Renaissance Neanderthal

Homage to Henry Pratt

2012-02-09T14:31:00.000-08:00

It was a combination of a bad pun inspired by 1930’s classic horror movies, and modern supermarket technology. Ariel and I were at the Safeway, grocery shopping. She had scampered off to another section to retrieve something overlooked on our list.

I was in the produce department choosing veggies. The list said "Limes, (2)" . I picked my way through a pile of the green orbs, finding two that were heavy for their size (the way you choose citrus). Inspiration struck. I held the two limes over my head and cackled “it’s a lime! It’s a lime!” in my best Dr. Frankenstein voice, ala Colin Clive in the 1929 classic film. Just as I finished my intonation, the auto mist in the fresh vegetable aisle went off, complete with canned rainforest thunder. The peal faded, I double over in self inflicted laughter, and Ariel came round the corner, witnessing the whole thing. “Daddy, you are so weird.” Was her comment, but she was laughing as she said it.

Christmas, 2011

2011-12-15T18:48:00.000-08:00

Earth’s odometer is set for another click. This has been a year of gains and losses, endings and beginnings. We hope your year has, on the balance, been one of joy and wonder.

In February, Pat and I decided cabin fever was taking hold, so we boarded a train and rode all night to Charleston, South Carolina for a 5-day mini vacation. Charleston is called the “City of Churches”, and they aren’t kidding. Dozens of them; in every denomination you care to name, including Huguenot (French Protestant), all with intricate wrought iron work at the gate.

We devoured Low Country cuisine such as gumbo, shrimp and grits, fried oysters, and more shrimp—my stomach was rising and falling with the tides. We visited the Charleston Aquarium and I took a boat ride into the harbor to see Ft. Sumter, where the Civil War began (astonishingly enough, no one was killed during the bombardment) and the original flag is on display.
We visited an antebellum rice plantation, now a nature preserve, complete with alligators and ibis. We took a walking tour of Charleston’s pirate history and our guide regaled us with stories of Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet, and of Calico Jack Rackham and his cross-dressing pirate crew.

Rhiannon, our niece, was wed this August in Indianapolis, and we were invited.

Ariel flew, and Pat, Alec, and I drove. The only catch was, it was a held at GenCom (the Sci-Fi and fantasy gamer convention; both Rhiannon and Eel, her betrothed, are avid gamers); so a fantasy/time travel theme was suggested, costumes and all. Everyone at the convention, wedding guests included, appeared in various garb, fanciful and otherwise. Dr. Who in his many incarnations and dozens of Starwars characters (my favorites was the Imperial Storm Trooper in a kilt) tended to predominate; at least among the ones I recognized. Ariel was a 1940’s pinup girl, Alec, a Walk-Like-An-Egyptian pharaoh. Pat went as Lady Sybil Vimes, a character from Terry Pratchett’s Disk World series. Lady Sybil is an aristocratic (read: Old Money) lady, the last of her line who spends her time doing Good Works; she runs a charity for homeless dragons. Al went as a pirate; with his raffish good looks, it wasn’t too hard to pull off. Ariel braided his beard, ala Edward Teach (Blackbeard), and he wore his colonial tour guide outfit.

All the guests and crashers were asked to supply back stories as how they met the happy couple in the past, the future, or present-and in the dimension of choice. One of my favorite back stories concluded with the guest addressing Rhiannon: “I love you, Grandma, but it’s kind of creeping me out to watch you get married.”The wedding cake adhered to the time travel theme—constructed by Ariel and several others and made of snack cakes including Ho-hos, Hostess Cupcakes, and Twinkies. The leftovers will probably stay fresh to the next Ice Age.

Those of us not needed for the preparations toured Indianapolis. The Children’s Museum was the first stop. This has everything a kid could want to see. Dinosaurs in droves, both fossil and reproduction. The museum’s front entrance features a life-sized Diplodocus (Brontosaurus to the non-cognoscenti), rearing up on its hind legs and peering through the fifth floor windows.

An entire wing devoted to Barbie in all her splendor was a must see for Ariel.

Full size replicas of the Chinese terra cotta warriors and exquisite doll house rooms scattered throughout the building round out the exhibits, along with a water-powered clock and Bumblebee from the Transformers movies.

A glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly reaches from the basement to the skylight.

Pride of place is a working 1905 Denzel Carousel. The horses are hand-carved with real horsehair tails. Art you can ride on.

About mid-August, I was sitting down to lunch around noon. The house began to vibrate as though a big truck was passing in front. The vibrations didn’t stop and, as the dog and cats ran to hide in the bedroom, my first thought was “This must be an earthquake…cool!” The rumbling lasted a good 30 seconds as I watched the framed pictures on the wall tilt crazily, and a small figurine on the breakfront walked to the edge and fell over. Ripples in the dog water dish slopped over. I went outside and saw the old-fashioned TV antenna on the roof next door vibrate like a tuning fork. The trembling passed, leaving a silence punctuated by car alarms. Turns out we had had a 5.7 quake, centered about 130 miles south. It was the biggest quake in the area for the past century. Cracks appeared in the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral, where a gargoyle fell off a wall. Check that off my list, although a 5.7 is as intense as I care to experience. Later that week, as I was giving a tour in Alexandria, I pointed out Gatsby’s Tavern and explained that the tall chimneys, dating from the 1790’s had cracked, one of the tourists piped up with “We’re from California—we don’t even get out of bed for anything less that a 7.2.” That kind of puts things in perspective.

Alec graduated this May from James Madison University, resplendent in royal purple robes and flip-flops.

He still needs to complete an internship to finish his degree. He now has it set up for this January with a speaker’s bureau/event planning agency in downtown D.C. He divides his time among Vienna friends, Harrisonburg (where he still has many friends), and his girlfriend, (Sam) near Ellicott City, Maryland. This and working at Basin’s, an upscale restaurant keeps him busy. His interest in the music industry has not diminished and is hopeful that event planning can be translated to music event planning, like some of the festivals/concerts he attends with Sam.

Ariel is working at a law office in Georgetown. She moved fro regular receptionist to Human Resources Assistant (and backup receptionist) and seems to be doing very well. She has an active social life with her friends from Randolph Macon, with movies, trips to the beach house and other adventures. She has discovered couponing and on her weekly grocery buying expeditions with Al, usually saves enough to pay for her own groceries.

Pat has successfully auditioned for the City Choir of Washington, under the direction of Robert Shafer, a famed and well-respected choir master. She has sung in two concerts this year at National Presbyterian Church and the sound is wonderful—truly fills up the space. Pat’s company has been sold (again). The new owners seem to be a better fit in terms of IT prowess, and she has high hopes for the new year.

Al’s mom passed away this summer after a mercifully short illness. She is buried next to Al’s dad in Silver Spring. Al is still working as a tour guide in Alexandria, leading walking tours showcasing the history and ghosts of the old colonial seaport. He continues to volunteer at Huntley Meadows, a Fairfax County park, and sees something astonishing nearly every time.

The animals are healthy and happy. Our boy cat, Basil, landed funny after a jump from a high place and broke his hip last June and underwent surgery to remove the fractured ball and socket joint. The vet told us this is the most common operation for cats (and dogs under 40 lb) He spent a week or so in confinement, limping about and looking pathetic, but soon healed back to his old self, dashing about the house and tussling with his sister. A recent check-up revealed that our cats, who weighed in at just over 2 pounds when 5 weeks old, have ballooned up to 12 and 13 pounds. Dinah has filled out her fur and is hard to pick up by the nape of her neck. I guess we may need to reduce one or more of their snacks.

Hoping your Holiday Season brings you joy and come-true wishes for the New Year.

Hell Spawn

2011-04-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

Now I’m not saying that the kids on my Ghost and Graveyard Tour in Alexandria the other night were anything but well-behaved and cute as bugs. But…

They were all fifth graders, they were divided up into small groups (that should have been a tip-off), and I got all boys. I don’t care how many chaperones are with them, a group of early adolescent male primates are enough to try anyone’s where with all. I’m convinced that Lord of the Flies was not fiction. The 19th century anarchist philosophers surely must have been with all boys.

One guide (who shall remain nameless) referred to his group as “Children of the Corn”, and was glad he brought his crucifix that evening.

At the start of my tours, I always lay down the ground rules: follow me—I know where I’m going; cross all streets with the light or at a stop sign; keep the noise levels down to a dull roar; save all questions to the end of the tour. Immediately, four hands shot up, and we were off and running.

When we got to the end of the tour at Christ Church cemetery, the sound levels truly could have woken the dead, some of whom slept through the Civil War. “What happens if you touch a tombstone?” “I don’t know,” I replied, “maybe you’ll be haunted.” “COOL!!” as they ran amok among the headstones. “I touched two! Maybe I’ll be haunted by two ghosts.” “Oh yeah? I touched three.”

My favorite question, though, was from a kid who asked if I were a ghost. “You have to tell the truth if you are.” Where the hell did he come up with that rule? “Don’t you know that ghosts always lie?” I asked. “So to answer you question, no, I’m not a ghost.” And left him to ponder that one.

Buccaneer Soap Opera

2011-02-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

To the best of my knowledge, there has not yet been a really good movie about the Annie Bonny-Mary Read-Jack Rackham triangle, but there’s a chick flick (or maybe a really raunchy porn film) just waiting to happen.

Anne Bonny was born in Ireland, the illegitimate child of a lawyer and a servant girl. The lawyer, William Carmac, whose reputation and career were in tatters, brought his new family to the New World where they settled in Charleston. Carmac resumed his lawyering and through shrewd business acumen, became a wealthy man and owned a plantation. Anne’s mother died soon after arriving and daddy was too busy with his business dealings to pay much attention to his daughter. Anne became a rebellious teen, hanging out in the bars and grog shops of Charleston and mixing with a bad crowd. Starting to sound familiar?

Still in her teens, she ran off with and married an impoverished sailor man and part-time pirate named James Bonny, who hoped for a slice of daddy’s fortune. No luck there, William Carmac disinherited his daughter so Annie and James left the Carolinas. They made their way to the Bahamas, then a notorious pirate hang-out. James, ever seeking the main chance, took the King’s pardon and became an informant, disgusting Annie, who left him. She soon took up with Calico Jack Rackham (named for his colorful outfits), a former pirate captain from Jamaica. He too had taken a King’s pardon and had gone legit, but was itching for something more exciting. Annie convinced him to “go back on the account”, so the two of them (Anne dressed as a man) recruited a small crew, stole a merchant vessel, and took off to the West Indies in search of adventure and plunder. The crew all thought Annie was a man (“that funny looking fellow who never shaves”) and if they thought there was anything unusual that the captain was sleeping with another crew member, they kept it to themselves. Everything was fine until the fateful day a year or two into their cruise when Calico Jack took a Dutch ship. That’s where the story gets interesting.

On board the Dutch vessel was a handsome young English sailor named Mark Read. Mark was induced to join the pirates and soon proved an able hand and fierce fighter. Annie, still disguised as a man, was attracted to Mark and soon took the opportunity to be alone with him. Anne confessed her adoration of Mark and hinted the good things were in the offing if he reciprocated. So, to recap, here we have a hot-blooded teen temptress, dressed as a man, confessing her undying love to a young sailor in secret.

I’m sure Mark looked somewhat embarrassed, gave a polite cough, and began telling Annie (who he thought was a man), that while uh, he was flattered and really wasn’t prejudiced, he uh really wasn’t ready for a relationship with another fellow, even one of the um pirate persuasion. At this point Anne realized where the conversation was going, and took off her shirt, proving that she was in reality most emphatically a girl. Pause for long exhalation in relief.

As the story goes, fate chose that exact moment for Calico Jack to walk into the cabin. So, there was Anne, the love of his life standing half-naked before the handsome young sailorman, and Mark wearing a stupid-looking grin. Jack, thinking reasonably that Annie was about to cheat on him, drew his dagger and threatened to scupper Mark from stem to stern. Mark took off his own shirt revealing to all that Mark was a Mary. She had dressed as a man for most of her life. Mary’s widowed mother passed her off as a deceased older brother in order to fraudulently collect an allowance from her in-laws. Mary ran off as a teen, joined the army, fought in the Netherlands, fell in love with another soldier, married him, and settled down running a tavern. When her husband died, she lost the tavern, went back to drag, and signed aboard a merchant ship. Where she ran into Annie and Jack. Now what?

They say pirates had a reputation as heavy drinkers but at least in this case, Calico Jack was justified in downing a dram or two. Or twelve.

The three of them decided that the women would continue to pass as men since most sailors believed a woman at sea was bad luck. Anne and Mary became best of friends (BFFs) and would often sit above decks at night and talk girly things. Mary fell in love with one of the pirates, a young man who had been forced to join the piratical crew due to his set of needed skills (navigator, carpenter, sail-maker, or whatnot), and let him in on the secret. One of the other pirates, a real hard case began bullying Mary’s boyfriend to the point where a duel with cutlasses was arranged. Mary, knowing her boyfriend would likely end up as shark food, contrived a disagreement with said hard case, and fought a duel with him before her boyfriend was scheduled to fight (“I’ll just pencil you in”). She handily dispatched the pirate. That together with her and Anne’s ferociousness in a fight, won the respect of the remaining crew. Jack outed the girls, telling the crew that, even though Anne and Mary were in fact, women, they were the best fighters amongst the lot and left it up to a vote. The crew unanimously voted a full share for the ladies. Anne and Mary dressed as women during “off hours” but went back into drag when doing pirate stuff. Ah bliss.

It all came to a crashing end on night off Jamaica. Jack and the crew were below decks drinking rum while Anne and Mary were chatting above decks. Their ship was boarded by the Royal Navy intent on capturing the pirates. Anne and Mary grabbed weapons and held off the boarders, all the while screaming for help. Jack and the rest were either too frightened or too besotted to come up on deck. Fighting with cutlass and pistol, the women were soon overwhelmed and the ship taken. The pirates were transported in chains back to Port Royal, Jamaica for trial.

After a speedy trial, all but two of the crew were sentenced to hang for piracy (Mary’s lover, being a “forced man” was set free). When the judge asked if there was any reason the death sentence should not be carried out, Mary and Anne stepped forward. “Sir,” they announced, “we plead out bellies.” Both were pregnant and British law prohibited execution of pregnant women. They were sent back to jail to await birth, to be followed by hanging. As the crew were led off to the gallows, Anne called out to Jack “If you had fought like men, you would not now be hanged like dogs.”

Mary died in prison of a fever, likely typhus, Annie vanishes from the record soon after. Capt Eric said the story is that Anne’s wealthy father got news of what had happened and went to Jamaica to visit his wayward daughter. Money changed hands, and Anne was sprung from jail. According to Capt Eric, she became a respectable lady, a member of the Charleston upper crust, married a rich Virginia plantation owner, and is buried somewhere near Newport News, Virginia.

Historical note: Other than hanging out with lady pirates, Calico Jack Rackham is remembered for fashioning the first “Jolly Roger” flag. His flag, a skull with crossed cutlasses, can be seen in Pirates of the Caribbean when the assembled brotherhood hoist their colors prior the climactic battle with Davey Jones in the third movie. Calico Jack himself can be seen as one of the three hanging corpses next to the “Pirates Beware” sign as Jack Sparrow sails into Port Royal at the beginning of the first movie.

Pirating 101

2011-02-22T20:53:00.000-08:00

Charleston also saw the demise of Stede Bonnet, the “notorious gentleman pirate”, hanged with his crew at what is now White Point Gardens, just down the street from Rainbow Row (Charleston’s version of the “Painted Ladies” Victorian row houses in San Francisco).

Bonnet was a wealthy Barbados sugar plantation owner who, sometime in his forties, decided to become a pirate. Capt Eric told us that the prevailing wisdom of the day was that he turned to a life as one of the brethren of the coast due to a nagging wife, but he was probably only having a mid-life crisis. Fire-engine red Corvettes not yet having been invented, piracy seemed a viable option. Bonnet had absolutely no experience at sailing or boats in general, but probably thought “hey, it can’t be that tough—it will be fun” and proceeded to purchase a vessel (real pirates either stole a ship or hijacked it through mutiny) which he named the Revenge, hire a crew (real pirates worked for shares of plunder, not wages), declared himself captain (real pirates elected their captains), and took off for the Spanish Main. He even had a flag made up.

Unlike Squire Trelawny of Treasure Island fame, Bonnet did not hire a real captain who could navigate and run a ship, so just getting out of the harbor in the first place proved something of a chore, what with all the aimless circling and running aground and such. His inexperience and general ineptitude soon became apparent. When he finally got to the Spanish Main, he met and joined forces with Blackbeard (most of Bonnet’s crew, tired of the pro/am circuit, left him to sign up with the “real” pirates). One of Blackbeard’s crewmen took over the Revenge, and Bonnet became a “guest” on his own ship, effectively removed from command. He eventually was restored to command and parted company with his mentor, and actually did manage to plunder a few ships off the Delaware Capes. It seemed he finally made it to the major leagues and left amateur status behind.

All good things come to an end, however, and in October 1718, Colonel William Rhett, a pirate hunter under orders from the newly installed governor of South Carolina, captured Bonnet and his crew in present-day North Carolina. Rhett hauled them all back to Charleston for trial. Bonnet’s crew of 29 all hanged that November. Nineteen crew members of another pirate ship danced the “hemp fandango” soon after.

Bonnet, since he was a gentleman, was allowed certain privileges, including not being stuck in the fetid prison with the rest of the pirates. Bonnet promptly broke his parole, and attempted an escape, disguised in a dress. Capt Eric, Bonnet said Bonnet made his way to the harbor, stole a boat, and sailed off, still in the dress. He needn’t have bothered—Bonnet’s total failure at Piracy for Dummies caught up with him—he ran aground on a sandbar in Charleston harbor and was recaptured with a great deal of embarrassment on all sides. Bonnet was convicted on two counts of piracy and hanged on December 10, 1718 at Charleston’s White Point.

Together with the remains of the other pirates, Bonnet was left to rot on the gibbet as a warning to other would-be buccaneers. However, the stench from close to 50 dead pirates soon became a bit too much for the citizen of fair Charleston, and all of them were cut down and, as a final insult, buried in the salt marsh at the low tide line—neither on land nor at sea.

Colonel Rhett cashed in on his capture of the “dread pirate Bonnet” even though he missed out on Blackbeard. Rhett became hugely wealthy with plantations in South Carolina and the West Indies. He died at the ripe old age of 57 and is remembered as one of Charleston's prominent citizens.

Rogues a-plotting

2011-02-19T08:10:00.000-08:00

"Such a day, rum all out: Our company somewhat sober: A damned confusion amongst us! Rogues a-plotting: Great talk of separation so I looked sharp for a prize: Such a day found one with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot; then all things went well again."

Charleston has a long history with pirates. Pat and I went on a “pirate tour” with Captain Eric, a costumed tour guide, a two-hour walk through the old part of the city. Captain Eric regaled us with pirate stories and lore, showed us the major landmarks, and generally gave us a good show. He told us why pirates wore eye patches (aside from those who actually lost an eye)—when pirates took a ship, they needed to go below decks to where the good stuff was as well as any lingering defenders. Below decks on a sailing ship was a gloomy place, so an eye patch was worn to accustom one eye to darkness. When the “gentleman of fortune” went down, he shifted the patch to the other eye with night vision, and helped himself to the goodies. Earrings, Captain Eric said, were something of an insurance policy in case the pirate died on land—anyone finding a dead pirate was to use the silver or gold earrings to pay for a decent burial. Huh. (I read somewhere that pierced ears were useful in helping a sailor see in the dark; Earlobes correspond to pressure points used in acupuncture for night vision—go figure).

Capt Eric told many stories of pirate lore and legend, especially those related to Charleston. Blackbeard, aka Edward Teach, used Charleston as a place to fence his ill-gotten gains. In cahoots with the Royal Governor, he would land his plunder dockside near a tunnel under the streets. The tunnel lead to a modest home where the stolen goods would be sold at bargain prices with a cut going to the governor and several prominent merchants. The house and at least parts of the tunnel exist to this day. Capt Eric recalled speaking with an elderly lady who grew up in the house in question and spent many happy hours playing in the pirate tunnels as a child. When her horrified mother found out, mom had the tunnel entrance bricked up. The tunnels are still there.

Blackbeard was not above extorting his favorite town—in May 1718, he captured eleven ships and blockaded the entry to the port, until his demand for medical supplies was met. Most of his crew was down with malaria and syphilis and he demanded quinine and mercury which was used as a treatment for “Cupid’s itch”. To further induce the burghers of Charleston to comply, Blackbeard had over 20 wealthy citizens as captives and threatened to kill them one-by one until his demands were met. Charleston gave in.

According to Capt Eric, most historians claim that Blackbeard never really killed anyone (well, hardly ever). A head taller than most men (well over 6 feet) of that era, with a wild shock of black hair and long flowing beard, he specialized in psychological warfare. Before boarding a potential prize, Blackbeard would plait long slow-burning cannon fuses into his hair and beard and light them. Wreathed in a cloud of gunpowder smoke, Blackbeard appeared to his victims as a fiend from Hell. Capt Eric related that, as he chased the terrified defenders around the deck, screaming threats, his crew would plunder the vessel unmolested. I can visualize the scene now:

Blackbeard: Aargh! I’ll have yer guts for garters, ye scurvy dogs! You’ll all walk the plank to a watery grave! Booga, booga, booga and other scary sounds!
Crewman (tapping him on the shoulder): Uh, captain?
Blackbeard: What?
Crewman: Sir, we’re done plundering. We can go now.
Blackbeard: Oh, right. Cheerio, chaps! Have a nice day. Booga, booga.

Well, maybe not exactly, but something along those lines.

Blackbeard and his crew were eventually hunted down in North Carolina’s Ocracoke Inlet by a young Royal Navy Lieutenant under the authority on Virginia’s Governor Spotswood. Blackbeard was killed in the fight and his head was lashed to the bowsprit to be brought back to Virginia. Some accounts claim his headless corpse swam around the ship seven times before striking out to sea. At least one historian pooh-poohs this because a quick extrapolation of tide charts for the area and date puts the time of Blackbeard’s death at slack low tide, with the ship sitting on the bottom in less than a foot of water.
Some say his skull was plated with silver and turned into a goblet by pirates who drank toasts to his ghost.

Head Bangers

2010-11-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post recently ran a story about the recent spate of concussions among NFL players and how the league is reacting to them. In essence, any head shots will be punished by major fines and suspensions, even for first offenses.

Ex-Redskins linebacker and head-hunter Lavar Arrington wrote a blog on his worst concussions, both giving and getting. Arrington is the fellow who dumped Cowboys quarterback Troy Aickman on his head in the course of a vicious sack, giving him the last of a long series of knocks to the head and ending his career as a player.

Concussions are scary things—no cartoon birdies flying around your head chirping classical music, just a closing wall of dark, that at least in my case, I was able to talk my way out of and stay in this reality.

My brother, who played football in high school, was whacked more than once, but never hard enough to pass out. A friend, who was dumped on by a defensive player, remembers waking up on the sidelines with the coach saying “What’s your name, what day is it?” He says he practiced his answers beforehand so as to be able to get back into the game, but instead of “what day is it?” he was asked: “how many fingers am I holding up?” and answered “Saturday”, winning him a trip to the ER.

