Purim 2021

 There are lots of different ways to “read” the Megillah.

The simplest, I suppose, would be to take it at face value as an historical account of the series of events that led to Purim becoming a universally observed Jewish holiday. Reading it this way would suppose that the personalities mentioned—and not just the major ones but even the minor characters who appear just once or twice in the story—were all real people and that they all played the specific roles the story assigns to them in the drama. This approach founders a bit on the fact that there are no traces of any of them other than King Achashveirosh (assuming he is correctly to be identified with Xerxes I) in any extra-biblical document, including any of the fairly voluminous works that chronicle Persian history during the period the story appears to be set. (For an excellent essay by Mitchell First on the question of whether Achashveirosh can reasonably be identified as Xerxes I, click here.) Still, that’s hardly proof-positive that none of them existed: lots of real people don’t make it into the history books! (But how many queens are in that category? Maybe that’s the more pertinent question to ask!)

Fortunately, there is no lack of alternate approaches.

Focusing on Queen Vashti’s principled refusal to degrade herself in public merely because her husband ordered her to and also on Queen Esther’s willingness to risk her own life for the sake of saving her people, it would be easy to read the Megillah as a feminist story intended to remind its audience that women—for all they are so often overlooked in ancient works of history—could and did play important roles at crucial junctures. But the Megillah could also be read as a work of proto-Zionism, one intended to drive home the point that, even in the very best of times, Jews living outside Israel are subject to the arbitrary anti-Semitism both of petulant foes like Haman and of naïve enablers like King Achashveirosh. And the book could also easily be read as a critique of the whole monarchic system of governance, one in which a drunken dunce like Achashverosh can be manipulated easily by wily advisers like Haman who are pursuing deeply personal agendas.

All of the above would be interesting to explore in more depth, but I would like to use this space this week to write about yet another approach to the Megillah, one inspired partially by last month’s assault on the Capitol and partially by the sense, dramatically heightened by those events, that there are elements out here whom we don’t know and haven’t ever met…but who nonetheless wish us harm.

As all regular reader of Megillat Esther know, the ninth chapter is the big one, the chapter in which all plot lines converge to produce a satisfying dénouement fully worthy of annual celebration. Indeed, it is the only chapter that actually takes place during the month of Adar, the month of Purim. (Almost all the action up to that point—including Haman’s casting of lots, King Achashveirosh’s order that Haman parade Mordecai through the streets to honor him for his good deed, both of the banquets that Esther prepares for Haman and Mordechai, and the fabulous scene in which Haman flings himself as Esther’s feet and knocks her over just as King Achashveirosh comes back into the room, only to end up sentenced to death and finally impaled on the execution post he had had prepared for Mordechai—all of that takes place almost a full year earlier during the previous Pesach. Then came the wrangling over how to stop the pogrom that led to an official edict promulgated on 23 Sivan, exactly two months later, that granted the Jews permission to defend themselves against their enemies.) And now, as chapter nine begins, almost a full year has passed and the big day is finally here.   

That ninth chapter is one we all read far too quickly through, and particularly if we want to read it the way I would like to propose today. But let’s start with that edict of 23 Sivan, the one executed in the first places because King Achashveirosh, the supreme ruler of an entire empire, lacked the legal authority to rescind one of his own edicts merely because the original copy was stamped with the mark of his signet ring. The whole idea that an absolute monarch can’t countermand one of his own edicts is idiotic and, indeed, the notion that an edict promulgated in the king’s name and sealed with his seal cannot be withdrawn is not known from any other Persian documents from the era. (It also directly contradicts the passage at the end of  chapter one that says that the specific way to make an edict not rescindable is for it formally to be “written up among the laws of the Persians and the Medes.”) So we’re being challenged to read with our eyes wide open. And what the new edict says is, to say the least, startling. First, there is to be defense:

Jewish men in every city of the kingdom are formally granted permission to organize local militias with the express purpose of defending the Jewish population by endeavoring to destroy, exterminate, and annihilate the thugs of every people and ethnicity who were planning such ill for them, their children and their wives, and then by plundering all their foes’ possessions.

