A Look at the Champlain Bridge

A Look at the Champlain Bridge

In keeping with this blog's mission of serving in part as a photographic supplement to the printed Rutland Herald, I thought I'd post some of the pictures I've taken during trips this fall to the Champlain Bridge, also known as the Crown Point Bridge, that connects Addison, Vermont with Crown Point, New York. Or at least it used to. This is the bridge you've been reading about and hearing about because it is in such bad shape that it's closed for safety's sake. Before that, it was possible to walk out onto the closed lane and see the structure as never before. And, as the photos of deterioration will show, maybe never again.

See all that rust staining on the pier? It's worse close up. Ask yourself: would you buy a used car with rust like this? Would you have the undercarriage checked out to see if it would need repairs that would cost more than the price of the old clunker?

The truss members look like they could use a truss.

I leave it to you to decide whether the next picture indicates a lack of basic maintenance or not.

Walking on it, a truck would make it shake, and even an SUV would make it tremble. A key point re the closing, for any engineering types: it wasn't just that some of the concrete piers had deep cracks, it was the fact that the expansion joints, which were meant to give the bridge operational flexibility, had locked up.

An unexpected pleasure of being on the bridge was having a good view of boat wakes. Each has a personality that fits the craft making it. This guy's testosterone-fueled sportster was skipping over the waves.

Could there be a ferry at the site, at least temporarily? One local said there had been one, before the bridge. The boat landing under the bridge looks like it has the beginnings of a landing. The boat in the picture is a good example of why there won't be a pontoon bridge unless it has a way of letting waterborne traffic continue along the international waterway: a knowledgeable fisherman said this was a yacht carrying snowbirds south; in the spring, he said, they will all come back to to their Champlain summer residences in their boats.

I'll close with a view of the Champlain monument in the park across the highway from the Crown Point ruins in New York. This was, after all, the 400th anniversary of the "discovery" of the lake by Samuel de Champlain, whose statue is on the monument.

What's this? What does it have to do with Lake Champlain? Well, this was the bottom of a lake, or sea, many many moons ago. It's the Omya marble quarry in Middlebury--I'll have pictures from their open house, always a festive occasion (seriously), in another posting. Meanwhile, consider this: as part of the open house, they have a 480-foot--long trail that describes what happens to make marble over a 480-million-year period. Step forward one foot and you've gone a million years. An 80-year human lifespan takes less than the width of a human hair.

This, too, shall pass.

GOTTA STOP DOGGING ME AROUND

GOTTA STOP DOGGING ME AROUND

 

       Like most of Rutland County, I’ve been reading about the pit bull attack at the Green Mountain Shopade, and have been thinking back to my own experiences with dog attacks.

       To start with the most important, when I was in second grade I had a frightening standoff with a dog near the Brandon Grade School playground, but was rescued by an upper grader, who came to my aid and scared the dog away. I made up my mind then and there that when I was a big kid, I would be the kind who protected smaller kids, not like the ones I knew who pushed them (me) around. That unknown boy’s deed has had a lifetime effect.

       In high school, I did a fair amount of long-distance biking. On one occasion, knowing I didn’t have it in me to do a 50-mile hike like President Kennedy said was a peak challenge for the fit, but as a substitute, I rode my bike from Burlington to Brandon on Route 7. This was a Schwinn whose gear for climbing hills by pumping harder while standing upright, and whose downshift was the brake, which meant standing on the rear pedal if stopping fast was necessary. My parents were blessedly tolerant of such adventures, though I suspect that in my mother’s case it fell into the category “Why mothers get grey.”

       I learned that dogs were as much as hazard as traffic, so I made a club from a thick stick, pounding nails through at the end so that I had a heavy weapon capable of inflicting serious damage if necessary. On one occasion, a dog on Pearl Street Extension ran at me, and I swung at him, making sure to use the nailheads rather than the spikes, upon which the real hazard became the family, which blamed me rather than their poor bleeding dog. Another time, carrying my fishing rod while coming up Depot Hill in Pittsford, a larger and more dangerous German shepherd  charged. Napoleon said, “Fight with the weapons at hand.” A well-timed smack with the two sections of the dismantled fishing rod hurt and surprised the dog so much that it turned and ran—while I stood on the pedals and pumped like hell.

       As a grownup, I haven’t been as fearful. Confronted by a dogfight, my standard procedure would be to wade in, grab the most available scruff of neck, lift the dog, swing in a circle, and throw it as far as I could. In the days when I was splitting my own  wood and could ring the bell at the Fair, that was far enough to break up the fight. Just for the record, I’m six foot two, weigh about 250 pounds, and was told by one college coach that I should go out for the tackle squad.

