Walking the Berkshires

Old Time Religion

Here it is the longest night of the year.  By rights as a long-lapsed neo-pagan (an orientation I flirted with in my neo-hippie days, back during the neophyte decade of my 20s), I should kindle a Yule log, make wild music and raise (multiple) horns of usquebaugh to the winter stars.  I did that, once, with the Waters of the Brandywine Grove of New Reformed Druids, and must say that any religion that has single malt as its sacrament has at least one undeniable good point.

We will worship like the Druids, Drinking strange fermented fluids, Running naked through the woo-ids, Coz that's good enough for me!

But while that Old Time Religion has its charms, it doesn't do for everyday.  Though before you take my disavowal too seriously, check out the Greenman who presides over this blog.  That is hardly a jolly old elf I've chosen as my avatar.  There is no white to those feral eyes.  And anyone who has attended as many Renaissance faires in full garb as I have - and who was a known associate of witches while living the life of what at Bryn Mawr (women's) College was colloquially referred to as a "Bryn Man" - has a healthy streak of the heathen going despite protestations to the contrary.  The point is, the spirit moves in mysterious ways.  There, now I've scuttled my chances at that Senate bid.  One less thing for us all to worry about.

In any case, a couple of weekends ago the family traveled to Turners Falls, Massachusetts to watch my cousin Margaret and her three children perform Welcome Yule with the local community revels.  I think Morris dancing has a lot to recommend it, particularly as done with clacking caribou antlers, and I have a fondness for singing wassail and the minor keys of medieval carols.  The performance of "On This Day Earth Shall Ring" by a willowy masked contralto was hauntingly done.  Elias was a bit unnerved by the blue woaded woodwoses - and who wouldn't be - but his sister heard the siren call of the theater and is drawn to the stage like nutmeg to eggnog. The cousins were enchanting and a grand time was had by all.

I like my religion in small doses of high ceremony.  Give me a vaulted cathedral where my tenor note hangs in the frosty air from choir to nave. For me the leaping lord of the dance and the rumble of the 5th Avenue subway beneath St. Thomas Church during the service of lessons and carols.  I'll take Linus reciting the King James Gospel to re-right the Christmas pageant derailed by consumerism.  Give me a bit of magic and mystery, though I despair of ever having true Faith.

Blessings on you all at the turning of the year.  And now for some mead.

Little Cabin in the Woods

Here is a shrine worthy of a pilgrimage, and a fews weeks ago my children and I did just that.  This one room cabin sits on a mound of shale above a braided stream on a hillside in eastern New York, and was for many years the site of boyhood adventure.  It was here that I and the neighborhood gang fought imaginary frontier skirmishes in our coonskin caps and dungarees.  The venerable log cabin sits back in the woods far enough from the road so that it might almost feel like a wilderness retreat, instead of being a mere 5 minute walk from my childhood home at Millbrook School.

The cabin was one of the original structures of the old Stevenson farm that formed the nucleus of the school when it was established seventy-five years ago.  It sat between the main farmhouse - what was to be the headmaster's residence and our home for 14 years - and the old dairy barn that would become a theater and student center with its cypress plank silo open to the elements.  Down the hill from the farmyard was an old red gristmill, built in 1862, and destined to become the school's first art classroom.  The other structures were moved or taken down when the boarding school was established, its quadrangles and Georgian brick laid out where hens once scratched and cows moved slowly from pasture to barn.

It seems odd to me now that a Hudson Valley Farm in the early 20th century would have a log cabin placed so prominently in its farmyard.  I remember a story concerning old farmer Stevenson and his wife and the fact that there were no windows on the cabin facing the farmhouse.  Each structure shared one distinctive feature often found in the architecture of the region - a pair of Dutch doors that divided laterally so that the top half could be opened while the lower remained shut.  I liked to imagine the farmer sitting on the stoop of his barnyard refuge, out of sight but still in earshot of his wife calling from the farmhouse door.

Be that as it may, there was just as little use for an old log cabin at the new boarding school as there was for it at a New York dairy farm, so the butts of its logs were given painted numbers, the field stone fireplace was dismantled, and the whole affair relocated and resurrected by the schoolboys and their masters on a hillside just beyond the campus pale.  Here it was reoriented to face East and the other Dutch door, symbolically if not in actual fact reconciling the shades of farmer and wife.