And then there is to be offense as well:

Over and above the right to defend themselves, the Jews in every province over which King Achashveirosh rules are also to be permitted, albeit only on one single day, to wit the thirteenth day of the twelfth month called Adar, to advance forcefully against their enemies and to seek revenge for the degree to which these foes had embraced the awful plot hatched against the Jews by wicked Haman.

So that’s pretty clear. And what happens the next spring is precisely what the text says will happen. On the thirteenth of Adar, the day Haman had planned to annihilate the Jews of Persia, the Jews rise up against their enemies. In Shushan alone, five hundred foes are killed. Then, after receiving royal dispensation to keep at it for one extra day, another three hundred are killed. In the rest of the empire, things go just as swimmingly: on the thirteenth day of Adar alone, a full 75,000 are killed, bringing the two-day total to 75,800 dead sonim. We are clearly meant to understand that there are no Jewish losses at all. Nor was this at all unexpected: at the end of the previous chapter, the Megillah notes that there was such anxiety afoot among those who had planned to attack the Jews that some pathetically attempted to disguise themselves as Jews so as not to be subject to their would-be victims’ wrath.

And now we get to the question that will challenge thoughtful readers. The enemy is completely demoralized, the fight clearly completely out of them. They don’t put up any resistance; the major plot detail that the permission granted them to go on the attack and to attempt to annihilate the Jewish population has not been withdrawn seems totally to be forgotten. Like most bullies, I suppose, they fold easily when facing real opposition. And this appears to have been the case despite the fact that the Jews were surely a tiny minority group in an enormous sea of Gentiles. Surely, they could have taken the Jews on even despite the permission granted the latter to fight back…or at least they could have tried. But they seem to have totally forgotten about their might, about the potential in their numbers, and about the full legality of their pending Aktion against the Jewish population. It feels, at least plausibly, that there is no real danger to the Jews of the realm on that fateful day: they go on the offensive and annihilate foes fully cowed into submission by the mere possibility of their would-be victims fighting back. How else could there have been no Jewish casualties at all?

And so we come to pathetic truth behind the narrative. The Jews could have defended themselves anyway. (Why couldn’t they have? Was fighting off your would-be murderer illegal in Old Persia?) The mob of anti-Semites retains its right to go on the offensive. So, really, nothing has changed at all. Except—this is the pathetic part—that a Gentile king (and, at that, a drunken oaf like Achashveirosh) told the Jews they could stand up for themselves. Which they could have anyway…but didn’t. Or wouldn’t have. Until someone formally gave them permission.

We feel safe, we American Jews. We trust the police, have faith in our government, feel secure enough (most of the time) to look past the occasional anti-Semitic remark by a member of Congress. We buy homes with twenty- or thirty-year mortgages because we expect to be living in them decades in the future. And we haven’t fled to Israel for the same reason. I know all the above because I feel that way myself! And then suddenly there are organized anti-Semites marching through the streets of downtown Charlottesville. A comedian we all thought of as super-hip and wholly benign tells an overtly anti-Semitic joke on television and only we seem to notice. The Capitol is overrun by insurrectionists, some of whom are openly displaying anti-Semitic slogans and symbols…and no one seems quite sure what to do about it. Are racist slogans on t-shirts protected by the First Amendment? Suddenly, the answer to that question seems to determine whom you ask for an answer.

The Megillah could not be clearer in its message that it is neither cogent nor effective solely to respond to anti-Semitism by reacting to it ex post facto. The Bible’s solution—that we go on the attack and annihilate our would-be annihilators before they have a chance to do the same to us—is obviously not something any normal citizen, Jewish or not, would countenance. But the lessons the Megillah teaches in this regards remains pertinent and timely. No one needs permission to stand up for his or her rights. The pathetic image of Persian Jewry finding the strength to oppose its own annihilation only when the government formally permits them to do so is meant to be both embarrassing and chastening. Helping bigots to divest themselves of their bigotry before anyone gets hurt is an excellent plan. But the Megillah teaches that that can only be undertaken successfully by people possessed of confidence, self-reliance, and unwavering certainty in their own right to exist and to flourish.

