Woodstock: Back to the Garden

The Woodstock Music Festival ended forty years ago today. In the years since, neither the Apocalyse nor the Harmonic Convergence has come to pass, but the culture wars are still alive and well. What did it all mean? Were you there? Share your stories of what it was like in a comment below. Radio Bob will feature your replies on the Radio Bob Show, starting 3 pm Wednesday.

Do you still have a pair of mud-encrusted jeans preserved in the attic? Send your photos from the festival or of other memorabilia to dale@ncpr.org. We'll attach them along with your remembrances to this post.

Supersize

The fiftieth anniversary of the St. Lawrence Seaway provides an opportunity to reflect on the respective costs and benefits of thinking big. As a cooperative human endeavor, the Seaway ranks up with the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or Machu Picchu. And it required a certain unstopability of purpose to accomplish such a task--a ruthless warlord, a demigod pharoah, or in the case of the Seaway, that creative/destructive genius Robert Moses who, in addition to his redrawing of the map of the North Country, invented the modern metropolis and its suburbs by mercilessly carving up the network of New York City neighborhoods.

One can't imagine the people of New York and Ontario ceding 64 square miles to be sunk for the bass, were it put to a referendum. To lose not only your home, but your town, is not a result to be had by local democratic process. Fifty years on, the feelings of the displaced are still raw, and yet the benefits are real as well: cheap power, new manufacturing, the opening of the Midwest to ocean trade, recreation and tourism destinations. And the cost, too, still rolls in--lost habitat, invasive species, erosion and water pollution.

At a time when we are facing big problems in the economy and the environment, thinking big is again in vogue. Whether small or big, the consequences will always include loss as well as gain. When you think big, they are just bigger.

Starting gun

Independence Day has gone through some changes over the years. Our notion of patriotism once focused much more on communitarian values, and less on the individual. A case in point is this excerpt from Franklin Benjamin Hough's History of St. Lawrence and Franklin County (1853). It concerns celebrations in the Town of Potsdam organized by pioneer settler Liberty Knowles.

"In 1825 the citizens of this town united in celebrating the national anniversary in a manner quite novel and utilitarian:

"Resolved therefore that it be recommended to the citizens of said town, to assemble the village, at an early hour on the 4th day of July next, with teams and suitable implements, for the purpose of embanking the meeting houses and gun house, and improving the public square in said town, as a principal part of the exercises of that day.

"Order of the Day:
1. The day will be ushered in by the discharge of cannon.
2. At half past 7 0'clock, A.M., prayers will be attended on the common.
3. Labor will commence at 8 o'clock A.M., at the discharge of one gun.
4. At half past 12 o'clock, at noon, at the discharge of a gun and the sound of a bugle, the procession will form, and, aided by the band, will march to the table (on the common), to be furnished with the provisions which each man will bring with him; and it is presumed some appendages will be added by the people of the village. Liquor will be furnished by the committee.
5. At half past one o'clock, P.M., labor will recommence, at the sound of the bugle.
6. At 5 o'clock, P.M., the sound of the bugle will announce the cessation of labor, when the procession will form and proceed to the place for receiving the address, from Rev. Wallace.
7. The day will close with music and the discharge of cannon."

Enjoy the holiday.

Eat the peas

You know your state's in trouble when the antics of its politicians start turning up on The Daily Show and in late night monologs. While New York has been briefly displaced by South Carolina as the butt of jokes, due to their governor's (once) mysterious walkabout, don't count Albany out yet. It's a slow-motion train wreck that keeps on giving. Dueling simultaneous sessions?--you can't make this stuff up. Lockouts and walkouts, shouting matches, the governor threatening armed intervention--oh joy.

Formulating fixes for our dysfunctional state legislature has become a cottage industry. Popular suggestions: fire the leaders (assuming you can tell who they are); dock everyone's pay; make them all sit at the table until they eat their peas. Rick Lazio (former GOP candidate for the US Senate) suggests: "Senate? We don' need no steenking Senate," proposing a single-house legislature like Nebraska's.

