Margotlog: The Achievement Gap
Growing up in South Carolina, I had no trouble identifying segregation. Blacks sat at the back of the city bus, whites in front. In dime stores, blacks were not allowed to sit at lunch counters. Super markets were for whites; small corner groceries for blacks. Because of slavery, Charleston didn't have sharp demarcations between where blacks and whites lived. The small houses which used to shelter slaves remained behind the mansions of former masters. Sometimes the small houses were inhabited by contemporary blacks. Neighbors, yet divided by wealth.
As a child, born of parents from the north who knew nothing first hand about racism, I was naïve and accepting. In other words, I hadn't imbibed racism in my mother's-milk. Yet even I knew, walking to my white girls private school, that the black granny swinging in the dirt yard and the small brown children hanging off the third-floor porches were poorer than my family. They wore torn, dirty clothes. Brown men in baggy trousers and slouch hats hung around corners, trading gossip. Even I sensed there was something terribly wrong with this--they weren't working. Later when I rode the city bus by myself, the cruelty of my whiteness made me very ashamed--black women who'd worked all day in whites' houses had to walk past empty seats, carrying heavy shopping bags, to find a seat in back.
Over many years living in Minnesota, I've come to think about racism as a very different kind of problem. Subtle and off-hand, it starts with an ignorance of black culture so deep-seated, so apparently innocuous and unquestioned as to appear nonexistent. A few years ago, I had a smart, white, masters-in-education student who had grown up in northern Minnesota, She quietly but intently refused to believe that she harbored any racism at all. "How often do you interact with black people? How much have you read about slavery and race in America? What black writers or educators, musicians or inventors can you name?" I knew she'd heard of at least two black politicians--Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It took nearly the entire course for her to acknowledge that she had white privilege (even though her family was poor) and that she took many things for granted which most blacks did not dare assume.
I'm not saying it's impossible for well-meaning whites and blacks in Minnesota to reach across the racial divide and work together for the common good. But I know, whatever their success, they remain in very different relations to civil power and authority--differences sharpened by centuries of oppression and yes ignorance. It's the rare white person in Minnesota whose mother or grandmother was forced to be demeaned on a city bus. It's not so rare for an African-American who lives here now to have that experience as part of their personal family history.
Recently I talked with a black graduate student whom I'll call Emily. Emily works in a Twin Cities school system--she's an aide in an elementary classroom. This year, Emily had health problems, as did several of her white cohorts, yet Emily was the only one who had to bring a doctor's order to obtain a school release for a doctor's appointment. "You people," said her supervisor, "often don't know how to follow regulations." The white teachers were not treated this way. Emily filed a grievance. "I had corroboration," she said. So far nothing has been done to correct the supervisor who so blatantly singled her out.
Another graduate student has recently written about teachers in the Twin Cities who have quietly, often with not much support from their districts, become effective educators of both white and black students. Interviewing these educators off school grounds, Andrea (not her real name) discovered several characteristics the teachers share: The most important is that they don't demean or give up on black students. They hold them accountable, but when they don't measure up, do not resort to labeling them racially inferior. Such teachers continue to let all their students know, no matter what race or culture, that they as teachers and human beings are concerned and care about them. This means, they recognize their students' potential, despite their immediate behavior.
Often black culture stymies white Minnesotans because black culture is more vocal, confrontative, "signifying," than most Minnesotan whites are comfortable with.
A good example comes from a northern suburban middle-school. Here teachers are being coached to "sing/talk/sign" (my words) their black students through daily transitions. For instance, as two students, Jake and Tammy, are making their way to their desks, teachers will say something like "There they go, ok Jake, let's see the bottoms of those shoes go faster. And Tammy, she's getting closer, there she goes, swishing past Patsy, and ok, she's sitting."
