Baby Boomers '52

Ice-Nine

2011-04-04T16:50:00.000-07:00

I just got it. The radiation leak in Japan, the seeping into the ocean, the oddball weather flashing around the world ... IT'S ICE-NINE!!!

How many times did Kurt Vonnegut tell us?

Yet it wasn't until I realized that the oddball lightening, the thunder that keeps rolling and rolling and rolling without any lessening of volume and with a palpably increasing pressure was like the storms in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

And then, of course, the skins peeling off airplanes and there is Doris Lessing's oft repeated tales of the falling apart of the infrastructure, the inability of governments or organizations to maintain safety or schedules.

So, of course, ice-nine was loosed so many decades ago. I had just forgotten.

Flashbacks

2011-04-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

I've been having flashbacks lately.

I don't think it is the result of drugs in the Sixties. But maybe this is what the adults back then meant when they tried to scare us straight.

My flashback occurred at a women's leadership conference -- designed to inspire toward success 800 women who paid a bundle for the insights. Flashback to the early Seventies, consciousness raising groups were reprogramming women to think of themselves as, well, women. Up to that point we had all been girls, regardless of our age. Back then the very word "woman" had sexual overtones.

Here I want to say, "We've come a long way, baby," but last month I discovered the joke was on me.

At the 2011 conference the bottom line turns out to be the same, huge success is the purview of those who are child-free.

I think Marlo Thomas coined that word, 'child-free' to lift the stigma that still existed in the Sixties and Seventies and still today upon woman without children. Child-free not merely softened the childless label but added a slight nobility to her sacrifice upon an overpopulated planet.
The term has evolved.

The only one of the highly successful half-dozen speakers who had children also had the wealth to hire a personal nurse for her seven-week-old infant while presumably other employees attended her two-year-old twins as she left town for a week. This style of mothering has become so commonplace, according to one of her inspirational anecdotes, that an intern under her charge didn't bat an eye when asked to ship pumped breast milk across country to an infant.

I don't know. Call me a fuddy-duddy old earth-mother if you must, but it just doesn't seem all that realistic to me -- given biology and economics are still stacked against us -- that these are the only steps to successful leadership.

Not unless, yet again, we are trying to trick ourselves into believing that wealth is the same as success.

Outsourcing Life

2011-04-01T17:47:00.000-07:00

I know I'm old now. I'm shocked at what Successful Womanhood looks like: spike heels, short skirts and family-free.

The only woman dressed dowdier than I among more than 800 at a recent Women's Leadership Conference was a retired military officer dressed in a blue polyester pant suit. Other women my age wore slacks if they'd remained lean or short sheaths cinched at the waist and topping the knee. They all wore spike heels.

This is amazing to me. Women my age watched their mothers navigate uneven sidewalks with grates and cracks that, if they caught one of those narrow heel tips could break their mothers' backs.

In rebellion we went barefoot and wore Birkenstock's and platform shoes. My platforms had room to raise goldfish in the heels and toes. They added four, six, maybe eight inches of height and sent us careening as off-balance as our spiked sisters, but at least with our weight still spread across our full foot instead of just the toes.

There is something reminiscent of a Mel Brooks movie watching 800 pairs of spike heels tiptoeing down crowded but thankfully carpeted stairwells.

This was not the visual I was supposed to take away from the conference. The visual and inspirational message presented was of empowerment and the steps required to get there. Powerful and inspirational women spoke. Their overpowering message was this: Outsource.

The most inspirational of them all left me with these two immutable laws of success: Determine and maximize others' perception of you and that even remembering your grandmother's birthday can be outsourced with a standing order at a dependable florist.

Remarkably this is what it boils down to: Look like what your bosses want and outsource the rest.

The brilliance of having your grandmother's thank-you call serve as the reminder to wish her a happy birthday is hard to trump and this super successful woman won appreciative guffaws at the anecdote. But dowdy old me, seeing all of these women back in bondage, felt defeated.

Yes, bondage, there goes that old feminist earth mother nag again, but what in the world are we saying when a woman's leadership conference is filled with short skirts and spike heels? Why is it inspiring to hear success includes slipping family-tending upon other family members?

It is retrograde, the same as my mother's spike heels. This is the success model where those without the wherewithal to outsource typically got a wife.

Back in those old days of Birkenstock's and platform shoes we thought women's success in the future would take the exact opposite direction. We thought it would involve equal standing, even that there would be fashionable sensible shoes by now. And we thought success in the future would mean that those family obligations (so many that turned out to be missed opportunities in retrospect), I guess we thought they'd be outsourced in a way. We thought we'd be sharing them with husbands.

Easy Ezines

2010-09-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

I am exploring ezines and so far there seems something shady about them, like those promises in the back of movie-star magazines or advertised inside old matchbooks covers.

And isn't that so baby boomer -- matchbook covers.

For those born too late, these were thin packets of matches in folding covers of pliable cardboard. They existed before disposable lighters, which existed even before "non-smoking" sections were partitioned off from a worldwide swath of smokers. Now it's the opposite.

The matchbook covers were anchored with a striking section from which sprouted a score of sulfur tipped, cardboard matches. The exteriors could sport brilliant promotional art. Sometimes, on the interiors of the covers, were printed advertisements for the secret of turning a 98-pound weakling into Atlas, permanent hair removal, mail-order programs to obtain an engineering degree or home courses to learn dentistry or secretarial skills. I'm sure I ran across one or two that promised a publishing house would read my novel.

It was assumed, back when matchbook covers promised new careers and wealth and baby boomers were getting the best education tax dollars could buy, that only desperate, gullible people answered these calls.

It's not like I'm eating cat food, but even with my college degree and graduate credits, last week I tore off the flap of the ezine matchbook cover and sent it in.
This, insists my marketing guru, is the first step toward building a destination Internet site. Which is, by the way, www.vikivolk.com.

I think that is the point. Usually when I reach this point of understanding someone shrugs and says, "It's the Internet. Who knows?"

So, next ezine step is writing 10 (?!?TEN?TEN! 10 !TEN?TEN?!?) feature-y, newsy stories about how to do something that someone else wants to learn how to do via the Internet. So there's the focus. "Who knows?"

In the philosophical realm ezines mean giving away work for free. Which, yes, this here is free as well, but it seems different somehow when I push "publish post" versus someone else. Call me a dilettante, but I see a difference.

Either way, my colleagues rightfully fear what happens to value with product cost at virtual zero.They already see me as crazy and detrimental to the cause. This ezine plummet could confirm their worse professional fears for me. Obviously, there is shame. I can only hope on both sides.

As if the whole self-publishing concept isn't shocking enough. The notion of publishing work un-vetted, let alone unedited, is stomach turning to baby boomer journalists, those old enough to have watched "All the President's Men" in real-time.

Which, btw, is so Old-timer today. Which, further-btw, means aspiring New-timers, please, comment on 10 things you want to know.

Take that step into the New-Age, record a Comment here. Help an old journalist make a buck. "Who knows?"

Burning Bibles and Qurans

2010-09-10T12:01:00.000-07:00

In my callow youth yelling fire in a theater universally denoted the limits of the First Amendment. Watching other lines of our First Right waver was the evening news of my Baby Boomer life. But I never heard tell of that original principle being abandoned.

But this past media week makes me think such limits have been lifted. So when did it become legal to incite violence? Before or after 9/11? It wasn't that way when I was coming along. Back then you could arrest non-violent protesters for inciting violence. Now it seems more illegal to conspire to commit treason than incite violence. How did that happen?

Another thing I don't get, what does it mean to burn someone's religious book? Is it like burning a flag? Which, by the way, is really confusing in America where burning the flag is both the correct and incorrect way to get rid of one. So that means, in America, with flags, it’s the intent that determines the criminality – or not – of the act. So maybe with flags it's sort of like conspiring. It's the part in your mind that is illegal.

The "will-I-won't-I" Quran burning is more like inciting than conspiring, the proverbial lighting of the match. Is holy-book-burning then an extravagant spit in the face? Could we counter it with a bigger spit? Facing off with a couple dozen Gideon's?

No. It could only work if the Bible burning were an offering of some sort, to peace I suppose. Burning with sneers on our faces is merely a tit for tat, or spit for spat as the case may be. And that is so obviously the problem, not the solution.

I don't propose burning Bibles as an anti-Christian gesture, more an attempt to balance the fallout. I've no disrespect for the Bible, a great book, it guided my upbringing and life values, however poor my adherence. Indeed, it is perhaps shoddy understanding that leads me to think that using the Good Book in any way to defuse hatred would be considered Good Works.

I specifically chose the Gideon’s Bibles because they seem the most nondescript. I don’t propose to offer the small white Bible my mother carried at her wedding and I carried to a smattering of Protestant Sunday schools throughout my childhood. No one suggests you give up something personal when dealing in symbolism.

Maybe that's why symbolism never works well for me at a burning -- be it a flag or an effigy or a book or a whole city -- I have a hard time grasping the philosophical from video of hotly led and undisciplined hooligans with no stake in their wake.

It always seems to me, sitting at a slight remove from my television, we have the stake in this wake, we theater-goers who had planned, at the end of the show, to make dinner and get on with it. We hadn't planned to bump up against a band of hooligans playing irresponsibly in the public streets attempting to set-off the Apocalypse.

So here I am, at my great remove, slack-jawed with wonder. If regulatory stop work orders halt bulldozers, court orders protect threatened individuals, how can there be no Homeland Security measure to protect America from a band of hooligans screaming fire in a crowded theater?

For that matter, when will the public health laws kick in? I thought in America we provided protective confinement for people in imminent danger of harming themselves and others.

What's Funny About Labor Day?

2010-09-06T08:19:00.001-07:00

I've been trying to think about something amusing to write about Labor Day. Since the other topics hot on my mind are bankruptcy, politics and governing, I was thinking laboring on Labor Day had more potential for light humor.

Indeed, as I write from the lap of paradise, two jet skiers sputter past. The riders are middle aged. Middle-aged and very sweet to one another. "Do you want to go in first?" asks the man looking back at the woman. "Oh, no, you go on," she says. I wonder if this means they are married or if they are not.

It's easy to hear their conversation and even establish the emotional tone because not only do voices carry well over water but people are typically screaming in a normal voice when a motor is running beneath them.

Come to think of it that also applies to bankruptcy, politics and governing. Or sort of: The natural voice is screaming as the motor of bankruptcy/politics/governing revs beneath them. I wonder if screaming pleasantries could be just as satisfying as screaming anything else.

I have been wanting to scream lately. Remember Primal Scream Therapy? Popular back when we Boomers were still in full possession of our own hearing. It sounded appealing then and sounds appealing now. A couple quick clicks assure me it is still available, Google and Wikipedia are all over it. But the potential humor doesn't draw me, I don't click further. I don't want therapy. I just want to scream.

I would like to scream: Stop! Wasting! My! Time!

The screaming itself might be good therapy. Baby Boomer Girls in my years were raised to fight stealthily and from the flank. We were advised to have a "good cry" over rejection, disappointment, apprehension, loss or disaster to purge ourselves of grief.

Lately crying seems the last possible reaction I could muster from any of those things. A good scream seems much more likely to provoke catharsis. That's what I want.

And then I want to go back to the garden Joni Mitchell was singing about on our way to Woodstock. Remember back when our full concept of "time" was captured in that song?
"Is it the time of year? Or is it the time of Man?"

Women were so young back we weren't even called women yet. We didn't even know to ask, "Is it the change of life?"

So not too far a metaphoric reach: Wanting to capture fleeting time as I write from the lap of paradise on Labor Day, the end of summer. Hard to be a Boomer of my years and miss the middle-aged metaphor there.

Oh no! Not another middle age crisis? It always feels that when the first of the Boomers go through it we're all over it. I think I just really want to scream to stop wasting time, regardless of whether its the time of man, time of day, time to write the great American novel or too late to even read it.

What do we know about it anyway? Ah, there's that famous rub. We know only that we don't know when or how. And now it's the end of summer and we're reckoning? Sheesh, is this as light as Labor Day can get? I might as well go back to bankruptcy, politics and government.

Thank goodness, here come the middle-aged jet-skiers again.

Mostly it's young kids screaming in and out on the jet skis. I clench my teeth and think how rare anyone gets out on the water for a rewind, reset, re-framing of the careening movie that is our life. The machines are nothing but mechanized dinosaur mosquitoes, whining and penetrating every crevice of hearth and home. But it is the lap of paradise and we creek dwellers have little right to whine ourselves.

So this couple puttering along, albeit at jet ski decibel, have a charm. They are wearing matching flotation vests, slimming in black. She appears to have the same armor plated long skirted swimsuit I got from Land's End Overstock last year. And that is not merely endearing but reassuring. I know that no matter what, she won't want to fall off that dinosaur. That suit has enough fabric to it to sink when it gets wet.

She screams across the creek, "Isn't this great?"

I think that's what I'll start screaming. Couldn't hurt.

Leaving Salvador Dali's House

2010-08-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

It is a long time now since leaving Salvador Dali's home.

Of course. How else would it be? At its most concrete, time is ephemeral; once an instant passes, once a breath passes, then the time of now is gone.

When that instant was,
when that breath was,
that is what time becomes.
Here and now
whatever time was
time is now ago
And there it will stay forever.

But is it gone?

The heads atop Salvador and Gala Dali's home still overlook the Mediterranean Port Lligat, even if the lens that captured this moment is not there.
They are there.
Now.
They are not ago.
This photograph is real,
right now.
Now.

You can't really help yourself thinking like this after you've been to Salvador Dali's house, the timelessness of it is omnipresent. Rock. Sea. Sun.

Surrealism arrived about the time scientists started adding dimensions to the long held Reality of Three. Come to find out, as the 20th Century rolled along, Time, the absolute yardstick of Life, and thus of Death, was bendable.

Up until then Life was measured in what seemed a one-dimensional way, Time was so one dimensional it wasn't even considered a dimension. Then, Wham!
Not only is Time dimensional, it's such a flexible dimension it can verily double back on itself.

Freud, whom Dali called "my father," found the same thing in the human psyche: Time stretches -- forward, backward, every which where. Memory, conscious and un-, overtakes even the all-powerful present and spills forward into dreams, and obsessions, carving out needs even before desire arises; shaping our destinies.

Dali's best known canvas is about Time and titled The Persistence of Memory.

Perhaps there is no true leaving of Salvador and Gala Dali's house.
It is like the inside of a very bright egg, a stucco cocoon full of open-air windows.
The eccentric couple bought it as a fisherman's hut in 1930 and began shaping it around themselves.

Like the artist and his muse, the house is unusual, its impact sensual and breathtaking.

Although shuffled in, shuffled through, shuffled out the door,
the timelessness of sea and sun and stone remains. Either in memory or planted by Dali whose so named "Paranoid Critical Method" called upon his own "irrational knowledge" to trigger the release of others' -- this was the method to seeing Reality in its multiple Dimensions. Surreal.

The home is as though stucco grew around the light and sheltered the correct womb for Dali's studio, rigged for accommodating even huge canvases; then a few stucco stairs -- this is all white. White, white, white, white -- and it is the right place for the shelf for the stuffed swans and there a small altar space for some shells.

It is right to say Dali's home/studio grew organically -- as if the stucco grew around Dali's outrageous genius made live from the brimming brew of the omnipresent Gala.

Just to convey again: The ceiling, the stairs, the walls are white. They are white, white, white, white, white.

It is the same white hot light inside as out.

Egg atop the summer dining room
Anchors the courtyard.
Birth.
Sun, sun, sun.
Sea, sea, sea.

Then something else. Georgia O'Keeffe?

Then inside, a grand piano, nestled and defunct within crumbling rock.

Meanwhile, playing on the white, white, white stucco wall is The Magician himself.

It would be easy to dismiss Salvador Dali on so many levels -- as George Orwell tried in 1946 in an essay discussing Dali's promiscuous and distasteful subjects:

He is a symptom of the world's illness. The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.

But by the next decade, as time warped and dreams became potentially more real than what had once been Reality, Dali added complex mathematics and Einstein and DNA theories into the visionary work he produced on canvas and in objects; seeking to provoke in others the "irrational knowledge" that layers our Reality and telescopes our vision into other Dimensions.

Perhaps, to try to answer Mr. Orwell from this more distant vantage, from the future, Dali is trying to warn us of something.

Still.
Now.

... the continuing saga of the dinosaurs

2010-08-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

... additional episodes posted March 10, 17 and April 6, 2010 of this saga of two dinosaurs - waterman and print reporter .... I went searching for this particular piece from thinking about when watermen were watermen:

When I merely had designs on Jackie Russell, my Cape Cod brother-in-law told me, "Fishermen don't know the difference between a woman and raw liver."

Indeed, women don't reckon for much on the Chesapeake Bay. To hear a waterman tell, they're bad luck aboard a boat and figure prominently in the three worst calamities to befall man: A leaking boat. A smoking stove. A nagging wife.

In self-defense, I'd heard only about the luck and the liver the day I endorsed gender bias for my editor.

He had walked past my desk and said, “If she asks, you have to tell her there are no waterwomen.”

“Waterwomen?” I trailed him across the bluish, threadbare, indoor/outdoor carpeting glued to the cement floor. “Who asks?”

"Mary Z."

The latest publisher. I joined the county’s newspaper of record in 1985. The buying and selling foretelling the end of what was then called legitimate journalism was well underway.

Mary Z had offered her initialized name acknowledging an awkward pronunciation. The newsroom had merely eyeballed one another. We'd never before dealt with last names, initialized or not. Or unless it was to denote by single name some so-christened reporter.

“Only if she asks,” my editor said. He was using his hands by now. They'd fallen naturally on top of an array of scribbled notes which he swept into a pile of privacy. These were the confidentialities he’d guaranteed safely ensconced, responsibly distributed, facts to be investigated. He expected his reporters could read upside down. When he opened his palms he offered a tight shrug. “I told her there were none. Absolutely none. None. Not a single woman working as a waterman on the Chesapeake Bay.”

