John Matel's Memorial Blog
Another uneventful day. Very cold, cold enough to discourage walking outside.
I spent much of the day working on my presentation for the tree farm leadership conference, but made little progress. This was not a complete loss or many not a loss at all. As I prepared, I followed lots of side paths with very interesting factors.
Chrissy and I went to see a movie at Tysons – “the Post” about the Washington Post publishing the Pentagon Papers. Good movie.
It is hard to buy Christmas presents for me. I know that I have everything I want that the kids could reasonably give me. So it is nice to get “consumables”. I do enjoy trying different sorts of whiskey and beer. I really cannot tell the difference in detail, but it is fun to try.
The picture shows what the kids bought for Christmas. I have begun to work through it.
Went to the Brazilian Embassy for a photo exhibit “Brasília 1957: a 20th Century Saga.” Brasília was not my favorite place, but it kind of grows on you. It is a nice pleasant place to live and building it was a heroic achievement. It pulled population and the development from the coasts and into the middle. Anyway, I enjoyed the exhibit and a film that went with it.
My photos are from the walk to the embassy from the Metro. It is around a half hour walk from Foggy Bottom and a generally nice way to go. First picture is Taras Shevchenko, a 19th Century poet and a father of Ukrainian literature. I am sure my old colleague Tania Chomiak-Salvi knows about him. Next is Phil Sheridan, famous for his action in the Civil War and later on the plains. Third is Ataturk and the last photo is from the exhibit.
We got home from Arizona a couple days ago. Arizona is nice this time of year and we much enjoy the relatives there, but it is good to be home.
I once thought that we would retire in Arizona for sure, and we may yet, but I am very fond of Virginia. I have sent down deep roots here, almost literally in the case of my forest land and also with networks of friends and colleagues related to forestry and environment.
We first came to Virginia in 1984 and bought a house here twenty years ago, but we spent most of our lives overseas. (The kids spent more total years in Poland before their eighteenth birthdays than anywhere else.) In the last years, however, I have become very attached to the Commonwealth.
Our neighborhood has also much improved. Within walking distance, we have all of what we need and most of what we want in daily life.
When I joined the FS, my plan was to stay in only for around seven years. I figured that after seven years I would have learned all that was transferable to other careers and I would move on. Each year, however, I was doing things that were fun and rewarding, so I just stayed around and it got to be more than thirty years.Virginia was also was supposed to be a temporary abode, a sojourn, a way station to someplace else, but it looks like there may be no place better.
I have a thirty year plan for my tree farms. I guess that implies a long-term commitment.
Of course, my plans tend to work out in ways that surprise me, so who knows?
My pictures are not especially representative. The first is the Japanese maple we planted when we bought the house. Next is the BBQ place near the Metro. Took the Metro back from the airport on our return from Arizona and had supper there. Next is Gallows Rd. My morning habit to ride with Chrissy when she goes to work. She drops me a couple miles from home and I walk back. It marks the start of the day. Look at the picture and notice the big oak and its odd shape. There used to be a house and some trees on the ragged side. On the trimmed side are wire and they cut it back all the time. Last is 495 not to far from my house. Since I can choose my travel times, I rarely face traffic. I was not facing it that day either, BTW. I was walking across the bridge.
Went to the Brazilian Embassy for the 60th Anniversary of the Fulbright program in Brazil. I was glad to be invited, even though I have been away for a few years. I am a true believer in education exchanges and Fulbright is the gold standard.
On the down side, it was rainy. I took the subway to Dupont Circle Metro and then had to walk a bit more than a mile up Massachusetts. If not for the rain it would have been very pleasant and even with the rain it was interesting, as you can see from the pictures. The first group are statues along the way. Last is the tunnel down to the Metro – a little scary.
They said it was going to rain. My custom is to ride my bike if it is not actually raining when I set off, no matter the weather prediction. It turned out to be a beautiful day.
I was going to Washington to listen to a “First Monday” lecture about public diplomacy outreach to North Korea, sponsored by the Public Diplomacy Council. I am not really interested in North Korea. I took some notes on the presentations, but I like to attend these meetings more to see old colleagues and ride my bike.
Anyway, it was a great day, one with the kind of soft air, that kind of balmy but pleasant weather you experience only in spring and fall, warm enough to be comfortable but cool enough that the warm sun feels good on your back.
