Dan in Real Life/Haiku

I do a lot of reading. Since moving to the East Coast three years ago, much of that content has been American History, since these places I drive past, and to, and from, are connected to times much older than my experience out west. It is amazing how much of history is intertwined with conflict, and the biographies of great leaders and common people alike revolve around the wars of those and these times. George Washington fascinates me: I live in the capital city of Maryland where he resigned his commission from the Army after the Revolutionary War; I work near the Federal center of government that carries his name; drive on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway; and I see the Washington Monument every time I come up out of the Mall Exit at the Smithsonian Metro Station. I love to visit Mount Vernon, his restored estate, where near the memorial that honors his African-American slaves, is the columbarium that holds his and Martha's crypts and an obelisk engraved with the name Col. John Augustine Washington, C.S.A. Also, I am most fond of Arlington National Cemetery, where at its highest land point is the Lee Mansion where another famous general resigned one commission, and accepted another - the same army as Col. Washington - married to the great grand daughter of Martha, whose father adored his step grand father, our first President (1). The longer the record of family histories, the greater the opportunity for drama and heartbreak to occur, perhaps even more so for the lives of great leaders.

In addition to various books related to work and business that I also read, at times I pick up on some pretty random themes - though in retrospect when looking back over this blog, it turns out that they too are historic by nature. For example, a friend from work recommended a title "Casting a Spell: The Bamboo Fly Rod and the American Pursuit of Perfection" by George Black, which is an account of the history of the American bamboo fly rod makers. Another book I happened on that I have been working through slowly is "Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding" by Scott Weidensaul (2). However, a completely random pursuit of mine has been to investigate haiku - a Japanese style of poetry. I don't know what was triggered in my mind, but for some reason I just wanted to read up on it. About a year and a half ago, I bought a book that described and gave examples of different styles of poetry, of which haiku was one. But no matter how many times over the last year I have gone back to those pages, I never seemed to get what haiku was about, and visions of original haiku never appeared.

A month ago, and for what ever reason, I put "haiku" in the Amazon book title search, and saw several promising titles, and even more promising tables of content - I never judge or buy a book by its cover. I ended up settling on W.J. Higginson's "The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku" (1985, Kodansha International, Tokyo. I was disappointed when it arrived in the mail because it turned out to be a paperback and pocket book-sized. Also, when I opened it up and browsed quickly through it, I thought it was going to be pretty dry ..... but was I wrong. With the blend of history about the haiku masters, the short narratives highlighting the evolution in its forms, and the great examples, all made the book stimulating reading - at least to me. However, it took a flying vacation to Oregon and back, sitting through the jury selection process at the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, and slowly pouring through the first 47 pages until I began to get a feeling in my head for the flow of what haiku is, and how to construct ones.

Below is my first haiku. It is not a wholly traditional one (no seasonal reference, and not with formalist 5-7-5 structure), but it is three lines and 17 syllables - not too bad for a first try, if I say so myself (3). I composed it while laying on my son's couch after watching as he returned with his high school church youth group from a mission trip to Pueblo Country. The convoy of vans arrived together, filled with kids and volunteers who trekked together in procession from Oregon to Arizona and back. Having slowly read the haiku examples, my thoughts began to collect around the images I had just seen earlier that afternoon - in living haiku.

The vans return
Across the upper lot
His children run to Daddy

The accompanying photograph helps make the meaning of the haiku lines more clear than a pure haiku'ist would want to do. But then, looking at the trees in the background and kinds of clothes everyone was wearing, you don't need a literary clue to hint at what is the season (4), or need to guess the result of the anticipation of the three kids, and Mom, to having Daddy back home. Perhaps, a snap shot photograph, itself is another form of haiku.

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(1) To experience how the histories of George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Arlington National Cemetery crisscross, see the National Geographic Society video: "Arlington: Field of Honor." There are also 4.2 seconds of content where this video visually crisscrosses our family history - connected through our Army son.

(2) The later of the two books is appropriate, because my wife has titled her blog "Empty Nesters", because this is our stage of life since moving to Annapolis: http://emptynestersonwindwhisperlane.blogspot.com

(3) The point of haiku is not the content of the experience, but the quality of experience, and of perception. The Haiku Handbook, p. 91.