       These days, at 61 and with a bad back, I might have to resort to what Patrick Todd taught me. Patrick Todd was, by his own description, “the only poet in Montana,” back when I met him in the early Seventies. (An Internet check found he had continued, published, and taught, still in Montana.) A big, bearded bear of a man, he was hitching around the country, and being near Robert Frost’s former farm in Derry, New Hampshire,  decided to stop by. I was the poet-in-residence there, thanks to Frost’s daughter, and in the years before the farm became a state park (I was the first park manager), I regarded guiding writers on such  pilgrimages as one of my duties.

       Todd said that if you are seriously attacked by a dog capable of severely wounding or killing, you should face it, crouch down, and throw up one arm to catch the dog as it lunges for your throat. When it clamps down on your arm instead, reach your other arm behind its head, pull that arm toward you as you push with the arm in the jaw, and snap the dog’s neck.

       I can’t say from personal experience how well this would work. I do know that Patrick Todd made it back to Montana.

       The title for this comes from one of my favorite rock videos, by Michael Jackson. Rest in peace, troubled spirit, rest in peace.

Third World Athletes

Third World Athletes

As the world follows the peregrinations, permutations and politicizations of the Olympic torch, and while this country follows and bets on the National Basketball Association championship, I’m collecting pictures of third world athletes.
Sometimes we get a glimpse of them, like the Maasai who ran the Boston marathon with spears and shields, chanting, the way they do chasing lions from their herds. East Africa’s runners—is it just a coincidence that the bones of the earliest humans were found in Olduvai Gorge, whose name comes from the Maasai word Oldupaai, for the wild sisal plant?--are so famous they’ve even been in a TV ad. It was one of the most subtle I’ve seen, deserving to be put in the commercials Hall of Fame, if there is one: a herder out in the arid Kenyan bush asks another herder, “How do you stop a rhino from charging?” Then he gives the answer: “You take away his American Express card.” “That’s good!,” says his interlocutor, “They’ll love that in Nairobi”—and he turns and starts running. The camera turns and shows a dusty road going up and down, up and down, into the invisible distance. Thirty miles to Nairobi? Sure, why not?
But back beyond this, I mean athletes like the workers in the sulfur volcano in Indonesia, who go down into the fumes and come back carrying 70 pound chunks of sulfur as if they were schoolkids carrying backpacks. Like the Laotian boatmen who have long, skinny, shallow craft that can speed when needed and navigate shallows when essential, which they pilot with poles, while standing upright in the stern. The peasant haymakers bringing back a wagonload of their harvest, pulled by a donkey, with the workers balancing on top of a load piled so high that it scarcely seems possible to have arranged it. The shipbreakers on the tidal mud flats of Chittagong, Bangladesh, about whose working conditions one observer said, “just a brief look around is enough for one to know that the working conditions found there would give an OSHA inspector instant cardiac arrest.”
To me, the glory of the Olympics and the championships is that they expand our ideas of what humans can do. We all gain respect for each other through such events: maybe we can’t do those things now, but in time, as our children’s children’s children to the seventh generation meet and marry, who knows?
The Third World athletes expand our ideas of what humans can endure.
So, as I weed old National Geographics that are threatening our foundations (Remember how Omya marble is used in the papermaking industry? This must be how) I look for pictures of these unregarded heroes and heroines—unregarded except for the photographers trying to pay attention to their settings and timing and not be overwhelmed by the inhumanity of it all.
Today, in one issue, I found three such athletes. Arguably four, since one picture shows candymakers in Kabul, Afghanistan, each wrestling with a huge rope of hardening sugar paste. The two turn out a thousand pounds of sherni a day.
Another picture shows the rice field worker in Japan, headed back home the same way he came: via a long path made of what look like two-by-eight boards, set in a staggered line about eight feet above a shallow river on top of poles and crosspieces. It’s not short walk: the end of the plank road is invisible in mist rising from the cooling water. One hopes the photographer had a telephoto lens.
When the work day is done, they relax: like the Zambian swimmer a foot away from the 365 foot drop of Victoria Falls, standing on the edge of an eight-foot-deep pool that somehow they discovered carved into the rock next to the waterfall. Deep enough for good underwater swimming, and probably no crocodiles, either. Just don’t dive in and come up forgetting which way you’re going.
There are towns in Vermont where the high schools have great athletic traditions that were raised into place by grandparents and great-grandparents who worked in mines and factories. There are factories in Vermont where the leaders will tell you the operation would have left the state long ago were it not for an incomparable work ethic, which in some cases they think may be founded on the work ethic of farming. Elsewhere in the world, the connection may not be so clear, but here at least we can appreciate that hard work can be athletic and heroic—and I hope in time we will honor all the other workers around the world for what they have suffered and survived, and what they have put into place.

