Hattie is just about ten months old. She’s the junior member of the family menagerie. She’s pretty quiet today, spent most of the day sleeping on our bed. I think I know why. Yesterday I found the field mouse she’d gifted us with behind the chair in one corner of the bedroom. Both Rigor and Mortis had set in. Poor mouse. He had a handsome tail.

I think he must’ve put up a helluva fight, because of the way Hattie’s behaving today. He might’ve been the mouse equivalent of the Quarry brothers, San Francisco fighters from more than a few years ago—Jerry and Mike—who also put up a helluva fight before, invariably, losing. Jerry, the heavyweight. lost to Muhammad Ali, which is nothing to be ashamed of.

I think that Mike, a middleweight, lived in San Luis Obispo for a time.

Fortunately, unlike the Quarrys, this mouse did not shed copious amounts of blood. Hattie must have killed him outside and brought him in for us—I looked but could not find a recipe for bacon-wrapped mousies—and then she kind of forgot. I’d already moved him when she went looking behind the chair, emerging with a slightly puzzled look.

Hattie is an uncommonly beautiful cat—I love cats, especially black cats—but it’s really hard for me to compartmentalize the “Hello-Sweetheart” with the “Predator-Killer.” Elizabeth rescued what she thought was a hummingbird from her last week. It turned out to be a huge moth. Thank goodness. The bell collar has helped a little, but not before we discovered, behind the same chair, enough bird feathers for a Lakota chief’s war bonnet.

I was, of course, reminded of this classic Kliban cartoon:

The poor little fellow, wrapped inside a paper towel and buried in the trash to go out tomorrow, reminded me of the Notorious Gregory Mouse Story.

When the boys were little human-type fellows, we hit on the misguided idea of going to the pet store in Los Osos to buy them some mousies. “They’re males,” the clerk assured us. He was in error.

Within a short period of time—it seemed like about thirty minutes—our mousie cage in the kitchen of our home was alive with little, little, LITTLE mousies. They were adorable, true, but their numbers were alarming. As you know, Elizabeth and I love Irish Setters, and their litters are often around nine or ten puppies. Or more. Romy, in the photo below, became a Mommy to fifteen in Coventry, England.

Mousies demonstrate the same reproductive talent, but their litters arrive about every—oh, for the sake of argument–about every thirty minutes.

The plot thickened. Sometimes we’d turn on the back porch light and would be charmed at a little raiding party of raccoons, family units, who finally made us realize that we had to bring the dog kibble inside the house and not leave it in the garage. They look like little burglars, with their raccoon masks.

What we did not plan on were the wild field mice that were out there in the Los Osos Wilderness along with the raccoons, possums, skunks and the occasional Wildebeest.

The wild field mice—at least the Frat Brothers among them—somehow found their way into the kitchen and began Making Whoopee with our far more sedate domesticated pets. So our mouse family grew, but with a difference: the new generation, half-wild, had the most incredible leaping ability. Sometimes we’d wake at night and here soft little bonks.

Bonk.

Bonk.

Bonk.

Bonkbonkbonk.

We finally realized—if you’re sensing a certain denseness here, we were not expert rodent people–that the bonks were the sounds of their little skulls hitting the top of the mouse cage as they jumped up and down, with all the joy but not nearly the grace of dancing young Masai warriors.

There are some problems that won’t go away, and Elizabeth informed me, pointedly, that this was one of them. I’m a little ashamed because this is what I decided to do.

I took the bonk-bonk cage across South Bay Boulevard to a lovely vacant lot near Los Osos Middle School–cypress, sweet-smelling sage and sand. I do not remember how I did it, exactly, because it’s darned hard to hide a cage full of adrenalized half-wild mice. Maybe I had a big overcoat, I don’t know.

But I found a pleasant spot—a dell, you might call it—and opened the cage.

The mousies began to dart out like little furry punctuation marks. The less daring among them waited. Then there was a little furry river of mousies, Yearning to be Free.

And then, of course, I was even more shameless. As our mousies disappeared into the vastness of the Los Osos Savannah, I sang the theme to the film Born Free.

I am not making this up.

Hattie, of course, would have been overwhelmed. There’s only so much prey one little predator can handle, after all, all by herself. I feel badly for the gift she brought us, but, as cold as it might sound, one dead mouse is preferable to two dozen lively little bonk-bonks.

Oops. Make that two dead mousies. Elizabeth just found another.

For those of you keeping score at home, here’s the theme from Born Free (1966), a marvelous little film about Elsa the Lioness.

