MY DEAR SISTER, Dr. Dr. Judy (she has a DDS and a PhD in education, which makes us all proud and hopeful that she'll avoid the penitentiary) responded to a note in which I mentioned that I'd "pulled a charette."
Another friend commented that this sounded like a painful muscle strain. But Judy, who signs herself "Princess Anne," after her childhood nom de guerre, sensibly asked "What is a charette?" I replied:
A “charette” is an overnight design push to the deadline, an all-out overnighter to finish, taking its name from the cart (“charette,” in Froglaise) that appeared in the draughting room of the Ecole des Beaux Arts architecture studio in France to collect the completed projects. Because the Ecole was considered the heart of architectural design, some of its terms are still used by architecture students and architects today.
The Ecole dominated “public” architecture during the Greek and Roman revival period between our Civil War and the First World War, roughly the time of Mark Twain’s “Gilded Age.” It was a style that reached back to architecture widely supposed to be insuperable in form and beauty and balance. Greek and Roman examples were closely studied, visited, redrawn and dissected geometrically. The forms were structurally appraised and modeled with new mathematical tools in place of the sculptural sense of weight and the rules of thumb used by the ancients. Many libraries and courthouses and churches were based on the designs of reconstructed Roman baths or gladiatorial arenas or temples.
This sounds silly to our ears but it was persuasive to American corporate and municipal clients. Through this era, Europe and even our own traveled gentry regarded the United States as a nation of apple-knockers, clod-hoppers and rubes, plus a few red Indians. Remember that this was the time a well-bred young person’s character and education wasn’t complete until he or she took The Grand Tour of Europe, Greece, and the Holy Land. The object was to understand just how naïve and uncivilized most Americans were. Our national obsession with “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” may or may not have stunted our national spirit but it surely didn’t nourish our pride.
So when a European-trained architect responded to a county seat’s aldermen with a design for the new courthouse, pointing out that it was an adaptation of the Baths of Titus in Rome, the local burghers were delighted to have a transplanted divot of cultural respectability flourishing in the county. They felt that classic proportions and plenty of columns would ennoble the institution of the court and improve the cultural climate of the town. It was a bargain: legitimacy, heritage, cultural improvement, nobility of purpose … oh, geez, a lot of stuff came with a Beaux Arts building.
Take the courthouse in the little burg where my sister and I grew up, St. Clairsville, Ohio. It beggars every other structure in town. It is a gallumphing great expression of civic pride and can’t be overlooked. Next to any other structure in town, it is enormous. The city fathers and the swells must have been proud. It is a “Second Empire” design, built between 1885-1888. The architect was Joseph W. Yost from Columbus, Ohio, who later practiced in New York. He also designed the remarkable geology building, Orton Hall, on the Oval at Ohio State University. I remember it well.
The basis of this rant is that a big chunk of America’s design history came from Paris and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. This influence reached its apotheosis in the Great White City of the 1891 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was organized by Beaux Arts architects “Uncle Dan” Burnham and John Root. The Roman and Greek revival buildings in the White City (lit by hundreds of thousands of electric bulbs powered by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse AC generators) marked a turning point in American identity, an announcement that the United States was a formidable power in every way. Except architecture. The impressive columned, porticoed, galleried, decorated buildings (built of plaster-soaked jute fabric on wood lath) were so popular that, in the words of Frank Lloyd Wright, “It set American architecture back a hundred years.” The buildings and their styles were so successful that roughly the same group of architects (minus Louis Sullivan, who had designed the only “contemporary” structure at the Exposition) designed most of the public buildings around the Smithsonian Mall. The Exposition fixed our expectations of dignity and official design. For better and for worse.
As an expatriate architect, it’s taken me a long time to reach this conclusion and I state it over the objections of my younger selves, but I predict that we will look at this era of revival architecture with sad longing. In many ways those Old Guys, like Uncle Dan Burnham, were right. There was a balance and rhythm inherent in the style, and a sensible human scale, and a rhythm of repeated parts that we don’t have. The vertical columns, the arches, the three dimensional geometry of many revival designs is appealing. It speaks to our collective unconscious, perhaps, or perhaps we simply enjoy variations on known themes. Whatever the reason, I look at work by H. H. Richardson and Edward Janney and Joseph Yost with interest and admiration.
One damnable tenet of the revival design dogma was that architecture reached its apogee during the late Roman empire and nothing offered could rise above it. Yet this quaint, pre-narcissistic notion granted a kind of freedom of movement within the forms. Okay, we’ll never do better than the Coliseum, so let’s do our best and arrange what forms we have in a pleasing way, using what worked well before us, creating new form out of handsome components. What came out of this was both new and familiar. It was steady and reassuring. Anyone could see the way forces were transmitted from cornices down to foundation. I think we’ll miss that.
Contemporary architecture seems to be largely a personality cult. Frank Gehry wraps his structures in stainless steel cocoons of fantastic shapes that have no relation to the flow or function within them. I. M. Pei violates the Smithsonian Mall with a self-indulgent and inefficient fantasy born from his whim rather than any interior, functional argument. Philip Johnson’s “Chippendale Building” is a perfect example of New York society star-worship. Frank Lloyd Wright, who was one of our greatest architects and a force for functionalims, was more concerned with his ideology than with the actual workability of his structures. (They all leaked. All of them.)
Architecture is called the First Art. A good conceit but what IS art? I maintain that art is communication: the artist uses his or her medium to express a verity, something living and interesting to the rest of us. The state of art in our culture is artificial and distant. It no longer represents us. We’ve been drilled to accept art that expresses only the artist’s emotions. So it no longer communicates shared ideas, ideals, fears, joys, wit, need.
If we could be honest with ourselves we might shrug off art dictated by ten galleries in New York City and point out that the art emperor is not wearing clothes. How much contemporary art addresses our feelings? We’re irrelevant to art. A Jackson Pollack painting may have meant something to Jackson Pollack (which I doubt) but I’ve never received his message clearly, not enough to say, “Ah, he’s got it there.” We take some odd delight in not understanding contemporary art. We’ve become so indulgent of our own whims that we license the whims of our designers, encouraging them to “express themselves” like the funded sculptors who have dropped “municipal sculpture” in public places all over the United States – sculptures that don’t reflect the indigenous citizens, who would much rather have them dismantled and taken away.
Architecture should speak to us, about us, for us. When we see a building we should have some notion of its function. We should see the entrance welcoming us. We should have an inherent sense of flow within the building. In a well-designed building we should never be lost but feel the current of design taking us to the right place.
We could understanding the revival buildings. We somehow knew them. Their proportions struck sympathetic chords in us. I’m sorry now I didn’t crawl all over that courthouse in St. Clairsville and learn something about architecture.
Well, Princess Anne, this is a confession and a correction: I have been at war with the Ecole des Beaux Arts too long. I pulled off a charette last week as Ecole students did long ago, and I was unexpectedly happy with the result. I thought about the origins of that word, and you’ve asked about them. It’s driven me to reexamine habitual attitudes. I’ve bad-mouthed The Ecole des Beaux Arts, denied it, damned it, and underestimated its students. I’m not certain that it was the best way to teach architecture but it beat hell out of contemporary architecture.
