Another Day at the Café

“Marc, what in God’s name are you doing?” said Lady, who wasn’t here and yet was, and since she had created the Poet’s Passage…well, is she ever not here?

“Be quiet,” I told her. “I’m busy, and besides, you’re not here.”

“I certainly am!”

“Prove it,” I told her. “If you were here, you’d order me a cup of coffee, which I gravely and desperately want.  But there is at this moment a young man wiping tables with the same energy as Amir, a man sent from lands far from here—OK, Aguas Buenas, but it’s still up there in the mountains, from which all wise men stem—to lead the Poet’s Passage into it’s culmination of poetic voice and economic profit, and I swear that he who does wipe is Amir’s brother, which would make sense since the tribe of Amir has been introduced to the Passage to lead it into…”

“Marc?” says Lady, who wisely knows when to interrupt when I am taking that verbal leap off the ledge of reality, or when I just don’t know how to end the sentence. “Marc, are you quite all right?”

“Just a moment,” I tell her, since the young man wiping the tables, this young seer of the Tribe of Amir, is now approaching me.

“Yes, I am,” he tells me. “I’m Alejandro. How did you know? Do we resemble each other.”

They do and they don’t. Or rather, I had divined their relationship simply by the manic way he was wiping the tables, since Amir has the same habit, though horizontally, since his preferred medium of wipe is Windex on glass. And so this young scion of the House of Santana—he being the progenitor of the Tribe of Amir, who even now stands above the sacred oils from which rise the mighty empanadas (and believe me, there’s nothing nada about a good empanada)—greets me, extending the hand that toils mightily in the battle of poetic truth and lovely lucre. Or maybe he just wipes tables, I don’t know.

“Marc, are you quite all right?” Lady asks again, or maybe she doesn’t since she is here, and not here, as is Alejandro, whom I may or may not have met. Nor is it important, since David and I have just had a funny conversation, because a guy who has to be 6 foot seven has just ordered coffee.

“And thus have the giants entered into the Passage, eager to sip poetic truth, or perhaps to lead us into the new land, the land where coffee will flourish and be given to the poet unasked, with or without the presence of Lady, the goddess dressed as poetess, who may or may not be here, but most certainly is.”

“Wow, he is pretty tall,” said Lady. “But it doesn’t answer the question, even if I’m here or not, which I certainly am, though just at the moment I’m not. You don’t appear to be drunk, and you’re not high, either. But what gives?”

“Ah, divine and diving presence,” I tell her, “it’s simple. I’m broke. On the skids. Nothing but the shirt on my back.”

“Actually, that’s a nice shirt,” says Lady, “finally, you’re looking like George Bernard Shaw.”

“It is the shirt of a dead man, wrenched from his widow’s ancient claws, and bestowed upon me the Crone of the Toledos.”

That would be Raf’s mother, whose brother-in-law died recently.

“And so I have been reduced to being clad in the raiment of the dead.”

“Dark green, checkered pattern—nice! But you still haven’t told me what you are doing.”

Can she be trusted? Is the world yet ready for that spark of light that will vanquish the long night that looms ahead us? I decide to tell her, all the better that she, as Goddess / Poetess, can fling the light into the gloomiest corners of the world.

“I’m starting a religion,” I tell her.

She spits out her imaginary coffee, very nearly besoiling (forget it, computer, in religious writing “bespoiling” certainly exists, and what about “besmirching?”) the cloth of the dead in which I am shrouded, and tells me I can’t, since aren’t I an atheist?

“Of course I’m an atheist,” I tell her. “Whoever needed to believe in God to invent a religion? Anyway, I can certainly invent a perfectly good religion. Just look at Joe Smith, and those wonderful gold slabs that he dug up but nobody has ever seen, and which revealed the glorious truths that became Mormonism, the religion of them who made the desert bloom!”

“You know, you might just be onto something,” she tells me. “This is kind of an unusual place, and it would be fun to have someone making a religion at the table under the mirror, at the back by the shrine to Clara Lair.”

“I am not making a religion,” I tell her, stung. What does she think I am, a charlatan?

“I am revealing the religion, under the mirror that reveals what is and yet what is not, because isn’t a mirror some piece of glass that has been tricked into thinking that it’s you, when you gaze in it? But I, sitting under the mirror, am seeing the world as indeed it is, as indeed it is not.”