(4) Summer, July in Oregon, long past the time of cherry blossoms.

Happy Cows Come from Mars

We are merely placeholders in the landscape. If not for the names of places, much of what we see has changed with time. Scenes we remember of these places would seem to always be there - last forever - but given enough time are gradually rearranged or suddenly shifted. In the end, things will never be the same again, and likely never return to what they had been, no matter how long the wait. Given enough time, even with the same names, places change so much they would now be unrecognizable to past inhabitants - strange as images transmitted from a neighboring planet, after a successful NASA rover landing. For me, Wisconsin is one of those places.

Some cultures have an oral tradition for passing on their history to future generations - my mom must be from one of those people groups. As far back as I can remember, I have known about Wisconsin through the stories or short comments she made as I was growing up. As I drove recently from the Milwaukee Mitchell Field airport to visit my Uncle Gordon while on the way to a meeting in Madison, the GPS map and road signs bore familiar names: Calumet County, Green Bay, De Pere, Chilton, New Holstein, Brillion, Chilton, Potter, Oshkosh, and Lake Winnebago - a body of water I knew of before there were recreational vehicles. That these names are familiar is somewhat remarkable, because even when taking the shortest driving route, it is still 2,183 miles from my home in Visalia to these places, and my relatives and their lives - etched in my mind because my mom stayed in touch - letters, phone, and occasional visits and returned visits.

Her Wisconsin is the Wisconsin I picture in my mind. She was born in a white house, next to a red dairy barn with silos, near the village of Hilbert - the homestead is more than 150 years old. She had three brothers - Uncle Earl who worked at the Brillion Steel Mill, Uncle Gordon, a World War II Veteran and the Hilbert Postmaster, her kid brother, Uncle Mike, an engineer at Allen-Bradley - and Earl's wife Aunt Rosie, and Mike's wife Aunt Maggie, but Gordon: a life-long bachelor. I remember Grandma and Grandpa on the farm when we visited before I was five; but the farm was sold in 1963, so when I next saw them in 1964, they lived in a house in town, near the village park where the Fourth of July Celebration was held. When my mom and we four kids came through the door, a polka dance show was on the television. Mom's cousin Lucille, always referred to as "Cousin Lucille", was married to Sam, who worked for American Can. They lived in the first twin cities I knew, Neenah and Menasha, until they moved to Connecticut - they were my God Parents. That was the year of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, when I first became aware of large eastern European women who could throw the shot put great distances; Sam commented so, and I remember it to this day. All of this may have not included me, if not for certain people in irregular orbits having their paths unpredictably cross - like country roads the connect farms and towns and the people that live there.

If not for my grand mother's sister being married to a man whose sister was my dad's mom, and they having another brother who got his wife-to-be pregnant before they were married, that family would not have left Wisconsin and moved to California; and my mom would have had no reason to visit her aunt in Visalia where her aunt's husband's sister lived half of a mile north on another farm and married to a man who was to be my paternal grandfather; and would not have met their son who would chase after my mom all the way back to Wisconsin - 2,183 miles; and eventually marry my mom and which resulted is me - one of three brothers with a sister - a West Coast bookend family the mirror of my mom's Midwest family one generation earlier with the same sibling compliment that is carried forward to the present with my wife's and my clutch: three boys and a girl.

If not for time, Wisconsin, America's Dairyland as the license plates read, should always be a place of dairy farms, corn and alfalfa hay fields, milk trucks, cheese and Sheboygan summer sausage factories.... a land with rivers of beer - Pabst Blue Ribbon and Miller Genuine. Even as my mom migrated west to California, so have many of the black and white holstein cows. So much so, that my home county where my mom now lives is the greatest dairy producing county in the greatest dairy producing state - sans the red barns with clusters of silos and white farm houses with old hand pumps out front that drew water up from wells drilled deep into the dark earth, set upon rolling hills bordered by woods, where the only remnants of the long-gone yellow cheddar cheese wheels are the golden flowered trefoil flowers that line the country roads and interstate freeways that crisscross north and south and east and west - the only similar thing about Wisconsin and California, because the California cows can now speak. But like the times past in Wisconsin, the memories carved in my mind are like the names carved in stone that are found in St. Mary's Cemetery, south of the village, on the highway from Chilton, the place I stop to look at first, the two times I have returned in the last 15 years, like bookends on time - later in midlife, complimenting two times earlier when I first visited as a little one.

