Buried History

Living in Brooklyn, I taught myself to find history as I walked down the street, to judge the houses, large, set back from the street, dating from the 1910s, and the apartment buildings with masonry typical of the 1930s.  I won't deny Henderson history, but it's scattered and separate and doesn't have the layers of patchwork places, places that have long gone unnoticed.  Take the area where I work, for instance.  It's what they call "light industrial."  Nothing scary, nothing big -- in fact, it's rather pleasant to walk in, since there's not much foot traffic, the sidewalks are wide, everything is landscaped.  A block and a half away there are some train tracks, and going up there makes a nice walk, especially to survey the wild-grown shrubs along the line, and think about the backs of the buildings that the train goes by.

It so happens that there are traffic cones along the streets, and have been for several weeks, along with construction signs.  Some city officials came in and held a meeting to explain the purpose of the construction and how it would affect on-street parking.  I missed the meeting, as it happened, but a few weeks later someone filled me in.  "Oh, they're removing contaminated water -- from Pepcon.  It was just over there, you know." (Waves hand down the street)

Wait, what?  Over where?

I'd heard of the Pepcon Explosion.  Anyone living in the LV area at that time remembers it, as it shook windows all over the valley and caused a huge fireball, and since moving here I'd heard the occasional reminiscence.  Pepcon made rocket fuel for the space shuttle.  Following the Columbia accident, when the shuttle program was on hiatus, they stored a great deal of fuel on-site.  On May 4, 1988, a fire started and spread to the fuel, which blew up, completely leveling Pepcon, as well as another plant next door, which made marshmallows.  Because evacuation began when the fire first started, only two employees were killed -- one who stayed behind to call the fire department, and a disabled man who was unable to evacuate quickly enough  (both heartbreaking stories, for all the "only two people").  Some 300 people were injured, mostly by flying glass and debris.  For several hours the fire was so intense that the FD didn't even try to fight it and just concentrated on evacuating the area.

I went to the Henderson newspaper archive on line, back to May 1988, and looked up the exact location of the plant.  There were the train tracks, and there was Gibson, the street I take to work every morning, and just beyond it two Xs marked the locations of Pepcon and Kidd Marshmallows.  Today there's an electrical substation there (that's what it looks like, behind a grayed-out fence) and a modest business park, including a place that sells used hot tubs (apparently, there's money in that.)  Somewhere beyond that is the Kidd factory, which I'm told was rebuilt.  Of Pepcon, nothing left.

Except that water.  Three to four hundred feet down, according to my informant.  They're going to cut a trench in the street and pump it out.  Why now?  What else might be down there?  Where else might stuff have gone?  I really don't know.  I note from the Wikipedia article that everything in a 1.5 mile zone (which would definitely include where my office building is now) was subject to "severe" destruction.

It's a reminder that even the most innocuous-looking block has history, somewhere.

Diana Wynne Jones reissues

On my desk calendar at work I have the words "Fire and Hemlock" written across this Thursday, April 12.  That's the day three of Diana Wynne-Jones' earlier novels -- Dogsbody, A Tale of Time City, Fire and Hemlock -- are going to be reissued by Firebird, in paperback and Kindle editions, with new introductions by Garth Nix and Neil Gaiman, among others. 

Jones wrote a lot of books and they're all worth reading, but I like seeing these particular examples of her early work made available.  Dogsbody is the story of a celestial object -- a star -- who falls from heaven to earth and is reborn as a mongrel dog with a task he must perform (but, being a dog, he can't ever concentrate on this task for very long.)  There's a quest in there, and a phantom hunt, and strong emotions -- jealousy and unhappy families.  It came out in 1975, when YA novels weren't expected to be quite so magical, and like many of her novels never got much recognition in the US.  A Tale of Time City starts with a girl being evacuated to the British countryside during World War II, and then pitches forward, dazzlingly, through the eons, to an era when humanity is very different, and still somewhat the same (at any rate, people still eat toffee), in a place called Time City, where time seems to be coming to an end.

As for Fire and Hemlock, which was originally published in 1985, it happens to be one of the few Jones novels I've never read -- out of print and the library didn't have it. I pre-ordered it back in January and I'm trusting that when I fire up the Kindle on Thursday it will be there. All I really know about it is that it's Jones' take on the Tam Lin ballad...which is quite enough for me. 

