Month: March 2020

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Sicily

Chrissy & I went to Smithsonian for a program “Sicily: Eternal Crossroads of the Mediterranean.” It was a disappointing program. I thought it would be something like what the title suggested. In fact, it was more a semi-technical art history discussion with some (not all) of the art and architecture happened to be in Sicily. The lecturer was well expert on the art, but her talks were more like watching slides from her vacation than an integrated program about cultural crossroads.

One thing I found interesting about the talk was about the talk itself. There was a big crowd there and many people seemed to like the program a lot. Chrissy and I talked about it. It might be that it was a lot like being a tourist. She took you through the buildings like a tour guide. I wanted the connections, not the tourist sites. That is the great thing about pluralism. We do not all need to like the same things.

No matter. It got us out and down in Washington on a nice day. They provided what they called a Sicilian lunch. We got a prosciutto ham sandwich, olive salad & some cannoli. I do not think these things are especially Sicilian (Prosciutto comes from Parma, not in Sicily) but it was good.

We went to Spain last year and were very favorably surprised by the wonders there. Sicily is another of those crossroads. It was an intellectual and cultural hotbed for a few centuries. I think that is the next place outside the USA for us to visit.

First picture is Smithsonian castle looking good in spring. Next is me at the mall. Lighting is not the best. Last is from the lecture itself.

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Kids and trees

Kids and trees

Some HS kids are coming to plant trees as part of some sort of sustainability project. I don’t believe sustainability is enough. We strive to regenerate. That is what I will tell them when they come. Thanks to Rob Bracknell for the contact.

I supply the trees & tools

I will supply the trees, the tools, lunch and drinks. I will also give each of them a copy of “Sand County Almanac.” I think it is more work getting them to do it than it would be doing it myself, but I like the idea of getting kids doing something useful in the woods. Sometime in the future, I hope that this can be part of a catalyzing experience that enhances of even puts them on the path to conservation. Planting trees is good for the soul.

I don’t want the kids to suffer too much, so spent the day cutting paths through the brambles and briars.

They will be mostly planting the are area where the fire killed some trees or where the brambles killed the trees, or more likely discouraged the planters. That is another reason I needed to take down the brambles.   My first photo shows a superficial but rather painful scrape I got when I pushed back one branch and got hit by another. I am hoping it doesn’t turn black and blue.

Planting paths   Next is the path at Brodnax. There is a lot of space between trees. Now that I have an ATV, I bought a discer. I am going to plant pollinator wildflowers in the middle. Picture after that shows clover coming up on the fire line. I planted that last time. I am hoping we don’t a hard frost that might harm them. It has been a warm winter and it looks like an early spring, so maybe we will be okay.

Streams and sand

Picture #4 is my bench and stream on Diamond Grove. We had the bench in back of the house and Chrissy wanted to get rid of it, so I put it there. I can sit, listen to the water, drink beer and just enjoy being. The stream has moved a bit and I am getting a lot of sand. The sand has packed tight, as you can see in picture #5. It looks like a couple feet of sand has accumulated. I am not sure whence it came. Upstream I thought was mostly clay and the stream bed was always clay. Something got loose. When I get time, I will walk up the stream and see what I can see. The stream starts in a cow pasture a couple miles up and picks up water from my forest. As far as I know (knew) there are not points of significant erosion on my land, but I will check. All that sand came from somewhere. If it is somewhere of mine, I have to do something.

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Cândido Rondon

Cândido Rondon is not well known enough even in Brazil, even though there is a state – Rondônia – named after him, and certainly not as well as he deserves outside the country. I had not heard of him before I went to Brazil, at least not that I recall. I was vaguely aware of Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition to Brazil. He explored what was then called the River of Doubt, because nobody knew where it went. It is now called the Rio Roosevelt. But I assumed that it was Roosevelt’s expedition, much like his safari in Africa. In other words, I didn’t know much and much of what I did know was wrong.  

