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The View from the Periphery

A loosely disorganized assortment of essays on history (mine), behavior (other people's), and imbecilities (wherever encountered).

Index

My Career

5/17/2016

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The apogee of my career was the short time I spent up in Newfoundland studying icebergs. For a time I knew more about icebergs than pretty much anybody and I loved it.
There is a mathematical construct called a drunkard’s walk which describes a stepwise progress in which the direction of each successive step bears absolutely no relation to its predecessor.  I came to icebergs through just such a process.
It all started right here in Burton Hall where I discovered a passion for paleontology.  Then I changed my mind, lured by the romance of marine biology, in pursuit of which I took off for grad school in British Columbia, because there was an ocean there but largely because it was as far as I could get from my family.
About a year into it I left the master’s program and got a job as technician culturing phytoplankton.  After an exquisitely tedious year in this job I crawled back to the University to resume my studies.
I chose a project that would allow me to spend the summer in my family’s summer house in Vermont.  This led to a happy summer spent playing house with my newly minted husband and studying pitcher plants on Snake Mountain.
Upon return to British Columbia, I finally completed my master’s degree and we moved to Nova Scotia where I waited on tables for a while before finding work with the Canadian Wildlife Service analyzing phytoplankton in Newfoundland.  I was captivated by the place.  There were no icebergs at the time, but we saw moose crawling around on their knees grazing in the picnic areas; we saw beavers swimming around in the little pond they had made and a lynx on the other side of this very pond also watching them with keen interest; we saw birds way out over the water swooping and playing and could hear every word they said owing to the unimaginable silence.
Then, tragically, my contract ran out, and I had to return to reality where I was a lab instructor in Halifax for a while, followed by a divorce, and then a return to British Columbia. I fixed projectors for a while followed by a brief period of self employment before the siren call of Newfoundland rang out again when a friend told me about the Fisheries Observer program in which inspectors were sent out on foreign fishing boats from Spain and Russia and Japan and other exotic regions to oversee their catch and practices. And so I packed up yet again and returned to Newfoundland with images of moose and beavers and the seafaring life dancing in my head.
Within a month of my return, the Fisheries Observer Program was suspended, so I filled my long summer hours with creating and distributing resumés and loafing around the bays and beaches looking for whales and puffins and such. 
Finally a small science and engineering research group specializing in cold ocean problems took me on as their field store manager.  However there really was not so very much managing the field store needed, and major field trips only went out every few months at most, so I devoted myself to slowly worming my way into various research projects and in the end got included on some field trips (which I packed for) which took us to places like Labrador, Baffin Island and the Beaufort Sea. 
These excursions mostly involved sea ice rather than icebergs, but on one of them I got to sidle up close an actual iceberg.  It was so BIG.  It was so clean and white.  Except for the many tiny blue refrozen cracks that criss-crossed it. Its surface was sculpted in places like folded marble, in places like hammered metal.  And in places absolutely smooth.  I was besotted.  The ice experts rolled their eyes, but I was in love.
Icebergs are the largest moving things on earth. A small iceberg weighs 1,000,000 tons. [the Brooklyn Bridge, by contrast, weighs a mere 15,000 tons; the Sears Tower 225,000 tons)  A large iceberg can weigh upwards of 100,000,000 tons.  They make noises. They are beautiful. They are majestic. Sometimes they carry around their own private fogbank. They have seagulls which rise as one when they roll.  They roll with thunderous calving and a boil of water and ice.
As soon as I met that first iceberg, I knew they had to be studied.  By me.  Others had already nailed down work on drift, source, age, longevity, shape, seabed scouring, and more. And so every weekly meeting, technical discussion, workshop, or gossip session I attended I listened through the filter of “How does this relate to icebergs?” Sadly, mostly it didn’t, but I finally discovered that nobody knew how cold an iceberg is, and it could be argued that this property could influence both the damage potential as well as the most effective means of destruction.
And before you know it I was haring off around the bay in a rubber boat borrowed from the zoology department, a van borrowed from tech services, and a couple of assistants who came along for the lark.  Sometimes there was a helicopter.  We crawled around on them with crampons and ice screws and ropes.  We augered holes in their sides.  We dodged through the rubble fields left after a calving event. 
I measured iceberg temperatures for 2 happy years.  I could have gone on indefinitely since the object of the exercise was to get out to the bergs, but ultimately there were suggestions from on high that it was time for a report, so one gloomy day I sat down and started making plots and schematics and equations.  I struggled with this since heat transfer is a complicated business and my training, such as it was, gave no hints as to how to go about this.
Nevertheless as the howling winds and driving sleet gave promise of spring to come, I finally had my answer.  I didn’t tell anybody for several days because I wanted it all to myself for a while, to know that I knew something that nobody else knew.  It was a surprisingly exhilarating feeling.
Then I turned in my report, submitted a paper to a technical journal and discussed it at conferences and the world knew too.  Nothing changed, of course.  The Nobel Committee was uninterested, the world continued to spin on its axis, but I had had my moment.

