Walking the Berkshires

Sign of the Times

The Nature Conservancy and Sheffield Land Trust are selling Tatkon House in Sheffield MA.  This property  was gifted by Carol Tatkon on her death in 1997 to The Nature Conservancy, to be jointly shared with Sheffield Land Trust.  It also came with more than 40 acres and an operating endowment.  In 2003, the building was expanded to include a wing with numerous offices.  At that time, there were nine TNC staff working from Tatkon House.  There has been considerable downsizing since then.

The building is being sold with 20 acres (18 of which will have a conservation easement).  There is a yellow birch on the property that I planted over the ashes of our stillborn daughter.  There is a vernal pool that brims with wood frogs and yellow spotted salamanders in early Spring. 

I have no doubt that TNC and Sheffield Land Trust have minimized the environmental impact on the surrounding protected lands by limiting development to the area surrounding the existing structure, but it is a sad situation. 

Times change, and priorities shift.  TNC previously sold land it owned in Sheffield this past May to a neighbor, which is its right so long as the terms under which it was acquired do not preclude its sale without restriction to a non-conservation owner. It also sold the house that went with it for a 32% loss over its 1996 purchase price.  I trust that TNC kept a good account of these transaction details, and had the property appraised so that as a charitable non profit it would not make a sale to a private individual that was below current value.

I hope TNC and Sheffield Land Trust decide to honor the conservation intent of the donor of Tatkon House and use the proceeds of an eventual sale to protect other significant lands in Sheffield.

Pine Nut Shortage Threatens Pesto Production

This is the time of year when I consider that my opportunities to harvest my basil plants are fast dwindling with the likely onset of frost.  I pull the great, woody stems and bushy green foliage up by the roots and proceed to the plucking and pureeing stages of putting by pesto for the winter.  There is nothing quite as satisfying as several quarts of the stuff ready to enliven a bleak midwinter.  All you need are olive oil, basil leaves, hard cheese, and pine nuts.  But this year, pine nuts are very hard to come by.

I first became away of a pine nut shortage when there were none to be had in the bulk food section of the local co-op and specialty markets.  When the major chain stores stopped carrying them either, or had tiny 2 ounce bottles for $8, I realized something was dreadfully wrong. A friend who runs a wonderful liquor store and deli in Great Barrington was only able to purchase pine nuts wholesale if he bought 20 pounds (at $26/pound instead of $18).  He set aside a pound for us, but in the meantime, I have been forced to use walnuts, or experiment with hazelnuts, in my pesto sauce.

What is going on?  It turns out that virtually all the world's pine nut production, along with so many other labor intensive activities, is concentrated in China.  Pignoliphiles bemoan the "second-rate taste" of these nuts over those from the Mediterranean, and there is even a phenomenon called pine mouth attributed to tainted Chinese pine nuts that may be suppressing demand from a market that constitutes 90% of the  pine nut imports to the US.  

At the moment not even the off-putting Chinese sort is making it to our market shelves in any great numbers.  Meanwhile the European varieties have doubled in price, due perhaps to the strength of the Euro, or maybe to something environmentally out of balance that is affecting the wild pines.  A crop failure?  Unsustainable forestry practices in Russia and the Far East?  Increased demand and poor production? Some kind of recall of tainted nuts from China?  Climate change?  Rumors abound.

The Chicago Tribute identifies the main causes as follows:

The reasons are several — poor crops, increased demand and the ever-popular climate change. And prospects for a turnaround aren't good.

The domestic version of pine nuts comes from the West and Southwest, produced by the pinyon pine. The vast majority of pine nuts, though, are imported from China. There have been problems in both locations.

"(China) had a pretty terrible crop last year," said David Braverman, one of the owners of nutsonline.com, a New Jersey business that has been dealing in nuts since 1929. "They lost a significant amount of the crop. And in addition, the demand in China was higher than it has ever been. So they cut their exports. A poor crop coupled with the high demand, and there was very little to go around."

The problem in the U.S. can be blamed on climate change, according to Dayer LeBaron, the CEO of wholesalepinenuts.com, a Utah-based family business that has been harvesting pine nuts since the late '50s.

...The result, LeBaron said, is that prices of domestically produced pine nuts have increased 200 percent in the last five years; imported nut prices have jumped between 800 and 1,000 percent....

In any case, there is more going on with pine nuts than just a paucity of perfect pesto.  And I am going to have to learn to love it without them.

