World-Wide-Matel

Which country has the  world’s best freight rail system,according to experts?   It is the United States, by a wide margin.  And it has gotten a lot better since 1981.  

Those of us who have traveled the comfortable and reliable passenger rail in Europe are surprised by this information.  But the key to our confusion is the word “passenger.”  American passenger rail doesn’t work as well.   And freight tends to be out of sight, so most people just don’t pay attention or even suspect what is going on in the vastness of our country and in those lonely places literally on the wrong side of the tracks.

If you look at the nearby chart, you see that rail productivity exploded and prices came down after 1980.  The Staggers Act was one of the few sustained successes that came out of the Administration of Jimmy Carter.  It rationalized regulation and eliminated some of the pricing schemes that had previously crippled the railroads.  It still working.  Some people thought that railroads were creatures of the past that couldn’t compete with trucks, but they were wrong.  

In fact, the fastest-growing part of rail freight is “intermodal” traffic: containers or truck trailers loaded on to flat railcars. The number of such shipments rose from 3m in 1980 to 12.3m in 2006.  This is something that affects all of us who drive on the highways, since one freight train can carry as much as 280 trucks. Now maybe we all appreciate freight rail a little more.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hunters are the backbone of rural society. People who live in cities and suburbs rarely appreciate that fact. I thought of this in relation to my own land and was reminded when Chrissy’s sister Diane visited a friend who lives in western Virginia. The friend owns some forest land in the Shenandoah.  Local hunters watch over it,  make improvements and generally take care of the place.  She was a little surprised at the role of local hunters. I used to be too, but not anymore.

The hunters on my land have been there for generations. Much of what I know about the land comes from them. They knew how long the roads had been in place. They remembered when the streams had flooded and when they had gone dry.  They had experience of fires and storms.  And they loved the land and understood the relationships with the animals on them.

Deer hunters are working to create better habitat for the animals they hunt and improve the herds.  They always have done this.  Much of the county’s wildlands were conserved by hunters.  Lately the equations have changed a bit.  The burgeoning wildlife and especially deer population has shifted emphasis from any deer to quality deer. Hunt clubs are actively managing the herds through selective  hunting, feed plots etc.  I get a magazine called “Quality Whitetails” from an organization by the same name that provides a place for the exchange of information and experience. It is very interesting the things hunters are doing in the conservation field, literally out in the field.

Another big factor is development and urban encroachment. A generation ago, there were a lot fewer deer and they were spread over a bigger area of undeveloped land. Today deer populations have grown to almost nuisance levels in some areas and this is exacerbated by the fragmentation of the forests.  This is another reason to emphasize quality of the herds over mere numbers.  The numbers problem is no longer a problem.

Hunting keeps people closer to the land.  One of my friends down in Southside Virginia spends most of his free time working on conservation projects on land his hunt club leases. He helps restore wetlands, makes wildlife corridors etc. He has helped a lot on my farm, at no cost to me since we work in our mutual interest. This guy doesn’t hunt very much anymore in the traditional sense.   He just really enjoys the conservation and wildlife management aspects of hunting.  Most of the hunters I know enjoy the sport more for the insights it gives them into nature than the actual shooting deer, which is only one part  of a full-year, multi-year effort.

The numbers of hunters has been declining over the past decades.  There still are enough, but if the trend continues, this will be a serious threat to the health of rural communities and the rural environment.  Somebody else – probably at taxpayer expense – will have to do what as work hunters do joyfully and for free. In fact, they actually pay to do it.

I am not a hunter myself, for the same reasons that the number of hunters has been declining.  I was a city kid, with no hunting tradition. I am also a terrible shot.  I support hunting by working with the hunt clubs  on my farms and supporting some hunting organizations, such as Quality Whitetails, that provide hunting education and advocacy.

Beyond the environmental benefits, hunting has a long tradition in American culture.  It is very different in the U.S. than it was in many parts of the world.  In Europe, hunting was a rich man’s sport.   When the ordinary people hunted, it was usually called “poaching,” especially when talking about bigger game, a crime that was severely punished by the aristocrats. Besides just wanting to keep the animals to themselves, aristocrats sensed the fundamental democratizing nature of hunting.  Besides giving the common man access to weapons and the training to use them, hunting allowed individuals a personal connection with nature, unfiltered by the hierarchy of the old world.  It also provides a means of support. One of the older hunters down near the farms told me that when he was young, hunting wasn’t just a hobby; it was needed to put meat on the table.  One of the things that impressed former-peasant immigrants to the early America was that they COULD hunt.  They were the owners of the land and didn’t have to kiss the ass of the local baron or “his” deer and elk untouched in the forest where only the fat-cats could hunt.  

So this is my paean to the pastoral pursuit of hunting in our great America, whether it is deer, turkey, geese, quail, ducks or bears (yes we have a few on the farms now).   We should appreciate what hunters and hunting have done for us.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My grandfather was an immigrant who came to this country w/o particular skills. Back in those days there were lots of jobs that didn’t require skills and his education was about the same as that of the average American at the time. Today we can still use immigrants, but maybe not those uneducated masses like grandpa.

We should allow MORE legal immigrants,but we should choose the types of people we want and need. Literally millions of smart & skilled people would bring their skills here within days if we would let them. There is no shortage of applicants. WE should choose who gets to come to our country. Sorry, grandpa. Today you need at least a HS education or comparable tech background and you need to speak English if you want to make yourself useful.

People say that we need somebody to do the dirty work that we don’t want to do. This is only partly true. We still need some temporary farm workers, given the seasonality of that work. But there is no reason why these guys cannot go home at the end of the season. If we had a system that allowed them to come when needed and then come back again, I think many would indeed choose to do just that. Besides that, cheap labor is a mixed blessing.

Cheap unskilled labor creates its own demand. We employ lots of people doing crap jobs like blowing leaves because they work cheap. If we didn’t have cheap labor, we wouldn’t bother doing many of these jobs or we would use machines to do them. Cheap labor makes it less profitable to invest in new technologies to replace labor. We “need” cheap immigrant labor because we have cheap labor. Many jobs could be restructured or replaced by machines if we had to pay more for workers. It is a fairly simple equation.

I used to load cement bags. They had a dozen of us piling bags on pallets. Now they have one guy with a machine. We used to work twelve hour days; this guy doesn't even come in to work every day. They don’t even use the bags at all most of the time. Now they just load cement directly. Dozens of dirty jobs have been eliminated by redesign. Some smart guy’s ideas replaced our many dirty and blistered hands. But if labor had been really cheap, nobody would have bothered doing that. Cheap labor retards development in anything but they very short run.

The fact is that you don't get prosperous by hard work and there is nothing virtuous about working hard at low productivity. That is just for people who don't know any better or are doing it for the exercise. People in the past worked physically harder than we do now and people in many poor countries still do but none of us wants to trade places with them. The key to prosperity is managing the connections, understanding the exchanges and working smarter. That is why we pay so little for unskilled labor. It is not worth very much. Knowing what to do and how to do it better is almost always worth more than actually performing the task. Brains won the battle with brawn long ago, even if some still ain't heard the word.

Some jobs cannot be automated, but many of those jobs now done by immigrants used to be done by American teenagers or college students and could be again. I worked at McDonald's, Burger King and several Italian restaurants whose names I cannot recall when I was in HS and college. My kids had trouble finding work at fast food places because they were competing with immigrants who would work almost full time. I say almost full time because employers are very careful not to let them work 40 hours where they would get benefits. Employers prefer immigrants to American young people because they are more reliable and easier to exploit. These are not indispensable reasons and may not even be good ones.

I don’t want my country to be competitive in low-wage industries, so I prefer not to import low-wage workers. I like the guys who come to America and open businesses, make software or do some things that create wealth. Immigrants account for about a third of the tech workforce in Silicon Valley. These guys make the big bucks and they create jobs in America. Good. Let’s have more of them and fewer of the cheap ones.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

America’s largest ethnic group is German.  Nearly a quarter of the American population or 58 million Americans claim German ancestry.  It used to be a big deal; as far as I know the Germans never formed a group specifically called “the race” (as in La Raza) but some clearly had separatist notions. It is a tribute to the American assimilation machine that now it matters hardly at all. You can see some famous German-Americans on the stairs to the left.  Who knew Elvis was German?

I had been meaning to go over to the German-American cultural center since I read about it in the paper.  Yesterday I went.  It is the kind of place that is worth seeing, but not worth going to see and you could easily miss it. Look at the picture below. The signs are small. Mostly, it is a permanent poster show detailing the long and varied contributions of Germans to American culture.   Since German contributions are now as American and Americanized as hamburgers, hot dogs and potato salad, it is easy to overlook them and think that now is the first time we have really had such large influx of immigrants and foreign cultures.

1910 was before the wars and before the atrocities.  Germany in those days was arguably the most advanced country in terms of science and technology.  An American who really wanted to learn science had to learn German.  It was like English is today to sciences.  This persisted.  When I was growing up, the stereotype of a scientist was a guy with a beard and a German accent.   During our space race with the Soviets, it is largely true that our German rocket scientists competed with their German rocket scientists.   We probably could not have achieved what we did in space flight w/o Germans and the Russians certainty did not have the home grown talent to compete with us.

Germans also pioneered what became the research university.   Our American universities resemble them because we specifically imported German methods, ideas and often Germans themselves to remake our system during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  

Posted by Broadnax at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t understand “good wine.”  I tend to like sweeter wines, which are considered “cheap” and less classy.  I also like the “oak” flavors.  Chrissy and I went to the wine tasting at the Biltmore.  They gave us a kind of a checklist.   I thought that three of the wines were okay: a Biltmore Estate Chardonnay, a Riesling and something called Tempranillo.  Some of the wines come from North Carolina grapes, but others are California wines according to the Biltmore recipe.  I think that means that they put it in bottles at the estate. You got a special deal on three bottles, so Chrissy bought one of each. 

I don’t know how they will be in larger quantities. Lots of things taste good in small amounts, like they give you on the tastings. But we got it now, so I guess I will see. I would have enjoyed a beer tasting.  I know I like beer in larger quantities.

When I was in Warsaw I got to take part in a bourbon tasting, sponsored by Jim Beam. The organizers told us lots of stories and legends about bourbon and the various kinds of bourbon. I think they made some of them up, but they were good stories so why mess with the legends. You really can tell the black label from the white label bourbons, but only if you drink one right after the other.  A good time was had by all.  The Jim Beam guys were smart. They had a lot of their wares for sale and offered them while everyone was in the type of exuberant moods provoked by whiskey tasting.  I bought three bottles of higher-class/higher-price bourbon than I would have normally.

I learned a little. Bourbon is aged in warmer places in North America.  It is good to go in seven years.  After that, it gets  a little harsh. Scotch can be aged up to 18 years, since it is cooler in Scotland.  But it doesn’t get any better after that. Actually it doesn’t get much better after 15 years, but paying more for anything over 18 years is a waste of money.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We saw a sign for the “Bunker Hill covered bridge” and found it after driving down a couple of country roads and a gravel path. The bridge was built in the late 1800s and it is an example of a lattice construction.   There were thousands of these kinds of bridges back then in the U.S. and hundreds in North Carolina. Now this is the last one.

The covering protects the wood.  An uncovered wooden bridge lasts around twenty years. The covered variety can last 100. The covering also made the horses feel like they were in the barn and they didn't spook because of the water.

This bridge was build by a guy called Haupt. He literally wrote the book on building such bridges as the the note about it says, Haupt was "Chief of Military Railroads for the Union Army during the Civil War. A Philadelphia born civil and military engineer, author, professor, inventor, and industrialist, Haupt’s improved lattice truss bridge was a response to Ithiel Town’s 1820 and 1835 patents for the plank lattice timber truss. Haupt used the analytical methods he developed in the 1840s to design a more efficient lattice truss which consisted of web members positioned only at locations which required support. Redundant members were removed, resulting in the improved lattice truss as described in his book General Theory of Bridge Construction published in 1851.” It is good for a man to have a passion.

Today the bridge goes from nowhere to nowhere. It has outlived its usefulness, but I suppose that 100 years ago there was a road that people sometimes needed.  

