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.

winter thoughts

it's the end of december and the end of the decade and time to reflect on a few things. after working for 20 years on art-related publications, i find it almost impossible to write without an image or two to give it credibility.

the barn is well stocked with split black cherry firewood and the slender poles await the saw. those are the remains of the round corral that the cowbow manque' across the road built. when finally the big collapsed barn was taken down in september, several of us scavenged wood, as most of it was just being burned up in fires night and day. now we have a different view from the front of our house, a long view across the fields to the distant forest.

we're hoping that the shed on the right will collapse on its own, leaving only the shabby deteriorating house across the road. it has been suggested that the most useful future for the house would be to donate it to the volunteer fire department for practice.

the work i did this summer on nine different assessments for the huron river watershed's bio-reserve project was so interesting and i learned so much from the truly experienced scientists on the project. of the nine sites , only one area was really quite pristine and happily it is near here a few miles to the west on six mile road. most of it is wet forest, a flood plain along a winding creek, and there were almost no invasive species. we found a stand of endangered wildflowers, the brilliant blue closed gentian. we hope that the owners will be interested in preserving it with a conservation easement.

but the other eight sites were less encouraging. some were abandoned agricultural fields with solid monotypic stands of autumn olive, canada thistle, goldenrod or, worse, wild parsnip. some were second-growth forests with a ground cover of garlic mustard, which eliminates native spring wildflowers like trillium, bloodroot, and may apple. others were over-grazed and full of spotted knapweed. a well-established hardwood forest was flooded as the result of a large virtually abandoned housing development adjacent that changed the flow of water onto the neighbor's land, killing the trees and plants.

the organizers of the bioreserve project assured me that there were many promising sites among the 80-some surveyed; the degraded ones i'd seen were just a coincidental luck of the draw.

next year i'm planning to contact the four owners of the forest across the road, which extends all the way west to earhart road, to get their permission to do an assessment. my own informal look makes me think it's in pretty good shape. there is a stand of large beech, now relatively rate in s.e. michigan. now all we have to do is find the money to buy the 80 acres and build a small modern house well back off the road, keep the fields in cultivation, and put a conservation easement on it all. anyone want to chip in?

the bald-faced hornet's nest

This summer I spotted a large paper nest in the maple tree in our front yard. When it came time to write a short final paper for field biology, I chose it as my subject.

The bald-faced hornet (Also called Dolichovespula maculata in Dunn (255) is not a true hornet, but in the wasp (Vespidae) family, related to the yellow jacket, but with a larger body and black and white coloration. Its face is white, suggesting the name. They are social wasps, who form communities built on a caste system, consisting of a queen who is served by her sterile female daughters. With mouthparts for biting and chewing, vegetarian adults drink liquids and feed on ripe fruit; they masticate insects to feed the carnivorous larvae.
In the spring, a fertile queen builds a small nest alone, lays an egg in each cell, feeds the larvae, and a first generation of “daughters” is born. The queen keeps their ovaries from developing by aggressive behavior towards them in the “form of head butting and shoulder charging” (O’Toole 190) and they become workers who enlarge the nest, creating cells for the queen’s eggs. All she does from the time the worker generation emerge is lay eggs; the workers bring her food, defend the nest, collect wood pulp to enlarge the nest with many additional cells, and gather food and feed the larvae. The legless, grublike larvae signal for food by scratching on the walls of their cells and a worker will offer a tiny pellet of masticated insects, often mosquitoes or flies. There are reports of worker wasps snatching a fly in mid-flight. Farmers welcome the bald-faced hornets who live near cattle or horse barns.
When the adult insect emerges, she too becomes a worker. She seals off her cell, which has collected excrement, and it is enlarged it to make room for a new egg. The colonies grow all during the summer and may contain as many as 500 or more individuals. These become very aggressive if disturbed and each individual can and will sting repeatedly.
The nest has one entrance hole towards the bottom and is well insulated with several outer layers of paper to maintain an ideal temperature of about 86 degrees F (30C) If it becomes too warm, the workers will cluster around it and beat their wings to cool it down and bring in drops of water to moisten the cells; if too cool, the workers will perform an exercise, rapidly expanding and contracting their abdomens, and raise the temperature (Frisch 62).
Both the initial small nest and the subsequent large one are made of paper in the same way. The insects use their serrated mandibles to scrape weathered wood, often posts, fences, and telephone poles, for pulp; mix the pellets with their saliva and build the nest by stretching out each section, aligning the wood fibers for strength (Frisch 61). As they build, they use their antennae as calipers to measure the walls of each cell. A glandular secretion is added to outer surface; it hardens like lacquer to waterproof the paper (Wooten 126).
The elaborate nests are used for only one season; at the end of summer a generation of fertile females and males emerges and mates. The males die. The fertile queens overwinter in leaf litter or in the hollow of a tree; the workers become disoriented and die. The queens start construction of a new nest each spring.
 This seems like an extraordinary labor-intensive and elaborate system for insuring the continuance of the species. 