Andrea's interviews also indicate the importance of empathy in working with students from different cultures. Teachers who have their own experiences of rejection, struggle, fear of failure have a far better chance of helping students whose race and culture differ from Minnesota's predominately white population. Ultimately, chances are, if students find encouragement in their teachers they are more likely to try and succeed. Education is, after all, a social, communal bus where we all get to take the first available seat.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Margotlog: Otricoli in a Distant Mirror
Margotlog: Otricoli in a Distant Mirror
Standing before my huge bathroom mirror, I look beyond my raised arm and find Otricoli, a memory so vivid as to be painted on the opposite wall. "What an odd name," I said, the first time Pat and Giangi showed me around the Roman ruins below the Umbrian hill town. "What does it mean?"
Giangi, grizzled mariner who had returned from filming in Australia, shrugged one of those quintessential Italian shrugs--shoulders raised, hands spreading, ready to capture whatever inspiration hits. "Forse, a name for the two-handled Roman jugs?" Forse, perhaps. My Italia, acquired through frequent trips and reburbished just before leaving home, works fine when he talks slowly, but if he speeds up, I an lost.
On that first visit years ago, before they'd renovated a single room in their hill top tower, I gathered unconnected impressions--helter-skelter carpentry in the ceilingless tower, narrow streets with only a hint of sky above, and a look-out point reached by wide stone stairs. Only later when I spent spend five nights with Pat did I get a sense of the place from gate to gate. She and Giangi had finished the tower sufficiently to include a bath and tiny kitchen at one end of her lofty studio, and a tiny third-floor bedroom and bath tucked under the eaves. When we stood on the top-floor terrace and stared down into the sweeping Tiber Valley, I grasped the setting's beauty. The original residents had moved up from the river to escape the barbarians, but I found their escape point far more commanding and breath-taking than the Roman ruins below.
Pat had brought back a Turkish cat Anusha, from an archaeological dig where she drew every object unearthed. Anusha stared down at us from the rafters--orange, black and white face with gleaming green eyes.
At night out of my third-floor widow twinkled the distant lights of Rome. We lingered over lunches, two women trying to tell each other our entire stories in five days. Mornings I wrote and Pat painted in her studio. A magic haze of effort and serenity hung over us. Gone was the huge shadow of the rest of our lives, hanging just out of reach, ready to smother us.
There were many other happy times. Once at Christmas, with Giangi in residence, I slept at the lowest level facing Pat's enormous collection of antique dolls and stuffed animals which she'd brought from her childhood in Savannah, Illinois. She baked one of her grandmother's extraordinary cakes--more trouble in one slice than I'd devote to meals for a month. We ate in the second-floor kitchen overlooking the narrow street--the neighbor's windows almost close enough to touch. In the holiday atmosphere, we talked about my buying a tiny pied-a-terre in town.
Later as Giangi and I sat before a functioning antique fireplace framed in stone, he talked about being a boy during the war. As he rode his bicycle along a rural road, American and British planes straffed him. He rolled into a ditch and survived without thinking much of it. Now years later he was plagued by nightmares. His constant travels perhaps an escape from what Italy presented in his dreams.
It is probably ten years since I've been in Otricoli. Pat and I still meet in Venice or Florence, still enjoy each other's company. We are full of opinions on everything from cell-phone use to our art forms, her painting, my writing. We discuss the U.S. and Italy. She is far more vehement politically than I am. I am more in search of little hints that will roll open, once more, a scene from Otricoli--perhaps La Contessa is serving us tea in 100-degree July heat. Near 90, she is dressed in a long-sleeved cotton blouse and navy cotton skirt. In the cool grandeur of her drawing room, cluttered with mementoes, she too talks about the war, her hunger and that of her first child, and how they eventually went to live with a farm family, who fed them sorghum.
La Contessa is long gone, and Giangi is not well. It is not so easy to be with Pat in Otricoli. Her life has become complicated.
And so I remember the charm of our early days, hanging over ancient stones and glimpsing the Tiber on its way to Rome between banks flecked with green.
Standing before my huge bathroom mirror, I look beyond my raised arm and find Otricoli, a memory so vivid as to be painted on the opposite wall. "What an odd name," I said, the first time Pat and Giangi showed me around the Roman ruins below the Umbrian hill town. "What does it mean?"
