Last night, Pat and Ariel sat me down to watch the DVD of Mamma Mia. This movie could just as well be titled Chick Flick for all of the singing, dancing, and utterly outrageous story, all tenuously held together by the music of ABBA. It is a remake of Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, a 1968 tearjerker starring Gina Lollobrigida. Mamma Mia has a star-studded cast, great actors all, but unfortunately, not a singer amongst them. The sole exception is Christine Baranski, a veteran Broadway actress, who knows how to play to the balcony.
ABBA, as we all know, was a Swedish pop group who blended disco and pop to produce total schlock. Schlock sells and for a time, ABBA was the number one money-maker from Sweden, bringing in more money than Volvo.
Lord help me, I actually enjoyed the film. I don’t know if it was Meryl Streep singing her way through “Dancing Queen”, or the guy who played the dead pirate with barnacles on his face in Pirates of the Caribbean, or Colin Firth playing a totally befuddled second male lead (“where am I? and what is this terrible movie I’m in?”). Actually the best part was listening to Pierce Brosnan (“Bond, James Bond”) singing. At last, I have found someone who has a worse voice than I do! He not only misses the key, he misses the door, the building, and the whole damn zip code.
When the three males leads come on for the final big production number, it is worth sitting through the first couple of days of the film. No human male should have to wear what they had on. They forfeit all of their guy rights for the next 10 years for that one.
I guess I have company, Mamma Mia is the highest grossing movie musical in history. The National Movie Awards gave it Best Musical, with Streep winning Best Actress and Brosnan getting a nomination for Best Actor. The Golden Globes nominated it for Best Picture, and Best Actress. There is even talk of a sequel, apparently there are a lot of unused ABBA songs left to go.
I think I’ll skip the sequel, but at least I know I can sing better than James Bond.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Wreaths of Old Town
Last Saturday we went to the Scottish Walk parade in Old Town, Alexandria. The Scottish Walk is an old local tradition, celebrating Alexandria’s Scots heritage. Pipe bands, politicians, Scottish clan societies, and hordes of Scottish dog breeds march over a round-about course for a dozen or so blocks. Our son, Alec, was a drummer for the City of Alexandria Pipes and Drums Band and we have been attending the Walk ever since.
An extra added treat is walking down the quieter streets and looking at the Christmas wreaths on the doors. Some are plain, others beautiful in their intricacy. The wreaths are entries in an informal contest, one that has been going on for over 35 years. Organized and judged by the Old Town Walled Garden Club, winners are announced in the Alexandria Gazette Packet newspaper. They receive a small prize (usually a gift certificate to a local restaurant) and bragging rights for the year.
The rules are simple: residents must decorate their own wreaths and use only natural materials (except ribbon), no lights, and no professional florists. Judges drive all 40 miles of Old Town's streets, coming to a consensus by the end of the day.
Door owners in Old Town take the "only natural materials (except ribbon)" rule to extremes. Wreaths run the gamut from plain pine and cedar with ribbon, to flowers, or seed pods, or whole oranges studded with cloves, or anything else from the fruit and vegetable bin.
Some wreaths are made from tropical fruit, complete with pineapples. Pineapples are a colonial symbol of welcome, dating from long sea voyages to the Indies. Upon return, the sea captain would display a pineapple to show he was home and receiving visitors.
There are wreaths made of ribbon, taking the "except ribbon" clause to the edge.
More than one wreath is made with feathers.
Wreaths with artichokes and other assorted veggies,
Wreaths made from tree bark,
One made from pears,
One made from seashells,
And even one made from red potatoes.
I don’t know who will take home the gift certificate, but if these photos are any example, the judges will be hard put to declare a winner. I guess the non-winners eat the tasty parts of their wreath.
Time Flies Like an Arrow; Face Flies Like Cows
When I was in grad school, I worked for the USDA as an integrated pest management field technician. My job consisted of traipsing out to various beef and dairy farms in Howard County, Maryland, to monitor face flies. Face flies are an imported livestock pest, originally from the Old World. They breed in cow dung and feed on cattles' nasal and eye secretions. While they don’t bite, they can become so annoying to the animal that milk production and weight gain suffer, causing monetary loss to the farmer.
In the late spring, I was part of a team setting up face fly monitoring stations. We would pull up to a farm and go into the pasture, first checking for bulls (dairy bulls are mean as snake spit). We set up tiny corrals of about 50 square feet, using three metal fence posts and barbed wire. Into each enclosure, we placed three fly traps made of plywood and painted white (Glidden’s semi-gloss exterior). The trap's shape, combined with the UV reflectance of the paint, presented the flies with the model of a bovine face; flies key in on angle and UV. We used a hand-held post driver (a short length of steel pipe plugged with concrete) and plenty of wire; enough to spiral around the enclosure three times. It was hard, dirty work and we averaged two farms a day, with two or more corrals per farm.
One day, we decided to go to McDonald’s for lunch. The team consisted of a PhD entomologist (later to become the chief entomologist of Guam), a PhD candidate, and an Master's candidate—me. Among the three of us, we totaled close to a half-century of education. We were tired, cold, and filthy from the work—we had discovered a dairy bull, a Holstein the size of a Cadillac and close to six feet tall at the shoulders—and had spent an eventful morning alternately working and running for our lives to get over the pasture fence.
Behind us in line were a father and his small son. “Daddy,” the kid asked, “why are those men so dirty?” I overheard the reply, sotto voce, “That’s why you need to work hard in school; otherwise you’ll wind up like them.”
In the late spring, I was part of a team setting up face fly monitoring stations. We would pull up to a farm and go into the pasture, first checking for bulls (dairy bulls are mean as snake spit). We set up tiny corrals of about 50 square feet, using three metal fence posts and barbed wire. Into each enclosure, we placed three fly traps made of plywood and painted white (Glidden’s semi-gloss exterior). The trap's shape, combined with the UV reflectance of the paint, presented the flies with the model of a bovine face; flies key in on angle and UV. We used a hand-held post driver (a short length of steel pipe plugged with concrete) and plenty of wire; enough to spiral around the enclosure three times. It was hard, dirty work and we averaged two farms a day, with two or more corrals per farm.
One day, we decided to go to McDonald’s for lunch. The team consisted of a PhD entomologist (later to become the chief entomologist of Guam), a PhD candidate, and an Master's candidate—me. Among the three of us, we totaled close to a half-century of education. We were tired, cold, and filthy from the work—we had discovered a dairy bull, a Holstein the size of a Cadillac and close to six feet tall at the shoulders—and had spent an eventful morning alternately working and running for our lives to get over the pasture fence.
Behind us in line were a father and his small son. “Daddy,” the kid asked, “why are those men so dirty?” I overheard the reply, sotto voce, “That’s why you need to work hard in school; otherwise you’ll wind up like them.”
White Cats for Obama
We were watching a rerun of Jon Stuart and the Daily Show the other night. Stuart was interviewing Barrak Obama, then just a candidate. When the camera isolated on Obama, Flint, our male white Maine coon cat, perked up his ears and trotted to the screen. He sat down in front of the tube and watched Obama, devoting his complete attention to the screen. When the camera cut back to Stuart, Flint blinked and turned away as if to leave. But Obama came back on and Flint was once again enraptured. He jumped up on the TV table and began pawing at the screen, nuzzling and purring loud enough to be heard from several feet away. As long as the President-elect was on TV, Flint was riveted. As soon as the interview ended, he jumped down and resumed his previous activities: washing and begging for food.
Huh.
Neither cat has ever shown any interest in television, even during the wildlife programs. I guess cats are natural born Democrats.
Huh.
Neither cat has ever shown any interest in television, even during the wildlife programs. I guess cats are natural born Democrats.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Woodstock Weekend
Real surfers don't say "Dude".
--Dana Brown, Step Into Liquid, 2003
Woodstock; August 15 to 18, 1969--3 days of peace and music somewhere in upstate New York. They say upwards of half a million people attended. People grooved to the music, exchanged genetic information, and imbibed various chemicals. Babies were born. Most of my friends vanished that weekend. My cousin--who had just turned 16-- borrowed his dad’s car “to go to a concert”, neglecting to say it was 400 miles up the Jersey Turnpike,--and didn’t come home for a week.
Me? I went surfing.
When I was a junior in high school, the film Endless Summer was released. I must have seen it eight or nine times. It was basically an old-time travelogue, following two California surfers around the world in “search of the perfect wave”. I was completely won over. I rented a surf board that summer and drove to Assateague Island to try my luck. It was a complete disaster. I was banged by the board, dumped every way imaginable and nearly drowned twice. I loved it. Once, in the shore break, I managed to stand up of a grand total of what must have been five seconds, but seemed like hours. It was ecstasy. I felt the ocean under my feet, felt the push and power of the wave; then the nose went under and I was gulping seawater and trying to figure out which way was up so I could find air and breathe. I was stoked.
The following summer, I bought a second or third hand board, a Hobie Sportflight, with a redwood stringer, ten feet long, weighing forty pounds, and as hard to turn as the Queen Mary. I brushed a pound of melted paraffin onto the deck for traction, scrounged a roof rack, and hit the beach every weekend. My summer job barely paid for gas and I camped out on the beach, fishing and foraging for clams in the bay behind Assateague for supper. It got to where sympathetic park rangers recognized me and would let me slide on the daily fees, directing me to out of the way camping areas where I could pitch my tattered pup tent.
I kept surfing the shore break, known to surfers as the “soup”. I got pretty good a paddling fast enough to catch a wave and stand up for a few brief seconds until the wave crashed down and the board grounded in the shallows; more than once, I ran down the length of the board to dry sand, having milked every inch out of a wave.
I began noticing other surfers, watched their style, and how they attacked the waves. Actually, most of them never went out, they mostly sat on the beach, worked on their tans, and drank beer. Their boards were untouched by wax and were just a lure for girls. The real surfers were out on the water, white triangles of zinc oxide on their noses, waiting for the next set to form. I seldom saw them with girls and the beer sat in coolers until it got dark. We were monks of the sea, sitting on the beach before dawn, waiting for enough light to go out, sitting on the beach in the late afternoon, waiting on the tide to turn. Watching the waves break with the concentration of chess players.
Woodstock weekend, mid-August. Assateague was breaking big (for Assateague); the soup was running at six feet plus, a wild and confused mass of foam and movement. I saw waves breaking left and right about a quarter-mile offshore. There is an offshore sand bar at Assateague, and when waves are big enough, they trip there first, reforming to break again, fulfilling their destiny on the beach.
I wanted to try outside, but couldn’t bring myself to paddle out that far; it looked about half-way to Spain. I was rubbing sand into the worn wax on my board to increase the traction, when a real surfer dropped his board on the beach next to me. Skin brown and leathery as an old saddle, hair bleached by hours under the sun, white zinc oxide on his nose. He asked to borrow some wax and noticed my beat up board, the dings covered with duct tape and filled with Bondo. “Hobie, huh,” he said “Well we’re not here to fuck around.” I nodded in agreement and kept sanding. “You going outside?" it wasn’t really a question. I nodded; the decision having been made for me. “Mind the rips” he said. “Rips?” “Yeah, rip currents; rip tides. If you get dumped in one, it’ll drown you if you don’t know how to handle it.” “Oh” I replied noncommittally. “Yeah, there’s one about thirty yards down the beach; see it?” I looked up and noticed a lane of confused water, brown with suspended sand going seaward until it spread out like a stalk of broccoli some ways off shore. “You can ride it out on your board; it’ll take you to the bar. Save on the paddling. Surf’s up; let’s go” I followed him down to the water, and pushed my board out. A few strokes past the soup and I felt the board begin to move off on its own. I was in the rip, brown water roiling all around me. The real surfer kept ahead of me, steering with short arm strokes until we reached the cut in the outside bar where the brown water bloomed out like a flower. “You straight or goofy?” he asked, meaning did I lead with my left foot (straight) or right (goofy foot).”Goofy”, I replied. “Take the right break, it’ll keep you facing the wave.” He headed left.