One of the best spur of the moment impulses I could have as a teenager home on school vacation was to spend a night camped out in the cabin.  This was particularly attractive to me and my friend Rob Stowell as a good thing to do over winter vacation when we had the campus virtually to ourselves. We'd gather sleeping bags, wool socks, slabs of bacon, decks of cards and six packs of beer and walk out into the woods where the moon cast blue shadows on the snow.   Much of our time was spent getting the wood stove to draw and the air temperature sufficiently warm so that we could deal the cards without our gloves on.  The wind would blunt its fury on the thick log walls before finding its way through the chinks, and in the morning the windowpanes - those we had not been forced to patch with tape and newspaper - would be glazed with ice from our respiration.

The place is likely deemed an "attractive nuisance" today, a place for teenagers to misbehave and get into trouble.  Back in the mid 1980's, my father permitted one of the Millbrook students to renovate the cabin, and this young man spent school vacations for much of a year putting his carpentry skills to good use. The cabin got a new roof, loft and deck out of the bargain, and a young man looking for his niche found a sense of purpose.  When Emily and Elias and I visited the cabin for the first time since I left Millbrook in 1990, it seemed as if in the intervening years it had seen no further maintenance.  The Dutch door was gone and the plywood replacement hung open on its broken hinges.

It was, if anything, even more shabby and decrepit than I remembered from my youth, but my children soon swept away whatever melancholy I entertained at its fate.  The quickly set up house, finding a broom to sweep the leaves and dust about with and clambering excitedly up to the loft.  They were suitably impressed when I said I had once slept up there and asked why we hadn't brought our own sleeping bags this time.  I found the scattered pages of a neglected sign-in book and left our names in the register.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the woods and fields of my childhood wilderness.  At the site of what my father used to insist was an old Indian burial ground, we discovered a fort built in the shape of a wigwam by the current generation of faculty kids.  Further on I pointed out a copse of trees in a hayfield and asked them to puzzle out why the farmer left them standing and didn't just cultivate the whole area.  As we approached, I showed them the cellar hole I knew we'd find there, and the overgrown lilac bushes and wild apples in among the Black Locust trees that are telltale signs of former habitation.

It's not every day that a father gets to conjure the past so successfully for his offspring, and particularly in a place where we have several generations of family tenure.  My grandfather was the first classics and music instructor at the school, and my father was a student there and in later years its headmaster.  Every place we visit, my children map the landscape in their minds through the stories we tell. 

"Remember that big tree that was hit by lightning?"

"Here is the place where I first saw a bobcat." 

"That was Pop's house when he was a boy." 

"There is the log cabin in the woods where I played Davy Crockett, long ago."

Merry Mountaineers on a "Magnificent and Awful Precipice"

Appropriately for this blog, I actually went walking the Berkshires recently.  The scale and scope of this whole thing has ranged farther afield than originally contemplated, but while I like the mix that has emerged - and apparently so do a considerable number of you, dear readers - it felt good to get back to my roots and take a ramble to one of my old Berkshire haunts and this time I had my children for company.

Emily and Elias are at that magical age when they like nothing better than a tromp through the woods and are too exited about the adventure to ask to be carried.  At six and three they are curious about the world around them and able to hike considerable distances, but this was the first time I tested our mutual endurance by suggesting we climb Monument Mountain, an eminence of gleaming quartz rising steeply above the village of Housatonic midway between Great Barrington and Stockbridge Massachusetts and affording panoramic views of 4 states. 

It was a cold November day but the sky was clear and there was little wind.  Throwing together a picnic lunch and a few essentials, we set out to climb the mountain and feast on its craggy summit.  A couple of key omissions were soon discovered - notably that Emily's gloves had remained behind - but as you can see in this photograph my big black ones served her as mittens.  My "garlic mustard patrol" cap, awarded for Best Invasive Species-related Post by the Invasive Species Weblog, was likewise commandeered by my daughter to ward off that low angle sunlight, but these minor difficulties addressed by stoic paternal sacrifice we continued our journey without further delay or mishap.

