-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

May 23, 2013

I drove out to Farmer B.’s place yesterday afternoon. He had loaded up his new bee hives with colonies. The insects were pissed, having traveled for three hours in the back of his pickup truck. In spite of his astronaut suit, one bee stung Farmer B. next to his eye.

Soon the fields filled with bees. Poppies and blue bachelor buttons were swarmed and glutted. White lilacs and five colors of irises filled up with bees.

The tall prairie grass was filled with dog-eye sulfur butterflies. We drank Stag beer and ate pork steak, radishes and asparagus fresh picked from the ground, surrounded by house and goldfinches and crazy mockingbirds.

Tar the old, deaf dog walked up to the hives and sniffed them and learned a painful life lesson. Which grandchild—Marley, Payton, Piper, Kian and Brice—will be the first to be stung?

May 8, 2013

I saw and contemplated a toad in the woods yesterday. I am incapable of passing by living things. “It’s just a toad; just a sparrow.” Really? I also saw a red fox. More special?

Try (and we are) exterminating one species and suffer the consequences. A pileated woodpecker flew just over my head and landed on the side of an oak tree, not ten feet away. We looked at each other for over a minute. Interwoven, interconnected, joined. One living planet.

One species of human left, five thousand species of ants. Who will inherit the earth?

May 6, 2013

I found a charcoal-colored, three foot long redbelly snake in the woods today. It lay straight as a ruler in the path. I had to relocate it so someone wouldn’t step on it. I kneeled and touched its tail and it wheeled and bit me on the hand. No harm, no foul. Best not stress a snake even if it’s not a threat. I picked it up on a stick and relocated it into some deadwood. All was well.

We are born with the fear of snakes. Somewhere in our reptilian brain stems lurks a universal memory of our two million year old ancestors, watchful at night in their tree nests, sabertooth tigers below, waiting for falling babies, serpents climbing the trees.

My stepdaughter Angelina, then ten, was freaked by snakes until she went with me to summer camp and met a charismatic herpetologist, who, by week’s end, got Nina to carry multiple snakes on her neck and arms, showing off the retiles and telling people about them.

We have an urge to purge wild things—unless they’re cute and cuddly. In the bad old days, men used to park their cars on a certain road in the Shawnee National Forest, take out bats and sticks and entertain their families by slaughtering migrating rattlesnakes crossing the road. Today, cars still gather, but families stand and watch the migration with reverence and awe.

Snakes (serpents) and wolves got the worst raps of the animal kingdom. There is the alleged deal in Eden, and once dogs evolved, their noble ancestors lived in secrecy. We are as much superstition and myth, as science.

January 6, 2013

1979. I was reeling from divorce and having severe vocal problems after screeching the parts of Judas and Jesus (not at the same time) in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” for the better part of four years in the seventies. My classically trained tenor voice had abandoned me, supplanted by a whisper. A doctor said only silence would cure me. How long? One year.

I knew I would never again sing professionally—my vocal chords were shot and so was my acting ambition. I wanted to stay in the arts—plays were my life; I would write a play. One morning, I sat at my desk, poised my two middle fingers and faced my typewriter. And stared. I had writer’s block and I hadn’t written anything.

That Christmas, I drove down to my hometown of Alton for the holidays. I met an old high school friend at for a drink and we caught up. The startling life story that pal told me stayed in my brain, and I knew what my play would be about. There would be a shotgun on a bar and a juke box. The writing god Anton Chekov once observed, if there’s a gun onstage it had better go off. My gun would go off in blackout. The end. Continue reading →

December 24, 2012

Sun comes closest to earth on the first day of the New Year, the perihelion;

At solstice I stand at Blue Pool in darkness and await the messenger, a portent—

Trumpeter’s blast, bejeweled refracted ray of light, or still, small voice?

I laugh because I am powerless, seerless,

Yet I will a presence, wait for a miracle,

Knowing one cannot conger such a sign, only hope:

Come.

I strip off my jacket and coat like the idiot boys at college football games,

Raising my naked arms, feeling the stinging wind, hearing the Mississippi’s watersong;

And then Bald Eagle appears upcliff, soaring west to east,

Eagle the embodiment of sublimity, equipoise, amazing grace,

(Benjamin Franklin proposed the wild turkey as our national symbol. The eagle:

“is a bird of bad moral character.”)

The King of Predators (Lord Barred Owl bows as it passes) shrieks, “Perihelion!”

Then it rolls, flying upside down over the snow-dusted rimrock.

Came.

* “Ray’s Star Tap” is a ten minute Christmas play that has been produced over thirty times. Feel free to stage a reading with the family. Rated PG. Producing theaters must receive permission from Ewing Eugene Baldwin.

THE CHARACTERS

GEORGE, an unhappy gentleman

CLARENCE, an angel

BERNICE, George’s unfaithful wife

STAN, Bernice’s insurance salesman

TIM, an orphan

JOSEPH, a poor carpenter

MARY, Joseph’s pregnant wife

The entire action of the play takes place on a bridge over the Sangamon River, near Springfield, Illinois, Christmas Eve.

SCENE: A bridge over a river. GEORGE balances on the rail, holds a support with one hand, strips to his boxer shorts, prepares to jump. A portable radio plays, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Enter CLARENCE, dressed as an angel. He turns off the radio.