I tell her that the Truth will be revealed, and that seekers shall flock to the Poet’s Passage with their tongues dry for coffee and freshened with the lushest of poetry. Oh, and their pockets full of cash.

“Well, that’ll be nice,” says Lady, the pragmatic poet who knows that the road is rocky and filled with missteps, even if guided by the Ancient Santana and his Tribe of Amir.

“Get to it.”

And so I did.    

The Gospel According to Johann

In the beginning…but no, there was no beginning, as there will be no end, since the unfolding of the genius that is the love of God neither started nor shall end, but has remained constant and replenishing for all time.

It was first felt as a whisper, the gentlest stirring of two winds encountering each other in the vastness of time and space. For trillions of years, they had searched for each other, they had approached each other and passed each other and grown near and then far, and even in the enormity of the void they had not stopped seeking, stopped waiting for each other, stopped searching endlessly, constantly, restlessly.

Upon encountering each other, the winds grew slowly, gently, over eons and eons until at last, sparked by a gleam from the right eye of God, an enormous explosion of light and heat and love and joy boomed forth. An explosion so vast and overpowering that still today and for generations to come it is still exploding, still expanding, still surging forth. And this explosion was the manifestation of the love of God.

For every force, there is a counter force, and so even at the moment of explosion, of expansion, of furious and fulminating quest outwards, there was the terrified and horrific contraction. Light battled darkness, heat attempted to vanquish cold, all elements of the world that we know of were in vehement opposition. All sought to annihilate its opposite; the galaxies were reeling like a drunken man seeking his gutter, discord was rife.

For really, was any one force better than its opposite? Light—so loved, so prized, that sun that shines down and grows the plants that nourish us! But don’t we, at some point after we have done our daily toil, come home to our simple bread and good beer, and after we have felt the fatigue of the day, the tug of the beer’s weight in our body—don’t we crave the dark? Ah, the dark, where the dreams lurks, and the nightmares as well, and where all that is straight and ordinary become twisted and fantastic. The judge becomes the murderer; the assassin succors the weak.

So it is with everything: the parched land craves water; then comes the deluge. The thinking man understands all, but cannot feel. The old die, only to be born again.

All was reaching out, all was contracting: the constant collisions of each thing with its opposite were creating cacophony, chaos. There was no day for the man to toil in, or for the plant to grow in, but rather there were tremendous explosions of light, followed by the blackest night ever known: a night when there could be no stars, no moon. When there was sound, it was the most raucous explosion ever known: it shattered the eardrums and men reeled backwards several decades at least. When silence came, an iota of a second later, the ears had healed, and were craving sound again.

All was in disarray, chaos reigned, since every great and beautiful thing—each the fruit of the two winds who had finally met each other, mated with each other, fought with each other, and reconciled with each other—was locked in the deadliest of contact with its opposite. Stars flashed and were darkened, universes appeared and were vanquished, the seas became the deserts, and the deserts drowned the nomads, who a moment before had been seamen.

It was thus for eons upon eons, and also in the most infinite fraction of a nanosecond, since time too was at war with itself, and the infinite and the finite raged greatly. At one moment great sages ruled the earth, disease had been vanquished, laws ruled over the just and merciful people, and all sank into the gentlest beds at the end of their virtuous days. Then there was nothing, only a molecule insanely attracted to another molecule, with no thought that one day, something as enormous as a ion might be formed.

The worlds were spinning, freezing, roaring and deathly quiet. The universe, so vastly empty when it contained only the two winds, was now impossibly full, raging, dense, nearly at the breaking point.

And then it happened. It was God’s will, or it wasn’t; it was the fulfillment of God’s love, or it was an army of demons unleashed upon us all. What can we say? What can we know? Only that it happened, and that once it had happened, it could never not happen, or rather, be happening. Yes, the infinite masses of galaxies, now horribly crowded and dense, exploded.

Yes, it was the downfall.

Yes, God had at last stirred; he who had noticed us by paying no attention, loved us by scorning anything to do with us, caressed us as he had flailed us, at last had God stirred.

Yes, it was the fulfillment.

For two elements had at last found each other, two opposites who not only did not clash, but who gloriously complemented each. Indeed, there could not be one without the other, so deeply enmeshed and in love were they.

Yes, it was mere coincidence, that chance meeting that finally, finally had happened.

