Walking the Berkshires

Last Week's Piece in the LJ

My most recent "Nature Notes" piece in the Lakeville Journal can be read here with free registration.

"...Proximity to major metropolitan centers in New York, and to a lesser degree Hartford, has made our land valuable as residential real estate. A renewed interest in locally produced food and concern about the loss of our remaining farmland to nonagricultural uses runs up against the hard fact that the land is worth more in a developed state than as farmland, and is too expensive for new farmers to obtain.  

Meanwhile, Berkshire County is losing population. Connecticut is losing young people at one of the highest rates in the nation.

We have saved many significant lands from development but are unable to maintain them in a condition that will ensure that the very qualities that made them special will persist over time.  Without the resources to care for and steward our fields and forests, they are vulnerable to fresh degradation from invasive species and to loss of ecological productivity..."

In other news, I wrote a magazine story for the latest issue of Massachusetts Main Streets and Back Roads, a free publication and not yet readable on-line, about The Mammoth Cheese of Cheshire.  Big as a millstone and a month in transit from the Berkshires to Thomas Jefferson's innaugeral.  I'll link to it once it makes it to the electronic media stream. 

The Becker Collection of Civil War Sketches

The American Civil War has been a strong historical interest of mine since I was nine, and while my study has broadened to other time periods, it is still the period in our country's history that I know the best.  So many iconic images were produced during that time: particularly photographs, but also engravings of artist scetches published in the newspapers and journals of the day.  It is unusual for me to come across images from the Civil War that I haven't seen before, or which brings a fresh perspective on these well chronicled events, but recently I was alerted to an extraordinary collection in the holdings of Boston College that does both.

Sheila Gallagher, an Associate Professor at BC and a longtime friend from down the beach at Wareham, also has the priviledge of curating a collection of artist sketches made by her great, great grandfather Joseph Becker and his colleagues for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper.  Sheila is Co-Director of The Becker Collection, which includes 650 largely unpublished drawings by these artist reporters that covers an extraordinary scope of subjects over a broad geographic range and timeframe.  

The Collection's website includes this biography of Becker:

"Becker’s career at Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. Hired by Frank Leslie as an errand boy at the age of eighteen in 1859, he retired in 1900 after supervising the art department for the last quarter of the century. At 22, he was sent as an artist–reporter to cover the Civil War, and he traveled with the Union Army recording scenes of daily military life as well as the preparation and action of battle. After the war, he traveled throughout the West to draw images for the series “Across the Continent.” It included such diverse subjects as the western landscape, Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, and Mormons in Utah. His drawings possess a liveliness and immediacy rarely achieved in contemporary photography and a wealth of information previously unavailable.

However, Becker did not work alone. Frank Leslie sent numerous artists to see and record the facts of the American experience: J.F.E. Hillen, Henri Lovie, Edwin Forbes, Frederic B. Schell, Francis H. Schell, Edward Hall, James E. Taylor, Andrew McCallum, C.E.H. Bonwill, William T. Crane, Arthur Lumley, E.F. Mullen, and others. They all sent drawings back to New York where editors selected images that fit stories, and other artists traced and altered the original work. Most of the drawings never appeared in print. As supervisor of the art department, Becker saved the discarded drawings."

He did a tremendous service by doing so, and Sheila and her colleagues have done us another by conserving and documenting this collection and making it searchable on-line.   There are sketches from seventeen states and the District of Columbia, and notably several among those depicting African Americans that manage to transend caricature and show them as part of the fabric of the events.  An excellent example can be found here in a sketch entitled "Dedication of a Monument to the memory of the New Hampshire Regiment in the battle of Winchester", recording a ceremony that took place the day after Lee's Surrender at Appomatox.  The details in the forground are sharper than the orator standing at the monument, or the hollow shell of the war damaged building in the background.  The onlookers include men and women, soldiers and civilians, and a number of African Americans dressed in their best clothes.  It rings true, right down to the small dog which alone turns its face fully to the viewer.  It also puts those relegated to the back in the forefront.

I highly recommend taking some time to explore The Becker Collection on-line, and look forward to seeing it in exhibition in the near future. 

