Walking the Berkshires

Melville Marathon

Twenty minutes ago, the Melville Marathon got underway at Mystic Seaport.  All 135 chapters of Moby Dick take 24 hours to read aloud, culminating on Melville's birthday tomorrow.  Meanwhile at Melville's Berkshire home "Arrowhead" where he penned the classic novel, readings by Berkshire authors are sponsored by - who else - Starbucks, which for all of you non-English majors was also the name of the first mate on Ahab's whaler "Pequod."

The white whale at right is not a sperm whale but a humpback named Migaloo - the only documented albino humpback - which frequents the waters off Australia.

My favorite chapter in Moby Dick, incidentally, is #15 "Chowder".

"..Upon making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and said- "Clam or Cod?"

"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.

"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.

"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?" says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple shirt who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.

"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make a supper for us both on one clam?

However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits, and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.

We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look, Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?"

Family Archive Caption Contest #7

It occurs to me that the Family Archive Caption Contest, an intermittently recurring feature here at Walking the Berkshires, might prompt  even more of you to submit your witty commentary if there were some sort of tangible benefit to go along with the honor of having your caption selected as the winning entry.  Therefore, let it be known throughout the realms that winners of the contest will receive, direct by e-mail, a handsome and artfully designed certificate, suitable for framing, featuring the image of an archival photograph from my ancestral files and their very own award-winning caption prominently featured.  Yes, you could be the envy of your coworkers, classmates, or the other inmates in your cell block. All you need do is figure out the best way to...

Caption This!

(Previous winners will receive their certificates once I get around to designing them.)

Rocking Down the Ocean HiWay: 1956

In pre-Interstate America, heading down the coast to Florida was not a simple matter of driving hell-for-leather all through the night on congested I-95.  In the mid 1950s the interstates were coming - Ike had seen the light on the Autobahn - but the cities and states of America were linked by old turnpikes and country roads on which automobiles were lucky to reach high speeds for any length of time.

Still, the population was increasingly mobile and a combination of post-war prosperity that put more middle class families behind the wheel and the expansion of residential air conditioning made the steamy south suddenly look like an achievable paradise to real estate developers, and chambers of commerce all along the eastern seaboard rallied to promote their routes to the palm trees and warm sand as superior choices.

This 1956 promotional map of the "Ocean Hiway" was purchased by my grandfather, presumably for a trip to the sunny south.  The Hiway was not an interstate and except for the modern New Jersey Turnpike, the rest of the route was not a super highway but patched together from Rtes 13 and 17.  Its major selling points were touted in glowing terms:

" The Ocean Hiway is a smooth, level, all-weather route, with a minimum of traffic delaying factors.  It avoids large cities and their congestion.  It follows the historic and picturesque coast; consequently seldom knows ice or snow in the winter and is kept cool by ocean breezes in the summer."

This must have been a relief to motorists in pre-air conditioned cars, but one wonders whether driving the  length of the Delmarva Peninsula to take a ferry across to Norfolk, VA was really the best way to reach the Upper South.  No ocean breezes on that leg of the route until you reached the mouth of the Chesapeake, but maybe they didn't have the industrial chicken farms then so the air might have been easier to breathe than it is today.  I can't see how the route was really cooler in summer, except as compared to winter.

The map has numerous points of interest to recommend along the 1006 mile route from New York City to Jacksonville, mostly related to grand old plantation houses and their gardens and salt water fishing.  Salisbury Maryland is praised for its "interesting and picturesque harbor", although "Due to many disastrous fires in Old Salisbury years ago, few of the early houses remain."  No matter; the fishing was supposed to be good.  Norfolk is lauded for having "the world's greatest ice free natural harbor" and being the home port of the Atlantic Fleet.  Southbound motorists are advised to follow Main Route US 17 and turn sharply left at the junction of Rtes 17 & 701 at Georgetown, SC. 

Whether rocking down the Hiway or taking the long way home, this reassuring bit of propaganda must have made motorists like my grandfather feel that heaven was within their grasp: that is, as long as they used their ashtray, not the hiway.