If not for highway construction detours that kept me from driving straight west to see Lake Winnebago, I would not have seen the new Wisconsinians - tall white sentinels that tower over the silos surrounded by pastures empty of black and white cows. Against the tall blue sky capped with thunderheads, on the way to Fon du Lac, near the south end of Lake Winnebago, stand new giant engines of industry, whipped by rivers of wind carried over the neighboring bluffs - so quiet and different than roaring rivers of air that stoked the iron smelting furnaces of the Fox River Valley in years gone by, as are the long-gone mill workers, like my Uncle Earl. These giants dominate the rolling hills and red barn landscape, dwarfing the once tall silos, like something machine out of a science fiction short story - likely also to be gone sometime in the future, when even long memories in comparative times are relatively short, sneaking up and passing us when no one expects anything to be different. When these giants are no longer useful, future inhabitants who remember them will either choose to go with the flow, or be drug forward kicking and screaming into the times future - people displaced by events they fail to see or realize, events over which they have no control.

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I was struck by the presence of wind generators that seemed so out-of-place across the Wisconsin landscape near Fon du Lac. I pulled over along the back roads I took for the highway detours on my way to Madison. But then, maybe they are not as out-of-place as the soybean fields growing in the foreground, whose ancestors originated in China, twelve time zones - half-way around the world. For some reason, the first thing that popped into my mind was remembering my reading of the Martian Chronicles way back in high school. There was a time before long ago when instead of taking formal English courses, electives such as Science and Fantasy were offered. Ray Bradbury's collection of short stories around the theme of Earth settlement on Mars was one of the books I remember (1). So, as I was driving through this wind farm, I thought of how this scene related to the end of the book when an Earth family looked down into the waters of one of the Martian canals (remember, the stories were written in 1948, long before Neil Armstrong, the Hubble space telescope, or interplanetary rovers), and saw the reflections of the new Martians - those who came after the original inhabitants. This is the story of the flora, fauna, and peoples in North America as well. Thus were my thoughts of this new Wisconsin landscape, my relatives, places, and times.

They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool and wet and reflective in the night.

"I've always wanted to see a Martian," said Michael. "Where are they, Dad? You promised."

"There they are, said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down.

The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver.

The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water....

The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, 1948

While on vacation in Oregon, I found a hardback copy of the book at the Book Bin used book store in Corvallis. My youngest son and I had made it a quest: looking in a bookstore at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, and Border's Bookstore in Corvallis. I enjoyed each chapter, and remembered most all of them, but may one or two.

(1) It wasn't until I had to start writing for a living - first my Ph.D. dissertation, then publications that went to refereed journals, and now, on a Program Staff that at times has to write more than there is time to think - that I really had to sharpen my composition skills. I don't think I can describe how I know how to write, I just do from the repetition of it. Penmanship and spelling are different issues - I am grateful for the spell checker in Microsoft Word.

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It is no wonder that dairy cows in California are happy in their new environs, able and willing to talk. Though the quaint rural settings shown in the cheese commercials are more like idyllic Wisconsin (or Mendocino Country) than Tulare County - where the land is flat and dry, and the pens are bordered by pipe with cable fences that hold the black and white cows as they wait to be milked two or three times a day, their massive frames spent after a year or so, and only able to dream of green rolling hills and rustic barns, in distant places only remembered by past generations - where Western farmers find Midwestern wives - almost like a Hallmark Channel romance movie. But then, these dreams may be more believable than illusions of evidence of alien visitors buried deep in the New Mexico desert - contrasted to here where talking cows, happy as they watch their time pass them by, waiting for the next migration, maybe to Mars .... or even back to Wisconsin where giant white windmills stand in empty green pastures bordered by woods, and turn silently twenty-four hours a day, driven by rivers of air bordered by invisible canal banks, reflecting back the images of old and new inhabitants alike - memories that float through minds past and present, waiting to be spoken of by future tellers of oral history traditions, and remembered by their young listeners.