The Interconnectedness of Generations

The passing this week of Irving Roth, one of the truly great Holocaust educators, was a loss for his family and his friends, of course. And it was a loss for our entire community. But it was also a loss for the larger world of Holocaust education, one made all the more terrible by the fact that he will not be replaced, by the fact that the countless young people (and countless really is the right word here) he spoke to in every one of the fifty states and all across the world about his personal experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald will collectively constitute the final generation of young people to meet actual Shoah survivors and to hear their stories not on videotape or in books but personally from their own mouths. This is how the world works in other contexts as well, of course—when Albert H. Woolson died in the summer of 1956, there were no remaining veterans of the Union Army left among the living for young people, or any people, to hear speak about the Civil War in terms of their personal experience. (The last living veteran of the Confederate Army had died five years earlier, so Woolson was the very last one on either side.) When Peter Mills died in 1972, there were no more individuals alive who had been slaves in the ante-bellum South. And yet, even though all events far enough back in history must have some specific individual who becomes the last living person to have experienced that specific event in person, there is a certain poignancy to that thought when applied to the Shoah because that what the survivors of the Shoah survived was not a tragic accident like the sinking of the Titanic or a natural disaster like the eruption of Krakatoa, but a well-organized, fully-funded, diabolical plot to murder them and every other Jew in occupied Europe. Given that detail, it feels amazing that there were survivors at all and doubly so that some have managed to live to become nonagenarians or even centenarians. But once they are gone from the world, there will be none left who can counter the kind of demented anti-Semite who insists that the Shoah never really happened with the simple sentences that Irving spoke so easily and so gracefully. I was there. I saw this happen. I knew these people. I was in that place. I remember. I personally was an eye-witness.

But even though every event in the far-enough-past past has logically to have a final witness to it, there is also the way the generations interlink and interconnect to consider.

For my first example, I submit the case of Lyon Tyler Jr., who died at age ninety-five last October and whose grandfather, John Tyler, was our tenth president. Elected to the vice-presidency in 1840, Tyler came to the presidency when William Henry Harrison died in office after serving all of thirty-one days. Tyler was an interesting personality in his own right. Like our forty-fifth president, he ended up serving only one term, but unlike President Trump he failed even to win his own party’s nomination for a second term, let alone actually be returned to the White House by the electorate. (The Whigs nominated Henry Clay instead, who lost to Democrat James K. Polk.) Probably, that was all for the best—Tyler not only owned slaves himself and ended up siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War, but he actually ran for office and was duly elected to the Confederate House of Representatives shortly before his death in 1862. But my question was not how an American President born in the eighteenth century—Tyler was born in 1790—could have ended up working actively against the nation he once led, but how a grandson of his could possibly still have been alive in 2020.

The answer, it turns out, isn’t all that amazing. Tyler was married twice and had fifteen children in all, the youngest of whom, a boy named Lyon, was born in 1854 when his father was sixty-three years old. Lyon, who died in 1935, fathered a son in 1925, Lyon Jr. And it was this Lyon Jr., the grandson of a man born in 1790, who died last October at age ninety-five. (Even more amazing is that he wasn’t the sole surviving grandson of our tenth president—Lyon Jr. had a younger brother named Harrison who was born in 1928 and who is still alive.)

So to think that all three of my granddaughters’ lives overlapped with the life of a man whose grandfather occupied the White House in the 1840s—that collapses history just a bit and makes the past seem—if not really part of the present—then at least intertwined with it in a way that makes events from John Tyler’s eighteenth century childhood somehow linked—at least fancifully—with my twenty-first century granddaughters’.

Of course, to as keen an observer of the human condition as myself, the eighteenth century doesn’t really feel all that distant. I regularly take my youngest granddaughter for a long walk in Ridgewood, Queens, where she lives, in the course of which we follow a route that takes us around the perimeter of two contiguous cemeteries, one of the which, the Linden Hill Cemetery, has some very, very old Jewish graves in it. And on our walk we regularly pass the grave of the late Mrs. Caroline Welsh, who died at age 90 in 1860—so who was therefore born in 1770, a cool six years before the United States even existed as an independent nation. I think about Mrs. Welsh and the others in her row as we walk by their graves, wondering what the corner of Flushing Avenue and Metropolitan Avenue looked like when she was borne to her final resting place…and what that corner might have looked like, assuming it wasn’t still virgin forestland, in the year of her birth. But I also wonder what Mrs. Walsh would make of us, of me and little Josie, as we pass by on our walk all these centuries after her birth. Would she find us indecipherable? Would she look at my cell phone or at Josie’s super-cool Italian stroller and wonder what planet we came to earth from? Or would she see, not something strange or alien but entirely familiar: a man and a baby going for a week on a shady street just as grandfathers have taken their baby granddaughters out for some fresh air since the beginning of time?

