water sprites found a home in streams and flow-forms. And most importantly, everyone strove to see the “ infinite being” in each person with a handicap passing through this life. As Köenig
wrote:

We are convinced that every human being has his individual existence not only here on earth between birth and death, but that every child was a spiritual entity before he was born, and that every man will continue to live after he has passed through the gate of death. Thus any kind of physical or mental handicap is not acquired by chance or misfortune. It has a definite meaning for the individual and is meant to change his life.”

The presence of people with disabilities was an opportunity to not only them, but each of us. Perhaps my own handicaps, then, against which I had struggled so long, had meaning as well. Perhaps they had meaning in changing my life. In considering the core passing from incarnation to incarnation in myself and in all those around me I had an opportunity to see the world become alive, transcendent, holy. And even the cows and the fields could keep their horns because the possibility that they might gore other livestock was far outweighed by their importance as antennae bringing cosmic forces into the farm. So I decided to stand, myself, poking my own horns tentatively into the world beyond matter, standing out on a hillock under the stars among the cows, hearing their low mooing in the shadows. What might I discover in such a strange and powerful place? What did the angel’s scroll say about Susan and me, and the company of these people? Maybe, we decided, we should find out.

August, 2002

A Eulogy for Harry Guise (1997)

2008-11-22T13:14:00.000-08:00

A Eulogy for Harry Guise
August 14, 1997
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Harrisburg

David B. Schwartz

It is with a sad heart that I walk from my home in the shadow of this cathedral to join in mourning the loss - but celebrating the life - of my colleague, friend, and mentor Harry Guise. I wish to sing the praises of a good man.

Harry and I worked together. Anyone who knew Harry even slightly knew that for him work was not a casual affair. He worked hard all of his life, and his work was helping people. I want to tell one story that tells a little about this work of his.

A few years ago our organization in government had an opportunity to hire someone for the summer to help us. When the paperwork was completed, the bureaucratic office handling hiring offered immediate approval - if we would take a person they’d like us to hire. In fact, she could start tomorrow. But Harry felt differently. We were an office to help people with disabilities, and we should hire someone with a disability for this job. So he persisted.

Harry had to persist a long time to get what he wanted, and the summer was long past and he had done a lot of additional work before he was able to hire such a person. That is how Horace came to work with us.

Horace was an older man who seemed to have never had much of a break in life. Harry took an interest in him, spent time with him, and he did good work for us. When the position ran out, he went on and moved someplace else.

A couple of years later, I was surprised to see Horace sitting in Harry’s office, visiting him. He had come back to town, and the first thing he did was to see Harry. Horace was dying, Harry told me later, and had come back to see Harry one more time. In Harry, this old disabled African-American man who no-one seemed to want had found someone who wanted him, who encouraged him, who saw something in him. So it was no surprise, actually, that he would come back to see Harry one more time.

How many Horaces were there in Harry’s long working life? How many people did he take an interest in and help them to find the blessings of work, a blessing that they would otherwise have not known, and which was so important to him? In fact, if you assembled all the people who Harry helped in this way, the crowd would fill this Cathedral, and the street beyond.

Harry, as others have said, was very self-effacing. He would never sit still for such praise as this. I used to tease him with a nickname I had for him: “Columbo,” after the Peter Falk character in the detective series. For Harry, like Columbo, combined his self-effacing nature with extraordinary perception and intelligence in service of his calling. Like Columbo, when he needed to get to the bottom of some knotty problem he would engage people in offhand conversation. If it was winter, perhaps he would even be wearing a rumpled raincoat. People would take in his comforting diminutive figure, look into his innocent face and his twinkling Irish eyes, and they would tell him everything. Then Harry, who would never miss the subtlest of inflections, would figure out from what they had unself-consciously told him just what to do to be able to get someone a job, or fifty people a job, or a hundred people a job.

I quickly learned not to do anything important without asking him. I would sit down in the big chair in his office, and run by him some new, enthusiastic idea of mine, and Harry would reveal the gaping hole right before my feet that I would disappear into if I took one more step. “How on earth do you know where all these holes are?,” I once asked him in amazement. “Oh,” he replied with a wry chuckle, “I fell in all of them.”

Sometimes, after patiently hearing out some new exciting proposed plan of mine, and being asked what he thought of it, Harry would ask, “How about if I sleep on it?” This, I came to realize, was Harry’s gentle way of saying “David, that is such an extraordinarily bad idea that I am actually worried about you, and maybe if you sleep on it you will forget about it by the morning.”

He was always saving me, and us.

In a meeting over some difficult problem, when everybody was starting to get just a little irritable, Harry would look up and say “Well, are we having fun yet?”

It is important to sing the praises of unsung heros, and Harry was such a hero. He was a hero of mine. He helped people. He was never confused about what was right. He was unwavering in his commitment to people, and untiring in his efforts. He taught me patience.

Thanks for being patient with me, Harry. And be patient for a moment, past the threshold of this world, while I sing your praises; that of a good man.

Post-Katrina in the Big Easy (2008)

2008-11-20T17:49:00.000-08:00

The Fragility of Natural and Human Culture in New Orleans

David B. Schwartz
3/30/08

“Culture,” the social philosopher Ivan Illich once said, “is that which holds the economy at bay.” A culture says that here in this place we do things in this particular way, we live in this particular way, which we hold above the measure of money alone. It is the unique, local way in which we “face illness, suffering, and death.” Here we eat in a certain way, live in a certain way, create in a certain way. “When a culture perishes,” Margaret Mead once wrote, it is a terrible loss for the world:

Human cultures are the most distinct creations of human beings, drawing as they do not only upon the special contributions of the singularly gifted, but upon the imagination, explicit and implicit, of every man, woman, and child who live within them, and through them, and who, each generation, remodel the traditions they have received from their cultural ancestors. But although human cultures are the most distinctive creations of the human, they are also the most fragile, for they live primarily in the habituated beings of living persons. Like a dance, for which the music and choreography have never been written down, a great part of human culture is lost to humanity when the group which has carried it, devotedly, in every word or gesture, is dispersed, or destroyed, or forsakes the traditional ways for ways which are new.*

One might think of the borders of a culture as a kind of levee holding back the sea of monetary economics which drives the modern world. Standing in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward I could see where the material and cultural levees failed in hurricane Katrina, and the scraped and barren ruins left in the wake of that breach. I stood where an enormous Mississippi barge, surfing a wall of water, scoured a living neighborhood from the face of the earth, taking a big part of a musical culture with it.

I was shown around the lower 9th by my old friend Richard Waller, a conservationist and volunteer with Common Ground, a visionary and unusual community organization operating out of a tiny house stuffed with 50 college students. They were stacked in bunkbeds, using one bathroom and a garden hose for a shower. The students and the organization’s leadership were there to try to do what they could for those who had called the lower 9th home. Richard’s own focus was not in house reconstruction, but in attempting to restore the wetlands whose slow death over decades had allowed the full force of wind and storm surge to strike unmoderated from the Gulf of Mexico.

“This neighborhood,” Richard gestured, “once had the highest percentage of home ownership by African-American people in the entire United States.” If one listened to mere reports on the news, one would assume that Katrina had washed away some kind of impoverished slum. But this was far from the case. This marginal, below sea-level land was once home to a unique culture whose art has spread throughout the world. These streets gave birth to the blues. It gave birth to jazz. It held the home of the legendary jazzman Fats Domino, who had to be pried away from his beloved piano by his family as the water rose. It’s a good thing, because when the levee broke his piano submerged under fifteen feet of water. It stayed for three weeks. The few remaining houses, scattered here and there across now open lots, still retained numbers spray-painted by national guard troops showing the number of bodies to be removed. There were 1600.

Why did art flourish here? What was so rich about this soil that such creativity emerged? One thing that was unusual about this neighborhood was what they did with their small homes. And they were small – tiny, in fact, by modern American standards. Most of these modest homes did not even have air-conditioning despite its near, humid subtropical climate. While almost everyone in an American suburb strives virtually ceaselessly to pay mortgages, car loans, and increasing improvements, something which requires two incomes to support even with effort, people in the lower 9th part of the “Big Easy” took quite a different approach. With many houses handed down and paid for, often only part-time jobs – even as musicians – were needed. They chose the luxury of time over productivity. With only part-time effort required to secure an acceptable roof over their heads, they could sit on their porches, drink some beer on a hot afternoon, play music, and sing. We are told by anthropologists that “primitive” tribes, including some still existing today, spent and spend much less time securing food and shelter than people in modern societies. In the modern world, work without end is taken to an extreme. Yet right in America, in a Southern city which was home to a community of free slaves even during the civil war, a certain traditional way of living persisted even into the beginning of the 21st century. Persisted, that is, until the levee broke.

Why did the levee break? In a phrase, the war against culture and the war against nature are the same thing. Richard took me out to the edge of the wetlands bordering New Orleans. Walking through piles of rusted steel from depots supplying offshore oil derricks, we came to the indistinct boundary between land and water. “They say down here that when God was trying to decide whether to make this part of the world land or sea, he finally decided upon - neither,” Richard said. You could see where the hurricane had torn up vast swatches of wetland grass, leaving reflective pools of open water that presented no resistance to winds and storm-surges. It was this grass that Richard and his teams of student volunteers were replanting from grasses sprouted in children’s blue wading pools. It seemed an inspiring effort, against overwhelming need.

But what was of greatest importance in that wind-swept place was not what you could see, but what you couldn’t. What was not there to be seen were the endless cypress and hardwood forests that within recent memory covered the spot where we were standing, as far to the north as one could see.

The previous day Richard showed my son and I through such an intact cypress swamp. Tall cypress trees with their characteristic “knees” emerged from the ground that was neither solid nor liquid, in the way that cypresses are particularly adapted to flourish in. Around their roots, a rich and complex ecosystem flourished, too: tall grasses, wild irises in bloom, seemingly somnolent alligators, and more snakes – mostly venomous brown cottonmouths, than I had ever seen anywhere. The boggy land practically squirmed with them. Although the swamp had been hit by Katrina too, here miles of established wetland vegetation had helped to muffled the blow.

It was only as long ago as when Richard and I were in high school that the Army Corps of Engineers had carved a canal through a swamp just like this to make barge traffic from the Mississippi to the Gulf more efficient – and profitable. It was called, by it’s acronym, “Mr. Go.” This immense and destructive undertaking had never turned out to be useful – it was now being decommissioned - but one thing that it did accomplish was to let the salty water of the Gulf up into the freshwater swamp. This breaching of an invisible biological levee caused the death of the forests, and the grasses, and the ecosystem itself. When the hurricane swept through this wasteland, the man-made levees failed. When they did, the culture of the lower ninth ward went under.

While much is made about how governmental systems failed in the emergency, the failure of technology is hardly a surprise. Louisiana is, too, hardly Holland, where an efficient system sticks its technological thumb in the first trickle of a leak. Here there was a pumping station that, unmaintained, failed to start when remotely signaled. We admired the massive concrete construction of a watertight door made to swing shut over a railroad cut in case of flood. Also remotely activated, it was disabled by rusty chains and padlocks. It was like chaining shut an emergency exit. You would have to wade out there with a key to get the thing closed in a hurricane.

Cypress swamps need no activation. They just need to be there. To claim that global warming spawned a killer hurricane is just a fragment of the story. All aspects of nature manifest boundaries that define inside from outside. They may be a cell wall, or a saline differential or a cultural boundary of language, of art, of ways of living. They are all levees that hold the economy at bay, to use Illich’s terms. For it is the unlimited workings of a freemarket economy that is the sea that ultimately covers them all. It starts with the death of a wetlands, proceeds to the collapse of man-made levees, and ends with the death of a culture. Standing in the remains of the lower 9th ward, where concrete steps punctuating blank grassy fields are all that remain of a community, you can walk the lonely streets and strain to hear a single blues note.

When the levee broke in the lower 9th, the storm had passed. It was a bright, blue-skied day. Everyone but the meteorologists, whose accurate warnings were ignored by politicians and the news media, breathed a sign of relief. When the levee gave way, it was like the proverbial Flood.

The legendary urbanologist Jane Jacobs published a book describing how cities really worked at about the same time that the “Mr. Go” canal was dredged. Called The Death and Life of American Cities, its original title was this: Why the Planners Are Wrong. While planners like New York’s Robert Moses sat in high towers marking neighborhoods for demolition and replacement by public works, Jane Jacobs pushed her small children in a stroller through streets and parks, noticing the cultural ecology of people as carefully as Richard observes the ecology of botanical nature. In New Orleans, you can see in dramatic form why human planning always fails to equal the intelligence of the natural world, a world that encompasses cells and people alike.

When Ivan Illich first encountered the word “planning,” which emerged in the language for the first time as the canal’s dredging operations, he was puzzled at his meaning. He went to visit his old friend theologian Jacques Maritan. Did he have any idea what that word meant? As Illich told the story, Maritan sat back in his study and reflected a bit. Then he responded. “I believe,” he replied carefully, “that it is a new word for the sin of presumption.” A more common word for presumption is hubris; the sin that is inexorably followed by nemesis. It is believing, as Illich used to observe, that man can do what God cannot.

Pulling out of Common Ground’s makeshift nursery with a load of idealistic college students and sprigs of seagrass, Richard heads out for a day of wading in the mud planting single stalks of grass against an ocean. He is cheered by these students, who are flocking to New Orleans to help. He’s one of the few “greybeards” among them. He’s been through this kind of thing before. He believes that it is particularly good that they are here, because New Orleans shows them first-hand what the world that they are going to be living in will increasingly look like. New Orleans, he speculates, is merely the first American city to fall to global warming. They can get a good look at what they are going to have to deal with as adults.

Pushing a CD into the dashboard player, he punches up his favorite current song, Bob Dylan’s 1983“Blind Willie McTell.” Dylan looks out the window of his New Orleans hotel and sings homage to the man he considers the finest blues singer of them all, a man who drew upon the traditions of the Delta. Dylan’s song comes out of the pickup’s tinny speakers:

Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what's his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

There’s no money in singing the blues. And there is no money in restoring wetlands. But that doesn’t stop these people. Cautioning his volunteers against alligators, snakebite, and sunburn, Richard wades out with his crew to plant the grass he has grown from seed divisions.

* Mead, Margaret, Foreword, in Zborowski and Herzog, Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl, New York, Schocken, 1973, p. 11.

Common Ground is a nonprofit community organization founded by Malik Rahim. It welcomes volunteers and contributions http://www.commongroundrelief.org/

On Acupuncture (1992)

2008-11-20T17:20:00.000-08:00

A Letter to Ivan Illich on Acupuncture
1992

David B. Schwartz

A few days before Christmas, the evening before my then wife Beth was to
get on a plane for Cincinnati, she was suddenly afflicted with a severe,
unremittting, pain in her left arm. We knew what it was because she had had
it before, exactly two years ago. It was a pinched nerve in her neck. Then she
had spent six weeks on her back on painkillers, and the siege had left her with
a deadened nerve. Now it had come again, this time even more severe. And
this time there was another thing: Beth was six months pregnant. It was a
holiday weekend, and she was in agonizing pain.