See the Happy Cow Commercial at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up880afV_qs&feature=related

A Different Place

We are a military family.

On April 1, 2003, my wife called me at work to say our second son had phoned to talk. When she asked him what's up, he answered: "I joined the Army." My knees buckled. But then she said: "April Fools... he got us good with that one!" I laughed and began recovering, we said good bye, and I got back to my work. But, sometime that day, maybe driving home, I thought: "Where did that come from?" The next night he called again: "Dad, I really do want to join the Army." Come September, we saw him drive off with a friend as he headed out to report for basic infantry training on September 11 at Fort Benning. Four years later, August 2007, our Army son was safely out and back in Oregon.

Our dads and uncles were in WWII, her brothers and other relatives served, and one died, in Viet Nam - but I had not. She had seen brothers off to the Navy, but this was a different experience for both of us - children in the military. And being a parent-of-a-child-in-the-service wasn't over.

On June 28, 2006, our youngest son reported on Induction Day to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. While on a business trip in May a year earlier, I called home to check in and my wife said we had received a West Point graduation celebration announcement for the son of friends we hadn't seen since living in California years before. Our youngest son was only six months old when we moved to Oregon and didn't have any recollection of that family, so asked questions about them and began Web surfing about West Point. I didn't think West Point was such a great idea - it seemed like lots of second lieutenants were getting killed in Iraq at that time. In September, while on another work trip, I called and asked what was up. My wife had just gotten home from work and said our youngest had called our Congressman's office to find out what he needed to do to get a nomination to the Naval Academy. What is it with kids these days?

Our two younger guys are similar but different: one Army - enlisted infantry; the other Navy - headed to be an officer, maybe a pilot. As for the older two kids - also similar but different: our son - a youth director in church; our daughter - a children's director in another church. Our eldest put it this way: "Two of us are in the ministry, and two of us are in the military, both begin with an M and end with a Y, and both are on the front lines." The Naval and Military Academies' grounds are that way, too: similar, but different.

Since I was going to be in the Hudson Valley for a business trip (see: Local Food Sociology 101), I figured there was never a better time to visit the United States Military Academy - the Black Knights, the arch rivals of the Midshipmen. With all the travel I do, I typically fly in for meetings and then get out and back home as fast as I can. But being so close, I decided to leave early in the morning to check out West Point on the way to my conference. Living in Annapolis and having a son attending the Naval Academy, we are able to drive onto the Yard any time we want - a divers license and family pass is all it takes. We consider ourselves fortunate to be so close and able to lend support - home nearly every weekend, lots off food, a place to crash and be alone, or to bring along friends for a meal, lots more food - we know the Academy routines about as well as a parent who did not attend can. As for West Point, I have only read books, heard a few stories, know from a distance. So what is it like? Not being Cadet parents, or having the rights and privileges we do as Midshipman parents - how could I know what to do, where to go?
There was only one option: Tourist - park in the public lot, get your ticket at the visitor center, wear your N cap with pride, and hang close to the retired Marine Corps tourists, just in case.

Compared to the Naval Academy, at West Point the security is greater, and access is limited to where the tour bus takes you. But this makes sense. The Yard covers only 400 acres, is adjacent to downtown Annapolis - the capital city of Maryland - and is surrounded by rivers on three sides. It is compact, so where ever you look, there are easy views of water in all directions. West Point, on the other hand, is way out in the country side north of New York City, up the Hudson River, with the campus sited on 15,000 acres (a great description is given in James S. Robbins' excellent book, "Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point").
The buildings are gray like the cadet's uniforms, and the main chapel has a touch of a castle look from Medieval Europe. The Midshipmen sometimes wear all white - the color of bleached sails contrasted by aqua seas and blue skies. Thinking of the Yard as a Navy ship - compact and self-contained - floating on the waters that surround it. The Army's West Point - sprawling and tree-covered, mountainous with rugged terrain - gives the impression as if the cadets were troops soon to be deployed in the field, soon to be in battles half way around the world - and a river runs through it. West Point is not a place to take it all in with one view, except perhaps from high above on the Route 9W highway, where the details below are left to the imaginations of we who are mostly unfamiliar. But then there are parts we see that are the same: both filled with young men and women who signed up at a time of war, who have little privacy or time to themselves - squad life, hard studies, companies marching and training for long hours.