I had the most extraordinary experience yesterday, a beer-and-brats meeting with retired Arroyo Grande High School, California, teachers at Kulturhaus Brewing Company in Pismo Beach, a marvelous little restaurant owned by the daughter of one of those teachers. AGHS is both my Alma Mater and the place where I taught history for nineteen years.

I am not sure how to make the equivalence, but John F. Kennedy, probably courtesy of his speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, once made this remark at a White House dinner that honored several Nobel Prize awardees. I will paraphrase:

Never has there been, in this room, such a brilliant gathering. With the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.

That was what my gathering yesterday was like. I was so incredibly honored to be in the presence of so many people who were—let’s face it, my heroes—math and English and Industrial Arts and history teachers.

I was stunned but not necessarily surprised when two of them said that they had subbed at our high school and would never do so again.

Of course, they reminded me immediately of one of the most formative novels of my sophomore year when I was a student at AGHS, All Quiet on the Western Front. The guilty party in that novel, sadly, is a teacher. His jingoism seduced the protagonist, Paul, into joining the army where, on the Western Front, everything he believes in is gradually destroyed by shellfire and poison gas. Finally, his idealism vanishes alongside the French poilu he watches die, slowly, in a shell-hole where dead rats the size of dogs remain afloat in the crater created by heavy artillery.

Teachers are suckers, like Paul. By that—I have to be careful here—I don’t mean that they are stupid. Paul wasn’t. They are instead idealistic and generous and self-denying. They work impossibly long hours that no one ever sees. Good teachers are good soldiers.

And, of course, All Quiet, the book about good soldiers, was banned by the Nazis once they’d come to power.

So are these books commonly taught in American classrooms today. The Florida widow of another soldier, killed in another war in 1944—she is now 100 years old—made this quilt to protest the censorship that now weighs heavily on American schools. Her husband died, she said, to preserve the freedom of thought that these books represent:

Ironically, one of the titles, Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, is about burning books. Fire brigades are devoted, in Bradbury’s novel, to setting them afire, as good citizens once did, on Chester Avenue in Bakersfield, California, to a pyre made up of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which they felt insulted their town for its treatment of migrant farmworkers.

A sign today that the walls that are closing in on teachers—particularly on history teachers—is the controversy over “Critical Race Theory,” which is taught in law schools or graduate schools. It is not taught in any K-12 school in any district in any part of the United States.

But the deliberately misinformed insist that it is. I once wrote this about perhaps the most threatening part of history, Black history, a discipline that may vanish, as Paul’s idealism did, in the rapidly contracting MAGA universe.

The passage refers to the student assessment, which required them to produce a computer-generated newspaper about what they’d learned about America in the 1920s.

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When White 17-year-olds from Arroyo Grande, California, learned about the life of Louis Armstrong, a Black prostitute’s son from New Orleans, Louisiana, nearly every single newspaper at unit’s end had an article about Louis Armstrong.

They caught what a masterful trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke, the son of German immigrants—“Bix” is short for “Bismarck,” the Iron Chancellor— to Davenport, Iowa, caught one night when a Mississippi riverboat approached out of the fog on the great river’s surface. There was a jazz band aboard, and Beiderbecke heard the sweet—and saucy—notes of Armstrong’s cornet floating above the steamer’s superstructure. He was enchanted.

This is what I taught and what my teenagers learned. 

When students learn that the hymn “Steal Away to Jesus” was the signal for carrying out a group escape from a slave plantation, when they learn about Crazy Horse’s generosity, after a big hunt, to Lakota widows and orphans; when they learn that one of the greatest frontier lawmen was a Mexican-American named Elfego Baca, or, in San Luis Obispo County, a sheriff named Francisco Castro; when they learn about the 54^th Massachusetts driving up the beach toward Fort Wagner or the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team advancing fearlessly under shellfire through the Vosges Forest in France; when they learn about Rosa Parks quietly refusing to give up her seat, they don’t feel ashamed to be Americans.

They are instead immensely proud.

They don’t feel ashamed because all of the people who perpetrated all of the cruelty that marks much of our history pass their knowing only briefly; these people are dead. But Louis Armstrong is alive to our children. He touches them.

There is nothing to be afraid of in teaching all of our past to all of our kids. It’s actually very hard to indoctrinate schoolchildren. What comes easy to children is recognizing needless cruelty—would you have us teach them to admire cruelty?– and, even more, kindred hearts. If we teach them to listen, then quiet ourselves, they’ll hear the cornet notes, sweet and saucy, clear and sharp, high and weightless above the river’s current.

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It’s not safe to teach Louis Armstrong anymore.