The newsroom gauges the editor’s anxiety by the tightness of his squint. “There aren’t any, are there?” he asked. You could have blinded him with tooth floss.

“Why does she want to know if there are women watermen?”

“She wants to call them fisherfolk,” he said.

“Fisherfolk?” I squinted.

“Fisherfolk,” he said.

“She wants to call female watermen fisherfolk?”

“She wants to call all watermen fisherfolk.”

“No,” I said. No doubt a nervous giggle escaped. Or an expletive. “Oh, no. She wasn’t serious was she?”

“Yes. She was serious. She was very serious. Yes she was. I told her it was impossible, it was a traditional name of centuries, and she asked if there were any women.” He paused. “I told her there were absolutely no women working on the water. Not one in the entire Chesapeake Bay.” He paused again. "And that I would check with you."

I would never have another date with Jackie Russell if my newspaper called him a fisherfolk.

The editor was silent and we looked at one another with narrowed eyes.

“Jackie Russell would agree with that,” I said.

“Yes. That’s what I told her,” he said.

Everyone in the newsroom heard this. The editor’s office consisted of four partitions, a door and no ceiling. The box sat in the cavernous back stocking space of a cinder block retail shopping strip. No one said a word when I returned to my desk, nor for the months that followed of Mary Z's tenure. But when Mary Z stepped foot for the last time out the glassed front door the whoosh of air hadn't yet reached the far back newsroom when a reporter called out, "She wanted to call watermen fisherfolk!" The newsroom cracked up.

Jackie Russell didn’t think it was funny. We would have seen one another the following Saturday night -- date night -- from whatever day it was my editor had sought gender guidance. Like poking at a loose tooth I naturally told him about saving the paper from fisherfolk. He didn't think it was funny at all.

Back when journalism was rated legitimate or non- we were the keepers of a very non-virtual century of our community's yellowing and crumbling archive of a world almost fully disappeared. We strove to shield the paper from ridicule from its loyal readers – the vanishing natives of St. Mary’s County – although few of them would believe such a thing of us. Many of our vanishing readers still considered “The Enterprise” the bastard paper. Thankfully indignation and outrage spurred them to plunk down increasing amounts of silver twice a week for the privilege of hating us.

We all understood why Jackie Russell wouldn’t think it was funny. Extinction isn’t funny. Coating a tradition as steeped in lore and legend as Chesapeake Bay watermen with something that sounded like a new display at the Small World ride in Disneyworld wasn’t going to translate well.

Back then the newsroom kept a bank of old filing cabinets with two drawers dedicated to the black and white photographs of people who made news. Many of the photos were still attached via rubber cement to stiff layout paper where every sentence and photo was arranged by hand less than five years earlier.

Back there, rifling through the "R" manila envelope, looking for a Raley or Ridgell, Jackie Russell manifested. The photo had been taken that first day I had met him, when I‘d just begun at the radio station, before I’d run thousands of miles away from St. Mary’s County and he'd called me back.

Later I would take the whole envelope back to my desk until finally I left the photo there. I eventually took it home. It was too old a photo by then to be newsworthy. By then Jackie Russell and I shared a home. I didn't write about the fisheries anymore. It’s probably still around here, somewhere. That photo.

When I first wrote down this fisherfolk story, during the years Jackie Russell turned from waterman to educator, I didn’t ask him again about fisherfolk. He can laugh about it now, the insult so far away the humor is more accessible. Still, I told him about the photo.

There was no point saying it was the day we met. Tell him instead the boat is leaking you want a reaction. “It was when you were chairman," I prodded, pushing at that loose tooth.

He thought back to the days he cast judgment upon the fisheries of the Potomac River and the watermen who made their livings from them.

“And we really thought we were doing something,” Jackie Russell said of that day, the day of that photo. He exhaled a heavy sigh before turning his back and asking to be spared any more narrative tonight, asking, instead for the peace of sleep.

“We really thought we were doing something,” he repeats and heaves his great sigh again, without self-consciousness, without awareness of his own melodrama.

“Trying to prevent this day from ever coming,” he says. “Right now.”

Unbelievable! Watermen Working In Tandem

2010-08-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

OK. It happened in the 17th century. Still it couldn't have been easy . . .

. . . when two llaguts (skiffs is a rough English translation) sailed parallel
dragging a purse net between them.

The boats worked the Catalan coast,
explained the exhibit,
as the farmers worked the land; thus
Dragnet Boats were also called Ox Boats.

The season ran September through March with the crews at sea two to three days at a time, according to the description below the model displayed at the Maritime Museum at the Barcelona Port. There could be several daily catches.

Centuries ago the process was criticized for its effect on marine life preservation. The seining would "drag up all kind of fish and other animals without discrimination scraping over the sea bottom."

Also displayed was a Trawler and Lamp Boat. The exhibit said the use of artificial light to fish is "very ancient." The use of torches was recorded as early as the Middle Ages in Catalonia.

A model of a Mediterranean trawler from the Catalonia coast. The lamps on the trailing Lamp Boat are almost more obvious in reflection off the glass case.

The exhibit marvels at the unusualness of a technique employed along the Catalonia shore originated in the New World. "Purse seine netting by trawlers is a fishing technique imported from the American coast" with its first recorded in use around 1825 in Rhode Island.

I admit it. I was proud. That's my Atlantic coast.

DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT YOUR PRESS PASS

2010-08-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I left my press pass at home. One of my cronies -- as my husband refers to my journalistic-ally bent friends -- told me to flaunt my credentials. Pathetic as they are, she reminded me, a press pass is the key to the city.

How many times have I told students, even their high school newspaper's press pass carries weight. Everybody, everybody, EVERYBODY wants to talk about themselves to a professional listener.

And although my hair is still dark and my face somewhat leaner in the laminated photograph, I do have a press pass and -- albeit from a company no longer in business -- IT WOULD HAVE WON ME THE RESPECT OF THE GATEKEEPER OF SALVADOR DALI'S HOUSE.

His house.

But no. I didn't listen. I pulled that ancient old laminated press pass out of my wallet more concerned with the Tel Aviv airport than thinking about Salvador Dali. I took it out of my wallet and I KEPT IT AT HOME! Digging before the gatekeeper I discovered I had I kept my government pass in my wallet. WAS I CRAZY? No one in Tel Aviv asked me a thing about credentials. They just kept asking the origin of my name and if anyone had asked me to deliver a package out of the country. Then they'd asked me again, about 20 seconds later, like maybe it had slipped my mind.

How can I be offended by that. Obviously I am slipping. Turning into a non-journalist -- because who else would leave their press pass at home. So many of us former journalists are slipping -- some becoming flaks, others complete sleaze-bag journalists others sanctimonious. By this I mean, lean toward the sleaze-bag spirit of the old days and even if you have to use your kid's computer software and the laminate-kiosk at the nearest mall: DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT YOUR PRESS PASS. We're talking about Salvador Dali's house.

Oh, and a small flashlight. Press pass or not, likely you're still in that economy hotel room down a hallway without a single electric light bulb. Some things change when you lose your credentials. Some things stay the same.

Old Ladies Can Still Solo -- SOLA -- to Europe

2010-08-15T04:04:00.000-07:00

I finally got to Europe. Just in time as it turns out. Much can be lost in translation but I was hugely relieved to make it over in time to disabuse a charming young Frenchman of his line of query involving whether I'd been a wife of Salvador Dali's.

"Uh. No," I said, which are the same words or at least sufficiently similar sounds to apparently mean pretty much the exact same thing in all languages. "No," I said. I might have said it three times. What I thought was, thank god I got over here in time to clear that up. I'd made the right decision after all.

The decision was to solo Europe. I should have gone in the 70s with the rest of the boomers whom I'd always supposed had gone, smoked hash, met the Beatles and returned home to lucrative writing careers with Rolling Stone. But I stayed timidly home. Nor did I go in the 80s when, actually, I really should have gone. That was the decade I spent catching up on so many other things I'd missed in the 70s. The Divorced Years, by any other name. It didn't feel right to go alone. Shouldn't Europe be a honeymoon kind of place, or something? By the 90s, well, by then there were so many reasons not to go and having never been no confidence to bundle up a family of Americans into the unknowns of language, custom and passports.

Suddenly it's a good decade into serious middle age, a daughter spurs me into a ticket across the Atlantic, but then I was alone. And finally I come up with the motivating response: If not now, never.

Just Say Yes, is my new motto. And carry extra underwear. Everything else is exactly like you've always been told: half the clothes and twice the money. Remarkably, at the advanced age of a wife of Salvador Dali, the axiom works perfectly.

A Few Minutes Before Midnight

2010-08-14T08:38:00.001-07:00

A few minutes before midnight in the Tel Aviv airport, jetlagged already and awaiting another transatlantic flight I found myself confessing, again, the accusation that my generation abandoned the struggle for Justice to become insurance salesmen and grow houseplants. That’s how it would have been said back then, salesmen.

I confess this time to an intrepid young woman who’d asked permission to share a table then left her passport beneath her wallet at its corner as she returned to a kiosk to retrieve a bowl of soup rich with pesto. She had graduated a few months prior from boarding school and launched a “gap year” from the West Bank. In response to my praise of the soup she said life was more primitive where she had stayed. People made their food from scratch, she said. She expected to enroll next year in a conservative Jewish seminary school in New York.

I am meeting my daughter in the airport; she is a few years older than the future seminarian and has also been in Israel. Her time was spent within a multi-national project viewed with suspicion by Israeli officialdom. “My daughter is working for World Peace,” I tell this younger woman with the small ironic smile that provoked wry and slightly condescending smiles from my Baby Boomer peers back in America.

I tell the younger woman how glad I am to see young people getting back to our unfinished work on Justice. I tap my cell phone, worrying my daughter about the approaching boarding time. I mention Stuart Brand to the girl, the visionary scientist who grasped the significance of the first photograph from space of the entire planet which, Brand said, “gave the sense that Earth’s an island…” He coined not merely the phrase but the entire “Whole Earth” concept and led many of its earliest manifestations.

The message to us Children of the Sixties that We Are One wasn’t exactly taken to heart, I confessed.

It is 30 years since my accuser said we abandoned the struggle for Justice once we saw the price of war. He told me this the week John Lennon was shot, 10 years after Kent State where overly armed and undertrained Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 students to rein-in protests against the Vietnam War. Four were shot dead. After that, he told me, my generation went home to sell insurance and grow houseplants. We didn’t merely capitulate; I inferred from this, we didn’t even stop at collaboration: We turned tail and returned to the lives of petty privilege feeding Injustice.

I wouldn’t need to explain Kent State to these two women; they’d been in Israel where overly armed men and women just their ages roam the streets. It would have been difficult to explain how it appeared back then that only men made war.

They would surely have grasped the quote from that time, “This is a nation at war with itself,” which Wikipedia attributes to a lawyer in the Nixon administration, but which was too broad a sentiment of the time to actually be accorded to only one man.

But as for One Earth – the Whole Earth – could they have grasped the significance of seeing for the first time our entire plant from outside, the recognition that we are not merely All One, it is actually a very tiny place. The first visualization of the mother planet, and she looked alone.

I offer none of these explanations. Instead I say of my accuser, “He lost his daughter and her family in 9-11.”

Why keep sharing this shard of guilt in the first place? And why now consistently endow it with the unrelated but somehow connected accumulated weight of 9-11?

And why in particular burden these fresh-faced women whittling toward World Peace? To assuage my own guilt? Simply because I had spent 13 hours in mind-numbing pettiness trying to move harmlessly and unharmed through Israel for no other purpose than to get home. I had not even been long in Israel. I had spent the weeks touring lovely European seashores and museums. I had bought my daughter a T-shirt of Pablo Picasso’s “Don Quichotte.”

Was that it? Simple but now compounded guilt?

It is time to seek our boarding gates. She has finished her soup and would like a polite way to exit. I am texting my daughter that it is time to board. All of this and a large glass of wine too quickly downed weighs on my jetlagged soul. “I’m nothing but an old hippy,” I tell the young woman. We smile and part.

And that alone of what I’ve told her was a lie. I wasn’t a hippie. In May of 1970 when four died in Ohio I talked a big game but pretty much expected life insurance, house plants, daughters. My friends and I didn’t choose petty luxury over war. We never considered war would – or should – interfere with the accumulation of petty luxuries. Few of us expected Lear jets, for example, but we all expected homes of our own, well, with our husbands and enough food and even ballet and piano lessons for our daughters. More petty bourgeoisie than hippie.

The Vietnam War was ludicrous. Our generation of soldiers weren’t saving anyone's world for Democracy, rescuing unjustly tortured and exterminated peoples. There didn’t even seem a conspiratorial economic reason for Vietnam as in oil in Iraq. Vietnam was our parents' petty bourgeoisie war.

It is only today I think to ask my accuser, what would he have had us do? Even had it been possible for Kent State to morph into a Harper’s Ferry what would we be today? Israel? You can't go to war to end war. It doesn't work. Nor did the peaceful strategies of refusal work when the war was more a generational struggle than a cultural clash. It is harder to bite the hand that feeds you than the one that takes your food away.

But even as I boarded, despite of or because of my tipsy jetlagged state, I still thought I'd handed something off. Something more than my guilt. Something kinder than the worn-out warning to do as I say, not as I do. I hope this young woman and my daughter nose around a bit about Stuart Brand or Kent State, about collective efforts and the incorporation of peace into life, even petty lives. And I also hope my husband watered the plants in my absence. It seems always a good thing to have reminders that in spite of it all, life is flowering around us.

What a Difference a Century Can Make

2010-08-04T12:24:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Cadaques, the Solomons Island of Spain.

Once a fishing village, the town has turned to mega-tourism and the marketing and re-marketing of Salvador Dali who lived here until the death of his wife/muse Gala in 1972.

Today there are four fishermen left.

The good news is, many are better looking than in 1917.

A stone piling in 1905 remains but is put to different use in 2010:

Boat building looks remarkably the same in 2010 Piney Point as it did in Cadeques in 1909:

Traps are still repaired by hand as they were in 1910:

And the preparing of fish for market (the women are working with anchovies, I think) remains labor intensive today, although perhaps not so much as in 1910.

Thanks to the Cadaques Museu which allows photography (wow!) in its exhibit of what the town looked like a century ago.

Boat Skinner

2010-07-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

When it has to do with 30-year old wood preserved beneath 30 annual layers of red copper and thick oil-based paints, sandblasting sounds about as wise a choice as taking a chain saw to the old keel, which is to say, the skipjack was sandblasted this week.

The sandblasting was done by a "boat skinner," agree the captain Jack Russell & builder of the Dee, Francis Goddard. Goddard finished with the chain saw work a couple weeks ago. http://justbeforeitsgone.blogspot.com/2010/06/merging-regs-and-zen-of-boat-building.html

Robert Knott beneath minimal gear -- earplugs only after an on-site supervisor passed them out -- peeled the paint off the starboard hull of the Dee of St. Mary's in two hot days.

The restoration now moves into inch-by-inch work. Today shipwright Ben Goddard works alone beneath the boat boring and drilling, adding and replacing long screws at precise angles into particular spots into the stripped starboard hull.

The skipjack had been tilted the day before the sandblasters arrived to expose more of the starboard bottom. This requires adjustments to the array of jacks balancing the skipjack's perch on land. This particular adjustment requires a slight lowering of the port jacks then slight hoisting of starboard jacks, then lowering again of the port jacks, raising the starboard's, and on and on until your heart just can't take it anymore.

Jack roars a dismissal of my foolish question, "What if it falls?"

"That boat will almost stand on its feet," he said. "You've just got to be slow with it."

(no endorsement of any other YouTube videos are made .... blogger.com just has issues with direct uploads .... this is just a disclaimer)

Arm Flaps

2010-07-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

OK. Here is a brilliant idea just waiting for exploitation: Arm-Flap Body Purses.

As time goes on I notice the possibility that this could come about without surgery, beyond the attachment of Velcro or some other decorative clasp.

Yes, I am talking about your arm flaps. Your Nannies, if you will. In case you haven't been informed, it's too late for us Baby Boomers to retrieve elasticity along the underarm. I learned this from an Eminent Authority -- my 20-year-old daughter.

I am still dense enough as a mother to try to get one up on her now and again and reminded her of Madonna when she dropped this wisdom upon me in the non-fat yogurt section of the dairy aisle. I was buying.

"Mother," she said, dropping the $3 per carton not on sale yogurt into the cart. Ten of them. "That is my point exactly. She looks terrible."

Now it seems to me that Madonna and I are within the same decade, albeit at different ends. And it seems to me she has been considered risqué within my adult lifetime -- although i realize even using the word risqué notes my age. And I am pretty sure she was showing off a buff body just the other day in the checkout stand.

Well lo and behold in the checkout lane with my Eminent Authority she whips out a Blackberry and Googles 'disgusting underarms + Madonna' -- or something akin. Whap and there is the screen in my face, there are disgusting, sinewy arms, veins bulging out of them, hands equally strained each hold at least a 500-pound grocery bag handle. The rest of the picture was off the screen. But I felt the power.

"Pretty impressive," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "So you see what I mean."

"Hmmmmmm," I say, which became my Om of motherhood once my daughters became daughters as opposed to simply babies and children.

So I take away from this grocery store epiphany that if Madonna started too late to have decent looking arm flaps I can pack it in now. Period.

This was reverberating with me this morning as I walked the dogs, my flaps flapping in time to their dog jog. I thought how productive if I were listening to my Basic Traveling Phrases in Spanish tape.

