World-Wide-Matel

I spent two days and two nights sailing up the Amazon with the Semester at Sea. Most of my waking time was spent talking to students. They kept me fully scheduled, which is how I like it. It was lots of fun to interact with the clever students and professors. They also have a group called “lifelong learners,” who are retired people who want to cruise in a learning environment.

But I did have some time to myself and I spent lots of that free time just looking at the river and thinking about how interesting it was just to be on the Amazon. You can see my balcony in the picture above. It was nice to sit out there. It is humid, but fresh on the river. The Amazon - the word conjures up all sorts of feelings and images. It was interesting and a little scary to look out over the river in the midnight darkness. It is so empty out there, as I mentioned in an earlier post. The picture up top shows a beautiful scene. Beautiful from a distance. That green in the front is not grass. It is a type of reed. You could not walk through it.

During the day you can see that the water is the color of coffee with cream.  The silt does not sink out.  There is a lot of other stuff floating. It is mostly branches and floating weeds, but I also saw whole trees and what looked like a dead cow. The dead cow made me feel more confident about the water. I figured that if a dead cow could float unvexed down the river there could not be that many piranha.

I was told that the water was low, even though it looked like the forest came right to the shore and was only a few feet above the water. Evidently in the high water time the river goes into the forest and you can see the tops of the trees reaching out of the water. That would be interesting.  It is hard to believe that the river could be much wider, but it can.

As far as famous rivers go, however, the Amazon is a little monotonous. The land along-side is almost uniformly flat. You get a lot more variety on the Rhine. The Nile has cataracts. I don't know the Mississippi except in Minnesota & Wisconsin, but it also has more bluffs and variety. The interesting thing about the Amazon is the water itself not only the sheer amount of it but also its composition.

The Amazon is formed when the Rio Solimões meets the Rio Negro outside Manaus. The Solimões is cloudy and coffee & creme colored, as is the Amazon downstream. The Rio Negro, as its name implies, is black. Above is Manaus from the Rio Negro. Below is a ferry stop on the Rio Solimões.You can see the difference. The waters meet but don’t immediately mix, instead running side by side for several miles. I did not see this, since the ship crossed this at night while it was still dark. I woke up to see that the color of the water was black, as we were heading up the Rio Negro toward the Port of Manaus. It was also dark when we passed Santarém the night before. This is where the Rio Tapajos meets the Amazon. The Tapajos is supposed to be turquoise colored. I will have to wait to see that some other time.

We did cross the new bridge in Manaus across the Rio Negro. I will write a little more about that later. Suffice to say now that on the other side we caught up with the Solimões.  The Amazon takes its look from this river. The Rio Negro & the Tapajos just give their water and soon lose themselves.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Recent earthquake did little damage to the general community, but it did crack the Washington Monument. If you look at it, you can see how this structure is very susceptible to damage. It is essentially a giant masonry pillar.

They closed the monument.  I noticed lots of news crews hanging around and when I looked up to see what they were looking at, I saw men at work. They were rappelling down the monument, checking for cracks, as I learned. 

The Washington Monument is one of the favorites. Some people like to go up to the top. You have to get a reserved ticket. They are free, but you need to get a time. But mostly people just like to stand around near the bottom, among the flags. That is what I do. You can do neither now. You have to keep your distance, lest a piece of masonry fall from on high and crush you like a bug. 

The other pictures are from the Atlanta airport. I used to like Arthur Treachers, so I was happy to see one. It wasn't really Treachers, except in name.  It was a TINO - Treachers in name only.  It was part of the Nathan's hotdog chain and it shared characteristics. The "chips" for example, were just fries and the fish was just like you would get anywhere out of the frozen foods aisle.

I would have been better off just getting a Nathan hot dog. They are very good and no doubt authentic there. 

The other picture is from a book shop. There are two things I liked, both dumb, I admit. I think the title "Mental Floss" is funny and monkeys are inherently funny, so the two combined deserved a photo.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the challenges we have when talking about law with experts in most other countries is that the American system is fundamentally different. A big part of our system is common law. Among our 50 states, only Louisiana has a code law heritage, based on the Napoleonic Code, in force in Louisiana when Thomas Jefferson bought the place from France in 1803. 

Common law has the disadvantage of being unclear, since it relies on experience. This flexibility is also its strength. Common law can be pragmatic; it relies on experience and judgment of generations working with real world problems. Most other countries, including Brazil, base their law on codes. There is convergence, as our system comes to rely more on legislation.

But we still value precedents in deciding cases, judges usually have discretion in applying the law and juries can and do bring their own interpretation of the cases to bear. As some of the judges at the São Paulo State Appeals Court explained to me, this is not how it works in Brazil. In Brazil, as in other code law countries, the law is supposed to anticipate all eventualities and the job of the judges is to apply the law.  Of course, this is not as easy as looking in the books, but the big difference is application versus interpretation.  

Another big differences is juries. Brazil uses Juries only in homicide cases. In other cases, lawyers represent clients, but they argue before trained judges & are considered more as servants of the state or the law than of individual clients.

Although Brazil has states, like the U.S., the states do not have the independence in law as they do in the U.S.  In Brazil, laws apply across the country and lawyers are regulated on the federal, not the state level. One of my interlocutors explained the difference. In the United States, the states preceded the federal government and they created the Union. The Union, in its inception at least, was a servant of the states and American states retain much of their autonomy. Brazil was an empire. Provinces existed, but not states. With the establishment of the Republic, states were created and they have characters of their own, but the Brazilian government preceded the Brazilian states and the central government created them.

It is often hard for Americans to understand what the centralization means in Brazil as it is hard for Brazilians to understand what our greater decentralization means in the U.S.

We often use the same terms and symbols (look at the courtroom and the depiction of Justice and you see the same things as you would in the U.S.); we don't perceive that they mean different things. As I wrote in a previous post, our Brazilian friends sometimes misunderstand the fact that our states and their universities are not managed by the federal government, so they cannot make an agreement with the federal authorities that will hold true in all the states.

In the case of an appeals court, where I visited, however, the differences are not as significant, since an American appeals court also has the duty of applying the relevant law. Still, there is not a court that corresponds to a state supreme court in the U.S. 

I understand, BTW, that I am in over my head on this, since I have no legal background. I am giving an interpretation of what they told me. I welcome any comments that might clarify or correct my work. 

I also visited the school for prosecutors at the Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo. This was a fairly big operation. Speaking of applicable law, the school is working on a conference to study American law concerning fraud and asked our support to bring American experts. The result of this conference is supposed to be a proposal for a law to be put before the Brazilian Congress to make frauds in securities more difficult to perpetrate and easier to prosecute, a worthy goal. 

Law is complicated and we have to let the experts do the thinking about the details, but is important to a free people that law is simple enough for the average guy to know whether he is doing right or wrong. The thing I always liked about having a strong dose of common law included in our rules was that it is a check on the otherwise uncontrolled rule of experts. When law becomes too complicated for the people to understand, at least in a general way, it has just become too complicated. I think we can all share that experience.

I mentioned the impact of the various permutations of the "Law & Order" franchise. Whether or not they always get everything exactly right, it is a good educational show for Americans and many Americans ... and Brazilians understand law through this simplified prism. There is a "Law & Order UK" which highlights some of the differences between U.S. and UK procedures, even thought UK is also a common law country.  "Law & Order" as well as the LA and Special Victims are available on Brazilian TV and my lawyer friends said they liked the shows. I need a "Law & Order - Brazil". 

Posted by Broadnax at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff wants to send 100,000 Brazilian students to study science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in other countries by the end of her term and we want to help. It is the classic win/win. American universities are coming to Brazil to get their share of the new students. We have an opportunity rich environment. Great.

Americans and Brazilians have been working together on this for a long time. We have the venerable Fulbright program, which was established in Brazil in 1957. U.S. universities have been active in Brazil and Brazilians have looked to the U.S. for more than a hundred years. American universities are acknowledged to be the best in the world.  It is an embarrassment of riches. We have all the networks in place and they have been working well for a long time, but now we are going to push more through the network than ever before.

Among our best assets is a regional educational advising center (REAC), headquartered in Rio at PUC University. I visited there during my recent visit to Rio. PUC, our Brazilian partner institution, gives us the space, which is at a premium on their crowded campus. Their students also provide volunteer support in marketing and advertising the services. In addition, we have advisers at twenty-three other centers, such as BNCs, around Brazil and three offices at private universities. State Department’s Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) office trains the advisers, but they are paid and otherwise supported by their local Brazilian institutions. Such is the demand for this service that our partners are happy to cooperate. The centers can defray some of their expenses by offering translation services and consultation on writing in English, but they do not charge prospective students for educational advising.  

One of their big activities is sponsoring Education USA fairs. American universities come to Brazil to recruit students.  The advising centers can and do charge U.S. institution to defray costs.  Interest in Brazil is growing and the fair in Rio scheduled for this fall is already booked up with fifty U.S. universities. Other centers also hold fairs.  The BNC Casa Thomas Jefferson will hold a fair later this month in Brasilia, for example. 

Nobody really knows how many Brazilian students there are currently in the U.S.  Our deceptively precise number is 8786, but we get this figure by a survey of answers supplied voluntarily by U.S. universities. Our educational advisers think this number is lower than the real one. They mentioned anecdotal evidence of universities where they know there are Brazilian students that reported none, but the real number in not much more. If Dilma’s aspiration becomes a reality, there would be more than four times as many coming to the U.S. in the next four years. This is a big bump and you get an idea of the challenge. 

One thing we have to explain to Brazilians is that America’s higher education system is extremely decentralized. The Federal government cannot order state or private universities to admit Brazilian students or offer them tuition discounts. This must be done on a individual basis. The good news is that we have hundreds of excellent universities in the U.S. and many want to get Brazilian students to diversity their student body and build a future alumni network in what will be a much more important country in the future. One of our (Embassy & REAC) goals is to spread the students out over the U.S. Brazilians tend to know only a few American universities.  Everybody wants to go to Harvard, MIT or University of California and who can blame them. But dropping thousands of Brazilians into a few institutions would not be desirable, even if it were possible. Our task is to explain the diversity of American education. We have many excellent choices and sometimes the best programs for a particular student might be at an American university that few in Brazil (maybe few Americans too) know exists.

Our centers are reaching out to Brazilians to explain things like that and to help with applications.  Their motto is that studying in America is “mais fácil do que você pensa” easier than you think. We have to remind students that there is essentially no waiting line for a student visa to the U.S. and that it is indeed, easier than they think. 

This is a great opportunity to shape the future of Brazilian-American relations through education.  It is truly a win-win. We just have to do it.

My pictures - at top is Rio from my hotel window. You see the symmetry of the reflection in the glass. I didn't get perfect symmetry because I could hang only so far out the window w/o falling 21 floors. Might have been a cool picture on the way down, however. Below that you see graffiti artists at the Complexo de Alemao, a favela that the Rio authorities recently took back from gangs and drug dealers. Third down is the Kennedy Wing at PUC. It is dedicated to the U.S. and JFK. Bobby Kennedy came down for the commemoration of the bust in the picture. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Antietam was the battle that gave Abraham Lincoln the cover to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Without at a significant victory in the field, he reasoned, such a bold proclamation would just seem hollow. The Proclamation changed the character of the war. After it became a struggle to end slavery, the threat of British or French intervention on the side of the Confederacy was removed.  

Historians have argued about who did what right and wrong. Some believe that Union commander George McClellan could have destroyed Robert E. Lee’s army had he acted more aggressively. The battle at Antietam was really not much of a victory. Both sides got badly mauled. But at the end of the day, the Army of the Potomac still held the ground, Robert E. Lee was limping back to Virginia and 23,000 Americans were casualties in the bloodiest day in American history.

The Civil War is the American Iliad. It features heroes with strong characters and personal stories. Many of the participants knew each other and they faced off repeatedly on different battlefields. I think that it is the personalization that has so fascinated Americans for nearly a century and a half. Historians can study diaries and journals; re-enactors can find enough information to “become” individuals.

The re-enactors are important to history. They maintain a living link past and their attention to detail gives historians a treasury of data. The re-enactors actually wear the clothes, use the gear and carry the weapons.  They can help explain the capacities and challenges of those who struggled.

Espen & I made the trip today. I wanted to spend some individual time with him before I go to Brazil next week.  We had a good chance to talk on the drive and during the walk around the battlefield. I have been to Antietam many times, starting before Espen was born, but it is better with him along.  It was a humid and a hazy day, as you can see from the pictures.

Some battlefields, such as Manassas, have suffered from suburban encroachment. Antietam has not changed since I first came here in 1985.  It is still rural in all directions. The Park Service tries to maintain the landscape more-or-less as it was in 1862. They plant corn in the corn fields of the time and try to keep the woods in woods.  Nevertheless, it is hard to visualize the battle both because it happened over a fairly large space but also because the battle itself was confusing.  Both sides fed more troops in to support their advancing or defending positions w/o much coherence.  At the very end of the day, just when it looked like Robert E. Lee’s line was breaking, AP Hill showed up from Harpers Ferry making the battle inconclusive.

The pictures: Up top is a re-enactor riding past a monument to New York troops. Recall that the states fought as separate units, so there is no U.S. monument. Next is the path to bloody lane, where 2200 Rebs held off 10,000 Union troops, until their position collapsed.  It is called bloody lane because the bodies were literally piled up there. The picture after that shows the lane. The pictures after that show a re-enactor camp, corn field and the Burnside bridge respectively.  Just above is me on the bridge.  There are lots of big sycamores near the creek. And below is Espen with a re-enactor playing a Confederate captain from Virginia. The re-enactors wear the same wool uniforms that the real guys did in 1862. On that hot and humid day, it was more uncomfortable than usual.  The blue at his sleeve shows that he is infantry.  Artillery had red and cavalry yellow.

Below is me buying a watermelon and some sweet corn from a farmer stand. 

Posted by Broadnax at 07:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

State Department, in its wisdom & generosity, is allowing me to take a two week course on environment.  I am learning lots of new things, reviewing even more and updating my outdated conceptions.  The last of these things may be the most useful.  As Mark Twain said, “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”    Anyway, it is fun and I believe it will be useful to my work in Brazil, where environment is a big part of our bilateral engagement.

Today we got an afternoon field trip to the Smithsonian.  I have been there many times before, but never in the back room.   Less than 1% of the Smithsonian’s collections are on display.  The rest are filed away, available for study.  The Smithsonian’s mission is to increase and disseminate knowledge.   The museum part is only a part of a much bigger whole.

Of course, we should be humbled by this.  If “their” science, i.e. the science of the recent past, could be so wrong, how do we know ours is going to stand up any better?   Maybe future scientists will discover something as revolutionary as DNA and as mysterious to us as DNA would have been in Darwin’s day.  We are not stupid and neither were our ancestors.  But we all are always ignorant in many ways.  

We can never give up.  Mark Twain was right about knowing.  But maybe we should also quote TS Eliot, from “The Wasteland” I think it applies to science.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

It is getting harder to collect and advance science.  Many countries now object to collecting and some fear that genetic material will be misused or they will somehow be cheated. This is anti-science.  When you get knowledge, the total available knowledge expands. Nobody loses.  Everybody wins, unless we cease from exploration.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The water jets outside Safeway near the Waterfront Metro are a good idea. When I first saw them, I didn’t really understand their probable use. Today was a hot day and the local kids figured it out.  The neighborhood really has improved.  It is lively but still nice.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is another late posting. 

Life in the past was simpler and they depended much more on local produce.Everybody was a locavore. You ate local products in season or you didn’t eat much at all. Americans in the 19th Century tended to eat a lot of animal protein and drink prodigious amounts of alcohol. It wasn't really a good diet by our standards, but it was hardy, which you needed because life was hard. We literally got a taste of that when we had lunch at the Eagle Tavern in Greenfield Village. They try to supply the table with local produce and they stick to whatever is in season, which means that the menu is a little different if you come in a different season.

When I started writing this post, I will still cold from the rain we had all day on our Village visit and I was thinking of the hardships of the past. This is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete. People in the past definitely had fewer choices. But the first fruits of summer must have seemed more tasty after a long winter without. We can buy produce from all over the world, but most of us do not take full advantage of the variety and we never get to feel that joy of true seasonality. You can look at it in both ways. You can emphasize the joy of finally getting the fresh fruit, or you can look at it like the guy who hits himself in the head with a hammer because it feels so good when he stops.

It is nice to visit the past as a tourist, but you really would not want to live there. The Eagle Tavern recreates many aspects of the past, but not all.  If it did, nobody would come. It has modern bathrooms, for example. This was a big improvement. They also do not feature all the smells of smoke, horse manure and human body odor. If you rented a room at the Tavern, you probably had to share a bed with strangers and there was a good chance you would be sharing lice and bed bugs, not to mention various diseases we hardly remember. Things are better now.

Things started to get charming for many people around 1910. I still wouldn't want to return to those times, but it was only then that average people started to live lives we would consider acceptable. It must have been exciting with innovations such as Ford, Edison etc. Innovation comes faster now than it did then, but it SEEMED faster then. The practical difference between no light bulb, no automobile or no refrigerator and the basic models of these things is enormous. The perceived difference between the new improved model and the older one is not so much. I just bought an LED light bulb. It will supposedly last longer and use less energy, but it does pretty much the same thing as the older one.

I am getting old. Life seems to be familiar starting in the 1930s. It well before I was born, but a lot of the old stuff was still around when I was a kid.  For example, I think I fit in well in that living room below. They were playing a recording of the Orson Wells radio drama, "War of the Worlds". Chrissy and I in the old roadster above is a little too much before my time.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is the tree version of the sword of Damocles. I suppose it will fall in the first strong wind and it is not over a walking trail, so it probably is not a real danger to anybody. Natural places need not be made antiseptically safe.

Below shows why forests in foggy places are different than those w/o so much fog. The tree leaves sort of comb out the moisture and it drops to the ground, as you can see in the picture with the water under the silver maple in Warinmont Park. 

Below is the fog bank hanging out over Lake Michigan on the other side of the Milwaukee breakwater. I thought it looked like a distant mountain that could move. 

Below are lichens on a white birch tree. This is a European white birch planted by the park authorities, not the native paper birch. Of course, neither is native to Milwaukee, but the paper birch range is much closer. 

Below are gargoyles on my old Bay View HS. The building was constructed around 1920. I heard it was designed to look like a castle in Germany, but I don't know for sure. My mother went to Bay View and it used to have strong local support and traditions. This was mostly lost in the 1980s, when the city did busing to achieve integration. The goal was good, but the method was bad.  IMO, it was an experiment that failed. It didn't quicken integration; it cost a lot of money; it delivered kids more tired to school; it contributed to the ruin of a once decent school system and it wrecked the idea of neighborhood schools. A quarter of a century later, we have nothing good to show for the suffering.

