It has not rained for more than ninety days and that was an unusual rain. I remember because it rained on the day Espen arrived in Brasília, June 16. I told him that it would not rain while he was in Brasília. I was wrong but rain in June is a rare occurrence. We have had not much rain for four months and none at all for three. Within a two or three week, however, the rain will start and then is will rain every day until next April.
It is springtime in Brazil or will be in a few days, but it has the feeling of fall, since many of the trees are now dropping their leaves. There is not a long time of bareness. In this tropical climate, they just drop them and replace, but having the leaves underfoot seems like fall. Of course, the anomaly are the flowering trees. This gives us a springtime feel. Very confusing for a child of the temperate forests like me.
This is the hottest part of the year. The sun is strong and there are few clouds. When the rain comes, it gets cooler. It is also smoky this time of year, enough to make your eyes hurt, as there are lots of grass and brush fires. Generally, I will be happy to see the rain, although the dry season has the advantage of certainty. You can go somewhere secure in the knowledge that it will not rain nor will the temperature vary much.
The picture is my backyard. I don’t water the lawn, as you see, so the grass doesn’t grow. The yellow trees are ipé. They are very pretty. Mine are not very big. A few days of rain will make all that brown grass turn vibrantly green. It is a spectacular & very rapid change.
I read the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” back in 1990 and it helped change my life. You could say that the advice is just obvious and you are right. But the greatest truths are usually simple things that “everybody knows” but doesn’t seem to appreciate. In many ways, it is like a diet & exercise program. Everybody knows how to lose weight and get in better shape, but not many people do it right.
You are only really changed by the people you meet and the books you read and then only if you think about them. Reading the 7 Habits made me think about my priorities in life. I was reading a lot of similar things at that time. I did the usual Peter Drucker and Tom Peters books popular at the time and read a lot about organizational theory in general. Covey’s book was certainly not the only influence on me and I am not attributing to the book magical powers, but it helped me. For example, that the book helped me work less and get more done. At the time, I consciously and specifically thought about my work life in relation to the 7 habits. I used to work a lot but not always highly effectively. I often would put in 16-hour days when I was building my career. It was not working well for my health, my family and even for my career. After reading the book, I felt I had a defensible reason to work less, work smarter and put more balance in my life. I started to “start with the end in mind” which made me quit doing a lot of things that were not very useful and avoid lots of meetings. I still don’t think that you can expect to be successful if you work only eight hours a day, but on most days 9-10 hours is enough if you do them right. Covey’s practical time management techniques made my shorter hours possible and his principles gave me reason to do it.
Even before reading the book, I believed in the idea that you should “serve the principle, not the master.” This made me unpopular with some of my bosses in the short term, but a life where you make decisions based on principles is better than one where you are pushed around by expedients or pulled along by your ephemeral desires. Good people recognize this as do good bosses and you really should not care about the opinions of others. Stephen Covey talked about a principle centered life and that made sense to me. He was right. In fact, I can trace almost all my mistakes and regrets to instances when I cut corners or did not act in clear accordance with my principles. You really cannot be happy if you violate your principles and you don’t deserve to be.
The other thing that the book confirmed for me was to be proactive. Don’t cry about your problems or become a victim; figure out what to do to change the situations you don’t like and then do those things.
Critics of Covey say that his ideas were simplistic. Life is indeed complex, but the basic structure of our responses really can be simple. They must be simple if we are to make them work. It worked for me for more than twenty years. I think that the “secret” of life is indeed the simplicity of thinking through and adhering to strong principles. Of course, simple solutions are not always easy ones.
Stephen Covey is dead. We should not mourn for the life well led, but I feel a loss. I met him only once in person and we talked for only a few minutes, but I felt I knew him from the work he shared. You can know people through their work and I am a better person for having known Stephen Covey. He left a legacy.
The pictures above and below are the lake from my running trail along Lake Paranoá in Brasilia. It is a very pretty scene. It gets dark in Brasília at around 6pm at this time of the year, so anytime I run on a weekday I am doing it in the dark, or at least the semi-dark. I don’t mind, no chance of sunburn. It is also a sublime experience to run through the landscape in the muted light. My system is to run a loop that takes me back about three quarters of the way. Then I walk the rest of the way, listening to my audiobooks. Right now I have the bio of Lyndon Johnson, “Passage to Power”. Great book and a great way to combine exercise, relaxation and learning.
