The old joke goes like this:
”If you talk to god, you are religious. If god talks to you, you’re delusional.”
...or variations on that theme.
Right now, and for a couple thousand years, there is land between the Jordan River, Dead Sea, and Gulf of Aqaba which people around the world have been fighting over, to horrible effect. Wars have been fought, many have died, because the groups who claim ownership of this land are large, and span the globe.
Right now, there is less than three-quarters of an acre in a U.S. state that isn’t anywhere special to anybody but one man. That man is me. My grandfather, and his father-in-law, built this house I live in now on that plot of land sometime between 1933 and 1940. I still have the original bill of lading for the lumber; a four-bedroom, two-story ranch house with a full basement, one bathroom, and a chimney for a coal stove …. the lumber cost just over $3,000 in 1933. It’s beautiful wood; rough-sawn, and in the summer when the sun hits the roof, the triangular ‘cubby’ spaces under that roof, outside those two rooms on the second floor have an aromatic smell of turpentine that sends me back to my childhood.
Later there was built a 20 x 30 foot cinder-block outbuilding that was a goat barn to answer President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s call to support the war effort with a “victory garden”. There were goats, chickens, and a garden that measured 50 x 50 feet, where cabbage, carrots, lettuce, corn were grown. My youngest years were filled with the meals my grandmother learned in her youth; her mother she thinks was an orphan from the slovak lands; my grandfather was one of twelve children who descended from the first generation Hungarian immigrant who came here sometime in the last 19th century. I have a picture of those twelve kids on the front porch of a house not far from here, up on a hill, and they were … proud, humble people.
Later on, as I am told, my grandfather ran a saloon in town. My father, a young boy, helped him clean up at night. One night he found a quarter. When the church came to offer raffle tickets for a new Plymouth, my dad bought a ticket. They won. The first car this family had was won in a church raffle. I still have the letter from the church telling them that they would owe the taxes on $600. They later built a two-car garage for their car, and later they had two cars.
I could write another thousand pages. If I could stop crying. If I could stop feeling like I’m going to throw up.
Proud to be humble. Because this… the American dream… even in the poverty that was the US in the 1900-1930s was still a miracle compared to the countries they had left. My grandmother made “halupki” — cabbage rolls, “haluski” (cabbage, onions, pasta), fresh from the garden, and they were were my favorite. My dad hated those meals. He hated them because during those lean times of the Great Depression — he was born in ‘35 — he said there were years when that was the only food they had to eat for months. The basement here has shelves built in — all of it hand built by my father and his father — to store the mason jars full of the canned vegetables they grew in the garden during the summer. I still find “Ball” jars on shelves downstairs … full of fasteners and bolts and odds and ends. The wooden templates for how far apart to place the cabbage, lettuce, and carrot seeds still hang from the rafter in the barn/workshop. The garden has been gone for thirty years… my dad planted grass when he retired here. I think that’s why my family doesn’t talk to me anymore. Could be religion, but that’s another essay.
So, why am I writing this?
Because I am being driven from my home by our new … industry … of the A.I. boom. Nobody has told me to move; no one has told me I’ve been bought out… but it doesn’t take a fortune teller to see it in the offing. In the last two years, and just in the last two weeks, the trees have been cleared from almost a square half-mile around my house, and now the tree-line is less than 400 feet away. My view of the sun rising and setting through the filter of the trees will be gone in a matter of weeks. When the walls of the half-million square foot behemoth buildings go up, they will be taller than the trees were.
Four hundred feet from my back yard … to a data center. My view of the rising Sun through the filter of the trees … will go away. I won’t see the sun until hours after sunrise, after it clears the roof of these buildings. I used to love to mark the winter and summer solstices by knowing where … how far down the tree line the Sun would be when it finally rose above the horizon through those trees. In some indeterminate time, I won’t ever see that again.
We were told they were warehouses; but now you know the ruse we have been sold. The city has made a deal to sell 300,000 gallons of water per day to this … this thing … to cool the computer servers in the data center. My house draws its’ water from a one-hundred-ten foot well out of that same water table. I wonder — with the dynamite blasting they have done in the last two years to build rainwater retention ponds for the acres of asphalt parking lots — — that blasting surely has had to disturb the groundwater aquifers around me. In the last sixty years that the strip mine has been a dumping ground, so what will find it’s way down into the water table?