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The Final Splat

11/13/2015

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Aging: it’s a stealthy process that tricks you into thinking that, from day to day, nothing has changed, and as between today and yesterday, nothing really has.  You cannot gauge the passage of time until you see somebody after a long time, say, your tenth high school reunion, and suddenly you are yanked back to reality and forced to realize that your old friend is just as shocked by your grey hairs and crows feet as you are by hers. 
You soon forget this chilly reminder of your mortality, though, as you look forward to the next thing.  The anticipation of what might come, possibilities good or bad, family commitments, career changes, maybe a divorce, an illness, a move.  As time passes, faster and faster, you occasionally stop to fret about the increasing gray in your hair, aches in your joints, diminishing eyesight, reduced enthusiasm for late night parties.  You catch yourself staring incredulously at groups of teenagers dressed in this year’s chic and wondering “What are they Thinking!?”
But still there are things to do, plans to make for next year’s summer cruise, for the birth of a grandchild, arranging for elder care for your parents in addition to the usual round of cleaning and shopping and cooking and fixing.  You are fully booked and longing for two consecutive days with nothing to do.
By and by you get news that one of your classmates has died of breast cancer.  Soon enough conversations with your contemporaries seem to start and end with a catalog of who has what disease, and who is still alive.  Then Ted, your husband of 50 years, has a massive stroke out back trimming the privet hedge and is gone.  Suddenly the world is a different place.
After the funeral, you realize that no one is asking you to do anything for them. You have no plans for next week, much less next summer. In fact, you have no future worth mentioning, in spite of the assurances of your children that you are a beloved and valuable member of the family.  All that remains is your long past which you can only meaningfully share with your contemporaries who are rapidly diminishing in both faculties and numbers.
You long to reminisce with somebody else who was there about the little carnivals that came around in the summer, about the polio scare when your children were in school, about Rocky, your beloved little Schnauzer, Christmases when the kids were small, those anxious autumn days during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  All the things that mattered to you are so far removed from the lives of those around you now, Harry Truman might as well be Odysseus.
You have lost the need to be thought successful.  You have lost your interest in money, beyond your daily needs.  You love seeing your grandchildren – you can see Ted lurking behind the eyes of Julius and Sally.  You love your daughter and your sons, but don’t know what to say to them.  They resent your suggestions on how to raise their children or how to cook a chicken, but are polite, nod agreeably and then do what they want. 
You want to return to places you used to live, expecting them to be the same
You start hearing voices faintly, as if from the other side of a wall, all your old friends along with Ted and your parents, just as you remember them, young and happy.  Even the little Schnauzer in his prime.
As the end nears you mistake your daughter for your sister who died 50 years ago.  You no longer recognize the children. You ask when Ted will be back. You want to go home.

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Thanksgiving Storyteller

5/31/2015

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We have nearly finished gorging. Talk is desultory and largely focused on gastric distention. The boys are still swallowing, but even they are slowing down. The turkey remains are a raggedy tangle of bones and skin. Frank, the patriarch, is winkling a nugget off the the far side with the carving fork.
“This reminds me – did I tell you about my truck?” he inquires of the turkey.
“More beans?” asks his wife Alice, who has heard about the truck. “Alex? Benj? Helen? There’s lots of squash left. And potatoes. There’s more gravy in the kitchen. Are there any cranberries left?” No takers.
“It all started back in early October with a little clicking.” Frank proceeds, a bit louder so as to be heard over Alice’s desperate offers. “I thought it was something in the heater or the cooling system. Intermittent thing, you know. I would’ve let it go except with winter coming, I wanted it to be in good shape. Well, the best shape you can expect from an old truck anyway, heheheh. Well anyway I took it into the garage next to my office…”
“Could I get the gravy?” whispers Frank’s youngest, Alex, pointing at the jug next to my elbow which is firmly planted in a congealed puddle of the stuff, I now discover. I pass it across the table.
“…and got the mechanic to look at it and he told me the engine was gone – wouldn’t make it through the month, much less the winter. Told me what I needed was a new engine. Well, of course, for such a major repair I wanted to get a second opinion,…”
Helen catches Alice’s’s eye, and asks, sotto voce, if she could get her recipe for that wonderful snow pudding she makes at Christmas.
“…so I took it into the GM dealer and they put it up on the hoist and had a look and told me sure enough the engine was shot,”
“Actually, it’s not my recipe – Maggie brings it – it is nice isn’t it?”
“…cylinders so badly worn no amount of new rings and reboring would help. So I took it back to the garage next to the office to save myself a few bucks on labor,…”
Alex turns to Benj, who works at Killington. “Have they opened the east slope yet?”
“…and they got a reconditioned engine and put it in. Well, a week later, I was driving around town and it just stopped. Just stopped.”
Helen flags down Maggie at the other end of the table and puts her request.
“A brand new engine and it just stopped. Well you may be sure I mentioned this to the garage and they came and got it.”
“Yeah, we’ve been making snow every night this week, and there’s some natural snow too – really good shape,” replies Benj.
“No delays. And agreed to fix it, whatever the problem might have been, and quite right too. A new engine!”
“Of course,” says Maggie “it’s not a family secret or anything, haha. Just give me your address and I’ll mail it to you.”
“So they got it up on the hoist and found something wrong with the fuel pump. Pulled it off and were about to put on new connectors…”
Alex turns to me: “So I hear you’re taking courses up at UVM?”
“…when somebody 2 bays down, who was repairing an exhaust system, fired up a welding torch…”
“Thanks,” says Helen, patting down her pockets looking for a notebook. “I’ll find a piece of paper after dinner.”
“…lighting off the gas that had dribbled out of the fuel pump and lighting off a bonfire underneath my engine…”
“Well, don’t know about multiple courses, but I have found one that looks interesting.”
“…that rose from the floor up through the engine compartment completely destroying all non-metallic parts…”
“Are you finished Alex?” asks Alice.
“…and causing a mess that defies description. All the hoses and plastic fluid tanks, wiring harnesses…”
“Yeah, I’m pretty well done – why?” asks Alex warily.
“…everything melted and oozing down onto the floor. First I knew of it I came back to the office and saw the fire engines out front…”
Maggie, over by a side table, has scrabbled a pad and pencil out of a drawer. “Hand this to Helen, would you?” she passes it down the table.
“…and I thought the fire department had come to get their truck fixed or something, but then I smelled the burning plastic and spotted the smoke…”
“Could you clear off the plates down at that end of the table? Maybe Benj’ll help you. Thanks.” Says Alice, beginning to collect dishes up at her end.
“…and so I went over there and that’s when I found out that it was my truck that had been incinerated. Lordy what a mess.”
Benj picks up my plate and the leftover carrots and sidles out toward the kitchen. “You were done, right?” he smiles over his shoulder.
“Of course there was no question that the garage will fix the mess. Of course my office is right next door so the guy knows I’m a lawyer…”
Helen writes her address on the pad and passes it back to Maggie. “I really love that pudding – perfect after a big meal.”
“…and there’s some advantage in that, and I hope nobody tells him the closest I get to a courtroom is a title search…”
I peer up the table at Maggie. “While you’re at it, could you dash off a copy for me too?”
"…but still there are so many little bits and pieces he needs to find and get there’s no telling when I will actually get the truck back.”
Chairs scrape. Everybody lumbering to their feet, groaning with pangs of overeating. “Sorry about your truck,” I murmur to Frank on my way to the kitchen with the leftover cranberries.