The most frightening concussions have got to be ones your kids get. When my son, Alec, was in eighth grade, he came home one afternoon with his glasses bent, the front wheel of his bicycle flat, and his bike helmet cracked. “I hit a rock,” was his explanation, “and got flipped over the front” (turns out he was riding down a flight of stairs and told me the rock story so as to not get into trouble). I bundled him into my truck and took him to the eye doctor to get his glasses fixed. On the way home, he complained of a headache and nausea. Alarm bells went off in the back of my skull and we skipped the last turn for home, going directly to the hospital. We walked into the Emergency Room and within a minute, he was on a gurney, headed for the MRI.

What seemed like years later (I think I aged at least that much), the doctor came in to see me. “Alec has a concussion” he said, “it’s not serious and a good thing he was wearing a helmet. Here’s the MRI scan”, he said, showing me a series of photos. I remember thinking how strange it was to be looking at my kid’s brain. “Nothing out of the ordinary” said the doctor, “All we can see here are girls and video games. Give him something for his headache, keep him quiet, and home from school for a day. He should be fine.”

I am happy for the parents of NFL players that the league is finally at least trying to keep their kids from harm. Except for any and all opponents of the Dallas Cowboys who still should be allowed to clobber them bums.

Smiles in the Stone

2010-09-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday at Pat’s urging, I signed up for a gargoyle tour at the National Cathedral. I knew going in that this would not be as spectacular as the informal one I got from a maintenance worker a couple of years ago, but I was looking forward to seeing things I missed the last time around.

I found a parking spot, paid my $10, admired the play of the light through the stained glass windows on the stones, and took an elevator to the 7th floor. A docent presented a short slide show and lecture on what we would see, along with a few stories and general history. It seems that gargoyles and grotesques go way back—the Temple of Karnak has them as does Fenway Park. I learned the difference between a gablet and a pinnacle and the definition of a termination molding. Then we all rode back down to the ground and began the tour.

Of course, the docent pointed out the grotesque of Darth Vader, a carving visible as a dot way up on the North Tower (“the dark side of the Cathedral”). We saw, also way up and only discernible through binoculars, one of two medieval-style gargoyles. It seems that back in the dark ages, carvers lacked the technology to cut a hole through stone so the gargoyles of that period were done with a trough on the top…huh, who knew? He also pointed out the pair of folded hands and explained that, although most people think that they are clasped in prayer, a closer examination shows they are, in fact, gripping a golf club. What else is there to do on a pleasant Sunday?

One paired pair of gargoyles is popular with the spotters—a wealthy grandmother commissioned a pair of sculptures in honor of her two grandsons. One is shown holding a schoolbook, gazing upwards, halo firmly planted. The other, right next to it, is shown raiding the cookie jar, broken halo askew. Grandma never said which was which…wise lady.

I spent most of the tour shooting the small carvings on the termination moldings—the end bits of the gablets. Not gargoyles (all gargoyles are grotesques, but not all grotesques are gargoyles) since they lacked the spout (same root as the word “gargle”), the termination moldings are smaller and for the most part, more whimsical.

Cats and dogs peeked out the limestone. There were dragons aplenty, stylized birds, even a winged mouse.

A hippy, complete with protest sign, stash bag, and horn (??) slung over his shoulder, peered into an upper floor window. (“You have to remember,” said the docent, “that this was the sixties.”)

We soon noticed that many of the gablet terminations were in pairs—an octopus and a lobster, ostensibly ingredients in that particular stone cutter’s favorite seafood salads, shared one gablet.

Another set was left uncarved, a tribute to the one stone-cutter who died in an accident.

The best, however, is a pair depicting Master Stone-carver Vincent Palumbo and the Episcopal Bishop at the time. It seems Mr. Palumbo had an eye for the ladies (as do all Italians) and would often have his lunch on the side of the Cathedral facing the girls’ school. His admiration of the young ladies often included a wolf whistle (remember, these were the sixties, an all together more innocent time). The Bishop, whose carving shows a well-worn shoe, a tribute to his ceaseless fund raising, often admonished the Master Carver over his behavior. Mr. Palumbo assured His Eminence that his motives were purely platonic and continued his sylvan lunches. The Bishop is depicted holding his hands to his head, mouth agape in shock, reacting to Palumbo’s behavior and presumably praying for the Master Carver to stay out of Hell.

Gothic cathedrals are built to last and over a long period of time-Notre Dame was begun in the eleven hundreds, Chartes even earlier. The cathedral of Ulm in Germany was not complete for nearly 600 years. National Cathedral only took 100 years to build (1907-2007), but I expect it will be around for a thousand years. Future visitors will marvel at the archetecture and smile at the gargoyles. I hope someone still gets the jokes.

Gifts from the Sea Shore (with apologies to Anne Morrow Lindburg)

2010-08-18T18:51:00.000-07:00

Whenever I go to the summer beach, I count it a successful trip if I get to see dolphins, pelicans, and osprey. Winter beaches have their own set of gifts. Pat and I went a few weeks ago to decompress and relax. We strolled the boardwalk at Bethany, took a dip or two in the cold Atlantic, ate seafood to excess, and hit our favorite bookstores. During one excellent lunch on the upper deck of a boardwalk restaurant, we watched an osprey fishing in the ocean. Hovering and diving, it grabbed a fish, and headed for the nest holding the fish head first in the talons, reminding me of a World War II torpedo bomber on patrol.

Dolphins we saw every morning, pods ambling their way south. I even glimpsed the fin of a small shark or ray in the swash of a breaking wave. No pelicans, though, no trifecta. The vague disappointment was kind of like being a kid at Christmas…presents a plenty including some you really wanted, but no Red Rider BB gun with the adjustable sights and patented lever-action loading. Just as often, though, you got something so unexpected that it made all the other stuff, actual or not, seem trivial. My unexpected present this summer was five different species of crab (OK; four, since one is technically more closely related to spiders and scorpions).

First up, while walking the beach and dodging waves in the late afternoon, I discovered (quite literally) an old childhood acquaintance, the mole crab. Bethany has been busy with beach replenishment in recent years so mole crabs haven’t been as abundant as at Assateague Island or other wild beaches. Mole crabs belie the old saying, “crabs walk sideways and lobsters walk straight”. In this case, they walk straight backwards. Mole crabs dig themselves into the upper beach almost to the limit of wave washed wet sand and sit just below the surface waiting for the next wave. As the wave washes over, they thrust out their feathery antennae and use them like tiny nets to filter out bits of debris and plankton. They draw their antennae through the mouthparts and pick out the tasty bits. The one I grabbed was a fat female, the size of my thumb (males are much smaller), scuttling on the wet sand in the backwash of a wave. I took her picture and watched her dig in and vanish as if by magic before the next wave.

As the shadows lengthened and the air began to cool from the blistering heat of the day, we repaired to the boardwalk for our evening constitutional. No visit to Bethany is complete without a lap of the boardwalk, all 5/8 of a mile of it. Near the north end, a flicker of movement caught my eye. There, in the shadow of a piling was a hole about the size of an old-fashioned half-dollar. Next to it, standing guard, was a ghost crab, again, the first I has seen on Bethany in some time. Ghost crabs are sand-colored with eyes on stalks like tiny periscopes, and run wicked fast. A mature female (big females take the beach farthest from the waves—location, location, location), she was nervously pacing back and forth by her burrow (which may be up to 3 feet deep), waiting for the gloom to deepen enough for her to set out for the beach and begin her night’s foraging—hunting mole crabs, beach fleas, and general scavenging. Now that I knew what to look for, I saw the entrances to several other burrows, some with tell-tale sand fans at the entrances indicating recent excavation. Keeping to the shadows, this one dashed a zigzag course through the compass grass, over the artificial dune, and quickly vanished from sight.

Next morning’s stroll along the beach revealed another temporary gift, a horseshoe crab. Dubbed “Delaware’s dinosaur”, it actually predates those mighty beasts by over 100 million years—truly a creature from another world. Every spring, horseshoe crabs come ashore to spawn just as they have since the mid-Permian, a third of a billion years ago. Back then, there was almost no life on land—just a few struggling primitive plants, so laying your eggs at the edge of the water was the safest thing you could do. Nobody told the horseshoe crab that things have changed in the interim—animals have evolved to live on land, including, several species of shorebirds who time their spring migrations to coincide with the spawning cycle.

Everything about this animal screams different—their blood is copper, not iron based. Horseshoe crabs’ ancient lineage predates that of crustaceans; technically, they are more closely related to trilobites and scorpions than to true crabs. Although their Latin name, Polyphemus refers to the Cyclops in the Iliad, horseshoe crabs actually have ten identifiable eyes, plus light sensitive sections on the upper and lower shell and on the tail. No problem with chewing gum and walking here—the crabs’ mouths are between their front legs, so in order to chew food, they must be walking. They swim upside down, righting themselves with the long dangerous-looking tail spine called a telson. Once on the bottom, the hydrodynamic curves of the upper shell keep them pressed to the sand—a good thing if you live anywhere near the surf zone. This one was a big female, 30 years old at least, cast up by the waves and hunkered down to wait the turn of the tide. I tossed her back into the sea with a whispered bon chance.

The beach was getting hotter and we were in desperate need of lunch. We retreated back to the house where, groggy from food and the heat, we began reading our new books in the chill of the AC. I can’t sit still for more than a few minutes so I took a walk to the local boat ramp to see what was going on. The tide in the back bay was at slack low, exposing the mud banks lining the channel. Salt marsh hay waved in the sultry breeze and laughing gulls and terns wheeled overhead. Salt marsh dragonlets, a small dragonfly and one of the few insects that can breed in salt water, hawked mosquitoes over the mud. Movement on the bank caught my eye, fiddler crabs feeding on tasty bits embedded in the mud. Females were using both small claws to shovel in the gooey mud, looking like small boys at a county fair pie-eating contest.

The slightly larger males were using their single small claw to feed, occasionally looking around and waving their huge “fiddle” claw to attract females. The motion the males use to attract females is familiar; the universal “come on over” wave. Males also use their large claw to wrestle with other males over a comely she-crab. Some males are “right clawed” others “left clawed”. I wonder what the ratio is and how they fare in combat. When I took fencing, I hated to go up against a lefty. Southpaws (or, to be more accurate, southclaws) have the advantage in an otherwise fair match—they are used to fighting the far more numerous righties and right-handed fencers are unaccustomed to fighting a mirror image of themselves. I doubt it’s so simple for fiddlers--my best guess is that the genetics will see-saw with whoever is in the ascendancy, giving the advantage to the other side in a few generations.

The tide was starting to come in, blue crabs and the occasional rockfish swam past looking for stragglers. The fiddlers were going down their burrows and pulling a plug of mud in behind them to wait out the rising water and its predators coming in from the deep. Nap time for me and the fiddlers (another gift of the beach).

Just Another Day at the Office

2010-07-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

Hi ho, hi ho. It was supposed to be a early tour for a group of high school kids from Louisiana. In my most recent incarnation as a tour guide giving the Ghost and Graveyard Tour in Oldtown Alexandria, I was scheduled to meet the bus at 6:45. As is often the case, the bus was late, caught in rush-hour traffic in D.C. We finally started a half-hour behind schedule. I gave a somewhat abbreviated tour, skipping a couple of stories, and finished up at Christ Church cemetery. We strolled back to the starting point at Market Square. At that point, the fun began.

According to a three-paragraph story buried in the middle of the Metro section of the Washington Post, two alleged gentlemen allegedly robbed an Arlington motel and allegedly escaped in an allegedly stolen car. Leading police in an alleged high speed chase (in Arlington? at the tail-end of rush hour? Hell, they just should have walked—would have made better time), the alleged suspects (this term was actually used by Fox “if it bleeds, it leads” News; film at eleven) made their way into Alexandria where they allegedly crashed their alleged vehicle into an allegedly parked car at Alexandria Town Hall (allegedly). One worthy hid in Alexandria Town Hall where he was found by alleged dogs and arrested (by police, not the dogs, although that does bring up an interesting mental image—“you have the right to remain silent; anything you say may be used against you and will result in a nasty bite”). The other guy stayed in the car and was arrested almost as an afterthought. The alleged suspects were held for bail without questioning (a direct quote--thanks again, Fox).

Meanwhile, I was leading my charges down King Street when sirens began to wail and multiply into a veritable symphony of hoots and honks. First one police car, then another, and another careened down the road, weaving around traffic, and blocking side streets. I began to think it was some sort of motorcade—maybe Obama was coming to Alexandria to make a speech or get a beer. I was about to make a comment (Tour Guide hint: when the primary visual object changes, change the spiel), when I noticed the cops swarming around Market Square, carrying shotguns and unholstered pistols. The tour bus was idling in front of Town Hall. A cop, red-faced from the oppressive heat, and holding a Glock 9mm, told me to get everyone inside. I told him the bus was just a half block away and he said he would get it through the barricade so the kids could board. He headed down the street, waving and shouting. The bus began to move, everyone boarded, and the bus rolled out of Alexandria in a haze of diesel smoke. As they loaded onto the bus, most of the kids remembered to say “thank-you.”

Passages

2010-03-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, at midnight, my son Alec officially turned 21. In a rite of passage as old as parenting and alcohol, I took him to a bar for his first legal drink**. I found a place nearby that was open after midnight and within walking distance. As we came in the door, my auditory system was assaulted to the edge of sensory overload shut-down by what at first sounded like an ogre having a seizure. Not to worry, it was karaoke night at the redneck bar. Alec assured me that the real song, sung by the real band, sounded the same. Kids these days.

We found a table mercifully far away from the speakers but with the decibel level still approaching that of an aircraft carrier’s flight deck during a combat mission…in a thunderstorm…during a volcanic eruption…and an asteroid strike. I ordered a pitcher from the barmaid, and mentioned it was for the birthday boy. Alec passed over his driver’s license and she confirmed that he was indeed, 21 years old by a full 5 minutes. “Happy birthday” she said and went to fill our order. She was back shortly with a pitcher of Bud and a glass. “On the house”, she said, placing the glass in front of Alec. “It’s a Four Knights—Jimmy, Jack, Johnny, and Jose,” That would be Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker and Jose Cuervo to the uninitiated. Alec took a sip, made a face, and passed it over to me. I tasted it; not bad, although Four Horsemen would have been a better name-just what you need to get through the appocylypse. I passed it back to Alec who slammed it down, chasing it with a beer. Kid’s been getting some practice I thought. As Alec and Craig, his newly arrived friend from back in high school, began looking over the karaoke selections, my reverie was broken by a pseudo-good ole boy in a black Stetson doing a voice-over to “Okie from Muscogee”. Jeeze, I thought, I haven’t heard that song since before my son was born. Funny how things change but pretty much stay the same—If you change the words in the line: “White lightning’s still the biggest thrill of all” to “Home-made meth” you still pretty much retain the essence of the song…well, maybe not. Time for another pitcher.

Alec and Craig were called up to the stage by the karaoke master for their selection. “But first, it’s Alec’s 21st birthday.” The DJ said, “Everyone join me in wishing him a good one.” The bar burst into song, following the age old rule of if you can’t sing it well, sing it loud.

Alec chose a song, “Just a Gigolo” by David Lee Roth, formerly of the head-banger band Van Halen. He didn’t really know the words and read his way though it to the end, not too bad; He got hung up on the scat singing la-la-la part but the bar gave him a rousing ovation anyway. He and Craig joined in a duet of the Beatles’ “Revolution”; again, same result. Don’t quit your day job.

I poured the rest of the pitcher, and asked for the check. Alec raised his glass to me and said “Happy birthday, Pop.”

**Note to Parents: In no way should this be construed as a “first drink”—this is just a first legal drink, eliminating the 3 a.m. phone call: “Mr./Mrs. insert name here , this is Officer insert name here, of the insert name here police department. We have you son/daughter, insert name here on a drinking under age charge and would like you to come down to the station house as soon as possible.”

One of the Boys

2010-02-27T17:43:00.000-08:00

I suppose most of us, in our own minds, think we lead pretty unexciting lives. Barak Obama, in his secret life, wishes he were an NBA star—hell, even James Bond probably fantasizes life as a NASCAR driver. I’m no different, except no one I know has ever been called in to an FBI interrogation.

It was in the carefree spring of 1973. You remember; peace, love, equal rights for vegetables. A newly minted college graduate, I was in grad school, part-time at night, and working construction to make ends meet. Not only was I the only college graduate on the laborer crew, I was the only one without a prison record. Lunch conversations were embarrassing—one fellow had done five years for grand-theft auto, another had shot a man five times in a bar fight. Me? I got a ticket once for passing a school bus. I tried to fit in; smoked Camels, the pack rolled up in the sleeve of my t-shirt, shot craps behind the foreman’s trailer on Fridays after work. I even used the “f word” as an all-purpose modifier in my speech. Nothing seemed to work; I would always be the college kid, the misfit, the nerd.

One Tuesday evening after class, my friend Freddy talked me into attending the circus. No, not the Ringling Brothers variety, a small, one ring, European, family circus was touring colleges around the East Coast. They were performing one night only on campus and admission was free. I said OK and we went. Acrobats, aerialists, a trained bear, great fun. I noticed that all the performers with the possible exception of the bear, all seemed related—family circus indeed.

I was giving Freddy a ride back to his place when my car was nearly blown off the road by a passing fire engine headed someplace in a big hurry. “Cool!” Freddy said, “Let’s see where they’re going.” Sure, I thought, why not. I followed the truck to the parking lot of the campus armory, where it joined other pieces of equipment already there. The firemen, all volunteers, and all woefully undertrained, leapt from the engine, and began running around, tripping over hoses running into each other, and acting like act II, the comedy part, of the circus we had just left. The only thing missing from the whole fiasco was the fire. No flames, no smoke, not brave firemen rescuing fainting maidens from upper story windows. “Huh,” Freddy shrugged, “I thought it would be better than this. Let’s go.”

Next day, I was digging a hole when the foreman emerged from his trailer. “Al,” he shouted, “call your mother.” My stomach turned, nobody ever got a message from the foreman to call home unless it was something dire. Did my dad have a heart attack? Brother in a car wreck? Heart pounding, I made the call from a pay phone. “The FBI called” my mom said, “I didn’t tell them anything.” My mom was a war bride, having grown up in Nazi occupied Europe. When the authorities came calling, you didn’t say anything. She gave me the number and I made the call.

“Agent Van Dorn speaking.” Came the reply. I identified myself and asked what was the problem. “The armory at the University was firebombed last night and someone saw your car leaving the scene. We would like to talk with you.” “Okay…” I said, “I can take off from work and meet you at your office.” “No no,” Agent Van Dorn replied, “I don’t want to make you miss too much time. Let’s meet off Route 29; there’s a parking lot by the Giant.” This was beginning to sound like a bad cop show. I had visions of large, heavily armed men in flack jackets with instructions to take no prisoners surrounding my car. “It’s ok,” I said, “I can come to your office to discuss this. No problem.” I got the directions from a disappointed sounding Agent Van Dorn and told the foreman I was going to an FBI interrogation.
A half-hour later, I was walking into the FBI field office in Silver Spring. I was dirty, my jeans and work boots encrusted in mud, and leaving muddy footprints on the polished tile floor. I was escorted to an interrogation room and left to wait. I began to wonder just what I had gotten myself into. One wall was covered by a large mirror, doubtless two-way, and a photo of the J. Edgar Hoover Marksmanship Trophy, presented to Agent Van Dorn, adorned the other wall. Two large men came in. Agent Van Dorn, almost certainly, along with another agent. Both men were in dark suits, dark ties, and pocket handkerchiefs. Standard FBI garb. Agent Van Dorn read me my Miranda rights and repeated what he had told me over the phone. He asked what I had been doing at the scene of the crime. I told him all about the circus and the fire engine. I ended by saying “It was like when you’re a kid, and a fire engine goes by—you just want to see where it’s going.” Agent Van Dorn smiled and nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy a good fire.” A phrase that would resonate in my head for probably the rest of my life. He thanked me for my time, took the names of corroborating witnesses, and told me if anything further came up, he would contact me. I was free to go.

When I arrived at the job site the next day, Jack, the biggest baddest dude on the laborer crew came up to me and said “I hear you were questioned by the FBI.” Apparently the foreman had passed the word. “Yeah,” I said, “No big deal.” I noticed the other guys on the crew began to talk to me more, joking and offering smokes. It dawned on me…I finally fit in; I had street cred.

The Departed

2010-02-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

The thing about ghost stories is that, although each has a central core, something that always stays the same, details differ with whoever is telling it. And ghost stories should be told. They are part of a human tradition as old as language itself. When such a story is locked in print, something is lost—the printed version becomes the baseline, the unimpeachable source against which all facts are measured.

Take the case of Alexandria’s Female Stranger. The truth, as far as anyone can reasonably determine, is that in September 1816, a ship, bound from the West Indies, docked at the Alexandria wharves. A young couple disembarked, the woman very ill, probably with typhoid or yellow fever. They took a room at Gadsby’s Tavern. A physician was called as well as a pair of nurses. The husband requested the doctor and nurses, as well as the inn-keeper’s wife, swear an oath never to reveal the couple’s name. Tragically, the young woman, declining all the while, died in her husband’s arms in October. She was (some say, secretly) buried in St. Paul’s Cemetery under a headstone with the name “Female Stranger”. The young man disappeared and the doctor and nurses kept their vows, never revealing the names. End of the facts as written—the mystery now becomes legend.

Depending on who is telling or writing the story, things take off from there. Speculation on the couple’s identity ranges from the daughter of Aaron Burr, to the disgraceful outcome of a love triangle ending in a fatal duel and furtive flight. Some stories have the young man dying in prison while others have him moving up the Potomac and becoming a recluse, overcome by grief, and living in a lonely ramshackle cabin by the river’ edge. He journeyed regularly down river to Alexandria to visit his beloved’s grave. Since nothing was known about him, locals took to calling him “John of the Cabin” or simply “Cabin John”. The name lingers today in a small community on the Maryland side of the river.

Another version of the story, told in Gadsby’s Tavern, concerns a beautiful young woman, who, dressed in the style of the early 19th century, frequented formal dances held in the ballroom on the second floor. The ballroom was down the hall from the room taken by the unknown couple years earlier. She never spoke or danced with any would-be suitors, and always slipped away before the festivities ended. One evening during the Civil War, a smitten young Union officer followed her as she left the ball, hoping to strike up a conversation with this mysterious beauty. Upon entering the room down the hall, he found it empty, with a lamp lit in the corner. He notified the manager of an unattended flame and the two went back to the room. When they got there, the room was dark and the candle wick in the lamp was unblackened—it had never been lit. As the puzzled young officer was leaving the room, he touched the glass globe of the unlit lamp. And burned his fingers.

As a student of the paranormal once said: If you believe, no explanation is necessary; if you don’t, no explanation is possible.

Interglacial

2010-02-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

It’s official, we’re number one—the D.C. area has broken the record for snowfall set in the winter of 1899. Hooray. We topped the charts at 55.6 inches of the stuff. This may seem trivial to someone from oh, say, Buffalo where they probably get this much in August, but then we don’t have the experience or the equipment to deal with a snowpocalypse of these proportions. Drinks on the house. Little kids, when they are old and creaky, will tell their grandchildren “I remember back during the winter of aught 10. You couldn’t see above the snow and we had to walk to school in the blizzard. Up hill. Both ways. And the snow was flying, the wind was blowing, the wolves were howling and the volcano was erupting to boot.” Sure grandma. Maybe some future president has noted the ungodly amounts of snow in his or her journal just like Washington and Jefferson did back in the terrible winter of 1722.

