August Travels

 August flew.

On the second of the month I flew out to Denver.  A research question had arisen about how people respond to the idea of raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

I had wanted to go back to Colorado in any case, and there were some good reasons to select it as a field site.  So my videographer and I met there and spent a few days button-holing people in Denver and out in the blasted parts of Aurora - getting folks to talk about the good things and the bad things of raising the minimum wage.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.  We'd start early so we could wrap up our interviewing before the day would finish its relentless climb into the upper 90's.  Then we'd deal with the data we had and figure out where to get ourselves some dinner and some beer.

We had about 50 interviews done, which what we'd promised, by the time I settled him at his hotel on Wednesday afternoon.


From there it was off to pick up the travel-weary Monica and the boys at the airport.

After day or so's interlude in Colorado Springs - where I did some more interviewing, and Porter visited a college - we tooled on up through Boulder - (another college) - and onto the lap of the Rocky Mountains.

And joined Mark, Sarah and their kids in Estes Park, 

where the meadows are still in bloom, even in arid August.

My sister, Christine, flew in to join us and by Sunday morning we'd strapped on our backpacks.

We all hiked up from Bear Lake to Lake Helene,

And down into Odessa Gorge,

To a ranger cabin on Fern Lake.

Mark is a park ranger.  He and the kids fished for trout.  As did an osprey.

Pine martens hunted the lakeside and the cabin's stone foundation, 

and I saw one make off with a ground squirrel.

On Monday we hiked to Spruce Lake and further up to Loomis Lake, in its snow-streaked cirque.  

Where we ate lunch.

But only Chris and I were lunatic enough to swim with the trout in the green, frigid water.

Pikas mocked us from the talus.

On Tuesday it was time to hike back out - our packs lightened by a couple days of eating.

On Wednesday - by now we're to the 12th - we said our fond farewells,

 headed up the Fall River road, and over the pass.

Saying so long to the marmots and the ptarmigan.

And we drove out along the creekish headwaters of the Colorado river 

and all the way to Utah, 

to pitch out tents along the Green River at Dinosaur National Monument.

Where we looked at petroglyphs and dinosaur bones.

and hiked

for a day.

And then drove north through Wyoming

Looking for bighorn sheep, but they eluded us.

We camped in the sagebrush under vast and star-gritted skies,

and watched the Perseid meteors streak along the Milky Way.

On Friday we stopped in Jackson to buy supplies 

and skirted the Grand Tetons which were dark purple and flickering with lightning.

To visit the geyser basins

and the wildlife

of Yellowstone National Park.

We camped at Lewis Lake for Friday and Saturday nights,

and spent the days around the park.

On Sunday afternoon (by now the 16th) we drove northwards to Coeur d'Alene.

Porter, at 17, has a learners permit and we gave him the wheel.

And then on to Seattle across the smokey plains of Eastern Washington, 

where we visited with an old friend just out of surgery.

Into the Cascades, weaving a bit to avoid the fires that filled the skies sometimes with acrid haze.

Out and down along the Columbia river gorge to Portland, 

where it was a withering hundred degrees, buying books and seeing friends.

And back again into the Cascades.

To chill morning hot springs along the Umpqua river

and famous volcanic lakes

until we got to old friends in Sacramento and Davis.

And delivered Porter to his school in Carpinteria,

and his view down mesa to the Pacific ocean.

By the time we flew home I'd been gone three and a half weeks and August had flown.

Ending a Hiatus

Mingo County, West Virginia

Hmmmmm.

2 posts in the past two months.  I'm not sure that counts as maintaining a blog.

I've kept journals pretty consistently since I was 14 or so.  Sometimes they lapse, usually either because I find myself too uninteresting to be worthy of record, or because I'm caught up in too many other things and the backlog of potential entries starve each other.

These last two months have been more that second problem.

At work we've been busy beyond our capacities - and as research director it's been my job to keep projects rolling that explore how different people conceptualize and think about: good governance, mental disability, the transition away from coal in Appalachia, the earned income tax credit, family work balance, taxation, and money in politics.

Welch, WV

There've week-long been research trips - to central Appalachia on the coal project and California for money in politics.  I leave for Kansas City on Friday.  There has been phone interviewing, both by me and by people I've been training - on money in politics, the EITC, family work balance, etc.  I've been training assistants to handle our on-line experiments at testing communications strategies - for governance, taxation, and others, but there are a lot of moving parts.  And recruiting an extra ethnographer or two for upcoming research in Philadelphia.

With so much data coming in, analysis and writing has been the bottleneck, and it's been a high priority to get me back into the thick of that.