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Fawn

5/25/2015

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One year the road crews got a deal on brilliant white marble chips and used them to disguise the potholes and washouts along the road as soon as the mud stabilized in the spring. The result was that our lumpy little road suddenly became a fairy tale lane aglitter with sparkling gems and alight from within. One sunny afternoon after this dazzling transformation and before the dairy farm’s industry dulled its luster, I was driving down one of these never never stretches, when I spotted a dark blob silhouetted up ahead in the middle of the lambent road. “A pox upon this agricultural residue, and the cows it came to town in,” I thought as I approached. And then I thought the blob moved. I slowed down in case my mind was suddenly gone. And then the blob changed shape. I slowed some more. And then the blob resolved itself into a deer standing in the middle of the road. Now I was down to a dead crawl. I was almost upon her.

She twitched and dithered and finally soared into the woods next to the road. I was nearly at the spot where she had been, but there was still a blob. A very small blob, which finally staggered to its tiny wobbly feet and staggered in the direction its mother had gone.

I stopped the car on top of the blob site and got out to look. There was a pretty good sized berm beside the road here, beyond which was a deep ditch. Then the hillside rose steeply into the trees. There was no sign of the deer. There was also no sign of the fawn. I couldn’t believe the little creature could have made it up onto the berm much less down into the ditch and up the other side. I walked up and down the road peering into the ditch, looking behind bushes, parting the grass. Nothing. I was standing on top of the berm about to throw in the towel. I looked down to find a foothold. There was a big leaf there. I lifted it up and there was the infant, folded neatly into a tiny speckled mound, like an exotic dessert, absolutely motionless except for its long velvety nose. I studied it carefully, its little legs folded up like carpenters rulers, its velvety ears pressed close to its neck, its long, soft nose moving almost imperceptibly, just as it was in utero.

Jim would love this, I thought. It was only a quarter mile back to the house. I backed away and studied the trees, the bushes, a mossy rock, so I could come right back here, and then went home.

We returned in minutes. I had no trouble finding the trees, the bushes, the mossy rock, but I could not find the fawn. I couldn’t believe the little fellow would have sprung to his feet and scampered off so soon. The both of us walked up and down the road looking into the ditch. Then I saw my big leaf. I bent double and looked under it. It was still there, still immobile, with its waffly little nose still probing its small world.

Now, I have read about cryptic coloration allowing moths and lizards to blend into their surroundings. I have seen photographs of zebras under trees and leopards in them, but it is my belief that this went far beyond that. This was not optical trickery. This was pure witchcraft.

