And the Award Goes to...

I used to be a member of HWA (Horror Writers Association). The same anagram, ironically, for the reason for the title of this blog: Hemlock wooly adelgid (the invasive insect that's driving our native hemlock trees to extinction). I found HWA (the one in all caps), at the time, to be a very helpful writers association and I enjoyed my initial membership. These days, I can't recall when I first joined or for how long I was a member. But I was there for a number of years.

One thing that HWA does is sponsor an award. It's called the Bram Stoker Award. I never paid a lot of attention to it, except that every year I would get a ballot to cast votes for the various works placed on those ballots. Best novel. Best short story. Best first novel. Best screenplay. You know how it goes.

Eventually, it seemed that the sole reason for the organization became the issuing of these awards. I began to lose interest in the group and let my membership lapse. It's been a long, long time since I was a member.

One of my friends actually won one of these awards. I won't name him, since I don't know how he'd feel about that. But he began to call the annual prizes doled out by HWA the "Stroker Awards". It was, he felt, a huge circle jerk. In fact, I'd have to agree with him. For what I saw happening was that every year I'd witness writers campaigning for their works. First they'd pepper the Internet chat rooms with propaganda for their stories and novels--generally after getting close friends who were also members to cast a few nominations of their works (and for whom they'd also cast votes--quid pro quo aka circle jerk). From there, it would get worse. After the most popular writers had their works solidly nominated and on the ballots, I would begin to get slammed with notes and letters asking me to cast my ballot for their novel, short story, article, what-have-you.

This seemed exceptionally venal to me. It reeked of a kind of narcissism that frankly sickens me. One year, a particularly untalented fellow peppered me almost constantly with pleas to vote for his stuff. He was, apparently, well-liked at writers gatherings and conventions where he'd attend (despite the fact that he couldn't write worth a good goddamn). I assume he had an outgoing personality and what was once called the "gift for gab". But he couldn't write worth shit, and I always felt sorry for him. Of course he won at least one of these things. At that point, the awards, and the group administering them, really became, at best, disputable for me.

This is why I finally dropped my membership in HWA and never even considered joining SFWA or MWA or any of the other WAs that might be out there. I just don't like seeing the egotistical bullshit falling like stench-rain over my life.

Are there positive aspects to these organizations? I'm sure there are. I think some of them have arms that work hard to protect writers' rights. It might be the closest thing to a union that we are likely to see for fiction writers. And that aspect of it is a good thing. But these seem to be, overall, subdued to a secondary status to the politics of issuing these stupid awards.

And the little cliques of butt-buddies and ass-kissers who tend to dominate these groups? Well, they can stick it. Unless that aspect of these organizations is wiped out or reined in, they're not going to do much of anyone any good.

The super-cool Bram Stoker Award. A little haunted house created by, I think, Tim Kirk. Has a tiny (blatantly vaginal) door (complete with clitoris) that you can open up to reveal a brass plaque inside engraved with the award-winner's name and for what he/she won the award (sniff-sniff). This is what my pal (who won one) called "The Stroker Award". Referring, of course, to the incestuous cabal to which one must generally be a part to nab one of these meaningless bits of propaganda. (Saving, of course, that Tim Kirk's design kicks High Holy ass.)

Where Did You Go?

When I was starting out as a writer, I used to attend a lot of genre writers conventions. Weird little gatherings for weird little folk who wrote weird little tales. After some time, I realized that I didn't care for 99% of the folk who came to these things.

The awards ceremonies were sometimes fun, but the political circle jerks that led up to the issuing of these awards sickened me. Year after year I would receive letters and phone calls and (after computers became commonplace) emails lobbying me for my support for this writer or that novel or this short story. It made me sick. Year after year I would see undeserving work winning awards that meant absolutely nothing, save that some writer had a lot of friends whom he had swabbed so effectively.

It's no wonder I stopped going to these "conventions". As I got older and began to see the natural world dissolving around me, I decided that what I really needed to do was get back out into the outdoors a lot more often to experience the wild places that I loved before they were all paved over or cut down or just generally wiped off the map in an orgy of human destruction. So, I stopped going to writers conventions and started spending a lot more time traveling to places where I could swim in clean waters, climb to roadless summits, and walk in virgin forests. These places are becoming more rare with each passing second. Every time we blink we lose a forest somewhere.