My first two pictures are slightly different aspects of the Capitol. Next is Grant’s monument. I felt a little trepidation posting this photo, lest some protestors see the beard and the Civil War uniform and seek to pull the statue down. Last is a big Japanese zelkova. I used to run around the Mall and this was part of my running trail, so it feels familiar. Grant and the Capitol have not changed much, although they cleaned up the Grant monument recently. The zelkova has grown a lot in the last ten or fifteen years. It is bigger, but I liked it better before. At one point in its life, it had a wonderful grace, a kind of hourglass trunk. It is still nice, but now it is just generally thicker.
The National Road
The National Road was authorized by Congress and signed into legislation by Thomas Jefferson in 1806. It started in Cumberland, Maryland and ended in Vandalia in what became the State of Illinois. It was the first piece of big public infrastructure that facilitated the settlement of western Maryland, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois – the first “West.” Vandalia was the first capital of Illinois and the place where young Abe Lincoln got his start.
I went to see young Abe and the terminus of the National Road. Life was tough for the pioneers. Imagine carrying everything you own in a wagon and establishing yourself in a wilderness. It was primitive. It is amazing that they could build our great country.
The first picture is the monument to pioneer women. It stands at the end of the National Road. Next is Abe and then Abe and me. My friend Steve Holgate used to do Lincoln one-man-shows, so he should appreciate that young Abe kind of looks like him. Next picture is the busy US 40. US 40 more or less follows the route of the National Road. It is now superseded by Interstate 70. Last is the old State Capitol.
The Iron Curtain
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “iron curtain” has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.” This is what Winston Churchill said in a speech in Fulton, Mo on March 5, 1946. It was a recognition of the Cold War. Some people, many people, thought that our wartime friendship with the Soviet Union could continue, but our goals and values were fundamentally incompatible.
I stopped at Fulton to see the place where the speech was delivered. It sort of completes my middle America history visits, since I went to see Eisenhower and Truman
This part of history has always been fascinating for me. Fighting world communism was one of the reasons I joined the FS. For the trip back home, I got a new audio book, The Cold War: A World History by a couple Norwegians, Julian Elfer and Odd Arne Westad. It is a different perspective.
The authors go way back to pre-WWI times and characterize Russia under the Czar as a hierarchical anti-capitalist country, while the USA was where the market developed most. After WWI, several flavors of anti-capitalistic/anti-democratic regimes developed, including the Soviets, Nazis, along with various other sorts of fascists and authoritarians.
Fascists and communists shared hatred for free market democracy, but they also hated each other, since each wanted to impose its own sort of totalitarianism. This is as far as I got.
Anyway, we vanquished the Nazis in 1945 and the communists in 1989, but these bad ideas have ways of resurfacing. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
My pictures are from the Churchill memorial. The first is a piece of the Berlin Wall. We sort of got used to it, but consider how truly evil it is to kill people who want to leave your country. Reagan was right to call it an evil empire.
The Wright Brother
In the worth seeing but not worth going to see department, I went to see the birthplace of Wilbur Wright. You have to drive around seven miles from I-70 along a pleasant country road fittingly called “Wilbur Wright Road” that connects with “Wilbur Wright Circle.”
Chrissy suggested that if his parents had anticipated having such an illustrious son they would have investing in a more appropriate house.
There is a good book on the Wright Brothers by David McCullough (the same guy who wrote bios of John Adams and Harry Truman). The early the last decades of the 19th century and the first ones of the 20th were a dynamic time in American history. Airplanes, automobiles and lots of other things were being invented and perfected. My Brazilian friends don’t credit the Wright brothers with the invention of the airplane. They credit their own Alberto Santos-Dumont, who they also say gave us the wrist watch. The Wright brothers flew in 1903. Santos-Dumont flew in 1906, but Brazilians argue that Santos-Dumont’s machine took off on its own power. Suffice it to say that they were all pioneers of aviation.
I didn’t take a picture, since I thought it might be rude, but there were lots of signs opposing a proposed wind farm in the area. I think it would be appropriate to have big propeller-like structures, but the locals disagree
Whether or not we have specific religious faith, all successful lives are faith-based. I am aware that I am using this phrase in a specific way, so let me explain.