And the classroom—once my sanctuary, the place where, in the course of my life, I was my truest self—is no longer safe, either.

What my retired friends were suggesting was something I’ve heard over and over from classroom teachers today. Whether it was the interruption of Covid, which retarded the socialization of young people for two years and when teaching was done remotely—both young people and teachers hated it—or the example of a president who mocked disabled people, there has been, I believe, a collapse in civility that is the societal equivalent of the climate crisis. Our future is in peril.

Both crises are being ignored.

Meanwhile, what teachers bring to the classroom are their open hearts, hearts that are open to America’s future.

But in many classrooms in America, every day in every way—whether it be by parents who challenge the teacher’s scholarship or by students who surreptitiously message their friends on iPhones hidden just beneath their desks, or by both teachers and students who come into the classroom with an immense and unassailable sense of entitlement—teachers are struggling with broken hearts.

I am a believer in Catholic education as well as public education, yet the many friends of mine who teach in four local parochial schools have seen the same decline in civility.

And so enrollment in teacher education programs has declined by a third in the last decade.

No wonder. If I could replace a broken windshield and get the thanks due me from a customer, I would fix windshields until I died.

Broken hearts are far more problematic than broken windshields.

And, to be honest, I didn’t teach history, not exactly. What I taught came from my heart: My classroom was a safe place where students could find acceptance. That allowed me to lead them toward a place where they could respect each other and, more, to travel to places they would never have the chance to visit and to meet people they’d never have the chance to meet. The people who’d inhabited those places were dead, you see. My job was to bring them to life again so that the young people I loved so much could meet them, wonder at them, honor them, remember them.

My classroom was a place where we could celebrate being human together. This was, for lack of a better word, my faith, which came from my mother.

Just one example of my faith is this man, whom I will remember all my life. Al Findley Jr. was shot down as a B-24 radioman—shot down twice—in World War II, yet he became a lifer in the postwar Air Force, a Command Master Sergeant. After his career he became, with his wife, an antique collector with a shop in England and then another in Los Osos, California and when he died at 94, it broke my heart. I only knew the man briefly—he used to drive his retirement home G.I. buddies to breakfast every Sunday just up the coast to Morro Bay—but he became part of a book I wrote and, in the process, became as well one of the dearest friends of my life.

Al had let me touch the past, you see, and there are powerful and terrified men and women who want to draw a curtain across our past so that we can never see it honestly again.

This is the place that made me a teacher and a writer.

I probably haven’t got everything right–I rarely do–but my wife took me on a little trip this morning that meant a lot to me. My big sister was wondering what the Arroyo Grande Creek looked like after the rains, so we went to take some photos.

So Elizabeth drove me out to our old house, where I grew up, on Huasna Road, and along the way I began prattling.

This has happened to me only once before, but that was at Gettysburg. I had read so much about the battle that I knew exactly where we were–Elizabeth and our sons, John and Thomas–and what had happened there.

This was far more personal.

* * *

–Mason Bar. The son of the owner when it was the Commercial Company, Lt. Daniel Elliott Whitlock, was awarded a Silver Star for bringing his crippled B-17 home safely after a mission over Berlin. A flak hit set the ship afire. Elliot’s pilot, Jim Lamb, ordered the crew to bail out. Elliott, the co-pilot, countermanded the order when he saw Jim was badly burned. So was his parachute harness, burned through. Whitlock refused to abandon his friend. He knocked down the fire with an extinguisher–he never remembered where it came from–and turned the plane back to the safety of England’s Norfolk Coast.

He was terrified, he admitted to his folks in Arroyo Grande, whose home still stands just below Paulding. “Your prayers are standing by me,” he wrote them.

–Paulding Middle School. The gym was a PWA project completed for $14,300 in 1938 for the old Arroyo Grande Union High School and it put a lot of local men to work. The high school student body gathered inside the gym on December 8, 1941. They listened to a radio set up on the stage, where my son Thomas performed for Mr. Liebo, to hear FDR’s call for a declaration of war on Japan.

Haruo Hayashi, whom we have just lost, was the team manager for Coach Max Belko, who coached basketball in that gym. He also coached the Eagle football team. Belko, the son of tough Jewish immigrant steelworkers from Gary, Indiana, was overlooked by nearby Notre Dame and instead became an All-American at USC. His field goal against Montana–they drop-kicked field goals then, enormously difficult–would be the last field goal kicked by a Trojan for fifteen years. Some Bakersfield kid named Frank Gifford kicked the next one.

