St. Louis is a pleasant city and I was lucky to get a nice day. I walked down Market Street down to the St. Louis Arch. It is a pleasant walk. There was evidently some urban renewal done here to make all the green space. There are lots of offices and government buildings but I don’t think many people actually live down here. Above is the Courthouse against the Arch. This is the courthouse where the Dred Scott case was first decided. That decision helped lead to the Civil War. The man most responsible for ending it is below.
Below is the St Louis Arch. It is much bigger than it seems in pictures and pictures don’t do it justice.
You can see some people near the arch that shows the scale.
I have some other pictures that are interesting but you can click on them separately.
Sense of smell is a very persistent and emotional sense. It can evoke feelings and memories like no other sense.
St. Louis is a Midwestern city and so is familiar to me on a visceral level. Some of the familiarity has to do with the sights; some is sound. St. Louis has my familiar robins and red wing blackbirds, with their pretty calls and the grackles without. But a big deal are the smells. I am here at the right time of the year. The hawthorns are blooming. This brings back memories at least back to sixth grade when we took a field trip to Hawthorn Glen. That was back in 1966. I also remember the smells from Grant Park. It is a distinctive smell. At the hotel, I am near the pool. I like the smell of chlorine, reminds me of my swim team days.
Another memorable smell is from the linden trees. They are just coming out here. I have written about this before. There are not many lindens in Milwaukee. Although their American cousins, the basswoods, are very common, they don’t have the same sweet smell. I remember the lindens from my first trip to Germany. They are a common tree in central Europe. Poland also has lots of them, so many than their word for the month of July is Lipiec from the Polish word for linden, which is lipa. In North America the lindens flower in late May or June. In Poland they are out late June or July, hence the name.
There is also lots of lavender. Lavender is an interesting memory. I became familiar with lavender smells because of air fresheners. When I first encountered lavender in real life, I was surprised how much it smelled like air fresheners. I guess Glade does a good job of mimicking it.
A few blocks later was the tannery. That was probably the worst stink.Just past the river, we got into the yeast smell from Schlitz & Pabst breweries.When the wind was right, you got the sweet chocolate smell from Ambrosia Chocolate factory.
Today the air is much cleaner. When it has any smell at all, it tends to be perfumed with flowers and trees and not the old familiar industrial smells. It is better, but it was kind of interesting to be able to tell where you were in the city by the taste of the air.
My pictures show lindens, hawthorns, a nice fountain and an urban farm. St. Louis is looking good.
I am in Rio holding down the post. All three of our American PA officers are out. Our Brazilian colleagues can well handle most things, but we need to do the representation and sign things, so I am here this week. It is also a good way to get to know the posts. I have responsibly for all of Brazil, which implies I need to know about all of Brazil. In any case, I can’t complain. My big work of the week was finishing EER and getting ready for the Biden visit, both things can be done just as well from Rio as Brasilia.
Rio is truly a marvelous city. I take the shuttle from my hotel to the consulate and today I got off about a mile early and walked along the ocean. On the way are lots of little places where you can get a tap beer and look out over the beach and the ocean. I stopped today. It was nice. This is Copacabana after all.
My reverie was broken a few times by people selling things. I was offered a selection of hats, blankets, bags and little statues of Christ the Redeemer that flashed alternatively in yellow, red and blue. I bought a hat I didn’t want from a guy who told me his kids needed the money. I didn’t really believe him, but I figured I could afford it. A few minutes later, a different guy showed up selling the same sorts hats. I told him that I already had a hat but didn’t really want it so I gave it to him to sell to some other sucker.
The waitress laughed at me and told me that if I wanted to waste my money it would be used to better purpose by giving her a bigger tip. These kinds of “transactions” used to bother me, but they don’t anymore. Brazilian beach salesmen are usually light-hearted. I told the guy with the plastic Jesus that nobody in his right mind would buy such a thing. He laughed and pointed out that his little statues would light the way to heaven, but admitted that he didn’t own one himself that he wasn’t trying to sell.
My picture is the view from my seat. Brahma is really good on tap, and tastes even better in situations like this.
Reverie – that is my word for the day. I am usually not an Emily Dickinson fan, but her short poem is kind of nice here.