I had that part of the Atlantic all to myself, straddling the board, facing out to sea, the August sun warming my back. I watched the waves come in for some time, bobbing up and down on the board, trying not to think of what was sharing the water out on the bar with me. I’d seen aerial photos showing eight- and nine-foot brown and sandbar sharks lying like logs amid surf bathers at Ocean City, a couple of miles north. I resisted the impulse to pull my legs up out the water where they were dangling like bait. Browns and sandbars pup in the back bay, I told myself, they don’t eat when they pup. Yeah, my brain replied, but what if they’re done and need a quick energy boost; and what eats them?
I was saved from myself by a set of three big waves marching in fast. I let the first go, sinking into its trough from where I looked up at the second. They weren’t really breaking; just mounding up when they hit the shallow bar, steep shoulders trailing off from the peaks. I felt the board climb up the face of the second wave, pop over the crest, and fall with a hollow smack onto the trailing edge. I spun my feet in opposite circles to turn the board around, lay prone, and began to paddle as hard as I could on the face of the third and biggest wave. I felt the board pick up speed and suddenly I was moving with the wave, caught in the palm of the sea. I did a quick push-up and stood, making sure my feet were positioned on the back third, and took off. I had never made a standing up turn before, but somehow my feet knew what to do. I took the drop and cut left and the board ran with the wave, outside rail buried in the water, making a sound like tearing silk. Time seemed to stop. All of the falling off and snoots-full of water in the shore break came to fruition. I was surfing. The shoulder petered out and the board slowed. I dropped back down and let out a whoop you could have heard in Missouri. I paddled back to my take-off point and waited for the next set to come to me. I was in the zone. I must have spent four hours outside, taking on wave after wave. Lengthening shadows, an empty stomach, gripping thirst, and shaky legs finally made themselves known. Time to go in.
I took one final wave, as flawless a ride as you could ask for. When the shoulder faded, I began paddling toward the beach. The shore break had calmed to three-foot breaks, crashing down all at once, like a falling brick wall. Unwilling to call it a day, I paddled with fading energy to catch the last piddling wave of the day. Big mistake. I stood up, watched the nose of the board go under, catching the full weight of the Atlantic, and was catapulted up and off the front. I landed on my feet in two feet of water and turned around just in time to see the board chugging sideways into my left knee. I heard an internal crack and went down in a heap, the board passing over me and banging me on the top of my head. I struggled to my feet and hobbled after it. The board was dinged where it made contact with the bone—more duct tape work. I sat on the beach picking fiberglass splinters out my knee. A shadow fell over me; I looked up to see a blonde angel in a pink bikini. “You OK? You had some really good runs out there. Mike wants to know if you’d like a beer.” This said with a motion down the beach where the real surfer sat. He gave a casual wave and I limped down the beach, board under one arm. Just like a real surfer.
--Dana Brown, Step Into Liquid, 2003
Woodstock; August 15 to 18, 1969--3 days of peace and music somewhere in upstate New York. They say upwards of half a million people attended. People grooved to the music, exchanged genetic information, and imbibed various chemicals. Babies were born. Most of my friends vanished that weekend. My cousin--who had just turned 16-- borrowed his dad’s car “to go to a concert”, neglecting to say it was 400 miles up the Jersey Turnpike,--and didn’t come home for a week.
Me? I went surfing.
When I was a junior in high school, the film Endless Summer was released. I must have seen it eight or nine times. It was basically an old-time travelogue, following two California surfers around the world in “search of the perfect wave”. I was completely won over. I rented a surf board that summer and drove to Assateague Island to try my luck. It was a complete disaster. I was banged by the board, dumped every way imaginable and nearly drowned twice. I loved it. Once, in the shore break, I managed to stand up of a grand total of what must have been five seconds, but seemed like hours. It was ecstasy. I felt the ocean under my feet, felt the push and power of the wave; then the nose went under and I was gulping seawater and trying to figure out which way was up so I could find air and breathe. I was stoked.
The following summer, I bought a second or third hand board, a Hobie Sportflight, with a redwood stringer, ten feet long, weighing forty pounds, and as hard to turn as the Queen Mary. I brushed a pound of melted paraffin onto the deck for traction, scrounged a roof rack, and hit the beach every weekend. My summer job barely paid for gas and I camped out on the beach, fishing and foraging for clams in the bay behind Assateague for supper. It got to where sympathetic park rangers recognized me and would let me slide on the daily fees, directing me to out of the way camping areas where I could pitch my tattered pup tent.
I kept surfing the shore break, known to surfers as the “soup”. I got pretty good a paddling fast enough to catch a wave and stand up for a few brief seconds until the wave crashed down and the board grounded in the shallows; more than once, I ran down the length of the board to dry sand, having milked every inch out of a wave.
I began noticing other surfers, watched their style, and how they attacked the waves. Actually, most of them never went out, they mostly sat on the beach, worked on their tans, and drank beer. Their boards were untouched by wax and were just a lure for girls. The real surfers were out on the water, white triangles of zinc oxide on their noses, waiting for the next set to form. I seldom saw them with girls and the beer sat in coolers until it got dark. We were monks of the sea, sitting on the beach before dawn, waiting for enough light to go out, sitting on the beach in the late afternoon, waiting on the tide to turn. Watching the waves break with the concentration of chess players.
Woodstock weekend, mid-August. Assateague was breaking big (for Assateague); the soup was running at six feet plus, a wild and confused mass of foam and movement. I saw waves breaking left and right about a quarter-mile offshore. There is an offshore sand bar at Assateague, and when waves are big enough, they trip there first, reforming to break again, fulfilling their destiny on the beach.
I wanted to try outside, but couldn’t bring myself to paddle out that far; it looked about half-way to Spain. I was rubbing sand into the worn wax on my board to increase the traction, when a real surfer dropped his board on the beach next to me. Skin brown and leathery as an old saddle, hair bleached by hours under the sun, white zinc oxide on his nose. He asked to borrow some wax and noticed my beat up board, the dings covered with duct tape and filled with Bondo. “Hobie, huh,” he said “Well we’re not here to fuck around.” I nodded in agreement and kept sanding. “You going outside?" it wasn’t really a question. I nodded; the decision having been made for me. “Mind the rips” he said. “Rips?” “Yeah, rip currents; rip tides. If you get dumped in one, it’ll drown you if you don’t know how to handle it.” “Oh” I replied noncommittally. “Yeah, there’s one about thirty yards down the beach; see it?” I looked up and noticed a lane of confused water, brown with suspended sand going seaward until it spread out like a stalk of broccoli some ways off shore. “You can ride it out on your board; it’ll take you to the bar. Save on the paddling. Surf’s up; let’s go” I followed him down to the water, and pushed my board out. A few strokes past the soup and I felt the board begin to move off on its own. I was in the rip, brown water roiling all around me. The real surfer kept ahead of me, steering with short arm strokes until we reached the cut in the outside bar where the brown water bloomed out like a flower. “You straight or goofy?” he asked, meaning did I lead with my left foot (straight) or right (goofy foot).”Goofy”, I replied. “Take the right break, it’ll keep you facing the wave.” He headed left.
I had that part of the Atlantic all to myself, straddling the board, facing out to sea, the August sun warming my back. I watched the waves come in for some time, bobbing up and down on the board, trying not to think of what was sharing the water out on the bar with me. I’d seen aerial photos showing eight- and nine-foot brown and sandbar sharks lying like logs amid surf bathers at Ocean City, a couple of miles north. I resisted the impulse to pull my legs up out the water where they were dangling like bait. Browns and sandbars pup in the back bay, I told myself, they don’t eat when they pup. Yeah, my brain replied, but what if they’re done and need a quick energy boost; and what eats them?
I was saved from myself by a set of three big waves marching in fast. I let the first go, sinking into its trough from where I looked up at the second. They weren’t really breaking; just mounding up when they hit the shallow bar, steep shoulders trailing off from the peaks. I felt the board climb up the face of the second wave, pop over the crest, and fall with a hollow smack onto the trailing edge. I spun my feet in opposite circles to turn the board around, lay prone, and began to paddle as hard as I could on the face of the third and biggest wave. I felt the board pick up speed and suddenly I was moving with the wave, caught in the palm of the sea. I did a quick push-up and stood, making sure my feet were positioned on the back third, and took off. I had never made a standing up turn before, but somehow my feet knew what to do. I took the drop and cut left and the board ran with the wave, outside rail buried in the water, making a sound like tearing silk. Time seemed to stop. All of the falling off and snoots-full of water in the shore break came to fruition. I was surfing. The shoulder petered out and the board slowed. I dropped back down and let out a whoop you could have heard in Missouri. I paddled back to my take-off point and waited for the next set to come to me. I was in the zone. I must have spent four hours outside, taking on wave after wave. Lengthening shadows, an empty stomach, gripping thirst, and shaky legs finally made themselves known. Time to go in.
I took one final wave, as flawless a ride as you could ask for. When the shoulder faded, I began paddling toward the beach. The shore break had calmed to three-foot breaks, crashing down all at once, like a falling brick wall. Unwilling to call it a day, I paddled with fading energy to catch the last piddling wave of the day. Big mistake. I stood up, watched the nose of the board go under, catching the full weight of the Atlantic, and was catapulted up and off the front. I landed on my feet in two feet of water and turned around just in time to see the board chugging sideways into my left knee. I heard an internal crack and went down in a heap, the board passing over me and banging me on the top of my head. I struggled to my feet and hobbled after it. The board was dinged where it made contact with the bone—more duct tape work. I sat on the beach picking fiberglass splinters out my knee. A shadow fell over me; I looked up to see a blonde angel in a pink bikini. “You OK? You had some really good runs out there. Mike wants to know if you’d like a beer.” This said with a motion down the beach where the real surfer sat. He gave a casual wave and I limped down the beach, board under one arm. Just like a real surfer.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Arsters
My friend Freddy and I were sitting in a bar in Eastport, Maryland after a day on the water. Eastport, protestations to the contrary, is a suburb of tony Annapolis. But where Annapolis has gone upscale with “Millionaire’s moorings” near the public dock, Eastport remains decidedly blue collar, populated with mechanics, teachers, carpenters, watermen, boat builders; people who actually make things work.
Freddy had invited me to join him on his old wooden sailboat for a day’s cruise and I jumped at the chance. Although not a sailor, I know my way around a boat. Besides, it was an opportunity to see some isolated Chesapeake Bay lighthouses up close.
It had been a long, windblown, sun-struck day. We were both burned rosy red, with the only pale skin covered by our sunglasses, giving us the look of raccoons on a piece of black and white negative film. I was trying to doctor a headache with a glass of whiskey and a bottle of Miller’s finest when the upscale couple strolled in. He was in a pastel polo shirt and khakis, sockless feet in polished(!) deck shoes. She was in painted-on jeans and heels, nary a blonde hair out of place. They sat around the corner of the U-shaped bar and he ordered two drafts (obviously slumming), and a dozen oysters on the half-shell. “You know” he said with a barely perceptible leer, “they say oysters are aphrodisiacs.” His companion giggled and went off to find the lady’s room.
Freddy glanced up at me, the crow’s feet crinkling at the corners of his eyes, and ordered a couple dozen for us. “Just because I’m getting oysters (he pronounced it ‘arsters’ like all good Maryland boys), don’t mean I’m easy.” This said as the cute blonde was returning to the bar. She must have heard, as a small frown crossed her perfect Maybellenned lips.
If you grew up near tidewater, oysters are a food, not something to put lead in your pencil. I’ve eaten them fried, fricasseed, steamed, scalded, scalloped, baked, barbequed, and raw. I’ve had them in pies, stews, and Rockefeller. There is something elemental about the mild salt tang, the slight metallic flavor from oyster’s copper-base blood, and the way they cringe when you squirt them with lemon juice (that’s how you know they are fresh). Just think of them as Chesapeake sushi.
Beyond mere food, oysters are history. Oysters made Chesapeake Bay and the tidewater culture that embraces it. Chesapeake itself means “Great Shellfish Bay”. Archeologists can spot a pre- European contact Indian village site by the overgrown piles of discarded shells. Visit old tobacco plantations from Mount Vernon to Cape Charles; each has tucked away, amid the poison ivy and kudzu, a mound of old oyster shells quietly dissolving back into the soil. Indentured servants and slaves were fed oysters; cheap protein and free for the harvesting in the shallows. One of the first labor strikes in American history rose from indentured servants complaining about having to eat oysters day in and day out.
