Walking the Berkshires

Lamming it in Namibia

 (Image courtesy of skyscrapercity.com)

 I'll admit, there are days when I yearn to cash all my chips, get an old land rover and disappear into the Namibian bush.  It would be a vain attempt to recapture my glory years there, and wrong for any number of reasons, but still, it has its appeal.  I am not, nor plan to be, a fugitive from justice, but apparently it occurred to at least one fraudulent investor fleeing extradition charges to take the money and run and set up house in grand style in Namibia's capitol, Windhoek.  According to The New York Times:

"In 2006, a federal jury indicted Jacob (Kobi) Alexander, an Israeli-American business wunderkind, on charges of wire and securities fraud. Mr. Alexander and his family flew to Namibia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.

The fugitive more or less tried to buy Namibia. He sponsored scholarships and built low-income solar-powered buildings, and he lived in a spectacular home in Windhoek. Last summer, according to The Wall Street Journal, he apparently felt confident enough to throw a four-day bar mitzvah for his son — and charter a jet to fly in 200 friends from New York City."

Namibia is not some Banana Republic, though it cleaves proudly to its "non-aligned status".  You could live very well indeed there with a 1st world income.   Mr. Alexander spread around $14 million in cynical donations to curry favor in Namibia, much of it invested in his own enterprises, and time will tell if that buys him anything extra during his upcoming extradition hearing in June. He was initially admitted in 2006 on a 2 year work visa with the promise that he would spend $300 million Namibian dollars in the country (then worth $42.25 million US).  He transfered $16.9 million from a bank in Israel before extradition proceedings were brough against him.  I would not hold my breath waiting for him to come up with the balance.

Frankly, if you are going to lam it in Namibia, you should show some class and earn it.  There is, for example, the extraordinary tale of Henno Martin and Hermann Korn: two German emigrants who avoided interment as enemy aliens during WWII by hiding out in the Namib desert from May 1940 to September 1942.  Martin's tale of their epic of survival and lonely contemplation - "Wenn es Krieg gibt, gehen wir in die Wüste" - is available in English translation as The Sheltering Desert and is a great read.  Martin and Korn were geologists and made valuable contributions to that field based on what they observed in the Namib. The Geological Society of Namibia awards an annual Henno Martin Medal to the best scientific publication of a geologist in Namibia. 

You can't buy that, Mr. Alexander.  Character is not a commodity, and $16.9 million won't last you long once you've tried to sway an independent judiciary and pay off your lawyers.  Better go down to the Buchcellar in Windhoek and pick up a copy of The Sheltering Desert.  You are going to need to know where the water is.

CWCID: Jungle Trader

Today's Lakeville Journal Article

I managed to wander quite far afield in this week's Nature Notes article in The Lakeville Journal,  which is readable on-line with free subscription.  Only the bookends of the piece are rooted in the local enviroment, since I found it difficult in the dead of winter to find something new and fresh to say about life outdoors.  As for the rest, I went back to my days in Africa and what I learned about tracking from a sleeping elephant.

Here are the bookends: 

"‘I track humans,” said the stranger sitting next to me, by way of introduction. As a conversation starter it made quite an impression. He was the sort of character who could fairly be described as crusty, and I suspected I might end up as captive audience to his Ancient Mariner. He went on to volunteer that he was an expert tracker whose services had been of particular value to law enforcement, and who now was responsible for preventing poaching on a large piece of private land in the Berkshires.

“You know how I catch ’em?” he asked, raising a craggy eyebrow with the confidence of one in possession of secret knowledge. “I find their tracks in deer season and then I go to the nearest bar.  Anyone sitting on a stool is showing me his boots. I just compare what I see to what I saw...”

"...The last elephants to roam the valleys of the Litchfield Hills passed away at the end of the Pleistocene age.  But one of the old family names of our region, the Spurrs, comes from the Dutch 'spoor', meaning the trail left by a person or animal. As a follower of spoor, I limit myself to following the tracks of small animals in the snow, the one time when our poor blinkered senses discern what other creatures know in every season."

For the part in the middle, go here.

New London Notes

I had occasion to be in New London, Connecticut early yesterday morning.  I was early for a day sponsored by American Farmland Trust across the Sound on eastern Long Island - which  I described to my children as like a field trip, with wine.  It was a cool fall day on the banks of the Thames (pronounced in these parts with a regular "Th" and a long "A"), and the low angle light lit up the red brick train station and the wet pavement.  I love having the time to walk around an unfamiliar city, and New London was only familiar to me in passing along I-95, but I did know some of its history and learned a good deal more before I took the 9 a.m. SeaJet to Orient Point on the North Fork.