Sometimes I bump into some writer I used to know (usually online) and they ask me where I've been and why I don't come to this or that gathering anymore. I try to be polite, usually, but mainly I'm honest and tell them that I reached a point where I couldn't stand to be there anymore. These same folk don't know what to say when I tell them what I've been doing instead of standing around watching a bunch of disingenuous fops pretend that they're somehow important. They don't understand how I can expend the calories to hike to the top of a mountain. It's beyond their ken.

Instead of attending those writers gatherings, I go hiking. I climb mountains. I watch wild animals, who are far more interesting and far more worthwhile in the scheme of things than some pandering wanna-Stoker asswipe. One thing that I like to do when I'm in a particular area of the country is to climb that area's highest point. Sometimes the hike is very easy, and sometimes it's a long and difficult undertaking. There are even clubs that do this, much like there are gathering places for passionless writers.

I'm heading up to New England later this year. I want to climb some mountains in Maine, principally, but I also was thinking of hitting some other areas. One thing that I find disturbing in the East is that most states have rammed roads to their highest points, spoiling them almost beyond repair with automobile access and parking lots and summit construction. Case in point being Mount Washington and Clingman's Dome and Brasstown Bald and Mount Mitchell...well, I could go on.

But I was pleasantly surprised to see that, for reasons that are temporary, there is no automobile access to the summit of Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusettes. Unfortunately, the foot-travel only access is temporary. But enjoy it while you can, folk. I may take the time to do so, just so that I can see what it's like to stand there without having to worry about the constant arrival of endless numbers of lazy Americans driving to a place where access should be strictly on foot.

Ah, if only the road closure was made permanent. If only you worthless car-driving assholes were forced to walk up.

Alas!

Learn to hike, you lazy bastards!

The Hemlocks are Breathing their Last.

Well, I knew the day was coming.

In western North Carolina, and especially in the Great Smoky Mountains and points north and south, it’s all but over.

The hemlock trees are all but history in those areas. What we call “hwa”, the hemlock wooly adelgid, has pretty much run its destructive course and all but a handful of hemlock groves are now completely dead or barely hanging on.

As I said, I’ve know for some years that this day was coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier to take. I feel very sad about this, but also extremely angry. Our government could have taken steps to save these trees and their accompanying ecosystems from destruction, but it was more concerned with committing mass murder in Iraq than in preserving two species of tree.

The Carolina hemlock and the eastern hemlock species are likely doomed to extinction, much as we saw the demise of the American chestnut tree. Yes, there are banks of seed and groves planted far away to serve as a source of new genetic material if the day arrives when the adelgid on these shores has breathed its sap-sucking last.

But all it would have taken is the application of an available adelgicide on our hemlock groves to save at least some of them until biologists could come up with a solution to put a stop to the invasive insects that have destroyed our southern and eastern groves of hemlocks. But more hideous priorities took the monetary pie into which we might have dipped.

And so it goes. Mankind has its twisted priorities.

Dead hemlocks along the Cherohala Skyway. (Photo by Will Blozan)

While There's Still Time...

A few folk have asked me about the title of this blog. It has nothing to do with the old poison termed hemlock, but rather refers to my favorite trees:


The Eastern and Carolina hemlock.


Go see them while you can.

In several sections of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are stands of hemlock trees that were never cut when lumber companies were hacking their ways through our vast tracts of forest. These trees, while not on the order of California’s redwoods, are nonetheless impressive. To stand amidst them and look up at those evergreen branches, their trunks rising great all around, the ground carpeted in the redred rust of needles shed and coppering on the forest floor... Well, you have to go see it, I guess, to understand the experience. Words are not sufficient.




But if you want to see them, you’d better hurry.

A few decades ago, someone bringing Asian hemlocks to the area around Washington DC introduced a pest called the Hemlock wooly adelgid. A bug. Native to the Old World, this pernicious little whore is of a species that has no males. Like arthropod versions of the Tribble, they’re all female and all born with the ability to eat like a black hole and lay jillions of eggs that hatch into versions of their bitch mommas. America’s hemlocks have no resistance to them, and there is no native beetle to prey on the tiny bitches. So they have had their way with the hemlock forests of America’s east coast. The Park Service is doing what it can to stem the infestations, but it looks as if the hemlock is going to become as extinct as the American chestnut.