Consider this one, clear fact: our American Culture is so bankrupt that there is no possibility of ever building the Belmont County Courthouse again. We can’t design in that demanding stye, we no longer have the courage of expression, we have no qualified craftsmen to reproduce the astonishingly careful stone and woodwork, and we simply can’t afford it. Any courthouse built today will have a service life of, perhaps, fifty years, probably half that. Our St. Clairsville courthouse is coming onto 125 years and should last another 200. Any new courthouse will be built of the cheapest materials and assembled from mass-produced components. Just as we no longer have the technology or the will to return to the moon, we can’t afford, design or construct the buildings of which our great-grandfathers were justifiably proud. Perhaps their pride was tinged with Gilded Age desire to be more European but I can forgive them that mistake.
If I had a time machine, being at the dedication of that courthouse would be exciting. Plenty of red, white and blue bunting, Civil War veterans, long speeches, and an imposing, overwhelming structure towering over the one and two story buildings of a sleepy little town. What a luxury: genuine municipal pride, unquestioned national pride, excitement at the American culture flowering. We’ll miss all that.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself would have made a bad architect in his youth. If we could return to our youth with experienced, mellowed, wiser attitudes, he might have made a very fine architect. It's probably just as well we don't have that option. Youth is given too much praise; it's a frightening experience, humiliating, and scarring. Himself is a much nicer fellah than he was, more understanding and less judgmental. Age is given too little praise.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
DR. GRAMMA
WE'RE ALL WORRIED about our health, and about our friends' health. We tell them to push fluids, sleep soundly, minimize stress, steam veggies. From a personal perspective we control only a few threads of our health. Ask a thoughtful, chess-playing, small town general practitioner who sees sickness played out on a small canvas over a few generations. He’ll agree that there’s not a lot we can do about sickness beyond a few things you heard from your gramma.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Like all grammas she droned on at length: wash your hands, get to bed, eat your vegetables, get out in the sun, stay out of the sun, shake a leg and get to work, wear clean underwear. It turns out that she was spot-on. The frustrating thing about old wives’ tales is that those wives got old by doing a few things right.
Wash your hands: plain soap and water turns out to be a powerful talisman against flus, coughs, and all communicable diseases. Lady MacBeth may have gone a little overboard but you should never pass up a chance to wash your hands.
Eat your vegetables: granted, your gramma probably underlined this as a matter of puritanical discipline but beneath the ugly-and-not-your-first-choice-so-it-must-be-good-for-you factor you’ve got the wealth of vitamins, way-high fiber and anti-oxidants in Brussels sprouts, cabbage, broccoli and oatmeal. Let’s not get carried away about about gramma’s laboratory virtues, however: she didn’t know beans (sic) about cooking veggies and probably stewed them into submission. Today we steam them lightly or, best (refer to The New York Times), microwave them briefly and with minimum vitamin loss.
Get out in the sun: important vitamin D, the “sunshine vitamin” is near-impossible to synthesize and is internally produced by our bodies’ interaction with the sun’s ultraviolet light.
Stay out of the sun: antique ladies wore sunbonnets for their complexions, but also because a bushel of their sunned-on friends succumbed to skin cancer. Given our immigration patterns, the prairie sun was especially deadly to fair-skinned Nordic, Irish and British families. Highest incidence of sun cancer in the world: Australia, where white-skinned Celts meet merciless sun.
Shake a leg and get to work: gramma didn’t have a Pilates studio down the block but knew that exercise made a difference. Or she just worked her bustle off, anyway. And if she didn’t know that exercise is healthy, perennial puritanical sensibility suggested that it was hard and, therefore, virtuous.
Wear clean underwear: we might make a case for fungus suppression but this is not gramma's finest medical homily and a social observance more than a clinical desideratum.
We could feel a bit more progressive and smugly scientific if gramma were a total loon and recommended nutso nostrums like echinacea. Embarrassing as it is, these are our New Age superstitions, driven by the narcissistic belief that “those know-it-all doctors aren’t any smarter than me!” Clinically, demonstrably, they are. Whole Foods may sell cool little vials of “safe and gentle” homeopathic cures but in double-blind studies homeopathic quackery registers no more than a placebo effect. Echinacea has no greater basis in logical pharmacopoeia than turning around three times and spitting between your feet.
Modern medicine is largely crisis oriented. Though antibiotics are wonderful and comforting, the statistical successes of real lifesaving medicine can be attributed to a few broader, earlier advances, and not many of those. There may be only five statistically significant advances in medicine.
The first is sepsis, recognition of the ubiquitous existence of germs. Even before germs were specifically identified, physicians learned empirically to wash their hands. One of the most mortal medical crises in the first three-quarters of the 19th century was postpartum infection caused by doctors delivering babies with dirty hands, killing children and mothers at a shocking rate. Civil War surgeons stropped their scalpels on their boot soles and made battlefield wounds doubly or triply lethal. The dangers of sepsis were recognized by the healing pioneer Louis Pasteur, an early gramma with a sly little French beard who insisted that midwives and doctors wash their hands and instruments before birthing. He also saved vast numbers of kids and grownups when he found a way to purify milk (a seriously lethal cocktail in days gone by) with high heat just under the boiling point (Pasteurization, look on your milk carton).
Dr. Pasteur also advanced the practice of vaccination. With it, we’ve conquered desperately lethal diseases like smallpox and polio. The defunct Soviet Union awarded a great distinction to a very few: Hero of the People. Pasteur deserved this award from all of us.
Clean municipal water supply is one of the basic wonders of health. This is a very old advance. The Romans determined, empirically, that tainted water killed, and brought fresh water from enormous distances through buried and elevated aqueducts, the engineering high points of an age. Providing reliably pure “city water” has been a municipal responsibility for many generations. One of the earliest documented tales of empirical epidemiology was the use of medical geography in tracing the source of an epidemic cholera in London of 1854. When Dr. John Snow persuaded officials to refuse use of the public well on Broad Street (where a “cluster” of 127 cholera victims had died), the situation improved. It was later found that the Broad Street well had been dug only three feet from a leaking cess pit. Quid erat demonstrandum.
Another municipal improvement is the fourth statistical advance in medicine: trash pickup. We’re so accustomed to this process that we don’t credit it for saving lives. It does. During one of the Great Plagues of London in the 17th century, a few careful observers commented that the healthiest place to live was London Bridge. This wasn’t the contemporary structure, or the bridge transported stone-by-stone to span an artificial stream in Arizona. Old London bridge was a teeming human marvel carrying shops, apartment buildings and residences, as well as London Bridge Gate (where the heads of traitors were displayed on pike-ends) and London Municipal Waterworks, which the flow of the stream past waterwheels as power. The structures were cantilevered out above the Thames’ flow, leaving a narrow, dim bridge surface for wagons and pedestrians. Cantilevered outboard of these sometimes flimsy constructions were “jakes” or “necessaries” – simple outhouses. The London weather is always damp, above the river damper still, wood is a porous material, nails were precious, so having an out-hung outhouse shear away from the main structure and fall into the river was a common source of annoyance (and even more annoying if someone were in it at the time). This, in this way, London Bridge was continually falling down, my fair lady. But why was it so healthy? Because the residents availed themselves of river’s conveniences: they threw their trash out the windows and their poop dropped directly into the river. Disgusting. But healthy. No trash, no cesspit, no rats. No rats, no fleas. No fleas, no bubonic plague. When American cities began to pick up domestic trash the health of the cities improved enormously.