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The Joy of Lists

5/16/2015

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Some of the most satisfying moments in life come upon completing something. Anything. The contents of my attic bear mute testimony of my repeated and rarely successful attempts to achieve this happy state. There are a dozen or so half knitted sweaters, boxes of dismantled small appliances, various projects involving textiles, and many many garments with missing buttons or split seams. There are photograph albums, partially filled, and heaps of unsorted photographs waiting to be sifted into them. There are half-done paintings, and apple crates filled with tax records in no particular order either by year, type, or importance. My desk looks like an entropy wave broke on it; there are addresses on postit notes, the backs of order forms, envelopes, and quite a few in my address book, which I can sometimes find.
One day I will resolve some of these things, and I will feel uplifted. But not today.
Instead I will make a list. There is a technique to this. First you need to understand that every list should have a purpose. A grocery list, for example, should display items that you can easily obtain on your next trip to the shops. Such a list should never contain significant items such as “refrigerator” or “sports car.” Major items each need a list of their own noting important features such as “manual transmission” or “upholstery that will not show dog hair.” Also you should never include service needs like “repave driveway” or “repair furnace” since in all likelihood these tasks will involve days of telephone communication, negociation, and scheduling, and other items on such a list stand in peril of being overlooked.
It is OK to make a list of tasks such as “Muck out the attic” which you know you will never do. The purpose of this sort of list is to demonstrate how hard-pressed you are so that you have a ready excuse for not doing something else. For example, your aunt unexpectedly phones wanting you to canvas your neighborhood for contributions to her church jumble sale. You can quickly glance at your impossible list and explain that Calvin will be coming soon (never mind it is next June) and you need to clear out the attic and repaint the woodwork before then so that he can set up his electric train.
This sort of defensive list should not be confused with the purely recreational list which is typically undertaken for its own sake. Birdwatchers, for example, have been known to keep a list of every bird they have ever set eyes on. This list serves no useful purpose, is not suitable for publication, has not the slightest value to posterity, but is of intense and abiding interest to the birdwatcher. I have not heard of people who are drawn to fish or mushrooms or dogs or orchids keeping such lists but perhaps they do.
One year I kept a list of every piece of mail I received from the most exalted personal manuscripts to the lowliest grocery flyer. There were 1940 items, the overwhelming majority being junk that had to be handed straight off to the recycle. This year I am keeping a list of phone calls, an increasing number of which appear to be mendicants of one sort or another. I couldn't say for sure because I don't answer these calls any more than I read the rubbish that comes in the mail. Again, nothing useful is likely to emerge from this, but it amuses me.
But I digress.
The most important list is the list of things that you know you can realistically achieve in a day. This list should be tailored to your mental state. If you are feeling happy and optimistic, then go ahead and include something from the attic, or some overstuffed closet. Make it a short list with items like “Clean garage,” but make sure to include something you can actually finish, like “Empty the trash.”
On the other hand, if you are feeling gloomy and depressed, what you need is a really long list of achievable things like “Hang up pajamas” and “Put away blender.” You need at least a dozen such things; the more the merrier. Take the list with you as you sigh and shuffle through the day, and cross off each thing as you do it. You should feel perkier by lunchtime. If you find yourself doing something that is not on the list, finish it up and then put it on the list and cross it out. By the end of the day you should have a long list of things that you actually did, that are complete. Now you can sink down in front of the evening news in a warm glow of satisfaction, and start on the attic tomorrow.


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Fox Dreams

5/13/2015

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I saw a fox once at a game park designed to instruct folk on the habits and lifestyles of the wildlife that used to be there before the highway came through. The fox was in a large cage with an illustrated placard in front describing what it ate and what it did in the winter. There were some beavers nearby with their own placards, and caribou and a black bear. All these creatures were separated from each other by a chain link fence, and from the viewing public by a moat. There were a few trees in the cage and bushes and rocks and a den carefully designed by a wildlife biologist to simulate a home the fox might once have chosen for itself. It had even been given a companion to share the den with. Everything was provided.

The fox was at the back of the cage when I saw her, pacing along the chain link fence on a well-worn path as she must once have done in some woodland, stopping from time to time to sniff at a rabbit run or scratch under a fallen tree that might yield a plump vole. Always wary, watchful for the many dangers she shared her home with, lynx, wolves, dogs, hunters.

She would scamper along a hedgerow today on the lookout for nests of partridges or pheasants that might harbor an egg or a chick for supper. At the end of the hedgerow is an open field. The fox hunkers down, hidden by brambles, and surveys the vista for a while, sampling the perfumed summer air with its freight of damp grass and fallen leaves. Finding nothing amiss she lopes off across it to a copse beyond, where there is a stream. Safe again in the undergrowth, she slows her pace, stops for a drink, and finally seeks out the cool, musty darkness beneath a familiar stump to rest. Tomorrow she will go up the wooded hill on the other side of the valley.

Then that terrifying day, a moment’s inattention or a single wrong decision, and the trap was sprung. Struggling and snapping in the net, strong hands bundled her into a truck. Terrified and confused by the sharp smells, loud noises, she crouched in her dark cell until she was brought at last to this place where she can live a long comfortable life with her assigned companion without danger, worries, or care. Raw meat and vitamin supplements arrive on schedule twice a day and fresh clean water dribbles constantly into the concrete basin near her warm, dry den where her companion is sleeping.

Such a lucky fox. So why does she spend her days pacing back and forth along the chain link fence and her nights dreaming of voles?

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Other Places: The Okavango Delta