I really do need to get out. I just feel much better and can think more clearly when I have had my daily dosage of nature. I would go so far as to say that it restores the health of the soul. I got a good portion of this soul-saving medicine today at the Texas Arboretum and Lady Bird Johnson wildflower garden.
The park represents the Texas biomes, especially the hill country. It is an extraordinarily pleasant landscape, a kind of oak savanna. The signature combination is the grove of oak, often live-oak, among the wild flowers, as you see on several of these pictures. Savanna is not a final landscape, i.e. it requires a couple things to keep it in place. The two most important factors are fire and grazing. Before cattle, BTW, it was bison that did the grazing. The African savanna has the many large ungulates. The grazing was important both because of what it took and what it left behind. The grazing animals ate the grass but ate other plants differentially, creating more diversity. They also fertilized with their manure. It was important that the herds moved. The savannas recovered in between grazing. Fire needed to be frequent enough to keep the trees from filling in entirely, but not so frequent or hot to kill all the trees. In the absence of grazing and fires as described, the savanna will transform either into a closed woodland or a grassland w/o trees. South American grasslands, like those around Brasilia, were little different in their natural states, since they lacked those large grazing animals. Of course, fire is still a factor.
Both these factors are declining today in the U.S. We still have plenty of cows, but they are increasingly fed in lots or at least raised more intensively. Fire is often excluded to the extent that people can do it. In time, this will change the ecology. The arboretum folks are well aware of this and are figuring that into their management. I will write a little more about fire in another post.
The dead oaks above are the victims of oak wilt. This has been a big problem for live-oaks in Texas. It also affects red oaks to a lesser extent, white oaks not so much. The malady is spread by insects and root grafts. It can be managed by separating oaks. This might involve digging trenches so that roots do not graft. We also need to be very careful about pruning (never prune oaks January to June) and moving wood (do not move firewood that may contain the fungus). Even with good management, it is a devastating disease. It won’t be as bad as chestnut blight or Dutch elm, but it is altering the ecology over large swaths of our woodlands.
I am not sure how dangerous the snakes are. I know that there are indeed rattlesnakes in this sort of environment, but maybe the sign is more meant to encourage people to stay on the paths than the really warn about the rattlers.
It was a pleasant drive from Houston to San Antonio. I followed I-10 most of the way and could just leave it on cruise control. One thing is a little surprising. Traffic moves a little slower in Texas, at least on I-10 on when I was driving, than it does on I-95 in Virginia. You can actually cruise at something near the speed limit and not be passed too often like you were standing still. It is a more open road too. The thing I love about Virginia is the thick forests that are all along the highway. You are generally looking at trees all the way from Washington to the Carolinas. This highway in Texas has a lot more grass and open vistas. This is also beautiful, but different.
One thing you also notice in Texas are the flags. Texans love their state flag, which is prominent along most of the roads and on building tops. It is a pretty flag. Above is the headquarters of Alamo College. I like the really big live-oak. Below is the street new Alamo College HQ. The place is gentrifying. It seemed familiar. I figured out why. The area was former light industry, which reminds me of Milwaukee were I grew up, and they have a cream colored brick, also like Milwaukee.
San Antonio just seems a pleasant city. I got to my appointment at Alamo way early, so I had a chance to walk around the neighborhood. I spent about an hour. It was a little hot, but worth the walk. Below is the Mexican restaurant where I had a good meal for $8.
The road from San Antonio to Austin, I-35 was not as nice. There was traffic the whole way and along the road were strip malls and car dealers. It seemed like a continuous semi-urban corridor. The only entertainment was a woman in front of me. She was ripping something up and throwing it out the window. Then we she passed some state buildings, she gave it the finger for a long time. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and couldn’t take my eyes off traffic long enough to see. She had Oklahoma plates. Maybe she bears some grudge against Texas. I didn’t take any pictures along the actual highway because I didn’t stop, but I took the one below from near my hotel in Austin, which gives the idea.
The hotel is nice, as Courtyards always are, but I was disappointed. It is called Courtyard-Austin-Arboretum. I thought it would be within walking distance to some trees. I learned that nothing is within walking distance of much of anything around here. The “arboretum” nearby is a shopping area called that and some condos called that. Below is where I had supper. I could walk there from the hotel, although you have to be careful crossing the road. I thought Marie Callender just made frozen pies. Who knew it was a restaurant? Seems like mostly old people frequent the place. I suppose that is now my demographic too.