This is the Empire State; maybe we just need an emperor. Caligula had no trouble with Rome's legislature; he could get his horse appointed to the Senate. The whole horse--he was probably thinking, "Why leave the job half done?"

Caption: Caligula parades his horse Incitatus before the Roman Senate.

Well-traveled

Seems like everyone's been on the road lately--Bob and Jackie no sooner get back from their Greek excursion than Bob gears up to bicycle from Canton to Provincetown. Martha and David are recovering nicely from recent travels in the Northwest. I'm more of a home body, Thoreau's type, who famously said "I have traveled widely--in Concord."

I clock a lot of miles on evening strolls down the Red Sandstone Trail behind my house on the Raquette River. The route doesn't change much, but the seasons do. The ancient bones of the North Country show, sand and sandstone laid down by the Cambrian Sea, stone so old it contains no fossils large enough to see. The woods change--mostly oak along one stretch, mixed maple and struggling beech along another, cool pine shade farther down on Sugar Island.

At one end is Hannawa Falls, called by the original namers "nihanwate," laughing waters. My favorite stop is a shaded outcrop overhanging the falls at such a perilous angle, some day the water will have the last laugh. At the other end you can see the village of Potsdam downriver, the pilings of the old narrow gauge rail line leading to Oak Island, used to transport salmon-hued loaves of fresh-cut stone from the upstream quarries. The river is dotted with cairns of stone, where the log drivers anchored their booms deep in the 19th century. It's not wilderness, but a place like many in the North Country, where people have lived long enough to make their mark, and long enough for the marks to sink back into soil, to crumble and be overtaken by vines.

This has been my stomping ground since childhood excursions on a bike with a banana seat and ape-hanger handlebars. I see no reason to change now. Though it did look like there were some pretty fair walking trails on the Greek Isles, too.

Photographic memory

As Photo of the Day editor at NCPR, I get a unique, if skewed look at the North Country. Skewed by the predilections of our contributors, I mean--for beautiful landscapes, colorful fauna and flora, for the outdoor life and children and pets--all the things that become the jewels in family photo albums. Nothing wrong with that--I have an eye for the pretty shot myself. But just as a family photo album shows a sanitized version of family life, so the Photo of the Day shows a North Country absent many of its dimensions, and most notably rare--the picture that tells a story.

Which is why I get excited when I receive a contribution that perfectly captures a narrative, such as Lizette Haenel's portrait of a soldier at Monday's Memorial Day observance in Canton. I received many from that event-- flags and formations and wreaths and salutes. But Lizette's soldier is seated by himself in a section of folding chairs, deep in thought. His only neighbor is a neatly folded flag. You can tell he is about to get up and address the crowd--his notes are held in both hands. But his gaze is not toward the paper, rather he looks into that middle distance where memory resides. The picture tells you everything that he will say.

Peekaboo

If you're the type of person who won't get the discount grocery card because you think the shadow government will use it to track you via Predator drones, you should probably just skip past this. I've been deep in the world of Google Maps this week, trying and not quite succeeding at building automated tools to generate a grand North Country map to deliver NCPR news, events, photos, etc., by geographical location. Mapping tools have been getter better and easier to use over the last few years, and I think it is long overdue that the amorphous space of the Internet should become reattached to the communities people actually live in. So-called geofeeds are still fairly deep geek, but they have the potential to really change the relationship between the real and the virtual world.

Google Maps got its first boost from satellite imaging combined with global positioning technology. But over the last few years, they have been dispatching fleets of 360-degree camera cars down the roads and streets of the world to catalog street views and to synch them up with addresses. It's kind of creepy, and the practice is getting Google into hot-water with the privacy-sensitive German government. Here's NCPR as seen by Google Maps, at 80 E. Main Street, Canton NY. Top floor, right wing, three windows in--that's me waving at you from my office. You can not only find us, get driving directions to us, and find the nearest place that sells pizza--you can rotate the view and get a good look all around the neighborhood.

