Month: November 2008

Sara Gruen tells two stories here: the day-to-day contretemps and frustrations of a decrepit old man in a nursing home….a fairly friendly one but still a nursing home…and his recollections of his days as a circus vet which begin with his dropping out of Cornell Veterinarian School just before his final examinations because his parents, already almost insolvent because his depression-era clients can’t pay his father their vet bills, are killed in an automobile accident.

Depressed and desperate, Jacob Jankowski, college drop-out, hops a freight car and finds himself with some workers in a small time circus.  Narrowly avoiding being thrown out, Jacob begins the first of eights years working with circus animals including proud prancing horses, an almost human elephant, a toothless lion, winsome apes and treacherous tigers.

Workers in a small traveling circus, often not paid, traveled and sometimes slept with the animals but were usually fed in a time when food was scarce.  The performers fared better than the workers, but even they confronted dangerous situations more often than not.  This circus comes to an end when a fire stampedes the animals right through the Big Top.

Adding to the excitement is the violent jealousy of a psychotic animal trainer,  the love of a beauteous lady horse-troop mistress, and the revenge of a terribly mistreated elephant.

Jacob goes on to successful years with a big circus and then a municipal zoo and even his nursing home tribulations yield to one last adventurous excusion.

In these short stories, a sequel to Brokeback Mountain,  Annie Proulx writes with bitter humor and irony about the hard scrabble life of small town Wyoming folks like the failed farmer turned coal miner whose brother-in-law talks him into helping with a wild horse round-up and he dies of a blood clot from being kicked in the leg.  Or the pregnant teenager who enlists in the army, becomes an MP and has her arm blown off. There is also the hardy woman hiker who dies alone with her foot caught under a rock on a little used trail.

Some stories are about early days when a barren pioneer woman might want a child so badly she would put kiddie clothes on a sagebrush, or a prehistoric Indian might be crushed in a buffalo stampede over a cliff or a teen-age homesteader dies of pneumonia after freezing to his saddle cowboying for a miserly rancher while his teen-age bride dies alone in their cabin trying to deliver her first child.

There are a couple of satire-laced tales where the Devil and his Sidekick amuse themselves while riding around the scenes of Hell in a golfcart planning new scenes of horror such as  New Orleans disasters embellished with additional crocs and imported plague-bearing insects or a Tour de France over the rock and boulder strewn Wyoming hills.

Yet the beauty of the Western hills and prairies, the hawks and cottonwoods, the space and stillness, the big sky are all here too…a gorgeous setting where it is dangerous and hard to make a living.

This clearly written and heavily documented book makes me want to avoid not only all processed foods but also all supermarkets. Yet where else can we shop except in summer at the farmers’ markets?

Raj Patel has worked for the World Bank, the WTO and the UN as well as Food First. Not only are the petrochemical companies controlling our food chain and the contents of our food but they are also sending small farmers all over the world into bankruptcy in favor of a few large agribusinesses. People can be obese and malnourished on overly fattened and sugared processed foods. The poor have little access to anything else.

Massive transportation systems are managed by a few large corporations. They are not only using too much petroleum for fuel; they are also using too much in destructive and harmful fertilizers. Their latest dangerous push is for genetically modified seeds that incorporate both fertilizers and pesticides into the seed and eliminate all other varieties.

Our only recourse is to seek out local suppliers, not easy to do in a part of the world where only half the year is a growing season. Perhaps we need to go back to preserving and/or freezing fruits and vegetables and patronize local organic meat and dairy farmers.

Above all we should avoid the big name brands and try to support those that benefit the farmer as well as ourselves.