Fall Food

The harvest is mostly in, at least in my garden, where all that remains are some sunflowers and several enormous basil plants that are destined for pesto if I beat the frost.  The air is clean and clear and very dry, despite some overnight rain a few days ago.  The rivers are very low, and the leaves are steadily turning across the landscape beyond the poplars, swamp maples and individually stressed trees that lead off the season.  We will need some rain, and soon, to bring out the full vibrancy of the maples, but then, grumbling about the color prospects is a venerable New England tradition, right up there with grousing about the weather.

I have switched over to consuming locally pressed sweet cider as my drink of preference - soft rather than hard, nor yet as what my grandfather called a 'stone fence" when mixed with rye whiskey.  I am working through a second gallon of unpasteurized cider from Windy Hill Farm in Great Barrington, and will head over to Sharon son to see if Ellsworth's has any of the late season white peaches that are so marvelous at the end of summer.  There is little I like better than cider donuts and sweet cider on a brisk Autumn day, unless it is the crackle of leaves underfoot and the scent of woodsmoke.  On a bright, clear day in late September there is truly nothing finer.

I have my eye out for roadside foraging opportunities as I travel through the Litchfield Hills.  I found a great mass of Sulfur Shelf mushroom a couple of weeks ago and am hoping for more.  I would be delighted to find more Shaggy Manes on our street as I did a couple of years back, or even Giant Puffballs or Lobster mushrooms.  Fall foraging tides me over until it is time once again to get out my taps and pails as the sap starts to stir in late Winter.  I still have in mind a great batch of wild grape jelly, and have my pruning clippers and several garbage bags in my car in case I come across a particularly well laden vine or two.

The Self Inflicted Wound

A dear friend wrote to me recently about the anguish she felt over the oil that continues to inundate the heart of the sea.  She is a brilliant poet, and one who looks squarely at the horrors of the body and soul, but she also is a person of action and feels helpless in the face of this heartsickness.  She is a writer, as am I, so this is what I wrote in reply.

"Sometimes it takes a self inflicted wound to halt the bleeding.  I think of those "relief wells" inching their way through the seabed, and it almost feels like using a lancet to release bad humors in those days when western medicine and modern science knew little of each other.  Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood.  The body out of balance. 

We are shockingly primitive in our modern response to what our greedy delving has released.  It is like Tolkein's Balrog of Moria that awoke when the dwarves went too deep after their mithril.  It took Gandalf's death and rebirth to quench its flame.  It will require something like that of us as well.

Tolkien the lover of Trees also understood the sadness of the elves who outlived all else that they loved, who knew the ancient oaks from acorns and saw whole forests heedlessly destroyed to satisfy the consumptive now.  The Scouring of the Shire is for me the most important part of the Lord of the Rings.

The more we look unflinchingly at the horror of this house of grimy cards, the more we insist never again, the better chance we have that some positive lessons can be learned.  As for the wounded sea, the irreplaceable losses and the long term scars, sometimes the best we can do is bear witness, to tell their stories, to feel and to weep and to give tongue to grief.  The real healing happens over spans of time beyond human years, although it is amazing what resilience is possible from decade to decade. 

Consider the dramatic change in status of so many birds, including Brown pelicans, threatened with extinction by DDT and now recovering in its absence.  The harp seals that now haul out on the beach at Windrock when before the Marine Mammal Protection Act they were heedlessly slaughtered.  The quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink which when you were growing up was fouled and disregarded. 

We cannot sit by and say in a thousand years the earth will cleanse itself of the outrages we inflict on it.  There is a small comfort in knowing that geologic time is measured in millions while we encompass decades, but we only learn through telling and bearing witness, and a poet with your heart and depth of love for the ocean is the right person at the right time to give expression and meaning to this self inflicted wound."

The Clouds Wept for Sabina (and the Sun Shines).

A young woman named Sabina was beaten, raped and murdered outside her home in north central Philadelphia last week.  As of today, there have been 28 homicides and 80 rapes recorded in Philadelphia this year, devastating to love ones and wrenching to communities.  As I write, hundreds if not thousands of people have gathered for a memorial send off for Sabina in the community-owned park and gardens called Liberty Lands, among them several who are very dear to me and are very involved in organizing the event. 

Local businesses, friends and neighbors have raised over $40,000 for Sabina, including $25,000 as a reward for the apprehension of her killer.  They have flown her family from Hawa'ai and will cover the memorial and funeral expenses.  They are looking out for each other the way sometimes happens in small towns and closely knit neighborhoods,which is what the Northern Liberties section of the city is today thanks to more than a decade of extraordinary grassroots locally-driven urban renewal.

