By Wayne Allensworth
When the sky opens the rain can come down in curtains of dense water, obscuring your view. The wind picks up and the tree limbs begin their dance. It’s November. I was taking my morning walk, hoping that the dark clouds that were gathering would hold onto the drops of water within them for just a few more minutes. I walked and felt the cool wind pick up. And I noticed that even here in Texas, some of the leaves on the trees were turning ever so subtly. A few were yellow. Even a splash of orange or red here and there. The weather has been warm, though the sun is farther away, and the shadows are growing longer. When the storm came, it came without warning. No thunder. No lightning. A great bucket in the firmament simply turned over and the curtains enveloped the landscape. And me. There really wasn’t any place to take cover, so I just kept walking, and I watched the water fall and felt its cold touch wrap me up. The tree limbs were dancing merrily or ominously depending on one’s point of view. The roads around me were empty. I was alone, walking in the rain.
And I thought of those days when I was a boy, and a hurricane would strike the Gulf coast. We had prepared for it, but my father’s main preparation had been building our house on relatively high ground. Our home, a small dot in a surrounding sea of water, never flooded. We would wait for the waters to recede, and the boys of the neighborhood would be out and about again. The deep ditch in front of our house that carried away the runoff from the storm would be full of the clearest natural water I had ever seen. Not the browns or greens of the bayous or the Gulf, but crystal clear, cool water. And we would wade in it and watch the mud castles that the crawdads had built. We would see a great number of them scurrying about in the transparent flow of the rainwater.
Some of the neighbors would catch a slew of them to boil for eating. But I was fascinated by their movements and watched them closely. Little armored bodies in the water. I remember them well, as I remember the fireflies in summer. And the dragonflies. And the horned toads that were so ubiquitous in my boyhood landscape. Armadillos looked like scaled-down dinosaurs. And a racoon, who, unafraid, approached us in our yard and stayed. He rode with me in my pedal powered red Indy car, a red plastic teardrop. He would climb in, and we would peddle up and down the driveway, his masked eyes surveying the scene. And then one day, he went away and never came back.
Those post-hurricane wading days came maybe once a year. Something’s to be said for relative scarcity, or at least infrequency. I can remember when we were not overwhelmed by a torrent of media distractions. When every movie you could think of was not available instantly anytime. I’ve been able to see movies I might never have viewed in the old days, but that comes at a steep price. First, the constant stimulation that breeds impatience and ennui. Depression might follow until some novel stimulation is found. We have to either keep up the stimulation or take our meds. I don’t think superabundance is a good thing. Nor is the saturation of our lives with technology that segments and fractures an already fragmented society. A family gathered in the same room, each of them with their eyes glued to their cell phones. I’m not much for games myself, but I fondly remember families playing together — board games, or card games, or checkers or dominoes. A social lubricant that became a social bond.
At special times of the year, the TV, limited to three networks and a local UHF station, would broadcast those special movies. The Ten Commandments or King of Kings at Easter. White Christmas or Miracle on 34th Street at Christmas time. One of my favorites was a Christmas allegory dressed up as a Western: John Ford’s Three Godfathers. And A Charlie Brown Christmas. Each one became an event we would prepare for, everyone gathered in the living room to watch that big TV with a wood cabinet and an oval screen and that enormous dial that clunked when you changed channels, a rabbit-ear antenna, wrapped up with tin foil to help with the interference. And then the holidays were over, and you had to look through the TV Guide or the newspaper to see if any movie spectacles were coming up.
Too much of that breeds indifference and dulls the senses.
My wife and I were cleaning out the attic recently and again, the superabundance of a consumerist society was much in evidence. The mountains of plastic and cardboard containers. Dozens of staplers and pens and notebooks, many of them unused. VHS tapes, unwatched for decades. A lot of it will end up in a landfill.
I’ve begun to believe that advertising is not geared so much to convincing us to buy a particular product as it is to keep us stimulated — and on the lookout for novelty. As Neal Postman noted, we can easily lapse into a dull routine of amusing ourselves to death— and cutting ourselves off from the natural world and a sense of awe that stimulates wonder, religiosity, and humility, a quality we seem to have forgotten. We drift through a maze of artificial stimulation without noticing the most beautiful, wonderous things that surround us. It’s up to us to lose our mental blinders.
So, one more time: The place to begin with re-enchanting our world is with ourselves. Exercise some discipline when using technology. You don’t really need it all the time. You needn’t constantly check your cell phone. And taking a walk without being wired can be calming. Relief from the constant crisis that is life as broadcast by mass media. Turn it off sometimes.
A walk in the November rain can be exhilarating.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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