I noted two different video clips on youtube the other week that fed into this line of thinking for me.

The one was a clip from the old television show “I’ve Got a Secret,” which aired in its first iteration for fifteen years starting in 1952. For those too young to remember, I’ll explain that the format was very simple: a panel of celebrities was challenged to ask contestants as many questions as they could squeeze into the time allotted in order to figure out the contestants’ “secret.” Most of the time, the secrets were slightly silly. (The lifeguard at a nudist colony sticks in my mind for some reason.) But the two clips I want to write about now weren’t silly at all.

The first aired in February 1956 and featured one Samuel J. Seymour, who at that point was the sole living soul to have been present in Ford’s Theater when President Lincoln was assassinated almost ninety years earlier. He spoke well and clearly, although he didn’t look too well or too healthy. (He died a mere two months later.) I don’t know if readers will respond the way I did (you can take a look by clicking here), but I had that same sense of the past intruding on the present as I watched: it would have been amazing enough to listen to someone who saw or talked to President Lincoln at all, let alone someone who saw him being shot. And yet our lives overlapped: I was a little boy of three and he was a nonagenarian, but we occupied the planet for a while together. And that brought President Lincoln into my life in a way that I would otherwise have found highly unlikely.

The second, also amazing, featured two older women, Delia and Bertie Harris of Knoxville, Tennessee. (Their episode aired in 1961 when both women were in their mid-seventies. To see the clip, click here.) And their “secret” was that their grandfather, Simon Harris, had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War and was with Washington at Valley Forge. How it was possible was also revealed: Simon’s son (the women’s father) was born in 1818 and he became a father when he was in his seventies. And now his daughters were themselves in their seventies…and that is how two women appeared on American television in the 1960s whose grandfather fought under George Washington. And so Washington himself stepped out of the shadows for the eight-year-old me and took his place in my parents’ living room. At eight, I wouldn’t have known to refer to what I was feeling as suggestive of the interconnectedness of the generations. (I heard that. But I was definitely not that precocious.)  In retrospect, though, that is precisely how I felt as I listened to these elderly dames and imagined their grandfather’s ghost flitting past us as we communed with President Washington during their fifteen minutes of fame in TV-land.

Both clips, of course, were meant to entertain rather than to serve as spurs to deeply ruminative thought. But both clips lured me into the same kind of thinking that the story about the death of President Tyler’s grandson inspired: that sense that the past is (pace Faulkner) not only not really gone, it’s not even really past. And that is how I propose we respond to Irving Roth’s death too.

The survivor generation is dwindling. When I came to Shelter Rock, there were literally scores of survivors in our midst. Earlier on, when I was a little boy, our neighborhood was filled to overflowing with survivors. (They were called “refugees” back then before the word “survivor” came into common use.) But we can serve, all of us, as those people’s hooks into future generations. My granddaughters will not know people like Irving personally. But they can know me. And us. And all those who knew these people and listened carefully and can say, slightly derivatively but still meaningfully and sincerely, “I wasn’t there…but I knew a man who was. And this is what he told me, what he saw with his own eyes, what he was an eye-witness to….”

The Blount Conspiracy

Did former President Trump’s remarks to the crowd that subsequently stormed the Capitol in January cross the legal boundary that separates speaking intemperately and unwisely from actually fomenting insurrection?  I myself am not a lawyer, but fifty-four out of our hundred senators actually do have law degrees and should therefore be more than qualified to answer that question…and especially since they were all present to witness the events under consideration! So, assuming the senators vote honestly and without allowing political affiliation to cloud their vision, we should have the answer soon enough.