When John Smith explored the Bay in the 1500’s, he found oysters so extensive that they formed reefs, breaking the surface at low tide and a hazzard to navigation. The European settlers adapted the Indian appetites and watercraft. Soon, schooners called bugeyes, sporting two raked masts and hulls built from nine old-growth pitch pine logs, were hauling dredges across the reefs. After centuries of onslaught, the reefs soon dwindled to bars; smaller, shorter, and harder to get at, but still chock full of oysters. Bugeyes gave way to skipjacks—single masted plank-built sloops that could handle the new conditions. These graceful craft began the evolution of clipper ships, the acme of sailing ship development.
Oysters are vital to Chesapeake Bay, in large part responsible for its teeming biodiversity and are the Bay’s filtering system. Oysters are what ecologists call a “keystone species”. Keystone species are defined, like the Cheshire Cat, by what’s left when they are gone. Pull a keystone species out of the environmental pyramid, and you get a resulting cascade of unforeseen changes and extinctions of species that, at first glance, have nothing to do with oysters drop in abundance and associated ecosystem function. Ecologists estimate that, at the turn of the 20th century, a volume water equivalent to that of the entire Chesapeake Bay was filtered through an oyster every three days. A single oyster runs 50 gallons of water a day through its gills, feeding on and removing algae and bacteria.
Oysters’ prodigious filtering capacity was the major influence on submerged vegetation. Oysters filter feed on one celled algae, keeping the water clear enough for sunlight to penetrate to the bottom, allowing aquatic grasses to thrive. The grasses formed nurseries for crabs and fish of all sorts.
In the 19th Century, sail switched to steam and gasoline engines and the plunder became serious. Maryland made feeble attempts at conservation, such as limiting dredging to sail only, but to little avail. It is an adage among fisheries management people that governments don’t enact management plans until the resource has already dwindled to critical levels. After being pounded for 400 years, the oysters have seemingly given up. Down to one percent of their former populations, they are no longer a major functional part of Chesapeake ecology.
Eastport once had nearly 20 oyster shucking houses and watermen tied up at nearby Annapolis City Dock to off load their bushels of bivalves. Skipjacks and smaller working craft were common in the harbor. The bartender where Fred and I sat was a part-time waterman who knew his way around an oyster. I watched as he deftly opened one oyster after another, his short razor-sharp knife pushing through the hinge at the back of the shell. He kept his non-knife hand, the one holding the shell, in a chain mail glove, looking like something out of Beowulf. A quick twist and the shell was open. Another twist and the morsel was free.
Fred and I slurped down a dozen each, washing them down with draft beer. When her companion left to go to the men’s room, the cute blonde slipped Fred her phone number with the pantomimed “call me.” Maybe there is something after all to the aphrodisiac story.
Freddy had invited me to join him on his old wooden sailboat for a day’s cruise and I jumped at the chance. Although not a sailor, I know my way around a boat. Besides, it was an opportunity to see some isolated Chesapeake Bay lighthouses up close.
It had been a long, windblown, sun-struck day. We were both burned rosy red, with the only pale skin covered by our sunglasses, giving us the look of raccoons on a piece of black and white negative film. I was trying to doctor a headache with a glass of whiskey and a bottle of Miller’s finest when the upscale couple strolled in. He was in a pastel polo shirt and khakis, sockless feet in polished(!) deck shoes. She was in painted-on jeans and heels, nary a blonde hair out of place. They sat around the corner of the U-shaped bar and he ordered two drafts (obviously slumming), and a dozen oysters on the half-shell. “You know” he said with a barely perceptible leer, “they say oysters are aphrodisiacs.” His companion giggled and went off to find the lady’s room.
Freddy glanced up at me, the crow’s feet crinkling at the corners of his eyes, and ordered a couple dozen for us. “Just because I’m getting oysters (he pronounced it ‘arsters’ like all good Maryland boys), don’t mean I’m easy.” This said as the cute blonde was returning to the bar. She must have heard, as a small frown crossed her perfect Maybellenned lips.
If you grew up near tidewater, oysters are a food, not something to put lead in your pencil. I’ve eaten them fried, fricasseed, steamed, scalded, scalloped, baked, barbequed, and raw. I’ve had them in pies, stews, and Rockefeller. There is something elemental about the mild salt tang, the slight metallic flavor from oyster’s copper-base blood, and the way they cringe when you squirt them with lemon juice (that’s how you know they are fresh). Just think of them as Chesapeake sushi.
Beyond mere food, oysters are history. Oysters made Chesapeake Bay and the tidewater culture that embraces it. Chesapeake itself means “Great Shellfish Bay”. Archeologists can spot a pre- European contact Indian village site by the overgrown piles of discarded shells. Visit old tobacco plantations from Mount Vernon to Cape Charles; each has tucked away, amid the poison ivy and kudzu, a mound of old oyster shells quietly dissolving back into the soil. Indentured servants and slaves were fed oysters; cheap protein and free for the harvesting in the shallows. One of the first labor strikes in American history rose from indentured servants complaining about having to eat oysters day in and day out.
When John Smith explored the Bay in the 1500’s, he found oysters so extensive that they formed reefs, breaking the surface at low tide and a hazzard to navigation. The European settlers adapted the Indian appetites and watercraft. Soon, schooners called bugeyes, sporting two raked masts and hulls built from nine old-growth pitch pine logs, were hauling dredges across the reefs. After centuries of onslaught, the reefs soon dwindled to bars; smaller, shorter, and harder to get at, but still chock full of oysters. Bugeyes gave way to skipjacks—single masted plank-built sloops that could handle the new conditions. These graceful craft began the evolution of clipper ships, the acme of sailing ship development.
Oysters are vital to Chesapeake Bay, in large part responsible for its teeming biodiversity and are the Bay’s filtering system. Oysters are what ecologists call a “keystone species”. Keystone species are defined, like the Cheshire Cat, by what’s left when they are gone. Pull a keystone species out of the environmental pyramid, and you get a resulting cascade of unforeseen changes and extinctions of species that, at first glance, have nothing to do with oysters drop in abundance and associated ecosystem function. Ecologists estimate that, at the turn of the 20th century, a volume water equivalent to that of the entire Chesapeake Bay was filtered through an oyster every three days. A single oyster runs 50 gallons of water a day through its gills, feeding on and removing algae and bacteria.
Oysters’ prodigious filtering capacity was the major influence on submerged vegetation. Oysters filter feed on one celled algae, keeping the water clear enough for sunlight to penetrate to the bottom, allowing aquatic grasses to thrive. The grasses formed nurseries for crabs and fish of all sorts.
In the 19th Century, sail switched to steam and gasoline engines and the plunder became serious. Maryland made feeble attempts at conservation, such as limiting dredging to sail only, but to little avail. It is an adage among fisheries management people that governments don’t enact management plans until the resource has already dwindled to critical levels. After being pounded for 400 years, the oysters have seemingly given up. Down to one percent of their former populations, they are no longer a major functional part of Chesapeake ecology.
Eastport once had nearly 20 oyster shucking houses and watermen tied up at nearby Annapolis City Dock to off load their bushels of bivalves. Skipjacks and smaller working craft were common in the harbor. The bartender where Fred and I sat was a part-time waterman who knew his way around an oyster. I watched as he deftly opened one oyster after another, his short razor-sharp knife pushing through the hinge at the back of the shell. He kept his non-knife hand, the one holding the shell, in a chain mail glove, looking like something out of Beowulf. A quick twist and the shell was open. Another twist and the morsel was free.
Fred and I slurped down a dozen each, washing them down with draft beer. When her companion left to go to the men’s room, the cute blonde slipped Fred her phone number with the pantomimed “call me.” Maybe there is something after all to the aphrodisiac story.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Renaissance Leiderhosen
My family has attended the Maryland Renaissance Festival since the kids were small. I never cease to be amazed at the diversity of costumes in evidence. Not the players, they pay close attention to detail of the Henry VIII cycle. Each week Henry moves on to a different wife and the actor playing him magically grows older and fatter. The ladies are in full finery with long velvet skirts and lace headpieces. What draws your attention is what passes for Renaissance garb among the paying customers. Everything from eleventh century chain mail and Viking helmets complete with horns (which is actually Bronze Age) to seventeenth century pirate garb with stuffed parrot on the shoulder. And that’s just the men. The women dress like something out of Xena, Warrior Princess, with lots of leather and tattoos. Cleavage is everywhere. Something about Renaissance Festivals that brings out the bad girl in who would otherwise be a demure young lady. This past Saturday was German day, with lots of beer and oom-pah music. Pirates and Vikings mingled with leiderhosen and fake British accents mixed with fake German ones, sometimes in the same sentence.
“Nice leiderhosen, dude, where’d you get them?”
“Ebay.”
“Ebay? No way, dude.”
“Way, dude.”
Two young ladies wandered close to the White Hart Tavern, where beer flowed and patrons sang. They were in beer hall freulien costume, with short skirts, shorter aprons and white stockings--like the girl on the St. Polygirl beer bottle come to life. They stopped a stone’s throw from the stage and began primping. Each in turn stretched a shapely leg and slowly pulled up a stocking. Everyone within a radius of fifty yards and possessed of an XY chromosome and pulse turned to watch. One girl feigned surprise at the attention and giggled. She wiggled her butt and sauntered off to catch up with her friend.
Her admiring throng included the pipe band about to take the stage. One young drummer stood mouth agape, eyes bulging, and commented: “I think I just forgot all the music”. A piper, beard showing grey and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, laughed and said “Son, just think of it as pre-performance applause.” They took the stage and kicked into a bagpipe version of the Rock’n Roll classic “Angel in the Centerfold”. The drummer played fine, but I noticed he kept scanning the crowd.
“Nice leiderhosen, dude, where’d you get them?”
“Ebay.”
“Ebay? No way, dude.”
“Way, dude.”
Two young ladies wandered close to the White Hart Tavern, where beer flowed and patrons sang. They were in beer hall freulien costume, with short skirts, shorter aprons and white stockings--like the girl on the St. Polygirl beer bottle come to life. They stopped a stone’s throw from the stage and began primping. Each in turn stretched a shapely leg and slowly pulled up a stocking. Everyone within a radius of fifty yards and possessed of an XY chromosome and pulse turned to watch. One girl feigned surprise at the attention and giggled. She wiggled her butt and sauntered off to catch up with her friend.
Her admiring throng included the pipe band about to take the stage. One young drummer stood mouth agape, eyes bulging, and commented: “I think I just forgot all the music”. A piper, beard showing grey and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, laughed and said “Son, just think of it as pre-performance applause.” They took the stage and kicked into a bagpipe version of the Rock’n Roll classic “Angel in the Centerfold”. The drummer played fine, but I noticed he kept scanning the crowd.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Some Like It Hot
The bank thermometer says 103°F. It is 1 PM and the “heat index” is pushing 105. Not that a couple of degrees makes any difference when the humidity on this mid-August day is closing on pure water. Neither mad dogs nor Englishmen are within eyeshot; just fifteen or so assorted lunatics sweating like sponges and waving nets about with gay abandon at what appears to be empty air.
“Dragonflies love the heat; it makes them pop” says Kevin Munroe, who is leading a field trip as part of the Dragonfly Identification Workshop, a course in the Northern Virginia Audubon Society’s Master Naturalist Program. Kevin is working on a book describing the dragonflies of Fairfax County, Virginia and he can tell you at a glance what dragonfly species is flying past.
Dragonfly spotting is a relatively young “sport” among naturalists. Birders, who had pretty much filled up the check boxes in their field guides (nobody ever gets them all), began looking for something to observe while waiting for the elusive what-ever to show up in their lenses. They hit upon butterflies. Butterflies are colorful, fly during the day (no pesky getting up before dawn), and exhibit enough variety to give most people a challenge. Add in the Skippers, a butterfly-like Lepidoptera group somewhere between butterflies and moths (and which all look alike), and a small cottage industry of field guides and web sites was hatched.
Birds, check. Butterflies, check. What else was out there to experience? Cue the dragonflies. North America boasts nearly 700 species; about the same number as bird species. Northern Virginia has 70 species, divided unevenly among 7 larger groups, a manageable number, with life histories and migration patterns to rival those of birds and butterflies.
