The Pups Watch Us

Fergus minding Claire one summer past

We are in Maryland at Claire's father's, a border collie farm near Westminster, Maryland.

Dave McCabe and his wife Lynn, fell in love with border collies a few years ago, first with Fergus and then a rescue dog, Paddy. Paddy unfortunately had been on his own for nearly a year, and had health issues that eventually claimed him, but not after he had enjoyed several years of unconditional love and excellent medical care. He was recently replaced with Nala, another rescue dog, but with a much better past. Fergus and Nala are both top dogs, humans are subordinate. They eat hamburger ground turkey mixed with dry dog food, topped with Pupperoni. The dogs, not the humans. The humans have to eat things like prime rib, veggies an salads.

The puppies, as Dave calls them, are watching Claire and I for a week while Dave and Lynn cruise the Rhine. Somebody has to do it; watch us, that is. We try and not be too much trouble. Claire doesn't chew up the furniture and I hardly ever knock over lamps while chasing a ball. We don't ask to be taken outside too often, but we do seem to prefer getting walked when it is raining hard. Some days the puppies want to stay in their outdoor play space (pen) and they send us to Turtle, so Claire can meet her deadlines, and I can write drivel like this.

The pups let us go for a bike ride Sunday, and I used the excuse of going to the post office to ride 32 miles another day. Boy did I get a barking at when I got back; must have worried Fergus.

Fall has come to the East, and gone, directly into winter. Not really, but it seems that way, when temperatures go from 80 to 50, and skies go from blue to rain in a few days.

We found some the best leaf color when we first arrived in Maryland, but the rain and wind have turned them brown and taken half of them off the trees already, and there are still faded green leaves hanging on. This is indeed a strange autumn.

Landscape, Change and Selective Memory

Since our main purpose in coming to New England this year was to gather fall color photographs, and material for magazine stories, this decline in color affected us. Only by using a few photographers’ tricks I have been able to get enough color images for the several stories we will eventually produce from this trip. I see a moral issue here: if the trend of poor color in New England continues; should we contribute to attracting people to New England when they are likely to be disappointed, as we were? Certainly the travel industry and chamber of commerce fall color web sites we regularly visited didn’t mention that the colors were spotty, washed out and weak. Their job was to fill the motels and B&Bs for as many weekends as possible.

But my disappointment was part of a bigger issue: how landscape is a product of change, and selective memory, and bound to, sooner or later, disappoint.

New England, for example: I grew up in the East, and yet the New England of my dreams came from calendar photos and Robert Frost poems. The poems were written in the 1910's and 1930's when New England was an agrarian society where people mostly made their living from the land. They built fences of stone and carved meadows and fields out of the forest, ground grain with water power, plowed and timbered with horses. They built covered bridges, not from a sense aesthetic, but for the practical reasons of climate. The calendar photos I saw were taken no later than the 1950's and already the photographers had to find just the right spots to make sure the images they presented matched those poems of many years before.

So I went to New England expecting say, North Conway, NH to be a bucolic village of a few hundred souls, church steeples, a meeting hall and country store; this inviting place would be surrounded by farms equal parts bright orange and yellow maples and meadows, each cornfield and pasture surrounded by a lovingly maintained stone fence. There is a little of all of that in and around North Conway, very little. What there is a lot of is factory outlet stores, by the hundreds, or so it seems. There is a Wal*Mart, for which we were thankful, carefully hidden away unlike the outlet stores which line the main street almost to the middle of town.

So, what’s a photographer to do? Cheat of course: hide all the power poles and lines, all the outlet stores and non-stop traffic jam; train the lens on a church steeple, detail of Colonial architecture with a hint of fall color blocking the satellite TV antennae. This is difficult for a photographer to do. In order to make pleasing compositions, ones that direct the viewers eye, inner and outer, to the essence of the subject, we must first see the subject dispassionately, warts and all, otherwise we get an image of warts. You see, your eyes are only a lens, not a camera. Your film, or memory card, is your brain, and your brain is far from objective: all grandparents know that their grandchildren are the most beautiful and most intelligent children ever to grace the universe. This of course is impossible, subjective, but oh so very true for them.

