On an excruciatingly quiet Thanksgiving Day morning, when everyone for miles around appeared to have run off to grandma’s place and not much was left stirring here in the outback, to keep from going bonkers, I read most everything the BDN editorial and advertising crews threw at me in Thursday’s impressive holiday edition.
That included a horoscope suggesting that although we who function under the astrological sign of Taurus the bull allegedly possess a pronounced “love of beauty, art and aesthetics,’’ we are also big on presentation. How something is presented “almost matters more to you than what the thing actually is,’’ according to the people who crank out the zodiacal boilerplate.
After learning that the planets are correctly aligned to engineer an appreciation for presentation as well as content when it comes to art and aesthetics in my life, I looked up from the page to behold a wall calendar above my writing table. Distributed by a County business, the calendar features old “Saturday Evening Post” magazine covers sketched by Norman Rockwell, arguably America’s favorite illustrator in his heyday.
The illustration for November, a Thanksgiving theme, depicts a buyer-ready turkey being weighed on a suspended scale similar to those used in the produce sections of most food marts. On one side of the scale, hoping to lighten the payload, stands the grandma who is purchasing the bird, an index finger pushing surreptitiously upward from the bottom of the pan holding the turkey. On the other side, his index finger pushing downward on the pan in expectation of adding a few more pennies to the sale, is the wily old grocer. Both are innocently glancing upward at the scale‘s reading, each presumably hopeful that the effort to outfox the other will result in no worse than a draw.
The classic Rockwell illustration is a favorite, as much for its demonstration of the human tendency to seek an edge in life’s daily transactions as for the artwork itself. Perhaps there is something to the horoscope’s appreciation-for-the-presentation business, after all, and it may apply to the printed word as well. There are occasions when I encounter particularly engrossing prose in a book and read the passage several times out of appreciation for how the author has presented the scene.
That is certainly the case with author Ian Frazier’s new book, “Travels in Siberia,’’ just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is a fascinating tale of a trip of thousands of miles that the laid-back troika of Frazier and two Russian companions took in a beat-up old van, west to east, across the vast expanse of storied Siberia.
Camping out along the way, the three adventurers endured some grim situations in their summer on the road. The unrelenting hordes of rapacious mosquitoes encountered in the extensive Siberian swamplands particularly bugged them.
On calm and sultry evenings, when the men busied themselves at their campsite, the Siberian insects “came at us as if shot out of a fire hose,” Frazier wrote. What’s more, they seemed to be masters of diversification.
“There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere,’’ Frazier explained. “Those are your general practitioner mosquitoes, or GPs. Then you have your specialists — your eye, ear, nose and throat mosquitoes. Eye mosquitoes fly directly at the eyeball and crash-land there. The reason for this tactic is a mystery. The ear mosquito goes into the ear canal and then slams itself deafeningly back and forth — part of a larger [psychological operations] strategy, maybe. Nose and throat mosquitoes wait for their moment, then surf into those passages as far as they can go on the in-drawn breath of air. Even deep inside they keep flying as long as possible and emitting a desperate buzzing, as if radioing for backup …’’
As presentations go, this one is hard to top, and you don’t have to be a Taurus to appreciate its beauty. Frazier and his companions faced other hazards on their adventure. But the enduring mental image is that of thousands of killer Siberian mosquitoes — the eyes, ears nose and throat specialists — attacking as if shot from a fire hose. Never have I been so content to read about an event, in lieu of experiencing it. Never again will I whine about the ferocity of the Siberian insects’ Maine cousins.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.