Monument Mountain is a Berkshire treasure, conserved and stewarded since the 1899 through  ownership by The Trustees of Reservations, one of America's first land trusts.  The mountain is the dominant feature of this landscape and has a storied past. It once had a cairn of stones from which it derives its name, a monument erected slowly over time by the native peoples of this region.  Local luminary William Cullen Bryant obscured its origins in his 1824 poem "Monument Mountain" with romantic imaginings about the grave of an Indian maiden who hurled herself from the cliffs out of unrequited love.  Bryant may have gotten his history wrong, but nearly 200 years later his poem does manage to convey something of the feel of this remarkable place:

"...Sheer to the vale go down the bare old cliffs,--
Huge pillars, that in middle heaven upbear
Their weather-beaten capitals, here dark
With the thick moss of centuries, and there
Of chalky whiteness where the thunderbolt
Has splintered them. It is a fearful thing
To stand upon the beetling verge, and see
Where storm and lightning, from that huge gray wall,
Have tumbled down vast blocks, and at the base
Dashed them in fragments, and to lay thine ear
Over the dizzy depth, and hear the sound
Of winds, that struggle with the woods below,
Come up like ocean murmurs. But the scene
Is lovely round; a beautiful river there
Wanders amid the fresh and fertile meads,
The paradise he made unto himself,
Mining the soil for ages. On each side
The fields swell upward to the hills; beyond,
Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise
The mighty columns with which earth props heaven..."

Other Berkshire authors have made mountain excursions here, none more famously than Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who first met on a picnic on Monument Mountain in the early 1850's.  Hawthorne's publisher, James T. Fields, recalled that Melville "bestrode a peaked rock, which ran out like a bowsprit, and pulled and hauled imaginary ropes for our delectation."  An earlier sojourner, Rev. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale University, visited the Berkshires in 1798 and recorded these impression of the mountain:

"After passing the ridge of the mountain, the country on the north opens beautifully to the eye of a traveler.  The mountain itself extends on its eastern front a magnificent and awful precipice, formed by ragged, perpendicular cliffs of white quartz, and rising immediately west of the road between five and six hundred feet.  Beyond it spreads the valley of the Housatonic, here running for several miles from east to west, and the fine hills by which it is bordered.  In the valley and on the hills, the farms and houses ornament the landscape, while a variety of mountains by which the whole scene is encircled to the eye finish the view."

From its jagged summit - the Devil's Pulpit - one looks out over the Housatonic Valley between the Berkshire and Taconic Ranges and across to the Catskills.  This photograph, facing north, overlooks Stockbridge with Mount Greylock, highest point in Massachusetts, visible near the horizon more than 40 miles distant with Vermont's Green Mountains just beyond.  It is a very steep climb over 600 feet of elevation gain, but Emily and Elias managed to make it to the top after little more than a hour.

There were waterfalls to watch spilling over stones and dashing down clefts in the mountainside.  We found acorns with missing caps and birch trees perched above the ghosts of their nurse logs.  We learned to name the trees by their bark alone, and heard the throaty rasp of a crow in the pines. 

We clambered up the rocks, Elias holding my hand but still keeping pace with his mountain goat of a sister, and triumphantly ate our picnic where the great authors did before us, flushed with the excitement of our accomplishment.  We took the longer, more gradual descent down the western side of the mountain, gazing up from time to time and wondering aloud; "Did we really climb all the way up there?"  This was the first of a series of hikes we three took together that week, accumulating confidence and memories with every step and learning the stories the land has to tell.

"Step Right Up!"

A few carnivals of note this past week:

Leading off at the top of the order, The Carnival of Baseball Blogs  had its second edition and is off to a promising start.  Given the winter we've been having in the Northeastern US, it could well be time for spring training.

The History Carnival was at Acephalous this week, and featured a post by my friend Lars Smith on Johnny Appleseed's Business Model.  It wasn't all flour sack shirts and tin pot hats for this early American entrepreneur, and Americans liked their apples hard and wet.

The early modern edition of Carnivalesque deconstructs the cavalry charge and shows that despite what modern historians may believe, it was not all "shock and awe".  I could have told them that given my brief and inglorious history in a troop of Confederate horse.