When you suddenly are faced by a loved one who is an extreme and
possibly dangerous medical situation, you reach for everything to help
healing that you know. You call the obstetrician, of course, who digs up a
neurologist to meet you at the emergency room, and then you deal with the
bureaucracy of the emergency room, which is all jammed up with poor people
whose kids have the flu and who have no money to see a doctor, and you and
the neurologist have to wait to get together because you have to go through
triage to get a room. And of course when he examines Beth you have to think
to yourself that he could have talked with her and checked her reflexes in the
hall, or in a booth of the corner diner, or even in our own home. He gives her a
prescription for codeine, which you can get over the counter in other
countries and which I now know is of course is inferior to opium by
inhalation, which has been illegal ever since the Chinese built the railways. The
doctors can't do a Magnetic Resonance Image test because Beth is pregnant,
and they can't of course do surgery unless it's an emergency, since she's
pregnant. So I bring her home to lie in bed on a special pillow and suffer the
pain and see if she gets better or worse. If it gets bad enough so that she
loses bowel and bladder function, we're to call. As it turns out it gets worse,
but not worse in that way.

We started with our chiropractor, who was very helpful but who could not
affect the problem with the sensory root, then went to the neurologist, as I
described. The pain intensified and Beth started visibly sinking in color and
vitality, and started to cease eating. It got pretty scary. I called up my
mother, who drove down and immediately took over the kitchen and bought a
soup chicken. I got Beth's closest sister, who is a neurological intensive care
nurse, to get on a plane and fly up from Florida. They were on their way now.
Finally I called up my friend and master acupuncturist Bob Duggan at home
down in Maryland. Bob grasped the situation immediately in a very broad way,
and gave me some acupuncture points to start massaging. And because Beth
could not move, let alone travel two hours, he did something that was to me
just incredible; out of friendship he got in his car and he drove all the way up
here on a Sunday afternoon and treated her right in her own bed. After that
point she started to get better, and Beth's sister Joanie arrived and started
arranging ice treatments and traction and all sorts of other nursing things
and my mother made delicious meals that sparked Beth's appetite. Soon what
had been a very scary, sinking situation in which we were alone and sliding
slowly towards surgery and the potential loss of this child started to be
reversed. After a week and a half, for the first time, Beth got up, walked
downstairs gingerly in her neck brace, and joined us for dinner.
So that is what happened.

Caring and Compassion

A friend of mine named Seymour Sarason once wrote a quite wonderful book
called Caring and Compassion in Clinical Services. In it he examined the
frequent complaint about modern medicine; that doctors were increasingly
distant, technological, and lacking in real compassion. Of course he ended up
looking at what he called the "disease of professionalism," a subject that I
have learned so much about from both he and Illich. In the people involved with helping
Beth there was a great range of caring and compassion, and I think a certain
theme emerged. The obstetrician is an excellent person, somebody who would
talk to us directly at 7:50 on a Sunday morning, and who could rustle up a
neurologist, something we would have been unable to do directly. But she was
a medical specialist; all she could do ultimately was make a referral.
Dr. Shaffer, the chiropractor, was much more accessible; he lived above his
office, he answered his own phone at home, and he immediately opened up his
office and saw Beth; twice on one Sunday. He was personal and concerned.
Perhaps above all, he touched; his fingers ran up and down the surfaces of
my wife's back, bringing up a picture of the minute alignment of vertebra, of
muscles in spasm. He hammered tiny light vibrations into the resonance of
muscles and bone and nerve, attempting to change their tune, head cocked to
hear like an intuitive piano tuner. But while he worked, while he figured, his
fingers, his hands, his close presence reassured, cared, and made evident his
desire to cure Beth, this particular person in this particular distress here on
his treatment table.

The neurologist was a nice, evidently kind, but somewhat distant physician
who was not in a rush. We saw him later at his office. He sat behind a big
desk; we sat on the other side. Then Beth sat on an examining table and he
briefly checked her reflexes; yes, some further deterioration was taking
place. Neurologists, even within the medical profession, have a reputation for
being cool, emotionally isolated, "cerebral." Surely he was picturing a lot from
his verbal and brief physical examination. But the main difference from the
chiropractor was pointed out by Beth as we walked out the door of his office.
"You know," she said, compared to Dr. Shaffer, he hardly touched me."
In fact, the only kind of touch proposed was that which was scheduled for
two weeks if she did not get better; an electromyogram. Beth had had this
before; what it consisted of was sitting very quietly while the doctor drove
steel needles into the muscles of her already throbbing arm, moved and
wiggled them around, while ink lines were made on chart paper. This would tell
us with some accuracy if deterioration was taking place in the motor root. I
already had noticed that Beth did not have the strength in her left hand to
squeeze the toothpaste tube, so I knew some deterioration was taking place.
This was not very accurate, of course. But for what end accuracy in this
case? If the only treatment was referral to a neurosurgeon, and they won't
and shouldn't do surgery anyway, why do the test? It was in this instance
that your phrase "medicalized torture" came to mind.

Then, at the most desperate moment, Bob Duggan appeared. I thought it was
tremendously interesting, as I sat in the room watching Bob examine and
treat Beth, what was taking before me. For Bob was not sitting in a chair by
the bed; he was leaning over, and crawling around on the bed on either side of
her, and behind her, and scrunching up against the headboard to get to and
reach the right places; touching, testing, probing, looking in her eyes, at her
face, inserting needles, massaging points, tracing meridians. There was no
professionalistic barrier at all. He was just my friend Bob, up here to help
Beth. Flat on her back, in bed, was where she was; therefore he had to drive
all the way up here, come to her bedroom, and get onto the bed with her.
thought what the neurologist might think if I proposed that he should do the
same. He would, I am sure, be stricken with anxiety! But this is what
had to be done.

Bob was with us all of the time; as guide through this experience, as helper an
interpreter. He would call every morning to talk to Beth and see how she was
progressing. After this one treatment, things really got stirred up and begin
to move around. For the first time she got pains in her other arm. Her skin
color started to improve. Then she started to get well.

What about Joanie, Beth's sister, the nurse? She immediately came in and
kissed her and hugged her and started treating the spine aggressively with
icepacks, lovingly and firmly helping Beth to stand them because the cold
hurt at first. As the pain started to ebb slightly, she lured her through the
risk of more excruciating pain to try some hours without codeine. They got
so she could be out of pain if perfectly immobile; then the next day up to eat
breakfast, then a brief journey out of the sick room downstairs, then a rest;
now take the codeine now before it starts to hurt; now let's do traction.
Aside from her intuitive and skillful nursing gifts, the kinds of practical
things to help of which the neurologist apparently knew nothing, Joanie, like
Bob, was where Beth was; in the bed, snuggled up in my ordinary place,
drinking coffee together, watching movies on the television, talking, napping. I
could see that Joanie was not only giving her nursing care, she was coaxing
and luring Beth out of the paralysis and pain she had become encapsulated in,
back tentatively into the world of upright movement.
In asking Joanie about what she was doing, she replied that she wasn't sure
she really knew, completely; it was intuitive, it was seat-of-the-pants. "The
main thing," she said to me, "is that when you start helping someone, anyone,
they have to know that you are absolutely there for them, you are in this
with them, that even if you're not exactly sure of what to do you are not
going to retreat and go away."

Finally, there was my mother, who works most winters caring for elderly
wealthy people in Florida. There was chicken soup, and more chicken soup,
and roast chicken, and snack trays brought to the room, and daily trips to
the grocery store to bring back mountains of stuff that I was just
confounded we could need all of, but it was as if she was going out to gather
sustenance, activity, color and smell and taste, to bring the wind of life into
the house that had formerly been so sick and still. We had a birthday party
for my mother in the midst of it all, right around Beth's bed.

Now each of these people, these healers were, it could be said, professionals.
But what an incredible range there was. What was the essential difference? I
must say, I was impressed with what seemed to be the influence of
economics. The one who was the strongest part of the economic system, the
neurologist, with his office and his instruments and network of referrals and
need to see patients in the emergency room, was the least influential of the
healers. The chiropractor, who lived above his office and who really
had a healing touch, was much more of a simple "tradesman." But the real
healing presence came from Bob and Joanie, who had no economic connection
at all. Joanie, of course, because she was Beth's sister, who Beth in turn had
once cared for and run her pig farm when she was laid up. The unexpected
event here was Bob, a friend who I had met through a friend in faraway Lee
and Manfred's and Ivan’s apartment in Oldenburg, Germany. Who would leave
the clinic, the desk, and just come. For what? I would have to ask him. For
care and compassion? Surely. But primarily from philia, because we were
friends and when I was in distress and called him he not only talked to me, but
he came.

This also reinforced something that I have been thinking about much lately;
that under the smothering and distorting layer of economics, of the
commodification of care, that here and there the caring, skilled, ethical
professional clinician can still be found to exist. They are a fragment of an
older culture of healing not yet displaced by modernism.

Which Body?

I had thought a bit about compassion and clinical professionalism before, of
course, so these events served mostly to help me notice a few finer points
about it. What was completely new to me was the evident and striking
difference in the body of my wife that each of these clinicians saw.

I began to see for the first time what my friend Ivan Illich was pointing to in
his work on the 'history of the body." And I had recently read a book by his
and my friend Barbara Duden. One phrase which kept coming back to me from
it was her realization in The Woman Beneath the Skin that in reading about
the bodies of 18th century Frenchwomen that her own experience of her
body was useless as a basis and guide. Visiting Bob Duggan’s school of
acupuncture I began to hear about this very unfamiliar acupuncture body,
which was similarly different from the allopathic medical body I had been
trained to see, and which I unreflectedly thought the body was.

Here all these acupuncturists were talking about six superficial pulses on each wrist that I had never even heard of. Of qualities of fire and of wood. They were talking
about a body I had never seen, but which was very evidently there.
In the space of a very few days, I saw three practitioners examine my wife as
I watched. I tried to follow along and picture in my mind what they were
seeing. The chiropractor, as I mentioned, followed the alignments and
movements and tensions of the body with a delicate sensing hand. It was
clear that he could feel the spine as his hand rippled along it; all of its fine
bony edges, where the nerves inserted; how the slight turn of a foot turned
up the tension in the right shoulder just so. The neurologist's body, in
contrast, seemed very abstract. He didn't need to touch it. From my own
limited training in that area, I could I think picture what he might be seeing.
There were all of these neurons, and synapses, and disks. It was a cool, clean
wiring diagram of sorts. The neurologist's icon for the body seemed to be the
computer-generated images of the MRI, showing the solid architecture of the
body, the map the neurosurgeon clipped to the back-lit screen before he
began to cut.

In the body seen by the neurologist, the fact that my wife's skin had started
to get pale and flaky at the same moment that the pain had started, or the
fact that her head was chronically congested, or what might be happening in
her emotional life when this pain erupted, were not part of his picture of the
body; they simply didn't exist. Even my wife's good obstetrician, when
questioned about the skin change, suggested she see a dermatologist if she
really wanted to pursue it. These aspects of the body were apparently part
of another specialist's picture. And all pictures in allopathic medicine seemed
to be taken at extreme magnification, like a snapshot with the wrong lens
that turns out showing only somebody's belt buckle, with their head and feet
beyond the frame.

Then there was Bob's picture of the body. Trying to follow what he was doing,
I watched him closely. It was clear that the body he was working on was
almost a completely different body that the body of the neurologist, and very
different in many ways from much of the chiropractor's. He put tiny needles
in the right arm, and made the pain in the left arm moved around. He showed
me where to press under the right armpit to reduce the pain in the left arm -
and it did! He had me massage a point near the right collarbone, and Beth
reported a warmth going down her left arm, ebbing away the pain. He saw the
fact that the pain was moving around as good, and helped I think to free the
energy up so that it could move around some more.

To Bob, the skin and the congestion were intimately connected; breathing
related to ability to heal and reduce inflammation, something that must be
opened up. He saw drinking hot things and avoiding cold as things that had
effects on the body before him. He looked at Beth's eyes; asked about her
energy level, saw the health crisis as a process with the nadir behind us, and
stirred the fires of healing. Even to the small extent I could follow the image
of the body he saw in my wife it was quite astonishing.

I began though this to see a little bit of what Illich was talking about in
examining the certainty that I had assumed to be the body. Can I say that the
body is a participatory creation? What a wonderful body the body of
traditional Chinese medicine seems to be. In the allopathic medical body,
there is no way of healing in this case but rest; no way of controlling pain but
giving the entire central nervous system a mild painkiller. In the acupuncture
body, I sit and massage points on the foot, wrist, and breastbone. When I
move the latter, my wife's breathing instantly slows down and deepens, the
tension starts to go out of her body, and the pain subsides a bit. I put my
hand on her swollen stomach. Every time I massage the breastbone, the baby
kicks.

Community

I did not consider myself to have deep roots in the community of Harrisburg
back when Beth was sick. So it really was a kind of a surprise to me to learn
what connections we actually had when we needed them so much.
Since we were unexpectedly at home for Christmas with nothing much in the
house, a friend from my office dropped by with a complete Christmas dinner
that we could eat on the bed. Jack at the pharmacy on the corner ordered
the special pills Beth needed. When I stopped by our neighborhood Greek diner
to pick up a milkshake to try to get Beth to eat something, the owner
refused to charge me for it, sending it along with get-well wishes. Since funny
movies helped distract Beth from the pain, I'd go over to the little movie
store on the next street to get her daily "movie prescription" refilled. Every
day the owners, true movie fanatics, would debate what would be the best
"classic" to send over, and inquire how she liked the last one. After a week,
they started to keep a list of ideas they had on the bulletin board behind the
counter in preparation for my evening visit.
The most moving thing, though, was Mary and David's visit. Two years ago
when we were in town alone we had a homeless mother and her three kids
over from the shelter for Christmas with us, and we became friends. We
helped them to get out and to set up, and I had thought to myself that this
Christmas they would again be celebrating it in their own home. We hadn't
seen them for a while but then Christmas night Mary and her oldest son David
rang the doorbell to come and wish us Merry Christmas and bring some gifts.
They had heard Beth was ill from a friend who runs a stand at the market.
Them reappearing was really the nicest Christmas gift of all. We had been
there for them, I guess, and they were there for us. We were there for each
other.

All of these things; the response of our friends and neighbors, my mother
and Beth's sister appearing, made me think about something that Illich said
once; that culture was ”that with which we faced illness, suffering, and death.”
I had thought that this seemed a somewhat unusual definition of culture at
the time. This experience brought home to me in a deeply personal fashion
how all we have to look to really is our culture, and that even when you think
that you are in a place where there is not much surrounding you there is
often more than you think.

Everything good that happened to us through this; Bob's trip up, the help of
family and friends and neighbors, took place within the realm of friendship, or
family, or neighborhood. And even the useful clinical help we received was
cultural first, and professional second.

