DVD Review: Colonial House

Colonial House, an eight-part documentary, was one of a series of “educational reality shows” that aired on PBS a few years ago. I’ve liked all the incarnations of this idea, where they take modern people and make them live like people did in past centuries, from the gentle 1900 House to the whiny 1940s House and the savagely funny Frontier House.

So, what do we learn from Colonial House? This: People don’t like to be told what to do.

Colonial House’s recipe is fairly simple: Send 15 or 20 “colonists” (ordinary Americans from all walks of life) to a remote shoreline in Maine, add some log cabins and a lot of dried peas, and see how they get along with day-to-day life using only the technology that was available in the 1600s—essentially, sharpened sticks and handsaws.

The story starts out with the plucky colonists, wearing scratchy-looking costumes, arriving at the dusty encampment that they'll call home for the next three months. Their first job is to read their “charter” to find out who’ll be doing what—who gets to be governor, lay preacher, freedmen, and indentured servants. The one chosen for governor is a Baptist minister from Texas in real life, a kind family man with plenty of experience motivating people. But before long, we find he has an agenda: He wants this little colony to be a City of God—the kind of harmonious Christian community that nowadays can rarely be found outside of cults and communes. And right away, there’s trouble.

All begins to unravel when some of the colonists can’t bring themselves to follow the rules that would have governed a 17th-century settlement. The atheists refuse to attend church. The women don’t like wearing head coverings, and they resent having to cook for all the men (no small feat with 1600s technology) while being banned from sitting on the governing council. The indentured servants resent being—well, indentured servants, which turns out to be just as bad as it sounds. And the two African-American participants have their own set of objections to this proto-slavery system, and both leave the colony abruptly. So what starts out looking like a living-museum piece on how to split lumber turns out to be a crash-course in civics.

I can only imagine the producers of the show saw this coming. They decided, after all, that the “governor” would be a real-life Baptist minister. And the “lay minister,” supposedly plucked from the crowd and forced to learn preaching on the fly, is in fact a theology professor. So right away, I’m thinking, “Evangelical Christians running things? That won't fly with everybody.”

And it doesn't, at least not at first. The Bible-quoting leaders are frustrated by their church-resistant flock. They try a few kind words, and they get nowhere. They try force, and they get rebellion. They finally have to throw up their hands and abandon all hope of saving their countrymen’s souls, because the corn needs planting and nobody can work while everyone’s yelling or tied to a pole in punishment. I guess on a remote tip of northeast Maine, with winter already biting at your heels, you either get your priorities straight or you starve.

This all makes me wonder how many people died in the early colonies as a result of bad management. Colonial House shows us that an off-balance colony can quickly tumble into real trouble—food supplies dwindle and the local native Americans, who are in a position to help, are offended by the bad manners and clumsy bargaining skills of the colonists.

And while nothing’s really at stake here—these faux colonists are merely stockpiling supplies to see if they “would” survive the winter, which none of them will stay to see—still, it’s a fascinating look at the complex little system that’s duplicated over and over in human societies everywhere, from Rotary clubs to sports teams to the United Nations. Governing, large or small, is a tricky thing. There’s a fine line between leadership and despotism, and those who get a little power seem to want a lot. And suddenly your goofy, salt-haired fatherly type morphs into a dictator, and everyone becomes obsessed with bringing him down. Meanwhile, banks crash and people lose their jobs and small countries are invaded and soldiers abuse POWs, and…wait, that’s another reality show.

DVD Review: Ballykissangel

Now deep into my Netflix addiction, I’ve just finished all six seasons of the BBC comedy-drama Ballykissangel.

Ballykissangel is one of those shows that had to grow on me. When I first encountered it on PBS years ago, it seemed like a self-consciously quirky knockoff of Northern Exposure­—a fish-out-of-water story about an English priest who’s been transferred to a backwater village in Ireland. The town comes replete with eccentric locals—the rich guy, the feminist, the rubes, the barflies—and, at first, the humor seemed cloying and the accents impenetrable.

But I soon realized that there was much more to Ballykissangel. Once I developed an ear for the accents, I found the show had writers, good ones, who could weave together disparate stories and somehow make them come out right at the end. They could elicit a satisfied sigh from me, or they could turn on a dime and suddenly make me think, hard. The plots are secondary; the main attraction is the relationships that grow and dissolve between the characters—beautifully drawn, complex morality tales of flawed people who, somehow, become important to us. And then, to lighten things up, there’s the occasional flatulent dog, or an automated confessional booth falling off a truck, or the impossibly beautiful 23-year-old Colin Farrell, already with the eyebrows.

The show went through a couple of bumpy patches and jarring cast changes, notably in seasons 4 and 6. But somehow the writers always pulled it off. Just when I thought they were about to shipwreck the show in a morass of slapstick, they’d stun me with a story about alcoholism, or the inexact sciences of preaching and policing, or the twin punishments of grief and guilt. I kept thinking, “How did they get me to care about these people so much?” And that, of course, is what a good writer does.

So bravo, Ballykissangel. I only wish there were more of you to enjoy.