Fuss and Feathers and a Murder of Crows

Add roosting crows to the growing list of modern inconveniences.    Crow complaints are on the rise, joining white-tailed deer, pigeons, squirrels, rats, skunks, raccoons, mice, moles, spiders and numerous other species that have taken advantage of niches provided by human habitat and made pests of themselves thereby.  Gregarious American crows give particular offense in some upstate New York communities where they have had the effrontery to establish communal roosts, fillings trees with their unlovely forms by the tens of thousands and carrying on after hours when decent folk are trying to sleep.

Oneonta, New York has been dealing with these uncouth avians since the late 1990s.  According to a 1998 article in The Daily Star, the crows in these parts have been raising quite a ruckus.

"It is a big nuisance if you sleep with your windows open," said Scott Van Arsdale, wildlife technician with the state Department of Environmental Conservation office in Stamford."

They have also caused damage to private property.  One Oneonta resident, Justine Diaz, reports that

"crows, along with skunks, feasted on grubs in the front yard until damage was so severe the lawn had to be reseeded at a cost of about $500. 'I think it was more the grubs' fault than the crows...They're birds. ... I just figured they were part of the flora and fauna — like deer."

Indeed.  But lest we make too much light of these aggravations, with each succeeding year there has been an escalation in the conflict over crows.  The City of Albany has requested non-lethal assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to discourage the birds from roosting.

The Business Review (Albany) reported on December 15th that:

"The non-lethal methods will include the use of pyrotechnics, electronic guards, lasers and amplified recorded crow distress calls.

The control methods will be used between 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. and from 3:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. City officials said residents in the area may be aware of the lasers, pyrotechnics and amplified crow distress calls."

Presumably these early morning noises are less objectionable than those made by the crows and more in keeping with the natural sounds of the urban environment.

Lest you think that the crows have no champions, no lesser body than Citizens of New York State Against Crows' Harassment (CNYSACA) petitioned Governor George Pataki to stop crow relocation efforts and even more sinister plans for baiting and poisoning crows refusing to vacate.  After expressing their opposition to the use of tax dollars to harass crows, they admonished the Governor to

"[p]lease remember that the “real threat” to our society is not the crows, but rather, terrorist attacks (internal and external), and the loss of moral values in all areas of our society, where school age children shoot and kill each other, and corporations misappropriate their employees retirement funds, leaving them penniless overnight."

Another group forthrightly called Save the Crows campaigns to stop crow shoots and efforts they claim have been made by New York authorities to circumvent the Federal Migratory Bird Act. 

I am well aware that wildlife management is a serious business, and doubtless having many thousands of crows as your neighbors presents challenges not mentioned in press reports.  I suspect there are concerns in some quarters about nutrient loading from increased guano deposits and fears of a depressing effect on property values.  And to be frank, most people don't consider crows exactly cute. If this were about a mob of parrots, you wouldn't hear all this nonsense from urbanites about pyrotechnics and distress calls. 

Still, they've got nothing on vultures, which are also communal roosters and flock to my town by the thousands when nighttime shadows fall.  The only fireworks you'll see around here are on the 4th of July.

'Tis the Season

I have always loved this family photograph, although I cannot say for certain who these people are.  They are my Grandma Clara Abbott's family, almost certainly Livingstons, and the fellow dead center in the tobaggon bears a close resemblance to my Gr-great grandfather Walter Livingston who was boss of a coal yard in Newburgh, New York in the 1890s.  With those thick mechanic's mustaches it is hard to distinguish one from the other.

The expressions on these dapper downhill dare-devils are priceless - the two gentlemen on the two seater sled seem particularly droll. The assortment of late 19th century hats and outerwear suggests a Sunday outing.   In fact, this may be one of the earliest examples of that stalwart Christmas tradition, the posed family photograph.  Whoever they are, I hope they enjoyed the end of their run as much as they appear to have enjoyed mugging for the camera at mid-slope.

These three urchins are my Great Grandfather William Livingston (at right) and his younger brothers Frank (at left) and Clarence.  The photographer's studio reproduced a winter setting for this photograph: a badly scratched tintype from the late 1880s. I actually repaired some of the damage digitally - otherwise Uncle Frank's face would have been pocked beyond recognition. 

