THE MONSTER UNDER THE (ENVIRONMENTAL) BED

                                         

 

                                                

     More than halfway through Infinite Games, the third volume of my Marshlanders Trilogy, the carbon dioxide in the real world hit 400 parts per million. There I was, writing a fantasy novel about human greed despoiling wetlands that had sustained people time out of mind, when the sustainability of our planet went up for grabs.

      Do you remember the monster who crouched under our beds when we were children? We would hide beneath our covers, hoping against hope that he wasn’t real.  Scientists have long agreed that carbon count over 350 ppm is perilous for our climate.  The environmental monster, more frightening than our worst childhood nightmares, has emerged. He is real and, what’s worse, he is us, an embodiment of our monstrous greed for economic growth and consumption.

 

     As the atmosphere gets warmer and warmer the oceans will heat up, rising higher and higher. More and more powerful storms will fall upon us, with hurricanes inundating our coastland cities and tornados flattening communities all over the country. Perhaps we won't survive as a species.

 

     The prospect is psychologically devastating. Fortunately, there is help for our feelings of helplessness.  Worrying about the planet one morning, I happened to tune into NPR's On Being, airing a program on "A Shift to Humility: Resilience and Expanding the Edge of Change."  Krista Tippett was interviewing Andrew Zolli, who announced that

 

"We are not in Kansas.                    
We are not in Oz.
We are in the maelstrom."

                                          

     The twentieth century advanced human capacity so far, Zolli said — our life span from 50 to 80, the invention of electricity, the discovery of the atom — that we thought every problem was solvable, and that we were in control. But we are not in control. We are not masters of our destiny. We are undergoing a shift to humility. We thought we could steer around the maelstrom, but we can't. The only thing to do is to invent sails that can get us through it. He calls this "risk adaption."

 

     We have been talking about sustainability, assuming that human beings could achieve a balance with nature.

      That's over. Nature is out of balance.

        We need to talk about resilience, how to live with the consequences of our action.

    What makes human beings resilient in the face of trauma? Zolli asks us to become “Hardy People,” who

·       Believe that the world is a meaningful place

·       Believe that we have the agency to act in the world

·       Believe that failures will occur but they may be overcome, that change is inevitable, that we will fall short but every attempt is to be valued.

 

     "The journey toward resilience," Zolli concludes, is the great moral quest of our age." “Every action is still of value.”

      We still have choices, I realized, but where on earth can we find the courage to face so much earthly destruction? “By stating that we cannot change the world,” writes Margaret Wheatley, “I do not intend to bury our motivation in despair. Quite the contrary. My intention is that we do our work with greater resolve and energy, with more delight and confidence, even as we understand that it won’t turn this world around.”  I was also heartened by Carolyn Baker’s writings about developing “Emotional Resilience in Traumatic Times” and Bill McKibben’s book about Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. (see links, below)

           Let’s get to it!

           Make a list of the values we  most cherish.

            How can we enact these principles in environmental actions?

Where can we find allies?

     It has not been enough to cap and trade carbon emissions on a national level, nor has lobbying  congress or marching against the pipeline in Washington done much good.  Think global, but act local: amazing things have worked at the grassroots level.  When plans were afoot to install the Keystone XL Pipeline right on top of the Ogallala Aquifer, a committee of grandmothers constituted themselves the Apple Pie Brigade to visit the Nebraska legislature week after week after week, bearing pies for their representatives and telling them about their fears for their water supply. Local organizations sponsored potlucks, tractor pulls, flashlight rallies, and wildflower drops in Capitol offices. Don’t laugh: the pipeline was moved.*

      We can do this!  We have the brains and the imagination to cook up local actions. Some of us write good letters, others are skilled organizers; some manage fund raising deftly, others can talk over the phone convincingly, while our tireless young can go door to door for hours.

 

     “On to the Great Mere,” said Joshua. “The stilt walkers are bound to be out there somewhere. You must find them, Clare, and call them to battle. Our boats are fit, and spring is upon us.”

