Blue Highways: Quechee Gorge, Vermont

Unfolding the Map

Stand on the edge of the rift in the earth.  Feel the wind racing up the sides of the gorge and blowing on your face.  If you dare, look down to the bottom, 165 feet below.  While William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) crosses the bridge over the gorge and moves on into New Hampshire, we'll stop for a moment and think a little about the symbolism of gorges and things that disappear into the earth.  To learn where you might make friends in low places, make a descent to the map.

Book Quote

"....The road crossed Quechee Gorge, an unexpected hundred-sixty-five-foot-deep sluice cut through stony flanks of the mountain; a couple clutched the bridge railing as they uneasily peered down into the gloom."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 10

In the Quechee Gorge downstream of the Quechee Gorge Bridge looking back. Photo by "AustinMN" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Quechee Gorge, Vermont

As you may have gathered in previous posts, I love mountains.  Thrusting out of the earth with craggy and intensely defined features as in most young mountains, or gently rising in tree covered glory, like many older mountains, I've always found them to be metaphors and reminders.  They are metaphors of barriers in our lives, and at the same time of the heights we can reach.  They remind us of how small we are in a large world and, to a greater extent, in our universe.  They also have metaphorically served as gateways to heaven - a great number of the gods that our human cultures have created have either lived on top of mountains, or going up a mountain was the way to reach them.  Think of the Greek gods that live on Mount Olympus, or Moses climbing the mountain to receive the commandments of God.   There is a continuing trope in literature and comics about the man scrambling up the side of the mountain to find truth.  I recently watched the first movie in the latest series of Batman movies, Batman Begins, and Bruce Wayne has to scale a mountain to reach the monastery where his training will begin and the unveiling of his mission in life will occur.

But this post is about gorges, the exact opposites of mountains.  In fact, gorges can be thought of as hills or mountains in reverse.  They sink into the earth, sometimes thousands of feet, so that one standing on the edge of a gorge might get a sense of vertigo.  To ascend a mountain takes effort, desire and hard work.  To descend a gorge is deceptively easy and, in some cases might be totally unexpected if one falls off the rim!

Whereas mountains are metaphors for our goals, and as barriers calling forth our best efforts to overcome, gorges seem, to me at least, to have much darker meanings.  I've been trying to think of literature that I've read where paths that sink into the earth have had a positive connotation.  It is down in the earth where some of our deepest, darkest fears and horrors have lurked, at least in our cultural sensibilities.  If mountains reach toward heaven and take us closer to God or the gods, gorges, caves and other places that take us into the earth take us toward places that we fear - the deepest recesses of our minds and psyches, Hell, and ultimately death.  Think of Dante descending into the Inferno, Frodo swallowed up in the Mines of Moria, or Orpheus heading into Hades.  Where the earth cracks, darkness is usually present.

This might be overdoing it a bit for a gorge like Quechee.  After all, the pictures I've seen of the Quechee Gorge show a beautiful river carving a slice in the rocks amid trees.  But there are deeper gorges, which but for the intrepid drive of humans might be inaccessible today.  The Hells Canyon on the Snake River, the deepest gorge on Earth, has a wonderful story attached to it about how it was created, combining mountains and gorges and their meanings.  The Grand Canyon was, for all intents and purposes not fully explored until relatively recently in human history.  And talk about barriers - if mountains are frustrating at times until one finds a pass through them, gorges can often be impassable.  I related in a previous post how the Spanish explorers, upon finding the Grand Canyon, almost found the boundary of their explorations and had to make herculean efforts to cross it.  Of all the gorges in the world, the Grand Canyon is still the gorge where the most people die each year (mostly due to human ignorance, ineptitude or the unnecessary taking of risks).

The lowest point on Earth lies in a gorge under the ocean.  The Mariana Trench is a place of fascination to scientific explorers, and a place where, for the rest of us, creatures live that appear to be drawn from our most horrible dreams.  The deepest gorge in our solar system lies in a place that we haven't even visited yet - Mars.  The Valles Marineris puts the Grand Canyon to shame, with a depth of up to four miles and a length that is much longer.  It is interesting that Mars, a future goal of exploration by humans, has all of the metaphors discussed here in gigantic scale - the deepest gorge and the highest mountain (Olympus Mons) yet discovered in the solar system.  It seems to embody, in one planet, our hopes as a species, the barriers and obstacles that await us, the heights that we can reach and the depths in which our fears reside.