It takes a lot of thought to be spontaneous, at least if you want to be effective. I have been thinking about planning and achievement because it is EER season. EERs are like some made for TV movies; they are inspired by a true story. But a good story is not enough. I am very interested in figuring out what exactly I had contributed to the significant success we achieved. It is not only for personal aggrandizement. I need an idea of what I contributed so that I can manage the process and improve it.
If it is mostly just luck, I can do nothing except hope it continues. If I just blundered into a good strategy, I need to know so that I can adapt it. I think our success is a combination of luck, opportunity and a type of planning. I say a type of planning because I don’t plan in the step-by-step way. Actually, I sometimes do, but I don’t expect those exquisite but fragile plans to survive contact with reality.
I plan less now than I did twenty years ago, but I think the planning is better. I don’t need to overt discipline I forced on myself earlier in my career for a few big reasons. The first is that I can rely on my colleagues to protect me. They do lots of the details and backstop for me. Thanks. Life has also become simpler because of technology. Think of travel. You don’t need to keep track of tickets anymore. They are all online. You can do your accounting online; actually the accounting is done for you online. Many of the chores that were so hard for me are gone. Life is easier. But the big reason I don’t have to plan consciously is because I now have internalized the processes and I plan automatically in ways that I could not do before.
At my level, almost all my planning is contingent. It is not step by step and it is full of feedback loops. What I learned in business school just doesn’t work. I know that I sometimes give the impression that I am a mystic and/or I am just not paying attention. This is not my intention but it comes with some advantages. After they get to know me, people come to trust me, which is an important prerequisite. My vagueness gives them license to innovate but their faith that I know where I am going provides direction. Almost all of what I accomplish is done through others and returning to my original question, where do I add value?
I think my main contribution is as a connector and a facilitator or shared vision. I say facilitator because it would be an oxymoron to claim to be a creator of a shared vision. A shared vision requires that participants share in its creation and then in its flexible implementation. The better the shared vision, the more people want to be part and contribute, the less you can tell where your ideas and skills stop and those of others begin. The more successful you are in facilitating the success, the less you can identify the parts you “did” but the better the results. I guess it is a sort of mysticism.
None of my teams greatest accomplishments at the end of this year could have been predicted in detail at the beginning. They resulted from opportunities offered, taken and expanded. We knew where we wanted to be and we developed a range of tools and skills and then waited for the chance to use them.
All greatness is based on contradiction and we should not try to resolve all contradictions and tension. Contradiction and tension are the fonts of creativity. But I will add that in addition to being creative, you really have to be excellent first in some basics. I worked hard to get my basic skills up to standard. Without my capacity in Portuguese, I could not be successful here. My basic ability to understand accounting procedures made it possible to work with budgets. Things like this make a difference too. The poetry of creativity needs to be based on a prosaic base, else it comes to nothing. I suppose that is the difference between dreaming and making them happen.
Of course, in my EER I sound a bit less tentative and more take charge than I do above. As I said, it is inspired by a true story and reads a little more coherently than it was lived.
I like to commute on bike and have been doing it my entire adult life. It is harder in Brasília than in any other place I have lived. It shouldn’t be. I am only four miles from the Embassy and there is lots of open space. But the city is poorly designed for bikes or people and not even very good for cars. But I persist in riding.
It is pretty good in Lago Sul. Lago Sul is more like an ordinary city. The trouble starts when you get to the lake. You can see the picture of the bridge above. The pedestrian part of the bridge is around three feet above the road and only about three feet wide. It is constructed of concrete panels. I was afraid to ride on it at first, since falling in either direction would be very bad. On the one side you would fall into traffic, on the other into the lake. But I got used to it, avoiding the big cracks. Recently, however, one of the panels fell in, as you see in the picture. I have to get off the bike and walk carefully at that part.
Brasilia has a lot of potential and could easily be retrofitted to make it much more user friendly. There are some nice roads for biking, but they often don’t connect to anything or connect into big roads that as designed only for cars.
Until we reach that bright happy situation where hardships don’t prevail, however, I would be content if they fixed the bridge.
