Things: Perspective From Small Town Newspapers

I always pick up community newspapers when I come across them.  They’re great sources of story ideas, chicken soup for the soul, and food for thought.

Case in point: Franklin’s New Found Voice, a free community paper distributed in Frankin, NH and beyond.

Whilst perusing this paper I found this write-up on local artist Mildred Lindsay, who at age 94, in addition to painting provincial landscapes, still shovels her own snow (see photo below), taps her own maple trees, spends time with her great-grandchildren and raises chickens.

I can’t help but wonder what Mildred must think of the world these days, namely our high-fructose society of morally bankrupt bankers, Twitterers and Facebook friends.  Does she think we’re in a recession?  Does she think Barack Obama’s doing a good job so far?  Does she support gay marriage?  Oppose the AIG bonuses or JP Morgan’s new jets?  Does any of it even register with her as she taps her maples and feeds her chickens?

Probably not.  But at her age she has seen more than her share of moral mishaps, financial hardships, technological revolutions and tragedies.

Here’s some of what was happening in the world when Mildred was my age, in March of 1944:
* March 1 – WWII: The USS Tarawa and USS Kearsarge are laid down, and an anti-fascist strike begins in northern Italy.
* March 2 – The 16th Academy Awards ceremony is held.
* March 4 – In Ossining, New York, Louis Buchalter, the leader of 1930s crime syndicate Murder, Inc., is executed at Sing Sing, along with Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss, and Louis Capone.
* March 10 – WWII: In Britain the Education Act lifts the ban on women teachers marrying.
* March 17 – WWII: The Nazis execute almost 400 prisoners, Soviet citizens and anti-fascist Romanians at Rîbniţa.
* March 19 – WWII: German forces occupy Hungary.
* March 18 – The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy kills 26 and causes thousands to flee their homes.

* March 23 – WWII: Members of the Italian Resistance attack Nazis marching in Via Rasella, killing 33.

On this day, March 24th, 1944, 335 Italians were killed in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, including 75 Jews and over 200 members of the Italian Resistance from various groups, in Rome.

And in the Polish village of Markowa, German police killed Józef and Wiktoria Ulm, their 6 children and 8 Jews they were hiding.

But one year later, the war was over.

In other words, as Mildred Lindsay would probably say, “this too shall pass away.”

Things: Pie in the Sky

I’m sure you’ve at least heard this phrase before, if not used it yourself, but do you know where it comes from?

I looked it up recently while I was writing a story for New Hampshire Public Radio about town meetings in tough economic times.  In one voice track, I’d listed off some expensive budget items and called them, collectively, a wish list.  My editor suggested I use the phrase “pies in the sky” instead.

Here’s the excerpt from the final script:

MULLEN: A full-time fire chief for the town of Ashland – 25-thousand dollars.

Two covered bridge reconstructions in Campton – 1-point-2 million dollars.

And a bigger, greener police station for Gilford – 1 –point- 6 million dollars.

Typical warrant articles in any other year…

But in the midst of an economic crisis, these items seem like pie in the sky to some voters.

I substituted the phrase, but realized that while I knew when and how to use this metaphor, I didn’t know its origin.

Enter “The Phrase Finder“, a co.uk website which, I’m sure, is one of many with a similar purpose.  I found it by Googling “pie in the sky”.

In any case, here’s what comes up:

Pie in the sky

Meaning:  A promise of heaven, while continuing to suffer in this life.

Origin:  This is an American phrase and was coined by Joe Hill in 1911. Hill was a Swedish-born itinerant labourer who migrated to the USA in 1902. He was a leading light of the radical labour organisation The Industrial Workers of the World – known as the Wobblies, writing many radical songs for them. The phrase appeared first in Hill’s The Preacher and the Slave, which parodied the Salvation Army hymn In the Sweet Bye and Bye. The song, which criticized the Army’s theology and philosophy, specifically their concentration on the salvation of souls rather than the feeding of the hungry, was popular when first recorded and remained so for some years.

Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

Chorus:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

The starvation army they play,
They sing and they clap and they pray
‘Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they’ll tell you when you’re on the bum:

Holy Rollers and jumpers come out,
They holler, they jump and they shout.
Give your money to Jesus they say,
He will cure all diseases today.
If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.

Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:

You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry.
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good,
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.

The phrase wasn’t taken up until the Second World War, when it began to be used figuratively to refer to any prospect of future happiness which was unlikely ever to be realized.