“Wandering Glider” says Kevin, pointing at a dragonfly-shaped dot hovering fifteen feet above our heads. Straw yellow body, red eyes and clear wings; this is the albatross of dragonflies. Wandering Gliders and their closely-related cousins, Spot-wing Gliders, cross whole oceans, their broad hind wings locked in glide mode, steering with the front wings. Following fronts and weather systems, gliding thousands of feet up, the two species, known collectively as “rain pool gliders” place their eggs in ephemeral rain pools following a storm. The eggs hatch and mature in just a week or two, taking advantage of the temporary water which being temporary, lacks predators. The Wandering Glider is found on every continent but Antarctica and is the only native dragonfly to Hawaii. The Spot-wing Glider makes it to the Galapagos Islands and throughout the Pacific. Rain pool gliders cue on the ultraviolet reflection from standing water, the same reflection given off by a newly waxed car. Check out a parking lot on a hot summer afternoon; dragonflies will be laying eggs on the hoods of blue and white cars.
Dragonflies have an ancient lineage. Fossils from Permian coal beds going back a third of a billion years show insects very much like dragonflies, reaching up to two feet in wingspan. Modern dragonflies, while smaller, have a few additional features such as a bend in the leading edge of the front wing for better maneuverability. And maneuver they do. Dragonflies can hover, fly backwards, and turn on a dime, sending power to each set of wings and to each wing individually as needed. Antennae have been reduced to tiny hairs act as air speed indicators. Heads are mostly eye with several thousand facets in each one, allowing for exquisite sensitivity to movement. In fact, dragonflies are so attuned to movement; it is possible to capture a perching insect by hand. Just move slowly enough and it literally does not see you—you are not there. How slow is enough? If it takes off with your fingers still several inches away from the wing, it wasn’t slow enough. Dragonflies can see better than we can at the far end of the spectrum; something that looks black to us like the Slaty Skimmer, may in fact be screaming purple to a dragonfly.
“Dragon Hunter” says Kevin, reaching in his net to extract a green dragonfly which, if not two feet across, is still pretty impressive. Over three inches long, this beast looks like it includes a healthy dose of steroids in its diet. Dragon Hunters specialize in preying on other dragonflies. This is prey that can bite back and this particular Dragon Hunter looks like it’s been through some real tussles. Its wings are tattered and the claws are missing from one of it its long hind legs. Kevin shows it around and releases it. It rests for a moment on a branch, then takes off, wings clattering, abdomen curling down in a J, looking for all the world like a helicopter gunship all weapons pods signaling “loaded”.
Dragonflies spend the first part of their lives in water. Eggs hatch into tiny ogres who crawl the bottom and rocks, using a wicked looking retractable lower jaw to snag insects, worms, and even small fish. The speed of the strike is among the fastest movement recorded in the animal kingdom. Dragonfly nymphs (technically naiads since they are aquatic) are top predators, the Great White Sharks, of the pool. Naiads may spend up to five years growing and lurking until one fine day, they climb out the water up a stalk or branch, split down the middle, and step out like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus. This process may take several hours, but at the end, a dragonfly has emerged, wings crumpled and shining like an enamel pennant. The insect pumps blood into the wings to expand them. Once expanded, the blood is withdrawn back into the body, and the hollow veins act as struts and braces (tubes are stronger than solid members) just like on a canvas and wood World War I biplane.
Just as birders are bedeviled by "Confusing Fall Warblers" and the myriad of sparrows ("just list it as an LBJ--little brown job”), and butterfly aficionados are made crazy by skippers (Peck's, whirlabout, or common? They all look the same), so too are dragonfly spotters beset by a whole group of look-alikes; the damselflies. Of the three groups, two (the broad wings and spread wings) are relatively easy to identify and contain manageable numbers of species. The group that makes people tear their hair out is the pond damsels. All pond damsels are small, all are blue, and all were put on this planet to humble the most discriminating of taxonomists. They can tell each other apart, but the luckless spotter is reduced to standing ankle deep in stagnant water, field guide in hand trying to remember if the light blue abdomen on the long-gone bug had nine or ten (or was it ten and a half) dark blue rings (that gets it down to only ten species or so). Audubon did his birding with a shotgun; they ought to come up with something similar for damselflies. You may still not get an ID, but you will have managed to waste the little bugger which is almost as satisfying.
“Dragonflies love the heat; it makes them pop” says Kevin Munroe, who is leading a field trip as part of the Dragonfly Identification Workshop, a course in the Northern Virginia Audubon Society’s Master Naturalist Program. Kevin is working on a book describing the dragonflies of Fairfax County, Virginia and he can tell you at a glance what dragonfly species is flying past.
Dragonfly spotting is a relatively young “sport” among naturalists. Birders, who had pretty much filled up the check boxes in their field guides (nobody ever gets them all), began looking for something to observe while waiting for the elusive what-ever to show up in their lenses. They hit upon butterflies. Butterflies are colorful, fly during the day (no pesky getting up before dawn), and exhibit enough variety to give most people a challenge. Add in the Skippers, a butterfly-like Lepidoptera group somewhere between butterflies and moths (and which all look alike), and a small cottage industry of field guides and web sites was hatched.
Birds, check. Butterflies, check. What else was out there to experience? Cue the dragonflies. North America boasts nearly 700 species; about the same number as bird species. Northern Virginia has 70 species, divided unevenly among 7 larger groups, a manageable number, with life histories and migration patterns to rival those of birds and butterflies.
“Wandering Glider” says Kevin, pointing at a dragonfly-shaped dot hovering fifteen feet above our heads. Straw yellow body, red eyes and clear wings; this is the albatross of dragonflies. Wandering Gliders and their closely-related cousins, Spot-wing Gliders, cross whole oceans, their broad hind wings locked in glide mode, steering with the front wings. Following fronts and weather systems, gliding thousands of feet up, the two species, known collectively as “rain pool gliders” place their eggs in ephemeral rain pools following a storm. The eggs hatch and mature in just a week or two, taking advantage of the temporary water which being temporary, lacks predators. The Wandering Glider is found on every continent but Antarctica and is the only native dragonfly to Hawaii. The Spot-wing Glider makes it to the Galapagos Islands and throughout the Pacific. Rain pool gliders cue on the ultraviolet reflection from standing water, the same reflection given off by a newly waxed car. Check out a parking lot on a hot summer afternoon; dragonflies will be laying eggs on the hoods of blue and white cars.
Dragonflies have an ancient lineage. Fossils from Permian coal beds going back a third of a billion years show insects very much like dragonflies, reaching up to two feet in wingspan. Modern dragonflies, while smaller, have a few additional features such as a bend in the leading edge of the front wing for better maneuverability. And maneuver they do. Dragonflies can hover, fly backwards, and turn on a dime, sending power to each set of wings and to each wing individually as needed. Antennae have been reduced to tiny hairs act as air speed indicators. Heads are mostly eye with several thousand facets in each one, allowing for exquisite sensitivity to movement. In fact, dragonflies are so attuned to movement; it is possible to capture a perching insect by hand. Just move slowly enough and it literally does not see you—you are not there. How slow is enough? If it takes off with your fingers still several inches away from the wing, it wasn’t slow enough. Dragonflies can see better than we can at the far end of the spectrum; something that looks black to us like the Slaty Skimmer, may in fact be screaming purple to a dragonfly.
“Dragon Hunter” says Kevin, reaching in his net to extract a green dragonfly which, if not two feet across, is still pretty impressive. Over three inches long, this beast looks like it includes a healthy dose of steroids in its diet. Dragon Hunters specialize in preying on other dragonflies. This is prey that can bite back and this particular Dragon Hunter looks like it’s been through some real tussles. Its wings are tattered and the claws are missing from one of it its long hind legs. Kevin shows it around and releases it. It rests for a moment on a branch, then takes off, wings clattering, abdomen curling down in a J, looking for all the world like a helicopter gunship all weapons pods signaling “loaded”.
Dragonflies spend the first part of their lives in water. Eggs hatch into tiny ogres who crawl the bottom and rocks, using a wicked looking retractable lower jaw to snag insects, worms, and even small fish. The speed of the strike is among the fastest movement recorded in the animal kingdom. Dragonfly nymphs (technically naiads since they are aquatic) are top predators, the Great White Sharks, of the pool. Naiads may spend up to five years growing and lurking until one fine day, they climb out the water up a stalk or branch, split down the middle, and step out like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus. This process may take several hours, but at the end, a dragonfly has emerged, wings crumpled and shining like an enamel pennant. The insect pumps blood into the wings to expand them. Once expanded, the blood is withdrawn back into the body, and the hollow veins act as struts and braces (tubes are stronger than solid members) just like on a canvas and wood World War I biplane.
Just as birders are bedeviled by "Confusing Fall Warblers" and the myriad of sparrows ("just list it as an LBJ--little brown job”), and butterfly aficionados are made crazy by skippers (Peck's, whirlabout, or common? They all look the same), so too are dragonfly spotters beset by a whole group of look-alikes; the damselflies. Of the three groups, two (the broad wings and spread wings) are relatively easy to identify and contain manageable numbers of species. The group that makes people tear their hair out is the pond damsels. All pond damsels are small, all are blue, and all were put on this planet to humble the most discriminating of taxonomists. They can tell each other apart, but the luckless spotter is reduced to standing ankle deep in stagnant water, field guide in hand trying to remember if the light blue abdomen on the long-gone bug had nine or ten (or was it ten and a half) dark blue rings (that gets it down to only ten species or so). Audubon did his birding with a shotgun; they ought to come up with something similar for damselflies. You may still not get an ID, but you will have managed to waste the little bugger which is almost as satisfying.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Moving Daze
Well, the wind is blowin' harder now
Fifty knots or there abouts,
There's white caps on the ocean.
And I'm watching for water spouts
It's time to close the shutters
It's time to go inside.
--Jimmy Buffet; Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season
Ariel moved out last weekend to her own (shared) apartment in a not-too-dodgy section of Arlington. Of 52 Saturdays in the year, she picked the one with a hurricane in it. I’ve got to hand it to her, though, she carefully planned what was going, and how, and in whose car. The only hitch in the giddyup was Hanna. An uninvited guest, Tropical Storm Hanna was scheduled to come ashore somewhere in the Carolinas late Friday or early Saturday and move up the coast with wind gusts up to 50 mph and loads of rain, spreading terror, destruction, and damp in her wake. Thursday night. Ariel announced the schedule had been moved up a day.
Friday morning, I began loading my pickup with boxes. After two additional trips to the storage locker for furniture (bed and bed stead, dresser, couch, etc., etc.) left over from Grandma’s move 2 years ago, I was sore in places I’d forgotten I had. Ariel’s friends came by and took additional boxes, furniture, and her enormous shoe wheel; girl’s got more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Pat came home early and joined me at the storage locker to load "that frickin' mattress and box spring into the bed of the pickup. The box spring was not too heavy, but lacked handles and was like trying to wrestle a walrus, while the mattress had handles but was heavier than the average loaded supertanker. Plus they were 4 inches longer than the truck bed so they had to travel tilted against the bed edge. Tying them down was more of a psychological help than a real one. They caught enough wind on the road that I felt like I was tacking a small boat.
Hanna had begun as a Saharan dust storm, moved offshore and became a group of thunderheads off the Cape Verde Islands. Like so many Atlantic "tropical disturbances", the storms drew heat energy from the warm tropical waters, organized themselves into a loosely rotating mass (with help from the Coriolis Effect), and began drifting west. Somewhere east of the Leeward Islands, wind speed picked up to 40 and a Tropical Depression was hatched. Hanna sailed through Tropical Storm and kept growing to a respectable Category 1 strength with winds at 80 mph, and took aim for the east coast of the U.S. She kind of snuck up on everyone since most attention was diverted to the Gulf coast where Gustav was impacting. Once under the influence of a high pressure system, Hanna began tracking north.
Saturday dawned glowering and dark. Doom knocking at the door. One more load and on to the apartment to unpack and set up. Good friends from church showed up to help; Frank, an engineer, was put in charge of assembling a mismatched brass bed and a bathroom étagère (no tools needed… right, just a power drill, screwdriver, vice grips, and lots of muttered words). In my wisdom and my haste, I had forgotten the clamps to keep the bed from collapsing- stuck them in the truck without a second thought. Problem was, the truck was at home in Vienna, and I was with the Honda in Arlington. So, back to Vienna for the clamps and a dozen framed photos for the walls which were pretty empty (“Not everybody grows up in an art gallery, daddy.”) By this time the rain was pelting down sideways and traffic was throwing up rooster tails of spray wherever the storm drains were overflowing, which was pretty much everywhere.