It's taken me a while to like gorges.  As I mentioned above, I was always drawn to mountains.  Frankly, I get vertigo looking from great heights straight downward.  On a recent visit to the Rio Grande Gorge in New Mexico, which on approach is barely noticeable until one is right on top of it, I could barely look down from the bridge to the river more than 600 feet below.  Yet standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which is immensely bigger, I had a false sense security rather than seeing the danger, as if what I was looking at was somehow less imposing because it didn't seem real.  It was beautiful, almost as if I was looking at a painting of the Grand Canyon rather than real life.  Some years ago, when I happened upon the New River Gorge in West Virginia, however, I was stunned by the beauty of the place and the thoughts that it brought to my head.  I even composed a piece of poetry standing at a viewing spot near its edge.  I now appreciate them for what they are, a part of the same geology that heaves up the mountains and in a way, their own metaphors for challenge and growth.

If gorges can be gateways to those things we fear, they are also passages to unknown places and discoveries that are wonderful and fulfilling.  When we look at mountains, we look at them as challenges to conquer.  We don't necessarily climb mountains to find out who or what is there, we climb the mountain because it is a mountain.  But for me, when I see a valley or a gorge or some other place slipping down beneath the earth, I wonder what or who is down there and what they might be doing.  I speculate on what sights might be seen there or wonders that might be uncovered.  I think about what the perspective might be from the bottom - whether it will be quieter or more calm below than up on top.  I've often heard that standing at great heights, people often feel drawn toward the edge and even over.  Perhaps this feeling that I have is the more benign version of that strange urge - in this case, an urge to climb down and discover.

I think about LHM's couple, standing on the edge and peering uneasily into the mist shrouded depths of the Quechee Gorge, and I understand the uneasy fascination of the deep places.  Life is not only about walking on the plains, but climbing to the high places and descending, at times, to the low places.  Whether climbing up, or slipping down, one is still assured of discovery, learning and growth.

Musical Interlude

I'm nothing if not tenacious.  In search for songs about gorges, I stumbled across this little thing called Scenic Gorges by Boats.  It's an interesting song, sort of catchy in a funny punk kind of way.  Not only that, but I figured out how to embed it from Grooveshark.  Enjoy!

Blue Highways: Mount Tom, Vermont

Unfolding the Map

In this post, as William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) spends a day on Mount Tom outside of Woodstock, Vermont, he seems a little distracted.  We'll reflect a little on the healing prospects of nature, and the double-edged sword of protecting oneself.  To find Mount Tom, let the map be your guide.

Book Quote

"I spent the day on Mount Tom.  Had I owned a ghost shirt, I'd have danced madly all over that mountain.  Instead, I tried to keep from looking inward, tried to reach outward, but, as Black Elk says, certain things among the shadows of a man's life do not have to be remembered - they remember themselves."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 9

Trail on Mount Tom near Woodstock, Vermont. Photo by "ikur" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Mount Tom, Vermont

If you ask me, LHM did this all backwards.  But first, a little back story that I didn't provide in the quote.  If you're joining for the first time as we follow Blue Highways, one of the reasons LHM took off on a trip around America is that his marriage fell apart.  At various points along the trip, he tried to talk with his estranged wife, who he named "The Cherokee."  In the passage preceding this quote, he wakes in Woodstock, Vermont from difficult dreams involving remarriage with her.  He spends the day on Mount Tom to clear his head and soothe his emotions, but by the end of the day when he is back in Woodstock he calls and has a frustrating talk with her which only serves to get him angry.

In my experience, nature is best experienced from a stable platform.  By that, I mean that if one is in an emotionally unstable state, the healing value of nature, of being in a calming, soothing environment like that of Mount Tom is hindered or muted.  It's not that nature wouldn't be able to calm and heal someone in that state, it's just that the healing forces of nature would have to work harder and would probably need to be applied repeatedly to have an effect.  A simple day outing would not suffice.

I think of myself when I have entered nature in an emotionally unstable state.  A few years ago, my wife and I went for an outing in the Tent Rocks, a geologically fascinating area near our home in New Mexico.  At the time, our marriage was troubled with many issues, and my mind was focused on those things.  We walked the trails of the Tent Rocks, through the hoodoos and fantastic geological formations created through volcanism, erosion and time.  I saw them, but I didn't really see them.  I was too preoccupied, my mind racing with potentials and possibilities and pitfalls.  Therefore, while being in the wilderness in an amazing place took me superficially from my everyday surroundings where all of my troubles and difficulties were stacking up, I didn't really absorb the Tent Rocks.  I saw but did not see.  I need to go back to see the Tent Rocks now that I am in a more stable emotional place.