I used to go in the door below the gargoyles at Bay View. From that spot, my home, grade school and junior HS were all within a ten minute walk. It was a better time to be a student in Milwaukee than it is today. We didn't need to be bussed. We didn't spend a lot of time commuting. We got some exercise and we got to know the neighbors. It was something that should not have been thrown away.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Replicas of Columbus’ ships the Niña and the Pinta were anchored in the Potomac branch in DC. I didn’t go aboard, since I didn’t have much time and it cost $8. I could see everything I wanted to see anyway. The ships were built in Salvador in Brazil. They sail around for exhibitions and, according to the notes, they were featured in the movie “1492”.

This area of town is changing. They just rebuilt the area around Waterfront Metro stop and it has gone from being seedy and dangerous to being nice and pleasant. Above and below are linden trees in bloom. I really love the scent.  It reminds me of Germany and Poland. I comment on them every year because every year it is nice. The linden is the European relative of the American basswood, sometimes even called American linden. The Euro variety is smaller, but has showier and more fragrant flowers. Bees are fond of the flowers and there is even a variety of honey called basswood honey. They only flower for about ten days. The lindens flower in Europe in late June and July, about the same time as they do in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Here we are a month ahead.



Notice the flag. There was a very strong south wind that brought in rain (see the last picture below)

The Potomac is fresh water, but it is affected by tides in the Chesapeake Bay. The tidal basin at the Jefferson Monument is meant to control for some of that. You can see the water flooding over the banks in the pictures above and below. It reaches about five yards farther in at times. At low tide, the place where you see the fence is 3-4 feet above the water surface. 

Below are storm clouds racing in at Dunn Loring. I snapped the picture and rode for home. I arrived just as the rain was starting. Literally seconds after I got in the safety of the garage, we had a cloudburst. A couple hours later, it knocked out the power for a while all over. Urban dwellers like us are unaccustomed to the sold wall of darkness. 

Posted by Broadnax at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some things, place & people become trendy about the time they stop being used by ordinary people.  This is what has happened in some parts of Milwaukee and some old habits. I mentioned the decline or disappearance of Milwaukee industry. The old industrial park is now becoming trendy. All those old industrial buildings make wonderful, sun-filled loft condos. Old bars that used to serve beer and whiskey, now serve drinks with cute names along with an impressive array of beers … with cute names.  I thought the "pedal tavern" above was cool. The drinkers have to propel themselves. Everybody seems to be having a good time.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Milwaukee Art Museum building is itself a work of art, perched on a wonderful location up against Lake Michigan.  Chrissy & I saw it shrouded in the lake mists.   I am sure that the designers anticipated such meteorological events as part of the presentation.

How much does art belong to the artist?  This is a difficult question.  IMO, we revere artists too much.  Artists express themselves through their art.  But it only becomes meaningful when interpreted by other people.   I don’t really think very much of individual expression. Art is a social activity.  Below is a good example. It is the infinity room. The artist evidently thought it represented outer space. Do you think it does? And I think that Chrissy standing there greatly improves the artist's vision. It is a human showing wonder at the otherwise soul-less light show. So the art was not complete until we stepped into it. And it will not be complete until others do too.

I wrote a couple of posts on this general subject here & here and won’t repeat it here.  I guess the general idea is that art is like a general idea.  You put it out there and other people add to it, change it and maybe perfect it. Below is the infinity room again with my feet improving the art.

I think it was a good thing when artists had patron who could help call the shots. A lot of great art resulted from the tensions between the creator and his patron.  When artists are left to their own, they too often drift into a kind of self-indulgence.  Art usually improves when it ages because it gets modified or reinterpreted.   Most art is incomplete when the artist gets done with his part.  Below is a "sunburst" sculpture.  It is made our of girders. It is interesting, but the city paid too much for it, since any competent steelworkers could make the same thing. In fact, when the city bought the thing, I recall that some old guy on the South Side made his own smaller version out of scrap steel.  Some art is like the "Emperor's New Clothes".

Posted by Broadnax at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My father's (and my erstwhile) employer at Medusa Cement seems to have left Milwaukee. There is a company still using the facilities called St. Mary’s. It looks almost the same, which is not surprising since there is not much you can change. The view that you see in the picture above could have been taken when I was worked there more than thirty years ago, except back then there was a big sign saying “Medusa Cement”. They evidently no longer get any cement via rail. I used to work on the hopper cars next to the river. Today the tracks are gone or at least overgrown with grass, as you can see below. The grass is very nice. They must have done something. Strange that you would cultivate such a nice lawn next to a parking lots in back of a rusty chain link fence where nobody goes.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For two days, the fog & the sun fought over a half mile of shoreline w/o conclusion. It never pushed more than a quarter mile inland and didn’t hang more than a quarter mile out in the lake.   It was a funny kind of fog, very bright. It could make you squint.

Their seeds are spread by ants.  The northern broadleaf deciduous beech-maple-basswood forest is too shady in summer to support much understory vegetation. In Virginia on our tree farms, the basswoods are replaced by tulip poplars and there are red maples instead of sugar maples.  The understory vegetation is also much thicker.  It took me a while to get used to Virginia.  Now it seems strange to see the more open woods of Wisconsin. There is also a big difference in color schemes. Virginia forest soils are reddish-orange. Wisconsin soils are brown or black.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Schmeeckle Reserve was not here when I went to school at UWSP, but I used to spend a lot of time up here. My friends and I would camp out in this wet woods north of campus. Of course, camp out usually just meant drink beer and sleep outside. Back in those days, the trails were not very good. We had to trudge in through the water and muck. Today there are nice trails and boardwalks over the bogs and marshes.  They also made a nice lake and restored the prairies and wetlands.

We drove from Stephens Point to Madison along US 51.  It is a lot easier drive now than it used to be.  I enjoyed going to school in both Madison and UWSP.  Madison has a very beautiful campus and there was a lot to do, academically and socially.   I get mixed up now. When I think of coming to Madison for graduate school in Madison, I don’t think of myself; I think of Alex, who is now studying history as I was. It was a magical time for me and I hope he is enjoying the same thrill from finding things out.

The pictures:  I have a bunch below that I will comment on separately. As you can see in the photos, spring comes more slowly to Central Wisconsin. In Virginia, it is already summer. The pictures show the Schmeeckle Reserve.  There are lots of deer and other wildlife and lots of wetland. The bigger trees are oaks in the middle picture. The lower picture is mostly aspen.

Above is a geographic anomaly. Look closely.  The top arrow purports to point west and the bottom one east. I always thought that east and west were opposites, but maybe not in the reserve. In fairness, there used to be some kind of sign next to the arrows. Maybe that explained. Below is the Wisconsin State Capitol from Bascom Hill at UW.

Below show the lake shore in back of the UW student union. In the middle distance is the Red Gym. It used to be the armory.  When I went to UW, there was a small pool and a kind of dumpy gym. I used to go there in between studying. The library was across the street.  The workouts woke me up.

Below is the new business school at UW

Below is my old running trail. It goes out to the point of a peninsula in Lake Mendota. I used to be able to run out there and back in less than 40 minutes. I cannot do that now.  It is a wonderful running trail. It goes through a variety of landscapes; lots of students use it, but not too many; and the surface is good for running.

Below are UW dorms along the running trail mentioned above. 

Below used to be a McDonald's where I worked during my first year a Madison. Now it is a post office. At McDonald's, I mostly did the counter staff. We used to have to remember the orders and do the math in our heads.  Now machines do the counting and the remembering. One of the techniques was to start the shake machine, grab the fries and then pick up the shake on the way back. I was quick. But I quit after 9 months because they refused to give me a 5 cent raise. The manager said that he didn't like my carefree attitude toward the products.  When I complained that I was a fast and good worker, he told me that if I didn't like it, I could quit. So I did. He was surprised and - incongruously - accused me of leaving him  w/o warning. I actually had another job, delivering mail at the history department. Working two jobs that added up to around 40 hours and doing full time grad work was killing me, so I was happy to have a reason to get rid of one of them. I missed the free lunch I used to get and I did not get that much more effective. When I had an extra 20 hours a week, I found that I often just wasted more time.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This part of the Great Lakes has some distinct traits. Some of it is based on the shared challenges of the harsh climate.  The soil is not rich, but there have been booms. The UP once supplied much of the country’s copper & lots of iron. You can still see it in the place names. There is Iron Mountain, Iron River etc.  But most of this was mined out. And the timber was also extracted in what was a lot like a mining operation. After the timber boom, the cut over land was sold to immigrant farmers. But the soil could not support farming in most places, so they left it.  Much of it reverted to state ownership for none payment of taxes and then it reverted to forest. Today large swath of the UP’s territory is National Forest.Tourists and summer residents love the place.Not so many people stay year round.  

It comes from the Great Lakes.  It has a mild flavor, so it makes a good breakfast addition. I had eggs, hash browns and whitefish for breakfast. For lunch we had pasties. Pasties, according to the guy selling them, were brought to the UP by Cornish miners. They are a pastry filled with meat, potatoes and rutabagas, among other things.  They are very filling and convenient. You can see why they were popular among workers. Above is where we ate pasties.
We got into Wisconsin on U.S. 41.   U.S. 41 was second only to U.S. Route 66 as a famous American highway.   It used to go from Canada to Key West.  I suppose it still does, but now it is overtaken by Interstates in most places.  Anyway, we took U.S. 41 down to Green Bay with a stop in Peshtigo.  

 

Peshtigo was the site the biggest forest fire in the 19^th Century. Unfortunately, the “Fire Museum” was not open.  We could see the fire cemetery nearby. There is not much there either, except for a marker.  More than 300 people were buried in a mass grave after the fire destroyed most of the city. The Peshtigo fire was disastrous, but because it happened at the same time as the Great Chicago fire, which got all media attention, it was largely ignored at the time and forgotten after.   

 

Our next stop was Green Bay. Green Bay would be an unremarkable city except that it is the home of the Green Bay Packers.  I wrote a post about this before and won’t repeat it here. We went to Lambeau Field, so now I have pictures. Above is Vince Lombardy. Below is the team's founder Curly Lambeau.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Mackinac Bridge was the world’s longest suspension bridge until a couple of years ago. Now it is #3, behind one in Sweden and one in Japan. But Mackinac hung onto the title for almost fifty years, which is a good run.  The bridge connects the lower and the upper peninsulas of Michigan and spans the straights where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron. The picture above shows the bridge; below is the lighthouse that used to protect shipping. It looks like my camera lens is dirty, but that is not where those spots come from. There were millions of little bugs all over the place.  A woman at a local restaurant assured me that they are only a problem for a little while during spring. But they made life very uncomfortable.

 

We got phenomenal mileage – a little more than 52 miles per gallon for more than 150 miles. Never before have I got such good mileage over any significant distance. Conditions were perfect. We could drive comfortably w/o air conditioning as we followed U.S. Highway 2 along the north shore of Lake Michigan. The road was smooth and flat with almost no traffic, so I kept it at 56 MPH, which I think is optimal from the Civic Hybrid. It was a pleasure to drive, which is not something you get to experience every day.

 

The UP is very beautiful and it seems familiar. When I was in college, I had lots of friends from the Michigan-Wisconsin border and I spent a fair amount of time in these mixed forests. I was also primed for it by my mother reading me the “Song of Hiawatha” when I was a little boy. It was set in forests like this.

“By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis. Dark behind it rose the forest, Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, Rose the firs with cones upon them; Bright before it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.”

Gitche Gumee is actually Lake Superior, not Michigan, but Longfellow could have been talking about the north shore of Lake Michigan. And the Big-Sea-Water was shining today. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I looked east over Lake Michigan for more than fifty years before I got to look the other way when  I took the car ferry to Muskegon, Michigan in 2008.  Today I get to do it again, this time from Bay Harbor near Charlevoix, Michigan.  It gets more interesting.

We are staying at the Marriott at Bay Harbor, which is built on an old limestone quarry and Portland cement plant.  This has special meaning to me, since my father worked for 36 years at Medusa Cement & I loaded the stuff during four summers 1973-77.  Our cement didn’t usually come from this quarry, which was owned by a competing firm, Penn Dixie. But Medusa used a nearby quarry in Charlevoix.  The rock is pretty much the same. My father got lots of overtime when the ship came in from Michigan.  The rock from Michigan built the freeways in Wisconsin.

You wouldn’t know this was an old industrial site if nobody told you.  The old dock is now just a little concrete jetty.  The deepest part of the quarry is now “Bay Harbor.” They removed the rock separating the quarry from Lake Michigan.  It looks good.  The old walls of the operation look like bluffs.  If you look close, they do not seem perfectly natural, but I suppose a few more years of weathering will take care of it.

The top picture is sunset from our porch at the hotel. Next is the porch from the window.Third is a boat on the lake at a minute after the sun has dropped below the horizon. And below us is the hotel.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We saw a sign for a CCC memorial just off I-75, so we stopped to see. As an out-of-state car, it cost us $8 for the short visit, but it was worth going to see. My father was in the CCC and they planted trees so I feel a special connection in two ways. The monument is in a quiet place with lots of trees. The day was beautiful, cool and sunny. I feel comfortable but a little sad in such places. Bittersweet is the word. They remind me of good things past and gone.

The CCC boys, my father among them, planted trees and did other conservation chores. It was important work for them and for the country. The early part of the 20th Century was the time when our American forests were in their worst shape ever. Lots of people feared we would run out of wood and that our soils and water would be forever lost.  The CCC was not the only reason we have had such great success in turning the situation around, but it was important. 

My father used to tell me about the CCC. When I think back on it, it was remarkable for him. He told me little in general about his life as a young man. I don't know much about his years in the Army Air Corps & I don't know anything for sure about his childhood, but I know a lot about the CCC from him. He enjoyed being in the woods and was proud of the work he had done. Whenever I saw a row of trees that I thought was planted by the CCC, I thought of him. It was one of the things we shared over the years.

When my father first told me about these things, it had less than thirty years since they did their work. Now it is more almost seventy. The trees they planted are fully mature and in some places they are in the second generation. They accomplished their mission, but youth has matured to age. I still think of the old man when i think of the CCC; I still feel proud of what he did and I still miss him. As I said, it is bittersweet.



Generations pass quickly and memory passes with them. I suppose that most young people know little and care even less about the CCC. I don’t suppose many people come to places like this, at least not voluntarily.

The CCC took young men like my father and gave them some productive work to do. It kept lots of unemployed kids out of trouble and helped prepare our country for the challenge it would soon face in WWII.  My father told me that it was very much like a military operation, including revelry and assembly. He said that when he went into the army in 1942, the instructors favored the men with CCC experience.

We have some similar unemployment problems today, but this solution wouldn’t work. I fear we have become too wimpified as a nation. The CCC boys built the barracks you see in the picture above. Forty of them lived in it in Spartan conditions. It was hot in summer, cold in winter and probably leaky when it rained. Before they built the barracks, they lived in tents. Imagine “subjecting” poor kids to that sort of thing today. Of course, I am sure there would be accusations of “bullying”, not to mention myriad violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And how would public employee unions react to thousands of kids making low wages taking jobs in public parks?  Finally, the CCC boys (I think they were all boys) had to send much of their money home to their mothers. How would today's kids feel about that?

The Pictures:

On top is a statue of a CCC boy.  Next is a mini fire tower, followed by a plaque talking about the CCC. The last picture is the CCC barracks. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thomas Edison invented lots of things, but his most important invention was the invention of invention.  He originated the concept of the research lab, where lots of experts came up with ideas and then made ideas into reality for the purpose of making an end product.

Edison had all the attributes of the person who accomplishes great things and he came at the right time and place to do it.

The pictures show the Edison part of Greenfield Village.  Henry Ford brought the whole complex from Menlo Park, NJ.

The top picture shows Edison himself as a young man.  The chair in the next picture is Edison's thinking chair. He sat in the middle of his lab and spewed ideas. Ford brought it to Greenfield Village and restored the lab around it.  He invited Edison, then an old man in 1929 to visit. Edison sat in it one last time. Ford ordered the chair nailed to the floor and, according to the staff, nobody has even sat in it since.  Notice the floor is different under the chair. They had to change the floor, but they kept the original under the chair. 

The next picture is Edison's foreman's office. This is the guy who managed the production of ideas. 

The old guy is yelling into the phonograph Edison created.  It is an original and still works. The sound is graphed on tin foil. It is not great sound quality, but it is sound.

the bottom is a replica of the light bulb. It doesn't throw much light. You notice from the other pictures that they still need a lot of natural light.             

Posted by Broadnax at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Ford has a mixed legacy. He was a great innovator and philanthropist. He perfected the assembly line which created the productivity that allowed him to pay his workers enough that they could have good lives and actually buy the products they made. In this way, he contributed mightily to creating the American middle class. 

Posted by Broadnax at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The drive from Virginia to Michigan took us back to early April in terms of weather & leafing out of the trees. I wonder how different my impressions would be if the weather was warmer. Highway 75 goes near Lake Erie, but never in sight. So we went down to get a fast look at the lake, which I don’t ever recall actually seeing.  We came to the water near a place called Monroe, Michigan. There was not much to see. I suppose there are lots of prettier places and I understand that my view could be pretty much any lakeside, but I walked through a half foot of water & drizzly rain to get to the pier to see the lake, so I am sharing it with you.

Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes. Some scientists said that it was dead back in the 1960s, but the reports of its death were exaggerated.  Because it was shallow, it got polluted faster than the other Great Lakes, but it also could flush out and clean up faster. It is now an ongoing environmental management challenge, but not dead. Many of the sources of pollution have been addressed, but not all. And the problem of species composition and invasives remains.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been on that road many times before, but I have never seen so many dead deer. We saw twelve dead deer by the roadsides. The population is really high. Besides that, even with that, the drive from Virginia to Columbus, Ohio was uneventful.

I am a perfidious sports fan. The only time I watched regularly was when I was kid. I broke my leg when I was eleven-years-old at the start of the 1966 season. I was in the hospital in traction for six weeks, so it was enforced watching. My father and sometimes my uncles would come to visit me every Sunday and we would watch the game. They must have allowed them to bring in beer.  

I became a very dedicated Packer Fan that season and the next. It kind of spoiled me. It is a colossal understatement to say the Packers were good in 1966-7, with Vince Lombardi, Bart Star & my personal favorite Ray Nitschke (he seemed like an ordinary good guy). At eleven years old, I really couldn’t remember a time when the Packers were not a great team. In my kid sort of way, I just assumed that it was an order in the universe that the Packers would win most of the time. After the 1967 season, the universe was out of order.