Governor, Don't Adulterate the AT

Is anyone else besides me disappointed that the staff of the faithless Governor of South Carolina lied ?  He did not, as his aides incorrectly reported, take off on his own for a few days on the Appalachian Trail.  When Governor Mark Sanford ditched his responsibilites, his family and all means of communication, the idea that he had strapped on his pack and headed for the wilderness had a certain appeal.  Who wouldn't want to shed the weight of executive power for a few days in the mountains without cell phones, without Twitter, without minders and the sleaze of politics and exchange all of this for the rejuvenation that this national treasure affords? 

To find out that instead he was betraying his marriage vows in Argentina along with the public trust is a far more believable, if pathetic, explaination.  This is hardly the "exotic" experience the Governor claims to have been seeking, but commonplace, tawdy, and utterly lacking in originality.  And for his staff to lie about his unexplained absense by claiming the Governor was behaving just like the 4 million people who enjoy the glories of the Appalachian Trail every year is an insult to them and to this great American natural resource. 

Never mind that infidelity is also commonplace in America, or that those politicians like Sandford with his feet of clay espousing family values are particularly craven.  There was no need to sully the AT along with his family, his reputation, and the public trust.  His professed love of the AT has nothing at all to do with his love of a woman in Buenos Aires.  It is also telling that the trail, over 2,300 miles long, does not include a single section within South Carolina. 

If Governor Sandford had walked out the door last Thursday, stopped in to the local sporting goods store for a rucksack, some beef jerky and a pup tent and disappeared up the spine of the eastern highlands instead of down to his Andean mistress, he might have been a sympathetic, if troubled figure.  If he had packed his rags and gone down the hill, to paraphrase a great breakup song by Richard Thompson, he might have been a failure and a disappointment but he would have been an honest one.  If he had shacked up in an AT lean to on some windswept mountainside, I would not be grinding this ax, but he didn't and his staff knew it and they lied, so now he's just another dishonest pol with his hand in the honey pot and they all need to take a hike.

See Emily Play

In a fit of focussed cleaning - the sort that fails to declutter the house but puts one portion of it in perfect order - I came upon a cassette I had made for Emily before she was born.  The date is March 15, 2000, and if I felt brave or hopeful enough at that stage in Viv's pregnancy, having lost our first child in stillbirth the year before, it must have been around the time of the level 2 ultrasond that showed nothing amiss this time around.

This was in the pre-download, late analog era when people still made tapes of their favorite music to share with their friends.  I was a decade out of college (4 years since graduate school), and much of the new music I was exposed to at this time came from tapes sent to me while we were in Africa.  I still had my vinyl out, and piles of hissing cassettes, and it was here that I went to make a tape for my baby, anticipating sharing a life of song and music from the first day onward.  Both Emily and Elias love music and are growing up in a family that sings.

So what did I put on this tape for my unborn daughter?  The title is also the name of an improvised composition by my old friends Theo and Charlie, part of a jam session from our boarding school days when Charlie had an in room suspension for some last minute holiday schnapps consumpion on the way back to school (as did I, but that is not part of this story).  Some of the music might be construed as lullabies, but certainly not all for there is also Morphine's "You Look Like Rain" and Hendrix doing "The Wind Cried Mary".

Loudon Wainwright III opened the 1st set with "Swimming Song" , with "B-Side" on the other side, naturally.  Bob Dylan played "Froggie Went a Courting" and Dianne Ferris covered a soulful "Blackbird ."  Nancy Griffith's version of "Boots of Spanish Leather" and the Indigo Girls "Watershed" are the sort of songs I might have sung at bedtime; when Emily was two, wshe knew all the words to "Rocky Raccoon" thanks to her Daddy's nightly crooning.  I slipped in the Cowboy Junkies doing "I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry", and Laura Love doing a raunchy "Clap Hand", but it turns out that Lyle Lovett's "If I had a Boat" has the controversial lyrics that have prompted recent family discussions of what can be sung in place of the delightful line "Kiss my a** I've bought a boat I'm going out to sea."   Well, in France they serve their children wine with dinner.  I expose mine to Richard Thompson and murder ballads.