 

     Clare reviewed her provisions. She had two days worth of fresh food, but her Marshland Company must fish, fowl, or forage, keeping their jerky and hard bread back for emergencies. The terror that had kept her awake all night fell away before these practical considerations.

 

    “To victory over our enemies and succor to our friends” pledged Hutchin, whose Delta Company must travel far into the perilous southern lands to alert their allies.

 

     “To friends we leave behind who will dwell in our hearts forever,”added  Clare, “for our fens and our fastness, for our reeds and our sedges,  we pledge ourselves to this battle.”

 

                              

LINKS:

 

A Shift to Humility: Andrew Zolli on Resilience and Expanding the Edge of Change | On Being

Emotional Resilience In Traumatic Times, By Carolyn Baker | Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Eaarth, by Bill McKibben

So Far From Home by Margaret J. Wheatley

*from Mary Pipher’s “Lighting a Spark on the High Plains,” at The Keystone Pipeline Fight Is Not Over - NYTimes.com

photo credit, Monster Under the Bed http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m241/veive257/monster.jpg 

 

 

STANDING UP FOR MOTHER EARTH

                                         

                                         

 

           I have always been a nature lover. When I was twelve years old I spent a lot of time sitting by a small pond in the Connecticut woods, reveling in shiny green frogs lolling near the surface and in the amazingly varied feathers of the towee.  

                              

             freefoto.com

             It was enormously soothing to my soul just to sit there, watching sunlight dappling the still surface where emerald dragonflies hovered and water skaters zipped back and forth..  Sixty-four years later, I feel just the same, watching salmon spawn among the sunlit pebbles of my Northern Michigan river, content in my very bones when the wood turtle slides down the bank and paddles away through all that dappled sepia.

                       

                                       The Betsie River          avp

I  used to take solace in the thought that when I die the earth will live on, but not any more.  As the weather changes drastically, as more and more powerful storms assail us and temperatures reach 100 degrees even in northern Michigan, I am terrified that we have polluted our atmosphere beyond earth’s tipping point.  Al Gore tells how he was crossing a busy boulevard after a baseball game, holding his little boy’s hand, when he felt it slip from his grasp.  The child was terribly injured, but survived. Today Gore feels that it is the earth that is slipping through our fingers. Profoundly fearful about climate degredation, he advises us to live with our fear and then use it as a source of energy for action on behalf of our planet.

 Even though we have brought this on ourselves, we feel so terribly puny. How can we stand up for the fantastically complex, interwoven web of natural being that is our only home? 

For years I have addressed threats to our planet as an environmental novelist.  telling the story of self-sustaining wetland communities fighting greedy merchants determined to drain their marshes for agricultural development:

“Modreck sniffed. There was a fishy smell, though not a pleasant one.  Their way led over slate grey flats stretched to the western horizon. The dried-out mud wasn’t entirely level; there were splotches here and there, some dark and some lighter, shimmering in the morning sun. The company halted abruptly as Berwyn fell to his knees, rocking back and forth, keening in his own language.

‘Oh bright ones, leaping ones, speckled ones

 golden-eyed ones, brown-striped ones

 wise-eyed ones, hump-shelled ones, flat-shelled ones

All dead,  all gone!’

 

                  ‘It’s the frogs he’s mourning,” translated Eryx, ‘and the turtles         and the fishes and the eels and the great red salamanders. The engineers have drained this part of the Reedlands down to nothing.’

They bowed their heads in horrified respect.”

                      from Infinite Games, vol III The Marshlanders Trilogy

When I came across this profound Pledge of Allegiance to the Earth, I knew I had to do more.