Belko’s coach, Howard Jones, called him “the finest example of a man I have ever coached.”

Belko, a Marine lieutenant, was killed on the beach at Guam in 1944.

The Arroyo Grande Men’s Club, including my friend Randy Fiser, restored the stone retaining wall below the campus that was originally a WPA project. So are the basketball courts below. And the cemetery stone wall. The Orchard Street building, now the AGHS math wing, was another PWA project. (The campus’s landscaping was done for free by volunteers–Japanese American farmers whose children attended the school. Twenty-five of the 58 members of the high school’s Class of 1942 were Japanese American.)

The beautiful park that’s now underneath Lopez Lake was another WPA project. So was the hard-surfaced Musick Road, a CWA work project early in the New Deal, supervised by county supervisor Asa Porter, that led to that park.

Arroyo Grande doesn’t today look like North Africa in part because of the reclamation work, made urgent by overcultivation, a product of collapsing farm prices in the Great Depression.

Arroyo Grande had the worst soil erosion the head of the New Deal’s Soil Conservation Service had ever seen in America. It was the Civilian Conservation Corps, 230 kids from New Jersey, Delaware and New York City, who lived in barracks on the site of today’s Arroyo Grande Woman’s Club, who terraced hills, built check dams and planted trees and so, at the very least, began to reverse the effects of what could have been an environmental disaster here. It was that damnable Federal Government Overreach that accomplished these things.

–The IDES Hall. This one was built in 1948. It’s the second one. The first one was the remnant of the old Columbian Hall on Branch Street. They had lectures, concerts and meetings there. Young women, in gauzy Greek gowns, used to dance to honor sweet peas at the Sweet Pea Festival.

Frank Gularte, killed in action on the Franco-German border in 1944, grew up on the farm that includes the hill just above the Hall. His son, Frank Jr. was born the same week; his widow, Sally, would’ve celebrated a christening and endured a funeral mass at St. Patrick’s on Branch Street in the same month.

–Unplanted fields on the right, along Huasna Road. Those were, and probably will be, reserved for seed flowers. Thanks to Louis Routzahn and the Waller Family, Arroyo Grande flower seeds were known all around America. You can still find their seed catalogues online.

Clara Paulding, who taught here for so many years, rode her bicycle to my Alma Mater, the two-room Branch School, in the 1890s. It was so much fun for me to write a piece about her bike ride, because the smell of seed flowers and sweet peas must have been delicious. She loved Branch kids, by the way. A woman of sound judgment, Clara was.

My favorite Clara anecdote: She went back to her Alma Mater, Mills College in Oakland, with her daughter, Ruth, for whom the middle school is named, during World War II, when there was finally money enough for teachers like Ruth, whose commute consisted of walking across the street from the house in which she was born to her Spanish classes at Arroyo Grande Union High School–to earn salary advancement for taking college course. So she invited her retired teacher Mom—Clara was in her nineties– to come along. Clara did. She decided to take a Mills College course entitled “The History of the United States before 1865.”

“That’s because I remember everything else,” she told a newspaper reporter.

–Strother Park. This was a Chumash village, or rancheria, whose chief was dubbed “Buchon” by the Portola Expedition, after the large goiter on his neck. That’s why we have a Buchon Street in San Luis Obispo. The rancheria was called Chiliquin; Rosario Cooper, the last speaker of Obispeño Spanish, has roots here—this is probably where her mother, a “Mission Indian” only because of catastrophic drought and the chance of survival the Mission Fathers offered, was born. I taught two of Rosario’s descendants, beautiful and brilliant young women, at Arroyo Grande High School.

Newell Strother was the editor of the Arroyo Grande Valley Herald-Recorder for twenty years. After Pearl Harbor, he urged his readers to suspend judgement on their Japanese American neighbors. They were loyal to America, he explained in an editorial message some in Arroyo Grande did not want to hear.

–Tony Azevedo’s place. Elsie Cecchetti, our beloved Branch School bus driver, was an Azevedo. Her father’s dairy, on the site of today’s Trader Joe’s, was a dairy farm where Elsie’s first driving lessons were on a Farmall tractor. The Azevedos were Azoreans, come to America because of earthquakes, volcanoes and political unrest in the Islands. They were whalers—there was a shore whaling station at Port San Luis—before John Davison Rockefeller and Thomas Alva Edison put them out of business. They turned toward crops and dairy farming. “I don’t know much about history,” my Branch School friend John Silva told me once when he was helping me research a book. He then proceeded to name every Azorean dairy family between Lopez Canyon and Corbett Canyon. My mouth fell open.