Posted by Broadnax at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When there is a big industrial accident these days, the lawyers come out and drain any of the real emotion or truth out of the event and displace it with cash.  In the old days, at least in the southern hills, they wrote a ballad.   So it was when a train with Joseph A. ("Steve") Broadey's hand on the throttle plunged into a ravine near Danville, VA in 1903.  Nine people were killed and seven injured in what the plaque called one of the worst railroad accidents in Virginia history.  This is what they mean when they say you are heading for a train wreck.

I heard the song as a kid. My father’s version was sung by Boxcar Willie (I think), although there is a Hank Snow rendition and Hank was my father’s favorite singer. I thought it was just a song, not a real historical event, but it had some very precise lyrics.  “They gave him his orders in Monroe Virginia saying ‘Steve you’re way behind time’” … “It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville and a line on a three mile grade.”

So in the wonderful world of Internet, I checked it out and found out it was true, so when I drove through Lynchburg I went looking for the place.  A couple people claimed to have written the lyrics.  It was first recorded in 1924 and you can listen to the original version at this link.

All that is left now is this easily overlooked historical marker along a seedy patch of Highway 58 just to the west of Danville.  There is nothing left of the trestle or the tracks and the ravine is overgrown with brush and vines.  It must have been really big news around here in 1903, but more than 100 years later only the song abides.  The picture of the train, BTW, is just a train crossing in Danville, unrelated to the Wreck of the Old 97, except that they are both trains.

Another thing about Danville is that it was the last capital of the Confederacy. This lasted literally only a matter of days, as Jeff Davis and his cabinet fled south, with Union troops in hot pursuit, after the defeat of Southern arms. Davis took up residence in the house of a prominent local man called William Sutherlin.  Sutherlin made his money in the tobacco business and was a successful and flexible businessman both before and after the Civil War.

Davis was a great man, according to his lights, but he was misguided. Robert E Lee and Joe Johnston did the right thing and in April 1865 contributed to saving the United States and making it the country whose freedom we love today. Davis wanted to keep on fighting, even after Appomattox. At some point, hanging on stops being noble and becomes stupid, pernicious and immoral.  I admire Lee & Johnston, Davis not so much. The guide treated Davis as a hero. I don't agree. 

Chrissy and I visited the house, an Italian style mansion. Pictures are above and below. The woman in the painting above fireplace is the Sutherlin's daughter on her wedding day. The house is restored to the period of around the Civil War. You really get the old South feeling there. The Daughters of the Confederacy use the place for their meetings. One of the rooms is deeded over to them.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Religions, regions, firms, families, clubs and even individuals often have distinctive cultures that help determine the choices they make. You might object that these things are ephemeral, but all cultures are ephemeral. Some last a short time, some a long time, but none is forever. When we try to keep them as they are, we create either cultural museums or graveyards.  America has been home to many cultures, many that you don’t notice toady because over time they melted into the American mainstream, making their contribution by not remaining separate. It is pluralism that worked for us.

Pluralism allows a variety of different philosophies and organization types to coexist, jostle together and produces disparate results that together are usually better than from what would seem a more logical planning process. It requires an acceptance of inequality and pluralism thrives when central governments exert only generalized authority (as was the case in the U.S. through much of our history.) Pluralism creates a kind of cultural marketplace of choice, where the most adaptive ones succeed and all of them collide, collaborate, combine and constantly change into something else.

Pluralism works because it allows the greater society to take advantage of productive arrangements and systems that might be destructive or dangerous if applied too widely or too long. The difference between a life giving medicine and a life taking poison is often in the dosage and the application. Pluralism allows us to take advantage of the positives of many systems w/o suffering the ill effects that would afflict us if they were widely applied. People can choose to live under particular rules that might be odious to others, and it works much better if one standard does not cover the whole society. We enjoy a kind of a la carte cultural menu in the U.S. We are free to copy the best and leave the rest.  None of us has to keep all the aspects of the culture we were born into, and few of us do.

I thought about this as we visited Old Salem in Winston-Salem, NC. Many people confuse this Salem with Salem, MA famous for the witch trials. Both were founded by religious groups that followed a kind of a localized theocratic socialism, but they are otherwise not very similar.

Old Salem is something like Colonial Williamsburg on smaller scale. I found it really interesting because it told the story of the Moravian settlement. I knew almost nothing about that before. It is well worth the visit.  The people who work there and play roles make products by hand using the old methods.  But they don't always remain strictly in character, which allows them to explain a little more about how things are. The gunsmith, for example,  told us that there is a good demand for his custom products. Their products go to high end collectors and museums.  The market is strong, he said.

The people who work there really seem to like their work. The guy in charge of the organ played us several of the pieces used in the churches and sang along.  He had a good voice. Everybody enthusiastically told us about the history of their location and of the community in general.

Salem, NC was consciously founded as a commercial and agricultural colony of the Moravian protestant sect, which traces its roots to Jan Hus, a century before Martin Luther. They seem to have been practical people who sought the elegance of simplicity.  Society was divided into groups, called choirs, based on status - young men, young women, male children, female children. married men, married women etc. When they died, they were buried according to their choir, not with their families. The graveyard, called God's Acre, has flat tombstones, so that nobody is above anybody else.  The Moravians clean the graves and scrub the stones each Easter.

The Moravians were good planners and were very well organized. They trained their people in useful trades and skills and produced simple but high quality products.  One of the reenactors told us that Moravians supplied good products at reasonable prices and that they were honest.  Having all three of those things at the same time was rare on the frontier. Their community prospered. Their location in the middle of North Carolina also contribute to their prosperity. It was right on the wagon road and had access to the growing North Carolina frontier, with its cheap land and good soils.

Organization was the key to success and organization and the needs of the community circumscribed personal choice. Boys were trained in trades, which were chosen for them by the church authorities, so that supply of labor met demand. Nobody could actually own land in Salem; it was all leased from the church and held on conditions of good behavior, including attending church and living a moral life. Women could marry when they were eighteen. Men could marry when they could demonstrate the ability to support a family. A man would build a shop and a home and then petition the church for permission to marry. He could submit a specific name if he had a girl in mind, but that match might not be approved. If he didn’t know any girls he especially liked, he could make a generic request and the church authorities made suggestions.

People like the Moravians made very valuable contributions to the development of North Carolina and to America, but most of us would not want to live under their strict rules, nor would those rules necessarily be adaptable to a wider society or changing conditions. In a pluralistic society, they were able to survive and prosper with the implicit conditions that they produce something useful for the wider America. W/o access to political power, they could not impose their views outside the fold. In fact, the ultimate punishment for those who consistently did not play by the rules was to be kicked out of the community. In other words, at base it was a free-choice association. You could leave if you didn’t agree and you could be forced to leave is others didn’t agree with you.

In a pluralistic society, individuals have the right to belong to whatever group that you want provided they will take you. All the individuals involved have the choice and they have to work out the particular relationships. It has to do with freedom of assembly. You can choose your friends and associates and should not be forced into any group membership. Groups themselves have no right to exist beyond the choices of their individual members. This is an important distinction. Pluralism as we have used it empowers individuals to be members of groups of their choice. If you empower groups over individuals you have a type of corporatism or fascism.

There were advantages and disadvantages to being a member. Leaving out the spiritual benefits, which believers would have considered the most important aspect of their lives, on the pragmatic side members, on average, were more prosperous than their similarly situated neighbors. Of course, they had to accept the strict rules, which included devoting large parts of your income, energy and time to the collective and one of the important reasons behind their success was their adherence to the rules. Would it be considered unfair that others couldn’t get the advantages w/o buying the whole organization?

Pluralism demands diversity and requires inequality of results. These are the things that choice will inevitably produce. We sacrifice pluralism and choice in exchange for greater equality. This may be a wise decision at times, but we should be aware of what we are doing - getting and giving up - and not hide it by misusing terms like diversity or multiculturalism. It should be about choice to the extent possible and that means picking up both ends of the stick and living with the results of our poor choices as well as our good ones.

The pictures are from around Old Salem.  They include the gun smith, the organ master and some of the buildings. The flowers and the flowering tree are catalpa.  They are also called Indian cigar trees, because of the long seed pods.  I took a picture of this tree because it was so full of flowers and unusually beautiful. 

Posted by Broadnax at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Biltmore is the biggest house in America, built by George Vanderbilt in the 1890s.  It is part of a enormous estate.   When Chrissy & I toured the house, the gardens and the general area, it changed our point of view a little.   An estate this size is not all about the owners and it is not really about a house as a place to live.

The first thing I noticed is how much the place resembles a hotel.  Hotels tended to copy many aspects of these mansions.  The “winter dining room” at the Biltmore is a classier version of the Holidomes I used to like so much at Holiday Inns.  Beyond that, these big houses were a lot like hotels in their functions.  They were set up to host, entertain and feed guests with a large staff devoted to doing it.

The second thing I noticed is how much the owners of this estate played their role. The Vanderbilts always seemed to be on stage.  They changed their clothes dozens of times a day.  There were specialty clothes for walking in the eating each of the meals, playing tennis, sitting in the library or walking in the garden. Below is the gate to the Estate.  After you pass through the gate, it still takes you around 15 minutes to drive to the actual estate buildings.

My first impulse was to dislike the Vanderbilts because they had piles of money and engaged in conspicuous consumption on a grand scale.  But they did a lot of good with the money too.  This massive investment in the hills of North Carolina employed lots of people and not only maids, butlers and kitchen staff.  Building the place required a massive labor force, as did building and maintaining the gardens.  Of course those things are still a type of consumption.   But the estate also included working farms and forests.  Some of the science of forestry was invented on the estate.  Gifford Pincot, the father of American forestry worked here.  I learned how to use a “Biltmore stick” to estimate timber volume when I studied forestry in college.  I never knew were the word came from.  I guess I just figured it was named after some guy named Biltmore.  It was named after the estate because its use originate here.

Fredrick Law Olmsted designed the gardens, the same landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York.  He also designed some parks in Milwaukee, including West Park (which became Washington Park), Riverside Park and Lake Park. Olmsted was expert in the use of water in the landscape.  Above is a bridge over the bass pond he created at the end of the garden.  Below is the rose garden.

You couldn’t take pictures in the house. It was a nice place.  As I said, it reminded me of a nice hotel, so if you have been in a nice hotel, you have an idea.  It must have been really impressive 100 years ago.  Today we are accustomed to big buildings (like hotels).  At the time the Biltmore had new innovations such as electricity, indoor bathrooms and refrigeration.  Now everybody has those things.  The rich today can live a very opulent life, but the practical difference between being rich and poor is smaller because being poor is a lot less miserable than it used to be. 

Additional pictures

Bass pond at Biltmore Estate

Corner of the Biltmore Estate

North Carolina Countryside near Asheville

Courtyard food court at Biltmore Estate

Posted by Broadnax at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Coffee at Pilot

I don’t much like coffee, but I like cream and sugar mixed with coffee. I am especially fond of the French vanilla cream, but I put so much of it in that I need a strong coffee to stand up to it.  IMO, the best coffee for my purposes is the Sumatra coffee at Pilot. Pilot is a truck stop station, which usually has the least expensive gas on the highway. The bathrooms are clean and they are usually lively places, so I stop at Pilot whenever it is reasonably convenient.

McDonald's is okay in moderation

Above is the McDonald’s in Asheville, one of the fancier McDonald’s I have visited. It was hosting lots of old people while we were there. My father always complained about old people when he used to shop at Pic-n-Save.  He said they were so slow and they always just stood around in the way. And I used to make fun of him. Maybe you have to be almost old yourself to make these kinds of judgments because I am beginning to understand his point. It took ten minutes to get at the straws, napkins and catchup.  Evidently how many napkins to take and whether or not you need a straw is a decision that requires more thought than some people can give it in less time.

I have been eating at McDonald’s since HS.  They used to give you a free Big-Mac for every A you got, which was a good marketing strategy. I didn’t get many free Big-Macs, but I did get to think they were good. Some people go on about fast food being bad for you, but it doesn’t hurt in moderation. “Nothing too much” is a good life guide. I used to have a minor cholesterol problem, but then I got a low dose of Lipitor and the problem was solved. Any problem you can afford to buy off is not a problem; it is merely an expense. I call my daily dose of Lipitor my “cheeseburger tax.” Maybe someday it will kill me, but not today.

