an icon for our time

just to follow up in the question of the value of portraits, in this case the one of susan rossen painted in 1975 by alice neel (see previous blog entry from july, "problems with portraits"). on november 2, 2010, it was sold at auction by christie's london for 380,000 british pounds, or $614,000. too bad susan couldn't buy it at the time it was painted for $5,000.

by their premiums you shall know them

driving around our fair country in the month of october, i listened to a variety of national public radio stations, all of which were having their annual fund drive. of course this is a bad time to listen, as the programming is constantly interrupted with pitches for support, so i began to contemplate the deeper meaning of the premiums being offered.


see a previous blog entry "oh california" for details on the san francisco station's lavish offerings (an earthquake preparedness kit and a meditation retreat for two) for contributions of $144.


heading north from columbus, ohio, the ohio state station. for $120, the same red cross emergency radio that san francisco offered as only a part of their kit, and a cd with some of the station's favorite music (unspecified). other premiums could be viewed on line.


then: toledo, ohio. for $120, a two-for-the-price-of one dining coupon book, featuring some of toledo's finest restaurants, like the spaghetti manufactory and panera bread, and a year's subscription to Newsweek (didn't i read somewhere that Newsweek was going out of business?) and their station program guide.


finally, home: detroit. a "made in detroit" gearshifter tee-shirt with wdet logo for $120. for $300, a "made in detroit" gearshifter black hoodie. for $2,500, a private party in your home with popular d.j. alternative music program host ann delisi (several contributions have already been made for this premium). and all contributors at any level will be entered in a drawing to win a $3,000 certificate to travel anywhere in the world.

spices in marrakesh

zorba the zuke

winner of the race on land, water, and in the mud


zorba the zuke from california won the 2010 port townsend "kinetic sculpture" race. she was lean, mean, and fast.

oh washington

in the olympic mountains

as a bonus, the flight from san jose to seattle offered me a spectacular view of crater lake in oregon, then a series of volcanic peaks in the cascades that i couldn't identify, and finally the two really big ones: mt. ranier and mt. baker. the plane circled over puget sound and there was one of the iconic washington state ferries making its way across. i could see the space needle and the black glass columbia tower, the tallest building in seattle, where i once had a drink of the very top floor with a slightly amorous colleague. i was happy to be coming back to this beautiful part of the world.

i was headed for port townsend on the olympic peninsula to visit friends peggy and pamela. port townsend is an attractive old town right at the north end of the sound.

downtown port townsend

there is a small but interesting marine science center

which houses at the moment a young giant pacific octopus. it sounds silly to say this, but i watched her for a long time and felt she had a real personality. one of the volunteers pointed out so many amazing things about her abilities, and her anatomy, including the fact that her brain is in a ring shape so it can be compressed as she moves into narrow spaces. we watched while she moved around her tank and then tried to get a half-digested clam away from a large starfish. she will be released soon and eventually have a tentacle spread of 20 feet.

port townsend has some lovely beaches and bluffs

and a fine farmer's market

with carrots in colors and fabulous wild mushrooms

and also a very strange festival that speaks of its past as a place for hippies and freaks. it's called the "kinetic sculpture festival"

home-made vehicles driven only by human power must race on land, in water, and through a mudpit. the space cow bus was one of the largest, with about eight people peddling frantically inside.

the winner was zorba the zucchini,  a much smaller contraption driven by a woman from california.

{more to come...}

ah california

the morning fog lies hazy over the santa clara valley (aka silicon valley) as seen from a high point in the santa cruz mountains looking east. i finally found a great place to walk not far from san jose.  this is part of a 700 acre natural area preserve with miles of hilly interconnecting trails. you can certainly see why fires are a constant threat.

listening to the fall fundraising drive on the san francisco npr station kqed, i was seriously tempted to contribute at the $12/per month level to get the two premiums offered:

first, a red cross approved earthquake preparedness starter kit. packed in a handy red canvas bag, you would find a combination nightlight for everyday use/emergency flashlight with solar power, which will also recharge your mobile phone (probably not your laptop)

next, a red cross approved emergency am/fm/weather channel radio, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, with solar power and a hand crank

and a 32-page booklet that describes all the supplies that you and your family should lay in for an earthquake emergency. i figure it would also be helpful when the dte power goes out.

also, for the very same contribution, a 24-hour mediation retreat for two at the medicine buddha center in santa cruz county, featuring a health assessment, guided meditation, healing yoga, and gourmet local organic food. now those are two premiums i could go for.

maybe wdet could adapt these to offer in the detroit area.

after my hike, i made a quick trip to the upmarket lifestyle center in san jose called santana row. here's how they repurposed a church portal.

ah, california.

old, older, oldest

arrowheads from Virginia 

As various of my friends are now turning seventy, we often say to each other, 'We're getting old.' It wasn't too hard to joke, "Oh, sixty is the new forty," but trying to position seventy as fifty doesn't work quite so well. Old. What is old?


