Tag: family

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Happy Port

I didn’t appreciate Porto Alegre when I was here a quarter century ago.  Your feelings about people and places often reflect your feelings about yourself. Times were hard, for me and for Brazil. Chrissy and I were abysmally poor. I didn’t make much as a junior officer and more than half of my take home pay went to paying off student loans. Beyond that, starting off in a new career, I had to buy suits and other work-related stuff.  Because of my particular position, we also had to buy all sorts of reasonably high-quality dishes and plates for at home entertaining. To top it all off, Mariza was born in Porto Alegre.  Babies bring great joy, but they are hard work and they cost a lot of money. 

Now add in professional problems. This was my first independent post. My boss was thousands of miles away and they really neglected me. I liked being left alone, as I mentioned in the previous post, but I realize now that I really needed a little more direction or “mentoring” than I got.  I worked too hard. Well, I worked too hard in the wrong way. I didn’t understand the old saying that you have to first seek to understand before being understood. I would have been better off “working” to get to know the society better rather than working on the ostensible work in the office.  It would have been more fun too. Sometimes you can go farther faster by running slower.

Finally, it was a hard time for Brazil.  The Brazilians were not happy with themselves so it was harder for them to be happy with us.  I was there during the “Cruzado Plan”.  They changed the currency and put on all sorts of price controls. This created shortages and black markets.  I remember it was even hard to get Coca-Cola.

It is better now for me, for them and better in general.

Porto Alegre seems like home and is familiar even with the big changes.  It is funny. The place is full of Mariza. I keep on “seeing” my baby girl in all the places we took her and even in the places we didn’t because she was always on my mind.  That was another thing I didn’t appreciate at the time.  I get a similar feeling in SE Washington, BTW, near the old Oakwood. It is filled with Alex from when he was a baby. Sometimes I just used to sit on the bench there and absorb that.  I have never really understood those feelings.  They are bitter-sweet, as it is with remembering intense things past.

So there were lots of reason I didn’t appreciate the place or the time.  I am better now and so the beauty of the place is easier to see.

The pictures show the beauty of the place. The first two are Parque Farroupilha where I used to run. Below is the street we lived on in a neighborhood called Moinhos de Vento.  The streets are lined with jacaranda trees. I got to POA a few days to early.  Soon they would be in beautiful purple flowers. It was a nice neighborhood then; it is fantastic now, with lots of shops and restaurants within walking distance down pleasant streets.  The swings are in Parque Moinhos de Vento, where we used to take Mariza to play. It looks like it is the same equipment.  The bottom picture is Zaffari, the grocery store where we used to shop. It is within walking distance from our old house. Zaffari is a chain of supermarkets. They are really nice, maybe like Wegmans in the U.S. 

Here are a few more pictures relevant to the story that I didn’t post.

  • Walking path from my old house to Zaffri
  • McDonald’s near my old house
  • My house in Porto Alegre

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Civilian Conservation Corps

We saw a sign for a CCC memorial just off I-75, so we stopped to see. As an out-of-state car, it cost us $8 for the short visit, but it was worth going to see. My father was in the CCC and they planted trees so I feel a special connection in two ways. The monument is in a quiet place with lots of trees. The day was beautiful, cool and sunny. I feel comfortable but a little sad in such places. Bittersweet is the word. They remind me of good things past and gone.

The CCC boys, my father among them, planted trees and did other conservation chores. It was important work for them and for the country. The early part of the 20th Century was the time when our American forests were in their worst shape ever. Lots of people feared we would run out of wood and that our soils and water would be forever lost.  The CCC was not the only reason we have had such great success in turning the situation around, but it was important. 

My father used to tell me about the CCC. When I think back on it, it was remarkable for him. He told me little in general about his life as a young man. I don’t know much about his years in the Army Air Corps & I don’t know anything for sure about his childhood, but I know a lot about the CCC from him. He enjoyed being in the woods and was proud of the work he had done. Whenever I saw a row of trees that I thought was planted by the CCC, I thought of him. It was one of the things we shared over the years.