Giangi, grizzled mariner who had returned from filming in Australia, shrugged one of those quintessential Italian shrugs--shoulders raised, hands spreading, ready to capture whatever inspiration hits. "Forse, a name for the two-handled Roman jugs?" Forse, perhaps. My Italia, acquired through frequent trips and reburbished just before leaving home, works fine when he talks slowly, but if he speeds up, I an lost.
On that first visit years ago, before they'd renovated a single room in their hill top tower, I gathered unconnected impressions--helter-skelter carpentry in the ceilingless tower, narrow streets with only a hint of sky above, and a look-out point reached by wide stone stairs. Only later when I spent spend five nights with Pat did I get a sense of the place from gate to gate. She and Giangi had finished the tower sufficiently to include a bath and tiny kitchen at one end of her lofty studio, and a tiny third-floor bedroom and bath tucked under the eaves. When we stood on the top-floor terrace and stared down into the sweeping Tiber Valley, I grasped the setting's beauty. The original residents had moved up from the river to escape the barbarians, but I found their escape point far more commanding and breath-taking than the Roman ruins below.
Pat had brought back a Turkish cat Anusha, from an archaeological dig where she drew every object unearthed. Anusha stared down at us from the rafters--orange, black and white face with gleaming green eyes.
At night out of my third-floor widow twinkled the distant lights of Rome. We lingered over lunches, two women trying to tell each other our entire stories in five days. Mornings I wrote and Pat painted in her studio. A magic haze of effort and serenity hung over us. Gone was the huge shadow of the rest of our lives, hanging just out of reach, ready to smother us.
There were many other happy times. Once at Christmas, with Giangi in residence, I slept at the lowest level facing Pat's enormous collection of antique dolls and stuffed animals which she'd brought from her childhood in Savannah, Illinois. She baked one of her grandmother's extraordinary cakes--more trouble in one slice than I'd devote to meals for a month. We ate in the second-floor kitchen overlooking the narrow street--the neighbor's windows almost close enough to touch. In the holiday atmosphere, we talked about my buying a tiny pied-a-terre in town.
Later as Giangi and I sat before a functioning antique fireplace framed in stone, he talked about being a boy during the war. As he rode his bicycle along a rural road, American and British planes straffed him. He rolled into a ditch and survived without thinking much of it. Now years later he was plagued by nightmares. His constant travels perhaps an escape from what Italy presented in his dreams.
It is probably ten years since I've been in Otricoli. Pat and I still meet in Venice or Florence, still enjoy each other's company. We are full of opinions on everything from cell-phone use to our art forms, her painting, my writing. We discuss the U.S. and Italy. She is far more vehement politically than I am. I am more in search of little hints that will roll open, once more, a scene from Otricoli--perhaps La Contessa is serving us tea in 100-degree July heat. Near 90, she is dressed in a long-sleeved cotton blouse and navy cotton skirt. In the cool grandeur of her drawing room, cluttered with mementoes, she too talks about the war, her hunger and that of her first child, and how they eventually went to live with a farm family, who fed them sorghum.
La Contessa is long gone, and Giangi is not well. It is not so easy to be with Pat in Otricoli. Her life has become complicated.
And so I remember the charm of our early days, hanging over ancient stones and glimpsing the Tiber on its way to Rome between banks flecked with green.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Margotlog: Alone with Cats, or a Dog
Margotlog: Alone with Cats, or a Dog
There are three of them. Three tails and twelve paws to our none and four. When I'm rushing to respond to other humans by phone, written comment, physical interaction, the three of them are a blur and minor rumble--tails around my legs, faces meowing for food. But when I'm alone with them, I descend to their level. I'm lying on the hardwood floor under the dining room table, a position I've taken many times with Julia, Tilly, Maggie.
Right now, Julia, the black and white Kitler, has wrapped herself around a chair leg and it beating the shit out of it with her back claws. Where did she learn this? None of the others, raised in hot-house environments, act like this. But Julia was a single mom at a young age. Out in the wild, she must have caught birds, even squirrels, and clawed them to death. Her pupils dilate. She is incredibly fast. If I don't wiggle and dangle the prey-string, she comes after it with her claws..