In an obvious way, the President’s trial begs to be compared with the three previous presidential impeachment trials our country has seen: the trials in the Senate of Andrew Johnson in 1868, of Bill Clinton in 1999, and of President Trump himself in 2020. But less well known is that the House has in the course of our nation’s history voted, not four times, but twenty-one times, to impeach individuals and thus to send them over to be tried in the Senate for “treason, bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” They were a varied lot, the accused: three presidents, fifteen federal judges (of whom, one Supreme Court justice), one cabinet official, and one senator. That’s twenty…and President Trump’s trial this week makes twenty-one. And these trials, which ended up with eight guilty verdicts and eight acquittals, together constitute the real precedent for this week’s proceedings. (Those verdicts add up to sixteen because in one instance—see below—the charges were dismissed and in three cases the accused individuals chose to resign from office before they could be tried.)

Given the degree to which impeachment has been a topic for discussion in our nation for the last two years, it’s amazing to me how rarely anyone mentions the impeachments not involving presidents. (The only exception would be the 1876 impeachment of William W. Belknap, the Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant who was charged with accepting payments in exchange for official appointments and whose case was actually mentioned several times this week on the floor of the Senate.) This week, I would like to write about the first of them all, however, and in my usual way to invite readers to look into the future by looking into the past and considering the strange case of Senator William Blount of Tennessee (1749–1800).

The whole matter had to do with something now called the Blount Conspiracy, a huge to-do in the last decade of the eighteenth century and now yet another important event in American history more or less completely forgotten by almost all. It was, however, a very big deal in its day. When Abigail Adams, our nation’s second First Lady, suggested in public that she regretted that Congress lacked the ability to resolve the matter with a guillotine, she clearly had Senator Blount’s neck in mind as she spoke.

William Blount was not a nobody. He signed the Constitution. He was the sole governor of the “Southwest Territory” that later joined the union as the State of Tennessee. He was one of Tennessee’s first two senators, coming to the Senate in 1796. He was also heavily into real estate, eventually owning about 2.5 million acres in his home state and in the adjoining territory then known as Trans-Appalachia and today covering parts of Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. (That there were native Americans on the scene to whom the land belonged in every sense except the strictly legal one invented by the Colonials themselves seems to have occurred to no one at all.) The problem—for Blount and his brothers—was that much of the land had been purchased on credit. That, in and of itself, wouldn’t have been a problem if the price of land hadn’t collapsed when war broke out between Great Britain and Spain the same year that Blount entered the Senate. The crucial detail here is that the Treaty of 1783 that ended the American Revolution guaranteed that Americans would henceforth be able to navigate the Mississippi freely, a commercial boon that was obviously going to collapse if Britain was defeated by Spain, which eventuality would have made the Blounts’ real estate dramatically less valuable. And so Blount, eager to avoid bankruptcy, chose to act daringly and wholly extra-legally by conspiring on his own with the British to assist the latter in defeating Spain. Part of the plan involved invading Spanish Louisiana. And another part involved abetting British plans to invade Spanish Florida.

There is a lot here to digest. For one thing, who ever heard of Spanish Louisiana? Didn’t our nation acquire Louisiana (along with another 750,000 square miles of what today is most of the American Midwest) as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, one of President Thomas Jefferson’s greatest accomplishments while in office? So the answer is that, yes, that is what happened. But Louisiana itself went through different colonialist phases  and was indeed part of the Spanish Empire after Spain acquired it from France in 1762 as part of the Treaty of Fontainebleau that was signed towards the end of the Seven Year’s War (another conflict remembered today by none). But Spain didn’t hold onto Louisiana for long, ceding it back to France in 1802, just in time for the United States to purchase it—and another roughly half billion acres—for all of fifteen million dollars. But when Senator Blount was trying to keep the price of land from collapsing even further, Spain was in control of present-day Louisiana.

Blount’s extra-legal negotiations with the British came out in in July of 1797 when a letter written by Blount was discovered and read aloud in the Senate. When Thomas Jefferson, then the nation’s Vice President under John Adams, asked for an explanation, Blount asked for some time to consult his papers. The Senate gave him twenty-four hours. That happened on July 3. On July 4, the twenty-first anniversary of American independence, Blount failed to appear and it became known that he had fled Washington. On July 8, the Senate voted 25 to 1 to expel him from the Senate for acting contrary to the nation’s best interests by secretly negotiating with a foreign power. Later that month, a federal district court judge issued a warrant for Blount’s arrest.