When my father first told me about these things, it had less than thirty years since they did their work. Now it is more almost seventy. The trees they planted are fully mature and in some places they are in the second generation. They accomplished their mission, but youth has matured to age. I still think of the old man when i think of the CCC; I still feel proud of what he did and I still miss him. As I said, it is bittersweet.

Generations pass quickly and memory passes with them. I suppose that most young people know little and care even less about the CCC. I don’t suppose many people come to places like this, at least not voluntarily.

The CCC took young men like my father and gave them some productive work to do. It kept lots of unemployed kids out of trouble and helped prepare our country for the challenge it would soon face in WWII.  My father told me that it was very much like a military operation, including revelry and assembly. He said that when he went into the army in 1942, the instructors favored the men with CCC experience.

We have some similar unemployment problems today, but this solution wouldn’t work. I fear we have become too wimpified as a nation. The CCC boys built the barracks you see in the picture above. Forty of them lived in it in Spartan conditions. It was hot in summer, cold in winter and probably leaky when it rained. Before they built the barracks, they lived in tents. Imagine “subjecting” poor kids to that sort of thing today. Of course, I am sure there would be accusations of “bullying”, not to mention myriad violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And how would public employee unions react to thousands of kids making low wages taking jobs in public parks?  Finally, the CCC boys (I think they were all boys) had to send much of their money home to their mothers. How would today’s kids feel about that?

The Pictures:

On top is a statue of a CCC boy.  Next is a mini fire tower, followed by a plaque talking about the CCC. The last picture is the CCC barracks. 

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Bean Soup

My father subsisted on pea soup and bean soup, more or less, for the last twenty years of his life, those things plus some Polish sausage and almost ripe tomatoes. Making them is easy and cheap. The biggest challenge is remembering to soak the beans/peas overnight. You can use leftover ham as a base, or the parts of the ham that you didn’t want to eat because they were too fat or too hard to pick off the bone. You can see why this is such a wonderful peasant food.  It stays good for a long time. In fact, it improves with age.  Nothing is wasted.  You can also toss in whatever vegetables were laying around.  It all turns into a kind of thick gruel that tastes pretty good if you put in a little pepper and salt.

I don’t make these soups as much as I did when I was in college. Back in college pea soup and bean soup were among the foods that had the three attributes I craved: they were cheap, reasonably nutritious and I could make them. That is probably why my father ate them all the time too.  But my kids don’t like either, so they cannot form the basis of a family meal.  As I recall, I didn’t like them either when I was a kid. I learned to like them when I was in college. No doubt under my father’s influence, I made it from scratch, the less expensive and better way, rather than buying the pre-made stuff in cans.

You can get pea soup at some nice restaurants, but it is kind of a specialty not common most places.

We had ham for supper and we have ham bone left over, so today I made bean soup.  In a couple of days, I will make some pea soup with what still will be left of the ham.  This week, we will dine like the old man taught me.

Oh yeah, he used to make cabbage soup too. I haven’t made that for a long time. No matter how much of this kind of food you try to eat, you really cannot get fat on it.  These kinds of food fill you up before they can fill you out – the original diet food.

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Encounters with the Legal System

One of the punks that attacked Alex is up for trial.  He is summoned to give testimony.  He doesn’t remember anything, but he has to go anyway.  I don’t know how strong a case they have against this particular guy.  I am fairly sure he is guilty, but as I mentioned before he is one of six guys who attacked Alex.  The bad guys are taking legal refuge in the confusion about which of them actually did the kicking and stomping.

The attack on Alex has made me a lot more sensitive to random crimes and hate crimes.  He is very lucky that he was not hurt more seriously or permanently.  I read in the paper about a kid about his age who was in a fight that put him into a permanent coma.  Of course, Alex could have been killed and for nothing.  He was just in the wrong place and had the wrong appearance.  I like to think that the world is rational, but not always.  Life can change in a second and all the hopes and aspirations can be gone.

