18 January 2025

After a stretch of bitter cold and howling gales, today’s temperature broke 40^o and no wind blew.  A better night’s sleep than of late primed me for a most enjoyable stroll to and along the Madbury reservoir, tricked out with ice fishermen and rendering a spacious new world version of a winter scene by Bruegel.  The eerie, eldritch sound of the expanding ice sheet, a mashup of whale song and sci-fi soundtrack, seemed a tribute to the late David Lynch, whose 1986 Blue Velvet cast such a spell over me that on first viewing I emerged from that Chapel Hill theatre afraid of the mall I was in.  But on this Saturday, the singing ice was only part of a cheering soundscape that included chatter that stopped as soon as the loquacious squirrel dove into a hole drilled by a piliated woodpecker and peeked curiously back out at me, and the friendly greeting of a neighbor with her four charming stair-step children making their way back up from the ice.

All told, this morning was a most welcome respite from annoyances and preoccupations, some minor and others more daunting, leaving me a dyspeptic combo of at least two of the Seven Dwarfs:  Sleepy and Grumpy.  All those bothersome emails from credit bureaus and banks making it seem necessary to log on, negotiate the two-step verification, and locate the message center only to discover the message is just a come-on for another unnecessary service. Oy.  And more oppressively, all that time and effort required to dispute fraudulent credit card charges from scammers!  Caveat emptor, Dear Readers, especially online.

Such bothers of privilege do, however, recede in nature and in company.  I’ve been enjoying the skilled efficiency of masons Steve and Josh of Rye Beach Landscaping who’ve been uncomplainingly working through the challenging cold to build a set of outdoor steps for me.  What a joy to see people who know what they are doing create something both practical and beautiful!

And there’s pleasure, too, in contemplating from a very safe distance in time and space the brutal history of western expansion so memorably recreated in the new Netflix series American Primeval, which begins with a shocking, appallingly realistic recreation of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre.  As Fresh Air critic David Bianculli noted in his review, it’s a sequence as stunning as the opening moments of Spielberg’s 1998 Saving Private Ryan.  With a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, who also wrote director Iñárritu’s 2015 epic and similarly graphic western The Revenant, American Primeval has engaged me over the last couple days of streaming its six episodes to an uncanny degree, perhaps in part because of a personal connection to an abhorrent tragedy.

My late husband David was a descendant of Robert Taylor Burton, a principal officer in the Nauvoo Legion, who led Brigham Young’s territorial militia during the Utah wars.  Raised as a Latter Day Saint, though from early on in full-fledged apostasy, David was also an Americanist historian, and part of the desert Southwest’s allure he passed along to me was not only his familial connection to Burton and the Latter Day Saints, but also his intellectual interest in what Tolstoy called Mormonism, “the quintessential ‘American religion.’”

Early in our regular visits to Utah and the Four Corners, David took me to see the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a monument a half hour’s drive north from St. George.  That’s where I first learned of the attack on the Baker-Fancher immigrant wagon train bound for California on the Old Spanish Trail through Utah under the martial law imposed by territorial governor Brigham Young.  Enflamed by suspicion that these settlers would abet the LDS persecution that first caused the Mormon migration west after the Illinois murder of their founder Joseph Smith, and amplified by the hysteria that President Buchanan’s military expedition of March 1857 to replace Young as governor brewed, Young sent the Nauvoo Legion, aided by Southern Paiute Native Americans, to attack the wagon train in the guise of hostile natives.  But the travelers fought back, and the Legion, fearing identification, approached the immigrants under a white flag, persuaded them to surrender their weapons, escorted them from their defensive position, and then killed all the adults and children over age 7, leaving most of the bodies exposed to wild animals and climate.

I recall very clearly one name inscribed on the monument wall we visited:  America Jane Dunlap, age 7. 

I’m wondering now if watching that horror re-enacted on my tv screen is resonating so with me for reasons beyond my distant but personal connection to that historical event.  In critical theory, insofar as my limited understanding allows, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules; abjection inherently disturbs conventional identity and cultural concepts.  Certainly the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre on ground contested by four groups, Native Americans, Federal troops, Morman militia, and immigrant settlers, each with competing values and allegiances, prompts questions about whose norms and rules apply.  And as we approach the inauguration of the Felon-in-Chief, who will swear to preserve, protect, and defend the very Constitution he sought to defy four years ago—on Martin Luther King Jr Day AND what would have been my late sister Jane’s 67^th birthday—I’m adrift in a sea of abjection.

Well, this too will pass.  And in the meantime, the news of star Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A. J. Brown reading Jim Murphy’s self-help book Inner Excellence on the sidelines while his team beat the Green Bay Packers 22-10 last Sunday offers hope to this other Murphy author of another self-published self-help book.

ESPN reports that from 523,497^th place on the Amazon sales list, Inner Excellence, with help from a star football player captured reading it on a nationally televised broadcast, shot to Amazon’s number one best seller.  In the resulting coverage of his good fortune, Murphy summed up four daily goals that are a key element of the book:

1. “Give the best of what you have that day.”

2. “Be present. Being in the place where there’s no concern for self, no concern for the outcome.”

3. “Be grateful. Look for the smallest moments, three a day, that were gifts for you. The smaller, the better.”

4. “Focus on your routines and only what you can control.”

I plan to take that advice.  And to try to find a footballer intrigued by Shakespeare.

Onward!