Robert Root

 

(Broadcast on WCMU-FM Morning Edition Fall 1982)

 

If traveling some six thousand miles in a single month taught me nothing else—other than the wisdom of getting to a place and staying put—it taught me the arbitrariness of the boundaries people project upon the land. After all, nature puts no boundary lines upon the earth; those that appear on maps are products solely of the lawyer's imagination and the surveyor's ingenuity.

 

I should have known all this before, of course—I've traveled enough to know that if you fall asleep in western Ohio and then wake up with only the landscape to tell you where you are, you really don't know if you're in southern Michigan, northern Indiana, or eastern Illinois. I've seen the flatlands of northwestern Minnesota become the flatlands of first North Dakota and then Manitoba with only highway markers and the colors of police cars to give warning that some people have divided this featureless landscape into two states of one country and a province of another.

 

But I only began to think about the ways the land contradicted subdivisions as I traveled west one August. Leaving Missouri and entering Kansas, I saw no difference in scenery. I watched the land change as we crossed Kansas, observing the lift of the land as we drove from the prairies of the Missouri River basin into the table-flat high plains section of western Kansas, on our way toward the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. But I never saw sharp distinctions—one topographic division led into another and, when we crossed the border into Colorado, I saw only more high plains before us. It would be another hour before the gradual incline led us to a place where the mountains would emerge on the horizon.

 

The remainder of the trip confirmed the suspicions about boundaries that Kansas and Colorado raised. At Mesa Verde, I looked out from Park Point at the one place in the nation where four states meet in a single location. The Park Point handbook could superimpose boundary lines on pictures of the vistas I beheld, but I couldn't see any natural borders between Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. In the days that followed, as we roamed the Four Corners area, I could see that changes in topography were always well within states, never between them. The canyonlands of Utah became the canyonlands of Arizona, following the Colorado River; the Guadalupe Mountains made no distinction between Texas and New Mexico; the Chihuahuan Desert extended from deep within Mexico to deep within the United States.

 

I could see as well that nature's indifference to boundaries extends to the zones of habitation it creates. Rivers are the centers of their environment, not the edges; nature works upward from them toward mountaintops, creating climate zones along the way, saying that here on the plains the pinyon may grow and here in the foothills belongs Ponderosa pine and here in the Montane Zone may grow Douglas fir. And yet a traveler up a mountainside will often see the zones overlap, pinyon growing with Ponderosa pine and, higher up, Ponderosa pine mingling with Douglas fir.

 

In McKittrick Canyon, in the Guadalupe Mountains, hikers can tramp through something like five biotic communities in a couple of hours, discovering the northernmost limits of the Texas Madrone tree, the westernmost limits of some deciduous trees more common to the Appalachians, the southernmost limits of some conifers.  Such a mixture of habitats causes a mingling of unexpected forms of wildlife as well.

 

The blurring of zones of habitation isn't confined to flora and fauna—it happens with people as well. I'd often noticed how southern Iowans behaved like northern Missourians and northern Iowans behaved like southern Minnesotans. In the west, I found the New Mexicans of Las Cruces not much different from the Texans of El Paso. Santa Fe seemed virtually a McKittrick Canyon of human habitation, where the styles of Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Tesque Pueblo, of Eastern Jew, Western Gay, Mexican, cowboy, and American Indian, all blend in an adobe melting pot. In parts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, the Navajo Reservation occupies a space larger than New England, unnatural boundaries overlapping other unnatural boundaries.

 

Nowhere can I find evidence that boundaries between states and between groups of people are anything more than the fictions of mankind, unnatural pretenses that sharp distinctions are possible. Nature seems to work by gradation, oblivious to unnecessary delineations. In place of continued conflict over imagined borders and hair-splitting distinctions of race, religion, and ideology, mankind might do well to ponder nature's example.

 

 

Note: "Boundaries" was included in Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves. Glimmerglass Editions. 2013: 64-66.

 

(Broadcast on WCMU-FM Morning Edition Fall 1987)

 

It's grey and overcast outside as I write this, but for a little while the pavement is dry and the puddles on the lawn are shrinking. In the three weeks since a deluge of battering rain triggered the worst flooding in Michigan history, the rain has seemed to be a permanent part of the landscape; such brief respites remind us that it's possible we'll spend a day in the sun again.

 

In such a month as this, after the devastation of swirling floodwaters, after days and weeks of virtually unrelieved gloom and damp, we struggle to figure out how to respond. We need distance from events to give us perspective, but the unchanging weather refuses us space to retreat to. Our collective spirits are being tested and we feel an end-of-winter gloom in the middle of autumn.