Granny's Country Kitchen

It isn’t always fast food. Other food can have lots of calories and cholesterol. We stopped off at Granny’s Kitchen just past Hickory, NC. Chrissy & I both had the pulled pork and French fries. Chrissy didn’t eat all of hers, so I helped out. We have been trying to go to local restaurants when we travel to get a little more of the local flavor. The trouble is that there is less & less local flavor that is worth eating unless you have inside local knowledge. Various franchises are pushing them out or at least away from the places convenient to the major highways.

Boutique hotels

Posted by Broadnax at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are back home in Virginia and we have evidently missed spring, at least late spring. It is now summer.  The leaves are all out. Today was hot & humid, mostly humid, at least compared to the cool weather we had when I was last here a couple of weeks ago. It will get more or less cooler again. May is a pleasant month; we usually don’t get that oppressive heat until late June. 

I went to see Alex just before I left for California. We went to the arboretum in Harrisonburg, but I never wrote a post or posted the pictures.  It was a pleasant spring day. I am posting the pictures today, but they are a couple weeks out of date.

The Shenandoah is one of most pleasant places on earth in the springtime. The picture on top I-81 that passes through the valley. It is a busy truck route, that carries much of the goods along the East Coast. The trucks make it a hectic drive sometimes. They are bigger than the cars and they know it. The middle pictures are flowering trees in the arboretum.

Above is the pond on the arboretum. Below is a pocket park in Arlington. It is near the place where we first lived when I joined the FS. It is just one block of green, enough to give kids a place to play and provide a nice space for the neighbors.

Below is the lawn in the park. It is a "real" lawn with clover and some weeds. I like this better than the chemical lawns so common around malls and new developments. The Chesapeake Bay is polluted with run off. They blame farms and farms do contribute, but at least they also produce something.  But it is just wrong when we use chemicals and fertilizers to create perfect lawns. This one is better all around.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can share the same country, the same physical space, with people and live in completely different environments. I focus on historical or natural scenes and I find them wherever I go.  So when I go to crowded California I find the empty beaches, forests and green vistas. That is what I look for, and that is what I find.

Not everybody sees the things the way I do. I see trees.  Maybe they see buildings or cars.  I saw signs for ethnic areas of LA – Korea town, Philippine Town, Little Armenia … We drove past these things at high speed and never experienced anything other than the signs.  Well, maybe not high speed.

Another thing I rarely experience is traffic.  I ride my bike or take the Metro to work, so traffic for me is sometimes a weekend choice.   I thought about this as we inched through the LA traffic – and this wasn’t even during rush hour and it was mostly moving.  This is a daily experience for many people.   The only time I got stuck in traffic regularly was when I lived in New Hampshire and commuted to Tufts University in Medford, MA.  I didn’t like it, although I listened to a lot of audio books.  I found that thoughts of traffic started to dominate my thinking.  Commuting can be an overwhelming experience,

I thought about how different life if you live in a beach community as we walked around our hotel in Ventura.  You can see Ventura just above.  The picture at the very top is Carlsbad. It is more or less a beachfront retirement community. It was founded in the 1880s as a spa and has some Euro-pretensions as a result. Ventura and Carlsbad are very different. 

Many of the houses near the beach in Ventura probably started out as shacks or weekend cottages and gradually evolved into homes.  My “baby-boom” generation was probably the pioneers here and many seem to have aged in place.  We saw a couple really old looking hippies.  It was probably really cool to hang out at the beach when they were young.  Add thirty years and thirty pounds and the picture changes. Look at the second picture down and you can see one of the "outdoorsmen" in his temporary camp on the park picnic table. Notice, he has brought along his fishing gear. There was a orderliness to his possessions that implied that he was out there as much by choice as by compulsion.

The next day we ended up in Palm Springs and another reality.  Palm Springs is an upscale community with lots of ties to celebrities.  We drove along Frank Sinatra Avenue, past streets named for Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, Gerald Ford and Gene Autry.   I have never been here before, but it was familiar because of the sixties television.   If you lived here, you could probably play golf and go to shows and galleries every day. That would be another interesting reality.

Of course, last week I was on the Marine base at Camp Pendleton and we go back to Virginia on Friday.  These lives intersect only occasionally.  Usually they just run parallel. But in the meantime, Chrissy is still having fun with the rental car and I am enjoying the hot whirlpool below. Actually, it was a little too hot at first.  But this is something we haven't done since the kids were little, when it still made a difference if I got my hair wet. Life is good for now.

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I have a few odds and ends that are not enough for a whole post, but I don’t want to lose.

Crows are among the most intelligent birds.  It is something you notice when you just walk around.  They have a sentry in the tallest trees and they caw differentially as you walk under.  If you are carrying a shotgun, they all fly off.  If you are unarmed, they just ignore you.

The job of eating food scraps around people eating lunch outside is usually the job of pigeons but at San Simeon the task belongs to crows.  The crows are scarier and not only because they are shiny black and raven-like.   Unlike pigeon, which are just stupidly annoying, you can see the calculating intelligent in the crows’ black eyes. The pigeons also are little fat-boys; crows look lean and mean.  You don’t want to mess with the crows, especially if you are driving a convertible.  You know that they will forget you never more and maybe come back to retaliate. BTW, Alfred Hitchcock filmed "The Birds" up the coast.

Speaking of bird-brained intelligence, turkeys are really dumb. They used to be thought “elusive” but that was only because there were not many of them.   A couple of them wandered across the road on our farm.  They just stood there in front of the truck. I had to get out and toss stones in their general direction. I am pretty sure that I could have caught them with my bare hands. 

The turkey population has exploded over the past couple of decades and our scientific understanding of them has changed.  We used to think that turkeys needed large ranges and significant protection to survive.  Today we have learned that any decent sized clump of trees will do, whether it is next to a farm field or a suburban street.   We should probably encourage more hunting of these big birds, along with the now ubiquitous Canada geese.   Some people could probably save a lot on food bills.

Pea’s porridge hot

We stopped off at a Danish bakery and pea soup restaurant. The Andersen restaurant claimed to be selling pea soup since 1924. Pea soup was one of my father’s staple menu items (along with bean soup, polish sausage and green tomatoes) and I like pea soup. 

I don’t often make it because you have to make big pots of it at a time. The canned varieties just aren’t right, even Progresso, which usually produces good soups. Chrissy and I both got pea soup in a sourdough bread bowl. The bread mixed with the soup made it into pea’s porridge. It was good and worth the stop.

We stopped in Carpinteria to get gas. We didn’t, because the gas station (yes we passed only one) charged a $.45 “convenience fee” for using a credit card.  I can't believe there is still a place that doesn’t have a pay at the pump, much less charging a “convenience fee.”  It was an Arco Station, which I thought was a major company.  

But it was worth the diversion. As we stopped looking for another gas station and decided to turn back to the highway, we noticed a very large pine tree. I got out to take a look and noticed the plaque that claimed that this was the largest Torrey pine in the world.

The Torrey pine is locally endangered in the wild of its own natural range, where few of the species get as big as the one we saw and most are slow-growing and picturesquely twisted. But it is grows fast, tall and straight when used in plantations in Australia and New Zealand. It just doesn’t like it at home.

I bet that if we looked hard enough, we would find that the largest Torrey pine in the world is in Australia or New Zealand - if not now, soon. I read that the tallest California redwoods will soon be the ones planted in New Zealand during the 19th Century. I saw some really beautiful sequoia trees at the Ambassador's house in Geneva and a whole beautiful forest of redwoods growing on the hills near Sintra in Portugal. In fact, Sintra has a castle a lot like a smaller version of San Simeon.

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William Randolph Hearst’s   father made big bucks from silver mining in Nevada’s Comstock Lode and then used some of the money to buy thousands of acres rancho along the California coast.  The land was really isolated back then and cheap.   It still is a bit isolated, but it is a fantastically beautiful place. 

William Randolph Hearst went with his mother on the grand tour of Europe and developed an appreciation for European art and culture.  After he made the big fortune he inherited even bigger, the project of his later life was to build this castle on the hill overlooking the Pacific.  George Bernard Shaw commented the castle at San Simeon was the kind of place God would build if he had the money.

I got my impressions of Hearst from “Citizen Kane” and his behavior during the Spanish American War.  Suffice to say that the picture is incomplete and inaccurate and I learned some history on this trip. I won’t bore you with the details, which you can easily find elsewhere.  I will contribute some pictures and comments.  

Above - you couldn't stray off the path except at the point where the guide invited people to sit in the wicker chairs and feel for a few minutes what it is like to be rich.  Below is the indoor pool.  It is ten feet deep throughout the whole pool. The gold color you see is actually gold leaf. The man had the big bucks to spend.

Below is the outdoor Neptune pool. Many of the columns are actually from Roman ruins.  It is nice, but it reminds me of something you might find in Las Vegas.

San Simeon has a lot of bona-fide art. Hearst was able to buy much of it inexpensively after World War II.  You couldn't do that today, both because of the prices. There are more rich people today and they have bid up the prices.  And there are also many more restrictions on export of art. 

The practical difference between rich and poor have actually decreased, despite ostensible greater income gaps. A century ago, only the rich could experience these things. Only the rich had telephones, electricity, refrigerator etc. There is a sort of threshold, when you have enough. The difference between refrigerator and having one is much greater than having a cheap version and the top-of-the-line.  Re telephones, everybody can afford phones with more features then they know how to use.

The castle is really cool, but it would have been a lot more impressive to people back then than it is now, at least to anybody who has visited Las Vegas.  We have seen reasonable copies, bigger pools etc.  Frankly, I liked the views and the gardens the most, as you might guess by my pictures. If I lived there, I would spend most of my time sitting outside or wandering the hills.  

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The Spanish established a road, El Camino Real or the royal road, from San Diego to San Francisco to connect and supply their missions and forts.  Today I-5 and U.S. 101 follow the route and we drove along both today on our way from San Diego to the Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

The route is marked with bells suspended from question mark shaped pipes.  These are good promotion and the reason we noticed that we were on the route. 

I originally rented a Chevy Cobalt and I used it to drive up to the botanical garden mentioned in the last post, but it was such a crappy car that I took it back to Alamo before I picked up Chrissy.   Chrissy always said that she wanted to drive a convertible, so I splurged and surprised her with one.  It was fun to drive in the convertible on the coastal highway and we look forward to more fun when we drive inland to Joshua Tree National Park. 

Below is Chrissy with the car.

The coastal highway goes through some beautiful county.   The part I like the best is the oak savanna.  I think they call them oak woodlands out here.  The ones along the coast tend to feature California live oak.  They are similar to oak openings in the Midwest, but the California hills are more majestic, especially when set against the Pacific surf.  The park-like widely spaced oak forests make a truly pleasant environment.  They are maintained by frequent low-intensity fires and are endangered when fires are too carefully prevented by humans.

Above is an example of the oak savanna/oak woodland biome.  Below is the road ahead north of San Luis Obispo.

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The Spanish settled southern California with a network of missions and ranches. These ranches were self sufficient economic and political entities and were very large, the size of a county, with a wide variety of possibilities. Cattle and other livestock raising was the biggest activity, but the ranches were also industrial producers at least on a small scale. Above is the view from the rancho veranda and below show the thick adobe walls that keep temperatures constant.

The model of the rancho was the Roman latifundia. Like the rancho, the latifundia was set up as a type of colonization entity designed pacify the colonial area, produce valuable economic results and give the  rich and powerful but restive individuals something to do far away from the capital.  Spain was colonized in this way by the Romans and it made Spain one of the most important centers of Roman culture, in many ways more thoroughly imperial Roman than Italy itself. It is no surprise if the Spanish employed the system in their own colonies, even if not directly copying the system.  It was in their cultural DNA.  Besides, it fit well with their imperial needs and was well suited to the Mediterranean type environment found in California.

The ranch house immediately reminds you of a Roman villa.  It spreads out over a large area with veranda and a beautiful open garden area in the middle. It must have been a really great way of life … at least for the ranch owners.*  Large latifundia type setups in Latin America are sometimes blamed for the class structures and challenges of democracy there.