Our Ambassador in Brazil, Tom Shannon, took a special interest in Rondon and that stimulated my initial interest. If the boss likes it, it is a good idea to at least look into it but I soon started to see why he was important. I ended up visiting Rondônia twice, talked to enough people, read enough to become a passable lay authority & developed enough of a passion for the subject that I still attend presentations five years after leaving Brazil.   Larry Rohter discussed his book at a Wilson Center program “The Life and Legacy of Cândido Rondon: Amazon Explorer, Environmentalist, Scientist, and Advocate for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” This is the most complete biography of Rondon available. It is available only in Portuguese. I thought of reading it as language exercise and may yet, but it costs $92 on Amazon. Not sure I want to pay that.  

Rondon had a long and eventful life. He was born in the year Abe Lincoln was shot and lived long enough to hear that Sputnik had been launched into space. He was an explorer, scientist, anthropologist and soldier, but remarkable was his philosophy of non-violence. When dealing with indigenous people, his orders were to die if necessary but never to kill. His expedition with Roosevelt was not unique for him. He was the greatest of tropical explorers. Roosevelt always gave Rondon credit as his co-leader, but back in the USA they kind of thought of him as a “native guide” to the great Roosevelt. Rondon saved Roosevelt’s life a few times in the Amazon, but the expedition nearly killed Roosevelt anyway. (A great book re is “River of Doubt” by Candice Millard). His health never recovered and this may have influenced U.S. politics, since he did not have that unbounded energy to throw into elections in 1914 & 1916.  

Besides his exploration and science writing, Rondon was a respected statesman. He was instrumental in keeping Brazil from falling under the influence of the Nazis and in getting Brazil on the USA side when the war came. Rondon was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, first time by Albert Einstein.   It was an interesting presentation. Glad I went. I rode my bike down to Washington and enjoyed a great spring day. I forget the simple joy of spring and then rediscover it with greater joy each year.   First four pictures are from springtime Washington. Pond cypress with spring catkins, magnolia and spruce, longleaf pine flowers at the National Botanical Gardens, followed by spring flowers in general. Last picture is from the presentation.

Background and video of the  presentation

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A new town

A whole new town sprung up where there were fields & parking lots not long ago. It is called “the Buro” and it is a mixed use development. Mixed use is good. For many years after WWII zoning rules discouraged or disallowed the mixing of residential, commercial or industrial. This sounded like a good idea, but it is not how people really like to live.
Espen told us about this place. I had been up there maybe a couple years ago when I dropped off my car for service at Honda dealer. I had no place to go, so I just walked around and walked up where Boro is now. I saw construction but didn’t pay much attention.
Whole Foods is one of the anchors. Being inexpensive is not one of the store’s traits, but it is very pleasant with high quality food.

But the thing that interested me (and Espen, which is why he mentioned it) is that they have beer on tap a few places around the store. You get a card and then tap as much as you want.

I am surprised at the flowering of beer culture in the USA. Tapping a beer on a Sunday morning and then freely walking around a store with it while shopping is strange.
I recently finished a book called “Over the Rhine”. This is a history of a German section of Cincinnati, Ohio. Like Milwaukee, St Louis and thousands of other towns in middle America, there where big and dynamic German presence in the 19th Century. The native Americans – the Yankees – often did not like them. For one thing, they came in large numbers and kind of took over. For another, they drank a lot of beer.

There was a strong temperance movement among the native Americans at that time and the beer drinking ways of the Germans was just another reason to dislike them.
Prohibition was a progressive American nativist project. To a large extent, it was aimed at immigrants from Germany, Italy or Eastern Europe, with their love of wine and beer. Prohibition hit these communities hard. (For reference, there is another good book about these times called “Last Call.”) Proponents of prohibition wanted to eliminate the influence of beer and wine and if it took out the culture of the Germans and Italians, that was a side benefit.

But we have now had our vindication. Beer is now firmly ensconced in the American mainstream, even more firmly today than it was when I was young. I just like beer. I no longer drink beer to get drunk, I just like the idea of it and I am glad that I am in tune with the culture around me, at least in this case. We live in a golden age of beer. Savor it; all good things must end and it is the curse of men that they forget.

My first picture shows a pineapple slicer. Pealing a pineapple hard. Brazilian Portuguese even has this idiom – “descascar o abacaxi”, peel the pineapple, to describe a tricky and unpleasant task. This machine just does it. Next is the doughnut shop. They have wonderful crullers. After that is me taping into the beer and finally is the street scene outside.