12/5/2014

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If it weren't for my friend Bronwyn, I would probably never leave the house. It was she who declared in early 2006 that this year’s trip should be to the Okavango Delta. Ten days of lolling about in African swamps watching elephants frolicking and hippos twitching their ears sounded nice enough, but I figured that 4 days of exquisite discomfort in the hands of the air travel industry plus two days of jet lag and then 8 days of carefree photography was not worth the price, so in order to get a better balance I sulkily demanded an extra week somewhere.
The final arrangement was that we would stay for a few jet-lagged days in Johannesburg with friends of friends, then move on (after much research and discussion) to a place called Umlani Bushcamp up near the Kruger Park, and finally join up with the Sierra Club back in Johannesburg. So Bronwyn locked in our tickets and we set about getting inoculated against a catalog of horrible diseases that made me feel itchy, feverish, and loose of bowel in anticipation, and assembling clothing and gear that weighed nothing since the Sierra Club only allowed 25# of baggage including carry-ons. We were warned that, it being late fall in these parts, it would be cold at night when we would be driving around transfixing wildlife in our headlights so a quantity of wooly garments were reluctantly included. We later learned that what “cold” means in South Africa is something like 50°F and were thus able to leave a lot of sweaters in Johannesburg, saving wear and tear on our load limits.
My first purchase, with the 25# limit resting uneasily in the back of my mind, was about 10# of guidebooks, closely followed by a camera with 10X zoom, a pocket full of SD cards, and a small computer. Since our tour leader had told us that the contents of our pockets didn’t count toward our limit, I combed the earth for a garment with sufficiently large pockets to contain all this stuff, and finally found a vest that fit the bill, with a total of something like 43 pockets of all sizes, including a couple of really large ones big enough for the computer and books, so in the end, that vest, fully loaded, weighed a good deal more than all the rest of my baggage and caused my portly silhouette to blimp to Michelin Tire Man proportions.
Meanwhile, obligations independent of foreign travel activities kept us distracted as February, March, and April flashed by. I found a cat sitter and somebody to cut the grass . I packed and repacked 20 or 30 times. I counted my SD cards and spare batteries and checked my tickets and passport about twice a day, and finally, on the last day of April, the first really fine day of the year, I phoned a taxi and went to the airport, my pockets rattling with malaria pills, and the anxious conviction that I had forgotten something Really Important.
The flight was painless, and our South African host, armed with photos I had sent for identification purposes, found us with no trouble, and so our adventure began. Our first minor culture shock was when we pulled into the driveway through a stout metal gate with barbed wire on top that rattled ponderously closed behind us. We might have been more alarmed by these precautions if we hadn’t passed a thousand other houses on the way there that were all similarly equipped, and not a single armed band of wild-eyed felons. Happily our hostess was a fabulous cook, so we ate ourselves senseless and staggered up to bed with our quarter-ton duffel bags and sank into a dreamless jet-lagged sleep.
After a couple of days in Jo’burg prowling through craft markets and eating interesting things we picked up our rental car, stuffed it with as many of our chattels as we could fit in the trunk, having been advised in the strongest terms never to leave anything visible in the car ever, and set off by what we thought might be a scenic route to the Umlani Bushcamp. We had a few white-knuckle moments getting used to driving on the left, but in general had a happy time driving past the gold mines and rock-studded hillsides. We only got lost once when we came to an intersection, and, knowing we should be heading north, turned away from the sun. Wrong instinct in the southern hemisphere.
But as we got further away from Jo’burg and the towns became sketchier and further apart, we kept looking for Animals and as distant features tentatively identified as antelopes or buffalo or giraffes turned out to be cows and rocks and stumps, we gloomily wondered if we had wandered into a mass extinction.
And then, of course, we miscalculated time en route and when we finally approached our motel it was full dark. And then when we actually found the place, the gate (with barbed wire) was locked, and there was no bell, and we were just wondering if we would have to sleep in our tiny rented car wrapped in road maps when the manager emerged from the gloom and let us in.
The reason, she explained, that we had been locked out was that she was not expecting us since the previous manager, with whom we had made our bookings, had stormed off in a huff the previous week, leaving no hint as to any arrangements she might have made, and the current manager had been parachuted in from another place in Zambia and knew nothing.
Fortunately it was off-season, so there was space available or we might have wound up sleeping in the car after all. In fact we received a very large room with 6 beds, plenty of room to unpack everything and repack before leaving in the morning, a ritual with which we were becoming increasingly familiar, before heading south (with the sun at our backs) for our Bushcamp. Still no interesting animals, but changing terrain and bad roads kept us interested until we arrived at Hoedspruit where we pulled into a place where other cars were parked, avoiding a tree sporting a sign warning “Park at own risk BEWARE Falling Seeds” and explored the possibilities of a nearby shop called the Hoedspruit Boekwinkel which had a paperback in the window.