                         
© Janina Lamb • lamblionstudio.com • all rights reserved• used with permission

We need to speak out on behalf of Mother Earth, walking our talk in these perilous times.  We can each act individually, signing petitions and writing government officials and/or undertake group actions, like joining organizations already involved in an issue and getting your friends and neighbors to rally around you. Since fracking is an issue in Michigan, I decided to look into it. I came up with a list of pros and cons and of possible actions:

 THE PROS AND CONS OF FRACKING

Fracking is hydraulic fracturing by pumping water, sand and chemicals into layers of shale so that oil or gas can be extracted.  Horizontal fracturing ruptures shale deep underground, in contrast to vertical fracking, where the wells are shallower. 

There are less federal than state regulations about fracking, so that most decisions are made at the state level.  The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality finds the practice safe. They say that there is enough regulation in place to prevent harm to people or to the environment

Research teams from The University of Michigan are studying the impact of hydraulic fracturing, especially horizontal fracturing, in Michigan. Their results will be available in 2014.

In Pennsylvania, people living near a well are suing a gas drilling company for contaminating  their water.  Independent tests have found copper, nickel, zinc and titanium. They are suffering from nausea, breathing issues, bone pain and other health difficulties,

Because of this situation in Pennsylvania, New York State has banned horizontal hydrofracking until at least 2015, so that they can research the environmental impact more extensively.

David Suzuki narrated a chilling documentary on the Canadian Broadcast System’s “Nature” program about the devastation a Colorado town near Denver where fields close to many homes were developed for fracking.  Children suffered nose-bleeds and breathing difficulties, the water became undrinkable, people had to move out, and housing values plummeted.

Multiple earthquakes in Ohio have been attributed to fracking .  (Faults created by fracking have also caused earthquakes in the Netherlands)

Also, the fracking process releases methane into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, home in Michigan, there is an extensive band of oil and gas fields stretching right across the state, just below the tip of the mitten, and cutting down through Benzie and Manistee counties to the Lake Michigan shore.  Recently, a natural gas well near Traverse City leaked into well water, and a homeowner near Kalkaska discovered that the value of her house had plummeted because of nearby gas drilling. This has led the Department of Environmental Quality to shift from its earlier declaration about gas drilling safety and call for “a public dialogue over whether we need to look at or change any of the fracking regulations.” Governor Snyder is also waiting completion of this study to determine the environmental impact of the fracking process.

Once we have informed ourselves, what are the positions each of us might choose from?

Possible Positions

1.      Support fracking.  We have the word of the gas and oil companies that the process is safe, so we should not impede the development of a fuel source that is so much cleaner and cheaper than coal and that can help us toward energy independence.

2.      Study it further and make the industry more transparent. Since gas is a cleaner-burning energy than coal, it is worth developing, but it needs to be safe.   This is the Sierra Club’s position. Its Beyond Natural Gas group is working for better standards within the natural gas industry.  They want to close legal loopholes permitting companies to “ignore basic environmental and health protections.”  They organize submissions of public comments to support the Environmental Protection Agency’s clean air safeguard for natural gas fracking, and lobby state officials to enforce regulations about disclosing what chemicals are being used.

 Michigan’s Clean Water Action group is taking a similar position.

           If you choose this position, you might want to look at  twp new Congressional bills (Reps Jaret Polis (-Colo) and Matt Cartwright (D-Pa) to repeal exemptions for oil and gas companies under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.  H.R. 1154 (BREATHE) is “Bringing Reductions to Energy’s Airborne Toxic Health Effect.   H.R. 1175 (FRESHER) is “FocusedReduction of Effluence and Stormwater Runoff Through Hydraulic Environmental Regulation.”

If you take this position you might want to join www.Let’sBanFRackingNow.org here, for example, is what Baldimore accomplished: @Food & Water Watch Maryland is celebrating a victory today! After a unanimous vote in the Baltimore City Council, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake signed the fracking wastewater ban bill into law, making it illegal to treat or dispose of toxic and radioactive fracking wastewater in Baltimore. Click LIKE to say thanks to Councilman Jim Kraft, Blue Water Baltimore, Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper, Maryland Environmental Health Network and Clean Water Action!