ICE STORM ZONE

ICE STORM ZONE

Now that it seems as if there’s a reasonable chance that we might be past having ice storms, I’d like to share a few thoughts about them. But to make sense of the first part, I have to digress into family history.
“Barna” means “brown” in Hungarian. If you know immigration history, you know that means the American branch of the family is only about a century old, having come over in the big wave of Eastern Europeans before and after the turn of the last century. Like many such groups, the “Bohunks” (it was hard for Real Americans to tell the Bohemians from the Hungarians from the Czechs from the Slovaks, so that was a handy label for all the solid, stolid Slavs). Did you know the Hungarians won the war with Japan? There was a moment during the atomic bomb project when Enrico Fermi left the room, and one of the other nuclear physicists remarked, “Now we can speak Hungarian.” Stolid indeed—look up the Polgar sisters’ record in the chess world. Don’t mistake the Asiatic eyefolds for sleepiness; behind that cover, he’s probably thinking several moves ahead.
But to return to the digression: like many such groups, the first immigrants clustered, close to Ellis Island more often than not. My parents were pioneers in leaving the New Jersey nest to come to Vermont, first for my father to use his G.I. Bill benefits studying languages at Middlebury College, then to teach in Brandon at the behest of the high school principal, another Midd grad.
Our cars were what grandparents gave us when they bought something newer, so for most of my childhood, we toodled about in a 1940 wood-bodied Chevy station wagon. It was a good car, so reliable that one time I dreamed World War Three had happened, and almost nothing would run because the bomb blasts had ruined the electronics—but the old Chevy went on as before.
So it was that we made trip after trip back and forth between Vermont and New Jersey. Enough of these took place in winter for us to hit ice storms—or rather, an icy zone through which we had to pass to get to the safer roads in Vermont (which was not that hard on the New York Thruway but a bit dicier on Route 9 before the Northway opened). I came to the conclusion that the Albany-Troy area was the ice zone.
You may have leaped to the conclusion here: global warming has shifted the ice zone northward, and now I think we have met the enemy and not only is he ours, he is us (the Pogo quotation gets shortened by most users; look it up, and wonder how many other great statements now differ from the originals).
Of course if conditions are right, you can have an ice storm just about anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line. (The Mason-Dixon line: Mason says to Dixon, “Why the hell are we out in this wilderness surveying a straight line to nowhere? Nobody will ever remember or care about it.” Moral of that story: do your work and do it well, you never know what it will become when joined with the work of others.)
Which brings me to ice storms and work. Ever look at a stone wall and wonder how the farmer ever got those multi-hundred-pound boulders into place? Part of the answer can be seen at the Rutland Fair if you get to the oxen pulls. Ice storms are the other part of the answer. With such a glaze on the ground, a stone boat could haul quite a load. Even an icy crust could carry smaller loads—read Robert Frost’s poem “Brown’s Ride” (that’s from memory, but I’m pretty sure it’s right).
One fascinating illustration of the same principle at work can be viewed, oddly enough, in Death Valley National Park. There is a flat stretch of dry lakebed that acquired the name “The Devil’s Racetrack” because again and again visitors found big stones with long tracks showing they had been moved, but never any human footprints. I’ll put a picture of this phenomenon at the end so you can see for yourself.
Though no one ever saw any stones moved, someone finally figured it out. Seasonal rains were soaking into the clay of the former LAKEBED and making the surface very slippery (something that can be observed right now in Addison County, much of which was once UNDERSEA). The prevailing winds were sometimes strong enough, coming off the area’s slopes (like the big windstorm did in Rutland) to send sizable rocks skidding along—no demons or UFOs necessary.
If you Google all this, use advanced search and put in Death Valley NATIONAL PARK, because there is a high-banked one-third-mile clay oval near the California-Nevada line whose enterprising proprietors have named it Death Valley Raceway. Bob Dylan comes onto the subconscious soundtrack here: “It’s easier to see without lookin’ too hard there’s not very much that’s really SACRED.”
Just remember, when it rains on a highway and the water pools up, the same skidding effect can make it harder to brake your car. And if it rains on a frozen road, turn around and go back home, if you aren’t turned around already.