This was Pequot country when the Dutch and English started poking upriver in the early 1600s.  I tried to imagine what it must have been like to paddle one of the huge dugout ocean-going canoes - made from a massive pine or chestnut log - that the Pequots used to travel across the Sound and over to Block Island.  Yesterday the wind was high and blew the tops off the waves, which certainly would have discouraged me from making the attempt.  The Mashantucket Pequot Museum up at Foxwoods has two life size models of such canoes with a dozen or more passengers.

One often forgets, with so little of its shoreline accessible to the public, that Connecticut is a maritime state.  New London was long a center for privateers and whalers, just as today the east bank of the Thames at Groton houses the Electric Boat shipyard.  I saw a submarine enter the river as we were heading out into the Sound, its curved sides menacing like a fat-bodied rattlesnake.  The Coast Guard Academy is in New London, and anchored at her berth is the barque-rigged USCGC Eagle (WIX-327).  My cousin Robert is now in basic with the Coast Guard Reserves, but won't be training on this beauty.  "America's Tall Ship" was previously a prize of war: the German "Horst Wessel" launched in 1936 and used as a training ship for the officers of the Reichsmarine.  Today she serves the same purpose for Coast Guard cadets.  At 90m long she is an impressive sight, even docked with her spars crossed rather than flying under a full spread of sail.  Even more impressive, she is made of metal, and during WWII was credited with downing three Soviet Planes and one "friendly" Luftwaffe one.

I walked along the curve of Bank Street with its mix of gentrified 19th century chic and tawdry wharf rat storefronts.  The old stone Customs House is associated with the saga of the slave ship "Amistad", which rode at anchor during the trial and ultimate acquittal of the slaves who had seized the ship from their Spanish captors.  New London has wonderfully preserved historic houses alongside derelict buildings from the same era.  Starr Street historic district was spared the ravages of 1970s urban renewal when it was reclaimed and restored, but I passed a portion of the old rope walk that is now a tenement just a block or two further on.  It has tremendous character, but not everything can be fixed by a fresh coat of paint.

New London can lay claim to two bookends of our Revolutionary days, individuals who occupy the very zenith and nadir of the Patriot Pantheon.  One of two schoolhouses associated with the martyred Nathan Hale is now on display right at the historic heart of the city (the other is in East Haddam).  And then there was that first agent of New London's urban renewal, Benedict Arnold, who was born upriver in Norwich and who lead a devastating raid on his home ground in 1781 after joining the British.  The imposing Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument next to the Nathan Hale schoolhouse pays particular notice to the naval service of the sons of the City, listing the names of famous vessels on which they served.  Intriguingly, the monument's list of land engagements also includes Groton and Bunker Hill, which hearken back to older wars.  Groton refers to the sharp engagement that took place across the river during Arnold's Raid.  Some of the ships, too, may refer to famous Continental vessels such as the "Trumbull", which was both a Revolutionary-era frigate from Connecticut and also the name of one of Arnold's shoal-draft galleys on Lake Champlain.  I am confident that it is not this particular "Trumbull" that the patrons of this monument had in mind.

It was a lot of history to take in during a short hour before my trip across the Sound, a fascinating glimpse and a fine diversion on a bright Autumn day with time to do as I pleased. 

Whirl, Dervish, Whirl

I like my roots plugged in.  Bob Dylan was more than welcome to rock out at Newport as far as I am concerned.  Fairport Convention inspired a host of electric folk musicians.  Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones dug deep in the Blues.

And the stuff coming out of Mali from musicians such as Vieux Farka Toure - son of the late, great Ali Farka Toure - and the electrified Touareg jams laid down by Tinariwen makes me want to talk a long, slow boat up the Niger and learn to race camels.  Poetry in motion. 

Great Escapes

I have a new favorite publishing house.  All the 1st person accounts of explorers and adventurers you can eat!  I believe I'll start with Africa.  Not your cup of tea?  The Narrative Press has other times and places covered.  How about women authors?  The Custer Myth owes much of its popularity to the efforts of his wife Elizabeth.

Something New Every Day

Here are some random facts I have learned this week.

