-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

January 18, 2015

I’ve been haunting the riverfront, looking for eagles—not a one. I had lunch at my friend Jerry’s house, on Friday. He was so eager for eagles he kept jerking his head toward the window view of the river, at the slightest movement. We saw songbirds, bluebirds, herons, egrets, robins, chickadees, nuthatches, pileated woodpeckers—but no eagles.

On the phone this morning, I said to Sheila S. (we were talking bad movies, acupuncture, house rentals in Elsah, Aunt Jeanie, some tribute Bob Seger band, how crappy is the TV show “The Black List” . . . and where are the eagles?), I guessed I’d hop in the car this afternoon and drive until I saw an eagle.

At noon, I drove down Clifton Terrace to the light. An eagle was perched on the road light. Two eagles were perched on a tree over Scotch Jimmy Island. Three eagles were riding ice floes. There was an eagle perched above Jerry’s house. And my heart beat in five/four time.

About a hundred cars were parked on the shoulder all the way to Alton, and people with elaborate photo equipment and binoculars Continue reading →

January 17, 2015

She was born during the great flood of 1993, one of the worst disasters in Mississippi River history. On July 16, she was in her mother’s womb, in her own calm water, oblivious to the conditions and her mother’s and two sisters’ fears.

Seven hundred forty-five miles of rivers flooded, the surge over twenty feet high, the width of the flood four hundred miles, and the result was fifteen billion dollars of damage to crops and barges and industry. In Grafton, just upstream from Alton, the flood lasted one hundred seventy days. Downstream, two entire towns were obliterated and ceased to exist.

An Illinois man, drunk and wanting to stay that way, waded to his house and pulled out sandbags, deliberately isolating his property—and his wife—so that he could go right partying with his pals. His actions flooded fourteen thousand acres of farmland and destroyed a vital bridge. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Continue reading →

January 15, 2015

On July 24, 2014, thirteen miles east of Cahokia Mounds near Lebanon, Illinois, in the uplands near Silver Creek’s Looking Glass Prairie, an archaeology team made an astounding discovery: a human footprint. Radiocarbon dating indicated the print was 1,000 years old, part of the Mississippian era, the same as Cahokia Mounds. Rain-washed silt had filled in the footprint and preserved it.

From the strata of soil in which it was discovered, we know that the person was standing at what is now called the Emerald Acropolis, after it had been abandoned. A great civilization had dispersed.

Emerald was not a suburb of Cahokia. Excavations have revealed platform mounds (raised and flattened earthen rectangles signifying ceremony or possible housing sites for “important people”). Indicators of domestic housing have not been found, but evidence for ceremonial structures (architecture) is in abundance.

Hearths filled with animals bones indicate that great feasts were held there. Pottery shard evidence (art) indicates Missouri, Illinois and Indiana styles, suggesting that the Emerald Acropolis was an important destination for pilgrims. A large plaza, surrounded by shrines and sweat lodges, has been unearthed. And a trail can be seen, using ground penetrating radar, the western segment leading straight to the great city of Cahokia, and the eastern leg extending as the crow flies (geometry), to Indiana. The mystery of Cahokia Mounds becomes more and more complex.

The shrines are aligned to celestial events (astronomy), and it is thought that rituals were performed there. The Emerald Acropolis appears to have been a religious site (theology), with pilgrims traveling thousands of miles, perhaps stopping at the sacred place before walking on to the great City of the Sun, hub of agriculture and trade, in its time (though the Old World  could not have known this) one of the largest cities in the world.

The last pilgrims of Emerald may have intentionally covered their structures by fashioning trenches of rain washed silts, so that each storm would run over the site and bury it. Why?

So an Indian, in a moon shadow, stood at a ghost acropolis 1,000 years ago, that person’s foot preserved in silt. Unknown to them, across oceans and great distance Mohammed, Jesus and many others had already made their marks. The Americas were the last place of inhabitance of humans. Does that render untrue or lessen that lone Indian’s and his 78,000,000 ancestors’ (before Columbus) sense of God(s)?

The modern, fundamental followers of Mohammed and Jesus: “YES!”