The Eminent Authority says she can get the old tape (it gives you phrases for buying 36-print black and white film) onto my i-pod. This means I'll have to learn how to handle my i-pod -- which I've put off for three Christmases -- as well as the travel phrases -- which I've put off since high school. And where would I carry that? I already look like Gypsy Rose Lee's grandmother with my walking paraphernalia now.

Along with the two vastly different sized retractable dog leashes, a sling to carry the purse dog when she gives up the ship, my cell phone -- because three acquaintances around my age were in dumb, potentially lethal accidents a couple years ago, two had cell phones on them at the time and they survived. The third did not and he did not.

So this is what I carry and where does that leave an i-pod ... well, you can see how the epiphany arrived.

I'm thinking a combination of Origami and the stuff that keeps pasties on. Perhaps as the flaps increase in both size and porosity new styles could be incorporated. Then, instead of throwing out all of our sleeveless blouses we could show-off our Under-Arm Body Purses. There could become eminent salons where creative gay men design and install those destined to be recorded as haute couture.

I already anticipate that the Eminent Authority will call this gross. (I try to keep to myself the triumph that this particular piece of slang has survived the generations intact just as I attempt to refrain from pointing out that their generation's best songs are usually covers of ours.)

Well isn't it about time we just said 'boo-hoo' right back to them? We are the Baby Boomers, after all. And our wealth has locked them out of the economy, so it still is all about us. I say let's just go for it. I'm thinking we could get Madonna to do some pretty risqué advertising for the product.

Don't Tell Francis

2010-07-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

Now that the keel is in place the job becomes putting the skipjack back together with a mind to never having to do another restoration. Jack spends hours cleaning everything he can from the planking throughout. Even slivers of wood fallen between planks can complicate the swelling that must happen when the skipjack returns overboard. It is the swelling that finally makes her seaworthy again.

Jack is bursting with notions -- which is not unusual -- of what can fill the chinks. The last I heard he had taken to discarded pillows.

That is all I know about that.

Here is a video about how the re-fitting of the puzzle is coming along. In the video are Carpenter James Laws, Captain Jack Russell and Shipwright Benjamin Goddard.

(no endorsement of any other YouTube videos are made .... blogger.com just has issues with direct uploads .... this is just a disclaimer)

A half-inch must be OK. U.S. Coast Guard visited again yesterday to keep tabs and again approved of the work done.

A New Keel

2010-07-13T09:27:00.000-07:00

This is what the shipwrights found beneath the flooring of the aft cabin -- photos by Jim Laws, 1st Carpenter, Restoration of the Dee of St. Mary's.

This is the new keel -- completed by Francis Goddard, Benjamin Goddard & James Laws.

The keel was the central concern regarding the 30-year-old skipjack. Its successful repair has passed U.S. Coast Guard muster. While a tremendous amount of work remains -- in the hull alone bulkheads must be replaced and pieces of braces and structural ribs made clean and whole -- the successful replacement of the keel is a huge accomplishment. This was the first and primary goal of the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority grant as well as the supporting grant from Preservation Maryland.

To orient the keel within the hull and in conjunction with the decking the standard 6' ladder pictured in most of the following photos has not moved:

The forward legs of the ladder rest on the new cap that runs from the aft bulkhead through the midsection of the hull. The midsection is where the diesel motor will return to a reconstructed cradle.

Stabilizing members are replaced if necessary. Except for a few staves in the bow the hull is intact.

Rot, say the shipwrights, from the keel to the deck comes from fresh water gathering and seeping into the wood. Salt water acts as a wood preservative.

The gaping hole in the foreground is where the fore cabin was removed to replace rotten decking around it and rot in the cabin itself.

Facing forward from the wheel housing the ladder is obscured by the aft cabin , but the flashlight and broom are visible in both deck shots.

The wheelhouse aft of the aft cabin.

The Chesapeake Bay Field Lab is seeking venues to apply for additional grants and for donations to extend the restoration to the decking and exterior hull. They can be located at www.thebaylab.org

Thanks for reading.

The Island Is Sinking

2010-07-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

Not only is St. George Island sinking, the water all around us is rising.

This is old news. So old that the Maryland state government, through its Department of Natural Resources, has an agency now that tracks by how much. There's a website where you can make the calculations yourself, if you have the time and inclination to fiddle. http://shorelines.dnr.state.md.us/sc_online.asp
If you really delve you can discover how quickly your very piece of the rock -- probably not a rock anymore -- will disappear from view. My piece disappears somewhere between two and five feet -- that could be two feet sinking, three feet water rising or any combination thereof. Or maybe, actually, four feet will do it for me. It seems this isn't an exact science yet, the future and weather still having something to do with it.

It almost seemed at a meeting last month that we St. George Islanders were slow to the draw. News of the disappearing Chesapeake Bay islands is nearly passe'. "Saving an island in the Chesapeake Bay," Alex Roy of the Maryland Department of the Environment said glibly last month to a gathering of St. George Islanders, "everyone is trying to do it."

Indeed, it seemed everyone and their brother was around last month to help St. George Island start. Representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Maryland Department of the Environment, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (three people from there), the Maryland State Highway Administration (two people from there), St. Mary's County Department of Public Works, a state delegate, a county commissioner and the president of the St. George Island Improvement Association met with about a dozen islanders to start the ball rolling to save St. George Island.

The meeting began with a lot of talk about how much more water sits on the land than has in past years, how much longer water stays around and how deep on the road and lawns the water reaches. Both rain water and tidal water.

The island includes 6.8 miles of shoreline -- not all of it eroding -- and is losing about 1.2 acres of land a year. The maps make this obvious to people who don't even live here. A lot of handouts were passed around confirming that indeed there is higher water, sinking land and less than perfectly maintained roads, waterways, ditches and bridges.

There was some more talk about why all of this has occurred. There were suggestions about which departments of government performing in different ways have caused or might be able to alleviate some of the problems. But as to the larger problem -- the island is sinking and the water is rising -- there were two immediate (so-called) proposals:

The state road people are going to make sure their roads aren't being undermined by the sinking and rising. If their roads are impacted they'll look for some money to make as quick of a fix as possible. Long term fixes weren't seen as particularly likely at this juncture. County road fixes consist of more asphalt and money is running low for even this.

Secondly, the Department of Natural Resources is poised -- if requested and when formal application is made -- to send planning and consulting type folks into the St. George Island community to facilitate and help St. George Islanders' "build a plan," explained Zoe Johnson with the climate change agency. The coming together to form a collective remedy to stave off tidal inundation has already begun in some Eastern Shore communities, she said. As Roy of MDE made clear, there are growing numbers of Chesapeake Bay communities facing erosion, rising tides, sinking land, evacuation and relocation.

So regardless of the proposals, there isn't exactly a solution to the problem. The goal of the planning effort is for citizens to agree on a fix and find a way to pay for it.

The Department of Natural Resources which coordinates both the climate agency and the citizen planning events is already involved with a number of other tidally-impacted communities around the Bay. Smith Island seems the most immediate. Apparently that plan has now moved into the Relocation Planning stage. The sinking and rising calculation for those folks is that they won't have any land left above water in 25 to 30 years.

Once a reporter it's hard to give up the cynicism. So forgive me, but if I were giving odds on these proposals resulting in action I'd start hoping there's something undermining the state road -- roads get funded. Plans, for the most part, just lead to arguments which lead to more plans.

But if I were an optimistic islander I might look again at the maps and note that my tiny hunk of the rock is colored in dark blue which suggests it will take two to five feet of sinking/rising to put my lot underwater. And the good news here -- the road to my house will go before two feet.

Maybe instead of meeting as a community to build a plan that looks destined to ultimately result in evacuation and relocation strategies we could just jump ahead of the game and start learning how to build boats.

Merging Regs and the Zen of Boat-building

2010-06-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

Francis Goddard is 78 years old. "Seventy-eight-and-a-half," he brags. He climbs a tall ladder up high sides then scuttles back down onto the floor of the hull of the first skipjack he built. He wields a small chain saw. He built the Dee and appears to recall how she went together splinter by splinter. He shows little compunction at sawing out her guts and rebuilding her. He would do it better just by the fact that he had done it once before.

Of building a boat Francis says, "Once I dream it, I can build it."

Ben Goddard, more than a decade younger, is a cousin once removed, or a second cousin, but more importantly another respected Goddard boat builder of Piney Point.
Piney Point, until the 1980s, was primarily a fishing village and settled in the horizontal traditions of cousins and clans rather than the more vertical father to son set ups. The sweeps of various European cultures across America had clannish, horizontal systems forming the Appalachians, more Scottish than British. And bits of this fell throughout St. Mary's.
Good thing. Ben isn't one for dreaming but for the practicality of the minimal disruption to reach the maximum goal. Where Francis wields a chain saw, Ben will hone a piece of wood into its cradle. And cousins respect cousins. And the same with boat builders.

In the photo above of Francis he is creating a template. In the photo below of Ben he is sawing and planing the new right cheek of the keel.

The collaboration has worked well. The captain remains calm and pleased. Phew.

In the video posted http://justbeforeitsgone.blogspot.com/2010/06/chiseling-out-center-keel.html Jack shows where the center keel and its starboard (right) cheek have been removed. The Coast Guard visited later that week and met with Jack, Francis, Ben and Surveyor Michael Previti. The determination was to also replace the left cheek as well. This was the concurrence of the Coast Guard, Shipwrights, Surveyor and Captain.

This final third of the boat's spine can't be removed until both the new center keel and right cheek, which makes sense to me.

Work on the center and starboard cheek continues.

All these photos were shot by Jackie. Thanks, babe!

It's Been A Long Time

2010-06-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since I've blogged. Since BP's Big Poop I just haven't been laughing very much. But I did go to the beach where I park my pop-up in a state park on the ocean. I try to go every year. This year I wanted to beat the oil. That's how I see it. I wasn't alone on the beach to see it that way. It's like a throwback to before the 60s. We know the end is near and we're determined to see it through with good times. It's what we have left now that it's too late to leave a beautiful corpse.

So the beach was nice. Some great girlfriend laughs -- daughter laughs -- even a nice husband weekend -- just nothing really funny to write home about as the ocean lapped and you kept looking for balls of oil.

Then I get home and my girlfriend Babs -- that isn't her real name but a lot of people will know who she is anyway, which serves my purpose -- has e-mailed "2 great iPhotos." One from the good-time crab feast on the beach inside the big mosquito and shade tent that stayed up THE ENTIRE WEEK for the first time ever because IT WAS A PERFECT WEEK at the beach UNTIL I GOT SAW THIS OTHER "GREAT" iPHOTO where my mother's thighs had been Photo-shopped onto my knees.

No kidding. I'd recognize those thighs anywhere. They were my mother's.

Looking out from behind the long-skirted Women's-Sized swimsuit I wear to the beach puts me out of view of my thighs. That's fine. Back when I was in the habit of looking at them, say about 30 years ago, I pretty much memorized them and hold that picture still. Held that picture. I'm currently working on recapture.

As a Baby Boomer I believe in Walt Disney and the Wizard of Oz who successfully convinced me that what we believe is true, is. You can have it all. I don't think I was alone in taking this to heart. How else do you explain the McMansions, second homes, big cars, four cars, big boats and ski trips and all for a series of minimum payments made irregularly for as long as you own your life.

There is a Faustian ring to all of this, but somehow I fail to make the direct connection, and so I don't. It doesn't really matter. Just dropping the name counts for Baby Boomers.

My generation was graded on the curve. This means you don't actually have to do Good or Excellent to get a B or an A -- you just have to to better than others do.

This could go a long way toward explaining the Big Poop and a lot of other ridiculous events taking place on the Baby Boomer's watch.

Then, Boom! Unexpected and unimaginable consequences. Your mother's thighs and the Devil to pay. Too little exercise, too many mortgages, too late to leave a beautiful corpse. Poop leaking out of the bottom of the ocean and dang if that doesn't float to the surface as well.

You see where I'm going with this, right? Out of sight, out of mind. Magic thinking. A generation (or two or three or so on and so on) graded on the curve.
It's not going to get better. I mean, I still believe I can create truth out of nothing. I was weaned on fiction. I made my reservation for next year on the beach. I accept leaving in a whimper not a bang. I am still capable of living fully in the present, the Disney moment, where truth is fully of my own consciousness' creation. I am a Baby Boomer!

Indeed, my epiphany upon seeing my mother's thighs stuck onto a woman who, actually, now that I check back, doesn't look much like me at all, was not about BP or global ecological disaster. It was much more positive.

I thought of the foresightedness of the Midwestern reunion planners scheduling our 40th in the fall. At that time of year weather permits three-quarter length shirts and pedal pushers.

I even had time to remind myself -- before I went on to think about BP and oil blobs and entire global catastrophe -- that these three-quarter length pants are called something else now and that I have to be sure and get that from my 20-year-old before I pack.

Catch-Up

2010-06-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

Just to catch everybody up.

1. There is a skipjack in my backyard.

This is because a long long time ago I married her owner. Catch the pronouns.

2. He doesn't look exactly like this anymore. But there are times he can still pull it off.

3. A skipjack is a Big Deal in the rarefied air of Chesapeake Bay Preservationists. A Really Big Deal. And a skipjack is astronomically, insanely and not to any definite economic end point -- Expensive. Really expensive.

4. So a foundation was created.

(no endorsement of any other YouTube videos are made .... blogger.com just has issues with direct uploads .... this is just a disclaimer)

They clearly need help. Please visit www.thebaylab.org

5. Meanwhile work continues.

Cutting-Up A Skipjack

2010-06-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

It started out as simply a good idea to replace the dredge chocks, as long as first class shipwrights were on-site and something as extreme as a keel was being replaced. And of course railing. It is always a good idea to update railing. That led to some decking. Then some more decking. Then the decking around the fore cabin. Then the hull.

By the time the U.S. Coast Guard arrived last week for inspection and endorsement there were holes in the skipjack where a captain never wants to see holes.

But it started so simply, with the chocks:

And that led to this:

The starboard side doesn't look much different.

Hull replacement work is limited to primarily these planks at the bow, seen below from port and starboard.

Among the volunteers working to keep the vessel readied for the next day's shipwrights are Dave Cronce of Bainbridge, Pa. and Matthew Clements of Roanoke, Va. Both men are from the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship at the Paul Hall Center of the Seafarer's International Union -- a generous and long-term supporter of the Chesapeake Bay Field Lab, Inc., the 501(c)3 that owns and operates the Dee of St. Mary's.

Visit www.thebaylab.org to learn more about educational programing and tours.

Chiseling Out the Center Keel

2010-06-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

The heart of the problem with the skipjack the Dee of St. Mary's was diagnosed last fall as rotten wood in her keel. Fresh water is what rots wood. Salt water preserves.

The extent of the rot in the keel was uncovered last week.

The inboard portion of the keel -- in the stern -- consists of a laminate of three chunky three-inch by ten-inch boards. The laminated keel runs from the stern forward about 12 feet to midship. From that point forward the Dee's keel becomes a single piece of 12 by 12 fir shipwright Francis Goddard had shipped from Oregon.

The laminate is described in the video piece by piece -- the center keel, right (or starboard) cheek and left (port) cheek. A substantial length of the right cheek had to be removed and a portion of the center keel as well.

The rot does not extend into the left cheek or below the hull planking. Nor is there any rot in the lower keel, the portion extending beyond the bottom of the boat or in the skag, the sternward extension of the keel for the mounting of the rudder.

Rotten wood found elsewhere is also being removed including segments of the deck, some hull planks and the entire forward cabin.

Shipwrights start arriving at 7 a.m. with the intent to remove all bad wood and permit the fullest exposure to U. S. Coast Guard inspectors due for an on-site inspection this week.

Bricks & Beckley of Preservation Maryland

2010-05-30T18:02:00.000-07:00

Preservation Maryland was founded in 1931 to preserve historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes and archaeological sites. In 2009 they included the yawl boat of the Dee of St. Mary's within their protective outreach. This year they joined again with the Chesapeake Bay Field Lab and added their support to a Maryland Heritage Areas Authority Capital Grant to further the renovation of the skipjack herself.

In addition to helping save the Dee just before she was gone -- and thousands of other historic resources in Maryland -- Preservation Maryland throws a great conference every year -- this past month convening in Easton at the very historic and thus very cool Tidewater Inn.

There were days of important sessions, some great eats and speakers, even another skipjack available for a spin about. I went to see how old bricks are made and laid today -- ala Jonas Miller & daughter Miriam Miller Maynard.

The program was put together by Preservation Maryland's Elizabeth Beckley, whose knowledge of how to build 'old' in the 21st century had preservationists clamoring for her to take a how-to-get-it-done show on the road.

Among the things I learned was that it takes five cords of wood in a kiln to heat 1,000 bricks. Lime is needed for mortar. It has something to do with making the mortar hot and thus allowing it to set up quick. Around the Chesapeake that means oyster shells.

The comfort of the mason is the condition of the wall. If the mason is hot and sweaty working on the wall, the wall is hot and sweaty. If the mason is cold. The wall is cold.

The time to begin working on a masonry wall, says builder Pamela Allen Lindsley, is the time of year to plant tomatoes.

"Timing is everything with mortar," Jonas said.

Thanks again to Elizabeth Beckley who left some on the excursion with this final thought. In Colonial times "everything was intentional. There was no waste. Siting was for the breeze. How to ventilate a house was a part of a Virginian ladies' housekeeping book."

Sheltering the Skipjack

2010-05-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

Carpenter Matt McFann made the decision simple. The reason to build a shed around the skipjack was "so this old boat doesn't turn to trash."

"She's drying out already," shipwright Benjamin Goddard said as he plucked chunks of loose paint from the stern where reconstruction is likely to occur. He talked about the boat and praised efforts (by the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority and the Chesapeake Bay Field Lab) to preserve the Dee as he walked beneath the growing canopy of plastic sheeting and pine framing.