John’s father, Johnny, and his uncle, Manuel, among the kindest men I have ever known, used to pull up pickup cab to pickup cab on Huasna Road to gossip, even thought they’d probably had breakfast together that morning at Sambo’s, many years later the still un-demolished Francisco’s Country Kitchen. I’ve seen farmers do the same thing in Kansas and Colorado, by the way. When a car approached, the Silvas would pull just off the road to the edge of their farm fields to let the motorist pass. They would wave cheerily at the driver. Then they’d pull back onto the road and resume their conversation.

–Clair Gibson’s home. Two generations of bankers—first, the Bank of Arroyo Grande then the Bank of Italy and finally the Bank of America. Today it’s Lightning Joe’s. The Gibsons were the kind of bankers you read about, but only in novels. They were generous with credit in hard times and with loans when they believed in what we today call a “business startup.” Once Mr. Gibson advanced a desperately needed emergency loan to the rock and roll star Peter Frampton. Frampton, needed it to secure a concert and couldn’t get the money from his own bank. Afterward, his people began to make deposits in the Bank of America in Arroyo Grande, California.

When I wrote a piece about Jack Leo Scruggs, a USS Arizona trombonist killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Clair called me. “Jack Scruggs,” he said—the two had been classmates in the Arroyo Grande Grammar School that stood where Mullahey Ford stands today—“I haven’t thought about him in years.” He chuckled over the phone line. Then there was a long quiet. He thanked me before he hung up. The memory of his lost classmate still moved him.

–The Kawaguchi Home. Japanese immigrants, mostly from Kyushu, the southernmost Home Island, were Buddhists and Methodists. The Kawaguchis, if I remember right, were Catholics, which means that history has a long reach. St. Francis Xavier proselytized in Japan in the 17th Century; both cities targeted by the atomic bombs had large Catholic populations. Carolyn Kawaguchi, along with Vard and Patricia Ikeda, was the fastest runner I ever saw as a little kid. In those P.E. tests they used to do in grammar school, she would pass by me—in skirts, mind you—laughing apologetically.

Kaz Ikeda gently cured me of the uppercut in my softball swing on a visit to Branch School one day. The wooden home plate behind which he caught at the Gila River Internment Camp is now on loan to the Baseball Hall of fame. And, of course, one son is named “Vard” because Vard Loomis, a Stanford baseball alum, a pitcher, coached the Nisei team, the Arroyo Grande Growers, before World War II. After the enforcement of Executive Order 9066, Vard invited Kaz to stay in his family’s home. (His wife, Gladys, had been the Growers’ Team Mom.) Kaz had stayed behind until his father, Juzo, the assistant manager of the Growers, was strong enough to travel. A team of horses dragged him away on the Ikeda farm one day and Juzo was paralyzed as a result. Kaz made it back home. His dad didn’t. Juzo died in a camp hospital in the desert heat of Arizona in 1943.

But my favorite Arroyo Grande Growers story is about a rest stop at a park in the Valley. The team bus, which Vard drove, pulled up next to another bus. The passengers in that bus were young Black men, members of a touring jazz orchestra. The Black kids approached the Nisei kids and asked if they’d like to play ball in the park. That sounded like a good idea to everyone. So there was a game—the Growers tossing their mitts to the musicians during in between innings–and what sounded like a good idea turned out to be a good baseball game.

Since Vard was kind of the odd man out, he became the empire. Jokingly, both sides agreed, at the end of the game, that they’d never met a White man with eyesight as bad as Vard’s.

–The Gularte Home. I’m not sure where to start with this family, parented by Rudolph and Mary Gularte. We loved them. Rudy was a vegetable broker who bailed us out frequently when either our creek pump (for irrigation) or our spring pump, which we shared with his family (for drinking water) broke down. He drove at first a dark olive 1953 Chevy stepside pickup and then one of the first El Caminos in town—copper-colored, with Chevy fins. It was classy. He was a pallbearer at my Mom’s funeral. He cried, which moved me, because Rudy was a quiet, undemonstrative man. We would nearly drive off the road waving at him when we saw the El Camino approaching. Rudy, with not much more than his felt hat visible just above the steering wheel, was intent on driving. He was a small man; it took Mom’s death to make me realize what a big heart he had.

The size of her heart was immediately apparent with his wife. Mary was a warm, generous woman with a sharp bite when my friend Dennis, one of her sons, crossed her. Her bite was very brief. She’s the one who one day, because Elsie Cecchetti’s bus was somehow, inexplicably, late, took me that cold morning from the bus top and fed me a bowl of sopa—Portuguese Stew—with a big hunk of coarse bread intended for soaking. I soaked. I did not have to eat for the rest of the day.