Easter goes Organic

When I used to go with my husband to visit his grandmother for Easter she always had the traditional Greek bright red Easter eggs.  I never thought to ask how she made them and unfortunately she's no longer here to tell us.  Not long ago, however, I read that Greeks get that color by dying the eggs with onionskins.  My husband disputed that Yia-Yia ever did this.  "She took the bus to the Greek store and she got some kind of dye there," he said.  But I decided to try it, figuring I had some freedom to branch out as my son is now too old for dyeing eggs.  My first test run two weeks ago, with two eggs and some yellow onionskins, produced eggs that were a deep...well, kind of mahogany.  This past Saturday I tried again, with both purple and yellow onionskins.  On the stove, the colors of the liquids were different, with the yellow onionskins producing pale orange and the purple producing a stronger red.  On the eggs themselves the color was basically the same, reddish-brown.  I tried a couple of variations seen on Youtube, including boiling the egg wrapped in pantyhose, with a cilantro leaf against it to make a pattern on the shell.  I also tried wax designs on the egg from a candle...didn't work, most of the wax came off in the water.

If you want to do it yourself, you'll need skins from onions (I had 5 or 6 reds, probably around 10 yellows, obviously the more the stronger the dye), vinegar and eggs.  Boil the onionskins in enough water to cover them plus two tablespoons of vinegar for about 20 minutes.  Strain the onionskins out and let the dye cool.  Then boil the eggs in the dye.  I boiled them as you normally would hard-boiled eggs (15 minutes).  You can do them longer but eventually the eggs will become inedible.  If you don't like the color after 15 minutes just let them cool in the water and the dyeing process will continue.  You can even soak them overnight. 
If you want designs, take a cilantro or other edible leaf and place it against the eggshell, then wrap in pantyhose and tie it with a twisty. 

As for the bright red eggs Yia-Yia used to produce?  Research suggests she may have used Rit fabric dye.  Sometimes traditions are better left unrevived.

"Salome" finds a home

My short story "Salome" has been accepted by the online magazine Jersey Devil for their June issue.  It's funny, I've been sitting on this news for about a week.  The first story I got published seemed a milestone, but I thought that maybe it wasn't "professional" to keep putting up notices about subsequent ones.  I don't consider myself a natural short-story writer but I do have another one rattling around out there which I hope to place soon.  I think it's the best I've written so far, but it could easily be a year before I write another one.

Jersey Devil is published in New Jersey, naturally, and they have a small press (Jersey Devil Press) as well.  They specialize in the offbeat, as you might guess.  The Jersey Devil itself is a Bigfoot-like creature that is supposed to haunt the pine barrens of Southern New Jersey.

I'll post a link once the story is up.

The Anne books

A few nights ago I read the ending of Anne of Ingleside, the last book (written, not chronologically) in the Anne of Green Gables series to my son.  The final scene includes Anne, after a long day, looking in on her sleeping children.  Above the head of one of them is the shadow of a cross from a window pane, an omen, L.M. Montgomery writes, "of a cross-marked grave 'somewhere in France.' "  I remembered puzzling over that passage as a child, and I interrupted the reading to explain  that in a subsequent book (chronologically, but written before Anne of Ingleside), the character dies in World War I.  

The Anne of Green Gables books I checked out of the library when I was a child were hardbacks with little circular pictures in the center of a long-haired girl who managed to look very turn-of-the-century and very 70s at the same time. Reading the books today is remembering reading them as a child, puzzling over old-fashioned things I couldn't understand, being secretly enthralled by the darker episodes*, living entirely in the world Montgomery had created.  Oddly enough, there were two books in the series -- Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside -- which were not in the library and which were not even referred to by the publisher who had brought out those hardbacks.  I found out about these books on the visit to Green Gables mentioned in my recent post, and had the pleasure as an adult of reading them, and some other Montgomery titles I hadn't known about, for the first time. 

When I began reading them to my son I was a little doubtful.  I cut out a lot of the more flowery stuff, but other than remarking, "Anne talks too much," he took to them.  Because he is a child who doesn't take to change, I'm still reading them to him.  I wondered a little why he liked them, however, and it occured to me one day that that that, too, is related to his autism.  In the Anne books, emotions are writ large.  They're easy to understand.   I think it's something of a myth that autistic children don't read emotions at all; I'd say it's more accurate that they prefer emotions to be simple and straightfoward.  No guessing, no gray areas.

It illustrates that unpredictability of literature that Montgomery's books are still going strong 100 years later while so many of her contemporaries have fallen by the wayside.  But for all the comfort her books provide, they're never sentimental.  She had too much humor for that, humor that she uses to puncture any possible flights of fancy.  And then there was the dark side that so gripped me as a child:  underneath the message of love and reason, problems happily solved, is a near-continuous narrative of unhappy marriages, tyrannical families and poverty.  The tension between these two things gives an electrical charge to her books and is one of the reasons why, I think, people still read them.