Rummaging through various desk drawers, looking for this or that, I've forgotten what, I came upon this cache of Native American arrowheads. My father found most of these  in Virginia over the many years he was out tramping around in fields, either shooting doves or looking for cornfields that would be a good place to shoot doves. I picked up one of the arrowheads myself, but I can't say which, perhaps the one with the broken base. We looked several times in the red dirt of the plowed field just above his fishing camp on the Shenandoah River after a rain, and finally I spotted one. I remember being a little disappointed in it. 


Just upstream from the camp was a stone construction across the river called the Fish Trap. They said that this extensive V-shaped pile of large stones with an opening just at the bottom of the V was made by Native Americans, who could stand on the rocks and club fish as they were forced to swim down through the open water at the center of the trap. Now it creates a class One rapid, fun to shoot through on an inner tube.


My friend David, the Native American expert, suggests that these arrowheads are probably from the Late Archaic period, 3,000 BCE to 1,000 AD. They are certainly old, older than I'd imagined. Most children are fascinated by Indians and their gear, so arrowheads are familiar enough objects, even if it is hard to imagine being skilled enough to construct a functional bow and arrow, let alone killing something with this equipment.

flint tools from Wadi Run

The arrowheads put me in mind of the stone tools that we found in the desert in Jordan, Wadi Rum, where Lawrence of Arabia lived and the eponymous movie was filmed. By chance, the Bedouin guys driving big Toyota 4-wheel drive trucks stopped at a place where there were many pieces of flint scattered on the sand. Some of the beautiful silky stones were obviously worked to serve as knives or set into hafts as sickle blades. Other pieces were the cores from which the tools were knapped and some were random flakes. Oded, the Israeli archeologist, recognized at once that this must have been the site of a flint tool workshop. 


He identified the flints as Neolithic, made somewhere around 7,000 BCE, several millenia before the pyramids were built, long before the stories that form the Old Testament were told. The blades are so sharp you could easily cut a lamb chop with them. We know, because we tried. I tried to visualize the early Semitic people that lived in this harsh but beautiful desert, chipping away at the flints which came from a rocky outcropping not too far away. Flint is commonly formed as nodules in chalk or limestone under a sea, so at one time in the history of the planet, the area that is now as arid as the Sahara was under water.

Devonian fossils from Sylvania, Ohio

Last Saturday geologist Jerry invited me to go fossiling with him and his grandson Patrick to Sylvania, Ohio, just over the border from Michigan. A sunny, cool day, we climbed, clambered, and slid over enormous piles of waste material from a vast mine that digs out huge quantities of limestone to make cement. The fossils are anything but in situ, but they are plentiful and the smaller ones easy to find, especially after a rain the day before.


The large dark critter at the top center is a rolled-up trilobite, balanced on a brachiopod. If you look closely you can see two eyes left and right of its round head; the ridges are the back of its carapace. The other shells are those of two different types of brachipods. All these creatures were alive in a warm sea in the Devonian period, when this part of the North American continent was still joined with all the other continents in the mega-continent known as Pangea. The Sylvania formation was at that time near the equator. And when was the Devonian? Well, somewhere around 408 to 360 million years ago.


I find it hard to warm up to a filter-feeding brachiopod, elegantly designed as the bivalves are, who lived anchored in the sea floor muck by a long peduncle. But a trilobite, an arthropod like lobsters and wood lice, with a head and two multi-faceted eyes and a segmented body with legs to carry it scuttling across the seafloor: I can identify with a trilobite. The most commonly found trilobite fossils are curled up, a reaction the books say to fear. In fact, the "roller" (as Jerry calls them) that I found contains three trilobites, small, medium (the one you can easily see), and large, rolled up together. What could have frightened these critters so that they were driven to pile in on each other and then suddenly die? Were their predators the looming primitive fish in the Devonian sea? Did they go into shock?


All trilobites and almost all the species of brachiopods were killed off in what is known as the Permian-Triassic extinction of about 250 million years ago. About 90% of marine organisms died out and 70% of reptiles, amphibians, and plants as well. Scientists aren't sure why. Possibilities include sea-level change, climate change, ocean stagnification, carbon dioxide buildup, an asteroid strike, some or all in combination. This was a bigger extinction than the more familiar and more recent Triassic-Jurassic event that killed off the dinosaurs. Geologists recognize that there have been five mass extinctions here over the thousands of millennia. 


Which reminds me, that if our species is intent on going extinct, as it seems to be, it won't be the first time on planet Earth that such an event has occurred. One question might be: how many other species will we take down with us? Perhaps not many; perhaps the world can get along quite nicely, much better in fact, if we and our destructive ways are gone. No more need for killing weapons, agricultural chemicals, genetically modified organisms, dams, power plants, asphalt, the internal combustion engine...on and on. We're not old, we're very new, and probably not going to last long.

gathering dust

When I was growing up in Charlottesville, my mother always seemed to be in the thrall of some more assertive older woman, one of whom was Mrs. Thomas Jefferson Randolph IV. This pretty, pleasant Nancy Randolph was an artist, or as my father insisted on calling her, an “artiste.” She painted perfectly respectable flowers, fruits, or birds on the black backgrounds of trays and cookie tins and mirror frames or the backs of antique chairs. Sometimes she painted credible but rather dull landscapes of the Blue Ridge Mountains near her home. But she also had the occasional commission for portraits—the owner of the Chevrolet dealership, say, or the retiring minister of the Methodist Church. My mother, who had about as many trays and boxes as she could possibly use (I still have two trays, a sewing box, and two chairs), asked her to paint half-length oil portraits of my two grandmothers, herself, and me. This must have been in the late 1940s.