I staggered out soon thereafter with another armload of books to add to my growing collection. Bronwyn got some postcards. And so we rattled off toward our bushcamp, on the way to which we finally spotted a creature worth stopping the car for. A small bird striking poses on an electric wire, the gaudiest bird on earth – pink and blue and green and purple and a dozen other colors, which we were creeping up on clanking with photographic gear, when a Land Rover came upon us, stopped to see if we had broken down. Our fabulous discovery took off, and our would-be savior dismissed our feathered beauty as one of the commonest creatures in South Africa. Which proved to be true, so we ultimately consoled ourselves with many other photo opportunies.
OK so we finally got there and were duly greeted by great numbers of staff members, since we were the only customers, it being off-season as I have mentioned. There was Shadrach the guide. Foreman, another guide. Makendal who ran the place. Ginger and Peter who I gather was called that because nobody could remember his real name.
We were just in time for lunch which was provided in sufficient abundance for about 50 people. Having eaten ourselves senseless we were shown our room which was a surprisingly comfortable reed-walled place, and given intense lectures by most of the staff in turn, the upshot of which were “Don’t wander away from camp – there are lions.” “Don’t wander around in the dark – there are lions.” “Keep away from the riverbed – there are lions.” And then we were left to unpack and digest until the evening game drive where we were loaded into a completely open Toyota Land Cruiser with a tracker on the front bumper and Shadrach at the wheel, and off we went over hill and dale in search of Animals. Which we (=Shadrach) found in satisfying abundance. Giraffes and buffalo and lions and zebras. Tsessebe, kudu, hippos and a thousand impala. A porcupine right in camp, and elephants that could disappear into a leafless bush half their size. Wildebeest and almost a leopard. Turtles and lizards and chameleons and the odd snake. Hornbills and francolins and trees engulfed in vultures. Eagles and wading birds and, as promised, a steady supply of those beautiful flying jewels we saw on the way in.
These game drives happened morning and evening every day, the evening drives enlivened by sundowners where we hove to in some scenic place and guzzled rum & cokes and biltong while the the westering sun settled into a blaze orange horizon. But when we weren’t doing that we were rousting out creatures and driving up so close to them you could smell them. I have many many very close photos of things like lions taken in a downward direction from our open vehicle. It seemed that the tastier the animal the more difficult it was to get up close, but the bigger and more carnivorous things we could get near enough to scratch their ears, although we were warned in the strongest terms not to do this. The antelopes were quite another thing.
Well, 5 days and 700 photos later (God, I love digital photography) we packed up our dusty clothes and returned to Jo’burg via Kruger Park where we were not allowed to get out of the car at all except at one of the scattered campsites. In spite of this I managed to fill up another memory card with more wildlife photos, including many of an invisible elephant that suddenly appeared to us when it emerged from the bushes about 2 car-lengths away and placidly sauntered across the road, giving us only the briefest disinterested look. Then of course there were all those baboons, and the pool full of hippos near the gate and the family of wildebeest that paused in the middle of the road to give us a good hard look.
Then after an extra day in Jo’burg doing laundry and downloading all those memory chips onto my tiny computer and burning them onto a DVD in case the computer came to grief, and at last whittling down our baggage to the requisite 25# + 30# vest, we finally met up with our tour featuring a small heterogeneous group of people, prominent among which was Martin, who amazed us all on that first introductory evening when we had all known one another about 5 minutes with a loud and detailed account of his prostate problems which apparently had something to do with his fanatical fondness for bananas. To add to the fun, he had brought along his friend Patricia, whose contribution to the introductions was a solemn assurance that she hated the outdoors, didn’t like bugs, would a good deal rather be back home in Brooklyn where she belonged, and wanted to know if she could use her hair dryer in these safari lodges. The rest of us flicked glances at one another and studied the hems of our garments until the group leader seized the podium, made a perfunctory welcome speech and left us to drink our free glass of wine.
As it turned out, Our Happy Couple, far from being a damper on our party, turned out to be an endless source of amazement if not hilarity. Like when we all were packed up and ready to go, down in the lobby our first day, then duly piled into the vans that took us to the airport, and were standing around clutching our precious 25#, and suddenly Patricia discovered she had left hers back at the hotel. Or the time we paddled out to an island at the edge of a hippo swamp and clambered out on the muddy shore where the guide was studying some very large lion footprints which he declared had not been there more than maybe half an hour. Martin glanced at this with mild interest and then headed off into the bushes nearby to photograph something. Fortunately the guide fetched him back before he was eaten. But these light-hearted moments were a daily feature of our excursions, and so varied in their nature that we were never bored.
Neither were we bored by the cheetahs and mongeese and hippos (which sang us to sleep at at least one of our camps) and monkeys and giraffes and of course the elephants.
And our final place was a mile downstream from Victoria Falls which we went to, of course. You could see the spray rising from it miles off and hear the roar from an impressive distance. We were told that it had been a very wet year, so there was more water than usual, which contributed to the effect, but up close we were not really much impressed. Until we realized that what we were seeing was about 300’ of the full mile width of the falls and about 50’ of the 400’ depth. The rest was completely obscured by the spray.
Then we went to another place featuring leopards and crocodiles and I was attacked by monkeys with blue bottoms.
And then before we knew it we were
anticlimactically back home.
The end