The fifth great advance in medicine came late: anesthesia. Before properly administered surgical “sleep,” a patient could die from the shock of pain. Untold numbers died because the thought of enduring the knife without a pain-killer was too horrible, so operations that might have saved the patient’s life (or might not if infection from the dirty scalpel settled in the wound), were put off. Queen Victoria was the first “public” woman to received anesthesia for the pain of childbirth. “Laughing gas,” nitrous oxide, revolutionized dentistry.
During London Bridge’s fashionable height, around the year 1600, and right on into our mid-19th century, a physician’s pharmacopoeia was essentially useless. Indeed, the attentions of a “doctor” were flatly dangerous. In the thousands of clinical substances available, there were only three or four that had real effect. One, and the most effective, was the placebo. Another was laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium. Then there were a few topical remedies, some unreliable folk remedies, and an overwhelming world of superstition.
Antibiotics also arrived late, well into the 20th century. Though antibiotics are a comfort to all of us (King Tutankhamen might still be around if his jaw abscess had been treated with penicillin) they aren’t statistically significant. They haven’t made a major difference in public health and mortality. Before antibiotics, many robust folks survived infections like pneumonia, cholera, typhoid fever and even smallpox. A surprising number of soldiers and sailors survived amputations with filthy surgical instruments.
Most of the advancements of science aren’t a drop in the bucket compared to the gargantuan face of humanity. But what your gramma told you, that counts.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has been tossed out of some tolerably high-toned California dinners for taking up the cudgel against New Age superstitions allotted a holy place in Marin folklore – healing touch, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbals, &c. In some ways, being asked to leave because you're insulting ignorant guests is a badge of honor. In most ways – and Himself is learning this slowly – it's boorish. He's a well-intentioned fellow with a persistent inability to identify what's appropriate behavior and discourse.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
BIG OCEAN
When we taped the promo sequence of our Childrens Public Broadcasting hopeful, "Ahoy Archimedes," I signed off with an antique sailing farewell, "Fair winds, a flowing tide, and following seas". This is a farewell in the original sense of “fare thee well.”
Fair winds are those blowing in the direction you’re bound. A “flowing tide” is the fortunate opposite of a “foul tide” (current against you). Following seas lift and seem to carry you – anyone who has tried to make headway in a “head sea” (waves opposing your course) knows what a buffeting, frantic, frustrating experience it can be.
The tide might seem a mega-force acting over enormous areas that has little application to tiny boats on its surface. At sea, yes. Onshore, it is to larf. When enormous areas of water attempt to empty from or fill up smaller areas of water, the resulting water pressure and consequent current can be shocking. Tidal bores in France and in China regularly set up six-foot to eight-foot walls of water moving at the speed of a bus up tidal rivers. The wicked “holes” between Buzzards Bay and the Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds see current twice a day that challenges the bladder control of staunch, experienced skippers. In one of them, Woods Hole, steel ocean buoys six and eight feet in diameter, weighing several tons, whip back and forth in the full flow, appearing at the surface only at one limit of their heavy mooring chains, emerging in a boil of water like sportive dolphins, sucked down again to make the next circuit and rear up at the other chain-limit. Tidal current fills and empties the Bay of Fundy inside Nova Scotia, making a waterfall that reverses directions twice daily, and giving ports at the head of the Bay a tidefall of (a flabbergasting) forty-five feet. To put this in perspective, the tide there would cover and uncover a four-story building twice a day.
When the tidal current runs against the wind, it sets up an unholy chop. At the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal, where the six knot SW current meets a steady twenty knot “smoky sou’wester,” standing waves of eight and ten feet set up in the channel off the Canal’s protective breakwater into Buzzards Bay. Watching a fifty-foot yacht expose half of her bottom, from forefoot to keel, before she crashes into the trough is impressive from shore but truly breathtaking from the deck.
One of the explanations I was making to Kai, a delightful kid who was part of our taping, is that a wave isn't what it seems. A wave is an energy pulse that travels through the water, while any given molecule of water stays pretty much in the same area, moving up, forward and back in a circular or elliptic motion. The water stays put (except for current effects) while the physical disturbance of the water travels on. The wicked surf on many beaches is an amplification phenomenon – the energy of the pulse rebounding from the shallowing bottom when the depth is less than a certain proportion of the waves’ height and period (length or time between crests). The rebounding energy increases the height of the waves without affecting the period, so the amplitude (height) of the wave is multiplied and, eventually, can’t support itself structurally and “breaks” – surf. There are tremendous waves at sea that can be very impressive from a small boat. It's not uncommon in, say, the Roaring Forties (40° south latitude) for seas to reach a regular height of forty feet and their crests, blown by wind, break in “combers.” Breaking waves like this are called “graybeards” in respect and awe. But the period of these graybeards, the length between crests, is dictated by wave physics uncomplicated by bottom amplification and can be a quarter or even half a mile.
In the vast fetch of the sea (“fetch” is the distance over which waves travel and grow) the waves around you may be generated by more than one factor. A storm working up the sea a thousand miles away can send its waves to you, and this “train” of waves (a long set of energy peaks) meeting your local waves at an angle can amplify, diminish, or alter the frequency of your wave conditions. It can be tricky to steer in a “confused sea” like this because the pattern of amplifications and diminutions seems random (which it ain’t).
Traditional oceanography was pleased with its wave theory until recently. Water is, after all, a relatively uniform fluid, so physical laws apply uniformly. Obedient wave equations had been built and confirmed. You seen one wave, you seen ‘em all. Professional bluewater sailors disagreed. Many have faced the phenomenon of “rogue waves,” which were considered folklore until sober reports from supertankers, research vessels, and sea-measuring radar satellites confirmed their existence. It’s now considered likely that, at any given moment, ten mountainous rogue waves are alive and rushing across the World Ocean for hours at a time, some in excess of a hundred feet. In 1943, for instance, the celebrated liner RMS Queen Mary had been pressed into service as a troop ship. She was capable of such extraordinary speed that she needed no conventional convoy escorts but she was sometimes accompanied by fast-moving, sub-killing Navy blimps. The Queen Mary met a a pair of rogue waves, startlingly larger than the “normal” storm waves around it. One wave was photographed from a blimp breaking OVER HER BRIDGE, ninety-three feet above her waterline. Bridge windows were stove in, the bridge flooded, and the Queen Mary, among the largest ships afloat, nearly went down in the battering. She listed 52° for several minutes before she righted herself and continued.
There are mysterious places – the Agulhaus Current off the Cape of Good Hope is one – that also produce rogue troughs, “holes in the sea.” A British warship encountered one in the 50’s, fell into the trough, and kept going down. Lost with all 600+ hands in a few moments.
A tsunami is not a rogue wave. Indeed, the energy pulse of a tsunami can pass under a ship without notice. It’s essentially a huge convex disturbance of the surface, of such a scale that a ship wouldn’t be able to detect it. When it reaches the continental shelf off the shore, however, bottom reflection of energy converts it to a giant, lethal wall of water.