Here in Northern Virginia, we get ready for a big snow by emptying the stores. Bread, milk, and toilet paper are the first to go. My daughter and I thought we would be clever and went to the supermarket two days before the onslaught of the first big storm back in early February. Ha! Shelves were already empty and we waited to check out for an hour and a half. The line actually did move, people were friendly, and we spent the time playing word games involving the contents of our cart.

Come the snow, and I was getting cabin fever at inch two. I took walks with the dog, spent time on line, worked on projects as the snow began piling deeper throughout the weekend. When it was over and the familiar sound of shovels on pavement began to ring through the neighborhood, I went out and cleared the sidewalk and driveway. Not too bad a job, thank god for ibuprofen. When the next set hit, it was more of the same, except this time it took longer and longer to make any headway. It wasn’t so much shoveling as it was trenching—I felt like a World War I doughboy. My neighborhood now looks like trench warfare has broken out.

Cars in their driveways sit in snow revetments, waiting on the barrage.

Uncleared cars are humps in the snow covered landscape, looking for all the world like igloos with sideview mirrors. Snow plows leave several feet of snow in their wake, which needs to be moved before it turns to ice.

I dig down to the lower layers of where I think the sidewalk went and flashes of blue spark and glimmer. This is the color of glacier ice. It is also an early symptom of snow blindness where enough UV hits your retinas to cause sunburn. The worst part is when the retinas peel just like the skin on your arms at the beach. I’m told it feels like sand in your eyes. Antarctic explorers don’t wear sunglasses to look cool.

My bird feeders, filled just before the blizzard, are doing a land office business. The smaller birds have been supplanted by the big boys—starlings, blue jays, and the occasional woodpecker, all feeding on sunflower seed and suet. The little guys have to make do.

Snow is patient—this is how ice ages start. Pile it up high enough and it will last through the summer, to form a base for the next winter’s offerings. Keep it up long enough and the bottom layers compress to ice. Or you could just run a car over it a few times. Some of this stuff will still be here in June, remembering the glory days of the Pleistocene, which in geological terms, was only a few hours ago. Keep in mind—even with all the fuss about global warming, we are in what geologist call an “interglacial period”—the ice will be back. I think my driveway will be the tipping point causing the next advance of ice.

Payback

2010-01-29T13:04:00.000-08:00

Sometime during the night a deer died in the marsh. By morning, only the rib cage remained above the surface in the shallows. A flock of crows were sitting in attendance and picking scraps from the bones, somber black feathers appropriate to the wake.

If you had to pick an all-purpose bird, it would be a crow. Feeding on anything more or less biodegradable, the American crow lives anywhere from the edges of the high Arctic to the edge of the South American rainforest. Social birds, crows form huge winter roosts which act much the same as singles’ bars where unattached birds pair up, usually for life. The young from the previous year stay around the nest, helping the parents raise the new brood, and acting as babysitters and gaining experience. Crows flap their wings fairly slowly, seemingly rowing their way across the sky. Highly maneuverable, crows will stay just out of harm’s way when harassing large hawks, seemingly just for the sport. The hawk eventually tires of being bullied and flies off to another, quieter perch. At least until a crow finds it.
Crows meet their match, however, in the ring-billed gull. Medium-size, for gulls, ring-bills are true masters of their medium. They can soar like vultures on their narrow wings and dive on fish and other prey like hawks, loosing airspeed by flipping over in midair, spilling wind from their wings. Gulls are consummate scavengers and thieves, living their wits and going by the motto: “You find it; I’ll help you eat it.”

Woes betide any crow that has picked a tasty morsel from the aforementioned deer carcass and attempts to fly off in hopes of a snack. Gulls are on it in a screaming, milling mob. In a few seconds, the mob reduces to one or two gulls, shadowing the crow’s every move. What follows can best be described as a mixture of aerial ballet and back-alley mugging.

The crow swoops low to the water, eliminating attack from below. The gull puts on a burst of speed, bringing it to within reach of the crow’s tail feathers which get yanked.

The crow veers left and right, with the gull mirroring every move in hot pursuit. The crow climbs to escape but the gull is better at it and follows at a closing angle. The exhausted crow finally drops the morsel the gull casually snags it out the air and leaves the scene followed in turn by a new set of pursuers.

The gull climbs steeply, does a wing-over to allow most of the flock to pass it, and drops the tidbit. The morsel, by this time just a toy, is passed in midair from gull to gull, until somebody finally eats it. You can almost hear the gull say to the poor crow, “That’s how you do it, Jack.”

The flock settles to the surface until another hapless crow launches into the air with a bit of venison in its beak. You get the feeling the gulls chase crows to distraction because they can and are having a grand old time doing it.

Winter Hawks

2010-01-11T06:55:00.001-08:00

Winter has settled in with snow and a week’s worth of below freezing temperatures. The marsh is pretty well locked in ice. The ducks have deserted, moving to the nearby Potomac where the current keeps the water flowing. A flock of ring-billed gulls crowd the only patch of open water, a few crows and a single family of geese hovering on the ice at the edges. A lone snipe circles the marsh, looking for unfrozen mud to forage for small invertebrates

Sparrows work the fast land, gleaning seeds and bits of whatever they can find. Song and white-throated sparrows scratch at the dead leaf cover like tiny barnyard fowl while swamp sparrows, true winter residents, flit through the brown and brittle cattail stalks. A downy woodpecker works its way up a cattail, looking for telltale holes made by larval insects now chilled and sleeping in the heart of the dead brown cane.

Hawks are out today, cold weather seems to their liking. One of the resident red-shouldered pair perches on a dead limb, surveying the frozen marsh, watching for any flicker of movement that might betray a mouse or vole. Motionless as a museum specimen, it follows my movement in its direction, flying off before I get within decent camera range.

Farther in the woods, I flush an adult female red-tail hawk from the ground. She lumbers into the low branches, the furry bundle of a former squirrel clenched in a talon. She perches and finishes her lunch, feathers gleaming and copper tail tucked. Red-tails are the utility infielders of the hawk clan—big enough to take anything from mice to rabbits, and fast and agile enough to get by. They are at home everywhere from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. One of the things I like about red-tails is that when you are close enough to really look at them, they always look back, yellow eyes bright as gold doubloons. Prey animals don’t seem to notice you—when they know they have been seen, they glance about in all directions doubtlessly calculating escape trajectories and factoring in all the variables. Predators like red-tails tend to look you in the eye in recognition of a fellow apex predator—top of the food chain, Ma. Then they go about their business, which in this case was polishing off lunch.

The red-tail female’s crop bulges and she casually flies off, leaving the skin of her prey draped over the branch. If she were truly hungry, she would leave nothing. Her round crop and the leftovers tell me she is “fed up” and looking for a quiet place for digestion and contemplation.

Near the parking lot, yet another hawk perches on a low oak branch close to the trunk. This one is an immature Cooper’s hawk as evidenced by the red irises (adults have yellow eyes). Coopers hawks used to be fairly rare this far south but have discovered bird feeders and will hang about all winter, picking off the unwary, the slow, or the just plain unlucky. Populations have blossomed to where every neighborhood has a Coop or two in residence.

The wind gusts through the trees, branches rattle, no human sounds are in evidence. I could be walking through a forest on the edge of the tundra thousands of years ago where glaciers loom in the distance and the ancient rhythms pulse.

Solstice

2009-12-23T15:33:00.000-08:00

I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
And shivering trees are standing in a naked row
I get the urge for going but I never seem to go

Sharp clear days, bitter nights. Winter has made its entrance. Brown cattails in the marsh, dry stalks rattling in the breeze. Groups of geese and mallards in the lees of the islets, a pair of northern shovelers and a hooded merganser couple working the open water, sculpted ice filming over the shallows. The seasons have finally flipped to cold. The warriors of winter give a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying and all that lives is getting out
See the geese in chevron flight flapping and racing on before the snow
They've got the urge for going, they've got the wings to go

Joni Mitchels’ pean to lost love notwithstanding, winter is a time of subtlety and brief flashes. Gone is summer’s exuberance, its myriad of bright colors clamoring for attention, scraps of orange and bright reds and blues on the wings of butterflies and dragonflies, pure yellows and creams on tucked-away wildflowers. Winter, to me, is when you really get to look—when things you normally wouldn’t see demand you notice them. Blue jays, carrying bits of hot summer sky in their feathers, and cardinals, glowing like banked coals, stand out amidst the grays and browns of the landscape. Red-shouldered hawks change their hunting tactics, moving like cats from branch to branch, hoping to ambush the odd unwary mouse or small bird.

Trees, the garnish of green leaves brown and fallen, stand as living sculptures—oaks with their single column of trunk and elms, branches spreading like upside-down vases, invite inspection and dare you to ID them using only the winter clues. Shy hollys and mountain laurels peek out from the understory, their thick leathery leaves finally noticeable after a seasons worth of blending into the overall green. Berries glow red in the thin winter sunlight, advertising their calories to the birds.

In addition to the skeleton crew of over-wintering locals, migrants have come in from farther north where winter really is a thing of privation and scarcity. Brown creepers, little whiffs of birds fresh from the North Woods, spiral up the trunks of winter-bare trees, gleaning their way up in search of insect eggs and chilled larvae. Nuthatches spiral their ways down those same trunks, finding tidbits over-looked by the upward climbing creepers. Eiders and harlequin ducks, fresh from Greenland and Baffin Island, bob in coastal inlets, while tundra swans have made their long flight from the high arctic to sport in the Potomac and its creeks. For most of these birds, this is about as far south as they get and must seem like a tropical vacation.

A foot and a half of snow changes the equation for everyone. For me it means digging out vehicles and clearing sidewalks and trying to ignore a tiny voice in the back of my head that says “Y’know, your uncle had a heart attack and died while shoveling snow. And you're older than he was.” I pace myself, conscious of my hammering pulse, thankful for a strapping 20-year old son to do the heavy lifting.

Overwintering sparrows work the snow-free ground at the undersides of branches and in thickets, scraping the leaves for tidbits like miniature chickens. Our four species of woodpeckers diligently work the snow-splashed tree trunks. I usually wait to put out my sunflower seed until the first of the year but am seriously rethinking. On the other hand, these are full-time wildlife, adapted to the landscape over the course of millions of years and I am just a part-time bird feeder. I defer to their judgment.

I'll ply the fire with kindling and pull the blankets to my chin
And I'll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in
I'd like to call back summertime and have her stay jut another month or so
She's got the urge for going and I guess she'll have to go

And she gets the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown
All her empires are falling down
Winter's closing in.

Fall Snapshots

2009-11-21T05:38:00.000-08:00

Autumn is meandering along on its way to winter. A few vestiges of summer abide—the chilled tattered late dragonfly and lost-looking turtles. Early winter residents like slate-colored juncos and white-throated sparrows are showing up. Both are sometimes fooled by autumn days—day length is about the same as mid-May, and you can hear the occasional spring peeper call in the swamp. The odd white-throated sparrow as well begins to tune up its song, which sounds like “old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody”, but they rarely get past the “Sam” part—maybe they figure out what is going on and are too embarrassed to continue.

If you keep your eyes open, you can see some of the fall specialties in evidence. A four-point buck, neck swollen from testosterone, picks his way across my backyard, oblivious to everything and everyone but does. (This is the time of year you see road-killed deer whenever you run an errand). Squirrels, their autumn breeding season in full swing, scamper up tree trunks in twos and threes and fours, spiraling their way like long gray scarves. Oak trees are finally releasing their crispy brown leaves to pile up in the gutters. Oaks are the last to let go in fall—I’ve heard Garrison Keeler explain it as vanity, but since they are among the last to leaf out in spring, it all evens out.

A northern harrier (aka marsh hawk) moseys his way across the marsh at Huntley Meadows. Banking and turning at walking speed, he checks out the flocks of mallards, testing for any sign of weakness as they explode off the surface. The harrier, rump showing the bright white diamond of feathers that screams “field mark!” to any birder, milks every erg of energy from the breeze with an ease and efficiency any America’s Cup skipper would sell his soul for. And the harrier does it in three dimensions to boot. He will linger here for a few days before moving on for the winter to the more expansive Potomac River marshes, sharing the area with the night shift of short-eared owls.

Canada geese, too big for the harrier to bother with, are busy harvesting a summer’s worth of marsh sedges. Think of them as feathered sheep, grazing on the swamp grasses, pulling up the stalks to feed on the calorie-rich rootstocks. Bow waves of grass blades form as they swim through the shallow water, past the skulking Virginia rails who have taken up residence in the marsh and pad daintily between the faded brown stalks of cat-tails, long since gone to seed. A pair of hooded mergansers newly arrived from points north, skirts the edges of the marsh, jumpy as cats, while northern shovelers doze in the watery sunlight.

Here and there, almost like after thoughts, or maybe grace notes, American witch hazel is in full bloom, forsythia-yellow blossoms the same color as maple leaves and easily overlooked amid all the riot of color.

The planet is turning, winter closing in, but not just yet. There is still business to be done, still things to do before the cold falls and the hemisphere sleeps.

Peter and Frederick..

2009-11-11T14:17:00.000-08:00

This article will appear in the December issue of The Capital Guide, the publication of the Guild of Professional Tour Guides of Washington, D.C.

At first glance, Peter L’Enfant and Frederick Douglass seem unlikely companions—L’Enfant, a slightly built Frenchman whose vision resulted in the city of Washington, D.C. and Douglass, a powerful orator whose calls for the abolition of slavery gave rise to the Emancipation Proclamation and the modern Civil Rights movement. They stand, paired in the lobby at One Judiciary Square, as the District’s contribution to the National Statuary Hall collection in the U.S. Capitol. Visitors need not go through security; the statues are easily viewed from the entrance as well as from outside the building.

The two larger-than-life bronze statues, each seven feet tall and weighting close to 850 pounds, were commissioned in 2007 by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. An advisory commission of historians and art experts (50 prominent citizens nominated by public ballot) chose local sculptors Gordon Kray and Steven Weitzman to create the statues of L’Enfant and Douglass, respectively.

Each man is shown practicing his profession, tools at hand. L’Enfant stands atop Jenkins Hill, later to become Capital Hill, plans for the Federal City and a pair of dividers in his hands. Douglass, leonine head erect, is depicted giving his 1852 July 4th speech, considered by many historians to be his finest. Weitzman shows Douglass as both orator and writer—a copy of the North Star, Douglass’s abolitionist newspaper clutched in his right hand, his left gripping a lectern on which his pen and inkwell rest.

The Statuary Hall collection in the Capitol displays two statues of historical figures from each state, 100 in all. Since the District is not a state, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting delegate to Congress, proposed special legislation authorizing Douglass and L’Enfant to join the select group under the Rotunda. Representative Norton’s bill has been languishing in Committee since in 2005, but she plans on reintroducing the legislation in the near future. In the meantime, visitors may see the sculptures in their temporary home at 441 4th St., NW.

Autumn Closing In

2009-11-02T09:17:00.000-08:00

Nights are getting crisp, days are filled with changing colors as the trees suck the nutrients back out of their leaves and begin to shut down. Winter’s coming on. We tend to think of autumn and spring as transition periods between the absolutes of heat and ice—parts of the pendulum swing before it hits the top or bottom. In reality, they are seasons of their own with their own milestones, their own comings and goings. Autumn and spring are more subtle, more nuanced than the exuberances of summer or winter’s bleakness. Pat says the autumns in Colorado are blazing with the bright yellow of aspens but lack the reds and oranges that make the East coast a leaf-peeper's Mecca.

If you pay enough attention, you can find the hallmarks of any season. Spring has its massed wildflower displays of ephemeral beauty, autumn, its own flowers and leaves. But here and there, you can still see summer’s children in a final curtain call before the cold stops the show.

A common spreadwing damselfly settles onto a perch, well below the level of the stiff breeze gusting above the tops of the cattails. Clear gossamer wings neither folded over its back nor spread stiffly out, you can almost hear the rustle of crinolines as it adjusts. Weak fliers, keeping out of the greater sky, damselflies prefer to hunt low, gleaning aphids and tiny bugs from leaves.

Autumn Meadow hawks, the last dragonflies of the year, sway in the breeze perched atop cattail leaves, alone or in coupled pairs, glowing red in the thin sunlight.

Orange and black flashes overhead give away migrating Monarch butterflies, riding the winds, looking barely in control as they flutter their way toward Mexico and the groves of fir trees where they will spend their winter.

Other sets of orange and black, a bit smaller, a bit redder give away the monarch’s mimics and doppelgangers, the viceroy butterflies. Viceroys take advantaged of the monarch’s retchingly bad taste to gain immunity from predators. They are often one of the last butterflies on the wing, first letting the monarchs pass by to teach birds not to eat anything orange. Orange isn’t just for breakfast. Trust me on this.

Autumn rains have called forth red-backed salamanders. Leaving their flooded underground lairs, they climb up tree trunks, bushes, and even walls to find some breathing space. Lungless and respiring through damp skin, they are almost never seen during the hot days of summer. The dampness of fall is the perfect time to see them. Coming in one of three flavors, the common redback with its dull red stripe running down its back, intermingles with the less common “leadback” whose red has been replaced with dull gray. A third form, more common elsewhere, is bright orange, mimicking red efts. An unrelated species, the red eft is the juvenile of the eastern newt. Newts live in beaver ponds and when the population reaches critical mass, efts leave in search of new horizons. Trudging across the forest floor, the bright orange efts tell predators to stay away—they are mildly toxic and will sicken anything foolish enough to eat one.

Red-headed woodpeckers work the dead snags at the edges of the beaver pond. White oaks, killed by the rising pond, the wood is rotted and punky enough for a wide variety of insect prey and soft enough for the woodpeckers to hammer in acorns and hickory nuts for future dining. Red-heads are one of the few woodpeckers in North America who store food for winter. Mice, flying squirrels, and gray squirrels do the same and are not above raiding the woodpecker’s pantry when times get lean.

This year, times will be good for all—it’s a mast year for oaks and other nut-bearing trees. Acorns litter the forest floor in abundance—more than enough for the hoarders to gather and bury. Oaks will belch forth a huge crop of acorns every so often and gray squirrels will gather them up and bury a few at a time in scatter hordes. Squirrels forget some spots or are detained by predators. The acorns, having been obligingly planted and away from other species with a taste for nuts, sprout to grow into new forests. Squirrels have spent thousands of years selecting the fattest and tastiest acorns to store, while oaks have spent the same time selecting squirrels to act as gardeners. Who has domesticated who?

You Have to Go Out…

2009-08-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

Tucked behind the dune that has protected it for 140 years, the United States Live-Saving Service’s Indian River Station has weathered hurricanes and north-easters. A barn like structure, it has been lovingly restored to its 1905 colors and condition. Photos of old ship wrecks line the walls and portraits of long-dead crew stare out at you, all mustached and unsmilingly formal.

These men were some of the bravest, most foolhardy people the U.S. Government had in its employ. Their job was to find wrecked ships along their section of beach, five miles or so in either direction, and rescue the crews and passengers, no matter what the conditions. They called themselves surfmen and their motto was “You have to go out; you don’t have to come back.” They lived in Spartan conditions, the wood-burning stove in the mess room the only source of heat—in freezing weather, they heated bricks on the stove and wrapped them in flannel to take to their bunks. The open cupola along the roof ridge was manned 24 hours a day, rain or shine, hurricane or blizzard. Like today’s firemen, their job was to put themselves in harm’s way for the safety of others. Failure was always an option, nearly every station lost surfmen to waves or the cold. Not going out was never considered. The rule book stated that a surfman “will not desist from his efforts until by actual trial, the impossibility of effecting a rescue is demonstrated. The statement of the captain that he did not try to use the boat because the sea or surf was too heavy will not be accepted unless attempts to launch were actually made and failed.”

The surfboat, an open wood-planked 20-foot affair, weighing 3000 pounds, rested on a carriage with extra large wheels in the ground level boat room. The eight man crew of surfmen dragged the boat to the beach to launch through storm waves often over 20 feet high. These boats were always rowed by the men. Motors were almost never used. As one surfman said, “Motors can quit; men never will.”

If the storm surf was of suicidal fury and attempts at launching were unsuccessful, the surfboat also carried a Lyle gun, a small cannon used to launch a grappling hook-like projectile to the crippled vessel. A thin rope called the shotline was attached to the projectile. Regulations called for the gunner to fire the projectile into the rigging of the stranded ship. Using the shotline, the surfmen hauled larger lines and pulleys to the ship to create a continuous loop with a breeches buoy, a one-man harness, attached. Passenger and crew rode the buoy from the ship to beach one by one.

Six stations ranged along the Delaware shore with another four in Maryland. Surfmen patrolled on foot in two-man shifts, each man walking the beach for five miles north or south of the station. They carried patrol clocks to ensure they patrolled their stretch of beach. They also carried Coston flares to warn ships too close to the beach or to burn at a wreck to alert the station lookout and to let the ship’s crew know they had been located and that help was on the way.

Although Cape Hatteras lays claim to the title “graveyard of the Atlantic”, the mid-Atlantic Delmarva Peninsula has had more shipwrecks. The Indian River Station saw seven major wrecks in its history. Some stations like the one at Bethany Beach, saw none, and others such as the one at Lewes at the entrance to Delaware Bay made nearly fifty rescues. Stations were expected to assist each other when possible and Alexander Graham Bell set up one of the first telephone systems in America so stations to communicate with each other up and down the coast.

Reading the accounts of rescues leaves me in awe of these people. The surfmen at Lewes once went for 72 hours without sleep or hot food during a screaming north-easter in 1889. With the help of the Cape Henlopen and Rehobeth Beach crews, they went from one wreck to another, rowing out with frozen hands and protesting muscles to rescue nearly 100 people from ships which wrecked one after the other over the course of the three-day storm.

In 1891, the Indian River crew attempted a near epic rescue of the schooner Redwing, wrecked down beach across the Inlet. The surfmen dragged their boat two miles to the flooded inlet, and could not cross on the flood tide. They reloaded the heavy boat back on its carriage and dragged it to nearby Rehobeth Bay, packed the carriage into the boat, and relaunched to cross the bay. It took nearly five hours to reach the wreck, and by then, the Redwing was a total loss with all hands. The surfmen spent the next day on the beach finding the bodies of the crew and paid out of their own pockets for graves at the nearby Ocean View Presbyterian Church. You can still see the site today with an added mystery—the schooner’s manifest listed six crewmen and the surfmen collected six bodies from the beach. There are seven graves in the Redwing plot.

Going South

2009-08-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

The dog days of August are upon us. Scorching temperatures, humidity you can swim in, and thunderstorms powerful enough to uproot houses. Time for Fall migration. I know what you are thinking, its not Fall. Not even close. Yet for some animals, it is time to head for tropic climes or even farther.

Shorebirds—sandpipers, plovers, and the like always lead the way. Nesting on the tundra, above the Arctic Circle, almost at the edge of the ice, they have reared out their broods and are ready for some fun and sun. They pass through the mid-Atlantic starting in late July and by September are pretty much gone. I saw least sandpipers, small brown and white birdlets, hardly bigger than marshmallow Easter duckys, working over the exposed mud flats at Huntley Meadows park last week. They were joined by a solitary sandpiper, a spotted sandpiper, and several killdeer, all partaking in the bounty of the ooze. The leasties are on their way to Peru, the others go as far as the Argentine pampas and Tierra del Fuego.