Isn’t this great?!  The site has interesting information on all sorts of these, even for obvious ones like “beat a dead horse” or “bite the bullet“, you can read about their earliest recorded uses in history.  There have been many other times when I’ve found myself dropping phrases like these and wondering how they were coined.  My mom knows a lot of them, saying her mother used to say all kinds of things like, “the bee’s knees”.  The Phrase Finder’s hypothesis on that one is pretty neat:

The bee’s knees

Meaning:  Excellent – the highest quality.

Origin:  Hard to tell if we need an etymologist or an entomologist for this one.

Bees carry pollen back to the hive in sacks on their legs. It is tempting to explain this phrase as alluding to the concentrated goodness to be found around the bee’s knee. There’s no evidence for this explanation though. It is sometimes said to be a corruption of ‘business’, but there’s no evidence to support that either.

I am a great procrastinator, like many other writers and reporters I know, so this kind of website has the potential to sabotage my best laid plans to get things done on any given day.  For example, I’ve been putting off writing a treatment for a screenplay I’m working on, and I keep allowing my technical ignorance stop me from even starting it.  I’ll work myself into a tizzy, wishing it would write itself… a silver bullet solution.

Silver bullet

Meaning:  A direct and effortless solution to a problem.

Origin:  We now use the term ’silver bullet’ to refer to an action which cuts through complexity and provides an immediate solution to a problem. The allusion is to a miraculous fix, otherwise portrayed as ‘waving a magic wand’. This figurative use derives from the use of actual silver bullets and the widespread folk belief that they were the only way of killing werewolves or other supernatural beings.

The most famous user of silver bullets was of course the Lone Ranger. This cowboy series ran from 1933 on radio and later as a highly popular television show. Silver bullets fitted well with the masked hero’s miraculous persona. He typically arrived from nowhere, overcame evil and departed, leaving behind only a silver bullet and echoes of ‘who was that masked man?’.

Happy procrastinating!

People, Things: Green Beans, Polebrity & the News

The headline of a story in today’s New York Times caught my interest:

Minutiae? In This White House, Call It News

At first I thought this might be a worrying piece about the types of stories the Obama White House might be trying to feed reporters.

But alas… it’s a thinly disguised denunciation of some media outlets’ obsession with reporting irrelevant details from the daily lives of the President’s personnel: “White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was spotted “getting money at the SunTrust Bank in the Safeway on the corner 17th St. and Corcoran St. NW.”  (Thank you Washington Examiner.)

Are you kidding me?! Not only is this “Political Memo” utterly lame, it’s also hypocritical of the Times, which recently published this story on its front page:

For Young President, Flecks of Gray

Photos from the New York Times

Hypocrisy aside for the moment, I’m reminded of one of my favorite episodes of the West Wing, “Galileo”, season 2, ep.9.  It starts with President Bartlett gushing over NASA’s unmanned mission to Mars, dubbed Galileo V, while elsewhere in the White House, his Communications Director Toby Ziegler notices a story in a Milwaukee newspaper about Bartlett’s dislike for green beans, citing an unnamed White House source.

Toby brings it up with Press Secretary CJ Cregg, who, of course, balks and calls it a non-story.  Toby shoots back, “Come see me in 3 hours.”

Sure enough, a short while later:

CUT TO: INT. TOBY'S OFFICE - DAY
C.J. is hovering outside Toby's office. She then walks in with a fake smile on her face.
C.J.: Toby.
TOBY: [turns and looks at his clock] Two hours and 20 minutes.
C.J.: Yes. Let me say first that you were right and I was wrong.
TOBY: And the odds makers take a beating.
C.J.: When I said before no one was going to pick it up?
TOBY: Yes?
C.J.: Everybody's picked it up.
TOBY: Yes.
C.J.: And when I said that even if they did, it wouldn't be a big deal?
TOBY: Yes?
C.J.: Turns out, it's a bit of a deal.
TOBY: Yes.
C.J.: You know where?
TOBY: In Oregon?
C.J.: In Oregon. You know why?
TOBY: Because they're a major producer of green beans?
C.J.: They're a huge producer, Toby. Green beans, or snap beans, represent a
significant percentage of Oregon's annual revenue. But here's the thing... [starts to sit]
TOBY: There's an electoral problem?
C.J.: [standing back up] There's an electoral problem. We won Oregon by less than
10,000 votes and we're going to need them.
TOBY: [smiles knowingly] Yeah.
C.J.: Okay, well, I'm on it now. [turns to leave]
TOBY: Good.