"I didn't know boards came that long," said Carol Cullison, St. George Islander and still married to a member of the Dee's first working crew. The Dee of St. Mary's oystered with the last commercial sailing fleet in North America from 1979 to 1989.

The shed of pine and plastic -- which comes in a long roll and is draped and industrial-stapled to the frame -- is needed to shelter the skipjack from the sun and make work at her home port possible.

Maryland Heritage Areas Authority applauded Chesapeake Bay Field Lab's successful effort to keep the skipjack at her home port for her restoration. Already classes from Virginia and Maryland have seen the vessel closer than any of the prior 100,000 students estimated to have sailed the Dee during her 20 years of environmental education.

Both the nonprofit that owns th Dee and the many preservations helping to support the restoration, hope such immediate access to the year's effort will spur fund raising.

"It ain't that bad," said Ben Goddard as he peeled the paint and walked around her stern. Indeed, he concluded, a wooden boat that has put in 30 hard working years is due an overhaul. That she remains stout and secure to the shipwrights is testimony to a masterwork of ship building.

Skipjack on Land

2010-05-16T06:07:00.000-07:00

Last week Keene Mill School in Fairfax, Va. saw a skipjack fly. One of their accompanying teachers was Robert Abell, former principal of Piney Point Elementary School and descendant of the Chesapeake watering industry.

The day began threatening with thunderstorms in the forecast. Before the Chesapeake Bay Field Lab teachers arrived a nervous captain paced the parking lot. The students arrived before the cranes.

It would require two cranes -- the smaller engined at the skipjack's bow the other at her stern. The boat's builder, Francis Goddard, arrived before the first crane. Next arrived was Charlie Knott, a man capable of inventing on the spot any necessary mechanical contraption out of the immediately available junk; within his realm he is a veritable Thomas A. Edison.

It is loud and then louder when the second crane appears. Holly Staats and John Fulchiron have joined the workforce in addition to the two crane operators, Mike Eagan and Aaron Mattingly of DirtWorks.

The cranes are in position quickly but it takes more than an hour for the men to satisfy themselves about which ropes and straps and hoists to use. They adjust, readjust, consider, reconsider, reconfigure.

Aubrey Mattingly was the only crane operator Francis Goddard permitted work on the Dee when her mast needed repair in 2001. With an ancient crane nicknamed Big Red Aubrey removed and then re-stepped the mast nearly a decade ago. His son Aaron inherited the touch and just as smoothly removed it again last month, April 23, 2010, preparing for this day -- May 12, 2010 -- when the skipjack would be lifted out of the water for restoration.

All appears ready. The cranes are revved, their arms extended and their back wheels off the ground allowing the legs to compensate the weight. Aaron yells above the noise into his cell phone, "I don't want to be the one breaks it in two."

As the straps tighten and the men jump off the boat and the hull is no longer floating but cradled, a loud creaking begins, louder than the cranes.
It was the straps, I am later told.
"I thought it was the wood," I said. Francis overheard and whipped his head around. He scolded in a single sputtering sound, walked on without pause, behind him he raised then dropped his long expressive arm in disdainful dismissal of such an impossible consideration.

Later I bring Francis a ladder. Of course the nervous captain wouldn't have thought to have one handy, I told Francis.
"You leave off him," Francis scolded me again. "Jackie Russell's doing fine. Just fine."

Tensions Are High

2010-05-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

All in all things aren't floating too well around this place, at this time. The winds have blown all the water out of the creek and the de-masted skipjack lists in the mud.

A group of Merchant Marines in-training at the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship in Piney Point came down a week and a half ago on a high tide and helped Jack nudge the skipjack into the bulkhead. This is so the cranes can reach it and swing it onto shore.

The cranes are due today. They say.

For a week Jack has hunted down huge wooden blocks and more importantly lifting straps that can nestle the boat as the cranes lift it from the water. There will be two cranes. The boat might be as heavy as 30 tons, Jack says. Francis shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. "Twenty-two?" he says.

Other men help locate the blocks and jacks. Danny Holden leaves a half-dozen nice solid blocks at the dock as his contribution.

Jack finds heavy rope and threads it through the sleeves in the straps he borrowed from St. Mary's Yachting Center, Brandywine Motors and one from David Adams. The rope he finds in the infinite stores of the endless rigging snugged somewhere within the dark and cavernous attic above the oyster house.

And on another high tide he slips the straps beneath the bottom of the skipjack the Dee of St. Mary's and pulls the ropes onto her deck.

There is a late call Monday night and a date given for the cranes to arrive. The date is set and rain dates aren't an option. There is a flurry of paperwork. The wind blows harder, the skipjack is immobile in the mud. Our daughter who is teaching the Wooden Boat station at the Chesapeake Bay Field Lab this semester reported to me last week, "The skipjack is on the ground."

When Jack and I agreed to create a nonprofit to continue the life of the Dee of St. Mary's beyond our own we spoke with our daughters --- Hoot and Holler -- about their loss of inheritance, that the boat would not pass to them.

"Whoo - hoo," they both cried and pumped their arms in the air. Despite their hooting and hollering and the one who dramatically flung an arm to her forehead at the tragedy of such a loss, they made it clear that neither were considering the life of a waterman.

Yet the day she reported, "The skipjack is on the ground," she didn't think to mention until later that a tool at her teaching station needed to be replaced. She shrugged that she could use something else in the meantime.

"It's on the bottom," I said.

"It's on the ground," she repeated.

So Jack stalks the waterfront, snaps at the wife, has no chance to kick a dog because none cross his path, instinctively smart enough to stay out of his way as he waits for the cranes to arrive.

"Well if they drop it, it drops," he says during his 90 seconds sitting at the kitchen table this morning. He leaves his coffee to chill and curdle.

Right, I think. And the boat is on the ground. Nobody's worried at all.

Launching the Skipjack

2010-05-04T15:51:00.000-07:00

“We had about 3,000 head down here that day.”

Jackie Russell’s face lights up still today, remembering that day in 1979. He’ll draw himself from the peace of sleep, from even the fury of interruption and turn immediately back to that most exhilarating of days nearly half his lifetime ago.

“ ‘National Geographic’ was there, but the fella who’d followed it couldn’t be there that day and the pictures got rejected and that was why we never got in ‘National Geographic’ magazine. “All the politicians were there, big hoop-de-la for Piney Point. And of course after they couldn’t get the boat off everybody went up to Swann’s and got smothered drunk. Except me. I slept on the boat that night.”

A roughly treated, large color photograph of that day is perhaps one of those rejected. I found it at the bottom of one of the drawers of Dee memorabilia in the trailer’s closet-bedroom. I can't find it anymore. It must have been shot during the smothering. Jackie Russell is alone on the stern of his new boat, looking down at her V bottom wedged in the muck of a low tide. Aground. He is centered in the heart of the photo, small aboard his big boat. A cap pulled hard over his head. An arm checkered in a woolen jacket dangling from the rail. He does not see the photographer.

You want to think it is a funny picture, but of course it isn’t. But it isn’t foolish or pitiful either. The most appropriate caption would seem to be, “What is wrong with this picture?”

“It floated off,” Jackie Russell continues. “It was three days later. We got a high tide, a sou’ easter’ and a high tide. It was lightly snowing and the fellow who was married to Anita Evans, I can’t remember his name. Doug. He was at the school and got a wet suit and cut the chains loose and pulled them loose from the fifth wheel and the boat floated off. We got her off December 19th and it was lightly snowing. I think we tried to launch it the 16th and we couldn’t get it off.

The deal was, I think the deal was, the wheels were all in a line.” He sits up in bed, staring into middle space, seeing the scene yet again. “Really why we couldn’t launch that boat, all the wheels were in a line and there was an old boat ramp there at Swann’s and somebody had been digging some manoses out of that boat ramp, that concrete boat ramp. And as those wheels went off the boat ramp one behind another she bogged down right at the end of that ramp. And it might have even been an old piece of concrete at the end of that ramp got caught up.

“And the tug boat the Susan Collins couldn’t pull her off. They had the tug boat up at Lundeberg School and the tug boat couldn’t even pull her off into the river.”

He falls backs and shuts his eyes. "Enough," he says. "Go on to another chapter."

It was more than 25 years ago I had the first of what sometimes feels a lifetime of ridiculous interviews with Jackie Russell. This night, when he tells again of that day, towel abandoned on the floor, dirty clothes resting on top of clean, it doesn't feel particularly different. Back then I hadn’t any idea what his business was about. I mean his professional business. I did, finally, notice his eyes.

Almost every woman I met those early years, if Jackie Russell dropped into the conversation the next sentence had to do with his eyes. They possessed the cinematic trick that forced a comic book twinkle out of Tony Curtis’ blue eyes in one of the celebrity vehicle movies of the 1960s. The leitmotif gag played for the duration of the movie whenever Tony Curtis’ character’s blue eyes met the camera.

Jackie could do it, can do it, without the cinematic assist, without the gag. “Jackie is genuine,” one of my least demonstrative girlfriends once gushed in a moment of appreciation. I grunted. Somehow I still suspect something of the trick to it. I can see the glint looking as far back as that first interview when he opened his arm wide to introduce his Associates. “My associates,” Jackie Russell welcomed me aboard his skipjack with a majestic sweep of his arm gesturing up the forward deck, just then being swabbed clear of the last of the oyster debris of the day.

A half-dozen men, layered in rag-tag collections of shirts and jackets and rubber boots to their knees, glanced up from their task and acknowledged me with sudden grins, then looked quickly to the captain before returning to their tasks or sauntering off.

“I call them my associates,” Jackie Russell confided to me, walking me aft. “It sounds better that way.”

Jack Russell was an egalitarian captain, well, as egalitarian as a captain can become. A huge snort of laughter bursts from him today as he reads over my shoulder.

“I can’t remember the name of the one who worked with Tynan Poe’s son, who, the two of them, beat up Eddie Poe so bad that time,” Jackie laughs. “He told me they were doing all the work and I was making all the money. He laughed.

He welcomed me aboard the skipjack, that first time, with his wide open arm, such a smooth gesture that it goes unnoticed once his eyes get you.

He draws that inclusive arm back, his left arm, and then brings it forward to grasp your forearm in a near embrace, then suddenly blocking that embrace he swings his right hand around and reaches for yours and grabs that handshake to pull you in closer. He holds you face to face, and he’s just a little bit too close but he stays too close, shaking your hand, close and tight. Without quite knowing how, you’re too close for refusal, too off-balance to step back.

Before you know it, you’re aboard, you’re a pirate too, you’re in his world and pleased with yourself. You’re possibly even lost to yourself.

Gene Weingarten Is Not My Friend. Yet.

2010-05-03T16:50:00.000-07:00

"Boohoo."
That's what the inestimable Southern Maryland journalist Michael Gray would say when a story's subject didn't like the story line.
Boohoo, Gene Weingarten with your promiscuity and too many friends on Facebook. Come on, man, you are a journalist. You are the only columnist left standing at The Washington Post Magazine. What exactly did you think would happen making blind liaisons with people you didn't know, who held motives you couldn't divine? I suspect you thought -- what a wealth of story ideas.
Or maybe you were just not thinking, Gene. Well, think now. Take a breath and listen to your tech people. They are breaking you in slowly. And you need to be broken in if you're boohooing about 1,400 friends.
The woman trying to market my blogs would scoff at your tech people's suggestion of fans -- she wants followers. Do you know what she would see in 1,400 friends? A toe in the door of the long shot opportunity to make money on blogging.
I don't mean to frighten you, Gene, but this is in some shape your future.
Your column came to me via e-mail from one of my semi-gainfully employed journalist friends. That's professionally better standing than about half of us who have lost our gainful toeholds in the biz. We're print refugees, Gene. We have seen the future. And for most of us it looks more like Facebook than The Washington Post Magazine.
Trust me on this too. No matter how much your tech people pimp you out, you aren't going to ever feel like Justin Bieber. You're a writer. Albeit you write for one of the best newspapers in the world, probably might not even know the names of the ad reps hawking you, but consider, this might be the best paying gig you'll ever get by written word.
Indeed. Only 1,400 friends? You're the columnist for The Washington Post Magazine! If that meant what it used to mean maybe you could feel like Justin Bieber. But as it stands, newspaper readers are disappearing faster than the dinosaurs split.
So "boohoo."
Un-friend who you want -- though your suspicions are correct, it is not pretty. Turn them into fans to make your tech team happy. Whatever. But if the problem is simply that your choice of friends are boring, maybe you need to pep up your own postings to attract a more fascinating crowd.
And I further suggest, whatever you do with your friends, keep in mind that one of these days you and your ad rep might have the same social security number. And when that happens, you're gonna want every friend you can get.

Why Are We So Rude?

2010-05-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

Last year's county budget hearing shocked me. Teachers, traditionally crying the loudest for tax hikes, were applauding the Constant Yielders.

The CY-ers are, in essence, our local version of the Tea Baggers. There are a parade of new faces over the years, but they all stand on the shoulders of a long-line of St. Mary's CY-ers entrenched long before I arrived in 1984.

Constant yield translates into a property tax mechanism that saves a homeowner of today about $170 a year. It saves a great deal more for the owners of super-duper homes, owners of multiple properties, commercial building owners and owners of large tracts of land zoned for development.

It doesn't save people who don't own a home anything at all. In fact, it can directly translate into service cuts to the poor.

So for public school teachers who depend upon taxes for their livelihood and upon the basic health and welfare standards of their community for the general well-being of their students, opposition to the Constant Yield Rate was an historic no-brainer.

So last year was weird.

http://onceareporter.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

So I sat before the television again this year, popcorn in lap, and was comforted in that sick-kind-of-way to see the teachers had returned to their traditional tactics. For hours they stood to ask for more money, many taking the opportunity to belittle, mock and insult the five county commissioners in charge of granting close to half of the schools' $177 million budget.

Don't get me wrong. I am certainly no foe of the mockery of public officials. It is often how I manage to sit in front of the television watching democracy unfold.

But even back when I had to attend in person I was amazed and confused by the technique at these county budget hearings. I'm sure I've more than once already quoted my mother's warning, "Honey attracts more flies than vinegar."

Well, I never much listened to my mother either.

So the insults are as traditional with county teachers as is Guerrilla Theater. This year they offered wieners in front of the school where the commissioners held the hearing. (Get it?) And they wore big carnival eye glasses to emphasize the short and long views. For me, the television audience who didn't see the wieners or the signs outside, the glasses provoked thought about the broad and narrow views.

Today I can more personally empathize with the rocks and arrows -- the spouse of a sitting commissioner, no longer a legitimate reporter -- but I confess, for as far back as when the county commissioners were my weekly fodder, I felt sorry for them at these budget hearings. No matter how short or long visioned they were -- or are, the bottom line is, at these public hearings they're simply sitting ducks. And they really don't have millions of dollars left to deal with.

It's not like stones and arrows have anything to do with the building of a public budget. And why would teachers complain of unpaid overtime to lower-paid sitting ducks who are similarly belittled at least monthly over matters equally beyond their control? It just doesn't make good sense if your goal is relief. Surely a teacher grasps the irony of the bumper sticker slogan, "The floggings will continue until morale improves." You do, don't you?

Then again, it's not like comments at budget hearings ever addressed the economics of running a school system, actual personnel and service losses associated with the constant yield tax rate or really anything other than each speaker's personal priority.
Budget hearings are more similar to petitioners coming before the king than the art of balancing a budget.

The months leading up to the hearing are when the dollar by dollar budgeting is largely completed for the pragmatic reason of needing a budget to have a hearing about. This budget document is typically crafted in cooperation and collusion with some of the very people who then stand red-faced and arms waving before the sitting ducks and spew their ire to -- nowadays -- the camera.

Sitting back with popcorn and history, it is great theater. In that sick-kind-of-way.

But to put it on TV next to all the other reality shows makes it much less humorous and much more obvious that it isn't confined to St. Mary's Constant Yielders or Constant Yellers. This is the style of contemporary public discourse. It fills every level of governing and of society.

Even our organizations form around central themes of common enemies: Cancer, the Republicans, the Democrats, Reproductive Rights, Women, Men. Even churches and parishes are selected by common enemy themes. And teachers have long complained that attitudes of disrespect and exclusion fill their classrooms.

I've got to think that turning St. Mary's County Budget Hearings into back-biting and finger-pointing reality television isn't helping.

Gray is the New Blond

2010-04-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

Have I got some great news! Gray is the new blond!
This epiphany came to me when that cute Jimmy-B from high school took note of a Facebook pix of me from the era.
I was a blond.
My daughters were shocked. Which made it a double-wonderful photo posting.
Blondes had more fun back then. This is, of course, news to my daughters who never heard the Clairol ad playing within the Musak of our formative years.
My youngest shrugs off the time differential and assures me she gets the jokes of the Sixties. "Remember," she flapped her hand at me, "I'm a history major."
I want to point out to her, a blond herself, that the girls of my generation with a Clairol connection led the way to the burned out brain cells that ultimately fostered her generation's blond jokes. Now that's history.
But I don't bother. Now that I realize gray is the new blond, I toss back a word of her own, "pssshaw."
This is even better than when brown became the new black -- an intelligent move taken as the Baby Boomer Bulge hit the age where black turned many of us sallow. And seems everyone has learned to work their photo-phone these days. Browns, of course, provide a wider range of opportunities to spruce up a paler palette.

Of course, I am gender specific here. Because, naturally, just like with Mz Clairol, none of this matters with men.

That's one of those failures I think we Baby Boomers have to accept. We have jealously kept much of our gender-stuff entrenched in WWII roles. This is different with the Boomlets. Just take a look around.
For a while it was nice to think Boomer mothering eased gender distinctions and barriers. But when my daughters reached puberty my mother's words spewed from my mouth. Nothing was different. It still was, after all, girls who carried the babies.