The point is that our World Ocean is aqua incognita. It ain’t Kansas. It is an arena in which humanly unimaginable forces dwell daily. We don’t know a great deal about the ocean, so far, and haven’t devised a way to live securely on or in it. Bits and pieces of information drift in like flotsam to the shore. Space Travel? Captain Kirk and the Enterprise? Puh-lease. We’ve got places a few miles offshore where no man has gone before.
NOTE: SAILOR FOLKLORE
There is an ancient joke about sailors’ reportage: What’s the difference between a “sea story” and a “fairy story?”
A “fairy story” begins, “Once upon a time…” A “sea story” begins, “Now this ain’t no shit…”
Readers are assured that, within the limits of good-faith research and suppression of poetic license, the above ain't no shit.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
As Himself has often said, "No one can love the sea." It's too cold and cruel and unfeeling and dangerous. But it's difficult for a thinking person not to be fascinated or even obsessed by the sea. The cowboys say, "The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man," and the hayseeds may be right. But ocean fascination and being on the water is good for the heart and mind. Neither Adkins nor I have any pretensions of mastery or even professional knowledge of the ocean. We're shoreside dabblers, coastal sailors with occasional leaps across blue water. I'm glad that neither of us has false courage about the water. One is especially pleased that a romantic like Himself still has a healthy fear of setting out on the face of the mighty deep, even when it's shallow. Fear is a much-underrated virtue.
Fair winds are those blowing in the direction you’re bound. A “flowing tide” is the fortunate opposite of a “foul tide” (current against you). Following seas lift and seem to carry you – anyone who has tried to make headway in a “head sea” (waves opposing your course) knows what a buffeting, frantic, frustrating experience it can be.
The tide might seem a mega-force acting over enormous areas that has little application to tiny boats on its surface. At sea, yes. Onshore, it is to larf. When enormous areas of water attempt to empty from or fill up smaller areas of water, the resulting water pressure and consequent current can be shocking. Tidal bores in France and in China regularly set up six-foot to eight-foot walls of water moving at the speed of a bus up tidal rivers. The wicked “holes” between Buzzards Bay and the Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds see current twice a day that challenges the bladder control of staunch, experienced skippers. In one of them, Woods Hole, steel ocean buoys six and eight feet in diameter, weighing several tons, whip back and forth in the full flow, appearing at the surface only at one limit of their heavy mooring chains, emerging in a boil of water like sportive dolphins, sucked down again to make the next circuit and rear up at the other chain-limit. Tidal current fills and empties the Bay of Fundy inside Nova Scotia, making a waterfall that reverses directions twice daily, and giving ports at the head of the Bay a tidefall of (a flabbergasting) forty-five feet. To put this in perspective, the tide there would cover and uncover a four-story building twice a day.
When the tidal current runs against the wind, it sets up an unholy chop. At the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal, where the six knot SW current meets a steady twenty knot “smoky sou’wester,” standing waves of eight and ten feet set up in the channel off the Canal’s protective breakwater into Buzzards Bay. Watching a fifty-foot yacht expose half of her bottom, from forefoot to keel, before she crashes into the trough is impressive from shore but truly breathtaking from the deck.
One of the explanations I was making to Kai, a delightful kid who was part of our taping, is that a wave isn't what it seems. A wave is an energy pulse that travels through the water, while any given molecule of water stays pretty much in the same area, moving up, forward and back in a circular or elliptic motion. The water stays put (except for current effects) while the physical disturbance of the water travels on. The wicked surf on many beaches is an amplification phenomenon – the energy of the pulse rebounding from the shallowing bottom when the depth is less than a certain proportion of the waves’ height and period (length or time between crests). The rebounding energy increases the height of the waves without affecting the period, so the amplitude (height) of the wave is multiplied and, eventually, can’t support itself structurally and “breaks” – surf. There are tremendous waves at sea that can be very impressive from a small boat. It's not uncommon in, say, the Roaring Forties (40° south latitude) for seas to reach a regular height of forty feet and their crests, blown by wind, break in “combers.” Breaking waves like this are called “graybeards” in respect and awe. But the period of these graybeards, the length between crests, is dictated by wave physics uncomplicated by bottom amplification and can be a quarter or even half a mile.
In the vast fetch of the sea (“fetch” is the distance over which waves travel and grow) the waves around you may be generated by more than one factor. A storm working up the sea a thousand miles away can send its waves to you, and this “train” of waves (a long set of energy peaks) meeting your local waves at an angle can amplify, diminish, or alter the frequency of your wave conditions. It can be tricky to steer in a “confused sea” like this because the pattern of amplifications and diminutions seems random (which it ain’t).
Traditional oceanography was pleased with its wave theory until recently. Water is, after all, a relatively uniform fluid, so physical laws apply uniformly. Obedient wave equations had been built and confirmed. You seen one wave, you seen ‘em all. Professional bluewater sailors disagreed. Many have faced the phenomenon of “rogue waves,” which were considered folklore until sober reports from supertankers, research vessels, and sea-measuring radar satellites confirmed their existence. It’s now considered likely that, at any given moment, ten mountainous rogue waves are alive and rushing across the World Ocean for hours at a time, some in excess of a hundred feet. In 1943, for instance, the celebrated liner RMS Queen Mary had been pressed into service as a troop ship. She was capable of such extraordinary speed that she needed no conventional convoy escorts but she was sometimes accompanied by fast-moving, sub-killing Navy blimps. The Queen Mary met a a pair of rogue waves, startlingly larger than the “normal” storm waves around it. One wave was photographed from a blimp breaking OVER HER BRIDGE, ninety-three feet above her waterline. Bridge windows were stove in, the bridge flooded, and the Queen Mary, among the largest ships afloat, nearly went down in the battering. She listed 52° for several minutes before she righted herself and continued.
There are mysterious places – the Agulhaus Current off the Cape of Good Hope is one – that also produce rogue troughs, “holes in the sea.” A British warship encountered one in the 50’s, fell into the trough, and kept going down. Lost with all 600+ hands in a few moments.
A tsunami is not a rogue wave. Indeed, the energy pulse of a tsunami can pass under a ship without notice. It’s essentially a huge convex disturbance of the surface, of such a scale that a ship wouldn’t be able to detect it. When it reaches the continental shelf off the shore, however, bottom reflection of energy converts it to a giant, lethal wall of water.
The point is that our World Ocean is aqua incognita. It ain’t Kansas. It is an arena in which humanly unimaginable forces dwell daily. We don’t know a great deal about the ocean, so far, and haven’t devised a way to live securely on or in it. Bits and pieces of information drift in like flotsam to the shore. Space Travel? Captain Kirk and the Enterprise? Puh-lease. We’ve got places a few miles offshore where no man has gone before.
NOTE: SAILOR FOLKLORE
There is an ancient joke about sailors’ reportage: What’s the difference between a “sea story” and a “fairy story?”
A “fairy story” begins, “Once upon a time…” A “sea story” begins, “Now this ain’t no shit…”
Readers are assured that, within the limits of good-faith research and suppression of poetic license, the above ain't no shit.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
As Himself has often said, "No one can love the sea." It's too cold and cruel and unfeeling and dangerous. But it's difficult for a thinking person not to be fascinated or even obsessed by the sea. The cowboys say, "The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man," and the hayseeds may be right. But ocean fascination and being on the water is good for the heart and mind. Neither Adkins nor I have any pretensions of mastery or even professional knowledge of the ocean. We're shoreside dabblers, coastal sailors with occasional leaps across blue water. I'm glad that neither of us has false courage about the water. One is especially pleased that a romantic like Himself still has a healthy fear of setting out on the face of the mighty deep, even when it's shallow. Fear is a much-underrated virtue.