As in all empires, there was the element of oppression. The workers were not entirely volunteers.  This would include the indentured Iberian colonists and more directly the native Indians, who provided much of the labor as long as they lasted.  Native Californians were not technologically advanced and they were not numerous. California just did not support the kind of advanced societies found in Mexico and parts of the Southwest.

Southern California is an interesting natural environment. It is fantastically rich, but only when developed by human technologies. In its natural state, California provides neither the challenge nor the payoff that historians like Arnold Toynbee credits with stimulating civilization. In other words, it was fairly easy to survive at a low, generally nomadic, level of technical sophistication. But moving beyond that was difficult, requiring technologies that were a couple leaps too far to make it from low level to higher one. As the saying goes, you can't jump a chasm in two hops.

The modern Southern California “natural environment” is largely a human creation, from the non-native crops and trees to the vast aqueduct system that brings water from many miles away. You can see the finely shaped, non-native date palm above as just one example. It goes down to the bug level.  Many of California’s most productive crops require pollination by honeybees imported from Europe or Asia. Left on its own, the place is really a semi-desert.

I will keep the rancho and the latifundia in mind when I go to Brazil. Brazil had a similar system of colonization and Portugal shared Spain’s Iberian-Roman heritage. In Brazil they were called fazenda, in much of the rest of Spanish America the system was known as hacienda.

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* This ranch paradigm in the Spanish colonial version is not like what we saw on the old Westerns. This is not the Ponderosa or even the Big Valley (which is in the California setting). If you watch the Cartwrights or the Barkleys, you see that the sons do almost all the work.  It would be amazing is a couple or three young guys could run something as big and complex as the ranch and still have so much time left over for all sorts of adventures.

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This is my last night on the beach.  I enjoyed being here and I enjoyed being able to walk to the mock Embassy.   One of the things I walked past was the YAT-YAS building. It means “you ain’t tracks; you ain’t shit,” and this Quonset hut is a museum of tracked landing craft.

The landing craft are well armored and the tracks allow them to come some ways onto the beach.  Nevertheless, you would have to be very even to approach a hostile beach in one of this things, much less leap out when you got there.

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We went for a ship visit to the USS Peleliu.  It is named after a World War II battle in the Pacific.  It is a kind of mini-aircraft carrier. Helicopters and Harrier Jets can land on the decks, as you can see in the picture above and below, and it supports Marine operations on shore.   You can see some pictures from the ship up and around this page.

This was the first time that I met Marines projecting power from ships.  This was the traditional Marine role, but in recent times they have been deployed in the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan.  One of the Marine colonels commented that there are Marines in their second or third tours that have yet to do any real amphibious actions.  This would never happen a generation ago. Marines are supposed to be amphibious.

We were invited on board by the commander of the 15^th Marine Expeditionary Unit, the one we were doing the exercise with.  We had a really good lunch.  I sat next to the Commodore.  I remember Commodore Perry, but I didn’t think they still had commodores and they don’t when it concerns the actual rank.  Fuller is a Navy Captain doing the job of the Commodore.  He coordinates the movements of the ships and forces from the three ships involved with the exercise.

Above is the hospital aboard the ship.

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A good lesson is that you should never count on machines.  Luckily, it was only an exercise.   We were supposed to demonstrate how the Marines could make fresh water from sea water.  In the exercise, we were supposed to let the Minister of Health drink the water directly from the desalinization machine.  Of course, the machine didn’t work while she was there.   It evidently worked before and after.  The evidence was that we had a lot of fresh water made.  But there are always breakdowns and hiccups.

Some are just little/big things, like the tide going out farther than the intake pipes can reach.  Other things are systemic, like filters getting clogged.   The better plan is to have the water ready to go, already produced. The machine can be in the background and if it makes water at the time of the visit, we can go down there and watch it.  But the show should never depend on it working at the exact time period.

This also goes, BTW, for web-based presentations.  I have seen it dozens of times.  The person tries to load something up and all we get are those hour glasses that show something is loading, or else it has to buffer so many times that nobody can stand to watch it.  

There is an old saying that one should not watch laws or sausages being made. It is probably good advice not to watch most things being made unless you are especially interested in the process rather than the result.  Most of the time, however, we really just want the finished project. It is tempting, but a little narcissistic, for the creator to want to show the work that went into his creation, but most people don’t care, at least not into the detail the artist himself wants to inflict on his audience.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I understand why so many people are fascinated by the sea.   Its moods can change in such rapid and interesting ways.  As I watched for just about a half hour, I saw it go from gray and calm to bluer and wilder.  Finally near sundown it became the wine-dark sea of Homeric description, as you can see on the pictures.

I was lucky enough to get a little cottage on the Pacific instead of staying at the hotel.  The trade off is that I have to walk up to the mock embassy.  Of course, that is also one of the things l like about being here.   So I guess there is no trade-off, unless you count not having Internet access.  This is why you are reading this post a few days after I wrote it.  This is the off season for these cottages. I would not be able to get a place here otherwise.  It is also unusual in that the beach in almost deserted.   There are not many places along the Southern California coast where you can look out over an empty beach.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

HAST - The first two letter stand for humanitarian assistance.  I am not sure what the others are for, but if you just use it as a noun, it means a Marine operation that provides local populations with thinks like food, water and basic medical care.

HAST was part of the exercise, but before the Marines could start doing good, they had to land their equipment.   The hovercraft you see in the picture is called a LCAC.  It skims across the surface of the water and then can also skim across the surface of the beach.  It is much more reliable than those landing craft we remember from John Wayne movies.  You know, the kind that are shaped like long boxes and open in the front.

The problem is that the landing craft have to go back and forth to the ships to bring in the materials and that just takes a lot of time and is very dependent on the state of the sea.

One of the keys to relief is clean water. The Marines has a combination filter/desalinization machine that can make fresh water from sea water or clean water from polluted water. We went down to the landing beach to see this thing in action. Unfortunately, sea conditions slowed delivery and it was not ready to do. Maybe tomorrow.

I am playing the DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission) during this exercise. While the exercise is for the Marines and I am just a prop, I am learning some useful things by playing the role. I would like to be more helpful to the Marines, but since this is supposed to be a learning experience for them and a test of their abilities, I have to been less forthcoming. I suppose that makes it more realistic.  In real life I would indeed know more and try to be more helpful. On the other hand, in real life there would be a lot more uncertainty. In the exercise I know or have a very good idea of what the future will be. I could be “helpful” and reveal some things, but that would mess up the whole thing, ruin the game. So I have to let it happen, knowing that around the corner something will happen to ruin their well-laid plans. Of course is the real world most plans don’t work; I just don’t know in advance. It is much better that they learn the lessons here than when they are playing for keeps.

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The stretch of I-5 that goes through Camp Pendleton is named after John Basilone, a hero of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima who won both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. One of the values of naming things after special people or events, rather than some non-committal thing like “Happy Crest Road,” is that they are remembered. John Basilone was a great hero and I am glad that driving along this road made me think of him.

Southern California is semi-arid and the natural vegetation would be scrub and brush.  When you see large trees, they are almost always planted and watered.  This is the best time of year to see the area around San Diego.   The hills are green and flower covered.  When I examined the ground more closely, it is clear that the vegetation is not thick.   It is, as I said, semi-arid.

The Spanish tried to colonize California using missions. They were founded about a day’s journey apart and there were twenty-one of them.  The San Diego mission, built in 1769, was the first one built.

Camp Pendleton is really big. It is one of the largest de-facto natural preserves in the U.S.   If the Marines didn’t own the place, it certainly would be covered with condos, like the rest of the coast here about.

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I watched the sun set in the Pacific.  It seems to drop so fast and be so close.  I almost thought I could hear it hiss as it hit the water.

Below is sunrise on Lake Michigan last September.  I suppose the latitude and the time of year make a difference.  There is a much longer twilight time farther north.

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Being able to cut through Fort Meyer has greatly improved my biking to work experience. I had almost forgotten that I have this blog to thank for this. One of my colleagues at State Department send me an email telling me that Fort Meyer was open again after reading this post.

Above is an interesting sign of the stimulus. It struck me as funny for a few of reasons, first because it is the Hoover Building. Hoover’s reputation on economic recovery is not that good. Second this renovation started a long time ago. Chrissy used to work in that building and they were already renovating it when she was working there back in 2007/8. Third, this building was one of the first big government buildings in Washington. It was the biggest office building in the world when it was completed in 1932. 

Above is new bigger home that replaced a little ones. This kind of "tear down" or "in filling" is still happening, as you can see, but has slowed down a lot because of the recession. People buy the smaller houses, like the one at the right, tear them down and rebuilt bigger, newer ones, like the one on the left, on the lot. This one is not as big as some and it seems to fit in well with the neighborhood. Sometimes people build huge houses that essentially cover the entire lot, often literally shading out their neighbors. 

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It was a little early to go down to the farms. The trees haven’t quite started to grow yet and the clover is still small and not flowering. I will be back in a few weeks. But I wanted to check on flood damage now. Above are the trees near the clover field at the top of the hill. The truck gives perspective. The land was clear cut in 2003, so you can see how much the trees have grown since then. The biosolids helped them grow faster last year. Below is another truck comparison. There is an interesting detail. Look at the two trees behind the truck. The round top one is a "volunteer" i.e. natural regeneration. It was probably a little tree when the place was cut. The one next to it is a planted genetically "super tree." Because of their location at the crossroad, I have been paying attention to this place. The round top tree was twice as big as the ones around it when I first noticed. Today, you can see that the one next to it is a little bigger and I expect that after this growing season it will be significantly bigger. I will take another picture.

I saw clear evidence of heavy rain and lots of runoff, but no real damage. The places near the streams overflowed, but that doesn’t hurt the trees. The water is running UNDER one of the water pipes. I figure it will undercut the road, but I don't think there is much to do about it. I will put in a load of rocks and turn it into a ford when/if it collapses. I think it will be better for the water to run over instead of under. 

One of the little streams changed course last year. It went back to its older course. When I dig down, I find sand and gravel all over, indicating that the stream has changed course a lot. It creates wetlands until the mud piles up into natural levies, and then it moves again. You can see from the picture above that there have been times when the ground was dry for a long time.  The dead trees were alive when I got the place in 2005, when the stream shifted and evidently drown the roots in wetland. I suppose that now the stream has shifted again, it will be dryer, although the whole place is spongy.

I also think that runoff will decrease over time as the trees on the slopes get bigger and their roots absorb more of the water before it hits the streams. 

I want to get the trees on the Freeman tract thinned this year or next, before I get to Brazil.   Above you can see from the comparison with the truck that the trees are big enough and thick enough. They will be fourteen years old this year, which is a little early for thinning but within the range.  Below is the power line right-of-way. They replaced the wooden pylons with steel and kind of tore up the grass. I have eight acres under those things. I am looking into establishing quail habitat, since I cannot plant trees (or allow them to grow) that would interfere with the wires.  On the plus side, it provides a long area of forest edge and wildlife plot and the utility company maintains the road. 

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The cherry trees are in full bloom. It is hard to recall that snow was on the ground just a few weeks ago. Some pictures are included with the post.  The picture at the side shows the bread line from the FDR Memorial. I went down to the cherry trees and visited Roosevelt on the way back.

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I drove with Frank Sherwood to the Virginia tree farm of the year and got a chance to talk to him as we walked around on the ground. Frank has been doing forestry in Virginia for thirty-five years and I got some good information on drive down from Winchester. 

This area of Virginia features a lot of mixed hardwoods and white pines. I was very familiar with white pines form Wisconsin, but I really had a lot to learn about them. For example, white pine wood is light and not as hard or strong as loblolly.  It is good for fence rails (it doesn’t twist) and it is used in log cabins, but it is not as much use as structural timber.  Frank lamented that there is not much of a market for white pine saw timber in the immediate area, besides in those two limited uses. A lot of the local white pine had not grown straight and un-branched.   The newer plantations are doing better.

White pines have not been developed genetically as well as loblolly and it is less likely to be planted, since natural regeneration works very well.   A white pine rotation is around fifty years (15-18 years longer than loblolly) with two possible thinning. 