References
Dunn, Gary A. , Insects of the Great Lakes Region, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996.
Frisch, Karl von, Animal Architecture, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.
Milne, Lorus and Margery, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1980.
O’Toole, Christopher, Alien Empire: An Exploration of the Lives of Insects, New York, Harper Collins, 1995.
Stokes, Donald W., A Guide to Nature in Winter, Boston, Little Brown and Co., 1976.
Wooten, Anthony, Insects of the World, London, Facts on File, Cassell Illustrated, 2002.

thomas jefferson and me, second version

By the time I was in high school, I was sick of Thomas Jefferson.

Our on-again-off-again relationship started the day I was born in the Martha Jefferson Hospital. The name does double duty, as Jefferson's wife and daughter both bore the name. Hospitals should be embracing, caring places, and feminine names seem appropriate. No one would want to check in to the Thomas Jefferson Hospital, that would be too intimidating.

As I was growing up in Charlottesville, down the hill from the famous house, the Monticello Dairy delivered our milk; special occasions might be celebrated in the dining room of the Monticello Hotel; I saw Gene Autry and his horse Champion at the Jefferson Theater; we had one set of cousins living on Jefferson Street and another on Jefferson Park Avenue.

My father named one of his hunting dogs Thomas Jefferson, even though he had no special love for the third president. "Everything in this damn town is named Jefferson; I can't beat 'em'; might as well join 'em." The handsome liver and white pointer was called Jeff, but my father added names at a whim and encouraged me to do so too. Jeff's official name grew to be Thomas Jefferson Washington Jackson Anthony Airpump Alonzo Anselmo Dynaflow Randolph DeMarkley Garbage Scow Henshaw. my friends in high school used to set us up by encouraging newcomers ask my dog's name.

In the 1950s, residents of Charlottesville were given free passes to Monticello to encourage us to bring our visiting friends and family as paying customers. My mother ferried them up in her big boatlike Buicks. She wasn't particularly interested in Jefferson either, but she liked the old-fashioned flowers in the gardens.

My father wouldn't go: "If I want to see Monticello, I can look on the back of any nickel."

I enjoyed going to Monticello several times a year as a child. I liked the clock that told the day of the week with canon balls, the mammoth bones, the polygraph that allowed the writer to make an exact copy as he wrote, the smokehouse smelling fiercely of hams, bacon, and hickory smoke, the wooden feedboxes for the horses, the circular stone ice house built into the side of the hill. The tour guides were genteel ladies from town, some of them my mother's friends. They had soft, gracious Virginia accents and reverently referred to "Mr. Jefferson," a local cliche that still goes on.

When I got a little older, I was taken in by what I learned at my old-fashioned school. Our own native son Thomas Jefferson was the greatest of all presidents, author of the Declaration of Indepedence, brilliant shopper who doubled the nation's real eastate with the Louisiana Purchase and sent local heroes Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their daring expedition. He was tall, handsome, red-haired, an accomplished architect and musician. Of course there were plenty of other stars in the firmament of Virginia history, but none shined so brightly or cast such a long shadow as TJ.