Both end in Y and both begin with early mornings, regardless of whether there is an N or A at the beginning of their service branch name, or the letter on their cap.

Yes, we are a military family.


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For an insider's perspective about A's and N's, see the blog story: "Beat Army, Yes - Bulldoze West Point, No" at:

http://midswatch.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/beat-army-yes-bulldoze-west-point-no/

For reference to family members mentioned in the service records above, see the Web links at:

http://www.thepurpleheart.com/recipient/RecipientDetails.aspx?wid=43ba8ff7-a665-4bd7-a304-411230e9ca1b

http://www.vetfriends.com/memorial/honoree.cfm?hindex=70766&user_ID=

Franklin Square, Washington, D.C.

John Barry, Commodore, United States Navy.
Born County Wexford, Ireland, 1745.
Died in Philadelphia, 1805.

I had just come up out of the McPherson Square Metro station, when I came upon this statue of Commodore John Barry in Franklin Square. I was on my way to a meeting to make a short budget presentation to a working group of the Biomass Research and Development Board. I had never been this way before, so when looking on my map for directions after coming up to street level, I expected the statue I saw in the distance to be one of Benjamin Franklin - but the closer I got, the more curious the form, and with each step I was sure this wasn't him. When I read the inscription, I recognized the name at once. Having a Midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy has given me many opportunities to take in the history of the Navy. I couldn't pass up this shot - actually 20 images automatically compiled in Photoshop because there was no way to do justice to the statue's height with a single shot from my little digital camera, looking up at this great figure. Other than the automated blending feature, I haven't touched up the image. To the right side there is a little bit of cubist artist effect from a building in the distance, just beyond the boundary of the Square. It gives a little bit of an unexpected surreal effect to the photograph that I like, and which blends in with the overcast sky at 7:30 in the morning today. As I was snapping and waiting for each of the images because of the flash I used, I thought of how Michelangelo was way out ahead in his time as a sculptor. I remember in art history class that he used a technique of making the upper parts of his statues disproportionately larger to the lower parts so that the viewer from the ground looking up would have the illusion of looking at a form that was proportionate - bottom to top. The statue of Barry looks dwarfed by the base, not at all a metaphor for his stature as the founder of the United States Navy - but then again, it is not about the man, but his service.

For more information about the Barry Memorial, go to here.

There is also a nice painting of the Commodore above the first table on the right, in the furthest back section in the Galway Bay public house, on Maryland Avenue, near State Circle, in downtown Annapolis.

Beijing Nightlife

What is comfortable space is a relative term. My wife often reminds me to not stand so close to those I am taking with. The second day into my business trip to China, I found out that I don't really know what it is like to live in a city. Moving from Corvallis with a population of 50,000 to the seven-million resident D.C.-Baltimore-Northern Virginia metro area is a study of contrasts (see the blog: Far From Home), but throw Beijing into the mix, a megalopolis with its 15 million people - you just know that you must be half way around the world.

A group of us led by Bill set out for dinner in one of the hutong (衚衕) districts Beijing is know for. The Hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan - traditional courtyard residences. They make for interesting walking, looking, eating, and smelling. Hutongs are definitely hubs of activity where tourists want to go, but they are also the compounds where real people live, work, and play. Bill, has lived in Beijing for years, so knows his way around - though if you ask him, he will say that the longer you are in China, the less you realize you actually know. Regardless, Bill knew of a traditional restaurant - just two alleys down and right until we get there - so along we walked, all the way me feeling like a voyeur as my 6'4" cruising height could easily look into the small rooms that must be home. On the wall inside one easily viewed room from the alley was a National Basketball Association poster with towering stars posing, who if we were walking together, would have had the same perspective looking down on me as I did when passing by the locals. Even though these narrow streets and passages are for public access, I couldn't get over an uncomfortableness that I am sure I would have if some former neighbor brought his grand child and used the side gate to pass through my yard for a look at Georgetown East Elementary School just across my back fence - "Look Susy, that is where my polling place was when I voted for President Obama." Where private and public spaces end and begin in the hutong is probably a home's door. Perhaps the brightly painted designs along the eaves are a sign of the pride of ownership - differentiating a private space from the drab alley passage we just walked through to view this inner courtyard. Are there trespass laws in hutongs?