I imagine that Mohammed and Jesus, by virtue of their collective wisdom would be appalled at the modern bastardization and translation butchery of their philosophies and the billion people killed in their names and, had they been able to see the future, delighted and not at all surprised re the history of the Emerald Acropolis and the City of the Sun and The Pueblo, and the empires of the Aztecs and Incas and Mayas, and, in our time the ultimate True Church: Science; and the brave, uncertain, fallible and wretchedly flawed, garlanded in native emeralds, New World.

I write this on the shortest day and the longest night of the year, the winter solstice, celebrated and observed for 170,000 years, on cave and canyon walls, at Stonehenge in England, Woodhenge at Cahokia Mounds, and hundreds of other places around the world (including my friend Jerry’s white-painted tracks on his west- and river-facing window). Early humans figured out relatively quickly, about solstice and equinox, and devised ingenious ways to mark same, one of the earliest examples of science.

I hearten myself by thinking that tomorrow will be longer, if by seconds, and so on until June 21, when splendid, sapid summer begins to darken. I need light, yet I am often found in the dark, in lights-out Genehouse and out in the woods, where I think and watch and never, but never interfere.

(I once inadvertently had lunch with a rattlesnake on a bluff top, coiled but a foot away from me as I ate a sandwich then saw the snake, my bladder all aflutter, me praying to God in multiple languages, but the snake could have cared less.) Continue reading →

January 8, 2015

I often write satirically, and I often (not deliberately) offend someone. That person never lets me have it in public, but I get the occasional private message. It is so easy to offend—merely speak your mind.

The irony of the French situation is that France outlawed burkas. Free speech can be ugly.

But I did get threatened. During the Ferguson tragedy, I was at a local store and a bunch of river rats freely used the word “nigger.” And I spoke: “That language is offensive and racist.”

Four of the men turned toward me and moved in as a u-shaped line, me backing up to the entrance door. One of the men pulled up his sweater to reveal a pistol in a holster. Words were not needed. I walked out.

Once friendly people who called me by name, now glare at me, the guy who objects to hate speech. I no longer patronize the store.

I broke my Midwestern child training early on. I kept dutiful and quiet, until I got big enough (and smart enough) that my father couldn’t threaten me anymore. I found a voice. I will not be silenced. The silence, on Facebook, regarding murder of artists, of children, of women, is deafening and oh-so-Midwestern.

Killing unarmed children is murder. Killing artists because they get under the flesh to the truth, is murder. Killing in the name of any god is murder. Killing anyone because of the color of their skin (when if fact there is one human species, and color is a function of climate) is murder.

Murder might shut up an individual, but thousands will come afterwards and be heard. The man with the gun was a coward. The man with a pen was as brave as they come.

To paraphrase Charlie, the French editor, I would rather die on my feet than on my knees.

Je suis Charlie.

January 6, 2015

I was going to walk at the mall, but then the sun came out, not a warming sun to be sure but a theater light focused stage west. I put on ear flaps, a fleece neck warmer, a fleece hood with a mouth guard, a tee shirt and sweatshirt and windbreaker with a hood, and I took off west into the teeth of the wind. I could always turn back and retell it as a joke.

Once on Stroke Hill I began to sweat and my sunglasses fogged up, first one lens then the other, and long puffs of breath shot from my mouth, and I reached the peak and passed by the field of the summer fairy rings, and descended toward the long line of Osage orange trees.

I heard a commotion and rounded a bend, and there in the middle of the road was a large dead possum, belly flattened, and on its back and running around was a murder of crows, the perched ones tearing possum flesh and pissed at me for disturbing the banquet.

They shrieked at the masked man, and the masked man stopped and watched. But smart crows, once spotted, don’t wait around for fate. They flew off in a rage, shouting obscenities and leaving the intruder to contemplate the possum shell.

I reached bottom, the contrail of the coal-fired electric plant billowing straight east. The wind pierced my armor and made my shrouded head hurt. On the River Road trail, the bluff woods aglow, a thousand blackbirds Continue reading →

January 6, 2015

I was sound asleep, lying on my right side, back to the bedroom door and dreaming that jazz singer/bassist/babe Esperanza Spalding was plucking my body with her wondrous fingers, when something heavy landed on my hip, pivoted and leapt into space and out the door.