A month or two later Beth was much better. In fact, she seemed completely
recovered. We had since seen a neurosurgeon, and he told us that despite the
lack of pain there was progressive motor loss, and that if she did not have
surgery after the baby is delivered (presuming there was no recurrence
before) that there was a danger of becoming significantly disabled. It was a
worrisome prospect. He seemed quite sure. He looked at the MRI (seeing,
incidentally, a different structural problem than the other physicians read
there) and there the problem was, plain as day. Perhaps, I worried, he was
correct.

Neurosurgeons are trained, and skilled, and can see something - the nerves -
much better than I could. But I, I learned, could see something that he could
not; that the body which he saw and accepted with such certainty is only one
body of many. There are many healers, and correspondingly many bodies. And
beyond the individual body, there is also the vision that includes the person,
physically, psychologically, spiritually (to use the closest available terms) as
one part of a network of others of which this body is inextricably part, such
networks themselves being part and expression of a larger culture of
meaning. Perhaps, I began to understand, culture is not only that with which
we face illness, suffering, and death, but that which defines these very
experiences. It is culture, after all, that gives us the specific bodies that we
are so certain that we have. This helped me to reflect more about why in my
own work on healing I have been so continuously drawn to the structure of
culture, rather than to the structure of nerves, whence I started twenty-five
years ago.
Our son Nate, who was three months away from his birth when Beth was sick,
is now ten years old. And Beth is fine. She seems just about as strong with
her left arm as she is with her right. Maybe a little less; I don’t know. She
carries heavy things around and doesn’t favor one arm. So I guess it remains
no problem for her.

She does have a problem every once and a while. Her back starts to knot up
in the same way that preceeded her terrible attack. Curiously, it is always at
the same time; around the winter solstice, when the days are shortest, a few
days before Christmas. She always tends to slow down, rest, and take a few
days off work. She gets some chiropractic adjustments from Dr. Shaffer,
and maybe a massage. Sometimes we used to drive down to see Bob for
an acupuncture treatment. The pinched nerve has never, so far,
come back. We felt lucky.

When Christmas comes, though, we always used to think back on what
happened that Christmas tenyears ago, when Beth didn’t have surgery after
all, and I learned so much about our bodies and about our community.

Previously published as: “An Occasion to Think About Healing: A Letter to Ivan Illich.”
The Journal of Traditional Acupuncture, XIV, 2, Spring, 1992, 15-18, 49-50. Excerpted in Quintessence, 13(2), 1-2, as The Acupuncture Body.

Woodstock Sells Out (1999)

2008-11-19T18:30:00.001-08:00

Woodstock Sells Out
Ithaca Times, August 8, 1999

David B. Schwartz

In 1969 My brother Dan and I went to Woodstock. In July, thirty years later, we went to different music festivals in upstate New York: he to the Woodstock revival in Rome, and me to the Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in Trumansburg. What we saw this time could not have been more different.

There has been a lot written about the original Woodstock, because something extraordinary happened there. People have various opinions about what it was. I’ll give you my own opinion, forged on the scene. The sixties were a period of time in which there was great estrangement of young people from the prevailing structures of the society. The Vietnam war, the military, police, government, corporations, careers, - all were rejected as false preoccupations with money, power, and “things.”In Dustin Hoffman’s movie [ital] The Graduate, the confused young graduate is advised soberly by an “organization man” that the secret of the future was [ital] plastics. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” we said, and believed it. The old world of organization men was over, and a new world of peace and love were at hand.

This was hopelessly naive, of course. But there was one moment in which the possibility could be glimpsed. The hundreds of thousands of people pouring into Woodstock completely washed away any semblance of structured authority for managing people. Police, overwhelmed, were on their own in the midst of the flood. Although police were widely distrusted - even hated - in the sixties, I remember a scene of a group of kids pushing a stuck police cruiser out of the mud. Without the trappings of power, they accepted the officer as a person - and extended a hand to him. He might as well relax and enjoy the music. He wasn’t going anywhere.

In the sixties there was a popular Rousseauan belief that if people just set aside the moribund world of power and management and money, that community would take care of everything. At Woodstock, for a brief moment, this was true. Everything was free. Abandoned to the care of each other, we took care of each other. The tribal instinct of people surfaced, and community worked. I remembered standing in the rain and mud, looking out over the hillside of people, and thinking “My God, it is true. This does work! Without organizations things [ital]were better! It was a moment in time. But social history did not go forward in that way, not in that way at all. It went back to money and power and organizations as never before.

Thirty years later, the same producers, now in their early fifties and presumably wiser, held another “Woodstock.” This time they ensured that everything was securely under control and that everything made a profit. They held it on an old military base double - fenced with razor wire on the outside so nobody could sneak in without paying. They ran everybody through metal detectors. They forbade anyone to bring supplies in. You had to purchase everything at the prices demanded. This was a moneymaking enterprise. Whether high gate fees, exclusive television access to young women with their shirts off, or 8oz bottles of water for $4, it could hardly escape anyone’s mind what they were ultimately there for - they were there to be a captive audience for people to make money from. The symbolic presence of bank machines helpfully scattered throughout the grounds could not have been more pointed. Take your money out and spend it here! When the riots broke out, the looting of the bank machines could have not been more pointed either. At the original Woodstock, money was of little use. A commune, the Hog Farm, gave out free food. Thirty years later, nobody was giving anything away for free.

While my brother was at Woodstock, my friend Cosmic Bob and I went to the Grassroots festival together, as we do each year. Unlike the one in Rome, this one was so much like the feel of the original Woodstock that it was stepping into a time-warp, even if many in the festive crowd hadn’t been born yet when the original took place. People wandered freely, listened to music, shared their food and their tents, kept an eye on each other’s children. “It’s Woodstock with nose-rings,” I remarked to my friend Bob.

There are those who claim that the riots at the ‘90s Woodstock show that kids are just different nowadays. And different they are, surely. It is a far different time. But the behavior of the same kids at a festival not 100 miles away showed that this is not the point at all. The point is that if people feel that they are citizens, involved in a community-sponsored event like Grassroots, they behave like citizens. If they feel like they are just consumers, being milked like so many cows, then they just may kick over the milking stands. You just cannot manage people for your own economic benefit without running the risk of them exploding, no matter how many security police you employ or how high fences you build. Whether the American Revolution, the French Revolution, prison riots, Columbine High School, or “Moneystock,” as some dubbed it, the managed approach blows up in your face - eventually - every time.

Cosmic Bob and I stopped by a fence to chat with Tommy Mann, who runs the security detail every year for Grassroots. An old hippie, Tommy has the kind of mind that would have made him a chief of detectives in another age. Casually leaning against the fence, his long blond hair brushing against his Tee-shirt, a small radio poking out of his back pocket, Tommy chatted with us, while scanning the crowd and missing nothing. For here and there, there might be somebody who hadn’t heard the news that we all looked out for each other here. When they acted on that belief, a few of Tommy’s orange shirted volunteers would materialize and expel them through the fence. You needed just a little managed security, and Tommy and his folks provided it.

Tommy, and everyone at the Grassroots festival, know that if you try to manage things too much, that you’ll spoil the fun. Besides, what kind of a festival would that much management make? The answer is Woodstock 1999. It’s like what’s happening to the practice of medicine under HMOs - all the caring is being driven out of it. It’s not surprising, I guess, that if some people think that you can produce care through management that you can even produce a music festival in this way. Bob and Tommy and I chatted about the Woodstock festival then taking place concurrently - this was before the ending riots. It hadn’t attracted any of us. “HMO Woodstock,” Cosmic Bob called it. I guess that if an HMO produced a music festival that’s just what it would look like.

The Cafe Cure (1990)

2008-11-19T18:27:00.002-08:00

The Cafe Cure: or, Take Two Cappuccinos and Call Me in the Morning

David B. Schwartz

Coffee is a powerful drug. I am not talking here of its well-known ability to increase alertness, keep one from nodding on one’s desk in the afternoon, drive that extra hour at night. Rather I am speaking of its less-acknowledged but no less powerful stimulant qualities: the ability to stimulate conviviality, assuage feelings of isolation and loneliness, even perhaps arm one for the personal irritations of the workday. These effects are not captured in formulaic descriptions for the chemical caffeine: C8H10N4O2. For this, chemical analysis will not suffice. To get these effects, coffee must be taken in the company of others.

Each morning in Harrisburg, the daily ritual of people part of this “drug culture,” (as the anthropologists might put it) is repeated. Tables fill up at the Alva Restaurant across from the train station, at the State and the Colonnade on Second Street, and scores of other places “where everybody knows your name.” In recent years, this ritual has blossomed in the emergence of a phenomenon which residents of Seattle or Paris or Vienna could possibly do without: the neighborhood cafe. At places like Sweet Passions on Third Street or The North Street Cafe, coffee is drunk and banter exchanged. Yet there is more going on than meets the eye. For in this casual “wasting of time” may lie a potent inoculation against some of the more pernicious diseases of modern living.

You don’t have to be a particularly astute observer to recognize that the modern world is obsessed with the feeling of stress. In fact, such stress, as well as feelings of isolation, disconnectedness, and loneliness, are virtually epidemic. An ever-escalating offering of stress-reduction programs, therapies, legal and illegal drugs, and wide-screen TVs attempt to assuage such feelings. The bottom line, however, is that they often don’t work. This is because of the simple reality that people were born and bred to be part of community, to feel they are members of a tribe, to eat and drink and celebrate and suffer together. Alone, they are as bereft as the last of the passenger pigeons, or one bee in a hive. Alone, they grow so isolated that they sicken. Many prescriptions can be offered for this sickness. Yet almost free - if not free - treatments exist for the price of a cup of coffee.

Available Without Prescription

People are suffering severely from the loss of a sense of connectedness and community. This is increasingly shown by research. While it may be surprising, for instance, to read medical studies showing that participation in a support group improves outcomes for women with breast cancer, this can only be news to a medical system that has believed the historically recent idea that disease is a phenomenon solely of cells, heredity, and chemicals. By reversing the interpretation of support groups, one might claim that the “tribal healing effect” is so powerful that it can even be observed in a hospital. Can it be that a short time in a cafe in the morning increases your resistance to disease? In fact, there is some medical evidence to indicate that this may be so, and research on this very phenomenon may verify what common-sense knows to be true.

Here in Pennsylvania, for instance, there is the well-studied “Roseto Effect.” Starting in 1961, medical researchers became transfixed by this small, Italian-immigrant town in the Poconos. In Roseto, unlike in neighboring towns, the state, and the nation, residents seemed nearly immune to one of the most common causes of death: heart attacks. People died of heart attacks at a rate half of the rest of the country. In Roseto, unlike elsewhere, there were more widowers than widows.

What could be causing this dramatically higher level of health? Researchers swarmed over the town, giving physicals, measuring cholesterol, following women into their kitchens to watch them cook. People who lived in Roseto, it turned out, smoked and drank wine freely. Well, the researchers thought, maybe it’s the olive oil - based “Mediterranean diet.” Then they found that the groaning tables of Roseto weren’t the product of olive oil - that was too expensive. In Roseto, meatballs and sausages were fried in lard. It didn’t matter. So it wasn’t about serum cholesterol, apparently. What was it about? Roseto, it turns out, was an outstandingly tight-knit community. Everybody knew everybody else. Family homes held three generations. Meals took hours. Nobody applied for welfare. Concluded long-time researchers Drs. Stewart Wolf and John G. Bruhn (the latter now Provost of Penn State’s Capitol Campus): “People are nourished by other people.”

The application of this once universally-known truth was summarized by sociologist Dr. Ray Oldenburg in his aptly-named The Great Good Place - Cafe’s, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (Paragon House, 1989.) If home is your first place, and work is your second, Oldenburg claimed, then cafes and corner taverns were a “third place.” A healthy society depends upon a balance between these three kinds of places. In Britain, everyone has their pub. In France there is still one cafe for every thirty-two adult citizens. But in America, inhabitants have increasingly tried to survive with only two: home and work. It is unlikely, Oldenburg cautions, for either a free society or an individual to survive on such a lean diet of meaningful community contact. It’s almost enough to make a person depressed.

Homespun and Professional Treatments

Depression - in fact all so-called “psychiatric” phenomena - are extraordinarily individualistic and complex. As an analytic psychotherapist, I treat people’s serious depressions, depressions which are significant, painful, and sometimes even life-threatening. For such depressions people are ill-advised to “buck up,” “slow down,” or even drink coffee. In serious depression, among other painful symptoms, all the color, verve and energy of the world can simply fade away. But a depression always tells us something about the struggle the person is in, as well as the society in which he or she lives. It is often an attempted solution to an essential problem. And it is undeniable that simply living in the modern world presents essential problems.

It is far from uncommon, for instance, for a person with far too much to do, who is plagued by feelings of isolation, and who is suffering in other ways, to walk past one or two convivial cafes on the way to fill a prescription for an antidepressant. Antidepressants are marvelous things, particularly for serious depressions, but one of their characteristics is that they often work even if taken alone in one’s lonely apartment. This is not true for coffee.

This is not to simplify the problem of depression and other afflictions. But, even in the many instances in which a convivial half-hour with the regulars in a cafe might produce miracles as great as Prozac, it simply seems impossible for many people to take that half-hour for themselves. Being driven has become unremarkable. Getting to the office a half-hour early to beat the rush has become quite common, even if it results in insomnia or an ulcer; coming in a half-hour late by way of the cafe is much less so. Yet despite fortitude and determination, there are many sensitive people who are unable to live in this incessantly busy, lonely, way.

The fatalities of the pressure which characterizes today’s American society reminds me of people with anexoria nervosa, “fasting girls.” Women with this extremely serious condition diet to the point that they can die. It is a peculiar form of death by malnutrition, for it is starving in the midst of plenty. Clinical work with such women reveals that they maintain a fixed idea that they are overweight, despite the evident fact that they are thin as rails, to the point that they weaken, to the point that their menses stop. It is the frightening consequence of a false idea. It is, as many observers have pointed out, a disease which only could emerge in a society obsessed by thinness, especially for women. No Eskimos ever had anexoria.

Likewise, overwork and incessant business have become so normal and accepted that people can starve themselves of the company of others. They rush past the cafe with the firm idea that they have too much work to do, that they have no time, that they must eat lunch at their desks. After a time, these people may go to their doctors for ulcers or depression or panic attacks or some other symptom that, insistent as an oil light in a car, is telling them that their bodies, minds, even souls, can simply not keep up the pace that they have set.

So, wake up. Disregard the incessant internal and social voices. Start leaving work early one night a week and go to the model train club, or the bowling alley, or take all the kids to see the Senators play baseball on City Island. Resolve that, barring emergencies, you are going to stop at the neighborhood cafe or diner at least three mornings a week to catch up on the local gossip. You may start to feel a lot better.

If you still feel driven by pressures, good professional care may be helpful. When it works, you may find yourself walking down the street, looking at the birds circling overhead, stopping in for some coffee and a glance at the morning paper with a new spring in your step, a new ease in encountering each day. But if you are not sure that you need this, try something close at hand and see if it works for you. Take two caupiccinos and call me in the morning. It might just work.