You really should get rid of that junker under the tarp. You know who you are. And now we know where you live.

Terrible longing

Lust is one of the big sins, right up there with sloth (my personal favorite) and simony--whatever that is. The usual objects of lust are money, power or sex, but I have become fixated on trillium. So ephemeral, so simple, so precious. I want to cut them and put them in a vase, or dig them up and transplant them home--I want to possess them. They are not gaudy and sociable like the daffodil, which permits itself to be herded chock-a-block into beds. They are modest and retiring, thriving in the most anemic of soil; they hide their beauty under partial shade. They keep a discreet distance from one another, lightly salted along the woodland trails. Far from the aggressive perfume of lilac, they cast no more aroma than cold spring water.

It's one thing to patiently wait out the cruel winter, then to take to the blackfly-infested woods, where one can savor their natural virtues in situ. But this terrible longing, this criminal impulse to uproot them--it can only lead to dining on larks in aspic, to buying strawberries out of season, to keeping a cheetah in the apartment on Central Park West. Were the trillium all mine, hoarded beneath my window, I would slaughter a dozen chipmunks to protect them. I would take a chainsaw to the pine trees if they so much as blocked the light.

Breathing the same air

Listening to the radio while doing chores, or playing a CD while driving a lonely stretch of road, it's easy to fall into the habit of thinking about music as a solitary experience. Cafes are full of people, each hearing their own soundtrack to life through earbuds. If we sing at all, it's to ourselves in the shower. Music is a commodity, served at a table for one.

What a change, then, to experience the real thing, the way humans have practiced the art for 20,000 years or so--as a community. Last Saturday I attended the spring concert of The Orchestra of Northern New York. While I haven't the ear to judge the quality of the performance--a program of Haydn and Beethoven--the quality of the experience was remarkable. Dozens of performers, many of them known to me, and hundreds of listeners, many also known to me, gathered in one room at one time, breathing the same air. The orchestra gave the gift of their practice and talent. The audience gave the gift of their attention and appreciation. They dressed up, put aside their other business, and traveled to be together for a single purpose. It happened in real time, from the opening theme to the final fall of the baton, becoming what it was moment by moment. If you weren't there, you missed it, and no recording can replace what you missed.

I will never forego the solitary pleasures of recorded music, and would never discourage anyone from listening to the radio--preferably to NCPR for hours each day. Just bear in mind that what you hear is only a synthetic echo of a moment, not the moment itself. For that, you need to go to where the music is being played.

"Out there" is a good thing

One of the things I like about the North Country, and about North Country Public Radio, is that we are a little "out there." A little loopy, often unpredictable, sometimes a little extreme. For example, one would expect any border news station to send a reporter to cover Obama's visit to Canada. But David Sommerstein, NCPR's guy on the scene, was probably the only one to skate five miles down the Rideau Canal to get to this morning's press conference. You would expect a bluegrass music host to enjoy and play old-time music. But Barb Heller has brought a dozen local musicians into the studio today, encouraging the world to play along with the radio, and providing all the sheet music online. One would expect an Adirondack reporter to cover outdoor recreation--maybe from an Olympic venue press booth. But Brian Mann reports from deep beneath Lake Champlain diving on a shipwreck, or from halfway up a cliff on an ice climb. In his spare time he writes a definitive book on the urban-rural political divide.

It's a little intimidating when all your colleagues have "exceeds expectations" written somewhere in their personnel jacket. But that's how we roll. That, and all the coffee.

Breaking new ground

NCPR has put up a lot of new sticks (transmitters, for the radio-jargon impaired) over the last few years. Mostly to fill in holes in our broadcast area that result from the vagueries of terrain, from wilderness regulations, and from protecting the frequencies of our radio neighbors. The biggest remaining hole--sort of like a cavity in a molar that you keep poking at with your tongue--is in the eastern Adirondacks and along the NY shore of Lake Champlain. No combination of horsetrading and technical wizardry would allow us to site a transmitter in New York that would serve the deserving (but NCPR-deprived) communities of Westport, Port Henry and Essex. And so it remained for many years.