And we’re off to the races.  CJ presumably spends valuable time that day trying to figure out who leaked the green bean detail and how to spin it.  Word gets around, and that evening she bumps into the President’s laconic Personal Assistant, Charlie Young, who takes her aside:

CHARLIE: Twice a year, the White House kitchen staff has writers come in from food
magazines.
C.J.: Yeah.
CHARLIE: They were in last week, and I mentioned to one of them...
C.J.: Charlie...
CHARLIE: I said the President doesn't like green beans.
C.J. stops at her tracks and turns around.
C.J.: Why?
CHARLIE: 'Cause he doesn't.
C.J.: How did you say it?
CHARLIE: What do you mean?
C.J.: What question did they ask?
CHARLIE: Is there any food he particularly likes or dislikes? I said the President
likes steaks. He likes lobster. He likes spaghetti. He likes ice cream.
C.J.: And?
CHARLIE: He doesn't like green beans.
C.J.: Did you leave any wiggle room?
CHARLIE: Wiggle room? What the hell, C.J.? He doesn't like green beans.
C.J.: We won Oregon by 10,000 votes. I don't know how many green bean farmers they have out there,
but if there are 10,001...
CHARLIE: C.J....
C.J.: This is a serious thing now.
CHARLIE: Well, I'm sorry I mouthed off to a reporter, but you're out of your mind.
C.J.: No, I...
CHARLIE: Education's a serious thing. Crime, jobs, national security. In 18 months,
I've been to Oregon four times, and not a single person I've met there has been stupid.
C.J.: Everybody's stupid in an election year, Charlie.
CHARLIE: No. Everybody gets treated stupid in an election year, C.J.

And there you have it…

I would argue that, these days, everyone “gets treated stupid” all the time.  I’m not saying that the people who eat up this minutae stuff are stupid, per se, but I think this Times piece is a prime example of news outlets thinking less of their audiences than the people deserve, to say nothing of how the media regards its obligation to inform the masses.

For the record, here’s how Aaron Sorkin’s White House settled the Green Bean issue:

The crux of this issue, in my opinion, lies with how today’s media’s defines “information.”  I can just hear it now… the likes of Murrow, and even the more recently departed Peter Jennings rolling over in their graves.

The psychology of celebrity, or in this case pol-ebrity, is surely in play here too.  “Coverage” like this feeds our tendency to deify certain people only to crave proof that they too pull their pants on one leg at a time.

I guess what really bothers me about all this is the fact that the coverage of minutiae is coming not just from tabloid papers and websites, but from such venerable news organizations as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.   I’m talking about full-time staff reporters with salaries and benefits spending their time writing stupid stories that don’t matter, when reporters like me (admittedly freelance by choice) are out here spending our days scouring the world for novel, surprising, original story ideas only to have our editors shoot down the pitches because they can’t afford them.  I’m telling you, it’s more maddening than I can properly articulate.

I don’t mind the New York Times spending column inches to tell me more about Obama’s 26 year old head speechwriter Jon Favreau, when the story centers on his path from the College of the Holy Cross to the West Wing.  But his ranking in the Huffington Post’s “Who’s the White House’s Hottest Employee”?? That was bad enough the first time around, when the Huffington Post went live with it, that we didn’t need to read about it again.

Give me a break!

If anyone reading this is also seeking relief from the drivel, send me story ideas that will put the minutiae to shame.

People, Places & Things: A Posthumous Lament for Deadwood

First, a disclaimer: HBO’s Deadwood has to be the most vulgar TV program I’ve ever watched, and in extolling its virtues I am in no way condoning said profanity.

That said, I think it’s one of the best written shows I’ve seen.

If you’ve never seen it, the historical drama was based on the South Dakota mining camp of Deadwood (site of the last big strike in the Gold Rush) and the real lives of its provincial power brokers, as well as the downtrodden men and women who did their bidding for good and evil.  The show’s creator and head writer David Milch (NYPD Blue) envisioned 4 seasons, with a time-line that would roughly parallel the real camp’s swagger toward civilization in the late 1800s.

Last fall, on a cross-country road trip, I passed through the tourist-trap town and stopped by the grave of Wild Bill Hickock (see picture at left), the infamous, misunderstood pistoleer who went to Deadwood seeking refuge from his own reputation, and ultimately met his demise, shot from behind by the coward Jack McCall.

The show’s portrayal of Hickock perfectly exemplifies how Milch’s Deadwood spared viewers another hackneyed western melodrama.

SPOILER ALERT: Almost as soon as Hickock rolls into town he is involuntarily drawn into the local mayhem, and we hardly have enough time to form an uneasy attachment before he is unceremoniously assassinated.

My first brush with the show left me spinning – confused, conflicted and unconvinced that this was a productive use of the daily time I allot for studying good film or TV.  But from word one it was different from anything else I’ve seen on television, in true HBO fashion.  It wasn’t long before I wanted more.