The few young urban pioneers who put down roots in what was in the early 1990s a blighted region of abandoned industrial sites and decaying tenements came to invest in the neighbors as well as the neighborhood.  One of my friends who moved here at that time says they took a practical approach to building community in what was then a virtual combat zone.  They decided that they would support a single strip club that worked with the community and actively oppose any others.  They had no parks so they created some.  They organized.  And things began to change.

The real estate boom that peaked in 2007 absolutely transformed property values and attracted upscale residences and businesses, but many long-term residents remain.  The area is a mosaic, a patchwork of colors and textures, of building up and coming down, but it is vibrant and it is not on life support.  It is safe to park on the street.  But it is still not safe for a young woman to ride her bicycle home alone at night.

Sabina Rose O'Donnell technically lived in an adjacent neighborhood in North Philadelphia, but that does not matter to the many people from far and wide who are bravely bearing witness to her murder and celebrating her life today.  She was by all accounts a vibrant and much loved young person who moved freely through these neighborhoods until the night of her death,  and she loved Liberty Lands.  I am deeply moved by the massive show of support from so many there today, and very very proud of what they have done and continue to do. 

The clouds wept for Sabina yesterday, and now there is sunlight in the Northern Liberties.  In spite of everything.  And because of everyone.

Sylvan and Scholarly Settings

I managed to visit three colleges last weekend while at my Haverford reunion, including side trips to Bryn Mawr and Swat.  All three are blessed with gorgeous buildings and stunning trees.  Haverford and Swarthmore in particular are renowned for their arborita.  I was always aware while an undergraduate at the 'Ford that we had a glorious campus with huge stately trees, but only now that I am a conservation professional do I have a full appreciation of what it means to see a Mossy Cup oak that is nearly seven feet in diameter at breast height, or a descendant of the Penn Treaty Elm that was planted in the 1860s and has a nearly complete perimeter of branches that sweep the ground.

Haverford also has its quirky statuary.   I am fondest of the marble gargoyle climbing structure carved during the Spring of 1990 by Haverford students under the instruction of fellow Alum Peter Rockwell.

 

 

"Cannon To the Left of Them, Cannon in Front..."

The quest for revolutionary war Salisbury Cannon took me to the waters of the Brandywine and the fields of Valley Forge last weekend.  At the former I found nothing beside three European gun barrels inside the sadly depleted museum - a victim of state budget cuts- though I did find my way to the "Plowed Hill" where my Ogden and Dayton ancestors held the line in Stirling's Division against the British and Hessian onslaught.  However on Sunday a friend and I struck gold, or rather what was occasionally gold painted iron, at Valley Forge.

I made an effort to slip loose the surely bonds of gender and ask for directions at the visitor center, only to be informed by the official I had selected that there were no American made revolutionary cannon at the National Historical Park, nor yet any cannon at all for that matter.  My companion commented that had I selected one of the young, buzzcut rangers instead of the sedentary fellow at the tourist information desk, I might have gotten a different response - gender fail - but as it turned out we needn't have been discouraged because the place is swimming in artillery of a decidedly locally made character.

We came upon the 3 gun battery in the picture above at a redan near where Conway's Division encamped  in the winter of 1777-1778, and determined that they were of two different calibers (4 or 6 pounders, perhaps) and at least one was a wooden replica (at right), which I believe rules it out as a Salisbury survivor.  We ate our lunch and as we wove our way along one way roads through he part on various genealogical errands as well as on the look out for more guns we found many more iron cannon, ranging from light artillery to siege guns and mortars.

I wanted to pay a visit to the Washington Memorial Chapel, when my ancestor Thaddeus Thompson was said to have had a memorial tablet placed by his daughter Rhoda, one of the last real daughters of the Revolution still alive near the end of the 19th century.  We asked after it at the gift shop, and while the volunteers there were initially uncertain whether we would find anything, I was able to say I thought it would be in the chapel itself and sure enough, it was one of just two large brass plaques in gothic script on either wall and had been polished by our guide without her really knowing its history!  Old Thaddeus was just one of thousands of men who endured that winter, and was later wounded in the trenches at Yorktown and one of the first veterans to receive a pension for his injuries after the war.  Whatever pull his daughter Rhoda had as one of the last tangible links to that era got him his solitary plaque on the church wall.

At the site of Knox's artillery park were a number of 4-9 pounders arranged on their gun carriages and painted a flat yellow in imitation of bronze although they all were of iron.  I am analyzing my images to see whether there are any patterns which will help us determine which batches may have come from the same foundry.  I found few distinguishing marks, though one large cannon by the Chapel had what looked like 20 C engraved just before the vent.