Alex really had a hard time last year.  He starts a new school, away from home for the first time.  That is stressful enough.  Then he gets set upon by six thugs.  He still finished his exams on time and never complained about his bad luck.  He didn’t even want to tell his professors why he missed a week of class and why he had some trouble concentrating after he came back.  I admire him for it, although I thought that he should have at least played for a little sympathy.  It must have impacted his grades.

My other contact with the legal system next month will be jury duty.  I have been a registered voter for nearly thirty-seven years, but I have never served on a jury.  Of course, I was overseas a lot of that time, but I don’t think I was ever even summoned before.   We are lucky to live in county with lots of voters in relation to criminals.  Some of my colleagues who live in DC, where the ratio tends to run less favorably, serve on juries with monotonous regularity. I don’t know if I will actually get to/have to serve on the jury.  I just have to report and see if they need me for anything.   I want to serve on a jury, to have the experience, but I would prefer not at this particular time, when I am focusing all my energy and attention on learning Portuguese and about Brazil.  I suppose there is never a really perfect time to do jury duty, but last October would have been good.

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Getting to Know a Few Things More

Mariza’s boyfriend wanted to attend mass, so we went down to Roanoke Rapids, which was the closest Catholic church with a Saturday service. The priest at St. John the Baptist was out, so they had a temporary priest who has done a lot of work with local forestry in Kenya. You can read more about it here.

After church, we went to a nice Italian, simple Italian restaurant on the main street in Roanoke Rapids. It is a pleasant little down, but not really exciting. This is probably the place where my thinned trees will end up.Below you can see the trees on the Freeman place, planted in 1996 and ready to be thinned.

We were down in the southern part of the state so that Mariza and Chris could see the forests.  Mariza had never seen the Freeman place and had not seen the CP property recently. Things have changed a lot. It was good to be able to show them the trees and explain a little about forestry.  Some of these trees will belong to Mariza someday. It is good if she gets to know the land and can become a good steward of the nature on it.

I got to ride down and back with Mariza, which was good. We had a chance to talk a little.  I don’t see Mariza that much anymore. We used to take walks and talk when she was a little girl, but since then not so much. It gets harder to keep in touch when they move away. She has become a wonderful young woman and I want to get to know her better. Above shows Mariza and Chris in one of our wildlife clearings in front of the CP pines, planted in 2004. The picture below is Mariza and me (I think she is just a little taller than I am). Right underneath is a picture from around the same place in 2006. I always like to show the contrast, which each year gets more pronounced. It was not that long ago, but already the difference is remarkable. Below that are Mariza and Chris walking among the mature pines at the edge of the property.

There was a lot of activity on the farms. On both places, guys from the hunt clubs were exercising and training their hunting dogs. The guy on the Freeman property was going to run down some coyotes. I don’t think he was hunting the coyotes when we saw him, just training the dogs. You can hunt coyotes all year around on private land in Virginia. I have no problem with coyotes either way, but if somebody from the hunt club wants to chase them on my land, I don’t have a problem with that either. Coyotes are not native to Virginia and they are a nuisance to local farmers. 

The guys on CP were training their dogs for rabbit hunting, which starts next week.

We are getting more and more bear in the area and I am not enthusiastic about that. I know bears are mostly harmless, but the “mostly” part worries me a little. I bring my lunch with me when I work on the land and I am often there alone.  I really don’t want to have to think about attracting bears or not. Southside Virginia was not “bear country for more than a century, but now they are back. We sometimes see bear signs and people have taken pictures with those motion activated cameras.

Of course, absolute proof of bears is that a local guy killed one with a bow and arrow.  I would be a little nervous going after a bear with a bow and arrow.  It just doesn’t seem like that is “loaded for bear,” but I guess that some of those new bows are really effective. I am glad that the hunters go after the bear.  I want them to retain their fear of humans. In different seasons, it is legal to hunt bear with bow, black powder and ordinary firearms.  Dogs can be used to hunt bear in some situations.  Brunswick County has a bear hound training season, where hunter can train their dogs to chase bear, but cannot kill them if they chase them down.