As I said, I am not a great sports fan, but the Packers always remained my favorite for nostalgic and emotional reasons as well as a few others.  The Packers are the only team in the league that is not located in some big city. Green Bay only has around 100, 000 people and it is not near any large commercial or population center.  This is because of the unique ownership. The Packers are a non-profit, community-owned franchise, the only one in Americans sports.  There are 112,015 shareholders. Nobody is allowed to own a large percentage of shares. The shares pay no dividends and it is stipulated that if the franchise is ever sold, all the profits go to charity. This removes the financial incentive for moving the team. It also means that the Packers are essentially owned by the Fans & the people of Wisconsin. I like that. 

I am watching the Super bowl today and writing this during the halftime show. The Packers are ahead and I have confidence that they will win.  If the Steelers come back, I will have had the pleasure of celebrating an interim victory.  Chrissy & I have been watching the playoff games and it is great to see the green & gold in the Super Bowl.  It brings back lots of memories and feeling that I had forgotten.

I bought the cake at Safeway today. I couldn’t say for sure if it was supposed to be a Packer cake or a Steelers cake, but the chocolate football kind of looked like a cow pie sitting on a green pasture, so I figured it must be Wisconsin.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the hopeful aspects of the recent Brazilian disasters was the response of Brazilian society.  There were more volunteers to NGOs than could be used and people were lined up to donate blood for the victims. This may seem unremarkable from the American point of view, but this is an evolution in Brazil.

What impressed the Brazilian television reporters about New Orleans was not the government’s response, which remains inadequate in many ways. The success in New Orleans is Make it Right, a non-governmental organization spearheaded by actor Brad Pitt.  Make it Right is doing innovative things quicker than any government bureaucracy could manage. Rather than building cookie cutter projects or maybe not really building much of anything at all, as is often the government response, Make it Right is constructing homes that different and unique. They are adapted to the environment, so that when the next flood comes, these homes will survive.   

The lower 9^th Ward of New Orleans is becoming a place where homeowners can experiment in new ways of building environmentally sustainable communities, not just individual homes, but whole communities with local vegetable production, rain gardens and open space. The unique thing about all this is that it is not top-down, nor really bottom up. Rather it is a partnership with ideas moving both ways. This is a development to watch.It might seem that I am critical of government because government has “failed” to do what Make it Right is doing. On the contrary, the beauty of the system is a government that allows, enhances and encourages  the efforts of private individuals and groups. The government cannot do these sorts of things and a wise government recognizes that it does not have to. The total society response is what counts; government is only one part of total, sometimes the most important part, often not.

Government contributes in a particularly American way based the choices of the people and on our tax code. For example, I decided to contribute money to Make it Right, and because of the nature of our tax system – i.e. the tax exempt status - government essentially matched part of my contribution. After granting tax-exempt status, no bureaucrat needs decide which charity is worthy. The individual Americans decide with their preference, knowledge and with their own money. This distributed decision-making is a total society response with a role for business, government and individual Americans. Balance is important.

Government doesn't have to and should not try to do it all. We fallible human beings don't know what a perfect society would look like, so we can't empower government to create one. We can create a government that contributes to conditions that help citizens prosper. A good society doesn't solve all problems; it enables citizens to do the right things & make their own choices. 

Posted by Broadnax at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went down to Arlington Cemetery for Veteran's Day, as has become my custom. It is a good day to think about the ones who have sacrificed and died to protect our liberty. I remember in particular a young man named Aaron Ward, who was killed by a sniper in Hit, Iraq on May 6, 2008. I wrote about him previously. He was only nineteen when he came to Iraq. His story made a particular impression on me because it was close and he reminded me of Alex. I can never again think of young soldiers, marines, sailors or airmen in the same way as I did before. It brings the pity of war closer whenever I think of him.  I understand that my determination to remember Aaron Ward's sacrifice does nothing to help him. A couple years later, I understand that I have to thank him not only for his service and sacrifice, but also for helping make me a more thoughtful and, I hope, a better man.

I walked from Roslyn to Arlington Cemetery, going past the Marine Memorial, with the Iwo Jima statue. I have posted pictures before. Above is a closer detail.  The complete picture is here. Below is Memorial Bridge that connects Washington, near the Lincoln Memorial, with Arlington Cemetery.

Below is one of the statues near Memorial Bridge. They were a gift from the people of Italy to the people of the United States. 

Below is the memorial to the 101 Airborne, the "Screaming Eagles."  Maybe appropriately, I saw a bald eagle flying over the Potomac.  I got a good look at it, so I am sure it was an eagle. Unfortunately, by the time I got my camera out and ready, it was too far out of sight to get a picture.  Eagles are becoming fairly common again. They are primarily fish eaters, so you see them along rivers like the Potomac or Mississippi.

Farther up the river is Theodore Roosevelt Island. It is literally an island of nature in the largely urban area. It used to be cultivated, but went back to nature  around 100 years ago. They claim that it is an "island of tranquility" but that is not really true. You may be able to pretend that the persistent traffic noise is the sound of the ocean, but the airplanes going over every couple of minutes from Reagan National Airport are harder to rationalize. The only time I really found tranquility there was when I was stranded in Washington after 9/11/2001. They stopped the flights and there was not so much traffic, so it was quiet, but in a sort of eerie way. Below is the Roosevelt Memorial, with old Teddy talking to the trees. I have a couple more detailed pictures here and here.

Below is the George Washington Parkway, which follows the Potomac from Mount Vernon, one of the sources of traffic noise on Theodore Roosevelt Island. It is a bit classier than some other highways, with its beautiful natural stone walls separating the lanes of traffic. They just just don't build things like that anymore.

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Fall is always the season of finishing. Another growing season is done. Days are getting shorter and cooler; the last flowers are blooming; the last leaves are falling. It is both a sad time and one of contentment of harvest and jobs completed. This fall has more of these characteristics for me than usual. I won’t be here next year. This is the last time I will be seeing some parts of Washington for maybe some years, maybe forever. 

Of course I will be back at the Main State, but my visits will be episodic and not the continuous presence I have now. I probably won’t be going over to Gold’s Gym, for example. I expect to be in Brazil for three years.  Who knows after that? I like to live in Washington, but the work here is not as interesting as what I can do overseas. There just aren’t many good jobs at my level. Many of the lower-ranking positions are more fun, if less ostensibly prestigious. I don’t like the political interface or the endless meetings. That doesn’t bode well for a triumphant return sometime in the medium term future. 

I have never had much of a long-term career plan and I don’t have one now. I have always relied on serendipity and opportunistically taking advantage of what comes. You don’t have to be smart if you are lucky and I have been lucky. Brazil, Norway, Poland and even Iraq were places that I wanted to o and places where I was content to be. There is not much time left anyway and I suppose I should be thinking about career transition.

The story I recall, the one I tell myself and others is that I learned about the FS randomly. I remember waking up from a nap at the student union in at UW-Madison and finding a booklet about careers in the FS left on the table in front of me. I was only vaguely aware of the FS before that time. The booklet had a practice test that didn’t look too hard, so I decided to try for it. For me that has become a kind of creation myth. I really no longer know how much is certainly true and how much is embellishment borne of the retelling. But I think the story has colored how I view the job. I guess I still see it as more of a gift than something I worked hard to get. And it has usually been fun. A sort of career plan that I did have was to work in the FS for around seven years and then leverage my experience a well-paying executive job. It never happened because there has never been a significant amount of time when I wasn’t either having too much fun at my current assignment, too excited about the next one or both. 

It was more like a hound-dog following the next scent than a step-by-step progress.

Anyway, I think about these things as I walk around in the still warm fall days and evenings. I came into the FS in October and got to know Washington for the first time during this time of the year. That was twenty-six years ago, but the area around the Mall has not changed much. I remember walking around the first time. It was like in that movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” I was so excited to see the monuments: Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and so many other things. It is no longer a new experience, but it is still exciting. What a privilege to be able to be among them all the time. That is something I will miss. So this fall has a special poignancy for me.

Let me tell you about the pictures. They are simple things taken around Washington. First is an informal football game on the fields in front of the Washington Monument.  Next is the Main State, the Harry Truman building. It is not one of Washington's most attractive. I am not a big coffee drinker, but the next picture shows them that do.  The little wagon is owned by a guy from someplace in the Middle East. It is good coffee, I guess. People wait for him to show up in the morning. Horse cops patrolling the Mall on Clydesdales in the next picture. Jefferson Memorial with fall color maples. Another of my Capitol pictures. The African Art museum is just above and below is the statue of Casimir Pulaski on Freedom Plaza.

Below is the Washington Memorial and the last is just the moon.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mariza’s boyfriend wanted to attend mass, so we went down to Roanoke Rapids, which was the closest Catholic church with a Saturday service. The priest at St. John the Baptist was out, so they had a temporary priest who has done a lot of work with local forestry in Kenya. You can read more about it here.

After church, we went to a nice Italian, simple Italian restaurant on the main street in Roanoke Rapids. It is a pleasant little down, but not really exciting. This is probably the place where my thinned trees will end up.Below you can see the trees on the Freeman place, planted in 1996 and ready to be thinned.

We were down in the southern part of the state so that Mariza and Chris could see the forests.  Mariza had never seen the Freeman place and had not seen the CP property recently. Things have changed a lot. It was good to be able to show them the trees and explain a little about forestry.  Some of these trees will belong to Mariza someday. It is good if she gets to know the land and can become a good steward of the nature on it.

I got to ride down and back with Mariza, which was good. We had a chance to talk a little.  I don’t see Mariza that much anymore. We used to take walks and talk when she was a little girl, but since then not so much. It gets harder to keep in touch when they move away. She has become a wonderful young woman and I want to get to know her better. Above shows Mariza and Chris in one of our wildlife clearings in front of the CP pines, planted in 2004. The picture below is Mariza and me (I think she is just a little taller than I am). Right underneath is a picture from around the same place in 2006. I always like to show the contrast, which each year gets more pronounced. It was not that long ago, but already the difference is remarkable. Below that are Mariza and Chris walking among the mature pines at the edge of the property.

There was a lot of activity on the farms. On both places, guys from the hunt clubs were exercising and training their hunting dogs. The guy on the Freeman property was going to run down some coyotes. I don’t think he was hunting the coyotes when we saw him, just training the dogs. You can hunt coyotes all year around on private land in Virginia. I have no problem with coyotes either way, but if somebody from the hunt club wants to chase them on my land, I don’t have a problem with that either. Coyotes are not native to Virginia and they are a nuisance to local farmers. 

The guys on CP were training their dogs for rabbit hunting, which starts next week.

We are getting more and more bear in the area and I am not enthusiastic about that. I know bears are mostly harmless, but the “mostly” part worries me a little. I bring my lunch with me when I work on the land and I am often there alone.  I really don’t want to have to think about attracting bears or not. Southside Virginia was not "bear country for more than a century, but now they are back. We sometimes see bear signs and people have taken pictures with those motion activated cameras.

Of course, absolute proof of bears is that a local guy killed one with a bow and arrow.  I would be a little nervous going after a bear with a bow and arrow.  It just doesn’t seem like that is “loaded for bear,” but I guess that some of those new bows are really effective. I am glad that the hunters go after the bear.  I want them to retain their fear of humans. In different seasons, it is legal to hunt bear with bow, black powder and ordinary firearms.  Dogs can be used to hunt bear in some situations.  Brunswick County has a bear hound training season, where hunter can train their dogs to chase bear, but cannot kill them if they chase them down.

Hunting and trapping regulations are available at this link.Below is Genito Creek. I like to go down there, since it is quiet and ever changing. I explained to Mariza and Chris how the creek keeps on moving as it undercuts one bank and then the other.  It floods an area of at least fifty yards on both sides. This is the kind of place that someone would like to have a house or a cabin because it is pretty and pleasant. Of course, this is also the kind of place where nobody should build a house, since it will regularly flood.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wanted to take a trip across the U.S. – again – to remind myself about the America outside what I see in and around Washington.  It is easy to forget that there is a lot of America far away from Washington when you live around here.

Driving is different than flying to particular cities because you see the places you cross close up. It is impressive how long it takes to get from place to place. You quickly understand that it is a big country, with pretty good roads.  I tried to get off the Interstate when I could. The Interstate is faster, but you see less and you never get the feeling of the open road that you do when you are the only one on a county road. You also cannot usually stop on the Interstate, so if you do see something interesting all you can do is race past it at 70mph. 

I enjoyed driving most on the old U.S. Highways. They are usually smooth and fairly straight. They were designed for more traffic than they get now in most of the rural areas, as the Interstates have drained the traffic, so it is often a comfortable and almost traffic free experience. I like the diversion when I slow down through towns. The Interstate bypasses them or hurries you through them on ramps above, artificial valleys below or man-made canyons of noise control walls if you stay at ground level. You miss a lot of history.

I drove through sixteen states, including the State of Missouri. I mention Missouri specifically because Missouri was the only one of the continental states I had not visited before. Missouri is just about right in the center of the U.S., so it is strange that I missed it so many times. I really didn’t see it too much this time either. All I did was stop at a rest stop and put my feet on the ground for a few minutes.But I got a picture.

I noticed the changes in the physical landscape. Once you cross the thickly forested eastern mountains, you get into relatively flat formerly-forested landscapes until you get to about fifty miles out into Kansas.  Rainfall drops off below the amount (about 30 inches a year) needed to support natural forests at about the 98th meridian. This divides prairies from forests. Historically, the prairies extended farther east because the Native Americans used to set fires to maintain the grassland. Today, our own civilization has brought trees into the grasslands and grasslands into the trees, but you can still clearly discern the differences as you pass over. The mountains in the West have all sorts of variations of climate. That is the attraction of the West. You can drive 100 miles in the East w/o noticing big changes. In parts of New Mexico I crossed dozens of biomes in that same distance.

I am not sure if it was Texas or New Mexico that were most surprising. I had been to both before, but not really through them. New Mexico, as I mentioned in one of my posts, is truly a land of enchantment, with a great variety of environments in very close proximity because of the mountains. Texas was also very surprising. I wrote several posts about that. Texas is such a big state that I should not have been as surprised by the variety, but I was.

The geography and topography was very different, but I found that Americans were very similar everywhere I went. I am in a good position now. I am old enough that I both am not too shy to approach and talk to strangers and I seem harmless enough that they are willing to talk to me. Actually, I am repeated surprised at how friendly people are and how much they like to tell you about themselves and their home towns.  The pride is palpable and everybody thinks his/her place in unique. And they are all right. But what is not unique is the feeling of unique pride in being different. It is a kind of a paradox.

It makes me a little sad that the regional differences are weakening. As each part of the U.S. becomes more diverse the country is becoming less so. You find the same restaurants, stores and outlets wherever you go. And it is not only the well-known chains. You can find the same sorts of independent Chinese, Mexican, or Japanese restaurants in San Antonio or Dodge City as you do in Milwaukee or Nashville. Everyplace is diverse now. All these places were less diverse internally a generation ago, but they were more different from each other. The whole country has been blended. It is great that you can get all the same things almost anywhere, but maybe also not so great.  You can tell this by what you CANNOT bring back home that you can't already get back home.

What is becoming more important is what you might call the back story. We are becoming a lot more concerned with the origins and the “stories” of the things we eat, drink, wear and enjoy. We can get to know these stories when we travel. As our country blends, we all look for the special things and we are reviving or recreating traditions, especially on the high end. This is how we connect in a world that doesn't tie us to our roots. For example, the Bourbon makers we visited have been working harder to make “craft” products and people are willing to pay more. Farmers are developing or rediscovering heirloom fruits and vegetables. I saw longhorn cattle like those that were essentially eliminated a century ago. Somebody is reviving the herds. I think this is healthy. It is usually not mere antiquarianism.  People are respecting traditions but also working and applying their innovation and intelligence to make them better. New traditions are being evolved from the old ones all over our country, so while we are becoming more homogeneous we are also developing new diversity.

I have a few miscellaneous pictures from the tip that I have included. The top picture is art work in the grassy hills above a Missouri rest stop. They are flat steel cutouts of Indians hunting bison.  Next is a water town in Franklin, Wisconsin.  A ranch in Kansas is below followed by a replica of the Bonnie & Clyde "death car." In the middle of the page the Polish-American Center in Franklin and then the Bay View "Redcat" football team in early season practice. The rocks in the next picture is off I-10 near the place where the Apache leader Cochise hid out.  Next is a gas station in New Mexico with the railroad in the background. The next two show an old school house in Mead, Kansas and then an oil pump on the Permian basin in New Mexico. Below is a mural in Fort Worth, Texas honoring the Chisholm Trail

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The Kentucky Bourbon Trail connects six Bourbon makers in Northern Kentucky. It is a very pretty drive and you get the added benefit of visiting distilleries and tasting their whiskey. We stopped only at Jim Beam and Wild Turkey. I think you might need a couple of days to do the whole thing, not least because you probably could not drive if you visited all the distillers in one day, even with the very small samples you get. Below is the center of the district, Bardstown, Kentucky the "Bourbon capital of the world."

Bourbon is a true American product. The Congress declared Bourbon to be America’s native spirit and there are specific requirements for making it. For example, it must be at least 51% corn. In early American times, distilling bulky corn and other grains into whiskey was the best and sometimes the only way farmers on the distant frontier could get their products profitably to markets across wilderness with no or bad roads. Bourbon can be made anywhere in the U.S., but around 95% is made in the State of Kentucky, near where this sort of whiskey originated. Northern Kentucky has good water for making whiskey because of its limestone and limestone soils that filter water and make it “sweet.” 

All Bourbon must be aged in new white oak barrels. The barrels can be used only once, after which they are sold to Scotch whiskey producers and makers of other alcohol products. They are charred inside. The raw whiskey – called white dog, this is as far as they get when they make moonshine or white lightning - is clear and essentially flavorless. No artificial colors or flavors may be added to the finished whiskey. During the seasons of the aging process (the aging barns are not heated or air conditioned) the whiskey expands and contracts soaking up woody flavors and color from the wood and charcoal of the barrels. When you take a drink of Kentucky Bourbon, you taste the forests, creeks and at least four and maybe ten years' worth of Kentucky seasons. Below shows Kentucky along I -64.

We bought a couple of bottles of whiskey at Jim Beam. I got a bottle of Jim Beam Black. It is older than the white label and has a noticeably smoother feel. If you want to drink Bourbon, this is the one I recommend.  I keep around a bottle of “Old Forester” because I like the name, but the Beam Black is better. We also got a bottle of a new product called “Red Stag”. It is not officially Bourbon because it has some cherry flavor added.  At the Wild Turkey distillery, we got a bottle of rye whiskey. This also was technically not Bourbon. It tastes a little more like Scotch. You can see below the distribution of grain in two Jim Beam products, Basil Hayden and Knob Hill. I don't like the Basil Hayden. It is a little too harsh. Knob Hill is good, but a little too pricey, IMO.