Today we announce the launch of transmitter WXLQ, broadcasting at 90.5 fm from Bristol, Vermont. This "filling" in the NCPR smile will serve thousands of new families on the New York side of the lake, as well as provide a better alternative signal to listeners in New York and Vermont on the south and eastern fringes of coverage by NCPR's 88.1 fm transmitter in Peru, NY. This expansion of our service area was made possible in part through friendly negotiation with our neighboring public radio service, Vermont Public Radio. We thank them. Thanks also to the Essex Community Fund, administered by the Adirondack Community Trust, and to two volunteers who provided assistance with signal assessment, Ed French and Carole Slatkin, both of Essex, NY. If you happen to know people in the new broadcast region, please help us to spread the word.

Photo: Tim from Wells Communications, installs a new antenna on an existing tower for WXLQ.

History in company

When I was a child in the 1950s, you would sometimes still see a newsreel in the theater, wedged between the previews and the cartoon. Television was still a baby, and video news was something consumed in company. Today, it is only the truly dire, or the truly monumental, that brings unrelated people together around a TV. I can count the occasions on my fingers: 1963, at school, as the events in Dallas unfolded; 1969, in the lounge of a South Dakota dude ranch, to watch the moon landing; 1974, at the commune, watching Nixon resign; 1986, at work, as the Challenger exploded; 2001, in the Satellite Room of the NCPR studio, as the World Trade Center fell; and Tuesday, back in the Sat Room, to watch an African American take the oath of office as president.

It is the last two that keep coming back to mind--maybe because I was in the same place with the same people. The occasions seem to be bookends, bracketing an era. After each, I found it necessary to walk by myself--after 9-11, to walk off the evil, and after the Inauguration, to savor relief and gratitude. As political happenings, they also bookend the spectrum--suicidal and murderous intimidation contrasted with peaceful transformation, one appealing to the tribal divide, and one to the common impulse toward mutual progress.

While each of the occasions listed above mark history for good or ill, I have to believe the most momentous is the most recent. An America that can embrace its diversity, rather than merely tolerate it, is a nation not only new to itself, but something new in the history of nations. And such a rebuke to the politics of fear.

Winter on the wall

It's hard to say what makes a great photo. If it can hang on your bedroom wall for years without vanishing into the wallpaper, and without becoming an annoyance, that's a clue. The one on my wall is a close-up of a single pine spray, spiky below, but soft on top with new snow.

I've seen similar, but this has nothing but the essence--sprig, snow, nothing else. Deepest green, purest white. The focus is sharp, the way one can see the sharp edge of distant mountains though the clear lens of icy air. It looks cold, without making me feel cold--perhaps because I usually contemplate it from under the comforter, while sipping morning coffee. I can smell the clean pine scent above the springwater tang of winter wind, but I don't need to burden myself with a parka or clown-walk back toward the river on snowshoes.

And that's a blessing for one whose ageing bones prefer to have a good thaw shovel the walk, and likes best to watch the whipping wind through a double-glazed window. Looks picture perfect. Think I'll get some more coffee.

Acceleration

Sorry about the duplicate LP mailing yesterday. I had set things to send automatically while I was on the road, and forgot to unset them on my return. My to-do list has gotten a little out of hand this week, with the departure of my able assistant Rachel Henderson. She is off to Oklahoma to continue her education. We all miss her, and no one more than I--Who knew how much stuff I had pushed off onto her plate, until all the extra helpings arrived back onto mine?