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The Importance of Other People's Languages

9/4/2014

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 I have long believed that one of the reasons we are such a loutish nation is related to our steadfast refusal to learn another language or even acknowledge that there is one.  The Mexicans have fixed that to a degree by swarming over us in their semi-literate thousands to snap up the jobs that our noble selves find abhorrent.  After all, somebody has to clean the toilets, and it strains the imagination to think of all those unfortunate millionaires in Arizona with bathtub rings and pet smells and gardens choked with horrible weeds that they will have to live with now that they have forced all the Mexicans to go to New Mexico.   The impact on real estate values in the gated communities alone fair boggles the mind.
Anybody who has taken a foreign language course will have discovered that there are words and concepts in other languages that simply cannot be easily rendered into English.  In some cases they are such useful words that we have claimed them for our own.  A famous example of this was brought into embarrassing prominence by that intellectual curiosity, former leader of the free world, George W. Bush, who was heard to say, in a public place, with regards to the French, “They have no word for entrepreneur.” It was not revealed whether any of his aides who had successfully completed fifth grade had the poor judgment to explain that the word and, presumably, the concept had been snatched from France.
But there are lots of others. Sushi for example, which is much more than dead sea life on a rice patty. Or siesta which is not just any nap, but rather a period in the heat of the day set aside for loafing around and having lunch and maybe a snooze, but maybe not. Or schadenfreude, a single elegant word meaning “the pleasure derived from somebody else's misery or misfortune,” a concept that Americans should be completely at home with having visited so much misery and misfortune on distant foreigners with the bad taste to speak a language we do not understand.
The important and valuable point is that a language tends to guide the thinking of its practitioners.  Those who speak only one language live in a somewhat circumscribed world. Like a painter who has only a single tube of green paint. His pictures will reveal only leafy closeups, caricatures, or distortions.  So it is that our so-called leaders peer at the world that appears to their blinkered minds to contain only one narrow spectrum stretching from the eye-scalding white of our own perfection through the grim grey British and the sooty grime of the misguided socialists to the inky blackness of Communists far and wide.
For the most part native Americans, by which I mean people who were born in the United States which is what the word means, speak English, or some  barely comprehensible variant of it, and see no reason to strain their intellectual resources with picking up a phrase or two in the gibberish of foreigners when there are important matters like Paris Hilton's love life or recent sports scandals to occupy their thoughts.  There are, of course, a certain number of immigrants who still speak the language of the old sod, but for the most part they want their children to forget all that and speak English only, forcing them into the tunnel vision of american linguistic and social thought and practice.
For the most part, the high-minded wise men who have been marching us off to distant and disastrous invasions belong to that seething majority who can barely speak their own language, much less anybody else’s. They see and measure the world through the lens of “refudiate” and “misunderestimate” from the comfort and security of their heavily guarded compounds along the Beltway.  Nobody needs multilingual advisors more than these benighted people.  They are proudly responsible for the death of thousands and the destruction of buildings, crops, and communications infrastructure in places they can't pronounce without a particle of understanding for the people they are destroying. All they see is a smelly backwater populated by people who need to be more like us who, through an inexplicable mistake by God, are sitting on top of a lot of oil that should properly be ours.
So the trumpets sound, the fighter jets are fueled up, and another blow is struck for peacelibertyandfreedom.
And that is why we should all study French in school.
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Life's Lessons #1

8/23/2014

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One of the most widespread fallacies in our society is that waiting is a wholly unskilled function. A mere nuisance, like intestinal gas, that requires no more training or aptitude than breathing or defecation. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Consider the new-born infant. It wakes up. It screams. Its mother immediately feeds it or cleans its bottom or both. Waiting has no meaning for it. It is inexperienced. But not for long, because pretty soon its mother has either dropped dead from exhaustion or discovered that attention postponed for a few minutes will not prove fatal. The wise baby will learn at the same time that these solitary moments can be put to good use by eating small objects off the floor or teasing the cat. This is the first lesson in waiting: that life offers periods of uncommitted time as well as myriad resources to fill them.
A lamentable number of people do not progress beyond this. These are the children in the supermarket who trigger grapefruit avalanches, the young persons who attack mailboxes, the junior executives who pace and fret in airports, the angry citizens who enliven traffic jams through repeated and prolonged use of the automobile horn.
The second lesson, that it is a good idea to sort out those methods of passing time that will result in gastric ulceration or jail time from those with a more benign impact on later life, may be learned soon after the first or may be postponed for years, depending on the aptitude of the individual and the quality of instruction available. Most of us do achieve this level of competence eventually. We are the ones who never leave home without a pocket full of reading material or a bag of knitting or a tape player that will teach us French in our idle moments. But we need these crutches. We are fidgety without them.
It is the rare one among us who successfully completes the third lesson, that resources can be found within us to ease the passage of uncommitted time. Those who have mastered this lesson are usually old, but rare instances exist of younger adepts. These are the people you see occasionally, without books or puzzles, who are seated quietly somewhere looking through the fuss of their surroundings at some gracious and satisfying world that they have summoned out of their experience. Their faces are peaceful. They have achieved satori.

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The Rise and Fall of Luigi's