That's what we called him in high school.

And who was afraid of Mrs. Thomas Jefferson Randolph V? We all were; she was the formidable headmistress of St. Anne's School. She had excellent posture, flashing black eyes, wore her iron-gray hair in braids around her head and well-tailored suits. She was not a warm maternal presence but her school had a reputation for academic excellence. Many Yankee girls came to St. Anne's as boarders, sent to acquire some Southern polish and/or get away from whatever trouble they'd had with boys at home. I suppose Mrs. Randolph's impeccable Virginian name with that Roman numeral after it must have impressed a few parents. Her appropriate first name was Augusta; we called her Gussie behind her back.

And imagine this: my mother had a close friend who was Mrs. Thomas Jefferson Randolph IV: a kinder, prettier, white haired Mrs. Randolph, named Nancy. An artist of sorts, she painted stiff, lifeless oil portraits of my two grandmothers (those from photographs), my mother, and me. These are gathering dust in my barn in Michigan now; no one can figure out what to do with them.

At St. Anne's our history teacher did point out the inconsistency of TJ's status as a slave holder when he had written "All men are created equal..." etc., but she didn't dwell on it. And certainly no one mentioned the rumors about his relationship with Sally Hemings, which had started in 1802. In the '50s that would have been absolutely scandalous; impossible to imagine that the great man was fathering children with a slave, no matter that she was very pretty, only an eighth African, and the half-sister of his deceased wife Martha.

So when the biography Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was published by historian Fawn Brodie in 1974, I eagerly read it; when the DNA evidence that TJ must have fathered Sally's youngest son Eston was published in 1998, I cheered. TJ finally came off his saintly pedestal and we saw that his feet were stained with Albemarle red clay. He freed Sally's sons but not Sally.

Recently I went back to Monticello. I looked forward to seeing the house again and restored vegetable gardens where the parking lots used to be. And i was curious to hear how the tour guide would handle the Sally Hemings question, if it came up.

The businesslike young woman pointed out a cabinet in TJ's library that was made by master carpenter and slave, John Hemings. She went on to say that this was the brother of Sally Hemings, who was the mother of six of Jefferson's children. No one commented and the guide moved us along into the study. Monticello was more interesting than ever and I was glad to see it all again.

It's unlikely that we will ever know anything substantial about the real quality of the relationship between TJ and Sally, as his children and grandchildren destroyed any pertinent documentary material. The book by Annette Gordon-Reed The Hemings of Monticello: An American Family is fascinating account of several generations of the slave family. TJ died in 1826. But in the census of 1830 she is listed a free white woman living on Main Street in Charlottesville. Where, exactly, on Main Street I'd like to know.

Since my mother's family in Albemarle County dates back to the mid-18th century, I wonder if I could find a connection, even though i knew we weren't related to TJ. Rummaging around in my mother's family tree, I found George Gilmer. He was TJ's personal physician and a close friend. In fact it was to Gilmer that TJ wrote from Paris in an often quoted letter of 1890, "I am happy nowhere else and in no other society, and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello." Gilmer's great-grandaughter was my great-grandmother. This was as close as i could come.

Ironically, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother's side also at least knew Jefferson. Pierre Chouteau of St. Louis accompanied a group of Osage indian chiefs to meet the president in 1804 and another in 1806. But that is another story.

When i moved to Detroit in the '60s, we lived a few blocks off Jefferson Avenue; my son lived on Jefferson Street in Ann Arbor. When someone says, "Let's go to TJ's for lunch," I don't think 'Traffic Jam,' I think the old man has invited us. The blather on the new granola box reassures me that hemp is a fine, healthy ingredient and that TJ himself grew hemp. An ad for rare books on the back page of the New York Times reminds us that TJ was a passionate book collector.

I can't get away from TJ but now he seems like a truly interesting, inconsistent human being.