Pulp prices have remained steady over the years, Frank told me.   Some people are a little concerned about biofuels, which would compete with pulp and drive the prices up (good for landowners), but there currently is not a biofuels market in the Winchester region.  You can make ethanol from cellulous, but it is not worth it with today’s technologies.   That means that effective biofuels for wood is to burn it directly and for that you need local facilities that burn it.   The alternative is to make wood pellets, but that industry is also not present locally.

Landowners have a couple options for timber selling.  The one you get the most money for is saw timber.  Saw timber will yield $150-400 per 1000 board feet.  Pulp is the cheapest, maybe biofuels in the near future.  Pulp yields $5-7 a ton for pine and $2-3 for hardwood.  In between is scragwood.  These are small diameter but straight trees that can be sawed into rough boards used in crates and pallets.

Frank feeds the mill in Luke, Maryland.  He says that the mill’s catchment area is getting bigger because it is harder to find wood in local areas.  Development and forest fragmentation are the causes.  You can do forestry on small tracts, but at some point it gets to be economically unviable.  You probably need around forty acres to do decent management. Development has been taking forestry out of business. Although the recent economic downturn has stopped much of it, development will resume when the good times roll again. Too bad.

Frank doesn’t know of anybody using biosolids or animal manure on forest lands in this part of the Shenandoah valley or around.  There are several chicken operations (we drove past a Perdue operation) that produce a fair amount of chickenshit, but Frank didn’t know what they did with it.  Chickenshit is a powerful fertilizer, high in potassium, but as I understand it, chickenshit has to be left to decompose a little otherwise it can burn out the crops.  IMO forest lands would be a good place to dispose of some of these farm wastes.  There is a lot of forest and they could absorb and use the nitrogen and phosphate w/o letting it slip into the Chesapeake Bay. Of course, the problem is transportation. Manure is bulky, heavy and stinky.

The problem is concentration.  These large animal operations concentrate the crap. That changes it from a valuable fertilizer into a potential pollution problem. The difference between a life-giving medicine and a deadly poison is often the dosage.

Anyway, those are some of the things I learned from Frank.  The biggest benefit of writing the tree farm of the year article is getting to talk to people like him while actually setting foot on the forests.

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Noble Laesch, the father of the current owner Judith Gontis, bought this acreage in the late 1960s and it has been a certified tree farm for the last twenty-eight years. Laesch and Gontis did not live on the land and so for the last twenty-eight years it has been forester Frank Sherwood’s business and pleasure to look after these 927 acres of hilly mixed forest just inside the Rockingham County line.

It is a tree farm with great diversity in terms of species composition, topography, soils and microclimates. The ridges are still dominated by mixed hardwoods, although gradually white pines are taking over, both through natural processes and forestry practices. We looked at a logging operations and examined some of the recently cut stumps during a recent visit. The partially shade tolerant white pines had seeded in naturally under an older stand of mixed hardwood, mostly scarlet oak, but were suppressed until released by the forestry operation. 

 We counted 130 rings on a scarlet oak stump. For the first sixty years of life, the tree grew slowly and crookedly. It is clear that there were too many trees here competing for sun, nutrients and water. We have no record of how the neighboring trees were thinned, but the tree started to grow much faster at around sixty until it slowed in older age. Unfortunately, although very big, this scarlet oak, like most of the others in the stand, had begun to rot in the middle. It was past time to remove them and give the white pines their time in the sun. Within a few years this will be an almost pure stand of white pine.

Farther down the hill was a recently thinned plantation, a total of 126 acres of twenty-year-old white pine and a clear cut left to regenerate naturally in white pine. The trees were vigorous but widely spaced. The blueberries had come in very thickly and perhaps they just outran the pine seedlings.   The plantation was clearly better for timber production, but the naturally regenerated area had cost nothing to plant and the widely spaced trees were providing excellent openings for wildlife.   As with any management plan, it depends on what the landowner wants and it was interesting to see the side-by-side comparison of different choices.

The tulip-poplars that grow so profusely on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge do well here too, but only in coves or bowls that have deeper soil than the rocky and sometimes sandy slopes.   In these places you find towering tulip poplars that can be harvested at regular intervals and regenerated naturally.

The rest of the tree farm is mixed hardwoods, especially white and red oak, plus some maples, as well as white pine.  This is white pine country. Although loblolly can be grown here too, the white pines do it naturally. With Frank Sherwood’s advice, Mrs. Gontis, as her father before her, manages for pulp and saw timber mostly through selective cuttings.  

Like all well-managed tree farms, this one provides a home for wildlife, a place for recreation and protection for water resources. The farm is drained by Runion Creek, whose waters find their way into the Shenandoah and the Potomac and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. Although there is some development in the region, it looks like this tree farm and its 927 acres will continue to provide these kinds of ecological services for years to come. 

Posted by Broadnax at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The snow is melting, but more is expected tomorrow to replace it.  It is hard to believe that within a month the flowers will be blooming.   The picture above is from March 23 of last year - a month from now.   I will appreciate spring more after this especially snowy and cold winter.

Above is a protest on 22^nd St. outside the State Department. I think they are Eritreans. I was in a bit of a hurry so I just took the picture and kept on walking, so I don’t really know what was bothering them. About a hundred showed up to chant for passersby and a good time was had by all except the taxi drivers who were annoyed that the street was blocked.

Above are broken magnolia trees outside the Archives. The snow is hard on these sorts of southern trees and there are lots of broken branches & trees around here.  The snow weighs heavy on their leathery evergreen leaves. You can see why trees from colder climates would adapt strategies other than holding onto their broad leaves all winter.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Most private and all public universities were founded in part to help educate good citizens. They really aren’t doing a great job of it, if you assess what students learn about America’s government, business, institutions and society. Take this simple test. The questions are based on our citizenship exam. Lucky for most Americans that we were born here, because 71% of us probably couldn’t pass the test to become citizens.

College graduates do better than the general population (49% to 57%) but adjusting for demographic characteristics (income, age, region etc) college students get only 3.8% better over their four-year tenure & some big name universities managed to produce “negative knowledge.” Seniors at Cornell scored 4.95% lower than freshmen. Yale, Duke, Princeton, Rutgers & Berkeley also went negative. Harvard seniors scored best at 69.56%. Maybe it will stoke Yale-Harvard rivalries. Yale freshmen beat Harvard freshmen (68.94 to 63.59%), but after Yale’s loss and Harvard’s gain, Harvard won in the end.

Read the rest of the report here. You can see the discussion of the reports at this link

Of course, there is some debate as to how much civic knowledge a citizen really needs. Our democracy relies on the wisdom of crowds. Each person has some bits of knowledge, which are presumably aggregated to produce a good result. It is not necessary for everybody to know what the Scopes trial was about, be able to name the three parts of the Federal government or even be able to name the countries who were our enemies in World War II, as long as some people know important things and we are generally wise enough to know when when know and when we don't. The problem that I see is that sometimes the ignorant also have very high self-esteem. Recalling the lines from Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worse are full of passionate intensity." Modern education may feed this.

There is an old saying that you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. Not everybody believes that anymore. Some people think it is important to teach critical thinking and not pay much attention to the facts. But if you don’t have any facts, what are you thinking critically about?

IMO the more you know about American history and institutions, the more you appreciate them. Thomas Jefferson believed that an educated citizenry was crucial to the working of democracy, which is why he founded the University of Virginia. Building good citizens was one of the founding justifications for the public school system.

I got one wrong on the test and I will advance the lame excuse that I wasn’t paying attention. But when I thought about the questions, a lot of what I learned I didn’t learn directly in school. Education doesn’t/shouldn’t stop when you graduate from college and college isn’t/shouldn’t be the only place you get education, especially civic education. I think we need to emphasize our heritage, for everybody in our lives every day, lest it slip away. Knowledge lives only in living people, not locked in books we never read. And the person who doesn’t read is really no better off than the person who can’t.

It is not all locked in the written word, however. One of the places I learned some of these facts is from television – yes television. Much of television is indeed crap, but there is a lot of good too. There is a very good PBS series called The American Experience. The episodes about FDR were on last week. He was an amazing man with an amazing education. He came from what is as close to an American ruling class as we can get, but it is true that we Americans don’t have a ruling class. They are us. We are our own “rulers” and so we have to train a new set of them each generation. We produced truly great generations of leadership. Let’s hope that we are not just living off and using up the capital that they created for us and let’s work to make sure that is not the case.

Maybe we should take citizenship a little more seriously.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Above is the Vietnam Memorial.  There was a bunch of grade school kids visiting the place and I heard them talking. They have no personal connection with a war that ended a quarter century before they were born.  It is almost as remote to them as World War I was to me.  It is not their war, nor even their fathers'. Vietnam is something their grandfathers may have experienced. Funny how fast time moves and how the defining events of your life are just history now. 

Above is the MIA booth.  They sell mementos, medals and patches.  Below is snow removal near the Memorials.

Below is the path along the reflecting pool going toward the Washington Memorial

Posted by Broadnax at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is Ronald Reagan’s birthday and I was trying to decide whether he was the greatest president of the 20th Century. I decided that FDR edged him out, but only because Roosevelt lived in more interesting times. Both presidents presided over inflection points in American history and both responded well to circumstances they faced.

After a while all presidents belong simply to the American people. That is why I can put Reagan and Roosevelt in the same category. The fact that Reagan undid many of the things Roosevelt had wrought does not affect the analysis. Roosevelt did things appropriate for the 1930s & 1940s, things that helped make American prosperous for decades. But nothing lasts forever and even the most effective solutions ossify and break apart with time. By the 1980s the appropriate thing for Reagan to do was change them. Solutions must be appropriate to the circumstances.

By the end of the 1970s, most people could see something was wrong. Stagflation was sitting on the economy like a raven. The old nostrums no longer produced desirable results. Even Jimmy Carter recognized this. It was Carter who deregulated important industries such as trucking & airlines. (Carter also did a lot to deregulate the financial industry. While we may see that as unwise now, it was appropriate for the times.)

But in 1980, Americans wanted something new and better, true change not mere adjustment. This is where Reagan came in. He was an immensely popular president, who actually won a majority in the three man race in 1980 and was reelected with nearly 59% of the popular votes when he carried every state except Minnesota. His opponents did not (and still do not) understand him. To them he was just an amiable dunce.

Recent scholarship has enhanced Reagan's reputation as an independent thinker and debunked the disinformation of the time that Reagan was fed his lines, like the actor he had been. However, Reagan himself seemed comfortable with their assessments.

Like Roosevelt, whom Oliver Wendell Holmes described at a man with "second-class intellect" but a "first-class temperament.", letting others underestimate him allowed Reagan to disarms, cajole and co-opt all those smart guys who would rather be correct than right. Now that we have access to Reagan’s hand written notes we can see that his ideas were based on his extensive reading and experience. He was a one man think tank, but he understood that there is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.

Ronald Reagan led a remarkable life. He was no child of privilege and his lifeguard job & diploma from Eureka College hardly impressed the elites. We can see the development of his character from his time as a New Deal Democrat, to the time when faced down communists in the Screen Actors' Guild (Reagan was the only president who had been a union leader), to his getting to know the country as spokesman for GE, to his political career and election as president.

He was the right man for the times. Inflation raged at more than 13%. Unemployment reached more than 10% some months. The Soviet Union was on the march. Energy prices were spiking. The America we envision in our nightmares is what we actually experienced in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  (We still have not reached those levels of unemployment and we have essentially no inflation at all.)  Ronald Reagan's presidency marked a turning point for our country. It really was morning in America. He was a great man and a great American.

The photo, BTW, is Alex in 2003 with a life-sized statue of Ronald Reagan at the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City. 

Posted by Broadnax at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It has been cold again this year but this year we are also getting more snow. They got a lot of snow in southern Virginia & North Carolina, so I wanted to go down and look at the snow on the farm.  Well, it wasn’t a lot of snow by Wisconsin standards and it will melt in a few days, but there was more than usual and it created a different look for the place. You really wouldn't guess that you were looking at southern Virginia.