 

3.      Oppose Fracking and Work for alternate sources of energy.  The process of fracking is environmentally degrading and hazardous for human health, and less environmentally friendly than solar and wind sources of energy. Work with proponents of solar and wind energy to develop these cleaner resources.

Hydraulic Fracturing or Fracking  websites

Listed are websites which have information on fracking. Use the search term “fracking” to locate the information on the particular website..

 

1. US Environmental Protection Agency   www.epa.gov

http://www2.epa.gov/hydraulicfracturing

EPA is working with states and other key stakeholders to help ensure that natural gas extraction does not come at the expense of public health and the environment. The Agency's focus and obligations under the law are to provide oversight, guidance and, where appropriate, rulemaking that achieve the best possible protections for the air, water and land where Americans live, work and play. The Agency is investing in improving our scientific understanding of hydraulic fracturing, providing regulatory clarity with respect to existing laws, and using existing authorities where appropriate to enhance health and environmental safeguards.

Conducting a study on hydraulic fracturing and its potential impact on drinking water resources.

 

2. MI Dept of Environmental Quality

http://www.michigan.gov/deq/0,4561,7-135-3311_4111_4231-262172--,00.html

 

3. Sierra Club          http://www.sierraclub.org

The Sierra Club's Beyond Natural Gas works to promote strong standards within the natural gas industry. Natural gas companies should be subject to additional scrutiny and strong national and state safeguards in order to protect our air, water, and communities. If we can’t protect our health and treasured landscapes from the damages caused by the natural gas industry and fracking, then we should not drill for natural gas.

 

4. ExxonMobil Corp           http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/

 

5. FracFocus           http://www.fracfocus.org

Chemical Disclosure Registry

… the national hydraulic fracturing chemical registry. … managed by the Ground Water Protection Council and Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, two organizations whose missions both revolve around conservation and environmental protection.
          The site was created to provide the public access to reported chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing within their area. To help users put this information into perspective, the site also provides objective information on hydraulic fracturing, the chemicals used, the purposes they serve and the means by which groundwater is protected.
          The primary purpose of this site is to provide factual information concerning hydraulic fracturing and groundwater protection.  It is not intended to argue either for or against the use of hydraulic fracturing as a technology.  It is also not intended to provide a scientific analysis of risk associated with hydraulic fracturing. While FracFocus is not intended to replace or supplant any state governmental information systems it is being used by a number of states as a means of official state chemical disclosure.  Currently, ten states: Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, North Dakota, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Ohio and Pennsylvania use Fracfocus in this manner.  Finally, this site does not deal with issues unrelated to chemical use in hydraulic fracturing such as Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM).  This topic is beyond the current scope of this site.

 

6. Ground Water Protection Council       http://www.gwpc.org/

… (GWPC) is a nonprofit 501(c)6 organization whose members consist of state ground water regulatory agencies which come together within the GWPC organization to mutually work toward the protection of the nation’s ground water supplies. The purpose of the GWPC is to promote and ensure the use of best management practices and fair but effective laws regarding comprehensive ground water protection.

Our mission is to promote the protection and conservation of ground water resources for all beneficial uses, recognizing ground water as a critical component of the ecosystem. We provide an important forum for stakeholder communication and research in order to improve governments’ role in the protection and conservation of groundwater.

 

 

7. Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission          http://www.iogcc.state.ok.us   IOGCC advocates for environmentally-sound ways to increase the supply of American Energy. We accomplish this by providing governors of member states with a clear and unified voice to Congress, while also serving as the authority on issues surrounding these vital resources.

The Commission also assists states in balancing a multitude of interests through sound regulatory practices. Our unique structure offers a highly effective forum for states, industry, Congress and the environmental community to share information and viewpoints to advance our nation's energy future. We stand dedicated to securing resources needed to ensure our nation's energy, economic and national security.