NATIVE FOLIAGE GUIDE

NATIVE FOLIAGE GUIDE

This year, I’ve seen in the news the usual handwringing over the quality of Vermont’s foliage season, and via the Internet pictures of brilliant foliage in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Two of those states have the kind of climate that global warming might move northward, yet they seem not to have lost their fall colors. Perhaps a thorough video survey of peak foliage conditions through a tier of states below Vermont would ease some local fears.
But that’s not why I’m blogging today. For those who are relatively new to this foliage business, I’d like to point out some of the relatively hidden wonders, some of which will be evident during even the most disastrous seasons for the big trees and their leaves.
--1. Stroll through the sumac. When pundits opine that an early hard frost will create better foliage, I cringe—such frosts kill the sumac that enlivens far more roadsides than tall maples. Up close, this persistent weed tree displays a whole spectrum of variegated colors—glorious for photographers.
To make a comparison: in Japan, cherry trees are often a nuisance. They don’t look that great, they rain down stuff from diseases and insects—no one would guess, without being so informed, that they are regarded as national treasures and indeed a symbol of existence. Their moment comes when they transform the landscape with their blossoms. The brevity of their glory became iconic during the era of the samurai, whose swords were so sharp that a falling blossom would divide if it fell on an upright blade, and who frequently went to Zen masters to cope with their realistic fears of mutilation and death. To live with bravery and indeed beauty, for as long as it was fated to do so, became the ideal. When you see the great Kurosawa movie “Yojimbo,” and come to the scene where the leaf is blowing around the hut where the samurai hero is recovering from a bad beating, and suddenly gets spiked to the floor by a thrown knife, that’s the same philosophy.
So, hate sumacs when they invade your garden, but love them as part of the landscape. If you need a symbol of fall leading to spring, remember that when the old-timers needed a maple spout, they would do what my father did for his backyard stovetop sugaring: core out the soft pith from a section of sumac to make a little pipe. Or if you want to take a Christian perspective, think of the last becoming the first.
--2. Look for little oak trees. Most people recognize the leathery brown of oak leaves, hanging on late in the season, later to (approximate Robert Frost quote here) go scraping and creeping over the crusted snow when others are sleeping. But during foliage time, younger oaks—say up to six feet or so—produce leaves so intensely decorated that they are worth photographing individually. This, by the way, is also a good strategy when the maples aren’t as red as they might be. Another the-last-shall-be-first, or perhaps the-stressed-shall-be-best: often maple leaves afflicted by some sort of disease or parasite will be characterized at the end by spectacular dotting, streaking and veining.
--3. Blackberry patches. Many brambles produce interesting leaves, but my experience has been that blackberry canes produce the best colors just as they produce the greatest variety in flavors. Again, this is a matter of getting close enough to see them—sometimes a hazardous enterprise, because the thorns are also an octave above other brambles in their functional capacity. Picking them is like doing yoga: once you get in a good position, hold it, and then the benefits will come.
--4. Burning bush. Some experts advise never to plant these, saying they are foreign and “invasive.” Well, they’re not nearly as hard to extirpate as purple loosestrife, and our in-town foliage would be poorer without them.
If it’s red you’re looking for, burning bush’s flaring crimson should give you an eyeful. Meanwhile, look around for other domesticated or semidomesticated bushes that may have coleus moments before fading out (the website Blossom Swap says that coleus “offer tons of color in the shade. Coleus are easily started by seed or cuttings and be over wintered as houseplants in colder climates.”)
As our culture grows more experienced, we’ll probably grow more like the Japanese, who can see all of Nature in a single bird in a backyard garden. We’ll probably have foliage gardens, as we now have butterfly gardens, planted to flowering species that suit these flopwinged mini-hummingbirds. Meanwhile, we Vermonters can rejoice that we live in a kind of gigantic mega-garden. It’s even big enough to have room for tourists—as we all are, in too short a time.