Other birds I saw that day are busy putting on fat for their own journeys. The chimney swifts chittering overhead are beginning to feel the call of the rainforests and the osprey circling over the open water of the marsh will be going to coastal Brazil by mid-October. Even the hummingbirds, weighing as much as a paper clip, will be flying the 90 miles of open water nonstop from Florida to Cuba.

What prompts an animal you can hold in the palm of one hand to fly thousands of miles twice a year? Sunlight and food. Consider: every point on the planet averages 12 hours of light and 12 hours of night in a day. The actual hours are lopsided except at the equator. The poles get three month each of endless daylight and stygian night. When spring hits the northern hemisphere, daylight exceeds night with a concomitant acceleration of plant growth. More plant growth equals more insects. More insects equals more protein to feed baby birds. A good number of bird species leave the crowded tropical ecosystems and head to the sparsely populated north. They settle in, raise one, maybe two broods, and return to Central and South America at the end of the season. We think of them as our birds going south for the winter when in reality, it is their birds coming north for the summer.

Something is always migrating. Think of the year as the arc of a pendulum. At the top of each swing, there is an instant when gravity and momentum balance and the swing stops. The migration swing stops for about 10 days in mid-July and again at the other end of the arc in mid-January. For those brief periods, all species have gotten where they were going. Then the process begins anew. Now is the time when the pendulum is moving back down and the birds are beginning to move with it.

Modern Problems

2009-07-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

Today’s news reported that Pope Benedict XVI suffered a broken wrist in a fall at his summer palace. Add to this the picture of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wearing a sling to support her broken elbow and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sottomayor on crutches after she broke her ankle in a fall, and a disturbing pattern emerges.

Gravity anomalies—little patches of disturbed gravitational fields have been popping up all over the Earth. Normally these attract no attention; after all, who notices fish floating up out of the water in mid-Pacific or the fact that Mt. Everest has shrunk by a full two inches in the last 5 years? Gravity, a real but little understood universal phenomenon, is under assault. The culprit?—Global warming. As the surface of the planet heats, it becomes less dense relative to the underlying crust. This difference in densities is expressed by localized increases or decreases in micro gravitational fields. The field switches off in small foot-square areas. If a person is unlucky enough to step on that area, the effect is similar to stepping on a banana peel. The corollary, as explained by Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of Conservation of Energy, is localized areas of hyper-gravity—someone stepping there weighs over 800 pounds for a fraction of a second. Injuries to upper extremities come from zero gravity patches, those to ankles and legs from hyper gravity anomalies.

This is not a new phenomenon—Albert Einstein postulated gravity fluctuations in his Addendum to Special Relativity, published in 1924. Einstein nearly won the Nobel Prize for this, but lost to Max Plank in the swimsuit completion. Human history has been changed for better or worse as a direct result of gravity shifts. One thousand years ago, during what is known as the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year era of global warming, Europe was saved from conquest when Genghis Kahn died after falling from his horse. This snippet, glossed over by most historians, belies the fact that Genghis was an expert horseman, literally born to the saddle. Falling off one’s horse, even while drunk, was considered by the Mongol hordes to be something of a gross faux pas. If one considers a gravity surge, which caused Genghis to suddenly weigh 600 pounds, making his poor mount collapse, the whole historical mystery comes into focus. Another example, that of the Mary Celeste, an American sailing ship found abandoned and sailing by itself across the Atlantic in 1894, can be explained by its sailing through a zero gravity area, causing the crew to float off the deck and into the water. The disappearances of Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and the Lost Colony have similar explanations.

How do we combat this seemingly inexorable menace? The obvious solution is to end global warming and stabilize the earth’s surface temperature relative to the underlying crust. Failing that, a multi-trillion dollar effort should be initiated by NATO to warm the crust with microwave ovens in order to bring it back into relative balance with the surface. As neither plan is likely, I propose a temporary fix—cats. Cats are well known to have mysterious effects on gravity, and are thought by some observers to possess rudimentary control over their own gravitational fields. Consider: a falling cat always lands on its feet. Long thought to be due to quick reflexes and loose skin, recent experiments using high speed video have demonstrated that a falling cat can cancel out or reduce its immediate gravity field, allowing time to twist into landing position. Consider also the sleeping cat phenomenon. Anyone trying to pick up a sleeping cat will remark “Geeze, this cat weighs a ton.” This is truer than once thought. A sleeping cat concentrates the local micro-gravity field to become several pounds heavier, thus keeping it in safely in place—a useful evolutionary trait for an animal who, in the wild, habitually sleeps on tree branches. Cats’ legendary sense of balance is nothing more than gravity field manipulation.

Obviously, the solution for persons of high societal rank, such as Popes and Supreme Court judges, is to emulate the Prophet Mohamed who always had a cat with him. According to legend, he once cut off the sleeve of a favorite robe so as not to disturb a sleeping cat. This was not entirely due to affection--when one considers that the cat temporarily weighed 150 pounds and Mohamed had a bad back from his early years as a camel driver, the real explanation leaps to mind. My modest proposal is that rather than carrying yappy rat-dogs as do some celebutants, world leaders should be accompanied by official cats. The cats could be carried in decorous accessories, lending statesmen a certain air of gravitas.

Greyfriar’s Bobby

2009-06-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

One of the fixtures of Edinburgh is Greyfriar’s Bobby. Bobby was a Skye Terrier belonging to a Mr. John Gray, a night watchman, who died in 1858, and was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard, the cemetery attached to Greyfriars Church. Mr. Gray and Bobby were inseparable in life and in death. For the next 14 years, Bobby kept vigil at Gray’s graveside, leaving only in bad weather, when he was sheltered in nearby homes and fed at the backdoors of local restaurants. Word of Bobby’s devotion spread and the City Council paid for the renewal of Bobby’s license, making him a ward of the city. Bobby died, old and full of honors, in 1872, and was buried just outside the cemetery proper but within the walls. Bobby’s headstone, dedicated by the Duke of Gloucester, bears the inscription “Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.” At the base is a pile of sticks and dog toys left by dog lovers for over a century.

A bronze statue of Bobby stands near the cemetery, just outside Greyfriars Pub. Legend has it that the publican turned the statue 180 degrees, so it no longer faces the cemetery, and any photo of Bobby will also have the pub in the background.

Technology and Nationalism

2009-06-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

Scots seem to be of two minds when it comes to Britain. On the one hand, Scots have fought and died for King (or Queen) and Country for nearly 250 years, supplying what is arguably the world’s best infantry to the British Army. The “feathered bonnet” worn by Scottish bagpipe bands traces its ancestry to the tall bearskins worn by Napoleon’s Old Guard. Scots picked up the headgear on battlefields across Europe when the original owners no longer needed it. Similarly, the leopard skin tunics on the bass drummers are from the Sudan where Highland regiments defeated an army of radical Islamists on the outskirts of Khartoum in the late 1800’s.

On the other hand, Scots do not really see themselves as British, Tony Blair (an Edinburgh native) not withstanding. They almost never refer to the English by that name, preferring “our neighbors to the south” or some other euphemism. It reminded me of Harry Potter, where the name of Voldemort is never called out. That actually makes a certain amount of sense, since J.K. Rowling, another native Edinburgher, wrote the early drafts of her first book in a coffee shop by George IV Bridge.

This can go to extremes; around downtown Edinburgh, you can see stickers proclaiming “Scottish not British” with the blue and white flag of St. Andrew.

Alec, who spent a semester at the University of Edinburgh, tells the story of a student-organized Scottish nationalism rally. The organizers xeroxed dozens of copies of the flag and slogan and posted them on campus bulletin boards, with the time and place. Some wag, with his or her own sense of history and nationalism, scrawled across the paper: Cornish, not Scottish—get a color printer. It seems the flag of Cornwall (the cross of St. Piran, patron saint of tin miners) has a white X-shaped cross on a black background.

The Sir Walter Scott Memorial—Drunks at Dawn

2009-06-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

During our stay in Edinburgh, I would get up at dawn, grab something to eat, and go exploring. One gray and chill spring morning, I hiked across North Bridge, over what used to be North Loch, now the Waverly Train Station, and wandered into Edinburgh’s New Town. I crossed the bridge, skirting the monument in its center, a statue to some Scottish regiment or other, mustachioed helmeted soldiers brandishing flags and weapons for queen and country in some long ago, half-remembered colonial war on the far side of the world. My plan was to see the Sir Walter Scott Memorial, shoot some photos, and in general, take in the ambiance of what has to be one of the ugliest structures I have ever laid eyes on. I had seen the Memorial from a tour bus and noticed it poking above the eastern skyline, but I wanted to see it up close, what may be the finest example of Victorian wretched excess in the whole of the British Isles.

You really can’t miss the Memorial, standing in Princess Gardens, 200 feet tall, and made of locally quarried shale—a bad choice, given that the oil in the shale has migrated to the outside and bonded with decades of coal smoke, making the entire structure soot black. Author Bill Bryson has described it as “looking like a Victorian gothic rocket ship”. He’s right. If the Brits had had a space program in the early 1800’s, Apollo 11 would have gone up in something resembling this, steam-powered and coal-fired.

I think maybe the only thing missing on the space flight would have been the gargoyles. Two in each corner about half way up, they are a bit unexpected. Then again, given Victorian tastes for jim-cracks and jee-jaws, maybe not. I’m sure the Brits would have figured out how to make them retract on re-entry.

I had finished walking around the base and the gleaming white marble statue of Scott himself at the center when two young men came up. They looked a bit rumpled and with the expression drunks have when they are trying to brazen their way along. “I see you’ve got a camera” the dark haired one slurred, “can you take a picture of me and the lad?” “Sure,” I said, “No worries.” The two posed, looking blearily into the camera. I snapped the shutter, they said thanks, and staggered off, holding each other up, zigzagging down the street like a sailboat tacking in a strong head wind. No address, no e-mail, no bloody idea in hell of who they were or what to do with the picture or where to send it. “Oh well,” came a bemused thought dancing around the edges of my brain, “it should make for a good story.” So, my two inebriated gents, if by chance, you happen to see this blog, let me know who and where you are and I’ll be glad to send you a photographic record of our meeting. Lord knows, you won’t remember it yourselves.

Beach Phantoms

2009-06-19T14:28:00.000-07:00

You can forgive most people for not noticing the flicker of movement or not seeing them at all. Sand-colored, no bigger than the palm of your hand, and fast as hell, ghost crabs are denizens of sandy Atlantic beaches from Rhode Island to Brazil.

Active at night, ghost crabs spend most of their daylight hours in L-shaped burrows up to four feet deep. At dawn or dusk or on overcast days, small gouts of sand periodically erupt from burrows scattered along the beach above the high tide line. Holes range from dime to silver dollar-size, depending on the size of the resident crab. Digging crabs cradle a spoonful or so of sand in the crook of their claws and fling it out to the surface from the entrance marked with a fan of damp sand that may extend up to a foot out. This is like a person tossing a snow shovel-full across down the block.

Ghost crabs are marine animals who have almost made the transition to land dwellers. On warm June evenings, egg-carrying females rush to the edge of the surf and release their eggs into the water. All ghost crabs scamper to the wave line on occasion to fill special sacks beside the gills with oxygenated water. Specialized muscles circulate the water over the gills keeping them working. In a pinch, specialized leg hairs can wick up moisture from the damp sand at the bottom of a burrow and fill the gill sacks.

Ghost crabs are predators and scavengers. They hunt smaller mole crabs, beach fleas, and tiny burrowing coquina clams right up to the strand line at night. They also investigate and devour anything that may wash up. They can pick a fish to bones before dawn and the day shift of scavengers wakes up. Any greedy crab caught far from its burrow in day light risks becoming gull food. Crabs lack the ability to look up and gulls know this, dropping like hawks on the unlucky.

Ghost crabs segregate by size. The youngest and smallest crabs burrow in the damper sand nearer the surf line, while older and bigger crabs move up the beach to the foot of the dunes. . Crabs guard their burrows fiercely, engaging in ritualized combat with individuals of a like size and plain tossing out smaller contenders. Crabs allow another crab into their burrow only during emergencies or for romance—there seems to be a secret handshake (clawshake?) involved. The biggest crabs, mainly older females, burrow into the face of the dune itself where they remain safe from storm tides. Location, location, location

When your eye does catch the movement, feel free to chase and try to catch the crab. You won’t succeed. Mounted on short stalks like twin periscopes, the crab’s eyes are as good as yours for following movement. Tracking you by your shape against the skyline, the crab slides along sideways effortlessly over the sand at 10 miles per hour, as quick as any Olympic sprinter. Keep following though, and the crab will shift direction at full tilt. Neat trick for someone with five times the legs as you. Keep on it, and the crab will do one of two things. Either it will disappear down another crab’s hole, any port in a storm, or it will stop dead in its tracks. Your eyes, following the movement and your brain anticipating the next move, will loose it in the sand. Score one for the crab.

If you happen to be at any beach on the Atlantic not swept by municipal trash collectors, on a June evening with no moon and a falling tide, you may be lucky enough to see hundreds of ghost crabs scampering down to the water’s edge to release their eggs. Females carry hundreds in a large cluster under their abdomen and walk on stilted legs at full term. Reaching the water, they carefully wade in until the waves lap at their bellies and release their eggs to the currents. Some females may actually turn over on their backs to get the eggs out; a risky move since a wave may wash them out and surprisingly enough, ghost crabs can’t swim and will drown. Eggs soon hatch and the larvae are swept into the longshore current paralleling the coast. Crabs on your beach may well have been spawned on a beach further south, ensuring constant mixing of genes and regular recolonization of storm wrecked sands.

Once you see one, you’ll begin to notice them on nearly any beach you visit. On an exotic beach, like Rio or Jamaica, it’s like seeing a friend from home.

The Very Model of a Modern Pirate King

2009-06-11T16:29:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, we went down the road to Wolf Trap Park for the Performing Arts to catch the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP) performing The Pirates of Penzance (or, The Slave to Duty). Pat’s sister, Kay, had seen them in St. Louis earlier this season and loved them. She wrote a review for her blog which David Wammen, aka the Managing Director, aka the Pirate King, added to the company’s web site (http://nygasp.org). He said it made his parents cry (a good thing).

We skipped down the hill past the grass-sitters (I know, awfully snobbish of me) to our seats in Row B—just a row back from the orchestra pit, where the conductor, also a member of the company, sat (never heard of one sitting before). We had a great listen to the unmiked instruments as well as an unparalleled view of the cast, complete with facial expressions.

It’s hard to mess up Gilbert and Sullivan, but when it’s really done well, it can rival most anything by Verdi or Wagner, and a lot shorter to boot. The singing is every bit what you would expect from a troupe of pros. The Pirate King’s baritone and chief ward Mabel’s soprano are wonderful. Mabel (Michele McConnell) has got one fabulous set of pipes. I swear I heard glass breaking in downtown Vienna.

One of the great things about Gilbert and Sullivan is the second-echelon characters. In Pirates, Major-General Stanley gets to show off his erudition as the Very Model of a Model Major-General—there must be some sort of informal contest amongst Major-Generals, present and past, as to who can sing the fastest and still be understood by the audience. Steven Quint must be in the top ten. His old creaky Major-General can barely walk (wears bunny slippers in Act II) but sings at light speed and like the energizer bunny, keeps going and going, refusing to wind up his aria.

“I can read a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform
And tell you all the details of Caractacus's uniform.”

The “ad lib” asides themselves produce a chuckle—“Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore…I'll never come up with a rhyme for 'din afore,”
To which the Pirate King, responds: "What, never?” the answer: "Well, hardly ever!", followed by “And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.”

David Auzier, the dance captain and Sergeant of Police (“When the Foeman Bares His Steel”), is the other secondary character, who also pretty much steals the show, or at least the second act. His hang-dog expression and loose limbed, Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks physical acting compliments the choreography of his none-too-eager policemen, one of whom dances all his moves, Sufi-like, in complete opposition to the rest of the line. That’s got to be hard to pull off and be funny. He does and it is.

As with most Gilbert and Sullivan, the plot proceeds at break-neck pace until everyone—romantic leads, pirates, policemen, etc., have seemingly been painted into the tightest of corners when, in the (ta-da!) nick of time, all is miraculously resolved with happy endings galore, including a Chorus Line-style kick line of pirates, police, and wards, complete with glittery top hats and spirit fingers. I could have sat through the whole thing again—it was that much fun.

Afterwards we hung around the stage entrance until the conductor let us in; we found the Pirate King and handed him Kay's note in which she asked for a autograph for her and her sister (Pat) since they "were both orpans" something the pirates couldn't resist. “Oh!” he said, “you know Kay! I put her review on our web site.” He signed our programs and wished us and you all the best. He had to cut our conversation short, since he is a local boy (Gonzaga High School) and his grandma was waiting to see him. Made it even better…local boy makes good.

The (Other) British Museum

2009-06-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

To a dinosaur geek, the British Museum of Natural History is paradise. Low and hulking, the yellow sandstone building covers an entire city block with terra cotta saber-tooth tigers lined up along the roof like ladies in the windows of an Amsterdam cathouse. Sculptured coelacanths and pterodactyls sport in the window bays promising untold pleasures within.

It starts at the entrance—you walk into the toothy grin of “Dippy”, the 100 foot long skeleton of a Diplodocus (Brontosaurus to the rest of us), stretching all the way back to the foot of the grand staircase. Head cocked to one side, seeming to say “and how are you this fine morning?”

The dinosaur gallery walks you through the history of what were the rulers of the planet for nearly 100 million years, showing what was replaced at either end and by whom. The gallery shows how the dinosaurs jump-started their reign when something big happened at the end of the Permian, about 250 million years ago and how they vanished without a trace when something equally big closed down the Cretaceous.

Subdued lighting casting sharp silhouettes along the walls heightens the sense of a lost world. High ceilings allow the beasts to stand to their full height while an imaginative steel catwalk brings you up to eye level. There is nothing like standing face-to face- with a Tyrannosaurus rex to really appreciate the size and bulk of the thing. It’s one thing to read about a twenty-foot tall creature with teeth like steak knives, and quite another to actually look down into a barrel-sized cuisinart looking back at you.

The museum devotes special attention to Tyrannosaurus rex, everybody’s favorite nightmare. As soon as the scientific world heard about this monster, the Brits sent expedition after expedition to the American west to find, buy, or flat out steal specimens. A hundred years of pouring over the best collection of T. rex skeletons (about 50 total) in the world has provided some astonishing insights and wonderful speculations.

The museum’s curators, using detailed microscopic bone analysis techniques, have shown that Tyrannosaurus life spans were on the order of a human’s. Growth was slow until the animal nearly doubled in size during its teen years. I can just imagine the young T. rex coming home after a hard day on the savannah and clearing out the fridge. The museum has taken advantage of this fact, constructing a life size animated model of a young T. rex, all teen hormones and angst, just hitting its growth spurt and polishing off an after-school snack of Triceratops to the delighted shrieks of school kids.

Not only about fang and claw; the gallery displays fossil and reconstructed eggs and even nests showing dinosaurs to have been attentive and caring parents. They had to be—any number of predators lurked in the Mesozoic brush, eager to convert one species into another. Still, there is an undeniable cuteness in the sight of a clutch of baby parrot beaks just breaking out of the shell as a parent dozes nearby.

The Stone of Destiny

2009-06-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

Christmas Day, 1950. Four Scottish college students creep through the early morning murk to Westminster Abbey. In a daring display of subterfuge, worthy of any number of secret agent movies, they break into the Abbey. Keeping to the shadows, they make their way towards the wooden Coronation Chair, seat of British monarchs since 1300. And break the chair. Not the political statement it may seem; the Chair was collateral damage to the real objective. The Chair was built around the Stone of Scone, known to all Scots, including our intrepid students, as the Stone of Destiny.

But of course, as with all stories of theft and skullduggery, more information is required to flesh out the details leading to such a seemingly heinous crime.

I heard the story of the Stone on Destiny on a bus out of Edinburgh, a tour called Highlands, Waterfalls. and Distilleries. Our guide, Mac MacKenzie, kept us regaled between stops with stories of Scottish history and folklore. Outside of Perth, he pointed out Dunsinane Castle of MacBeth fame, near Birnham Wood. And in the midst of hills, glens, and sheep, Mac began to tell us the story of Scotland’s most famous artifact.

Kept on display with the Scottish Crown Jewels deep within the dank walls of Edinburgh Castle, rests the Stone of Destiny. The premier symbol of Scottish nationalism, the Stone, in addition to being called the Stone of Scone (pronounced “Scoon”), is also called the Coronation Stone, and Lial Fail in Scottish Gaelic, has by custom and by tradition been used in the coronations of Scottish kings since Kenneth MacAlpine, the first Scots king in 847. Legend has it the stone was transported through Spain and Ireland from the Holy Land where it was the pillow used by the prophet Jacob when he dreamt of a visitation by God. Jacob awoke and turned the stone to its side as an altar to Jehovah, the first one.

The Stone actually doesn’t look like anything special—an oblong block of chiseled reddish sandstone, a small cross, and iron handles at each end. Two feet long, a foot thick, and one foot wide and weighing about 350 pounds, it’s just a big rock and far more modest than its name might suggest. It was kept for centuries in the abbey of Scone, near Perth.

In 1296, the Stone was captured (stolen, depending on your point of view) by King Edward I of England as part of his never-ending campaign to subdue Scotland. Edward, “the hammer of the Scots”, took Edinburgh and announced he was marching on Perth to capture the Stone. Logic had it that whoever possessed the Stone was the rightful King of Scotland and Edward Plantagenet, every bit the homicidal megalomaniac so aptly portrayed by Patrick McGoohan in Brave Heart, was bound and determined to add Scotland to his collection of conquests.

Edward and his army took a month to march the 50 or so miles from Edinburgh to Perth, fighting every inch of the way. When they arrived, Edward burned the Abbey, slaughtered the monks, and took the Stone to London. He had a special chair constructed, placing the Stone on a low platform below the seat. The chair became the Coronation Chair, used by every British monarch since 1300.

Edward never did complete his conquest of Scotland, dying in Edinburgh and cursing the Scots with his final breath. His son, after a bloody defeat on the battlefield at the hands of Robert the Bruce, thought better of the whole thing and went home.

The official story is that in 1996, after 700 years of political wrangling, the Stone was transported back to Scotland where it remains to this day. “End of story” said Mac. “Or is it?”

Enter our intrepid four led by Ian Hamilton, all students at Oxford and all members of a Scottish Nationalist Society. Having cased the joint, and determining that the best time to enter would be the small hours of Christmas morning when security would be dozing, the four lifted the stone and spirited it away. Not quite. While carrying it out of the Abbey, someone lost their grip on an iron ring and dropped the stone. And broke it. Scotland’s most sacred symbol was lying in two pieces on the marble floor of Westminster Abbey. It had survived centuries of transport in sailing ships and oxcarts, gone through sieges and warfare, only to be broken by four kids in what was essentially a prank. Worse, it had fallen on the foot of one of the would-be hijackers, breaking two toes and making him pretty much useless in helping to move the bits.

Somehow the students got the Stone outside and into a waiting car. They hid the Stone in various places for the next several weeks while a Nation-wide search commenced. They drove it across the border, getting past police roadblocks, with the Stone covered with a blanket and disguised as the back seat of their car.

