-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

June 5, 20 

First of all, I hate it that I’m hip and I use words like “besties,” but hey, I’m knee deep in the Zeitgeist (look it up, Ted S.) and the kids love me. LOL.

Second of all, I’m in a funk this morning, as my friends Dave and Linda are on their way back to the California desert and “we all had a real good time.” The three of us have been together for forty years, starting in Chicago in the hippie days, and on to California, where Dave got his master’s in social work and never left. Their house in Atascadero is my house. You can’t name a mountain in a forty mile radius of their home that I haven’t climbed. It would take twenty Genehouse Chronicles to tell all the stories of my adventures in the Salinas River Valley.

Most often, we are a trio, though I’ve had two wives and assorted girlfriends, all of whom were welcomed in the Mulvey home. Dave and Linda figured marriage out, a miracle considering I was the singer at their wedding. Their children D-3 and Suz (Suz married a David, murking up the already Dave-heavy roster) have spouses and children of their own, the splendid Ellie Belly and Davey and Abigail. In that family, I am Uncle Blue (my nickname is Blue—don’t ask), surely the greatest title I could ever have received. Continue reading →

May 29, 2014 

Prairie plants are starting to bloom. Cornflowers and purple cone flowers and lobelia and brown-eyed Susan and wild daisy and wild grasses and milkweed and rattlesnake master and dandelions and hemp, and more, are pushing up and setting incredibly deep root systems. They will peak in July, with taller flowers and native grasses reaching twelve feet high. Butterflies peak at the same time, no surprise there. This morning I saw the first skippers and purple hairstreaks, two vital species of tiny butterfly, their health and numbers a crucial indication of the health of the environment.

Ninety-seven percent of the native tallgrass prairie of Illinois is gone. Ninety-nine per cent of the remaining prairie is in CookCounty, in the 70,000 acre forest preserves which ring Chicago, lovingly restored and preserved by volunteers. Had our European ancestors not plowed, they could have harvested the renewable prairie for free and made their bread from whole grains. They should have asked the Indians instead of killing them. “Amber waves of grain” pale in comparison to the riot of color of prairies.

In 1999, the fledgling, 20,000 acre Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, on behalf of the National Forest Service, commissioned me to write a play, “Water Brought Us and Water’s Gonna Take Us Away,” which premiered at Prop Theatre and ColumbiaCollege in Chicago. The play traces a fictional escaped slave’s adventures as he wanders from Kentucky across the Illinois prairie, and eventually reaches Canada. (If you love wildflowers you must travel to the Midewin, a Potawatomi Indian word meaning “healer,” outside the town of Wilmington, on the Kankakee River. 7000 acres of the park have been restored to the way the land looked in 1840.) Continue reading →

May 27, 2014

Yesterday’s Genehouse walk gave me a chance to see old pals. Hummingbird Man was mowing his lawn, his long blond ponytail looped over a bare right shoulder. Bob was outside his house, sweeping catkins off his driveway and talking to his cat which was rolling in the catkins. He was getting ready to hike with his sons in the Gila Wilderness, which straddles New Mexico and Arizona. I have hiked there a few times with my friend Marmie Walther. Aldo Leopold, the godfather of the ecology movement, wrote much of his classic book, “A Sandhill Almanac,” there. A year ago Bob told me he was done with New Mexico—too many memories of his deceased wife. And now he was good to go. Continue reading →

May 26, 2014

The two brothers, ten and eleven, were playing on the enclosed porch of the farmhouse during a rainstorm. The shelves of the porch were lined with empty Mason jars. Their father kept the jars there for emergencies, in case he needed a stiff drink. He would pour remnant drops of whiskey out of each jar into a glass and down it. On this rainy day, the brothers had to pee, and the outhouse was far enough away from the house, they couldn’t see it through the rain. So they peed into a jar, intending to wash it out later. The rain stopped and the boys ran outside. And the old man came home, in need of that emergency drink. And he found a miracle, a jar a third full of amber liquid. He downed it then spit it up. He nearly whipped the hides off his sons. The brothers could laugh about the incident, as adults, but then they would grow silent and contemplative. Continue reading →

May 25, 2014 

Monticello College, now Lewis and Clark Community College, was a private women’s institution since the 1800s, and, in the late 1970s, the subject of much Alton gossip, all of it revolving around sex and wild girls. Boys loved the place, for obvious reasons. Monty had a wonderful theatre and a problem—no boy actors. I was one of the lucky local guys that were recruited. I appeared in the musicals “Oliver,” “The Fantastiks,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Once Upon a Mattress,” and my favorite, “The Boy Friend” (I was Tony, the boyfriend), and a lot of plays.