One of the simple joys of life is just walking around w/o a rush. You just have to put your feet on the ground. I had the chance to do a lot of walking and some running in the old places around Washington. Washington is one of the world’s great cities and great for running and walking. One of the things I like is that you can be by yourself but not alone. There are enough people around but you can get away from them.
They have the Mall all dug up. The signs say that they are replacing the dirt with dirt that doesn’t compact easily, so that it can handle the crowds. They are also laying some kind of drainage and water holding pipes so that it can stay green w/o lots of watering. A lot of science, technology and engineering will go into this lawn and if they do a good job nobody will notice when it is done.
IMO they did a good job on the Mall in general. You would not know to look at it, but the Mall is largely hollow, i.e. there are roads and buildings under it. They didn’t want to build up when they built new museums a couple decades ago, so they dug down.
The Mall is getting a little crowded. They built the Museum of the American Indian about ten years ago. It is a superb building and the grounds are interesting. I don’t think the museum itself is very good. IMO, it lacks a focus. They tried to accommodate too many groups. The picture above shows construction of the Museum of African Americans. I think that museums on the Mall should commemorate our common American heritage. Our motto is still “e pluribus unum,” which means “from many, one.” There is lot of room for pluralism in our country; it is what makes our country great, but there are only about 300 acres on the National Mall.
Above is the work on Gallows Road. Notice the change in grade. I wanted to take a picture before they were done. I think it will be very different later.
Being back in Washington has the advantage of being able to do intellectual things, such as attending lectures, at low of no cost. Alex & I went to two of them this week. We saw Jonah Goldberg launching his new book called the “the Tyranny of Clichés” at AEI and H.W. Brands talking about his new book, “The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr” at Smithsonian. Both were lively speakers.
Goldberg says that people use clichés as ways to shut off debate and delegitimize arguments they cannot win. He gave the example of somebody saying “violence never solved anything.” This often ends a debate. If you question the statement, it sort of implies that you support or at least accept violence. In fact, violence has solved many problems, especially violent problems. And non-violence works only against people who are already not very violent. Gandhi, for example, could be non-violent only because was facing an opponent – the British – that believed in the rule of law and was susceptible to persuasion. There may have been Gandhi type people in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union but they disappeared into concentration camps of Gulags with their voices forever silenced. Usually, potential Gandhis were silence before they even said much of anything at all. Nazis and communists were skilled at identifying and liquidating potential threats even before they were manifest.
I enjoyed the Goldberg speech, but it was more along political lines. The H.W. Brands was more intellectually interesting. He is a historian talking about history and seems to have reached some of the same sorts of conclusions I have about historiography. In fact, when I relate what I recall he said, I am a little worried that it more what I think than a real description.
Brands talked about the differences between writing novels and writing history. Novels are more compelling to some people because you can have dialogue and you can know what people are thinking. Historians almost never can do this. The problem is sources. People tend not to write down all their thoughts and even if they did, the letters or papers tend not to be preserved.
This is the big problem for biographers. Brands said that you can write about extraordinary people because people know that they should keep letters or make notes about what they say. You can sometimes write about ordinary people in extraordinary times because they know to write things down. That is why we can write history of common people during the Civil War because so many people wrote their thoughts. I thought Brands took a courageous stand when he explained why he couldn’t write biographies of women. Women, he said, tended not to have available sources.
You could write a biography of Abigail Adams from her letters to John Adams, but that would mostly be a biography of John too. In fact, that is what David McCullough did with his biography of John Adams. This brings another interesting permutation. The John & Abigail relationship is so rich for historians because they were so often apart when important things were happening. If they are together, they presumably still talk about these things but they leave no record.
Another disadvantage of history versus a novel has to do with conclusions. A novel can produce a story with clear heroes, villains, beginning and endings. History is never so tidy. Beginnings and endings flow into each other and they rarely are clear. History never ends.