The holiday season is ramping up at a level of acceleration that drags all the blood to the back of the brain, like flooring a Tesla roadster (holiday giving hint). Despite the economy, I joined in on the Black Friday death march, attacking multiple shopping venues via car and mass transit. Who knows when we will be able to spend with equal abandon again? The nation must agree: the Age of Prosperity Farewell Tour brought retailers a 3% bump over last season. Boston's Downtown Crossing shopping district resounded with the cautionary strains of "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer," but no one was taking the hint. Time enough for a reality-based lifestyle come 2009.

Back to the table

I'm on the road today, bound for Boston, to one of those scaled-down modern Thanksgivings. Instead of using up all the leaves in the old dining room table just to seat the grownups--and a card table or two for the younger kids--we'll be just four. It's the way of the world. In the 1950s, you couldn't throw a rock in Bradford County PA without hitting one of my mom's relations, generations of them clustered around the gentle hills and good soil of the Susquehanna Valley. Same with my father's clan in Indiana.

Since then, decades of jets and cars and jobs have swizzled my family evenly into the long drink of America. Working in countertrend, I have stayed pretty much in one spot for fifty years, but to no avail. You move, they move--it amounts to the same distance.

My sister dropped by the other day with a big box of old family photos. And there they all are again, those missing from the table, the dead and the living, distant in time, distant in place--brought near again in memory--in sepia, in black and white, and color faded as a dream. I sorted out a selection to take on the road, to bring them back again to the family table, where even though the bird may be smaller, the thanks will be as great.

Just in time

Back in the old economy, if it was time for a little home baking, Mom might send me down the block to Don's Market for a can of sweetened condensed milk. Don would take out his can claw and hook me down one, and blow the dust off the top. If the shelf was bare, no matter--he'd order a year's supply at a time and keep the extra cases back in the stock room. These days nothing has a chance to gather dust. They teach just-in-time manufacturing and inventory in MBA school. Fedex has offices in Papua New Guinea. If you asked people what they really wanted from the Internet, they'd tell you they want the ability to download a cup of cappuccino and a ham sandwich, because they don't have time to leave the desk. Busy, busy, busy, knocking off the to-do list just in time. (Cappuccino, by the way, generates 22,600,000 search results on Google.)

Paul Willcott was in the studio this morning, working on the audio book of his novella A Franklin Manor Christmas (which Joel assures him will be done "just in time" to accompany the print release). Paul asked if I had my Listening Post essay done yet, and I had to laugh. There were hours to go before the deadline. As usual, I hadn't a clue. He suggested something about Sundays, but writing about the day of rest requires more leisure than I have available. Besides, I had to write all the other stuff first.

Joel dropped by my digs later on, just in time to put the kibosh on a concert feature for the online section, but Kevin, also just in time, came up with an alternate feature from our reel-to-reel archive. This would have been a good time to have had a couple of essays in the can--back in the stock room, as it were. But that's 20th Century thinking. So here's a new one, just in time to make the email deadline.

A child's garden

These days my gardening efforts are pretty much reduced to weeding the perennials that survived another winter and the predation of the deer. Life in Millennium 3 seems to leave less and less time for playing in the mud. But I'm finding that each year of neglect brings my yard more closely into line with what I remember from my childhood. The hardy survivors seem to be those favored by earlier generations of North Country gardeners. The honeysuckle and mock orange will probably outlive me. Day lilies and bearded iris grow where they've always grown, and have even spread to the old compost pile where I dumped the spade-damaged thinnings. Exotics and annuals have long gone extinct, but the lily of the valley and the myrtle undergird the thick old lilacs each season. The peony transplanted from my grandfather's house sprawls each spring in aromatic disarray.

Dutchman's Pipe shaded many a North Country porch

The elms of my childhood are long gone, supplanted by maples that struggle now with their own blights. Much else that once shaped the North Country yard is also gone rare. As a once-voracious grazer of my neighbors' bounty, I can tell you that style has changed from "eating apples" to flowering crab apple in most places, and that the ubiquitous twin patches, one for rhubarb and one for raspberries, are now a rarity in town. And in the age before air conditioning, a vine-shaded front porch was the summer living room. Now only the Potsdam Food Co-op seems to sport the huge-leaved vine (I forget its name) that once broke the summer sun all over town. And I miss other old-fashioned favorites—few plant gladioli and more, or the simple miniature cabbage roses--modest, but hardy.

