Walking the Berkshires

Walking the Berkshires is 5: Bring on the Wood!

Walking the Berkshires has reached its 5th Blogiversary today.  Traditionalist readers are welcome to send gifts of wood (I accept nickels and nutmegs only, please).  There have been 1233 posts and 2246 comments since I began blogging here, although now that I link back to Facebook many additional comments happen there.  I am pleased by this ratio, since I write as much to connect as to inform (or entertain). 

Particularly with regard to connections, I have made some very special friendships along the way.  One longtime reader gifted me with his homemade Single Malt Marmalade, and another welcomed me to his home and showed me where my ancestors are buried.  Yet another has shared an extensive interest in Revolutionary war history and reintroduced me to the world of historical reenacting.  And I have met someone very special who was a longtime admirer from afar and who has opened my eyes to the possibility for new found joy.  All this and more, from these eclectic and erratic musings.  I am very grateful.

In retrospect, I really had no idea what WTB would come to mean to me, nor the form and content it would assume over time.  With interests as broad as mine, readers are as likely to encounter a series on a little known episode in American history as they are an irreverent look at Presidential fashion (the one post that launched an Instalanche) or the occasional revelation of personal transition. It is a lot to ask, and I am touched that so many of you check in from time to time for whatever the catch of the day (or every third day or so) may be.

I do have some personal favorite posts.  If I were to update this 2008 vintage greatest hits list, it might well include the following:

Once and Future Holy Ground

Name That DWF

Slave Soldiers in the Struggle for American Independance

Damn Yankees and Civil War Art

Dark Secrets on Gallows Hill

Teach Your Parents Well

Descant

Snow Falling on the Old Year

When the Potus Ad Libs & The Tea Party Chorus

"That is So Wrong!" - What Else Could be Improved with Zombies?"

My 2008 Cliopatria Ward Winning Series on the 1775 Canada Expedition and the Death of Montgomery 

Ebenezer Olmsted, Late, Failing Collector of Taxes

My Margaret Corbin Series

The Court Martial of Col. Matthias Ogden (series)

The Fact of Their Being

There are some additional posts of mine that attract daily visits from people searching for information on obscure historical incidents for which WTB has become something of an authority by virtue of what I have aggregated and analyzed.  Searching for "Morro Castle Disaster" leads to this post, while I get considerable traffic drawn to a post regarding this image of Canadians at Vimy Ridge.  Without question, the casual visitors are largely looking for images, but some of them stay for content.  Even when I have added nothing for days, there are 200+ unique viewers and 400+ page views here.

That last observation has lead me to think long and hard about the future of WTB.  There was a time when I felt driven to write something new every day - a time, it is fair to point out, when blogging was an escape as much as a passion.  I have other interests, now, and outlets for my writing.  It has been good while since I had the time and interest to delve into another long and engaging historical series, much as I still have that interest.  Much of my nature writing ends up in the local paper.  WTB has eased into comfortable middle age, and is resting on its laurels.   Perhaps it has lost its edge.

In any case, I have no plans to discontinue this blog, but I will be taking some time to consider its future.  Whichever way that path leads, I will be glad of your company.

The Solution is Clearly More Stimulus

"When I see some of them looking for returns of 20 or 25 per cent, at a time when fellatio is close to zero, and in particular in a slump, that means we are destroying businesses,"

- Rachida Dati, France's former justice minister

Let's get right on this, shall we? 

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.

A Man in Need

There is a whole catalog of emotion that opens to me as my marriage is slowly ending, now that I have given myself permission to seek joy.  For someone who has learned to compartmentalize as a means of living with the many things that rattle about in my heart and head, this is a particularly unsettling time. 

Add to this the full weight of that great harvest moon, here at the tipping point from light to dark and whatever lies beyond, and the fact that today is (still) my 15th wedding anniversary and we still live under the same roof, and I find myself especially pensive and disquieted.

I tell myself with my rational mind that this is not the time to go howling with the Wild Hunt, to lose myself in the primal and ferocious. This is not the time for a man in need to play ninepins in the mountains.

"We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?"

Neither can I teeter overlong on the fulcrum of the year, balanced between my old life and the new.  My feet spin in empty space.  I feel the bones of the Earth and resist the instinct to hole up in my den.  You can't resist the season's change, though, and you can't be a floating island untethered to the bed of the sea.

I want to turn my prow into the current, dip my blade into the bright water and shoot through the flume and around the bend.  I want to learn to savor these last, lingering months and moments when I have a foot in both worlds.  To get where everything leads means letting go of one life and reaching towards another.  Some of what is precious to me will remain, but not as it was, not unchanged.  Some that I yearn for waits for me there, in that place of silver linings and the stuff of dreams made real by faith and love. 

And for all that is beyond the scope of my power to alter or command, I am not without the means to steer nor the vision to realize what must be, in time, the result of all this transition.  My marriage will end.  My dreams will take new form, in grief and hope and joy.  I will watch the splendid procession of colors at the dying of the year, feel the glowing heart of winter as the stars erupt in frost and fire.  I will inhale air so cold it freezes in my nostrils and coats my beard with ice. 

And Spring will come, as it always does, and with it renewal, and new life.  And I will dance in the center of the wheel as it carries me forward.

