I remembered

to spend some time

looking

at the sky today.

Porter was part of the Greek Chorus

for their play about Odysseus.

He has a good voice

and a good presence, 

but no ambition for the limelight.

The boys had a half-day of school on Friday, and Monica was finishing up leading a class at the Nature Center at about the same time, so we all gathered ourselves together for a 6-hour drive to Pennsylvania.

About 60 people were descending on Sunday to celebrate Dad's 70th birthday, so we and Chris and Cathleen came to rescue Mom from her failure to keep the guest-list down.

Saturday was busy without being too hectic as we made the place ready.  Porter took on any task that gave him an excuse to drive the little tractor - and drove it around plenty with no excuse at all.  I cleaned the pool and fixed a broken seal on the pump.  The day was hot and I was the third one into the pool after Nico and Porter.  (Dad waited until Sunday, his birthday, when the water temperature had risen all the way to 58 degrees.)

Monica traveled to Lititz for chocolate and shops.  Chris came north with loot from the Baltimore farmer's market and Cathie and Bridget arrived with rising breads and cheeses.

Sunday came hot and sunny, and sure enough 60 people showed up -- the whole clan from Big Valley and Tom, Alice and Celine from Annapolis -- a couple of neighbors, old science-teacher work colleagues and quite a slew of friends he's made in his conservation work on native plants and in the local EAC.

Despite the dreaded afternoon shower that chased everyone onto the porch, it was a wonderful, good-spirited gathering.  The food was good, Dad's enthusiasm for native wildflowers was in full blossom around the house, and the kids played and there was neither tears nor bloodshed.

(And Mom was very happy with how things went, so hopefully we get credited with some Mother's Day points for helping out.)

photos by Kim Brown

pre-post-capitalism . . . .


I was reading a fascinating article by Chris Martenson on how to turn an investment profit as the fossil-fuel age collapses.  He makes the case that there are boatloads of money to be made in the energy sector, but you'd better have cashed out by the time the shit really hits the fan.

My advice to investors dreaming of windfall profits from $500/barrel crude oil futures would be this: Pretend it’s 1940 and you have a magic crystal ball that tells you in advance that the United States will be drawn into World War II. You might start to speculate that by investing in rubber, airplane parts, materials needed to make bombs, and so forth you’ll make a killing. Those products will become so important and so valuable that you might presume you’ll be able to name your price and demand any amount you like for them. But of course you’d have been mistaken. World War II wasn’t a routine macroeconomic event. It was a game changer. Laws were re-written, often retroactively. A state of national emergency was declared and people in possession of materials essential to the war effort were ordered to hand them over as price controls were implemented to thwart profiteering from speculation on the supply needs of the war effort . . . I contend that any Peak Cheap Oil investment strategy that fails to consider government intervention scenarios is flawed and likely to underperform. That’s not to say that there’s no money to be made from an early awareness of peak cheap oil. 

The whole article is a thought-provoking glimpse into an alternate universe where the heroes of Late Capitalism (or Pre-Post Capitalism) face Ragnarok like fleas who are timing their leap from off the hairy back of Fenrir and calling that a savvy investment strategy.

I have a shaggy lawn full of violets.


Today I bought a reel lawnmower at McQuade's hardware store.  (A tall man in a suit smiled at me and reckoned that I must have a teenage son if I was buying that thing.)   Our grass is too high already to mow, so it's taking some work with a grass whip first.  Well it's exercise and there's no roar of an engine.


By the time I get to the end, the violets at the beginning will be blooming again.

I remember when Sinead O’Connor scandalized us by tearing up a picture of the Pope on SNL.  But I didn’t remember that she did it to protest sexual abuse of children by priests.

Historically, there was a time, I imagine, when priestly recruitment in the Catholic Church drew more equally from diverse sources – men overtaken by a genuine passion for the church; men (like youngest sons) who had few opportunities elsewhere; or more generally, men who saw the Church as an institution from which to lead a meaningful, purposeful life – socially, spiritually, materially and even politically; and always of course, men who were suppressing their own sexualities and so felt attuned to the Church’s rhetoric of sexual shame.