Yes, it was God’s will.

Who knows? But at last, one thing could endure without immediately being cancelled by its opposite. It grew and grew, until finally all the water could find the sea, and all the dry land the desert. Man could fight wars and hunt, women could garden and nourish their children. At last, the sun was given its time of day, and the night even allowed for the moon to shine, and for the stars to come out, to lure wishes out of little children gazing upon them from their beds. The world had at last ceded to its perfection and imperfection. The winds had borne fruit, after some much devastation and triumph, and all was in order, and whether God had sent the fruit, or God had sent the winds, or God had done nothing at all but watch or doze or contemplate or lie in a drunken stupor, it mattered not. God had reigned, mighty and nothing is the power of God!

At last, the two elements of the otherwise clashing world of things and their opposites had found each other. They were…

…silence.

And its mate…

…music.

And thus came to be the music of the spheres.     

                               (a portent of that which comes)

Death Comes for the ex-Archbishop

I want everybody out there to know: I’ve been exercising incredible self restraint, and it hasn’t been easy, since one of my minor talents is a significant ability to obsess, and one of my most recurrent obsessions was a papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic and to Puerto Rico, Jozef Wesolowski.

You probably know the story: The archbishop of Santo Domingo ran off a few years ago and whispered into the new pope’s ear that the Dominican press was about to show footage of the nuncio, drinking beer on the malecón and then strolling it, all while wearing shades and a baseball cap. What was he doing there? OK—it was pretty clear, and even if he weren’t, well, what about those 100,000 photos of kiddie porn that were found on his computers?

It was the old, old story, and don’t tell me, anybody out there, that our new pope is going to be any more rigorous about sexual abuse of the clergy than any of the other ones. Did Wesolowski stick around and face the music in the Dominican Republic? Of course not, he was recalled to Rome, and one report—can I find it? maybe, but who cares?—was that he travelled under false documents. So there he was in the Vatican, and then the lies began. The matter was administrative. Then there had been the feud with the archbishop of San Juan. Then, when it really couldn’t be denied any more, it was admitted—Wesolowski was defrocked, and stripped of everything but (and this I love) the obligation of celibacy.

At some time while all this was happening, reports came in of Wesolowski strolling the streets of Rome; was he doing so as he had the malecón of Santo Domingo? And was it wise? So Wesolowski was placed under house arrest, which was no problem, since he had more time to download, yes, more kiddie porn, even from within the Vatican. 

Do I know how things work at the Vatican? Nope, but I assumed that someone would take a defrocked priest down to the Greyhound station, give him a few thousand lira, and then send him off. Alternatively, they could have sent him off to Santo Domingo to face the music there, but that was impossible, since the acts that he had committed were all exempted under diplomatic immunity.

So politically correct do we have to be about religion, these days! In terms of size, the Vatican is half the size of the average American farm, nor can I recall those lovely Swiss Guards getting down and dusty in the Afghan and Iraqi deserts. And in fact, the United States never recognized the Vatican as a state until 1984.

So Wesolowski had diplomatic immunity, and that meant that neither Poland nor the Dominican Republic could prosecute him. What absolutely nobody noticed, of course, was that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and given that Wesolowski had spent so much time—remember that feud with the archbishop of San Juan—on the island, it was quite probable that he had committed crimes on US soil as well.

But no—Wesolowski than had to face a criminal trial, and this was trumpeted as a great example of the new pope’s tough, tough stand on priestly abuse. Now the story gets seriously weird, since on the very first morning of his trial, Wesolowski’s lawyer stood up and announced that the ex-prelate was in intensive care.

The Vatican of course couldn’t comment on the cause of the hospitalization, but they did announce that he had been released after three days.

Three days?

I’m an old nurse, and I can think of only one way to get from the ICU to the streets in three days: an overdose. Anything else would have an underlying pathology that would require treatment, tests, monitoring. With an overdose, you clean ‘em out and ship ‘em out.

Well, did the trial resume? Of course not, since it gets hot in August and the judges get cranky, so everybody went on vacation, and Wesolowski was left in his rooms and that’s where, over a week ago, a priest found him, at five in the morning, sitting in front of his television, which was still on.

Time is so relevant in the Vatican. A priest is accused of sexual abuse, and the process grinds on for years. But what happens when the Archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy Dolan, needed to shift 57 million bucks to the cemetery fund? Why? Consider this priestly sentence:

I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.