The program has an absolutely distinct dialect, roving between ornate Shakesperean prose and idle backwoods prattle.  Watching the first episode I got frustrated like someone learning a foreign language, who tries to translate every word into English instead of just taking it in.  This was off-putting at first, but after a couple of episodes I was hooked.

It’s an incredibly effective tactic that I find similar to the way Aaron Sorkin wrote dialogue for The West Wing.  While watching that show many viewers have to pay such close attention in order to follow the characters’ esoteric, machine gun dialogue that when we come up for air at the end of an episode we feel a sense of accomplishment followed by attachment and belonging.  When evoked in an audience these are addictive emotions that make and keep dedicated fans.

In the case of both shows, when I watch them it feels like reading poetry; in the moment I worry that huge chunks of meaning are lost on me, but I’ve learned I have to just let the words wash over me, and let me mind register what it will.  And register, it always does.

As I work to learn the craft of screenwriting I find myself wanting to study Deadwood scripts so as to learn what else makes the writing so good.

Here’s a sample from a scene that’s stayed with me, in which lead character Al Swearengen stands with his henchmen Dan Dority on his roof deck above the Gem saloon, the unwitting town’s heart and soul, and together they watch workers raise telegraph poles in the distance:

 Al: Messages from invisible sources, what some people think of as progress.
 Dan: Well, ain't the heathens used smoke signals all through recorded history?
 Al:  How's that a (expletive) recommendation?
 Dan: Well, it seems to me like letters posted one person to another is just a
      slower version of the same idea.
 Al:  When's the last time you got a (expletive) letter from a stranger?
 Dan: Bad news about Pa.
 Al:  Bad news. Tries against our interests is our sole communications from
      strangers. So by all means let's plant poles all across the country,
      festoon the (expletive) with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our
      judgements of motive, huh?
 Dan: You've given it more thought than me.
 Al:  Ain't the state of things cloudy enough? Don't we face enough (expletive)
      imponderables?
 Dan: Well, by God, you give the word, Al, and them poles will be kindling.

Ian McShane as Al Swearengen - HBO photo

Al Swearengen is the town’s de facto despot and dealer of fate.  We’re introduced to him as a man with no cracks in his exoskeleton, no soul, even, but this doesn’t last.  Soon we’re allowed into his bedroom as he recounts his lonely, troubled past in nightly confessions to his whore du jour.

My first screenwriting professor told me in so many words, if you want to sell scripts, write great bad guys… actors live to play them.  Al Swearengen has got to be one of Hollywood’s best-written bad guys.  Milch and co. gave this uneducated character a vocabulary that is profane, yet profound.  Despite the evil he is capable of, we pity him and somehow wish him well.  That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to swallow the show’s final episode as “The End”.  History tells us how things ended in the real Deadwood (here’s the Wikipedia summary, for what it’s worth) so we can come up with a conclusion on our own, but it’s just not the same.  I feel cheated, robbed!

But here’s the thing, even the show’s mastermind looks down on that reaction.  In an article published not long after Deadwood’s abrupt cancellation Milch disdains the tidy ending as a tool people use pointlessly to try to organize their lives, that we’re lying to ourselves thinking we’re “entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing of something which never concludes.”

Nonetheless, when it came time to box those DVDs, Milch agreed to walk through the boarded-up Deadwood set at Melody Ranch in Santa Clarita, CA for a bonus feature in which he describes how he would have brought the show to its conclusion in one more season.

HBO has not taken down the show’s website, but neither does it contain any mention of Deadwood’s cancellation.  How fitting, considering fans had no inkling as they took in the final episode of season 3 that it would be the series’s last.

A letter from HBO lays out the network’s reasons for canceling the show, but it boils down to Deadwood’s lack of popularity and rising production costs going into its third, and ultimately final season.   Plans to make a Deadwood movie died likely sometime during pre-production, if the effort ever made it that far.

I have always struggled with endings in my career as a journalist.  Too often, too many reporters resort to the fail-safe OTWT (only time will tell), often prettily disguised by other words, but employed with the same eye-rolling effect on listeners.  I’ve wasted countless hours staring at blinking cursors, overwhelmed by the infinite number of ways to end a story.

I think the real problem is, we just don’t like good things to end.  I guess we should be glad they ever got started.

People, Things: America, [how] do you want your news?

A couple of months ago I visited the Johnson Space Center in Texas, where a tired one hour tour passes through NASA’s historic Mission Control Center.  Until 1992 this was a cutting edge communication hub, filled with the hum of important activity and the same state of the art technology that helped mankind take our world famous “giant leap” on the lunar surface.  The room now sits behind a glass wall, silent, empty, seemingly irrelevant, as tourists are ushered past, dumbfounded by the rotary telephones and keyboardless computers inside.