And then, on January 28, 1798, the House approved five articles of impeachment against Blount, including conspiracy to violate both the Neutrality Act of 1794 (that made it illegal for an American citizen to wage war against a country at peace with the United States) and the Treaty of San Lorenzo, also called Pinckney’s Treaty, that defined the border between the United States and Spanish Florida. (The plan Blount hatched with his British handlers involved, among other things, invading Pensacola.) Seven “managers” were duly chosen to argue the case in the Senate. Almost a year of in-house wrangling followed, during the course of which Blount steadfastly refused to return to Washington. And then, finally, the Senate convened as a Court of Impeachment on December 17, 1798. (In the meantime, Blount, clearly taking his expulsion from the Senate as a done deal, ran for and was duly elected to the Tennessee Legislature.) For its part, the Senate debated whether it could proceed in the absence of the accused, then decided that it could.

And now we get to the interesting part. Blount’s lawyers argued on two different grounds that the Senate lacked the jurisdiction to try Blount: one, because the phrase in the Constitution allowing for the impeachment of the “President, the Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States” did not mean to include senators (and, indeed, Blount was and is the only member of either the Senate or the House ever to be impeached); and, two, because even if it did have the theoretical right to try a senator, Blount, by virtue of having been expelled from the Senate, was specifically no longer a “civil Officer” of the United States government and was therefore no longer under their jurisdiction.

They apparently made their case effectively. On January 10, the Senate failed to approve a resolution declaring that Blount’s prosecution fell within the Senate’s jurisdiction. Then, on January 11, the Senate voted formally to dismiss Senator Blount’s impeachment, whereupon Vice President Jefferson formally dismissed the case against him.

Blount died a hero to his fellow Tennesseans, but the precise reason his impeachment was dismissed remains a matter of debate. Did the Senate feel that having made him a hero was enough, that they hardly needed to go all the way to making him a martyr? Or was the sense of the Senate simply that the impeachment process exists to remove criminals from positions of authority in the government and that there cannot be any real reason to undertake proceedings against someone no longer holding office? Both arguments are cogent. And both are highly relevant in that both could easily be applied to President Trump. How it can be that William Blount’s name is not on the nation’s tongue these days as the very same issues are debated in the very same Senate—now that, at least to me, is even more of a mystery than the “real” reason, whatever it was, that James Blount was able to break the law with impunity without suffering any consequences at all!

(The portrait reproduced above of Senator Blount is by Washington Bogard Cooper, one of the greatest American portrait painters of the nineteenth century and also a son of Tennessee.)

  

Walking

I’ve been writing about various topics in American history for these last few weeks, attempting to find in our understudied American past a reasonable path forward into our shared American future. But this week I thought I would go off in a different direction entirely.

Last week, a snowy owl appeared in Central Park. For some, this must have sounded at first like a non-event—the park, after all, is filled with birds! But the owl’s visit actually was remarkable, and in several different ways.

For one thing, the last time a snowy owl was spotted in New York City was apparently in 1890, a cool 131 years ago. (I’m speaking, of course, of living birds, not dead ones. In the latter category, there’s a stuffed snowy on display in the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West that none other than the eighteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt shot somewhere on Long Island in 1876. Nor is that one the Museum’s only stuffed snowy—they apparently own another twenty or so, but only the one shot by a future President is on permanent display.) For another, the owl hung around just long enough for  its presence to be noted and recorded, and then promptly vanished. In our world, celebrity is considered—at least by non-celebrities—a desirable status to be sought after rather than quickly fled. And yet, unlike most of Snowy’s avian predecessors among famous New York birds (long-time celebrity red-tailed hawk Pale Male, for example, who spent decades flying around in the Park when not ensconced at home with his chicks and his impressively long succession of mates on the roof of his adopted Fifth Avenue home), Snowy Owl spent a bit of time showing her (or his) stuff, then went off to wherever it is snowy owls hang out when they’re not attracting huge crowds of well-wishers in Central Park.

But for me personally, Snowy Owl—who didn’t even hang around long enough to be named by his admirers—was a visitor from a different part of my life.