How long did it take for the Vatican to sign off on this questionable scheme? The article didn’t say, but it was weeks, if not days, if my memory serves.

So it was no surprise that Wesolowski was buried within days of dying, but what was a surprise was the eight minutes of silence at the funeral, in lieu of a homily. As my mother used to say, “if you can’t say anything nice…”

Or is that just a Midwestern thing?

Anyway, the Vatican reached a new low in smarminess with the unctuous hope that God might "cancel the sins that (Wesolowski) had committed with human fragility."  Then, it was ship the body off to Poland, where Wesolowski was buried yesterday.

Of course, there was one other detail to take care of, and that was the cause of death. And again, the Vatican has been a virtuoso at deception. First, we were told that preliminary examination indicated that Wesolowski had died of a cardiac incident.

Did he? Of course he did, because guess what happens when you die? Right—the ticker stops beating.

Then it was announced that “macroscopic” evidence indicated that a cardiac event had occurred. “Macroscopic?” Consider, that word is the opposite of “microscopic,” so what that means is that somebody walked into the room, stuck a stethoscope of the ex-nuncio’s chest, looked him up and down, and said, “wow, musta been a heart attack or something.” Presumably, either in Italian or Latin.

But wait—three distinguished doctors were appointed to do an autopsy, and then we would know, all the world—or at least one marginally sane but heavily obsessed blogger in Puerto Rico—what had carried the Wesolowski out of the world, and into the heavenly hands of God, who would cancel the sins of that human fragility.

Right—so I waited. And waited. And googled, of course, since Google is to the obsessed what YouTube is to conspiracy theorists. And at last it came, from the horse’s mouth—though could it have been the opposite end of the alimentary tract? At any rate, here is Vatican Radio, putting an end to the whole affair, in a story entitled, “Autopsy Results Confirm Cause of Former Nuncio’s Death.” Here’s the lead:

(Vatican Radio) The vice-Director of the Press Office of the Holy See, Fr. Ciro Benedettini, CP, issued a statement to journalists Saturday morning, explaining that preliminary results of the autopsy performed on the disgraced and defrocked former Nuncio, Jozef Wesolowski, confirm the decedent succumbed to natural causes – specifically a deadly cardiac episode.

Below, please find Vatican Radio’s English translation of the full statement

Was I going to read the full statement? Dear Reader, how little you know me! And here we have this:

The investigations took place [Friday] afternoon and, according to the first conclusions reached on the basis of macroscopic examination, confirmed the natural cause of death, attributable to cardiac event.

Friday afternoon—the day of Wesolowski’s death, and recognize that word “macroscopic” up there. In fact, the next paragraph states that the lab results, which might perhaps indicate blood alcohol levels and other toxicology, are still pending.

Does it matter? Is it really so important what killed the archbishop, or the nuncio, or the defrocked priest that Wesolowski ended up? Hadn’t he suffered enough? Sure, he died in relative comfort in front of a television set, but hadn’t he lost everything? Wouldn’t the seven years in an Italian jail have been overkill?

Maybe, maybe not. Ultimately, Wesolowski is less interesting than the institution that created him, that shaped him, and that—just possibly—turned him into the predator he became. Sexual abuse thrives in secrecy, shame, absolute power, lack of transparency, and exclusively male environments. The wonder of it is that only an estimated one percent of priests are abusers; the other 99% are fighting huge odds not to succumb to an environment that is a Petri dish for abuse.

The Vatican never wanted to try Wesolowski. How do I know? If the actions—or the consistent lack of action—didn’t tell me, the phrase “human fragility,” describing Wesolowski’s crimes, gave it all away.

Human fragility is having that piece of chocolate cake, even when you know you have to shed 20 pounds. Human fragility is saying an unkind thing about a person who cannot help him or her self. Chasing a poor black Dominican kid down behind a statue, convincing him to masturbate, filming him, and then giving him money is not human fragility. It’s a crime.

Will these guys ever get it?

               

On Writer's Block

“When are you going to write something,” said Lady, who’s becoming impatient with my extended writer’s block.

When, indeed? Because the world has been spinning faster and faster, and anyway, my own house has been turned not upside down but rather sideways, since everything that was in the back of the house is now in the front of the house, all the better so that Lord—who is logically Lady’s brother—can scale scaffolds and ladders in order to drip paint on the floor.

