Walking the Berkshires

Missed by a Myles

It used to be that having a Mayflower Pilgrim in your family tree made you a member of a rather exclusive club.  With each successive generation the odds that you or the person you marry have a Plymouth pedigree are exponentially greater.  Thanks to the bottleneck of the Black Death, and a quirk of genealogy that has more slots available for ancestors with each preceding generation than there were individual people alive back then to serve in that capacity, just about all of us with European ancestry can justly claim to be royal bastards of one sort or another.

Still, for Yankees of old Puritan stock there is a special allure to finding a Brewster or Alden in the family foliage.  There is, in fact, a Mayflower Pilgrim lurking in my ancestral files somewhere though I cannot offhand recall his name - who was one of the many who did not survive that first winter of 1620-1621.  His wife and children remained behind in England, and one of his progeny eventually made a more successful go of it in the New World.

And then there is Thomas Standish.  That is a name to capture the imagination, for it would be tantalizing indeed to link my ancestor who was born in 1612 and died in 1693 with the red-bearded captain of the Plymouth militia made famous in a wholly fictional romance by Longfellow. 

 Myles Standish came over with his wife Rose, who died with so many others that winter.  his second wife Barbara arrived in Plymouth in 1623 and all of his known children were by her.  None of these is Thomas Standish, whosettled in WethersfieldCT.  Wethersfield, which vies with Windsor for the claim to be the oldest settlement in Connecticut, was established by Puritans from Plymouth.  Could Thomas Standish have been a child of that first marriage, left in England as a lad of eight?  So far, there is no verified connection between the two Standishes.

Thomas Standish had a daughter Lydia who married John Belden, of an old Norman Yorkshire family with links to noble houses, and from there to Charlemagne, and ancient Picts, and if the Royal pedigrees are to be believed - to Joseph of Arimathea, but no Myles.  Not yet. 

When The Winner Loses All

I am a good negotiator.  I have good instincts for what is core and cannot be compromised, and what is negotiable or can be given up.  I understand needs and recognize motivations, even when they are not articulated or are acting subconsciously.  I study human and institutional behavior, and have learned to measure negotiating success both in terms of tangible gains and intangible benefits. 

There are times when it is better not to insist on a legal right when it costs your reputation to secure it.  It may, in fact, be better not to win every hand and to leave something on the table, because otherwise you may never get another chance to play.

This is a particularly sticky area for locally-based organizations that need to maintain the goodwill of their supporters and of the communities in which they work in order to be effective and viable.  Some conservation organizations have gotten into trouble by failing to defend the easements they hold for fear of alienating an important donor or exhausting their limited resources in a protracted legal battle.  Others have defended their prerogatives so vigorously that they have turned public opinion against them.

If you know what is core and immutable - and this should not be a long list - it is easier to get beyond positions to actual needs.  A landowner insisting on a high price for selling family land for conservation may be motivated by more than financial value, including the emotions involved with being the one who ended up selling the family asset.  Seller's remorse is a real factor even for conservation-minded sellers, but this gets missed if all the conservation buyer sees is an inflexible price and a stubborn owner.

I remember a situation when I was with The Nature Conservancy where we had the legal right to enter State conservation lands and apply herbicide to invasive plants over a very wide area.  In one community - a community that happened to be 2/3 permanently protected open space -  there was strong and vocal opposition to our exercising this right.  It was clear that we could have accomplished our conservation objectives for invasive species control if we had insisted on our legal right to spray.  It was also clear that our other, greater objectives for working with willing landowners in that town to conserve key parcels of land would be irreparably damaged if we did so.  Showing the community that we could be responsive to local desires and sensibilities gave us a wealth of credibility - one of those intangible benefits - even though the invasive species control we were undertaking would fall short of our initial expectations.  Ecologically, we would still be on track for managing the resource and abating the invasive threat if we applied the program in other adjacent towns where they were more receptive to herbicide.  Once we got away from whether we had the stronger legal case, it allowed us to deescalate a stand-off that threatened our reputation and instead gained us respect with precisely the constituents who were rallying in opposition.  To me, that was a winning outcome.

The difference between what is fair in the court of public opinion and what wins in court is sometimes a critical consideration.  Sometimes you need to defend your legal rights without compromise.  The ability to tell one situation from another makes for good negotiations.

Nature Notes This Week in the LJ

Today's Lakeville Journal piece (readable online with free registration):

"There is wonder in a blade of grass, a wilderness in our own backyard.  I would love to see glaciers again, or to stare out over the Namibian escarpment where half a lifetime ago my tracks mingled with those of elephants in the sand of dry riverbeds.  But for now these adventures are part of my past, recaptured in my mind's eye and informing that inner wilderness of the heart.  I know that just as sure as growth and decay in the forest, with parent and child it all comes around again."