Poem: For Blossom, a $10 Hamster

Your God will know you

by the slant of your one white spot

and the way you don't cry out

when lifted from your cardboard cage

by the giant hand of a five-year-old girl.

In your two months you already

have become secretly pregnant,

the dials of your soft body

spinning through their complications

in the slave cells of the pet store.

Think, if you were rare, the distant sightings

and cataloguing, your steep and cordoned

habitat, the teams debating your very

existence on that clean pin-top of land.

Instead you, born in a clutch of sisters,

known only by your crooked spot

(though to your sisters you smelled like you

and your name was never Blossom),

here you are sleeping on sawdust

the girl tries so hard to keep clean,

and though she is not your God,

she lays a finger on you late at night

to feel your warm pulsar of breath.

And when the mean boy comes over to play,

she hides your box under the bed

and says you ran away,

her face on fire with the lying

she does for you, Blossom, as if

you were the last of your kind

on Earth, and she

was the only one who knew.

(appeared in Mudfish, 2009)

The Shoe's Tale, Part II

The shoe went missing again last night. This time there was a clue, perhaps: a hellacious, snarling fight outside my bedroom window around midnight, followed by the smell of skunk spray fired at point-blank range. Today the whole house reeked of skunk, and so did my car -- even though it was nowhere near the fight.

After two rounds of searching, I finally found the shoe this afternoon under the back deck and fished it out of there with my nice swan-neck hoe. The shoe is none the worse for wear -- still gray and stiff and, as always after one of these abductions, laced tight to within an inch of its life. Once again, the intruder stole the right shoe. The left one has never been shoenapped.

Poem: A Parking Lot

I stayed kissed.

I said god, god

of the glacier letting go,

god that made the mouths

of Connecticut Valley men

strong after all that

rough weather. Hands

in your pockets, I pulled

you in. The air snapped

its ten-degree

fingers. Couldn’t tell

if every crackmoney tramp 

in town was yours

already, but then—black sky,

blue stars, naked heat

at the fingertip hollow 

of your neck—

that was home,

that was here.

I live there now.

I stayed.

(appeared in Northwest Review, 2008)

The Shoe's Tale

I have a mystery. Twice now, some animal has dragged one of my gardening shoes off into the yard at night, swiping it from its usual spot on the back deck. Always the same shoe—the right one. I find it in the morning in some far-flung corner of the yard. There are signs of a struggle: The shoe is filthy, its laces are pulled tight so it looks pinched and strangled, and they’re gray and stiff with what I can only assume is spit.

     I’ve never caught the animal red-handed, so I can only theorize what animal it is, and why it keeps taking my shoe.

     1) It’s a gang of deer who hate humans, and the smell of that shoe just gets their blood boiling. To hell with you humans and your deer fence and your shoe and your shoelaces! We will rip your bloody shoelaces out by the roots! And then we’ll kick down your deer fence and then you won’t be able to put on your shoe so you won’t be able to fix the fence. And then we can eat all the tomatoes we want. Damn, these shoelaces are strong.

     2) It’s a cat who is thrilled to bits that someone has left two perfectly good shoes out in the open. This yard is like a land of miracles—the shoes keeps reappearing, always in the same place. At home, the humans are all very fuss-fuss about putting their shoes in a closet and shutting the door. Whenever the cat makes a grab for a shoelace there, it’s a freakin’ national emergency. There was only that one ruined shoe that one time; it’s not like they didn’t have another.

     3) It’s a raccoon mom who is teaching her kids how to be clever thieves. The lesson always starts off so well—look here! A pair of shoes!—but then descends into chaos and unintentional comedy as she tries to drag the shoe across the deck and into the yard. Jesus, the noise! This heist will wake the dead. And if she gets busted, the kids will never let her forget it. And then one of them—the little wiseacre—says, “But Mom, what will we do with a shoe anyway?” And she realizes—slowly, but with utter clarity and conviction—that she has given birth to children who have no imagination. But by then it’s almost dawn and they’re all full of leftover Mexican food anyway. They will go home and dream of corn tortillas and small banditos.

     The next day I put on my spitty, dirty shoe—that’s why God made socks—and am back in the garden, trying to tell what’s weeds and what’s lettuce. Afterward, I leave the shoes on the porch. In a way, it’s an honor that they’ve been touched by something wild. And, like all of us, they may one day be taken out of the yard, borne off to some other grand adventure. Who am I to hold them back?

Poem: Daughter

Fortune: You will receive a compliment 

from a stranger on Friday

Stranger, was that you

ordering tacos to go

at the long glass counter

steamed with beans and beef,

your daughter in tow,

her hair a weedy lot

betraying her mother gone,

a father with no heart to comb?

There’ll be time enough for chance

in ten or twelve years 

when you’re home alone,

Danny Gatton on the stereo,

a bill from her college

a landmine you found

in the mailbox, this black hole

you birthed—every drink

and dollar and man

falling ever in to her.

And you were lost yourself,

a blue star trailing a train of light,

only visible a moment

that night in the taqueria

as you turned—was it 

my jacket, my earrings?—

before she pulled you back,

you with a laugh for her,

her hair such a godly mess,

her face so bright

she could burn you alive.

(appeared in Northwest Review, 2008)