ICU Psychosis (1999)

2008-11-19T18:27:00.001-08:00

Intensive Care Psychosis
David B. Schwartz
December 19, 1999

Driving a person into a psychosis usually takes years. Also, you usually have to start young. I am a psychotherapist; I treat people with psychoses. So I was astonished to see my mother, before me in the bed in an intensive care unit of the Cleveland Clinic recovering from abdominal surgery, in the midst of a full-fledged psychotic reaction. She hallucinated floridly, seeing people who neither I or the nurse could see; she stared fixedly at my face, describing how she could see right through my transparent jaw to my spine. She was preoccupied with something that I couldn’t make out about a hurricane. “Help! Call 911! “She yelled at me as I was outside her door speaking with the resident doctor. “These people (she meant the nurses changing her intravenous lines) are killing me!” She was delusional and sometimes panicked, but was too weak and groggy to be able to get up.

Around her, dozens of electronic instruments blinked and beeped. Monitors called out when her pulse rate went high, or low, or her breathing rate changed significantly. Four or five IV drip regulators signalled insistently when something stopped up or went wrong; these were a lower-order sort of alarm that the nurses could attend to when they had a moment to turn to something less pressing, so they often continued, ignored, for a long time. The nurses, one to each two patients, moved constantly, adjusting their charge’s physical parameters and needs. I sat by the bed, talking to my mother in a soothing, hypnotic voice, suggesting that everything was all right, that there was no hurricane here, only in her dream, and that she could rest and get better. Then she would go to sleep again, and into troubled dreams, eyelids flickering like some dog by the fireplace chasing rabbits, or maybe being chased.

The next day, when my mother was physically well enough to be transferred to the regular floor, her psychosis was still florid. But now she was stronger. She demanded her coat so she could go out for dinner. She wanted the bars on the side of her bed down; when the nurses and I said that she really had to stay in bed, she ordered me to get my toolbox and take the bars off. My ability to calm her waned. When I went out of the room for a minute she tried to crawl out between the side rails and the footboard, pulling her IV lines out in the process.

Unable to control her now myself I demanded the resident doctor on call who, with admirable patience instead of drugs, which he explained would depress her already diminished breathing ability, managed to talk her fully back into bed and reluctantly ordered body and wrist restraints until the psychosis passed. “It’s ICU psychosis, certainly, he confirmed. We see it all of the time, especially in older people.” “How long does it last?” I asked. “They have to experience a day and a night,” the nurse interjected. They have to see the sun come up and go down and come up again. Up on the ICU there is no day and no night. And it’s noisy and busy; they can’t sleep.” True to their predictions, a tumultuous day later my mother’s psychosis started to break up, leaving much residual confusion and alarm.

What Causes ICU Psychosis?

Everyone that I talked to, both doctors and nurses, instantly identified my mother’s psychotic break as an ICU psychosis. It was, in fact, apparently unremarkable to them. They see it constantly. But what was unremarkable to these clinicians was remarkable to me. What immense pressures must be operating to jar someone into a psychosis so quickly! This is almost unheard of elsewhere. At first, I assumed that this must be a toxic reaction of some kind, or a neurological event. Such things will produce a psychosis this quickly. But I was reassured by those who saw it daily that, despite the alarming symptoms, it was not toxic or neurological, and usually dissipated after a little while. Although when I first put the question to the resident doctor about its usual duration, he admitted that he did not know. It only dissipated after patients had left the ICU, he pointed out. He, himself, was always in the ICU. So he really didn’t know.

Everyone agreed, however, on the various factors that seemed to go into the potent mix which produced ICU psychosis. First, there was usually age and some fragility, together with the patient’s own pre-operative anxiety. Then there was anesthesia, which took a while to completely wear off and get out of the bloodstream, and the trauma of the surgery itself combined with post-operative pain medication. In addition to these primarily physical factors, there were others inherent to the ICU environment itself. The ICU was a self-contained, brightly-lit world in which the normal rhythm of days was suspended. Things hummed on endlessly, day or night, weekdays or Christmas. There was the busyness of the staff working tirelessly in shifts to keep the person alive, attended by the constant beeping of clusters of machines around the bed. There were dozens of unrecognizable people constantly disturbing and touching you . There were staff conversations at all hours and the checking and administration of medications 24 hours a day, making it almost impossible to sleep.

Research on ICU psychosis has attempted to weigh the various factors in the ICU experience to determine which is most influential. Perhaps it is the loss of a 24-hour circadian rhythm, some speculate, or the constant bright lights. Others have shown the importance of the sheer level of noise in an ICU, which approaches the din of a subway. Staff conversations are the most disturbing of noises, they found, and one hospital implemented programs to reduce noise in such units, with successful effects. Sheer sleep deprivation due to noise, apparently, may be the biggest factor in inducing a psychosis; in one study one-third of people who were sleep-deprived developed psychosis.

The possibility exists, however, is that it is none of these individual factors that precipitates ICU psychosis. Instead, I wonder if perhaps it is the cumulative effect of all of these disturbing factors, these necessary side effects of life-saving treatments, that together knock an old person loose from their moorings. Taken individually, all of these treatments have side effects which are manageable. When they are applied together, however, it is possible that a strange thing happens: beyond certain level, these individually healing factors combine to produce an environment of a fundamentally different nature: one that has a decent chance of saving the person’s life while driving them briefly out of their minds.

Perhaps it is in the ICU, I realized, standing there caring for my delusional and hallucinated mother, that the ultimate effect of an intensive caring environment may be seen. How paradoxical, I thought: out of such incredible, lifesaving care should come an environment that the human mind can simply not bear.

Effects on Staff.

One thing that struck me immediately about the intensive care unit was the astonishing compassion and dedication of almost everybody I met. There are many complaints these days about a lack of compassion in medical and other service environments , but this was undetectable to me here. The nursing staff and the doctors, charged to maintain life in people who were at a high risk of dying any minute - and who did die, every day, despite the most heroic of efforts, showed the seriousness and commitment one sees only in MASH units on TV - and without the lulls in the action. Residents virtually lived in the hospital. Nurses came in even if they were sick. There are few places in society in which people work with such undying commitment, with such unslacking effort, without a break. It was simply inspiring.

I tried to imagine going to work every day to take responsibility for people who were, by definition, at the very edge of death. One error, perhaps one personal trip to the bathroom, and they might die. Many of them would die anyway. In this ICU, virtually everyone was elderly, very sick, with many things wrong with them, who had just endured yet another major surgery. After one of these surgeries, they would probably die here. If there was a complication, they might be rushed back to surgery. “Here, If it can be done, it will be done,” admitted a young nurse, who talked with me during a rare pause late one night. The atmosphere of sedated agony must be intense, despite being punctuated with the relief of people who recover to go home like my mother. “I just try,” the nurse admitted startlingly to me, “not to get too attached to them.” This, I realized, was not the statement of a grizzled and uncaring old veteran; this was the confession of a dedicated nurse on her first job who was trying to avoid a nervous breakdown of her own.

ICUs are, in fact, notorious boiler-rooms for staff burnout. Nurses are so much on the edge of coping, she said, that they tend to request transfers out in waves. Everything will seem to be going along all right, and one nurse will put in for a transfer. Then transfer fever will spread through the tightly knit group of women, like a rash of suicidal attempts rippling through a college girl’s dorm. Before you know it, seven nurses are gone, the place is impossibly understaffed, and you have to start all over again to staff the place.

As with ICU psychosis, there apparently are a variety of theories to explain the high turnover. Certainly, it is “stressful,” to use the contemporary term. But I wonder if the same factors that make the ICU so difficult to bear for patients may have a similarly powerful effect upon the staff. They don’t go psychotic, of course, but apparently many people find the environment similarly impossible to bear over the long-term. There were no nurses over the age of 35 there, I noticed. The longest-tenured “veteran” nurse I met was a twenty-something woman who had been there six years.

The Loss of Proportion

The problem of ICU psychosis arising in intensive care units, it seems to me, captures the dilemma of what happens when you make care settings steadily more intensive in response to “need.” John McKnight pointed this out in relation to social services in a community; if you keep intensifying services around a person, eventually you pass a threshold in which people are no longer connected to the world, because all of the services surrounding them have combined to create a new and artificial environment. Sitting in the intensive care unit in Cleveland I realized that this process of intensification reaches its apogee in ICUs. It is here that one can observe the logical endpoint of increasing professional services around a person to help them. It is here that you can observe both the blessings and the costs of combining helpful services past a certain threshold.

ICUs are a kind of “miracle pill” with one whopping side effect. “Caution,” ICU’s would say in bold print if they were pills listed in the Physician’s Desk Reference; “may cause psychosis.” This doesn’t change for a moment the fact that ICUs are literally life-saving pills. But if one looks at their application with a little common-sense, certain incongruities arise. Is the accepted level of side-effects inevitable? Or could it be reduced by the application of a little proportion in prescription-writing?

While other ICUs in the Cleveland Clinic held people who were recovering from injuries and/or surgeries for neurological or cardiac conditions, or who were in acute medical crises, the people in my mother’s ward were almost all both old and sick. Does that mean that they should be denied treatment? Of course not. But many of these people, according to the nurses, came back again and again, following one surgery after another at the end of life. This is what used to be called drawing near death, or, eventually, dying. There were a lot of people there, it seemed to me, who were passing out of this life in stages via the surgery and ICU. Were at least some of these people prolonging the agony of dying by extensive medical intervention, adding a psychosis to the process as well? It seemed to me entirely possible.

If you accept the idea that there are some people passing through ICUs and experiencing a psychosis who intensive care really can’t help much, then perhaps they could be spared this high-tech tool and the side-effects that come with it. Perhaps they could approach death with the palliative help of less injurious care, and die in their own, rather than hospital, beds.

For those for whom the ICU has real life-saving blessings to offer, on the other hand, could the environment be “de-intensified,” keeping at least some connection with the rhythms of the natural world? Others have suggested that ICUs don’t necessarily have to have unvarying white lights, no windows, and a screeching-subway noise level in which it is impossible to sleep. A sharp nurse on the regular hospital floor to which my mother had been transferred after the ICU did not re-connect a cardiac monitor. She noted that in their unit the staff had reached the decision that reasonable attention to one’s patients was really just as good. “Those machines tend to make you lazy,” she observed. “You don’t have to look at the patient.”

In fact, the general nursing text used in that same hospital in 1922 retained the idea of some judgement and balance in using the technology of the humble thermometer in attending to an unstable patient whose temperature needed to be closely monitored, the more so when it was one of the few technological monitoring measures available. In that handbook the authors advised nurses this way:

“The pulse and respiration in critical conditions are watched constantly, and even though the temperature is not actually taken because it might disturb the patient, a nurse is on the alert to note any increase shown by the face - flushing of the face; hot, dry skin; hot and tremulous lips; and rapid breathing.” [italics mine]

If a nurse from the wards of 1922 were to come onto an intensive care unit, along with marvelling at the wonderful new technology, might they also not see what contemporary nurses become inured to; that the beeping of a temperature monitor might disturb a patient’s life-restoring sleep as much as rolling them over to insert a thermometer might? It might take people from another time to notice that proportion had been lost. I suspect that one reason that ICUs are quite as bright and noisy as they are is simply this loss of a sense of proportion, or said more simply, the loss of common-sense about what a sick or injured person needs to recover. The technology is there, and so it gets used. The fact that all of this together precipitates a major psychotic break is simply something that one gets used to, like the fact that taking an antibiotic may give you a stomach-ache. A psychosis, however, is no stomach-ache.

Curious about what I was seeing of the culture of ICUs, I asked my cousin, Dr. Robert Schwartz, a hematologist of wide experience. He explained it to me this way:

“ICU-ers are a lot like fireman. There may be a very small self-contained fire in your house, but the firemen in their zeal to prevent further flare-ups, will usually take their axes and water hoses and systematically destroy whatever is left of your home and possessions, doing far more damage than the fire ever would have done. In a like way, in their zeal to treat, ICU-ers may forget what they’re trying to accomplish and endlessly assault a patient with procedures and drugs, even though the suffering becomes unbearable and the outlook futile.”

After 48 hours with the ICU, Bob made it a rule to go back to basics and decide whether it made good sense to go on. I had the feeling that if he were the staff physician of the patients in my mother’s particular ICU that it would not have been quite so full.

As I write this my mother is back in the Schuyler County Hospital near her home, recuperating until she is strong enough to go back to her apartment. It is a tiny hospital, perched on the hillside above her village of Watkins Glen, N.Y. Looking out her windows she can see Seneca Lake stretching off to the north, the same visa that she has seen and lived in for much of her life. She knows many of the nurses and doctors at this hospital; Watkins Glen is a small village, and you don’t meet a lot of complete strangers if you’ve lived there a long time. The food is enticing and good. Her neighbors come and visit her. Not coincidentally, the confusion consequent to her psychosis has faded completely. Last night she went to the Christmas dinner at her apartment complex, returning to the hospital to sleep.

Would my mother have experienced an ICU psychosis at Schuyler County Hospital? It’s not a fair comparison, really; they don’t do major surgery at such a little hospital. She had to travel five hours to Cleveland, to the big teaching hospital, to get that done. But I wonder; if her ICU in Cleveland had a view out of the window through which she could see hawks soar, would it have made a difference? If the dawn had broken each morning on a valley outside, the sun making its transit across the sky to cast the long shadows of sunset upon the far hills, would even an unconscious person know it somehow? If the lights had been turned down softly at night, the nurse padding silently in to look at her breathing, the alarms turned down or placed outside, might she have retained a thread to the rhythms of the world that had been already so disrupted by anxiety, anesthesia, major surgery, and medication?

I think that if you tried these things and conducted a study - modern medicine is guided by studies - that you would find that the incidence of ICU psychosis would decrease dramatically. In other words, people might be able to receive the good of hospital care without incurring so many of the injuries that such care now brings. This would surely be a good thing.

I think that the lesson of ICU psychosis is that professional care, concentrated beyond a certain point, becomes something that is not so good for you. Like a powerful medication diluted to the correct proportions, care can pull someone back from the shadows of death. But beyond a certain point, paradoxically, it begins to turn into something different, harmful, even toxic. Beyond a certain point it is not the world, even in small measure, but an environment. Beyond a certain point you may preserve your existence, but lose your mind. This phase-change that occurs with the concentration of care can be observed not only in hospitals, but in all settings where people are cared for, whether these be hospitals or human service agencies, mental retardation programs or schools. ICU Psychosis dramatizes the fact that sometimes too much of a good thing is not so good at all.

The Yuri Gagarin of NIH (2002)

2008-11-19T18:25:00.000-08:00

The Yuri Gagarin of NIH
Roger P. Peters ( 1943 - 2001)

Though you are in your shining days
Voices among the crowd
And new friends busy with your praise,
Be not unkind or proud,
But think about old friends the most:
Time's bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.

-WB Yeats

“The modern hero is he who triumphs in the inner struggle.”