It's not that LHM didn't try to calm his emotions.  He states that he tried to focus outward, rather than inward, but to paraphrase him, a man's shadows will manage to make themselves known.  In my experience again, those shadows seem to come when one is ungoing emotional unrest.  LHM makes reference his quote above to the ghost shirt, which to Native Americans were a protective garment.  The ghost shirts were adopted by many Native tribes in the late 1800s and were initially worn to protect the wearer from the certain doom, notably earthquakes, that were believed to be the punishment for the white invaders in North America.  However, some Natives believed that the ghost shirts would protect the wearer from the white man's bullets.  They didn't, as was proved at the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.  It is believed that the idea of the ghost shirts were adopted from Mormon temple garments that are supposed to protect the wearer from evil.  However, throughout history there have been many beliefs that the wearing of garments, or even the shedding of clothes, offered one protection.  One of the most interesting cases I've read is about General Butt Naked, in Liberia, who led his troops into battle while nude believing that it protected him from bullets.  He hasn't been proved wrong yet, as he is still alive!  Although I think that his butt-naked battle days are over. 

However, the ghost shirts and other forms of protection are all focused on dangers from without.  How do you protect from the turmoil within?  If you are surrounded by a cloak of protection, such as a ghost shirt, a protective bubble ala Green Lantern, a safe room, or a Romulan or Klingon cloaking device, it doesn't actually mean that you are able to vanquish the doubt, madness or rebellion that can brew within the individual or individuals within the protective device.

Here we get back to LHM.  From my lofty perch thirty years in the future, I might have advised him to get his compulsive act of calling his ex-wife over with before he went up to Mount Tom.  He could have had his despairing, angry moment where he yelled and hit the telephone booth door.  After, a drive up to Mount Tom and it's clean air and forests would have helped calm him.  The views from the top of the mountain could have given him perspective.  Perhaps Black Elk's wisdom, "I did not know then how much was ended," would have come with less desolation and more inner peace.

But then again, I have been known to act exactly as LHM did.  Lucky for me, I have had access to good people who provide me that perspective, and the slightest bit of wisdom to know that should I need healing energy, calm and perspective, that I can always reach out to Nature.  In a week, I will be doing just that.  I will go camping for a weekend in New Mexico's Pecos Wilderness.  I will hike on mountain trails, take in the vistas, and observe wildlife going about its business in the moment.  I will watch my dog joyfully leap into the car, not caring for a moment where she's going but just happy to be going somewhere, and then her joy at being outside for an entire weekend.  For a few days, I will heal, and then come back to civilization, work, and relationships, put up some protective cloaks and live, taking the buffets to my psyche and soul that life brings, until I realize I need rejuvenation and peace again.

Musical Interlude

For the musical interlude, I am posting Protection.  Written by Bruce Springsteen for Donna Summer, who recently passed away, both of them recorded their own versions of the song, as well as a duet that has never been heard.  This version is a fan remix, putting these legendary musicians' voices together.

Addendum

At the risk of giving in to my own hubris, I once wrote a sonnet that sort of fits LHM's situation in this chapter.  Here's what LHM writes about his phone call to The Cherokee:

"By evening, my judgment had given way, and I called home.  I was talking fast, talking, talking, trying to find where we stood, how our chances were.  She talked.  No matter how we tried, our words - confounded - ran athwart and, as usual, we ended up at cross-purposes.  Neither of us knew where to go from there.  Nothing to do but hang up.  When I put the receiver down and heard the line ding dead, I tried to excuse the failure by thinking that nothing ever works out over a telephone."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 9

I wrote this sonnet after a similar experience with a girlfriend a long time ago, in the late 1980s.  It has similar themes to LHM's quote, including dancing, nature, a dead telephone line, and loss.  I humbly offer it to you here:

Autumn Thoughts
by Michael L. Hess

A click, and then the lifeless droning hum,
As I replaced the phone upon its hook;
I walked outside, into the setting sun,
And sat upon the porch to think and look.