Lying on the floor like this, I've often studied the underside of the table with its frame and brackets. There's a secret passage in the middle, like a drawer with neither front nor back. When Tilly was little and mischievous, I'd draw a string from one end to the other and tantalize her. She batted at it. Better yet, when the back of the small baby grand piano was up, she leapt to its top, and from there to the curtain rods, miles above her tiny body. We watched her peek down at us. Tilly: the kitten whose foster mother kept her and her brothers in the basement where they lived on the furnace pipes, safe from grabbing children, Tilly can't leap like that anymore, but she is still and always NOT a lap cat.
My daughter has gotten another dog to go with her huge, fluffy, hundred-pound Pyrennes. The new dog, Fritzer, is a tiny Pomeranian, all thirteen pounds, but like his enormous brother Winston, Fritzie is also very fluffy, front and back, like a dame with a cinched waist and a deck, fore and aft. Now my daughter's ménage includes two dogs and two cats, one so aged that it sleeps on a heating pad and rarely greets company. This is a lot of critter action. She thrives on it, single mom that she is.
As does my neighbor, also single, who fosters puppies, along with her usual two terriers. All are high strung. Recently this neighbor, about the same age as my daughter, took a "rescue" trip to Kentucky or was it Missouri? The goal: to bring back a van-load of neglected dogs. I've heard other Minnesotans say most of the rescue dogs in our neck of the woods come from the south. Pets are not part of the family there. They are kept to prevent nuisance mice or to use for hunting or dog fighting. No pet "owner" bothers to spay or neuter them. When the inevitable occurs the babies are drowned in a rock-weighted sack or simply go wild.
How different it is from making intimates of our pets, indulging them, talking to them, giving in to them, and sometimes treating them like equals.
There are three of them. Three tails and twelve paws to our none and four. When I'm rushing to respond to other humans by phone, written comment, physical interaction, the three of them are a blur and minor rumble--tails around my legs, faces meowing for food. But when I'm alone with them, I descend to their level. I'm lying on the hardwood floor under the dining room table, a position I've taken many times with Julia, Tilly, Maggie.
Right now, Julia, the black and white Kitler, has wrapped herself around a chair leg and it beating the shit out of it with her back claws. Where did she learn this? None of the others, raised in hot-house environments, act like this. But Julia was a single mom at a young age. Out in the wild, she must have caught birds, even squirrels, and clawed them to death. Her pupils dilate. She is incredibly fast. If I don't wiggle and dangle the prey-string, she comes after it with her claws..
Lying on the floor like this, I've often studied the underside of the table with its frame and brackets. There's a secret passage in the middle, like a drawer with neither front nor back. When Tilly was little and mischievous, I'd draw a string from one end to the other and tantalize her. She batted at it. Better yet, when the back of the small baby grand piano was up, she leapt to its top, and from there to the curtain rods, miles above her tiny body. We watched her peek down at us. Tilly: the kitten whose foster mother kept her and her brothers in the basement where they lived on the furnace pipes, safe from grabbing children, Tilly can't leap like that anymore, but she is still and always NOT a lap cat.
My daughter has gotten another dog to go with her huge, fluffy, hundred-pound Pyrennes. The new dog, Fritzer, is a tiny Pomeranian, all thirteen pounds, but like his enormous brother Winston, Fritzie is also very fluffy, front and back, like a dame with a cinched waist and a deck, fore and aft. Now my daughter's ménage includes two dogs and two cats, one so aged that it sleeps on a heating pad and rarely greets company. This is a lot of critter action. She thrives on it, single mom that she is.
As does my neighbor, also single, who fosters puppies, along with her usual two terriers. All are high strung. Recently this neighbor, about the same age as my daughter, took a "rescue" trip to Kentucky or was it Missouri? The goal: to bring back a van-load of neglected dogs. I've heard other Minnesotans say most of the rescue dogs in our neck of the woods come from the south. Pets are not part of the family there. They are kept to prevent nuisance mice or to use for hunting or dog fighting. No pet "owner" bothers to spay or neuter them. When the inevitable occurs the babies are drowned in a rock-weighted sack or simply go wild.