James Hillman

I only heard from Roger in times of great crisis. Once, after years of radio silence, he called from a curbside in L.A. He had just filed for his third divorce and was fleeing crazy in pain from his home in Colorado, driving his Volvo P1800 fast and living in his car until the worst of it subsided. “I’m getting divorced again, Schwartz,” he started abruptly. “I’m across the street from the L.A. courthouse. I just filed the papers. I’m heading North.” Then all was quiet for some more years. He buried himself in teaching, tracking coyotes, skiing, and writing books on cognitive psychology, trying to grab fame somehow with this next one. This was normal for Roger. He had been just this way back at New College in Florida in the sixties, when we had sat on a log by the bay and studied the emerging field of psychobiology together. Life for Roger was all full-throttle acceleration punctuated by cataclysmic crashes. As he crawled out of the latest wreckage, my phone would ring.

“Roger!,” I exclaimed with delight when the phone rang a few years ago. “How great to hear from you! What’s up?” Roger was at home in Durango. This time he did not get to the point right away. We talked of this and that. But then he blurted it out. “I have melanoma.”

I’d heard a little about melanoma, one of the most feared of all cancers. I remembered Doc Daneeka in Catch 22 was morbidly afraid of it. Doc Daneeka was a driven hypochondriac who was always sure that the latest of his symptoms were sign of some dreaded disease that would kill him and, at least by that route, get him out of the War. He studied up on fatal diseases. His favorites, I remember were melanoma and Ewings’s tumor. He liked the fulminating kinds best.

A fulminating disease was what Roger had, but he seemed typically matter of-fact about it. Once he rebounded from the first lightning-bolt of a cataclysm, Roger always spoke as if he were delivering a lecture to a large hall of his students; outlining his points logically, enunciating clearly with precise diction. He had had the mole even thirty-some years ago at New College; old photographs of him without a shirt showed it. It had never caused him any trouble. But a couple of years ago a physical therapist giving him a routine treatment had remarked upon it and advised him to get it checked out. It looked suspiciously like a melanoma to him. The physical therapist had been terribly right.

Melanoma, a physician friend of mine told me, is “sneaky.” I thought of it as a dry dandelion ball. You blow on it and the seeds fly in all directions. At least one seed had apparently scattered in Roger’s body. He hadn’t even bothered to tell me when he had the first mole removed. He hoped for the best. Sometimes it doesn’t spread. But another mole had appeared nearby. That was bad. His doctor had removed this one, too, but had taken the serious step of starting him on a year-long course of interferon. Interferon stimulates your immune function, makes you run a fever and hopefully “burns out” the dispersed melanoma seeds. Roger had just started as we spoke. He had taken a year’s leave from the university. Taking interferon, he said, was like having a mild intermittent flu. You gave yourself a shot, then you started feeling sick. You felt bad for a few days, and when you started to feel better you gave yourself another shot. Roger rolled with it. For the first time in his life, he was not focused obsessively upon being productive. For once he didn’t have a book deadline set for himself. He didn’t because he couldn’t.

Interferon was strange stuff, Roger reported, ever the meticulous observer. It gave you technicolor dreams. It also impaired your sexual functioning. No real matter, he quickly said. His girlfriend was on an extended job in another state. But she was to come home just when his year of interferon was over. “When Sherry gets back, Roger volunteered enthusiastically, “I’m going to get a 55-gallon drum of Guinness-flavored Astroglide!” That was Roger, fighting melanoma and laying in sexual lubricants at the same time.

Although he kind of breezed past it, there was one thing that told me just how serious Roger’s situation really was. “The doctor,” he said, after outlining in detail the next stage of his medical campaign, “says that if it comes back a third time, I’ve got about six weeks.”

I hung up my telephone and called our old friend Hart. “If we want to see Roger, we should see him soon,” I said pointedly. “Despite his optimism, I don’t think he has long. “Let’s go to Durango.” Hart agreed at once.

“But let’s not just fly,” I suggested. Let’s arrive in the proper style on motorcycles, just like the old days.” Hart was enthusiastic. We bought plane tickets, and not many weeks after met in the main concourse of the Albuquerque airport. “So how bad do you really think it is?” Hart asked, now that we could talk in person. “Roger sounded pretty upbeat on the phone.” “Roger’s always upbeat,” I countered. I’ve done a little reading on melanoma. Do you know what one oncologist said?” I asked.
“What?”
“Melanoma,” I paused,” “gives cancer a bad name.”

An hour later we were at Pedro’s motorcycle rental shop, cranking over two overlarge bikes for the trip up to Durango. Motorcycles had changed since Hart, Peters, and I had been riding buddies in Sarasota in the sixties. You used to have to stand on the crank in sturdy boots and kick the engines over. Now you just pressed a starter switch. But they roared just as loud as ever and went immensely faster. We flew out of town on old route 66, catching the old twisty main route up to Santa Fe. We leaned through the curves in the desert hills, stopping in Santa Fe, then climbing the mountains into Colorado, soaking our stiff motorcycle butts in the Pagosa hot springs. Pausing overnight, we rode the remainder of the route into Durango the following day, following Roger’s directions to his driveway.

Stopping at the bottom, we rode side-by-side up the sandy road to his house in a valley overlooking the overhanging mountains, rattling the windows with our straight-pipe exhausts. As we leaned the hot bikes over on their kickstands and pulled off our helmets a frail, back-braced, but broadly grinning Roger came out of his house to greet us. “Schwartz!,” he exclaimed, hugging me. “Hart!” “You came! And on these beasts!” He walked around them admiringly.

A mutual friend later told us that Roger had said that when we arrived it was like a whole part of his youth had come riding up his driveway. I was pleased. This was the effect that I was looking for.

Basic Natural Roger Peters.

Roger made his dramatic appearance on the New College scene in a memorable Basic Natural Science lecture on the mating ritual of the cricket. It was 1966. All one hundred of we first-year students were sitting on folding chairs in the teak-lined music room of the old Charles Ringling mansion in which we had heard so many intellectually challenging but academically wooden lectures. It was sometimes hard to keep one’s mind on the speaker as just yards away Sarasota Bay sparkled under the brilliant Florida sun, dolphins swimming along the breakwater in pursuit of jumping fish. And sitting just a few seats down from you was the entrancing and intelligent young woman with whom you had watched the sun come up sitting on that very breakwater. Having passed the night deep in conversation, you wondered if the pleasures of last night might lead to even more thrilling ones in the coming evening. Looking up from her notes, she gave you a warm glance. Yes, it was hard to concentrate on a monotonous academic monotone.

Then this little intense guy - he couldn’t be more than 5’2, shorter than his younger brother John a year or two ahead of me in school - took the lecture platform. I knew that he was a math tutor, although the catalog listed him as having a degree from Chicago in political science. But here he was lecturing on animal behavior. Well, at New College, the lines weren’t drawn rigidly. He was an incredibly dynamic, energetic speaker. He talked about the new emerging field of psychobiology, and the way that the study of animal behavior could tell you a great deal about the foundations of human experience itself. Sex, for instance. I glanced over at the young woman to my left. To dramatize, he laid out the invariable“hard-wired” fourteen steps of the mating dance of some kind of cricket. But instead of just delivering them from the podium, he danced them out.

‘First, the male cricket approaches the female cricket and waves one antenna,” he instructed, crouching down in a cricket-imitative stance, hands pointing out from the top of his head as antennae. Fixing a fetching woman in a sundress and sandals in the front row in a libidinous gaze, he suggestively wiggled one antenna at her. She colored, and the audience roared. “The female then signals back,” he intoned, leaping as if he were a cricket himself to the far side of the platform, spinning about and wiggling an antenna in the direction from which he had come. More giggles. Meticulously and dramatically, he laid out all fourteen ritualized exchanges of cricket foreplay.

“The purpose of the instructor, a great Michigan professor named Marian Kinget once pronounced, “is to dramatize certain insights.” The cricket lecture, remembered fondly by friends who were there with me in that room thirty-five years ago, conveyed an insight that piqued curiosities on my part that have driven a lifetime of study. Back then I couldn’t know with what power Roger would come into my life. “Who was that masked man?” I questioned a classmate after the lecture. “That class, my friend, was Basic Natural Roger Peters. And that’s the guy himself.”

Sitting on the Log.

By a year later Roger and I had become fast friends. We both loved motorcycles, we both loved adventure, and we both had become completely absorbed in the emerging field of psychobiology that I had first heard of via the crickets. Back when the field was small, we could do the heady thing that is so rare in modern scientific fields - we could read every article that came out. Then we’d talk about them.

One spring, Roger signed up to teach only one tutorial, and I signed up to take it. That administratively took care of his teaching and my course requirements for the trimester. We developed a rhythm. Starting early in the mornings, we would read the literature. Then, after lunch, we would meet on our tutorial log in a little clearing by the bay. Roger would fish under the log and fish out our mason jar, we’d roll a joint, and talk. “What about this new holographic theory of memory in Pribram’s Scientific American article?” I’d ask. “Is this incredible, or what?” And we’d talk animatedly about Pribram’s experiments and his new theory, which promised to replace the old localized idea about memory storage. We’d connect it with other things that we had read and thought about, about the behavior of people around us, and even society, in the midst of sixties turmoil. Everything was fodder for our conversation. This conversation continued between us, despite long interludes, for the rest of his life. These are things I speak of to no-one, anymore.

In doing psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which has become my profession in later life, I have learned the truth of the dynamic formulation of intrapsychic conflict. You conceive a wish, and against this experience a fear. The wish draws one forward, and the fear pulls back. In describing this, Freud captured a basic quality of the experience of living. I have come to see that the nature of the conflictual struggle in a life is determined in part by the intensity and energy of what analysts term libido, and which I think of as soul-force. In some people the energy of the soul seems very weak; in such people the intensity of the struggle is weak also. Desire is weak, and fear strong. When resistance to moving forward arises, it is not so hard to distract and subdue the resulting anxiety: some television, a few beers, maybe a little shopping makes it possible to continue what one is doing without too much discomfort. With others, however, the soul-force is massive, and the fear also. Here one sees a great and even illuminating struggle, with massive suffering. One may see a life-course characterized by stratospheric flying interspersed by cataclysmic crashes.

I remember hearing a story about the great composer Stravinsky. He had written a piece for violin which a great violinist in an orchestra had struggled with hopelessly. Finally throwing down his violin in disgust, the violinist shouted to Stravinsky, at the podium, that the piece “unplayable.” “Yes,”Stravinsky replied. “What I am looking for is the sound of someone attempting to play it.”

This was like Roger’s life - riveting music punctuated by broken strings, jumping up and down on the violin like a frustrated Daffy Duck, followed by great heights of musicianship. As often as Roger proclaimed another “peak experience,” he was alternatively dusting himself off of broken glass, broken telephones (he once put one that had brought news that displeased him through a small hole in his kitchen wall, followed by the kitchen chairs.) When he married his second wife, a very nice woman who struggled with depression as much as Roger struggled with more animated crashes, we referred to them as a couple as “R & B:” not for Roger and Bonnie, as they thought, but for “Rhythm and Blues.” Roger was all Rhythm.

This was the story of Roger’s life. Back in college, one of those sudden torrential downpours started when Roger realized that he had left his car windows open. Rocketing out of the door of the science lab without looking to the left or right he stepped right in front of one of the maintenance crew’s pickups, which caught him square on the bumper like the sweet spot on a baseball bat, whacking him in a low, sickening arc into the sandspurs alongside the road. When I dashed over to pick him up, he groggily pulled himself up on my arm, waved off any offers of medical attention, and insisted that I drive him not to the hospital but to a friend’s house, where he staggered in and collapsed on the couch, regaining consciousness later that evening to go stiffly about his remaining business.

On another occasion, running in late to teach a class he neglected to see that the glass door to the room was closed until he was on the other side of it, covered with glass and dripping blood on the carpet. Girls screamed as he started to ready his lecture notes regardless, and he was forced to retreat, staggering into my girlfriend’s room to be cleaned up and bandaged. As his motorcycle riding buddy, it seemed to me that he was saved from vehicular disaster only by his lightning-sharp reflexes.

Roger’s appetite for walking the razor’s edge reached its highest form in relationships with women. The complexities of a relationship with one woman seemingly not enough, Roger often arranged relationships with two women at a time, constantly calculating their respective travel paths so as to avoid encountering one when he was with the other. Once, walking down Main Street in Sarasota with his girlfriend Marci, he suddenly spotted his wife walking toward them, who had suffered a breakdown and was presumedly in the psychiatric ward. Marci felt a sudden push in her back and found herself propelled through the open door of a shop, as Roger ran forward to see his wife and redirect her away from the scene. Marci had to find her own way home. Later, of course, he was deeply and sincerely apologetic to her - as he always was after such near-misses and disasters. Supplicating angry women was a regular necessity of Roger’s early romantic life.

This diminished as Roger grew older, but never disappeared. In his early fifties, he wrote a letter to a sometime girlfriend when he realized that he owed a letter to another. Hitting the “find/change” command on his MacIntosh, he printed personalized but identical versions to both: every “Kristy” became a “Jordan.” He sent both out. A few weeks later he received replies from each of them, who were friends. Both Kristy and Jordan sent him copies of the same reply, word-for word. They had just had lunch together.

Despite the many “crashes” he experienced, Roger was like the legendary motorcycle-jumper Evel Kenevil: always rolling out of some flaming crash to jump to his feet, arms held up to show the crowd he was OK. A few ribs taped, and he’d be back off the ramp, whether that was tracking wolves by light plane and snowshoe in Northern Minnesota, working out a new theory of how human intelligence evolved from the cognitive mapping necessary to track prey, passing Robert Redford’s sport’s car on his bicycle down a precipitous mountain road, high and outside, teaching his classes, writing another book, getting married again. “Our relationship has deteriorated to the point,” he wrote me in the midst of one marriage, “that we communicate exclusively through slammed doors.” Yet he would always try again. How can you not love someone like that?

The melanoma had reappeared, despite the year on interferon. It was a reversal surely signifying his imminent death. I spoke with him by phone. “Yeah, I was really bummed out for a day,” Roger admitted. “But now I’m seeing if I can qualify for a Phase I trial at NIH.” As a researcher, Roger knew better than I that a phase I trial is the stage of experimentation in which they try to find out merely if last-resort patients can survive the treatment. No matter: Roger didn’t dwell; he was always ready to try the next thing.

I woke up last night from a dream in which my doctor had biopsied my intestines and told me that I had a fatal malignancy, from which I would soon die. My doctor did, in fact, recently tell me that he has detected some abnormality with my liver. It is probably not a cause of significant alarm, but I am scheduled to see a liver specialist in Philadelphia. Maybe she will do a biopsy with a long hollow needle through the abdomen - that is how they do it, I know. So the dream may tell me that I am more worried about this than I realize. Or it is even possible that the dream tells me that I am in fact fatally ill - dreams do tell such things sometimes. What the dream makes me think most of is Roger - how for four years he must have had such dreams, only to wake up always to find that it was true.