Monday, February 22, 2010
HOPSCOTCH REMEMBERED
THE SUN CAME OUT this morning, so Laura and Hannah were out in the driveway. Hannah was drawing on the concrete with big chalk. I walked down and was drawn into the chalk drawing. Hannah lay down so I could trace her outline. This was so fine that Laura lay down and had hers done. I laid down but rather than flat-on-back, arms-outspread, I tried a lying-on-side profile. When I drew a cross for my eyes, the driveway became a crime scene. Naturally Laura insisted on her own crime-scene profile, which she got. I did two cross-eyes for this but it disturbed Laura considerably and she tried to wash out the "dead eyes" because, she said, "this is beginning to look sick."
She took the kabosh off our crime scene by drawing a familiar figure farther out in the driveway: a hopscotch matrix – one, two, three, double, six, double, nine, heaven. We showed Hannah how it was done. She refused to get into the racket but demanded that we continue.
I returned to my studio (proclaiming my intention to "use the potty," since Hannah is in the midst of intense potty training, big girl pants, &c) and looked down at the hopscotch matrix. What a familiar figure and how evocative! It was probably a game played when Gilgamesh was king. Of course it was a girls' game. I can't remember the play or the scoring and refused myself the time for Googling "hopscotch." It made me consider the flow of time, yet again this week.
When I began seriously fooling around with computers the industrial design studio with which I worked in Providence, RI, had a memory hard drive with a 2 GB capacity, a larger drive than I'd ever seen. We thought this amount of 0's and 1's was extraordinary, amazing, who could use so much? Sitting next to my keyboard presently is a SanDisk thumb-drive as big as a French fry with a memory storage capacity of 4 GB. I bought a pack of three at CostCo for under $30. Things change.
My first commercial flight was aboard a DC-4. The service of the “stewardess” was attentive and pleasant. We walked out onto the tarmac to board via a rolling set of steps. Our friends came to see us off (we were flying from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Tampa, Florida, by way of Atlanta, because Wheeling had no commercial airport). A 5’ chain-link fence separated the onlookers from the runway. In the air I got ear-popping gum as a matter of course. Later a meal was served handsomely with airline-monogrammed silverware. Each diner had tiny salt and pepper shakers. I was invited to look at the cockpit. It was more impressive than contemporary cockpits because radial engines need more complex monitoring than jets, require a "flight engineer" and have close to a hundred dials. The cockpit door was open most of the time. No one had highjacked an airplane. What a crazy idea. They'd know where you were going, right? You couldn't get away with it. What kind of a nut would highjack an airplane?
I'm proud to say that I received Flying Wings as a bona fide flight passenger when we reached Tampa.
I flew the week after 9-11 (I had lost a friend, Anne Judge, in the Pentagon crash that day) but haven’t flown since exploding underwear came into vogue, so I don’t know the drill of not covering one’s lap, drinking liquids or humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the last half hour of flight. One crazed Islamicist attempts to light his sneakers and millions of Americans take off their shoes. One supposes that next year we’ll be flying naked with a mood probe up our ass.
I’m one of those people who remembers early-childhood experiences, like the texture of the cast-iron crib at my grandparent’s summer place in the West Virginia mountains, or the sound of cars passing on the dirt road directly in front of that cottage, or the smell of the green, slightly translucent wallpaper cleaning dough my mother used at our house on Wheeling Island, or the smell of the pineapple-flavored rum my gramma and grampa brought back from Cuba. I remember the gritty feel and stony smell of Lava soap, always beside the sink because my grandfather, father and uncles worked in the shop. I liked the smell of Jergen’s Lotion, Lifebuoy soap, and my father’s green Mennen’s Aftershave. That was his smell. I loved spaghetti, partly because (in our Wonder Bread world) it was so exotic.
We sometimes took road trips with my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. One of the trips brought us to Washington, DC. The Smithsonian was wonderful. I put my nose into the tiny porthole of the Explorer II high altitude gondola, a black and white sphere sent manned into the actual stratosphere by the National Geographic Society. The old, uncirculated air smelled musty and dry. There were two sets of drinking fountains; it was disappointing that the fountains under the “COLORED” sign offered plain, uncolored water. At the National Zoo the keeper at the primate house showed us that the monkeys ate well, breaking off a dense, sweet cornbread made with honey, bran, seeds and vitamins, fed to the chimps. When he took a bite my mother, who was definitely a delicate creature, almost fainted. When I took a bite from the keeper before she could stop me, she was forced to sit down and recover. It was delicious. I wish I had a piece right now.
Things change. My G-4 Mac computer is now, ahem, "old." The notion of air travel as an elegant way to go is antique. Presently it's a feedlot experience. I’m an old guy now. Thank God for stents, Zoloft and Viagra. And also, thank God for the beautiful sun that burned through the rain and fog at last. Maybe I'll Google "hopscotch" tomorrow.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Childhood memories are odd artifacts. One wonders if they're honest. Things Adkins' grandson Max has said seem to reflect the long labor of his birth as a memory of his mother "trying and trying to get me out." Still, I must be aware that Himself can grow morose with too many memories. Looking back too earnestly ensures a stumble in the present.
She took the kabosh off our crime scene by drawing a familiar figure farther out in the driveway: a hopscotch matrix – one, two, three, double, six, double, nine, heaven. We showed Hannah how it was done. She refused to get into the racket but demanded that we continue.
I returned to my studio (proclaiming my intention to "use the potty," since Hannah is in the midst of intense potty training, big girl pants, &c) and looked down at the hopscotch matrix. What a familiar figure and how evocative! It was probably a game played when Gilgamesh was king. Of course it was a girls' game. I can't remember the play or the scoring and refused myself the time for Googling "hopscotch." It made me consider the flow of time, yet again this week.
When I began seriously fooling around with computers the industrial design studio with which I worked in Providence, RI, had a memory hard drive with a 2 GB capacity, a larger drive than I'd ever seen. We thought this amount of 0's and 1's was extraordinary, amazing, who could use so much? Sitting next to my keyboard presently is a SanDisk thumb-drive as big as a French fry with a memory storage capacity of 4 GB. I bought a pack of three at CostCo for under $30. Things change.
My first commercial flight was aboard a DC-4. The service of the “stewardess” was attentive and pleasant. We walked out onto the tarmac to board via a rolling set of steps. Our friends came to see us off (we were flying from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Tampa, Florida, by way of Atlanta, because Wheeling had no commercial airport). A 5’ chain-link fence separated the onlookers from the runway. In the air I got ear-popping gum as a matter of course. Later a meal was served handsomely with airline-monogrammed silverware. Each diner had tiny salt and pepper shakers. I was invited to look at the cockpit. It was more impressive than contemporary cockpits because radial engines need more complex monitoring than jets, require a "flight engineer" and have close to a hundred dials. The cockpit door was open most of the time. No one had highjacked an airplane. What a crazy idea. They'd know where you were going, right? You couldn't get away with it. What kind of a nut would highjack an airplane?