Your eye lens takes in a general scene that approximates a standard lens on a 35mm camera of 50mm. The content of that frame is imaged in total objectivity and passed on to your brain, where almost anything can happen to it, depending on the processing of your brain. If there is a running dog, aimed at you, your brain, unlike the eye, will immediately recognize it as a possible threat, zoom its attention in to 200mm, ignoring all around, make an evaluation based on the barred teeth (and growl) of the dog that it is time to initiate fight or flight. That ability to zoom in on what might be important is unique to the combination of eye and brain that no sophisticated camera has been able to achieve.

Photographers can only compose the image to direct your attention to what we want you to focus on: the beautiful white church steeple and blazing red tree, cropping out the tourist trinket store nearby, the streetlight, the parking meter and Hummer, and that annoying brat skateboarding past just as you are about to press the shutter for the perfect moment, the moment that will recreate New England Village of 70 years ago. It is a bit easier for painters, they can just leave out all evidence of modern life, or paint from very old photographs. It’s hard for a photographer to put a horse and elegant carriage cantering past in place of the skateboarder, without a Hollywood budget, but even that can be done if the advertising budget is large enough.

Which brings up why photographers, painters, illustrators and graphic designers, go to so much trouble to remove those warts? Motivation number one is money. A coach tour company selling a fall leaf tour wants photos for its brochures and ads to evoke romanticized images that will create nostalgic responses about what a New England fall visit should be, not the unvarnished truth. The idealized images trigger selective memory of a landscape of another age, dimly remembered from a childhood in New England, or more likely from second hand images. Motivation number two is simply aesthetics. Creative people want to put their stamp on any image they create. This could just as well mean making those streetlights, parking meters, Hummer and skateboarder the center of focus, to point out the true experience of a modern North Conway. Both are valid uses of selective imaging, but neither can be the whole truth for any one person. You have to be there and make those choices for yourselves, deciding whether the New England of today is what you expect, seen through your own glass darkly.

For me, my first New England experience left me disappointed at not being able to find more examples of the images my reading of Robert Frost had embedded in my young mind in middle school.

There was much more traffic than we are accustomed to in small towns in the West, and found that often the line of traffic stretched from one village to the next. New England’s narrow streets were built for horse and buggy, but then so were streets in the West; perhaps when Easterners headed west, they built new cities with very wide streets; did they know the automobile was coming? I doubt it; but what was the reason?

Visiting the New England of today, however did change my perceptions and expectations, and I found I liked parts of it after awhile. Peacham, Vermont has too many power poles and lines, TV dishes and cars, but after some time there, those things mostly disappeared and I saw the lovely old cemetery as a treasure, remembered the church basement dinner and the people, the meeting house steeple sticking above the green and gold leaves and the meadow and cornfield from a high ridge above the village. So, over time, I created a new landscape of that place, selecting out the unwanted, unromantic, unaesthetic and having it my way. That is human nature. We select out what we don’t like in a landscape, and focus on, hold on to, the things we treasure.

That is a good thing, and a bad thing. The good part is we can enjoy our local landscape even though it is becoming crowded with those factory stores we like to shop at, but would prefer not to look at. The bad part is it allows us to selectively ignore those things we don’t like to see, and so allow unexamined growth to overtake and ultimately subsume our uniqueness. That is what has happened to North Conway, New Hampshire, but has not occurred (yet) to Peacham, Vermont.

The Loss of Robert Frost's New England

The loss of Robert Frost’s New England began with the Industrial Revolution, when many left the farms to work in the water powered textile mills of the larger towns. Whole families moved to town to work in the mills, leaving the farms behind. Neighbors bought the farms, but had to mechanize to take care of the additional acreage. Horses began to give way to tractors, which meant fields were enlarged, and the first loss of those famous stone fences began. With World War II came an avalanche of change that would inevitably bring relatively rapid change to the landscape of New England. The young men went to war, the young women went to build B-17s, and their families lost ground to the encroachments of nature for at least four years. The GI Bill of Rights meant many of the young men went off to college, something few farm boys could ever dream of. After college few returned to the family farm and ma and pa lost more ground to time and age, and the farms began to grow up in brush first and finally small trees.