Hunting and trapping regulations are available at this link.Below is Genito Creek. I like to go down there, since it is quiet and ever changing. I explained to Mariza and Chris how the creek keeps on moving as it undercuts one bank and then the other.  It floods an area of at least fifty yards on both sides. This is the kind of place that someone would like to have a house or a cabin because it is pretty and pleasant. Of course, this is also the kind of place where nobody should build a house, since it will regularly flood.

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Alex back to JMU

I took Alex back up to school at James Madison.  He is in a new dorm right in the center of the campus.  I think he will be better.  He can more easily walk to the places he needs to go and will have more contact with other students.  The room is smaller than the one he had before & has no air conditioning.  This will be okay most of the school year, but it still can get hot in September.  His room is part of a suite with six guys, who share a kind of living space in the middle.  Above is his building and below is his room as it looked when he moved in. The tree is a river birch, the southern cousin in the birch family. In Wisconsin we can grow the paper birch or the white birch. They are pretties than this kind of brownish one, but you have to adapt to local conditions.  I wanted to get a picture of Alex too, but he refused and kept on moving in and out of the shot.

The campus was full of new freshmen, you can see the gaggle of them below. They are much better groomed than back in the 1970s when I started, but otherwise look similar. Speaking of gaggles, the geese just stroll across the road and most cars stop.  I didn’t.  I went slow enough that they could move out of the way, but I am not going to yield to geese.  They squawked a little but they cleared a path.  Up at the farm, a turkey stood in front of my car and stared at me.  I actually had to get out and shoo it away. Turkeys are dumb enough to be run over by a car going 3MPH; geese are not.

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Fells Point in Baltimore

Chrissy and I went to visit Mariza in Baltimore. It really is a nice city, at least the parts we visit.  Espen and I once turned into a less nice area. It looked like the set for a cop drama; lots of people just hanging around, but these places are being renewed and redeveloped pretty well.

The pictures are from Fells Point, where we went to eat at a place called Kali’s Corner, a seafood restaurant. They had a special menu for restaurant week. I had sea bass; Chrissy got skate, evidently a sting ray & Mariza got the salmon. The Atmosphere was very good; food was okay.

Mariza is doing fine.  Business is picking up a little at Travelers.  Evidently they are at least hiring some new people this year. Above & below are pictures from the windows of Mariza’s new apartment.

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Not Like Law & Order

We attended the hearing for the six guys accused of beating Alex.  It was painful to hear the story of how these thugs attacked him, unprovoked, and started to kick him in the face.  Evidently there was  a pattern of attacks.  

I don’t want innocent people to get in trouble and I know that is why we have all the complicated legal procedures. It is good that the system is stacked in favor of defendants. But their lawyers were clearly fishing. They asked the cop on the stand all sorts of questions clearly designed to tax his recollection, things that really didn’t matter and/or things he could not have known.

Alex took the stand to tell what he knew, which wasn’t much. He only knows that he found himself on the ground being kicked. None of the lawyers for the defendants cross examined him. I was glad for that; he could not have added anything, but I thought the lawyers might try to cloud the issue somehow.  

I made a special point of staring at the defendants as they were identified. They didn’t show emotion. During the recess they all went into the bathroom and I got to wait in line among them.  None of them looked at me. I don’t know what that means, if anything. Maybe they had to go to the bathroom really bad and that was all that was on their minds. I cannot tell who is guilty just by looking. I was hoping they would brag or say something that I could bring to the attention of the authorities, but they were completely silent. They were very savvy defendants, which I think is significant.

The authorities are still waiting for DNA evidence. Human blood was splattered on one of their shirts. You have to wonder how it got there and if it is Alex’s it will prove that the guy in question at least came close enough to get splashed. Until that comes in, they had enough evidence to hold only one of the guys.  As I wrote above, I don’t want innocent guys punished. But they caught these guys at the scene where they were identified at the time by witnesses. Maybe they were not all involved, but the probably all know who was involved. There is no honor in protecting bad guys.