“Look,” Roger said in Durango when I asked him about what was thinking about death, while he pumped his daily massive dose of antibiotics into an IV line taped to his arm, “either I live or I don’t. If I live another month, I get to go deliver a paper at the APA conference in Hawaii and visit Richard Waller up in his rainforest. If I live until fall, I get to go back to teaching my favorite course and go hunting. If I die, I don’t think I’ll have any experience at all, so it won’t be unpleasant.” When he got finished with the IV, we went out to walk and look up at the mountains he loved, in the bright Durango sky he had warmed to years ago when he had moved there. He was, as always, ecstatic at the view. “Up there is where I hunt elk,” he indicated, pointing his finger along the high ridgeline. “Maybe again.”

Yuri Gagarin

Roger and I had both been in elementary school at the birth of the space age, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had ridden the first rocket into space carrying a man - at least, the first one we know of. Gagarin, a prime physical specimen, had walked into his capsule. After he hit earth at the end of the experience he was too weak to walk alone. Roger checking into the National Institutes of Health was like Yuri Gagarin climbing into his space capsule.. Checking in, he seemed a man in perfect health: we took energetic walks about the grounds and talked animatedly. I drove regularly down to Bethesda from my home in Harrisburg, this was the longest that Roger and I had been able to spend together since college, and we made the most of every minute. Roger was happy about feeling good again after recovering from almost dying last year. He was his old self again. It was only the results of medical tests that revealed him a sick man; a candidate for the last-resort of all last resort treatments, an experimental stem-cell transplant.

Always the observant scientist, Roger immediately grasped the theoretical problem. Cancer cells are always floating in the body, he reminded me. Why, then, do some cancer cells take hold? Obviously it must be some failure of the immune system. So the idea was to transplant his brother’s functioning immune system into him, replacing his compromised one. To get the transplant material, his younger brother John came to Bethesda and donated blood. Taking it into the advanced labs at NIH, technicians centrifuged out all of the new, embryonic stem cells from which new white cells, macrophages, could grow, and put them aside. Then they set out to kill Roger’s existing immune system to get it out of the way.

So-called immune systems are hardy. That’s why you remain alive. Killing one involves injecting toxic agents so powerful that they destroy the bone marrow itself. With no immunity, ordinarily you would die. You would die, that is, unless you were in the world’s most advanced research hospital, with skilled nurses working constantly to keep you alive. From a seemingly healthy man, Roger retreated into a man curled up in his hospital bed, burning up with raging fevers over 105 degrees, retching constantly, lost in agony. Agony, I recall, was the term technically denoting the last stages of dying, when one was literally “in one’s agony.” But this agony was one that wasn’t allowed to proceed to death. In a brief period of lucidity, Roger quipped that his IV pole was so hung with antibiotic bags that “it looks like a Christmas tree.” Nurses, doctors and lab technicians worked to identify the specific bacteria that were trying to wipe him out. He ended brief phone calls by a hurried need to hang up as he was overcome with wrenching dry heaves.

Looking back on that terrible period, once he was able to speak once again, Roger told me that the suffering had become so all-consuming that at a certain point he lost the sense of “I” from which one experiences suffering from. He was just all pain, spinning lost in a dark void. I have read that this is the ultimate state that torturers aim to create in their victims. The phrase of my old friend Ivan Illich came to mind: medicalized torture.

When he came out of this, and stopped shaking, there finally came the signal day: they wheeled Roger up to the lab to have brother John’s stem cells dripped into his veins. I downloaded a microphotograph of a microphage engulfing a cancer cell for him to past on he wall by his bed and use as a focus for visualization exercises. Roger was going to leave no effort undone in the quest to survive where no-one had survived before. “You, Roger,” I proclaimed one day, are the Yuri Gagarin of NIH. You volunteered to be shot off into a place where nobody has been, to advance human knowledge. One day there is going to be a bust of you downstairs in the lobby.” Three months later, another college friend and I held him under each shoulder to help him to climb the three steps to her house, where we tucked him into her bed. It reminded me of that old joke: “The operation was a success, but the patient died.” Roger himself never thought of regret; he only set himself to the next goal, whether it was taking the correct complex schedule of medications, walking a few more feet the next day, or working a few hours on his latest book manuscript.

Road Trip

Roger was subsequently hospitalized for short periods for fevers, and, six months after he had arrived in Bethesda, was ready to be discharged from this last hospitalization to go home to Durango. He had tickets on a 6:10 AM flight. We arranged for me to show up at his room at 4:00 AM the morning of his departure. He was going to take a cab to save me the trouble, but this was hardly the way to celebrate such an event, I told him. “It’s just another road trip!” I admonished him. “I’ll be here.”

When I appeared at 4:00 AM, having caught a few hours rest on a friend’s couch on Capitol Hill, Roger had his duffel packed and was ready to go. I pulled the car up to the silent entrance, and we set off. Before us, the lights of the sleeping city arrayed themselves: the lights of the Capitol dome, of the Washington Monument, the highways along the Potomac. Early flights lowered themselves on the flight path toward National Airport above us, following the river to the runways. Roger was excited.

As we drove, we remembered road trips together of so long ago: driving in my Corvair Spider convertible across the middle of Florida, taking turns shuttling a friend’s Bultaco Metralla to West Palm Beach, where we all spent a memorable week aboard a sailboat called the Volante that Waller and Hazelhoff were crewing. We recalled road trips before daybreak on our motorcycles down the old Tamiami Trail from Sarasota to Sanibel Island, arriving over the causeway as the sun came up over the mainland behind us.

As we spoke of his medical “space shot.” Roger was characteristically optimistic. The previous afternoon, as we went down for his final blood tests before discharge, Roger pulled the Nurse aside. “Can you do a HIV test while you are at it?” he asked her. “Having an AIDS-free test printout is a good thing to have in your pocket on a date,” he offered me, by way of explanation. Was this the very definition of optimism, I wondered to myself, or of denial? Perhaps it is not so simple to say.

As we drove to the airport, we spoke also about deep changes that Roger had experienced within himself during this humbling experience of serious illness. Roger had not been especially given to such deep conversations about feeling, but during his illness this had changed. We had had many deep conversations about both of our struggles during his last year - conversations that were as much solace to me as they were to him. Isn’t this what friendship is, after all? We had our troubles - him especially - but we were not all alone.

In our conversations, Roger told me something that he had never expressed clearly. During most of his life, he confessed, he had felt driven mercilessly to produce. Friends always came second to this compulsion. This, of course, I knew. But I didn’t realize how deep it had gone. I knew that Roger always was writing a book against some deadline, preparing a class, organizing a new program - and before that getting his PhD, getting into graduate school - the series of stiles along his personal track had been endless. I had written a song about him - and me too, I guess - a long time ago. It was called the “PhD Blues,” and started:

When I was a little boy
In the wheatfields green
I asked my mother
What would become of me?
She said “Hey - listen up, my son,
You know full well,
You must get your PhD
Or roast eternally in hell.”

There was always that feeling about Roger, as if he were trying to produce enough, somehow, to be loved. Roger confessed that for all his years on the faculty in Durango he would come home each night and have a stiff drink to calm the desperate feelings of not having accomplished enough that day. Yet, as is so often paradoxically true, love was all around him. It was his illness, he told me, that finally caused him to see this. It was only when he could not produce in any way, but could only be cared for, that he came to see that he didn’t have to produce anything in order to be loved by his friends. His friends surrounded him - at home, in Durango, they took turns sitting with him, bringing him food, taking him to doctors, taking simple pleasure in his company. When he came East, his Colorado friends handed him off to the group of which I was a part. For this, Roger had to produce nothing - no books, no articles, no lectures.

Back in the spring on Hart’s and my motorcycle trip, Roger had taken us over to see his ex-wife Rita, who he had not seen himself for some time. Like most exes, they usually confined their talk to their now-grown daughter. But today Roger mentioned how he had been in the hospital there last spring, in intensive care. He was in terrible pain and it was expected that he might die. For a long time he was heavily medicated and unconscious. “I know,” Bonnie replied quietly. “I was there.” “You were?” Roger asked, turning to her in astonishment. “Every day, Roger,” she said softly, touching him softly. Sitting on the front steps, Roger started to cry.

When the final recurrence of the melanoma came, there were no other hospitals to go to, even in Bethesda. His brother John flew in from California with Roger’s daughter Eden. His close friends came to be with him. I talked with Roger by phone. He was characteristically doing “real good.” John was more sober. It would not be long now.

In the end and in this place Roger, who had struggled and worked all of his life unsuccessfully to find love and caring, found himself in the center of a warm and loving family. It was nothing he had to work for. There, dying in his home in Rockies, surrounded by those who loved him, he was curiously but obviously happy. At the end, when the cancer spread to his brain, the magnificent mind that had shone so brilliantly all his life began to misfire on a few cylinders, as he would have put it could he still describe such things. Finally, John told me, he lost his ability to speak. “How are you, Roger?” John asked him. Roger flashed him a grin and raised his hands from the bedsheets: Two Thumbs Up. Then he died.

The Vein Dowser (1998)

2008-11-19T18:23:00.000-08:00

Touch my Hands: Bessie the Vein Dowser

When you want to find a vein of water underground in Tallahassee, Florida, you call a dowser. When you want to find a vein in a person you call Bessie Smith, RN.

Dowsers wander around your property with a forked stick until the stick dips. "Here," they point. "Drill it here." And the well driller does. I saw a dowser work, once. This one didn’t use a forked stick: he used a backhoe.. My friend Bob had a broken underground water line. He’d searched for it fruitlessly for a week, digging holes all over the side yard. He called in Willie, the local backhoe operator, and showed him where he thought the break most likely was. Willie didn’t seem to listen to him. He bent over his steering wheel for a few minutes, holding lightly to the hydraulic levers. Then he suddenly dropped it into gear and headed for a place two hundred feet away from where Bob had directed him. Bob ran behind, trying to keep up. He lowered his scoop, quickly dug down four feet and hit a break in the line precisely where the water was squirting out underground. Then, while Bob stood slack-jawed by the edge of the hole, Bubba drove over to a second place seventy-five feet distant, lowered his bucket, and quickly exposed a second leak that Bob didn’t know about.

Bessie Johnson is like that. She finds veins under the surface of people’s skin. I heard about her from a friend who worked as an IV nurse in a Tallahassee hospital. All day my friend went from room to room putting IV lines in people. You do this every day for a few years and you get really good at it. My friend could get a needle into the veins of people with tiny or collapsed veins, or people who had had many previous intravenous lines, with consequent scarring. It might take her a few tries with a really complicated one, but generally she could do it.

There were certain cases, however, that she or any other nurse simply couldn’t get a line into no matter how hard they tried. These were inevitably very sick people for whom getting intravenous fluids and medications into was a matter of life and death. For these people, they would page Bessie Johnson wherever she was at the hospital.

Bessie is a large, Southern African-American woman with an easy manner and a perpetual smile. She has been putting IVs into patients at the Tallahassee General Hospital for thirty years. I got her to talk with me one day about what she did and how she did it. Initially a little guarded about her gift, she eventually warmed to my serious interest.

"Yes, it’s true that I can get an IV line into anybody," she admitted. "I’ve never not been able to do it on somebody -- not after my first year, anyway. When I go in to see a patient, I always give myself just one try. I have to get it in that one try. I always tell myself this. And I always do." "When they call me, it’s always somebody that’s been stuck a bunch of times. It’s usually an old, sick person whose veins are all collapsed or some little, newborn baby in its mama’s lap who is all dehydrated and squalling. The mama’s always real upset, and the baby’s upset, too. Lots of times when I come in, there is a whole group of nurses and doctors around that person’s bed. When I come in, that crowd just parts. I feel like Michael Jordan," she chuckled. "When I slip that needle in so easy and test it, they just about always look up and say, ‘That’s it?’ Lots of times they cry – the old person or the mama. I start the drip and pretty soon they start to pinken up and feel better. It makes me feel good."

"How do you do this?" I asked. "How do you hit the vein every time?" Bessie paused before replying. "I lay my hand on their skin, and I know what those veins are doing," she said simply. It became clear that Bessie was describing exactly what she did. Putting her hand over the surface where veins lie, she visualized – literally saw -- the veins under the skin. She saw them even if they were in an unusual place, if they tended to roll in a certain direction when pricked by the needle, or if certain places were impenetrable because of scar tissue. She saw them like Willie the dowser saw water underground. It was then simple to insert the needle into the center of the vein that she was seeing.

"How do you suppose you got this ability?" I asked her. "From God," she replied immediately as if, perhaps, I were a little bit dense. "All gifts come fron God."

Given this, I knew what Bessie was going to tell me in response to my last question.

"Do they ever ask you to train others to do what you do?" I asked her. "Oh, Lordy, yes!" she laughed. "They send me them young nurses all the time. But you can’t really teach somebody how to do this. It’s not something you learn by teaching. I just tell them: Lord, child, just touch my hands."

Hillbillies by Intention (2001)

2008-11-13T19:34:00.000-08:00

Hillbillies by Intention
March, 2001

“A human community must exert a kind of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place.”

Wendell Berry

Amtrack's Crescent pulled into Philadelphia's 30th Street Station right on time at 4:50 PM, and my son Nate, 9, and I boarded her bound for Greenville, South Carolina. It was the day after school let out for the summer, and we were bound for Country Dick's cabin in the Smokies for a salamander hunt. Nate loves salamanders. Before we moved to the city, his mom and I had lived for many years deep in the woods in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. We built a log cabin from trees I had cut one winter up on the high ridge between the lakes, just as my great-grandfather Philo had done nearby after the Civil War. We spent many years there, before work had called me to Harrisburg, PA. But we kept the old place, and brought Nate there for the first time the spring he was born, when he was just three weeks old.

Below the cabin is a stream, and when we go back to our homestead in the summers Nate and his best buddy Ian are down in that ravine as they have been from the time that they could walk, flipping over rocks to find the salamanders beneath. In the evenings, we go up to the farm pond and they catch frogs, just like I did when I was a kid. Now we were going to take the train to find salamanders at Country Dick's. We were going to see the mountains, and we were going to take an overnight train.

So I pulled my son away from his usual city amusements; cartoons and computer games and city parks, and we boarded a Pullman car for Greenville. A couple of family trips in Pullman cars are happy memories of my own childhood. I remember lying in the top bunk, looking out the little window at the small towns passing in the night, of the rhythmic clicking of the wheels as our long train sped down the track. I wanted him to know that too. Who knows how long there will still be such trains? Our friendly porter showed us to our room, and Nate sprung like a monkey up onto the top bunk as the train pulled out and headed south. Down below I unpacked my guitar and sang train songs; "The City of New Orleans," of course, and "Daddy What's A Train," an old Utah Phillips favorite:

"Daddy what's a train?
Is it something I can ride?
Does it carry lots of grownup folks
And little kids inside?
Is it bigger than our house?
Well how can I explain,
When my little boy he asks me
'Daddy what's a train?'"

The train sped along on its modern clickless rails. We had dinner in the dining car, and fell asleep to the lonesome whistle of the engine ahead, barreling through the night through the Virginia hills.