We should all drink responsibly, of course, but I think we should all drink a little. Beers, wines and whiskeys are deeply embedded in so many of our traditions, both in the creation and in the consumption of the products.  There is just much more than the schluck going on. I suppose you could have specific health or religious concerns, but besides that, it is a silly person who refuses a drink when offered.

Above is Booker Noe, the grandson of the eponymous Jim Beam. Booker created the modern Jim Beam distillery.  His son, Fred is the 7th generation of the Beam family to run the business. If you look in back of Booker and below at the ginkgo tree in the front yard, you notice the black bark. This is caused by a fungus that grows on the surfaces around distilleries because of the evaporation from the whiskeys. The lost alcohol is called the "angel's share" and in humid climates it feeds the fungus. It makes it look like there has been a fire, but it is evidently harmless to the trees.

Below is a truck moving the barrels. 

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The State Department has a good, but generally underused, program that lets us to volunteer to speak to people around the country when we travel. I often give them my schedule when I am traveling and sometimes they can arrange meetings in my free time.  I find I get more out of travel when I get to talk to interesting people and this is a good – official - opportunity for that. I learned a few things about Nashville at a meeting arranged by State public affairs.

I think of Nashville as the capital of country music and that is still true. The Grand Old Opry is here and musicians come to Nashville from all over the country.   But I learned that Nashville is much more, with a diverse economic base. The biggest industries are education, health care & tourism.  

The most famous local university is Vanderbilt, but there are many others.  The guy at the mayor’s office told me that around 60% of the students who come to the area to study stay after graduation, enriching Nashville with their “human capital”.   He pointed out that young people today often choose where they want to live and AFTER that look for the schools and the jobs that will get them there.   Young people today, especially those with the most marketable skills – the kind of people cities are trying to attract – are more mobile than we were.  On the other hand, they are a little less likely to move once established.  This may be because they choose the place in the first place and like it and/or because relationships hold them in place.  

Nashville competes with – and “benchmarks” – cities like Austin and Charlotte, NC. They are around the same size and have similar compositions.  Austin also has a strong music scene.

Chrissy and I had lunch at a bar and grill called Piranha’s.  They had a truly odd sandwich made of roast beef with the French fries jammed in.  It tasted okay and was very filling, but I don’t think I would order it again.  You see in the picture above that they have some kind of contest going about eating a 10lb cheese steak.   Nobody has won, so far, and I am not surprised.   I think the whole thing might just be a bridge too far even for the biggest eaters.   I recall that the “Big Texan” in Amarillo has a 72 oz steak challenge.  If you can eat it, you get it free.  Some people succeed in that and a solid meat meal would be a bit harder – maybe – that something including bread, but I just cannot figure out how eating 10lbs of anything would be possible. Maybe I misunderstood the challenge.  Across the street from Piranha's was the Charlie Daniels Museum, actually just more of a shop, pictured above.

The other pictures are the cheese steak challenge, some interesting buildings and a music festival being set up in front of the courthouse. I understand they have live music most weekends. 

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We spent last night at the Holiday Inn in Forrest City, Arkansas.  The town was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest.  As we drove through western Tennessee, we came across Forrest a few more times. He was very much the famous home town boy.  I read that there are thirty-two monuments associated with him in Tennessee. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate cavalry officer and a true military genius.  On the other hand, he trafficked in slaves, was accused of war crimes and was associated with the KKK, although he denied both of the latter. On the other hand, in later life Forrest advocated re-consolidation between North and South and between the races.   

The man was a fighter and good at his job.  He famously said that war means fighting and fighting means killing.  What you can say for sure about Nathan Bedford Forrest is that he was a man of significant contradictions and that he was well-thought-of at least by some people around Western Tennessee, Western Arkansas & Northern Mississippi.

A less controversial local hero is Casey Jones.  He was an engineer on the Illinois Central Railroad.  His passenger train, the Cannonball Express, ran into a stalled freight train near Vaughan, MS.  Jones stayed with the train, pulling on the brakes. He managed to reduce the speed of his train from around 75mph to 35mph. His bravery undoubtedly saved the lives of passengers, none of whom were killed, but Casey Jones died in the wreck.

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We went to an old railroad tunnel near Fredericksburg to see the bats emerge. You can see from the picture above that bat viewing is a minor local attraction. We didn’t actually see the bats emerge. They did it too much after dark. They come out around dark every night. If they come out around dark before it gets too dark, you can see them, otherwise we just take their word that they came out.

The bats in the tunnel are Mexican free tail bats. They are small bats that eat insects, mostly moths.  They are useful because they devour prodigious numbers of corn moths. 

We were told, but I didn’t actually see, that the bats take off in a spiral to get enough lift to get into the air.  The experienced bats do it well.  When there are lots of new bats, the show is evidently more chaotic, presuming you can see it.  The bats never come out on schedule and nobody is sure why they come out when they do. One theory is that they just come out when they get hungry, so it depends on how much they ate the night before.  Another theory is that there is not theory. One or more of them wanders out and others follow.

A couple people run the “bat watch”. Bat people are special and they are very enthusiastic about bats.  They showed pictures and explained the importance of bats in the environment.  As I wrote above, the most useful thing they do is eat lots of flying bugs. Bat guano makes very good fertilizer and the bat woman explained guano used to be one of Texas’ biggest exports.

Bats are threatened by a fungus disease called white nose.  It can wipe out whole bat colonies.  Nobody knows what causes it, but it is probably helped to spread by people coming around from cave to cave, so many bat caves are now closed off to casual visitors. At out bat viewing area, we were told not to go down to the opening.  I would not have done so anyway. I appreciate the importance of bats and understand that these little bats are harmless, but I still  think it would be a little creepy to be standing right among them.  Besides, they probably crap when they fly.

The top picture is the crowd waiting for the bats. Below that picture is one of my friend Dennis Neffendorf's sheep just before sun up. Dennis owns a peach farm near Fredericksburg. If you want some great peaches, let me know and I will put you in touch. You met Dennis in earlier posts. He worked with me in Iraq.  The sheep are unrelated to the bats, but I needed a place to put the nice picture. 

President Johnson & his ranch

We also visited the LBJ ranch. Unfortunately, I deleted the pictures by mistake. My only text would be that LBJ actually cared about his ranch. He had a great herd of cattle and he took good care of the land. No matter what you think of him as a politician or a human being, he was a good steward of the land.  For me, that means a lot. 

Dennis, mentioned above, grew up near the Johnson ranch and as a kid got to do odd jobs around the ranch. He know a lot about the Johnson's and the people around them. He said Johnson was a bigger than life type guy. He could be a bully and an A-hole, but he remembered his roots and took an interest in everyone he met.  Like all great men, he was complex and contradictory, so biographers can find what they want.  Lady-Bird Johnson was universally a lady in all the positive senses of the word and she stood by Lyndon. I took a good picture of the tombstones of Lydon and Lady-Bird. Hers is a little bigger.  On his tombstone is the presidential seal.  Hers features a Texas bluebell. Mrs. Johnson did a good job with wild flowers.

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You can see the physical German influence in the buildings and the people in Fredericksburg and all around the Texas hill country. I knew that lots of Germans colonized Texas, but I was surprised by how much this resembled Wisconsin in terms of heritage and appearance. My picture doesn't really show it. I made a mistake and erased fifteen of my pictures, so I have to use what I have left.  Along this street there are mostly German names. We had breakfast in a nice German bakery. 

Germans were hard-working and frugal, which meant that they adapted fairly well almost wherever they went.   We visited one of their neat farms – the Sauer-Beckmann farm - near the LBJ ranch.  They have living history, with period costumes, appropriate livestock etc.  The original colonists, the Sauer family, made a “modified” log cabin.  I say modified because logs were relatively rare in this part of Texas centuries ago.  (It is a little misleading to look around today because there are more trees today, since the wild fires started by lightning and Indians have been controlled.) To save on wood, the logs were interspersed with stones, which were common. Making a wall entirely of stone takes longer than making this kind of hybrid.  When they had the time, they made the buildings out of limestone and so later additions were often stone.

The pictures above and below are from the Sauer-Beckmann farm, part of the LBJ park complex.  One good thing about both is that they have actual livestock. Livestock were a big part of rural life and when they do the recreations w/o them it is not realistic.  Johnson himself left some of his land to the park system with the stipulation that they maintain the place as a working ranch with cattle. 

The Germans fit uneasily into the pre-Civil War Texas because they set themselves apart to some extent and had a superior attitude at times.  More importantly, they were strongly and loudly against slavery.  When Texas voted to succeed from the Union in 1861, the counties with heavy German populations voted to remain in the Union.  Texas Confederates declared the hill country in rebellion – against the confederates.  There were open battles between pro-union and Confederate forces.  Scores of Germans were killed in the fighting, others were shot and hung.  Lynching of Germans was practiced. These episodes of Civil War history are not well known.   Germans being lynched, beaten and murdered because of their stand against slavery doesn’t seem to fit in well with subsequent narratives.

I have written before about Germans in the U.S. and recently about the Amana Colonies. We now have forgetting the contributions of America’s largest ethnic group because Germans and their contributions have become as American as hamburgers, hot dogs and good beer.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Texas hill country is extraordinarily pleasant and we got a very green period because of lots of rain in the last couple of weeks. But my joy at encountering this beautiful landscape was tempered by oak wilt that has been killing the wonderful live oaks that give the hills their dominant feel. Oak wilt was identified in Wisconsin in the 1940s and has gradually been spreading.  It is s fungal disease spread both by a beetle and through natural root grafts among the oak trees.  So if one oak tree get the disease, it usually spreads to the neighbors.  I knew about oak wilt before, but seeing it in action here made me profoundly sad.  It seems to have had a bigger effect here in the Texas hill country than elsewhere, maybe because the live oaks form pure stands giving the beetles and the root grafts an easy way to go. 

You manage oak wilt, but it can be trouble. You have to be sure that the oaks have not sustained injuries that can attract the beetles or give the fungus spores an opening. The danger time for this is in the spring, until about July when summer heat kills exposed spores. This means that spring pruning of oaks is out.  You also have to be careful not to smack into the oaks with lawnmowers or other equipment.  If you have an infected oak, you have to get rid of it quick AND made sure the roots are not passing the fungus.  This means trenching between the infected oak and any others nearby.

When planting trees, it is a good idea not to create pure stands.  If oak trees are separated by other sorts of trees, the beetles and spores will spread more slowly or not at all.

The USDA page on oak wilt is here.

As long as I am feeling bad about the ragnarok of beloved big trees, I am also very upset by the emerald ash borer.  This rotten little bug is a native of Asia, first identified in Michigan in 2002.  Since then it has killed millions of ash trees and spread as south as Virginia, east to the Atlantic Ocean and west to the Great Plains.  The insect gets under the bark and quickly kills ash trees.

Emerald ash borers are not very mobile and left on their own they would probably remain a local problem.  Unfortunately, they hitch rides with us when we drive and especially when we transport infected firewood.   Never move fresh firewood any farther than you can walk.

The other one that bothers me is the hemlock wooly agelgid. This is another Asian import that was first reported in America in 1924.  This bug threatens the continued existence of hemlocks in the U.S. outside protected gardens.  Treatments are available but many of our nicest hemlock forests are gone already.  Hemlocks occupied a particular ecological niche in that they can grow in very deep shade. They used to fill an important role as understory trees and in shading little streams and keeping water temperatures lower.  Their ghost forests cannot do this.

On the plus side, we have developed American elms that are resistant to blight. We have better science available all the time. Maybe we can stay ahead of the bugs, but it will be a lot of work.

The top picture is a Texas hill country landscape.  You can see the dead trees in the foreground. Below that is what a healthy Texas live oak looks like. 

PS - I am informed that my reference to Ragnarok is too obscure and that some people might confuse it with some kind of video game. Ragnarok is from Norse mythology. It is the final struggle where the gods, such as Odin and Thor, are doomed. In German it is (also obscure) Gotterdamerung. A Wagner opera has that title and goes into the subject. The English "Twilight of the Gods" doesn't really cover it, IMO. I understood when I wrote that it was hyperbole, but it seems that hyperbole is not really out of place if you risk losing species of trees that have dominated our landscapes since the end of the last ice age. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The thing I liked most about San Antonio’s Riverwalk was that it seemed very natural because of the very large trees, mostly bald cypress and Montezuma cypress, and the lush plants along the route. Chrissy & I walked along the paths and then took the boat ride. The boat ride is worth it. The city is named after the San Antonio River, not the other way around.

Part of the river is natural, i.e. it has a mud bottom and part is created with a concrete channel. The river was a center of city life since the founding of the city, but the River Walk has been developing in something recognizable as predecessor of today’s version since the 1940s. In order to make that possible, the river needed to be controlled. San Antonio can get heavy rains and the river used to flood. Today the big investments along the river walk are protected by a flood gate system, which shunts flood waters into holding basins and an underground channel.

The climate and vegetation surprised me. It is more southern and Gulf shore-like than I thought. I always pictured the place as a more Western place, in the sense of drier or more of a prairie ecosystem. But there were palm trees, live oak, tropical looking rubber trees and the cypress I mentioned above all growing in enthusiastic profusion.  

I suppose that most people are less passionate about environment & trees and more about the many nice restaurants. It is very much alive with people, probably mostly tourists. We had lunch at a place called “Dick’s” where the waiters are encouraged to be wiseasses. That gives the place a special character. The food is just okay. In the evening we had some good steaks at the Texas Land & Steak restaurant.

Another surprising aspect of San Antonio is its Middle American feel. I expected the city to be a lot more Hispanic than it is. Maybe I was just in a particular part of town, but besides the sub-tropical plants and the Alamo, this place could have been in Ohio or Illinois.  In fact, what I have been noticing generally in my drive across America has been how American the country is. We talk a lot about our differences, but they pale before the things we have in common.

People have local pride, of course, and Texas has more local pride than any other place I went.  From my hotel window I saw Texas flags on top of many buildings. There are lots of other signs of Texas pride.  Even the waffle at our hotel was shaped like the State of Texas.

The top picture is the San Antonio River Walk. They put food coloring in to give it that green color. The next shows one of the many foot bridges over the river. The trees that are shaped like elm trees are actually Montezuma cypresses. There is an individual picture of one along side. Between that is a live oak. And at the bottom are the Texas waffle and flags.  Below is the Buckhorn Saloon, full of stuffed animals of the kind PETA doesn't approve. There are even more in the rooms above.

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We all know the stories of the Alamo. I say stories,plural, since there are lots of legends. Ever since I watched Davy Crockett when I was a little kid, I have enjoyed movies about the Alamo.The most elaborate was the one made by John Wayne, but I also recall a made for TV version with James Arness that was pretty good. The most recent one featured Billy-Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett. I have also seen dozens of documentaries and related programs. It is a big part of our historical memory. The legend has changed to accommodate changing sensibilities.  

No matter how you interpret or reinterpret it, however, the Alamo remains a story of heroism, sacrifice and bravery. The fewer than 200 volunteers who held the Alamo against more than the more than 3000 soldiers of the tyrant Santa Anna knew that they were facing steep odds & would have little or no chance of surviving the encounter.

Santa Anna seized power in Mexico City, abolished the constitution of 1824 and set about centralizing power in his own hands. Several states rebelled and Santa Anna put them down. The most distant was the rebellion in Texas. Santa Anna was a megalomaniac and he didn’t think he would have too much trouble dealing with the ragged and disorganized Texans. He came north himself with his and was impatient with the defenders of the Alamo, which helped build the legend. Instead of waiting for his big artillery to arrive, which could have reduced the Alamo to rubble w/o much loss of life among his own troops, Santa Anna ordered a frontal assault.  When some of his subordinates objected to the unnecessary loss of life, he reportedly compared his soldiers to chickens. It was their duty to die for him and he didn’t think the cost in their lives was not too much to pay for his glory. By giving the Texans a fighting chance he ensured a fight to be remembered.

It is interesting to think about how different history could have been with a few different decisions, and with a few people present or not. In this respect I am not thinking so much about the heroes of the Alamo but about Santa Anna. The Mexican constitution of 1824 was a good one.  It provided for more liberty and a more decentralized system. Santa Anna seized power and centralized the state in the same way that created problems in Latin societies throughout the 19^th & 20^th Centuries. Retaining the constitution of 1824 may or may not have prevented the succession of Texas, but imagine a century and a half of Mexican history with a more stable and liberal society and constitution. How different could have been the history of all North America.

The Alamo is smaller than it seems in the movies, which is no surprise since much of the battlefield is now occupied by various San Antonio buildings, including the hotel where we are staying.  It is also true that we just expect things that were important in history to be big.  The battle of the Alamo was not physically big compared with fights we saw in later history and not too much later in our own Civil War.  But the relatively small number of participants is one of the things that makes the Alamo so memorable.  We can know the participants as individuals. I am no expert on this and yet I can name several of the defenders and I know their stories, at least their legends. I suspect this is fairly common knowledge. I looked at the wall listing all their names. I could quickly read through the list from A-Z, along with where they came from.  This makes the history personal.

The pictures show the Alamo at night and the grounds.  The middle picture is a very nice live oak. The bottom picture is a Japanese monument to the heroes of the Alamo.  It goes to show the fame of the place and I thought it was a very good example of public diplomacy on the part of the Japanese to associate themselves with such a Texan and American symbol. 

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I knew Carlsbad Caverns well from looking at the old View Masters, as I wrote yesterday.  Their photos were/are better than mine.  They made the place look familiar.  The same was true when I first saw the Grand Canyon and Yosemite.  The good thing about the View Master was that we didn’t have very many slides and there was not as much competition from other things to watch or do.  I watched them over and over so I got to know all the pictures very well.

Nothing has changed in the Caverns since the View Master took the pictures fifty years ago.   Nothing much has changed for thousands or maybe millions of years.  Change is slow down here, 750 feet below the surface.  Water drips slowly and makes the rock formations you see in the pictures.  The little lumps on the formations are called “popcorn.”  They are formed by moisture from the air, which carries enough mineral that – with the many millennia - rock forms.  The rock down here is mostly limestone, the remains of the ancient sea I talked about in the previous post.

Unlike most caves, Carlsbad Caverns was not formed by flowing water like a stream.   Instead, water drained slowly from the caverns when the climate was wetter.  The “decorations” were created by the slow dripping.  The water carries carbonic acid, the same stuff in Coca-Cola.  It is a very weak acid, but it is enough to dissolve stone over long time.

The ranger explained all the above.  Carlsbad is not the biggest cavern in the U.S. but it is among the most interesting because of its unique characteristics or not being formed by flowing streams. This gives it lots of big and little rooms.  Caves formed by flowing streams usually are smoother and more uniform in the size of the rooms or chambers.  

