The Vindication of Signs and the Soft Side of Trotsky

Yes, on Easter Sunday I passed the Moose Warning sign and one duly appeared, standing in the middle of an exceedingly wet wetland, a leggy she, contemplating the universe of Being Moose. No photographic record exists because there are rules which don't appear on signs. As in "no-bird-identification-while-accelerating" and "no-wildlife-photography-in-single-lane-construction-zones."

Maybe an Easter Moose is more likely in that area than an Easter Bunny. It seems that the native New England cottontail is extinct in Vermont and endangered in Maine and New Hampshire. Wily Coyote (much more successful in life than in cartoons) has done in a number, and the cottontail's shrubby habitat has been eaten away by deer and development. Deer, which for the last decades of the 20th century, spread like an ungulate weed, have decreased in numbers over the past two harsh winters--nature's cruel control. It may seem incredible to the Mr. McGregors of us, yearning for the perfect rabbit-proof fence, that it is time to work on protecting the cottontail, not carrots.

Maybe Mr. McGregor's beard suggests the snowy whiteness of Karl Marx's facial forest. Which brings me to a book I'm reading, Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna: A Novel. (It's not about animals per se, though howler monkeys provide a dominant trope for the book.) Marx is not a character, but an adapter of his ideas, Leon Trotsky--"Lev"--appears during his exile in Mexico. While the novel draws on historical accounts in the portrayal of characters such as Trotsky, his lover-host Frida Kahlo, and rival-host Frida's husband Diego Rivera, it is narrated by fictional Harrison Shepherd. Shepherd or H.S., estranged from his American father and largely ignored by his mother who tries to succeed through seduction, chronicles the 1930s through the 1950s in diary entries and letters.
Kingsolver's prose is often enchanting--her mouth piece H.S. lives to write--but the first half of the book does lack structure, and H.S.'s role as passive observer affects the telling of tales. As a teen and young man, H.S. works as cook and scribe in the Kahlo Rivera household--Frida is vividly described in her bright clothes and jewelry as a fierce Aztecka queen.

When exiled Trotsky shows up, who had been Lenin's right-hand revolutionary until his comrade's death you know something is going to happen.

It seems Trotsky and the guy who SHOULD have been his BFF, Josef Stalin, have had a falling out, and Stalin takes lines like "I'm so mad I could kill you" literally. The novel's Trotsky does make a few pained references to the brutalities of the Russian Revolution, but generally is shown as idealistic intellect and grieving father--his children have been executed. Yet his hopes continue, and he's portrayed as dedicated to the Working Man, and to the cactus plants he collects and the chickens he feeds. He seems like an extremely intense Nice Guy. Stalin, however, there's no redeeming him.
 More on the fate of Kingsolver's Lacuna later, and more on animals.