David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

It Wouldn't be Thanksgiving

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a few hours spent helping prepare the holiday meal at Open Hearth, a shelter for homeless men in the Hartford area since 1884.  The kitchen isn’t particularly spacious with over a dozen people at work, but that only makes getting to know each other easier while we slice vegetables, stir pots and mix stuffing.  It’s a commercial kitchen crowded with stainless steel counters, ovens, refrigerators, sinks, stacks of hotel trays, and racks of hanging utensils, but we make it a cozy place.

Amidst the sounds of clattering pots, running water and bursts of conversation, I begin the morning by peeling potatoes with Nick and Maria.  Nick’s a newcomer who’s a bartender and handyman.  Maria and I seem to pick up where we left off last year chatting about books, our children, and the elaborate holiday confections she creates at home.  Most of the helping hands return year after year and we’ve become a kind of family meeting annually to catch up while slicing vegetables, stirring pots, and setting tables.

The room fills with the smell of warming turkey and stuffing.  There's productive energy in the sound of trays filled with beans and corn as they scrape along the counters, and the click of a whisk whipping up gravy.  Vegetables sizzle in a sauté pan, and huge stockpots brimming with boiling potatoes throw clouds of steam into the fragrant air.  In assembly line fashion, we create portions with a large dollop of stuffing covered with generous portions of breast meat laid over dark.  The tables are neat and colorful with bowls of olives and pickles.  Soon it will be “show time.”

I never fully grasped the holiday’s spirit of gratitude until I joined the Open Hearth crew on Thanksgiving morning.  By the time I sit down with my family and friends it’s easy to look around and know why I’m thankful.  Even the food has a keener taste.

Remembrance Lights

This past Saturday found me in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for the annual Remembrance Day commemoration.  Close to the date in 1863 when the Soldiers’ National Cemetery was dedicated and President Lincoln delivered The Gettysburg Address, people in period costume filled the streets.  Men in top hats and long coats or military uniforms and women in gingham bonnets and bell-shaped dresses strolled as easily as if almost a century-and-a-half hadn’t passed.  In the middle of the afternoon, thousands of Civil War reenactors in both blue and gray, my son and I among them, marched through town to throngs of cheering and often saluting crowds.  But the day’s highlight came after dark as I stood in the silence of the candle illuminated cemetery.

Light fell away at the horizon as the land also falls away toward the village.  Old trees stood guard, their trunks like pillars, their tangle of bare branches dancing against the sky’s last splashes of gray and orange.  A crescent moon was on the rise.  And as the stars came out overhead, thousands of luminary candles beside the low headstones of fallen Union soldiers created arcing galaxies of flickering light on the grass.

My heart rose into my throat as the President’s words about “the last full measure of devotion” and a “new birth of freedom” came rocketing back to me from grammar school years that required memorizing the speech.  These fragile, temporary lights garrisoned together on this dark hillside burn with an emotional intensity greater than any piped-in, gas-fired eternal flame could possibly provide because each year’s lighting requires the dedication, hard work, and care of the living to keep them burning.  My few moments stay quickly ballooned to the better part of an hour.  Finally, I awakened to the time by the chilling notes of taps sounding from the far side of this Milky Way to those who consecrated this ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Stepping into the Picture

Hartford Courant, September 27, 2009

On a recent trip to Iowa I visited a familiar place to which I’d never been.  Though it’s hidden on a back road in the sleepy town of Eldon, it’s a place most Americans and many people around the word would recognize almost instantly.

Near the middle of the nation I stood transfixed in a fit of déjà vu before a steep-roofed, board-and-batten house with a large pointed gable window.   This white cottage forms the background of Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 oil painting American Gothic, a portrait of a taciturn couple standing before the humble structure, the balding man grasping a pitchfork business end up.

Leaf Songs

Long after most trees have become dendritic skeletons, many oaks and beeches retain a smattering of khaki and coppery leaves that glow with a tawny light when struck by the sun.  Breezes blowing through them make a different sound than they did when the branches were thick with greenery.  It’s a higher pitched rustling, a more percussive music as the leaves grow increasingly desiccated.  The few still clinging weeks from now even as the snow flies will have a scratchy, rainstick-like sound with their curled and crunchy remains.