As an anthropologist I can appreciate the deftness with which authoritarian religious sects like the Catholic Church have been able to use guilt and shame in order to psychologically bind people to their hierarchies.  But for most people Humanism and the Enlightenment (however vaguely perceived) have granted a soft landing from Genesis’s Fall from Grace and religions lost their moral monopoly.  Religions in the Occident haven’t been able to use violence to enforce participation for generations, and the churches have lost much of their social and temporal power.  They are not at the center of civic and philosophical life like they once were.  And we now live with a consumer capitalism that puts people’s anxieties about sex to work in other ways.

I think priestly recruiting draws from a much smaller pool now, especially when it entails the sacrifice of celibacy.  As shame about hetero-sexuality becomes less and less useful as a tool for attracting and incorporating followers to authoritarian religions, this seems to have left a higher proportion of those still widely condemned as sexual deviants (notably closeted homosexuals, pedophiles and misogynists) to be susceptible to the psychological alchemy of the Church’s sexual shaming.  We’re left with a church that attracts to its understaffed priesthood more than its fair share of men who are afflicted with sexualities about which they are conflicted, in denial, closeted, clandestine, repressive and so on.  Which brings us to the scandals of today.  And I think it is probably no coincidence that not just shame about heterosexual sex, but rampant homophobia among the churches’ rank and file (tied so often to the shame of repressing personal sexual desires) is so crucial for maintaining passionate adherence to the authoritarian churches – whether Catholic, Baptist or Anglican.

There is no scriptural need to hate the homosexuals (as demonstrated by scores of Christian sects), but  many churches do, despite the obvious drawbacks of trying to keep the power of sexual shame in play.  They have struck a devil’s bargain: hate the gay, purge the self, love the church that has delivered me.  These churches should be ashamed of themselves, and I think one day they will be.

The moon lodged pearl-like in an abalone cloud.  A dull, heavy west wind was bringing rain, and I unhitched the Colombian hammock from the climbing tree.  The gray cat aquiver was padding along each branch above me as I moved to unhook the cords and carabiners.  I remembered that someone said -- cats are creatures not so much nocturnal, as crepuscular.  So I whispered that word, crepuscular, and touched the cat's out-clawed feet above me.  Startled, sniffing, she lowered her head,  rasped my knuckle twice with her tongue and moved to a branch above scanning the night around.  And the tree-branch lichen whispered something under my restless fingers.

A headline in this morning's NYT illustrates the power of words to frame an issue.  The article, stimulated by the recent mining deaths in West Virginia, was entitled "2 Mines show how safety practices vary widely in US."  "Safety practices" -- isn't it good that mines have these things to protect the miners?  Hmmmm.  But they "vary"?  Well it sure sounds like a technical issue that these companies have to keep track of as they keep their workers safe.


Now imagine instead a headline like, "Some mining companies are more willing than others to gamble with workers' lives for higher profits."


It's exactly the same topic -- the reality that worker lives are put at risk for company profits; some companies are more careful than others with the lives and health of their workers; and the profit-motive often gives them an incentive to take chances with their workers' lives.


But that sure sounds like more of a problem than variance in safety practices.  It almost sounds life and death.

The Harrah’s hotel and casino sits on the river between Omaha and Council Bluffs, Iowa – so that gambling doesn’t technically take place on Midwestern soil.  I wasn’t there to gamble but to give the keynote address to a gathering of a couple hundred meatpackers.  In particular these were union organizers for poultry, pork and beef plants from around the country. 

Normally, this kind of task would fall to Axel or Joe, but neither of them were available, so I had taken the morning flight out of Providence.  Axel had warned me that I’d need to be the opposite of professorial for this crowd, so I’d left my suit jacket and black shoes at home, and cleansed the powerpoint presentation of its pretentious phrases. 