I'm proud to say that I received Flying Wings as a bona fide flight passenger when we reached Tampa.
I flew the week after 9-11 (I had lost a friend, Anne Judge, in the Pentagon crash that day) but haven’t flown since exploding underwear came into vogue, so I don’t know the drill of not covering one’s lap, drinking liquids or humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the last half hour of flight. One crazed Islamicist attempts to light his sneakers and millions of Americans take off their shoes. One supposes that next year we’ll be flying naked with a mood probe up our ass.
I’m one of those people who remembers early-childhood experiences, like the texture of the cast-iron crib at my grandparent’s summer place in the West Virginia mountains, or the sound of cars passing on the dirt road directly in front of that cottage, or the smell of the green, slightly translucent wallpaper cleaning dough my mother used at our house on Wheeling Island, or the smell of the pineapple-flavored rum my gramma and grampa brought back from Cuba. I remember the gritty feel and stony smell of Lava soap, always beside the sink because my grandfather, father and uncles worked in the shop. I liked the smell of Jergen’s Lotion, Lifebuoy soap, and my father’s green Mennen’s Aftershave. That was his smell. I loved spaghetti, partly because (in our Wonder Bread world) it was so exotic.
We sometimes took road trips with my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Mary. One of the trips brought us to Washington, DC. The Smithsonian was wonderful. I put my nose into the tiny porthole of the Explorer II high altitude gondola, a black and white sphere sent manned into the actual stratosphere by the National Geographic Society. The old, uncirculated air smelled musty and dry. There were two sets of drinking fountains; it was disappointing that the fountains under the “COLORED” sign offered plain, uncolored water. At the National Zoo the keeper at the primate house showed us that the monkeys ate well, breaking off a dense, sweet cornbread made with honey, bran, seeds and vitamins, fed to the chimps. When he took a bite my mother, who was definitely a delicate creature, almost fainted. When I took a bite from the keeper before she could stop me, she was forced to sit down and recover. It was delicious. I wish I had a piece right now.
Things change. My G-4 Mac computer is now, ahem, "old." The notion of air travel as an elegant way to go is antique. Presently it's a feedlot experience. I’m an old guy now. Thank God for stents, Zoloft and Viagra. And also, thank God for the beautiful sun that burned through the rain and fog at last. Maybe I'll Google "hopscotch" tomorrow.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Childhood memories are odd artifacts. One wonders if they're honest. Things Adkins' grandson Max has said seem to reflect the long labor of his birth as a memory of his mother "trying and trying to get me out." Still, I must be aware that Himself can grow morose with too many memories. Looking back too earnestly ensures a stumble in the present.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
GREEN BOATING
A discussion in today's "Marina, Boatingbuilding and Dealer Professionals" forum asked if "Green Marinas" were viable. This is a charged debate because the "professionals" depend on big boats for their profits, and the big powerboats get about half a mile to the gallon, if that.
But being on the water is so important, so precious. Watching from shore just isn't a substitute. You see the ocean and its life only beyond the surf. My contribution to the subject was:
The Green Marina is a goal. Even faltering steps toward energy savings and zero-added-pollution should be encouraged. Should Green Marinas harbor sailing craft only? Not necessarily; some motor yachts designed for modest speeds are fuel-efficient. And some small, economically disenfranchised boaters are zero-polluters. How many marinas welcome small scale sailors – kayaks, pulling boats and daysailers?
It's surprising to most wind-sailors how much fuel fast-moving demands. It's a guilty fact that we motor through calms, light winds and even headwinds. We might return to the slip after a trip out to the Farralones and back, motoring for a good part of the day, and use, perhaps, 7 gallons of diesel. The sport-fisherman across the dock has made the same trip at a higher speed, has admittedly covered more bottom by setting and pulling crab pots and trolling for stripers, but has burned more than ten times the fuel. Things change. Oil is no longer a negligible component of boating's future.
Being on the water is a rare privilege most landlocked souls aren't offered. The prime benefit of access to the water life is witnessing and being part of its powerful but delicate ecology. A responsibility comes with the privilege: we're obligated to do as little harm to the water we love as possible.
A Green Marina, even one with some contradictions and drawbacks, is a good start and a good example. Any Green Marina would remind its skippers to think more clearly about how they affect the water. If we saw more Green Marinas, the industry would inevitably push technology (still grounded in its high-ticket, twin-Chrysler, go-fast stage) toward efficiency and sensible conservation. It may not be too early to accept the logical expression of our privileged closeness to the world ocean: reducing fuel consumption at LEAST in proportion to reduction in automobile standards.
We don't want to lose marinas! They're critical portals to the water world, and they're a happy, colorful component of shore life. Marinas can't survive if they can't make money. Big boats make big profits. Fuel markups aren't what they were but they're part of the profit margin. What's the responsible, proactive, progressive, foresighted path? Green Marinas are one part of the answer: they're an institutional commitment to positive change.
The sensible path surely depends on reading the future as wisely as we check the weather forecasts: can go-fast powerboating continue as a highly visible symbol of boating's lack of concern for conservation? Will every big, creamy wake, so visible scarring the Bay, encourage legislators to make the boating industry a sop to Cerberus? Will legislation crack down on boating as a smoke screen for allowing trucking and auto manufacturers to ignore fuel reduction guidelines?
You know that I'm merely a gadfly in this discussion. My dog in this fight is a Chihuahua. But from a journalist's perspective, the boating industry might serve itself best by getting on the Green Barge and making its own changes.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself can offer himself to ridicule pitifully eagerly. One speculates that marine businessmen, boat manufacturers and even small-boat builders would prefer that amateurs simply shut up. But ridicule can be an honorable state for journalists, whose business demands that they step out onto the balcony of palaces and observe aloud that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Ridicule doesn't do journalists much lasting harm, and we suppose they must accustom themselves to the sting of cold water in their faces in order to say the critically important thing when it is, by common consent, ridiculous.
But being on the water is so important, so precious. Watching from shore just isn't a substitute. You see the ocean and its life only beyond the surf. My contribution to the subject was:
The Green Marina is a goal. Even faltering steps toward energy savings and zero-added-pollution should be encouraged. Should Green Marinas harbor sailing craft only? Not necessarily; some motor yachts designed for modest speeds are fuel-efficient. And some small, economically disenfranchised boaters are zero-polluters. How many marinas welcome small scale sailors – kayaks, pulling boats and daysailers?
It's surprising to most wind-sailors how much fuel fast-moving demands. It's a guilty fact that we motor through calms, light winds and even headwinds. We might return to the slip after a trip out to the Farralones and back, motoring for a good part of the day, and use, perhaps, 7 gallons of diesel. The sport-fisherman across the dock has made the same trip at a higher speed, has admittedly covered more bottom by setting and pulling crab pots and trolling for stripers, but has burned more than ten times the fuel. Things change. Oil is no longer a negligible component of boating's future.
Being on the water is a rare privilege most landlocked souls aren't offered. The prime benefit of access to the water life is witnessing and being part of its powerful but delicate ecology. A responsibility comes with the privilege: we're obligated to do as little harm to the water we love as possible.