Opera singer and Broadway and Off Broadway star Jeanne Beauvais, who had been in the second New York production of “The Boy Friend” with Sandy Dennis, in 1958, came to Monticello to revive her Boy Friend role of Madame Dubonett. It was an unforgettable experience for a cast of teenagers to appear with an actual star. Continue reading →

May 22, 2014 

In the middle of Tuesday night, I get up from bed and walk in the dark to the bathroom and pee . . . and fall backward in the dark, one second of time but I’m thinking at supersonic speed and feel I’m falling from a great height, and I land on my right elbow and right shin, on the rim of the bathtub, and I fall on my back, my elbow screaming, my right shoulder screaming, my right shin tearing on something . . . and I slam into the floor of the tub and crack my head . . . and lie in the dark and assess.

What happened? What’s my name? Where am I?

Toes, fingers move. Arms move but pain in the right wrist and shoulder. Tailbone throbs. Head aches. I manage to align my body with the bathtub’s bowl, blood dripping down my right leg. All is quiet. Continue reading →

May 20, 2014

The perfume of the river valley is overwhelming, and so are the buffalo gnats.  The harsh winter seems to have made the noseeums more aggressive, or perhaps it is my imagination. Just walking from the front door to the garage brings down gnat swarms on my head and legs, the tiny pricks of their nibbles mildly hurtful, majorly annoying. On the Genehouse walk I flay my arms wildly and mash buffalo gnats in my ear canals.

I see two bald eagles early this morning, an adult and a juvenile. The migrating eagles have long since packed their bags: those two are permanent residents. Forty American white pelicans fly along Scotch Jimmy Island in a single, undulating line, staying close to the water. The air is alive with the sounds of baby birds. Crow and the missus have two kids, and they spend a lot of time pecking away at my neighbor Irene’s lawn, for sustenance for the babies. Continue reading →

May 19, 2014

For me it began with Laurie Frazer, a raw-boned, loud high school kid who was involved with a group of teens trying to put on a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” only they didn’t have a clue as to how they would accomplish this. Someone contacted my dear friend Art Gorman, a composer and musician. Could he help? Art and I couldn’t have known that call for help would alter our lives. We took on the project and became known as the “Underground Superstar,” by Chicago Tribune rock critic, Lynn Van Matre.

So Laurie Frazer decided I was the perfect candidate to be her older sister Pam’s boyfriend and she brought me home to dinner, in Winnetka, and I met my true family, over chicken ala king. And since Pam and I are siblings you know how that part came out. That fateful chicken ala king dinner would lead to countless adventures, in Winnetka and at their summer cabin, Frazer Lodge (room for seventeen), in Deer River, Minnesota, hometown of Judy Garland and, after Dick died, in Dover, New Hampshire, where Mardean moved to be closer to her kids. Continue reading →

December  3, 2013 

The weather continues to be mild, but the leaves are down and the color is brown earth, brown leaves, brown river. I hiked a river-to-bluff trail this afternoon, descending the steep north back of the bluff. The trail winds north and east, until it reaches a wooden bridge which spans a small spring. Then it gently descends east on a floor of limestone, to a trailhead. North, left, takes one to a series of beautiful waterfalls along the main creek.  The south trail, with three Indian burial mounds from the Mississippian era along its borders, follows the stream to the river.

I had crossed the ridge and was carefully navigating the slick limestone, when I saw movement to my left. I stopped and listened and searched. There was a brush pile thirty feet below me. Some ink-black animal was in the brush pile, its rear end raised and shaking sideways, an attack position, the front part of the creature low to the ground and obscured by the brush. Continue reading →