This image came to mind when I heard that the Rocky Mountain News, one of two newspapers in Denver, CO, published its final edition on Friday, just 2 months shy of its 150th birthday.  I can’t help but wonder if today’s newspaper newsroom, like the old Mission Control, will one day be a stop on journalism’s own tired tour?

The empty newsroom at the now defunct Rocky Mt. News (Photo: Rockymountainnews.com)

The story of the RMN’s demise is sadly becoming banal.  It was a mighty little newspaper (4 Pulitzers since 2000) and a farm team that funneled reporting talent to the likes of the inveterate New York Times.

Now it’s the latest casualty of what some are calling a multi-front war on journalism.  News outlets everywhere are succumbing to a recession on one front, the new media revolution on another, and on at least a third we’re fighting for a share of our readers’/listeners’/viewers’ ever shrinking appetites for journalism done de rigeur.

Like my visit to the defunct Mission Control Center, the death of the Rocky Mountain News is a lesson in the inevitability of change.  But, if I may I add, isn’t there opportunity in change, and discovery through it?

Over the past few months I’ve noticed more column inches and airtime devoted to that dreaded question: is journalism dying? (Here’s what a quick google search turns up on that question.) On the contrary I truly believe that journalism is still very much alive.  I would argue instead, as many others have, that our current media and methods are simply evolving.

So we are losing the newspaper, much like NASA upgraded to a fancy new Mission Control down the hall (and computers with keyboards), but don’t we still have astronauts in space, not to mention much better methods of keeping in touch with them?

As such, instead of navel gazing on the subject of our demise, perhaps we journalists could and should better spend our energy, to say nothing of our precious airtime, finding better ways to report the news for today’s audiences?  I suppose that means we could all put down our pens for a moment, and take a pause from informing the masses to try to better understand them?

That brings us to the million dollar question:  America, how do you want your news?

I humbly offer that until we can answer this, we keep trying, erring and trying again with the newest tools at our fingertips, taking risks and chucking norms in search of the next frontier.  To the staff of the Rocky Mountain News, I say DON’T GIVE UP!  You helped get us here, and despite your lament for the past, you can be part of journalism’s future.  Easier said than done, perhaps, but possible nonetheless.

Even as these times force me too to contemplate defecting, I am confident that there are enough people who value journalism that the field won’t falter, if for no other reason that that every time as chorus rises to the contrary, we do something like this:

Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility

By Dana Priest and Anne Hull

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page A01

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

People and Places: New Zealand Nomenclature

In New Zealand many of the people, and most of the places and things have two names, one in English and one in the language of the indigenous Maori.

So I got to wondering, to whom does this country belong?

Does it belong to the Maori who came here from Polynesian places in outrigger canoes (canoes!) between 950 and 1130 AD?

They gave beautiful names to the land and its features ~ from the tallest mountain, Aoraki, (cloud piercer) to one of the smallest birds, the kiwi (this is a Maori word for the shrill call of the male).

A stunning view of Aoraki (Mt. Cook) taken after an arduous hike nearby.

In spite of New Zealand’s first human occupants, some people would argue that the country belongs to the European explorers who arrived here in the 1600s.  Abel Tasman of the Netherlands led them, in search of a mythical, beautiful and resource-rich southern continent that the Dutch eventually found and dubbed Nieu Zelandt or Zeelandia Nova, meaning new sea land.

They too gave names to the land ~ Aoraki, to Captain James Cook, was Mt. Cook; a low passage over the Southern Alps, to Julius von Haast became Haast Pass; a river of tears shed down a mountainside by a goddess for her lost love and frozen there by the Maori gods, became the Franz Josef Glacier.

Or does New Zealand now belong to the British, who in 1840 signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori, in effect absorbing New Zealand into the United Kingdom, and barring the Maori from selling their land, to this day, to anyone but the crown?

Perhaps New Zealand belongs to King Aragorn and the stewards of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or perhaps to its wild stewards, including the mighty Northern Royal Albatross, blue-eyed penguins, fur seals, Kea mountain parrots and the tiny but fierce sandfly?

I’ve had many questions as have explored this vast, wild, breathtakingly beautiful, awe-inspiring place, including how long it will remain so?  How long before yet another outside force arrives to impose its will on whatever population happens to be “native” at that moment?

Given this country’s perilous position on a massive, active alpine fault line, its dynamic glacial and volcanic landscape, and its relatively recent reshaping at the hand and whim of mother nature, I can not help but think that this land belongs to her, and she will reclaim it, and that any names it’s been given will, as Tolkien said, pass into shadow and legend.