The most pleasent rediscovery on this compilation is Elvis Costello's "Clown Strike " from the 1994 album Brutal Youth. The lyrics are marvelously inventive:

And it's pandemonium
For the humble and the mighty
You don't have to tumble for me
Even a clown knows when to strike

Tell me what you want of me
Or are you terrified of failure?
You put on a superstitious face
Behind all this paraphernalia
We're not living in a masquerade
Where you only have three wishes
It isn't easy to see
In a lifetime of mistaken kisses

But there's one thing that I had to keep inside
Because I was shaking
Why don't you get some pride
There was a clown strike
And the clowns threw down their tools
But you don't have to play so hard
And I'm nobody's fool
You don't have to go so far
'Cause I love you as you are

Going back to the vaults, 9 years and a few months more, I remember the man I was then and the father I hoped to be.  Panemonium for the humble and the mighty, but sweet as summer wine.

Wheels Within Wheels

The heavy rains of the last two nights have drenched my gardens to their thirsty roots.  Today in the welcome warmth of the sun, my children and I weeded the rows of new lettuce, the beans getting visibly taller day by day, and the lush tomato and basil plants.  I found a volunteer mustard plant from last year's seed, and a few gladiolas that managed to overwinter despite the bulb killing frost.  One pink ladyslipper beneath the old spruce has stayed in splendid bloom since Memorial Day.

The wildflower gardens are also transitioning from the ephemerals of spring to June glories.  Butterfly weed is preparing to blossom and a rain of new plants from sailing seeds is colonizing new patches.  The clumps of blue and yellow-eyed grass wink at the sun, and the bee balm is a yard high at least. 

The raspberries and black cap canes are in flower, as are the high and low bush blueberries.  The bare root strawberries and just starting to leaf, but the compost that forms their new bed is sprouting volunteer pumpkins from last year's Jack 'o Lanterns.

If you measure the season by the intervals between mowing the lawn, you miss all the others movements, unfurlings and fadings that make up the growing time.  I like to walk out to the garden gate and watch the tassels of grass in the twilight and their winking fireflies.  I like to see what is new and what is still to come in the garden and the world beyond.

Today (and 2 weeks ago) in the LJ

Today's Lakeville Journal article, readable at the link with free registration, was all about bioluminescence.  Or faeries and witch lights, take your pick.  I managed to work a bit of Coleridge and Rachael Carson in there, too, and the inspiration, as it always is at this time of year, was the first night o fthe fireflies:

"...Last night at dusk, out where grasses sway in the meadow beyond the garden gate and a wild apple reaches its gnarled limbs to touch the western stars, they all took wing and began their meandering flight. From under leaf and blade, first one, then swarms of winking lights called and responded among the grasses:  “Here I am, come dance with me!” Enthralled, my children and I stood by the garden gate and watched the wisp lights in the vapors swirl and eddy from tassels to treetops..."

Two weeks ago, my piece in the journal was about those spring glories of the swamp: yellow ladyslippers and marsh marigolds.  The season for both has passed, now, but you can read about them here.

Terrapin Crossing

Snapping turtles smell like the swamp.  I stopped for one crossing the highway in the rain this morning on a fast stretch of road that slices through the largest inland wetland in Connecticut.  This is the season when gravid females haul out from the ooze and journey overland looking for suitable high ground to lay their eggs.  Often the gravel of a road embankment has the characteristics they seek, which exposes them to the twin perils of traffic on paved roads and graders on gravel ones. 

This is a vulnerable time for these otherwise fearsome turtles.  Their nests are prone to racoon raiders and hungry skunks, both of which have seen their populations spike thanks to the forgaging opportunities presented by human habitation and its associated garbage.  Road crossings can be perilous for snappers, though in this respect they fare better than smaller wetland creatures like migrating amphibeans that are flattened in their thousands on warm spring nights.  I found a shattered spotted turtle just a bit further along this stretch of roadway last week, and stopped to see whether it was indeed this declining species or the federally threatened bog turtle it resembles.

So I brake for turtles, even snappers.  This one did not appreciate my efforts when I hefted her by the tail and carried her across to the other side of the road.  She hissed from deep within the underbelly white of her formidable mouth, and right away I caught the thick, foetid odor that clings to these turtles as if they were part of the reeking mire itself.  This is nothing, however, compared to the stench of the common musk or "stinkpot" turtle", an unassuming little creature that seems to me to have been steeped in effluvia and then glazed with clotted slime.  Had she been one of these, I might have looked for something other than my bare hand to move her with.  As it was, the snapper was quickly on her way and I on mine, and neither of us the worse for wear.