OK—be fair. The paint dripped is a wonderful near Norwegian blue (actually, in my mind it’s a Finnish blue) but also very runny, or maybe it’s just that it dislikes being put on the cornice and wants the limelight of being lower down. Anyway, it’s running, which is unfortunate, since neither Lord nor I had the sense to realize that we should probably paint the ceiling first, then the cornice, and then the rest of the wall. No, we went the other way, which would have been fine if we had remembered to get the paint that falls up. But the great thing about Lord is that he’s very clean, which means that the floor is looking far cleaner than it ever has. He also has fallen for Mauricio, who is supposed to be a cat but is instead a genetically modified skunk (they removed the stripes) and whose other name is Monsanto. So Lord has provided Monsanto with a roller hanging from a string, and the cat / skunk has been happy ever since. See? Service you don’t get from ordinary painters!

So for years we had been living with mold, we are now living with dust and the cement scrapings and scraps of paint. Not that we didn’t escape once or twice, first to go to Walmart to buy a mattress, and second to go to the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean, since someone had crashed through to the very nadir of nefariousness and robbed my phone.

It’s my fault, of course, though I still think that the current thief was in his last life Joseph Mengele. But the point is that I succumbed to a salesman who told me that I would never get a date—or what might come after it—if I continued to have the phone that Radio Shack had actually paid me to take off their shelves. That phone, which was red but nameless, I could leave in a prison lunchroom, and would anyone steal it? Of course not, but the sleek little Galaxy s5?

I realized it in a flash, that it was gone, that it was stolen, that I was defenseless. True, I had most of my contacts in a little black notebook—yes, you have that honor, you out there—and I had most of the three hundred CDs that I had collected gathering dust—and paint—next to the piano. But I was faced with the horrifying possibility of reentering all those contacts, and playing all that music back into the computer so that it could play it back into the phone.

Curiously enough, the phone did it all by itself, even without the SIMS card, so now I have my contacts and my music, and this little Asus zenphone is a Galaxy manqué or maybe a faux Galaxy but whatever it is, it is not a Galaxy. Which means that I could throw it into a den of thieves and they would throw it right back. Yes, it’s that bad.

So that’s why my mood had been rather sour, of late, plus of course the fact that I’m a news junkie and living in Puerto Rico, which in the current moment is spiraling through a vortex of crises. So what could I possibly write about? After all, I had been compulsively reading articles entitled, “Puerto Rico Debt Crisis: Yes, Western Civilization Soon to End!” Could I help myself? Of course not, but neither did it seem like I should inflict it on anyone else.

So I haven’t been writing, since what is there to write about? Would anyone really be interested in the interesting relations between Lord and his niece Naïa? Or that she had dragged him all the way to the other side of the mall, so that he could pay six dollars for a Godiva ice cream cone, which she declined to allow either of us to sample? Or that I had told her that I was 9,6423,0974,987 seconds old, when she asked how old I am.

“What’s that in years?” she asked.

“Who knows,” I told her, “anyway, at my age, you have to start counting in seconds…. Years just don’t make sense anymore.”

The daughter of a poet and a Frenchman, Naïa completely gets this. So we go home, and I sit down to write, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing to write about, which is depressing because—in those smug days when I could write—I had declared that writer’s block was entirely fictitious. And haven’t I proved it? 842 words, one and a half pages, and have I said anything at all? Of course not!

So since I couldn’t write, I devoted myself to watching videos, which meant that I had to listen to every word John Oliver has ever uttered publically, since I had long since consumed the entire oeuvre of Rachel Maddow and John Stewart. So that was a problem, since where could I turn after that?

The odd thing about a blogging life—let’s call it la vie del bloguer—is that things sort of enter into your head, and you find yourself thinking or more likely obsessing about them. But what made me think of prairie chickens? Right—it was The New York Times, reporting on the near extirpation of the Attwater Prairie Chickens, and that put me in mind of the prairie chickens that I had seen, way back in the 60’s, in central Wisconsin.

It amuses me now—I live in the tropics, and the national bird, our Puerto Rican parrot, is—in addition to well past extirpation and just to the east of extinction—a very handsome bird indeed. Magnificent, with vibrant green and striking red, and no little call, either. But for all that, I’d rather be of a place that has the prairie chicken, and especially of a place that had the likes of the Hamerstroms, who were the ardent champions of the bird.