They turned off all the lights during the program to show what a cave looks like in its normal state.  There is no way your eyes can adjust to zero light and all the wonders in stone are invisible.  In a very obvious way the cave we see is created by light we bring.  Someone asked about using color lights.  That may seen a little Disney-like, but the whole thing is a artistic creation of the light. The placement of the lights creates the reality.   The “natural” condition is pitch blackness.

There is no way I can get my brain around those millions of years and minute changes that lead to big things.  I noticed drops of water on the ends of some of the stalactites.  They weren’t dripping off and I don’t think they were going to drip off any time soon.  It will set there forming new rock formations.

Above is one of the formations. Chrissy said it looked like Gaudi architecture in Barcelona.  Below is the "lake" in the cave.  It is about the size of a jacuzzi.  It took thousands of years to fill to that depth.This is the place I remember best from the View Master. Something about the clear water stuck in my memory. The stone waterfall also makes an impression.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We went down to Carlsbad Caverns.  This is another familar place I visited for the first time.  I really saw a lot of the world - in 3D - with View Master.

I will post some actual cave pictures in the next entry.  I was also interested in the geography up top. There has been a fair amount of rain, so the landscape is unusually green. But this is generally a high and dry landscape with an interesting geology.  This used to sit at the bottom of a shallow ocean during the Permian Period. It was something like the Persian Gulf is today, very hot and dry on the land, but the undersea environment was very diverse.  This was a reef that supported all sorts of life.  Some, like sponges and algae, are familiar today.  Then there were the trilobites, my personal favorite. 

Lots of the animals, whole families of them, are extinct, since the Permian Period ended with the greatest mass-extinction of all time, wiping out the majority of earth’s species.  The Permian Period was the last period of the Paleozoic Era.  What followed was the Mesozoic, the age of dinosaurs.

The first two pictures are up top of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. The bottom picture is alone I-10 in Texas.  Notice the rainbow. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We drove south to Tucson and then east through the Sonora Desert.  The Sonora is the desert we all think of as THE desert.  It is the hottest of our American deserts, the one with all the cactuses that we know so well from the western movies.  We visited my cousin Elise and her husband Carl who live near Tucson.  I wrote re that last year here and here. The Tucson area is higher, greener and cooler than Phoenix, although both are in the same biome.

On the side is me with my new hat (purchased in Texas) in the desert. The hat is made of palm leaf and it really does keep the sun off and the head cool.  I like it.  

Just outside Tucson is the Saguaro National Park, where I took the pictures of the Sonora Desert vistas.  The saguaro cactus is the one with the arms that looks like a man flexing his muscles.  It takes many years for them to grow big enough to get arms.  You can tell you are in the Sonora when you see the saguaro, which grow naturally nowhere else.

Above and below are Sonora landscapes

Below - the flat area behind the sign is - believe it or not - the continental divide.  At some point out in that field, if you peed some would go toward the Pacific and some toward the Atlantic. We are actually at a fairly high elevation.  It is just a flat plateau.  I don't know how exactly they can tell which way the water would flow. I always thought of the continental divide as a sort of ridge. 

North and west of the Sonora is the Mojave Desert, which I wrote about last April, with its characteristic brush and Joshua Trees.   You hit the Chihuahua Desert as you go east.  It is not true that the Taco Bell dog’s wild ancestors roamed this region.  The Chihuahua desert is theoretically less harsh, but it seems to have a little less interesting life.  I guess that the Sonora is very harsh, but fairly consistent, which allows varied life forms to develop.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Between Clovis and Portales, New Mexico is the Blackwater Draw archeological site and museum.  It was closed, but the old guy running the place let me in anyway and we talked about archeology.  This is the place where they found the “Clovis Points,” a particular type of spear point used by the people who lived around here 13000 years ago.  They didn’t have bows and arrows.  Those came only around 3000 years ago.  Instead they used spear throwing sticks – an atlatl.  The stick essentially extends the arm and gives a man leverage to throw harder and farther than he could with just his muscle alone.

There is a lot of controversy about the Clovis people.  Nobody knows what they were like, since no human remains have been found.  Scientists used to just assume that they were ancestors of today’s Native Americans, but recent archeological discoveries, such as the Kennewick man (who looked a lot like Jean-Luc Picard), have called some of that into question.   

What happened in America 13000 years ago - before anybody around today was here - is a bigger issue today than you might think.  Some Native American creation myths hold that their people were original to the area or even sprung from the earth. Scientific evidence to the contrary bothers some people. Some have even gone so far as to essentially try to destroy evidence, or at least prevent its study. It is really a species of racism.

It strains credulity to believe that they particular native people inhabiting this place a hundred years ago were the same ones living here 12000 years ago. Linguistic and historical evidence alone would preclude that.  But evidently creationism dies hard no matter where it is rooted. And sometimes political correctness demands that we pretend to believe the believers.

I have a simple view of history. After around a century, when events have passed from living memory, ALL human achievement becomes the common heritage of all humans. In other words, we cannot take special credit or blame for anything that nobody alive actually remembers. I studied and appreciated ancient Greeks and Romans, despite probably being more related genetically to the barbarians that destroyed their civilization. It is great when someone from China can claim inspiration from Thomas Jefferson as I may from Lao Tzu. The Clovis people were our human ancestors. It really doesn’t matter who can or cannot make a silly claim to being genetically more similar.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More pictures and comments. The geography becomes more pretty and varied as you climb out of the high plains into the foothills and mountains. Below are more pictures from the plateaus and coming down the other side in the Salt River Canyon of Arizona. Some of the pictures are fairly high resolution, so if you want to see details, click on them and enlarge.

Above is Hondo, NM. There is not much besides a gas station, but it seems very pleasant. Below is probably somebody's hobby: part of a herd of longhorn cattle.

Below is the place were the original Smokey Bear was rescued from a forest fire. They have a marker and a bigger Smokey to show the place. 

Below is heavy traffic on US 60

Below are views of the Salt River Canyon, as you come off the mountains into the Sonora Desert.  Building the road must have been a heroic venture.

From the other side.

Road

Posted by Broadnax at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New Mexico board of tourism calls their state the “Land of Enchantment” and they are right.  As you drive across the middle of the state, you encounter a wide variety of beautiful ecosystems, lots of cute towns and great vistas.  I drove along US Highways 70 and 60 and avoided the Interstate. Below are some pictures and comments.

Above and below are examples of the changing biomes  that sometimes sit within a few minutes drive of each other.  Above are ponderosa pine.  The open park-like terrains is naturally kept that way by frequent small fires. The ponderosa pines are fire-dependent.  The young trees have black bark; as they get older -at around 100 years - the bark turns reddish.  Ponderosa pines have a distinctive smell and you could tell you were near them with your eyes closed. I stopped at the roadside where I took the picture to experience that. Below is a mixed juniper and pinyon pine landscape.  It is a bit drier than the ponderosa places.  Pinyon pines produce "pine nut" consumed by local people and wildlife.

Below - as you get into drier places, the trees disappear and you get various types of grassland.  I am less familiar with the specifics of those biomes. 

Below is almost entirely grass. The modern things you see are the "very large array," a series of radio telescopes used to explore the far reaches of the cosmos, from the far reaches of New Mexico.  I guess that the elevation and clear air make that easier.

Below are lava bed. According to what I read, the lava oozed out around 800 years ago.  Some plants have since colonized.  It must have been nearly impassible on foot or in a wagon when people first found them. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I needed to get maximize my daylight so I left Portales just before the sun came up and for about an hour and a half I drove through some of the most monotonous landscape possible, sometimes made less appealing by the early morning gloom, I suppose. Sometimes there was little evidence of active human occupation.   At other times you could see where people had moved away. 

US Highway 60 runs through what was the edge of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.  The countryside had a denser population back then than it does now. This is a good thing.  The land here gets irregular rainfall.  In some years there is enough to temp people to plow up the sod and plant row crops. That is what happened right after World War I, when this area was booming with high war-time prices for wheat and other crops.   A vicious cycle set in when prices came down off their highs.  Farmers needed to plow up more grassland and grow more crops to make the same money, which they often needed to pay off their mortgages and the equipment they invested in during the boom time.

An agricultural method had been developed in the humid Eastern U.S., where rain is more consistent and where the wind doesn’t blow so hard or steadily.   Something you notice even on a short trip is that the wind is persistent as a toothache out here.  

The grass and prairie vegetation had protected the soils from the wind for around ten thousand years, ever since the warming following the last ice age.  Prairie vegetation is adapted to the wet-dry cycles of nature and to the wind and fire that is endemic to the high plains.  Most of the plants are perennial. They send down deep and interwoven roots.  When the dry weather comes, these roots sustain the plants and hold the dirt. 

The grassland ecosystem had created deep and rich soil over the course of literally thousands of years.  During the wet decade following World War I, farmers essentially mined and used up this soil in an unsustainable way.  They didn’t understand it and some thought the rain was natural or permanent.   Many were probably surprised that nobody had discovered the bounty of the land before.  The hotter-drier cycle set in again in the 1930s.  Soil, exposed to the wind by plowing and harvesting just blew away, leaving some farms almost bare of topsoil and other buried in the stuff.  This was the environment when thousands of refugees headed out.  You read about that in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” or in a more recent non-fiction book called “The Worst Hard Time.” (I studied the dust bowl years when I was going to Iraq, since the dust storms there are also partially man-made catastrophes.  It formed the basis of some of my slow-moving but grandious dreams)

We take better care of the soil today.  During the 1930s farmers and government folks (like the CCC) planted windbreaks of trees. FDR had a special fondness for tree-planting. Of all his great and not so great traits, that is the one I find personally most appealing.  Farmers now use low-till or no-till methods that leave the soils more intact and leave cover vegetation on the surface during the off-seasons.  Years of experience has taught us that there are some grasslands that just cannot be made to produce any crops besides maybe hay and some that cannot-should not even do that.

An old farmer told me that this year was a good and a wet year on the high plains. He said that the crops, like the milo/giant sorghum were growing well and that the harvests were good.  But today we know that this wet year will sooner or later – probably sooner – be followed by some dry ones.  And we know that we need to keep and protect the environment for those times.  Dirt is the basis of civilization and if you don’t care for the soil, there really is nothing left for you.

The picture up top in along US 60 in Western NM.  The one below is up the hills a bit in the more central part of the state. The bottom picture explains itself. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Palo Duro Canyon was sort of on my way, so I went a little out of the way to look at it.  I only spent a couple of hours there, since I needed to get to a hotel and prepare a PowerPoint presentation for my talk at Arizona State University on Thursday.  I still owe some work to the State Department, even here.

I did manage about an hour’s trail walk. The ground is hard and baked red, but the vistas were surprisingly green.   I could tell from the still fresh mud around the waterways that they had a fair amount of rain this season. In fact, the road was closed in one place because of the water, as you can see below.

Palo Duro used to be home to the Comanche.   They used to herd buffalo into the box canyons to make it easier to slaughter them.   Later Charlie Goodnight, who I wrote about in the previous post, used the canyon in similar ways to herd cattle.   Today it is a Texas State Park. 

I enjoyed the vistas and the silence during my walk. I realize how much good it does me to get away into these sorts of natural places. I just feel good mentally and physically when I can hope around on rocks with the varieties of nature all around. I have a different appreciation of arid lands since I was in Iraq.  Most places are less barren than Anbar, so everywhere is a step or more up.  This land isn’t really arid anyway, just semi-arid. There is a lot of life in the canyon and on the prairies above and even the erosion is beautiful here.

The CCC and the WPA built many of the roads and walls during the 1930s.   There was an exhibit re in the museum.  It is very nice for me to walk around today on a developed trail in the relative cool and comfort of a nice late September day. It must have been something else for those young guys to live in tents and actually build the trails I enjoy.  My father was a CCC boy, so I always feel a little bit of a connection to whatever they do.  I always feel grateful for the work they did what is getting to be a very long time ago.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems like I was constantly passing trains, as I drove along US 60 from Canyon, Texas to Clovis, New Mexico.   Trains came by in both directions every few minutes on the tracks parallel to the road.  Many of them were loaded with containers or with actual truck loads.  I kept on thinking how good it was that all those trucks were on the tracks and not with me on the road.

We have the world’s best freight rail system, as I wrote in a posts a few weeks ago.  Seeing it in actions, over and over and over again, reminded me.  Above is one of the trains passing one of the trucks. How many trucks would it take to move the stuff on that train?  Below is the feedlot, but look closely behind. What looks like crenelations is another passing container train.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am getting to know Charlie Goodnight by his work, which is the truest way to know someone. As I drive through the Texas Panhandle, it is impossible not to. I saw the historical markers for his “drift fence” to keep the cattle from drifting south in winter. There is a reconstruction of his dugout house in Palo Duro Canyon, where he ran cattle.  The man is a real western hero. He was a Texas Ranger, fought the Comanche & later helped make a treaty with their last great war Chief Quanah Parker, pioneered cattle trails, the biggest, the Goodnight-Loving trail, went from Texas through Colorado and all the way to Wyoming, and built a ranch and an industry in Texas cattle. When he was all done with that, he helped save the Bison from extinction. The Bison in Yellowstone, on Ted Turner’s ranch and around the West are to some extent descended from the herd that Charlie Goodnight protected on his ranch.

I recognized Goodnight.  I knew him from western movies and my research showed that this was the case.  He was the inspiration for a raft of movie cowboys.   One of the ones l like the best is “Lonesome Dove.”  The character of Captain Woodrow Call, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is loosely based on Goodnight and the Gus character, played by Robert Duvall, is based on his friend Oliver Loving.   Loving and Goodnight ran cattle as in the book/movie.  Like Gus, Loving was fatally injured in an Indian attack (Comanche) and died of gangrene.  Like Woodrow Call, Charlie Goodnight brought his friend back to Texas to be buried. You can also see the Goodnight character in a movie like “Red River” with John Wayne.  In fact, Charlie Goodnight was one of the characters that I knew best, although I don’t recall actually hearing of him until recently.

There is so much to this man, I suggest you look him up and read more. Suffice to say that few men have had such an eventful and exciting life. His real life is like a fictional western, actually a series of them. We shall not soon see his like again.

The picture up top is a reconstruction of the dugout cabin where he lived while settling the area.  Below that is a nearby stream, typical with its cottonwood and willow, probably his water source, certainly a watering place for cattle.  Access to water was the key to success. They had an saying, "Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over." The last picture is a feedlot. There are lots of lots around here. The old round up and cattle drive has changed a bit. BTW - Goodnight also helped improve the herds.  Among his other contributions was introducing Hereford bulls into the gene pool. The Longhorns were picturesque, but there is better beef.  Beef - it's what's for dinner, to some extent thanks to old Charlie.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had more time today, so I could do a leisurely drive through Kansas and the Texas panhandle.  I took the little roads and sometimes I was the only one on them. The day was perfect, cool, but with a warm sun. The panhandle is high, sometimes as much as 3500 feet.  One reason I was enthusiastic about visiting the Texas high plains was that they are similar to the planalto – the South American high plains where Brasilia is located. Above are pronghorn antelope.  There were dozens of them just standing around. They are supposed to be the fastest animal alive over more than a short sprint. I don't know. They weren't running.I thought of running out there after them, but what if they didn't run?

Above is Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in Liberal, Kansas. They evidently have some kind of pageant. The names in back of the statues are previous Dorothys.

Above and below are cows at the watering hole. I thought they looked very picturesque, iconic with the old fashioned windmill pumping water. It was very quiet, so also imagine the squeaking of the windmill and the mooing of the cows on the empty and quiet plains.  I took a picture from a distance. As I walked up for a closer look, they all came to me. They were very friendly animals. The solid rust red stuff in on the little hill in the background is milo, or giant sorghum. I saw a lot of it on this trip. It ripens to that color. They use it as a feed crop on the dry plains, much like farmers use field corn in the East. I didn't know that either, but an old man explained it to me. He also said that it was a very good year in the panhandle - more rain than usual. It still seemed dry to me, but the milo was pretty.

Below is the Texas state line, just a line on a map with no geographical feature to mark the change. I suppose lots of state lines are like that, but it seems more true here where it is so flat and featureless.

Below are mammoth bones found locally. They are now in the Museum of the High Plains. Admission is free and the guy running the place is extraordinarily friendly. He told me that they use the buildings for wedding receptions and community events and that the museum survives on that income as well as from the generosity of visitors. I bought a T-shirt and made a donation. 

Below is Lake Meredith. It is seasonally bigger or smaller. My photo didn't properly catch the colors, but it was very attractive. Take my word. 

Finally, the picture below speaks for itself.  What's the country coming to if you cannot take your gun to the hotel even in Texas.  Seen from another perspective, interesting that they need a sign. 

Posted by Broadnax at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You don’t know open space if you live on the coasts.  The middle of America has a lot of emptiness.  They called it the sea of grass and the metaphor is apt.  In many places the land here is as featureless as the sea. Above is a landscape near Perryton, Texas.

I am interested in the high plains.  The Spanish explorer Francisco Coronado (his statue is above in Liberal, Kansas) named it the Llano Estacado, which means palisaded plains.   There is some disagreement about what he was describing, but the most accepted explanation is that the plateau starts with escarpments that look like fortification palisades or a stockade. I didn't see this "fortified" part, since I came from the north, where it is less abrupt.

I have been listening to the audio book Empire of the Summer Moon, about the rise and fall of the Comanche.  The Comanche were primitive and not very successful Indians until horses came to the Great Plains after they escaped from the Spanish. They quickly learned to use the horse and it changed their tribe.   The mobility provided by the horse allowed them to kick other tribes, mostly Apaches, off the Llano Estacado in what would be called a genocidal war if it happened these days.  Like most horse nomads, the Comanche were violent and cruel.  Their main passion was raiding, which included lots of torture, rape and pillaging.  It was essentially a type of terrorism designed to … well terrorize opponents.   

The Comanche were a formidable fighting force.  They stopped the Spanish conquests and held back the Mexicans. One reason why the Mexicans welcomed Americans settlers in Texas was that they wanted a buffer against the Comanche.   Nobody could really cope with them until the Texas Rangers learned to fight in the mobile and flexible fashion used by the Comanche themselves.  It takes a network to defeat a network.  The revolver was a great help in fighting the plains Indians. An Indian with a bow enjoyed an advantage over a man armed with a single shot rifle or pistol.  The six-shooter evened the odds. The U.S. Cavalry finally defeated the Comanche in the 1870s, mostly by sheer persistence helped by the destruction of the buffalo herds.