So. If you want to see these amazing stands of trees, then you’ll have to visit the Smokies within the next few years. After that, the trunks will still be standing, but they’ll be dead. I’ve asked folk who know where the most impressive stands are located in the park and I’ve been making an effort to see them over the past few years. Biologists are predicting the complete elimination of both the Eastern hemlock and the Carolina hemlock from our forests. If you’ve never seen a hemlock tree, you might not know how beautiful they are. They’re my favorite trees when I’m hiking and backpacking. Instantly recognizable. Always green, branches sheltering, growing very tall. I’ve seen hemlocks over 150 feet tall.

All around us, the Earth is telling us how sick it is. All around us. Our atmosphere is in turmoil, but those who control us claim otherwise. Our forests are sickening, but those who hold domain over them want to cut them down. Our wildlife is vanishing, but those who can help will not allow us to protect that life. The land itself is poisoned, but those who pull the strings won’t let us cleanse that land.

Do yourselves a favor and visit the hemlock forests of the Great Smoky Mountains and the Southeast before the only thing remaining of them are dead, drying husks that once were trees.

Til the Last Hemlock Dies

Other writers make me sick.

It’s a sad truth.

Their work doesn’t necessarily sicken me, (fairly often, alas), but the writers themselves.

They are a self-centered lot, unfortunately. And as the years have passed and I have shared their company and listened to their constant droning, I finally concluded that I could not stand another reading, another convention, another social gathering with writers in attendance.

Some writers are my friends. I may have met them because they were fellow writers, but it’s not their status as writers that keep them as my friends. It’s a fact, by and large, that the ones who remain my friends are so in spite of the fact that they are writers.

When I was younger I thought that writers, by their nature, were better than most of the rest of the mass of mindless baboons. I thought they’d think free thoughts and live free lives and not be slaves to the dogma that dictates the movements of so many of my fellow humans. But I found, too quickly, that this was not the case. Writers are just as stupid, just as witless, just as mired in a kind of slave mentality as any other group I could choose.

So it goes, so it goes, so it goes.

Because of this, I chose some years ago to stop seeking the company of writers. Invariably I would have to listen to the droning of their own accomplishments, the whining of their own failures, the unfolding of their future projects which they found oh-so-fascinating and which I, without fail, found insipid and lacking in vision.

In short, I discovered that writers were a bunch of puling, crying, self-centered louts.

And so, some time back, I began to avoid the very mention of genre conventions. I no longer went to read what was going on at various author websites. I wanted nothing to do with the blogs of so-called writers crowing about their so-called creative works.

Writers, like the rest of humanity, had ultimately disappointed me. And, worse, they made me sick. Truly.

Bubbles, along the way, were burst. I found that writers were just as hateful as the meanest Christian. I found that writers were just as greedy as the most ruthless Republican. I saw that writers were just as closed to change as the most powerful plutocrat. I realized that writers were every bit as intolerant as any cross-burning racist. They cheated on their wives. They abused their children. They drank to excess. They drove recklessly, shit their pants, farted in elevators, voted for Bush, owned guns, ate at McDonalds, enjoyed Jurassic Park III, watched television, supported the troops, read about movie stars, denied Global Warming, thought their vote counted. And worst of all, I found that they cared about things that don’t. Really. Matter.

So it goes. So it goes. So it goes.

Ah, you writers. I discovered things about you that made knowing you unrewarding. I found out that you were just subnormal, after all.

So, go live your lives. Wander aimlessly. Inhabit your little genre ghettoes and read about your fellows’ latest publications. For myself---I don’t give a rat’s ass about you anymore. If, somehow, we are passing and you see me before I see you, please duck and cover. I’d like to remain ignorant that we actually shared the same general locale.

But that, of course, is doubtful. I spend my free and leisure time in the outdoors. I hike forest trails seeking the last hemlocks before they succumb to invasive species; and I paddle the shrinking number of undeveloped rivers; and bag the few peaks that remain unpaved. Fortunately, I’m not likely to see you there, you church-going, blackbox-voting, TV-watching, hamburger-eating, numb-skulled bunch of idiot writers.

And so it goes. And all is well.