People, Places, Things: Facing Fear on the Great Barrier Reef

There are pictures of me as a little girl, floating in open Caribbean waters with my father, rendered fearless by childhood.

I have no recollection of those times, nor of any time before I was afraid to swim in deep or dark water where I am surrounded by the unknown.  For as long as I can remember, my fear has kept me close to shore, physically and metaphorically, as fears tend to do when they rule you.

It is this phobia that I set out to confront and rid myself of when I boarded the catamaran Calypso out of Port Douglas, on Australia’s tropical northeastern coast, and headed for the Great Barrier Reef.  It is the world’s largest, can be seen from outer space, and being there feels like arriving at the edge of the earth!

Yes, there are sharks out there, but one has a better chance of getting killed by a falling vending machine than a shark, according to a sourceless, yet oft-cited statistic here… 

Ethan tells me I looked nervous on the way out to the reef; he kept checking in to make sure I was okay, and I’m sure my face must have looked pale and expressionless to him, but I wasn’t feeling scared yet, at least not in the way I imagined I would.  I think I was more afraid on dry land, two days before we left.

Most of the reef tour boats give you the option of snorkeling or doing what’s called an introductory dive, wherein instructors will teach you some basics and take you 30 feet down for 30 minutes or so.  We were both nervous, for different reasons, about going in the water at all, but we liked that this option was available in case we could summon the nerve to do both.

So on the way out, we sat through the intro diving course, which was both a welcome distraction from the long boat ride to our first jumping-off point, and a terrifying exercise in all the ways one could die out there…

We got a physics lesson (water + depth = pressure, so don’t hold your breath) and we promised not to fly for a few days after diving, then signed the obligatory release form detailing all the terrible things that could happen to us on the reef, foreseen and unforeseen…

Soon we arrived at the first dive site, the captain turned off the engine and we decided to try snorkeling first.  We slipped into some sexy, full-body stinger-proof suits (it’s jellyfish spawning season here right now), then we squished our faces and feet into our masks and fins, respectively, and headed for the swim platform off the boat’s stern.

There was a massive lump in my throat as I suited up, and I had to choke back some tears – I was in the kind of emotional state where if anyone had said anything nice to me, or understanding, or sensitive, I might have started sobbing.  It was strange, and powerful, but it still didn’t feel like fear.  It was as if I’d arrived at a huge turning point, and the flood waters were about to break the dam…

There was a moment when we sat down on the edge of the boat, and my pulse quickened a bit as I looked down.  Ethan snapped this shot as we sat there together, taking a few deep breaths.

A nearby Calypso crewmember told me to put my face in the so I could see the coral and the fish straight away.  Almost as soon as I did, she took my hand and into the water I went.  Ethan jumped in behind me, took my other hand, and we took off to explore.

After a few minutes I felt like a pro, so I dove under for a closer look at the reef.  The water was fairly shallow, ranging from 8 to 15 feet deep, so we could easily see the bright colors of the fish and coral (these become muted the deeper you dive).

When completely submerged it sounded like I was swimming in a bowl of rice krispies with freshly poured milk, as millions of tiny fish nibbled nutrients off the coral.  Other than the crackling, it’s completely peaceful and quiet.  The fish dart by in every color, shape and size, and the coral conjures up scenes out of a Dr. Seuss story, some of it is brain-like, solid and globular, while other types have waving feathery tendrils.

Scientists know that this reef is suffering, but I wasn’t sure what to look for when searching out evidence of bleaching caused by human contact and climate change versus natural attrition.  Here’s a shot of some bleached, dead coral (the white bit in the center), the cause of its demise a mystery, but nonetheless it is a picture that will become increasingly common.

There is an overwhelming amount of information about the reef, its residents and its health, that I’ve decided not to get into it here, but I heartily recommend a google search if you’re curious.  This is one, perhaps the only area where I was disapointed in my Calypso experience.  I wish the crew had done more to educate customers on the reef, in addition to one hasty (15 minute), half-hearted and sparsely attended lunchtime talk on fish and coral types, given AFTER the first two reef stops.

Rewind for a second though, to the moments after we emerged from snorkeling, dripping from head to toe and giddy with excitement and a sense of accomplishment.  But before we could pause to catch our breath, literally, our bleach-blonde diving instructor came looking for us, and said it was time to suit up.  Gulp.  Okay.