My maternal grandmother (née Elizabeth Long) was dead, but Mrs. Randolph had at least known her a decade earlier. “Bessie” had dark hair and eyes and was considered a handsome woman. For this portrait the painter worked from her memory boosted by a photograph. My paternal grandmother (Julia Plummer) was still alive, and also said to have been a beauty in her day, but she was neurotic and reclusive. Mrs. Randolph worked from an old photograph of a much younger woman. I could never see that this resembled the thin, nervous old lady who seemed not to care much for me, her namesake and only grandchild. My mother (Elizabeth Magruder) never really sat for her portrait. Mrs. Randolph protested that she knew my mother so well, it wouldn’t be necessary. My mother is presented as younger and slimmer than photographs of the period show. She is quite pretty, wearing a red formal gown with a princess neckline and a luxurious mink stole. I never saw either one of these and don’t believe she owned them. As for my portrait, a plump, pale eight-year old girl appears, wearing her Sunday best blue dress with a lace collar and what appears to be make-up and lipstick, stiffly clutching a bunch of daffodils.

 “Give these to Mrs. Randolph,” my mother had commanded, “You know she loves flowers.”

Mrs. Randolph cooed that this was such a sweet gesture. “Why thank you, honey, I’ll paint you just like that,” and she did. She asked me to sit still for a little while in her living room as she quickly sketched me in pastels.

When I first saw the finished portrait, I didn’t think that sappy little girl, all prim and proper, looked like me at all. My mother had given me a home permanent and my curly hair never lasted long. I wore glasses, but of course these were considered inappropriate the portrait of an ideal daughter. I was already a tomboy in training and this girl didn’t even look like someone I would want to play with. These portraits all respond to what my mother wished for—an ideal world, with her own handsome mother and a pretty, polite good little girl, and herself looking elegantly dressed as if about to leave for a ball. If there were any balls in Charlottesville in the late '40s, i'm sure my father wouldn't have agreed to go.

All four lifeless portraits in their gilt frames now gather dust and cobwebs in the tack room of our horse barn in Michigan. No one wants them. I can’t imagine hanging them in our small, informal house. Perhaps one of my sons would exhibit them in his garage, over the extra fridge that holds the beer, as ironic statements. The paintings wouldn’t even bring a good price on eBay, though Mrs. Randolph’s tole-style trays sell well in the local Virginia consignment shop. It seems wrong to destroy the portraits, though bonfires have been mentioned. 

problems with portraits

Part Two: How Much is Susan Worth? How Much Marilyn?

“You’re not going to believe this,” my old friend Susan Rossen said on the phone, “that portrait Alice Neel painted of me in 1976 is going to be sold at Christie’s London in the fall. The reserve price is 100,000 pounds, or $150,000.”

                  That seems so unfair. Back in ’76 Alice Neel was herself 76, a painter who had been neglected all her life until the feminist art movement of the 1970s led to an effort to celebrate little-known women artists. Susan was a mover and shaker in those heady days when artists and art historians woke up to the fact that they were under-represented everywhere. Susan was on the board of the Women’s Caucus for Art; she met Alice at a conference in New York and Alice immediately announced that she would like to paint her portrait. Susan sat for it in Alice’s studio in Spanish Harlem and when the painting was finished, Alice announced her price: $2,500. Susan didn’t really like the portrait—she was going through a bad time and her clenched fists and tense expression expressed that. And she didn’t have the money either. As Director of Publications at the Detroit Institute of Arts, hers was a modest income.

                  Alice’s reputation grew rapidly. Everyone enjoyed the fact that this plump, proper-looking white-haired lady in a mink pillbox hat had been an outsider artist all her life, struggling with poverty and depression. She painted some sexually explicit portraits, and could swear like a sailor and spoke bluntly whatever was on her mind. She asked the most personal questions of her sitters and they willingly confessed dark secrets to her, no doubt aiding her understanding of their psyche. She called herself a “collector of souls.” By 1979 she was one of several distinguished women artists who were honored at the White House, with Jimmy Carter presenting them with awards for Lifetime Outstanding Achievement.

In 1981, Alice offered the painting to Susan for $10,000, but insisted on cash, immediately. Susan had just taken a job at the Art Institute of Chicago and bought an apartment, and didn’t have ten grand to spare then either. Over the years, Alice’s reputation continued to grow and then the price of her paintings appreciated dramatically when she died in 1984. Museums had begin to collect her work, hoping to show off their tiny efforts at diversity to balance the overwhelming population of works of art by dead white males on exhibit. Susan’s portrait had been purchased by an English collector of modern art who now, in 2010, decided to sell his collection. Christie’s London had googled and then emailed Susan to ask if she was indeed the sitter.