BABYLON RED

BABYLON RED

Since my Hungarian immigrant ancestors first arrived in America via Ellis Island, I’ve known the New York City-New Jersey area since childhood. My parents were among the first to fly from the ethnic nest, but we went down again and again for visits and reunions.
So I can remember when only the Greater New York City glowed red at night. Even before sodium vapor lights put similar caps of ruddy illumination over almost any municipality of any size, the concentration of warning lights, neon lights and billboard reflections was enough to make driving into The City a Dante-esque journey. When I first heard the Rastafarian reggae singers using the name “Babylon” to refer to the unnatural life of big commercial cities and cultures (in the 1970’s, when WTBS MIT-College had a Jamaican show; “That guy Marley is a damn good songwriter!”) this was the image that came to mind.
This past week, I drove into New York City to see my brother Joe’s one-man show on how seeing Sputnik before there was any announcement of its existence changed his life. (For Brandonites: this took place while he was lying on the Brandon High School lawn. Later, he was able to confirm that the orbital path went over Brandon. There is a lot more to his show, which is very witty and funny, and which I hope he’ll get a chance to do around here some day.)
Here are a few observations from the 698 miles I put on my rented Toyota Corolla:
--I had to drive at least 70 miles an hour to avoid getting rear ended on the Thruway and other Interstate-type highways. Coming back, I hoped this would relax north of Albany, but no such luck. There is a kind of convoy psychology at work: all the drivers know they’re speeding (the limit is usually 65), but if no one goes too much faster than that, the cop cars will remain at the No U-Turn strips between the one-way lanes, hoping someone will get heavy-footed enough to be worth pursuing amidst all the vehicular clutter. Bringing the rental car back from Middlebury to Rutland, I had to be very, very careful not to zoom up to 65 on Route 7. The cars these days are made for such speed, and backing off on the accelerator puts your foot under such strain that you are in danger of cramping. Everything—airbags, car body armor, sound insulation, stereo systems, the power available at the touch of a foot, the power of the braking systems—conspires to lock this country into a culture of speeding. Like the pattern of suburban housing development (aka sprawl), this complex of mutual reinforcements has painted us into a corner.
Like the spirits who are blown endlessly around and around their circles in Dante’s Inferno, we are trapped, and don’t know how to get off.
--As an experienced cloud-watcher, who has posted 91 pictures so far this year on Weather Underground (see previous entry; site is at www.wunderground.com; look at ERLBarna), I can report that the clouds over urban New Jersey are STRANGE. Sometimes there is a peculiar haze in the air which, at a certain altitude, turns into white puffs—a phenomenon I’ve seen taking place (via Weather Underground) during some Western wildfires. There is a phenomenal amount of gunk at high altitudes, probably from air travel. Clouds often take on forms never seen hereabouts, and I saw nothing like the crisp “fair weather cumulus” clouds we get here on cool summer days. Yiddish, a language which some say “has more vitamins” than many others, has a great word for clouds this crazy: “farpotchket.”
--New York City has been fighting for years the same battle over creeping gentrification that is now showing up in Vermont as unaffordable housing, unbearable property taxes, and so on. The Medicine Show Theatre, where my brother performed, has been in existence for 37 years, in 13 locations, their director said. They’re trying to acquire their present 10-story building on 52nd Street West, but only have the first three floors so far due to political complications. Meanwhile, the block, which was terribly run-down when they arrived, has seen a total transformation since the artists arrived, with big money buying structures and tearing them down to put up bigger moneymakers. Like Soho, she said: the artists found low-budget lofts, created a vibrant art scene, were catalysts for the development of galleries and restaurants, then the area SOuth of HOuston Street became so desirable that the artists were priced out.
(Steven Spielberg’s movie “batteries not included” is, among other things, a fierce satire on this sort of commercialization and destruction on New York’s Lower East Side).
--Driving with Joe to his New Brunswick home after the show, I got to see a zone that made me ache for the time and resources to photograph it. Hyper-industrial, it includes huge power plant towers pouring out steam (just steam, we hope), Erector-set factories, squat but looming oil terminal tanks, and arrays of electrical transmission lines that made the VELCO upgrade look like child’s play. Shrouded in mist and lit by the almost-danger-orange sodium lights, this concentration of power was, in its way, awe-inspiring and even magical. Like it or not, this zone is a major organ of the body politic of our “civilization.” Flying along an Interstate trajectory through it is just as dizzying as looking down from the Empire State Building, and relying on this Gut for our sustenance is every bit as risky as ripping through the air along strips of paint-splotched asphalt at 75 miles per hour.

Urban, suburban and exurban comments can be sent to [email protected]

GLORIOUS VERMONT ROCKS

GLORIOUS VERMONT ROCKS

A visitor to Vermont, driving along during the spring during the days before much pavement, saw a farmer out in one of his fields, using a team of oxen and a stone boat to carry rocks to where the edge of the field was marked by a stone wall. He stopped and watched for a while, then called out, “Where did all these rocks come from?”
“Glacier brought ‘em,” yelled back the farmer.
“Where’d the glacier go?”
“I think it went back to get more rocks.”
In a geological sense, this is only partly true. Ice a mile or two thick does a pretty good job of grinding mountaintops into rocks and carrying them along to be deposited later as gravel, but other forces thrust those parts of the earth’s congealed crust upward to be ground down. Vermont has had quite a history, in its time, of continental collisions, and I’m not talking about Continental soldiers in the Revolutionary War clashing with British, Hessians and Iroquois. What is now Africa banged against what is now North Africa twice, and the Connecticut River, as I understand it, at one time was at the collision point.
Look at geological maps of what’s underneath America, and you will see colored zones denoting different types of bedrock. The Vermont map has them packed together like pages in a big scrapbook, looked at on end. This particolored piece of cartography is one indication of how colorful the geological history has been; another is an abundance of pretty rocks.
I became aware of this in the mid-1970’s, when my wife and I took a Cambridge, Massachusetts poet up to Johnson, Vermont to see Hayden Carruth, who was then living with his family at Crow’s Nest. While the Important Poet talked about Important Literary Things with Carruth, this young poet headed outdoors with Johnson’s son, so he could show me the path he and friends had cut to take hellacious bike rides through the forest (“So you have to duck,” he explained, pointing to one big limb). I wonder sometimes what he’s doing now.
A brook ran through the woods, and in that brook were remarkable rocks. Not long before, I had invented a form of folk art sculpture by putting some interesting rocks into a pint jar, filling it with water, and putting on the lid. Rock jars do what rain and polarizing sunglasses do for the appearance of many things: they change the light in a way that brings out colors. Looking at these Johnson, Vermont mixtures of quartz, granite, and more sedimentary materials, I realized these would be prime rock jar material, and set about gathering a canful—before going back to Crow’s Nest and talking a bit with Carruth, who would make a good Vermont Poet Laureate were it not that an upstate New York college decided to give him shelter from the storms and he went west.
Fast-forward to today, and both my wife and I are big fans of cute Vermont rocks. No journey to northern Vermont is complete without bringing back at least one.
Recently, I had personal business to do in the Burlington area, and went on up to Fairfax when it was done, because I knew there were good rocks near the covered bridge there. This time, I was on a mission: the last cat had died, and I wanted memorial stones for the grave that holds her and her half-sister, both from the same amazing four-color mother (orange, black, white and patches of gray tabby) and two great rival fathers, Granite (who was agile enough to run headfirst down a tree and leap sideways to break his fall) and Black Beauty (to fight with whom Granite was in such a hurry to get down the tree).
It’s impossible right now to describe with any adequacy how close to me these two female cats were. The people who say furry-purries have no affection for people are dead wrong. As long as they are raised with other kittens (TWO KITTENS ARE EASIER THAN ONE!) and know they are cats rather than people, their relationships with people are clear and uncomplicated and, with time, rich.
For years, Mohawk and Lyle (my son, now 27, originated those names) didn’t have an indoor catbox, because they never used one: they knew my schedule, I knew their schedule, and they went outdoors. To the end of her life, Lyle, the last cat, wanted first thing in the morning to go to her cat condo, jump on top, then have a nose-nuzz, then a pet-and-purr with me—before seeking any food.
But my wife and I agreed that at our age and in our circumstances, Lyle would be the last. We would make them a good memorial rock garden and remember them with love, but, as a Mark Twain character put it, “Overreachin’ don’t pay.”
So if you have any pretty rocks you don’t want any more, mail them to….
Not really. Vermont has plenty to go around. The Slate Belt has interesting pieces in waste rock piles, Lake Champlain has places along the shoreline that are worth prowling, some marble quarries have places where other minerals have joined the calcium carbonate, and if you want to see the ultimate, go to the Burlington Gem & Mineral Show, that area having the only active mineral collectors’ club in the state that I know.
And never forget: there’s no rock like a pet rock.