A Green Marina, even one with some contradictions and drawbacks, is a good start and a good example. Any Green Marina would remind its skippers to think more clearly about how they affect the water. If we saw more Green Marinas, the industry would inevitably push technology (still grounded in its high-ticket, twin-Chrysler, go-fast stage) toward efficiency and sensible conservation. It may not be too early to accept the logical expression of our privileged closeness to the world ocean: reducing fuel consumption at LEAST in proportion to reduction in automobile standards.
We don't want to lose marinas! They're critical portals to the water world, and they're a happy, colorful component of shore life. Marinas can't survive if they can't make money. Big boats make big profits. Fuel markups aren't what they were but they're part of the profit margin. What's the responsible, proactive, progressive, foresighted path? Green Marinas are one part of the answer: they're an institutional commitment to positive change.
The sensible path surely depends on reading the future as wisely as we check the weather forecasts: can go-fast powerboating continue as a highly visible symbol of boating's lack of concern for conservation? Will every big, creamy wake, so visible scarring the Bay, encourage legislators to make the boating industry a sop to Cerberus? Will legislation crack down on boating as a smoke screen for allowing trucking and auto manufacturers to ignore fuel reduction guidelines?
You know that I'm merely a gadfly in this discussion. My dog in this fight is a Chihuahua. But from a journalist's perspective, the boating industry might serve itself best by getting on the Green Barge and making its own changes.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself can offer himself to ridicule pitifully eagerly. One speculates that marine businessmen, boat manufacturers and even small-boat builders would prefer that amateurs simply shut up. But ridicule can be an honorable state for journalists, whose business demands that they step out onto the balcony of palaces and observe aloud that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Ridicule doesn't do journalists much lasting harm, and we suppose they must accustom themselves to the sting of cold water in their faces in order to say the critically important thing when it is, by common consent, ridiculous.
MORTALITY
BY MY TROTH, I care not; a man can die but once: we owe God a death: I'll ne'er bear a base mind: an't be my destiny, so; an't be not, so: no man is too good to serve's prince; and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV
A friend's mother-in-law just died, and another friend's mum is teetering on the brink. Recently I lost my dear mentor, Matt Finn. What can you say to friends, what can you say to yourself, about death?
We can't understand how folks depart, leave the husk, and don’t return. It’s not in our human makeup to grasp this finality. They leave, gone, that's it. All that experience, all those stories, all that humor . . . Gone. How can that be?
I’m an old dog and I still can’t get my logic around it.
I’m not comfortable with churches. Despite my science reporter’s background (or, perhaps, because of it) I’m certain that a benign current underlies our reality. But I can’t support the idea of ghosts or heaven or souls, if only because it would be too damn comforting to have these hedges. So I don't expect the Ghost of Christmas Past or my Uncle Pete to shuffle through rattling chains. I don't expect to continue in any way after I check out.
What bothers me most is the reality of what was. How can a day forty-five years ago – in late fall on a hillside in the mountains of West Virginia, when hickory nuts fell from the trees rattling on branches, and I felt the soft hand of Becky Barlow’s hand in mine – not be as real as what I see outside my window now? How can my mother's pies not be still as fragrant as the moment before they were cut, still warm? I see those times, I very nearly smell that pie. Where is the day and the pie? I don’t know. It’s one of the basically disturbing things about being human, this awful backlog of afternoons and evenings, moments and loved ones, that don’t logically exist in the present. Where did they go? Aren’t they still somewhere?
When you’re older dreams take on more authority. They have as much reality as the news, or what you see at the supermarket. If those dreams have such power to jog my emotions and stir my spirit, what about those gleaming gems of memory – intense joy, understanding, grief, frustration, desolation? It's hard to believe they're not in some sideband of time, some back-file of reality.
Maybe my low blood pressure has something to do with these delusionary wonderings. When I get up quickly from any chair I swoon a bit, as the mass of my blood readjusts and causes new hydrostatic pressures in my brain. These bits of dizzy pause are unscripted by logic, current events or the flow of conversation. It's possible these transient lapses predispose me to see the world as less that absolute, a garment sewn up loosely.
My doubts about the absolute nature of reality don't seem to affect my skeptical regard for acupuncture, chiropractic, Scientology, homeopathy or prayer breakfasts, but it casts a shadow of doubt on the whole damn river of time.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
As Himself grows older, he's more aware of his own lapses of sanity, as well as these lapses of swooning consciousness. He's often confided that he's crazier than he thought he was. One of his recurring fears is that he's lost critical opportunities because folks can sense his instability. True, he's a nutball, but I have less respect for most people's sensitivity than he does. The great majority of humanity wouldn't know their ass fell off unless they sat down quickly.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV
A friend's mother-in-law just died, and another friend's mum is teetering on the brink. Recently I lost my dear mentor, Matt Finn. What can you say to friends, what can you say to yourself, about death?
We can't understand how folks depart, leave the husk, and don’t return. It’s not in our human makeup to grasp this finality. They leave, gone, that's it. All that experience, all those stories, all that humor . . . Gone. How can that be?
I’m an old dog and I still can’t get my logic around it.
I’m not comfortable with churches. Despite my science reporter’s background (or, perhaps, because of it) I’m certain that a benign current underlies our reality. But I can’t support the idea of ghosts or heaven or souls, if only because it would be too damn comforting to have these hedges. So I don't expect the Ghost of Christmas Past or my Uncle Pete to shuffle through rattling chains. I don't expect to continue in any way after I check out.
What bothers me most is the reality of what was. How can a day forty-five years ago – in late fall on a hillside in the mountains of West Virginia, when hickory nuts fell from the trees rattling on branches, and I felt the soft hand of Becky Barlow’s hand in mine – not be as real as what I see outside my window now? How can my mother's pies not be still as fragrant as the moment before they were cut, still warm? I see those times, I very nearly smell that pie. Where is the day and the pie? I don’t know. It’s one of the basically disturbing things about being human, this awful backlog of afternoons and evenings, moments and loved ones, that don’t logically exist in the present. Where did they go? Aren’t they still somewhere?
When you’re older dreams take on more authority. They have as much reality as the news, or what you see at the supermarket. If those dreams have such power to jog my emotions and stir my spirit, what about those gleaming gems of memory – intense joy, understanding, grief, frustration, desolation? It's hard to believe they're not in some sideband of time, some back-file of reality.
Maybe my low blood pressure has something to do with these delusionary wonderings. When I get up quickly from any chair I swoon a bit, as the mass of my blood readjusts and causes new hydrostatic pressures in my brain. These bits of dizzy pause are unscripted by logic, current events or the flow of conversation. It's possible these transient lapses predispose me to see the world as less that absolute, a garment sewn up loosely.
My doubts about the absolute nature of reality don't seem to affect my skeptical regard for acupuncture, chiropractic, Scientology, homeopathy or prayer breakfasts, but it casts a shadow of doubt on the whole damn river of time.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
As Himself grows older, he's more aware of his own lapses of sanity, as well as these lapses of swooning consciousness. He's often confided that he's crazier than he thought he was. One of his recurring fears is that he's lost critical opportunities because folks can sense his instability. True, he's a nutball, but I have less respect for most people's sensitivity than he does. The great majority of humanity wouldn't know their ass fell off unless they sat down quickly.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
CLOTHESLINE
HOMEOWNERS ASSOCIATIONS are fierce guardians of design morality, yard upkeep, and homogeneous property values. They've politely mentioned to a friend that her clothesline is not an approved landscaping feature. Of course they're polite. Bigotry and reminding folks that they have stepped outside accepted standards is always begun politely.
