Next week, I hope to began to share with you stories from my ridge on the C&O canal towpath from Cumberland MD to Washington, DC.
Virgil, The Aeneid,
Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, translators. (Audible, 2025) Edoardo Ballerini and Emily Wilson, narrators.
Virgil, The Aeneid, Robert Fagles, translator. (New York: Penguin/Viking, 2006), 486 pages including Introduction, map, translator’s postscript, genealogy, suggestive readings, variants to the text, notes on the translation, and pronunciation glossary.
A group of survivors escape the fall of Troy. Led by Aeneas, they make their way to the Italian peninsula. After distractions and battles, they start a new kingdom. In time it will become Rome and the greatest empire the world has known. Virgil wrote this epic poem during the reign of the Augustus, at a time when Rome was at its peak. While the poem ends with the victory of the Trojans over those in Italy, future prophecies look forward to Rome’s rise in power. While Aeneas and his followers display bravery, it’s all done with a backdrop of the gods’ activities which hold the human within their fate. The Aeneid provides the full retelling of the Trojan Horse and from where we get the saying, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
The poem is broken into twelve books. The first book involves Aeneas and followers making their way from a burning Troy. Due to the winds and storms on the sea, they find themselves in Carthage. There, the widow queen Dido rules. She has pledged herself not to marry again, but is intrigued by Aeneas. She asks him to recount their story of escaping Troy and their travels to date, which are told in books two and three. Smitten with Aeneas (with the help of Cupid), she wants a relationship. But Aeneas, while intrigued by Dido, holds hope to the prophecy of a great kingdom to come from his family in Italy. He rebuffs her advances, and leaves Carthage for Italy. Sadly, Dido kills herself, which establishes a a divide between the two rising powers. In book six, Aeneas visits the realm of the dead to learn more of his fate from his father. While there, he sees Dido, but she is now reunited with her first husband and avoids him.
Books 7 to 12 involve the conquest of Italy. It concludes with a final battle which ends in a struggle between Aeneas and Turnus. Aeneas is the victor and Turnus pleads for mercy. Aeneas at first seems to be open to sparing his life, but then he see’s the sword belt of his friend Pallas on Turnus, indicating Turnus had slain him. Aeneas drives his sword into Turnus, assuring his family’s prominence on the Italian peninsula
There are similarities between this book and Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. For some reason, I never read this book. I think it was used in Latin during high school, a class I regret not taking. After a year of Spanish, I was going to transfer to Latin, but I let my Spanish teacher talked me out of it. This book influenced both Augustine’s City of God and Dante’s Inferno. With Dante, he used Virgil to guide him through the layers of hell. Certainly the book served as propaganda for the Roman Caesars, showing their destiny for greatness, it also reminds the readers of the terrible price paid for such glory.
While I mostly listened to a new translation on Audible, I checked out from the local library another recent translation by Robert Fagles. I found myself liking both translation, but really appreciated the aids in Fagles translation.
Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
1975, New York: Avon Books, 1976), 387 pages including a map
I came across this book when I was living in Nevada in the late 1980s, just before Abbey’s death. The adventure excited me. I found myself at the time thinking I was blessed not to have read the book earlier in my life as they closed the B. Everett Jordan dam in North Carolina in the early 1980s. Jordan Lake now covers some of the best whitewater in Central North Carolina. If I had read this book beforehand, it may have given me ideas which were only talked about at launch points along the Haw River, on how to blow up that dam! Woven into the story is a desire to blow up (or have God send a strategic earthquake) and take out Glenn Canyon Dam, restoring the Colorado River to its splendor.
There are four main characters in the book. We first meet Doc Sarvas and his attractive girlfriend with her long rich, molasses-colored hair, Bonnie Abbzub. Doc and Bonnie spend their date nights destroying billboards in the desert around their home in Albuquerque. Doc then takes his Jewish girlfriend on a river trip with Seldom Seen Smith. Smith is a Jack Mormon (non-practicing) but he holds to the church’s older teachings on polygamy. He has a wife in Cedar City, Bountiful, and Green River Utah. His wives gave him the name, “Seldom Seen..” When Smith’s hired helper on the river fails to show up, he hires a drifter, Hayduke, who is an ex-Green Beret Vietnam veteran. As they float down the river, the four of them hatch a plan to strike back at those ruining the American West. At first, they do easy things such as pouring sand in the oil reservoirs and Kero syrup into the fuel of bulldozers. In time, they become more destructive including destroying a railroad and power lines and taking out bridges. On their trail is Bishop Love, a Mormon church official with hopes of political power. He runs a search and rescue outfit. Wanting to end their activities, and give him a name to run for governor, there’s a chase which runs across southern Utah and eventually leads to everyone’s capture except for Hayduke. We last see him drop over an edge of a canyon in a hail of bullets. The reader is left to assume he’s dead.