 

8. National Wildlife Federation     http://www.nwf.org

The National Wildlife Federation is working to:

• Require fracking companies to disclose the chemicals they are releasing into the environment.
• Make sure fracking companies are held accountable to America's keystone conservation laws like the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.
• Protect key habitats and public lands from fracking.

 

9. Clean Water Action/Michigan   http://www.cleanwater.org/mi

… a one million member organization of diverse people and groups joined together to protect our environment, health, economic well-being and community quality of life. Our goals include clean, safe and affordable water; prevention of health threatening pollution; creation of environmentally safe jobs and businesses; and empowerment of people to make democracy work. Clean Water Action organizes strong grassroots groups and coalitions and campaigns to elect environmental candidates and solve environmental and community problems.

 

Tips for Tightening your Writing

                       


     No matter how highly you think of your own writing, don’t kid yourself, you need an editor. Every book I’ve written — three with university presses and two self-published — has benefited from extensive editing.  Writers have blind spots that keep us from seeing what is right in front of our noses. We need another pair of eyes, preferably not a friend’s or a relative’s; they should belong to a professional copy editor.

      It didn’t matter that I spent twenty-three years as an English professor putting my students through rewrite after rewrite. When it came to checking my own prose, I rarely caught my errors.  My traditional publishers provided editors for my academic books, but when I self-published my novels, I had to pay for them myself.                                      

 Here are some examples of their comments, with my befores and afters.

                             

“You use too many prepositions in a single action.  For example, down into, up over, around beside. You need to avoid prepositions altogether if action is already implicit: Jump up, jump down, sat up.”

 Before: A large white face peered in at him.

After: A large white face peered at him.

 Before: They stomped over to the edge of the forest.

After: They stomped to the forest edge.

 Before: She climbed back up into the wagon

 

After: She climbed into the wagon

 

“You need to avoid overlong sentences and passive writing.  Work towards direct writing instead, using simple, declarative sentences: noun, verb, object. “

Before: Hutchin, who had been out catching desert animals, which he told the company were a kind of small rabbit to spare their sensibilities about eating rodents, took his vengeance by serving Roger a plate entirely made up of bones, and Roger glowered all through the evening because he wanted to thrash Hutchin for it, but knew perfectly well that beating his slave would stretch the Company's toleration of his behavior.

After: Hutchin escaped briefly to hunt desert rodents. He took his vengeance by serving Roger a thin piece that was mostly bones. Roger wanted to thrash him, but restrained himself because it would stretch their toleration of his behavior too far.

 

“Don’t use a conjunction to link related sentence elements; use a semi-colon.”   

Before: Roger was frightened until he realized what he was hearing was the sound of a sizeable waterfall and he knew exactly where they were— by the falls of the Nern, a tributary of the lower Danner that had its wellspring in the last of the uplands to the south and west of Twist.

After: Roger was frightened until he recognized the sound of a big waterfall. He knew where they were; it was the falls of the Nern, a tributary of the lower Danner.

“Replace description of what is going on with dialogue. Skip ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ when it is already clear who is speaking.

Before: Carl reassured him that it wasn=t over a mile now and they=d been heating warm stew for breakfast: they’d had rabbits last night, they had, and gravy=d be thick and crusty for their breakfast. (notice the problem that my past perfect tense introduces here; see below!)

After: “Under a mile, now; we’re having last night’s stew for breakfast. Rabbit, it was, with thick gravy.”

 Before: Preoccupied, he was startled when Carl asked him to look behind: did he hear some animal coming along from back there, or was it Carl's imagination?

 

After: “Look behind us,” said Carl. “Is there an animal following us, or is it just my imagination?”

 

“Past Tense is less passive than Continuous Past Tense. Change phrases like ‘she was running’ to ‘she ran.’”

Before: Now Father was leading those bands whose exploits everyone was marveling at.

 After: Now Father led those bands whose exploits everyone admired.