Above is the marker for the battle of Adobe Walls. There were two of them here. During  the second battle the Comanche were attacking buffalo hunters holed up in an adobe inn. Although there were 700 Indians and only 29 hunters, this was a bad idea. The Indians couldn't burn the hunters out, since adobe doesn't burn and the hunters were well armed with long-range rifles. They were able to shoot the Indians at very long distance. Read about it in the book I mentioned.

Dealing with the tribes reminded me of the tribal diplomacy in Iraq and defeating the Comanche “insurgency” probably still has lessons for us today.  Anyway, it is a good book and I recommend it, especially the audio version that you can listen to in the car as you drive across the endless sea of grass where the Comanche used to ride.

I have more pictures and thoughts re the high plains and will post more.  It was a good day to look around.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dodge City makes a much bigger impression on American folklore than it does on American geography.  Above is Wyatt Earp, one of the town's most famous marshals. Others included Bat Masterson & Charlie Basset. There really isn’t much here anymore really of theirs. But I wanted to stop anyway. I am beguiled by the legend. Below is what is left of the "real Dodge."  The parking lot occupies the space where all the taverns and whore houses used to be. The real Dodge of the old west was probably flimsier and less permanent than the movie sets made to portray it. They were always worried about it burning down and the good citizens of the city finally got rid of what they considered an eye-sore that attracted the wrong sort.

So many of our Westerns are set in Dodge.  I grew up watching Gun smoke with James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon.  Each episode started off with Matt winning a gunfight in the streets of Dodge.  Westerns were popular when I was a kid.  You wonder why any bad guys would ever show up in Dodge with Matt Dillon around.  He gunned down a couple of them every week. I wonder what the cumulative total was.

Cumulatively, I bet there are more total hours of TV and movie time about the Wild West than there was during the actual Wild West period.  Dodge City was at the end of a branch of the old Chisholm Trail. It was where the big herds from Texas met the Railroad. You can see the rail depot and tracks above and the longhorn below.

Dodge was the big cattle town for about ten years.  It replaced Abilene as the railroads moved west. The cowboys didn’t want to drive the cattle any farther than necessary. It was hard on the men and on the cows. They lost weight and hence value, so they loaded them on rail cars as soon as they could. The whole period of the big cattle drives – the Wild West - was only around twenty years from around 1870-1890.  After that, rail transport became widespread enough that the days of the picturesque but dangerous and grueling cattle drives were over.

When you think about it, life on the frontier was not much fun. The settlers understood this very well and fact, tried to bring civilization (such as the Carnegie Library, now an art center, pictured above) as fast as they could in order to avoid all the excitement of gunfights and Indian raids.  But if you don’t actually have to live through these those sorts of things, they capture the imagination. In the absence of danger, everybody imagines himself the hero.  It is exciting in retrospect to have built something up, wrested from hostile nature and dangerous primitive men.

Posted by Broadnax at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was vaguely aware of the Amana Colonies, but the name was familiar mostly because of Amana appliances.  In fact, as I write this in the Holiday Inn in Dodge City, the air condition is an Amana product.  But there is much more to the story than stoves and refrigerators.

There are seven Amana colonies in Iowa.  They were founded in the 1840s by a German sect.  They were related to Lutherans, but had a more communal point of view. It is the usual story.  They were persecuted in Europe, so they came to set up a new life in America. Below is a model of one of the farms.  There is a "barn museum".  It has models of all sorts of local buildings.  They were all made by a single local guy with a lot of time and significant model making skills.

These kinds of colonies were successful in the U.S. because the adherents believed in hard work and were well disciplined.  That is pretty much all it takes to be successful in America.  The thing I like about the German-culture sects is that they have very well organized agricultural operations and they don’t shun beer.  Beer is a integral part of central European culture.   IMO, it is an integral part of pleasant civilization, but that is another story.

The Amana colonies were integrated agricultural enterprises.  They are not like the Amish.  The Amana folks embrace technologies and machinery.  Farms were communal until 1932, when they all got shares in an Amana corporation.  They farmed, processed farm products, made crafts and later on even made appliances.   The Amana Corporation, which is still in existence, still runs a prosperous enterprise.   I was interested in that they own and manage a large – 7000 acre - forest reserve.  It produces forest products and is run sustainably.  The hardwoods from the forest supply the wood for their furniture making businesses.  A guy I talked to told me that they do TOO good a job with wildlife.  He cautioned me to be careful driving around because the deer would be jumping over the road, especially at dusk.

Beer drinking, hard working, not complaining and forest loving - I like these people.

As you drive around in the American countryside, you realize how many of these sorts of groups there were – and still are – in America.  We tend to forget about them or think they are just historical artifacts.   But they seem to have developed sustainable systems, both in the natural and the human ecology.  We talk about diversity in America.  This is actually a very important part of it.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not too far off the highway is the birthplace of John Wayne in Winterset, Iowa.  I drove over there to look.  They said it was a modest house and that was true.  You can see by the picture that it is not much bigger than one of these little cabins you can rent at the campgrounds.  I didn’t figure it was worth it to take the tour.  John Wayne was not famous for his deeds in Winterset, Iowa.

I was talking to Jerry & Dorothy about John Wayne.  Jerry & I like him better than Dorothy.   Dorothy pointed out that John Wayne wasn’t much of an actor.  In fact, he was not an actor; he was a movie star.  The two are not the same.  A movie star needs to create and maintain a personal brand.  So no matter where you see John Wayne, you can recognize the character.  His persona transferred well in westerns and war movies.   When he tried to play Genghis Khan in “The Conqueror” it didn’t work at all.  That is why the movie is one of the ten worst of all time.

An actor can play many roles and blend into them.  This is very good for the craft of acting, but not so good for fame and fortune.  They have a name for such people.  They call them character actors.  When they die, the newspapers often call them “beloved” and when you see their picture you say, “Oh yeah, that guy.”  But you would not have been able to name him unaided.  And more than a quarter century after they die, they still won’t be famous – actually iconic – like John Wayne.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sister Chrissy & I walked around the old neighborhoods and parks today. It was a beautiful early fall day, cool with enough wind to keep the bugs confused. Yesterday was not so good. It was a little damp and cool.  I went running yesterday along the bike trail in Warnimont and it was a bit too cool. But today was just right.

The parks near the lake really are pretty. My favorite is probably Grant Park. You see the Lake from there in the picture. 

We walked down to the Lake along the "Seven Bridges Trail".  I have walked and run down there hundreds of times, but I only found out today that it is called the Seven Bridges Trail. I don't know if they can still call it that, however.  One of the big bridges is gone, washed out.

The trail was put into its present form by the WPA and CCC. They built the walls and planted some of the more exotic trees.  One of the walls is pictured above. The trail endures because it is simple. The problem with projects today that they try to get too complex.  We cannot do lots of things today because we demand too much.  This simple piled rock walls and trails work as well today as they did a long lifetime ago.  Except for the bridge, of course.

After Grant Park and after I dropped Chrissy off, I wandered over to Humboldt Park. That is my "home park" and the one I know in the longest detail. The pond in the picture above used to be very tamed and mowed.  They used to rent row boats. Now it is more like a wetland. I think I like the new thing better, but I do miss the old one. 

The new pond is full of geese, which are pretty much everywhere these days anyway.The old pond was home mostly to ducks. I think the geese have driven the ducks off.  The geese are bigger and much more aggressive.  I remember that geese used to be kind of rare. Not any more. They still are fun to watch, although it gets a little annoying always to be stepping in the ubiquitous goose crap.

Along side is an old bur oak tree.I used to like to come and look at those trees and I still do. I have no idea how old it is, except that it was already big and old when as far back as I can remember.  I noticed this particular specimen in 1972, when I was learning tree identification. I don't think it has gotten much bigger in those nearly forty years.  I guess once it gets to a certain size, it grows much more slowly. Some of the branches seem to be dying back. That would concern me more if I didn't remember that some of the branches were dying back forty years ago. I think that is just the way a mature bur oak is. Bur oaks seem to grow slow. Sometimes they get to be very big, like the one in the picture, but often they are only medium sized or even scrubby. I don't think it is genetic variation, probably has more to do with the quality and depth of the soils. In the thinner soils, they form "oak openings" with mature trees looking sort of miniature.

Milwaukee's parks are its treasure. There are lots of them and they are often tied together. It gives everybody in the city the chance to feel like he is in the country.  If you look at the pond above, you can imagine that you are in some far away marsh, of course you can hear the city sounds and see the cars if you turn around, but the feeling is still nice. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was surprisingly rural so close to Chicago as I continued down the country roads through Illinois & Wisconsin.  I went through Kankakee and then up State Road 47.  It was mostly corn fields and evidently home to a thriving ethanol industry. The gas stations sell E85, which I understand that some cars can use. I don't think mine can, so I didn't try.

I crossed into Wisconsin in Walworth County.  Southern Wisconsin sort of merges with Northern Illinois.  There is rich, black soil.

Not many people know it but it used to be that some of the Southern Wisconsin counties were prime tobacco country. It was the cash crop that paid for a lot of the mortgages. It was also a way that young people could make some money.  It helped to be young, since hoeing tobacco was almost literally bank breaking work. I still recall the tobacco barns in Dane County. They were long and narow and had open sides so that the crop could dry out.  I dislike cigarettes, but the smell of tobacco curing is actually kind of pleasant. Wisconsin tobacco tended to be chewing tobacco and not used for smoking. They don't grow much tobacco anymore.  Demand has largely dried up; tobacco support programs are gone and besides growing the weed is really hard work.  Young people have other options or are lazier, depending on how you want to view it. Tobacco is a finicky crop that requires significant skill and experience to cultivate and cure. 

Chrissy's father used to grow a little tobacco. 

I kept on going north and caught up with I-94 at Johnson Creek. I needed new running shoes, so I stopped at Johnson Creek outlets. They have a Nike outlet there.  This is a new development.  The area around the freeway exit is not part of the original Johnson Creek.

I used to stop in Johnson Creek or nearby Helenville when I rode my bike between Madison and Milwaukee. Jefferson County, which sits between Dane and Waukesha, was (and still mostly is) a nice mix of farms and little towns.  I used to also ride from Lacrosse to Milwaukee, which required an overnight stop. One trip, I made it as far as Johnson Creek. I was looking for a hotel, but they were all filled. I ended up at a place called "the Gobbler".  It was a funky place, sort of a 1970s dream with a kind of a purple color scheme and shag carpets. They only had one room left, which was a bridal room.  I was tired and it was getting dark so I took it. That night I slept in a water bed with a mirror on the ceiling over it. It came with a dinner as part of the package. The dinner was for two, so they saved a little money on me, although I ate a lot.     

They are out of business now.  

The pictures are a barn in Walworth county, black soil in Northern Illinois and a cornfield in Northern Illinois on state road 47. 

Posted by Broadnax at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just outside Lafayette is the Tippecanoe battlefield. This is where William Henry Harrison defeated the combined forces of the local woodland Indians.  Not many people were actually involved in the battle, but it was decisive.  It was the last time that the Eastern Indians stood a chance of stopping, or even slowing American settlement. 

Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) tried to build a vast Indian confederation to push white men back.  But the Prophet moved too soon and provoked the battle of Tippecanoe before the confederation was ready. The Prophet told the Indians that his strong medicine would make it so the soldiers bullets couldn't hurt them. He was mistaken.

The site of the battlefield is very pleasant.  There are lots of big trees, mostly oaks and maples. Look at the shape of that oak tree. Lots of the older trees in the Midwest have that basic shape. I think it might be from growing up with other trees nearby, making the long trunk, and then having them cleared so that the tree is free to branch. Along side is just looking up one of the big oak trees.  I just enjoy doing that and thinking about how long they have been growing. 

Not many people visit the place anymore, so it was quiet.  I walked around a little near a creek the feeds the Wabash.  It was a beautiful early fall day with some leaves slowly drifting down.  

I heard that there was a lot of construction on I-65 near Chicago, so I took the more scenic, country road route. Between Lafayette & Remington I ran into this forest of windmills.  Most were turning.

I drove down one of the gravel roads to get the pictures. Gravel roads are still common in Indiana farm country.  I guess there really is no need to put asphalt on everything.  They make good running trails but are probably hard on the cars' paint jobs. Below is a landscape scene from Tippecanoe. They were having some kind of antique car rally, so I got the 1929 Model A Ford in the photo.

Posted by Broadnax at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the Road - Maryland, WVA, Ohio & Indiana

My almost cross country trip started today with the rather long drive from Virginia to Lafayette, IN.  Why Lafayette?  I lived here for a couple of weeks way long ago. I landed the job of Director of Marketing Research at Microdatabase Systems right out of B-school. Of course, there was nobody in the marketing research department except me. That is why I was director. Sort of like the guy who has 1000 people under him at work – cuts grass in the cemetery. Never trust titles.

I worked at MDBS for five weeks before I took the job in the FS. I think I made a good career move.  How different life could have been. Lafayette is a very pleasant place, but there is not much here besides Purdue University. I suppose that I would have found more to like if I had been here more than a few weeks.  Running trails were good. I used to run on the country roads through the cornfields.

It was a long drive. I got a speeding ticket. It is the first I got since 1992. I have only had two in my whole life, so it was actually more exciting and interesting than unpleasant. I thought about trying to outrun him, like in the Dukes of Hazard or Smokey & the Bandit, but the Civic-Hybrid probably was not up to the job. I was going 80 in a 70 zone. That is what the cop said, and he was right.  I know because I had the cruise control set to that, so I didn’t try to claim that I didn’t know or it was some kind of mistake. I would have had to pay up w/o complaint. He got me fair & square, but he only gave me a warning ticket, no fine attached. Nice guy. 

Always be polite to policemen, none of those rude questions or complaints. My old Milwaukee upbringing tells me that if the cops stop you, they must have a good reason. And I know they have a tough job.  I suspect a lot of the people they stop give them a hard time. I would have taken his picture for the blog, but I figured it was not a good idea to push my luck, so I just said “thank you” and drove off – chastened – at the legal speed, until I got across the state line. I did try to keep my speed lower for the rest of the trip, but it is hard. All the trucks pass you if you drive the speed limit and it is very nerve wracking. I try to stay with traffic.

Let me tell you about the pictures.  On top is a western Maryland landscape.  It is a pretty place.  The thing that looks like a canyon is the cut through Sideling Hill on I-68.  They blasted through in 1985. It must have been hard to go over the hill before that time. The mountains in the Appalachians are arrayed in long folds.  In many ways, they are tougher than the Rockies, which although they are higher often have less relief and wider passes. The picture at bottom is I-70 just passed Dayton, Ohio. It is a typical Midwestern road picture, pretty with flat fields and isolated oak trees. There were lots of trucks on the road.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Which country has the  world’s best freight rail system,according to experts?   It is the United States, by a wide margin.  And it has gotten a lot better since 1981.  

Those of us who have traveled the comfortable and reliable passenger rail in Europe are surprised by this information.  But the key to our confusion is the word “passenger.”  American passenger rail doesn’t work as well.   And freight tends to be out of sight, so most people just don’t pay attention or even suspect what is going on in the vastness of our country and in those lonely places literally on the wrong side of the tracks.

If you look at the nearby chart, you see that rail productivity exploded and prices came down after 1980.  The Staggers Act was one of the few sustained successes that came out of the Administration of Jimmy Carter.  It rationalized regulation and eliminated some of the pricing schemes that had previously crippled the railroads.  It still working.  Some people thought that railroads were creatures of the past that couldn’t compete with trucks, but they were wrong.  

In fact, the fastest-growing part of rail freight is “intermodal” traffic: containers or truck trailers loaded on to flat railcars. The number of such shipments rose from 3m in 1980 to 12.3m in 2006.  This is something that affects all of us who drive on the highways, since one freight train can carry as much as 280 trucks. Now maybe we all appreciate freight rail a little more.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hunters are the backbone of rural society. People who live in cities and suburbs rarely appreciate that fact. I thought of this in relation to my own land and was reminded when Chrissy’s sister Diane visited a friend who lives in western Virginia. The friend owns some forest land in the Shenandoah.  Local hunters watch over it,  make improvements and generally take care of the place.  She was a little surprised at the role of local hunters. I used to be too, but not anymore.

The hunters on my land have been there for generations. Much of what I know about the land comes from them. They knew how long the roads had been in place. They remembered when the streams had flooded and when they had gone dry.  They had experience of fires and storms.  And they loved the land and understood the relationships with the animals on them.

Deer hunters are working to create better habitat for the animals they hunt and improve the herds.  They always have done this.  Much of the county’s wildlands were conserved by hunters.  Lately the equations have changed a bit.  The burgeoning wildlife and especially deer population has shifted emphasis from any deer to quality deer. Hunt clubs are actively managing the herds through selective  hunting, feed plots etc.  I get a magazine called “Quality Whitetails” from an organization by the same name that provides a place for the exchange of information and experience. It is very interesting the things hunters are doing in the conservation field, literally out in the field.

Another big factor is development and urban encroachment. A generation ago, there were a lot fewer deer and they were spread over a bigger area of undeveloped land. Today deer populations have grown to almost nuisance levels in some areas and this is exacerbated by the fragmentation of the forests.  This is another reason to emphasize quality of the herds over mere numbers.  The numbers problem is no longer a problem.

Hunting keeps people closer to the land.  One of my friends down in Southside Virginia spends most of his free time working on conservation projects on land his hunt club leases. He helps restore wetlands, makes wildlife corridors etc. He has helped a lot on my farm, at no cost to me since we work in our mutual interest. This guy doesn’t hunt very much anymore in the traditional sense.   He just really enjoys the conservation and wildlife management aspects of hunting.  Most of the hunters I know enjoy the sport more for the insights it gives them into nature than the actual shooting deer, which is only one part  of a full-year, multi-year effort.

The numbers of hunters has been declining over the past decades.  There still are enough, but if the trend continues, this will be a serious threat to the health of rural communities and the rural environment.  Somebody else – probably at taxpayer expense – will have to do what as work hunters do joyfully and for free. In fact, they actually pay to do it.

I am not a hunter myself, for the same reasons that the number of hunters has been declining.  I was a city kid, with no hunting tradition. I am also a terrible shot.  I support hunting by working with the hunt clubs  on my farms and supporting some hunting organizations, such as Quality Whitetails, that provide hunting education and advocacy.

Beyond the environmental benefits, hunting has a long tradition in American culture.  It is very different in the U.S. than it was in many parts of the world.  In Europe, hunting was a rich man’s sport.   When the ordinary people hunted, it was usually called “poaching,” especially when talking about bigger game, a crime that was severely punished by the aristocrats. Besides just wanting to keep the animals to themselves, aristocrats sensed the fundamental democratizing nature of hunting.  Besides giving the common man access to weapons and the training to use them, hunting allowed individuals a personal connection with nature, unfiltered by the hierarchy of the old world.  It also provides a means of support. One of the older hunters down near the farms told me that when he was young, hunting wasn’t just a hobby; it was needed to put meat on the table.  One of the things that impressed former-peasant immigrants to the early America was that they COULD hunt.  They were the owners of the land and didn’t have to kiss the ass of the local baron or “his” deer and elk untouched in the forest where only the fat-cats could hunt.  