Country Dick

I had heard that Country Dick had moved up to the mountains, and I resolved to visit him. He and his wife Lori had finally had enough of what Mencken had called "snivilization." They sold their house in Knoxville and moved up to their little summer cabin high in a notch of the Great Smoky Mountains. They moved far, far, up: far from the nearest store, far from the nearest paved road, up where the mountain people lived as they had lived for generations. Setting their modern habits aside, Dick and Lori took up the way of living of what city folk called hillbillies. Despite the effort, they did so with a great sense of relief.

Back at New College in Sarasota in the mid-sixties, Dick had arrived at that eclectic place standing out by his southern country drawl, his apparent calm and personableness and how he set you at ease with his warm, relaxed style. He stood out there, far from his origins, and that is how he got his name. Early on in philosophy class one day he mispronounced Nietzsche, calling him "Nizke,[sp]" like the football player. Some New Yorker put his arm around his shoulder and corrected him. "Man, we're going to have to call you Country Dick from now on," he kidded him. And the name stuck.

Despite the six AM arrival of our train - Country had gotten up at three AM to make the two-hour trip down to meet us - he was there as we stepped off with his usual warm smile, and a thermos of coffee under the pickup seat. We headed up through the dawn mists through Asheville and then into the corkscrew roads of the mountains, pulling through deep green forest hollows and around grassy mountaintop "balds," turning left and right down unmarked washboard mountain roads, past tiny "patches" of fields and ramshackle houses, splashing through the trickles of innumerable springs flowing out of hillsides, until we finally arrived at that little collection of farms known as "Max Patch," after the high mountain "bald" in whose lee it nestled.

As we pulled up the dogs roused themselves from holding down the railingless cabin porch and ran over to sniff us over and greet us. Dick and Lori's log cabin sat on the edge of a steep field overlooking a steep-sided valley known as 'Boomer Den,' after the boomers (squirrels) that had once made their homes there. Sitting on the swing seat on the porch, you could see the high ridge of the Smokies off to the West, and other named peaks to the East. The almost complete silence of the surroundings was broken only by the hummingbirds that "buzz-bombed" you on the way to their syrup feeders. There was not even airplane noise overhead.

Spring Lizards, Healing Plants, and Neighborliness

Country Dick had written us that the Smokies had one of the biggest concentrations of salamanders in North America. “It’s one of the largest sections of biomass in these mountains,” he had written me. Even more tantalizingly, one of the myriad species crawling around in these mountain springs - hence the local term “spring lizards” - was the hellbender, the biggest spring lizard of them all. “They are a foot long,” Country had written. “Fifteen inches,” Nate sagely corrected. “Anyway,” Country Dick wrote, “down here they call them allegheny alligators.” Dumping our bags into the cabin and waving hi to Lori, we pulled on our boots and headed out into the lush woods, looking for springs and spring lizards.

While Nate turned over countless rocks reaching for lizards, Dick and I looked about the woods. Like all of his neighbors, the woods were his home, and he knew a large number of plants and their medicinal uses. Those that he didn’t know, his wife Lori did. They grew wild ginseng, sought-after by the Japanese for its potency, in these woods, and they gathered others that Lori had learned from her mother. There was blue cohash for female troubles, and others I had only faintly heard of. When we became tired and started to feel hunger pangs after long hiking, still far from home and our noon-time dinner, Dick paused by a serrated-leaf, waist-high plant with a distinctive purple stem. “This here is spignet,” he told us, busy exposing a lateral root with a pocketknife, “but some people call it spikenard. I never heard of it before I moved up here. Here,” he offered, scraping the dirt off a three-inch section of root he had cut. “Chew on this. It takes care of being hungry and thirsty and tired.” I chewed the slightly bitter-tasting root, swallowing the astringent juice and spitting out the fibrous pulp. We walked on, and in a little while I noticed that in fact my hunger pains had gone away, and I no longer felt fatigued at all. We walked along the trail with renewed energy, as if we had been chewing coca leaf up in the Andes. Here, so much of what people needed, I mused, was under their feet.

We pushed our way through the woods from spring to spring, eyes out for snakes, as Nate unearthed salamanders, bugs, and the occasional squirming orange mudpuppy. Nate would be on them like a cat on a mouse, diving full length along the stream-bottoms after them. “That Nate is all boy,” Dick observed approvingly, leaning against the rail of a footbridge.”

Later, a farmer hoeing his "tater patch’ observed about the same thing, watching Nate wade after frogs in his farm pond. ” I began to see the true differentness of these mountain people. Unlike most of modern America, the mountain folk really like children. They seem to enjoy them rather than to feel inconvenienced by them. Marcus leaned on his hoe and looked approvingly down at Nate splashing intently around the margins of his pond. “We can use boys like that in these mountains,” he volunteered. Nate reminded him, it was clear, of himself when he was young. Nowadays, Country told me later, everybody has nephews and nieces and grandchildren who come up to visit from the cities who want only to know about cable tv and computer games, which don’t exist here. I felt relieved and grateful to see that Nate was not among them.

I think of the children who I see in my practice who have been referred by schools pressing for ritalin and counselling. I am reminded of my child psychiatrist friend Normand up in the Canadian Maritimes, who observes that up in Newfoundland they don’t have any attention deficit disorder and hyperkinesis among children. “Up there, they just run around in the woods,” he observed. “People don’t think anything is wrong with them". In the modern world, it seems to me, there is very little tolerance of genuine manhood or womanhood, and very little tolerance for differentness. Up here, there was tolerance of everything except government.

The thing I noticed in countless interactions with Country Dick’s neighbors was how they had time for and interest in each other. Nobody would think of passing each other with a wave on their way to do some work; everyone always paused for a long conversation about the crops, and the weather, and, in our case, the best place to find spring lizards. It was not just children who they liked; they liked each other. Except for living in a commune in the early seventies, Dick and Lori told me, this was the only time that they had really felt part of a community in their adult lives. If you visited “Grandma” down the road, you weren’t bid “hello,” but just “get you a plate,” motioning to the wood cookstove always simmering with beans and corn and potatoes and cornbread, to be served with jars of relishes on the kitchen table. If you came by to visit someone, to stay less than an hour would be unforgivably abrupt.

The love of these hill folk for children and the time and interest they took in each other had more in common with third-world people than in their fellow Americans. I was reminded of our Eritrean neighbors in Harrisburg, whose son Binium is Nate's daily playmate. Binium's family became Nate's second family, and ours Binium's. When these hospitable Eritrean's invited you for coffee they invited you to a ritual. First they roast the beans on the stove, bringing the pan out for the guests to smell. They take it back to the kitchen and pulverize it into powder with a mortar and pestle. Then they bring out a tray with demitasse cups and a special urn, from which the coffee is poured over spoonfuls of sugar. You talk, and drink, and then another dense urn would is stirred up in the kitchen. You talk some more. To take one’s leave before the coffee is brewed a traditional three times is to be most un-Eritrean.

Stepping foot on these mountains is to feel the pace of life to drop back to a slow idle. And I recollected the current thinking of anthropologists that prehistoric peoples, like remaining primitive peoples today, had an enormous amount of time to simply be around each other. The necessitities of living simply took much less time and effort than they do today. People would sit around the fire and pull vermin out of each other’s hair, a form of elemental caring that Diane Fossey reported seeing among chimpanzees. Here in these hills, with their shacks and old pickups, their gardens and tater patches and the abundant woods, people lived a more loving and mutually caring life than in the busy flatlands below, from where I had come. I fell into bed each night and slept as if I had fallen into the bottom of a well; Nate barely made it to dinner before passing out exhausted on the couch.

Although Dick and Lori were raised near these mountains, neither of them were products of these high patches and deep glens. But it had beckoned to them more and more powerfully over they years. Dick had run far from the mountains for many years, said that he never conceived of coming back anywhere near here. He was lead singer in a rock band that traveled North America and Canada in an old bus, playing at any joint that offered another booking. He had worked construction and the usual hard jobs of the wanderer. Finally he settled down with Lori and worked a job as a writer for the government at Oak Ridge Laboratories. He sent me a sign from those days warning motorists of radioactive frogs. It was on my old state government office door for years. They gardenened and spent increasing weekends in the mountains, eventually buying a cabin for summers. But one day Lori came home from a particularly irritating engineering conference and announced “I’ve had it with people like this! Let’s move to the mountains." After a month of talking it over, they moved in the fall in time for the most severe winter in years. Since then they have never looked back.

Each year Dick and Lori fall deeper into mountain life, and cut more ties to the modern world. “We don’t like the world, much,” Country explained when I first asked him why he had moved up here. They grow their crops and hold on to some telecommuting work to supplement their limited needs. By the “world” it is clear that Dick does not mean the natural world in which they dwell, including that part of the natural world that is the society of mountain people. The “world” that he refers to is the created, perhaps even “virtual” world of human gain and ambition and rush and estrangement lying far below their hilltop. It is this world that makes the smog that has begun to replace the clean “Smoky” fogs blanketing the valleys below. It is this world, he keenly knows, that is killing off the frogs all over the world, even in the most remote mountains, because of pollution. The spring lizards will eventually follow.

Dick and Lori are keenly aware of having at least some toes of one foot remaining in this rejected world. In addition to making his potatoes and garden crops, Dick writes a national newsletter for his former employer, the Department of Energy, using a computer and a modem over the slow mountain telephone lines. Telephones are relatively new here: the first phones didn’t get put in to this area until 1968, and the technology is rudimentary. Lori spends all day working at her own computer running an environmental engineering department at the University of Tennessee, driving the hour and a half there and back once a week. She, particularly, is restive to cut this last economic link. Her hope is that herbal cultivation, and perhaps renting out a house they just bought nearby, might allow them to live within the local economy alone. The outside work has become an increasingly dissonant note in their high mountain tune.

As they settle deeper into “mountain living,” I see what Country Dick and Lori are doing as having real significance in the modern world. At a time in which local ways of living in a particular place and a particular way are perishing from the earth, they have gone back to a place to try to learn what place and people can teach them. In trying to keep the mountain ways alive, what they are doing is as important as those who maintain “heritage” seeds of once-common apples, or garden plants, plants that, unlike those from modern hybridized and perhaps even genetically manipulated stock, can provide their own seeds for following years.

When my son and I helped Dick plant, we seeded sunflowers that he had harvested from last year’s crop, just as farmers had done from the dawn of agriculture. His planting was informed by the moon and stars as the Farmer’s Almanac advised, just as those now resting in the local cemeteries had planted in their own time. And he leaned against his hoe and took time to talk about crops and weather in the same laconic drawl that all these people spoke to each other in as well, cultivating the human culture in they had root.

Country Dick and Lori came to this life not being born to it, but by rejecting prevailing ideas of how people should live, and deciding upon a different traditional of living. They were hillbillies, one might say, not by birth but by intention.

Boomer Den

"High on the ridge above his farm
Gone, Gonna rise again.
I think of my people that have gone on,
Gone, gonna rise again.
Like a tree that grows from the mountain ground
The storms of life has cut them down
But the new wood springs from the roots underground,
Gone, gonna rise again."

Si Kahn, "New Wood."

Even the many people who had left these parts continue to return to this
soil as home. Births, weddings, and deaths mark the reuniting of family clans on their soil. The cemetery nearest Dick and Lori’s has a picnic grove adjacent to the graveyard for burial dinners. Each family cemetery has a different weekend for a “decoration day,” when they all convene to rake out and trim the plots. But the greatest example of the attachment of these people to their original soil is what Country Dick showed me in Boomer Den.

The beautiful, musical and laconic language of the hill people is filled with words unique to the mountains. Sitting on Country’s porch, your gaze drops into the deep valley below called Boomer Den. He and Lori tend a small field down there, at the lower reaches of their property. To farm it, he usually walks, a trip of some twenty minutes. Driving down as we did takes forty-five.

Taking one twisting road after another winding into the depths of the den, we gained the bottom and followed along a winding stream to its origin. There, alone in the woods, stood a picnic pavilion, a developed spring, and a closed up log cabin. “Boomer Den,” Dick told me, was once a settled little hamlet. Most of what is woods now were fields, where they grew their beans and corn and squash, and grazed their cattle. They shot squirrels - “boomers” - with which the hollow was thick. Whether the term “den” signified a valley or rather a home, not only to squirrels, although the picnic grove was all that testified members once scratched their living out of this tiny place. In the depression, everyone left, hoping for better economic times in the cities. That hope turned out to be a cruel disappointment for many, but once there, they inevitably stayed. Except for once a year, when they all came back.

Each July, Dick said, the remaining elderly men and women who remembered living in Boomer Den came back with their children, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; those who had married in, cousins, and others of assorted relation. They opened up the cabin, and pitched tents. They drew water from the spring, and cooked together, and ate together. They told the old family stories. They cleaned up the graveyard, and spoke of those who had passed on. Once again Boomer Den rang with the sounds of children playing around the streams and stumps and fields. Then everybody went back to the cities where they lived until the next reunion.

This story was testament to me of the powerful attachment of a family to a particular place, a particular soil. This is something that is talked of in many songs and stories, but never had I seen this bond so firmly maintained after so many years of diaspora. The connection of these people and these hills was the strongest I had ever seen.

Glimpses of Reasonable Lives.

These habits, this rootedness in the soil of a place, may run deeper than even this family, Country mused. Up here, people grow the trio of corn, and squash and beans, as well as the more recently-introduced practice of “making potatoes.” Maize and squash and beans were the holy trinity of native Americans. They had raised these crops in these valleys for centuries until displaced by Scotch, Irish, and English settlers. Those settlers in turn, perhaps taught by the natives, continued these crops so suited for cultivation here. But more than that, it is possible that the very way of relating to one another, the emphasis of mutual support and relationships in a daunting climate had its roots in native American culture. “The land shaped the Native Americans, and then the land shaped us mountain people, Dick murmured, looking out over the patch. Everybody was formed by this place, not the other way around. And now this place is shaping Lori and me.”

Over some days I watched how this place, and particularly Country Dick, shaped my son as well. Going out together to his potato patch one misty morning, Dick handed Nate a bag of sunflower seeds, dug a furrow with his hoe, and showed him how to plant them an inch deep. Nate worked his slow way down the rows while I followed behind, covering them and tamping them down with my foot, as fathers and sons had done in this place for a very long time. When he did well at that, Country set him to prepare a new section with the rototiller. Nate followed the massive machine as it turned over the soil, wrenching on the handles built for a man to turn it at the end of each pass, but not giving up and asking for help. Finally, apparently determining him to be reliable, Country let Nate run his new Kabota tractor.

Country backed the tractor up to the heavy disks, and lowered the three-point hitch while I slid the arms over the pins, forced them home with a rap of the sledge, and knocked in the restraining pins. Dick got Nate to climb up into his lap, and I watched him carefully instruct him about all of the unfamiliar controls: the throttle, gears and transaxle settings, the hydraulic controls for the disks. As they pulled to the end of the row, I watched Nate familiarize himself with the power steering; much easier to turn than our old Army jeep. Shortly, under Dick's oversight, he was running everything but the clutch; his legs were too short. He addressed the end of the row, lowered his disks, steered a pretty straight course for the far end, lifted the disks, turned around, lowered them, and started again.