When they made it to Scotland, they contacted a sympathetic Scottish politician who took the stone to a master mason for repair. The mason repaired the Stone and left it on the remains of the altar stone in the ruins of Arbroath Abbey near Perth. The mason assumed the Church of Scotland would protect the Stone, but police soon retrieved it and the Stone was returned to London and to a presumably fixed Coronation Chair.

Hamilton and his three accomplices turned themselves in and were promptly arrested. Within a week, all charges were dropped and the matter laid to rest. Under British law, the Crown would have had to prove rightful ownership. Since the Stone had been stolen to begin with, the powers that be decided to pretend the whole thing never happened. Ian Hamilton went to law school, become a prosecutor, and his friends went on to distinguished careers of their own. A happy ending to the story…or is it?

Mac had more tidbits to add. He had once worked with James Hamilton, Ian’s son who told him that when the students dropped the Stone, it actually broke into three pieces, not two. The third piece was small enough for Ian to slip into his pocket and forget about. Later, he had the fragment made into a necklace and gave it to his bride as a wedding present. Happy ending number two.

After the Stone was recovered, rumors began to fly that the mason had not only repaired the Stone itself, but had also made an exact copy. The copy he left at Abroath Abbey for the police to find. The real Stone, labeled a replica, is on display at the abbey—the Stone of Destiny is in Scotland. Happy ending number three.

Mac then mentioned that medieval chroniclers described the original stone as round, black, and polished, with symbols inset with silver. It may have been a fragment of meteorite. As best as can be determined, the Stone on display at Edinburgh Castle is common Perthshire sandstone.

“Imagine” said Mac, “that you are the abbot of Scone and learn that the most bloodthirsty ruler in Europe has announced that he is headed your way to steal the very symbol of your people. You have maybe a month to do something. What do you do? You hide it and come up with a substitute.” According to Scottish fable, the stone Edward took to London, the stone that British monarchs have been crowned over for 700 years, is actually the stone cap of the abbey cesspit. British coronations have taken place in pomp and pageantry over what is essentially a toilet seat lid. When all is said and done, it appears that the Stone of Destiny, object of desire, theft, national identity, and fierce pride is a copy of a fake.

Which begs the question: where is the real Stone? Mac ended his story with the tale of two kids, playing on a hillside near Dunsinane Castle after a rainstorm. They slipped down a mudslide into an underground chamber, injuring one of them. Within the chamber they claimed to have seen a smooth rock, round and black with silver symbols, half buried in the dirt. After getting to safety and a doctor, the boys came back with their fathers. They found the chamber but it was empty. The real stone remains hidden from mortal view, which is probably as it should be.

Collections

2009-05-31T17:41:00.000-07:00

The late Hunter S. Thompson once said “once you get locked into a serious collection, there is a tendency to push it as far as you can.” Of course, he was talking about firearms and drugs, but the principal is the same. Sir John Soane and Hunter would have hit it off famously.

Born in 1753, the son of a bricklayer, Soane was a wealthy architect (he designed the Bank of England) and Royal Academy Member who also collected art and antiquities. His home was one of the finest private museums in London and was open it to anyone (“amateurs and students”) who wanted to see it.

When his wife died in 1815, Soane puttered about the house for another twelve years, adding to and rearranging his collections. After a falling out with his sons, both of whom he considered ne’er-do-wells, Soane pulled some strings and had an Act of Parliament passed to preserve his house and collections for all time. When he died in 1837, he left his house to the City of London with the stipulation that it be kept just as he left it, and be made a free, public museum.

My sister, who had visited a couple of years ago, told me about the place with a “you have GOT to see this”. So one afternoon we found ourselves on a quiet residential street in Westminster. Number 13 Lincoln Inn Fields is a nondescript town house with Corinthian columns in front and a small knot of people waiting to go in. We had no idea what to expect. What we found was a house jam-packed with treasure. The place just overwhelms you from the moment you check your bags in the front foyer. You sometimes read about eccentric older people who keep everything and have to maneuver around stack of newspapers piled to the ceiling. Soane had to maneuver around stacks of the stuff that dreams are made of.

Every room is crammed full of wonderful items. Sir John collected everything he could get his hands on in true Enlightenment style. The walls are covered with art, including paintings by Hogarth, Canaletto, a couple of very fine Turners, and a Watteau. A rare portrait of Napoleon as a young man hangs over the dining room sideboard. There are Greek sculptures, Roman busts, and Renaissance marbles all jumbled together, some on ceiling joists in the walk-in closets. If you don’t have a catalog or you don’t have advanced degrees in art history, you can’t tell if you’re looking at a real Greco-Roman bust or a copy from the neoclassical period. That’s not including the Asian art mixed in as well. Sir John had a high boredom threshold and something different competes for your attention wherever you look. What little wall space not covered by art is taken up by bits of classical architecture—a foot-long piece of the Parthenon pediment or a bit of intricately carved limestone from a Roman villa, circa 0 AD.

Every floor is crammed to bursting with beautiful things, including pantry holding shelves of small Greek, Roman, and Egyptian figures that originally were scattered about the house. I assume they have all been gathered together under lock and key because they would be too tempting and too easy to scoop into a pocket. At the bottom of the circular stair to the basement sits the sarcophagus of Pharoah Setti I. The size of a small sports car, carved from a single piece of alabaster, thin enough to let the light through and covered with hieroglyphs. Soane got it for a song when the British Museum turned it down. Shelves full of Egyptian pottery and figurines reach to the ceilings and don’t over look the mummy cases on the floor.

The museum is astonishing in its own right, but thing that kept bumping my thoughts is that this was this fellow’s house. Visitors were allowed in only during business hours and only in nice weather—this kept out people who just wanted to get in out of the rain. Every morning he would wake up in his bedroom under the watchful eye of a portrait by some old master, dress himself, and have breakfast amidst the treasures of empires. I can imagine him telling his butler, “Jeeves, I shall have my tea with the bust of Caesar this morning, and perhaps lunch in the sarcophagus.”

I always thought of myself as something of a packrat, but Sir John Soane’s house is in an entirely different league. I stand awed and humbled. I want to live there.

Aqua Sulis

2009-05-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat
in wide surge; the wall enclosed all
in its bright bosom, where the baths were,
hot in the heart.
--The Ruin
8th Century English Poem

One of the things that kept crowding into my consciousness was how old a country England is. We tend to think of US history as starting around 1776, but that seems just the day before yesterday in England. Our hotel in London was on Egeware Street, one of the old Roman roads into the city, and you could still find bits of the old Roman city wall if you knew where to look.

We had signed up for a bus tour of Bath and Stonehenge with a dinner stop at the village of Lacock in a pub dating from 1361, a hundred years before the War of the Roses. On the drive out of London, our guide kept up a running commentary, pointing out buildings and sights to visit when we got back as well as general chatter. “Prices for a flat in this part of London are less expensive than in the West End and by the way, that Tudor style building on the corner survived the Great Fire in 1666 and continues to be a home.” We wound our way through Chelsea, past churches and factories recycled into trendy restaurants, and past the Famous Three Kings pub (James I, Henry VIII, and Elvis).

Once we were out of the city, we passed canary-yellow fields of flowering canola, grown for oil seed, and pastures of spring lambs. Green hills falling away in ordered rectangles bounded by hedgerows. Villages and market towns, each with its Norman or older church, flashed past.

The city of Bath, a world heritage site since 1987, sits on low hills in the valley of the Avon River. The site of Britain’s only hot spring, it has been a place to go to ever since some achy bone-weary Celt flopped down in a warm boggy pool and discovered his aches and pains went away. The Celts built a temple to their Goddess Sulis, and basked happily in the warm mineral-rich water until the Romans happened upon the place shortly after they invaded. By 60 AD, the Romans had built a spa and a temple to Minerva. Minerva, the Roman version of Athena, became associated with Sulis and the whole complex was named Aqua Sulis. Clever chaps, those Romans, they kept the shrine, adding to it and making it more grand over 300 years. They just changed the god being worshipped; expediting the conversion of the Celts from their savage pagan ways to more enlightened Roman pagan ways. The lesson was not lost on early Christians either, many of the old churches and cathedrals in the countryside are centered in a grove of yew trees, sacred to the barbarians. Same church, different god, makes Sundays easier to tolerate, at least everyone knew where to go.

Bath has drawn travelers and tourists since the hot springs were rediscovered in Elizabethan times. Jane Austen lived in Bath for several years, locating Persuasion in and near the city. Ironically, she actively disliked the city, claiming it stifled her muse. Dickens was a regular visitor, and Bath is a locale in several works. To accommodate the crowds of tourists (today over three million a year), the town fathers rebuilt most of the inner part of the city in the mid 1700’s. Downtown is a confection of a city in buff colored limestone. A curious mixture of classical and Georgian, narrow streets wind past three-story row houses, each level sporting a different style of column—Ionic at ground level, Doric on the second floor, Corinthian at the third. Busts of Minerva and other deities adorn the front porches.

Buses disgorge tourists and day trippers in front of Bath Cathedral. Technically it’s an abbey since no Bishop resides in Bath, but who’s counting. Built from the same buff stone as the rest of the downtown, the cathedral features stone ladders carved into either side of the doorway. Angels climb upwards, taking care to hold their robes aside (tricky things, robes) so as not to trip themselves up. The presumed goal, a full choir of angels, adorns the wall above the rose window. I’m not entirely sure what the allegory is here, at least one angel on each ladder is headed down. While the abbey needs some serious restoration, you can still sense the whimsy.

The buildings around the actual Roman baths are replicas; nothing remains but the bath itself complete with the original Roman-installed lead lining. The hot spring, rainwater that fell centuries ago and percolated deep in the earth over many miles, still flows through a Roman-built tunnel system and into the main bath. Signs warn visitors not to swim in, drink, or otherwise touch the water. The official reason being it is not treated-that’s as may be, but the warm water also harbors a population of amoebas with the nasty habit of occasionally entering body openings or scratches of hapless tourists and eventually eating their brains.

We entered the main bath plaza through a well-kept museum. Statues and altars dedicated by rich people to Minerva-Sulis show how busy this place must have been. An entire Roman Legion chipped in for a life-size statue of their unit emblem, a wild boar, in thanks for victory over the barbarian hordes in some forgotten battle. Small stone and clay figurines of Minerva fill a case. They were manufactured by the locals and sold to visitors to leave as offerings. The locals gathered them up periodically and resold them. The figures were probably recycled dozens of times.

The museum has heaps of coins spanning nearly 400 years of Roman rule recovered when the main bath was drained in the 1800’s. Along with the coins the workmen found curse tablets, folded lead sheets about the size of a Post-it Note. Requests for Minerva to strike down one’s enemies, they were tossed into the water to be read and presumably acted upon by the goddess. The best one displayed is from a disgruntled bather asking Minerva to bring down hell-fire on whoever stole his clothes while he was swimming.

One museum case has fifty or more ring signets, each slightly smaller than a dime, made of amber, topaz, or other semi-precious stone and exquisitely carved with dolphins, horses, birds, or people. One theory is that these were offerings, but a second school of thought and the one that sounds right, is that they were the ring stones, held in their settings with wax. Bathe in a geothermal hot spring, the wax melts, and oh damn! I’ve lost my signet.

I think it was the curse tablets and the lost ring stones that brought the place to life for me. Real people came here, swam and soaked in the warm waters, bought souvenirs, ate their lunch. The spring still flows, the warmth still rises.

I dropped a quarter in a corner of the pool. For Minerva.

History in a Box

2009-05-10T09:32:00.001-07:00

The one thing everybody tells you about the world’s great museums is “don’t try to do it all in one day”. I worked at the Smithsonian for six years and still only saw a fraction of what they had and understood less. So here I was in London with a whole day to spend at the British Museum, desperately trying to heed the advice. I had been here five years ago, with an hour before a mad dash to the airport. Back then, I made a beeline to the Rosetta Stone and feasted my eyes until my wife dragged me to a cab.

This time would be different—a whole day to spend and a million (minus one) things to see. I was going to see stuff, learn stuff until I bled from the ears. All I needed was a plan, the plan I had needed since this trip was conceived.

We walked through the front doors and into the courtyard. The new roof connecting several buildings made this the largest enclosed space in Europe and I was going to need every inch of it. Pat and Ariel found seats at a table by the food court and planned to sally forth to various rooms as the spirit moved them. Me, I was going to keep moving till I dropped or my brain went into overload. Whichever came first. As I stood admiring the three story tall Haida and Tinglit totem poles by the lunch counter, right next to the first century Roman equestrian statue, a plan finally formed. I would ask a guard what to see. After all, who better knew the ins and outs, the wheat from the chaff than someone who spent their working life amid the treasures of a thousand empires representing two million years of human history? Whatever else you may say about the Brits, they are a nation of collectors. It seemed that everyone with enough where-with-all to go abroad spent their time looting antiquities. On return, they handed it over to the British Museum.

“Excuse me, I was here several years ago and only had time to see the Rosetta Stone. Could you recommend three or four items on your favorites list?” I had the spiel down pat and asked several guards. I figured I would take the high scores and hit those. Surprisingly, they all had the same response: the Parthenon Sculptures, the Lion Gate of Ashurnasirpal II, the Mummy Room. One guard added the Enlightenment Room, and another said not to miss the Portland Vase. “When I retire, I’m taking it with me.” That was good enough for me and off I went.

I wandered into the Enlightenment Room for starters and was completely bowled over the sheer amount of stuff on display. Grecian urns floor to ceiling, a statue of Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess tucked away in the corner. Tahitian war clubs and Australian boomerangs collected by Captain Cook, even a piece of bark cloth made by Fletcher Christians (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame) Polynesian wife. Books everywhere. A copy of the Rosetta Stone with the sign “Please touch” and the legend on the side “Captured in Egypt by the British Army, 1801” which justified its being in London…”we nicked it off them what nicked it off the Egyptians.”

A few steps away Ancient Greece began in earnest. The stacks of Greek vases in the Enlightenment Room were a mere appetizer compared to the riches offered in the Greek wing. A marble wine mixing bowl big enough to bathe in with exquisitely carved swans whose intertwining necks formed the handles.

An entire transplanted temple, and pride of place, the Parthenon Sculptures. They used to be known as the Elgin Marbles but political correctness dictated the name change. Lord Elgin was the Royal representative to Greece back in Georgian days. He bought the entire north frieze of the Parthenon from a Turkish dealer who apparently had stolen them outright. A bone of contention between Britain and Greece ever since, it appears that it will never be resolved. I for one am glad of the theft, since they are at eye level and although somewhat fragmentary, take your breath away.

Walking out of the gallery, took me through the next check on the list, the Gate of Ashurnasirpal II. Ten foot tall lions with human heads, made from stone they loomed over us mere mortals, looking ready to bring back the glory of the Assyrians. The statues have five legs, and depending on how you view them, are either striding into eternity or ready to pounce on the emperor’s enemies. Blocks of cuneiform writing listing the triumphs and battles of Ashurnasirpal II stand beneath the legs. I couldn’t help but think of the Shelly poem Ozymandias, “look upon my works ye mighty and despair”. Look upon my works ye mighty and find the men’s room.

A brief stop to check with the wife in the snack bar with a spin through the Aztec, Maya, and Toltec gallery (I told you they have everything from everywhere) to see the Aztec lightning god and a modern Mexican paper mache sculpture of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse hanging from the ceiling, and it was off to Ancient Egypt and the Mummy Room.

I’m amazed there is anything left anywhere in Egypt. Mummies, sarcophagi, mummy cases, canoptic jars for storing various internal organs, grave goods, the Sphinx’s beard, more mummies, human, falcon and cat—a cultural avalanche of all things Egyptian. Tucked into corners, almost as after thoughts, were everyday items used by real people and placed in the tombs for use in the afterlife. Combs, copper mirrors, even a pair of dice if the afterlife got boring. By the time I stumbled out, my head was spinning.

I don’t know if there is any rhyme or reason to the floor plans, but it seemed the Egyptian stuff lead directly to the Roman stuff. Case after case of it. If the Brits got it, they want you to see it. Dozens of marble busts of various emperors and their ladies, the men all looking stern and politic, the women all with the same half smile. Weapons, arrowheads, and a Centurion’s armor, complete with brass buckles. I bet if he knew where it was going to end up, he would have used more polish. I walked right past the Portland Vase on my first pass and had to backtrack to find it. About the size of a gallon milk jug, deep cobalt blue and two thousand years old, it was made by blowing a blue glass bubble and dipping it into molten white glass to cover. A master gem cutter spent the better part of a year cutting off the white to show a story of a seaside wedding. You can almost see the movement, feel the joy.

They were right; you can’t do it all in a day. You can’t even do some of it in a day. You could spend years and still not absorb it all. I’m sure there are wandering tribes of feral scholars, looting the vending machines in the basement for food and feasting their souls the rest of the time.

Techno Challenged

2009-04-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

“You need a new phone.” It was true; my cell phone seemed to have something wrong with it. For starters, the battery seemed wonky. Every night when I placed it in its charging cradle, it said “charging”, but an hour after I slipped it into my pocket, it would bleat at me- “Low battery”, “Feed me" it flashed. That, plus the fact that I could neither send a message nor receive one, convinced my tech-savvy daughter that a new unit was in order.

Bright and early the next day, phone flashing “Feed me”, we trundled off to the phone store. Ariel stopped by the door at a bank of screens and signed us in. “What’s your number?” she asked before filling in a crucial data line marked with an asterisk to indicate it was a crucial data line. I had no idea, having never called myself on my cell. “No problem,”, she whipped out her phone, one of those sleek jobs that open either vertically or horizontally, depending on intended use, and checked my number in her favorites list. We were in the system and shortly a bright young man asked us how he could help us. I explained the problem and he grew solemn. Taking my phone he asked “How old is this?” I had no idea. “Must be four or five years old” he muttered and called over a co-worker. “Have you ever seen one like this before?” he asked, making my phone sound like something Lee used to text message Pickett at Gettysburg just before the big assault. “You need a new battery, but I don’t think we have anything this old in stock. We can special order one from the Nokia factory in Finland or we can give you an upgrade.” He led us over to the display phones, pointing out various features. “GPS, 64 HD rez, 15mega-whoozies, voice recognition artificial intelligence, recyclable nuclear power, heads-up graphics display, aps for choosing restaurants, hailing cabs, and leveling paintings on the wall, as well as time warp capabilities. Whadya think?”

“I’m just looking for something I can call with and text.” I said, feeling a bit like Fred Flintstone in a Jetsons cartoon. “No problem,” came the answer, “We’ve got just the thing.” He steered me to a black Samsung; menu button, contacts button, no frills. Fine. Deal done, I took a good look at my new hand-held communications device. Wait. This is a phone for an old person, maybe a preschooler. Nice big number buttons. A dedicated 911 button in case I fall and can’t get up, an ICE button to be used for emergency contacts in case I fall and can’t get up and forget that 911 is an emergency button, and a Health Info button in case I fall and not only can I not get up but forget how to call for help. Even the menu has a line in big red letters for emergency contacts. This is a phone for a true hypochondriac, or maybe something to use while digging out of the steaming wreckage from the latest hurricane or earthquake. This is not your father’s Oldsmobile—wait, it’s your grandfather’s Oldsmobile. Huh. Oh well, as long as it gets me from here to there.

Civilization

2009-03-21T15:01:00.001-07:00

I felt more than heard the screeching brakes. Every cell in my body went into a fetal crouch as the voice in my head screamed (not for the first time that weekend) “You’re going to die. You’re going to be mashed flat by a Citroen taxi cab in the middle of Paris.”

I had arrived upon the point of messy death in a somewhat round-about manner. My traveling companion Jeff and I had arrived a few hours earlier on an Air France flight from Khartoum, Sudan, with a stop for refueling in Cairo, and had struggled with bureaucracy every foot of the way. As we went through what passed for airport security in Khartoum airport, one of the security people took exception to my Swiss army knife, and confiscated it. He handed me a hand-written note in Arabic with the instructions to give it to the pilot when we arrived in Paris. “Fine”, I thought—I understood that a knife, albeit one with a three-inch blade, could pose a risk, but what about the nine-millimeter pistol the fellow behind me turned over and was given back after the security person ensured that the clip was fully loaded?

At least the Air France A10 Air Bus was roomy and comfortable, unlike the Air Sudan 727 we had ridden from Port Sudan to the capitol. We made the mistake of leaving just before the start of Ramadan, the holy month when everyone travels to be with family or just someplace else. To say the flight was overbooked was a bad joke. It reminded me of seventh graders on a school bus. People were standing in the aisles. Carry-ons filled the rest of the floor space. No in-flight snacks here--the flight attendants had sold their own seats, and presumably all the bags of peanuts as well. The aircraft was easily carrying half-again as many passengers as rated. “Oh Christ,” I remember thinking as the overloaded jet charged down the runway, “We’re all going to die in a third-world country, and no one will even bother to look for us.” The 727 clawed its way into the air, delivering us to Khartoum and to a real airline.

As we followed the Nile north,I saw Lake Nasser and Abu Simel, a toy in the Sahara as we passed. We banked over Giza and everyone rushed to the left side of the aircraft to see the Pyramids. Luckily, the pilot compensated for the sudden weight shift and effected a smooth landing in Cairo for refueling.

Cairo to Paris was uneventful. We were fed real food from real plates with real tableware embossed with the Air France logo and we weren’t even first class. We passed over Naples and its attendant volcano, Vesuvius. From the air, the Bay of Naples is nearly circular. Sort of like photos of volcanic calderas. Gives you pause; you can almost hear the ticking. Once we were on the ground, I waited to leave the plane and handed the pilot the receipt for my knife. Surprise, he had no idea what it was. I guess the security guy in Khartoum needed a Swiss Army knife. I hope he cut himself.

Paris. City of Lights, center of civilization and Western culture, and a major reverse culture shock. After three months in the bush, electricity and traffic were somehow out of focus. No herds of camels in the streets, no loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer. We cruised the line of taxis outside the terminal building at Charles de Gaulle Airport looking for someone who spoke English. I had assumed that Jeff, who gave off a Humphrey Bogartesque world weary air, spoke French--Hell, he even smoked Galois cigarettes. “Not a word”, he said, leaving me to dredge up mostly forgotten high school lessons. “Parle-vous Ainglais?” I asked the first cabbie in line. He narrowed his eyes under his beret, shifted his cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other, and said “Non”—unspoken was the tagline, “and I spit on you for asking, American pig-dog.” We dragged our duffel bags down the line and finally found a younger fellow who said “But of course”. I was ready to gag on clichés, but we loaded up and piled in. I told the cabbie we needed a cheap place for our one night layover in his wonderful city. He took us through the city, showing off the sights, Notre Dame, Sacre Cour, until we arrived at a small building within sight of the Arc de Triumph. “This is a pension run by my cousin” he told us. “He will take care of you.” Dog-tired we stumbled into the lobby and signed in. The cabby’s cousin directed us to a local bistro and off we went, searching for real French food and wine.

Our search led us down the Camps d’Elese and being American, we found an English bar. The Winston Churchill Pub promised distilled spirits and, most importantly, beer. We stopped for a round, and resumed our search for French food. The bartender, from Liverpool, told us of a bistro not far off that “had the best bleedin’ steak au poive in France, mate.”