Toppling Towers

I’ve developed a concern about smokestacks, those lofty brick towers once integral to thousands of factories dotting New England’s landscape, some of which are still used today.  It’s not a fear they will fall on me and it’s in addition to any concern for potential toxics or particulates they emit.  No.  I’m worried they are disappearing.  Last year the iconic Naugatuck Chemical stack, its company name emblazoned vertically on the gigantic cylinder, was demolished.  For generations it had been a beacon along the Naugatuck River and Connecticut Route 8, one of the earliest architectural landmarks remembered from my childhood.   I felt its absence when I passed the spot yesterday, like some phantom limb.

The decline of these monuments is logical given the disappearance of the massive redbrick factories of a century ago, but even when these old temples of mass production are reborn as apartments or shops, the associated stack is often unneeded and becomes a maintenance headache and liability.  The result is demolition.

A remnant of the days when the solution to pollution was dilution, these gigantic, functional objects remind us of a grand industrial heritage when this region dominated in making everything from buttons to firearms. They also provide an environmental lesson in how far we’ve come in cleaning our air since the days when emitting coal black smoke was common.

Okay, such a worry probably seems over-the-top, way over, given other historic preservation and smart growth concerns, but I guess architecture doesn’t have to be beautiful to be meaningful.  Sure, we can’t and probably shouldn’t save them all, but how about a sampling to honor the past and teach the future?  It’s great that the old Scovill stack is preserved at Waterbury’s Brass Mill Center shopping mall as an art object and curiosity. Some, like the stack at the old Bristol Brass plant has found a second life as a microwave tower.  Still, many are crumbling and will soon be gone without a trace.

 

Never Have So Many Trees

Never have so many trees lived among so many people.  That’s the essence of Connecticut’s landscape as I savored the view last week from Meriden’s rugged Hanging Hills.  Situated almost in the state’s center, these traprock ridges afford distant views of Hartford’s high rises to the north and New Haven’s in the south.  But the foreground is even more engaging.

Half hidden in a forest of mixed hardwoods and pockets of pine and spruce is an astounding smorgasbord of land uses.  There are quiet streets lined with orderly homes and an interstate highway whose tireless whine reaches the ridgetops. Sprawling, boxy industrial buildings are half hidden in the trees, and power lines lace together the countryside.   The sculpted greenery of a golf course and the patchwork fields and pastures of farms can be seen in a single glance.  A slight turn of the head and shopping centers appear, the runways of Meriden-Markham Airport, or the slender shaft of the Otis Elevator test tower in Bristol.  Yet right up against all this thickly settled busyness are dramatic cliffs and forbidding rocky talus slopes leering down at jade-tinted reservoirs.  Pockets of woods grow where no structure is visible.

Spread out like a living map is a landscape of such intricate detail it defies a camera’s capacity to capture more than a hint of its vitality.  A climb to the heights is the only way to truly experience the energy, complexity, and artistry of the ordinary place below.  With a winding road to the top, there’s no excuse for failing to see a region where the natural and built environment come so perilously close.

The Golden Road

Bare hardwoods of birch and maple glisten in October’s thinning light among dark pockets of pagoda-shaped fir and spruce.  Tamaracks are feathered with golden needles and stately windswept pines tower over the deep woods.   Such was my view from Maine’s Golden Road, where huge logging trucks speed in dusty clouds over the rough dirt track that has a canal-like feel as it winds through the trees.  Running almost a hundred miles from Millinocket to Canada, the gloomy forest along this privately owned interstate highway of the backwoods is relieved only by daylight-filled boggy swamps, shimmering lakes, and occasional clearings where trees have been harvested.

Since before Henry David Thoreau’s visits to the area in the 1840s and 1850s, the north Maine woods has been legendary as wild country.  From this vehicle rattling, washboarded and potholed road and some rougher ones to the north, I saw a bear climbing a hillside, moose grazing in a ragged wetland, grouse exploding to flight at the roadside, and a fox leaping through a field in pursuit of a rodent.  There were vistas of rugged hills and whitewater rivers that wound through dense forest.  But in the middle of what appeared to be nowhere, I also encountered monster machines that cut, limbed, and piled trees as easily as I plucked asparagus from my garden.

The north woods of Maine remain a wild place where roads are unpaved, permanent residences rare and local government nonexistent.  In most places, no one hears a tree when it falls.  But it is also an intensely managed industrial garden for production of pulp and saw timber.  There are gatehouses on the roads and depots for truck repair.  This remote region is a wonderful, startling contradiction that is as beautiful as the area itself.