Her homeowners association is cowering before the persistence of image. When they see her clothes fluttering in the breeze, they don’t see a farm wife in the prairie wind but the stigma of the tenements, all those clotheslines hung between buildings, in air shafts, on tar roofs.
As a journalist, I should greet the association’s wet-jammie jitters as a compliment, since it stems in some part from one of the earliest and most powerful landmarks of photojournalism, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements In New York, 1890. This photo essay made an indelible impression on middle and upper class consciousness and persists to this day. It revealed the “shame of the squalid tenements.” A few efforts were made toward improving conditions but it was clear that the shame resided with the tenement dwellers, and there was obvious pique that the poor had embarrassed the rich.
But there’s something odd in the tenement clothesline prejudice. The period in which we welcomed so many immigrants and enriched our national gene pool with so much genius and drive was one of America's golden times. Yet our central icon of America, also from that time, is the cowboy. In reality the cattle drover we celebrate as the Marlboro Man was another indigent, socially abhorrent member on the lowest rung of society. The literacy rate in the tenements was sky-high compared to the readin’ and writin’ of the cattlemen. The cowboy’s heyday was brief: the “Texas cattle for Yankee dollars” era of driving big herds from the Southwest to the railheads in Kansas and Missouri spanned only about fifteen years. In that heyday the drover was seen by most of society as a pariah, filthy and uncivilized, ignorant and rowdy. To be fair, this perception was probably spot-on.
But out of our tenements in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnatti, Pittsburgh, Albany, Hartford and other urban centers we saw invention, enterprise, social reform, striving, artistic expression, and a new national spirit of diversity and respect. Granted, it took a hundred years for that spirit to gather power and legitimacy, but our national conscience began in the tenements with all those fluttering, clean clothes strung between buildings.
What social upheavals did the cowboys offer? The spirit of independence and self-reliance? No historic evidence of that. Most cowboys were hired on as part of a local cattlemen’s associations or a big-business rancher’s outfit, often with eastern or British money behind them. They were mounted troops at the beginning of the undeclared "War of Western Consolidation" that squeezed out "small-holders" and established big-money agribusiness.
That war saw a prairie suspension of habeus corpus, death squad "regulators," lynchings and corporate terrorism. But it's not a war you found in your textbooks. Billy the Kid was one champion of the small-holders in the Lincoln County War. The Mussel Shoals War was a bloodier conflict waged in California, involving Leland Stanford and his robber baron colleagues. Mussel Shoals was followed with obsessive interest in the class struggle it represented by a writer and theorist in London, Karl Marx.
So why the cowboy and not the immigrant striver? It was probably the hat. Even today a good Stetson attracts attention. It surely wasn't the horse. In that pre-automobile era everyone knew horses, every streetcorner layabout presented himself as an expert on horseflesh. But the hat, now there was the key to romance.
So why isn’t our national romance grounded in the tenements? Bad hats? Mebbe. In large part the influx of intelligence and talent the United States received between the beginning of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War is what made this country great. Immigrants, a sound and balanced Constitution, size and fortunate geography. There you have America.
The homeowners association should bugger off and read their history books a little more closely, damnit.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself exhibits a dash of unaccustomed passion in this rant, but he makes sense. Surely we could afford more diversity in our heroes. We recall the Pecos Bill archetype in our pantheon but we seem to have largely dismissed Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett and Joe Magarak. Dirty Harry should be turned away as a national model, of course, but he's the obvious product of Duke Wayne's legacy.
Her homeowners association is cowering before the persistence of image. When they see her clothes fluttering in the breeze, they don’t see a farm wife in the prairie wind but the stigma of the tenements, all those clotheslines hung between buildings, in air shafts, on tar roofs.
As a journalist, I should greet the association’s wet-jammie jitters as a compliment, since it stems in some part from one of the earliest and most powerful landmarks of photojournalism, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements In New York, 1890. This photo essay made an indelible impression on middle and upper class consciousness and persists to this day. It revealed the “shame of the squalid tenements.” A few efforts were made toward improving conditions but it was clear that the shame resided with the tenement dwellers, and there was obvious pique that the poor had embarrassed the rich.
But there’s something odd in the tenement clothesline prejudice. The period in which we welcomed so many immigrants and enriched our national gene pool with so much genius and drive was one of America's golden times. Yet our central icon of America, also from that time, is the cowboy. In reality the cattle drover we celebrate as the Marlboro Man was another indigent, socially abhorrent member on the lowest rung of society. The literacy rate in the tenements was sky-high compared to the readin’ and writin’ of the cattlemen. The cowboy’s heyday was brief: the “Texas cattle for Yankee dollars” era of driving big herds from the Southwest to the railheads in Kansas and Missouri spanned only about fifteen years. In that heyday the drover was seen by most of society as a pariah, filthy and uncivilized, ignorant and rowdy. To be fair, this perception was probably spot-on.
But out of our tenements in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnatti, Pittsburgh, Albany, Hartford and other urban centers we saw invention, enterprise, social reform, striving, artistic expression, and a new national spirit of diversity and respect. Granted, it took a hundred years for that spirit to gather power and legitimacy, but our national conscience began in the tenements with all those fluttering, clean clothes strung between buildings.
What social upheavals did the cowboys offer? The spirit of independence and self-reliance? No historic evidence of that. Most cowboys were hired on as part of a local cattlemen’s associations or a big-business rancher’s outfit, often with eastern or British money behind them. They were mounted troops at the beginning of the undeclared "War of Western Consolidation" that squeezed out "small-holders" and established big-money agribusiness.
That war saw a prairie suspension of habeus corpus, death squad "regulators," lynchings and corporate terrorism. But it's not a war you found in your textbooks. Billy the Kid was one champion of the small-holders in the Lincoln County War. The Mussel Shoals War was a bloodier conflict waged in California, involving Leland Stanford and his robber baron colleagues. Mussel Shoals was followed with obsessive interest in the class struggle it represented by a writer and theorist in London, Karl Marx.
So why the cowboy and not the immigrant striver? It was probably the hat. Even today a good Stetson attracts attention. It surely wasn't the horse. In that pre-automobile era everyone knew horses, every streetcorner layabout presented himself as an expert on horseflesh. But the hat, now there was the key to romance.
So why isn’t our national romance grounded in the tenements? Bad hats? Mebbe. In large part the influx of intelligence and talent the United States received between the beginning of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War is what made this country great. Immigrants, a sound and balanced Constitution, size and fortunate geography. There you have America.
The homeowners association should bugger off and read their history books a little more closely, damnit.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself exhibits a dash of unaccustomed passion in this rant, but he makes sense. Surely we could afford more diversity in our heroes. We recall the Pecos Bill archetype in our pantheon but we seem to have largely dismissed Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett and Joe Magarak. Dirty Harry should be turned away as a national model, of course, but he's the obvious product of Duke Wayne's legacy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)