–The Harris Bridge. Before the bridge, this was near the spot where fourteen-year-old Sam Cundiff drowned in the flood of 1911.

Our house was (and is, much improved) just over the bridge, which was built, I think in 1927, when Lopez Drive was called Musick Road. I was very happy to see that our walnut trees, just beyond that bank of Queen Anne Lace, are dead. I hated harvesting walnuts, stoop labor, and your hands and nails were black for weeks. Walnut trees used to cover the fields between the high school and Halcyon Road before an insidious pest, the husk fly larvae, began to kill them. I did not much mind. The only way I found walnuts tolerable was in my Mom’s chocolate-chip cookies.

In the winter of 1968-69—you can get a sense of it from the video below—the creek rose above that chasm and spilled into our walnut orchard. There were ponds and lakelets in the Upper Valley for months afterward.

I used to catch rainbow trout in the chasm below and, of course, I did NOT catch the big female steelhead who hit my line one afternoon. She was so fierce that I nearly had a twelve-year-old heart attack. It was glorious the way she broke the surface, with a terrific splash, and it was only seconds before she snapped my leader and went upstream for the business of motherhood.

In the winter of 1911, when the tragic Cundiff family returned to their home—fourteen-year-old Sam had been swept away by the flood, one of three sons they lost in the space of a year— which had been underwater, they found the skeletal remains of a steelhead and, not far away, a very contented cat, fast asleep.

Once my friends and I found the heads and innards of two spike bucks—yearlings, illegal to hunt in California—tossed over the side of the bridge by the hunters who’d butchered them and who wanted to get rid of the evidence. We pondered their remains, appalled, for a long time as the creek rushed past.

But once, on a ledge just below the bridge railing, I saw two barn owls asleep, one’s head sweetly on the other’s shoulder. I will never forget them.

Then we turned up Huasna Road toward the Four Corners at Huasna and Branch Mill Roads, near the bridge over Tar Spring(s) Creek. Don’t get me started. I did, on monte, the willow scrub that used to cover the Upper Valley. But I was–finally–starting to get a little tired. It was time for Elizabeth and me to come home.

I am not always safe to drive with. I nearly drove off Corbett Canyon Road once, where are roadside ditches only a smidge shallower than the Grand Canyon, at the sight of the Varian stallion Major Mac V, who was just peacefully nosing his oats. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite that beautiful.

A friend just posted on Facebook this photo of two red-shouldered hawks—courting?—and I think they are beautiful, too. We have one who perches atop an electrical pole that rises just beyond the reach of our ancient California oak. She reigns up there, imperious and sometimes indignant, as if to say Move, you stupid humans. You’re blocking my view and I’m hungry. Being stupid humans, we just stare back her, transfixed.

I would use almost any excuse possible, in any class, to teach a terrible and wonderful poem, “Hurt Hawks,” by Robinson Jeffers, because of the immense respect the Big Sur poet had for red-tails. He built himself, in Carmel, a house made of stone—he called it Tor House—and wrote from what he called Hawk Tower.

He didn’t have much use for people, but he was writing during World War II, and places like Stalingrad or Treblinka or Saipan or the Ardennes, I guess, will do that to a poet. Poets feel the ripples from faraway places.

Hurt Hawks

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

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Nearly sixty Civil War veterans are buried in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery. This excerpt from the book Patriot Graves describes the forces that drove them here.

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…A soldier who had endured the third day of Gettysburg and emerged unhurt, and who had then seen his own boys in their counterattack destroy Pickett’s Charge…had already passed the zenith of his life. Nothing like this would ever happen to him again, and what had happened to them brought them, ironically, great joy.

So, for a generation enmeshed in the ethical web spun tightly by mid-Victorian Protestantism—these were Christian soldiers who fought in armies, on both sides, marked by intense waves of wartime revivalism within their camps—the excitement of battle generated a profound moral contradiction. In This Republic of Suffering, a superb account of coming to terms with the scale of death the Civil War generated, Harvard president and historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes the experience of a stunned Confederate who, during a firefight, came to the aid of a shrieking comrade, only to find out that he was “executing a species of war dance,” exulting over the body of the Union soldier he’d just killed. In another battle in 1862, Union soldiers on the firing line called their shots, as if combat were billiards: “Watch me drop that fellow,” one said to his comrades; battle was, indeed, like a game.^[1]

The killing didn’t end when the war did. Violent crime rose at three times the rate of population growth in the decades following the war, and perhaps as many as two-thirds of the nation’s convicted felons were veterans.^[2] Soldiers understood, on some level, that combat had changed them irrevocably and some worried about it. Society, one Vermont soldier wrote his sister, “will not own the rude soldier when he comes back, but turn a cold shoulder to him, because he has become hardened by scenes of bloodshed and carnage.”^[3] He was, in many respects, right: some of the soldiers who came home to Vermont, New Jersey or Iowa brought with them a measure of fear—they had become, in the Civil War novelist Michael Shaara’s term, “Killer Angels.”