Then, one by one, we were taken into the water to practice the basic skills we’d learned earlier, including what to do if we lost our air regulator… yikes!  First obstacle: this dive site was much, MUCH deeper than the first one… say 30 feet or so, at least!  Second obstacle: once in the water we had to sit there and wait for our two fellow divers to pass their skills reviews, and said wait included a scary view of the boat’s underbelly, and our firm grasp of a slimy anchorline descending into the murky depths below.

Double gulp…

I must have sucked down half of my air supply just waiting there, focusing on Ethan’s face, trying to slow my breath, trying to remember not to HOLD my breath…

And finally we descended, popping our ears along the way, until it was time to let go of the rope.  Pretty soon I’d forgotten any sort of fear, and was too busy checking out a sea cucumber to remember that I was diving 25 feet below the surface of the shark-laden southern Pacific – me, Miss Fear of Dark Water Mullen, diving…

Before we knew our instructor signalled that it was time to turn back to the boat.  We’d done it!  I’d confronted and conquered one of my greatest fears!  Ethan deserves my gratitude for making the entire experience possible, and never leaving my side, not to mention admiration for his own bravery in the face of his own, presumably more powerful fears.

My mind flooded with thoughts on how many opportunities I’d missed, how much energy I’d wasted on this fear over the last two decades, and then almost as quickly I told myself to let go of those thoughts and enjoy the moment, as so many friends and family members have been advising me to do lately.  Live only in the present.

On the way back to shore I fell in and out of sleep in the sun on the boat’s top deck, my stream of consciousness drifting among my other fears and hesitations, wandering over which one I should vanquish next…

Places, Things: Australia’s Wet Season

So apparently, Australia has two seasons: wet and dry.  The wet season runs from November through April, marked by a high frequency of cyclone and monsoon activity and fast-moving low-pressure systems that bring torrential rains.  Alas, in planning the rest of our time in Australia we did not know this, nor did we look at the weather forecast for the place we were heading after Sydney and Melbourne…

And so we arrived late at night in the tacky tourist beach town of Cairns, some 2,400 km north of Sydney, during just such a rain, on the outskirts of Cyclone Charlotte, which drenched the country’s northern coast with 20 inches of rain in 36 hours even as it was downgraded below cyclone status.  Apparently the storm did massive damage all around us, flooding homes and businesses.

The downpour continued and we spent the entire next day in our hotel, testing out the gym, catching up on the news, watching season 1 of Deadwood (excellent, excellent show!!), trying not to eat the snacks in the minibar…

The next morning we woke up to bright sunshine outside, so we rented a car and headed for the hills.  Unlike the vast, arid outback, this is a part of Australia where the lush rainforest rises up from the ocean into mountains where the air is hot, steamy and close.  Insects and frogs fill the forests with eerie, rhythmic sci-fi sound effects, and tropical downpours can sweep in over the hills to end even a cloudless day.

The good news is, the other tourists left town about a week ago, and the past three days have been mostly sunny (and steamy steamy), so that means we have places like the stunning Four Mile Beach in Port Douglas all to ourselves…

Next stop: the Great Barrier Reef (gulp)…

Places, Things: The Land Down Under

Sydney Harbour is simply stunning, especially at dusk…We arrived in Australia two days in advance of the new year, just enough time to sleep off our jet lag before it was time to ring in 2009.

We’ve been staying in Curl Curl, near Manly, a laid back beach town north of Sydney.  On New Year’s Eve, just before sunset it was all aboard and onto the harbor for sunset cocktails.  I’ve seen many ports of call in my 29 years, but few with a metropolitan skyline.  From the silhouetted skyscrapers and the flamboyant Opera House to the “old coat hanger” as the Aussies call their famous bridge, it was a treat to take in the Sydney Harbour skyline from the water.

The fireworks got underway at 9pm for families, and then the real show came on, shooting off an unrivaled spray of color and light. 

You can watch the whole show here on YouTube.

The $5M ($3.4M USD), 12 minute show took 15 months to plan and set up, and its theme was kept secret until midnight ~ creation, whose interpretation in this particular manner still eludes me.

A dozen computers ignited more than 100,000 individual fireworks from the bridge, the tops of skyscrapers and six barges around the harbor.

It was unrivaled, drawing more people than the fireworks in New York City and London!

I haven’t seen fireworks from the water since I was little, at the 4th of July on Lake Winnipesaukee, where I remember being able to feel the explosions in my tummy!  Strangely, the booming doesn’t feel quite as loud from my adult’s perspective.

In looking up the stats on Sydney’s show, I stumbled across this write-up on some new research about the toxic effects of smoke generated during fireworks.