We crossed a wide street, hurrying on the unfamiliar lights cycle, when I was stopped dead in my tracks. Walking toward me was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Forget that I had spent the past three months in the bush, forget that I was terminally jet lagged and completely bushed, and forget that I had just consumed two excellent Scotch wiskys on an empty stomach. She was lovely. Tall, blonde, short dress, with legs reaching all the way to the ground, she walked oblivious to the stares and sidelong glances from the people around her. Me, I was dumbstruck, gob smacked. I stood in the middle of the street and watched her pass, my cigarette falling from my mouth open in frank astonishment and ignorance of the changing stop light and the onrushing traffic.

I looked down to see a chrome bumper inches from my knees. It must have actually touched the fabric of my jeans before rocking back to rest. A steady stream of what must have been, judging from the volume and passion involved, the most vile of Gallic curses penetrated into my shell-shocked brain. The cabbie was leaning out the driver-side window, shaking a fist and shouting. Flecks of saliva were floating in the street lights. I looked down again and at his purple face distorted with rage. I shrugged. “Hey,” I yelled back, “I’m American.” Almost instantly the invective stopped. The driver gave a small smile as if to say “oh, American, you’re supposed to be stupid No problem, mon ami.” I hurried across the street and rejoined Jeff who had missed the whole drama while watching the girl recede down the crowed sidewalk.

We spent the entire rest of the night wandering around Paris, savoring its sights, sounds, smells and music. We walked by the floodlit Arc d’Triumph, the Eiffel Tower white lights up its entire length. We strolled wide boulevards; still packed at 3AM, and lurked down dark side streets where we were told to move on by armed guards (“just keep walking”). When we at last got back to our pension, stumbling from Absinthe and exhaustion, it was only to gather our stuff and head for the airport and home.

Jeff left the company soon after. At his farewell lunch, he told me “I’m sure both of us had a list of fifty other people we would rather have been there with, but it was fun.” “Yeah”, I replied, “we’ll always have Paris.”

Observations

2009-03-08T08:55:00.001-07:00

We hit meteorological spring earlier this week. Today the thermometer topped out at 51º but snow hides in hollows and on north facing slopes. Squirrels are starting their courtship chases spiraling around tree trunks. Crows still hold to their winter conclaves, festooning bare branches like macabre ornaments on the Adams family’s Christmas tree.

In my front yard, two snow drops and a lone brave crocus have pushed their way through the damp soil to proclaim the glaciers’ retreat. It’s as if the pendulum of the seasons is poised at the top of the upswing, in that moment when time stops, before the earth draws breath and real spring can start.

This is crunch time for most animals. The bounties of autumn are exhausted and the promise of spring stays just that. The Jamestown settlers called late winter/early spring the “starving time”, raiding Indian food caches and resorting to cannibalism for survival. New England Pilgrims suffered appalling losses before spring supply ships could arrive.

My backyard feeders are depleting at twice their usual rate. The skeleton crew of year-round birds is beginning to prepare for breeding and the species that winter here are trying to put on weight for the long trip north. I am seeing juncos for the first time this year and goldfinches have shown up as well. Goldfinches are becoming more yellow by the day as their drab winter plumage wears away. Males are calling, setting up territories and then trying to defend them against all comers. House finches, gather in rows at the feeder, the males glowing red with breeding passions. Social birds, house finches do not establish territories—females go with the reddest males.

We have had five species of woodpeckers coming to our feeders. They hang around at the suet cage, waiting their turn to gorge on the calorie-rich fat. Four wait—they all give way when the local pair of pileateds deigns to make an appearance. To their lordship’s credit, they usually work the backyard trees, leaving my humble offerings to the peasants. A pileated can bang its way through a moderate sized branch in a few minutes using its barbed harpoon-like tongue to lap up insects from their wood tunnels.

The silver maple in the corner of my yard is in flower, pumping out pollen to the breeze, and the red maple nearby is nearly ready to go. Elms downtown are yellowing windows and puddles with copious pollen. The catkins on the river birch at the end of the street are swelling and will be streaming pollen by the end of the week.

Yellow perch are spawning in tidal creeks, long ribbons of eggs tangling on submerged branches. Shad roe from the Carolinas in the grocery store, the gentleman manning the fish counter patiently answering the same questions he’s heard a hundred times already in the last week. “Sauté them with bacon and don’t overcook.” The fish are protected in the Chesapeake and no local roe is available when the Potomac shad make their spawning runs. Shad season has been pushed forward in the mid-Atlantic.

Skunk cabbage is poking out of wet places, luring early flying flies to the flowers with their perfumes of rotting meat. Skunk cabbage can generate metabolic heat, melting their way through snow and ice, providing a warm place for pollinators to rest and lay eggs. It’s all sham, though. The heat fades with the flowers and the larval flies starve in the depths of the flower. The dime-sized harbinger of spring at least provides nectar for the solitary bees who visit its flower clusters, arranged like parabolic reflectors and tracking the sun through the day. Most of the spring wildflowers due in the next month have the same general shape and behavior.

Spring is peeking in the windows, getting its foot in the door. Each species, plant and animal, runs on its own calendar. For some, it is still the dead of winter, for others, it’s time to get going. Most, however, are hitting the snooze button and turning over for a quick last doze.

Scorps and Smuggled Hootch

2009-02-03T17:41:00.000-08:00

So there I was, three and a half sheets to the wind, standing so close to the middle of nowhere that we were in the same area code, in the dark, with it about to become much darker. I was holding a well and truly ticked off four-inch long scorpion in my right hand in the only way that a primate with opposable thumbs can hold one safely. And on top of everything else, I had to pee. Badly.

I can hear the questions now. “Was it poisonous?” All scorpions are poisonous-that’s how they work. Was it deadly? The rule of thumb is the smaller the animal, the more toxic the venom. This one was nearly the length of my hand, so by the rule of thumb, it probably wasn’t deadly to humans. There was only one way to run the experiment and I really didn’t want to play, having grown attached to my thumb.

“How did you get yourself into this predicament?” I was in eastern Sudan, north of the Tropic of Cancer, just south of true desert, on an AID-financed expedition to control desert locusts. The locusts were late that year, so the team went to Plan B, studying the other animals in the area and determining what alternatives to DDT were least harmful to them. We also collected specimens from this seldom visited part of the world for friends and acquaintances at the Smithsonian.

“No, how did you get yourself into a situation from a bad movie or a funny cartoon?” We had a generator; the only electricity for a hundred miles in any direction. We had a TV and a VCR. We had two tapes. Two really bad movies; they were the only ones the US embassy in Khartoum was willing to part with and I really don’t remember either one. Suffice it to say, we had watched them both dozens of times just to pass the time between sunset and 10 pm when the generator kicked off. We had pooled our carefully hoarded snacks-a bag of mostly crushed chips, a few dented granola bars, a couple of squares of half-melted chocolate, and declared a movie night (again). What made this night special, were the two bottles of smuggled Ethiopian gin supplied by Paul, our camp manager, an ex Foreign Legion paratrooper. He bought them from gun runners supplying AK-47s and grenade launchers to Eritrean rebels about 50 kilometers south. At night we could hear their trucks off in the distance, a faint glow of masked headlights reflecting off the sand from miles away. Paul had picked up a case of Asmara gin from a smuggler headed north for another load of munitions. He said it was purely medicinal and claimed that, as a chronic malaria sufferer, the only cure for an attack was to get as drunk as possible, as quick as possible, for as long as possible. I don’t know if it helped the malaria any but it helped him pass the time.

The movies tracked, the gin was passed around and around and around. We timed the party to break up with ten minutes to spare before lights out. Lights out was the real deal. When the generator shut down, the entire camp went black. You could, if you had enough time for your eyes to adjust, make it to the latrine by starlight. The shack was black and white stripped so as to stand out in the darkness.

With unsteady steps and sloshing bladder, I wove my way toward the aforementioned convenience when a movement in the shadows at my feet caught my eye. “Gerbil” I thought and made a barehanded grab. This is not as crazy as it may sound—biologists are always grabbing specimens. Nets are usually just an ornament. The great Charles Darwin himself, collecting beetles saw a rare specimen while holding a beetle in each hand. He popped the left hand beetle in his mouth and grabbed, securing all three.

Of course it helps to make a good identification of what ever it is you are snatching at. An entomologist friend once grabbed a red velvet ant. Red velvet ants are wingless wasps, covered in red and black striped fur. Anything red or orange is warning you not to mess with it. Discretion is called for if not demanded. Heed the warning and you both walk away unscathed. Ignore it at your peril. My friend grabbed anyway and was stung twice before he could register what he had. His hand swelled to catcher’s mitt proportions and he only made it through the night with liberal applications of Benadryl and scotch.

I grabbed at the gerbil with my right hand. Small mammals are easy to grab. The worst they can do is bite. OK, so you get a mouse bite. Big deal; that’s the worst it can do on its way to the big museum in the sky. As soon as my hand closed on it, the still thinking part of my brain fired off a message: “Not a gerbil”. The next message, delivered, postage due, was: “Something bad.” They say God looks after fools and drunks and that night I was both. Pure blind dumb luck had me holding the scorpion, for that’s what my brain finally decided it was, just inside the last segment of the tail. That last segment was the one with the nuclear warhead. The scorpion wiggled in my grasp like an enraged miniature lobster, pinching me with its claws. Part of my thinking processes were going: “What a cool animal” other, more rational, parts were going: “Now what? You can’t drop it or it will nail you as soon as you let go. There is no doctor within a hundred miles and no hospital until you get to civilization. Oh, and by the way, the lights are going out any minute.”

I half ran half staggered back to the tent where the TV and gin were. My brain, helpful as ever, was chanting a mantra: “Don’t pass out, don’t throw up. Don’t pass out, don’t throw up.” I found an empty pint jar and a half full bottle. Using my teeth, I unscrewed the cap and poured the gin into the jar. I eased the scorpion, head first, into the gin and held it until it quit moving. As the lights cut out, I capped the jar, took a swing from the bottle, and walked with exaggerated care in the dark back to my tent and flopped down on my cot, hoping I wouldn’t dream. I’m sure that somewhere, Darwin was laughing.

Acquired Tastes

2009-01-24T12:45:00.000-08:00

Like single-malt Scotch or old Japanese samurai movies, winter beaches are an acquired taste. Gone are the miles-long traffic backups, the endless quest for a parking spot, and the crowds. I have walked beaches in February where I was the only human in sight, my footprints the only tracks in the sand. Even the smell changes—summer beaches smell of sun warmed creosote and cocoa butter, the winter beach just has a tang of salt.

Everything—color, shape, lighting—is different. The sand, lacking the sun’s summer heat to bake out the moisture, goes from that neutral beige favored by home decorators to a cold gray. Footprints last days, even weeks in the damp and pockets of frost and sea ice linger in the hollows. This would be a great time to build magnificent sand castles if you could keep any feeling in your fingers. The major change to the winter beach is the cold. A damp chill that penetrates the marrow of your bones, combined with the constant wind straight from the Pole, stings then numbs any exposed skin. You are at the lowest part of the continent and the cold runs downhill like water. Bundle up.

Thin winter light and sharp shadows give a painterly cast to the landscape, while the sea itself is a deeper, darker color. Waves, depending on the recent weather, either hiss up the slope in slides of foam and ice, or drop all at once like a collapsing wall. Surfers are few and far between. The beach shape turns from a long easy glide to the water’s edge into a double slope with a three-foot berm separating the upper beach from the lower. Skeletons of shipwrecks, keel and ribs poke out the sand on the upper beach. When the wind is right and nobody else is about to distract you, snatches of voices, just below hearing threshold, go through your brain. Old beach combers say certain beaches are haunted; maybe so.

Birding winter beaches has its points. While the number of familiar species is down, no pelicans, terns, or laughing gulls, the beach holds surprises. Razorbills, murres, and loons, birds of the Arctic, sport in the wave troughs, while rafts of snow geese newly arrived from Greenland bob just outside the breakers.

A few familiar birds eke out winter sustenance along the tide line. Herring gulls, some possibly remembering summer handouts, sidle up like hopeful beggars or stand wrapped in their feathers, one baleful eye following you. Sanderlings, birds who spent their summer in the high Arctic, are here all year, running like windup toys along the edge of the sea foam. A circumpolar species, they are probably the best traveled bird on the planet. Sanderlings spread out on winter beaches from Cape Cod to Tierra del Fuego on the Atlantic and from Korea to Australia on the Pacific.

I have been visiting winter beaches all my adult life. I always find something new, something different. A plethora of purple starfish along the top of the lower beach, cast up by last night’s high tide, gone the next day and replaced by an equal number of moon snail shells. Sometimes, purely by chance if you happen to be looking out to sea at the right time, the flukes of a sounding whale, probably a humpback. And once, a young harbor seal, with heart shaped nose and soulful puppy dog eyes, perched on a rock at the jetty. Fins tucked in, dozing in the watery light, waiting for the tide to turn and fish to catch.

Guilty Pleasures

2008-12-27T11:21:00.000-08:00

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.

The Wreaths of Old Town

2008-12-11T11:03:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

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.”

White Cats for Obama

2008-12-11T08:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Woodstock Weekend

2008-10-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Arsters

2008-10-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Renaissance Leiderhosen

2008-10-05T13:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Some Like It Hot

2008-09-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Moving Daze

2008-09-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Painted Ponies

2008-08-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

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.

Extinct Technologies

2008-07-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

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.

Old Birds

2008-07-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Humbirds

2008-07-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Flotsam

2008-05-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Stone Monsters

2008-05-24T11:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Really Old Glory

2008-04-29T19:22:00.001-07:00

The world is full of things that make you wonder “how the hell did they come up with that?” For example; who first came up with: “You know, I’ll bet that tarantula-looking thing we just pulled out of the water would taste good if we steamed it with Old Bay and figured out how to take it apart; and maybe dipped the edible bits in some melted butter, too.”

Dye stuffs fall into this category. Royal purple was produced in ancient times by gathering tons of Murex snails from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and letting them rot in huge vats. The resultant goo yielded a deep purple dye which turned indigo in the presence of sunlight (ultraviolet radiation). Ancient travel writers told of being able to smell the dye-producing city of Sidon from far at sea on shipboard while Sidon was still below the horizon.

I was recently rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and was intrigued by the chapter on domesticated animals. Diamond says that domesticated species share several characteristics including social behavior (humans can take over the top spot in the pecking order) and docility.

These criteria apply to mammals (except maybe cats) and explains why the ancient Egyptians, who went on a domestication binge, failed to domesticate the hyena or the hippo (although the why in this equation seems to be lost in the dim mists of history). Of the three species of domesticated insects, only one, the honeybee fills Diamond’s condition of sociality. Of the other two, silkworms are docile but most assuredly non-social, and the other, the cochineal scale, seems social only because it is sedentary and almost entirely females. Cochineal is a small scale insect feeding exclusively on prickly pear and closely related cacti.

Cochineal, though now no longer produced industrially, was at one time, the major source of red/scarlet dye in the world. Somewhere way back when, an unremembered Mesoamerican hunter-gatherer found red stains on his or her clothes after harvesting cactus fruits and probably thought: “You know, if we could produce this stuff in industrial quantities, we could revolutionize the textile industry”. Originally raised throughout the drier parts of Central America, cochineal was the source of scarlet dye, the color of Aztec royalty. It was farmed like any other livestock. Scale rancheros tended the prickly pear cacti and the herds of bugs, to the point of building small straw “barns” to keep the rains from dislodging the insects. Cortez brought back cochineal scales as part of the spoils from the conquest of Mexico—gold, silver, corn, chili, bugs.

The Spanish made cochineal production a state monopoly and a state secret, much the same as China had tried to do with silkworms centuries earlier and Venetians did with glass. As with the Chinese experiment, it didn’t work for the Spanish. Prickly pear with its attendant cochineal scales was smuggled out of Mexico and introduced into Europe, to desert islands such as the Azores and the Canaries, and as far afield as the Galapagos and Australia. Fortunes were made on the dye, which some early chemist discovered could be made colorfast with the addition of tin salts.

The English and Dutch, in particular, went crazy over scarlet. Painters like Ruebens used it with abandon (close examination of pre-Columbian renaissance paintings reveals no bright reds) replacing the red-brown kermes dyes (made from European bugs) on their palettes as soon as they could lay hands on the stuff. The uniform tunics of British soldiers (redcoats) were dyed scarlet with cochineal dye as were eight of the fifteen broad stripes on the original Star-Spangled Banner.

Following the invention of coal tar aniline dyes in the late 18th century, the cochineal industry collapsed, leaving acres of untended prickly pear in its wake. The insects, which are as domesticated as chickens, mostly perished from their island homes, leaving the cactus to run riot without anything to eat it. Prickly pear cactus has become a noxious weed wherever it was planted outside its original range.

Today, cochineal has come full circle; it is produced in small amounts in Peru and Central America and is exported as safe, USDA-approved food coloring. Cochineal red is a replacement for coal tar dye Red 40 which comes from petroleum. You may fondly remember coal tar dye Red 40 as what gave bottled maraschino cherries their startling red color. Nowdays, the red comes from bugs; kind of puts you off that next banana split, doesn’t it?

For Kay...

2008-04-29T19:07:00.000-07:00

This scene is pretty generic; we’ve seen it scores of times—in Dr. No, an early James Bond movie, one of the evil Doctor’s henchmen releases a Mexican redknee tarantula on the slumbering Bond’s bed. Cue ominous music as the hairy monster creeps ever so slowly up towards the blissful dreaming victim. Bond awakens in the (ta-da!) nick of time, flings back the covers, and mashes the hapless spider with several well-aimed whacks from his elegant, handmade, rich Corinthian leather, Gucci loafer; the music climaxing discordantly with each strike.

Too bad neither the henchman nor Cmdr. Bond was able to stay awake during biology class. They would have learned that Mexican redknee tarantulas, for all their nasty looks, are really quite docile. This despite the fact that Sean Connery insisted upon a pane of glass to separate him (or his stunt double) from the creepy-crawly itself. Due to their size and conspicuous coloration, Mexican redknees are movie stars, also appearing in Raiders of the Lost Ark (in the opening scenes) and as the title role in Tarantula, a late 50’s horror film, wherein a giant mutant redknee develops a taste for pickup trucks.

In the wild, Mexican redknee tarantulas mate in the summer, shortly after the male sheds his exoskeleton for the final time and becomes fully mature, usually by the start of the rainy season (July and August). Mating occurs in or near the female's burrow, where the male uses his pedipalps (front limbs) to transfer sperm to openings on the underside of the female's abdomen. After mating, some females will try to eat the male, although this has never been observed in the wild (usually they just smoke a cigarette and cuddle). The sperm and eggs are stored in the female's body and not deposited until spring. In the spring, the female deposits hundreds of eggs and the sperm onto a silk mat she has made and then fashions into a ball or egg sack. Fertilization takes place in the sack within minutes and the spiderlings hatch in 3 months but remain in the egg sack for 3 more weeks. Once out of the egg sack, they spend 2 weeks in the burrow with mommy before they disperse out into the big wide world on their own. Males mature at about 4 years, females 2 to 3 years later. They are a long-lived species with females reaching 25 to 30 years; longer in captivity. Males only live about a year after maturity. Adult females are sedentary, with permanent borrows, but males wander the country side in search of mates, making them vulnerable to predators. (Sounds familiar.)

A nocturnal ambush hunter, the Mexican redknee tarantula is what ecologists call a “sit and wait” predator, preferring prey (insects, small frogs, small lizards, and mice) to come to it. The tip of each leg is sensitive to smells, tastes, and vibrations, and the spider uses it to detect prey or to avoid predators. The spider holds its prey with its pedipalps (front limbs) and injects it with venom delivered via two hollow fangs. This venom has a double component; a neurotoxin and a toxin which degrades proteins. The neurotoxin paralyzes the prey and the other toxin fraction begins digestion. Once the venom has acted, the tarantula is able to suck up the liquefied proteins and fats of its prey, leaving just a small ball of undigested bits.

The usually docile Mexican redknee tarantula has an unusual defense: when threatened, it flicks hairs off its abdomen with the hind legs. Known as urticating (irritating) hairs, they may cause a skin rash in humans. In rare cases, Mexican redknees may bite, producing results comparable to a wasp sting—there are no known human fatalities from the bite of a redknee. Mexican redknee tarantulas make popular class pets in elementary schools—you can get one from biological supply houses—beats the hell out of a hamster.

Tarantulas are surprisingly delicate—a friend who grew up in the Canal Zone once told me about stepping on one in the bathroom—“it felt like stepping on a banana”. I leave the rest to your imagination. Books on keeping redknees as pets mention that they are terrified of heights and can die from falling only a foot or two onto a hard surface.

Unless he was planning on tickling 007 to death, the henchman should have chosen something a bit more lethal; perhaps the rabbit from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Bond, for his part, should have suavely thanked the evil Doctor for the new pet and mentioned that he was planning on donating it to the local orphan’s home as a cute and cuddly companion animal. But alas, when he threw back the covers, dashing the spider to the floor, the fall probably killed the poor creature outright and James didn’t need to get spider guts all over his hand-tooled, pabulum-fed, kidskin bedroom slipper, with the expensive tassels on the top. “Hello, front desk? Could you send someone to clean up a large squished spider? Oh, and maybe polish my shoes?”

Backyard Stuff

2008-04-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

Friday night, spring finally came home. I was on my back deck shortly after dusk, enjoying the first rain-free evening in a week. The spring peepers were calling up a storm from down the road. Next door, the grey tree frogs were in fine voice, building to a crescendo in the unused swimming pool with the flooded liner. The perfume of lilacs and a half-dozen other flowers spiced the evening air. I watched a big brown bat hawking for insects over the roof line. The bat had just finished a wing-over Immelman turn to grab a particularly tasty morsel when movement caught my eye on the silver maple in the corner of the yard. Glancing over, I saw a quick shadow flit from the maple to the old tulip poplar at the other end of the yard and heard the scrabble of tiny claws on bark. A small silhouette scampered up the trunk and launched into the air, for the next tree down the block. A flying squirrel; I always knew they were here but that was my first yard sighting. All we need now are a few exotic migrants from the Amazon and spring will be official.

A Pirate Looks at 300

2008-03-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

Old Dampier, a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Everybody loves pirates, or at least the romantic notion of pirates. In reality, pirates, all the way back to Antiquity, were universally reviled as the worst sort of sea scum--to be exterminated without mercy. Julius Caesar was captured and ransomed by pirates as a young man. Years later, he returned to their lair and executed the lot. To this day Venetians celebrate the Feast of the Seven Virgins, commemorating the victory of the Cabinetmakers Guild in 1433 over sea rovers from Trieste who abducted a group of young brides and their dowries. The Cabinetmakers hunted the pirates down, killed them all, and retrieved the dowries (no mention is made of the erstwhile brides). My dad, in researching family history, found Triestini pirates (hopefully not hanging) on several branches of the Giraldi family tree. One presumes they called in sick for the Venetian job.

William Dampier always took pains to call himself a privateer. There was often a thin line between the two; privateers were hired men o’ war, with a warrant from the king or colonial governor to harass the enemy (usually the Spanish and later, the French). Pirates were out-and-out brigands, preying on any ship they happened across, regardless of nationality, including their own—that’s what got Blackbeard in trouble.