A cavalcade of brightly colored leaves
Ran helter-skelter down the somber street,
Driven by a soft, yet forceful, breeze
That pushed them onward to an unknown fate.

How I wished that I could join them there,
And also dance away my lonely grief;
Until, with growing pain, I was aware
That life is but the wind, and I, a leaf.

I thought of love and loss, and thus entranced,
I ran into the street to join the dance.

If you want to know more about Mount Tom

Climbing Mount Tom
Hiking around Woodstock
Mount Tom
Mount Tom and the Pogue Trail

Next up:  Quechee Gorge, Vermont

Blue Highways: Woodstock, Vermont

Unfolding the Map

Sometimes it's very nice to stop in a quaint, picturesque, historic town and just hang around.  As William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) gets the feel of Vermont in Woodstock, I'll look at historic towns and how sometimes they are what they seem, and other times they are not.  To locate Woodstock (sorry folks, not the Woodstock of concert fame), find your way to the map.

Book Quote

"It looked like the set for an Andy Hardy movie - things quaint in the manner of Norman Rockwell...Maybe the town wasn't the prettiest village in America, but if the townspeople wanted to make the claim, I wouldn't have disputed them.  It was Woodstock, Vermont.

"....the village lived by the tourist - the well heeled tourist.  But few places in the country fused tourism and town life so well.  In Woodstock, they were parts of the whole.

"If the village had a fault, it lay in both a hubris about its picturesqueness and in its visitors with new money and new facades...."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 7

Covered bridge in Woodstock, Vermont. Photo by "traaaacey" and seen at Tripadvisor. Click on photo to go to host page.

Woodstock, Vermont

I grew up in the shadow of a town like Woodstock.  I saw "shadow" because really, Mendocino, California wasn't a big place.   A few hundred people in a picturesque, New England village by the ocean.  Mendocino looked so much like a New England town that it was used as such for the Murder, She Wrote mystery series that had a long run on television.

But I didn't grow up there.  I grew up in Fort Bragg, it's more down to earth, blue collar, lumber town sister about seven miles north of Mendocino.  Where Mendocino was cute, Fort Bragg was gritty.  Where Mendocino was picturesque, Fort Bragg was utilitarian.  Where Mendocino had a great coastal access, Fort Bragg was blocked from the coast by a large lumber mill.  Where Mendocino was filled with "hippies," really counter-cultural artists, writers and musicians, Fort Bragg was filled with loggers, millworkers, fishermen, and other salt-of-the-earth types.

I wouldn't say there was a lot of animosity between the two towns, though one thing was clear.  The well-heeled tourists went to Mendocino and only really used Fort Bragg if they couldn't find lodging.  After all, while I was growing up the options to stay in Mendocino were limited.  Things were more expensive in Mendocino also - restaurants and lodging all cost more.  Now it's a little different.  Fort Bragg, since the closing of the lumber mill, has marketed itself to tourists, with much success.  Festivals, art, restaurants and other attractions, such as the Skunk Train, have managed to draw a lot of tourists to my home town.  Yet if I compare the two, Mendocino is still, by far, perceived as the more arty, counter-cultural, foodie, and picturesque of the two.  And, it prides itself on that.

I find it interesting that all the states that I have lived in or visited have some such type of town.  It is usually a town or village that has tried to keep a flavor of its historical and cultural past, or one epoch of its historical and cultural past, even if that flavor has been sanitized somewhat.  Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, where you can see a colonial town with reenactments.  Cedarburg, Wisconsin.  Fredericksburg, Texas. Virginia City, Nevada.  Sometimes a state doesn't have to work too hard to maintain that cultural heritage.  In Shipshewana, Indiana cars mingle with Amish buggies on the main street, and men with straw hats and long beard and women with gingham dresses and bonnets knock shoulders with tourists in shorts and t-shirts.

What I really find fascinating is that with all our technology, and all our modern progress, we still feel that it's important to have these historic, picturesque, quaint, throwbacks to an earlier time.  A time when there were few telephones if any at all, and televisions, computers and the Internet were not even a remote conception.  What is it in our psyche that preserving these time capsules, state by state, is so important?  Where I live, in Albuquerque, nobody would ever think of razing Old Town for new business today, even as most of the action takes place in the newer downtown or in the even newer Nob Hill district.

Even more interesting is that some places are so adamant in preserving some ideal sense of past that they actually cover up the real past, intentionally or not, to create that idealized vision.  Or sometimes, the actual past has been covered up already, and has to be resurrected.