I agreed with Brands’ distinction of mysteries from secrets. A secret is something you don’t know but in theory could find out. For example, the plan of attack on Pearl Harbor was a secret, but it could have been known by the U.S. A mystery is cannot be known. A mystery has to do with intentions and aspirations. Many times the person himself doesn’t really know what he wants to do before conditions become clearer. This is the case with the famous treason of Aaron Burr.
Burr went west and was accused of planning to foment a war or maybe an independent movement in the West. Brands says that there is no way to know what Burr really planned. The circumstances never came together to allow him to make his move. Brands also thinks that Burr probably did not have a firm plan in mind. He didn’t know what he was planning to do.
IMO, this is an important thing to remember in history. We all like the good stories, but there are many mysteries in history. They are not known to us now and can never be known. We like to think that all would be well if we could just have been sources, but this is not true. They are not unknown; they are unknowable.
I kept on thinking of the dilemma of history writing. Is there history w/o historians? Obviously, things happen whether or not anybody is there to write them down. But history is more than just a recording of one thing after another. That is why we acknowledge Herodotus as the “father of history.” People recorded events long before Herodotus. Herodotus’ contribution was to try to look at history through a kind of a system, to make explanations, not just record one damn thing after another. This means, however, that historians write their narrative and that their narrative is history. Brands gave the example of constellations. We recognize the big dipper, Aquarius, Scorpio etc. when we look at the night sky. But the stars that make up these constellations are in no way connected. They are thousands of light years apart. But once somebody points out the big dipper, you can never again look at the random jumble of stars w/o seeing the big dipper. We would hope that a historical narrative is more than a mere artificial imposition on a random and meaningless distribution, but clearly the intelligence of the writer imposes order. The interpretation is necessary to make it understandable, but it is not a metaphysical truth. Historical interpretations can change and they do.
In the end we didn’t talk very much about Aaron Burr. Brands joked that we could get that story out of his book. He did explain that he tried to write the book to be interesting like a novel. He was able to do this because there was a good body of letters between Burr and his daughter Theodosia. For details, we need to buy the book.
My top picture shows Brands. He looks very severe in this picture and all the pictures I have seen on his books, but he is very engaging and friendly. The picture don’t do him justice. Below is the Hirshhorn Museum. They had some kind of projection on the building. It was well done. It must be hard to project on a curved surface like that.
We had rain on and off but it was good to see Alex graduate from college. He worked hard for this and I was glad to get home to see him do it.
Chrissy and Alex above; Mariza and Espen below
Alex followed a pattern that I think will become more and more common. He started in community college in Northern Virginia and then transfered since his grades were good. I think this is a better system. Not only is it less expensive, but it allows the students to earn their way in. Community colleges have open enrollment. The students can get better. The traditional entrance makes them jump a barrier when they are 18 years old. But then they are in. I also think we should probably go in more for distance learning. College has become so expensive. Many of the classes don’t really require residence. IMO, some courses would be BETTER as distance learning. Kids could go at their own pace.
I admire Alex. He chose to go to NOVA while still working at Home Depot, studied and finished. He was particularly brave after he was attacked during his first semester at JMU. He never complained or asked for special treatment. He came through. I am really proud of him today.
I have not written much for a while. We have been unusually busy in the office. What have I been doing?
We have had visits by important people like the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. This sucks in more people and time than you might think. I remember when Secretary of State Eagleburger came to Norway back in the 1990s. This was my first SecState visit. He came with a few people. We didn’t have to spend a lot of time preparing for the visit. He knew his business and was not much interested in VIP treatment. I tried to give him some talking points. As near as I can recall his response he said, “I don’t need these things; I make them up.” Suffice to say that it is not like this anymore.
Of course Eagleburger is a special case. He is the only career FSO ever to be Secretary of State. If that is not enough reason to revere him, he was born in Milwaukee, went to school in Stevens Point and got his degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Another thing that has been taking time is writing fitness reports. I wrote my own (we write our own first page), those of my key staff and reviewed those from our consulates. Since I had experience on promotion panels, colleagues have asked me to help with theirs. I tried my best. I work with really great people and when I read their accomplishments I feel much honored to be in this group.
Writing the reports is one of the most important things I do. Good people should get what they deserve. But I really hate the software we have to use to file the reports. It is complicated and troublesome. I never met anybody who actually likes it. It is not intuitive. You spend several hours learning how to use it each April and then don’t use it for a year and have to relearn it next time. But we cannot seem to get beyond it. We used to have a simple Word document that you could fill in. It took a few minutes. But a couple years back, they started to make us use this thing called e-Performance. It transforms a few minutes of work into hours or even days of wresting with the kind of software everybody thought was obsolete in back in the 1990s.