Thinking back, the layout of the restaurant we eventually arrived at probably took advantage of a cluster of what were at some earlier time a cluster of homes. Regardless, adding to the unfamiliar was the food, Chinese of course, but different than my favorite dishes at King Tin on Ninth Street in Corvallis. All the other patrons we saw there were internationals, but none Chinese. Adding to the mystery, was this another sign of Chinese economic development, an emergence on the world stage, with former dwellers now relocated to the many high-rise apartment buildings that lined the rings of beltways - real inner and outer loops, and more loops - and crisscrossing boulevards throughout this city that is the size of Rhode Island. After eating, we stepped back out into the night, where the alleys that were earlier illuminated by dusk, now were covered by a dark sky, and the street was only lit by the lamps inside shops, and tea houses, and bars that often blared the well-known songs of eras-past rock bands. It is funny, how sounds of something relatively new seem to blend in with places that are so exotic and old.

Another in our group wanted to find the restaurant district he remembered on an earlier trip, so off we walked off in another direction, into the night, me in tow, trusting my ten-year younger friend's sense of direction. After what have must have been a mile or so, the real nightlife of local Beijing - the real Chinatown - appeared: a plaza filled with couples dancing to music - recognizable melodies, but arranged in such as way that you were left wondering whether the recording artists had paid copyright royalties; men playing a board game that looked similar to checkers that was a kind of chess, but a scene I couldn't bring myself to photograph because the flash would, to me, seem intrusive - this was their living room; or the street corner where a man painted Chinese characters on the pavement with a water brush while other locals walked in circles around his canvas and commented. Lucky for me and my companion's reputation, we finally came on the brightly lit streets he remembered, lined by restaurant after restaurant with bins of crayfish and turtles and other specials-of-the-day by the front door; streets with young and old men and women talking; couples holding hands; shop hustlers inviting you in; parents with children, even an occasional small dog on leash - hardly a Western or African or Arab face to be seen - streets with traffic lights that had to be obeyed, because streams of cars and buses and bicycles passed through the intersections; strings of colored lanterns and lights that hung across the sidewalk and across the street; restaurants with tables inside, and restaurant tables on the sidewalks - all lit by the neon signs above that all seemed colored red or orange; bike vendors with fresh fruit in bins; and bike racks full of bicycles - all the same, but different because each had a different seat cover....and the smell of sewage....not sewage in the street gutters I was glad to discover, but the smell of public restrooms on every block... where else would so many people go while living on and above and along these streets?

It all goes to show what is comfortable for relatively all, may not be for those who normally stand close to you. Many people living closely together, with a few strange voyeurs passing through - hardly noticed under the night sky above, on the dusty streets below. And the next morning these same streets are swept by an armada of broom pushers, and the next night.... the cycle repeats itself - but not including this voyeur.... my legs are tired and my back is sore.'.. I am not as young as my companion and guide who pressed on from his memory of a scene past, to make these streets and lives at night my memories as well.

Long Ways from Home

It is funny how seeing something triggers a thought. A couple of weeks ago while I was commuting to work on Route 50, I saw an orange "O" like this on the back of a car in front of me. My first thought was an "O" for Oregon State. Re-calibrating for present geography, I made the correction that this was an "O" for the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, not the OSU Beavers. When I first started driving in the D.C. Metro area, I had to make similar adjustments when seeing freeway signs for "Washington" which meant District of Columbia, not State of Washington - as in the northern neighbor of Oregon that is at most 300 miles away when in the south of the state, not 3,000 as when in Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay. The same was when I first saw LAX in Annapolis - why so many bumper stickers indicating Los Angeles International Airport? Oh! - lacrosse, the game that every kid here plays like Oregon kids play soccer.