I said to Nico, "All these books on the steps.  Don't they have a home somewhere?"


"No," he sighed, "they're hobos."

I took two loads of mildewing cabinetry, old drywall scraps, and decaying particle-board toward Westerly.   All of it was stuff that shouldn't have been in the basement in the first place -- nothing really of value. The town has put out dumpsters at various places for storm-detritus.  The section of route 91 to Lakeshore drive had been well underwater in at least four places a week ago and the area still looks like it has a bad case of bed head.  Fences buckled under the push of water and debris, new potholes and eroded gullies, sand and gravel in the woods.  And the water in the swamps and rivers is still seriously high -- ready to gush over the banks with any new dousing of rain.

Above the highway are two birds -- sparrows or finches -- locked in deathfight.  The morning sun lights through the spinning featherball, that is fluttering, sputtering downward.  Too fast falling toward the destruction of traffic.  But the sparrows, or the finches, are intent only on their own murders.  Now my car is there.  Somehow the featherball misses the center of my windshield and rolls upon the air cushion that encases us.  In the mirror I see a car close behind me, but the birds drop and are swept under the front bumper.  Do they rise again from their little double miracle, or are their battle and their bodies just obliterated by the thousand cars behind me?

San Francisco's Market Street was sunny and full of people.  Everyone was in good spirits, the pale tourists, the suits chattering into their bluetooths, the hipsters in ill-fitting clothes.  I sat and drank my coffee on a stone bench that circled back around a pillar of vegetation.  In a paper bag beside me I had a peanut butter cookie that I was breaking pieces off.   A crazy woman, blonde and raggedy and mute sat down beside me and I picked up the cookie.  She gave me a look of theatrical affront -- as though I had accused her of trying to steal my cookie.  She stood up, shook her matted hair out from her bandana and slowly circled the bench looking around but always returning to me with her look of affront.  I ignored her mostly.  Finally, she stopped few feet away and poured a splash of coffee onto the sidewalk.  She giggled and skipped away as a dozen ratty pigeons arrived.  They gathered in front of me, walking even under my legs, tilted heads staring upward with their little reptile eyes and leaving dime-sized dollops of pigeon shit beside my feet.  I put the remainder of my cookie back on the bench.  The woman left, but the pigeons didn't.

I flew out to San Francisco Saturday -- on a bit of working vacation, but also to give Madi and her partner Diana a hand with things.  After years of feeling little but dislike for cities, I'm beginning to find them interesting again.  Or at least ones like San Francisco that actually realize some of the potential of what cities should be.


After the downpours of Easter Sunday, the city and its air was freshly washed and scrubbed.  The retro, brightly colored streetcars glowed.  People walked, seagulls cruised, morale was clearly high.  From high spots - Bernal Hill or Holly Park - I could see the whole city sprawled below and its bridges out into the bay.  From low spots the colorful, whimsical diversity of San Francisco's hill hugging architecture entertained the eye.  From cafe or bench I could watch the panoply pass.  And the farmer's market at the Embarcadero would break Monica's heart.


I'd go out to find a restaurant for lunch, but both Madi and Diana are excellent cooks, so we mostly ate dinner at home together with their little girl, Lily.  On Tuesday I worked for a few hours in the morning, but then took the tram to the SF MOMA.


Although most modern art leaves me feeling slightly foolish (either because I suspect I'm being duped or just clueless) there are always a few pieces that  make me pause and engage.  But it was the photography -- documenting the scapes of the city and the state -- that was stunning and made me question how I could be traveling without a camera.


Thursday I flew back to sodden Rhode Island and it was good to be home.


I arrived home to lilacs pushing out leaves, yellow blossoms on the currants, and two fruit trees blooming in pots and needing to be planted.  But a rainy Friday re-filled the pools in the yard and doused any chance of gardening.  Just as well, since I needed to get back to work for Cultural Logic.