How different it is from making intimates of our pets, indulging them, talking to them, giving in to them, and sometimes treating them like equals.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Margotlog: Oil and Water: Minnesota Sandpiper Project
Margotlog: Oil and Water: Minnesota Sandpiper Project
Two things in recent StarTribune articles sent mini-shock waves through my thoughts: first that Enbridge Energy in Calgary wants to add another pipeline to carry oil from the North Dakota tar sands under and near iconic Minnesota bogs and lakes and parks -- think Lake Itasca. The pipeline already there skirts Lake Itasca by what looks like only a few miles.
The second item of note, from the same area, came in today's paper - Fargo, N. Dakota, and Moorhead, MN, on either side of the Red River of the North, could soon be in the middle of a huge flood-control project that would flood hundreds if not thousands of farm land acres, especially to the west of Fargo. Flooding spreads pesticide residue and disrupts all kinds of life systems. No surprise: farmers in the area are up in arms.
Oil and water do not mix.
Flooding along the Red River suggests flooding further east in the bogs and wetlands where thousands of already endangered waterfowl nest, or rest, to and from summer and winter grounds. Many prairie and water birds once swarming through western MN and eastern ND in the hundreds of thousands have already been reduced due to draining of land for farming, pesticide damage and other predation.
Every time I hear the "Big Oil" wants to put down probes in a watery environment, I think the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only did this kill thousands of dolphins, fish and water birds, but many more have been dying slow deaths, damaged by oil residue. Most recently, the StarTribune published an article about tuna in the Gulf whose eggs now show malformations. This means that for decades to come, tuna fisheries will find slim pickings. No doubt all kinds of other creatures are likely damaged "in the egg."
Oil damage does not go away. It is very difficult to reverse.
Of course, the bottom line is our own inordinate appetite for fuel. Yes, President Obama has set higher standards for retiring coal plants, for reducing electrical energy use. But this oil from North Dakota will probably fuel cars/trucks/planes.
We are going so fast we forget to notice the consequences until "But Oil" does a nasty and we're all shocked and appalled.
Here's something we can do: The Minnesota Public Utilities Comission is the ultimate permitting authority for PROJECT SANDPIPER. (Innocuous name for such a nasty business, especially when we consider that a big oil leak would no doubt kill many many sandpipers.)
I just called Tracy Smetana at the Public Utilities Commission who kindly told me that there are two ways to be involved:
1st: email sanpiperdocketing.puc@state.mn.us and ask to be put on their email list for updating on the project.
2nd: Once the assessment is completed--by the MN PUblic Utilities Commission, the MN Commerce Dept, and US Army Corps of Engineers--there will be A PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD.
3rd. Go on line and let the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission know that you oppose the additional pipeline and why.
Help keep Oil and precious wetlands and water going their separate ways.
Two things in recent StarTribune articles sent mini-shock waves through my thoughts: first that Enbridge Energy in Calgary wants to add another pipeline to carry oil from the North Dakota tar sands under and near iconic Minnesota bogs and lakes and parks -- think Lake Itasca. The pipeline already there skirts Lake Itasca by what looks like only a few miles.
The second item of note, from the same area, came in today's paper - Fargo, N. Dakota, and Moorhead, MN, on either side of the Red River of the North, could soon be in the middle of a huge flood-control project that would flood hundreds if not thousands of farm land acres, especially to the west of Fargo. Flooding spreads pesticide residue and disrupts all kinds of life systems. No surprise: farmers in the area are up in arms.
Oil and water do not mix.
Flooding along the Red River suggests flooding further east in the bogs and wetlands where thousands of already endangered waterfowl nest, or rest, to and from summer and winter grounds. Many prairie and water birds once swarming through western MN and eastern ND in the hundreds of thousands have already been reduced due to draining of land for farming, pesticide damage and other predation.