 

Armada of Flotsam: Bath Toys Reach Britain After 15 year Odyssey

It sounds like something straight out of Captain Quint's monologue: "28,800 plastic turtles, ducks, beavers and frogs went into the water, a few hundred washed up in Alaska, the wind and tides took the rest."

15 years after a container of child bath toys tumbled into the Pacific, the Friendly Floatie flotilla is still sailing the world's oceans and has started to arrive on the shores of Britain.  They have been buffeted by storms, gnawed by animals and frozen in pack ice, but they would have encountered harsh conditions in a toddler's bath, too, and their rugged construction makes them an invaluable aid to oceanographers studying ocean circulation patterns.  There is a $100 reward from the toy's American distributor, First Years Inc., for any beachcomber finding one and reporting the location where it made landfall.

The ducks and other flotsam from the lost container began their journey in mid-Pacific at the International Date Line and 45th parallel in January, 1992.  Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer has been tracking them since then and traces the Rubber Duck Armada's dispersal in this Beachcombers Alert:

"After the tub toys first arrived in Sitka, flocks headed west along coastal Alaska and the Aleutian Islands where — 3,500 miles from the spill — hundreds invaded Shemya...Many continued on westward to Kamchatka, Japan, then redoubled the Pacific back to Sitka completing the 6,800 mile loop around the Pacific Ocean’s northernmost gyre, the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre..."

Research, aided by beachcomber finds, indicates that the ducks and their other plastic companions made 4 circuits of the Gyre in cycles averaging three years.  As many as 19,000 of the toys drifted into the larger Subtropical Gyre and reached Australia and South America.  Another group headed into the Arctic and moved eastward, often frozen in pack ice, to Greenland and the Gulf of Maine where they started turning up in 2003.  The ones approaching Great Britain were caught up in the Gulf stream.  Those that remain afloat could continue their journeys for decades to come. 

Cover Me: Your Chance to Pick the Top Ten Cover Songs of All Time

My tech savvy friend frumiousb turned me on to the award-winning music podcast Coverville in a response to the previous post and now I have a new addiction.  It's hard to be hip in the sticks - too few role models - but then, rural living has other charms and I generally enjoy my analog life.  Coverville, though, is the mother load of cover songs, and as an aficionado of the genre I look forward to many happy hours discovering finely crafted and throwaway covers to my heart's delight.

Which naturally leads me to propose, dear readers, that we pull together our own Top 10 list of best cover songs here at Walking the Berkshires.  Hey, that rag the New York Post could only muster up an unranked Top 100 list; surely we can winnow that down!  To get the ball rolling, here are a few suggestions to discard or adopt as you will:

Marlene Dietrich : Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind   Original Artist: Pete Seeger

Then there is Richard Thompson's elevating cover of Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again", which you can download and listen to here, the Jimi Hendrix version at Woodstock of "The Star Spangled Banner",  and Stevie Ray Vaughan's ethereal rendition of Hendrix's classic "Little Wing."

What else?

Jonathan Coulton's Creative Common Ground

As I've previously mentioned, I'm a big fan of music covers, the more bizarre the better.  So those of you who appreciate clever, tongue in cheek delivery (and are not easily offended or around those who are) may want to check out Jonathan Coulton's soft, acoustic rendition of Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back.  The New York Post just voted it among the top 100 cover versions of all time.  Never heard his version before tonight, which shows how far outside the mainstream of cutting edge Web 2.0 geekdom I dwell, but Coulton himself is something of an Internet phenomenon and more than a mere one hit wonder. 

JoCo's oddball humor has its appeal - he sings about zombies and robots and test tube babies and sex in the park- and he has a loyal on-line fan base that promotes, enhances and elaborates on his creative work.  This activity is encouraged through Coulton's choice to make his music available under a Creative Commons license that allows derivative work, with attribution, for non commercial purposes.  If I thought that anyone would want to take my writing and derive something other than personal enjoyment from it, maybe I'd modify my own Creative Commons license for this blog and then you all could be treated to Walking the Berkshires inspired videos animated in the World of Warcraft, like a fan has done for Coulton:

Coulton is pushing the bounds of Creative Commons can do in a discussion on his blog on how the creator of an original work and the creator of a derivative of it might collaborate for commercial gain as well as for art's sake and explores the prospects for an Internet solution to profit splitting.  There is a very organic discussion in the comment thread on how to build the company that would facilitate such partnerships.  Savvy stuff.  Geeks with guitars are clearly forces to be reckoned with.