When we moved from Germany to western Canada in 1986 so that I could serve in the first of my three pulpits, we basically had no idea at all what we were getting into. I would have googled British Columbia, but Google was only founded in 1998. Nor was the early version of the Internet that sort of did exist available for use by regular people like ourselves. I did check in our local branch of the Heidelberg public library to see what I could find, but they didn’t have much of a selection of books about Canada at all, let alone specifically about Vancouver or its environs. So we were left on our own to pack up and hope for the best. Eventually, we found our way, got used to a new set of daily norms, adjusted to living in a place where most people spoke English. We moved into a house. We bought a car. And we acquired a dog, a first for me if not for Joan. (The late and much lamented Hector was still a real, if ghostly, presence in Joan’s life when we first moved to Canada. But she was ready, or ready-ish, to move on and I was certainly ready to support the idea.)

And that dog—a succession of dogs, actually—brings me to the topic of snowy owls. I grew up in Queens. Owls were not in abundance. I remember my childhood mostly fondly, but Yellowstone Blvd. was not a place of great (or any) physical beauty. But now I actually was living in a place of almost unimaginably stunning physical splendor. (Tourism B.C. doesn’t use the slogan “Super, Natural British Columbia” for no reason.) I took to walking the dog along a path that meandered along the banks of the mighty Fraser, B.C.’s longest river. And it was there, at the bottom of No. 3 Road where a half-mile or so of the dyke walk was specifically designated for off-leash dog walking, that I met my first snowy owls.

Let me draw the picture just a bit more precisely. This is young me we’re conjuring up—I was all of thirty-three years old when we moved to B.C., younger than both my sons are today—and the dogs, serially, were all black labs. So here I am walking one of the dogs along the Fraser. To my right, seals are having a grand old time frolicking in the water. Across from the water, to my left, are huge pine trees featuring gigantic bald eagles’ nests in their crests. (I was born and raised an American, but have seen our national bird living in the wild—or at least not living in a zoo—only in Canada.) And in the lower branches, apparently unconcerned by the neighbors upstairs, were—depending on the season—a few or many snowy owls looking out at the world and thinking, I always imagined, how lucky they were to be owls and not dogs, eagles, or seals. Or, for all I knew, people.

I never really understood the concept of walking before I moved to B.C.  

Last week I wrote about a speech Lincoln gave at the Springfield Lyceum in 1838. So it was only thirteen years later that Henry David Thoreau gave a speech at the Concord Lyceum in Massachusetts that he eventually delivered another ten times in different venues and which was eventually published in The Atlantic in 1862. The speech was called, simply, “Walking.”

For Thoreau, walking was not just exercise, but a kind of conscious effort to leave civilization, represented by town and house, and step into Nature itself. He writes in his essay, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.”

I suppose that’s clear enough. Maybe he’s being a bit harsh, but the author is just warming up. “Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind,” he goes on to observe, “will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.”

There was a time in my life when I would have been incapable of understanding what Thoreau was trying to say. And then I moved to Canada and began to walk the same stretch of the dyke path for thirteen consecutive years. Day in and day out. The same path. The same river. The same trees. I would once have imagined that to be the most boring assignment possible. But it turns out Thoreau was completely right. And, indeed, as I walked through the years I noticed things Queens-me and Manhattan-me would have been incapable of noticing: the way alluvial mud smells slightly different in late fall and early spring, the way the pitch of frogs’ croaking rises during the springtime mating season, the way the activity level of seals, eagles, and owls changes as the temperature rises. We had many visitors too. From time to time, a vulture or an osprey would show up. One memorable time, a walrus made a brief appearance before vanishing into the waves. It was like living in the Wild Kingdom, except that my immersion in Thoreau’s writing allowed me to picture the experience not as a TV show that I had somehow stepped into, but as a time machine that had somehow propelled me back to Old Concord and allowed me to walk along with my silent but fully present partner, a man whose orientation towards nature and its mystic dimension became mine as well.

I loved the owls most of all. I knew their reputation as the wisest of birds and they seemed that way to me too, quietly sitting on their low boughs lost in thought, observing the world, taking it all in. When we finally left Canada for California, I took one final walk on the dyke with Harry, our final B.C. dog. The seals weren’t around. The eagles were off doing whatever they did when not perched atop the evergreens along the Fraser. But the snowy owls were there, watching us silently, bidding us farewell, saying nothing. And in saying nothing also saying everything and, at that, allowing Nature—which (or do I mean whom) Thoreau qualifies as our “vast, savage, howling mother”—to wish us Godspeed and good fortune on our journey into an uncharted future.