So now I think it is because of the hormones in grocery store chickens. It's what my friend Carolyn has always said. A Boomer. Blond Boomer.

And for Boomers, men will always be boys. And even this most spectacular of recent Baby-Boomer shifts -- making the Seventies the new Fifties -- isn't really going to help. As I see it, the guys just get twenty more years to play Peter Pan.
What do you bet they still picture Wendy as a blond.

Did you? Or didn't you?

2010-04-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

So here's how I see it. Those of us born in 1952 ride the upswing of the 18-year wave of postwar babies destined to change everything.

We embrace that destiny. We've held the spotlight pretty much since the beginning of time -- circa 1946 -- we're good at it. This means, in the Boomer World, that we think we're the most fascinating going. Our offspring and their offspring are clever, and we have photos, but accept it, they're still covering our music.

Yet, even though we still tap our feet to the same oldies, there is a divide between us: Those of us who Did and those of us who Didn't.

Those of us who smoked (cigarettes). And those of us who didn't. Those of us who quit and those of us who still miss it.

Those of us who smoked (and inhaled). Those of us who voted for Nixon.

Those of us who swallowed, snorted and shot up and those of us who had personal levels of Didn't on each of those verbs. And held to them mostly.

Those of us who learned three chords and rocked and rolled. Those of us who learned the fourth minor key and stuck with folk and thought we were cooler.

Those who went to Vietnam. Those who protested. Those who did neither.

Those who went to Woodstock. Those who still wouldn't. Those who wish they had.

So it's not just Did or Didn't -- it's timing as well. Maybe that's what Einstein meant. So does it matter when we went all the way? High school? College?

Did you or a girlfriend have an abortion before it was legal? Ah, that is more than a timing question. Its phrasing determines which Boomers will not broach this topic with me.

It is odd. I have dear friends on both sides of this crux. We did and we didn't. We know it and remain friends. How do we do that?

As a nation we fall about evenly on opposite sides judging from elections, pollsters and the Supreme Court's dabbling in both. We all shrug, one outcome or the other. How do we do that?

We did it with Vietnam. How did we do that? Do you remember that divide? Search that long-term memory for the evening news. Think how much we have assimilated.

Back in the days when we lined elementary school hallways, squatting chin to backbone of the classmate before us, we learned compartmentalization. It is not that there would be a nuclear meltdown. The bad times would be when Billy Johnson farted. We learned to compartmentalize and tell jokes.

So maybe that's it. Our Make Love Not War generation has developed a way to work around huge gulfs between one another's values, lifestyles and beliefs and to remain friends.

Or, then again, maybe we're just shallow.

Removing a 76-foot Mast

2010-04-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 23, 2010 the mast was removed from the skipjack the Dee of St. Mary's for the second time. The mast was removed once before in 2001 to dig out the damage "clinker bugs" had done to the wood.

Travis Mattingly, overseen by his father Aubrey Mattingly, pulled the mast the first time. Aubrey's son Aaron Mattingly operated the crane to pull the mast this year with the assistance of Joe Hockinson.
Francis Goddard, who built the Dee of St. Mary's skipjack in 1979, advised on both projects down to specific inches and pounds on the 76-foot mast and (estimated) 22-ton vessel he built. For example, Francis determined where the strap would be secured on the mast for a safe pull, swing and placement.
Jackie Russell, former owner and still Captain of the Dee -- now owned by the nonprofit, Chesapeake Bay Field Lab, Inc. -- performed on-site supervision and labor.
Eugene "Bones" Ramsey, former first mate of the Dee during her oystering years, went aloft to fasten the strap.
The entire process from the arrival of the crane to its departure took less than 2 hours.

When the Dee was built in 1979 her launch came before her mast was stepped. The photos below were taken before and after.

The mast is a single tree. A pine tree Francis, Jackie and George Bean floated across the Potomac from Virginia once Francis found the tree he wanted. George pulled the tree is his boat the Cathy Lynn -- also built by Francis. The tree would dive deep into the river, Jackie Russell recalls and the men would lose sight of it and not know when or where it would rocket out of the water. Or when it would dive again.

Everyone on Facebook is 35

2010-04-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

Everyone is 35 on Facebook. Did you already notice this? Probably. But for me, naturally, it took a mistaken identity involving a replacement wife to provoke my typical foot-in-mouth epiphany.
While chewing on and attempting to explain the foot in my mouth, it came to me how easy it is to mistake a generation or two in Facebook. Almost every little photo on my Facebook Home page looks, well, 35.
There are my 20-something daughters. They seem to always be posting photos of themselves looking 35. What do they think? Hiring executives won't look at those other campus party pics where everyone looks 6 at the end of a high-glucose, bad day at the playground?
I certainly post any 35-year-old photo of myself that I run across. My scanning skills have become sensational since joining Facebook. I've been thinking of ordering PhotoShop.
All of my rediscovered childhood friends and even sorority sisters (who would have guessed) look 35 on Facebook. Well, that's not exactly true, there is that solid contingent who post photos of themselves in high school and junior high so we can recognize one another. And then they sometimes also post photos with their significant other which mandates their true ages appear at least briefly. This is where I have gained photo splicing skills I would be happy to share with any of my Facebook friends.
Because, really, who among us Boomers and Boomlets wouldn't want to be 35?
Sure, plenty of Boomers might not want to be much younger than that, forced to relive the abandonment of our Whole New World movement for day care and mutual funds. But just dropping 15 years off the current date could put us back before 9-11 and Baghdad-the-Recent and even the embarrassment of the whole 2YK misjudgment. (And the government is surprised we don't react to Amber Alerts? Did no one read Peter and the Wolf to these folks?)
As for the Boomlets, adding 15 years should theoretically carry them past the current employment and financial disaster our mutual funds and leveraged greed brought upon them. Fifteen years and they are well into their own universe. Might not be any prettier, but at least us old, self-consumed and greedy oldsters will have largely moved on.
I continually have this image of the Baby Boomers as a lump the size of a jack rabbit making its way through a snake. The image always makes my stomach hurt.
My father, when asked -- at the time in his mid-40s -- said 30 was the best age because you were old enough to know what you wanted to do and young enough to still have time to do it.
So who wouldn't want to be 35?
Now if I can just remember where I put that box of old photos I think I'll go update my Facebook profile.

Removing the Boom

2010-04-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

With the support of a generous grant from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority, the Dee of St. Mary's skipjack will undergo a tremendous restoration this year. Planning began in late 2009 and continues. This month labor began to prepare this 30-year-old wooden boat for major surgery.

The Dee of St. Mary's is 56 feet long with a 20-foot beam. Her mast is 76 feet tall and her boom 56 feet long. She carries about 2,600 square feet of sail with a hull speed of roughly 10 knots--about 11 m.p.h.

The large amount of sail enables skipjacks to pull large iron dredges--toothed scoops--along the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay even in minimal wind. The few skipjacks still oystering today use hydraulic motors to pull the dredges from the bottom.

The boom of the Dee of St. Mary's weights 750 pounds. This boom, the vessel's second, was made in 1987 in Jack Russell's yard. It is made of laminated pine. The boom is held in place by lines rigged to the mast.

Helping Cap'n Jack Russell in a delicate dance of balancing and weight lifting to remove the boom are:
Antonio Hernandez, Joe Panella, Roman Pauley, Andrew Sarenceno, James Burnett, Jr. and Marcus Fields.

A Lot of Work Ahead

2010-04-16T12:52:00.000-07:00

Shipwright Benjamin Goddard, Marine Surveyor Michael Previti and Captain Jack Russell spoke in somber,sometimes outright grim tones as they prepared to write the plan for

the reconstruction of the inner keel. The men are standing in the aft cabin on the bottom of the skipjack (flooring was removed ahead of the ballast earlier this week.

The Dee of St. Mary's skipjack was built in Piney Point in 1979 -- the first skipjack to be built in 50 years.

.

Left: from disparate collection of photos taken during the 1979-1980 construction of the Dee.

Her first sail in November 1980.

So Much I Don't Get

2010-04-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

There is just so much I do not understand.
I don't understand how Google makes money on me writing this.
I am savvy enough to know that somewhere, somehow, somebody makes money for letting me send -- well, what? Blog-ese? And sending where? Cyber-Neverland? I guess so. I think so.
Maybe Blog-ese is just something in the air, virulent and free, like Bubonic Plague.
Regardless -- whether it's the Odyssey or the garbage -- I don't understand Whose reaping What for sending My Blogese into a Permanent Repository--somewhere.
So of course I don't understand how certain ads land on My Blogs. And I don't understand how you could ever effective filter them if the Reader's computer impacts the selection. How do I know what a reader's cookie are about?
Sheesh. Suffice it to say that there is a tremendous amount I don't understand about cyber-advertising-networking-linking algorithms -- which is the best understanding I have of what Monetize does.
What I did come to understand clearly was this: There is no opting out, no sign-out button to click, no ctrl-alt-delete.Acceptance came to me when the only opting-out program I could find contained 'jihad' in its name.
The single cyber-warning granted me from a younger generation old hand was, "Just remember, it's there forever. That's really the only thing."
Indeed.
I started slowly. I get the New York Times online. I joined Huffington Post even word-a-day and watch the e-mails accumulate. Today I waded in. I read about Michelle Obama and what she wore to Haiti.
I looked at every photo.
There is just so much I don't understand.

3.5 Tons of Ballast Taken from Skipjack

2010-04-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

Jack Russell and crew currently training at the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship at the Paul Hall Center in Piney Point removed this week 3.5 tons of ballast from the skipjack Dee of St. Mary's.

Skipjacks are commercial sailing vessels used to harvest oysters. The vessels, when working under sail, drag man-sized toothed mesh claws from both their port and starboard beam. They carry a great deal of sail in order to gain the speed and power to pull the dredges along the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay scooping up oysters. The Dee carries more than 25,000 square feet of sail.

Despite carrying such sail capacity, skipjacks are shallow-bottomed for maneuverability so their ballast consists of many small weights nestled in their bottom hull between the ribs.

The Dee's ballast included:

Removed from Wings (beneath aft cabin bunks)
Starboard: 24 bricks; 13 cinderblocks
Port: 55 bricks and 13 cinderblocks

Removed from Stern:
Stern: 8 bricks, 1 lead and 25 cinderblocks

Removed from beneath Aft Cabin:
Port: 96 brick; 44 cinderblock; 1 lead in keel
Centerline keel: 17 bricks, 0 cinderblocks 11 lead
Starboard: 88 bricks; 55 cinderblocks

Observation from C. Caryn Russell, "You'd be surprised how small three-and-a-half tons of brick are."

Baby Boomers Can't Grow Up

2010-04-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

We're all screw-ups. Our parents lived too long and they held power for too long.

That's my sister's view of why we Baby Boomers keep, well, screwing up. Let's not quibble. Let's just put the words "Greed" and "Self-indulgent" right here and concede that as a generation we don't appear poised to leave a strong legacy.

Not every last one of us is a screw-up, of course. Indeed, a few of us are brilliant and, then again, a few of us are colossal screw-ups. But for the most part we're middle-management screw-ups who, a sage once pointed out to me, left our so-called revolution to tend houseplants and sell insurance.We are indeed the pinnacle of bait and switch -- driving Suburbans to fossil fuel protests and joining Save the World organizations and flushing into the nearest tributary.

My sister claims our failure to grasp Real Life stems from our parents' generation refusing to hand over the reins. I contend that we don't want them. Regardless, she says, we never learned what to do with them. We never learned how to be adults.
Try not to picture Lord of the Flies.

As is the wont of Baby Boomers my sister places the blame for this arrested development squarely at the feet of someone else. In this case; the Greatest Generation, those Americans who came of age believing they had already saved the world which their Depression-addled parents had bankrupted.

"They named themselves the Greatest Generation," my sister says, meaning what novelist Tom Robbins meant when he pointed out that the brain is what tells us the brain is the smartest organ.

As the 1950s opened the newly minted middle class (that would be one returned GI plus one stay-at-home wife) moved into suburban homes bought on the GI Bill. The men went off to work somewhere and the women consumed, which was what their new homes were designed to do. Many of their own mothers ran complicated home economies in their more rural and decentralized times, but those times were over.

Boom.

So the Greatest Generation had babies and the women stayed home to pamper and educate us to become consumers in a way unimaginable to anyone coming before.

They made us, my sister says, but "they never trusted us. Our parents thought our way of thinking was BAD," my sister drags this out over the telephone. "We didn't follow the rules. We didn't play kiss-ass."

Even those of us who were and are prodigious rule-followers, we really didn't follow their rules. We may have left the revolution early, as my sage suggests, but we really were different.

They started, the Greatest Generation's overhaul of the framework of America had our economy based on things that hadn't even existed before the war. Rather than start listing them -- plastics, appliances, pantyhose -- consider this one thing that didn't exist before the Greatest Generation returned from World War II: Garbage.

"Garbage is a new invention," my grandmother would say as my grandfather carried food scraps into the garden. Once a week they had a fire in a small cylinder for those rare items worn beyond repair -- the only things I recall in the ashes would be an occasional tin can from the store. My sister probably won't remember this. She is younger. Garbage, as a commodity, caught on quickly.All that was needed were consumers. Boom.

No matter that if you did or didn't grow up to look like them, vote like them, scold like them -- think back. Remember your father's face when you brought home James Brown's first album? Remember the Walrus? Remember whatever then slipped from your short term memory and is now stored somewhere in your long term? And the biggest punchline: Vietnam, a war without a point. Remember?

My sister is right: We were and remain a different commodity, and our parents not only didn't want to give up the reins to a society that mocked them, they really and truly didn't believe we had the moxie to keep it all going. And looking around I have to wonder, maybe we don't.

We stand ill equipped my sister contends, to take on what we all pretty much still want to see -- equality and access and free Internet and unlimited gadgetry. Nobody hungry. Nobody tortured. Peace. We still by and large believe all that stuff, we just wish he grownups would come back and take care of it all. And a darn good thing, some of us are thinking, that are kids are showing signs of early rein-taking.

We're busy supporting the economy.
It's what we're trained to do.
Boom.

Sad Story

2010-04-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

Somewhere there is a black and white photograph of Jackie Russell taken the first day I met him. In this old black and white photo self-consciousness shows in his eyes which are averted from the photographer. Otherwise it is an unusual photo of him. He wears a sports coat, no hat and holds a pencil with its eraser touching the perfect bow of not quite pursed lips.

For a newspaper, the description of a photograph is in the present tense. The cutline sustains the action. Even if the photograph is centuries old, its description is of its current depiction, even if that which it depicts no longer exists today.
It is perhaps merely this that makes old photographs seem poignant. Makes us keep them. Makes them worth a thousand words.

“His is a sad story,” Joseph Norris intoned the day that photo was taken. We sat side-by-side in cold metal folding chairs. He looked up at Jackie Russell. First time I’d seen Jackie Russell. Joseph Norris hung his head. His arms draped over his thighs and he looked at the lean reporter’s notebook held in one and a pen held in the other of his dangling hands. “A very sad story,” he repeated and slowly shook his head.
Joseph Norris is an authority on local sadness. He sings woeful ballads of the disappearing Chesapeake culture and munificence. He writes prodigiously of St. Mary’s County’s losses. He calls it The County. He carries about himself a moroseness and appreciation thereof. At barely 30, he was a tradition, under his belt a decade in local print on the subject of all that was gone or headed that way. That morning at 4 a.m. he showed me how to work the audio switches in the closet where he broadcast the news. And where, on Monday, I would broadcast the news.
“It’s good on Wednesdays,” he told me when the closing bars of the “He IS Southern Maryland News” promo played and he opened the door, unfolded himself from the closet and joined me in the hall. Wednesday was the day The Enterprise published so the local stories were fresh. “But you’ll have some good local stories for Monday,” he assured me. We were to meet up again at 8 a.m. for the Potomac River Fisheries Commission meeting held in Colonial Beach, Va., a two-hour drive but right across the river as the radio beams fly. “Probably the most important story you’ll face,” Joseph Norris told me.

I located Joe in the first row. Sliding into a seat next to him I jumped when my skirt slid up and my thigh made contact with the cold metal folding chair. I realized I was the only woman in the room. At the far wall a bank of white men faced the room. They sat across the width of three tables pushed together end-to-end. Behind them, sitting off to the side next to the wall, I spotted one other woman. She was also taking notes.
Behind us sat 40 or 50 men, mostly with their hats in their hands but a few with caps affixed atop their heads that they’d methodically take off, punch or fold about a bit with their hands and replace. They wore mostly old clothes, outdoor clothes, long-sleeved shirts and heavy woolen vests. Some held thick coats in their arms wrapped tightly around their chests. They were brightly clothed above their underpinnings of gray and brown and scuffed workpants, creased and greased. Their shirts and coats and hats filled the room with tufts of bright red, faded hunter green and flecks of yellow-gold.
I wouldn’t have noticed that day, but there would have been no blue. No blue beyond faded denim. A bad luck color aboard a boat, blue is. As bad of luck as carrying a women aboard I have had occasion to learn since.