We rarely can immediately see the results of our decisions and most of the things that makes us happy and prosperous in the long run give little satisfaction in the here and now. More often they are even unpleasant or painful. This is not deep wisdom, although an astonishing number of people seem not to understand it, or at least it is not reflected in their choices. I think the explanation is not that they have too little intelligence but rather that they have too little faith.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This is the best practical definition from a trusted source. We can better apply this to the secular world by inserting one word. … the evidence of things not YET seen.
When the out-of-shape guy starts to eat better and exercise more, he does it with the faith in the vision of his thinner healthier self, aware that he will not be seeing this reality for a long time. He can’t see how any particular hour at gym or day spent defying donuts makes a difference. He has faith.
When a twenty-five-year-old buys the first stock fund in her new 401-k account, she does in contemplation of a better life that by definition will not show up for at least forty years. That $50 investment seems less than a drop in the ocean and could be much more enjoyably deployed buying beer of coffee. But she has faith.
In my old job in diplomacy and my new vocation of promoting forestry products, networking is important. You must see and be seen. I am mostly an introvert. I do not enjoy big social gatherings, but I know that I have to get out there. When I come home from any particular event, and ask myself if it was worth the energy spent, it is very easy to answer in the negative. “Yeah, I saw a few people and they met me, but what really happened? Nothing.” But I know that with time and persistence good things happen and opportunities open. I do not know what they will be. I act out of faith that I will find them and know what to do when I do.
Maybe this secular faith comes easier to forestry folks, since our whole outlook is faith-based. I plant trees that I will never see mature and rely on forests provided by others. When I bought my first “forest” in 2005, it didn’t look like woods. It was a recently cut-over mess of weeds and brambles. The most prominent trees were invasive tree-of-heaven that I knew I would have to battle. The loblolly were there, but you had to look really hard to find them. But I had faith that the pine trees would grow and that I could control the invasives. Twelve years later you see what we have in the attached photo. The one below is what it looked like in 2005. Notice the very big tree of heaven patch and the smaller pine trees.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not YET seen. A guy with a forest gets to see it, if he has the patience and faith to wait. But everyone can and needs to find the evidence of faith in their own chosen sphere.
We noticed when we were in Oak Park and Elmhurst that many trains went by on at-grade tracks. Trains are a key to our prosperity, but they are largely out of sight.
America has the worlds best freight train network, facilitated by the Staggers Act or 1980. This fact comes as a surprise to most people, since American passenger rail is not very good and that is what experience most directly.
You can see the power of freight when you watch a train go by. Today they often carry containers. This is intermodal transport. The containers can be moved by ship, train or truck w/o being unloaded or reloaded.
The intermodal revolution – and it was a revolution – happened in plain sight starting around 1970. Before that time, something moved by ship required unloading and reloading at the port. Something shipped by train required loading, unloading and reloading all along the road. The same for trucks. Each step created delays, damage and “shrinkage,” i.e. stealing. This is the “fell off the back of a truck” idea.
I was in the Longshoreman Union back in the 1970s when I worked at Medusa Cement. We were in that union because we had a dock, although I never worked on ships.
Longshoremen were hard workers, but the episodic nature of the much of the work meant they did not need to be very consistent. It was possible to be a good worker AND a drunk. In fact, some of the hardest workers were drunks. There was also a fair amount of fringe benefit or the “falling off the truck” sort. And there was lots of unskilled or semi-skilled work to be done. All this changed in the 1970s. Containers require many fewer workers and most of them need to be skilled at operating heavy machinery, i.e. shaky drunks cannot do well.
My pictures show some of the trains. The first shows how many trucks can be carried on one train and the next (look closely) shows trains going in both directions. In front are bulk hopper cars, in back containers. I have enjoyed watching them go by since I was a little boy and still do. The first photo, however is Medusa’s cement ship – the “Challenger”. It is now owned by St Mary’s, so it is the St. Mary’s Challenger, but I think it is the same boat that my father used to unload. The last photo is a water tower in Oak Park, Illinois. They were more artistic in those days.
Sky Islands – In southeastern Arizona, a unique geology has created a ‘sky island’ ecosystem – meaning you’ll find deer, bears and mountain lions in the arid, dry desert.