For example, underneath many of the brown adobe-like walls of Santa Fe, for instance, are original brick and mortar buildings that were converted after a law passed in the 1950s mandating that all new and rebuilt buildings take on the pueblo adobe style.  While there has been important historic preservation of the actual adobe buildings that remain, many others that look adobe, especially the two-story downtown buildings, are not.  A building style, adobe, that was once considered backward and inferior to the false-front saloon style buildings of the old west, is now celebrated again and even mandated by Santa Fe law.  In this case, buildings that were historic in their own right were changed to reflect an even earlier history.

We saw this in California also, where in San Diego preservation of its Old Town has been very important for the city.  Yet in many ways historical preservation covers up much that was neglected.  My wife visited the Old Town State Historical Park museum, and most of the pottery was collected from New Mexico pueblos and is not indigenous, even though it might be similar to pottery once made in the San Diego area.  San Diego is also one of the earliest homes to a phenomena I have touched upon in other posts.  Helen Hunt Jackson wrote a wildly successful novel in the late 1800s about the Santa Diego area called Ramona.  It was a romantic view of the indigenous Native Americans of the area through the eyes of a half Scots-American, half Indian woman.  The novel was so popular it turned San Diego into a tourist destination, especially for its depictions of the Spanish missions and the "nobility" of the Natives.  To appeal to tourists, entrepreneurs marketed area attractions for their supposed connections to Ramona, including Estudillo House in Old Town San Diego which began to call itself "Ramona's Marriage Place."

This romanticized past, taking hold of the public imagination in a time when the Native American population of Southern California had been reduced by disease and the oppressive governments of Spain, Mexico and the United States, put San Diego on the map and sparked a rejuvenation of interest in saving what little remained of that earlier time.  Because there was so little, San Diego had to recreate that past, but since the past was romanticized, it never quite existed in that way to begin with.

By far, for me, the most successful and authentic representations of the past and of cultures have been in cultures that preserve themselves.  For example, some New Mexico pueblos have done very meticulously preserved their heritage because these places are where Native Americans still work and live using techniques that date a thousand years.  In Zuni Pueblo, Native women still cook bread in horno ovens.  In Sky City at Acoma Pueblo, the historic adobe town on the top of a small, 300 foot high mesa, about 30 families still maintain homes, sell art and pottery, and try to continue the lifestyle of their ancestors.

Other places around the United States have similar experiences - the Amish communities for example.  Sure, such places appeal to tourists with their arts and culture, and have been come destinations.  But these villages and cultures also strive to maintain an authenticity because the culture of those people, Native and Amish, depends on the survival of their communities.  That's the difference between the "cute" American towns that echo the past, and the places where cultures live in both the past and present.  If Mendocino, Williamsburg, Cedarburg, Virginia City or even Woodstock, Vermont disappear, American culture will survive.  If Acoma Pueblo, or Zuni Pueblo, or even Shipshewana, Indiana disappear, it will be a huge blow to these unique cultures that live in and around modern American culture, but also live apart from it as well.

Musical Interlude

There's been a number of songs about Mendocino, the village I mentioned above near where I grew up.  Here's a song, Talk to Me of Mendocino, performed by songwriting legends Kate and Anna McGarrigle with Scottish chanteuse Karen Matheson.

And for a more upbeat vibe, here's an old song by the Sir Douglas Quintet with their classic number Mendocino, performed on Hugh Hefner's Playboy After Dark television show in 1969.

If you want to know more about Woodstock

Billings Farm and Museum
Woodstock, Vermont
Wikipedia: Woodstock

Next up:  Mount Tom, Vermont

Blue Highways: Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen, Vermont

Unfolding the Map

We cross state lines again, and now we are traveling in Vermont.  The Salada Tea signs that William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) notices helps cover for my lack of knowledge of anything in Vermont, and allows me to wax poetic on my love of tea.  Pull up a nice easy chair, pour yourself a cup and don't spill any on the map as you look for Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen!