So with this new … whatever this thing is... is it even safe to drink the water. There is no city water here… I’m on the “wrong side of the tracks.” Funny — you’ll love this — the township brought the sewer here in 2008 because of a federal mandate to end septic systems, all driven by algae blooms in the Chesapeake Bay, which is 230 miles from here. But we’re in their watershed, so there was a big federal grant to get everybody tapped into the sewer. But no money for the water supply; so I pay a sewer bill when I have no water bill. They estimate. The real joks is this: I’m 1500 feet from the municipal water tank, but I’m not tapped into the city water system. I still have a beautiful 110 foot deep well that brings up water with a pH of about 5.0. Eats through copper in about ten years without treatment. Tastes … pristine. No Chlorine… (hint of copper).
I fixed all of this myself; my blood, sweat, and tears, along with all of the stuff my dad built, and that his father built; the house, Aunt Mary’s father next door, this is my Jerusalem. The big house two doors down, that was here first. That’s where the father’s father lived. This is my sacred land, and the only temple to my elders.
The back yard of my area has been an open pit anthracite mine for a hundred years. The land I live on had no trees a hundred years ago; they had all been cut down to build the houses that are the town two miles up the road; the coal seams torn up and dug out by heavy draglines for decades. “The Anthracite King” — I remember driving to see that thing not far from here. My mother had a 1969 Dodge Polara — big car — — and my dad showed us that that six of them would fit in one bucket of that dragline. IT was magical stuff to a small boy; and since I only came here for holidays, the excursions we took up to the stripping to climb the mounds of culm (overburden, slate, rock) were the stuff of small children’s legends. I once dragged an old tire to the top of the biggest culm bank just to roll it down. I was ten years old.
On that day, I was the lord of all creation.
My grandfather and his father-in-law built these houses, and back then, this house, and about six others… we were were the outliers. We we were isolated for all this time. Every delivery driver or appliance repair or contractor who came out here always said, “Wow, this is beautiful, I never knew this was out here!” We were only two miles from the center of town, but … here we were. That’s because for my entire life, the trees had grown around us. The pictures from the 1930’s… I never noticed when I was younger, but now I see… the trees were not there. The trees grew after they took the coal and after they stopped the logging to build houses. The trees were full grown here by the time I was born in the late 1960’s
The trees … they are gone ... again. I watched that goddamn harvester slice down a tree every seven seconds and pile them up like bundles, to be buried in the dirt to make a “berm” that will be my only obstacle between my back porch and the thirty-five-foot-tall walls of a data center.
And I am told if i don't’ like it, move. Of course, who will buy my house now? Nobody. Nobody will want to live here, and I will be offered nothing by those corporations who own what is now around me. One of these skinny old men in his expensive Italian suit and tie who came to the township meeting where the township sold us out for the ten-year tax abatement they gave them — the wrinkled old guy from the corporation said they will be “beautiful” warehouses.
I noticed he lives nowhere near here. Never will. You would think he would want to be here with us to appreciate the beauty he wrought. They say beauty is in the eye ... oh, never mind.
I think that in our current moment, beauty to some people is only found in a wallet, or a bank account. They can’t see the rest for the trees, or something like that. I mix too many metaphors, surely.
This land is sacred to me, but nobody else. I have a picture of my grandfather holding his newborn grandson in his arms that was taken almost 60 years ago; that picture was taken in the living room, just ten feet from where I sit now. Where I can stand in the same three-dimensions and be in the moment with my elders, my heroes — the people who are the gods in my eye. My father died in the room behind me. That’s sacred, too, isn’t it? Perhaps then, I can be forgiven when I don't’ see a difference between how I feel when I stand in that spot and someone else who stands in a religious site — pick any one I want, I’ll offend somebody, so I won’t pick one — but people travel the world in pilgrimage to a place that is sacred to them. I can eat a TV dinner in a place that is sacred to me and sleep in the room upstairs to find my peace every night. To sleep in the same space where I felt so magical to be with my family six decades ago.
