Sydney. M. Williams                                                                                          March 14, 2011

Notes from Old Lyme

“The Return of the Bluebird”

“And Spring arose on the garden fair,

Like the spirit of love felt everywhere.

And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast

Rose from the dream of its wintry nest.”

“The Sensitive Plant”   1820

                                                                                          Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Saturday morning, like most people in the world, I awoke to the devastating news of an explosion at one of Japan’s largest nuclear power plants, the Fukushima Daiichi facility in Okuma. The blowup was a consequence of the fifth largest recorded earthquake in history and the subsequent Tsunami that swept 23 foot high waves six miles inland. Cracks in the casing of the cement structure allowed radiated plumes to escape, potentially making this the worst nuclear power plant disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. (A no-go zone of 20 miles continues to surround Chernobyl twenty-five years after the accident.)

When not speaking of the devastation in Japan, reporters turned to the news of a 5:00AM bus accident on I-95 in the Bronx. A tour bus, returning to New York’s Chinatown from Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun Casino, overturned near the Bronx killing fifteen and leaving five severely injured.

Trying to digest the meaning and attempting to understand the randomness of these horrific events and the role chance plays in our lives, I began my morning exercises, standing on my Bosu warming up and looking out toward the marshes and the Connecticut River. Amazingly, the first thing I noticed was that our bluebird family had returned, a harbinger of spring. Later that morning, working in our flower garden, I noticed that the season’s first flowers – Snowdrops – had pushed their way through the warming, but still cold, soil. Ten thousand or more people may have died in Japan’s earthquake and the ensuing Tsunami, and fifteen died in the Bronx, allegedly a consequence of human error. Lives have been snuffed out, but life endures.

Man’s capacity to overcome disaster has been shown time and again. The ability to do so does not diminish the awful nature of the act, but it is how the species survives. In 1888, in Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Japan, in 1945, was destroyed. With a population of seventy-one million in 1940, the country lost an estimated three million people – four percent of their population. Cities were bombed. Industry was destroyed, along with railroads, cargo ships and port facilities. Yet twenty-three years later, in 1968, Japan had become the world’s second largest economy. In 1995, the Kobe earthquake killed more than six thousand people. In the aftermath of that quake, according to Peter Tasker writing in the Financial Times, more than a million Japanese, demonstrating man’s humanity to man, volunteered their services.

In February 1945, on top of Mt. Belvedere in Italy’s Apennine Mountains and after a bloody fight attacking entrenched German mountain troops my father wrote to my mother, not of the casualties or of the explosions of land mines, but of the buds of new flowers poking their way through the blood-drenched snow. The war in Europe still had two and a half months to go and thousands more would die, yet, amidst all that death, budding flowers, those perennial symbols of renewal, were making their presence known. Death and destruction resulting from natural or man-made causes are, unfortunately, an inevitable aspect to our lives; but, so too are hardy flowers, budding trees and the returns of songbirds to our New England gardens heralding the renewal that this season brings. And, so too, are the fortitude and determination of mankind.

Knowing no one on the fated bus driving down from the Mohegan Sun early Saturday morning and having no relationship to the ten thousand Japanese killed the same day, it is easy for me to look through those calamities to the morning that will surely come. But we have all experienced tragedy and we know that the passage of time, while never fully healing the wounds, makes them bearable. That bluebird, sitting atop his red birdhouse last Saturday morning, was a sign that days of renewal lie ahead.