Lt. Colin A. Canham's Royal Navy Service

On this Memorial Day, I am grateful to my Uncle Colin Archibald Canham, Jr.: a veteran of Viet Nam.  Over the weekend, in his shy and unassuming way, he delivered to our family a beautiful display of the medals, insignia and badges reflecting the service in WWII of his father-in-law - my grandfather - Robert H. Barker.  It was a labor of love that for most of the family was completely unexpected and we were all deeply touched.

Colin also shared a small bit of his father's service in the Royal Navy during WWII, including a  story heard at his memorial service in 2003 which seems so fantastic that it requires a leap of faith to believe, yet which very well might have happened.  I'll get to that in a moment, but first I'd like to share what my curiosity about Colin A. Canham Sr.'s war record has subsequently turned up on-line.

Colin Archibald Canham was born near the end of the Great War, and he first appears in the navy lists as a Midshipman RNR on January 10th, 1935.  He resigned from the Royal Navy with the rank of Commander on August 15th, 1956.  Along the way he served on vessels as varried as submarines and aircraft carriers. 

From January 20th, 1940 to May 30, 1940, he was a junior officer of the battlecruiser H.M.S. Hood.  During this period, the old WWI battlecruiser patrolled north of the Shetlands on convoy duty supporting operations in Norway.  When the Hood put into Liverpool at the end of May, Lt. Canham left the ship's company, and was therefore not on board when the Bismark sank the Hood with practically all hands in May of 1941.  He had a very good reason for leaving.  He volunteered to assist the evacuation of Dunkirk.

There was a story told at his memorial service about Dunkirk that my Aunt Marty recounted over the weekend.  He had a brother with the British Expeditionary Force and so had an extra motivation for volunteering to ferry the soldiers back across the channel in the face of the German Blitz.  There was a heavy surf and a strong offshore breeze as Lt. Canham loaded up whatever little vessel he had found and tried to pull away from the beach.  The engine suddenly gave out, with the sea pushing them back and the Germans already coming down the shore.

My aunt said that a family record tells of all those soldiers in the boat, standing with their arms outstetched and their greatcoats open to catch the breeze and win free of the coast as human masts and sails.  Stranger things have happened, and the image is so quintessential of the Dunkirk spirit that one yearns to believe it as gospel truth.

From July, 1940 to February, 1941, he was assigned to the accounting section at Portsmouth, which the Navy records as service on H.M.S. Victory III.  While Nelson's Flagship of the name is berthed at Portsmouth, there were various designations of H.M.S. Victory used during WWI and WWII for different establishments.   Portsmouth was heavily targetted by the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain and Lt. Canham would have endured several months where bombing was an all too frequent threat.

His next sea assignment was as First Lieutenant on the long range patrol sumbmarine H.M.S. Parthian.  The namesake of her class, the Parthian was assigned to Malta and Lt. Canham joined the ship's company on August 20th, 1941.  She crossed the Atlantic to the USA to refit and was back in the Mediterranian the next year stationed first at Beirut and then at Malta conducting supply runs and engaging with enemy targets as this link shows:

16 Nov 1942 At 1048 hours HMS Parthian fires four torpedoes against a convoy made up of the small Italian tanker Labor (510 BRT), the German merchant Menes (5609 BRT) escorted by the Italian torpedo boats Calliope and Climene north-east of Isola Marettimo, Italy in position 38?03'N, 11?51'E. All torpedoes fired missed their target(s). 

28 Mar 1943 sinks the Greek sailing vessel Archangelos (120 BRT) with gunfire and ramming in the Aegean Sea in position 39.19N, 25.18E.

29 Mar 1943 sinks the Greek sailing vessel Angela Mitylene (120 BRT) off Mitylene, Greece.

4 Apr 1943 sinks the Italian San Isidro Labrador (322 BRT) off Merichas, Greece.

4 May 1943 Lt. M. B. St. John sinks the Italian sailing vessels Despina II and Spina Secundo (both 13 BRT) with gunfire off Kos, Greece.