Back to the apartment, where Frank figured out the clamps which looked like something Galileo had cobbled together on an off day. We assembled the bed and Ariel tested it by flopping down full length down the center. I cringed, but the contraption held together; good enough for jazz. The étagère (no tools required!) was up, needing only to be bolted into the drywall. The rain continued, and the area around the ground floor apartments, excavated and landscaped to allow in light, had turned into a moat with more water pouring down all the time. Ann was there, putting up curtain rods and threading the curtains, and Ariel’s friends were unpacking. The bed, assembled, pizza delivered for the masses, and curtains up, the place was looking lived-in and girly. Kathy from church arrived to help Ariel unpack the books, and unpack the books, and unpack the books…not everybody grows up in a library, daddy.
And Tropical Storm (formerly Hurricane) Hanna? She passed on through, leaving 10 inches of water in Vienna but not much wind. By Tuesday, she had recrossed the Atlantic and was flooding Northern Ireland. The RAF sent helicopters to evacuate isolated villages. Begorrah.
Fifty knots or there abouts,
There's white caps on the ocean.
And I'm watching for water spouts
It's time to close the shutters
It's time to go inside.
--Jimmy Buffet; Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season
Ariel moved out last weekend to her own (shared) apartment in a not-too-dodgy section of Arlington. Of 52 Saturdays in the year, she picked the one with a hurricane in it. I’ve got to hand it to her, though, she carefully planned what was going, and how, and in whose car. The only hitch in the giddyup was Hanna. An uninvited guest, Tropical Storm Hanna was scheduled to come ashore somewhere in the Carolinas late Friday or early Saturday and move up the coast with wind gusts up to 50 mph and loads of rain, spreading terror, destruction, and damp in her wake. Thursday night. Ariel announced the schedule had been moved up a day.
Friday morning, I began loading my pickup with boxes. After two additional trips to the storage locker for furniture (bed and bed stead, dresser, couch, etc., etc.) left over from Grandma’s move 2 years ago, I was sore in places I’d forgotten I had. Ariel’s friends came by and took additional boxes, furniture, and her enormous shoe wheel; girl’s got more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Pat came home early and joined me at the storage locker to load "that frickin' mattress and box spring into the bed of the pickup. The box spring was not too heavy, but lacked handles and was like trying to wrestle a walrus, while the mattress had handles but was heavier than the average loaded supertanker. Plus they were 4 inches longer than the truck bed so they had to travel tilted against the bed edge. Tying them down was more of a psychological help than a real one. They caught enough wind on the road that I felt like I was tacking a small boat.
Hanna had begun as a Saharan dust storm, moved offshore and became a group of thunderheads off the Cape Verde Islands. Like so many Atlantic "tropical disturbances", the storms drew heat energy from the warm tropical waters, organized themselves into a loosely rotating mass (with help from the Coriolis Effect), and began drifting west. Somewhere east of the Leeward Islands, wind speed picked up to 40 and a Tropical Depression was hatched. Hanna sailed through Tropical Storm and kept growing to a respectable Category 1 strength with winds at 80 mph, and took aim for the east coast of the U.S. She kind of snuck up on everyone since most attention was diverted to the Gulf coast where Gustav was impacting. Once under the influence of a high pressure system, Hanna began tracking north.
Saturday dawned glowering and dark. Doom knocking at the door. One more load and on to the apartment to unpack and set up. Good friends from church showed up to help; Frank, an engineer, was put in charge of assembling a mismatched brass bed and a bathroom étagère (no tools needed… right, just a power drill, screwdriver, vice grips, and lots of muttered words). In my wisdom and my haste, I had forgotten the clamps to keep the bed from collapsing- stuck them in the truck without a second thought. Problem was, the truck was at home in Vienna, and I was with the Honda in Arlington. So, back to Vienna for the clamps and a dozen framed photos for the walls which were pretty empty (“Not everybody grows up in an art gallery, daddy.”) By this time the rain was pelting down sideways and traffic was throwing up rooster tails of spray wherever the storm drains were overflowing, which was pretty much everywhere.
Back to the apartment, where Frank figured out the clamps which looked like something Galileo had cobbled together on an off day. We assembled the bed and Ariel tested it by flopping down full length down the center. I cringed, but the contraption held together; good enough for jazz. The étagère (no tools required!) was up, needing only to be bolted into the drywall. The rain continued, and the area around the ground floor apartments, excavated and landscaped to allow in light, had turned into a moat with more water pouring down all the time. Ann was there, putting up curtain rods and threading the curtains, and Ariel’s friends were unpacking. The bed, assembled, pizza delivered for the masses, and curtains up, the place was looking lived-in and girly. Kathy from church arrived to help Ariel unpack the books, and unpack the books, and unpack the books…not everybody grows up in a library, daddy.
And Tropical Storm (formerly Hurricane) Hanna? She passed on through, leaving 10 inches of water in Vienna but not much wind. By Tuesday, she had recrossed the Atlantic and was flooding Northern Ireland. The RAF sent helicopters to evacuate isolated villages. Begorrah.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Painted Ponies
And the seasons, they go round and round.
Painted ponies go up and down.
--Joani Michell, The Circle Game
The other week was Ariel’s 23rd birthday; presents, restaurants and, as an improvisational treat, a trip to Glen Echo, Maryland for a carousel ride. Glen Echo is a little-known regional gem and one of those anomalies the National Park System takes perverse pleasure in administering. Started in 1891, Glen Echo was a Chautauqua assembly-a popular 19th century institution where working class people could learn the sciences, arts, languages and literature. The Chautauqua failed due to a rumors of malaria since it was so close to the Potomac and C&O Canal. Glen Echo then became an amusement park in the early 1900s. Streetcars ran from Georgetown upriver to the park. Buildings were replaced and added until, by the 1940’s and ‘50s, the park was the mid-century equivalent to Six Flags. Attractions included a pool complete with sand beach, bumper cars, a spinning ride called the CuddleUp (guaranteed to induce nausea in the most hardened of souls), and a huge rickety wooden roller coaster with a man-killer reputation. The park went bankrupt in the mid-60s and languished until taken over by the National Park Service who turned it into an arts and artists center.
Several of the old original Art-Deco buildings are still standing, including a corner of the Crystal Pool, largely sacrificed to become part of the Clara Barton Parkway (she lived next door in the town of Glen Echo), which parallels the river. The old shooting gallery, its far wall covered with stray bullet pock marks from the tethered .22’s that always pulled right, is now a set of art galleries. The bumper cars pavilion is an open air picnic area and contra dance space. The Spanish Ballroom, maple dance floor on huge springs to dampen the crash of feet, still echoes to music from community dances every Saturday night and the original stone Chautauqua tower is now the park office and book store.
The best item in the whole park, however, is its last operating ride, a 1921 Denzel Carousel, lovingly restored over the past 20 years. Horses, chariots, giant rabbits, ostriches, and even a tiger and lion pace their endless circles to a working calliope organ. Back when we lived in nearby Brookmont, a plan was hatched to remove and sell the carousel to a private interest. Locals all along the river screamed in protest and put together bake sales and whatnot to raise a matching price to keep the carousel in place. An art show/sale was one of the whatnots, featuring the carousel in various media. The first picture I ever sold was of one of the paired ostriches on the inner circle. I think I got $50 for it and promptly donated it to the fund. I still wish I could have afforded some of the other works, some of which were heartbreakingly beautiful.
The wooden figures on the carousel are hand-carved and near life-size (the bunny rabbits are somewhat bigger; sort of an "Island of Dr. Moreau" ride). Until restoration began, they were mostly a dingy shade of various browns and tans. Following rebirth, vibrant colors glow from within the figures, making them seem as live as the real thing down to the silver horseshoes.
In Disney’s Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dike, and assorted children jump through a chalk drawing into a delightful live/animated adventure. In the course of the sequence, they hijack the horses from an amusement park carousel and Mary Poppins wins a horse race. If they had taken the horses from Glen Echo, they’d be running yet.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Extinct Technologies
I feel the way about a Springfield that I do about a Gooney Bird; some pieces of machinery are ultimate perfection of their sort, the only improvement is a radical change in design.
--Oscar, in Robert Heinlein's Glory Road
Sometimes a technology evolves to the point where the only improvement is a whole new technology.
Case(s) in point, last week, Pat and I took a mini-vacation to Pennsylvania, to Lancaster and Philadelphia. We visited Pat's cousin, Phil, deep in the heart of Amish country. Pennsylvania has more covered bridges than any other state; 30 in Lancaster County alone.
Covered bridges are the acme of wooden bridge design. Most employ the arched Burr truss --a double arch of laminated timbers combined with a series of triangular king posts. The king posts gave the bridge rigidity and the double arches (one on each side), distributed what engineers call the "live load" (the weight of moving wagons or trucks) to the bridge foundations. The arches are three 4x12 planks made of heartwood oak, steamed to allow a slight curve, and bolted in sections to each other. The seams are staggered so the pieces overlap, resulting in a single load-bearing piece. Most of the covered bridges we saw are still in use by traffic, including honking big farm machinery.
The bridges are made of locally quarried stone with local timber. Wood rots when wet. The builders added a roof, usually tin or shingle, to protect the wood elements and prolong the life of the structure. Uncovered wooden bridges have a lifespan of 10 years; covered bridges go ten times longer, maybe more. Wooden bridges were cheap and quick to build using local labor and were the way you crossed a creek dryshod until the advent of structural steel in the early 2oth century.
The bridge tour was part of the trip to Philly. On the way, we stopped at Strasburg, an early hub of railroading in the Keystone State. Three different railroad museums to choose from; one devoted to toy trains, one to model trains (there is a difference) and one featuring the real deal.
The model train museum, a private outfit, held a layout the size of a basketball court featuring local color. The sheer size of the layout and movement, including aircraft circling on wires, contribute to the biggest sensory overload I've experienced since going through It's a Small World at Disney World. Every 10 minutes or so, the lights dimmed and the houses, streetlights, and cars lit up. Pretty impressive. My favorite, though, was all the small jokes the modelers worked into the set. I saw several, but I'm sure I missed a lot. Jokes like the town square bronze statue of Eisenhower in full uniform with a pigeon on his head.
Or the hobo jungle with a club wielding three-headed troll under the bridge ("my brother is much bigger") the heads were miniature portraits of Larry, Curly, and Moe. There must have been 20 trains running all over the layout including a familiar face.
We saw gentlemen of a "certain age" leaving the gift shop with big shopping bags stuffed with model railroad cars and building kits. A trail of drool led to the door; you could almost smell the lust.
The real deal, however, was the Railroad Museum at Strassburg. I felt the same as when visiting the Smithsonian's Hall of Dinosaurs; big bellowing creatures that evoke the small kid's "Oh wow" response.
Steam locomotives ranging from one used to transport sugar cane in Hawaii to the huge Atlantics and Mikados that ran from one end of the continent to the other and back. A working exhibition train with coal smoke puffing from the stacks and brass bells agong.
Don't get me wrong; I harbor no nostalgia for bygone days. Being an American in the early years of the 21st Century is as good as it gets (on my optimist days) or as good as it ever will be (on my pessimistic ones). But the scent of live steam or the sound of hoofbeats on wooden decking evokes the same feeling as seeing a live mastodon.
When we have perfected aircars and matter-antimatter drive, I can't help but wonder what bits of today's stuff will be considered cool enough to keep.
--Oscar, in Robert Heinlein's Glory Road
Sometimes a technology evolves to the point where the only improvement is a whole new technology.
Case(s) in point, last week, Pat and I took a mini-vacation to Pennsylvania, to Lancaster and Philadelphia. We visited Pat's cousin, Phil, deep in the heart of Amish country. Pennsylvania has more covered bridges than any other state; 30 in Lancaster County alone.