Born in 1651 and soon orphaned, Dampier received a good basic education in mathematics and literature, including Latin. With bleak prospects ashore, he shipped out as a sailor in the Royal Navy, learning navigation and gunnery. While still in his teens, he managed a plantation in Jamaica and worked as a logwood cutter in Yucatan. Logwood was used for textile dyes and made many a man wealthy; but not Dampier. He shipped out once again from Jamaica as mate on a merchant vessel and was the last to leave when the entire crew jumped ship in the Bay of Campeche, joining a privateer off to harass the Spanish and gather plunder in the bargain. Dampier was the first person to circumnavigate the world three times and was a keen observer of exotic places, people, and events. Unique among his fellows, he kept a journal of his voyages and published them upon each return to England.

I mentioned him to Pat around Christmas time, hinting for a copy of A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, a recent biography of the old scoundrel. Instead she found me a Dover reprint of his Third Voyage Around the World in 1692. This is infinitely superior to any biography; Dampier’s voice comes through, unfiltered, across 300 years. The Dover edition keeps the syntax and spelling of the original; Dampier talks about Indian canoas (canoes) and guanoes (iguanas). His matter-of-fact descriptions of breadfruit, bananas, and “avogado pears” were their first introductions to the English-speaking world. Dampier sailed the West Indies as well as the East Indies and cruised the Galapagos Islands, writing extensively about the giant tortoises and marine iguanas he encountered. He ends each description of an exotic plant or animal with a comment on its culinary qualities. “Most sweet and wholesome a meat” when describing what is today an endangered species makes me cringe a bit, but perhaps we shouldn’t judge too harshly. These fellows were living on the edge and in one chapter, Dampier describes his timely acquisition of several sea turtles for provisions, thereby quelling an incipient mutiny. Had he been unsuccessful, he writes, the starving crew would have eaten the ship’s officers, including him.

Dampier always kept his journals with him, tucking them into a hollowed-out bamboo sealed with wax, when he was ashore trekking across the isthmus of Darien or hobnobbing with the locals on Guam or the Philippines. Dampier was the first Englishman to explore and write about Australia (New Holland). He gave the English language the word “typhoon” and, having survived a West Indian hurricane, was the first to figure out that these storms are giant whirlwinds.

The narrative of his first voyage was a huge best seller and brought him to the attention of Samuel Peppys and the Royal Society. An adventure-hungry public snapped up his books as soon as they were printed and clamored for more. Dampier became something of a cottage industry—anyone having any vague association with him published books of their travels under his “authorship” or just mentioned his name (“Sailed with Dampier against the Spanish”) in the title.

Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, calls him “Cousin Dampier” in the first chapter and uses Dampier’s voyage to Australia as the model for the Land of the Talking Horses in Gulliver’s fourth voyage. Daniel Defoe modeled Robinson Crusoe on Alexander Selkirk, the sailing master of a ship sailing in company with one captained by Dampier. Selkirk had grave doubts about the seaworthiness of the Cinque Ports, and asked to be put ashore. He was marooned for four years until Dampier, on his next round-the-world voyage and serving as navigator under another captain, remembered to stop and pick him up. (It turns out that Selkirk was correct in his assessment; the Cinque Ports sailed off, never to be seen again.) Defoe also borrowed from Dampier’s account of a “Moskito Indian” picked up from another island where he was five years marooned. Samuel Taylor Coleridge based the nautical bits of his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as well as the description of the albatross, on Dampier’s observations. A century after their publication, Captain James Cook used Dampier’s books as a pilot’s guide for anchorages and prevailing currents during his own historic voyages throughout the Pacific. A half-century after Cook, Charles Darwin read Dampier for information on the natural history of South America and the Galapagos Islands. Dampier’s observations of prevailing winds in the South Seas were included the British Admiralty’s “Sailing Instructions” until the 1930 edition.

Dampier was the first modern travel writer, giving first-hand accounts of his experiences and carefully pointing out any hearsay as such. Writer, traveler, navigator, hydrographer, naturalist, and buccaneer—how cool is that.

Fairydiddles

2008-03-02T19:07:00.000-08:00

It’s dark, it’s cold, and the wind is howling through the trees like a choir of banshees. I’m standing with feet slowly going numb, on the back porch of the Long Branch Nature Center in deepest darkest suburban Arlington, Virginia, waiting on the appearance of wood sprites.

Although they are real creatures, as serious about making a living as any Internet tycoon, fairydiddles or flying squirrels have contributed to enough ghost lore in North America to qualify as semi-mythical. Readily entering houses, flying squirrels get into small spaces in search of food. Attics are a favorite haunt. Stories about spinning wheels turning without human assistance may be laid at the furry feet of these wee beasties who like nothing better than an exercise wheel, no matter what the original purpose.

About a third the size of their more familiar cousins, flying squirrels come out about an hour after dusk. They are actually more common in the mid Atlantic than grey squirrels, their bigger cousins. Being small, quick, and above all, nocturnal, they are usually seen, if at all, as a pale flash in the night woods or a dark shape against a full moon. Of the fifteen or so species world-wide (mostly in Asia including the four-foot long woolly flying squirrel), we have two; the southern and northern species. Northern flying squirrels are found in the mid Atlantic in the mountains in pockets of boreal forest left over from the glacial days and stranded on mountain tops like Dolly Sods in West Virginia. Their southern kin are everywhere else.

Flying squirrels rely mostly on nuts as winter food. Since they have small mouths and can’t stuff their cheeks like chipmunks; they must gnaw a hole in the nut to be able to grasp it while they scamper and fly. They also have a unique way of dining. Grey squirrels chew an acorn to bits while eating it; you find a pile of shell fragments. Mice leave a jagged edge as they gnaw through the shell, bisecting it like you would a soft-boiled egg. Flying squirrels will chew a round hole in the nut and extract the meat. The nut shell looks like an olive minus the pimento. While they will eat peanuts (everything is attracted to peanuts from mice to grizzly bears), flying squirrels prefer hickory nuts and hazelnuts are at the top of their culinary chart. Food not eaten on the spot is cached in scatter hordes, a few nuts here a few there, in hidden locations throughout the forest canopy. In spring and summer, flying squirrels become ravenous carnivores, feeding on large insects like grasshoppers, katydids, and moth larvae and adults. They will eat bird eggs and nestlings and the young of other squirrels, including those of their own species.

Until the babies are about three weeks old, their mothers cannot tell them from other baby flying squirrels and will care for and adopt anything cute and cuddly that they happen across. Researchers at VA Tech discovered this when a family of flying squirrels moved out of their damaged tree hole nest. The mother took a baby in her mouth and sailed off to new digs and came back for the next. The researchers would add a new baby to the nest every time she left. Twenty or so babies later, they came to the conclusion that: a) flying squirrels can’t tell their own babies from others, and b) flying squirrels can’t count.

Not only are they lacking in mathematical skills, flying squirrels can’t really fly, either. Among the mammals, only bats are capable of true powered, flap-your-wings to get where you are going flight. Flying squirrels, however, are champion gliders. They possess a specialized flap of skin, the patagium, stretching from the front legs to the back legs. This flap gives them an enormous (relative to their size) area to act as an air foil. The furry tail spreads out flat for additional airfoil area. Contrary to belief, the tail is not a rudder—flying squirrels steer by swooping and banking, much like a paper airplane. When they get to the target, they use their momentum to scoot 180 degrees to the opposite side of the tree trunk in a singe movement. This disappearing act is an anti-owl maneuver--owls are the flying squirrels’ major predator but owls must learn to counter the flip-around-the-trunk move by flying past and snatching backwards with their talons as they sweep by. In some areas where the owls have figured this move out, flying squirrels numbers are kept low. In areas with less adept owls, flying squirrel populations boom.

Flying squirrels will sometimes crash-land. They have extremely long whiskers which they point forward as they glide. The whiskers act as an early warning system; if they touch a surface first, indicating an incipient crash, the squirrel is quick enough to adjust and land more or less correctly. Flying squirrels are very noisy little beasts; they chatter constantly, even in the air. These vocalizations are so high-pitched as to be inaudible to adult people, and it was once thought that they served as a form of echo location. Up stepped our friends from VA Tech once again with another experiment. They set up a maze and let flying squirrels traverse it in low light conditions. With their outsized eyes exquisitely adapted to dim light, the squirrels had no problems navigating the maze to the reward (you guessed it, peanut butter). When the lights were fully off, leaving the maze in complete darkness, the squirrels crashed into the walls with happy abandon. The conclusion--flying squirrels don’t echo locate (at least not well) although they are very chatty.

A pale flash in the dark and the scrabbling of small claws on bark announces the arrival to the bait of the first customer of the evening. As if by magic, a small face appears on top of the squirrel roosting box, grabs a peanut, and vanishes. The flying squirrel gnaws a small hole in the nut shell to carry it away. I can hear rapid munching noises from the other side of the trunk, moving higher up into the canopy. Flying squirrels need at least a foot of elevation for every two feet they soar. The squirrel climbs to the top of the old oak and launches; we follow the flight with the beams of our flashlights, watching it hit the air brakes and flip upwards for landing on a hickory down the valley. A flip of the tail and the fairydiddle is on the far side of the tree and gone to hide the peanut for future meals.

Snows Fall

2008-02-21T19:02:00.000-08:00

Folks on the Delmarva Peninsula have a delightful term for the seemingly out-of-nowhere arrival of tundra swans each autumn. They call it ‘swan fall’. Arriving from their breeding grounds in the upper reaches of the western Arctic, swans stage every December in the Dakotas and Lower Canada. They wait for the first strong Northwesterly winds and ride them all the way to the Atlantic coast. Overnight, baylets and creeks of the Chesapeake are graced by their elegant beauty. A line of swans, honking and laughing their way south, backlit by the full moon, is one of the more unforgettable sights you can witness in nature.

Snow geese are poor man’s swans. Slightly smaller than Canada geese, they are gleaming white with black wing tips. Moving in family groups of up to half a dozen, they form large flocks to feed on marsh grasses and newly sprouted winter rye in farm fields. Geese are birds trying to be sheep and will graze happily on anything green.

The snow geese in this area are almost exclusively Greater Snow Geese.(Chen caerulescens atlantica) as opposed to their smaller and more abundant Lesser Snow Goose (Chen caerulescens caerulescens) cousins. Lesser Snow Geese are rarely seen along the Atlantic, but very common along the Mississippi and Central flyways in the heart of North America.

Any flock of snow geese, Greater or Lesser, will contain a proportion of blue geese. Blue geese, with white heads and blue-gray bodies, were once thought to be a closely-related species and given the poetic scientific name Chen hyperborenis, meaning “goose from beyond the north wind”--this was before hardy explorers with an ornithological bent journeyed north to above the Arctic Circle and actually observed the birds on their nesting grounds. Blue and snow geese paired indiscriminately and broods had both snow and blue goslings. Blue geese were determined to be a genetic color variant or morph and the species name was retired. Blues and snows vary in relative proportions, depending on environmental factors favoring one morph or the other. Currently, snows seem to be in the ascendancy, with over 90% of the birds being the white morph.

Snow geese, due to their resemblance to swans, have been protected from hunting (nobody wants to shoot an angel by mistake), and populations, especially in the Lesser Snow Goose, have exploded to the point where over-grazing orgies (called eat-outs) at the nesting grounds are destroying the sparse vegetation, endangering the goose population as well as other species using the same tundra habitat. Increased bag limits and longer seasons for hunters seem causing some leveling-off in the population.

Greater Snow Geese are the farthest-north breeding waterfowl in North America. Summer breeding grounds range north from the Foxe Basin (the northern arm of Hudson Bay) to Elsmere Island, the farthest north of the Canadian Archipelago. Their wintering range is the mid-Atlantic Coast from New Jersey to the Carolinas. While Greater Snow Geese on most of the Delmarva come from Hudson Bay north, birds wintering along salt water come from a separate breeding population in western Greenland. Snow Geese have serrated edges to their bills, allowing for greater traction in pulling plant roots and tubers, their main diet. In the past few years, snow geese have been moving into farm fields to graze on waste grains and green cover crops such as rye or winter wheat. Watching a flock move across a field covered in sprouted rye reminds me of a party, groups come and go, aggregating and breaking up like conversation groups at a cocktail party and there is an overall background conversation buzz of honks and gabbles. Snow geese mate for life; young unattached adults meet and court their new mates on the wintering grounds. Adults who have lost mates do the same. Mixing and mingling on the wintering grounds serves to keep the population genetics mixed up—geese return to the females’ nesting areas. This may be a party in more than just metaphor.

Guest Spot

2008-02-21T18:59:00.000-08:00

The following is an email from Alec. I post it without comment save to say that most of the people on the Titanic did not drown; they succumbed to hypothermia.

Tuesday 11:27 PM February 19, 2008

I would like to fly.

This phrase popped in my head just now, and I decided to write it down. I went swimming in the lake outside my dorm the other night. I asked Tim to borrow his soccer ball to go practice my penalty kicks, and on the way to the field the ball got away from me and fell into the lake. I had some premonition that it would, seeing as how every time I pass the lake I imagine the day I would have to go in it. So it didn’t take twenty seconds for me to take off all my shirts and jump into the freezing water to retrieve the ball. It was after that I remembered why the lake is there. The power plant (a trash incinerator) for JMU is on the top of the hill that ends in this lake. It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to say that some…unwanted things…end up in the lake. When I got out of the water I stayed squatting for a few minutes to drip dry and stay out of the harsh February wind (wind chill on Sunday was in the 20s). I put on my dry shirts, and with my soaking gym shorts and running shoes I went to the soccer field and tried my best to hit the upper 90. I suppose my inspiration of flying could come from this jaunt in a possibly radioactive lake, and I might be feeling the hints of a super power. I would not object to flying, because as I have already said:

I would like to fly.

Highland Light

2008-01-03T18:10:00.000-08:00

Cape Cod is, in geological terms, a recessional moraine - where the glacier paused for breath on its retreat north 15,000 years ago. The terminal moraine - the point marking the ice’s farthest advance south, more or less parallels the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The Cape Cod cliffs (technically a glacial scarp)form a bulwark against the pounding Atlantic. Highland Lighthouse sits atop the highest cliff on the Cape, about 130 feet above the beach. This boost gives the 50-foot tower an overall height above sea level of 180 feet, only about 20 feet shorter than Cape Hatteras Light,the tallest lighthouse in the U.S. Of course, the beach Hatteras is as flat as a board so its tower has to go it alone. Highland is the official name since 1976, locals, including the Park Rangers, still call it Cape Cod light.

Highland Lighthouse sits on the seventh fairway of the Highland Links Golf Course. Locals joke that all they need is the windmill from Eastham to make Highland Links the world’s only full-sized miniature golf course. Windows in the tower, including those up in the lamp room, have been struck and broken by errant golf balls. I wonder how many penalty strokes are invoked for hitting a lighthouse. Talk about hitting the broad side of a barn. Maybe the embarrassment is enough.

Highland light stands on the Cape Cod National Seashore and is jointly operated by the National Park Service and the Friends of Highland Light. The Friends run the light 24/7 as a “private aid to navigation”. Mariners use the light for a day mark, as a GPS reference point, and to tell them when they are near the offshore shoals, reputed to be the most dangerous on the Cape and which have claimed many a vessel over the years. The light is open to the public and manned by volunteer guides who sit up in the lamp room. To get there, you have to negotiate a cast iron winding stairway bolted to the brick walls. I felt like Alice through the Rabbit Hole as the steps became progressively narrower and steeper. There were no fat lighthouse keepers ever on duty at Cape Cod Lighthouse. I overheard one visitor (of a certain age) comment that climbing the stairs was like “re-enacting the birth process.” When you pop out at the top, the view is worth the climb - impressive vistas over the Atlantic and the moorland behind the lighthouse and helpful signs point out landmarks and landfalls (Portugal, due east 2500 miles; Nova Scotia, due north 700 miles).

Highland Lighthouse is one of the oldest in the U.S., dating from 1797, authorized by George Washington himself and is the first lighthouse using a revolving light. The light was originally fueled by lard, then whale oil, then kerosene, and now runs on electricity. The original lighthouse had its feet cut out from under it by constant wave erosion and toppled over the cliff in 1853, to be replaced a year later. The cliff continued to be eaten away by the waves until, in 1996, with only 50 feet to spare, the lighthouse was moved part and parcel 100 yards inland on the same day as Nauset Lighthouse and by the same outfit. Highland Light now sits well back from the cliff edge, waiting for the Atlantic to catch up.

You can walk from the light to the edge of the sheer cliff and gaze out over the ocean. The view is impressive; just you and the most ferocious mosquitoes on the planet. I don’t know how the golfers can stand it; they must bathe in repellent or have skins tough as rhinoceros hide. The Park Service probably sends out a daily cart to gather up the bodies of exsanguinated golfers just to keep the putting greens from getting too cluttered.

Slippers

2007-11-21T17:18:00.000-08:00

“Long Island Sound is slipper shell soup.” said my friend as we walked the beach at Milford, Connecticut. Judging from the windrows of shells cast up by the tide; 90% of which were slipper shells, she looked to be spot-on correct.

The world is full of animals (and a few plants) busy earning a living pretending to be something else. A cheetah is a cat pretending to be a dog; a grey fox is a dog pretending to be a cat. Slipper shells are snails pretending to be oysters. They are also girls pretending to be boys, but more on that later.

The Atlantic slipper shell (Crepidula fornicata) is one of the most common shells you can find on any eastern beach in North America, with a few Eastern white slipper shells (Crepidula plana) tossed in just make things confusing. They get their name from the shelf or deck on the inside, which makes them resemble shapeless slippers that have been under the bed for years. The deck extends about a third the length of the shell and serves as an anchor and protection for the internal organs. The Atlantic slipper shell is arched with brown markings with the tip bent downward to one side at the back. It is up to an inch and a half long. The Eastern white slipper shell is white and flattened, sometimes a little convex or concave, and generally a bit smaller. Eastern white slippers seem to prefer the inside of old shells and the underside of old horseshoe crabs.

Eggs are brooded within the female’s shell until they develop into exact miniatures of the adult. Periodically, females lift their shells and push the juveniles out into the cold briny deep. Newly hatched young sink to the bottom, where they scrape algae from hard substrate until they settle down in the shallows. Like oyster larvae or spat, slipper shell babies set on anything hard; rocks, shells, horseshoe crabs, each other.

Once a juvenile sets, it attaches with its muscular foot and remains in the same place forever. It has functionally become an oyster - immobile and filter feeding on the microscopic algae and detritus suspended in the water. Oysters have had gazillions of years practicing filter feeding and have evolved an elegantly simple way of moving large volumes of water past their gills, which rake out food particles and pass them to the gut. It has been said that prior to the European invasion, the entire volume of Chesapeake Bay went through an oyster every three days or so. Slipper shells aren’t quite so efficient. Descended from grazing snails that use a tongue-like organ called a radula to rasp algae off rocks, they have come up with a whole new way of getting food. Mucus is secreted from specialized organs located in the mantle and just in front of the gills; the gills sweep in plankton and other particles that stick to the mucus, and the creature uses its radula to lick the whole thing up and pass it to the stomach. Not a dinner guest who would cause you to break out the good china, but it works well enough to get by.

A slipper shell needs a hard surface on which to live; they live in an environment where this critical resource is scarce and scattered. When a slipper finds a hard surface to colonize, be it a rock, piling, shell, or horseshoe crab, other young slippers are attracted to it. Slippers tend to form piles, with the oldest and biggest on the bottom, the youngest and smallest on the top. Piles can be up to ten shells deep.

Slippers are sequential hermaphrodites. The oldest and biggest is the functional female, the smallest and youngest is the functional male. The animal in between are in various stages of transition from male to female. Female is the fallback gender. When a young slipper colonizes a new surface, it becomes female and releases a pheromone to prevent others from following suite. When the female on the bottom of a stack dies, the next one up becomes female and begins to produce pheromone and eggs.

Hermaphrodism occurs throughout the animal kingdom wherever you get a sedentary species with scattered resources. The familiar orange and white clown fish is just such a species. Clown fish colonize sea anemones. Anemones possess tentacles armed with stinging cells and can capture and devour prey up to and including clown fish size. Clown fish secrete a mucus which the sea anemone chemically recognizes as itself, and which protects the clown fish. Anemones are relatively scattered along the bottom in reef environments, and are the critical resource required by the clown fish. Clown fish form groups living around and defending individual anemones. The biggest and oldest clown fish is the functional female, the next biggest, the male. The rest wait their turn. If the female dies or falls to a predator, the male becomes female and the next biggest clown fish becomes the male. Everybody moves up a notch in the hierarchy. Try explaining the movie Finding Nemo in that context. When little Nemo’s mommy and siblings are eaten by the big bad barracuda, Nemo’s daddy should become Nemo’s new mommy, and little Nemo becomes the new daddy…things go weird from there.

For all that they are mucus-eating, bisexual hermaphroditic snails pretending to be oysters, slipper shells are the most common shell on any beach from Florida to Maine. They must be doing something right.

Starry Messenger

2007-11-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

The other night, Alec called from school. He has been pretty much incommunicado this semester, so a phone call was an occasion for some concern. Turns out he was headed back to his dorm after Marching Band practice after dark, when he happened upon the school’s astronomy club. He stopped by to chat, and was shown Comet Holmes. The club members pointed out the location for naked eye viewing and gave him a look through a telescope. He was excited and his first impulse, like ET, was to phone home.

Comet Holmes was discovered in November 1892 by (you guessed it) Mr. Edwin Holmes, a British astronomer. His namesake comet orbits the Sun once every seven years at a distance of about 200 million miles (a little over twice Earth's 93-million-mile orbit). It was re-observed in 1899 and 1906 before being lost for nearly six decades. Based on a prediction from calculations, the comet was found again in 1964.

It is a local (relatively speaking) object, reaching its farthest distance from the sun somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Every seven years it makes the round trip, and has been doing so for who knows how long. What makes this comet remarkable; a once in a lifetime viewing as some authorities have dubbed it, is that it periodically “erupts”. Normally a magnitude 17 object, only visible with a pretty powerful scope, it blossoms to a magnitude 3 object every 100 years or so. Magnitude 3 means it becomes as bright any star and is easily visible to the naked eye. On October 20, in less than 24 hours, it brightened by a factor of nearly 400,000 and has now up to a factor of over a million times what it was before the outburst. This is a change "absolutely unprecedented in the annals of cometary astronomy." The comet is now rivaling some of the brighter stars in the sky. When it first cooked off, some observers thought they were witnessing a super nova – an exploding star. A super nova was last seen in the galactic neighborhood around the time of Keppler and Tycho Brahe.

Theories abound as to why Holmes brightened up ("elementary Watson"--sorry, I couldn't resist), but as yet, no one has come up with anything definitive or remotely plausible. For all we know, Scottie just turned on the warp drive engines. What is amazing is that Holmes made its closest approach to the sun last May and came no closer than 190 million miles to the sun. The comet is now moving away from the sun, boggieing its way back to Jupiter. Not exactly a recipe for the typical show-off Great (notice the initial caps) comet. None the less, there it is, in the constellation Perseus.