As mentioned in a previous blog about the Washington Irving Biography (named for the General who the District, the State, and a county in Oregon are named as well), the eastern hardwoods are a novelty to me. The forests here in the mid-Atlantic region are unlike the western Oregon woods that are dominated by Douglas Fir with oaks mixed in which still have a pale green appearance in winter from the bearded lichens that hang from the limbs. Back here in Maryland while driving Route 50 every week, I see the progression of the four different seasons displayed in the stands of trees, with autumn's rich mosaic of red, orange, and yellow colors the annual crown. What turned out to be a surprise for me has been the phases of color changes in spring, with different species leafing at different times, and light-colored leaves darkening into deeper shades of green. All the time this is happening, the housing and business areas that are off the freeway and which don't change color with the seasons, become less and less visible and eventually are naturally camouflaged by the time June is here. However, six months later, with all leaves on the ground and none any longer floating in the air, the different shaped and colored stems stand in ranks but are alone, with branches indistinguishable among their crowns.

It is also funny how different people from the same family describe the winter trees here: my wife, longing for the evergreen woods of Oregon, uses stark to describe the woods during this time of the year; my son, the diplomat, prefers to describe their condition as barren. As for me, I speed back and forth from work where as many as ten lanes cut through woods, hoping my speed doesn't drop below 65 miles per hour so my 29 miles can be covered in 35 minutes - a sight far different and far distant from my Oregon commute at 25 mph, not even thinking much about the three miles of two lanes winding up hills and around bends, ending up in a parking lot full of cars bearing the other orange "O".

Local Food Sociology 101

Here is a fresh food market below the entrance to the Great Wall, about 45 minutes from Beijing. The variety of kinds of dried and fresh fruit, as well as nuts was impressive. Just as with the other vendors in the bizarre, the standard operating procedure is "Let's make a deal." There were also street vendors in Beijing who rode on mobile produce stands - selling their wares on street corners, outside restaurants or other stores. These street sales in China are no different than the ones I have seen elsewhere, like this one north of Visalia, California - on the road that runs between my parents' old farm and my hometown. I know this produce wasn't produced locally, because the middle of March is too early in Central California for local strawberries. Most likely these came off a truck from southern California, or even Mexico. So much for local food in this case, and I sure don't know where the Great Wall and Beijing produce came from - other than from a grocery store - and given that there are bananas, I am sure from some distant place.

All this brings me to some interesting information that was presented at the local and regional food research conference I attended last week. One of the plenary speakers, Clare Hinrichs, a well know rural sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, gave a presentation about the social dynamics of local food producers and consumers. One of the aspects of the increase in popularity for locally produced foods by consumers is a desire to know where the food came from, who produced it, and how it was produced. There are a range of opinions for why this is, but one often given reason is a desire by consumers to connect with the farmer who produced the food. This desire goes beyond "know your farmer" and extends a desire for relationships. This is interesting because some studies also show that not all farmers necessarily want a relationship - that they have enough to do just to farm, much less get to know who buys their products.

All-in-all, there is something going on with people who sense a need for connections with others, and things are not getting better for Americans. A paper that Clare cited was: "Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades" by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Barshers that appeared in the American Sociological Review, 2006, 71:353-375.

See the publication at:
http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf

A statistic that floored me was that 43% of the U.S. population now has only one or no confidant to discuss important matters - there has been a tripling of isolation in the last 20 years. Much of this loss has been due to a loss of connection in voluntary associations and neighborhoods. For some, a vision for building connections and reversing that trend is to have better ties between buyers of food and those who produce that food, with the reason given that food is so fundamental to life. It seems that regardless of the downward trend in the number of meaningful relationships that Americans have, somewhere imbedded in us is a desire to do better than that.

What is interesting to me is an observation Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mother Theresa made more than 20 years ago about Americans. In a 1986 documentary film I saw about her, she made the comment when visiting New York City that Americans are suffering a different kind of poverty than the people she ministers to - Americans suffer a poverty of loneliness. If this was apparent then - more than 20 years ago - how much more so now - 20 years later - with data and analyses to substantiate that claim - that folks desiring to see change must realize that people need more than food alone to live.