My father knew them, or maybe just knew of them, since we were friends with the Schorgers—the foremost authority on the wild turkey—and they were friends with everybody including Roger Tory Peterson, which is why I can tell you that Peterson was utterly puzzled when somebody told him he really should buy a suit, since the President was giving him some medal or other.

“But why,” he said, “I already have a suit.”

And so he did, which he had been wearing every day since his teens….

(News flash—page 3, 1170 words, and absolutely nothing substantive yet!)

Now where was I?

Right, the Hamerstroms, a wonderful old couple who lived in an 1850’s stagecoach inn that hadn’t been painted since the Civil War but did have a ballroom on the second floor. The ballroom housed the ornithological books, and the first floor housed everything else, including a great horned owl, who took what I felt was an unhealthy—for me, at least—interest in a small, tow-headed boy. I sat down, the bird immediately flew behind me, and perched on the cornice. I changed seats, the bird did as well. The Hamerstroms and my parents found this funny; I, like the Queen, was not amused.

So we slept in this house which had, as Fran Hamerstrom once said, “all of the luxuries, such as a first-class ornithological library, but none of the necessities.” Which is to say it had no running water and only wood-burning stoves for heat. Which was no problem for Mrs. Hamerstrom, because she had been batty all her life. She was born into wealth in Massachusetts, but instantly took to the wild, so much so that her parents tried to tame her. She retreated even further, and took to planting poison ivy on the path between her and her parents. Typically, she was naturally immune to the plant, though she may have caused it to itch.

Well, she proudly flunked out of Smith, and then met her husband, whom everybody called Hammy, and they both became students of another Wisconsin legend, Aldo Leopold, who wrote Sand County Almanac, a book I have lied about reading for years. So Leopold sold them on the idea of saving the prairie chickens, and the Hamerstroms set to work, and have done so well that there is now a Central Wisconsin Prairie Chicken Festival. Yes, we take our prairie chickens seriously, we of Wisconsin.

As do the prairie chickens, though I did not, that next morning at five AM when we had to get up and sit in a freezing blind, since it was my father’s professional duty to report on the doings of the prairie chicken. And what were they doing? Well, you can see below, but it’s sort of the ornithological equivalent of break dancing—very enticing, to the mesdames prairie chickens, or las poules de prairie.

Yes, the male does all the elaborate footwork of a manic ballerina on cocaine, and then, after puffing his orange sack out from his neck, soars up and bops his competitor, and that’s pretty important, since I can now tell you that the top dog…err, chicken…gets to impregnate 90% percent of the chicks.

At last, exhausted from not having slept in a freezing house, and having woken up at before anyone even thought of cracking the dawn, we went away. Fran Hamerstrom stirred around, writing books, writing articles, and venturing down to Peru to observe native Amazon hunting customs. She broke her hip there, and had to be canoed out down the river, which was an annoyance but anyway, she went back the next year. She was only 87 at the time, so it was no big deal….

She had been a little off all her life, but always in the best way, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see her on the Letterman show, in the clip below. If you can, skip to about minute 23 of the clip. Letterman is painfully not funny for the first ten minutes, the comedian who follows him is hardly better. But then Doctor Hamerstrom comes in, with the news that all violets are edible, and with a dead fox snake, which she is proposing to cook in—now burnt—butter. She’s taken an interest in cooking wild things, and has become a sort of Julia Child of the Wisconsin woods.

They are, in fact, quite similar—Brahmin ladies who are completely sincere and utterly funny without in the least meaning to be. So it’s no surprise when Hamerstrom pulls out a small grass snake—her pet Matilda—from a coin purse where she carries it. She then plops the snake into her brassiere.

So now its four pages and 1868 words and I still have writer’s block but…

…at least you know about prairie chickens!
        

A Land So Fair

Boy, were they quiet about it! Consider that I’m a news junkie, that I’m from Wisconsin, and that I care I-suppose-you-could-say passionately about environmental issues. So why didn’t I know about line 61, about which the company that operates it says this:

As part of our ongoing efforts to meet North America’s needs for reliable and secure transportation of petroleum energy supplies, Enbridge is expanding the average annual capacity of Line 61 from 560,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 1.2 million bpd.