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.

Witch Hysteria in a Teapot

The Tea Party movement is not my cup of tea.   All that bad history and hysteria is a real turn off.  Still, I do find it amusing that its Senate primary upset in Delaware has presented the Republican party with a Christian fundamentalist who was once a practicing pagan, or dabbling witch, if you prefer.  It harkens back to the wrong century for the Tea Party, but instructive nonetheless.

Some of my best friends are neo-pagan witches.   I wonder whether Christine O'Donnell ever hung with Niszsa Zeron and the Waters of the Brandywine Grove of Reformed Druids in Newark back in the late 1980s.  Maybe we shared a horn cup of single malt (hell of a good sacrament) at the Solstice fire back in the day when I dabbled in druidism.  [Damn.  How did that slip out?  Now I will never get to be a Tea Party candidate for national office.  Bummer.]

I would think better of her if she had been dancing at Lughnasa in her teens, rather than playing Stairway to Heaven backwards on her turntable, her subsequent conversion to right wing conservative Christian notwithstanding.  There is an ancient tradition of pagans turning to the Cross (although not always willingly).  This is nothing for her less tolerant fundamentalist backers to get their hair shirts in a bunch over. 

I say, "An' it harm none, do as thou wilt."  Don't call it a youthful indiscretion.  Who among us is without sin or skulls on our bookcases skeletons in our closets?

And pass the single malt, witch.  Much better than tea.  Should have called it the Whiskey Rebellion.  I could get behind that.

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.

Cool Day in a Cool Ravine

The children and I went out for a drive yesterday with vague notions of roadside foraging and adventure.  We helped a painted turtle cross the road, and found a dead pigeon with blue bands on its claws.  We also ended up at Sages Ravine, the water of the stream so low that it poured underground and through the fractured bedrock, only to reappear from beneath a ledge several bends father down its dry watercourse.

There are plunge pools and waterfalls that extend in splendid isolation far up the ravine where it cleaves the side of the Taconic Plateau.  In high summer the water is still bracingly cool.  No one had a thought to swim on this last weekend of summer, but we listened to the music of the cascade and watched the light and shadows play across the surface of the pools and their mossbound rocky walls.

Both my goat-footed children were able to negotiate the climb up to the third waterfall and back without assistance, and the rocks were no as slick as they often are in wetter seasons.  Still, it is a place where it is important to move with care.  This affords the opportunity to see things that the fleet-footed miss, like red efts and shelf fungi and smooth stones that slip into the palm of your hand like they were made for it.

It is a landscape of gray and green, of dark water and bright reflections.  It is one of the most magical places I know in these hills, and has few visitors.  It was good to be there yesterday, almost by happenstance, and someplace I plan to revisit again before all is cold and rimed with winter ice.

What, No Dogs Playing Poker? Expurgated Republican Presidential Art Caption Contest

I came across this painting at the old Market in Charleston, South Carolina last week, just across the way from the Confederate Museum.  This probably explains the omission of various Republican Presidents who served in Union Blue (Grant, Harrison, Garfield, McKinley).  It does not, however,explain the egregious relegation of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Johnson (the other Republic who faced impeachment), Taft and Arthur.  I am certain there are several worthies here who could shoot pool better than Gerry Ford.

But what I really want to know, is what Lincoln said that the rest of this anachronistic tableau thinks is so gash darned funny.  By all means, provide your own caption.

Last Week in Charleston SC

Last week I was down in Charleston, South Carolina, and took full advantage of its historical, culinary, and ecological wonders.  In this last category is the Angel Oak, a massive Live Oak that some estimates place at well over 1,000 years old.  Located on John's Island, it is absolutely magnificent, if a bit over loved.  There are vigilant monitors watching hidden cameras to keep people from sitting on its lowest branches, or poisoning it, as some pro development types have attempted.

At Magnolia Cemetery we visited the graves of H.L. Hunley and the veterans markers for all three of the drowned crews of his eponymous Civil War submarine.  The last of these seamen were recovered when the  H.L. Hunley was raised from the bottom a few years back.  In 1864 this was the very first submarine to sink a ship in war, and the luckless Union vessel she took down with her, was the U.S.S. Housatonic.

Up the Ashley River from Charleston are the remains of old Dorcester and its colonial era fort with its tabby walls.  The brick bell tower of the old church also stand nearby, and aside from all the Spanish moss and signs cautioning against swimming with alligators it has an oddly English feel.

We also made it out to Sullivan's Island and Fort Moultrie, which has been conserved with bastions reflecting its service from the early federal period through WII.  before that, though, it gained fame for the Palmetto Log fort defended by Colonel Moultrie in 1776 during the first British attempt to capture Charleston.

Downtown Charleston is so picturesque, I almost forgot to take any photographs.  This shot is down at the extreme southern end, with a stunning view from these houses of the Harbor and distant Fort Sumpter, which incidently my southern friend Grant says is much smaller than it looks.  He used a rather colorful phrase in describing it which I shall not utter here, but it made the point rather well, I thought.

I enjoyed Benne wafers, Oysters and Shrimp and Grits.  Not such a fan of boiled peanuts, but all in all a grand adventure.