The Flood of 2010.  When March broke the record for wettest month ever in Rhode Island history.


The ground was already soggy when it started raining on Tuesday, and by evening the smaller streams were out of their banks.  By Wednesday the rivers had overflowed as well.  The Blackstone River flooded and the Patuxet River cut off I-95 between here and Providence.  But it was the Pawcatuck River and its tributaries down here that wreaked havoc for us.  The Wood River sunk the Woodville-Alton Road and overran the route 91 bridge to Alton threatening to burst the dam there, cutting us off to the north.  Downstream, below the merge with the Pawcatuck the Burdickville Crossing was under water a hundred yards wide, cutting us off from the east.  And to the south, although the Bradford bridge was above water, the road was not and the river ran across and through the Bradford Dye Works.  To the west and south, Chase Hill road was cut off and route 3 down toward Westerly was flooded at French Village (though people were getting around that for awhile by getting on the bridge via Old Cemetery Road).  Westerly, Stonington, Pawcatuck, Hope Valley, Old Mystic and so on were all flooded -- many without electricity as substations were inundated.  For a time route 216 was impassable beneath the Ashaway river and our only way out was route 3 up to 95.


Our sump pump ran non-stop for 2 days -- never draining the water down enough to switch off.   I had to swap in our spare several times to keep the motors from burning out.  On Wednesday, when the battle was being lost, our house was pretty much surrounded on three sides by a new pond of sluggish-flowing water.  The water rose to 5 or 6 inches in the basement despite two pumps running simultaneously.  If the electricity had gone out we would have quickly had several feet.


Monica was trying to get an interview for a job at Brown and actually tried to get up to Providence on Wednesday, but was stymied by the Patuxet and all the flooding in Warwick.  On Thursday morning, I-95 was still blocked, but she found a route more inland and managed to get to her meeting.  By Friday, the rivers were falling and some of the bridges cleared for traffic.  And now, with the ground utterly soggy, people scan the weather reports hoping for a few dry weeks -- knowing that the next rainstorm is going to lay itself right down on top of all this wet.

On Monday I pulled the jute rug out from the basement where it had gotten wet during the last storm.  (The  electricity had gone out and left the sump pump without power.)  I thought I could burn it rather than hauling it to the dump.  There was also some pieces of wood from discarded furniture -- including, unfortunately an old TV case that the Kendalls had left behind.  Jake and Porter added Silva's Christmas tree that they had salvaged from the woods where he'd discarded it.


And, well, long story short, I've now used up my one free warning from the fire department when it comes to illegal burning.  Funny how quickly Porter and Jake disappeared once the firemen started showing up.

It was a good trip to Costa Rica.  We got to stay with Clara and Eckart and Sofia (who's nearly 6 now!) in San Jose.  And they all came down with us to the Osa Peninsula for a few days.  It's not one of the most accessible parts of the country.  In fact, you can only get to most of it by boat -- in our case an hour down the Sierpe river through one of the world's great mangrove forests, out to the Pacific and then a beach landing below Casa Corcovado on the borders of the national park.


We didn't stay at the hotel, but at the house of the owner, Steve, a friend of Clara and Eckart's.  He's a guy from Chicago who rode a barge down in the early 1970's and stayed. Carved a living for himself literally in the jungle and now owns a beautiful lodge that he's built there.  And he's proud that he's the only hotel in Costa Rica to receive the highest rating from the country's sustainable tourism program.  To us he was a generous host, not just sharing his house on the beach, but feeding us at the restaurant, leading us on a hike to the Pedrillo River in Corcovado National Park, taking us snorkeling on the coral reef at Isla Caño, and helping the boys with their sand castle engineering efforts.  