But then there was also that rash affection for japonica, or "bamboo"—three and four generations later, we still pay the toll on our knees, digging out the roots that extend without end—who knows—all the way through the earth to their Pacific island home. Long after we're all gone, japonica can fight it out with the cockroaches.

The thirty-threes of sixty-eight

Radio Bob wandered in this morning with his latest $5 CD treasure, a compendium of Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly--tasty. The music of 1968 was special for a lot of reasons, but most special because I was then 15 years old--an age when musical passion runs an inch wide but a mile deep, when there are only 3 or 4 decent bands in the world and the rest of everything is chopped liver, when you can listen to the same cut 15 times in a row, just because that screaming guitar lick is so freaking amazing.

My early adopter friend David stopped me on the street in the summer of '68 to pass along a brand new copy of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Iron Butterfly's side-long rock extravaganza. I was about to hustle it home to fire it up on my crunchy portable, the one with the tone arm weighted down with a penny to grind the needle over the skips. David said, "No man--you gotta do this with headphones." I trekked up to the college library's listening booth and jacked in. And the world changed, or so it seemed.

But the world changes, and then it keeps on changing. Iron Butterfly just doesn't sound the same. I listen to '60s music still, but different music, and with a different ear. Less naïve perhaps, but also less engaged, less willing to be transported. I have the benefit of experience, and the deficit.

Audio archaeology

Kevin Irwin has been camped in the back of the web office for the last few weeks with a resurrected reel-to-reel tape deck hooked into a computer. Tape is like a Twinkie--leave it in a dusty box for a couple of decades and it will eventually go bad. So beside Kevin is a piece of ad-hoc tech cobbled by Radio Bob out of plywood, tin foil, light bulbs, and a thermostat pried out of an old CPU. Inspired equally by a toy Easy Bake oven and a Clarkson engineering degree, it is used to cook the tapes, stabilizing them just long enough for one last good playback.

String band sketch by Matt Gordon from their 1980 LP Backroad Breakdown.

Some at the station view this exercise in audio archaeology with trepidation. Radio is meant to play, then go away. And given the quality of much that has come to light from the somewhat random library that survived the move to the new station offices more than a decade ago, one could agree. But now and then, the midden heap disgorges a gem--intermittent reinforcement to keep the digger keen to his task. One such for me is a recording from around 1975 of the St. Regis River Valley String Band.

Back in the day, band founders David and Linda Danks lived around the corner from me in Sanfordville, in a farmhouse on Pickle Street. This was a golden time for live music in the area; another band lived downstairs from me, and yet another down the road in the opposite direction. I recall the largest member of the Danks family was a massive and ugly specimen of swine named Captain Gonad. The band limped from gig to gig in a crapulous and ancient GMC school bus, renamed The Fool Bus. The prime venues of the day were bars, beer blasts and Legion halls. Hearing the band today, the sweet old-time tunes are inextricably bound up in my mind with the din of table talk, the clamor of pinball machines, and the pungent funk of half-dried beer, tobacco, and woodstove-scented flannel shirts.

Nosing around

The North Country is pretty easy on the eyes these days: lilacs, apple blossoms, trillium, new leaves, tender grass, lots of sun. We take the world in first through the eyes, so much so that the interrogative "See?" is synonymous with "Do you understand?" Nature may have shorted humans in other ways, but a big chunk of our big brain is dedicated to sight. If we were dogs, we'd be gaze hounds. But the brain is an onion--peel away the primate and find the mammal, peel away that and find the reptile, deep within the secret core of us. That part of the brain is only interested in the eyes if they show a fast-moving object, prompting us to hotfoot across the intersection, or shriek at the 3D horror movie dagger. The lambent pastels of spring are wasted on it.