 
Before: Hutchin was rummaging among the bundles.

 After: Hutchin rummaged among the bundles.

 

Use past tense but not Past Perfect:  ‘I had gone,’ ‘he had thought,’ are more wordy than ‘I went,’ ‘ he thought,’ especially when used frequently.”

Before: Flora had not been asleep but had been feigning it as he banged about in his chests to find something warm to wear under his rain gear.

 

After: He rummaged in his chests to find something warm to wear under his rain gear. Flora feigned sleep as he banged about the room.


Before: Rory thought their new recruit had looked shifty.

After: Rory thought their new recruit looked shifty

 

“Edit down: cut every unnecessary word.  Out of doors = outdoors; out of the window = out the window.”

Before: Roger and Carl could only see only four or five feet in front of them. 

 

After: Roger and Carl could see only four or five feet ahead.

 

 

               HAPPY WRITING!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Infinite Games

               What were your favorite games when you were a child? I don’t mean indoor board games like Parcheesi or Monopoly, but outdoor, running around games you got up to with a bunch of other kids. Mine was Kick the Can, a hide and seek game where you could free everyone already captured and held at home base by kicking the can off it. What was yours? When you were playing your favorite game, what did you feel like? Did you give a hoot about what your parents were doing?

            At my all-girls’ school we were always being told to look up to this or that grown up because we might want to be like her someday — our principal  was big on role models — a suggestion I never could get my head around because I thought that adults belonged to a different species from children. In the parent-centered households of the l940s and 1950s, grown-ups pursued their mysterious and incomprehensible lives while we lived in another realm entirely. All they wanted was for us to still and listen to them; all we wanted was to get away from them and back to our own world, which was the world of play.

  Fiona Opie, one of the great collectors of games and pastimes, writes that

“Childhood is a time more full of fears and anxieties that many adults care to remember, and play is a way of escape. A game is a microcosm, more powerful and important than any individual player; yet when it is finished it is finished, and nothing depends on the outcome.” 

     If you are listening to them from a distance, she goes on,

“you hear a kind of thin screaming noise…Vitality? Yes. But come closer and step into the playground; a kind of defiant light-heartedness envelops you. The children are clowning. They are making fun of life; and if an enquiring adult becomes too serious about words and rules they say, ‘it’s only a game, isn’t it. It’s just for fun. I don’t know what it means. It doesn’t matter.’”  Opie, The People in the Playground

Think back to your favorite running around game. Did you care whether you or your side won or lost? Did you think the game mattered?  Of course you did. Who wins and who loses, not to mention how long they can play and when they can get out to play again matters terribly to children. It is what they live for.

                                          

           In the first chapter of my novel, The Marshlanders,  Clare is playing hopscotch with her friends, totally obsessed with winning. (for my blog on Hopscotch, scroll down or go to (http://marshlanders.blogspot.com/2012/07/hopscotch.html). She is so busy looking for a perfect hopscotch potsy that her mother gets captured.  I chose a game as a way to dramatize her energetic and harum-scarum character only by happenstance, but I liked the way it expressed her character much better than my describing it could do.  So, having been a research scholar, I  researched childhood play.

After my hyper-intellectual life as a college professor and academic writer it was such fun to work traditional games and pastimes into my story. I used an ancient “game of toss,” in which you throw a bean bag back and forth to a set pattern of rhymes, as a way for Clare to get a bit of food to her mother and the children she is imprisoned with.  When she is lying in a coma after being savagely beaten, her insistence that only one “choosing rhyme” is the correct one brings her out of it.  These nonsense jingles are rigidly upheld, considered absolute in a child’s home village; that’s why Clare is so furious when she hears the Marshlander children doing a choosing rhyme all wrong:

                          

                            Inty, minty, tippety, fig
                            Delia, Dilia, dominig
                            Otcha, potcha, dominotcha
                             Hi, pon, tusk.
                             Huldy, guldy, boo.
                             Out goes you.  

Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground

 

Some games fairly lept off the pages of the library books to embody moods and themes. “Sheep Sheep come home,” played with sheep trying to get to their mother through a line of wolves, worked nicely to foreshadow approaching danger:

         

                 “Sheep Sheep come home,
                   Afraid. What of? The Wolfs.
                   Wolfs gone to Devenshire
                   Won’t be home for seven year
                    Sheep Sheep come home – “

                                          Norman Douglas, London Street Games       

At a meeting last night, everyone said that the idea of play was meaningless for them at this stage of their lives;  they felt too “serious” to even talk about it. I wondered if there was medicine for that, until I realized it probably wasn’t true.  For example, most of us make time during the year to set our adult concerns aside and plunge into light-hearted activities. Purim, Holi, Christmastime, Eid ul-Fitr  — these are all seasonal festivities that reawaken our perennial hunger for play. Long ago, before there was electricity or television or even radio, the European world seemed ominously darker and colder as the nights drew in.  With their candles inside and bonfires outside, people threw themselves into all kinds of games and frolics to lighten the midwinter gloom.

 

                Joseph Strutt, Sports and Pastimes of the People of England

In England, you could hire companies of fools to fill your house with music and laughter at your midwinter festivities, all to an energetic kind of gymnastic dancing.  I used one of these fools’ dances as part of a frolic at  the Tapestry House, a weaving community where Clare is apprenticed.

          Although The Marshlanders Trilogy isn’t strictly historical,  it is based on the East Anglian Fens where “Fen Tigers” fought for their autonomy against the encroachment of “Merchant Adventures”(they were really called that) trying to drain their homeland for agricultural development. So I was delighted to come upon Sybil Marshall’s first person account of Fen folkways, including games and frolics.

          “The rhymes we said were often about courting or getting married, and the ones we loved best were the vulgar ones

         

              Polly went a-walking one fine day
              She lost her britches by the way
               The girls did laugh, and the boys did stare
                     To see poor Polly with her backside bare.”

          On Plough Monday,  a Christmastime holiday,   she describes “The Straw Bear” as

“a sort o’ceremony [in which] a party of men would choose one of their gang to be ‘straw bear’ and they’d start a-dressing him in the morning ready for their travels round the fen at night. They saved some o’ the straightest, cleanest and shiniest oat straw and bound it all over the man until he seemed to be made of straw from head to foot, with just is face showing…some parties used to do a play about  ‘Here I come I, old Beelzebub,’ and there were another place where one man knocked another one down, and then stood over him and said

                    Pains within and pains without

                    If the devil’s in, I’ll fetch him out
                    Rise up and fight again.’”

                                       Sybil Marshall, Fenland Chronicle

           One of the joys of sitting down at my computer every morning to find what Clare is getting up to is that I can plunge into all these fun and frolics as I work them into my writing. I turned the Sybil Marshall’s Straw Bear into a Straw Lion and combined him with a Fool’s Frolic for one of my favorite chapters in The Marshlanders.  Here is how it all came out:

After enough dances to tire them, Mother Eleanor asked the apprentices to sit. Then she and the Master Artist and Weaver rose to serve them mead and sweetmeats.  Sister
Barbara pretended to trip and spill Clare’s mead, but Mother Eleanor refilled her mug with a reproving look. Then, returning to the high table, she called for the revels to begin.

It was always fun to see the new apprentices’ surprise when this happened.   Constance and Sally watched Clare’s her face as the kitchen door was flung opened and a procession marched into the hall. This year it was led by Foxy, sporting a red bow around his neck and bells jingling on his feet. Behind him pranced four little folk, not as tall as Clare but, she thought, adults full grown. How could that be? They were dressed in bright green tights, red tunics, and a headgear of red and green shaped like pointed horns tipped with bells that jiggled and jangled this way and that as the Fools flew through the air. Like Foxy, they wore bells on their ankles, and their leaping feet were bare. Behind them came musicians playing flutes and drums.