I thought it might be a raccoon or a possum, which didn’t make a lot of sense as I haven’t seen raccoons and possums in Genehouse—outside to be sure, but not in. I didn’t move, just lay in the dark and mourned the dreamsmoke of Esperanza, her luscious cascades of hair no longer dancing on my chest.

It happened again: The fiend landed on my hip, pivoted and jumped. I turned to see a critter, its legs splayed like a parachutist, landing on the floor and running, a dark shadow streaking away.

A few minutes later, IT landed again, this time staying and rocking on my bony hip, and extending a paw and patting my nose. Scout the Cat is a known nose patter, and indeed it was she, as hyped up as a bobcat, which told me it must be cold outside.

Scout reverts to banshee lion, throaty growler Continue reading →

December 31, 21014 (maybe)

Physicists are working on the problem of whether or not time is a human construct, or an actual entity. If it is an entity, human history has meaning and Taylor Swift has anorexia. If it’s a coping mechanism, we’re living in an imaginary place. It may or may not about to be 2015.

Wisdom in case there is a new year: Never take a tree or a dandelion for granted much less a bald eagle. Those of you who don’t live along the river have no idea how miraculous are birds, how they came back here after decades of DDT, how protesters brought them back by fighting for the environment.

A place to go if there is a place to go: Confluence Park. Today each pond of the wetlands teemed with birds: the glow white of the fishing pelicans, the lace white of the trumpeter swans lumped across the water, their heads tucked into their massive wings, and the pale white of the drifting snow geese—thousands of birds and songs.

A walk (or not) to take: The Genehouse trail. This afternoon the woods Continue reading →

December 27, 2014

Frogs croak today, down in my two ponds and along the Calhoun County wetlands. It is winterspring, the new fifth season of the Anthropocene, the epoch of extinction, yet life is stirring, and the hibernators awake, and snakes venture out and earthworms seek warmth on my concrete porch.

The goldfinches, turned olive green for the winter, perch on the birdfeeder like patrons at a bar. A mother screech owl and its baby have been hanging around my yard. The youngster fits in indentations on tree trunks, and if you have a feeling you’re being watched, you are. Your heart had better be strong, should you get too close to a screech owl and honk its horn. And overhead, the first trumpeter swans are arriving and in the landing path for Confluence Park.

I visited Farmer Orville and his wife Quilt Queen this afternoon. She placed four huge bins of cookies on the kitchen table in front of me, popped the lids, and said, “Eat. What you won’t eat, Orville will.” To be helpful, I downed four chocolate chip cookies and felt superior that I stopped at that.

I told them about seeing my physicist friend Evie yesterday, who spends her days measuring the radii of protons with help from a super collider. “It makes you think about what heaven is like,” Orville said. “You know, take all the Christians ever died; they’d all fit in a Florida of the Sky.” “With diamonds,” added the Beatles. Continue reading →

December 18, 2014

It is Day 12 of my illness. Sometimes you shake the blahs, sometimes the blahs shake you. I walked to the front door at noon and looked outside to my bowl-shaped front yard. I would have settled for watching passing cars on Clifton Terrace, or the mailman pulling in to my driveway or the old couple that prowl the road shoulder with their dog and somehow don’t get run over, or the Alton High/Marquette High cheerleaders doing splits in the leaves.

There was a bird luncheon going on under the closest fir tree. Red-headed woodpeckers and red-headed northern flickers and blue jays—ten birds altogether—were hammering at the frozen ground. I backed away—all those species are skittish—and fetched my binoculars and returned and watched and swore. Have you ever seen something so beautiful, you swore because no words could match the splendor?

The flickers and woodpeckers had matching scarlet heads. Normally they perch on the sides of trees and hammer at dead wood. The lavender blue jays, in the crow family which means they possess high intelligence, aren’t known for socializing, so seeing these three species side by side at the lunch counter, was amazing.

Chickadees perched in the fir and watched from above. The hammerers were gulping up a Christmas treat and not bothering to chase one another away. It was like a highway Continue reading →