Stonings, moanings and digital phonings can be sent to [email protected]

THE CHINESE NEED CHECKERS

THE CHINESE NEED CHECKERS

Lee Houston was right: the mess in China is our mess, too.

Brandonites may remember Lee as the manager brought in to begin the turnaround of the Vermont Tubbs Furniture plant and keep it competitive with lowball furniture from abroad, a task his successors have accomplished to an extraordinary degree. At a time when so many manufacturers have rolled over and died, Tubbs supplies big name stores with, rarity of rarities, something Made in America.

Lee got that job because he had a long record of working with companies in trouble, one that included several years helping companies in China—which gave him a broad view of the situation. He had lived with air pollution so bad you couldn’t see from one side of the city to another, had witnessed workers living in prison-like barracks under robotic conditions, and knew firsthand about dealing with corrupt officials.

Three years ago, he emailed me and told me that if I wanted a good book project, or a team of journalists wanted to do a news series, there was a big story to be told about the hazardous nature of many products the Chinese were sending our way. “It would take a great deal of work, but if a group of reporters were to do a story, a book, on all of the potential problems Chinese products may cause, the nation would be well served,” were his exact words.
I didn’t have the contacts and credibility in the publishing world to change my whole way of life and dive into these murky waters, but boy, was he ever spot on. Any such book would be old news now, because a far-flung “team” of reporters have made headlines with news about poisonous dogfood, contaminated toothpaste, sicko seafood, and lately toxic toys. Lee had been worried about the toys. “Our
daughter works in a pediatrician's office and they have noticed an upswing in lead poisoning symptoms and tested blood levels and are seeing high levels of lead in kids that they KNOW do not live in houses that have lead,” he wrote.

Lee had his own example of the true cost of cheap goods: mirrors. When he wrote about our toxic orientations, he was president of two companies in the South, one making particle board and one making mirrors. The particle board was safe from overseas competition, he said, because it would cost too much to ship such a heavy but relatively low-cost commodity. But at the mirror factory, the Chinese were “after us,” he said.

“It is the same old story,” he wrote. “We Americans work at a decent wage and produce products that meet or exceed all governmental standards. The Chinese are sending in mirrors made with near slave labor using aluminum coating backed-up with paint whose lead content is 2.4 to 2.6 times our country's maximum limit.

“The problem is that our laws only affect the guy that ultimately takes the broken mirror to the dump years in the future. So, they can flood our market with the cheap stuff, and we'll pay the environmental bill years from now.

“We use silver and low lead content paint. In fact, we are 60% below EPA standards. Washington doesn't give a damn – we do not want to upset the Chinese.”

And the Chinese, though our largest source of imports, do not have a monopoly on environmental degradation. “I have been in 21 countries, mostly on business.” Lee said. “Without thinking very hard, I have seen pollution in both China, Russia, Taiwan and Malaysia that would turn your stomach.”