5 May 1943 Lt. M. B. St. John attacks the German auxiliary minelayer Drache with gunfire 7 miles north-east of Doro in position 38.20N, 24.46E. 

7 May 1943 Lt. M. B. St. John sinks the Italian sailing vessel Barbara some 10 miles north of Cape Stavros, Naxos, Greece

25 Jun 1943 attacks the German merchant Gerda Toft in the Aegean Sea off Cape Midia. Possibly there was one dud torpedo hit.

Lt. Canham was awarded a DSC (Distinguished Service Cross) for these and other operations between July 1942 and June 1943.  He was not on board when the Parthian was subsequently assigned to patrol the southern Adriatic.  On August 6th she failed to respond to a signal and is believed to have been sunk by a mine off the southeast coast of Italy near Brindisi with the loss of all hands.

He was assigned to the battleship H.M.S. Royal Sovereign on July 26th, 1943 while the H.M.S. Parthian was on its last patrol.  He was part of this ship until December, 1943.  An old WWI battleship, she was in poor condition and underwent refitting during this period in the United States.  The following year, she was transferred to the Soviets in lieu of Italian war reparations and renamed the Arkhangelsk.

On October 1, 1944, Lt. Canham joined the light cruiser H.M.S. Newfoundland and soon dispatched to the Eastern Mediterranian, where in February 1945 an explosion in a port torpedo tube casued casualties.  She was repaired and then sent Pacific Theatre, arriving at Sydney in April and supporting operations by Australian land and naval forces in New Guinea that May.  Involved in operations at Truk in June and supporting operations against the Japanese home islands in July, the H.M.S Newfoundland was present at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.

There are gaps in this chronology, and much more that will only be known by those who served.  Still, if there is information here that is new to my Uncle Colin and his family, then perhaps in some small way I  can say thanks to him for the way he has honored my grandfather.

Caption This! Reconstructionist Edition

This image from a University of Iowa collection of political photos is rather unimaginatively captioned:

"Tableau representing Confederate and Union reconciliation to free Cuba - Spanish American War"

I am confident that you, dear readers, can do far better than that!

 

The Drama of the Herring Run

I watched a herring gull live up to its name as Emily and I were leaving Windrock last weekend.  My annual pilgrimage to the Agawam River Herring Run is a favorite springtime ritual.  I start checking in late March, when the very first Osprey come winging northward, and the river herring out in the cold Atlantic sense something warmer in the meltwater that calls them home.  By late April the blueback herring and alewife should be in the river and making their way to the flume.  Here they collect beneath the plunging water and negotiate the fish ladder up and under the highway and into a chain of ponds by Myles Standish State forest where the lucky ones will spawn.

The herring fishery is closed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and several other states as far away as North Carolina because stocks are so depleted.  I can remember times when the Agawan was crammed with fish from bank to bank, and any Town resident could get a bucket for fish for fertilizer or lobster bait.  Even so, there is usually still at least one other car at the herring run when we arrive: another Pilgrim like me who is there just to check on the fish.  There are a number of herring gulls there, too, a species much maligned for its attraction to garbage.  On this ocassion, however, Emily and I saw one catch a herring.

The bird stood on a stone in the rushing water, poised above the dark river and the fish striving in the current.  Suddenly it struck and came up with a foot long fish.  It flew to the bank and choked down the herring in a few great gulps while other gulls closed in to try and snatch away the prize should the bird falter.  It was a great mouthful that stuck for a short time in its gorge as it worked to swallow its prize.  I have seen herring gulls with corncobs wedged in their gullets, but this bird managed to complete its task in short order and demonstrated that it still derserved the name.

Emily felt badly for the fish, yet here before us was the great cycle of life and death played out in one of the great migration dramas of this or any other place.  It is the same with salmon and grizz, lion and wildebeast.  We saw the power of the school to overwhelm the predators even as it loses individuals, and felt something of the compulsion of instinct that draws the fish to the river in our desire to be there to watch it happen.

Herring in the river is a reassuring sight.  It gives me faith that at least for another year, a part of the natural heritage of New England will still abide.  I never knew the East's great rivers with their full compliment of sturgeon and salmon, but herring face their greatest struggle in our time.  Long may they run.