• The meaning of "Fennicisation": to alter a word from another language to make it more like Finnish.  What Anglicization is to English.  (encountered at Aardvarchaeology)

• The first time a Gatling gun went into action with the British army was at the outset of the Zulu War during The Battle of Inyezane on 22nd January, 1879.  It was manned by a royal navy crew under 19-year-old Midshipman L.C. Coker. ( Morris, Donald R (1962): The Washing of the Spears; The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation: pg. 422)

• There are just two pairs of nesting bald eagles in all the Adirondacks, and one of these is directly above my cousin Tigerhawk's family place!

• Henry John Burnett was the last man hanged in Scotland (1963): (courtesy Executed Today)

• "Alevromoutzouromata", which is Greek for "people throw flour at each other", is a major event just before Greek Orthodox Lent in the in the port town of Galaxidi: (courtesy of Jungle Trader)

What else have you learned?

Walking After Midnight

I got back late at night from visiting a friend Sunday evening.  I stepped out of my car and glanced up at the sky and froze, head cocked back and eyes wide and wondering.  I haven't seen a starry night like this in many years, especially not in summer when the atmosphere in these parts is often thick with haze.  In this land of unshielded lights, the the Milky Way is seldom seen in its true glory, but last night what the Bushmen call "the wood ash stars" were so clear it was as if they had been pricked in black velvet and held to the light.  I saw half a dozen of the Perseids streak across the sky, one of these so bright when I closed my eyes I could still see the track of its passage.  Jupiter in the Southwest was the pearly color of oyster shell.  I thought I could pluck each string of Lyra and feel the great wing beats of Cygnus bearing its cross along the edge of the Galaxy where the stars seem to cluster. 

One of the great gifts of my years in Africa where season after season of dark skies, with nothing but a campfire below to mar my night vision.  I saw planets in close conjunction and a comet spitting blue fire at the horizon.  I learned the names of unfamiliar stars and constellations in those southern skies, and to recognized those from the north in their inverted form.  Nights that clear and dark are as rare in this latitude as rural electricity was back then in Namibia, though sometimes in winter when the frost adheres to my whiskers with every breath I see something of that remembered glory.  The Milky Way, though, is never better than when it bisected the heavens in summer, a celestial charm bracelet dangling crowns and the wings of eagles.

The fireflies of June are gone from the field beyond the garden fence, and already those migrants with the greatest journeys ahead feel the pull of the season and turn toward the south.  If I get another of these nights in mid-month, and fine a clear horizon to the west beyond the Taconics that hide the sinking sun, there will be five naked eye planets sharing the same sky.  I will remember a dog watch in the Gulf of Maine with meteors of every hue so dazzling that they called to mind the great Aurora, and tales told of Asgard and dragon ships far from land.  If I am very lucky, I will have two more pairs of eyes and two small hands in mine for company as we watch the curtain rise and the wheeling dance of the night sky.

10 to the 20th Power, But Not Worth a Dime

10^{20 is a really big number.  It is , I am told, equivalent to 100 quintillion.  In 1946, Hungary circulated a banknote in this amount, which has the dubious distinction of being the highest currency denomination ever issued for general use.  Next to that, Zimbabwe's 100 billion note is small change, though that is cold comfort for those enduring stratospheric hyperinflation.} 

Sacred Cow, Hold the Fries

If Jesus can appear in the tinted glass of a hardware store, why not the name of Allah in boiled beef?

"Diners have been flocking to a restaurant in northern Nigeria to see pieces of meat which the owner says are inscribed with the name of Allah.

What looks like the Arabic word for God and the name of the prophet Muhammad were discovered in pieces of beef by a diner in Birnin Kebbi.

He was about to eat it, when he suddenly noticed the words in the gristle, the restaurant owner said."

He mooves in mysterious ways.

Who Wants to be a Billionaire (in Zimbabwe)?

The BBC reports that Zimbabwe has just introduced a Z$100,000,000 note, which thanks to hyperinflation is not enough to buy a meal, assuming there is food to be had.

"Some Zimbabweans are already calling for higher denominations in a country where the official annual inflation rate has exceeded 2,200,000%...

...Nowadays, for my expenses a day, I need about Z$500 billion," one resident said.

"So Z$100 billion can't do anything because for me to go home I need Z$250 billion, so this [note] is worthless."

I can remember when the largest bank notes were $20, and trading 6 for 1 USD.