Carpinteria, California

In California, Porter is finishing up his junior year of high school, which these days means college visits.  So, when he came back from boarding school on his spring break in March we traveled to Maine to see old friends, but also to visit the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin triangle.  Plus MIT, Worcester Polytechnic and Brown.   Only a few weeks later we all went out to visit him on Family Weekend at Cate - meeting his teachers and advisor and seeing him perform in his chorale and camerata, and in the school musical - (he was the policeman in Singing in the Rain).

I've sworn to not neglect the garden.  Sunchokes have been dug up and pickled, the garden tilled and planted with potatoes, beets, and parsnips.  Chard and fennel overwintered and are growing again.  Mustard and cilantro seeded themselves, and I've planted more - as well as little patches of basil, parsley, broccoli, greens, leeks and tatsoi.

Monica came home with a few starts of cabbage and cauliflower, and though I doubt I'm diligent enough to save them from the caterpillars, I've planted them.  I even loaded some dirt onto the high hugel and put in some squash seeds.  Asparagus is up, though sadly I've only spied a single morel. Still to go in are the tomatoes, hot peppers and eggplants.

Asparagus and chard

My sad little peach tree didn't come back this year.  The root stock has put out some suckers, so I cut the top off and let it be.  The cherry is in leaf and I pulled off a few dozen caterpillars (winter moths, I suspect).

The apple trees put out blossoms, but whether they will set any fruit this year is anyone's guess.  The little crabapples seem to have evaded the deer, and only one of the plum trees took damage.  Other than giving them some water and checking to see if the Japanese beetles have arrived yet, there's not much labor there.

And the beehives are abuzz.

The Brown family Christmas, 2014

The family was gathering at my parents' log and stone house in central Pennsylvania.  My cousin, Fred, has been marooned there since April, recovering from a back injury, but now waiting to rejoin his life on tour as one of the dancers in Sesame Street Live.  He's been baking Christmas cookies.  Monica, Porter (16), Nico (13) and I drive across from Rhode Island - with The Amber Spyglass playing on the tape deck to speed up the five hour drive.  My sister Cathie arrives with Eric, Bridget (6), Leo (4) and their dog, Bella (that I always call Rosie).  They have swung through Berks county to pick up a mountain of tamales for our dinner.

My sister Chris would come up from Baltimore to complete this year's cast of an even dozen.

The morning of Christmas eve: on the 24th there is generally a fair amount of sitting around and chatting.  There is some last minute Christmas shopping.  It was a drab and drizzly morning, but Dad's bird feeders were active -- nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, finches and sparrows.  And squirrels, of course.

In our family there is a strong slugabed contingent - (small, early-rising children are the cross that Cathie and Eric bear).  The two teenagers might never rise voluntarily.

Mom and Monica went off to the farmer's market for supplies and to pick up the turkey.  I scouted the property's six acres for a suitable Christmas tree.  The bar isn't particularly high.  My father planted hemlock trees years ago, and though they are more spindly than the classic Christmas spruce, spindly hemlocks have become traditional in our family.  Last year, we took down what looked like the last passable top, but 2014 must have been a good year for growth.  I rousted Porter from his bed and he helped me saw the top eight feet from a good looking tree.

Winter Solstice

The winter solstice marks the turning of the year.  Days that have been growing shorter and shorter, finally reach a nadir, and will begin to grow longer.  The sun will arc higher in the sky. The cold will deepen, more snow will fall, the ground will become iron-hard and the ponds will freeze solid.  But the sun is coming back - and today begins the long process of re-warming these northern woods - of waking things from yearly dormancy and dearth.

It's an event that humans in the north have marked for tens of thousands of years - taking reassurance that spring will return and life will re-emerge.

We marked it in our own little way.  Friends came over to eat and drink and converse around a bonfire, which the kids fed with pine boughs until the flames reached above their heads.

At this turning of the year, if a person likes, they bring a symbol of something they want to leave behind - something to burn away in the solstice fire.  Or something they wish for the coming year.  Into the fire goes a scrap of paper, an icon, a thought.  Monica saved a pile of birch bark for people to write their notes upon.

Autumn days like this one call

The back field at Pine Point school

After we drop Nico off at school, Monica has been walking to get some exercise.  I'll either go to the gym or join her.

Behind the school, the trails for the cross-country runs go along fields and down into the woods.

On the morning of the first real frost the hedgerows were alive with sparrows, towhees, thrushes and jays all in an uproar about the sudden freeze.

Icy grass hunkered in every tree-shadow, but turned to dew in minutes as the sun would strike.