Many Union soldiers had demonized themselves and by extension all of their comrades by celebrating their mustering out with epic alcohol binges and episodic violence throughout the demobilization summer of 1865.^[4] A Chicago civilian’s insulting comment about William Sherman set off a saloon brawl that cascaded into a riot that police were helpless to put down. Only the fortuitous appearance of the legendarily hard-drinking Gen. Joseph Hooker, who had the credibility to intervene with combat veterans, brought the violence to an end.

But for even the most sober of veterans that was precisely the problem with homecoming: it brought them little peace. Professor Jordan describes a sense of what, at its mildest, could be called disorientation. Home wasn’t home anymore. Even little farm towns had changed so much in four years that, for some veterans, they didn’t feel like home at all. Soldiers from the hard-fighting regiments of the Old Northwest, states like Iowa and Minnesota, couldn’t reconcile themselves to the cold winters they’d forgotten while fighting in Mississippi or Georgia. There was a more sinister change to which they couldn’t adjust: Union veterans resembled the little boys who’d survived the 1918 influenza epidemic and were finally let out to play, only to find there was no playmate on their city block left alive. The survivors of “Pals” Battalions who’d joined the Great War’s British Army together went home to neighborhoods empty of the young men with whom they’d grown up. Their pals were gone, swallowed up by the Western Front.

Gone too, in 1865, were whole towns of young men in New York or Vermont or Indiana, dead and buried on Southern farmland that had been poisoned by violence, land still studded with spent bullets. Other young men had vanished without a trace in dark, dense woodlots or fetid swamps.  Soldiers came home, then, ostensibly alive and whole and strong but with unseen dead spaces inside where their comrades had once lived. Missing them, or the trauma of seeing them killed, figured in the chronic depression with which so many veterans struggled. Now that the war was done, they still were caught in its aftermath like swimmers in an undertow, struggling to break surface, to find light and cool air, to breathe again.

They recognized, too, that what they had fought for—for the rededication of the democracy Lincoln had described at Gettysburg in November 1863—was fast slipping away. Union veterans remained intensely suspicious of and hostile toward the defeated South; Lincoln’s assassination had been one impetus for their rancor but their anger only intensified when they read the newspaper accounts of the postwar emergence of the old Slave Codes, now called Black Codes.  They read, too, of the defiance and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, co-founded by a cavalryman, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had bedeviled some of them in the Deep South. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, Jim Crow laws revived white supremacy in a way that rivaled the days of slavery. The Union veterans’ hostility was exacerbated because the other side refused to admit—significantly, on a moral level—that they’d lost the war. Typical, in 1894, were the dedicatory remarks that accompanied the unveiling of a Confederate memorial in Richmond, when newspapers noted that the clouds parted and the sun emerged when the speaker, the Rev. R.C. Cave, began an oration that included passages like this:

But brute force cannot settle questions of right and wrong. Thinking men do not judge the merits of a cause by the measure of its success; and I believe

The world shall yet decide

In truth’s clear, far-off light,

that the South was in the right; that her cause was just; that the men who took up arms in her defence were patriots who had even better reason for what they did than had the men who fought at Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and that her coercion, whatever good may have resulted or may hereafter result from it, was an outrage on liberty.^[5]

Similar remarks by Southern speakers invited to a Gettysburg reunion in 1913, Professor Jordan notes, rankled the same Union veterans who had protested another unveiling, in 1909, in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall: a sculpture of Robert E. Lee. No matter how chivalrous Lee had been (He never, for example, uttered the word “Yankees,” using instead, in his verbal orders to his subordinates, the term “those people.”), he was a killer, and he had harvested thousands of solders’ lives. The survivors of what they saw as Lee’s war would protest again at the rapturous reception, one that included the Southern-bred President Woodrow Wilson, awarded the 1915 D.W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation, which depicts Klansmen, too, as chivalric heroes who reassert Southern white supremacy over rapacious carpetbaggers and predatory African Americans. “It is like writing history with lightning,” the president said, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”[6] The most enduring image of the 1913 Gettysburg reunion is that of Confederate survivors of Pickett’s Charge reaching across the stone wall–fifty years before, it had been their objective–to shake the hands of Pennsylvania veterans. What goes unmentioned is the fistfight at the same event that sent seven aged Yankees and Confederates to the hospital.^[7]