Book Quote

"...a soft amber light fell over Vermont to give the rise of wet fields deep relief and color.  Through the villages of Orwell, Sudbury, and Goshen Corners, past the old groceries with SALADA TEA lettered in gold on front windows, and into the Green Mountains (which, some say, Vermont means in French despite cynical literalists who insist on 'Worm Mountain')."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 7

Orwell, Vermont skyline. Photo by "origamidon" and hosted at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host page.Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen (Corners), Vermont

Here's a disclaimer.  I've never been to Vermont, or New Hampshire, or Maine.  As you've come to expect, for the purposes of these posts that doesn't mean much, as I simply write about what images and feelings the quotes bring to mind, or what caught my eye or imagination and interested me and which I then explored.

So when it comes to Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen (Corners), I can't really tell you much.  It would be a disservice to try to force a treatise about George Orwell on you simply because the town's name is Orwell or to stretch something out of Sudbury or Goshen.

I was a little curious about why "Vermont" would translate to "Worm Mountain."  After all, I've had enough exposure to Spanish and to Latin that I know that "verde" or "verte" means "green" in those languages.  "Mont" clearly means mountain, such as "montaña" in Spanish, "montagne" in French, "montanha" in Portuguese, or even "munte" in Romanian.  Well, it turns out that "ver" means "worm" in French (it is "verme" in Portuguese and Italian, "vierme" in Romanian but inexplicably "gusano" in Spanish).  Since the Green Mountains are within Vermont, I am pretty sure that Vermont means Green Mountain, but even so, it is pretty interesting to think of a mountain of worms.

But the thing that really catches my eye in this quote is the reference to Salada Tea. For years, my wife has given me a bad time because of my propensity to drink tea.  Her need, one might almost say addiction, is to get up and have a cup of coffee.  Once, when she and I visited El Paso, we drove around one morning with her getting angrier and angrier because we couldn't find a place where she could get a cup of coffee.  If she doesn't have her coffee, then she can't get going and she'll actually get a headache.  It's been this way for years.

I never developed a taste for coffee.  My mom and dad drank it, my father especially.  He drank coffee all day, and Early Times at night.  In high school and college, while my friends became increasingly dependent on coffee, I never took it up.  It didn't taste good to me, no matter how much you masked it with sugar or milk.  When I worked as an overnight security guard at the lumber mill in my home town, I briefly considered it but one pot, brewed badly by me, was enough to convince me that I would never like it.  More on this later, because one should never say never.

What has happened is that I've slowly developed a taste for tea, to the point that it is now my main morning drink.  Like Captain Picard, I prefer "tea, Earl Gray, hot," though I usually mix it up with Irish Breakfast or English Breakfast.  Like most people, I drank tea in the bag.  I started with Lipton and sugar, but as my tea palate became more discriminating, I discovered that Lipton wasn't that good.  It was a whole new world for me when I realized that there were more kinds of tea than the generic white bag that simply said "tea."  "What is orange pekoe?" I wondered, and later began to wonder "just what is Earl Grey and what is the bergamot in it?"  And so on. 

Then I discovered that tea did not have to black.  Another world opened up for me when I discovered green tea.  My tea awareness grew by leaps and bounds as first, I began frequenting stores that weren't supermarkets, such as health food stores.  A visit to the Whole Foods or my local cooperative would often open up new varieties of tea I hadn't heard of, and suddenly, I became aware of green teas.  I also learned that I liked certain types of teas in the mornings (black) and other types in the afternoons (green).  I also became aware of white teas as well, and began trying them.

For a while, like most people, I called anything that steeped in water and made a colored, tasteful drink "tea."  But as my tea wisdom grew, I learned that tea only comes from tea plants.  A lot of the things that are marketed as tea are really not tea, such as the herbal concoctions.  There is no such thing as chamomile tea, though that's what I called it when I was trying to get myself around Rome and see the sights with a bad case of bronchitis.  I really thought that it was the chamomile "tea" that I would find in the shops that helped break up the phlegm and make it easier to breathe.  It was really the hot water, I've learned, but I have a fondness for chamomile to this day.  But it is not a tea.  It and other herbal teas are called tisanes and have different properties than teas.

Another advance in my tea awareness came a few years ago, when I was introduced to an iced tea called "vanilla rooibos" served in a coffee shop near my house in New Orleans.  It was good - I love vanilla too - and I began to read up on rooibos.  A South African bush, rooibos is technically not a tea though they call it "red tea" in its own country.   However, it has some similar properties.  All teas are high in antioxidants, especially green tea, and rooibos also has a number of antioxidants as well.  All I know is that I like it.