The watermen were all a sad story, Joseph Norris had told me before we left The County. Their way of life was disappearing. The oysters were dying. None of the fish populations were what they used to be.
“Who’s that?” I asked Joe, squirming to warm the seat.
“Jackie Russell. He’s one of the saddest stories yet.”
He didn’t look all that sad to me. He looked, actually, to be in pretty good shape. Jackie Russell had the round face of a little boy with a couple broken blood vessels to enhance rosy cheeks. A small curl actually did curl down the middle of his forehead. He had lips like a bow when he pursed them together in a pose of attention. I mention this only because of the photo mentioned above. Because, actually, usually he was grinning.
He had a quick smile and bestowed it widely, speaking to nearly everyone in the room. He moved smoothly through the rows of chairs, suddenly up from his seat at the front table to grab a man’s upper arm and clasp his hand in a pumping shake, then startling me only a row away, pulling another man near to whisper something short before leaning back with a guffaw. Straight, white teeth. He’d throw his head back when he laughed. He’d reappear behind the table, his arm around yet another man. Shaking hands. All the while smiling, laughing.
“He doesn’t look sad,” I said to Joe.
“He’s from The County,” Joe said in a mournful tone. “He’s local,” Joseph Norris said of Jackie Russell.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Local, like St. Mary’s County?”
“Oh yeah. More than that. St. George Island. He built a skipjack.”
“Uh, huh,” I said, looking finally from Jackie Russell and registering a blank look for Joe Norris.
“A skipjack,” Norris said, lifting his arms up from their dangle in a struggle to convey to me the colossal nature of such a thing. “First one built in half a century. The Dee of St. Mary’s. A boat. A big boat. A big working boat. A wooden sailing boat.”
Joseph Norris was upright in his sea. “She’s the youngest vessel of the last commercial sailing fleet of North America.”
“Uh, huh,” I said, looking back at Jackie Russell, who was still not looking back at me.
It’s even possible Joe Norris told me the whole skipjack story that day, that first day I saw Jackie Russell. But I don’t remember Joe telling me the story of the skipjack. I only remember Jackie Russell telling that story.

I didn’t get the story that day. I couldn’t even pull that glad-handing man’s eyes to mine that day. That day I was too far away to get the story. To get that story. But I got the drift, which was more than Jackie Russell got as I tried again and again to catch his icy blue eyes and suspected for the first and not for the last time that he might be pointing them steadfastly away from me. “Well,” I said, determined, not for the last time, to not take it personally, “he doesn’t look sad at all to me.”
“But it is a sad story,” Joseph Norris insisted with his hanging, shaking head. “He built this beautiful boat and then him and his wife split up.”
“Well,” my head jerked up and I tried yet one more shot at those icy eyes. “Well break my heart.”

Pre-Election Consumption

2010-03-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

It's getting harder to to de-personalize enough to blog for pre-election consumption. Former colleagues suggested this would happen.

Let's be clear here. My husband is the president of the local governing board -- a five-member county commission in St. Mary's County, Maryland. His first term wraps up the end of this year. He's running for re-election.

My former employer, The Enterprise newspaper, made clear a few years ago that his elected office is intimately connected to my health insurance coverage -- coverage that for nearly 20 years I carried via The Enterprise newspaper. Let that stand as my conflict of interest disclosure.

The point is, I want him re-elected, so I refrain. Still, I keep watching state and local politics play out, I'd like to make a couple suggestions that federal office holder are welcome to take as well.

If office holders could just take votes I think government might move a bit more efficiently. Just vote. Stop delaying. And while you're at it, talk less. Quite a bit less. Actually I'm not all that terribly interested in why you decided to vote a particular way. I'm just interested in the vote.

And quit blaming other people and other governments or agencies for what's going wrong. Figure out how to fix what you can on your watch. Even just make some suggestions. Or go asking for fixes. Just quit talking about it or worse waste your time fixing blame on someone else.

Here's the thing: You have all been elected as conduits, not as the brain trust of the civilization. Your job, which you clearly wanted -- you ran for it, begged for it, grovel for it every day you're in it -- is to vote on how specific things are to run. You're the deciders.

I vote based on your votes. All of your talking isn't likely to alter that fundamental. It may be that I vote as a bloc but even so, the rhetoric I adhere to is based upon your vote.

All of this talking, this vitriol, this backstabbing and finger pointing -- such a stall. Office holders perhaps believe that if they take no votes, voters will never cast one against them. Or maybe they believe they are the brain trust of the civilization. Power, even the tiniest crumbs of it, can warp reality. Even the best of you, you're the conduit. The system will roll on without you in large part just as it rolled on before you and while you were in place.

It's the system. And that is what you've been elected -- as a conduit -- to keep rolling. So vote, that's the required activity. Vote as soon as you're informed on each piece of each decision just as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Stalling the vote is just pissing me off. All of the talking is really annoying me too. And by and large you're all starting to look silly.

Legends

2010-03-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

     It’s more than a quarter century now I’ve watched and written about this dwindling handful of watermen parading themselves and their vanishing culture, resignedly and relentlessly before governing councils, scientists and their incoming neighbors of far deeper draft boats.
     “Indeed by God!” and “Christ may kill me,” they’ll sing, their lilting vernaculars lifting even their cursing to Shakespearian levels.
     I have seen them fall to their knees their clenched hands raised in mock prayer.
     Science, bureaucracy, progress and diplomacy fail to inspire in the face of a man resembling a Paul Bunyan icon with broken blood vessel cheeks crying and raising his calloused, stained and torn hands to the sky, “’Tis thee ways of my daddy and his daddy and his daddy as weil.”
     I have seen them sprawl across podiums, sweep chairs aside row by row upon their approach. I scratched out quote after quote of their increasingly irrational pleas for reason.
     They make for incredible copy. They say ludicrous things. They say uncanny things. They know things. Things about natural order and secrets about nature itself, like where a spring of freshwater bubbles out of the bottom of the Potomac River. Really. It is as David Sayre said, a mason jar could catch a fresh drink midst crabbing if you timed it right.
     They can make electricity from gasoline engines and from batteries. They can put food in their families’ bellies. Most can cook the meat, fish and fowl they bring home. Most can cook it well.
     They are dinosaurs. But they are not reptilian in thought. Even those not particularly clever are savvy. Most of them, by the time I started taking notes, knew one another or knew of one another, or of a cousin, brother. There weren’t all that many left, even then.
     Jackie Russell stood out among the pirates. For pirates they were and they remain an uncooperative lot, distrusting, clannish, unforgiving and un-forgetting.
     “Quick, get that basket in the cabin,” Jackie hissed at me the day he first took me trotlining. “In the cabin,” he hissed again and kicked the basket forward. Its lid bulged, the basket packed so full of jimmy crabs. Tossing a basket lid on a partial basket of females he jerked his head to indicate I should lift it onto the full jimmy basket now secured in the cabin. When I did he shut the door with his foot.
     All this time he’s speeding toward another boat, the broad smile on his face never faltering despite his abrupt and impolite commands to me.
     “Latch the door,”’ he said to me, “ and don’t say anything about them,” he added before coming alongside the other man, who, as I thought to be the point, cased me up and down. I smiled. Took his photo. Wrote his name down. Jackie puffed up his chest.
     “Got a good run over at Tarkhill,” Jackie said, and shook his head toward the single partially filled basket in the boat and the one full basket toward the stern. “How’re you doin’?”
     “Comin’ back from Windmill Point,” said the other man, shrugged over at a pitifully small catch and they pushed off from one another and went along.
     “That can’t be enough for him to keep crabbing?” I asked.
     “Hell, he had five baskets in his cabin. I’d like to know where he’s been working.”
     “Windmill Point,” I offered, just as puffed up as he’d been.
     "He hasn’t been near Windmill Point all day. Sonny’s workin’ over there and I just talked to him.”

      I met Jackie Russell as he turned 40 looking a decade younger. He dressed like Marlon Brando on the waterfront, only dirtier. Fish guts, dried paint, sweat, the smell of crab crap or oyster mud, depending upon the season. Like a mechanic, his hands never come clean.
     He will grab your shoulder, open wide his eyes and poke their icy blue gaze into your face. He can grin hugely or purse his lips tight when he tells you something in a high pitched laugh or in a hissing growl. Regardless, whichever voice, whatever the tale, you believe him. You believe him with all your heart.

I Wanted To Like Jim Schroeder

2010-03-11T14:47:00.000-08:00

I had lost interest in Jim Schroeder as the Political Spouse I wanted to sit by well before he started in on how Pat helped him get a job through Hillary Clinton's staff which was different than helping him get the job. That would be Pat, as in the former congresswoman from Denver that gave James Schroeder the credentials to publish Confessions of a Political Spouse.

Early on in the book I suspected Jim and I shared few if any confessions. He served at higher rank. He was national. The way that works is, the farther away the elected office is from its constituents, the higher the rank of the politician. I'm married local.

His feminist credentials were a bit cloying as well. I regret that about myself. It's sexist, right? To distrust a male spouting feminism. I struggle with guilt about this. Jim Schroeder did confess to male chauvinistic behavior in high school when he "dated his fair share of bimbos." He itemized a couple. He used the word "bimbo." That made him seem a bit more local to me, actually.

Then came this tender confession "that I never seemed to solve: cleaning up and dressing up the kids when Pat was unavailable." He clucks on about a photo of the Schroeders at Christmas with President and Mrs. Carter with the children looking "like urchins from a Dickens's novel."

Come on. This is an international lawyer who, presumably, is capable of dressing himself. He can't figure out how to locate appropriate clothing for his children to meet the president --- and he gets a pass on this?

Dang. It's not rank at all. It's right back to gender. No politicial wife would get a pass on urchin-looking children at a presidential greet and flash. Michelle Obama would not get a pass for that.

Then just when I'd about given up and turned the Kindle back to The Tipping Point Jim does come up with a teeny bit of tattling. (Why did he think I downloaded?) Jim dropped the dime on Bob Dole's failure to actively support Elizabeth Dole's stab at the Republican nomination. That would have been fun to flesh out at one of those long-winded affairs where the spouses are otherwise disposed and there's too long of a line at the bar to get another unobtrusively. That's the kind of story I want during those dinners where I usually can only say "Oh," a lot and, "My."

But then Pat's husband went and ruined it by praising Bill Clinton as "a terrific asset in [Hillary Clinton's] historic campaign." Puke. I love Hillary Clinton. I loved her as a political spouse. I loved Bill Clinton. Would have voted for him a third time if given a chance. But who are these husbands kidding? Bill was a millstone around his wife's neck from start to go.

So I was already puking before the (spoiler alert) Follow the Golden Rule ending. Turns out this memoir is a cautionary tale of dual career families when the wife holds the primary career. A small market you would think, but in a funny little chapter near this golden rule ending, Schroeder finally slips in a little bit of tongue. He introduces Charles Horner.

Horner founded the nebulous Dennis Thatcher Society for husbands who remain obscure behind their wives success. Charles Horner knighted Jim Schroeder into the society when called by a Washington Post reporter who had heard of what may or may not have been pure whimsy at that point in time -- this is never made explicit by Schroeder.

Ultimately Horner and Schroeder met and even a few times convened with appropriate members who could meet their rules which included always meeting at a club where they could sign the bill off to one of their wives. Their slogan was, "yes, dear."

And, "The element of obscurity was crucial," Schroeder wrote, "As Horner once observed, 'Bob Dole couldn't possibly be a member.'"

Now that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. You come on over to my table, Mr. Horner, sit down right here by me.

Nice Walk

2010-03-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

     St. George Island dangles like a crescent wrench off a peninsula of St. Mary’s County into the mouth of the Potomac River. In 1985 it came to be that I landed from afar and firmly planted one foot here. It was then a small fishing village. By 2000 I still had one foot out but the fishing village was gone.

Spring 2010 I have walked St. George Island for more than 20 years. It is March now, so the osprey will soon be back including the pair on the low nest at the crook in the road – I have an old essay about that nest and will try to find it for my next post. My walks include two mismatched dogs now so my interactions with the birds are quite different than when those essays were fresh.
     Passing me and my dogs were two well behaved Scotties, unleashed and at the side of the new weekend couple. I realize with a tinge of embarrassment that by “new couple” I mean they bought a house on the island less than a decade ago. It is surely pretentious to flounce my two decades over their one or that I married local. (My girlfriend's brother said he'd heard I'd "gone local" when at that time I was merely dating local. Clearly nothing to flounce.)
     The new couple is down from the city for a weekend in the country. My dogs are on their retractable leashes and acting like dogs which made their dogs act a little bit more like dogs but all was fine and we passed the time as neighbors do while their dogs sniff.
     He said, “There are really a lot of cars.”
     I said, “Yes. Particularly on the weekends.”
    And then they walked on to our place at the end of the road where our two cars and one truck park. I walk up past their house where their three cars were parked.
     Nice walk.

Irresistible

2010-03-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

Albert Poe

Albert Poe knew best where to lay his traps on St. George Island for meat and skins. He knew where the crabs were in the summer and oysters in the winter. He knew when and where he could dig a mess of piss clams, if anyone should want them.
He knew when the fish were in and where they would school. He saw the first osprey arrive every year and the first martin. He knew the day their young ones flew and the day they left.
He knew when it would rain to harm a day’s work and when it would only hinder.
He read the newspaper aloud in the island’s store. He explained to his neighbors what came above their scrawled legal signatures.
He died in the state mental institute. Vitamin deficiencies, his daughter said with a shrug.
A framed, black and white photograph of Albert Poe, skinning something spread across newspaper upon a kitchen table, sits on my husband’s dresser. He is an older man in the photograph. Not too old. He is smiling a small, nice smile. He looks nice.
His daughter called him Daddy to her last breath. Her youngest son is his embodiment. So goes the talk. So grows the legend.

Jackie Russell
Legends were easily made on the Chesapeake Bay, filled, as it was, with lone fishermen upon emptying seas. Watermen are the last true hunters of the continent. Those few remaining were sons of women who in the 1960s still ordered chicks through the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue to hatch the egg money that ran their households between seasons.
When their mothers were girls, at least on the Chesapeake’s islands, laundry was carried by boat to the nearest mainland high enough above sea level for hand-dug wells to reach freshwater.
In the early 1980s Chesapeake Bay watermen still made plentiful livings from a diminishing wilderness. Cash bulged in their pockets. They were weathered, muscled and independent. If they’d kept up their dental work they made for attractive legends. They still held unquestioned dominion over the water and the shore. They were wily but direct and somehow trustworthy despite the air of piracy that clung a bit to them all.
Their sudden standing in a legislative hearing, their rolling stride up a center aisle quieted the room. One alone could fill a bar with the nearly sexual smell of oily fish and ammonia.
Jackie Russell was the living embodiment of it all. He claims an island lineage from the English no-goods and stow-a-ways traveling beneath the decks of the Catholics who in the early 1600s sailed to the Calvert’s Merrye Lande of tolerance. He makes the claim, and plenty of others, with still a piece of an accent of that long-ago England.
It was mightily picturesque in the waning of 1983 to stumble upon a living legend. It was, in fact, irresistible. And it has dominated everything since.
“I’ve never met a man so popular,” a client gushed 20 years later, trying to charm me into a better cruising rate. “For all the places I’ve traveled and people I’ve known, I tell you, I’ve never met anyone, not anyone, there’s just no one more popular.”
“Yeah,” I tell him, “I know.”

Mandatory Unemployment Workshop

2010-03-02T12:59:00.000-08:00

Unemployment insurance recipients in Maryland must attend a workshop (put on by another branch of state government) regarding job seeking skills and coping with the stress of unemployment.
It used to be a two-day workshop but was halved as the numbers of unemployed grew, Maryland instituted a hiring free and then began furloughs of the remaining employees.

I hope the workshops aren’t phased out entirely. Call me a Baby Boomer but I love workshops. They appeal to me as a quick fix like magazine quizzes: What type of man wants the real you? Can you wear black? Are you a Paul girl or a John girl?

Set before our dozen seats were the ubiquitous folders and blank name badges. The first page in the folder was a scrambled set of encouraging aphorisms titled, “101 Stress Relievers.” The page was blanketed with these hundred sayings spewed about in dozens of fonts and sizes, some reading across and others up and down. The workshop leader had been told the inanity of the layout was stress producing.

“Talk to yourself,” extolled one piece of advice further suggesting two phrases, “I can do a great job.” and “I can stay calm under pressure.” Another prodded, “Write down your fears. Write down your dreams. Write your congressman.”

And that was that for the stress management portion of the day. It seemed sufficient. Short of passing out Valium, how much stress reduction is actually going to be accomplished in six hours minus one hour for lunch and two fifteen minute breaks?

The rest of the time was spent shaping us into attractive new hires. We needed different things. All we had in common was that we’d worked on-the-books (meaning we’d paid into our unemployment insurance funds) and had job histories. No small feat as it turns out.

Nine of us were young – I’m saying nobody closing in on 40 any time soon. Three of the young men – one black, two white – were laid off from the construction industry. Six more young people – two white women, two black men and one white man – came from the service sector from jobs in food service, educational services, retail and automobile repair. And three older workers (let’s say 45- to 60 years old) consisted of a white man out of work after two decades in menial non-union retail labor and two white women – one with top notch administrative and para-medic skills and me, refugee from a dinosaur industry.

The workshop leader was among us oldsters and was spot-on with her assessments of each of us. She rallied with the spirit of a wise if slightly tired scout mother. But it's got to be a tough job, trying to arm a disparate people with the tools to battle increasingly bad odds. There's the economy, of course. But that allows for everything else to escalate, she tells us. And she has touched at a piece of each of us by now, so we believe her. Discrimination is alive and well, prepare for it, she says. There are hundreds and in many cases thousands of applicants for a single job, be the best candidate and know someone on the inside. You will take an income cut, the older you are, the bigger the cut.

And that specific information that gets through, it is just damn terrifying, such as: Cut 25 years off your resume.

That's a quarter-century.

But she gave good workshop. Here's some of my specialized good news: Desktop Publishing is one of the projected “future careers.” Old white women are, as always, encouraged to return to school to update their skills or open a small business.

I think I see a future career in this interplay. All I need now is to get one of my daughters to pose for my honed, on-line resume photo.

Seeking an Invitation to Scott Brown's Party

2010-02-23T09:50:00.000-08:00

While the most optimistic among Democrats strive to cast Evan Bayh as a canary, for all the world he looks to me like a rat that precedes the call I have been waiting for -- “Women and children first.”