*The Anne books are full of stuff that would never be put in a children's book today.  Example: on p. 50 of Anne's House of Dreams we are casually told about a man who is "slow in the uptake" because his father threw a stump at him when he was a child.  This is the same book where, a few chapters later, a character narrates how she saw her brother killed before her eyes in a farming accident and then walked into the parlor on her birthday and found her father had hanged himself.

The haircut

Sometimes you meet someone and it's a scene right out of a book.  When I write dialogue, I try to stay believable.  If I wrote a scene like what happened when I was getting my hair cut yesterday, it would not seem believable. 

One of the things I somewhat dislike about getting my hair cut is that the stylists always want to talk to you.  I feel for them; I'm sure that if I were in their position I'd be dying to talk to somebody, but I'm not a talkative person at the best of times and hair salons have a sedative effect on me.  (The place where I go is not one of those high-energy places, they were playing Roberta Flack when I was in there, and a couple of the stylists were singing along.)  I'm sorry I never caught her name, but this is what she said:  do I watch "Real Housewives of Atlanta?", you know, they were going to do a reality show about Las Vegas called Trailer Trash, isn't that awful?  I think they should do a show like they did in the 70s, did you ever see it, it was called "Vegas" and it had a guy driving his car into his garage below his house, he was a p.i.  They should show that again, like on TVLand.  I'm going to write a letter...another letter...to TVLand if I can find where I put the address and tell them to bring it back.  I'd never want to live in a trailer, though, would you?  Actually, you know, what I've always wanted is to live in a log house.  They cost a lot of money, though.

There was also something in there somewhere about bowling tournaments and the Showboat Casino being imploded.

My husband said later that he would have liked to have seen my expression while this was going on.  But when you are sitting in a chair and the person saying all this is holding scissors and the scissors are right next to your face what you say is:  "Yes, I've always wanted to live in a log house, too."

The Orange Moon

One of my recent reads is Mal Peet's Life: An Exploded Diagram.  Like his earlier Tamar, it's a multi-layered book, a story with tentacles that reach back to WWI and forward to 9/11.  The heart of the book -- and really the best part, as I thought a lot of the layering was unnecessary -- is the relationship between two small-town teens, deeply in love and lust, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This, and the current setting on my WIP, brought me to thinking how to convey the atmosphere of the Cold War to teens reading today.  The oddest part of it, for me, is the way we dealt the prospect of total nuclear war:  we just tried not to think about it.  I was well aware that in Europe there were massive protests against missile silos and sit-ins at Army bases, but for me it was just a reality that couldn't be looked at.  It had always been there, and it was insane, and it just didn't bear thinking about.

The thing about things that you don't want to think about, however, is that you do think about them, sometimes when you least expect it.  One summer when I was in college my mother and sister came up to New York and we took a long car trip up into Canada, through the Maritime Provinces, culminating in a stop in Prince Edward Island.  It was a beautiful place, still remote (we had to take the ferry over), green hills, red roads, stormy clouds coming in off the sea and the sun shining through them.  We stayed in Cavendish and went to the Green Gables house, walked Lovers Lane and the Haunted Wood.  That evening we decided to drive out to "lobster supper", a traditional event held in a basement of a local church.  Now, I don't eat lobster and my mother can't eat it, so why we decided this would be a desirable thing to do, and what we did end up eating, have been lost in the mists of time*, but what I do remember is driving back along a lonely, winding PEI road.  The moon had come up, and it was orange.  I had seen orange or red moons before and I vaguely knew that it was just some atmospheric-type phenomenon involving dust or something, but in the darkness, in that strange place, I began to wonder if maybe it wasn't something worse.  What if, while we were on vacation, the nuclear button had been pushed?  What if the moon was orange because it was reflecting distant fires burning in the lower parts of North America?  (It was easy to believe that the Russians might not bother to bomb PEI.)  We'd be trapped up here, forever, everything familiar gone, homeless, stateless, alone.  The world gone, the future gone.  I mused on and on and worked myself up in to a state of cold terror that not even our arrival back at our rooms in Cavendish  could dispel.  I don't remember anything else,but I suppose in the light of the next morning everything was normal again, and so we packed up and went on to Nova Scotia.

The strongest feeling from this memory is the feeling that there was no hope.  We were slowly, inexorably moving towards the day when everything would end.  If it wasn't today, it would nevertheless come.  (We always believed it would be very sudden too -- without warning, although the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis should have proved otherwise.)  For me, the end of the Cold War has been a modern miracle.  It's something I always try to keep in mind no matter who the enemy is made out to be, and no matter what we are supposed to believe about them.


*The mists of time have no power against my old diaries, which reveal that  the church was called St. Ann's and I had potato salad while Mom had filet of sole, and that my opinion of the cuisine was uncomplimentary.  Of my nighttime terror I simply wrote, "lonely drive home in the dark."