In the Epilogue, we learn that the three got off fairly easily for their crimes, especially since Doc saved Bishop Love’s life. While they are under probation, Doc decides to convert to Mormonism and marries Bonnie. She refuses to convert because she wants to be the only Jewish Gentile around. Doc isn’t serious about converting, cause he really wants to be a Jack Mormon and assumes he first needs to be the real thing. Two of Seldom’s wives leave him and he sticks close to the wife in Green River. And as they play cards one evening, Hayduke shows up, as he’s recovered from his wounds.
I should have reread this book when living in Utah as iI covered some of the same ground that the Monkey Wrench Gang covered. At the point of reading, my Western experiences were mostly limited to Idaho and Northern Nevada.
After nearly 40 years, this book seemed more juvenile than when I first read it. It’s also more prophetic as Abbey warns of the desert being used for data centers! For the reader, there’s plenty of humor in the book. I was also reminded of Abbey’s vast knowledge of the desert Southwest. Also, there’s plenty of harsh language (with Bonnie trying to clean the guy’s mouths) and plenty of drinking (and Bonnie, who prefers to smoke pot), and references to sex. The book is credited with giving rise to eco-terrorism. Between 1988 and 1992, I read almost all of Abbey’s books. This is the third book I recently reread. The other two are Desert Solitaire (Abbey’s best in my opinion) and The Fool’s Progress.
Carrie Fountain, Burn Lake
(New York: Penguin Books, 2010),
This National Poetry Series winner focuses mostly on the author’s childhood and young adult years in New Mexico. Burn Lake appears in a series of poems interspersed throughout the book. The artificial lake, dug by Burn Construction Company, remained after building a bypass for I-10. It appears a place to swallow hopes and dreams, from a bulldozer to classmate and his motorcycle. These poems focus on fate and impending change (a new McDonalds, a new road, her father unrealized dreams replayed in a pecan orchard). Fountain watches the early morning traffic heading to California on I-10 and wonders where she’s headed. Planted throughout the poems are such observations of a young woman looking at the world around her.
A favorite line:
“A road is the cruelest fate in things to come.”
This is the second book I’ve read by Fountain. The first book,The Life, I read in June. I also heard her speak at this year’s Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin University in Grand Rapids. For those who enjoy poetry, check it out.
Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919,
Grover Gardner, narrator (Audible, 2013), 9 hours and 23 minutes.
It sounds comical. A flood of molasses! But it was also tragic. At lunch hour on January 15, 1919, a 50’ high tank of molasses on Boston’s waterfront collapsed and sent a 2.3 million gallon tidal wave of the thick syrup through the north end of the city. Twenty-one people died and more were injured as nearby buildings collapsed adding debris to the slurry mix. The tank had been topped off the day before with a shipload of molasses. The author divided the book into three parts. Part one deals with the construction and early operation of the tank during the First World War. Part two focused on the events of the tank rupture and the clean-up. The third part focuses on the courtroom battle over the responsibility for the disaster.
The tank, owned by. United States Industrial Alcohol, had been hastily built to supply industrial alcohol for the use in war munitions to be sent to Europe. Built along the inner harbor, the tank would hold the molasses waiting rail transport to the company’s distillery in Cambridge. From the beginning, there were questions about the safety of the tank. Those servicing the tank, loading molasses from ships and onto train tank cars complained about its safety. It leaked, so the company had the tank painted brown so it wouldn’t show the molasses seeping from the seams. They re-sealed the seams, twice.. But the molasses kept leaking and the tank often groaned. However, children in the poor neighborhood would often take their pails and collect molasses for their family use from the pools around the based of the tank.
After the war, with the 18th Amendment ratification on the horizon, US Industrial Alcohol decided to shift to rum production, hoping to unload the product before the nation outlawed the sell of alcohol. The last shipment to the tank was destined for such use, but instead spilled out across Boston’s North End.
The political struggles of a nation play out against the backdrop of this story. The Great War, Prohibition, labor and ethnical battles played a part. 1919 was a year in which anarchists activity seemed to be on the rise, allowing the owner of the tank to suggest its failure came from deliberate destruction instead of shoddy construction. In the trial, the company presented itself as a victim against the 100s of civil lawsuits who said they were responsible.
The final third of the book deals with the legal battles, which continued for several years. While the company avoided criminal charges, they were required to pay significant damage to the families of the deceased and the injured along with property damages. Puleo brings the characters in the story to life, making this an interesting book to read.