And in other environment news, Sydney’s mayor has promised to audit and offset carbon emissions from the event, making this the city’s first-ever carbon-neutral New Year’s Eve… except for all the carbon generated in transporting 1.5 million onlookers to the waterfront (including Ethan’s and my flight from New Hampshire to Vegas to L.A. to Melbourne to Sydney).

Next up:  Tomato sauce, chips, capsicum and Kumara

Places, Things: Back East

Arriving back on the east coast was a strange experience, at once comforting and disquieting.  

I was glad to be heading “home” for Christmas after such a long trip, but that also meant our long trip was coming to an end, and we both have yet to answer some of the big questions we set out with.

But there is still so much of the eastern seaboard that I’ve never explored, and I was looking forward to our scheduled stops in Savannah, GA, Hilton Head, SC, Charleston, SC, the Outer Banks and Kitty Hawk, NC, to name a few, so I tried not to think too far beyond the next town north.

After New Orleans, the next city we plotted our course through was Savannah.  Here’s a shot of the Cotton Exchange near the riverfront there, designed by a Boston architect and built in the late 1800s when this burgeoning southern city ranked second in the world as a cotton seaport.

During that era, AFTER the 13th Amendment ended slavery as a legal institution in the U.S.A, more than two million bales a year moved through Savannah.  I’ve always been intrigued by this period; the Civil War was over, slaves had been freed (on paper at least) and many became sharecroppers, working for white landowners to continue harvesting the bounty of the south for the benefit of the northern ports, until the mid 20th century when machines took over.  I’ve imagined the deep south for so long, in my mind and through movies, so it was stirring to finally put my feet on the ground there, on the same land where our country’s greatest shame was once and recently the pride of the land.  I tried to imagine the myriad reasons why so many former slaves stayed in the south where deep-rooted racism must have daily stoked smoldering memories of their long bondage…

Why would they stay in this place?  I can imagine there are both simple reasons – this trade was all they knew – and complex ones that I could never understand.  I’d like to study those reasons some more, maybe find some books about them.

From Savannah we headed north to Charleston, SC a lovely city by the sea where I had my first bonafide fried green tomato, the delicious main act in my BLT at The Hominy Grill (where I also tried the restaurant’s regional specialty, true southern grits with just the right amount of butter and salt).

Our time in Charleston was short, so I can’t wait to go back and explore when we aren’t in a hurry to make it to the Outer Banks.

Unfortunately, when we got to N.C., bad weather hindered and ultimately ended my first and Ethan’s second attempt at hang-gliding.  The same bad weather also made for a wet drive along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.  We almost couldn’t tell where the ocean ended and the sky began.

From North Carolina we headed for Washington, D.C., one of my most favorite cities in the world.  While en route the odometer hit a milestone, considering there just under 10K miles on the car when we left NH in October…

From the Capitol it was on to the Big Apple overnight, where we ate exceptionally good hamburgers in one of the most unexpected places imaginable, known mostly to locals and their guests lucky enough to be let in on the secret!

Then I had my portrait taken in the Plaza with Eloise.  I was interested to see what the inside of this stately hotel looked like after having read a story in the January issue of Vanity Fair about the residential renovation follies in the works since the hotel was bought by an Israeli oil baron, and half of Manhattan turned out to successfully protest and change his plans.  The conflict was relatively intangible, with much of the hotel’s old-world extravagance still in tact.  But high above us, on the embattled luxury floors, Vanity Fair’s Evgenia Peretz tells us that particleboard is fast replacing mahogany…

Post-Plaza I couldn’t help but dash accross the street to gaze in wonder at the windows of Bergdorf Goodman, dressed to the nines for Christmas by window master David Hoey and his team, who raise window decoration to the level of art.

From Manhattan we headed home for Christmas to enjoy some family time, eat square meals at tables, decompress and process.  On the way out of the city we agreed that we’re both more confused about where to go from here than we were when we left two months ago.

In just that small amount of time we have driven through 33 states, seen countless breathtaking vistas and natural wonders in 13 national parks and many national monuments (a difference in nomenclature that we still don’t understand), marvelled at our country’s geological and environmental diversity, rendezvoused with family and good friends, enjoyed excellent road food (including many delicious hamburgers), had 3 oil changes, and avoided getting any speeding tickets!

I have new appreciation for the vastness of the United States, and new awareness of my own insignificance in the universe.  I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment at having taken this trip, especially since I was able to do a little reporting along the way.  Now all that’s left to do is figure out whether we we want to move to any of the cities we visited, and if not, where we want to live and work next.

We have another month or so to figure that out because we’re off to Australia for a wedding in Ethan’s family, and a couple weeks in New Zealand after that.  I’m hoping inspiration will strike me down under in the new year…