Covered bridges are the acme of wooden bridge design. Most employ the arched Burr truss --a double arch of laminated timbers combined with a series of triangular king posts. The king posts gave the bridge rigidity and the double arches (one on each side), distributed what engineers call the "live load" (the weight of moving wagons or trucks) to the bridge foundations. The arches are three 4x12 planks made of heartwood oak, steamed to allow a slight curve, and bolted in sections to each other. The seams are staggered so the pieces overlap, resulting in a single load-bearing piece. Most of the covered bridges we saw are still in use by traffic, including honking big farm machinery.
The bridges are made of locally quarried stone with local timber. Wood rots when wet. The builders added a roof, usually tin or shingle, to protect the wood elements and prolong the life of the structure. Uncovered wooden bridges have a lifespan of 10 years; covered bridges go ten times longer, maybe more. Wooden bridges were cheap and quick to build using local labor and were the way you crossed a creek dryshod until the advent of structural steel in the early 2oth century.
The bridge tour was part of the trip to Philly. On the way, we stopped at Strasburg, an early hub of railroading in the Keystone State. Three different railroad museums to choose from; one devoted to toy trains, one to model trains (there is a difference) and one featuring the real deal.
The model train museum, a private outfit, held a layout the size of a basketball court featuring local color. The sheer size of the layout and movement, including aircraft circling on wires, contribute to the biggest sensory overload I've experienced since going through It's a Small World at Disney World. Every 10 minutes or so, the lights dimmed and the houses, streetlights, and cars lit up. Pretty impressive. My favorite, though, was all the small jokes the modelers worked into the set. I saw several, but I'm sure I missed a lot. Jokes like the town square bronze statue of Eisenhower in full uniform with a pigeon on his head.
Or the hobo jungle with a club wielding three-headed troll under the bridge ("my brother is much bigger") the heads were miniature portraits of Larry, Curly, and Moe. There must have been 20 trains running all over the layout including a familiar face.
We saw gentlemen of a "certain age" leaving the gift shop with big shopping bags stuffed with model railroad cars and building kits. A trail of drool led to the door; you could almost smell the lust.
The real deal, however, was the Railroad Museum at Strassburg. I felt the same as when visiting the Smithsonian's Hall of Dinosaurs; big bellowing creatures that evoke the small kid's "Oh wow" response.
Steam locomotives ranging from one used to transport sugar cane in Hawaii to the huge Atlantics and Mikados that ran from one end of the continent to the other and back. A working exhibition train with coal smoke puffing from the stacks and brass bells agong.
Don't get me wrong; I harbor no nostalgia for bygone days. Being an American in the early years of the 21st Century is as good as it gets (on my optimist days) or as good as it ever will be (on my pessimistic ones). But the scent of live steam or the sound of hoofbeats on wooden decking evokes the same feeling as seeing a live mastodon.
When we have perfected aircars and matter-antimatter drive, I can't help but wonder what bits of today's stuff will be considered cool enough to keep.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Old Birds
People who visit museums tend to fall into one of two categories; those that know nothing about the exhibits in front of them, and those who know more than enough. These categories do not include the usual herds of school kids who only know that they are not in class today and who are savoring a rare taste of freedom.
I visited the Udvar-Hazy facility of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, also known as the Air/Space Annex, near Dulles Airport the other day. Forget the $12 parking fee and the fact that the building is out in the middle of nowhere (OK, not the middle, but you can see it on a clear day). Forget that the lots are less than 25% full and its the least visited of all the Smithsonian facilities. What's really cool is that it's big enough to house real airplanes, real really big airplanes.
The first to catch the eye is the SR-71 Blackbird. Sleek and flat black like Steve McQueen's Mustang in Bullet, as menacing as a T. rex, it sits on the ground floor, looking ready to chew right through the walls and take off.
"Did you know," said an airplane geek, standing at the nose of the beast, "that when they flew this bird from Edwards Air Force Base to here, it broke the speed record for time across North America? And that was just practice." I knew that particular factoid, but went along anyway; "Last time I saw one of these, they had just been declassified and were touring the air show circuit." "Whoa," came the reply, "you go back some on this plane." I mentioned that when last I saw an operational Blackbird, the crew had spread tarps under it to catch the oil dripping out of the fuselage and wings. "Yeah," my expert replied, "these things were built loose in the airframe and leaked like sieves. When they got up past Mach 2 or 3, the air friction and heat caused them to tighten up. If they were that tight on the ground, they would implode at speed." I noticed the tail insignia and pointed it out. "oh, yeah," came the reply, now aimed at a small cluster of people who had gathered for the impromptu lecture, "that's the symbol of the Skunkworks." The Skunkworks was a super secret facility located in (wait for it) Area 51 out in the Nevada desert. The Blackbird, the B-1 and -2s and the U-2 were all developed and test flown there. No wonder people kept reporting UFOs all the time. Report seeing a highly classified aircraft that doesn't exist from an experimental facility that isn't there, and nobody in any authority will say "yeah, that's one of ours."
The museum is loosely divided in to general themes. Military, civil aviation, and space. The military wing has examples of aircraft I grew up reading about; a Nieuport with the Lafayette Escadrille emblem on the side, a Spad and a German biplane are the heart of the World War I section. The Spad comes equipped with a Lewis machine gun, state of the art in 1918, and cool enough to be used by George Lucas as one of the weapons carried by the Imperial storm troopers in the first Star Wars movie.
The World War II area has more aircraft, simply because the old biplanes are few and far between today. As a kid I built models of many of the WWII aircraft and hung them from my bedroom ceiling with monofilament fishing line. The Smithsonian has done the same with some of the smaller aircraft, using something stronger than monofilament. The windscreens aren't clouded over with gluey thumbprints either. An old Flying Tiger fighter, a Navy Hellcat and a short takeoff and landing Lysander used for inserting spies and agents into occupied Europe are locked in a frozen dogfight overhead.
The silver dollar in the penny pile, though, has to be the Enola Gay, arguably the most famous airplane in history. An airplane that changed history, carefully restored to look like it did on the morning of the last day of the old world. You can't look at this machine and be neutral about it. I once asked my dad, a veteran of the European Theater, what he thought about the atom bomb. His answer paralleled a quote from James Jones (a veteran combat infantryman and author of From Here to Eternity and several other World War II novels). "It meant" he said, "that I was going to be able to grow up and have a life." My musings were interrupted by a family strolling the catwalk and reading the signage. "This is the airplane that dropped the first atom bomb on Japan" read the dad. "I thought Japan was on our side." replied the semi-bored son. "It is now, but not then." I blame the education system. Had I wits quick enough, I would have quoted Robert Oppenheimer from the Batisvada, "Now I am become death, breaker of worlds" although I doubt anyone present would have got it.
Pride of place, however, goes to the Space Shuttle Enterprise, the first one and possibly the only shuttle named by geeks. Housed in its own gallery with the rest of the space stuff, the first impression is one of overwhelming enormity. It is hard to believe something that big can actually fly. It's like a building with engines you can stand up in. The eye ignores the space suited astronaut off in the corner and provided for scale.
The Smithsonian prides itself on keeping all their exhibits in working order. You could, for example type a letter on one of their vintage 1900 Remington typewriters. A few years back, they let out the Tom Thumb, the first locomotive in North America and took it for a spin on an old B&O spur line along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland. I suppose they could, if the spirit moved them, oil and gas up any aircraft hanging from the ceiling and buzz Dulles Airport.
I visited the Udvar-Hazy facility of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, also known as the Air/Space Annex, near Dulles Airport the other day. Forget the $12 parking fee and the fact that the building is out in the middle of nowhere (OK, not the middle, but you can see it on a clear day). Forget that the lots are less than 25% full and its the least visited of all the Smithsonian facilities. What's really cool is that it's big enough to house real airplanes, real really big airplanes.
The first to catch the eye is the SR-71 Blackbird. Sleek and flat black like Steve McQueen's Mustang in Bullet, as menacing as a T. rex, it sits on the ground floor, looking ready to chew right through the walls and take off.
"Did you know," said an airplane geek, standing at the nose of the beast, "that when they flew this bird from Edwards Air Force Base to here, it broke the speed record for time across North America? And that was just practice." I knew that particular factoid, but went along anyway; "Last time I saw one of these, they had just been declassified and were touring the air show circuit." "Whoa," came the reply, "you go back some on this plane." I mentioned that when last I saw an operational Blackbird, the crew had spread tarps under it to catch the oil dripping out of the fuselage and wings. "Yeah," my expert replied, "these things were built loose in the airframe and leaked like sieves. When they got up past Mach 2 or 3, the air friction and heat caused them to tighten up. If they were that tight on the ground, they would implode at speed." I noticed the tail insignia and pointed it out. "oh, yeah," came the reply, now aimed at a small cluster of people who had gathered for the impromptu lecture, "that's the symbol of the Skunkworks." The Skunkworks was a super secret facility located in (wait for it) Area 51 out in the Nevada desert. The Blackbird, the B-1 and -2s and the U-2 were all developed and test flown there. No wonder people kept reporting UFOs all the time. Report seeing a highly classified aircraft that doesn't exist from an experimental facility that isn't there, and nobody in any authority will say "yeah, that's one of ours."
The museum is loosely divided in to general themes. Military, civil aviation, and space. The military wing has examples of aircraft I grew up reading about; a Nieuport with the Lafayette Escadrille emblem on the side, a Spad and a German biplane are the heart of the World War I section. The Spad comes equipped with a Lewis machine gun, state of the art in 1918, and cool enough to be used by George Lucas as one of the weapons carried by the Imperial storm troopers in the first Star Wars movie.
The World War II area has more aircraft, simply because the old biplanes are few and far between today. As a kid I built models of many of the WWII aircraft and hung them from my bedroom ceiling with monofilament fishing line. The Smithsonian has done the same with some of the smaller aircraft, using something stronger than monofilament. The windscreens aren't clouded over with gluey thumbprints either. An old Flying Tiger fighter, a Navy Hellcat and a short takeoff and landing Lysander used for inserting spies and agents into occupied Europe are locked in a frozen dogfight overhead.
The silver dollar in the penny pile, though, has to be the Enola Gay, arguably the most famous airplane in history. An airplane that changed history, carefully restored to look like it did on the morning of the last day of the old world. You can't look at this machine and be neutral about it. I once asked my dad, a veteran of the European Theater, what he thought about the atom bomb. His answer paralleled a quote from James Jones (a veteran combat infantryman and author of From Here to Eternity and several other World War II novels). "It meant" he said, "that I was going to be able to grow up and have a life." My musings were interrupted by a family strolling the catwalk and reading the signage. "This is the airplane that dropped the first atom bomb on Japan" read the dad. "I thought Japan was on our side." replied the semi-bored son. "It is now, but not then." I blame the education system. Had I wits quick enough, I would have quoted Robert Oppenheimer from the Batisvada, "Now I am become death, breaker of worlds" although I doubt anyone present would have got it.
Pride of place, however, goes to the Space Shuttle Enterprise, the first one and possibly the only shuttle named by geeks. Housed in its own gallery with the rest of the space stuff, the first impression is one of overwhelming enormity. It is hard to believe something that big can actually fly. It's like a building with engines you can stand up in. The eye ignores the space suited astronaut off in the corner and provided for scale.
The Smithsonian prides itself on keeping all their exhibits in working order. You could, for example type a letter on one of their vintage 1900 Remington typewriters. A few years back, they let out the Tom Thumb, the first locomotive in North America and took it for a spin on an old B&O spur line along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland. I suppose they could, if the spirit moved them, oil and gas up any aircraft hanging from the ceiling and buzz Dulles Airport.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Humbirds
Q: Why do hummingbirds hum?
A: Because they forgot the words.
--Boys’ Life Magazine
I needed some photos of hummingbirds for an article I was researching for an on-line discussion newsletter. I called around to my various friends and acquaintances in the area parks. Most, when they thought about it, were somewhat puzzled that they hadn't seen any coming to their feeders lately. One park had a few coming in but they were irregular and couldn't be counted on to make an appearance. Finally, the desk volunteer at Huntley Meadows said "Yes, we have a pair. They alternate every 5 minutes or so. I'm looking at the male now." I thanked her and tossed my stuff in the truck.