So this is my paean to the pastoral pursuit of hunting in our great America, whether it is deer, turkey, geese, quail, ducks or bears (yes we have a few on the farms now).   We should appreciate what hunters and hunting have done for us.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My grandfather was an immigrant who came to this country w/o particular skills. Back in those days there were lots of jobs that didn’t require skills and his education was about the same as that of the average American at the time. Today we can still use immigrants, but maybe not those uneducated masses like grandpa.

We should allow MORE legal immigrants,but we should choose the types of people we want and need. Literally millions of smart & skilled people would bring their skills here within days if we would let them. There is no shortage of applicants. WE should choose who gets to come to our country. Sorry, grandpa. Today you need at least a HS education or comparable tech background and you need to speak English if you want to make yourself useful.

People say that we need somebody to do the dirty work that we don’t want to do. This is only partly true. We still need some temporary farm workers, given the seasonality of that work. But there is no reason why these guys cannot go home at the end of the season. If we had a system that allowed them to come when needed and then come back again, I think many would indeed choose to do just that. Besides that, cheap labor is a mixed blessing.

Cheap unskilled labor creates its own demand. We employ lots of people doing crap jobs like blowing leaves because they work cheap. If we didn’t have cheap labor, we wouldn’t bother doing many of these jobs or we would use machines to do them. Cheap labor makes it less profitable to invest in new technologies to replace labor. We “need” cheap immigrant labor because we have cheap labor. Many jobs could be restructured or replaced by machines if we had to pay more for workers. It is a fairly simple equation.

I used to load cement bags. They had a dozen of us piling bags on pallets. Now they have one guy with a machine. We used to work twelve hour days; this guy doesn't even come in to work every day. They don’t even use the bags at all most of the time. Now they just load cement directly. Dozens of dirty jobs have been eliminated by redesign. Some smart guy’s ideas replaced our many dirty and blistered hands. But if labor had been really cheap, nobody would have bothered doing that. Cheap labor retards development in anything but they very short run.

The fact is that you don't get prosperous by hard work and there is nothing virtuous about working hard at low productivity. That is just for people who don't know any better or are doing it for the exercise. People in the past worked physically harder than we do now and people in many poor countries still do but none of us wants to trade places with them. The key to prosperity is managing the connections, understanding the exchanges and working smarter. That is why we pay so little for unskilled labor. It is not worth very much. Knowing what to do and how to do it better is almost always worth more than actually performing the task. Brains won the battle with brawn long ago, even if some still ain't heard the word.

Some jobs cannot be automated, but many of those jobs now done by immigrants used to be done by American teenagers or college students and could be again. I worked at McDonald's, Burger King and several Italian restaurants whose names I cannot recall when I was in HS and college. My kids had trouble finding work at fast food places because they were competing with immigrants who would work almost full time. I say almost full time because employers are very careful not to let them work 40 hours where they would get benefits. Employers prefer immigrants to American young people because they are more reliable and easier to exploit. These are not indispensable reasons and may not even be good ones.

I don’t want my country to be competitive in low-wage industries, so I prefer not to import low-wage workers. I like the guys who come to America and open businesses, make software or do some things that create wealth. Immigrants account for about a third of the tech workforce in Silicon Valley. These guys make the big bucks and they create jobs in America. Good. Let’s have more of them and fewer of the cheap ones.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

America’s largest ethnic group is German.  Nearly a quarter of the American population or 58 million Americans claim German ancestry.  It used to be a big deal; as far as I know the Germans never formed a group specifically called “the race” (as in La Raza) but some clearly had separatist notions. It is a tribute to the American assimilation machine that now it matters hardly at all. You can see some famous German-Americans on the stairs to the left.  Who knew Elvis was German?

I had been meaning to go over to the German-American cultural center since I read about it in the paper.  Yesterday I went.  It is the kind of place that is worth seeing, but not worth going to see and you could easily miss it. Look at the picture below. The signs are small. Mostly, it is a permanent poster show detailing the long and varied contributions of Germans to American culture.   Since German contributions are now as American and Americanized as hamburgers, hot dogs and potato salad, it is easy to overlook them and think that now is the first time we have really had such large influx of immigrants and foreign cultures.

1910 was before the wars and before the atrocities.  Germany in those days was arguably the most advanced country in terms of science and technology.  An American who really wanted to learn science had to learn German.  It was like English is today to sciences.  This persisted.  When I was growing up, the stereotype of a scientist was a guy with a beard and a German accent.   During our space race with the Soviets, it is largely true that our German rocket scientists competed with their German rocket scientists.   We probably could not have achieved what we did in space flight w/o Germans and the Russians certainty did not have the home grown talent to compete with us.

Germans also pioneered what became the research university.   Our American universities resemble them because we specifically imported German methods, ideas and often Germans themselves to remake our system during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  

Posted by Broadnax at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t understand “good wine.”  I tend to like sweeter wines, which are considered “cheap” and less classy.  I also like the “oak” flavors.  Chrissy and I went to the wine tasting at the Biltmore.  They gave us a kind of a checklist.   I thought that three of the wines were okay: a Biltmore Estate Chardonnay, a Riesling and something called Tempranillo.  Some of the wines come from North Carolina grapes, but others are California wines according to the Biltmore recipe.  I think that means that they put it in bottles at the estate. You got a special deal on three bottles, so Chrissy bought one of each. 

I don’t know how they will be in larger quantities. Lots of things taste good in small amounts, like they give you on the tastings. But we got it now, so I guess I will see. I would have enjoyed a beer tasting.  I know I like beer in larger quantities.

When I was in Warsaw I got to take part in a bourbon tasting, sponsored by Jim Beam. The organizers told us lots of stories and legends about bourbon and the various kinds of bourbon. I think they made some of them up, but they were good stories so why mess with the legends. You really can tell the black label from the white label bourbons, but only if you drink one right after the other.  A good time was had by all.  The Jim Beam guys were smart. They had a lot of their wares for sale and offered them while everyone was in the type of exuberant moods provoked by whiskey tasting.  I bought three bottles of higher-class/higher-price bourbon than I would have normally.

I learned a little. Bourbon is aged in warmer places in North America.  It is good to go in seven years.  After that, it gets  a little harsh. Scotch can be aged up to 18 years, since it is cooler in Scotland.  But it doesn’t get any better after that. Actually it doesn’t get much better after 15 years, but paying more for anything over 18 years is a waste of money.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We saw a sign for the “Bunker Hill covered bridge” and found it after driving down a couple of country roads and a gravel path. The bridge was built in the late 1800s and it is an example of a lattice construction.   There were thousands of these kinds of bridges back then in the U.S. and hundreds in North Carolina. Now this is the last one.

The covering protects the wood.  An uncovered wooden bridge lasts around twenty years. The covered variety can last 100. The covering also made the horses feel like they were in the barn and they didn't spook because of the water.

This bridge was build by a guy called Haupt. He literally wrote the book on building such bridges as the the note about it says, Haupt was "Chief of Military Railroads for the Union Army during the Civil War. A Philadelphia born civil and military engineer, author, professor, inventor, and industrialist, Haupt’s improved lattice truss bridge was a response to Ithiel Town’s 1820 and 1835 patents for the plank lattice timber truss. Haupt used the analytical methods he developed in the 1840s to design a more efficient lattice truss which consisted of web members positioned only at locations which required support. Redundant members were removed, resulting in the improved lattice truss as described in his book General Theory of Bridge Construction published in 1851.” It is good for a man to have a passion.

Today the bridge goes from nowhere to nowhere. It has outlived its usefulness, but I suppose that 100 years ago there was a road that people sometimes needed.  

Posted by Broadnax at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When there is a big industrial accident these days, the lawyers come out and drain any of the real emotion or truth out of the event and displace it with cash.  In the old days, at least in the southern hills, they wrote a ballad.   So it was when a train with Joseph A. ("Steve") Broadey's hand on the throttle plunged into a ravine near Danville, VA in 1903.  Nine people were killed and seven injured in what the plaque called one of the worst railroad accidents in Virginia history.  This is what they mean when they say you are heading for a train wreck.

I heard the song as a kid. My father’s version was sung by Boxcar Willie (I think), although there is a Hank Snow rendition and Hank was my father’s favorite singer. I thought it was just a song, not a real historical event, but it had some very precise lyrics.  “They gave him his orders in Monroe Virginia saying ‘Steve you’re way behind time’” … “It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville and a line on a three mile grade.”

So in the wonderful world of Internet, I checked it out and found out it was true, so when I drove through Lynchburg I went looking for the place.  A couple people claimed to have written the lyrics.  It was first recorded in 1924 and you can listen to the original version at this link.

This is the whole story from the Danville Historical Society.

All that is left now is this easily overlooked historical marker along a seedy patch of Highway 58 just to the west of Danville.  There is nothing left of the trestle or the tracks and the ravine is overgrown with brush and vines.  It must have been really big news around here in 1903, but more than 100 years later only the song abides.  The picture of the train, BTW, is just a train crossing in Danville, unrelated to the Wreck of the Old 97, except that they are both trains.

Another thing about Danville is that it was the last capital of the Confederacy. This lasted literally only a matter of days, as Jeff Davis and his cabinet fled south, with Union troops in hot pursuit, after the defeat of Southern arms. Davis took up residence in the house of a prominent local man called William Sutherlin.  Sutherlin made his money in the tobacco business and was a successful and flexible businessman both before and after the Civil War.

Davis was a great man, according to his lights, but he was misguided. Robert E Lee and Joe Johnston did the right thing and in April 1865 contributed to saving the United States and making it the country whose freedom we love today. Davis wanted to keep on fighting, even after Appomattox. At some point, hanging on stops being noble and becomes stupid, pernicious and immoral.  I admire Lee & Johnston, Davis not so much. The guide treated Davis as a hero. I don't agree. 

Chrissy and I visited the house, an Italian style mansion. Pictures are above and below. The woman in the painting above fireplace is the Sutherlin's daughter on her wedding day. The house is restored to the period of around the Civil War. You really get the old South feeling there. The Daughters of the Confederacy use the place for their meetings. One of the rooms is deeded over to them.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Religions, regions, firms, families, clubs and even individuals often have distinctive cultures that help determine the choices they make. You might object that these things are ephemeral, but all cultures are ephemeral. Some last a short time, some a long time, but none is forever. When we try to keep them as they are, we create either cultural museums or graveyards.  America has been home to many cultures, many that you don’t notice toady because over time they melted into the American mainstream, making their contribution by not remaining separate. It is pluralism that worked for us.

Pluralism allows a variety of different philosophies and organization types to coexist, jostle together and produces disparate results that together are usually better than from what would seem a more logical planning process. It requires an acceptance of inequality and pluralism thrives when central governments exert only generalized authority (as was the case in the U.S. through much of our history.) Pluralism creates a kind of cultural marketplace of choice, where the most adaptive ones succeed and all of them collide, collaborate, combine and constantly change into something else.

Pluralism works because it allows the greater society to take advantage of productive arrangements and systems that might be destructive or dangerous if applied too widely or too long. The difference between a life giving medicine and a life taking poison is often in the dosage and the application. Pluralism allows us to take advantage of the positives of many systems w/o suffering the ill effects that would afflict us if they were widely applied. People can choose to live under particular rules that might be odious to others, and it works much better if one standard does not cover the whole society. We enjoy a kind of a la carte cultural menu in the U.S. We are free to copy the best and leave the rest.  None of us has to keep all the aspects of the culture we were born into, and few of us do.

I thought about this as we visited Old Salem in Winston-Salem, NC. Many people confuse this Salem with Salem, MA famous for the witch trials. Both were founded by religious groups that followed a kind of a localized theocratic socialism, but they are otherwise not very similar.

Old Salem is something like Colonial Williamsburg on smaller scale. I found it really interesting because it told the story of the Moravian settlement. I knew almost nothing about that before. It is well worth the visit.  The people who work there and play roles make products by hand using the old methods.  But they don't always remain strictly in character, which allows them to explain a little more about how things are. The gunsmith, for example,  told us that there is a good demand for his custom products. Their products go to high end collectors and museums.  The market is strong, he said.

The people who work there really seem to like their work. The guy in charge of the organ played us several of the pieces used in the churches and sang along.  He had a good voice. Everybody enthusiastically told us about the history of their location and of the community in general.

Salem, NC was consciously founded as a commercial and agricultural colony of the Moravian protestant sect, which traces its roots to Jan Hus, a century before Martin Luther. They seem to have been practical people who sought the elegance of simplicity.  Society was divided into groups, called choirs, based on status - young men, young women, male children, female children. married men, married women etc. When they died, they were buried according to their choir, not with their families. The graveyard, called God's Acre, has flat tombstones, so that nobody is above anybody else.  The Moravians clean the graves and scrub the stones each Easter.

The Moravians were good planners and were very well organized. They trained their people in useful trades and skills and produced simple but high quality products.  One of the reenactors told us that Moravians supplied good products at reasonable prices and that they were honest.  Having all three of those things at the same time was rare on the frontier. Their community prospered. Their location in the middle of North Carolina also contribute to their prosperity. It was right on the wagon road and had access to the growing North Carolina frontier, with its cheap land and good soils.

Organization was the key to success and organization and the needs of the community circumscribed personal choice. Boys were trained in trades, which were chosen for them by the church authorities, so that supply of labor met demand. Nobody could actually own land in Salem; it was all leased from the church and held on conditions of good behavior, including attending church and living a moral life. Women could marry when they were eighteen. Men could marry when they could demonstrate the ability to support a family. A man would build a shop and a home and then petition the church for permission to marry. He could submit a specific name if he had a girl in mind, but that match might not be approved. If he didn’t know any girls he especially liked, he could make a generic request and the church authorities made suggestions.

People like the Moravians made very valuable contributions to the development of North Carolina and to America, but most of us would not want to live under their strict rules, nor would those rules necessarily be adaptable to a wider society or changing conditions. In a pluralistic society, they were able to survive and prosper with the implicit conditions that they produce something useful for the wider America. W/o access to political power, they could not impose their views outside the fold. In fact, the ultimate punishment for those who consistently did not play by the rules was to be kicked out of the community. In other words, at base it was a free-choice association. You could leave if you didn’t agree and you could be forced to leave is others didn’t agree with you.

In a pluralistic society, individuals have the right to belong to whatever group that you want provided they will take you. All the individuals involved have the choice and they have to work out the particular relationships. It has to do with freedom of assembly. You can choose your friends and associates and should not be forced into any group membership. Groups themselves have no right to exist beyond the choices of their individual members. This is an important distinction. Pluralism as we have used it empowers individuals to be members of groups of their choice. If you empower groups over individuals you have a type of corporatism or fascism.

There were advantages and disadvantages to being a member. Leaving out the spiritual benefits, which believers would have considered the most important aspect of their lives, on the pragmatic side members, on average, were more prosperous than their similarly situated neighbors. Of course, they had to accept the strict rules, which included devoting large parts of your income, energy and time to the collective and one of the important reasons behind their success was their adherence to the rules. Would it be considered unfair that others couldn’t get the advantages w/o buying the whole organization?

Pluralism demands diversity and requires inequality of results. These are the things that choice will inevitably produce. We sacrifice pluralism and choice in exchange for greater equality. This may be a wise decision at times, but we should be aware of what we are doing - getting and giving up - and not hide it by misusing terms like diversity or multiculturalism. It should be about choice to the extent possible and that means picking up both ends of the stick and living with the results of our poor choices as well as our good ones.

The pictures are from around Old Salem.  They include the gun smith, the organ master and some of the buildings. The flowers and the flowering tree are catalpa.  They are also called Indian cigar trees, because of the long seed pods.  I took a picture of this tree because it was so full of flowers and unusually beautiful. 

Posted by Broadnax at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Biltmore is the biggest house in America, built by George Vanderbilt in the 1890s.  It is part of a enormous estate.   When Chrissy & I toured the house, the gardens and the general area, it changed our point of view a little.   An estate this size is not all about the owners and it is not really about a house as a place to live.

The first thing I noticed is how much the place resembles a hotel.  Hotels tended to copy many aspects of these mansions.  The “winter dining room” at the Biltmore is a classier version of the Holidomes I used to like so much at Holiday Inns.  Beyond that, these big houses were a lot like hotels in their functions.  They were set up to host, entertain and feed guests with a large staff devoted to doing it.

The second thing I noticed is how much the owners of this estate played their role. The Vanderbilts always seemed to be on stage.  They changed their clothes dozens of times a day.  There were specialty clothes for walking in the eating each of the meals, playing tennis, sitting in the library or walking in the garden. Below is the gate to the Estate.  After you pass through the gate, it still takes you around 15 minutes to drive to the actual estate buildings.

My first impulse was to dislike the Vanderbilts because they had piles of money and engaged in conspicuous consumption on a grand scale.  But they did a lot of good with the money too.  This massive investment in the hills of North Carolina employed lots of people and not only maids, butlers and kitchen staff.  Building the place required a massive labor force, as did building and maintaining the gardens.  Of course those things are still a type of consumption.   But the estate also included working farms and forests.  Some of the science of forestry was invented on the estate.  Gifford Pincot, the father of American forestry worked here.  I learned how to use a “Biltmore stick” to estimate timber volume when I studied forestry in college.  I never knew were the word came from.  I guess I just figured it was named after some guy named Biltmore.  It was named after the estate because its use originate here.

Fredrick Law Olmsted designed the gardens, the same landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York.  He also designed some parks in Milwaukee, including West Park (which became Washington Park), Riverside Park and Lake Park. Olmsted was expert in the use of water in the landscape.  Above is a bridge over the bass pond he created at the end of the garden.  Below is the rose garden.

You couldn’t take pictures in the house. It was a nice place.  As I said, it reminded me of a nice hotel, so if you have been in a nice hotel, you have an idea.  It must have been really impressive 100 years ago.  Today we are accustomed to big buildings (like hotels).  At the time the Biltmore had new innovations such as electricity, indoor bathrooms and refrigeration.  Now everybody has those things.  The rich today can live a very opulent life, but the practical difference between being rich and poor is smaller because being poor is a lot less miserable than it used to be. 