It is not all that uncommon for a computer programmer to quit his job and try and make a go of it as a singer songwriter.  What is new and unusual is how an open source approach to the creative process can launch an artistic career on line.  It helps that Coulton is talented - and may even have written an anthem for the new media generation in Code Monkey - but it is understanding of that new media and willingness to let others use it to participate in that creativity that makes it groundbreaking instead of gimmickry.  Plus, he thinks it's cool to have his songs accompanied on ukulele.  How cool is that?

Clambake

It's the New England tradition that few of us have truly experienced: the iconic seaside clambake with the rockweed and rock-lined pit and great weather and nary a "no seeum" to be seen.  Most clambakes are not like this at all, but rather professionally catered, steamed over gas and served at company picnics or even indoors.  This save a great deal of time and mess but the expense is beyond most household budgets. The authentic article requires a few things that few of us have, including a private beach and a ready source of rockweed.  Even if you are fortunate enough to have access to these two indispensable items - as we have at Windrock - the subtle art of the bake master may not be part of your family tradition.  In any event it is a heck of an undertaking. 

I have attended two clambakes at Windrock - one catered at my cousin's wedding in 1993 and one supervised by my Uncle Rob at a family gathering in 2000.  I appear to be on a seven year cycle with these things, and when my two oldest friends from high school made plans to visit while I was at the shore, I figured I had enough exposure to the art of the clambake to attempt one on my own. 

The idea behind this ancient form of communal cooking is to bake the feast in the steam generated by hot rocks and rockweed.  I dug my 3' diameter pit above the high water mark on a cobble beach.   Getting to the right depth and finding the right stones to line the pit took about an hour.  I did this step several days in advance of the bake, partly out of anticipation and partly to see whether I had truly placed it well above high tide as it would be in full flood when the fire was lit. 

There is no good tidal flat nearby for steamers but we have an abundance of the hard shelled quahog and Emily and Elias helped me forage 35 of these to bake and stuff.  Wrapped in aluminum foil, these went into the bake with the other ingredients and came out moist and savory.  Also on the menu were seven pounds of steamers ($3.50/lb), 12 ears of sweet corn ($3.98), 4 pounds new potatoes ($5.00), and five 1.5 pound lobsters $10.99/lb).  We had purple cabbage slaw straight from the garden as well as mixed salad greens, with hot dogs for the kids and homemade blueberry pie for dessert.  It promised to be a spectacular feast, if in fact I could pull it off.

The rockweed came from the breakwater lying about 50 yards offshore.  The children and I wadded out as the tide started to flow and collected a 20 gallon bucket full that turned out to be just enough for a a 3' pit.  At about 2:15 we lit the fire using ceder and oak and tinder-dry laths from an old horsehair plaster wall that was replaced with new sheetrock several years ago.  We let this burn for three hours to get the rocks as hot as possible, but here I faced my first technical challenge.  Most of the guides to clambakes tell you to remove all embers before starting to lay down the bake, but our pit had a deep bed of coals when we were ready to get cooking.  I ended up shoveling them out and drenching them in water, but in retrospect I would recommend an old metal bucket to contain them rather than making all those trips with hot cinders on my shovel.  Unless you are into fire walking.

Now came a layer of rockweed and the pit started to sizzle and spit.  Research determined a six inch layer was recommended, but for a small pit like mine I might have done better with a little less: perhaps 4 inches.  I would also have added the potatoes first, as they seem to take the longest to cook.  Instead, I went with clams and lobsters, followed by unshucked corn, quahogs and potatoes.  I have found it unnecessary to remove the silk or any outer layers from corn when I roast it, and this proved also to be the case when steamed in my clambake.  We put another light layer of rockweed over the food and my old waxed canvas tarp provided a cover, weighted down with leftover wood.  This left us an hour before all would be done to get the rest of the food and utensils down to the beach and for guests to engage in a bit of boating after bluefish before dinner.

