What's Tony Thinking

At Week’s End

If you happen to be in Seattle you might enjoy swinging by Carkeek Park (north Seattle) to see the spawning salmon. I was up there the other day and was stunned by what I saw. This run is the largest number of fish I’ve ever observed during the fall spawning season. The fish are Chum Salmon, which are not much prized for consumption either by humans or by Orca whales, but are still amazing to watch as they work their way up Piper’s Creek thrashing over barriers.

I asked a couple of biologists what might account for the bigger run. A number of possible factors, smolt survival rates, ocean conditions, habitat restoration. Or it may just be all the rain we’ve been having this month. The rain fills up the streams, like Piper’s Creek, making it far easier for the salmon to get upstream. They pool offshore, waiting for their moment. Chum salmon have a 5 year life span. They are big fish, usually two feet in length, weighing in at about 10 pounds. There are at leasts four in the photo here. Can you find them all?

Maybe you’ll be going to see the new movie version of Barbara Robinson’s Christmas classic, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever this weekend? It’s not only lots of fun, it’s also great theology as grace comes for those for whom we least expect it and those the world would say least deserve it, in this case, “the horrible Herdmans.”

Here’s a wonderful review/ essay about the movie from Joey Goodall at the Mockingbird site. In his review Goodall writes about what he thought about God as a child, and how this story testified to something quite different.

“[As a child] my assumptions about adults had extended to assumptions about God. Because I thought adults wanted perfect kids, I wondered if God also favored the perfect and blemish-free, leaving me and everyone I knew out. But, if the creator of this book was able to love the flawed characters she’d created, maybe adults could love actual flawed children. And maybe God, who created all of us, already did.”

Lately I’ve been enjoying the fiction of the not terribly well-known but amazing writer, David Rhodes. Ten years ago I came upon Rhodes book, Driftless, and was blown away. Recently, I re-read it for our book group and loved it all over again.

But I also discovered something I’d missed ten years ago, that Rhodes had done two follow-on novels after Driftless, situated in the same part of rural Wisconsin and with some of the same, as well as many new, characters. The second is Jewelweed, which I am now enjoying. The third is Painting Beyond Walls. 

These novels fall somewhere between Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone stories and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series. More humor than the Gilead novels, and more depth than Lake Woebegone. But like both with a discernible outline of grace amid life’s many dark clouds.

The “Driftless” of the title is the name of a region in Wisconsin that was somehow untouched by glaciers and hence free of the “glacial drift” that ground and swept most of the state. It is a hilly area whose residents are isolated from the world but deeply connected to one another, at least in Rhodes’s books.

In the late 70”s Rhodes had a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He recovered enough to write these books before his death in 2022. He credited his neighbor’s kindness for his ability to go on living and writing after the accident.

To close, I suggested in my previous blog it is a time to be curious. Here’s a provocation for curiosity, consider it my weekend puzzler. The very interesting sociologist Musa al-Gharbi who teaches at NYU Stonybrook had this to say about the election: “Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle.” Lots to think about there. Certainly “counter-intuitive” as the phrase goes.

Musa al-Gharbi is quoted in a longer piece by David Brooks about why identity politics, so beloved by the left, the academy and Democrats, failed. Calling to mind a line from the economist Glenn Lowry who, before the 2016 election said, “Those who live by the sword of identity politics, will die by it.”