My father died in this house, and I had hoped to as well. I’m almost 60. I have congenital conditions that make it unlikely I will live to be as old as my grandmother at 95. My dad died at 70, he was a heavy smoker. My mother made it to 82. Who knows.
My cousin next door — their family helped build this house three generations ago — she found these places sacred too — is moving. They see the writing on the wall. The trees that came down last week. We are all crying. We all cant’ stop crying.
I’ve been crying for three days straight. I have been taken to a strange place I do not know; and yet I have not moved. I know it is familiar, I know it is the same place. It just looks so horribly wrong, it can’t be the same place. It will never be the same place again.
I used to get confused when people would say “You can’t go home again.” Hey, for twenty-five years now, I have been “home”, where my grandfather and grandmother, my father and aunts and uncles once lived. I was home again…. but they were all gone. And now all of the other sentimental things that made this home will be altered so radically that it will be almost impossible to see and feel the same feelings.
The walls are closing in… that’s the metaphor. The walls of OTHER buildings are closing in.
This is brute force capitalism. This is puritanical “free market forces” at work. This is … not new. I’m not the first one. See: Jethro Tull “Farm on The Freeway”; that song was 30 years ago, and he’s from Great Britain. Not a unique problem.
search.brave.com/...
But this idea that things are sacred ... bothers me. It bothers me because it’s so capricious how we define what is sacred, and what we hold in contempt for other things that are not sacred, because … well, the other guy just doesn’t see it the way you do. I'm an atheist, so for all my life I have faced people telling me that I’m a bastard if I don’t regard the things they say are sacred with the same reverence and respect that they do. I tell them what is sacred to me…and they roll their eyes. I’m just one man, so the laughter in my face is to be expected, or so it seems.
It’s why I bristle when the people from the South got so twisted in their garments over their “heritage”. When I tell people about how much my heritage means to me, and all I get is contempt that I didn’t move sooner when I saw the writing on the wall, so that I could have gotten more $$$$ for the house… as if some other poor bastard would have bought it and be facing what I face now.
I have worked with my own hands on this house for twenty five years now. I saw my father and grandfather in those same places I have stood as if we were all still together, in the moment. I have sunk about $30,000 into the house, because I had planned to die here. I added a bathroom, just put a new roof on all three buildings — the house, the garage, the barn (now a workshop) — — and …. looks like I’m a fool, unless I die here.
So I will try to do just that.
No, put the phone down; not that way. No. But I still can’t see moving. I’m too old. I’m too set in my ways. Even with the outside turned into something else, I still see my father in his recliner smoking a cigarette; I still see my Baba crocheting blankets. I still see my grandfather in the same space my father sat — in a different recliner — years before. I still make halupki and haluski.
I just wanted to open up a debate about this bullshit canard that we all respect what is sacred to another in the context of religion. Or that there is any respect for the individual — — a man’s house is his castle — — right? Oh, well, ok...unless some other rich bastard buys up everything around him and creates Hell on Earth around that castle. I'm one guy, so what I regard as sacred means nothing to anybody else. I submit that is why I bristle when you get a billion people together and convince them to say that their … “father” … was born someplace, and died someplace, those places will hold a different kind of reverence. Those sacred places will inspire generation after generation to keep the war going for thousands of years, to and span the globe with the people who think defending them no matter how many lives are lost, is always worthy. I find this troublesome when Republicans speak about “individual liberty” and “personal conscience.”
Sure, they respect it… when it aligns with theirs. Try to ask them to revere what is sacred to you… and see how that goes.
Indeed, tell me more, please. When a person who is Christian talks about their “individual liberty” and their “personal conscience”, I sort of throw up in my mouth a little bit. What is sacred to me… just makes other people laugh, and i have to live with that because there’s only one of me. Everyone tells me to just “move”, you know…
What If I said the way to solve world wars was as simple as “just leave Jerusalem” What’s the big hassle, right?
I'm an individual. I don’t have any mass of people rushing to defend me.
Interesting dichotomy, isn’t it?
Or a tortured one, depending on where you stand when you look at it.
