They Married for Peace and Were Gone

As we were driving back from the Willimantic Department of Motor Vehicles Tuesday afternoon, my wife, Sigrid, looking out the passenger window at the grey landscape blending seamlessly into a grey horizon where, somewhere overhead, it met an equally grey sky, and offered a word in her native tongue, German, that too perfectly described it, trostlos-hopeless.

This is the toughest time of year for a lot of us, including folks like me who stare out the window in My Situation Room ("Fortress of Ineptitude" finished a close second in the name-the-spare-room contest we had when our daughter, Michelle, moved out) hoping to catch a glimpse of what's next. A number of years ago someone took me on a short helicopter flyover of some of the woodlands and farmlands in this area of Connecticut in the late fall, early winter, and the view from the top seemed to be of another world.

I can recall everywhere we went (and you can see a lot of them from the roadways, but there are many, many more as it turns out), seeing rock walls through the forests and brook beds, intersecting at angles, and wondering how odd that must have seemed to the indigenous peoples here when European settlers first arrived. In comparison, the European landmass was the smallest of the continents, and maybe that's where the assertiveness (if not out and out aggressiveness of its natives) developed as they went out into the big world and marked their territory not only to use but, at times, to use up.

I drive through lands demarcated by ancient stone walls every day as I travel across the Real World, and none of the creatures I pass in my travels or travails regard them as immutable boundaries or barriers. They are there and nothing more. I would imagine for a Mohegan or a Pequot, thinking of the tribes in this region of Connecticut, watching an early settler struggle to subjugate the earth to farm crops, engaged in back-breaking labor to maneuver the giant stones they unearthed while tilling, to serve as property markers was too amusing to not smile.

And it's taken us centuries to learn lessons of harmonious, not rapacious, living within a natural order and I'm not sure we're learning enough and fast enough. Reuse and recycle instead of plunder and leave. We have to work very hard to not spend too much time calculating what has been lost from the lessons left unlearned for too long and too long ago. Broken Arrow.
-bill kenny