                  “Dumbest thing I ever did, “ Susan said. “I should have bought it. I wish I had, maybe borrowed the money from my aunt.”

Christie’s had mentioned the reserve and suggested that this would be considered a very fair price.

                  “Unfair,” I said, “Not fair at all. You should have it. Now you don’t even look so tortured.” I remembered her struggles in the mid-70s with her job and especially with romance.

                  “Besides,” Susan said, “I could use the money for the grandchildren’s college.”

                  We both agreed that it would be good if a museum bought it, so that it wouldn’t just disappear into another private collection. “I thought the DIA should have bought it when I left,” she said. “A fitting going-away present.”

                  “You have a lot of friends,” I said, “ all you need is for each of a thousand of us to put up a hundred dollars, and then strike a deal with Christies.”

                  By chance, the next day my old friend Marilyn called to chat. Alice Neel had also painted her portrait in 1981, when she was a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts. I told her about Susan’s portrait going on the block.

                  “That’s nothing,” Marilyn said, “Mine is still at the Madison Avenue gallery and is priced at $250,000. It isn’t even finished—Alice never painted the background. But it’s only worth that if someone actually buys it. Alice wanted $15,000 cash. My parents said they would be willing to skrimp and save if I really wanted it, but I said no, not worth it.”

 Marilyn had an attack of Bell’s Palsy when she sat for Alice; her face has an unnatural asymmetry as a result. But the artist caught an expression that shows Marilyn’s tentative uncertainty about the proceeding when she wasn’t looking her best, but a sort of half-smile is characteristic of her good manners and eagerness to please.

So here is another problem with portraits: there is no cut on the profit of the picture’s sale and resale for the sitter. Nor, of course, for the artist, dead or alive.

Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson?

This is not a portrait of either Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson, but it is a portrait of one of their contemporaries, an unknown early 19th-century Virginian done by a French artist called St. Memin.

Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson?

Shortly before I was planning to head back to Michigan, Maureen showed me something I’d never seen before. She brought out a small round profile portrait in black and white of an elegantly dressed, late 18^th-century gentleman. It was two inches in diameter in a silver frame and inscribed in pencil on the back in an old-fashioned hand: “Judge Dabney Carr, St. Memins.” It had been treasured by both Maureen's late husband Bill Minor and her late brother-in-law Dr. George Minor, who kept it in the centerpiece on his dining room table. 
When Maureen showed me the image of an eighteenth-century Minor ancestor that had descended somehow through the family, it gave me a little shiver of connection with the past of two-hundred years ago.


Both George’s and Bill's grandmother and great-grandmother were Carrs who married Minors, and they were proud to have this elegant little portrait of an ancestor. Maureen was distressed when the picture had seemed lost in the confusion as ignorant, ill-intentioned strangers cleared out George's house, but months later she was very happy to find it tossed in a box with other less significant objects.

                  “I don’t know exactly what this is,” Maureen said. “A drawing? Do you think it’s a photograph of a portrait that George had framed?” I looked at it closely; it didn’t look like a photograph.

                  A quick search turned up plenty of information about the artist. A French aristocrat who fled the Revolution in his own country and came to America in 1796, Charles-Balthazar-Julien Saint Memin  (1770 – 1852) worked with a copying device called a physiognotrace, invented in France in 1783. This allowed the artist to trace a very accurate profile of his sitter, which he then filled in by drawing facial details with a pencil or chalk. This was then transferred to an engraving plate. For $25, the sitter bought the original drawing and twelve copies of the engraving; more could be ordered. In fact, Thomas Jefferson purchased forty-eight copies of his portrait. George Washington, Meriwether Lewis, and Paul Revere sat to St. Memin, as did hundreds of other reasonably well-heeled new American citizens, up and down the East Coast. The charge for women’s portraits was $35, presumably because details of dress required more time. There are only a few examples of women but the artist did portraits of several elaborately dressed Native American chiefs who came to Washington, D.C. to be received by The Great White Father.

                  Judge Dabney Carr (1773-1837) was a nephew of Thomas Jefferson; his father also named Dabney Carr (1743-1773) had married Jefferson’s younger sister Martha. The elder Carr died the year his son was born, and according to the Jefferson Encyclopedia, young Dabney “spent a great deal of his early life at Monticello under the care of Jefferson.” He began practicing law in Albemarle County; by 1824 he was elected to be a judge of the court of appeals in the northern Virginia town of Winchester.

St. Memin spent the years from 1803-09 working in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Richmond, so it seems likely that Carr’s portrait was done then. St Memin returned to France in 1809.