The ancient brain "sees" instead through the nose, which wraps mysteriously around the limbic chemical pumps of our emotions, triggering cascades of long lost memory and association. Compare the impact of watching someone outside the window mow the lawn with the experience of walking out into the sharp-scented grassy air. It recalls to mind every warm day since you were a child. Last weekend, I had the happy occasion to be in the rare book room of the Strand Bookstore in New York City with my daughter Elena. She turned to me and said "It smells like your Dad." I took a deep breath to "see" what she meant and there it was: all the generations the old books in the stacks had steeped in pipe smoke in the libraries of bookish men, still seeping back out decades later into the environmentally-regulated air. His dimming face comes sharp in the mind's eye once more. I see him turning the pages even now. The smell of aftershave.

Two cent lunch

I've lost track of how many lunches I have consumed, oblivious at my desk, sandwich in left hand to free my right for the mouse. Lunch is mostly fuel in a working life: nuked leftovers, a pound of takeout swathed in petrochemicals, drive-thru cardiac incidents. It wasn't always so; somewhere I lost the knack for leisure, the rest and playfulness and companionship that once divided the day.

Not that I was ever a cafe caballero, lingering over latte and pondering Proust. What I miss is--somebody help me--the elementary school cafeteria. The simplest of fare--brown bag, white bread, gooey peanut butter, purple jelly--milk in a glass bottle, carrot sticks in wax paper, raisins in a cardboard box. And the company of two hundred other yammering children. One guy at my table would eat his sandwich down to the shape of a flipped "bird," for the benefit of his recess rivals. Another would squish the whole thing into his mouth at once, roll it into a glutinous ball and display it on extended tongue. I forget why. Carrot sticks can double as Dracula fangs. A California raisins box, once empty, makes a dandy kazoo. The uses of a milk straw are too numerous to mention, and the lunch bag itself can be inflated and exploded immediately behind a girl carrying a full tray of spaghetti and meatballs.

It's the greening grass that brings it all to mind, and the memory of milk--two cents for a half-pint bottle, stoppered with a cardboard tab. One day each year it would become transformed from funky white liquid into pure ambrosia, when the local dairyman switched from hay to pasture. You could see the Holstein it came from out the cafeteria window. If you had a good arm, you could hit it with a dried chip from the edge of the schoolyard.

Achieving liftoff

Yesterday was it--the day Spring became a reality instead of a theoretical possibility. Everyone has their own gauge. For some it's the first robin, but as far as I'm concerned, the early bird gets frostbite. For some it's the first snowdrops--but they get ahead of themselves, too. I look for the first sunny day in the 60s, and the first blue heron. Yesterday--double whammy.

If the heron has come back, you know it wasn't some flighty decision--they can, after all, barely fly. They seem to be a "proof of concept" design on the part of nature, rather than an actual production model. Watching them lumber up from the shallows is like watching a grainy newsreel of Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk. They graze the water with each downbeat, like a seaplane powered by oars. Both the principles of lift and the grace of God appear to be necessary to accomplish launch.

Just so my spirits. The blue body of winter is almost too massive for my wingspan to support. But give me sufficient open water, a little solar power assist, and up I go--eventually.

Where did the future go?

Chip Forelli photo of the Unisphere

Beside my desk is a photo of a relic of the lost future, an eerie view of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York World's Fair. Beyond bare trees the floodlit globe, circled by silver rings, floats on glowing fog. No one occupies the row of benches to contemplate the vision. As an eleven-year-old, visiting the fair, I was assured that the future would be full of marvels, turbine-powered cars that drove themselves, space colonies, undersea cities, a benevolent world government, and an end to disease and hunger. Perhaps a secular view of heaven, but heaven.