Here’s one I’m going to look into: apple juice. Have you tried to buy juice lately? Look at the label and you will probably find apple juice listed high up, even if it’s supposedly cranberry juice or peach juice, for instance. Juicy Juice used to be a trusted source—100 percent juice, not water as the first ingredient or lots of high-fructose corn syrup (which I’ll talk about in a later posting). Now it’s been taken over by Nestle. They still don’t add corn syrup or sugar or artificial flavors or preservatives, but here’s the list of ingredients for “All Natural 100 percent Grape: “apple juice, grape juice and pear juice (water, juice concentrates), natural flavors, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), citric acid.”
It’s apple juice, flavored with grape juice, folks. Why? Presumably because apple juice is a lot cheaper. And is that because it’s coming from China, where the trees are sprayed with who knows what that may have been banned in this country decades ago?
There’s a number on the Juicy Juice can for “Questions?” which I’m going to call: 800-510-6763, Monday-Friday 8 a.m.-8 p.m. I would be DELIGHTED to learn that only domestic apple juice goes into those cans, and will report that here—or will report that the person didn’t know and couldn’t provide me with a way to find out. By all means call, too, if you want, and please let me know how it turns out. As it says on the Juicy Juice can, “IT’S GOOD TO KNOW.”

Yearns, concerns, and stomach turns can be shipped to [email protected].

Weather Underground

WEATHER UNDERGROUND

Ed Barna

This being the Fourth of July, a time to consider what it means to be an American, I want to share a way that anyone online can be part of a worldwide community. I do care about this country, but the idea of a nation is indivisible from the existence of other nations, and the better we know and the more we appreciate other countries, the more we will appreciate and the better we will know our own.
“Everyone talks about the weather,” goes an old saying, “but no one does anything about it.” Today, we know the last part isn’t true. All our actions influence climate change, and the worldwide community I will momentarily describe shares an in-depth knowledge of this.
In Vermont, though, talking about the weather is still the most common way for strangers to get from grim to grin. Maybe the information exchanged is banal, but as Winston Churchill famously said about negotiations, “Jaw jaw is better than war war.” This northland eye-on-the-sky-speak isn’t just heritage from our predominantly agricultural past, when an old-timer with a deeply intuitive weather sense might indeed have a better understanding of when it was safe to put in seed or to cut hay or go to market. We divide up the land, making our homes our castles, but we share the air--as one contemporary poet puts it in a piece about the seeming humanity of the moaning and crying of a strong night wind, “we go all the way to the wind/ and the wind goes everywhere else.”
Which brings us to Weather Underground. The name of this online gathering, accessible by all at www.wundergound.com, comes ultimately from a Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in which he raps (he was a pioneer rap innovator, in case you hadn’t noticed) “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The political thrust of that line did not go unnoticed by a faction of the leftist Yippies who, frustrated by the failure of peaceful methods to end the Vietnam War, decided to try violent upheaval—under the name The Weather Underground.
Today’s Weather Underground is a peaceable lot, exception for the violence implied in some of the storm pictures that people from all around the world sometimes post on the site. Under the categories of Very Important Pictures (weather disasters like the recent flooding in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas), Approver’s Choice (subtitled “a bit of inspiration”—good shots, of anything outdoors), Weather, and Outdoors, both amateurs and pros contribute. Aside from some people putting their names on the shots, the participants don’t let copyright considerations block them from letting people make personal use of the medium-resolution photos.
People can email back and forth via the site, or blog, so it has truly become a community. An expert in bird identification will help someone put a name on a rarer species for that area; a pro fotog will give tips to someone who says they’re just beginning and would welcome critiques; and the captions, sometimes quite extensive, give the homebound an opportunity to ride a virtual tour bus. When a regular poster goes silent, there is general concern; right now, for instance, a lot of people are waiting for Lampy, a railroad enthusiast, to post another of his fabulous train-in-operation shots.
“What a unique way to see the world through others’ eyes!” writes kathydee in Ohio, who had sent in 331 pictures—all of which can be viewed, 50 at a time, by clicking on her online handle—of which 11 were Approver’s Choices. One of the latest was a heartbreaking picture of an old coal miner’s two-room disability retirement homestead—a friend of kathydee’s who will no longer bring her blackberries despite his ailments because he just succumbed to them. This site has heart.
Last night I started listing the countries from which pictures had arrived on Weather Underground. With only 12 hours gone, the following have taken part: Montenegro, Latvia, Belize, Croatia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Slovakia (maybe should count as two because Lena from Slovenia is vacationing there), Greece, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Bahrain, Thailand, and the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. I know, the last isn’t a country by legal definition, but for true it is one of the ends of the earth. Russian, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mongolia, and many more have chimed in at other times.
Ends of the earth: there are people who climb mountains and send back their peak experiences; seashore dwellers document the infinite moods of the seascape; veteran wildlife photographers add closeups that no casual picturetaker could ever equal; and stormchasers, that death-defying breed who go after tornadoes and travel TOWARD hurricanes, send images that can be genuinely terrifying. Vermont, be glad you’re in a geographical location where the big storm systems arrive exhausted and panting: there are clouds in the middle states of this country that are enough to make you shake, never mind the storms themselves. Look up superstormchaser Mike Theiss’s glimpses of supercells that look like they arrive with instructions to 1. Open chuck; 2. Insert drill; 3. Tighten chuck; 4. Send pieces flying everywhere and leave a big hole behind.
Spend a year looking at Weather Underground and it’s hard not to believe in climate change. Not “global warming” exactly, because the extra energy that the warming puts into the system drives it to all kinds of extremes. Kansas soaks while Florida burns. London gets hail on July 3 so deep it looks like the sidewalks and streets are deep with snow, while elsewhere you get to see what it’s like driving into a dust storm. At one point earlier this year, a location reported flowers opening two months early, with snow on top of them. Lightning bolts so powerful that the photographer was scared even while in his car. Coldest on record, warmest on record, hurricane winds without a hurricane—meteorologically, it’s a world gone mad.
So, as I implied earlier, there is a serious side to all this weather talk. As quietly as the fog that sometimes swallows half of the Golden Gate Bridge, so that it appears to emerge from a tunnel, the necessary consensus is building.

comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome at [email protected]

List of the Month: The Outer Limits of Ethnic Food

List of the Month: The Outer Limits of Ethnic Food

By Ed Barna

In case anyone is wondering, the name “Out and About” for this column refers to the common phrase for going walkabout, as the Australians sometimes say. It has nothing to do with people’s sexual identities being revealed, as in “coming out” or “outing” someone.
These writings, if not their author, are 100 percent heterogeneous. In keeping with that, the usual flow of events will bump up against recurring features, including:
--Back Pages, a look back at some worthy writing from yesteryear.
--Virtuous Virtual, descriptions of worthy sites found while prowling the World Wide Web (that’s where “www” comes from, by the way).
--Gone But Not Forgotten, thoughts about how Vermont life is changing, from someone now old enough to qualify as a boring old flamer (that’s not the exact word, but I’m not going to use the exact word, for a change).
--Poetry Time, a revival of the old newspaper practice of printing poetry—sometimes from others, sometimes mine.
--List of the Month, because lists sometimes are like poetry in the way they convey a great deal in a few words.

This column introduces the last feature.

List of the Month: Truly Ethnic Food

I went to an open invitation dinner at Middlebury College one time, and I found myself sitting next to a bright, personable young man from Malaysia. In the course of our conversation, I remarked to him that he must find American food very boring. He agreed: there were so many spices that grew in his tropical country and cooks knew how to use, but that people in the United States don’t know at all.
We’re improving, though. When I was a kid, we went to a restaurant once a year, at New Year’s, and always the same one: Rutland’s only Chinese restaurant, the Kong Chow. Since then, Americans have shown a growing fondness for Asia food of many kinds. Adjectives have become nouns: city dwellers ask each other, if you don’t feel like Chinese tonight, now about Thai? Vietnamese? Mongolian? It’s an old American tradition, immigrants getting an economic foothold by opening a restaurant featuring things that are second nature to them, but exotic to others. Many people probably don’t think of Italian as ethnic, let alone exotic--the dishes have become as American as pizza pie.
But there are limits. It’s important not to assume that we really understand and accept another culture just because we like some of its recipes. Deep down under, there can be differences that aren’t so easy to translate into American. It’s important to recognize these differences, too, because they remind us that mutual understanding is a continuing process, and perhaps always will be.
A picture of a Vietnamese restaurant menu, which a world traveler had shared on a website, brought this home to me with especial force. On a visit to Ho Chi Minh City (Hanoi during the war), he discovered a place that catered to those with gourmet tastes in snake.
The intense heat and abundant water of some countries closer to the equator cooks up plant life of an abundance Vermonters can scarcely conceive. (For Southerners, the word “kudzu” may be enough.) This in turn creates habitat for gazillions of bugs, which become the food for phenomenal numbers of frogs and toads and lizards and other minor predators. Both bugs and the things that eat them get viped up in turn by the snakes.
Ask a former Vietnam infantryman about snakes and you might not get an answer, but watch for changes in expression. A close friend of mine who saw a LOT of action over there said he probably used more bullets on snakes than he did on the Viet Cong and NVA.
If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If life gives you snakes, you make gourmet delights like the following, given as written, in order, Vietglitch words included. Only one page of a menu; what might have been on the others?

“SNAKE DISHES

Snake soup with appetizer
Fried with lemon grass, mushroom
Spring roll
Chopped bacon
Fried skin (dip chili sauce)
Fried rib (serve with pancake)
Grilled snake
Chopped rib and meat roll in leave
Snake spine simmer with greenbean, sticky rice (noodle)
Sticky rice mixing snake fat

THE WINE LIST

Blood wine
Venom wine
Snake heads wine
Snake gall bladder wine
Cobras wine
Chinese medicine herb wine
Penises wine snake eggs wine
Gecko wine
Bees wine

“Bon appetit!”, as the French used to say before Dienbienphu.

Comments can be emailed to Ed Barna via [email protected].