                  It’s not difficult to figure out how the Minors are related to Judge Dabney Carr, and no doubt there are other connections among  old Albemarle County families. I’m descended from a Dr. John Gilmer and Sarah Minor, whose graves are in the same small family cemetery as my mother’s. If I am in any way related to Judge Dabney Carr, it would be distantly and in some highly convoluted fashion. But with a Carr grandmother and great-grandmother, it seems reasonable that the Minors would inherit the little portrait of their cousin.

                 

                  A few days later, Maureen pursued some information about St. Memin and Carr and found that a distant Minor relative had previously done so, but she had come to a different conclusion about the portrait. In a large, expensive book ($400 on Amazon) published by the Smithsonian that includes all portraits by St. Memin in their collection, there is an identical print identified in St. Memin’s handwriting as Overton Anderson. And who was that? His mother too was a Carr, and so he was a distant relative of the Minor family. His fifteen minutes of fame rests on the fact that he was rejected as a juror in the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr. He had no children, so it is reasonable to suppose that his twelve portraits might have been handed down through the family, who confused him with Judge Carr. The handwriting couldn’t have been St. Memin’s, as Carr was only made a judge long after the artist had returned to France.

                  If the portrait does in fact represent Overton Anderson, does that change it’s meaning? It is no longer shows a Minor ancestor; no longer Thomas Jefferson’s nephew.  The two elderly Minor brothers, George and Bill who treasured it, both died recently, happily before anyone raised the possibility that it might not be their ancestor at all. The engraving is still an attractive little object, two hundred years old, but it no longer carries the historical significance and emotional meaning that was determined by its misidentification. Bill and Maureen's children and grandchildren will inherit it but I don't think Overton Anderson can have the same resonance for them that Judge Dabney Carr had for the older generation.

kept awake by invasive species

The other night I woke up a 5 a.m. worrying about all the invasive species of plants which seem determined to take over our small world. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I turned on the light, got a book that my cousin Maureen recently gave me All about Weeds by Edwin Rollin Spencer. Published originally in 1940, it was inscribed by her late husband Wm. F. Minor, Arnold Arboretum, Boston, Mass., 4/28/85. It appealed to me for its chatty and judgmental  tone.


For example, "There is no weed worse than the Canada thistle...it is perhaps the worst weed of the entire United States...it is outlawed in every northern state." (p. 293) Canada thistle is trying to take over our field to the west. We are fighting it by repeatedly mowing it down before it flowers, but it is now blooming all up and down Six Mile Road. If it gets established in a hayfield, it renders the field useless, as neither horses nor cows will eat it. And we have eight acres of hay to the east, downwind.


Even the otherwise entirely neutral 1977 Newcomb's Wildflower Guide calls it "A bad weed of pastures and waste places."


Of the Wild Parsnip, Spencer: "a big, bad weed...an ugly worthless, dangerous weed." (p. 172). In its second year, the whole plant is poisonous and produces a sap which severely burns human skin. Wild parsnip's pretty yellow umbelliferous flowers can now be seen all along Six Mile Road and down Dixboro Road. They are potentially more harmful than poison ivy, but few people know anything about this plant, only recently seen here.


You thought you liked the lovely flowers of Queen Anne's Lace? Spencer: "One of the worst weed that has come to the United States from Europe is Queen Anne's Lace...It can take over meadow and pasture lands with the greatest of ease, for no pasturing stock will touch it and it is tall enough to crowd out all the grasses used for hay." (pp. 173-175)


And pretty white flat topped yarrow? "About as worthless as any plant that grows." (p. 284) Ox-eye daisy: "a beautiful, bad weed." (p. 287). Buckhorn (which my parents called "Fly-Trap" as children knew how to weave the stalks to make a sort of cage) is one of the vile species of plantain, "so villainous that it deserves to be declared an outlaw by every State in the Union." (p. 240)


All of these are alien weeds brought by our ancestors from Europe; all are common on our property or at least up and down the road. Garlic mustard, one of the worst problems in Michigan, isn't even mentioned by Spencer. By 1940, it hadn't spread enough to attract attention. And of course there are so many others that are common: dandelions, wild onion and garlic, spotted knapweed, burdock, curly dock, nettles, bull thistle, teasel, reed canary grass and purple loosestrife in wet places. And more, the many grasses, the vines...


Nor of course the shrubs multiflora rose, honeysuckle, buckthorn, and autumn olive are mentioned in a book about weeds.


Unfortunately this all ties in with the sad facts about how we are destroying native plants and our ecosystems in general. It's all keeping me up at night.

to virginia in june

when i drive from michigan to virginia, i feel i've arrived in my homeland when i reach berkeley springs, west virginia. this is a small town under the brow of a mountain with a wonderful hot spring that comes out of a very deep place inside our planet. the water gushes out at about 700-1,000 gallons per minute at a temperature of 74 degrees farenheit. most well water arrives at 56 degrees; the difference is that the spring water is heated by its proximity to the hot core of the earth. there are two pumps available free to anyone, and i have never been there that there wasn't at least one other person filling up jugs with water. i got 12 this time. the soft water has a delicious pure taste and is high in many minerals, especially magnesium. to me, it is the most delicious water in the world, and there it is, free, and not 50 feet out of my way on a drive i must have made almost a hundred times.