Some young men stayed home and tried to hold out, but the economics of city life drew most of them away. By the 1960’s the patchwork quilt of meadow, field and sugar patch, all delineated by well-kept stone fences, had given way to young forest. The few farms and dairies had to greatly enlarge and further mechanize in order to survive, and the landscape was again altered. Now, the abandoned farms host expensive single-family, mostly second homes, or small developments, surrounded by maturing forests. The stone fences have long fallen, overtaken by forest, moss and neglect. Time changes everything. Robert Frost’s New England landscape is made of memory, on Christmas cards and in the souvenir shops between the outlet stores in North Conway.

Most (not all) of the pictures you see here are fictions of a sort, crafted of real places, but carefully made to produce a pleasant colorful image that fulfills the dreams of what our eventual magazine readers’ idea of a New England autumn.

For a few photos of New England: http://newbohemiansnet.spaces.live.com

Perhaps someday I will go back to New England, and allow my camera to dispassionately record what is, not attempt to recreate what was.

Fall colors and global warming:

Excerpted from Associated Press reports; the boldface is mine.

"University of Vermont plant biologist Tom Vogelmann, a Vermont native says autumn has become too warm to elicit New England's richest colors."

"According to the National Weather Service, temperatures in Burlington have run above the 30-year averages in every September and October for the past four years..."

How warmer climate affects trees:

Colors emerge on leaves in the fall, when the green chlorophyll of summer breaks down.

In order to hasten the decline of chlorophyll, (to get the bright colors we all want to see) cold nights are needed.

Otherwise: "The leaves fall off without ever becoming orange or yellow or red. They just go from green to brown," said Barry Rock, a forestry professor at the University of New Hampshire."

Most of the locals we met in New England complained of poor color the past two years. Some blamed the lack of rain this summer, and yet others said last summer was rainy and it was still poor color. Both years had well above average temperatures. I would be interested to know if springs are also warmer. Would that lead to the decline of maple syrup production, which needs freezing nights to drive the sugar-laden sap up the tree in quantities necessary.

I once lived in a beautiful part of West Virginia, the Potomac Highlands. It is far south of what is ordinarily thought of as maple syrup country, yet many years had good sap production and lots of farmers added to their income producing syrup. There would often be several years of low production, and then a couple of great years. Perhaps that is the future of the New England maple syrup industry. Oh well, we have maple flavored corn syrup.

The science of global warming has been confused and co opted for short term political advantage, and thus serious action delayed. The moral and common sense decline of American politics grows ever more acute. New England fall colors and maple syrup production are not all that important in the overall scheme of things, but do miners notice when just one canary keels over dead, or does it have to be ten or a hundred...

Reminder of Photo Blog

Just a reminder that I am now posting most of my photos to: http://newbohemiansnet.spaces.live.com/ You can find the link to the right at the top of my list of links. The Live Writer software Edwina Dale introduced me to is a tad hard to learn, but is turning out to be worth the effort particularly when it comes to posting photos larger, and more editing opportunities. I hope you'll give this new blog a try and add it to your favorites! bob

The Invisible Ones

You know that by preference, Claire and I boondock in Turtle most of the time. To boondock means to park in a remote area overnight. We generally don't need the services of RV parks, and so don't see the point of spending the time to register, hook up water, electric and sewer each night, when we only need the water and sewer once a week, and electric hookup is a convenience, not a necessity. So why pay $30 or more for something we don't need? We have done so three times since the middle of May.

Many times our overnight parking can't be in our preferred wild country, but in urban areas, mostly at welcoming Wal*Marts. We simply park, eat dinner, go to sleep and leave in the morning. We don't put out an awning (don't have one) lawn chairs, grills, slide-outs (don't have) or other signs of "camping", and we discourage other RVers from doing the same; we have even put copies the Escapees overnight parking etiquette rules under a few windshield wipers of flagrant offenders. However generally RVers are considerate, park in a far corner of the lot and Wal*Mart has a very large traveling customer base; we all want to buy as much from them as we can in thanks. It works, and I think Wal*Mart has found the RVers to be a calming factor in late night shenanigans; sort of like piping Classical music into stores who don't want teenagers hanging around. I mean, what self respecting teen or drug dealer wants to be seen around a bunch of old farts in RVs!