            As the Fools' began their frolic Foxy ran over to Clare and buried his nose in her lap. He had never liked flutes, and the Fools had frightened him out of his wits when they had dressed him up with an undignified bow and aggravating anklets. Clare hugged him tightly as they leaped in the air, bells chiming, to a rollicking of flutes, then somersaulted to the roll of the drums.

 It was an astounding performance of cartwheels and walking on hands, splits and leaps and double somersaults front and backwards, beyond what any of the apprentices had ever dared, and all precisely timed to the music.  The frolicking Fools and the feast and the music and the joyous dancing were felt to shoulder the wheel of a year and nudge it forward. Reveling in the excitement, loving the feeling of Foxy in her lap, catching Jean's eye, Clare felt assured that the Tapestry House could protect her from all the world's cruelties. She resolved to be less impatient about carding and dying and running back and forth with shuttles, however long it took until she could try her own hand at weaving.

But the frolic wasn’t over. At a roll of drums, the Fools opened he kitchen door to usher a very peculiar creature into the hall. It had straw sticking out in all directions. Foxy stiffened, ready for attack, but then, unaccountably, relaxed. Clare thought it was human, but it went on all fours, like some kind of a riddle. There was straw all around its face, straw bound to its legs, a long straw tail and a straw mane. Suddenly, it rose on two feet, shouting and growling:

            “Here I come, Old Beelzebub!”

This seemed to be a challenge to fight, as Nathan stepped forward, fists up, to box with the whirling bale. Everybody was shouting at Nathan to conquer the Straw Bear but he was soon knocked over, the Bear crowing over him:

           “Pains within and pains within I
            If the devil’s in, I’ll fetch him out
            Rise up and fight again!”

Clare shuddered at the mention of the devil: she knew perfectly well that Nathan had no evil in him.  One after another the boy apprentices challenged the Straw Bear and were knocked down.  After he had laid the last one low, he tramped angrily around the circle of onlookers, demanding

            “Now your defenders all are down
           What pretty maiden will wear my crown”

Coming to a stop in front of Mother Eleanor, he seized her in his arms and tore off around the room in a whirl of dance raucously accompanied by drums. Clare was amazed to see Mother Eleanor leap and stamp as lithely as her partner, whose coat must surely prickle?  After leading her back to her chair, he tramped around the circle, choosing first this girl and then another to whirl with him, accompanied by chapping and cheers. Clare began to feel left out as the golden being chose one after another, but never approached her. Had he sensed something evil in her, the way the ministers had?

            Now the music changed: the flutes played a soft adagio which resolved into the tune of a womanhood song Clare had learned last summer:

            “Green grow the leaves on the hawthorne tree
             Green grow the leaves on the hawthorne tree.”

The Straw Bear stood in the center of the circle, swinging his mane this way and that, while everyone laughed at a joke Clare didn’t get.

            “What pretty maiden will wear my crown”

he asked, pulling a circlet of gold from the straw around his waist while Clare sat, unaware that, as the last apprentice to arrive and the newest to womanhood (Mother Eleanor had wormed this out of Constance), she would be chosen as the Straw Bear’s Queen. Everyone was pointing at her and laughing as he approached and took her by the hand and placed the crown upon her chestnut braids.

            As flutes and drums took up the song, the Dance of the Midwinter Queen was accompanied by “Green Grow the Leaves” sung lustily by the whole community. Whirling through the intricate figure as if she had been dancing with the golden bear since the world began, Clare thrilled at the applause, and all for her!  Staring through the mane to two penetrating black eyes, she realized it was Joshua. Seeing her recognition, he threw back his head to belt out his great, resounding laugh.  When their dance came to an end they joined a long line of apprentices and their masters, fools and cooks and gardeners and stable boys weaving hand in hand around the floor and in and out of the looms, singing in the new year of the sun and wishing for each other its every blessing.