i wouldn't have known anything about berkeley springs, except that my mother's mother was from winchester, virginia, which is about 30 odd miles from the town, and my mother went there as a child. while i know a lot about my male ancestors--the henshaws, magruders, minors--my maternal grandmother's maiden name was long, and i know almost nothing about that family. somehow the only contact i have with them is berkeley springs, just knowing that the longs went there makes me feel a small degree of belonging. 

there is an extant letter from george washington saying that he was enjoying "ye warm springs." here is a photo of what is said to be his bathtub.

my cousin maureen minor is kind enough to put me up and put up with me when i visit my home town. she lives near ivy, outside of charlottesville, in an attractive house that was designed by her daughter margaret, an architect in boston. from that porch you can often have a fine view of the blue ridge mountains, but there was so much haze in the humid air every day in june that the mountains disappeared. it is a lovely place to stay and maureen makes me feel very welcome. her husband bill died last year. he was a passionate nature lover, an expert birder, and under an often gruff exterior lay a truly caring individual. more to come...

early june

there was a kingfisher at the pond yesterday, helping the big snapping turtle and the great blue heron reduce the goldfish population. There's been a lot of rain lately and the water is quite high. I saw a painted turtle crossing six mile road nearby and there have been more baby rabbits than we've seen in a few years. maybe the neighbors have been shooting the coyotes or maybe the rough-neck ex-neighbors were shooting the rabbits.


all up and down the road wild parsnip is growing, a recently arrived alien invasive whose sap creates a bad burn on skin when it is exposed to sunlight. it has a large, pretty yellow umbellifera type flower which really shouldn't be picked. and few people know this. in the on-going battle against garlic mustard and autumn olive, some progress.


the wild roses are blooming on the fenceline with a lovely scent; a dead raccoon in the side yard has been picked at by turkey vultures (as many as six at a time) to the point that it only has a slightly repulsive smell. we've been away so often in june that it's a treat to be here and especially because the peonies are spectacular this year. some of them have a wonderful scent that is somewhere between vanilla and peppermint and a spice i can't identify. my mother loved peonies and gave me some of the ones blooming now.


wrens are nesting in two of the bird boxes; tree swallows in another and bluebirds somewhere nearby, as the sparrows have successfully 
captured the others.


i've planted a mix of lettuces, some basil and parsley, and five tomatoes, three of a new variety called mountain spring (evocative name) said to be very resistant to wilt, which was a problem last summer. jm has tended and replanted a long border of flowers along the west side of the house; many perennials came back and it looks very fine. what to do with the weedy patch opposite that was at one point intended to be a prairie is under discussion. raised beds with vegetables? a shade tree with grass and flowers? how much longer will we be staying here? can we wait for a tree to grow?

colors of commerce in morocco

spice shop in marrakesh

berber market near a town

outside the berber market: donkeys and trash

melons and carrots for sale, a few potatoes too

lamb transport

souvenir camels and sudoku

adventures in north africa

well, the photo says it all, or almost all. after this was taken, i gave my hat to Marcia who was nearby in a caleche, and my new Bedouin friend Malek and i went off for a nice long gallop over the sahara in the south of Tunisia. i started off on a camel but when Malek offered a ride behind him on Alix, a snappy little chestnut, who could resist? this was the most pure exciting fun i've had in quite a while.

another highlight, but no photos possible, was going to a hammam (traditional Turkish-style bath) in the town of Hammamet (the name means 'baths'). our Tunisian tour leader Mamdour was from that town, and he asked his mother to take two of us to the neighborhood hammam she and his sister use. she supplied Christa and me with towels, shampoo, bath gel, and a loofa, since we were not equipped for this experience.

there was a central sort of courtyard all whitewashed under a round dome for undressing, dressing, and relaxing after the bath. Five or six women and several children and a baby were chatting, drinking tea or water after the bath, though the children ran in and out several times. Christa and I undressed (keeping our underpants on). i can't say that i felt exactly thin, but by comparison with several women both old and young, i didn't feel specially fat even with my clothes off. those large tent-like overgarments that older and more traditional younger women wear hide a lot of lovely fatness. one very large older woman who was wearing a necklace with small coins, a thong, and nothing else grinned at us and did a little dance as we entered the steamy bath.

we were shown into one of several small doorless tiled stalls with two little stools and hot and cold taps and several plastic buckets of various sizes and told to get ourselves wet. (the language was French punctuated with universal gestures). Then Christa and i were taken into a hot steamy wet room with a raised tile platform where a youngish woman in a black camisole and black shorts (?) scrubbed us all over, front and back while lying down, with a black mitt of a coarse material, and we were led back to the stall where she washed our hair, scrubbed us again but with little nylon mesh puff, and poured lots of buckets of water over us.

then we went back to the first room, got dressed, had a drink of water, and relaxed until it was time for Mamdour to pick us up. the same women and children were there; the baby was under a heavy blanket enjoying a bottle. we gave the madame ten dinars each (about seven dollars, including a generous tip; by contrast, hotel hammams listed their baths and gommage-scrubbing--as fifty dinars or more.). We felt very clean and relaxed.