Thirty minutes later, I was set up at the feeder and waiting. Hummingbirds just materialize out of nothing. One second you are staring at an empty feeder, and the next, there it is. "Beam me down, Scottie." The male, resplendent in a carmine gorgette (the "ruby throat" of Rubythroated hummingbirds), hovered while he sipped at the 1/4 sugar to water solution. A low buzz from the wings, like a bumble bee, only more punctuated, was audible even 10 feet away where I snapped like crazy. Three or four sips later and he was off, Turing the corner of the building and disappearing like so much fairy dust.
Five minutes later, right on schedule, the female winked into existence. No ruby throat, but body shining in metallic green, she perched on the lip of the feeder and guzzled like a construction worker in a tavern.
Hummingbirds are tiny scraps of life; the Cuban Bee hummingbird, about the size of your thumb and weighing less than a penny is the world's smallest bird. The Giant hummingbird, found in the Peruvian Andes, is about the size of a starling and the Goliath of hummers. Hummingbirds only inhabit the New World and islands throughout the Caribbean have their own endemic species, such as the Jamaican Red-billed Streamertail with 8 inch tail plumes on the male (over twice the length of its body). The streamers hum during flight. The locals call it the doctor bird because the black plumes remind them of the old fashioned frock coats worn by physicians (“and the big bill”). The doctor bird is the logo for Jamaican Airways.
There are about 340 different species, though new ones are discovered almost every year. Sixteen species nest in North America, but only one, the Rubythroated hummingbird is found in the eastern half of the continent. Every year, however, we get reports of western species spending the winter in the East. One year, a Broad-billed hummingbird, usually found in the Rocky Mountains, wintered only a few blocks from our house.
Hummingbirds all have specially shaped short stubby wings that allow them to hover in place, back up, and even fly upside down. The wings cup air and provide lift on both the up stroke and down stroke; most birds’ wings only lift on the down stroke.
Hummingbirds all drink nectar for energy. They prefer red flowers with long tube shapes like trumpet vine. Pretty much any long flower, especially red ones are dependant on hummingbirds for pollination (most insects can’t see the color red) depositing the stuff on the birds’ heads and throats. With their long bills and longer tongues with fringes on the tip, they soak up nectar via capillary action and squeeze into their mouths. Hummingbirds also hunt small insects like aphids and tiny spiders for protein, and feed them to the chicks for a rapid growth boost.
Christopher Columbus was the first European to see hummingbirds, noting them in his ship’s log when he arrived at the island of Hispaniola; he thought they were bees. In fact, the name “hummingbird” comes from both the low buzz they make in flight and from the old name for bumble bees (humble bees); interesting aside: another old name for a bumble bee is “dumbledore”. Of course, the people who already were living in America knew about hummingbirds. The Aztecs believed them to be the ghosts of warriors who had died in battle, combining the bird's brilliant beauty and utter fearlessness. The Hopi people thought hummingbirds could predict rain. In the arid Southwest, hummingbirds build nests just before the summer monsoon rains to ensure a good supply of nectar-bearing blossoms and associated small insects.
Hummingbirds nests are tiny —the nest of a Rubythroated fits over the end of your thumb like a cap. The female builds nests of silk stolen from spider webs, lines the inside with soft plant down like dandelion fluff, and attaches lichens to the outside for camouflage. Silk stretches, allowing the nest to expand as the chicks grow. Two pinto bean-sized eggs, hatch in 2 weeks and the babies are up and out in about 3. Hummingbirds usually raise two broods a season, fixing and reusing the old nest with each new clutch.
Due to their tiny size and warm bloodedness, hummers have ferocious metabolisms, burning their way through life. Hearts, largest in size in proportion to body weight of any animal, run at 500 beats per minute at rest- double that in flight. They hover with wings going at 55 beats per second, 75 in flight. The human eye just can't follow that speed so all you get is a blur. Naturally, with such a jacked-up metabolism, you expect them to have a very short life span, but hummers have several tricks up their feathered sleeves. They go into torpor or temporarily hibernate every night and in cold weather. Body temperature drops 20 or more degrees and metabolic rate slows accordingly, saving energy. The oldest Rubythroated is documented at 9 years. Other species, particularly those in temperate regions may live even longer.
Hummingbirds in temperate areas are migratory. Rufus hummingbirds go from Alaska to California and back every year. Rubythroateds migrate 500 miles across Gulf of Mexico in one hop. They were once thought to ride on the backs of migrating geese since nobody could believe such a tiny bundle of feathers could make the trip on its own.
Hummingbirds, especially males posses iridescent feathers in metallic greens, blues and reds. Feather color is due to structure, not pigment, with layers of specialized scales on each feather acting like miniature prisms. The metallic feathers on the throats of males, called gorgettes, catch the light during courtship displays to show off to any females in the area. Males fly patterns to best display their colors - Rubythroats fly in low inverted arcs like a clock pendulum, other species fly spirals or weave back and forth through the foliage, flashing on and off like living neon signs.
A: Because they forgot the words.
--Boys’ Life Magazine
I needed some photos of hummingbirds for an article I was researching for an on-line discussion newsletter. I called around to my various friends and acquaintances in the area parks. Most, when they thought about it, were somewhat puzzled that they hadn't seen any coming to their feeders lately. One park had a few coming in but they were irregular and couldn't be counted on to make an appearance. Finally, the desk volunteer at Huntley Meadows said "Yes, we have a pair. They alternate every 5 minutes or so. I'm looking at the male now." I thanked her and tossed my stuff in the truck.
Thirty minutes later, I was set up at the feeder and waiting. Hummingbirds just materialize out of nothing. One second you are staring at an empty feeder, and the next, there it is. "Beam me down, Scottie." The male, resplendent in a carmine gorgette (the "ruby throat" of Rubythroated hummingbirds), hovered while he sipped at the 1/4 sugar to water solution. A low buzz from the wings, like a bumble bee, only more punctuated, was audible even 10 feet away where I snapped like crazy. Three or four sips later and he was off, Turing the corner of the building and disappearing like so much fairy dust.
Five minutes later, right on schedule, the female winked into existence. No ruby throat, but body shining in metallic green, she perched on the lip of the feeder and guzzled like a construction worker in a tavern.
Hummingbirds are tiny scraps of life; the Cuban Bee hummingbird, about the size of your thumb and weighing less than a penny is the world's smallest bird. The Giant hummingbird, found in the Peruvian Andes, is about the size of a starling and the Goliath of hummers. Hummingbirds only inhabit the New World and islands throughout the Caribbean have their own endemic species, such as the Jamaican Red-billed Streamertail with 8 inch tail plumes on the male (over twice the length of its body). The streamers hum during flight. The locals call it the doctor bird because the black plumes remind them of the old fashioned frock coats worn by physicians (“and the big bill”). The doctor bird is the logo for Jamaican Airways.
There are about 340 different species, though new ones are discovered almost every year. Sixteen species nest in North America, but only one, the Rubythroated hummingbird is found in the eastern half of the continent. Every year, however, we get reports of western species spending the winter in the East. One year, a Broad-billed hummingbird, usually found in the Rocky Mountains, wintered only a few blocks from our house.
Hummingbirds all have specially shaped short stubby wings that allow them to hover in place, back up, and even fly upside down. The wings cup air and provide lift on both the up stroke and down stroke; most birds’ wings only lift on the down stroke.
Hummingbirds all drink nectar for energy. They prefer red flowers with long tube shapes like trumpet vine. Pretty much any long flower, especially red ones are dependant on hummingbirds for pollination (most insects can’t see the color red) depositing the stuff on the birds’ heads and throats. With their long bills and longer tongues with fringes on the tip, they soak up nectar via capillary action and squeeze into their mouths. Hummingbirds also hunt small insects like aphids and tiny spiders for protein, and feed them to the chicks for a rapid growth boost.
Christopher Columbus was the first European to see hummingbirds, noting them in his ship’s log when he arrived at the island of Hispaniola; he thought they were bees. In fact, the name “hummingbird” comes from both the low buzz they make in flight and from the old name for bumble bees (humble bees); interesting aside: another old name for a bumble bee is “dumbledore”. Of course, the people who already were living in America knew about hummingbirds. The Aztecs believed them to be the ghosts of warriors who had died in battle, combining the bird's brilliant beauty and utter fearlessness. The Hopi people thought hummingbirds could predict rain. In the arid Southwest, hummingbirds build nests just before the summer monsoon rains to ensure a good supply of nectar-bearing blossoms and associated small insects.
Hummingbirds nests are tiny —the nest of a Rubythroated fits over the end of your thumb like a cap. The female builds nests of silk stolen from spider webs, lines the inside with soft plant down like dandelion fluff, and attaches lichens to the outside for camouflage. Silk stretches, allowing the nest to expand as the chicks grow. Two pinto bean-sized eggs, hatch in 2 weeks and the babies are up and out in about 3. Hummingbirds usually raise two broods a season, fixing and reusing the old nest with each new clutch.
Due to their tiny size and warm bloodedness, hummers have ferocious metabolisms, burning their way through life. Hearts, largest in size in proportion to body weight of any animal, run at 500 beats per minute at rest- double that in flight. They hover with wings going at 55 beats per second, 75 in flight. The human eye just can't follow that speed so all you get is a blur. Naturally, with such a jacked-up metabolism, you expect them to have a very short life span, but hummers have several tricks up their feathered sleeves. They go into torpor or temporarily hibernate every night and in cold weather. Body temperature drops 20 or more degrees and metabolic rate slows accordingly, saving energy. The oldest Rubythroated is documented at 9 years. Other species, particularly those in temperate regions may live even longer.
Hummingbirds in temperate areas are migratory. Rufus hummingbirds go from Alaska to California and back every year. Rubythroateds migrate 500 miles across Gulf of Mexico in one hop. They were once thought to ride on the backs of migrating geese since nobody could believe such a tiny bundle of feathers could make the trip on its own.
Hummingbirds, especially males posses iridescent feathers in metallic greens, blues and reds. Feather color is due to structure, not pigment, with layers of specialized scales on each feather acting like miniature prisms. The metallic feathers on the throats of males, called gorgettes, catch the light during courtship displays to show off to any females in the area. Males fly patterns to best display their colors - Rubythroats fly in low inverted arcs like a clock pendulum, other species fly spirals or weave back and forth through the foliage, flashing on and off like living neon signs.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Flotsam
It was supposed to have been just a quiet adventure. I was going to River Bend Park here in Fairfax County to try to find a Cyrano Darner; a state-rare dragonfly rumored to inhabit one of the ponds a mile or so upstream from the visitor center. I never got there. About 500 yards upstream, I saw a group of half a dozen vultures on one of the numerous rocky islets that dot the Potomac above Great Falls. They all looked like black vultures and I walked quietly to an opening in the vegetation lining the bank. I focused and shot maybe 5 or 6 photos of the flock. Finding vultures in a group is not all that unusual since they gather in sunny spots to bask and raise their low energy metabolisms to flight level. What was unusual, a small voice in the back of my brain was saying, was that they were all black vultures, not a red-headed turkey vulture among them. Black vultures will visually track turkey vultures to a carcass and drive them off when they get there.
The voice in the back of my brain was getting louder when I put the binoculars on the group and saw a pair of blue jeans draped over a tree branch. The jeans waistband ended at an old river worn log. The voice began to go off the chart when a vulture dipped its head down and I saw the exposed bones of the rib cage. The voice said, quite calmly, “We should go back and report this.”
I made my way back to the visitor center and found a uniformed park person at his desk. “I think I have found a body in the river” I said. His eyebrows rose, “Are you sure it’s not just a deer?” “Not unless they’ve started wearing Levis” I replied. I realize now that it sounded flip, but the twin ideas of “body” and “person” never made the connection. It was wreckage and it was human. Not someone’s kid or parent or whatever. Just a pile of bones in blue jeans. The park ranger walked with me to the point and glassed the thing in the river. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called it in. “Now the circus begins” he muttered.