But a funny thing happened on my way to the lifeboats – Scott Brown rowed by.

Whatever the nature of Senator Brown’s party, he proved this week that it isn’t the nature of the Republicans or Democrats of the 111^th Congress.

And what even the canary scenario makes clear is that the nature of the problem with the 111^th Congress isn’t a two-party stalemate – not when one of the parties controls both legislative houses and the executive branch. It’s a food fight among all iterations that ever were in the splintered Democratic Party.

Gnashing their teeth at this table are everything from the Bourbon Democrats (which in Southern Maryland means needing to drink more to sit by one of them but elsewhere might simply mean Chamber of Commerce isolationists) to the New Democrats (somewhat akin to Chamber of Commerce internationalists). And there are the War Democrats and Peace Democrats, named not for anything in the 20^th or 21^st centuries but holdovers proving we’re a nation not recovered from its Civil War. There are even smatterings of New Deal Democrats and Great Society Democrats retread as Progressives (named such since the spell cast in 1964 forbidding the speaking aloud of the L-word). And of course there are the true Republicans affectionately referred to as Southern and/or Reagan Democrats.

Why even try to explain the Republicans who don’t splinter their factions but kill them off. (How else to explain the contemporary GOP as evolved from Free Soilers?) The last shreds of the Republican’s liberal faction dissolved in tears shed by Senator Charles Percy in 1978 when he promised Illinois voters that if they reelected him he would leave such waywardness behind. They did. He did. More recently the endangered Moderate Republicans turned into Independents. And who does that help?

Looking longingly at Scott Brown’s lifeboat it seemed possible that a Truth in Labeling Strategy might help me stay aboard my Democratic ship; first moving the Southern Reagan Democrats over to the Republican side of the aisle. Let’s at least get over the illusion that a majority of anything exists in congress. And before you Democrats start wailing about your loss of numbers (cause judging from my Southern Maryland district let me assure you there would be a loss of numbers) consider how this relabeling would reconfigure our upcoming gubernatorial primary.

If the Republicans are leery of these additions they could turn into Tea Partiers and perhaps those Southern Democrats could return some Moderates to the Grand Ole Party. It couldn’t hurt to have a few more Moderates running the place.

Then let’s throw the Bourbons and New Democrats in together. Let them bicker among themselves about who gets to make the buck today at the expense of ten bucks tomorrow. Let’s see if they can convince anyone besides the bankers that a dollar today regardless of tomorrow is really Capitalism at Work for All.

Let’s just change the name of the War Democrats to the Add-Ons and seat them near the New Democrats. Then fold those Peaceniks in with the Liberals because their couple of votes never matter in the present anyhow, but it is always nice in hindsight to see one or two Democrats had a sane world vision.

And as for all the rest of us – we wimpy Progressives and noncommittal Independents and even some of those Tea Partiers who actually just want their country back – let’s give Scott Brown a call to see just what this new form of governing is about. Let’s ask him to speak at a luncheon or something. Maybe he doesn’t have a grand plan yet, but it would be nice just to hear again his explanation for voting in favor of a Democrat-crafted job-creation bill. “…anytime you can make a small step, it’s still a step.”

Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

2010-02-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

That question was posed in the Feb. 7, 2010 Washington Post Outlook above Gerald Alexander's argument that liberals “to a degree far surpassing conservatives” believe their view “self-evident” and that conservatives are either too ignorant to have legitimate views or are liars.

Liberal sanctimony far surpasses conservative sanctimony? The words “talk radio” alone should dispel that notion.

Not that liberals aren’t condescending. They are. It’s from getting there first on the social issues: universal education, civil rights, women’s suffrage, Vietnam. They are the outreach branch of government. They believe they can see the future, shape it and bring everyone on par with themselves (whether this means up or down). As Alexander implies, their condescension can be insufferable. Liberals not only think they are right -- as in correct -- they believe they are in the right. This is akin to believing God is on their side, which actually has something of a right-wing ring to it.

Alexander’s interchangeable use of Republican for conservative and Democrat for liberal is also inadequate to describe the paralyzing failure of legislators to listen to one another.

As the spouse of an elected middle-of-the-road Democrat I’ve had plenty of opportunities to sit between one of the many conservative Democrats in my husband’s district and one of the fewer liberal Democrats.

Painting in broad strokes, the liberals are condescending and, as Alexander describes, suggest that if I were smarter I would grasp the imperative of their vision and its singular rightness. When they are at the podium they tend to lecture.

Again in broad strokes, the conservatives are bombastic and not listening either. They pegged me as a liberal since I was a reporter a decade ago. Not that I wrote opinion pieces, just that I worked for a newspaper so I was a liberal. They don’t care if I’m smart or dumb, they just don’t care. When they get to the podium they tend to criticize.

It just isn’t about a warring two parties. If it were that simple the past year would have been a legislative triumph for the Democrats.

It isn’t about philosophical differences. The conversation is nowhere near a philosophical level. That would be a huge step forward. Great friendships, even love can grow across political, religious and ancestral divides. Even if not common ground, an exchange of give and take can be forged among people speaking and listening to one another.

It is about behavior, as Alexander suggests, but not just of the liberals. Perhaps town meeting rage shocked some federal lawmakers last summer, but nearly any local government forum on property taxes or garbage or land-use will show no one group more vitriol or inflexible than another. Or that one subject – be it health care, immigration, Afghanistan, Iraq – draws more fury than any other.

Enraging tones of voices and superior attitudes are the norm in political arenas today and maybe everywhere. Perhaps this is what is meant by “postmodernism,” suggested a friend more conservative than I am who agrees that no one philosophy or party has a corner on the misbehavior market. Her point is that today we value individual expression, the individual above the group.

Now that sounds capable of producing the intractable behavior both parties and both liberal and conservative philosophies appear to embrace today. In terms of the U.S. Congress, that would change the formula from a simple us versus them battle – which surely would have been won/lost by now—into a case of every single legislator versus everyone else.

Now that is postmodern. That is intractable.

Emasculated at the Super Bowl

2010-02-09T15:14:00.000-08:00

Super Bowl XLIIII commercials from three ad agencies promoted three dissimilar products and all using the same theme.
Tom Shales of the Washington Post named the “oddly recurring theme” of the Super commercials “the perpetual male fear of emasculation.”
The Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review 2010 Results by Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker called this “creative theme … the domestication of the American man.”
I saw them as simply bizarre with themes of castration and impotence at the hands of women, not women in general but very specifically their wife/girlfriend.
Calkins and Rucker suggest “compelling research” backs up the “insight that men in the United States are feeling weak and powerless.” They offer unemployment and economic indices as specifies. (http://kelloggsuperbowlreview.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/kellogg-super-bowl-advertising-review-2010-results/).
Well, maybe that explains the theme of emasculation. Two other ads could be lumped in that category. One featured men wandering around fields dressed in their underwear. And then another spotlighted only one man, sleepwalking in his underwear, on his search for a Coke. Those guys looked pretty weak to me.
But what about those that blamed women for feeling powerless?
“Were these ads for a post-feminist age?” Shales asked and then answered, “They seemed to have a retro appeal – for better and worse. Probably worse.”
A retrograde synapse was sure triggered in my mind as the theme emerged – it recalled the 1970s perfume commercial of a woman who promises to “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never never let you forget you’re a man.”( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X4MwbVf5OA)
Yep, worse than retro, back then the theory was that sex sells. Neuromarketing holds sway today and finds that fear sells much better.
So although virility is deeply linked to wealth – or as Aristotle Onassis said, “If women didn’t exist all the money in the world would have no meaning,” – that doesn’t seem quite the message of the emasculation commercials.
And fear of domestication? Please. Marriage remains a much greater benefit to men than women – after all, who wouldn’t want someone to bring home the bacon, cook it up in a pan, and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera?
No, a few of these spots have the feel of the stuff of nightmares – the same fears of – dare I say it – women that prompted Germaine Greer to warn us, around the same time the bacon perfume was hitting the airwaves, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”

Dreaming of Libraries

2010-02-02T14:54:00.000-08:00

If I were dreaming about the perfect library I would plunk it down in the midst of a campus with – at least – a small middle school and small elementary school. My favorite part of this particular dream is to include – attached to the schools – offices for a social worker and a police officer and a public health officer. I’ve got no problem visualizing librarians in that mix.
Yeah, yeah, yeah … I know, I know, I know … That’s why I call it dreaming.
My public construction dreams always reduce central bureaucracies. I dream of central offices holding many fewer desks but just as many filing cabinets. Naturally, in my dreams, the few administrators are cheerful and keep their agency’s missions alphabetized, on-time and legal.
In my dreams social workers, public nurses, cops and other such human advocates work as close to teachers as I can imagine them – helping services are provided from offices embedded throughout the community.
My favorite part of this dream is linking to public schools. I believe public schools are the most important of the three great American institutions that permit democracy by making knowledge available to everyone. The other two are a free press and public libraries.
I can do quite a few riffs on this theme, but usually stop myself at this point; realizing dreams of de-centralizing bureaucracy and empowering neighborhoods borders on delusional. Still, dreams do ultimately prove the starting block for public construction. And lately dreams about a new county library on a hunk of undeveloped public land are making headlines – as such things often do. It got me dreaming.
A quarter century ago Leonardtown’s library was overflowing. Librarians and citizens convinced the powers that were of their need for bigger digs. They got the Armory.
The next St. Mary’s County library dream resulted in new construction – a regional library in Charlotte Hall. By the time the facility was built desktop computers, the Internet, changes in service needs and deliverables made the ultimate arrival of bricks and mortar obsolete by completion. (It's like when a jetty was finally built to protect a channel for commercial fishing access, but commercial fishing had died before the channel was completed. But that's another story.)
Because librarians are resourceful, the Charlotte Hall building was re-imagined as a community library that houses a regional function.
A more recent decade -- and this was nearly a decade ago -- was spent seeking funding to replace the old Lexington Park library because it was located beneath an aircraft flight zone for tester jets.
I’m just saying.
I'm saying that technology is ubiquitous. I'm seeing the time it takes to move dreams into bricks and mortar. Concrete outcomes are increasingly obsolete by the time they are achieved. Having sat through my fair share, I have my doubts that public hearings can resolve this. Bureacracies can't easily change course midstream. Perhaps, like most of us, they don't have the ability to see changes as they are happening.
But whether those of us steeped in print media acknowledge it or not, cataclysmic changes on the scale of Gutenberg’s press have occurred. It is no longer a question whether electronic books and computers will replace print books, let alone dvds and everything else ever labeled "media."
The questions now are how to preserve the integrity of knowledge in the face of incalculable input; how to disperse it. Books might not even figure into the equation by next decade.
What is needed is not less dreaming, but larger dreaming. Not delusional dreaming but struggling through today’s immediate needs to imagine a life not yet invented: Tomorrow.

Those Damn Watermen

2010-01-26T06:15:00.000-08:00

Aren't they ever going to give it up? Those damn watermen, those under-educated, poorly disciplined, oddly spoken pirates, perennially accused of a willingness to take the last oyster (or crab or fish) if given half a chance.
As if to prove themselves just that bad they raise their Shakespearian voices and press their faces much too close and call their accusers bald-faced liars.
The vitriol suggests Shakespeare again, suggests they doth protest too much.
I walk a thin line here – writing about watermen. A legitimate newspaper wouldn’t let me do it. But I’m compelled, whenever I hear drums beating for those damn watermen again, when I hear government officials calling for restraint and scientists demanding more laws to prevent those pirates from taking the last living oyster of the Chesapeake. I'm compelled when the Shakespearian oratory starts up in my kitchen.
Each time officialdom drums up animosity against the watermen more empty Save the Bay promises follow and then some more money will be piddled away in yet another phony solution. At least that’s how the last 25 years have gone.
It is similar when the focus shifts to the farmer and that profession is pilloried in the name of the Chesapeake Bay. Or in the name of tobacco, as the case may be. Except, of course, the federal and state governments bought the tobacco farmers out.
Eh, eh, eh, not to go there, I walk a thin line.
Still, regardless of my biases, it seems odd to blame the aging and disappearing watermen for the death and breeding failures of the resource. I don't mean to be stupid. I get the tipping point theory; more watermen, more clever capturing devices, etc. etc. I get that they’re not angels. Trust me, I get that. I know they are pirates. I am bias. I wouldn't accuse them of taking the last oyster. I won’t have to. That oyster will be dead long before a waterman reaches it.
But putting all of that aside, if harvesting the Chesapeake Bay is the reason the life in the bay is diminishing, how come there aren't any more toad fish left? Why won’t the grasses grow? How come the eroding shoreline is filling with junk weeds?
Maybe the problem isn't actually the watermen. Or maybe their share of the problem is minuscule. Might not even be the watermen plus the farmers together. Maybe even both the watermen and farmers added together aren’t even a statistically significant portion of the problem. Maybe they're nothing but another resource being pilfered away by other mismanagement problems.
Maybe all of us recently arrived at water's edge to live and boat and spew and drain and dribble – those of us with those damn watermen in our view-shed, threatening to take our last oyster, maybe we too doth protest too much.

Swimming In Poison

2010-01-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

Check this out. A nonprofit devoted to business expansion in the Washington D.C. region includes in its guidelines this advice, “need to refrain from disparaging other localities,” as quoted by V. Dion Haynes in a recent Washington Post Business story.

The business leaders in the greater Washington D.C. region need to be told to be polite?

Oh, my, my, my, my, my. Used to be courtesy paid off, it ranked right up there with Cleanliness and Godliness as the upward mobility route.

Not that the loss of courtesy is news, but to such an extent that grownups have to remind grownups that rudeness is acting in their own worst interests? They need to be reminded to be courteous when representing their company? Be polite when portraying themselves?

The Be Polite message always seemed to be: Act right to get your way. Act obnoxiously and you will not. Or, as my mother was fond of saying, “You attract more bees with honey than vinegar.”

Clearly that message has gone astray. Courtesy used to be an expense-neutral commodity whereas discourtesy cost opportunities and advancement. So maybe it is the results that have changed. Maybe disrespect and rudeness don’t backfire anymore. Maybe courtesy no longer reflects back upon itself.

And maybe that’s why I so often feel I’m swimming in poison.

I have wanted to write about swimming in poison for some time now but am usually so immersed, dispassionate commentary eludes me. When I’m in the pool drowning in it, it’s all I spit back out.

We make this poison out of pure meanness, I think. And I can manufacture meanness as fast as anyone. It’s rampant in the world, perhaps sparked by nothing more (or less) than unvoiced insecurities and fears. Maybe by scars left in 7^th grade.

We feel like such little things in the overall scheme; cornered in our various pools of meanness and fears and misunderstandings, rarely if ever receiving recognition deserved.

It is tough to be a grownup. As Marshall McLuhan described it, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

Making that even more frightening, according to Buckminster Fuller’s seminal “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, “… there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it..

“Lack of instruction,” Fuller continued, “has forced us to find that there are two kinds of berries-red berries that will kill us and red berries that will nourish us.”

I’m thinking we’ve been chewing on a lot of bad berries lately.

For a variety of reasons I’ve not been picking any berries lately – to extend the metaphor – although the respite will end soon and I will be back swimming in both the Pool of the Political Spouses and the Pool of the Nonprofit Beggaries– and there is plenty of poison flowing in both those places.

I write now because the brief respite lets me ponder ways to swim across without swallowing and make resolves to add no more poison of my own. As I mourn the lack of an instruction manual to tell me how, exactly, to do those things, it strikes me that that Greater Business Leader’s Guide is exactly what we do need. Maybe that is where Spaceship Earth is right now, at a place where the best instructions we can offer is to be polite.

As the World Warms

2010-01-12T04:40:00.000-08:00

When the blizzard of 2009 paralyzed Washington D.C. global warming manifested – again – upon St. George’s Island.
St. George’s Island is shaped like a crab claw dangling into the mouth of the Potomac River. The spine of the chunky part of the claw is a beach facing southwest. It is separated from the smaller pincer by a gut descriptively named Island Creek. Along the other side of the island the pincher crumbles into marsh and the larger St. George’s Creek.
It’s a lovely island made particularly picturesque as snow fell the weekend before Christmas. Surely the falling was equally picturesque in Piney Point – the other side of the bridge – and on up the 50 miles to D.C. However, unlike those towns to the north, St. George’s Island did not remain picturesque on the ground. Upon impact the snow turned to brackish puddles which grew into inland seas – some of which never fully recede anymore.
That’s something new.
Flooding isn’t new to St. George’s Island. When the wind blows hard East, across the mouth of the Chesapeake, the tide rises but does not completely fall. Ultimately this floods the creeks and marshes; on St. George’s Island typically a couple times in autumn and occasionally in spring.
For my first two decades here, the phenomenon merely flooded a small stretch of road, little more than a spillway of asphalt, between St. George’s and Island creeks. For the first few years traversing the flooded spillway required driving slowly so the water didn’t splash into the car’s engine. Within the past 15 years a trapped tide can get so high only the tips of tall marsh grass indicate the asphalt's edges.
Still, this was not considered a big deal by true Islanders.
In the late 1980s, St. George Islanders’ living memories recalled storms that tore away farm fields, their schoolhouse and ball fields, hotels and homes. These were rare, monumental storms, some on par with the disastrous Hurricane Isabella (2003).
Prior to Isabella only three storms had carried water across this yard. But since then water has flowed across the yard and beneath my house a couple times a year.
It used to be only backed-up tides could flood the island. Fresh water, no matter how long it rained, drained into the surrounding tidal waters. As long as the tide fell, water drained off the island. Even with land a mere two feet above sea-level – like this yard is (was?) – it takes a lot of water to raise sea-levels two full feet. Up until then, up until two full feet of tide had backed up, rain drained.
But the rain pools now. I don’t see that two-foot elevation anymore. The snow melted upon contact with the pools already so slow to freeze they must be brackish.I am thinking of replacing the azaleas with aquatic vegetation.
I wasn’t always so cavalier. I used to harangue about the loss of wetlands and development incentives on fragile landscapes. I was so active an activist. I would forget I lived in a glass house. I could even forget Walt Kelly’s rejoinder:

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

No matter how we couch it, that is the truth.