 

The physical damage of the flooding has been so widespread that everyone knows a host of horror stories—collapsed basements, ruined carpeting and furniture, lost books and papers and photographs. In my town the Pine River surrounded a local supermarket and department store, swept across downtown streets, closed every bridge connecting the two sides of town. What on the first day was a curiosity of raging water and limited inundation became on the second day a creeping threat and on the third a relentlessly spreading terror. From dry ground on impassable streets we stared uncomprehendingly at houses made uninhabitable by the floodwater. While I watched, playful canoeists out sightseeing paddled down the middle of Downie Street past a despondent couple in a rowboat—the men in the canoe trailed a mallard decoy, the couple transported luggage away from their apartment building.

 

Even those whose homes were safe on high ground had connections to the damage. A couple who had recently moved to a new home found five feet of water in their old one and pondered the impact on the unfinalized sale; an older house down by the river that we had thought of buying three years before, its exterior totally renovated by its new owners, was completely surrounded by water several feet deep. Friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers—everywhere you turned you found someone damaged or ruined. One day when the water had receded, we helped a couple empty their home, lugging waterlogged bedding to the street, disinfecting furniture, ripping up ruined carpeting and pulling up the spongy linoleum under it and watching the wooden floors begin to buckle as they dried. The smell of muck and mold and disinfectant stayed in our lungs for hours after we had returned to dry ground, a shower, and clean clothes.

 

The spiritual battering of the flood's aftermath has been even more widespread. As the rains continued and the waters rose again, we watched the weather with numbed disbelief, the initial shock and eagerness to rebuild replaced by a sodden weariness and persistent wariness—no time to ponder cause and effect, only dazed acceptance of a permanently waterlogged lifestyle.

 

If any good comes from the weeks of relentlessly rainy gloom, it lies in the constant reminder to those unaffected by the flood of the plight of those devastated by it. Those of us on high ground have a tendency to get on with our daily lives once our curiosities and conversations are sated with flood information; those still waiting for the waters to recede, still struggling to count and compensate their losses, still listening nervously to the rain at night and waking with alarmed alertness before dawn, know that the fabric of their lives has been altered and their sense of security perhaps permanently shaken. We highlanders need to stay aware of the lowlanders' situation: there but for the grace of topography go we.

 

If anything, these days in deep water ought to remind us that much of what we occupy ourselves with daily is of transitory importance, that ultimately what matters is the quality of life where we live. Moreover, the quality of our lives is inextricably bound to the quality of our neighbors' lives. In an age when our society continually invites us to isolate ourselves from one another, to value our individual desires above our communal needs, the lesson of catastrophe is that we can't survive in isolation. The flood's effect is paradoxical: at the same time the rising waters cut us off from one another, they remind us that no man is an island.

 

If we haven't learned that lesson these last few weeks, we are in far deeper waters than we can handle.

 

 

Note: "In Deep Water" was included in Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves. Glimmerglass Editions. 2013: 42-44.

 

 

(Broadcast on WCMU-FM Morning Edition Fall 1981)

 

 

One morning this week, when I began my early morning walk to the university, autumn was in evidence all around me. The air was chill and moist, and wood smoke drifted in it from somewhere, reminding me of the smell of burning leaves that pervaded the autumns of my childhood. In the sky the bright fall harvest moon was low above the western horizon, reluctantly giving up the night, but still not dimmed by the onset of the dawn.

 

My usual route to school takes me down a street of older houses, where the neighbors seem to worry little about the trespassing of leaves from one another's trees. No homeowners here have scurried out to rake the lawn free of evidence of fall and prop up plastic bags at the curb like an honor guard saluting their compulsive tidiness. You can still hear the rustle and crackle of crisp dead leaves under your feet and occasionally plow through ankle-high drifts of colorful decay. Occasionally, disheveled mounds of leaves reveal the places where the disorder of nature has been improved upon by the chaos-making of children. Even in the stillness of the morning, more leaves detach themselves from the branches overhead and drift to the ground. About now in the season, the trees above your head and the carpet of leaves below your feet seem almost to mirror one another. The passage down an autumn street is hard to complete without thoughts of the season.

 

I've always been fond of fall, but never so much as this year, perhaps because I'm finally accepting the onset of my own autumnal season. The metaphor of the seasons for the stages of a man's life may be a commonplace, but it's durable because it's apt, even though we never realize its appropriateness fully until we've gladly given up attempts to make our summers linger.

 

Summer seems to me to be too intense, too extravagant. It celebrates its lush fertility in bursts of excess, expending the virility of its heat upon lengthening days with no acknowledgment that the days grow shorter midway through the season. Summer is all heat and light, all sensuality and ardor, all undirected energy and undifferentiated passion; its color is green, a sign of fertility but a mark of conformity as well, a willingness to be regimented in the pursuit of pleasure.