Scarlet macaws dropped beach almonds on the boys heads as they played, the mangrove hawks keened, capuchins and spider monkeys disputed over a fruit-bearing tree, while we sipped our beers.  Toucans, trogons, honeycreepers and cuckoos were in the trees.  Magnificent frigate birds and brown pelicans cruised the coastal air currents and a million hermit crabs streaked the sand.  Coatis snuffled along the verges.  Long-billed Hermit hummingbirds sipped from the long native blossoms, but the little banaquits nipped the flowers' base to steal the nectar.  Jungle plants, down in the gloom with us fought for their drops of sunlight and army ants scouted among them.  Porter spied agouti foraging silently and we all swam in the waterfalls of the San Pedrillo despite the false coral snake in the rocks. 

(linked bird photos courtesy of Richard Garrigues.)

The no-see-ums plagued us in the afternoons, when it was best to stay in the breeze, and my feet swelled up -- probably a combination of heat, bug-bites, and an overdose of margarita salt.  Among the fish at Isla Caño was a white, speckled eel and a parrot fish that watched me warily when I dived down among them.  


At night, after watching the sunset from a bluff the boys chased the red-orange eyes of nightjars -- the compact hawks would unfold surprising wings, flutter a dozen or score feet away and light once again in the grass -- and I could see why the local grandmothers warn the children not to follow the nightjars, for they'll tempt you off into the jungle to be lost forever.


We stayed there from Monday to Friday, when we retraced our path back through the mangroves to Sierpe and then on back toward San Jose.


We headed out again on Sunday, this time just Monica, the boys and I.  We drove Clara's car up into the high country, past the cedar woods or Zarcero through Ciudad Quesada (which everyone calls San Carlos). At every corner in this country of horse and cattle there were melons and yucca blossoms and other fruits for sale.   We stayed at the Termales del Bosque -- the hotsprings of the forest.  


In the fields where the path to the hotsprings starts there were red deer, and grey-necked wood rails foraging in the grass.  You descend down a wet path (because it had begun raining and the canyon is filled with jungle) to the spring fed pools along the creek.  There you can find the pool with the temperature to suit you -- the hotter ones are those closest to the source, of course -- and you soak.  


On Monday Porter and Monica rode horses in the rain and fog.  They saw keel-billed toucans.  As for Nico and I, after he had watched some cartoons in Spanish we walked.  Then we all gathered all our things from our little bungalow and made our way back down to the pools.  The rain fell harder today, but if you are going to have a rainy day during your vacation then hot springs are the place to schedule it.  We lingered far longer than we had planned.


We traveled on to the foot of the Arenal Volcano.  Supposedly, it is the most dramatic and active of all of Costa Rica's volcano, but mostly there was rain and fog and howling winds -- and vistas of the huge Lago Arenal with the heavy clouds torn above it.  Still we hiked up the hills.


The next day we circled the lake a drove out of the lush basin of the lago and into the parched heat of dry-season Guanacaste.  The dessicated fields, leafless trees and herds of gaunt brahman cattle reminded me of India's Rajasthan more than anything else.  If the rock outcroppings would have had ruined hill forts upon them the illusion would have been complete.  Across the Nicoya Peninsula we headed for Playa Samara, a classic beachtown on the Pacific coast.  And so it was sandcastles decorated with coral and swimming in the surf.  (I found that I had crossed some line in birding-geekdom when I ignored a full troop of howler monkeys in the mangoes and spent 5 minutes concentrated on figuring out whether the bird in the weeds was an Olive Sparrow or a Worm-Eating Warbler.  -- Its conical bill gave it away as the sparrow.)


We spent the last couple of days back in San Jose, doing some eating out and some shopping and some video-gaming and some good hanging out with Eckart and Clara and Sophia.  On our last day I made a morning run down to Carara National Park for a final hike (crocodiles! peccaries! iguanas! monkeys! macaws! -- and I identified 46 species of birds that morning, including pale-billed woodpeckers, trogons, manakins, herons and motmots).


And as I said, it was a pretty good trip to Costa Rica.  And nice to be home, too.

Hanging out at Steve's place.

To Isla Cano to snorkel on the coral reef and build sand castles.