Alex is philosophical about this. He doesn’t want them punished very much, since they are young and perhaps inexperienced. But anybody who would hit a stranger from behind and then commence to kick him in the head and face is dangerous to society. I can understand, if not accept, assault during a robbery, but they didn’t try to rob Alex. It takes a special kind of evil personality to want to hurt a stranger purely out of hatred. I have never even contemplated doing anything like that and I don’t think many people do. It is our civic duty to get these kinds of people out of circulation until his attitude improves or his energy diminishes.

A witness clearly identified the one guy they were able to hold. That is how they got him. She said she had seen him earlier too. Evidently he attacked a customer headed into the gas station with his money in hand. The witness said that the perp hit the customer in the face, took the money and taunted him saying, “What are you gonna do now?” and walked away. That is why she could identify him with such certainty as the one who attacked Alex when he showed up a second time. I stood next to him when waiting in the bathroom line. He just looked at his shoes and seemed very harmless. He was wearing a suit and had cut off the dreadlocks he sported a couple months ago.  He didn’t look much like the picture we had seen before. You cannot judge guilt by looking at people and they tend to behave differently in the courthouse than they do on the street.

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May 2010 Forest Visit

I bought a couple gallons of Chopper Gen2 and some backpack sprayers. The boys and I went down to the forests to check up on them and spray down some of the vines. I have mixed feelings about spraying.  I would spray the whole place if I was really doing intense pine management. They usually do this with helicopters and it would cost me around $6000. I don’t like to spend the money and I don’t like to spray everything.  I want some diversity, but the vines are getting out of hand. The backpack sprayers allow more precise applications and they cost much less. The materials cost a couple hundred dollars and labor is cheap, essentially free. Getting the boys involved with the land is also a good idea. So that is what we did.

We got an early start, but only worked until about noon. It was getting too hot and I didn’t want to kill the boys or make them not like the forest.  We got the easy targets, i.e. the places within easy reach of the roads and paths. I like to do these things in iterative ways. This will give me a chance to see how it works and decide if I want to do it more widely. It will also give me something useful to do on my visits.  I can spray down some of the offending vines each time I go down and do it selectively.

I talked to Larry and Dale Walker from the hunt club. They also work at a forestry company and showed me their operation last year. You can see pictures and read about that here and here. They are honest guys and their firm does a good job.  We talked about thinning on the Freeman property. It would be good to do it this fall. This would be my first significant harvest and I look forward to it.

The utility company put in new poles. They ripped up the dirt a lot, but have since leveled it out and reseeded it.  The grass is coming up. The wires and the right-of-way are useful, despite the fact that they take up eight acres of my land.  The opening provides good wildlife habitat and the long, narrow aspect produces a lot of the “forest edge” so favored in wild ecology. From the practical point of view, the most useful thing about the right-of-way is the road. The electric company maintains the road and they just finished fixing it up. It was really rutted before, but they put in rocks over the washouts and made little stone banks to divert the storm water. All this will provide good infrastructure for the thinning operation.  If for what they did, I would have to do it and/or the timber companies would have to do it and that would cut into what they could pay me for the wood. It is a de-facto subsidy for me.

The pictures are from the farms. You can see the roads along the right-of-way. The picture of Alex and Espen shows the grassy path Larry Walker made down to the creek. It is a “wildlife corridor” Alex is looking very buff these days. They are hard workers and strong boys. They can get a lot more done than I can. My clover fields are looking good. Other wild plants are beginning to seed in and this is okay.

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Five-Five

Jake, Dorothy, Mary, Barb

If there is significance in numbers, this birthday is significant. I am double nickels now and it was double nickels the year I was born. You notice birthdays that end in zero or five. They seem like milestones. This one really isn’t, beyond the numbers. Nevertheless, it is an occasion to pause and think about past, present and future. But I don’t have any profound thoughts today.

Life has been good so far and most things worked out better than I planned, although I can’t say that I ever really had a smart plan. Maybe that’s why things worked out. You don’t have to be smart if you are lucky and I have been lucky.