 

Autumn moves at a different pace. Its days are temperate, nights gradually cooler. As its heat retreats, and its light grows less intense, it heightens other senses, making you more aware of color and tastes and smells, making you more discriminating and alert about subtler pleasures. It's a more sober season, more reflective and thoughtful. It teaches you to understand, accept, and expect change; it focuses your attention on transition, on what you've learned and what you have yet to learn, on what you've done and what you've left to do. Autumn never deceives you about its ability to last; even as, in Indian summer, it lets you remember fondly the seasons past, it never lets you forget that winter is coming, that you have to accept its onset, that you have to be prepared for it.

 

I think there's something to celebrate in autumn, and I apply the season to my own life. If I take it more seriously than I do summer, I don't take it somberly. After all, I see myself as only beginning my season; there's hope that I'll display my brightest colors, channel my energies into a stirring achievement, right at the moment before I begin to let my powers fade. You could do worse than be a tree at the height of its individuality, its color, its perception and acceptance of the change of seasons. You could do worse than be a harvest moon, full, serene, brilliant, illuminating more and more the lengthening night below you.

 

I find comfort and reassurance in the autumn season. I'm really going to enjoy it while it lasts.

 

 

Note: "Autumn" was included in Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves. Glimmerglass Editions. 2013: 36-37.

 

Having discovered a few recordings of my radio scripts on cassette, I searched our garage for a box with all the typed copies of essays written for my university's broadcast of "Morning Edition." My colleague Ken, who was taping film reviews for a local slot on that program, suggested I write book reviews for it. I did write a few, focusing on writers I liked and sometimes taught, but I wasn't comfortable doing it. I had no real alternative in mind when I asked John, the station's executive producer, if I could write something other than book reviews. "What would you write about?" he asked. "Just anything I feel like writing about," I answered. "Okay," he said. So, I did.

 

In 1980, when I started writing radio essays, I had completed my first book, Thomas Southerne, drawn from my dissertation research on Restoration theater, and written conference papers and articles on composition and rhetoric and English pedagogy. All that was about to elevate me from assistant professor to associate professor. I was a fully functioning academic. But as an undergraduate, I'd written a column for the college paper, The Lamron, succeeding a friend who had published satirical and humorous pieces. Titled "Root '66," my feature managed to amuse, entertain, or annoy those students and faculty who occasionally read it. I hadn't written that kind of thing in fifteen years and, probably because encouraging students to write personal essays had helped center my thinking somewhat, I had mellowed quite a bit. I felt ready to write short random essays.

 

The topics I felt like writing about were wide-ranging: our family life in Alma, my Western New York childhood, my reading, my viewing, the cycle of seasons, life on the road, the cosmos, a philosophy of place, and even, occasionally, current events. The first 20 scripts were written and recorded in the late summer and autumn of 1980, when Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were competing for the presidency. My satirical piece endorsing Bugs Bunny for president made one colleague confront me about my failure to be more reverential about the nation's highest office. Two other essays, titled "The Voter's Prayer" and "Evolution and Education," were never aired. I tried for fewer opinion pieces in ensuing essays.

 

At the end of each school year, I collected my scripts into binders with general titles: Airwaves Essays I, II, and III, Alternate Route (a variation on my old "Root '66" title), and finally Thinking Out Loud, drawn from my habitual tagline, "This is Bob Root, thinking out loud." The series ran weekly two-thirds of each year between 1980 and 1987, eventually totaling 225 scripts and only ending when I felt the need to write longer, more complicated essays.

 

Twenty-six years later, hoping to better preserve some of that work, I included fifty-two radio essays in Limited Sight Distance: Essays from Airwaves. I claimed in the preface that writing around three dozen essays a year "forces you to be more alert to the world, to move through your life always open to the possibility that what happens to you—whatever you notice, view, read, observe, experience, hear or overhear, wherever you go, however you get through your days—might end up in an essay. You walk through your life ever so much more awake because, pressed by constantly recurring deadlines, a part of you is always testing potential opening lines, composing narrative or descriptive or expository or reflective sentences." I compared it to "having a play-by-play announcer and a color commentator piped in over images from a video camera attached to your head, permanently displaying your angle of vision."

 

Sometimes a broadcast would prompt listeners to get in touch. One man wrote me about how, after hearing my script about a small-town hamburger joint, he convinced his co-workers to lunch at a local restaurant rather than a fast-food chain. The restaurant made their own pies, and my correspondent reported having had a slice of both the rhubarb and the lemon. Other people approached me to share their own thoughts about that week's subject. Hans, my department chair, sometimes stopped by my office to say he'd been in the shower during the broadcast and only heard the final minute or so and wanted to know what he'd missed. These encounters taught me something about writing essays—that what really interests you enough to write about, whether ordinary or idiosyncratic, will inevitably set off vibrations in other people, a kind of sympathetic tuning, almost in spite of your intentions. You may be writing for yourself but that doesn't keep readers from connecting to what you've written.

 

I'm going to post some of my radio essays over the coming weeks, ones that resonate with me, ones that might have resonated with some listeners.