Later, Nate confided to me his excitement: "Country Dick said I was the first person he has ever let drive his tractor!" This was no ride at Disney World. Nate had just a glimpse of an unspoken fact of life here: at nine a boy was ready to start to learn to run a tractor, because by ten he might be needed to do it to help on the farm. Up in the hills, a boy still needs to become a man. He was needed as a man.

Dick and Lori have a dream. They have purchased a nearby house, and hope to invite people who wish to know mountain life and mountain plants to come and stay. Lori knows her plants and herbs, and Dick knows the mountains and farming and local people. In addition, and importantly, he has a gift. That gift, which he has had as long as I have known him, is simple but profound: people in Country Dick’s presence become calmer and clearer. How this occurs I do not know. But now that he is in this place, his gift has magnified. Or perhaps it has just taken root.

Maybe Dick and Lori will be successful in dispensing with the “dissonant” economic notes which they find so foreign to this life, and be able to offer an immersion in this lost way of living to others. Guests can sleep in the clear mountain air, dream mountain dreams, eat biscuits and gravy, and walk in the herb-filled woods. Maybe they will hoe the rich loam with bare feet as I did, and look down into Boomer Den as I did, while the slow rhythmic tones of Dick and his neighbor’s speech work their way into nerve and muscle and bone. They may stoop to drink from mountain springs, scaring away a few colorful wiggling spring lizards. Like generations of people in this place, they may end each day on the porch along with the dogs, sipping a lemonade and watching the setting sun before turning to supper and playing some music and singing together, wishing that they didn’t have to go back down the mountain tomorrow to go to the cities to work:

Like a highway heading North,
Like a highway heading South,
Sometimes I feel that I’m
just like a rolling stone.
From the rolling mills of Gary
To the rolling fields and spinning mills of home.

-Si Kahn

There is a church tradition that monasteries, high on their own hills and seemingly producing little for others, are in fact “dynamos of grace,” bringing grace to earth through their ceaseless and rhythmic prayer. I wonder if it is too far afield to see Country Dick and Lori, up on their mountain, as practicing a similiar kind of devotion by the daily work of seed and soil and neighborliness, keeping a lost way of dwelling on a particular spot of earth alive with eyes clear upon the beauty that this most endangered of all species really is.

Talking to Grandmother Oak (1998)

2008-11-13T19:30:00.000-08:00

TALKING TO GRANDMOTHER OAK
August, 1998

David B. Schwartz

She camped all the way to Florida, living on fresh roadkill. That’s the first thing I heard about Brenda when she showed up in Sarasota back in 1967. She and her companion Tom, an Arctic explorer, drove down from Canada, camping along the side of the road. They’d stopped when it got close to dinnertime at each roadkill, poking and examining the carcass until they found something fresh and appetizing. Then they’d make camp, dress out the raccoon or possum or squirrel with their razor-sharp buck knives, make a fire, and turn the meat on a spit. Crawling into their pup tent, they’d rise early in the morning, make coffee, and drive another day. Brenda sure looked like somebody out of the North woods compared to all of us in our shorts, T shirts and sandals. Tall, blond and angular, she dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, well-worn blue jeans and hiking boots. A buck knife was strapped permanently to her belt, a small sketchpad always in her hand.

Brenda, even at that young age, was an experienced Arctic naturalist. Traveling with her partner Tom on his frequent trips above Hudson’s Bay and Baffin Island, Brenda sketched and painted wildlife, getting as close as she could to see birds, seals, walruses, and polar bears. The finished watercolors in her folio were charged with the sharp, illuminating light of the Northern latitudes. Against a pale-blue sky and dark sea a Great Blue Heron would stand on a rocky shore. Each pebble, each blade of grass, each feather was drawn with the detail worthy of an Audubon. I had never seen anyone my age who could paint like that. The nature that she painted was alive. Later, when she linked up with my friend Roger and they moved in with him on an overgrown estate on the tip of Longboat Key, where I made my own home in a shack near the bay, I got to know her a lot better. We talked as she stood at her easel, which was set up in front of an orange tree in the overgrowth. Under her brush, three oranges on a branch rose off the page like glowing suns setting over the Gulf nearby.

After college, I saw Brenda only rarely for 30 years. But like most friends from that extraordinary time, we did not lose touch entirely. We would always hear news of each other, and we’d see each other upon occasion. I knew that she had become a noted Canadian wildlife artist, with her own gallery in Merrickville along the Rideau Canal, whose portraits of birds in the wild had become especially sought after. She painted for the National Geographic, and even achieved the greatest honor for a painter of birds: to have her work appear on a Canadian duck stamp. Then I learned that her companion Tom had taken seriously ill. In his farmhouse far from the Arctic wilds where they had spent so much time together, Brenda nursed him through his final illness.

I called Brenda up about a year after Tom had died to tell her that Roger had terminal
melanoma. So Rodger’s own dying served to bring us together again to care for him in his own final illness. The years had changed Brenda little. She still wore blue jeans and a buck knife. She still carried the ubiquitous sketchpad. But since Tom’s death, she had lost the ability to paint. When she picked up her brushes, she told me, old critical parental voices called so loudly to her in her head that she could only stop it by laying the brushes down. She struggled, for the first time in her vigorous life, with a chronic illness herself precipitated by Tom’s loss.

More than 30 years after I had stayed at Brenda and Tom’s farmhouse with she and Roger, I wheeled in the driveway with my young son Nate and his best friend. We were on a boys’ road trip, the summer after my own separation from my wife. I wanted to take Nate and Biniam on a "Blue Highways" trip to Maine, traveling only on secondary roads, taking ferries instead of bridges, and stopping to see old friends along the way. I wanted them to see the America that I had known as a child, before the advent of the interstates and their accompanying identical fast-food restaurants, Holiday Inns, and strip-malls. I also wanted to show Nate grownups who were pursuing in their adult lives precisely that interest in the natural world that so compelled him. I wanted to show him more friends of mine who did what they loved, rather than being trapped in offices and careers.

I had taken him to see friends who had returned to living the way that they really wanted to after some years of conventional employment. But Brenda was a person who had never wavered, even for a moment. We walked the trails on her 550 acres of Ontario woods. A bird flew overhead, squawking. Brenda looked up. "Those terns have made a nest in that tree. Now, they are talking in their teenage voices." It was clear that Brenda knew all of the birds around her house individually and could identify them at a distance and by voice. She knew the trees, too, even deep in the woods. She pointed out an immense white oak in a boggy hollow to the left of the trail. "Grandmother Oak has given me a hard time over the years. Not so much anymore, though. I would try to paint her and she would play tricks on me." With my questioning, Brenda allowed that she could feel the spirit of trees.

"What is the spirit of a tree like?" I asked.

"Very slow, very deep," she replied. "They don’t notice or change much. Wetness, dryness, fire, insects; that sort of thing." We walked on, Nate and Biniam running ahead, as boys do, towards the swamp.

Brenda and I sat on a rough bridge that she had made which crossed a muddy, water-lily choked, shallow stream. Nate and Biniam immediately stripped and jumped into the water, paddling through the mud and vegetation like some little African children. We watched them playing, happily and fearlessly, in the swamp. I asked Brenda to tell me more about her deep connection with the natural world. How did she come to it? How had she overcome pressures to get a "real job" for all of her life?

"I have always known that the world is alive," Brenda said, dropping a stick into the slow current and watching it lazily flow through the water lilies. "I’ve always known that there is no real dividing line between humans and the rest of nature. But it was the gift of a book from my mom when I was seven that convinced me that it was possible to live a life of adventure. The book was Man Eaters of Kumaon, by a guy named Jim Corbett. After that, I never considered living any other way. My dad used to give me a lot of trouble about it. He didn’t like this about me. ‘You’re going to end up a street cleaner,’ he yelled at me. I didn’t reply – he could get pretty mad – but privately I would think to myself that it might be a rather nice job." She pursued what she wanted to anyway. Contrary to my impression, Brenda pointed out that in the art world, she wasn’t considered a "real" artist. No wildlife artist was. "Animal painting isn’t considered ‘real’ art unless the animals are dead," she explained. It didn’t bother her. We were sitting on the bridge on a beatingly hot August day. It was extraordinary – it just doesn’t get that hot in Ontario. We had driven hundreds of miles north, north of the Great Lakes, anticipating that it would cool down as we came north. But the heat never lessened at all. It was the hottest summer on record, and the longest drought. I asked Brenda about the global warming that was so evident around us. She looked off philosophically. "People are turning forms of nature that are beneficial to them into forms that are toxic to them. Eventually, it will be too toxic for us pink, squiggly worms to survive. But the earth, Giaa, will go on – that’s all the world is: cycles of creation and destruction. I’ve been sketching a portrait of my cleaning lady – you know, like these natural cycles, she is the one who cleans up. I call the drawing my ‘Black Madonna.’ Nature is going to clean the earth of all these humans." I looked out at my son and his friend paddling back toward me, pulling up things to examine from the muddy bottom with their feet, and I felt a pang.

When we left Brenda for the mountains of New Hampshire, she was about ready to leave on another birding trip. "A year after Tom died, I still felt pretty discouraged," Brenda had explained to me, "and I was sick. So I decided that I needed to do something new – some big undertaking – to pull myself out of it. I decided that I would identify and sketch in the wild 200 birds in the coming year." This was an extraordinary undertaking, it seemed to me: many birder’s life lists – the number of birds they had simply observed in the wild over a lifetime -- was only 200. By November of that year, Brenda had already sketched her 200. Then she kept on going. Someone had told her where a rare bird could be sighted in the swamps of Louisiana, and she was about to get on a plane to see if she could find it.

Before we left, she helped me pick some peaches from her tree for our journey. "You should pick them when they are as firm as a young girl’s breasts," she said, plucking a ripe peach deliciously from its stem and handing it to me. She sounded like Julia Child giving instructions for marketing. Then she unsheathed her buck knife and cut me a stem of ripe tomatoes from her garden. The boys and I got into my car and headed off towards the Eastern Mountains.

Rick's Camping Trip (1998)

2008-11-13T19:15:00.000-08:00

Falling into the Stream: Rick’s Third-Grade Camping Trip.
1998

David B. Schwartz

I saw her when she fell. She had climbed tentatively up the steep embankment to where the other children were lined up excitedly for their turn on the swing. They would tightly grasp the rope I had suspended from the pulley, then launch themselves off the edge, whizzing down the suspended rope over the streamlet below to the bank where I stood. Screaming in happy excitement, they would fly down to where I waited.

It was clear that she was going to have a more difficult time doing this than some of her other peers; no doubt that is why she had held back. But she didn’t stay away; she had the courage to come over from the campsite and get herself to the top. Her classmates crowded around her showing her how to hold the rope, how to push off, encouraging her. She kicked herself free of the edge, rode down a few feet in the air, and then she fell. She wasn’t holding onto the rope tightly enough, and she fell like a stone to the rocks below, levering face-down into the water and the rocks. I saw it as if in slow motion, fifteen feet beyond my grasp; she lay inert in the stones and frigid water.

I and Rick, her old first-grade teacher and the camp leader, sprung into the creek at the same time, lifting her and helping her to the dry ground, as she gasped air and started to cry. We checked her over carefully; her arm, her forehead; miraculously, she seemed all right, just frightened and cold and wet and shaken. As we sat her down on a dry spot of mossy earth and I put my jacket over her, Rick knelt down beside her. He didn’t merely pat her on the shoulder or the head; he enveloped her in his arms. Rick is a big man and his arms are strong. He had no doubt held her when she was little. His hug was a familiar one. She cried and shook. He was speaking to her softly. He didn’t let her go. I noticed that he was not only reassuring her, but he was praising her - she had fallen so well! She really knew how to fall without hurting herself! And this was true. She easily could have broken her arm or cracked her head falling from such a height, but she had managed to protect herself. Rick held her for a long, long, time. His daughter clambered down from the hillside and put her arms around her friend too. And then I came over and put my hands on her shoulders as well. The other children made little noises of concern while the grownups took care of her, wondering if she was all right.

Only when she had gathered herself and was all right again did Rick unwrap his arms and help her upright, commending her into the care of a friend to walk her back to the campsite. Word of her fall had reached the camp before she did, and a parent met her to make sure that she hadn’t sustained a concussion, taking her over to another parent who was a physician to carefully examine her. She was all right. Someone else got her dry clothes, got her a cup of hot chocolate, and seated her by the fire to warm up. In a little while, she was all right again. She was just a little sore.

In this simple story I caught a glimpse of something remarkable. For this is not how these stories usually go. Often, instead, they go like this: the child, already painfully aware that attempts like this usually don’t go well for her, falls the same way. But instead of the soft voices of concern of her classmates, there is the cruel judgment of one’s peers for someone weaker, or not as accomplished, or merely different. The teacher picks her up, but she is merely dusted off, settled, perhaps offered a few tissues, and enjoined not to cry. It may be very subtle, but the child does not miss that she is not in some way accomplished, desirable, or loved.

I will sit in my office this week and conduct psychotherapy with adults who are struggling with deep depression, or debilitating anxiety, or other painful problems in their lives. In the course of our careful work, I may eventually hear such a story as this; the story that didn’t go the right way. It will not be this story alone, perhaps, but will be a series of them, taking place over the years, that will cement a conviction that they are clumsy, different, not really quite loveable. When they tell me the story of how they fell, again, and how everyone laughed, once again, they will start to cry softly.

Standing there in the woods watching Rick hold that little girl and whisper to her of her success in falling correctly, I realized, somewhat awestruck, that I was seeing such a traumatic incident smoothed out, erased before my eyes at its very moment of origin.

Rick has been teaching first-grade children at Londonderry school for twenty-five years. In that time, he has taken groups of children to the same campground perhaps that many times. One of his former students, Chip, now in college, showed up with his sleeping bag to help out. He remembered the same hikes, the same games, the same way Rick was with the children as he was today. And he remembered the caring, loving, atmosphere of Londonderry with which Rick and his co-founder Rhoda inoculated every child who grew up in that school, every teacher who taught there, every parent who went along on a camping trip. It was not an accident that the children did not laugh when their classmate fell. That does not happen at Londonderry, and every new generation of pre-schoolers learns why.

Later, talking to Rick, I was asking about the caring community that he and Rhoda and the other teachers and parents and students had built over the years. Londonderry was not what the “outside world” was like, he readily agreed. This was a rare experience for many. But to experience the possibilities of being in a place where one was safe, and loved, and secure, whether a young child or a parent with their own grown-up realities, was to see that living this way together was not an impossible thing. Somewhere, in there, one might develop a taste, even a hunger, for living together in this way. And they might well carry this vision into the world in which love and caring are not held in such high importance.

For the children especially, though, like this young girl, the results would be deepest. For her, she would probably never really be aware of the fact that her teacher, with greater skill than a psychotherapist, had simply wiped away what might otherwise be a searing emotional experience that could cause her to be guarded and self-protected her whole life. She might never be aware that he had probably done this countless times during her childhood. She might not recall that other teachers and countless community members over the years had followed Rick’s example, and Rhoda’s, and those who had learned from them. It would be in what was not in memory that the greatest gifts would be recorded. She could simply be free.