Walking the Berkshires

You May Be an A-Capella Singer If...

1.  The only lines you know to every song you've ever sung are "doo-bee-do-bee-do." (Hat Tip, Joe Stern)

2.  You own some truly embarrassing clothing along with your various jackets and ties.  Mine includes a bowling shirt in my school colors that says "Rock and Bowl" on the back and is monogrammed "Joe Acapella".   Two examples appear in the alumni concert photo at left, but I, cleverly, do not.

3.  All the garage bands when you were growing up had singers who played instruments and weren't in the market for geeky front men.  Their loss.

4. You think an arrangement of  Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" in 4-part harmony is what the world needs now.

5.  You believe that public spaces are just opportunities to perform without a permit.

6.   Spring break for you was all about road trips in vans, dropping in on distant relatives and singing for your supper.

7.  You think it would be awesome, but have not yet attempted, to perform the entire B side of Abbey Road unaccompanied.  That, or something by Prince, or Kiss, or "Kiss" by Prince.  It's all good.

8.  You have a glaring omission from your resume under "group memberships."  Surprisingly, not everyone thinks A-Capella rocks.

9. Your iPod has 50 college groups that never sell more than 500 copies of their latest CD in heavy rotation.

10.  You describe your college years as "like being in a fraternity or playing on the varsity, but not."

Guilty as charged; Ford S-chords 1987-1990

Signs of Spring

There are bluebirds in the backyard, darting down to scratch the damp earth where I have been raking.  I pulled the spiles from the maple today and the afternoon sun made the dry holes weep anew.  Last night, the first official Berkshire peepers of spring where heard and confirmed in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts and late this afternoon I grilled two pork tenderloins and watched my children run without coats through the ground is still frozen.  The shoots of ramps and trillium push through the earth where last week there still was snow. Each day an old acquaintance renewed and new wonders turning toward the sun.

Abbott's Sapworks

It has been an exceptional year for Abbott's Sapworks, the 2 spile operation we traditionally run in our little corner of the Litchfield Hills.  Usually, I can count on a bit more than half a gallon of syrup, but this March we have had an almost unbroken month with ideal sap conditions, often producing a gallon per bucket each day.  I have sugared off a gallon plus a pint of the amber nectar, enough to enjoy on aebleskiver, Belgian waffles, blueberry buttermilk pancakes, silver dollar flapjacks, indian pudding, oatmeal, and sour dough french toast for at least a month of Sundays.

I am grateful to our maple tree for its largess, and will give it an extra layer of mulch this summer.  Next season I may decide to set just a single spile.  I don't want to take advantage, and anyway there's a butternut back there I've been interested in tapping.  Like the maple, it has sap that is 3% sugar but a distinctly different flavor.  Variety is the spice of life.

Ice Out

NASA issued a report on March 18th that identifies a disturbing trend of decreasing perennial sea ice in the Arctic despite this year's colder weather and the expansion of new ice. 

"the scientists said they believe that the increased area of sea ice this winter is due to recent weather conditions, while the decline in perennial ice reflects the longer-term warming climate trend and is a result of increased melting during summer and greater movement of the older ice out of the Arctic.

Perennial sea ice is the long-lived, year-round layer of ice that remains even when the surrounding short-lived seasonal sea ice melts away in summer to its minimum extent. It is this perennial sea ice, left over from the summer melt period, that has been rapidly declining from year to year, and that has gained the attention and research focus of scientists. According to NASA-processed microwave data, whereas perennial ice used to cover 50-60 percent of the Arctic, this year it covers less than 30 percent. Very old ice that remains in the Arctic for at least six years comprised over 20 percent of the Arctic area in the mid to late 1980s, but this winter it decreased to just six percent.

According to Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as ice ages it continues to grow and thicken, so that older ice is generally also thicker ice. This winter the ice cover is much thinner overall and thus in a more vulnerable state heading into the summer melt season."

Last year, Arctic sea ice loss during the summer melt season blew away all records since satellite measurements began in 1979. 