3/30/2014

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Back before Big Oil came to St. John's and gentrified the place, there were very few eateries whose main offerings were not deep-fried. One of these places was an eccentric little dive down on Water Street called Napoli Pizzeria and Restaurant. The proprietors were a colorful old couple from Naples who came to Newfoundland for some undisclosed and wholly incomprehensible reason and opened the place years and years ago. He scowled at the world through a style of spectacles not in use since the fifties and possessed a kind of furtive hunch suggesting illicit knowledge, an apron which was never either notably clean or particularly dirty, and a tone of voice that seldom varied from a querulous trumpet. She, on the other hand was a jolly, rotund little thing, wreathed in smiles and black taffeta, usually wearing 3-inch heels which brought her brain pan maybe 4 ½ feet off the floor. She spoke virtually no English but could turn out a remarkably tasty meal with the best salad available in St. John's and a lovely chewy Italian bread she made in the pizza oven.
As near as we could make out her name was Mamma and he didn't have one. We referred to the place as Luigi's just because we knew what we meant, and went there from time to time because it was handy and cheap. Most of their patrons went there to get take-out pizza but there was an actual menu with spaghetti and ravioli and such on it and they were always excited when somebody ordered from it because it was more expensive than the pizzas and it looked more respectable having people sitting at the tables with plates and forks rather than just lounging at the counter waiting for the heavy-on-the-pepperoni.
After we had gone there a few times it got so they recognized us and Luigi would escort us solemnly to a table and trumpet something to Mamma in the kitchen. Then he would carefully unfold a couple of paper napkins and deploy them over the spots on the table, first in front of Jim and then me, then deposit a second pair of virgin paper napkins in front of each of us, as if he was preparing for surgery, and dump a heap of sticky cutlery on them. Then Mamma would waddle out beaming beatifically and chattering in some hybrid tongue incomprehensible to Anglophones and Italianophones alike. And we would beam back at her and pretend we knew what she was trying to say, which we almost never did. Then we would order something and wait for our salads to appear.
There was no shortage of visual distractions to while away the time and spur conversation. There was usually either wrestling or greed shows on the tiny black-and-white television which was thoughtfully placed so all the customers could share the entertainment. Or idiosyncratic floral arrangements which ran to a jelly jar full of plastic flowers with an occasional daisy tucked in for authenticity. And on the walls, which had not been washed since 1953 when Luigi got his glasses, there were great numbers of original paintings lovingly rendered by somebody's relative who was either very young at the time or almost entirely lacking in talent. Or we could squirm around in the chrome set chairs and pick at the clothes pins that held the construction plastic in place over the tablecloth.
For most of the nine endless years I spent in that dreary land Luigi had been engaged in a no doubt fragmented and certainly frustrating dialogue with City Hall concerning the acquisition of a liquor license. As you can imagine, it was a red letter day in the annals of Napoli Pizzeria and Restaurant when some minor functionary inadvertently allowed this application to slip through. Luigi responded gamely by immediately acquiring an artistically calligraphed sign, conspicuous by its absence of fly spots, announcing FULLY LICENSED, and propping it in the front window next to the menu. While it didn't draw tumultuous crowds as anticipated, it did cause a tiny flutter in the breasts of certain of us regulars, and on our next trip we plumbed the depths of this veiled promise and discovered that what “Fully Licensed” meant to Luigi was a bit of cheap scotch, a bottle of gin, three or four varieties of local beer and two kinds of Italian red wine. Having sampled both of the latter we settled on Chianti Classico and as soon as we walked in the door Luigi growled a greeting, very nearly smiled, and rushed off into the kitchen to fetch us a bottle.
Meanwhile Mamma effused and we looked at the menu and then for the sport of it, asked her what she thought we should have since we once discovered that there was a whole world of stuff which was not on the menu which was frequently better than what was, and furthermore what was on the menu was often not available. The menu was just a coded notice which said “We've got stuff that isn't pizza.” Encouraged by our interest, she launched into a very long and perfervid discussion involving clams and spaghetti and “shrimpa like dis” (indicating a point halfway up her forearm) and since she clearly wanted us to do this we ordered it with no clear idea what to expect. When it came, it proved to be one of the happiest surprises I've had at a restaurant. They charged us twice the price of anything else on the menu bringing it up to the price of an average meal anywhere else in town and it was worth every dime.
I think it was this meal that earned us Most Favored Diner status down at Luigi's. Be that as it may, the next time we went in there we got cotton napkins.
Then one momentous Valentine's Day we thought we should have a night out, and naturally thought of Luigi's. So we set out through the rain, drizzle, and fog thinking about all those nice surprises in Mamma's scrupulously tidy kitchen only to discover first, a big, red Closed sign, and second, and altogether unnerving, an accompanying For Sale sign right there next to FULLY LICENSED. We were dumbstruck. This was like selling Mount Rushmore.
A few days later I happened to be strolling down that way in the middle of the day and looked in. I was pleased to note that Luigi was there in his usual spot propping up the counter and watching the TV, so, consumed with curiosity and concern, I badgered Jim into going down there for dinner shortly thereafter to explore the mystery of the For Sale sign. All seemed as it should be: Luigi fetched out our Classico and Mamma came and told us what we should have, and then ensued a fractured conversation slotted between the arrival of the wine glasses, napkins (cotton), salad, and the unreasonable demands of Other Diners, the upshot of which was that they (i.e. Mamma) suddenly decided she had had enough and wanted to go home. So they put the place up for sale and were returning to Naples the following Tuesday. The catastrophe confirmed.
Then after we had finished our meal (a lovely bit of squid, unremarkable sausage, and world class salad), Mamma waddled up and planked herself down at our table, which she had never done before, and poured out their whole sad story. I think this is what she said.
She and Alfonso (not Luigi after all) had arrived in Canada donkeys years ago and had gone to Hamilton, Ontario, where there were lots and lots of Italians. Then 19 years ago they had decided to strike out on their own and open a restaurant in St. John, New Brunswick. Unfortunately there was some misunderstanding when they bought their tickets and they found themselves in St. John's, Newfoundland instead. One can only guess what ran through their minds when they discovered their mistake. But I guess they didn't have the price of return fare and one barbaric outpost was no worse than another so they stayed on. But now Mamma was 63 and Alfonso was 68 and they were unable to entice any relatives to come over from the old country to take on the restaurant, so they were throwing in the towel, which is the most sensible thing they could do, I suppose, but it left us bereft and uncertain about where we would find another source of shrimpa-like-dis.
With heavy hearts, Jim and I went down for dinner on their last day for one last culinary adventure. We took along a little going away trinket accompanied by a Farewell and Have a Lovely Retirement card (the range of greeting cards available these days takes my breath away). Mamma ordered us lobster tails (three apiece), which were delicious, the usual wonderful salad and chewy bread, and of course the Classico. When we were finished Mamma brought us a couple of glasses of Sambuca with a couple of coffee beans floating in it which you are supposed to suck on while you drink the stuff - not bad. Meanwhile Mama brought us a doggy bag with breadsticks and apples and butter packages and we finally broke away (the bill came to $60 Canadian, including 12% sales tax), shaking hands all around and turned our backs regretfully and forever on the legend that was Luigi's.

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