I saw a couple cars in the ditch on the way down and I didn’t dare take the back roads, as I usually do.  Instead I went down I95 all the way down to Emporia and then went over on 58. I also didn’t dare drive down the dirt roads on the farm.  You can see that 623 was good in the spot above, but look near the bottom and you can see why I didn't want to drive up the farm road.  It is harder to walk through the snow but it is nice to feel it underfoot. There were a few animal track, but it was otherwise undisturbed. It is nice to have land.

It was a long trip to see it and it took longer because of the adverse weather conditions. I finished almost the entire audio-book Infotopia, which I found very interesting and useful (I hope) in my job.   This was one of the three audio downloads on Audible.com that Mariza gave me for Christmas.   It was a good gift.  Audio books make long drives bearable and even beneficial. I lose my NPR a few miles outside Washington.  I don’t like music radio or those silly talk shows that purport to give advice that will solve problems that I don’t have. Audio books do the job.

Another good audio program is “the Teaching Company”.   Alex likes them too because they are around forty-five minutes long, which fits his workout schedule.

Anyway, take a look at the nice pictures. 

Complete set of photos are at this link.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went to Charlottesville for the meeting of the Virginia Tree Farm Committee.   Unfortunately, the meeting was in Richmond.  They alternate between those two places, and I just screwed it up.   I had actually written the correct place in my calendar, but went to the wrong one.   Well, I am not crucial to the meeting and It was not a total loss.  I got to visit Alex, since Harrisonburg is not far from Charlottesville.   In fact, I think that my desire to see Alex might have figured into my mental slip. Above is the main street in Waynesboro.  

Alex had classes until 3:30.  This was good when I had planned to attend the meeting, but now I had lots of time on my hands.   I thought I might drive up along the Blue Ridge Parkway but it was closed, evidently weather related.  So I went through Waynesboro.   I  was not seeing it on the best day but they did have an A&W.  I like the hamburgers and the root beer.  A&W fries are not good, however.

Above is the dining room. I had it to myself. Below is the outside.

I followed a little road north.  It was a charming rural area.  I wanted to stop off at Grand Caverns, but it was closed for the season.   Again, not the best time to come around.   Since I was still too early, I walked around Harrisonburg.   You can see pictures.

Alex likes his classes at JMU.  He has a couple of Asian history classes, symbolic logic and an anthropology class on North Americans native people.  He found the gyms and good running trails.  College life is good.  We had supper at “the Blue Nile” and Ethiopian restaurant.   Harrisonburg is well endowed with restaurants and services.

Rain mixed with snow scared me a little when I left Harrisonburg at around 6pm.   I don’t much like driving up I-81 because of all the trucks even in good weather.  The weather cleared up not too far into the trip and there wasn’t too much traffic on 66. I got 42 miles to the gallon on this trip, which is good for going through the mountains. I usually get good mileage on the way to Charlottesville along 29.  I think it is because of the slower speeds and the hybrid does particularly well on the rolling hills. I get a significantly better mileage at 50 MPH than I do at 65. 

Below is the city hall in Harrisonburg.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Above is the U.S. Capitol from the back of the American Indian Museum.  Below is the Lincoln Memorial on the other end of the Mall.

The Federal government (although the Senate was at work late into the night) was closed because of the snow, but it really wasn't hard to get down to Washington.  I just caught the Metro.  I wanted to see Washington in the snow and quiet.  There was a lot of snow, but it wasn't quiet.  Lots of people seemed to have the same idea.  I took a long walk from the White House to the Capitol.  Some pictures are included.

Above is the Washington Monument.  Below is the frozen reflecting pool at the World War II Memorial.

Below is the Smithsonian Mall.

Below is the White House from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thomas Jefferson was a remarkable guy.  The thought deeply about almost everything and made the world a better place.  On his tombstone he wanted to be remembered for founding the University of Virginia and authoring the statutes of religious freedom of Virginia the Declaration of Independence.  Any one of those accomplishments would make him a great man.   He didn’t even mention being president of the United States.

We first visited here in 1985.  Chrissy was pregnant with Mariza and I remember thinking that it would be nice if our expected child could become part of this legacy by going to Thomas Jefferson’s university.  She did.   So besides his contributions to our freedom and prosperity, I have a very personal reason to thank Jefferson.

Monticello is owned and run by a private foundation that makes its money from ticket sales and donations.  The foundation supports historians, archeologists and researchers in addition to maintaining the house and grounds.  

Alex and I talked about the pros and cons of a private foundation.  It seems like a place like Monticello should be government owned, but why?  A private foundation is more flexible and can often do a better job.  Many of our best American universities are private and they are the best in the world. A foundation works out just fine for Mr. Jefferson's home.  

Jefferson always considered himself a farmer.  He grew tobacco and wheat as cash crops and produced vegetables, apples and other fruit for consumption on the farm.  Like other plantations, Monticello was self-sufficient when possible.  They made their own bricks from local clays. Carpenters from the estate made furniture from the wood of the local forests.  Jefferson owned 5000 acres, which gave him a diverse landscape to draw from.  Below is Jefferson's vegetable garden.  It is set up to take advantage of warming winter sun.

Jefferson was an active manager of his estate. Washington's Mt Vernon actually turned a profit, not so Jefferson's Monticello.  The difference was top management.  Washington didn't have Jefferson's intellect, but he had practical abilities.  Jefferson was an idea man.   And his house - and our country - is full of his ideas, but he was not a good businessman. He died deep in debt and his heirs had to sell Monticello.

Of course, Jefferson didn't do much of the real work. The paradox of Jefferson the hero of freedom is Jefferson the slave owner.  Slavery had existed since the beginning of history, but by Jefferson's time the Western world was beginning to see the moral contradictions of the practice.  Jefferson shared the revulsion of slavery in theory, but couldn't bring himself to take the practical and personal steps against it.  I guess he was just a true intellectual in that respect and unfortunately remained a man of his times. 

In any case, Jefferson's contributions far outweigh the negatives of his personal life. All human being are flawed.  They make their contributions based on what they do best, not what they do poorly.  

We Americans were truly blessed during our founders generation.  Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton & Madison all were greats.  But the remarkable thing is how their skills and even their personalities complemented each other, even when they fought and hated each other. Their differences created harmony and their joint efforts filled in for some serious individual flaws.

The American revolution is one of the few in world history that actually worked (i.e. didn't end in a bloodbath followed by despotism). We can thank good luck & favorable geography.  But the biggest factor was the moral authority, courage and intellect of our first leaders.  We are still living off their legacy. 

Above is the visitor's center that opened last year. In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, it takes advantage of natural forces and uses appropriate technology.  This is a green building, earth sheltered, energy efficient and heated & cooled to a large extent by geotheromal energy.  The wood and natural stone construction is simple, but elegant.  I like it.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We got to Appomattox too late yesterday, so we had to go this morning.  It is not the big tourist season, so we had the place largely to ourselves. 

I like these kinds of communities, with the old fashioned houses and the open spaces.  Alex thought the houses were “lame.”   But it is interesting to stand at the cross roads of history.   They have done a good job of preserving and restoring the historical area, but I think they should get some animals.   The community of the time would have featured horses, pigs, cows and chickens.  Well … probably not exactly in April 1865, when the starving soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia would have made short work of such rations on the hoof, but in normal times a community like this w/o animals would not be normal.   I bet the Park Service could get some farm hobbyists to do it for nothing. 

I thought back to April 1865 and the starving ragged Confederates up against Union forces that were better off but still not properly rationed.   Both armies were exhausted.   Robert E. Lee made the horrendous decision to surrender and the enlightened decision not to keep the fighting going on by guerilla tactics, as President Jefferson Davis wanted.   The South was finished.  No reason for more men to die and the country to be torn up even more for a lost cause.   Grant and the Union made it as easy as it could be in such circumstances.  

There was generosity, nobility and honor on both sides.   April 9, 1865 was truly a day when humanity showed its better side amidst terrible suffering and hatred.    As I wrote before, this is a even unique in human history.  

There is no such thing as destiny.  People make history. If Grant, Lee or Lincoln had been lesser men - ordinary men - blood would have continued to flow and our great nation may have never recovered.  But it could have been different.

Lincoln was there in spirit and he was a motivating force behind the generosity that Grant was able to give, but within a few days Lincoln would be dead, shot by that cowardly actor John Wilkes Booth. Had Booth struck a week earlier it is not likely that Grant could have offered such terms to Lee.  The conflict might have continued as a desperate war of extermination. 

Grant’s close friend William T Sherman would soon be similarly generous with General Joe Johnston, who would also prove as honorable as Robert E. Lee. 

We all remember Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but the Second Inaugural is my favorite.   It is not very long, so I copied it entire.  I especially like the last paragraph.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Alex and I visited the battlefields associated with the Petersburg Campaign and Robert E. Lee’s final retreat.   Petersburg gave the world a taste of what trench warfare would be like.  You go from Federal earthworks to Confederate earthworks.   As in the World War I, the armies were racing around the flanks.  It soon became a grim slog, a war of attrition.  The South could not win this kind of war. They just didn't have enough men or materiel. 

Above is Alex in front of some of the earthworks.  Below is a reconstruction. 

Lee was trying to escape to the west, where he could hook up with General Joe Johnston, while Union forces tried to bottle them up.   Lincoln’s fear was that the war would go on and maybe turn into a guerrilla war.  The Petersburg campaign has that endless war feeling anyway.  They were regularly taking thousands of casualties each DAY.  The soldiers were becoming more accustomed to war and much more cynical. They came to understand that the war in Virginia was ending and nobody wanted to be the last man killed.  There is a good novel about this period called "Last Full Measure" that captures some of the feeling.

Above is a soldiers' house.  It looks like a playhouse, but it held four men.   Below is what is left of the crater. Union miners from Pennsylvania made a tunnel under the Rebel positions and blew up Confederate fortifications.  Unfortunately, the attack didn't go well.  Union troops poured into the crater and many were trapped there. It looks bigger in real life.  You also need to remember that there has been almost 150 years of erosion and filling in.

America’s Civil War was remarkable in its ending.   In France, terror followed revolution.  The Russians and Chinese murdered millions of people in similar situations.  In fact, protracted Civil Wars almost NEVER end without significant retribution and bloodletting.   I think that I can safely say that the ending of the American Civil War was unique in human history.   The victors were generous and the vanquished honorable.  Because it happened as it did, we think of it as inevitable, but the decisions made in April 1865 were not foreordained.

Grant allowed Lee’s soldiers to keep their side arms and their horses.  Robert E. Lee instructed his men to go home and become good citizens.  Most did.   

I know that some scholars talk about the “myth” of reconciliation and point to the problems that persisted. Some people still hold a grudge for Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas. You have to ask the “compared to what?” question.  In most countries, more people die violently AFTER the wars.  Not in America.  Rebel leaders are usually executed.  The lucky ones are only imprisoned or exiled.  Not here. Can you imagine Cuba exiled welcomes back by the regime?  Russian exiles lured back were usually murdered.  

The Civil War was the worst war in American history.  The destruction was horrendous.  Yet after it ended … it ended.  April 1865 was probably the most remarkable month in world history.  This just doesn’t happen very often – or at all.   I think we should take time to think about this.  If others had learned from the Federal-Confederate example, we might have avoided most of the carnage of the 20th Century.   

Above is a battlefield at Five Forks.  When the fight turned into a battle of attrition, most of the engagements were small, but this was a key turning point. Phil Sheridan defeated troops under the unlucky George Pickett, who was off having a fish dinner and didn't return until it was too late. The collapse of the Confederate position at Five Forks led directly to Lee's decision to abandon Richmond & Petersburg.  It was the beginning of the end for the Army of Northern Virginia and for the Southern Confederacy, and so Five Forks is sometimes called the Confederate Waterloo.  There is nothing much to see here today.  The trees and fields have grown back.  It is hard to believe that war was ever close to this peaceful, bucolic place.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You can just about live off potatoes.  I mostly did that during my years in graduate school.   A baked potato topped with a little butter and green beans or sauerkraut is a good meal and really requires nothing else. Potatoes have an unjustly bad reputation. 

They got a bad rep from the Irish Potato famine (the monuments above commemorate the refugees who fled Potato Famine and became fine citizens of Massachusetts) but more recently they have been attacked for being a high carbohydrate, high calories food.   A potato has no more calories than an apple of around the same size (potatoes tend to be bigger). The calories come from all the crap we pile on them; it’s the butter, bacon bits, sour cream, cheese and all the other things that add that fat and calories.