Every time I hear the "Big Oil" wants to put down probes in a watery environment, I think the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only did this kill thousands of dolphins, fish and water birds, but many more have been dying slow deaths, damaged by oil residue. Most recently, the StarTribune published an article about tuna in the Gulf whose eggs now show malformations. This means that for decades to come, tuna fisheries will find slim pickings. No doubt all kinds of other creatures are likely damaged "in the egg."
Oil damage does not go away. It is very difficult to reverse.
Of course, the bottom line is our own inordinate appetite for fuel. Yes, President Obama has set higher standards for retiring coal plants, for reducing electrical energy use. But this oil from North Dakota will probably fuel cars/trucks/planes.
We are going so fast we forget to notice the consequences until "But Oil" does a nasty and we're all shocked and appalled.
Here's something we can do: The Minnesota Public Utilities Comission is the ultimate permitting authority for PROJECT SANDPIPER. (Innocuous name for such a nasty business, especially when we consider that a big oil leak would no doubt kill many many sandpipers.)
I just called Tracy Smetana at the Public Utilities Commission who kindly told me that there are two ways to be involved:
1st: email sanpiperdocketing.puc@state.mn.us and ask to be put on their email list for updating on the project.
2nd: Once the assessment is completed--by the MN PUblic Utilities Commission, the MN Commerce Dept, and US Army Corps of Engineers--there will be A PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD.
3rd. Go on line and let the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission know that you oppose the additional pipeline and why.
Help keep Oil and precious wetlands and water going their separate ways.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Margotlog: Trout Lilies and Bakken Tar Sands Oil
Margotlog: Trout Lilies and Bakken Tar Sands Oil
I had a job to do this evening while it was light. Cleaning up a mess, a pile of stems and their roots clogged with dirt, pulled up from a patch of Trout Lilies.
I will not tell you where they are, these lovely trout lilies, native to Minnesota and impossible to transplant. I know because I've tried. I won't tell you because they are rare, not in some places, but here, along a St. Paul alley half a mile from my house within walking distance, which is where I found them one early spring years ago.
Trout because their long low leaves are flecked with dark shadows, like water running over rocks in a trout stream. The white flowers with back-curved petals bend low yet are perky with a shape like a jester's cap.
What a charm, the first years of their discovery and spring return. Because they die back completely. Now, for instance, it is almost impossible to perceive they grew there. The first time I saw them, I knew they were rare because I had never seen them in the neighborhood before.
The Moyles' book of Northland Wild Flowers lists them as abundant in Nerstrand Big Woods Park near Northfield, along with their even rarer kin, the Minnesota Trout Lily. They grow, write the Moyles, along the margins of streams, where perhaps once trout swam. It's possible the alley margin where I see them was once a stream. Over 300 years ago what is now Ayd Mill Road was a river which has been diverted underground, yet the high banks on either side of Ayd Mill Road, and even the "Mill" itself, suggest a river to turn a water wheel.
It puffs me up with unnecessary pride to know these small local secrets--of trout lilies and hidden water--and to keep these secrets except now when I tell you. And it infuriated and horrified me when about five years ago, someone on the other side of the alley discarded slabs of concrete in the trout lily bed. I moved some, but the ground was scarred, which opened the way to noxious weeds. This spring when I visited the trout lilies, I saw how starved out they were getting from these huge spiny weeds. I vowed after the next big rain, I would pull the weeds. Which I did, and left a pile of broken stems and clods of roots along the alley. This evening I cleaned that up.
On my way back across Ayd Mill Road and the railroad tracks that run beside the road, I was stopped by a huge line of ominous black tanker cars. The train slowly clunked by, car after car as I memorized the messages on the cars: Chemical Spill, call 800-424-9300. I stopped counting at 75.
Possibly the cars were empty, returning to the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota for refills. Slowly it occurred to me how close the tracks are to the houses I pass on my way to the lilies. How close in fact the tracks are to my own house, three blocks away. There have been terrible oil fires and contamination of rivers and ground water from overturned oil cars just like these.