Finally, lately I have discovered just how good it is to have fresh, loose leaf teas.  A tea shop, the New Mexico Tea Company, opened in Albuquerque and it has afforded me the opportunity to learn more about teas, how to properly make them, and to try a myriad of different teas from all over the world.  The taste, depending on the type and color of the tea, can be remarkably different.  I still tend toward the Earl Grey, but I also try other teas that can range from delicate flavorings to strong ones, fruity flavors to smoky.  I occasionally love the smokey flavor of a Lapsang Souchong, or the strong over-the-top flavor of an Irish Breakfast to break up my usual Earl Grey fix at times.  I really enjoy the nutty flavor of a good Genmaicha on a rainy afternoon, and I absolutely love jasmine green tea.

It may be that I can't brew a good pot of coffee, but I really think there is more variety and depth in tea.  Coffee is in your face, and people use coffee, in my opinion, to rev themselves up or stay awake.  But tea, to me, is more subtle.  I use tea in the morning to awake, but I also use tea in the afternoon to relax.  Tea seems to me to be very associated with the mood that one is trying to cultivate and, in Asia, serving tea properly has been considered a high art form.  I'm not trying to say that drinking tea makes me better than those "uncouth" coffee drinkers.  It's just that it is different, and I feel good, and a little different from my friends and relatives, in making it my personal drink.

And now my second disclaimer.   Remember my never say never?  I have developed a taste for Turkish coffee.  Now that's some coffee that I can drink!

Musical Interlude

I'm going to give you a double-dose of tea today.  For the first time, I'm going to repost a song I already used in this site, but I think you'll understand why I put Colin Hay's Beautiful World in here when you hear the lyrics.  The second song is fun also.  It's by a Croatian hip hop band named Elemental, who extol the wonders of tea in A Cup of Brown Joy.

If you want to know more about Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen (Corners)

Town of Goshen
Town of Orwell
Virtual Vermont: Goshen
Virtual Vermont: Orwell
Virtual Vermont: Sudbury
Wikipedia: Goshen
Wikipedia: Orwell
Wikipedia: Sudbury

Next up: Woodstock, Vermont

Blue Highways: Somewhere on Lake Champlain

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) trip on the ferry across Lake Champlain leads to some reflection on ordinary miracles like boats and ships, airplanes, and even bicycles.  We'll even start the reflection with a memory of Bangladesh.  If you wish to know how all these things connect, read on!  If you want to see just where to catch the ferry and the route it takes across Lake Champlain, consult your bearings, nautical or otherwise, on the map.

Book Quote

"A ferry, interrupted off and on only during the Revolutionary War, had crossed the long lake at this narrow point since the 1740s.  The boat of 1759, large enough to carry a stagecoach, had a sail, but on windless days, boatmen walked the length of it and pushed with a single, thirty-foot oar....

"Almost a century and a half later, I made the same crossing with only a few technological changes here and there: the sail and oarsman had given way to a modified, Navy-surplus landing craft attached to a cargo barge...."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 7

The current Fort Ticonderoga Ferry. Photo at the Fort Ticonderoga Ferry website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Somewhere on Lake Champlain

Have you ever contemplated the sheer wonder of how simple, ordinary things work?  I'm going to preface a post that explores this type of wonder with a story from a ferry ride I took in Bangladesh.

In the late 1990s, I traveled to Bangladesh while I got my masters degree in international relations.  My goal was to visit a micro-lending program that had been organizing in rural communities, making small loans to women to not only help them finance their own small businesses, but also to teach them the value of savings and, most importantly, to increase their status in society by turning them into earners making incomes independent of their husbands.  I stayed in Bangladesh for a month, and during that time I was taken by a variety of modes of transportation, including car and motorcycle, to various places where their programs were in effect.

I arrived at the start of the monsoon season, the regular afternoon rains that are responsible for rejuvenating the groundwater and the plant and animal life in that region of the world.  From the time I landed to the time I left, the country, which is mostly at sea level, filled up with water.  From one week, even one day, to the next, roads that we traveled on the day before would be impassable the next day due to mud and flooding.  Fields and rice paddies became lakes and ponds.  On some roads on raised roadbeds, it almost felt like we traveled across a shallow inland sea, dotted with islands with dwellings on them.

On one of those trips, we stopped our small SUV where the water had inundated the road in years past and the roadbed had not been fixed.  I looked across the expanse of water to the other side, maybe a quarter mile away, and saw a flat boat with people on it coming across.  Similar to what LHM describes above, the operator of the makeshift ferry had a long pole to push the boat across the water.   I assumed that we would take the ferry across and our car would be driven another way around.