I should not complain. I am very lucky to work in this place, at this time with these people. There is no place I would rather work. I don’t have any unfulfilled career ambitions. Promotion for me would be an honor, but it isn’t very important to me. I am not angling for any job beyond the one I have now. My goal in taking the job as PAO in Brazil was to pursue excellence. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I just wanted to get it really right before my time was done. This time I felt that I could really devote my full attention. I always thought that if conditions were right, I could produce excellence. Conditions are excellent; me … still not so much. It is humbling to come up against the limitations.
I don’t put enough time into gardening to be really good at it and my harvests result more from luck and the inherent characteristics of the plants themselves. I would starve if I had to depend on the produce from my soil. But I will be better next time. This year was a learning time. There are seasons in Brasília, even if it is a place of eternal springtime. After spending a year here, I hope I will have a better understanding of the subtlety of my garden. The obvious seasonal difference is the rainy versus the dry season.
As I explained in earlier posts, Brasília is a very strange place with regards to water. It is like a desert during the dry season, but unlike a place like Arizona there is no shortage of water on the Brazilian high plains. More rain falls in a couple days during the rainy season here than falls in Phoenix all year long. You could water your gardens and lawns every day w/o running afoul of water restrictions or even feeling bad about wasting a scarce resource.
Most of my neighbors are profligate water users and they can be because of the unique nature of the water cycles here. I did not and do not plan to soak my grass during the dry season. It is less because I want to conserve water, which around here really doesn’t make a difference, and more because I prefer not to have to mow the lawn so often. I did and will water my flower and vegetable garden, but it is not as easy as that.
It doesn’t seem like you can dump enough water on the garden during the dry season, at least I didn’t. I planted tomatoes, watermelons and lots of flowers. They grew fitfully until the rainy season, when they went through a phase change. I suppose it is a matter of how much irrigation you use. Brazilians successfully grow all sorts of fruit and vegetable around here, so it must be possible
I also need to analyze my soil. The gardener told me that the local soil is poor and sour/acid. I have been adding organic material, i.e. grass clippings, peels etc. but that doesn’t much change the Ph. I hope that Espen will be here during this U.S. Summer. I will have to feed him a higher quality diet than I eat, which means I will be grilling more and producing wood/charcoal ash that I can use as potash to sweeten the soil. I will get my soil in shape just about the time I leave. The Embassy will probably plant grass on my erstwhile garden and future tenants in my house will notice that the grass grows faster on that spot, but they won’t know why.
You can see in my pictures that my crops are almost ready to eat. I didn’t have much luck with lettuce. It is just starting to come up now. I think that birds ate the seeds. Well … I did a poor job of planting. Lettuce seeds are very small. I had trouble with them as they stuck to my fingers and got lost in the dirt. I should have started them in pots and then moved them. Instead I put them directly into the Brazilian clay with poor results. I planted the tomatoes seeds directly into the soil and it worked out okay. Tomatoes are forgiving, however. I only need to get one or two plants to work in order to produce more tomatoes than I could eat. The big surprise is the watermelons. I grew them from seeds of a particularly good watermelon. The vines grew slowly, with lots of flowers but only one fruit, which was damaged by some animal and rotted inside. I gave up, but didn’t bother to pull out the vines. I was surprised how they grew and then only a couple weeks ago I got a profusion of melons. I counted eleven, a few of which are getting pretty big. I read that you pick them when the stem entering the melon turns yellow. I consume one watermelon every two weeks, so if even a few of these come to sweet maturity I will be set for months.
I didn’t include a picture of my sweet corn because it is depressing. It just has not grown up to its promising start. I will leave it alone, however. Maybe it will work out as the watermelon did. My banana tree is growing robustly, but I am told that it will not produce bananas for about a year and half.
It is a lot of work to dig up all plants and create a garden and I don’t always have time to do it. I will work on this a little at time, incorporate my compost etc. and have it ready for the next rainy season. Next year will be better, with my improved soil and enhanced experience. The wonderful thing about gardening is that you get many chances for iterative learning and improvement.