And where is that expansion? Check it out:

OK—Enbridge wants to transport over a million barrels of tar sand oil through Wisconsin every day: Is that a problem?

Regular crude oil is plenty toxic, but the tar sand oils are an environmental disaster at every level.

Let’s start with the sand that you need to fracture the oil wells: That sand has to be very fine, and Wisconsin has the fortune or misfortune to have the largest source of the rock that produces the sand in the nation. So there was a boom in production of the sand in the last decade or so, a boom four which the state’s environmental protection agency was completely unprepared.

Hmmm…or was it? According to my lights, it had been very carefully prepared indeed, and from many angles, and it was prepared to do absolutely nothing.  Why? Well, consider this quote from the Scientific American, tellingly and heart-breakingly titled “How Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin’s Environmental Legacy.”

Since taking office in 2011 Walker has moved to reduce the role of science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees. And he has presided over a series of controversial rollbacks in environmental protection, including relaxing laws governing iron mining and building on wetlands, in both cases to help specific companies avoid regulatory roadblocks. Among other policy changes, he has also loosened restrictions on phosphorus pollution in state waterways, tried to restrict wind energy development and proposed ending funding for a major renewable energy research program housed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

So now we have an explosion of sand mines, and that sand is extremely fine, making it easy for it to become airborne, and also causing silicosis, which can lead to lung cancer. And according to one source, 79 percent of air samples in frac sand sites exceed the levels of silicone established by OSHA. Right—the miners wear masks, but what do you do about little Billy, five years old and living downwind from a mine?

So the sand is bad enough, but the fracturing? Well, first of all, it requires a huge amount of water, and then produces a correspondingly huge amount of very contaminated sludge, about which nobody knows what to do, so people have been digging ponds, most of which are leaking. And as you can see in the video below, wildlife is severely affected, both by drinking it and by—in the case of birds—being coated in it.

And so what gets produced? Well, it's tar sand oil, the bulk of which is drilled in Alberta, Canada, and it's particularly nasty stuff: It can lead to things as minor as a headache to diseases as lethal as leukemia. So from a public health point of view, wouldn’t it be logical not to expose as many people as possible to the oil? Of course, but what have we done? Chosen to ship—either by rail or by pipeline—the stuff all the way across the country.

Which is precisely what Enbridge, the largest distributer of natural gas in Canada, and the operator of—in their words—“the longest crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons transportation system in the world” does.

How long is that system? Well, it goes from Superior, Wisconsin, to a refinery near Chicago, but that’s only the system in the USA (on different lines of the system, the pipelines cover 1900 miles); in Canada, the figure falls to a little over 1400 miles. So that’s 3300 miles of pipeline for both countries; that’s not bad if you’re piping water, it’s potentially disastrous if you’re piping oil.

And in fact, it was either very nearly disastrous or absolutely disastrous, depending on your point of view, when the pipeline broke on 25 July 2010 near Marshall, Michigan, and began flowing into a creek that fed into the Kalamazoo river that would later flow into Lake Michigan.

Back up five years—that’s when, according to an investigation by the National Traffic and Safety Board, Enbridge first knew that they had problems on that part of the line, but chose not to, or at least didn’t, act. Why would they do that? According to one critic-turned-whistleblower, John Bolenbaugh, it was financially a better deal to let a spill happen, and then have the insurance company pick up the tab, than it was to do routine maintenance. (As an aside, the tar sand oil is apparently especially toxic and corrosive on pipes.)

Nor was that all: Enbridge decided that the alarms were false, due to a bubble in the pipeline, so the solution? Instead of shutting down, they increased the pressure on the line, so that when finally, after 17 hours, they realized they had a leak, 81 percent of the amount spilled occurred in those 17 hours.

 That was because the boys in the monitoring station were in Edmonton, Canada, and not smelling what the boys fishing down by the river were smelling, which was very strong indeed. Oh, and they were also getting headaches….

How bad was it? The worst inland spill in the country, nor was that all, because it turns out that tar sand oil reacts differently in water than crude oil. Crude oil stays on the surface and is relatively easy to collect: We were in uncharted seas with tar sand oil. So we had to learn that tar sand oil initially stays on the surface, releases hydrocarbons such as benzene, and then sinks to the sea or river floor, and what to do with that?