First to arrive was the rescue squad. Their job, I gathered, was to ascertain that: a) there was a body and, b) it was dead. The ranger walked them upriver and when they got back, they began putting away the rescue equipment. It was now a recovery operation and legal issues reared their ugly heads. The Potomac River is technically all in Maryland, up to mean low water, a precedent dating all the way back to early colonial days. The body was in Maryland, Montgomery County, to be precise. Having grown up in Montgomery County and having lived along the river there for several years, I knew that the only safe places to launch a boat were at Cabin John, which was below Great Falls and impossible to traverse, or at Seneca, about 15 miles upstream from where we were. Montgomery told Fairfax to stand by. Meanwhile, Fairfax police began to arrive. A cruiser, then another, then another with an officer in charge. I was asked to wait so I could give a statement, having been the one who discovered the wreck. Helicopters began appearing overhead. US Park Police, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, News 7 and Fox. All holding station or buzzing up and down stream. One of the cops said Montgomery was putting in at Seneca and would be there within half an hour. One of the Fairfax Fire and Rescue people, who already had their zodiac in the water at the boat ramp scoffed. “Maybe an hour if they have someone steering who knows the line” meaning knew how to avoid the rocks and snags that make the Potomac such fun for kayakers. “We can have this guy in a bag in 15 minutes if they let us.” Somewhere along the way the “it” became a “he”.
I told my story to several cops in a row, uniform, uniform supervisor, homicide detective, cold case detective. The cold case guy noticed my camera and asked if I had made any photos. “Yeah, I wanted to get images of the vultures, but I think the body is in the pictures.” He asked if he could have my camera card so he could download the photos. Turns out that with digital, the first download is the official one and the one to be used in court. He promised to get the card or its replacement back soon. “We will take the images off if you don’t mind” he said. Sure, like I really want that in my camera—bad enough the image is in my brain. Last to ask questions was the WJLA reporter. She was pleasant enough in a wide-eyed gosh weren’t you scared kind of way. I gave some inane answers to the questions. Even spelled my name. So I made the news at 11, answering two questions. The caption labeled me as a hiker. Andy Warhol once said everybody gets 15 minutes of fame. He didn’t promise they would spell your name right.
The voice in the back of my brain was getting louder when I put the binoculars on the group and saw a pair of blue jeans draped over a tree branch. The jeans waistband ended at an old river worn log. The voice began to go off the chart when a vulture dipped its head down and I saw the exposed bones of the rib cage. The voice said, quite calmly, “We should go back and report this.”
I made my way back to the visitor center and found a uniformed park person at his desk. “I think I have found a body in the river” I said. His eyebrows rose, “Are you sure it’s not just a deer?” “Not unless they’ve started wearing Levis” I replied. I realize now that it sounded flip, but the twin ideas of “body” and “person” never made the connection. It was wreckage and it was human. Not someone’s kid or parent or whatever. Just a pile of bones in blue jeans. The park ranger walked with me to the point and glassed the thing in the river. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called it in. “Now the circus begins” he muttered.
First to arrive was the rescue squad. Their job, I gathered, was to ascertain that: a) there was a body and, b) it was dead. The ranger walked them upriver and when they got back, they began putting away the rescue equipment. It was now a recovery operation and legal issues reared their ugly heads. The Potomac River is technically all in Maryland, up to mean low water, a precedent dating all the way back to early colonial days. The body was in Maryland, Montgomery County, to be precise. Having grown up in Montgomery County and having lived along the river there for several years, I knew that the only safe places to launch a boat were at Cabin John, which was below Great Falls and impossible to traverse, or at Seneca, about 15 miles upstream from where we were. Montgomery told Fairfax to stand by. Meanwhile, Fairfax police began to arrive. A cruiser, then another, then another with an officer in charge. I was asked to wait so I could give a statement, having been the one who discovered the wreck. Helicopters began appearing overhead. US Park Police, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, News 7 and Fox. All holding station or buzzing up and down stream. One of the cops said Montgomery was putting in at Seneca and would be there within half an hour. One of the Fairfax Fire and Rescue people, who already had their zodiac in the water at the boat ramp scoffed. “Maybe an hour if they have someone steering who knows the line” meaning knew how to avoid the rocks and snags that make the Potomac such fun for kayakers. “We can have this guy in a bag in 15 minutes if they let us.” Somewhere along the way the “it” became a “he”.
I told my story to several cops in a row, uniform, uniform supervisor, homicide detective, cold case detective. The cold case guy noticed my camera and asked if I had made any photos. “Yeah, I wanted to get images of the vultures, but I think the body is in the pictures.” He asked if he could have my camera card so he could download the photos. Turns out that with digital, the first download is the official one and the one to be used in court. He promised to get the card or its replacement back soon. “We will take the images off if you don’t mind” he said. Sure, like I really want that in my camera—bad enough the image is in my brain. Last to ask questions was the WJLA reporter. She was pleasant enough in a wide-eyed gosh weren’t you scared kind of way. I gave some inane answers to the questions. Even spelled my name. So I made the news at 11, answering two questions. The caption labeled me as a hiker. Andy Warhol once said everybody gets 15 minutes of fame. He didn’t promise they would spell your name right.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Stone Monsters
It was a beautiful May day; the sun was shining, the sky blue, bird on the wing, and snail on the thorn. On the spur of the moment, I decided to go the National Cathedral to shoot gargoyles. I had read that the Cathedral had added a Darth Vader head to the collection and was eager to see it. I debouched from the underground garage near the north transept where I heard the Dark Lord was ensconced and gazed about. The bottom row of gargoyles were all there; the rattlesnake and the elephant with eternal mouths open to spout water (or boiling lead if you are a fan of the movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney Jr.). I was trying to locate Darth when a maintenance worker emerged from the basement. “Excuse me,” I asked, “I’m told there is a gargoyle of Darth Vader somewhere up there. Do you know where it might be?” He replied “Sure” and directed me up to a lonely tower where old bullet head was just visible. “Tell you what”, he said, “I’ve got some time left on my lunch hour—I’ll take you up there if you don’t mind the walk.” When gift horses stare one in the face, you don’t count teeth, and I enthusiastically agreed. Several stair cases, one elevator ride and a steel ladder later, we were up on the roof, over 100 feet up. “I’m not supposed to bring people up here due to liability, but just don’t fall off. OK?” We tracked around the transept, with “Bill” (not his real name to keep him out of trouble) giving a running narrative of all the gargoyles and grotesques along the way. “Bill” has been at the Cathedral for 25 years and knows every nook and cranny in the building. I squeezed through the passages between the flying buttresses trying to keep up and not miss anything. There were no fat hunchbacks. The sculptures were in themed pairs, flanking each gable, but from up top, they were seemingly out of kilter until I figured out the pattern. The penguin and baby made more sense when you knew the companion pieces were a polar bear and an old man.
I don’t know whether it was my good ole boy accent, or the fact that “Bill” just recognized a fellow story teller, but it was a tour to remember. He pointed out the Veep’s house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, about half a mile off and the front line of the Blue Ridge Mountains over 30 miles to the Southwest. Sugarloaf Mountain, an isolated outlier of the Appalachians was on the horizon over 50 miles to the north in Maryland. He pointed out the caricatures the stone carvers made of each other and the fanciful animals, monsters, people, and whatnots that are just not visible in any detail from the ground. We stopped less than 20 feet below the Darth Vader sculpture and I could even see the small stone hands holding onto the wall for dear life. The Cathedral sponsored a contest for young people a couple of years back to get suggestions as to what to fill the remaining spaces. One kid suggested Darth and the administration and (most importantly the stone carvers agreed.
The stone carvers of the Cathedral sometimes worked from models made by other artists, turning the ideas into Indiana limestone. But often as not, they made their own sculptures, using each other, their pets, and whatever came to mind for inspiration. Master carver Roger Morigi, the chief carver for many years, was known for his explosive temper, so his caricature has him blowing his top,
a mushroom cloud erupting from his hat, one foot changed into a cloven hoof. The carvers made a stone security camera,
a bulldog (the mascot of St. Anselm’s school on the Cathedral grounds), and when master carver Vincent Palumbo had a heart attack on the job, a stone heart monitor machine, complete with EKG readout, was created to welcome him back.
We ambled to the older section of the Cathedral, which was begun in 1907, and “Bill” showed me some of the older sculptures. More along the lines of traditional European carvings, the lacked the humor of the more recent batch, but were still impressive with suggestions of Art Deco in their lines.
We passed one of the stained glass windows for which the Cathedral is justifiably famous. ”Bill” pointed out the individual glass bits cemented into the matrix. Instead of using colored glass panes, the glass workers flaked chips from bricks of Italian colored glass. The varying thickness and striations from the chipping process give additional depth and refraction to the windows.
The National Cathedral has 120 gargoyles and heaven knows how many grotesques (gargoyles have drain spouts in their mouths; grotesques don't), each hand-carved with loving care. Even the carved stone frieze contains identifiable flowers and plants native to the region. Hand carving the flowers was a tedious job, “Bill” said, so the carvers would add a flourish just to keep from being bored. I noticed a long line of flowers was interrupted with a face of Bozo the Clown.
You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking carefully. Other jokes began to pop out as well; a monkey face peering out from a cluster of stone leaves, the Green Man from another.
“Bill” asked me if I was up for one more stop; we rode a service elevator down into the bowels of the building and into the boiler room. There above the door, were a set of shelves, lined with empty wine bottles, each with the year of its consumption in magic marker on the label. Each New Year’s, the carvers would toast their work and drink to what was to come. The last bottle was finished at the funeral of the last master carver. “They’ll find out about this one day and tell me to take it down” said “Bill” with a sigh, “I’ll tell ‘em to go to hell. This is part of the soul of this place.” I do believe he’s right.
I don’t know whether it was my good ole boy accent, or the fact that “Bill” just recognized a fellow story teller, but it was a tour to remember. He pointed out the Veep’s house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, about half a mile off and the front line of the Blue Ridge Mountains over 30 miles to the Southwest. Sugarloaf Mountain, an isolated outlier of the Appalachians was on the horizon over 50 miles to the north in Maryland. He pointed out the caricatures the stone carvers made of each other and the fanciful animals, monsters, people, and whatnots that are just not visible in any detail from the ground. We stopped less than 20 feet below the Darth Vader sculpture and I could even see the small stone hands holding onto the wall for dear life. The Cathedral sponsored a contest for young people a couple of years back to get suggestions as to what to fill the remaining spaces. One kid suggested Darth and the administration and (most importantly the stone carvers agreed.
The stone carvers of the Cathedral sometimes worked from models made by other artists, turning the ideas into Indiana limestone. But often as not, they made their own sculptures, using each other, their pets, and whatever came to mind for inspiration. Master carver Roger Morigi, the chief carver for many years, was known for his explosive temper, so his caricature has him blowing his top,
a mushroom cloud erupting from his hat, one foot changed into a cloven hoof. The carvers made a stone security camera,
a bulldog (the mascot of St. Anselm’s school on the Cathedral grounds), and when master carver Vincent Palumbo had a heart attack on the job, a stone heart monitor machine, complete with EKG readout, was created to welcome him back.
We ambled to the older section of the Cathedral, which was begun in 1907, and “Bill” showed me some of the older sculptures. More along the lines of traditional European carvings, the lacked the humor of the more recent batch, but were still impressive with suggestions of Art Deco in their lines.
We passed one of the stained glass windows for which the Cathedral is justifiably famous. ”Bill” pointed out the individual glass bits cemented into the matrix. Instead of using colored glass panes, the glass workers flaked chips from bricks of Italian colored glass. The varying thickness and striations from the chipping process give additional depth and refraction to the windows.
The National Cathedral has 120 gargoyles and heaven knows how many grotesques (gargoyles have drain spouts in their mouths; grotesques don't), each hand-carved with loving care. Even the carved stone frieze contains identifiable flowers and plants native to the region. Hand carving the flowers was a tedious job, “Bill” said, so the carvers would add a flourish just to keep from being bored. I noticed a long line of flowers was interrupted with a face of Bozo the Clown.
You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking carefully. Other jokes began to pop out as well; a monkey face peering out from a cluster of stone leaves, the Green Man from another.
“Bill” asked me if I was up for one more stop; we rode a service elevator down into the bowels of the building and into the boiler room. There above the door, were a set of shelves, lined with empty wine bottles, each with the year of its consumption in magic marker on the label. Each New Year’s, the carvers would toast their work and drink to what was to come. The last bottle was finished at the funeral of the last master carver. “They’ll find out about this one day and tell me to take it down” said “Bill” with a sigh, “I’ll tell ‘em to go to hell. This is part of the soul of this place.” I do believe he’s right.
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