Additional pictures

Bass pond at Biltmore Estate

Corner of the Biltmore Estate

North Carolina Countryside near Asheville

Courtyard food court at Biltmore Estate

Posted by Broadnax at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Coffee at Pilot

I don’t much like coffee, but I like cream and sugar mixed with coffee. I am especially fond of the French vanilla cream, but I put so much of it in that I need a strong coffee to stand up to it.  IMO, the best coffee for my purposes is the Sumatra coffee at Pilot. Pilot is a truck stop station, which usually has the least expensive gas on the highway. The bathrooms are clean and they are usually lively places, so I stop at Pilot whenever it is reasonably convenient.

McDonald's is okay in moderation

Above is the McDonald’s in Asheville, one of the fancier McDonald’s I have visited. It was hosting lots of old people while we were there. My father always complained about old people when he used to shop at Pic-n-Save.  He said they were so slow and they always just stood around in the way. And I used to make fun of him. Maybe you have to be almost old yourself to make these kinds of judgments because I am beginning to understand his point. It took ten minutes to get at the straws, napkins and catchup.  Evidently how many napkins to take and whether or not you need a straw is a decision that requires more thought than some people can give it in less time.

I have been eating at McDonald’s since HS.  They used to give you a free Big-Mac for every A you got, which was a good marketing strategy. I didn’t get many free Big-Macs, but I did get to think they were good. Some people go on about fast food being bad for you, but it doesn’t hurt in moderation. “Nothing too much” is a good life guide. I used to have a minor cholesterol problem, but then I got a low dose of Lipitor and the problem was solved. Any problem you can afford to buy off is not a problem; it is merely an expense. I call my daily dose of Lipitor my “cheeseburger tax.” Maybe someday it will kill me, but not today.

Granny's Country Kitchen

It isn’t always fast food. Other food can have lots of calories and cholesterol. We stopped off at Granny’s Kitchen just past Hickory, NC. Chrissy & I both had the pulled pork and French fries. Chrissy didn’t eat all of hers, so I helped out. We have been trying to go to local restaurants when we travel to get a little more of the local flavor. The trouble is that there is less & less local flavor that is worth eating unless you have inside local knowledge. Various franchises are pushing them out or at least away from the places convenient to the major highways.

Boutique hotels

Posted by Broadnax at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are back home in Virginia and we have evidently missed spring, at least late spring. It is now summer.  The leaves are all out. Today was hot & humid, mostly humid, at least compared to the cool weather we had when I was last here a couple of weeks ago. It will get more or less cooler again. May is a pleasant month; we usually don’t get that oppressive heat until late June. 

I went to see Alex just before I left for California. We went to the arboretum in Harrisonburg, but I never wrote a post or posted the pictures.  It was a pleasant spring day. I am posting the pictures today, but they are a couple weeks out of date.

The Shenandoah is one of most pleasant places on earth in the springtime. The picture on top I-81 that passes through the valley. It is a busy truck route, that carries much of the goods along the East Coast. The trucks make it a hectic drive sometimes. They are bigger than the cars and they know it. The middle pictures are flowering trees in the arboretum.

Above is the pond on the arboretum. Below is a pocket park in Arlington. It is near the place where we first lived when I joined the FS. It is just one block of green, enough to give kids a place to play and provide a nice space for the neighbors.

Below is the lawn in the park. It is a "real" lawn with clover and some weeds. I like this better than the chemical lawns so common around malls and new developments. The Chesapeake Bay is polluted with run off. They blame farms and farms do contribute, but at least they also produce something.  But it is just wrong when we use chemicals and fertilizers to create perfect lawns. This one is better all around.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We left the Joshua Tree National Park and keep on going on a little road toward the Salton Sea. (Above is Interstate 10 in the distance.)  The area is below sea level and w/o irrigation it is a hot and desolate place.  With irrigation, it is a hot and productive place.  This is the Imperial Valley, one of the most bountiful agricultural areas in the world, where a lot of our lettuce, grapes, berries and broccoli come from.

The Salton Sea is a fascinating accident related to the irrigation. In 1904 the irrigation dikes broke and almost all the water from the flow of Colorado River poured into the below-sea-level desert depression for almost three years. The escaping water had created a vast fresh-water lake.  It is so big that you cannot see across it.  Had they not fixed the dike, the Colorado River probably might have simply changed course and eventually found its way to the Gulf of California by alternate means. (This, BTW, happened periodically with the Mississippi.   If not for human intervention, the Mississippi probably now be following the route of the Atchafalaya River, bypassing New Orleans.) Geologists say that the Salton Sea has been formed and dried up many times in the past w/o the intervention of man.  You can see the Salton Sea chronology at this link. 

At first it was great.  People put in fish and the bred fast in the warm and empty waters.  But the water in the Salton Sea didn’t stay fresh for long.  The salts and minerals from the lake bottom soon dissolved in the water and with no outlet to the ocean, it was in the same situation as the Dead Sea.  It is getting saltier and saltier.   Many of the fish are dying out.  The only ones still thriving are tilapia, which can survive almost anywhere if the water is warm enough and are now being used for cat food. 

The dying of the Salton Sea is a problem from several points of view. Migratory birds have become very fond of using the Salton Sea as a stopover.  If it becomes a dead sea, it cannot serve that purpose.  The State of California is trying to “save” the place, but it is hard to see what they could do, short of breaching the dikes again and sucking in the Colorado River.  It “benefits” from some irrigation discharge, but this is not water of the highest purity. The Salton Sea is essentially a big puddle, with no reliable sources of replenishment or discharge.  It is a very temporary lake and in a moment of geological time it will return to its former condition.

We almost got to Mexico on the last leg of the day’s journey. We caught I-8 in El Centro, California.  Not too far along the road, we were stopped at an immigration checkpoint. I didn’t know they had such things except at the border.

The road to San Diego is very interesting.  The first set of mountains look like a pile of stones.  If you didn’t know better and they weren’t so massive, you would think that humans dumped and piled these rocks.  It just doesn’t look natural. As I wrote earlier, the wind really blows out here.  They have signs on the roads warning about the high winds.  The winds sandblast the rocks, and everything else, and knock off the rough edges.

As we got farther west, the mountains became green and beautiful.  In other seasons the grass is probably brown, or golden as the Chamber of Commerce might describe it, but the green was really nice. Below is another picture of Chrissy.  Sorry to post so many, but she looks good and really liked the car.

We ended up at the Courtyard Marriott at Liberty Station.This used to be a Naval Training base and now it has been redeveloped into hotels, shops and restaurants.It is very pleasant if a bit too neat, see below. Chrissy has already left for Washington.My flight is a little latter so I am writing this at the airport.It has been an interesting visit to California.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The only place Joshua trees grow is in parts of the Mojave Desert, on elevations from 2000-6000 feet, and their highest concentration is where they are protected in the Joshua Tree National Park. This is high desert and cooler than the Sonora Deserts lower down and farther south. You pass through the transition zone between these two biomes as you drive south across the park. From the north you cross a vast expanse of Joshua tree savanna.  

Joshua trees are a type of yucca. They don’t grow like ordinary trees, with rings marking each year’s growth, so it is hard to tell how old individuals are. They don’t get very tall. They look sort of like crazy people waving at you. This seems to confirm one of the stories about how they got their names. The story goes that early Mormon settlers thought the trees looked like Joshua welcoming them to the Promised Land.  They were also sometimes called desert oranges.  This story says that land sellers wanted to entice settlers to this barren land, so they not only implied that these were productive fruit trees, but even went around and tied some oranges to the trees near the roads. It evidently didn’t fool anybody.

The landscape is beautiful in that harsh sort of way, a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here. We were seeing it at its best time. Spring rains have made it greener than usual.  The day was very windy, which I understand is fairly common. That is why they have all those windmills nearby.  It also explains the sculptured roundness of the rock outcroppings: natural sandblasting smooths off the rough edges.  

The Joshua trees dominate the open spaces, but in among the rock outcroppings you find pinion pine, California juniper and scrub oak. These communities are under some stress, however. The climate was wetter until the 1930s. The same hot and dry conditions that provoked the dust bowl affected the local climate. I couldn’t find out details about this, but evidently the previous relatively more verdant environment did not return. There are hot/dry and cool/moist cycles in climatic patterns and this could not have been anything new to the plant and animal communities. 

The difference may have been human development. Cattle grazing took out some of the natural cover and made it less resistant to the changes.  But the bigger problem seems to be invasive species, such as cheatgrass. These things deliver a double punch.   During wetter periods, they fill in below and among the pines and oak. In drier times, they die back, but don’t quickly decompose. This makes wildfires hotter and more destructive, which kills some of the trees that would have otherwise survived. When the area regenerates, these non-native grasses form a thick layer of turf that makes it harder for the pine and oak seedlings to get a roothold. This is not a very generous environment and there are not that many second chances.  

IMO, the native environment is better than what we will get if we let the invasive take over, but it will be sustainable only with a little human intervention and probably chemical warfare. BasF makes a good herbicide that can take out cheat-grass and its ilk, while leaving the oaks and pines intact.  This should probably be done periodically. I don’t know if it is. I would get more involved if I lived nearby.  This is certainly an environment worth saving. Doing nothing is not a good option.

Above - Joshua Tree NP is a favorite for rock climbers. Below is a lake made by ranchers for cattle by building a dam at a runoff point.

Below is the dam holding back the water. The little lake has become a major wildlife attraction, as one of the only steady water sources in this arid place.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wasn’t allowed to take a picture of the most interesting part at the Palm Springs Art Museum.  The guard literally stopped me just before I pushed the button.  He claimed it was because the artist has not given permission and I can well understand why. If I produced art like that I also would not want to allow evidence.  It was a stack of black garbage bags.  I have seen such installations before, but never in a museum.  This guy evidently got paid for putting them there. Usually they only pay when somebody takes them away.

Some of the other art was very good, like the cowboy sculpture in the picture.  These places are nice to have in a town.  It adds a certain spiritual/artistic dimension.  But sometimes we suffer from the “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomenon.  Garbage bags are interesting, but they are not art.

Below is a statue of a chameleon at Marriott. This is nice art, but not considered "fine" since it is inexpensive and common.

Below is a street in Palm Springs.  Some of the stores and restaurants have some misting. In a dry climate, it really cools it down at street level. 

Below is real art. This is a man-made landscape set in nature's valley. Very nice. Notice the way to clouds sit on the mountains. I think those are the Santa Rosa Mountains.  The moist air cannot make it over the summits, so on the one side it is wet, cooler and cloudy.  On the other side, it is dry, hot and clear deserts.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can share the same country, the same physical space, with people and live in completely different environments. I focus on historical or natural scenes and I find them wherever I go.  So when I go to crowded California I find the empty beaches, forests and green vistas. That is what I look for, and that is what I find.

Not everybody sees the things the way I do. I see trees.  Maybe they see buildings or cars.  I saw signs for ethnic areas of LA – Korea town, Philippine Town, Little Armenia … We drove past these things at high speed and never experienced anything other than the signs.  Well, maybe not high speed.

Another thing I rarely experience is traffic.  I ride my bike or take the Metro to work, so traffic for me is sometimes a weekend choice.   I thought about this as we inched through the LA traffic – and this wasn’t even during rush hour and it was mostly moving.  This is a daily experience for many people.   The only time I got stuck in traffic regularly was when I lived in New Hampshire and commuted to Tufts University in Medford, MA.  I didn’t like it, although I listened to a lot of audio books.  I found that thoughts of traffic started to dominate my thinking.  Commuting can be an overwhelming experience,

I thought about how different life if you live in a beach community as we walked around our hotel in Ventura.  You can see Ventura just above.  The picture at the very top is Carlsbad. It is more or less a beachfront retirement community. It was founded in the 1880s as a spa and has some Euro-pretensions as a result. Ventura and Carlsbad are very different. 

Many of the houses near the beach in Ventura probably started out as shacks or weekend cottages and gradually evolved into homes.  My “baby-boom” generation was probably the pioneers here and many seem to have aged in place.  We saw a couple really old looking hippies.  It was probably really cool to hang out at the beach when they were young.  Add thirty years and thirty pounds and the picture changes. Look at the second picture down and you can see one of the "outdoorsmen" in his temporary camp on the park picnic table. Notice, he has brought along his fishing gear. There was a orderliness to his possessions that implied that he was out there as much by choice as by compulsion.

The next day we ended up in Palm Springs and another reality.  Palm Springs is an upscale community with lots of ties to celebrities.  We drove along Frank Sinatra Avenue, past streets named for Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, Gerald Ford and Gene Autry.   I have never been here before, but it was familiar because of the sixties television.   If you lived here, you could probably play golf and go to shows and galleries every day. That would be another interesting reality.

Of course, last week I was on the Marine base at Camp Pendleton and we go back to Virginia on Friday.  These lives intersect only occasionally.  Usually they just run parallel. But in the meantime, Chrissy is still having fun with the rental car and I am enjoying the hot whirlpool below. Actually, it was a little too hot at first.  But this is something we haven't done since the kids were little, when it still made a difference if I got my hair wet. Life is good for now.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have a few odds and ends that are not enough for a whole post, but I don’t want to lose.

Crows are among the most intelligent birds.  It is something you notice when you just walk around.  They have a sentry in the tallest trees and they caw differentially as you walk under.  If you are carrying a shotgun, they all fly off.  If you are unarmed, they just ignore you.

The job of eating food scraps around people eating lunch outside is usually the job of pigeons but at San Simeon the task belongs to crows.  The crows are scarier and not only because they are shiny black and raven-like.   Unlike pigeon, which are just stupidly annoying, you can see the calculating intelligent in the crows’ black eyes. The pigeons also are little fat-boys; crows look lean and mean.  You don’t want to mess with the crows, especially if you are driving a convertible.  You know that they will forget you never more and maybe come back to retaliate. BTW, Alfred Hitchcock filmed "The Birds" up the coast.

Speaking of bird-brained intelligence, turkeys are really dumb. They used to be thought “elusive” but that was only because there were not many of them.   A couple of them wandered across the road on our farm.  They just stood there in front of the truck. I had to get out and toss stones in their general direction. I am pretty sure that I could have caught them with my bare hands. 

The turkey population has exploded over the past couple of decades and our scientific understanding of them has changed.  We used to think that turkeys needed large ranges and significant protection to survive.  Today we have learned that any decent sized clump of trees will do, whether it is next to a farm field or a suburban street.   We should probably encourage more hunting of these big birds, along with the now ubiquitous Canada geese.   Some people could probably save a lot on food bills.

Pea’s porridge hot

We stopped off at a Danish bakery and pea soup restaurant. The Andersen restaurant claimed to be selling pea soup since 1924. Pea soup was one of my father’s staple menu items (along with bean soup, polish sausage and green tomatoes) and I like pea soup. 

I don’t often make it because you have to make big pots of it at a time. The canned varieties just aren’t right, even Progresso, which usually produces good soups. Chrissy and I both got pea soup in a sourdough bread bowl. The bread mixed with the soup made it into pea’s porridge. It was good and worth the stop.

We stopped in Carpinteria to get gas. We didn’t, because the gas station (yes we passed only one) charged a $.45 “convenience fee” for using a credit card.  I can't believe there is still a place that doesn’t have a pay at the pump, much less charging a “convenience fee.”  It was an Arco Station, which I thought was a major company.  

But it was worth the diversion. As we stopped looking for another gas station and decided to turn back to the highway, we noticed a very large pine tree. I got out to take a look and noticed the plaque that claimed that this was the largest Torrey pine in the world.

The Torrey pine is locally endangered in the wild of its own natural range, where few of the species get as big as the one we saw and most are slow-growing and picturesquely twisted. But it is grows fast, tall and straight when used in plantations in Australia and New Zealand. It just doesn’t like it at home.

I bet that if we looked hard enough, we would find that the largest Torrey pine in the world is in Australia or New Zealand - if not now, soon. I read that the tallest California redwoods will soon be the ones planted in New Zealand during the 19th Century. I saw some really beautiful sequoia trees at the Ambassador's house in Geneva and a whole beautiful forest of redwoods growing on the hills near Sintra in Portugal. In fact, Sintra has a castle a lot like a smaller version of San Simeon.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

William Randolph Hearst’s   father made big bucks from silver mining in Nevada’s Comstock Lode and then used some of the money to buy thousands of acres rancho along the California coast.  The land was really isolated back then and cheap.   It still is a bit isolated, but it is a fantastically beautiful place. 

William Randolph Hearst went with his mother on the grand tour of Europe and developed an appreciation for European art and culture.  After he made the big fortune he inherited even bigger, the project of his later life was to build this castle on the hill overlooking the Pacific.  George Bernard Shaw commented the castle at San Simeon was the kind of place God would build if he had the money.

I got my impressions of Hearst from “Citizen Kane” and his behavior during the Spanish American War.  Suffice to say that the picture is incomplete and inaccurate and I learned some history on this trip. I won’t bore you with the details, which you can easily find elsewhere.  I will contribute some pictures and comments.  

Above - you couldn't stray off the path except at the point where the guide invited people to sit in the wicker chairs and feel for a few minutes what it is like to be rich.  Below is the indoor pool.  It is ten feet deep throughout the whole pool. The gold color you see is actually gold leaf. The man had the big bucks to spend.

Below is the outdoor Neptune pool. Many of the columns are actually from Roman ruins.  It is nice, but it reminds me of something you might find in Las Vegas.

San Simeon has a lot of bona-fide art. Hearst was able to buy much of it inexpensively after World War II.  You couldn't do that today, both because of the prices. There are more rich people today and they have bid up the prices.  And there are also many more restrictions on export of art. 

The practical difference between rich and poor have actually decreased, despite ostensible greater income gaps. A century ago, only the rich could experience these things. Only the rich had telephones, electricity, refrigerator etc. There is a sort of threshold, when you have enough. The difference between refrigerator and having one is much greater than having a cheap version and the top-of-the-line.  Re telephones, everybody can afford phones with more features then they know how to use.

The castle is really cool, but it would have been a lot more impressive to people back then than it is now, at least to anybody who has visited Las Vegas.  We have seen reasonable copies, bigger pools etc.  Frankly, I liked the views and the gardens the most, as you might guess by my pictures. If I lived there, I would spend most of my time sitting outside or wandering the hills.  

Posted by Broadnax at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Spanish established a road, El Camino Real or the royal road, from San Diego to San Francisco to connect and supply their missions and forts.  Today I-5 and U.S. 101 follow the route and we drove along both today on our way from San Diego to the Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

The route is marked with bells suspended from question mark shaped pipes.  These are good promotion and the reason we noticed that we were on the route. 

I originally rented a Chevy Cobalt and I used it to drive up to the botanical garden mentioned in the last post, but it was such a crappy car that I took it back to Alamo before I picked up Chrissy.   Chrissy always said that she wanted to drive a convertible, so I splurged and surprised her with one.  It was fun to drive in the convertible on the coastal highway and we look forward to more fun when we drive inland to Joshua Tree National Park. 

Below is Chrissy with the car.