Despite their ubiquity central and northern European diets, Potatoes are a native American food.   It took a long time to get Europeans to eat them. Like most “ancient traditions” it is not really very old.  Many people thought they were poison.  The green tubers and sprout are indeed poisonous.   Potatoes and tomatoes are members of the nightshade family and most of the siblings are as dangerous as the ominous family name implies.  But the bigger reason was just habit.   Potatoes are strange.  They are not like other root crops such as carrots or turnips.  In fact, they are a lot more like an apple.  The French even call them pomme de terre or ground apples.

The French Revolution and the generation of violence it provoked across Europe was the catalyst that thrust potatoes firmly into European cuisine.  The edible part of the potato plant grows below ground and so is less at risk when marauding armies trample or burn the crops.   Of course, potatoes were not as good back then.  The potatoes most of us love were developed by Luther Burbank in 1872.  Like the corn & tomatoes, potatoes as we know them are largely a man-made modern creation.   

I still eat baked potatoes seasonally.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First is that potatoes are available and cheap in the fall.   You can get a ten pound bag of potatoes for a few dollars in November or December.  That is why I ate them as a poor graduate student.  (You can get a week’s worth of meals for around $10 even at today’s prices.)  Beyond that, I don’t like to bake during the warm weather months, but it is nice to let the oven warm up the house when the weather turns cold.   I learned to be a cheapskate long ago and I see no reason to change now, especially when my potato habits make sense and potatoes are so good.

Anyway, potatoes are easy to cook, cheap and basically good for you when you add some vegetables and not too much butter or sour cream.  I suppose that is the reason why they are an integral part of a hardy meal.

Posted by Broadnax at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We spent our last day in Arizona at the Bryce Thompson arboretum, where you can see trees and plants native to the desert southwest, the Sonora and Chihuahua regions, as well as those from deserts in South America, Africa and Australia.

Desert landscapes are strange for someone who grew up in Eastern North America, although the Sonora vegetation is vicariously familiar because of all the cowboy movies.   Almost everything has thick skin and thorns and takes a long time to grow. 

The exception is the gum tree or eucalyptus. It is a type of miracle tree from Australia.  It can grow very fast in dry harsh conditions.  This wonderful capacity for growth and adaption has made eucalyptus an invasive species.  It can often out-compete the native desert flora, but it provides little for wildlife to eat.  

Kuala bears eat the leaves, but most other animal avoid them. I suppose this is because they smell like Halls Mentholypus cough drops and probably taste like them too.  It is an acquired taste.  Like everything else, its value can be judged only in context.  Eucalyptus are great trees to provide shade, cover and erosion control.  They get big. The one pictured below was planted in 1926.  And they are attractive individually and in clumps.

Date palms were familiar from Iraq. Dates are a very productive desert tree.  I have written about them before. I cannot tell them apart, but I understand that there are dozens of varieties.

An arboretum is not only a pretty place. It is also a place to learn about natural communities. They say the desert speaks, but I like to have someone put up a few signs to interpret it for me.  The biggest surprise was an Australian she-oak.  It is not related to our oaks (quercus).  I had absolutely no idea what it was.  Below are Maleah, Diane & Christiana in the date palm grove.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of the fathers in my neighborhood were veterans of World War II or Korea. I remember them mostly as middle aged guys with short haircuts, strong forearms and thick necks. They were like everybody else in our working-class neighborhood because they were the neighborhood. 

Non-veterans were rare.  We kids just assumed we would go into the military when we reached manhood.  But I grew up just at a turning point.  They stopped drafting young men the year before I turned 18.  The new volunteer military meant that fewer and fewer Americans had any experience with the military.  Many young people today don’t have any close friends or relatives with military experience.  They take their impressions from Hollywood, which exhibits a systemic negative bias toward the military these days. 

That is too bad.  Today’s military is extraordinarily impressive, but many of those who haven’t seen it up close lately are stuck in the old stereotypes. You hear the prejudice when people say that the military is full of poor people w/o other choices. In fact, the opposite is true.  75% of today’s young people are not qualified for military service because they are too fat, too weak, druggies, crooks or dropouts and studies show that the average soldiers or Marines are better in terms of education, health and general attitude than the average civilian Americans of their age.

Until not long ago when I thought of veterans, I still saw those old WWII guys I knew as a kid. There service was twenty years in the past by the time I knew them.  It was distant, almost legendary. Their sacrifices and those of their comrades were equally remote. The Vietnam vets were only a little older than I was, but that war got compartmentalized, with student protesters and hippies taking the starring roles leaving the military as supporting characters, portrayed as victims, villains or psychos.   (BTW – I think that is one reason why movies like “The Men Who Stare at Goats” or “Brothers” infuriate me so much.  I fear that Hollywood is doing to the heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan what they did to those of Vietnam.)  In both cases, they were isolated from my reality.

But on this Veterans’ Day I realize that my views of veterans have undergone a significant change.  It is not only because of my Iraq experience.  Some of it is generational.   I am now older than most veterans and many of the older veterans are nearly my contemporaries.   I am now seeing veterans not as fathers, but as sons.   That has made it more poignant and I have seen it closer.

The death that affected me most was that of PFC Aaron Ward. He was only nineteen and had been in Iraq less than two months when he was shot and killed on May 6, 2008 as he stretched his legs outside his vehicle in Hit (that is the city name).  I knew the place but I didn’t know him or anything about him until I attended the memorial service. His friends described him as a friendly guy who liked to lift weights and joke with friends. Like everyone in Iraq, he was a volunteer who had chosen to serve his country knowing that he would be deployed to a war zone.  He seems a great guy and at the same time an average guy who did the things nineteen year old guys do.  I thought of Espen and Alex and I thought of Ward’s parents. And so this Veteran’s Day and every Veterans Day until the day I die I will pause to remember Aaron Ward.

Brave men and women put their own lives on hold and their own lives at risk to protect ours.  We mourn the fallen, but we should think of our military as heroes, not victims. Most come back healthy and alive.  They bring with them the skills, discipline, maturity and experience from their service to our country defending our freedom. They serve in the military for some years. Then they serve as good citizens for the rest of their lives.  Like those veterans I remember from my Milwaukee childhood, first they defend the country and then they come back to build it and keep it healthy. They deserves the honor and respect we give them on Veterans’ Day and every day.

BTW - Please see my note from last Veterans' Day at this link. 

Posted by Broadnax at 07:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lighten up while you still can

We finally got down to Winslow, Az.  Winslow is world famous among fans of the 1970s pop group “The Eagles,” since one of their hits “Take it Easy” features a hitchhiking vignette when the singer is “…standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.”   We didn’t actually see the corner, although I looked for it and evidently drove past it on the way to Highway 87.

Burning Brush

The geography changed as we climbed from the semi-arid grasslands through juniper and back up to beautiful ponderosa pine forests. I regret that it was getting a little late and we were losing the light so I couldn’t tarry longer.  This is part of the Coconino National Forest and the Forest Service was busy burning the brush.  We saw a lot of smoke and even some flames.  You can see the smoke in the distance in the picture above. I am encouraged to see the proactive use of fire to restore the landscapes.  The park-like ponderosa forest, with its interspersed meadows, is one of nature’s most beautiful communities.  Below is a well-managed ponderosa forest.  The ones with the red bark are at least 100 years old.  Younger ones have black bark.

Cool Air and Cooler Sunsets

Although Arizona was experiencing a heat wave, and temperatures in Phoenix were reaching into the nineties, the air in the piney woods was cool.   The thermometer in the car registered 59.  You might think you were driving through upper Michigan.  As I wrote above, we were losing the light and I didn’t want to drive the narrow, curvy roads in the dark, so we cut sideways to catch I-17.  We saw one of the most beautiful sunsets I have seen with red clouds turning purple before going dark.  I think the smoke from the prescribed fires contributed to the color.  I didn’t even bother trying to get a picture.  Beautiful sunset pictures are cliché.   Part of the beauty of a sunset lies in its ethereal & ephemeral elements.  Taking a picture is like trying to grab a handful of air.  

The picture above is taken near a gas station in Happy Jack, AZ.  Interesting name for a town.  We didn't see the actual town. 

We lost altitude as we approached I-17 and the temperature rose to 81 degrees, in spite of the coming of evening.   It was 86 by the time we got to Phoenix.  Back in the desert.  It is interesting that you can get such changes in such a short time and distance.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anybody can eat when he is hungry but it takes a real man to eat when he’s full.

We went east away from the Grand Canyon into the Painted Desert and the Navajo and Hopi nations.  We stopped at a “trading post” in Cameron. 

Information about our trip through the Navajo nation in 2003 are at this link, BTW. 

They had a nice restaurant with very friendly staff and an old fashioned ambiance.  I had Navajo stew, which tasted a lot like traditional beef stew.  It came with fry bread, which is excellent, and the portions were generous.  Chrissy just had the cheese burger and fries. Usually I help Chrissy finish her lunch.  This time I failed. The fry bread is very filling.

That fry bread is really good. I enjoyed it just by itself and I tried a little with butter and honey. Then I got the great idea that it might be even better if it had some tomato sauce, melted cheese and maybe some sausages and mushrooms.  Maybe I should check to see if anybody else has had a similar idea before I open my restaurant.

Space & the Eternity Highway

There is a lot of space out here.  Chrissy joked about those signs you sometimes see on developments, “If you lived here, you would be home already.”  These roads are near nothing. We saw a few lonely cows and horses, but not much else. Sometimes I wondered if we were really moving.  Although we were going 65, the horizon didn’t seem to change. This is the kind of landscape featured on SciFi.   The aliens could abduct you out here and nobody would see.

Proper Picture Protocols

We stopped at the Hopi Museum.  I cannot show you pictures from the actual museum. (The best I can do is the cool looking gas station above, which I assume is culturally appropriate.)  A sign at the museum admonished visitors not even to take notes.  The $3 you pay for admission only goes for you.  Other signs warned that you would have your camera confiscated if you took pictures of various villages or activities. So I don’t have pictures of the Hopi stuff.  I have some Painted Desert pictures below.  There was nobody out there or much sign of life in general.

I have a good memory and could probably tell you about the things I read and saw at the museum, but they seemed unenthusiastic about this sort of sharing, so better not.   Suffice to say that there were some excellent black and white photos from around a century ago of people and places as well as a display of Kachina dolls with narratives complaining about Kachina doll knockoffs and/or imitations based on the concept. 

There was also a lot of information about a boundary dispute between the Hopi and the much larger and faster growing Navajo Nation. As per instructions, I didn't take notes, but seems that things were not going well. The Navajos and Apache arrived in the area a few hundred years ago and this is only the latest round.  According to the last census, there are almost 300,000 Navajos and fewer than 7,000 Hopi.  The numbers explain a lot.

I framed an excellent picture in my mind.  Outside the museum there were a bunch of guys selling things like firewood, rugs and Kachina dolls from little stands or the backs of pickup trucks.  In the background were spaced pinon pine trees.  Very picturesque.  But business didn’t seem too good and I was intimidated by the picture prohibition.  I didn’t know if I could take a picture or not, but why chance it?  You can find out all you need to know from “National Geographic” and they have better photographers who know the proper picture protocols. I hope I didn't anger the Kachinas.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Above is the hotel were we stayed. The El Tovar lodge has that rustic elegance characteristic of the early 20th Century.  It was built in 1905, financed by the Santa Fe railroad as a sort of rail destination. President Theodore Roosevelt took the first steps to preserve the canyon about that time and the lodges here reflect that muscular personality of Roosevelt and America of that era. The Canyon was declared a national monument in 1908 and a national park in 1919.

The dark log walls are studded with actual heads of moose, deer, mountain goats and even bison.  I always wanted a moose head for my wall, but I have never had enough walls to handle something as big as a moose head.   You need a really big room with really high walls.  Actually, you probably need something a lot like the room in a big lodge. Moose are not native to Arizona, BTW, so the head came from somewhere else.

Below is Bright Angel Lodge. 