Winter's monochrome palette lends itself to the medium of early photography.  There is a sweetness in the image of these little boys, solemnly bundled up in a faux winter wonderland. One hopes they will partake in the gaiety of the overdressed sledding party when they step outside the studio and that it is not blistering summer instead.

"What a Walloon!"

The next time you are playing that ever popular parlor game; "Name five famous Belgians" - I usually get stuck after Jean Claude Van Damme and Plastic Bertrand - spare a thought for Yves Thiran, the "Orson Welles of Wallonia", who as head of news at a Belgian public television aired a fake broadcast on Wednesday reporting that the Dutch-speaking half of the nation had declared independence.  Thiran claims the mock broadcast, which featured real political figures and reportedly took a year to make, was intended to stimulate broader public debate on the important topic of the possible consequences of Flemish separatism.   

It was also, by all accounts, a botched ratings bid that managed to outrage Belgians of all political persuasions who were duped by the newscast with its scenes of crowds waving the Black Lion of Flanders in the streets and their King being spirited away to the airport and parts unknown.

“Irresponsible,” “questionable” and “regrettable” were among the reactions from Belgium’s political mainstream in both French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders after a fictional report that Flanders had declared independence.

Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt’s office described the program as a “misplaced joke.”

Now where have we heard that before?

If you are still working on coming up with five famous Belgians, here are 259 of them.  Plus Thiran.

My Last Dutchman

Here's a fellow who was much more in evidence before majority rule came to South Africa.  The noble curls and high collar of Jan van Riebeeck, first Dutch commander of the Cape of Good Hope, graced the banknotes of South Africa from the late 1950s until 1993, when his image was replaced by portraits of native wildlife.  This bill was the last 5 Rand bill (it and all smaller denominations have been replaced with coins), issued in 1990. 

The South African Rand was legal tender in Namibia after its Independence in 1990 and the Namibian Dollar is still linked to that currency.  Namibia has put a nationalist hero of its own on its bills, Hendrick Witbooi, Captain of the /Khowesin or Witbooi Nama, and the strongest adversary to German colonial rule in Namibia.  You can find his biography by scrolling down here.

Not So Funny Money

It is a felony offense to leave Zimbabwe with bills like these.  A country with a trade imbalance as severe as Zimbabwe's and 4 digit inflation hoards its currency.  This series of bills is from the 1983 print run, in the first years of Zimbabwean Independence when it was valued at or near the USA dollar.  When I last visited Zimbabwe in 1997, the official exchange rate was 10 Zim Dollars to the USD.  Prior to revaluation, the actual value of a Zimbabwe dollar was less than 1/100,000th of a single US greenback.

So this is worthless currency, but beautiful in its own way.  A great deal of national pride and hope went into the designs on these bills, which feature national treasures and the once abundant wildlife of this troubled land.  Featured on the obverse of these old notes are Cape Buffalo, Burchell's Zebra, Sable Antelope and Giraffe. 

At the time they were printed, these were the only denominations. 

Rescuing Wetlands Close to Home

The title of this post is also the title of a new book produced by the Trust for Public Land highlighting stories from private landowners around New England who are passionate about wetlands conservation and restoration.  I encountered a copy while at a corporate retreat last week and much to my surprise and delight found two of my neighbors featured prominently.  Ben and Matthew Freund have a 350 acre dairy farm in East Canaan, CT where they have been conservation innovators and stewards of long standing in a valley where scenic viewsheds, significant water resources, rich agricultural land, rock and gravel mining and mixed residential and commercial development commingle in the shadow of Canaan Mountain.  The Freunds have conserved much of their farm and are actively engaged in protecting the Blackberry River, a tributary of the Housatonic that defines their narrow valley.

Shrewd promoters as well as dedicated conservationists, the Freund's website features not only their farm market but projects like CowPots™, made from dehydrated, composted cow manure and scheduled to be featured on Discovery Channel's "DIRTY JOBS" in a program to air early next year.  Their neighbors may smile but they take the need to manage agricultural nutrients seriously.  According to the Wetlands book; "The Freunds and seven neighboring farms have formed a cooperative to find better ways to manage their manure and to transform the extra nutrients into profit."  Given that nutrient loading is a major source of environmental degradation in our sweetwater wetlands and the Blackberry is lined with dairy farms, this is welcome news.