The results were very fine indeed.  Clams a bit too done, potatoes underdone, but the lobsters, corn and quahogs were outstanding.  No bugs except sand fleas - and these fried like tiny shrimp when they settled on the hot tarp.  We overturned a pound of melted butter in the process of removing the feast from the bake but there were no other mishaps.  I am told the pie was something truly special, and can only reveal that I winged it and used both lemon and vanilla to good effect.  Mostly, it was a joy to offer good friends a New England clambake as we have all imagined it and largely living up to expectations.  I may not feel the need to attempt another until 2014, but I've got experience under my belt now and a few improvements in mind for next time.  In the meanwhile, I've been thinking about a luau...

Fish Story

Godfather Charles bought Emily and Elias fishing poles.  The tide was all wrong and the terns plunging above the bluefish were far out of range of our limited flotilla of dinghy and kayaks.  Casting is a skill totally new to them, and as they reeled the lure back in it invariably dragged along the bottom.  I figured we'd use the time to get accustomed to the rods and reels and after a few casts they'd tire and move on to other pursuits.  I certainly didn't expect them to catch anything besides the bottom or seaweed.

Elias hooked a quahog.

The odds of catching a hard-shelled clam with this technique are approximately as remote as me winning Megabucks (and I don't play).  Nonetheless as I helped Elias reel in a bluefish spoon that I thought to be fouled on rockweed, in came a bivalve with one of the prongs of the hook wedged securely between the lips of the small portion of the shell that protrudes above the sandy bottom.  I had worked over that stretch of sand the two days before for the clambake and somehow missed this quahog.  It took a great effort to pry loose the hook from what is, for all I know, the only successful catch and release of a clam with rod and reel in the annals of New England fishing. 

Maybe next time he will land a lobster.  Stranger things have happened.

Art Lover

Is the crime here that a woman kissed a valuable work of art, leaving a red stain on the canvas, or that an all white painting should be valued at more than $2 million dollars? 

"A woman who says she was so overcome with passion for a valuable painting on display in France, has been charged with criminal damage after kissing it.

The immaculate white canvas so attracted Sam Rindy she smudged it with her lipstick, saying later she had wanted to make it even more beautiful."

If she beats the rap, look for viewer additions to other famous works of art.

Caption Contest #6 Revealed

The 6th Walking the Berkshires Family Archive Caption Contest featured this radiant bride flanked by two swankily dressed bridesmaids.  The shoulder pads alone would do honor to any linebacker and with the rakish tilt to an almost masculine fedora, the effect is something like a zoot suit for WASPs.

There were several excellent captions in contention for this contest.  My cousin Tigerhawk, who knows the principals, and the always witty Bill West delivered marvelous entries, but after a great deal of back and forth among the judges, one submission rose to the top.  It gives me great pleasure to announce that the winner of the prestigious and highly coveted WTBFACC (6th edition) is none other than the Educational Tour Marm, who noted that the face makes the model with the following caption:

The Three Muses:
L. Very Amused, R. Slightly Amused, Center: Unamused

The alabaster bride is none other than my grandmother Athalia Ogden Barker in whose house by the sea I compose this post.  On the left is her older sister Esther Ogden Henneman, from whom TH descends, and on the right is her eldest sister, Margaret "Margie" Ogden, Great Aunt to us all and the family genealogist who stewarded and expanded the archive that it is my pleasure to continue.  My grandmother's wedding was in February, 1937, and the formal portraits taken of her on that day convey and expressionless solemnity totally our of character with her bright and impish spirit.  It was, I think, a sense of decorum rather than disinclination to wed that caused her (or the photographer) to strive for statuesque.  No such injunction applied to her sisters, who clearly felt the occasion warranted a bit more levity. This picture belonged to Margie and now hangs in the rogues gallery of ancestors in the hall at my house.  Whether or not they represent "the height of fashion and the model of form", the picture cracks me up whenever I view it and now it has a caption worthy of the amusement it inspires.