Insult to Injury

It was bad enough when former Connecticut State Senator Louis Deluca (R-Waterbury) plead pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor charge last year for engaging a waste management tycoon with mob connections to threaten his grand-daughter's spouse.  Now it turns out that under the State Senate's ethic's laws, that solicitation should have been declared a gift from a lobbyist. 

The Hartford Courant reveals: 

"DeLuca decided to speak out Wednesday because a long-running ethics complaint against him was finally settled this week. In the stipulated settlement with the state ethics office, DeLuca agreed to pay $2,500 on a complaint that he essentially received a gift from a registered lobbyist when he agreed that now-convicted Danbury trash magnate James Galante would have someone "pay a visit'' to the husband of DeLuca's grand daughter because DeLuca believed that the man was physically abusing her.

Under state law, Galante was deemed to be engaged in lobbying because his trash-hauling companies were registered lobbyists in Connecticut."

Deluca also noted in his press conference that:

"...legislators were hypocrites for investigating his misdemeanor conviction last year and refusing to investigate numerous Democratic lawmakers regarding drunken driving, sexual abuse, engaging in a bar fight, witnessing a bribe, forging an application for public campaign funds, and having an affair with a legislative liaison."

The moral of the story, I suppose, is for politicians to "pay their own visits".  You never know if the kids you engage to pull up your opponent's yard signs will turn out to be registered lobbyists.

Cabinet of Curiosities #11 at CanadaGenealogy

The #11th Edition of Cabinet of Curiosities is up at CanadaGenealogy, or Jane's Your Aunt. M. Diane Rogers has done a wonderful job of curating this assortment of wonders, weirdness and whatnot.

My blogchild has been well served by back-to-back hosts at other blogs, and returns to Walking the Berkshires on the third Monday in December. 

Arboreal Burlesque

The Autumn trees raise their skirts in high kicking review.  For weeks this chorus line has held my gaze in a gaudy swirl.  Now its leafless branches, stiff as corset stays, undrape in bare-limbed beauty.  The woods reveal their secret places: fine-boned fieldstone walls and the mountain flanks with dark hollow creases. 

Pert young buds in Spring may turn other men's fancy, but I'll take pleasure unadorned in silver bark and evening shadow - the last still loveliest - though the weary world may fade to winter white. 

Buckley and the Bog Turtle

I had a memorable day yesterday, bookended by breakfast with a Buckley and after dinner drinks with the Tigerhawk clan.  The two events are linked, albeit tenuously, by the same thread of boarding school, for the Tigerhawk daughter is in Northwest Connecticut today for interviews at Hotchkiss and Kent (with two more downstate tomorrow), and the Buckley brothers William F. and James L. both attended Millbrook School where I grew up. 

My grandfather was a teacher at the school when the Buckley boys were students in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  I've gotten to know James Buckley outside of the family connection as one who shares a strong interest in the natural world that was fostered in part by experiences at Millbrook.  The former Senator has moved back to the family's roots in Sharon, Connecticut, and at a conservation breakfast hosted by the Sharon Association yesterday, I found myself sitting at the same table as he.  Buckley asked me how my work with the Litchfield Hills Greenprint was going and listened attentively to my reply, but then his eyes took on an even brighter sparkle when he asked; "tell me the status of what we used to call muhlenberg's turtle"

When I was with the Nature Conservancy, I was responsible for overseeing a conservation program with this federally listed species at the core of its efforts.  Clemmys muhlenbergii is more commonly known as the bog turtle, though its preferred habitat should rightly be called a fen.  It is the smallest of our turtles, reaching only about 4" at maturity, and cursed with a collectible cuteness that has contributed to its decline in the wild.  Connecticut is well on its way to becoming the next state within the bog turtle's current range to lose this species altogether, and our little corner is its last bastion in the Nutmeg State.

They also occur just over the line in Dutchess County, New York, and I thought perhaps it was in connection with Millbrook that the question has been asked.  I started to say that I knew of two documented occurrences at the school, none more recent than the 1980s, but with a gentle smile James Buckley informed me that there were precedents for those discoveries.

During his time at the school, a great ditch was laid downslope of the "New Dorm" which would eventually accept a buried storm drain.  Buckley said that while it lay exposed it was the most marvelous place to find things, including several unusual species of snakes and, on more than one occasion, muhlenberg's turtle.  I could just imagine what a boy of his age and time must have felt making these discoveries while mucking about in the ditch, and the memory of those times was still fresh and meaningful.