CLARENCE. Hey up there! If you’re going to kill yourself, at least play less sappy music. “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” My god, the maudlin sentiment of it. How many people jump, or shoot themselves with that rag as accompaniment.

GEORGE. Are you my angel?

CLARENCE. Your what?

GEORGE (jumping down, embracing CLARENCE). Are you my guardian angel?

CLARENCE (indicating costume). Oh—this? No, I wore this to the office Christmas party. Sorry, I’m a mortal. My boss holds originality in high regard. I thought I’d impress him by being the staff wit. Unfortunately, I discovered the punch bowl, and after seven glasses I “flew” from an overhead lighting fixture. Landed plop in his mistress’s lap. (as GEORGE climbs back up) She has a very nice lap—. There you go again. I’m glad I’m not your insurance agent. What a mess of claim forms you’re about to produce! Continue reading →

December 23, 2012

Jersey County, in Illinois, borders the Mississippi River. St. Louis, via a new superhighway, creeps ever further northward toward this hill and bluff country, and a rural way of life is slowly disappearing, displaced by suburbs.

I have hunted Indian artifacts in the region for decades. I follow streams as they merge and flow to the Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri rivers. Indians have lived in the Great Confluence for 20,000 years, from the Paleolithic to the Mississippian eras. I have found arrowheads, spear points, stone and clay pipes and every kind of stone tool imaginable. One cornfield has yielded an Innuit harpoon carved from wooly mammoth ivory, a fossilized conch shell with a drill hole, and axes ground of stone not native to Illinois. The First People traveled to Three Rivers for the purpose of trading goods over hundreds of generations.

Over the last decade, I have encountered bobcats, alligator snapping turtles, bald eagles, pileated woodpeckers, barred and great horned owls, hawks, hummingbirds, timber rattlesnakes, coyotes, foxes, tens of species of butterfly, scores of deer and wild turkeys—and yes, a black wolf. Farmers swear they are seeing cougars (a friend set up a trip wire camera in his woods and got a photo of a cougar dragging a dead buck along the ground) and armadillos. The latter have been confirmed in newspaper photos: armadillos crossing the river on bridges, from the Missouri side. Continue reading →

December 18, 2012

One sun ornament hanging on the Tree of Life;

Shivery bluebirds’ beaks sifting for baked seeds from curled, singed grass,

Fine black ash smelling like bitter chicory,

Wild turkeys pecking their way through the black snow;

Sunlight absorbed by ghostsmoke and cremation and black mass:

A concatenation of feasts of carbon, of color:

For fire leads to more grass leads to finer flowers leads to sweeter nectar

Leads to more bees, more vibrating strings of prairie roots on Nature’s harp;

So fire is a penultimate Christmas gift, a pagan gift, God’s and the gods’ gifts,

A fox and coyote and screech owl and field mouse gift,

A gift of future for the lonely, for the lost, for the loved:

An infinite, chatoyant solstice light . . .

Bluebirds the bells, woodpeckers the carolers,

Red-tail hawks the priests of meditation, kestrels the hovering angels:

“Hallelujah,” the wing and the prayer and the hope and the holy, the wholly

Chanted by the kin of dinosaurs:

(One moon ornament hanging on the Tree of Life.)

December 11, 2012

It steps onto the path fifty feet from me,

My fourth and last traverse of the circle trail,

And I dead-stop,

The six point buck now facing me,

This alpha deer with no intention of running;

We lock eyes, my breaths quick, my body soaked with sweat

From four ascents of Heartbreak Hill;

The buck does not blink,

Its thick haunches swathed in dark fir;

Its majesty and fearless gaze is thaumaturgical—to me—

(“It’s just a deer,” I imagine unromantic friends saying, “ubiquitous, man.”)

To me, this day, after seeing a barred owl, a red-tail hawk, a red fox,

This encounter is a portent;

An ancient Indian would have interpreted all these as signs;

Brother Buck tired of me and walked south through the oaks,

Slow, as if to say, You are insignificant;

It didn’t know Man—Man’s inclinations for conquering,

For culling, for shooting, for trespassing, for selfishness;

This day belongs to the buck, not thinking of the future,

Alive and proud and haughty, sensuous and sentient.

December 4, 2012 

It is so warm that the snakes and skinks have come out of hibernation. Yesterday, just outside a hiking trail that crisscrosses a bluff, I drove around a wide curve on a rural road and came upon a huge black rat snake, looking like a piece of black hose stretched straight. It was sunning itself on the warm asphalt and wasn’t going to move. I stopped and got out. The snake, grooving on the heated surface, didn’t glance back.

Rat snakes are the least temperamental of snakes—unless you’re a bird. Someone was going to run it over—indeed, six cars pulled up from both directions and patiently waited for me—so I gathered it up, five pounds and seven feet of it, and it coiled around my left arm, the black-scaled beauty, and I carried it across the road.

The traffic resumed. The snake raised its head and flicked its tongue toward my face.  O friends who fear reptiles: May you meet with a rat snake, entwine with an obsidian-colored rat snake and feel your blood pressure lower, feel your aches and pains dissolve by reptilian muscles stronger by far than hands.

Reluctantly, I unraveled the beast and watched it glide languidly into the woods.  My arm muscles had been massaged by a living, rippling bracelet.