These are data points.  They describe conditions outside of seasonal norms.

Here is another data point analyzing increasing trends in sea level rise.  There are two major influences on sea level rise: thermal expansion with warmer ocean temperatures (which National Geographic says has already raised ocean levels between 4-8 inches and melt water from ice sheets.

You do not have to subscribe to the theory of anthropogenic global climate change to recognize that change is occurring.  What you do with that information depends on what you believe is the proper role of governments and individuals in changing behavior and whether anything that our species can do will mitigate the change that these data and countless other data points represent.

Seat of the Pants Historical Inquiry

The best historical fiction is character driven.  It makes smart use of period details that engage the reader without a smothering degree of esoteric jargon.  A few masters like Patrick O'Brien and Herman Melville manage both, perhaps, but in lesser hands (I would put Tom Clancy's techno-thrillers in this category) the effect is to go overboard with technical description at risk of losing the reader and the plot. 

On the other hand, there are many lesser works that simply get the history wrong ,and bad history holds little interest for me.  Presentism is the bane of these popular writers even more that it can become a biased trap for academic historians.   J. L. Bell's indispensable blog Boston 1775 handily demonstrates this phenomenon in his analysis of what's missing in the John Adams household in the HBO film adapted from the book by David McCullough - Look, Ma, no servants!  One can do far worse, of course, such as Mel Gibson's execrable fable, The Patriot - Look, Ma, no slaves!  Fluff and nonsense can be good fun, but when it is bad history tarted up as sober fact I avoid it like the bloody flux.

Well, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  Now that I am writing in a period that has long been of interest but is not my particular area of historical expertise, I sweat the details.  This demands not only that I take great care in my research, but also be willing to pare down period descriptions to a few broad strokes that animate and enliven.  This means that while accuracy is essential to maintain credibility, the art of the thing is not to overburden with the minutia of my research but let the story play our against a believably described backdrop with plenty of room for readerly imagination.

Still, certain details matter a great deal, such as the pants one of my protagonists wears at the Battle of Trenton.  He is a Hessian with a leg wound, serving in the Landgrenadiere Regiment Rall ,and you might think with all the interest in this battle there would be ample evidence to draw from to determine whether he was breeched in buff with black gaiters as in Europe, or wore the one-piece gaiter trousers) said to have been issued during the winter of 1776-1777 to German troops in America. I have written alternate language for either contingency, but so far the jury has not returned a definitive verdict.

According to an article by Brendan Morrissey concerning the attire of the German forces in the Saratoga campaign;

"Riedesel had one-piece gaiter trousers made for all his men for the winter of 1776, using old British tents and sailcloth; given the type of material used, these were likely to be plain and off-white in colour (the only evidence of striped overalls, as in Mollo/McGregor, appears to relate to the Dragoons – possibly because this was a smaller unit and therefore could be clothed using material that was only available in a limited quantity. Other corps may have worn striped material later in the war, but there is no evidence of widespread use in 1777..."

It is possible that in December, 1776, the Hessian regiments at Trenton wore such overalls, but despite  the preference of several high end toy soldier manufacturers to depict them in stripped pillow ticking glory, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.  Charles Mackubin Lefferts (1873-1923) in his uniforms of the American Revolution shows the Regiments Rall and von Lossberg as they were in 1776 at Trenton in their high spatterdash gaiters, as does Don Troiani, who prides himself on exhaustive attention to period detail.

I have more work to do to make certain, but I think it probable that men who only had enough overcoats for those on guard would not have been provided with cold weather overalls at this stage in the war.  I would be delighted if one of my well informed readers could point me in the right direction.

Family Archive Caption Contest #15

Perhaps it is because I am rather closely related to the barelegged cavalier in this archival image, but it strikes me as rather droll and suitable fodder for the 15th Walking the Berkshires Family Archive Caption Contest.

We'll put your finest offerings to a vote next week.