These cars, in fact the whole business of digging up tar sands and leeching oil out of it, are analogous to the slabs of used concrete someone threw on the trout lilies. They are a disaster.
I will call our Congresswoman Betty McCollum and our city council person, and urge that these trains be rerouted away from homes and families. But the truth is, there is no safe place for such trains. The practice itself is so damaging environmentally that it's only because it has flooded N. Dakota with jobs and because we all use far too much oil that we tolerate it at all.
Trout lilies--persistent even in their secret spot until some careless remodeler turned their small slice of land into a dump.
Note: As I return home and begin writing this message, our lights flicker and go out. The darkness is intense. I am in an island of darkness with no help, Sometimes, even if only for a few minutes, I feel alone and endangered. Until I remember that the lilies wait underground. Perhaps our humanity and good sense must wait too.
I had a job to do this evening while it was light. Cleaning up a mess, a pile of stems and their roots clogged with dirt, pulled up from a patch of Trout Lilies.
I will not tell you where they are, these lovely trout lilies, native to Minnesota and impossible to transplant. I know because I've tried. I won't tell you because they are rare, not in some places, but here, along a St. Paul alley half a mile from my house within walking distance, which is where I found them one early spring years ago.
Trout because their long low leaves are flecked with dark shadows, like water running over rocks in a trout stream. The white flowers with back-curved petals bend low yet are perky with a shape like a jester's cap.
What a charm, the first years of their discovery and spring return. Because they die back completely. Now, for instance, it is almost impossible to perceive they grew there. The first time I saw them, I knew they were rare because I had never seen them in the neighborhood before.
The Moyles' book of Northland Wild Flowers lists them as abundant in Nerstrand Big Woods Park near Northfield, along with their even rarer kin, the Minnesota Trout Lily. They grow, write the Moyles, along the margins of streams, where perhaps once trout swam. It's possible the alley margin where I see them was once a stream. Over 300 years ago what is now Ayd Mill Road was a river which has been diverted underground, yet the high banks on either side of Ayd Mill Road, and even the "Mill" itself, suggest a river to turn a water wheel.
It puffs me up with unnecessary pride to know these small local secrets--of trout lilies and hidden water--and to keep these secrets except now when I tell you. And it infuriated and horrified me when about five years ago, someone on the other side of the alley discarded slabs of concrete in the trout lily bed. I moved some, but the ground was scarred, which opened the way to noxious weeds. This spring when I visited the trout lilies, I saw how starved out they were getting from these huge spiny weeds. I vowed after the next big rain, I would pull the weeds. Which I did, and left a pile of broken stems and clods of roots along the alley. This evening I cleaned that up.
On my way back across Ayd Mill Road and the railroad tracks that run beside the road, I was stopped by a huge line of ominous black tanker cars. The train slowly clunked by, car after car as I memorized the messages on the cars: Chemical Spill, call 800-424-9300. I stopped counting at 75.
Possibly the cars were empty, returning to the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota for refills. Slowly it occurred to me how close the tracks are to the houses I pass on my way to the lilies. How close in fact the tracks are to my own house, three blocks away. There have been terrible oil fires and contamination of rivers and ground water from overturned oil cars just like these.
These cars, in fact the whole business of digging up tar sands and leeching oil out of it, are analogous to the slabs of used concrete someone threw on the trout lilies. They are a disaster.
I will call our Congresswoman Betty McCollum and our city council person, and urge that these trains be rerouted away from homes and families. But the truth is, there is no safe place for such trains. The practice itself is so damaging environmentally that it's only because it has flooded N. Dakota with jobs and because we all use far too much oil that we tolerate it at all.
Trout lilies--persistent even in their secret spot until some careless remodeler turned their small slice of land into a dump.
Note: As I return home and begin writing this message, our lights flicker and go out. The darkness is intense. I am in an island of darkness with no help, Sometimes, even if only for a few minutes, I feel alone and endangered. Until I remember that the lilies wait underground. Perhaps our humanity and good sense must wait too.
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