That is background, now to my point: Increasingly, we see small families sleeping in their cars in Wal*Mart lots. They, like us, are quiet and unobtrusive. There is the potential for a sanitation problem, but most stores are open 24 hours for toilet availability. It used to be that the cars were old and beat up looking, worth a few hundred bucks at best, and probably a down and out family heading back to Appalachia after falling on hard times in the big city where they went to work.

Now I see a new trend; late model cars, less than five years old, well kept. I slept in my VW when I was in college, but then I was young, frugal and adventurous and my back could take sleeping in a car seat. The PT Cruiser we have seen the last three nights in Wal*Mart sleeps three people: a mother, her pre-teen son, and grandfather; I can't imagine the pain for the old man. As inexpensive as some motels are these days, there is something else going on here. They are, at least temporarily, homeless. I can think of a number of scenarios, and all involve a sudden decline in financial circumstances, since a late model PT Cruiser is not cheap. But our stocks are going up, how can this be?

Why do we say they are invisible? Only we RVers and store personnel know they are staying all night. Wal*Mart is not a destination shopping experience for most, and people are in and out quickly, and would assume the three people in the beige PT Cruiser are waiting for someone inside to finish shopping.

I am always a bit conflicted about invading their privacy to find out if we can help. They are proud, or they would be knocking at our door begging, and that has never happened. Being transients ourselves, we have nothing to offer in the way of knowledge of local social services, if any, and a little money is not the answer they seek. I can only hope they find a way to improve their circumstances soon, as I go to sleep in my comfortable, if small, RV home.

A few miles north of here, is a resort where the rooms begin at hundreds of dollars a night, and it appeared full for the leaf peeping season. It makes one wonder how some can be so wealthy, and others who's struggles are invisible. Personal choices are always a factor I suppose. Fortune is probably a bigger factor: if you were born to wealthy parents, you will most likely be even better off than they; you were born with a native intelligence and bought a fine education. Some of the fortunate manage to blow it, and some born to disadvantage make good. But those are the poles, not the middle ones who do the best they can with what they were given, and who's struggles are invisible to the rest of us. Oh, I can hear some say some sin brought this on, that they are being punished, taught a lesson by a vengeful god. Well I have an opinion about that which I will keep to myself, today.

We, and all of you who have the time and means to read this, have been very fortunate indeed. Be thankful, and keep your eyes open where you live, for the invisible ones.

Vermont Colors l,2,3

I am attempting to learn how to use Widows Live Writer to post to Live Space, and it is a slow process, so bear with me please. I am making progress. To see photos of Vermont this fall: http://newbohemiansnet.spaces.live.com/ for three postings of photos. You can get to that blog, which won't necessarily match this one, at any time by clicking on the link at the right that reads: Turtle's Adventures 2007-2008

The Road(s) Taken

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

If anyone wants to see the stanzas corrected, go to http://newbohemiansnet.spaces.live.com/

Does anyone know how to get html to make double line breaks so I can create five line stanzas of this poem? Double paragraph symbols doesn't work.

This, perhaps most quoted of Frost poems, seems most descriptive of the method we have found most productive, joyous and adventurous for our leaf color searching. Besides, we're in Frost country, though I'd imagine it's changed a bit, but his muse might as well be our muse while wandering Vermont.

Our method: We take any dirt or gravel road that promises color and views, and avoids the hordes of leaf peepers along the red highways where the color is far away, pale and dissappointing. Our new (one year old soon) Winnebego View motorhome, is skinny enough, and short enough, to go places few dare tread; even the scant cars we meet, and skinny up to pass, are slack-jawed at our audacity. But, we know our Turtle and where he can go and, usually, where he cannot.

We also often sus-out a place to park near the high point, and best color, of a Green Mountain crossing, and thus are at the best place to utilize the warm colors of morning and evening; even one rainy morning, and one foggy, proved lovely in a way that could not be had by the time most people were having their first coffee. We begin our quest after one early cuppa and stop for breakfast later, since the milk is always in the refrigerator with us anyway, and the stove always at the ready to produce cuppa number two.