Terra Firma

On the sixth day out, we’d anchored in a protected bay on Norman Island, uninhabited except for a pirate-themed beach bar on one of its many coves. The island is considered to be the model for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In spite of many intense searches over the centuries, no one has found the treasure chest that legend says was hidden there by pirates in the 18th century. A gold doubloon was found in one of the caves in 1972, the most recent sign of any such thing.

            

 There were three other boats anchored nearby but no sign of anyone  on them. The curved shoreline was fairly long, but stony and rough. I felt a strong desire to walk, actually walk somewhere on land. Terra firma. In almost a week, we’d been off the boat for three lunches, otherwise only to swim or snorkel. I announced that I would like to swim ashore.

David warned me not to touch any trees, as the extremely poisonous manchineel tree is common in the area. Its highly toxic sap was used by the indigeous people on the tips of poison arrows. Many early explorers of the Caribbean found out the hard way why the small green fruits of this tree were called “death apples.” Caroline pulled out a small book on tropical trees, and I noted that the manzaneel was a large tree with rough gray bark and small, shiny, alternate pointed leaves.

Caroline said it was too early in the day for her to swim, so she settled into reading Quakers in Conflict, about a 19th century split in Ohio between more traditional Quakers and a reformist branch that broke away.

As I let myself down the ladder, I saw a large, long gray fish lurking just off the stern of the boat.

            “That’s a barracuda, but don’t worry,” said Caroline; “they won’t bother you here.”

              Didn’t they call Sarah Palin a barracuda when she played basketball? But what do they know of barracuda in Alaska?

            I cautiously entered the water and the fish moved away.

Fortunately I could swim in the water sandals I’d bought for the trip, so I tucked my regular glasses inside my suit, and snorkeled a couple of hundred feet in, noticing schools of silvery minnows but few larger fish, as this was not part of the reef.

I left the mask and snorkel beside the bleached trunk of a fallen tree in a little clearing just off the shore. Only small portions of it were pure white sand. I’d read that the colorful herbivorous parrotfish actually make the sand. Vegetarians, they feed on algae that live inside the coral and nibble off and ingest tiny bits of it. Thus every grain of pure white sand has passed through the gut of a parrotfish.

I walked happily as far as I could along the beach until a rocky outcrop barred the way and then I ventured a little way back into the jungly forest. I had no idea what species any of the trees or plants were. They were not the showy flowering imports used for landscaping around fancy resorts. Higher up on the hills I could see small clearings with clumps of bristly cactus. No romantic swaying palms here.  Coconut palms, not a native species, were originally planted around the sugar plantations to provide cheap food for the slaves.

Further inland I noticed tens of thousands small red ants building a huge nest of reddish mud about six feet off the ground in the crotch of a large tree. It had gray bark and small, pointed leaves. Could it be a manchineel? And could these be fire ants? Aren’t fire ants from Florida, or Texas, or somewhere with a warm climate? Aren’t they called fire ants because of their burning sting? There were trails of ants coming from several directions, making their way in several lines up the tree trunk. Considering that the tree might be a manchineel (though its gray bark was pretty smooth) and the insects fire ants, the practical part of me overcame my interest in observing the natural world and I walked quickly away.

There was very little in the way of trash, flotsam, or jetsam on the beach, but the round plastic lid of a white bucket had washed up, making a possible sear on the stony ground. I settled down in the shade of a shrubby tree with round, leathery leaves, and put my feet in the water. Two Magnificent Frigate Birds soared overhead; Brown Pelicans startled me more than once as they crash-dived for minnows in the water nearby; and a Brown Booby landed on a rock, looking as foolish as the name suggests. Behind me, in the forest, a number of small birds were calling. I had no idea what they were.

It was very pleasant to be on land but i realized how very unfamiliar my surroundings really were. In Michigan I can identify almost any tree I see and most plants, but here nothing was identifiable except the landforms. The contours of Norman Island were gentle, relatively low hills, quite unlike the conical volcanic peaks of some of the surrounding islands. The colorful angular rocks exposed on the small cliffs were clearly sedimentary in origin; they’d been thrust up by nearby volcanic events so that the strata were almost vertical. They were stained in streaks of rusty red from iron leaching out and in some places black, probably caused by bacteria living on the iron.

I looked out at the Unity and waved to see if anyone was watching me. No response. After a while I swam over to the reef at the edge of the bay and added several new species to my list of corals and fishes. But I wanted just to sit still a little longer. When I returned to my spot in the shade, I found a conch shell, perfectly intact, about four inches long, just at the edge of the water. It was the only shell I saw. A nice little souvenir.