Phoebes fluttered - a migrating flock - picking off any cold-sluggish insects that might take flight or climb a blade of grass.

There'll be enough days to go to the gym as the weather turns foul.  Autumn days like this one call.

Easing back

The salt marshes of Barn Island 

 After a 10 week hiatus, I have to assume that any readers of this blog will have wandered off in search of more verdant pastures.  But through the years I have usually keep a journal of some sort, without any particular need for a readership.  The act of rendering events into words is the fixative in my history.  This act of mental reflection and the assembly of sentences.  An act of communication to unknown others and among them, my alien future self, who might otherwise ruthlessly edit me and my days right out of existence.

So, know, future self, that today, the 3rd of October I walked for a morning hour - with long strides and deep breaths, with Monica, across autumnal salt marshes.

And I drank hot tea and sat for hours at my large tiger oak desk reading transcripts and delving into what Americans seem to mean by the people - this thing that the government is made of and which the government is meant to serve.  And on the phone I spoke with a man in Seattle - the last of two dozen conversations with men and women who make energy decisions about commercial property - and I stalked his motivations and assumptions as subtly as I could.

And Monica and I picked up Nico from school in our beat up old Honda, and he was still in his soccer uniform, and blood was crusted in his nostril from an ill-timed header.  But he was singing all the songs from the school musical he is rehearsing for.

And the three of us went into Stonington to the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society, because they were starting their Friday fish and chips nights.  And we sat with all the other people on folding chairs at the plastic-covered tables and ate french fries and very good fish, because Stonington is still a town of docks and fishermen and very good fish.

The Love Note to 2014, March 31 - April 13

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I love the thawed earth - 

to rake the naked garden a darker shade,
and crumble clods between my fingers;
to find the dirt no longer dormant,
full of creatures.

I love to see music being made,
Nico at the keyboard, his fingers certain
with some secret understanding that I don't share,
Porter's baritone that swells the harmonies he builds with his companions,
Monica hums a snatch of song as her coffee cools.

I love the poets whose songs have been such fearsome company:
Uncompromising Dylan,
Pink Floyd along the precipice of sanity,
Johnny Cash enrapturing on redemption,
Joan Armatrading, Tom Waits, Van Morrison,
and all the others who companied my own triumphs and turmoils.

===============================================

Rocky Neck State Park

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Bride Brook marsh

We hiked at Rocky Neck State Park on Saturday.  The still ungreen marshes were alive with egrets and herons, green-winged teal and black ducks, and double-crested cormorants.  A pair of ospreys fussed with sticks in their nest upon a platform.  A flock of glossy ibis moved systematically through the reeds, poking their long curved bills into the roots and stems.

We looked for terrapin, but saw only minnows.  The breeze, for the first time since October, had no bite to it, but was soft and warm.

The campground, which is still closed this time of year, is on the east side of the marsh.  On the west side is a rocky spine of land that runs between the brook and Four Mile river. We hiked up along it watching the birds - more egrets, a great blue heron and a pair of hooded mergansers in their spring finery.

Nico and his friend Sam climbed some rocks and trees as we went northward up the spine and then back southward toward the beach.  We had a picnic in the sun on the rocks below the enormous stone pavilion.  As the afternoon came on more people arrived, walking, picnicking, clambering out the long stony jetty, or flirting with the cold ocean on the white sandy beach itself.

Grills Preserves in the wet season

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The Westerly and Hopkinton Land Trusts got together to build a 75-foot steel hikers' bridge across the Pawcatuck river, linking the 500+ acres on the Westerly side with nearly 700 acres on the Hopkinton side.  This winter they added a causeway and bridge across Tomaquag creek to make hiking this thousand acre preserve even more accessible.

And in these days of the spring floods, it is wonderful to be able to walk these woods without hip waders.  The swale of the Tomaquag is drowned entirely, but the bridge and causeway take you across to the granite hills on the northwest side.  Every little spring and brook is burbling and there are frogs eggs in the vernal pools.

The flooded swale of Tomaquag Creek

 We hiked from the Chase Hill road trailhead on the Hopkinton side, crossed the Tomaquag, walked over the Polly Coon bridge, waded through the remaining eight inches or so of the Pawcatuck that had overflowed the banks, and made our way along the river back to the Bowling Lane trailhead on the Westerly side (where we'd left our other car.)  It took about 90 minutes to cross at an easy pace.

Looking back at Polly Coon bridge, spanning (most of) the Pawcatuck river

Though we didn't manage the hike with dry feet, the new construction meant the woods were passable even at this time of year.  So kudos to the people who made all this happen!

Is it a trail or a creek?

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