Posted by Broadnax at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The pictures I took of the canyon do not do it justice.  It is hard to get my camera to adjust properly to the combination of bright light and dark shadows.   Even when the light works, the colors don’t show exactly right and it is impossible to convey the depth.  But this is the best I can do.  You will have to come here yourself.

The light seems to spill into the canyon when the sun is just over the rim.  There is still a little haze in the air.  I think it is left over from prescribed burns to manage the neighborhood forests, as described in earlier posts.

Above & below are canyon panoramas.  The bottom one was taken just at dusk, so there are not the shadows.   When you see the canyon in person, the shadows make it much more beautiful as you eyes can move and adjust.  But the pictures come out better w/o the sunlight.  I bet the nicest photos could be made when high clouds blocked some of the direct light. 

View Master

The best pictures of the Grand Canyon were the old View Masters I had as a kid.  The canyon seems very familiar to me today because of the many visits I made via View Master.  The simple technology worked great and the fact that we didn't have very many options gave me the exposure I still remember more than forty years later.  

The Real Thing Requires a Little Pain

Everything goes in and out of the Canyon on mules or people.  They don't bring machines, which makes the trails and facilities more primitive and much nicer. 

I hope it never changes. IMO, views and experiences are better when you have to earn them.  Some day I will be too old to make the journey and then I will have only memories and pictures. So sad, but so right.

I don't want it to be made easily accessible for me or anybody else. Not only would that impact nature adversely, the experience of the Canyon would be different and much shallower if you could just drive down in air conditioned comfort or take an elevator.

It is that way with most things.  A rest you earn with good hard work is different and better than when you just get to lay around.  Achievement easily given is not achievement you value. 

Most people stay on top and marvel at the beauty in a more detached way.  Good. Keep it that way. The more spiritual experience requires a little more skin in the game. The sweat and exertion are part of it.  An erzatz version would be worse than nothing, or at best a feeble imitation.  We already have too much of that in today's world. 

Posted by Broadnax at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Chrissy and I went down as far as Indian Gardens.  This is an oasis on the Bright Angel trail and it is the logical terminus of a day hike for a person in average condition.  It took us around three hours to get down but only around two and a half hours to get back up.  It doesn’t make intuitive sense.  I think it is because of all the rocks.  I walk gingerly among them going downhill.  We also had to get to the side of the path to let hikers pass who were coming up or mule trains coming down. There was less oncoming traffic on the return trip and no mule trains came past. 

Of course I am not counting the leisurely lunch-break we spent at Indian Gardens.  The cottonwoods and willow make very pleasant surroundings.  Both are fast-growing adaptive trees but are often unloved because of their weak wood, short lives and susceptibility to wind damage.   Of course, it depends on where they are.  As long as they are not near houses or roads, they do just fine.  Except that they grow in generations, i.e. a lot of them come up the same time and whole clumps grow, live and die together.  This is not a problem except during generational change, when the whole clump of cottonwoods begins to die back about the same time.

PS

The morning later I my complaining muscles reminded me that I am no longer in the top condition I used to imagine.   The pattern of pain was interesting, more characteristic of overdoing cross country skiing than overdoing ordinary hiking.  I suppose it is because of the poles. 

My legs hurt a lot less than I would have guessed, but my arms, chest and lats are screaming. 

I used to cross country ski a lot when we lived in Norway.  I am sure I used the poles the way the Norwegians taught me, which is to push off in back of your body instead of leaning forward on the sticks. I recognize the feelings.   The good news is the pain confirms that the poles worked.  I pulled myself out of the canyon w/o overstraining my legs or knees.  

As they say (for different reasons) in "Animal Farm", "Four legs good; too legs bad."

PSPS

The link to my earlier trip down the canyon is at this link.  That time we did it in 117 degree heat and went all the way to the river and back.  That was stupid.  The bottoms of my shoes melted off on the hot rocks. Really. 

This time we had perfect weather. Cool at the top and only warm near Indian Gardens. AND we didn't go all the way down.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Route 66 has been replaced by I-40 through Arizona, but the legend remains.  Among the places showing homage to the “mother road” is the Route 66 Grill.  My guess is that the clientele includes a lot of bikers and truckers. You get to (have to) grill your own lunch. I chose bratwurst, since I was reasonably sure that I couldn’t mess up with a pre-cooked sausage. I just had to blacken the outside.

Farther down the road is Williams.  We visited here in 2003 and you can read about that at this link.  Williams has a superb natural location with a nice cool climate in the middle of the ponderosa pine forests on the way to the Grand Canyon, but it is just a little too far out of the way.  It has always been thus.  The town is named for the mountain man (and son of plainly unimaginative parents) William Williams.  According to the plaque at the monument, Williams organized the regional mountain man rendezvous at the site of the current down and generally “did a heap of living.” 

Those rendezvous must have been something to experience, with the grizzly men coming out of the woods once a year to trade their pelts for the goods they needed, including whiskey, women & weapons.  Merchants came from all over to trade and probably rip them off.  Of course, it was dangerous to cross a man who lived by himself most of the time and whose daily life required him to kill animals & fight Indians.  Fuel that guy with rye whiskey and you had murder and mayhem waiting to happen.

Mountain men like Jeddiah Smith, Jim Bridger and William Williams went up to the mountains to get away from civilization, but their activities opened up the wilderness and allowed in what they were trying to escape. 

The mountain man epoch lasted less than a generation.  A lot of their activity was based on chasing beavers to satisfy the vagaries of fashion. The pelts were used for felt hats worn by gentlemen in Europe and the Eastern U.S. The bottom fell out of the market when fashions changed and silk hats became all the rage. Anyway, by that time settlers were moving in and the railroads were binding the nation together. There was no longer any room for the mountain men.  Their legend has endured longer than their moment in history.

The story of our 2003 trip to Williams is here.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We headed up to the Grand Canyon via Sedona, which took us through the red rock country along Oak Creek.  Our first stop was Montezuma’s Castle, misnamed after the legendary King of the Aztecs, whose people never got this far north.   Castle is also a bit of a misnomer.  It is essentially a lightly fortified cliff dwelling and it was a Pueblo type people who made the structure as a refuge against enemies.  Archeologists call them Sinaqua people.

Looking at the extent that people lived in fortified villages reminds us how precarious life was in the past.   Violent marauders or dangerous animals could appear at any time and the lookouts could only detect as far as their naked eyes could see.   Since old guys, less useful working in the fields, evidently often got the lookout job, sighting distances were cut even further by failing eyesight.

However, as far as stone-age communities go, this was a top of the line location. It was defensible, as mentioned above. Oak Creek provides a steady supply of water, important to human life and attractive to game animals and the loose soils near the creek were easily worked with simple tools available. 

The community thrived for centuries and then just disappeared around 600 years ago. Nobody is sure what happened.  There was significant climate change at the time, with the area becoming drier. This might have changed availability of game species.  That cannot be the only explanation; since the creek did not dry up and no matter how tough conditions were near the creek, they must have been worse away from it. Below is Oak Creek near Sedona.

I blame Rousseau and his "noble savage" myth for giving us the misconception that life before civilization was good. In fact, life for most was violent, unpredictable, generally brief and often unpleasant. A better question to ask is how people persisted for so long rather than why they disappeared. It was probably a combination of war and changing ecological conditions that drove the people away from this area. Of course, sometimes things just happen. Only around fifty people lived in this village. With a small, preliterate culture a few bad decisions, a couple of nasty neighbors or just a run of bad luck can doom a community. I suppose a bigger question is why they didn’t come back.

I didn’t think of Arizona as a beautiful autumn location, but the sycamore trees along creek were showing off a rich golden color.  It was a beautiful fall day at Montezuma’s castle, as you can see from the nearby pictures. We moved up the road and upstream to the town of Oak Creek and the Sedona area. We stayed at the Best Western in Sedona.  Below is the view from the balcony.

This is the red rock canyons area with natural beauty all around.  It reminded both Chrissy and me of the Petra area of Jordan.   Sedona was a cowboy movie location during the 1940s and 1950s and there were markers with handprints of famous actors who played in the movies.  The only ones I recognized were Gene Autry and Ernest Borgnine.  More recently, it has become a center of arts and crafts and a kind of aging hippie hangout.  There is supposed to be some kind of vortex that connects to other dimensions or releases psychic energy or something like that.  This and the lyrically beautiful scenery attract various sorts of people.  There are also plenty of trails for outdoor activity.  It is a nice place generally.

Past Sedona you climb the mountain in a series of switchbacks.  You are still following Oak Creek, more or less.  That little creek is responsible for most of the beautiful topography.  The natural communities change as you climb with scrub, juniper and pinion pines giving way to open ponderosa forests.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maybe it is just that Carl knows them. (Carl is a connector. He knows lots of people and is genuinely interested in their activities.)  Maybe a place like this is just particularly attractive to people associated with the aviation and travel industries.  Maybe something draws them here.  The nearby University of Arizona evidently gets a lot of grants to do aviation related research or it could be just a case of random clustering.  Whatever the reason, there seem to be are a lot of pilots and airline employees around here.  Many are retired but others own homes here sort of as a base.  I suppose they are like FSO in that respect.  They travel around so much that they really are no longer tied to a particular place, so they choose a nice place like Marana, with its sunny climate and ample amenities.

Below is a view from a bedroom in one of the model homes,

Below is an "outdoor room" at the development.  The doors open completely making the living room and the patio one space.

Carl showed me around his community, which is still an expanding work in progress.   It was started around 1990 and spreads up the canyons.  The growth is extensive, but well-planned.  Distances are significant and it is a long way to grocery stores or services. In other words, it is not a place to walk, except as exercise along the trails or on the golf courses.

You could not call it a retirement community, even though many of the residents are retired or semi retired.   Carl and Elise seem to be typical of the community in that I don’t know think you could say that they are retired.  They no longer work where they did during the bulk of their working lives, but they are active in their community and pursuing a bevy of business ventures.  I mentioned Elise’s Jewelry business.   Carl works on a variety of computer related projects and produces things like custom greeting cards.   A friend of his take pictures of the local wildlife – and sometimes not local as in Australia or the Galapagos – that they use for the cards.    If this is retirement, it is the kind of active and actualized life most of us say we want in both work and leisure.

Putting on the Ritz

There is some income diversity in the community, but the scale runs from well-off to rich.   You have to pay to live in a nice place like this.  Ritz-Carlton is developing the community up the canyon.   The big resort will open in December and the residences around can take advantage of the facilities there.   The Ritz will also manage the community in terms of trash pickup and maintenance.  This is a step above the average home-owners association, however.  The residents have a concierge service. You can call and have service worker sent to your house or if you are waiting for a service worker, they can send down someone to wait for you.  No more hanging around the house all day waiting for the cable guy.

When I think of putting on the Ritz, the scene from "Young Frankenstein" comes to mind, BTW.

The climate here is hot in the summer, but very nice most of the year.  The higher elevation makes it more pleasant even in the hot months and it is around 5 degrees cooler than Phoenix.   If the mountains seem familiar it is because those of us who watched TV during the 1960s saw them a lot.  Many of the westerns were filmed around here.   Even though Bonanza was set in Nevada, much of Virginia City and the Ponderosa were actually filmed here, for example.  The diversity of scenery and almost perpetual good weather made it good for filming.

The community builders are doing an excellent job of conserving nature.  I wrote in an earlier post how some people seem to be offended by golf courses, which they claim are ecologically wasteful. Those with that affliction probably should not come here.  But Carl pointed out how the golf courses are built around the natural drainage patterns and are irrigated only with gray water.   As a conservationist, I believe that we should use resources wisely and that is what they are doing here.  

Ample areas are left wild and they make a extraordinary effort to preserve the saguaro cactus. Above is a cactus nursery, where the saguaro wait for a new location.   Below is a cactus forest.

Areas of the cactus forests are put off limits to development and care is taken to move the safely saguaro in places where development must occur.  These symbols of the Sonora desert take many years to grow, but they have small root systems which makes them very easy to transplant.  The apparent anomaly of a shallow root system in a place w/o much water is explained by the hard-pan nature of the soils and the ability of the cactus to suck up and store immense amounts of water during the short times it is available. below and along side is a saguaro crown.  This is not something you see every day. It can take many years for a cactus to grow even one arm. This one is certainly more than a century old.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)