A few years ago I read Bruce Catton’s magnificent words in his book, “Waiting for the Morning Train.” A delight at the beginning, the book later chronicled the ruination of Michigan’s white pine forests and the decline of his native town, Benzonia, Michigan, after the lumber supply was exhausted.
Once Catton established that the people of Benzonia lived in a kind of paradise, he went on to say that they were mostly unaware of what they were doing in the large scale − destroying the forests and ruining the environment. “We were living in Indian summer and thought it was spring,” he said. He likened that population to a ship whose pilot doesn’t know − can’t know − where it is going.
What began as a tender reminiscence ended in mournful decrying of the foolishness of man who won’t see what he is doing and can’t know where his actions are leading.
Catton died in 1978, but nothing had improved since he wrote the book. My new Audubon magazine arrived, so for diversion I opened it, only to find pictures of dead songbirds laid out in shallow boxes by type, dozens of them, victims of cellphone towers.
On all sides I began to see signs of mankind=s foolishness, wastefulness, inhumanity.
Nothing seemed right.
I decided to share all this negativity with my husband Jack. This is one of those times, I said, when it seems too depressing to open a newspaper because of all the insane, bad things we are doing to ourselves and the environment. I outlined the causes of my pessimism and he offered a few quotations and observations designed to restore perspective.
“First, do no harm,” he quoted Hippocrates.
“Yeah, but, there’s the rub,” I said. Define harm. To some it’s cell towers, to others Great Lakes drilling. Or, it’s threatened Alaskan wilderness, even as we hear that we must have Alaskan oil in order to survive. On all sides there are controversies, each side telling us that they have solutions to our problems. How do we know who is right? How do we know which are genuine threats? How do we find the middle ground? Is there middle ground? Radicals choose sides and feel they have the only answers. I feel so helpless, and guilty, too, because I’m doing almost nothing regarding any of these issues.”
We pondered a while, deciding eventually that the only harm we could define was harm we could clearly recognize. Maybe we could proceed by simply not adding to any identifiable harm in our own little spheres of influence. After all, as Catton pointed out, we don=t really know what the future holds anyway.
Okay. That’s how I would proceed: Do no harm that I could identify as harm. If everybody did that, maybe there would be hope for us.
Then help came from an unexpected direction. We tuned in to a book talk on C-SPAN.
An archeologist was talking about the bones of Kennewick Man, recently discovered on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington. Kennewick man turned out to be 9,600 years old. The author spoke about other ancient men and women found in the United States and Canada, few in number, but roughly from the same time period.
Kennewick man had a spear embedded in his hip, causing an injury which had apparently healed over, but according to the author it created an infection that would burst open occasionally. He would be in constant pain. Kennewick also had dents in his skull from old injuries, bad teeth and broken ribs that had never fused so that even the act of breathing would be painful. Other ancient men were similarly damaged. The author said that the average age at death was around 40. Women didn’t seem to show the same severe damage, but their average age at death was 23.
He spoke of these people almost with affection, seeing them as real people, faced with the problems of real people. He said that ten thousand years from now, humans would be unrecognizable to us in terms of race, lifestyle − any standard we use now to categorize ourselves.
Listening, I felt small, insignificant. But I also felt relieved. What we as a people do in the next year or two, or in one hundred years will not necessarily doom us − or for that matter, save us. Suddenly the problems of the present seemed less life-threatening. We can’t control much. We really can’t control anything, except possibly parts of our immediate little worlds.
If Kennewick Man and his contemporaries feared the future, certainly we who are in that future would fear their lives of constant threats, pain and illness. If our future meant going back to being Kennewick Man, we would be very, very afraid.
Bruce Catton says in his book, “Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting before a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.”
It is what you do while waiting for the train that matters.
Both thought-provoking and disturbing and yet comforting in the end. Nice article, Clarice!