You can see Holmes' comet almost any time this fall until it fades, when that will be is anybody's guess since we don't know how it got bright to start with. Some astronomers predict it will grow to rival the full moon in size. Go outside and find the constellation Cassiopeia. That’s the one in the North-east sky that looks like the number “3” as drawn by a first grader. (Tilt you head right and it looks like an “M”, tilt left and it’s a “W”). Find the bottom star in the group and look at about 5 o’clock. You will see a bright star in the Perseus, with a somewhat brighter star about 5 o’clock from it. This star is the top of a triangle. The bottom left star of the triangle is Comet Holmes. Look at it carefully and you will notice it is fuzzy around the edges. Binoculars bring this out even better. I set up my 20x spotting scope on the back deck and even with this relatively puny optics, I was able to see a star shining through the fuzz and the hint of a denser area in the center; the nucleus itself. Way cool.

A well-known astronomer once remarked: “Comets are like cats; they both have tails and they both go where they please.” If that is the case, then Comet 17P/Holmes must be of the Manx variety. Unlike some the so-called Great Comets (Haley on most occasions in the past thousand years, or Halle-Bop from a few years ago), Holmes does not possess a tail to speak of. Most comets can be described as “dirty snowballs,” consisting mostly of ice with chunks of rock embedded in. It may be that Holmes, with its seven-year run, has had most of the ice already ablated off the nucleus and is pretty much solid rock…or not. Like cats, comets are pretty much inscrutable.

Nauset

2007-10-13T15:04:00.001-07:00

The light at Nauset is hard by the Town of Eastham. It is more famous than other lighthouses on Cape Cod; the red and white tower is the logo for Cape Cod Potato Chips, sold in every convenience store from Connecticut to Maine.

Pat and I climbed down the wooden steps to the narrow beach where we set up chairs and the all-important umbrella. Pat took off her sandals, dipped a toe in the water, pronounced it freezing, and ensconced herself with cool drinks, and a new mystery novel in the shade of the umbrella to enjoy the beach in her own inimitable fashion. I can’t sit still on a beach and took off back up the stairs to explore the lighthouse and environs.

Cape Cod has always had a problem with its lighthouses. The coastal cliff that (technically a glacial scarp) forms a rampart against the ocean affords a free additional fifty feet or so of elevation at Eastham, but the remorseless Atlantic nibbles away at the cliff base with every wave and every storm, and the edge keeps moving ever westward and closer to the light. Every lighthouse facing the open sea is a replacement--sometimes second or third generation--of a light that went over the lip when its feet were cut out from under it.

The current Nauset lighthouse was built in 1877 as one of the “Chatham Twins”- old postcards show the keeper’s house flanked by identical fifty-foot tall white lighthouses. The right-hand tower was dismantled in 1923 and moved by barge up the coast to the cliffs, where it replaced the last of the “Three Sisters” lights. The Sisters were themselves wooden replacements for the three original brick towers, built in 1838, when the cliff stood about 800 feet further east. The last of the brick sisters slid over in 1892-what's left of the foundations are visible at extreme low tide. The “new” Nauset Lighthouse was operated by the Coast Guard until 1955, when it was sold out of service. The owner donated the light and the grounds to the National Park Service to be a part of Cape Cod National Seashore. That seashore kept moving closer to the base until, by 1996, the cliff edge was only 25 feet from the base of the tower. The light was moved 100 yards inland, waiting for the ocean to catch up with it. Nauset Lighthouse is run by the Nauset Light Preservation Society, who keep up the maintenance and do restoration, operating the light as a “private aid to navigation”. Boaters and fisherfolk use the red and white tower as a day mark and the alternating red and white aerobeacon lights can be seen up to 20 miles at sea.

The day we were there, Nauset Beach had more that its share of surfers, most on long boards, a good number sporting grey in their beards, and all but one in full wetsuits. Long boards handle better than hot dog boards on the small waves sloshing ashore. The waves were smallish but well formed and a surfer usually had the choice of left or right breaks. Long boards give a stable smooth ride and can better take bumps with rocks as well. The beach was littered with rocks from football to chair size; dumped there by the last glacier and eroding out of the cliff face when the glacier retreated (gone back, as the locals say, for more rocks). A pair of surfers were standing up on wide Hawaiian-style paddle boards, looking like gondoliers in wetsuits with their long single oar, and were catching more curls than most.

When I was fifteen or so, I happened upon a book entitled The Outermost House by Henry Beston. I still have it; pages yellowed and corners folded, the 95 cent price tag still in the corner. Beston, a burnt-out magazine editor and bon vivant built a two-room vacation shack on the dunes at Nauset Beach and found himself unable to leave one September. Beston spent a year on Nauset Beach, recording his experiences and thoughts in longhand on a kitchen table. He wrote of storms and shipwrecks, bird migrations and fishermen. His few visitors were mostly Coast Guardsmen from the local station or the lighthouse. Beston always offered them coffee, or something a bit stronger, on winter nights. I can still remember long quotes from the book, some passages, like long-ago memorized poetry stick in my mind. It would have been nice to have visited the house, which was dedicated as a "National Literary Landmark" in 1964 by the then Secretary of the Interior, but the house was demolished by a howling Northeaster (the lady in the local bookstore called it hurricane)in 1978. The foundation and the commemorative plaque are gone as well, the beach and dunes changed, the cliffs pushed back by the constant waves and the patient sea.

Private Viewing

2007-10-12T18:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel as if I’m the only one around paying attention. I was walking around dusk in Old Town Alexandria a couple of weeks ago, when my attention was drawn by a chittering overhead. The sound came from a flock of chimney swifts wheeling around the unused smoke stack at the old Courthouse Building on Washington Street. Having raised their babies, and prior to migration for the rain forests of the upper Amazon, swifts spend the rest of the summer feeding on the wing and forming communal roosts in (guess where) chimneys. Before the European invasion of the Americas, chimney swifts roosted in standing hollow trees, but chimneys are even better and it is rare to find them in hollow trees anymore. The wheel in the sky grew as more swifts joined and the sound level intensified. I like to think they were swapping stories of where the best spots are for the tastiest bugs and about the one that got away.

Roger Tory Peterson in his Field Guide to Birds East of the Rockies, describes swifts as "a cigar with wings". Swifts are related to hummingbirds and move their wings almost as fast. Rather than the blur you see with hummers, swifts seem to flap their wings alternately; it's just an optical illusion from the rapidity of movement; your brain interprets it as alternate movements. Swifts have tiny feet; early biologist who should have known better, thought the feet were missing altogether, leading to the group name Apodidae (no feet). Their small feet and weak toes leave swifts unable to perch on a horizontal surface as do other birds. Chimney swifts prefer to find a rough vertical surface and hook their claws into some irregularity and roost like upside down bats.

The wheel reached out to half a block in size, and it seemed as if every swift in Alexandria was circling the chimney and chattering up a storm. At some point, known only to the birds, critical mass was reached and the entire mass spiraled down the chimney like smoke going backwards. It was like some sort of magic trick, which I guess that’s really what it was. From the first circling birds to empty sky, the whole show was over in less than five minutes. The truly amazing thing was that, as I stood there, agog in astonishment at being privileged to see such a spectacle, nobody else along that busy street even bothered to look up. I mumbled a thanks for the show to Whoever might be listening, and rejoined the throng, hurrying towards my destination of the evening.

Chatham; Hammerheads and Horseheads

2007-10-10T18:47:00.000-07:00

Pat and I spent a long weekend on Cape Cod. Rather than go through a blow by blow, I am doing a series of vignettes interspersed with the usual stuff. Intro done, we commence.

Chatham Lighthouse sits about a mile down Main Street, just outside of Chatham, Massachusetts. It perches on a cliff overlooking the approaches to Chatham harbor. The light was built in 1881; one of a set of twin lighthouses, and part of the third set of twin lighthouses in Chatham. The original lights, as well as their replacements, slid into the ocean as the cliff slowly eroded away. In 1923, one light was moved up-cape to Nauset to replace a set of aging triple lights. Chatham light was taken over by the Coast Guard in 1939 and is still an active Coast Guard station.

Coasties were known on the Cape as Hammerheads. They got the name from an elite military unit set up during the days of Prohibition. Hammerheads went after rumrunners smuggling liquor from Canada, smashing contraband whiskey barrels with sledge hammers and spilling the contents overboard, much to the delight of the local lobster population.

Pat and I drove to the lighthouse after a leisurely stroll through the town. We were taking in the view from the cliff top and contemplating a trudge down the wooden stairs to the beach when a couple came past and asked if we had seen the seals. Really? Where? They had lunched up the road and had seen seals sporting in the channel. I scanned the area with my binoculars and came up with nothing. Then I checked out the tiny island off the point. No bigger than a sandbar, it looked covered with logs. Which moved. Eureka. I dug out the 20x spotting scope that Pat had me bring along (thanks, Pat) and focused in. The sandbar was wall-to-wall seals. Gray seals the size of sofa beds along with smaller, lighter harbor seals lay cheek by jowl on the beach looking for all the world like a crowd of summer sunbathers. I half expected them to be passing the Coppertone. I decided to hike out to the point to see if I could get some pictures. Pat elected to stay on the cliff top with the scope. She asked anyone who passed by if they wanted to see the seals; most people were blase about it until they got their eye to the lens. When I got to the bottom of the stairs and looked back up, Pat was doing a land-office business - she could have sold tickets. Pat says she didn't offer a look to the bikers who roared up soon after I left. Too bad, she could have swapped a view of the seals for some free legal or accounting advice.

Local fishermen call Gray seals “horseheads” from their long rounded heads that poke out of the water to stare at you with huge soulful puppy eyes.

Grays and the smaller harbor seals have ballooned in population in the past 30 years until their numbers are approaching 6000 along the Cape. With the increase in the seal populations, have come (cue up scary music here…Da Dum…Da Dum..) their major predator, the Great White Shark. There have been reports of shark attacks on seals off Chatham for several years and the occasional seal carcass washes up showing half-moon bite marks the diameter of garbage can lids. A Great White, estimated to be 14 feet long, was observed killing and eating a seal just off the beach not 2 months ago. Chatham Town has issued an “advisory” telling people not to swim with seals. It seems to me that swimming with an animal possessing a head the size of a grizzly bear’s with teeth to match, is only slightly less foolhardy than swimming with an animal possessing a head the size of a grizzly bear’s with teeth to match AND knowing that something with the firepower to eat it may be nearby. The good news is that Great Whites rarely attack humans; when they do, it is usually a case of mistaken identity - a swimmer or surfer on a board looks an awful lot like a seal on the surface. Seals have a thick layer of blubber (read: calories) that the shark can detect when it hits. Humans are too skinny and not worth the effort to digest; a shark will spit you (or whatever part of you it took off) back out. The bad news is that the first bite is enough to ruin your day.

Pat and I drove back to the lighthouse in the evening after a good seafood dinner in a local restaurant. Chatham Light sent its double beams out into a clear black night, broken only by the lights of passing cars on the main road. The Milky Way was visible, with the Pleiades hovering, and Orion climbing over the horizon like a fat man getting out of the tub. The cries of migrating shorebirds punctuated the darkness over the empty beach with summer past and a north wind rising.

Far Travelers

2007-09-09T18:29:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning Pat and I saw a sight few people witness; Freshwater jellyfish in the pond at Locust Shade Park in Prince William County, Virginia. Scattered far and wide, freshwater jellyfish have been found on every continent except Antarctica and on many oceanic islands including Guam and New Zealand. They are not particularly rare, but like the pookah in Harvey, they "appear here and there, now and then, to this one and that one (and how are you Mr. Wilson?)". Freshwater jellyfish may show up in a pond one year and not be seen again for the next twenty, if ever, although they have been reported from the pond at Locust Shade for the past three years. A big reason that few people see them is that almost nobody looks. Freshwater jellyfish are not very high on the average person's list of things to see. Craspedacusta sowerbii, although not a true jellyfish, is close enough so as to make no difference; a few slight anatomical differences put freshwater jellyfish in the same group as hydras (tiny stalked critters resembling miniature sea anemones). However, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck...Actually freshwater jellyfish don't quack or walk and they don't swim like duck either, but you get the point.

These are interesting little blobs of protoplasm. They swim, like their saltwater cousins, by pulsating the bell and trailing their tentacles to pick up small plankton such as water fleas and daphnia. Stinging cells on the tentacles kill prey which the tentacles pass up to the mouth for digestion. The stinging cells on freshwater jellies are too small to penetrate human skin, so if you really wanted to, you could pick one up with impunity. Like sea nettles, fifty miles east in Chesapeake Bay, freshwater jellyfish are 90% water. They have an inside layer of cells and an outside layer of cells and in between, they contain gelatinous mesoglea (jelly) which gives them buoyancy. Since they are basically animated water, jellies are nearly clear with an X-shaped set of gonads standing out in white. The biggest ones are about the size of a quarter, with nickel-sized specimens far more common. Pat described them as "swimming edelweiss".

Freshwater jellyfish undergo alternating generations. Colonies of polyps, the stalked form, grow on the bottom, reproducing by branching off clones. The freshwater jellyfish part, or medusa, is the sexual generation, produced by the polyp under favorable conditions. The polyp clones several copies, stacked up like saucers, each of which separates off swims away. Once the medusae release eggs and sperm, they die. In winter, polyps go into a resting state, called the podocyst, which withstands cold. These resting cysts are picked up on bird feet and feathers and move from pond to pond, a few miles at a time, until freshwater jellyfish are found all over the world. Podocysts jump across oceans probably by hitching a ride long-distance migrants which can traverse whole hemispheres. Being a clone species has advantages; the same species of freshwater jellyfish is worldwide and is therefore unlikely to become rare. On the other hand, the medusa stage seldom bears fruit, since all the freshwater jellyfish in a pond are likely descended from a single podocyst and the medusae are all males or all females. Only when podocysts are from different ponds, of different sexes, and both clones manage to survive to the medusa stage, do genes get mixed.

Some researchers postulate that jellyfish represent an early "experiment" of life, unrelated to anything else. Indeed, fossils of jellyfish-like creatures show up in some of the oldest rocks with any traces of life. Called the Edicaran fauna (after some god-forsaken spot in the middle of the Australian outback), they were thought by some to show no affinities to any other known life forms although recent research seems to disprove this theory.

Jellyfish have always seemed to me to be too ethereal to be real (except when I get stung). Maybe it's the ghostly coloring and the unhurried pulsating swimming that makes them seem as if they really are not of this earth. Indeed, the late Carl Sagan, in speculating on possible life forms that could exist in the thick clouds of Jupiter, used jellyfish as a model. He never mentioned if they got there on bird feet.

Paw Paws

2007-09-07T16:34:00.000-07:00

I was walking the banks of the Potomac on a warm late summer Saturday morning, looking for dragonflies and assorted other targets of opportunity to photograph. As I rounded a bend in the trail, I suddenly had a mental flash of "Juicy Fruit", as in the gum. They say the sense of smell taps into your deepest memories and creates the strongest associations. So why was I thinking of a chewing gum that I haven't even cared for since I was a kid? A short bit of looking turned up a forest floor littered with ripe paw paw fruits. Paw paws are middling-sized understory trees, usually found on the rich flood plains of streams and rivers. They have large leaves, always in threes, and the flowers in early May look like those of wild ginger, even though the two plants are not remotely related.

Paw paws are the northern representative of what is a huge tropical family of trees, including the tropical custard apple, which my old economic botany text book calls "the queen of tropical fruits".

Paw paws are loaded with aromatics; crush a leaf and you smell green peppers. Cut open a ripe fruit and you get a whiff of sweet potato and banana. The taste is the same; sounds kind of ghastly, but is surprisingly good on the pallate. Just make sure the fruit is fully ripe - green ones can be mouth puckeringly astringent. Paw paw leaves are the only food plant for caterpillars of the zebra swallowtail butterfly, and the Potomac valley is well known among lepidopterists as the best place to see this hauntingly beautiful species.

The late Euell Gibons, in his Stalking the Wild Asparagus, gives a recipe for paw paw chiffon pie, although you would be hard put to find enough ripe fruits to give it a try; I only found enough unchewed fruit to fill a baseball cap. Everything in the woods, from bears to mice, eats paw paws. Paw paw seeds are the size of nickels, and as hard and brown as mahogany. They are designed to be gulped down with the sweet pulp and (ahem) deposited some distance away from the parent tree. Dan Janzen, an ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania writes that these fruits, along with those of persimmon, honey locust, and others, were originally dispersed by Ice Age megafauna such as mastodons and giant sloths (or as those in the business call them, BHMs - Big Hairy Mammals). If that is true, when you enjoy a ripe paw paw, fresh off the forest floor, you are fulfilling a role once played by extinct beasts. Just remember to swallow and do like the bears do.

Bluegills, Satellites, and Sneakers

2007-08-04T17:55:00.000-07:00

Ask any angler what was their first catch and, nine times out of ten, the answer will be "bluegill". Bluegills are perfect pan fish. Small enough for a kid to handle, aggressive enough to bite on any bait, and abundant as anything that swims. They are also very scrappy at the other end of the line. There is a whole subculture of fly-fishers whose art is devoted to the deception of bluegills. The local sporting goods shop sells more artificial flies designed for bluegills than for trout. Trout in this area are fading aristocrats; the last local population of native brook trout vanished when the town of Reston was constructed and the last self-sustaining population of brown trout is in danger from a planned highway. Bluegills and their many cousins, however, proliferate in any body of water bigger than a a wading pool. I have netted bluegills from a golf course pond no bigger than an average suburban bathroom.

Bluegills are are related to the perches and are members of the family Centrarchidae, which includes large- and small-mouth bass. Centrarchids are an ancient North American speciality; found coast-to-coast and from Mexico to above the Arctic Circle. They have survived the dinosaurs and have been transplanted by humans to all parts of the globe. Bluegills (and their cousins the basses) are native to the Mississippi River drainage system and were brought to the Atlantic rivers in the late 19th century. Bass were taken to California in the water tenders of steam locomotives almost as soon as the Golden Spike was driven. Now that the Potomac has been cleaned up, thanks to gazillions of your tax dollars (thanks!)and the introduction of an aquatic weed that thrives in polluted water, it has become a major stop on the Pro Bass Fishing Tour. Yes, there are professional bass anglers. One of the cable channels carries pro-bassin' programs. I guess it's entertainment, but watching someone else fish is slightly more boring than watching paint dry.

Bluegills are colonial breeders, meaning all the bluegills in the pond will be nesting at the same time. From about late June until now, if you haunt ponds, lakes, slow moving creeks, and other assorted wetland areas, you will see what looks like a series of small bomb craters lining the banks in water about a foot or so deep and going out into deeper water. These are bluegill nests. Given the limited area for nesting, competition is fierce. Males stake out hexagonal territories, build a round depression in the bottom, and stand guard with all their breeding colors showing. A bluegill in breeding fettle is as pretty as any exotic fish from the rain forests that you may see in the local aquarium store. Males build and guard their nests fiercely; they will attack anything encroaching into their territory and a small lure trolled near the surface is sure to get a strike. Females flit from nest to nest, sizing up the males and deigning to lay a few eggs in whatever nest whose male strikes their fancy. One female can produce up to 50,000 eggs, but she will distribute them around several nests, mating with several males. A single nest can hold up to the same number of eggs produced by a single female, so the numbers even out. Eggs hatch in about a week, and the young spend their first year or so hiding in weeds or submerged brush. Two- and three-year olds begin breeding and five-year old bluegills are rare. Nests near the center of the colony are preferred and males compete for them, the bigger guys ousting the smaller ones. Nests on the edges are more heavily preyed upon by catfish and surprisingly, snails, which may account for up to half the egg losses. A closely related sunfish, the pumkinseed, is a solitary nester. Pumkinseeds feed on snails and may cruise around the bluegill colony hoping to pick up a quick snack.

It may seem that the big alpha males have all the advantages in colonial nesting, but they are not alone in the sweepstakes to get their genes out to the next generation. Aside from other alpha males constantly patrolling the colony, hoping to take over an established nest(any male you catch will be almost instantly replaced), two other male types; satellites and sneakers, also lurk the shallows. Satellites are males, but with female coloration and some their behaviors. When a couple begin to go into their breeding behavior, a satellite will come into the nest and join in, mimicking the female. This is the stuff of Penthouse Letters for the alpha male and he happily and blindly sets forth. When the real female releases her eggs and the alpha male begins to fertilize them, the satellite also releases a cloud of milt to mix in. Up to half the eggs in a nest may be fathered by satellites. Unless the sneakers get into the act as well. Sneakers are dwarf males, hanging around the edges of territories, looking inconspicuous, and staying out of trouble. At the right moment, a sneaker will dash in upon the happy couple, release his milt, and be gone before the alpha male realizes what's happening.

Bluegill population genetics are such that neither satellites nor sneakers will ever get too abundant; both populations are dependent, almost parasitic on a good number of territorial alpha males who stake out territories and defend the nests, eggs, and young. Even so, next time you take a kid fishing, don't forget to ask your catch "Who's your daddy?"

Happy Birthday, Carl Linnaeus, the Man Who Saved the Loch Ness Monster

2007-07-30T17:09:00.000-07:00

This year (June actually) marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who invented the system of biological nomenclature. An excellent article by David Quammen on the man and his achievement (Quammen calls him the first "information architect") may be found in the June, 2007 National Geographic.

Without going into the detail so well described in the Geographic article, let me present, for your amusement, a couple of stories told me by a taxonomist and member of the Linnean Society.

It seems that Carl was either a) possessed of an extremely dry wit, or b) a cranky old fusspot. The Norway rat (actually from the steppes of central Asia) was named Rattus norvegicus by Linnaeus because, as a Swede, he despised Norwegians. He must really have had it in for Germans since the German cockroach (Blatella germanicus) is really from tropical west Africa.

Linnaeus named both the house mouse (Mus musculus) and the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). Here we have one of the smallest of mammals and the largest creature who ever lived, both sharing a name. One wonders why...perhaps a joke? "Hey Sven, go get me a musculus"; leaving poor Sven to wonder if he needs a jar or a harpoon.

Linnaeus' legacy is the orderly system of naming living things (he tried it for minerals, but gave it up as way too complex). The foundation of the system is the genus and species. All living things must be named according to the rules set forth by the rules of nomenclature. Plants must be described in a scholarly journal in Latin, and a specimen, called the type specimen, must be deposited in an accredited institution. The type and associated description ultimately are what all members of that species are measured against when taxonomists try to determine what ever it is they may have in hand. The rules for animals are pretty much the same with the exceptions that the description need not be in Latin, and the type specimen may be a part or even a photograph of the animal. If you discover a new species, you get to name it. Linnaeus described and named us; Homo sapiens. Guess who he named as the type specimen? Himself. We are all held comparable to a middle-aged Swedish man. Go figure.

On to the Loch Ness Monster. In the 1970's, a plan was hatched to depth-charge Loch Ness in an effort to bring some closure (dead or alive) to the myth of the Loch Ness Monster. To thwart this, Sir Peter Scott (son of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, of Antarctic fame, and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund) and Robert Rimes co-published a paper in the journal Nature, describing the beast. They named it Nessiteras rhombopteryx (Greek for "the wonder of Ness with the diamond shaped fin"), "affinities uncertain". As a type specimen, the authors used a pair of blurry photos, purported to be of the Nessie, one showing what could be imagined as a squarish fin, the other just a blob. Under the rules of zoological nomenclature, the photos counted as a type specimen. Nessie was placed on the British list of endangered species and saved from a cruel fate. Some skeptics have noted Nessiteras rhombopteryx is an anagram for "Monster hoax by Sir Peter S." Robert Rines responded to these critics with his own anagram: "Yes, both pix are monsters, R."