I keep coming back to the importance of place, and the freedom to explore and inquire about ones physical surroundings be they natural or cultural.  Here is a man who was elected to the U.S. Senate in New York on the Conservative Party Ticket, and still as captivated by a creature most people have never seen as those scientists who make a career of its study. 

Jerry Mallett, who worked with him during his time in the Senate described James Buckley as "a true conservative (who) saw the whole idea of conservation as working on the interest, not the principal." Buckley helped to write the Endangered Species Act that protects the bog turtle that so captivated him in his boyhood. Writing "In Defense of Snail Darters," for the Washington Post, Sept. 4, 1979 , Buckley said the Act "represents a quantum leap in man's acknowledgment of his moral responsibility for the integrity of the natural world."  He is also founding board member of Polar Bears International. 

The Annual Armistice Day Post

It has been 90 years since the end of the Great War.  There are only 10 confirmed veterans of WWI still with us who were there for the first Armistice Day.  There were 23 alive last year at this time, and 51 in 2006.  Next year may very well be the last.

Three of Britain's surviving 4 WWI veterans participated in remembrance ceremonies today. From the BBC:

"Henry Allingham, 112, Harry Patch, 110, and Bill Stone, 108, represented the RAF, Army and Royal Navy respectively at a ceremony at London's Cenotaph...

Mr Allingham - the world's oldest World War I veteran and the UK's oldest man - said: 'I'm glad to be here. It means a lot to me. I hope people realise what my pals sacrificed on their behalf.'

The last-known survivor of the Battle of Jutland, who is partially deaf and nearly blind, said his comrades should never be forgotten, and he could not describe what they meant to him."

The last living US veteran of the Great War is Frank Buckles, who enlisted at 15 in in 1917 and drove ambulances and motorcycles in France.  He was honored this past May at the white house as the last American doughboy.

Losses from the Great War are unimaginable, even in hindsight from the other side of WWII: 41 million casualties, military and civilian.  This includes 1,397,800 French military deaths with 4,226,000 wounded. Russia and the German empire lost more.  Pueblo, Colorado's courthouse plaque commemorated 62 deaths in WWI, until historian Michael P. Thomason started to research their stories and discovered 85 more area residents who served and died.

Memories fade, and old soldiers fade away.  It is imperative that we remember.

For my relatives: Ned Olmsted, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, 27th Division and Sergeant Stanley Clark of Newburgh, New York, who served in one of the National Guard units that comprised the 27th Division.

Better Dead than Red (Power Tie)

Readers of Walking the Berkshires and those who know me in person know how little attention I generally   pay to the world of men's fashion.  True, like most men with facial hair I am keenly aware of how it works - or doesn't - on the faces of others as well as my own.  If we were peacocks we'd be checking out each other's tails.  But aside from that, my own wardrobe trends toward jeans and safari cloth, with something to wear to funerals and formal business meetings and that's about it.

But being an observant fellow, I have noticed a trend in American politics away from the aggressive Reagan-era red power tie toward a cool and sophisticated blue.  Today's photo-op of President Bush with President Elect Obama is a classic example of this new chief executive style.  In fact, president Bush has been favoring blue ties for some time now - some are calling his fashion legacy - and Obama often dispenses with neck wear altogether, which very well may become his.

How did this come to pass?  What is it about red power ties that had members of both parties dutifully knotting up their Scarlet half Windsors in the 1980s, and seems today as dated in American politics as the double wide "Barney Miller" ties of the 1970s?  Herewith, a photo-mosaic, courtesy of a quick Google image search.  Feel free to free associate:    

Now there are so many matters of great import and substance requiring strong and decisive leadership today that it would be rash indeed to favor one candidate over another based on the one item of men's fashion apparel that makes the most dramatic statement.  Still, this sort of scrutiny is how our society treats women seeking advancement and high office, so why not the alpha male?

Style over substance, perhaps.  But McCain might have taken a cue from the pale blue Prez before trotting out on the hustings in tired bureaucrat drab.  Or from those who dressed his own running mate, whose glamor made him seem more like an accessory (after the fact).   Would a nice powder blue silk tie have made the difference?  Or a Mandela shirt?  Hey, the first candidate Clinton borrowed a jazzy tie from Arsenio Hall before blowing sax for the late night crowd.  Politicians gotta do what it takes...

More: I don't know how I failed to make the connection the first time around, but on reflection it occurs to me that G.W.'s pale blue has a presidential prededent from the other G.W.: our first Commander-in-Chief.  Washington wore a silk sash in that color as a badge of rank, as this action figure from Sideshow Collectibles accurately portrays!  Red is for Redcoats, Blue for Whigs. Case closed.

Mystery Yeomen

Anyone know the book that this illustration goes to?

Anyone ever read it?

My copy is falling apart with age and long use.