So pushing it out of my mind with new gardening strategies is getting tougher with each tidal slap of the pilings beneath me. My home has become a glass lighthouse.
With such an encompassing vantage, haranguing is getting harder, too. As is obvious from this watery perch, there’s no one left to harangue.
So I grow cavalier. It’s nearly imperative to become cavalier, just to go down with any dignity whatsoever.

7th Grade Girls and 5th Grade Boys

2010-01-06T12:17:00.000-08:00

To start 2010 on a positive note – given that we learn more from failure than success – I advocate looking at the debacles of the Decade of the Aughts as a series of Hard Lessons Hard Learned and puting them to work improving the upcoming Betwixt and Be-Teen Years.

Who among survivors of the Aughts can’t cough up a couple Hard Lessons Hard Learned? Who among us, just for example, hasn’t learned a financial lesson or two?

Something else I learned about the Debacle Decade was that seventh grade girls and fifth grade boys ran it. This seems to me to be an obstacle to getting the job done. Whatever the job is.

The labels are neither age nor gender exclusive. My debacles of the past decade include old men back-stabbing on a caliber unequaled by anyone less than a seventh grade girl and young professional women beating their chests like fifth grade bullies atop whatever mound on whatever playground happened to be designated top-of-the-hill. And I saw -- and participated in -- all manner of behavior in between. My lesson hard learned? I'm still a seventh grade girl.

I was in student council in 7th grade in the mid 1960s. Back then it was called junior high, as though the adults were merely prepping us for the Real Thing. I also wrote for school publications – writing being my single gifted talent. I received recognition for writing, but since competition was sparse – a lot of people actually don't like to write – I was dismissive of those recognitions; but I was very proud to hold the popularly-elected council seat. Winning that seat displayed a second-tier of popularity.

In junior high, first tier for girls was cheerleader, a competition I lost annually.

In junior high the tiers didn’t apply to the boys – whichever boys the first tier girls went steady with were the first tier boys. But fifth grade boys were still king of the hill. Girls weren’t yet of consuming interest. Holding one’s own in the playground was paramount and could still be achieved by fairly blunt force. Fifth grade is pretty much the end of the pushing and shoving games permitted children – tag, snowball fights that deteriorated into faces in the snow, war. Fifth grade, at least for boys, if you ran fastest or climbed highest or pushed to the ground the most other boys, you held a place on the hill.

My Debacle Decade was populated with both those seventh grade girls and fifth grade boys loosed upon the playground without an adult in sight.

Everything from a neighborhood association meeting about where to locate the fire hydrant to a council discussion regarding where to place the line to the hydrant to a state legislature debating how much water can be allocated to the line to proposed federal guidelines to assure the water is safe – everything I could see during my Debacle Decade was conducted by seventh grade girls and fifth grade boys.

No matter the stated mission for the gathering, the energy was spent positioning and assessing ourselves in relation to everyone else who was also positioning and assessing.Seventh grade girls. Fifth grade boys. A lot of energy was spent but not a lot got done. The mission itself lent little more to the effort than a title for the agenda:

Wednesday Night Association Meeting about Fire Hydrant Location.

Proposal to Extend County Water Line.

Legislation to Withdraw from State Aquifer.

Health Care Reform ... I’m just saying ...

The world as we know it is crumbling about us and we’re worried about how we look and where we place within an imagined hierarchy. We worry about how it plays to the folks back home; about the next election; about who on the committee can help pull us farther up the hill. We’re so worried about these things we have become unable to get done even our most basic agenda items. These behaviors – just as in fifth and seventh grade – have become not merely a collection of human impulses but ends unto themselves: becoming the most popular; becoming the most important.

So that is one of my Hard Lessons -- being the most popular still doesn't get the job done. So what to do with the Hard Learned to address the Betwixt and Be-Teen approaching? Maybe reduce my craving for popularity. Get back to the business of writing. Since not that many people actually like to do it, maybe some of it is being left undone.

I Believe Howard Kurtz

2009-05-14T19:06:00.000-07:00

Newspapers died for me four years ago when I was disappeared from mine.

It was already a running family joke. Local elementary and middle schools invited both my husband and me to their job fairs. "Who in their right minds would suggest a child become a waterman or print reporter?" we would laugh at the dinner table. But even as we laughed neither of us really believed we would become extinct. But we have. And it isn't funny at all.

He went extinct first and reinvented himself as an environmental educator. Then four years ago I was banished in 20 minutes from the newsroom I had joined in 1985, before marrying that retrograde waterman who had reinvented himself once again, this time as an elected office holder.

The Washington Post Company's conflict of interest rules that govern the newspaper company I worked for proved impossible to abide during my husband's candidacy -- despite my transfer to a sister paper in a different county. I left the chain around the same time Matthew Cooper of "Time" and Judith Miller of the "New York Times" were refusing to name their anonymous sources regarding the disclosure of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Gallons of ink debated the importance of anonymous sources to journalism and thus to democracy itself. It seemed the debate only generated interest among print reporters.

In July 2005 Howard Kurtz wrote a piece in "The Washington Post" about Cooper who Kurtz apparently couldn't reach, so he quoted Cooper's wife the "Democratic consultant Mandy Grunwald."

The story pushed me over the edge. Friends and former colleagues were already desperately tired of my entreaties: Why could reporters of large, national publications retain their positions and marriages to newsmakers? The only answer that ever made sense -- although it never seemed fair exactly -- was size. Large, national newspapers could move a reporter married to a newsmaker to a different floor or a different beat -- the conflicted reporter could be -- at least theoretically -- removed from those reporters who covered the spouse in question. At a community newspaper this is impossible on every level imaginable, including theoretical ones.

I was not assuaged by the size argument. I ranted and raved and fumed. Of course readers didn't believe in newspapers anymore -- from the outside it looks like insider baseball.

So when the layoffs -- called buyouts -- began and it became clear that the bigger the newspaper the faster it failed, I felt slightly vindicated. But that ended quickly, when entire papers began disappearing. And when the meager freelance budget of that community paper one county removed dried up last year, I started getting really scared. That community newspapers could fail, long considered the strongest financial bastion of the industry, was like suggesting that environmental educators could disappear as surely as the ecosystems they celebrate.

It got even worse last week when Kurtz, a self-proclaimed optimist, admitted he, too, saw the end at hand. The newspaper, he wrote within the first 100 words, "might be left behind by history and public indifference."

Might? Meet my daughters: avid readers who grew up in government hallways and the newsroom of a community newspaper. Their humor is newsroom cynical. Their history is community news. One even qualified for admittance to the august University of Maryland's journalism school last year -- despite those laughing dinners. But she turned on her heel and transferred to a school that doesn't even have a journalism department. These are the most newspaper-friendly of their generation. Even if I can convince myself they aren't indifferent, I cannot fool myself into thinking they see newspapers as anything other than history.

Kurtz's article was long and carried an increasingly desperate tone as he tried to affix blame and share blame. I know that feeling. I've lived that sense of banishment for four years now and struggle to confront living with it forever. I've created a webpage and write about all that has been lost of my husband's former life. Now I have to include my own. And I need to find other financial resources since writing doesn't do it anymore. It is hard to outlive your vocation. Really, really hard.

Toward the end of his article Kurtz pegged us all -- the celebrities down to those of us who cover school boards and planning commissions and the biggest pumpkin at the county fair. He wrote, "Newspaper folks may have an inflated view of their self-importance, but what they do has an impact beyond their readers and advertisers. Local TV isn't likely to expose a crooked mayor, as the Detroit Free Press did. Bloggers aren't going to reveal secret CIA prisons."

He's right. We're going to rant and fume and write about what used to be.

And we should all be scared. Really, really scared.

No More Kissing

2009-05-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

What a relief! Finally a reason to turn away this kissy-kissy habit that has become the bane of many a political spouse and one would have to presume thousands of others, who, let's be honest, were much happier with a handshake instead of a kiss.

I'm not talking about those air kisses or even the cheek-to-cheek stuff. I'm talking about how in the past half-decade this kissing business has become extreme.

I don't think it was the matter of my demotion from reporter to political spouse that accentuated my personal awareness of this. I am willing to concede that I might have been more immune to the practice as a reporter but even so, I think this increased kissing was happening in the wider world and merely coincided with my demotion.

It seemed to be an established practice when I was a mere candidate's wife. Standing next to an already installed political spouse I watched with dread a reknowned lip-to-lip politico making his way down a spousal greeting line. (You may ask, "Why were only the spouses stuck in this line?" Even now as a bona fide elected official's spouse I can still only respond that I don't know. But after a mere four years I must add that their timing is a constant wonder to all us spouses.)

So, standing next to this tenured spouse, watching the lip-locker drooling his way toward us I asked, "Once you're elected, can you just say no? Turn your cheek? Avoid this lip-lock?"

"No," she said just before the lip-to-lipper drooled her silent.

As he turned to drool one on me she took a deep slug of her deeply amber shaded drink and as he laid one on me she lowered her drink and confessed quietly in my ear, "It's why I drink. It kills the germs."

The H1N1 flu warnings do not suggest alcohol as an antidote, but the warnings do make clear that the casual lip-lock is a bad plan in a world frightened of a pandemic. So while the warnings don't pointblank admonish casual kissing those masks appearing on everyone's faces imply it. And the constant handwashing advice goes further, suggesting that the handshake might rightfully be banished as well.

This has given me pause, I had never equated the handshake to a kiss, which is quite surprising as I look back. My decades of public bathroom behavior inspired stand-up comedy from both my daughters. Who would have thought washing with soap through at least two choruses of Happy Birthday, using elbows for turning off faucets and toilet paper for opening doors in restrooms equipped only with blow driers could be so inspirational?

But for all of that bathroom paranoia, I was a consummate handshaker. And for decades of such behavior I had never even heard of hand sanitizers. What was I thinking? Extending my hand all these years of reportage to politicians, criminals, lawyers, teachers, the afflicted, the winners and the losers, all in the search of a good story, a better angle, a closer bond. I used those same hands to first diaper, then brush hair and ultimately guide those little girls in and out of those bathroom incubators for, well, ever it seemed at the time.

And I missed the grip after my fall from reporter to political spouse. As a reporter the handshake felt like a great equalizer. As a spouse I learned that my old hand clasp became merely a handle pulling me into often awkward and occasionally really yucky encounters. Perhaps this is merely redirected bathroom paranoia, but once no one was interested in printing what I had to say about those objects of my hand clasps it began to feel that some of those former claspers relished lipping me up in my new role. And it didn't feel as though they meant it in the good way.

So these pandemic fears of damp germ distribution seem a healthy step toward a better life for many -- certainly for me -- but what's the alternative with handshaking suddenly considered risky behavior as well?

A friend suggests the oriental bow. Palms clasped together -- not offered -- and a slight inclination of the head toward your own fingertips. Of course, she counsels, the lesser personage must bow slightly deeper to the higher ranked, which will certainly pose some difficulties -- although not for spouses who are pretty clear where they stand in most greeting situations. But the lower bow can carry its own gender issues, not the least of which will be who gets the best view down someone's blouse.

Still, I like the idea. Frankly, looking strikes me as a lot healthier than all this touching. And I can think of a certain sloppy kisser who might be well pleased with the trade-off.

Not to Say Fishermen Aren't Scoundrels

2009-04-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

Not to say fishermen aren't scoundrels, liars, maybe even thieves -- at least of fish and oysters and crabs. Until recently that seemed penny ante compared to, say, derivative trading, whatever that is.

Fish thievery was more in keeping with the waterman who asked a legislative panel, "You don't think we'd take the last oyster, do you?" Indeed, the legislators did and legislated accordingly.

It isn't easy to legislate fish, or crabs for that matter. Oysters can be a tad bit simpler, staying in one place as they do. Thus fishery laws end up as complicated as proverbial fish tales. To make the point, a New England maritime museum displays a four-inch thick three-ring binder filled only with current tiny-print regulations.

By and large fisheries laws boil down to limiting when and where a certain number of fish can be taken and by what method. The result is that every fish, oyster, lobster and crab caught commercially carries a manifest from sea to platter.

Scoundrels can still steal fish and lying about their size and how they were caught is as old as fishing itself. But a lying, thieving fisherman will have to eat an undersized, out-of-season fish. Selling the wrong sized fish in the wrong season isn't going to work.

That does, however, leave the Bait and Switch Con -- recently demonstrated by mortgage lenders and again those derivative traders. Consider the bait, "You can afford this house." And the switch: But only at the first year rate. Or,"This house is worth a half-million dollars." Last year.

If it didn't sound so Biblical you could almost call those folks Fishers of Men.

Recent federal indictments surrounding the baiting of watermen and switching of fish manifests are now sending a handful of St. Mary's County watermen to federal prison. It seems their manifests contained lies about the method they used to entrap the fish. And the way the feds figured this out was to entrap the watermen, which somehow seems to wind back around and make the feds Fishers of Men. Or, as one of the men who bit on the bait described it, "You might be able to walk by a $100 bill lying on the ground one time. Maybe you can even walk by it a second time."

In a Bait and Switch the point is to make more money than the delivered product is worth. When the indictments came out the amounts of money the watermen were accused of making were laughable. The value of those landed fish must have been based on Cafe' des Artiste's dinner prices, joked local watermen. That was before the specter of federal prison rippled through the local watering community.

"If I was speeding up this highway, a cop would stop me and I'd get a ticket," said another fisherman. "They wouldn't wait until I'd gathered five years worth of tickets and make a federal case of it."

Fisheries are federal cases, partially because of the transitory nature of fish. Unlike the folks at the bankrupt banks, the bankrupt mega-insurance agencies or the financial investment firms, these fishermen broke federal laws dealing with how they caught fish. Traders and bankers and other derivative folks didn't break laws. They broke the nation. Maybe the whole world.

It seems, though, greed motivated all of them. And it happens that greed makes wrongly manifested fish a federal offense but wrongly manifested livelihoods legal.

So the punishment for lying about fish doesn't warrant a bail-out. Still, it seems that would be cheaper. Probably only one of the derivative folks' bonuses would cover even the Cafe' des Artiste prices applied to these watermen's fish. It seems possible only one bonus would suffice to convince all of these busted fishermen to never fish again. That's what the federal laws are all about -- stopping overfishing. Federal law presumes overfishing makes fish so rare they deserve federal protection -- it doesn't assume what some folks suspect, that the explosion of over-mortgaged houses lining the waterfront might have had something to do with the rarity of fish as well.

Then again, in some lights, it does seem odd that overfishing is the federal offense. If that is really why the fish are gone how come you can't catch any of those old toadfish anymore? There has never been a fishery for them. No manifest necessary for those bardogs. Just used to throw them back and hope they didn't bite again. Maybe they'll come back, too, once those fishermen reach prison, that is if the folks struggling to find jobs or pay their mortgages ever get a chance to just take a day off and go fishing again.

Constantly Yielding to the Teachers

2009-04-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

Tuesday night St. Mary's County government's 2010 budget hearings were televised. What a relief. I used to have to attend.

When I first attended -- this would have been in the mid-1980s -- the very richest man in the county was a county commissioner. He held fast to a policy of absolutely no property tax increases whatsoever, no matter what, come hell or high water. The tax rate was close to the lowest in the state, which saved most property owners some bucks but saved him bundles.

Two groups of people typically testified: Parents who wanted more money for recreational activities for their children. And teachers. The people who wanted more parks and sports asked that more money be spent on them. The teachers were more outspoken. They asked for tax hikes. They were working in schools from hell suffering from high water.

Public schools were visibly crumbling. The elementary school closest to my home had buckets collecting rainwater in classrooms and down the hallways. It was the solution to leaking roofs in other schools as well. Local teachers were among the lowest paid in the state. Recruiting and retaining teachers were Herculean tasks. Classrooms bulged with well more than 30 students at even the youngest grades. Closets in some schools were turned into instructional space.

It took another decade before all the roofs were repaired, new schools were under construction, teacher salaries became competitive and class sizes regularly fell below 30 students. The richest man in the county was still the richest man in the county but he wasn't a commissioner anymore. Term limits.

Teachers were the driving force of the changes. Some years recreational proponents gave way to library patrons who other years were overshadowed by sheriff deputies who other years were outdone by pleas from senior citizens to keep tax rates low. But every year teachers made the biggest show, created the headlines, demanded that St. Mary's County cough up the money to keep its educational system competitive. And they were successful.

Even during the years taxes were reduced -- in the late 1990s -- and the years they were raised to compensate for the depleted coffers -- in the early 2000s -- the teachers came one after another to speak for increased educational funding. They insisted, one after another, that the increasingly well educated population would support paying more for the benefits of quality education.

But this year -- and maybe it was the medium, maybe the television itself warped the message -- but this year, even as they asked for more money, a vocal cadre of teachers wielding umbrellas applauded an even larger cadre of speakers calling for tax cuts.

The umbrellas symbolized the teacher's perennial call for more spending on education. But as the same teachers applauded those calling for tax cuts the umbrellas reminded me of the old leaking roofs. That past was remedied by teachers and parents who insisted that the average home owner would forgo their relatively modest savings from reductions of pennies on the tax rate in exchange for a quality school system.

Of course, the richest man in the county would save a great deal more from those pennies than the average home owner. He's gone now. But I thought about him Tuesday night and imagined how he would have grinned at such a turn.