I was very happy to be on land after five days at sea. What joy seeing land must have been to early travelers crossing the ocean on voyages of many months. We are terrestrial creatures, after all, and as lovely and fascinating as the underwater world of the reef is, it is not our home. Only our modern equipment allows us to look in on it. The coral, fish and other marine creatures have evolved their myriad shapes, colors, sizes, defenses, and reproductive strategies safe under the sea, all without interference from plundering, polluting  Homo sapiens. Until relatively recently, that is.

A Learning Experience

“But what is your address in the British Virgin Islands?” the stern young immigration officer asked me, looking at the line I’d left empty on my official immigration form.

I was third off the plane, having had a seat by the exit door of the small propjet that had brought me to the Beef Island airport in Tortola. The warm, humid air of the tropical evening smelt evocatively of the sea.

“I don’t know; I’m going to be sailing with friends on their boat.”

“What is the name of the boat?” he asked.

I blanked it out. Senior moment.

“Liberty?”

He asked if I was sure. I waffled. Not sure.

“Where is their boat?”

“It’s in a marina,” I guessed, haltingly. Where else would it be?

“Marina Cay?”

“Sure, that’s it, I think,” I replied, and wrote Marina Key on the form.

He could tell I was lying. He took back the form, scratched out those words with a frown, put my passport aside, and told me to stand against the wall near his booth. He beckoned to the next traveler to come forward.

I tried calling Caroline and David’s mobile phone. No answer, no message service on their British Virgin Islands number. Of course, we’re all in our late 60s, a generation not perpetually wed to those handy devices. Tried it again. No luck.

I watched as the last of the other passengers slowly made it through. A half hour had passed. The officer seemed to have forgotten about me.

I tried the phone again. I was tired; I’d been traveling since I left home in snowy Michigan at five a.m. I wanted to get on with my Caribbean adventure. What would I do if I couldn’t contact them? Would I be spending the night in an immigration holding cell? Put on a plane back to San Juan?

Finally a young woman in a uniform walked in and I waved her over. I explained that my friends were surely outside to meet me and could give her the information needed. She spoke to the immigration officer, interrupting him from processing a young white man with dreadlocks. He looked displeased but agreed that she could escort me outside. He tossed my passport and forms in a drawer.

On the other side of a low barrier, there were my smiling hosts, slim, tanned, gray-haired and all dressed up in their matching Unity baseball caps and polo shirts.

“What’s your address?” I cried frantically, “They won’t let me in without an address. I tried calling you…but no answer.”

“Your address is Sailing Vessel Unity,” David replied.

“Okay, but where is it? They want an address.”

“At the moment, in Trellis Bay.”

The woman official wrote down the information.

“Oh dear, we didn’t bring our phone,” Caroline murmured. “We were afraid you’d missed the plane.”

The immigration officer made me wait until all the other passengers from a second small plane had gone through before he returned to my case. He leafed carefully through my passport, examining the visas, corrected my immigration form, and scrutinized my customs form. An hour after my arrival, I was finally allowed to pick up my duffel bag, pass by a customs officer, and enter the British Virgin Islands .

What I learned: first, you need to have an address, any address, when you enter a foreign country and second, don’t mess with an immigration official. Caroline and David led me across the short distance from the small airport to the dingy dock on Trellis Bay, boarded their dingy Seek and motored over to a restaurant on the other side of the bay. I really needed a drink. After a gin and tonic for me and a glass of wine for them and some grilled mahi mahi, we dingied back to the Unity. They showed me a few essentials on the 36-foot boat and we all went to bed early. The bed in the aft cabin was comfortable and the gentle rocking of the boat pleasant, but I had a hard time getting to sleep.

announcing the winner

the mitten raffle is officially closed, and the lucky winner is marcia. a pair of mittens will be sent posthaste to help stave off the cold in georgia. congratulations and happy wearing.

back by popular demand: the grandchildren

y tamara  (5) and bennie (9 mos)

sorry, i can't rotate the mall photo here...yes, they are very cute, of course.

mittens for you?

 as some of my friends know, i have been knitting 'scandinavian style' mittens for a year or so now, though the scandinavians themselves may find my erratic use of pattern and color peculiar and undisciplined and recognize immediately some irregularities and flaws in the execution. and i'm told by my swedish friends that it is very uncouth to brag about yourself, so that's certainly not what i'm doing here.

what i am doing is offering any of the faithful blog readers a chance to own a pair of these one-of-a-kind mittens, custom knitted for you, as thanks for your interest.

below, four mix and match mittens. the color schemes are based on some extra wool that i wanted to use up, in combination with some yarn that was on sale at bargain prices at "knit-a-round" in ann arbor.

a simpler, more somber pair. i made these on a flight to california when i managed to forget the intended complex pattern sheet in the seat pocket of my first flight when i changed planes minneapolis.

all the mittens are 100% wool (variously swedish, austrian, irish, peruvian, and american) and a generic size that fits most women's hands. should a smaller or larger size be required, or custom colors requested, special orders can be accommodated.

you must enter a comment on the blog to win; a winner will be chosen in a random drawing on february 1, 2010, conducted by the certified firm of Ellie, Iris, and Ivy P.C.


happy new year, good luck and thanks so much for reading.