That future would, of course, be now. And the future did bring marvels, if not the same marvels touted by the fair and my endless collection of science-fiction novels. Who could have foreseen that by the time we built the infrastructure to support world-wide videophone service, that the hottest method of interpersonal communication would be typing arcane abbreviations onto itty-bitty keyboards? It would haven taken a huge cynic to predict that once the entire corpus of human knowledge was available to anyone in the world, the one thing people would be clamoring for would be a thirty-second amateur video of a farting panda. Heavenly. The future's wasted on the present.

A Shocking Performance

To open a conversation, a usual gambit is to ask what's new. The usual answer is "Not a whole lot." Maybe you saw an amusing movie; maybe you tell the one about the werewolf, the throat singer and the pole dancer. You might have been to a concert where they sounded satisfyingly like their record. On the other hand, you might have been lucky enough to share the room with Bobby McFerrin last night in Potsdam.

I had been looking forward to the show, having heard McFerrin years before, but I had also been working since before dawn--I told my wife to punch me if I started to snore. But nobody, no matter how dozy, can sleep through something which is really new--a program comprised totally of vocal improvisation. Anyone who recalls the forty-minute drum solos of 60s rock remembers how badly such a thing can go wrong. For McFerrin and his twelve accomplices to be so on top of each moment for 90 minutes left me flabbergasted, and more awake than I have been at any time since I touched that bare wire with a socket wrench. In a time when the word genius gets applied to anyone halfway competent, I want a new word for what I saw and heard. To be present while a first-rate mind makes up first-rate work completely on the fly--I can only babble about it. Years from now I will still babble about it.

Three Bowls

There had been much talk lately about the so-called "hundred mile diet"--living primarily or completely on foods grown and prepared within 100 miles of where you live. Economy looks very different when one of the factors in the bottom line is "Do I know who grew this? Do I know who made this?"

Lately, my wife and I have been getting a lot of use out of three bowls, survivors of a set of four thrown and fired more than 30 years ago in the house where we lived with our potter friend, Annie. Any vessel would do to keep the soup from our lap, but the feel and the history and the look of these particular bowls add to the savor of anything contained within. The profile is a simple unbroken curve of high-fired stoneware with a milk-white crackled glaze. Each is decorated with a few seemingly offhand brush strokes that suggest a cobalt flower with translucent leaves. And each has an elegant bulb handle, itself a tiny separately-thrown pot, half closed at the top, with its foot smoothly mated to the curve of the body. The notch is a perfect fit for the thumb web when the bowl is cradled in the palm to feel the warmth within. They are not identical as machine ware, but are meticulously consistent, in the way a quality crafter demonstrates focus and integrity.

They were made as gifts for my mother-in-law, and returned to our hutch on her death a few years back. So whenever I use one now, I think of Annie, and I remember my mother-in-law, Betty, as I turn it slowly in my hand to admire. What would we own and what would we pass over, if this was the standard toward which our desires aspired?

A mountain view

There could be a whole subspecialty of psychology that focuses on the images people choose to adorn the desktops of their computers. I tend to pick paintings. For the last few months, in idle moments, I have rested my eyes on a Rockwell Kent rendition of his AuSable home, farm and studio, Asgaard. The view is across a long meadow to the barns, which are well removed from the house. Both are up against the shoulder of forested hills that rise up into the soft signature lines of Adirondack peaks. The foreground is in cloudshadow, deep green peppered with clover in bloom. The midground is flooded with sun, lambent upon the tidy miniature white barns and their lesser satellite, the home. Behind them the deep green returns, going up into dappled hills and shadowed summits. The sky is mostly overcast, with sun rays striking through.

One of the satisfactions of the piece is in its unmistakability--this is one place, in one moment, and nowhere else. And the way the landscape dominates the works of man should be pleasing to one of modest demeanor, but the way those works shine out in the sun speaks also of love and pride of hand. The foreground is dimmed to lead the eye on, the background soft to draw the eye down. The farmstead is a buttery island of work well done and rest well deserved.