Ah, for the days of American ingenuity! Because I would love to have read, as I now will love to write, “Enbridge’s expert team of haz-mat professions instantly realized and conceived a special vacuuming process (since patented) that scoured each millimeter of the river bed, collected any trace of oil or other chemicals, transferred it to custom-made tanks, which were then taken to a disaster response center, which had rockets ready in order to shoot the hazardous material into space, to incinerate the material as well as the rocket itself outside of the fragile tissue of our precious atmosphere. At Enbridge, we care!”

No, that wasn’t the sentence (run-on intended, all the better to obfuscate and lull you into passivity) that got written.  Instead, Enbridge pretty much told the EPA what they were going to do, which is why I could view in one video the fascinating spectacle of the side of the boat, the oil-drenched river, and the hand reaching down to clean up this toxic mess with…

…a paper towel!

Guys? That’s something I’d do!

Well, they got more clever as time went on. According to whistle-blower Bolenbaugh, they scooped up whatever was visible, took it to a field, dumped in out, pulled layers of burlap or canvas or whatever, put a topping of soil on that, and then seeded it. Viola! Instant meadow—just don’t dig to deep.

Or stir the riverbed too much, since, as the videos make clear, you’ll get a plume of oily who-knows-what floating down the river. So they poured in rocks, then sand, and…

This was too much for even the EPA, which ordered further dredging. It was all bad enough for the director of the NTSB, Deborah Hersman, to say that Enbridge officials acted, “like the Keystone cops.”

Unless, of course, you were the whistle-blower, who got the ax the very morning after he blew the whistle, and then started getting death threats. All of which were freaking him out enough to start putting videos of his motorcycle with two screws missing on the front tire, and his neighbor opining that those screws were designed never to come out.

Full disclosure—yes, he looks nuts. But remember that old adage that even paranoiacs have enemies? It’s all on his website: you judge.

Nor was the public unaffected, and Bolenbaugh got all of that on camera, too, and pretty compelling it is, especially if you have never seen a person having a seizure. I have, and if the video’s is an act, I hope it wins the Oscar.

Nor was it the case that you had to be sick to get Enbridge’s attention, you had to be sick in the right location, which meant that unless you had the river passing through your living room—right, I know I should edit that out, but watch the videos, and you’ll get steamed, too—well, you were probably a malingerer or hoping for a handout.

Apparently, it was all so bad that Enbridge had to buy 134 houses. The catch? Well, they got them at fire sale prices, cleaned up their mess (maybe) and then sold at a higher price. So says—of course—the whistleblower.

The videos are wrenching in part because of the constant complaint, which I find utterly true, that “they don’t care”—with the “they” being Enbridge. To which I would reply that of course they don’t care, and perhaps they shouldn’t. Why? Because corporations don’t care until it’s too expensive not to care, which is why we have regulatory bodies like the EPA and the NTSB that have enough teeth to gnash the corporation into shreds and fed it to their cubs, and then loll in the sun, looking at the bones and the carnage. Then—trust me—the corporations will care.

So it was a disaster, a disaster of over one million US gallons of extremely toxic muck spilled that got into the creek and then into the river, and almost—though who knows, maybe it did—got into Lake Michigan. Which is connected, you do remember from 5^th grade geography, to all of the other Great Lakes, and which are scenic, yes, but also provide a lot of water for however-many-millions to drink.  

One final irony: Everybody is reporting seriously that they “closed” the river, which I found curious, because I have seen rivers, including the mighty Mississippi, and it was very much my impression that a river flowed, so had someone found the faucet handle that could turn off a river? If so, not doing so was criminal negligence when we had all that flooding five or ten years ago. But no, closing a river simply meant that humans could not swim or boat or even go near it. But what about fish and wildlife? You know the answer.

A long piece, I know. But Enbridge, this Enbridge, this fair country—sorry, company—is the very company that wants to “upgrade” the pipeline so that one million barrels will pass through…. OK—I think I did the math, which was to figure out that a barrel contains 31.5 US gallons, multiply that by 1,000,000 (barrels per day), divide by 24 (hours per day) and then get the figure of 1,312, 500 (gallons per hour). And that means? That we could have a spill as bad as Michigan’s in under an hour. A spill in Wisconsin, my home state.

Remember Wisconsin?

Stay tuned!