As an investor, I got into tree farming backwards; I love forests and I wanted to own land, but I had to convince myself that tree farming could be a good investment. I made what I considered generous estimates and jumped in. No matter the rationale, it looks like tree farming really is a good investment. Mills opening in and near
Virginia, a possible housing revival, a thriving relatively new market in wood pellets, many of which are going to places like Germany to support their renewable fuel mandate programs, and things like Dominion Power’s decision to convert some coal fired plants to Virginia grown biomass is making me happy that we decided to get into forestry. But good investment potential is just the factor that enables me to be engaged in forestry; itself it is not the reason I do it. I think most forest “investors” are like this. I take great satisfaction and pleasure watching my trees grow and planning for the future, knowing that the future will be just a little better because I am helping conserve and improve the quality of the soils, the purity of the water, the beauty of the land and its capacity to support wildlife, all the while sustainably growing timber and forest products that our country needs. This is a long sentence because it encompasses a lot. This is why I do it. This is why we do it.
My sons often come with me to work on our land and meet forestry folks. The other day, my older son asked me, “Why are the people we meet always so happy?” As I thought about the question, I realized that he was right in his observation. People involved in forestry are an unusually happy bunch. Coming up with a definitive answer as to why might require research beyond my abilities but I have a few ideas. Mostly they related to the things I wrote above.
People are happy when they are doing things they love and when they know that what they are doing has value and meaning. It helps if what they are doing is sustainable both for them and the larger community. Good people want to do good things. Forestry includes all this.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the money I can make and I am delighted that a forestry investment pays off. Profit is the price of survival. I could not do forestry if it didn’t pay off; few of us could. But I don’t know anybody in forestry who does it only or even mostly for the money. People in forestry love forests and we love them in all their glorious complexity. We love to look at them, walk in them, plan for the future and remember the past. For me, and I believe for many others, the forest is a place of sweet contentment, where yesterday, today and tomorrow flow together. In times of stress, I find my mind wandering back to my woods. The problems of a day matter little compared with the perpetuity of the forest.
There is a corny saying, “If you are lucky enough to be in the woods, you are lucky enough.” But it is true. We should all work to continue the tradition of forestry through organizations like Tree Farm. We grow the trees and we grow happiness for ourselves and others at the same time.
I am in São Paulo again and I like it here. But I was rereading “A Sand County Almanac” and I felt a lot of nostalgia for Wisconsin. For those who don’t know it, “A Sand County Almanac” is one of the classics of conservation, written in 1948 by forester Aldo Leopold mostly about his farm in southern Wisconsin.
The part that drew my attention was an essay on bur oaks and oak openings. These are the places in the Wisconsin prairies where thick barked oaks content with grass in what Leopold characterizes as the front lines in the battle between grasslands and forests. The equilibrium was broken when settlers moved in and stopped the periodic burning that had favored grass. Many of the forest covered hills in southern Wisconsin were grasslands 200 years ago. The forests date from the 1850s when this part of Wisconsin was settled.
I have loved bur oaks since as long as I can recall. There are some really big ones in Humboldt Park near the lagoon that I remember from childhood. They were giants when I was young. They seemed about the same size when I last saw them and I expect they will be there still when I am composted. I miss the woods of home.
I got a flat tire on my way to work a couple days ago. These are less common now that I got tires lined with Kevlar, but I still get them sometimes. I started to use duct tape to fix the flats. It works as well as the patches, better because it is so easy to use. You can put a fairly big square of the stuff over the hole and it holds at least as well as the patches. I guess duct tape really is good for everything.
I have been riding my bike a lot more because I pulled a muscle in my right leg. It is a strange sort of injury. It doesn’t hurt at all most of the time, but if I walk more than a few hundred yards I get a feeling of extreme fatigue on the side of my leg followed by a tightening of the calf muscle. It passes in a few minutes if I stop walking but it has stopped my walking. I didn’t realize how much I walked. I was spending about two hours walking in the evenings, listening to my audio books. This was in addition to walking to the store or restaurants. Walking is not working, but biking is okay.
I have been using the bike as transport and exercise/recreation. There are two problems with biking. I cannot do it after dark, when I was walking around listening to my audio books, and I cannot listen to my audio books while riding my bike no matter what time. It seems strange to ride five minutes to restaurants in Deck Brazil, but I have been doing that. The bread and grocery stores take about ten minutes. This would still be a preferred walking distance, but not so strange.