I'm Ready For My Close Up, Jumbo

Elephants are known for their talent with a paintbrush, and the reverence with which they treat their dead.  However I was not aware that they were also gifted cinematographers.

But can they make balloon animals?

Verisimilitude

I am writing an historical novel based on the premise that the American Revolution failed to win American Independence.  In some ways this is harder than writing about events as they actually played out, for to deviate convincingly down an alternate historical path requires getting so much of the actual history right.  It is also a fascinating exercise to consider that the birth of the United States was neither inevitable nor a million-to-one shot, but an outcome that had much to do with contingency, risk, and choices made wisely or wrongly by great and small on both sides of the Atlantic. 

My plausible contingency - the one that tilts the outcome of the war in a different direction - takes place at Trenton.  To me it was this victory, and a week later the stolen march and audacious attack on the British rearguard at Princeton, that even more than Saratoga marked a true turning point in the war.  Washington is the linchpin, for he alone among the American commanders was able to keep a fractious army from breaking into its disparate parts as enlistments ended, and so I must deny the colonies his services.  The battle must not end with nearly 1000 Hessian prisoners and not one patriot combatant killed of the field of battle, but with the loss of the American commander and an outcome that guarantees that New Jersey, lower New York and Rhode Island remain under British occupation and the war becomes a prolonged irregular insurgency, even more internecine than it was in fact.

That's the background of the story.  I weave historical personages and fictional characters into this setting and let the narrative play out against this alternate backdrop.  Hessian Colonel Johann Rall gets to play Pontius Pilate at Trenton.  Benedict Arnold gets another shot at glory.  Washington's mulatto manservant William Lee has a new career after the fall of the General and it is not the role of the faithful retainer for which this most famous of Revolutionary-era slaves is remembered.  Several of my ancestors provide fodder for the character development of my fictional protagonists.  My heroine is inspired by the author of this 1779 letter from our family archives and she has an odyssey worthy of Ullyses.  The Founding Fathers?  Some find a gibbet, and some are sent to penal servitude in West Florida.  Some come back to their allegiance and some go underground with the "Sons of Terror", as the Sons of Liberty were known to the British and Hessian occupation forces. 

I've worked out a number of "reconstruction" scenarios for an occupation and counter insurgency under British hardliners rather than the moderate Howes.  All the Colonial charters are revoked.  The Quebec Act of 1774 remains in place, as does the permeable Proclamation Line of 1763.  The Iroquois League remains intact and holds its home territory in central and western New York.  An exodus reminiscent of the Acadian diaspora depopulates patriot strongholds, the deportees replaced by Tories and Hessian farmers.  And the other European powers bide their time and wait for the opportunity to strike at British interests as they strive to win the occupation after defeating the rebel armies in the field. 

It might be tempting to draw parallels between this scenario and current events, but I did not set out to make that point.  I am, however, lead to the conclusion that the British would have found the countryside and frontier difficult to hold from their garrison towns and the blockaded coastline.  As long as the rebellion remained alive in what is now called "asymmetrical" war, Britain would not have the resources to crush it as they had the the Irish and the the Jacobites a generation before.

Asking "What if" about the Revolution is newly furrowed ground and much less commonly encountered  in historical fiction than "Lost Cause" fantasies.  If there were no successful American War of Independence, would there have been a French Revolution, or a Napoleon?  Would America have expanded from sea to shining sea, or shared this continent with many other nations?  And what would it mean to be an American then?   I can imagine a Battle of New Orleans in which Lord Wellington and the 60th Royal American rifles fight alongside their colonial American countrymen to dislodge another great power from Louisiana.  I can imagine a Civil War that takes place not in 1861 but in 1834 when Great Britian abolished slavery throughout the Empire, and John Calhoun leading proto-confederate "voortrekkers" on a fillibuster into Mexico.  I'm about 50 pages into my alternate history of the American Revolution and already I can tell I'm writing a series...