Even as Southern whites reasserted their social and political primacy, American democracy in the North was no tribute to the sacrifice of Civil War veterans, either. The Radical Republican Congress and Andrew Johnson finished what should have been Lincoln’s second term in what resembled the political equivalent of a Western range war. Johnson escaped conviction on impeachment charges by one Senate vote. Grant’s relentlessness and drive had served him well in the struggle against Lee, but another aspect of his personal character—an almost childlike credulity—ate his presidency alive in a series of scandals perpetrated by subordinates who betrayed Grant as surely as Warren G. Harding would be betrayed by his “Ohio Gang” in the 1920s. 

The corruption penetrated to state houses, where the lobbyist for the Santa Fe Railroad kept a slush fund in his office safe for the frequent lubrication of Kansas legislators about to vote on regulatory bills; the monopoly that railroads enjoyed in their American fiefdoms and the freight rates they demanded were so egregious that it cost a farmer more to ship a bushel of wheat from Topeka to Chicago, by rail, than it did to ship that bushel from Chicago to Liverpool, mostly by water. Machine politics dominated cities from New York to San Francisco, where Irish-American voters really did vote early and often, and deceased. In New York, the most famous political machine was Tammany Hall, and it was Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed who disbursed the equivalent of $4 million to a Tammany-contracted plasterer for two days’ work on City Hall.

In both their disillusionment and in their restlessness, the Civil War generation seems to resemble the generation that came of age during the First World War. After that war, they would become expatriates–Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos among them—young men, many of them veterans, and young women, who no longer recognized or understood the America they’d known as children. They were among the members of Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation.”

…[Like}the young people of the 1920s, Civil War veterans were members of a generation on the move.  In postwar America, veterans, according to a 2010 study by Seoul University economist Chulhee Lee, were 54% more likely to move to a different state and 36% more likely to move to a different region than non-veterans.^[8] Lee posits several reasons for this phenomenon: a central one is the idea that veterans had been exposed to the concept of a wider nation, one beyond their rural farms or row tenements, by campaigns in the South. Westerners, too, fought along the Atlantic seaboard, and some Easterners saw combat or garrison duty during the 1860s Indian Wars on the frontier.

Lee’s point is a key one: Americans had been so isolated and disparate before the war that an outbreak of measles that would make a New York regiment sick would kill soldiers in the Iowa regiment bivouacked alongside, soldiers that, before the war, were so geographically isolated that they lacked the immunity to that particular strain of measles–measles, in fact, killed 11,000 soldiers during the war.^[9] The war had begun to break that isolation down, and the troop movements necessary to fighting it had opened young soldiers’ minds to the vastness of their nation and to the possibility of starting over somewhere else.

This pattern of increased mobility was a key factor in the lives of Arroyo Grande’s Union veterans. Over fifty would settle the Arroyo Grande Valley and nearby Nipomo. Enough census data exists to follow twenty-three of them, in the course of their lives. After the war, seven of them moved once from the state they’d served as soldiers; seven moved twice. Nine moved three times or more before they came to the Arroyo Grande area. So the men who came here had come as far as they could—like Jody’s grandfather in the Steinbeck novella The Red Pony, they had to stop because they’d arrived at the Pacific: their days of “Westering” were over.

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[1] Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Vintage Books: New York, 2008, pp. 37-38.

[2] Michael C.C. Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 2014, p. 198.

[3] Edward Alexander, “Life of the Civil War Soldier in Battle: And Then We Kill,” Hallowed Ground Magazine, Winter 2013, http://www.civilwar.org/hallowed-ground-magazine/winter-2013/life-of-the-civil-war-soldier-battle.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/

[4] Jordan, pp. 46-47.

[5] R.C. Cave, “Dedicatory Remarks, Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, May 30, 1894,” Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 22. Reverend J. William Jones, Ed. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2001.05.0280%3Achapter%3D1.27%3Asection%3Dc.1.27.198

[6] “D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation,” The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, PBS., http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_birth.html

[7] Jordan, p. 197.

[8] Chulhee Lee, “Military Service and Economic Mobility: Evidence from the American Civil War,” February 2010. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498312000046

[9] “Civil War Diseases,” http://www.civilwaracademy.com/civil-war-diseases.html