The exercise/recreation part is more straightforward and I will have to do it until I can walk and run again. Brasília is not a good biking city, at least not for my style of biking. As I have written before, it is kind of a 1960s science fiction vision of what the future would be. People were expected to drive everywhere and be organized by the city. So you CAN ride a bike or walk, but you are meant to drive to the place where biking or walking was designated. Getting between these designated regions w/o a car is nearly impossible. Sidewalks end; roads narrow and ramps are made for cars not people. There is an impressive amount of open space, but not usable space. On the plus side, the city could be easily improved. On the downside, some people want to protect the legacy of the original plan. I don’t understand why, but they do.
I rode my bike to the Botanical Garden a few days ago and to the City Park yesterday. The bike ride to the Gardens was easier. On this side of the lake the planners had a less pernicious effect. You still have to ride along a busy road, but there is a bike lane. The problem is that there is only one entrance to the Garden and that is on the side farthest from my house, which means I have to ride around five miles around. The Garden also sits on top of a ridge. It is not a very steep hill, but you have to go up for about two miles with no going down or even flattening. Coming back down is not as much fun as you might think because you go too fast and have to fear for merging cars. I like the Botanical Gardens. They are mostly wild and not too crowded. But the ride there is a bit to arduous to make regularly.
The City Park is nice. It has a long bike/walking trail. This is one of those places designated by the planners as a place to ride or walk. The park is pleasant. I used to run there when I was in Brasília in 1985. It was less developed then and the trees were smaller. Like the Garden, the problem is getting there. There was not much traffic on the roads because of Carnival, so I was okay, but a bike would not be safe much of the way on an average day. It is also mostly uphill on the way there. You climb gradually out of the valley. It is not very hard but consistently hard.
As I ride and walk around Brasília, I always think of what could have been and what still might be. This city has a great climate and topography. It is an ideal city place for things like walking, biking, sidewalk cafes etc. They could easily construct a network of bike and walking trails on much of that open land and along some of the streets. A few well-placed stoplights would make it safe to cross the busy streets. They are probably too wide to put up pedestrian bridges. I know all this would deviate from the original plan, but the original plan is outdated. The planners built for conditions and habits that never came to pass and people’s preferences are not what they thought.
My bike riding is giving me a strange type of tan. You can see the contrast in the picture above. The top of my hand is brown from the sun, but the fingers stay mostly pink since they face down.
Other pictures: On top are pine trees in the City Park. I remember them being much smaller, but it is very pleasant in their shade. Next is Brasilia from the City Park. Below that is a path in the Botanical Garden and then a “blitz”. Brazil has a zero tolerance law now for alcohol. At one of these blocks, the cops stop everyone to check blood levels.
My sheep experiment didn’t work and I don’t have an animal to eat the grass, so I decided to declare my lawn a nature preserve and stop mowing. You can see what it is like in the pictures. I didn’t only stop mowing. I also gathered seeds when I ride my bike past flower beds on the median strips for my wild garden.
I scatter them and some things have come up. I don’t know most of the plants but some are familiar. Morning glories and marigolds grow down here and I found some seeds from them. One of the most aggressive volunteer plants is “Maria sem vergonha.” This means Maria w/o shame. The name comes from the fact that it grows easily almost everywhere. Brazilians think it is a weed. It has the nice deep green leaves and pink flowers.
I don’t know what the red flower below is called. There were a bunch of them growing on the median strip near my house. I gathered a couple seed pods; only three came up. I have no idea what the other one is. That is just another volunteer.
I like it better than the carpet-like lawn, especially because I am not sure what will come up. It is a surprise. One thing that is disappointing is that there seem to be not many bees and butterflies. Generally speaking, the grasslands around here are less exuberant than our plains. I read that this is because the Brazilian grasslands lacked large ungulates, such as bison. These big beasts graze the grass, fertilize with their manure and help spread seeds. I can help spread the seeds, but I don’t think I want to do the other two things on my lawn and I don’t want to repeat my sheep experiment. Below is Maria sem Vergonha.