This motorhome is much better built than our first, and takes the shaking of dirt roads very well; all the cabinets are still tight and nothing rattles except our accumulated stuff.

Perfect Day in Peacham, VT

We'd heard Peacham, Vermont was considered one of the most picturesque villages in Vermont, so we had to go see for ourselves. What we found was indeed picturesque, I shot gigs of photos, but we found more. It was a real place with real people and a real history. Only one small negative did we find: a couple from San Diego moved there, bought the general store, and filled it with, what I'm sure they think is quaint, and made it a tourist attraction, but even they were nice, and no doubt mellowed by Peacham.

What happens when you try and cheat: Claire threw leaves in front of my camera, for an attempt at that windblown leaf look. Somehow it doesn't quite work.

After an afternoon exploring, we decided we'd give Pecham a whole day in our rushed desperately-seeking-color-tour, to relax, take a bike ride and, since my camera never lets me rest for long, take pictures. The afternoon was sunny, and nearly 80 degrees, something locals had never seen before, since more of their memories of this time of year involved rain and snow and wind, they were all in a great mood.

Bob, who cooked the spaghetti dinner sauce for at least three days, entertained us with Pecham stories and history, between stirring the sauce and organizing the next night's church basement dinner. We were so impressed with his sauce that he invited us to spend the night parked in the meeting house (what they call a church hereabouts) so we could go to the dinner. We never turn down a free place to park, and that sauce did smell great.

Cowbells, bluejays and crows awakened us the next morning to another, even warmer, day. After a walk in the cemetery, or was that the day before, anyway a walk and pictures, we unloaded the mountain bikes and headed up a gravel road looking for color. We found some, and an intriguing sign leading to a pond (small lake hereabouts) and there we found great color, a loon and a local girl out for a kayak tour of the pond. It would have been a perfect boondock spot, but we already had a good one, right in the middle of the village.

After the dinner was over, and Bob had refused our offer of cleanup duty, we reluctently drove off into the main road crazy leaf peeping traffic to seek a Wal*Mart closer to our next destination, Green Mountain National Forest.

Banned Books Week

We have crossed back over the border and are entering Vermont for the second time, still in search of those famous New England fall colors we have heard so much about. So far they are a little washed out, or at least eluding us, but we still have high hopes, and the landscape is lovely anyway.

New Hampshire. Afternoon shadows hint of winter light to come.

We are back in one of our favorite libraries of the trip, in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont. It is filled with beautiful artwork , woodwork and books; and of course wi fi! I really like the combination of old and new in libraries here, where there is money available. The Conway, NH library was in an old brick building, probably the town hall from the clock tower, but was modern inside, but with beautiful old stained glass and calligraphy of famous quotes running around the rooms below the ceiling. Here everything, down to the glass in doors and clocks looks to be over 100 years old, and yet the wi fi is fast!

This happens to be Banned Books Week, and the library has yellow Fire Line Do Not Cross tape across two doors to rooms where formerly banned books are displayed. It's a sad commentary on the past and present when you read a list of banned books; I mean, Tom Sawyer! not so long ago banned in some Southern libraries, probably because of White/Black friendship, or in a few cases, people who see a queer around every corner. Some Americans think think if we could only return to pre Civil War social norms, we would be better off. Heck, why not return to burning witches, and books, while we're at it.

Books, and the libraries who revere them, are one of the most important foundations of our democracy. So much media we absorb today is composed of sound bites mouthed by loud rude uninformed performers with little sense of integrity. I somehow feel a responsibility to all these books around me when I write this blog in this old building where so many have read, and written.

Love your library and your freedom of expression. There are few things more valuable in America.

In order to get a photo of me on this blog, I have to have a place to have it hosted. So I am having it hosted here. Sorry you have to look at me all the time. My sister, Anna Ruth (we're from West Virginia) says it is the perfect portrait, because everyone always sees me with a camera, not in the picture, which is the way I prefer it. Claire took this when I was taking a photo of her to accompany her Desert Leaf work sometimes, and who knows, perhaps me too sometimes.