I assumed wrong.  After some haggling over price, boards were put down to create a ramp, and our vehicle was driven onto the boat.  We climbed on, and just as before, the boat was propelled by pole across the water to the other side, where the vehicle was driven off and we resumed our journey.

In Bangladesh, where people work very hard to scrape out the most rudimentary living and in which, unlike the stereotypes we have in the west, people are extremely entrepreneurial.  It is not surprising that somebody saw an opportunity to provide a ferry service in order to make a living and created it.  That in itself is a wonder.  But the wonder that I write of is a part of those everyday wonders that when I think about it, just makes me drop my jaw before I accept it's every-dayness.  We put a ton of car onto what was a small wooden float, and one man poled that ton plus the added weight of people across water.  Isn't that amazing?  I would have to strain to push that car on land.  The fact that a few bits of wood, configured into a raft could move it so easily is a miracle to me.

A similar feeling came over me recently when I visited San Diego and took a tour of the aircraft carrier Midway.  At the time it was built, in the 1940s, the Midway was one of the biggest and most complicated ships ever produced.  It carried 4,500 people and a large number of planes and equipment and stores.  And that's just what was in it.  The carrier itself weighed, at its decomission, 75,000 tons.  Now, I don't know about you, but boats are a miracle to me in general, and a ship like the Midway is almost incomprehensible.  If I take a piece of steel and drop it in the water, it sinks like a stone.  But, a ship like the Midway is made of 75,000 tons of steel and not only floats, but managed to take on additional weight and survived voyages and rough seas through war and peace time for 60 years.  Another miracle.

Airplanes also constitute a miracle to me today.  I've flown on jets routinely and yet, as I watch Boeing 757s and other aircraft at the Albuquerque airport, marvels of metal and electronics, take off and land with a weight up to 255,000 pounds, my mind still sometimes reels.  I understand the mechanics of air flight - thrust is generated by engines that creates speed, and that speed leads to a rush of air over a fixed wing which provides uplift and then flight.  Yet occasionally I see one a jet, and I really get this when I see it landing, hanging there in the sky, and my mind still argues that so much weight in the air shouldn't be possible.  And yet, it is.

Lately, I've been contemplating the miracle of a simple bicycle.  I note that I'm unable to balance it when there is lack of motion, when standing still.  Yet as soon as I move forward, I have balance.  Again, I understand the mechanics of how I ride a bicycle.  The wheels moving forward provide stability because they act like gyroscopes.  The bike's inertia in motion means that it is reluctant to move any other way and this counteracts some of the force of gravity which wants to pull it to one side or the other.  Yet sometimes, when I am on a bike and zipping down the street toward my work, I am amazed that I can, balancing on two thin wheels, get to another place more quickly and efficiently than walking.  Another small miracle.'

LHM contemplated only a part of the miracle as he crossed Lake Champlain on the ferry.  He saw how little the conveyance had changed through a century and a half of use.  To me, however, the fact that humans could understand, unlike any other beings on earth, how to put materials together that by themselves are useless, and make a mode of transportation on the water that not only carries them, but if we extrapolate up to the biggest ships of our time, anything we want to carry...to me, it still touches the side of my brain connected to the miraculous.  I think that always, even as I understand how and why such things as ships, planes and bicycles work, there will be a side of my brain that will be astonished that such things are possible.

Musical Interlude

The song and video I found for this post, Sarah McLachlan's Ordinary Miracle, was part of the soundtrack for the movie adaptation of Charlotte's Web.  Charlotte's Web is a wonderful story, and is all about miracles, so I think it fits the sense of seeing miracles in our lives each day, even those that may not register as such until you really think about them.  By the way, I read this story first when I was young, and it was the first and last time I ever cried over the death of a spider.  Spiders are miraculous beings in themselves, and I respect them, but the primitive side of my brain gets the willies over them.  So that I cried about the death of a spider - that in itself is a miracle.

If you want to know more about Lake Champlain

Fort Ticonderoga Ferry
Lake Champlain Ferries
Lake Champlain Maritime Museum
Lake Champlain Region
Ticonderoga Ferry
Wikipedia: Lake Champlain

Next up: Orwell, Sudbury and Goshen Corners, Vermont