History Mystery #5

My grandfather Dr. Robert H. Barker had this photograph among his papers. He may have been the photographer.  He was an OB/GYN at Boston's Lying-in Hospital, now Brigham and Womens, but those are children in those wheelchairs.  In fact, there is great deal I'd like to know about this picture.  Perhaps some of you can help.

There are children peering through the hospital gate, and something unusual seems to have attracted the onlookers.  The four convalescent children and the two nurses seem lined up in anticipation of something.  And who it the man with the curtained handcart out in the street?  Puppeteer?  Candy man?  Organ grinder?

Can any of you car buffs get me an approximate make and year for the vehicles parked on the left side of the street?  And is it significant that they are parked as if in a right hand drive country and not Boston?  The tree is a broad leaf oak and not an English Oak, but that is all I can deduce about this photograph.  Anyone see anything different?

"I Think That This situation Absolutely Requires a Really Futile and Stupid Gesture Be Done on Somebody's Part."

Nearly twenty years ago - Spring semester of 1989, to be exact - I instigated one of the more memorable pranks at Haverford College.  I have alluded to this caper before but the full story has not been told until now.  I will not claim to have eclipsed the "achievement" of one of our most notorious alums - Chevy Chase - who allegedly was asked to leave the college after one semester because of his shenanigans.  College lore has it that young Chase managed to get a cow to the upper floor of Barclay Hall, which may or may not have been the inspiration for the horse episode in Animal House (which film also provided the inspiration for the title of this post).

"Another of Chase's stunts is supposed to be a faked suicide. During Parents Visitation Weekend, he stuffed some of his clothes to create a scarecrow-like dummy. He sat the dummy on the sill of his open window in Barclay Hall, which overlooks Founders Green, the center of the campus. As students and parents milled around the green, Chase screamed, "I can't take it anymore!" and pushed the dummy out the window. People turned at the sound to see a human-like figure hit the pavement four stories below."

Still, what I and three other merry pranksters pulled off had a certain style of its own, and here are the pictures to prove it. We converted a lonely security shed into a Fotomat booth late one night while the guard was on duty.

Right off the bat I have dated myself and completely lost the legions of Walking the Berkshires readers who are too young to remember analog living or any President before Bill Clinton.  Something as anachronistic as a Fotomat would hardly do today, but the whimsy of the thing had great appeal to us in those days.  There it sat, a tawdry little outpost on a lonely wooded path in dire need of a makeover.  The trick was how to do it.

Anyone who has ever organized a sleeper cell knows that a decentralized command structure is essential to avoid infiltration.  My co-conspirators were casual acquaintances, though I knew one of them from my boarding school days, and we were not known associates.  One of us bought the paint, trays and rollers.  Another purloined a board to make the Fotomat sign.  A third found hammers and nails.  The last did a recon of the guard hut to determine the schedule of the officers and discover any gaps in night-time coverage that we could exploit.

It turned out that the guard left the shed punctually at 2:00 a.m. and returned less than 10 minutes later for three nights running.  Whether to relieve himself or merely a change of shift was not clear, but we had enough information to plan our attack. 

We hid our finished sign and our paint and tools in the woods and moved stealthily into our positions as the hour of action approached.  It was late March, just exactly this time of year.  Sure enough, the guard stirred and got into his patrol car.  As soon as he rounded the bend in the path we were out of the woods like lightning, two of us plying rollers for all we were worth and the other two preparing the sign.  We had almost completed the paint job, with only a few areas to trim before we mounted the sign, when the headlights of an approaching car told us the guard had returned.  We dropped tools and fled, a paint tray still on the ground before the shed and our sign just off to the side.

Two of us flattened out in the leaves and watched the guard walk around the shed.  He ensured that it was still locked, then went back to his car and to our utter astonishment drove off for back up.  We had the sign on the shed within 30 seconds, retrieved our tools and paint and were safely indoors when reinforcements arrived.  The four of us posed in from of our handiwork later that morning. 

I think the campus police secretly liked their Fotomat, for it retained its cheery paint job and Fotomat sign until graduation week.