We also came upon a monument to Maxwell's New Jersey Brigade, with my ancestors Matthias Ogden in command of the 1st and Elias Dayton in charge of the 3rd NJ regiments.  The bronze soldier atop the pedestal is wrapped in a blanket and seems to be wearing woolen stockings.

The enemy never attacked Valley Forge, which is today besieged by an invasive sea of microstegium and excessive herbivory by white tailed deer but is treasured as open space by joggers and sunbathers.  I had an absolutely delightful time, even if the answer "Yes, we have no artillery" proved unfounded.

High in the Highlands

I was on top of Mohawk Mountain yesterday, and despite the road to the summit I had the view to myself.  This is looking south across Cornwall toward Warren and Kent, CT.  I was there to take pictures in support of a submission for funding under the federal Highlands Conservation Act in FY2012.  I believe the forested and scenic character of the landscape is pretty compelling.

Here is the view looking north and north west toward Massachusetts and New York.  With a picnic table for each view shed, I wish I had brought my lunch.

 

Berkshires' Big Dig

(This article first appeared in the Winter 2008-2009 issue of Massachusetts Main Streets & Back Roads.)

The Berkshire Hills and rugged Taconics are merely roots of ancient ranges far greater in stature than the rounded crests of today.  Uplifted by clashing continents, these mountains rose and wore away over a period of tens of millions of years.  The resulting geological record in western New England is a trove of folded rock and minerals transformed by tremendous heat and pressure.  Worn down to hard nubs, cracked by ice and scoured by glaciers, our mountains are now shadows of their former selves.

 

As ramparts go, these diminished ranges remain formidable impediments, dictating the patterns of travel and settlement in the Berkshires since the first Neolithic hunters occupied the tundra lands the ice relinquished.  The rivers of our region, with their narrow intervals and fertile bottomland, only rarely breach the mountain chains running north and south on either side.  There are just a few gaps and saddles between the ridges to accommodate east-west travel.  Anyone who has driven the switchback of the Mohawk Trail from North Adams to Florida is keenly aware that these mountains are still an impressive barrier.

 

Early travelers through the region found the going very hard indeed between the Connecticut River and the Hudson.  In 1694, it took one colonial delegation three days to travel the “Great Road” between Springfield, Massachusetts and Kinderhoek, New York in a party that included 60 Connecticut dragoons and spent nights sleeping rough in huts of pine boughs.  Commissioner for Massachusetts the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth described the road as “very woody, rocky, mountainous, swampy; extream (sic) bad riding it was…a hideous, howling wilderness.”  This ancient path would later serve as a military road during the French and Indian War, and witness the passage to Boston of the guns of Ticonderoga and the surrendered regiments of Burgoyne’s Saratoga army.  

 

With our Independence from Great Britain came the defeat and dispossession of the Iroquois, whose influence and proximity had served as a check on the expansion of Algonquian settlements in the Berkshires even before the arrival of European colonists. With the fertile western lands of the Iroquois now open, it wasn’t long before men of ambition and ingenuity started to hatch plans to expand commerce by piercing the mountains between New England and New York.  In 1819 an idea was hatched to connect Albany and Boston by canal, and a route for this venture was even surveyed through the northern Berkshires in the mid-1820s before the scheme stalled on the flanks of Hoosac Mountain and was abandoned for being too costly.

 

When railroads supplanted canals as the modern means of transport, a northern route through the Berkshires once again was proposed as a way of linking the mill towns of central and western Massachusetts.  Climbing westward up the Deerfield River valley, the Troy & Greenfield Line would have to cut through the Hoosac Mountain to reach North Adams.  In 1852 an attempt to bore through the mountain was made using the extremely expensive Wilson’s Patented Stone-Cutting Machine, that managed to burrow a dozen feet into the rock before it seized up for good. 

 

Four years and millions of dollars later, the Troy & Greenfield Line secured the service and investment of Herman Haupt as its chief contractor.  The project was now one of the greatest engineering efforts of its day – a tunnel four and a half miles long through the heart of Hoosac Mountain - and Haupt was one of the most brilliant engineers available.  Politics and rival railroad interests, naturally, intervened, with Massachusetts ultimately abandoning its promise to provide funding to complete the work.  His reputation slandered and his fortune at risk, Haupt was commissioned a Brigadier General in the early months of the Civil War and put in charge of railroad development for the war effort.  He was a tireless worker and his contributions were a major factor in maintaining the military superiority of the North, but he lost his investment in the Hoosac Tunnel project when Troy & Greenfield defaulted on its mortgage and was taken over by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

 

Stuart Murray, author of A Time of War which details the history of Berkshire County and its citizens during the Civil War, describes the challenges facing our own “Big Dig” during this period.  “(I)t was difficult to find reliable workers because so many men were away at war.  Excavating the shaft, twenty feet wide and twenty-four feet high through the mica slate of Hoosac Mountain, required hundreds of laborers working long hours with hand-drill, pick and shovel.  Black powder blasted the rock apart, but explosions left dangerous cracks and unseen weaknesses that resulted in sudden collapses.  Men died regularly in rock falls.”  On October 17, 1867, 13 workers died in a gas explosion in the central shaft, earning it the name “the bloody pit.”

 

By 1868 miners were averaging 150 feet per month and rail lines extended from Troy and Boston to either side of the mountain.  On Thanksgiving Day, 1873, the final feet were cleared and a bevy of dignitaries and 500 assembled onlookers ceremoniously stepped through the 5 foot opening between the two ends of the tunnel.  The first trains would run in early 1875, with an official opening in July, 1876 coinciding with the nation’s centennial.

 

Today you can stand on a ridge overlooking the Deerfield and be unaware of the marvel of engineering beneath your feet.  A few freight trains pass through the tunnel daily, but in the Berkshire hill towns the need for connectivity is now about high speed internet access instead of railroads.  Our mountains are generally free from communications towers, resulting in gorgeous views as well as fragmented cellular service of dubious reliability, much like the “Great Road” of old.

Once and Future Holy Ground

During the American Revolution, the area in lower Manhattan now known as "Ground Zero" was then known as "Holy Ground".  This was a fire scarred district north and west of Broadway in the vicinity of St. Paul's Church - hence the name.  However, it was also a tongue in cheek reference, for it was at that time the largest red light district and open air brothel in North America.  Even before 1776, there were as many as 500 prostitutes on "Holy Ground."

When I was growing up during the later years of the Cold War and Nuclear Freeze movement, "Ground Zero" referred to the center of a hypothetical detonation of a nuclear weapon over a major city.  New York was almost always the illustrative case, with predictions of casualties and fall out from a direct strike on lower Manhattan extending four miles beyond a "Ground Zero".  Today, of course, Ground Zero has a different association in New York, but its linguistic roots come from the era of mutually assured destruction.

New York, more than any other United States city, builds on the ruins of its past.  All that remains of the notorious Sugar House prison where thousands of American P.O.W.s died during the Revolution is a small number of Holland bricks and two barred windows, one of which is not even at the original site.  The real estate that was once part of Holy Ground and now a hole in the ground is far too valuable to remain undeveloped, and far too imbued with modern meaning to be redeveloped insensitively.  For some, it is indeed sacred ground, and for many nearly a decade later it remains an open wound.

Abraham Lincoln understood the difference between where important events took place and the significance of what people did there;

"we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." 

Walt Whitman knew that the grass itself is not one thing but many, and sometimes "the beautiful uncut hair of graves." 

Although it is my profession to preserve land, and I understand the value of maintaining some places as they once were so that we who follow can connect with what transpired in that earlier time, even war graves lie beneath the city streets, and new buildings replace what might have been kept as shrines.  A symbol must stand for the whole, like the barred window of a colonial prison that people pass in their thousands every day without reflection. 

I once had the good fortune to sing with an American choir in Coventry, an industrial city in  the English Midlands that was  pulverized in an air raid that the British knew was coming but which they could not prevent without alerting the enemy that codes had been compromised.  More than 1,800 people were killed and wounded during the raid, and along with much of the city its cathedral became a bombed out shell.  A modern church was subsequently built, connected to the truncated columns and roofless walls and spire of the original medieval building, and the entire cathedral complex today is dedicated to reconciliation and remembrance.  There is a small museum in the lower level of the church that reconstructs the period of the Blitz, along with an interior of a bomb damaged house and its everyday contents covered in rubble, but nothing about the site is bitter.  There is a cross of charred beams in the ruined cathedral, and another of nails made from the roof lead that melted during the bombing, but no raised fist.

Coventry is not New York.  This conflict is not over.  But for all its dead the city is not a tomb, though the remains of the fallen will never be entirely recovered.  It is as alive as Whitman's grass and Lincoln's words, and it will take on many forms in the years to come.  We all have a stake in that future, but none an exclusive claim on what is carried forward.