Alexandersmap

    Month: January 2019

    • Celestial Dance

      This morning Venus was dancing with the crescent moon, while Juniper looked on with envy.  The air is brutally cold this morning, but getting outside before the sunrise has its benefits.  Watching this tango was one of them.  Sadly I couldn’t get a decent picture of conjunction of these three, but I’m glad to have shared the moment with them.

      My reason for being outside in the first place on this cold morning was to let Bodhi get outside for a little relief.  The days of long power walks are over for him, and it seems I’m not inclined to do many myself without his company.  So seeing celestial dances like this aren’t as common as they once were for me.  I clearly need to change my routine and get back outside.

    • Gray Gables

      Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th President of the United States of America (the only President to be re-elected in non-consecutive elections), was the Governor of New York before that, and the Mayor of Buffalo before that.  Grover Cleveland was a Bourbon Democrat, which today would be aligned with a Libertarian or conservative Democrat.  He’s considered one of the more successful Presidents we’ve had.

      Cleveland was born and died in New Jersey.  During his years as President he had a summer home in Bourne, Massachusetts in an area known forever since as Gray Gables.  That was the name of his summer home, which became the Summer White House during his Presidency.  The house burned down in the 1970’s, but the history of Gray Gables lives on in the area.  A train station that was built for the President’s train stop still exists today, but was moved away from the tracks to an area near the Aptucxet Trading Post and Museum.  This train station had a direct telegraph connection to Washington, DC.  Gray Gables was the epicenter of politics in the summers of 1893 through 1896.

      Cleveland Ledge is named after the former President and it was in these choppy waters in Buzzards Bay that the President would go fishing.  Road names like Presidents Road and Cleveland Circle betray the history of the place.  The land around Gray Gables has been built up over the years since then.  Hog Island stopped being an island when they used fill from the channel leading up to the canal to create a peninsula.  But Buzzards Bay remains largely as Cleveland would have remembered it.

    • Wooden Pipes

      Before lead and copper and cast iron pipes, there were clay and wood pipes.  Woods pipes sound crazy, but in a time when trees were abundant but copper, iron and lead were harder to come by it made sense to use materials that were readily available.

      Wooden pipes were basically logs that were drilled out.  Nothing especially exotic about this, and it turned out that they could be effective transportation vessels for water when buried underground.  And they would do their job until they rotted away, split or were replaced with more modern options.

      I came across a wooden pipe from the 1870’s or 1880’s at the Department of Public Works in Burlington, Vermont a couple of years ago, and I’ve seen it every time I visit there.  It’s a great reminder of the older infrastructure that our ancestors had to create to support the growing cities of the time.  Yankee ingenuity?  I think so.  And also a time capsule that reminds us of our not-so-distant past.

    • Reading Water

      Back in college when I rowed, we would row in all kinds of conditions.  In general we would row in just about anything.  But two things you never wanted to see when you were rowing were lightning and whitecaps.  Lightning was a problem on summer afternoons.  Whitecaps were a problem on bigger bodies of water.  It’s been years since I rowed.  I have strong memories of rowing in both thunderstorms with lightning crashing around us and in races where the whitecaps were cresting over the gunwales.

      I don’t row on water anymore, but I still look to the water whenever I’m around it, and read the surface as I once did as a rower.  Rowers read the water a little bit differently than sailors do.  Where sailors read the water looking for puffs to propel the boat forward, rowers look to those same puffs with a mental calculation of what that means to the set of the boat.  Wind and water conditions determine rigging, strategy in a race, and whether you’re going out on the water or hitting the ergs.

      Sunday I was looking out at Buzzards Bay and watching the gusts of wind ripple across the glassy water.  It reminded me of those days reading the rivers and lakes that we rowed on.  And I remembered that I miss rowing.

    • Prevailing Winds

      The prevailing winds are different as you move from the North Pole to the South Pole.  Up in the north where I am we have the westerlies.  Which means that the prevailing winds blow from the west eastward.  Further south, roughly around the lattitude of the Gulf of Mexico, the winds blow in the opposite direction, from the east downward towards the equator in a southwest direction.  Below the equator the winds blow from the west in a northeast direction towards the equator.  Further south, the winds blow from east to west.

      Prevailing winds are a strong consideration when you’re planning east-west travel as it will slow down the trip and burn more fuel as you fight the winds.  Going west to east will shorten the trip and save on fuel.  These are factors in flying, but also in sailing.  Adding to the economy in my lattitude on an east-west trip is the Gulf Stream ocean current.

      Prevailing winds also factor into other things.  You don’t want to be downwind of a sewage treatment plant.  Or in my case a next-door neighbor who chain smokes.  Important considerations like these require a sense of place, an understanding of the prevailing winds, and foresight into who is moving next to you.

    • Jeffrey Amherst

      The winners get to write the history.  That maxim has dictated what we’ve learned in history books, at church or in the stories told time and again through generations.  Whether its historical perspective, political correctness gone awry or a long overdue reset, there’s no doubt that some of the historical figures of the past are getting re-evaluated over the last decade or so.

      General Robert E Lee, Columbus, Hannah Duston, and Tom Yawkey are some of the historical figures honored in the past who are being re-examined in the present.  Outrage addiction is real, and there are plenty of people who look for anything they can find to be indignant about.  Some people ignore the realities of the situation people were in at the time, like Hannah Duston’s immediate peril should she be discovered escaping that island on the Merrimack River.

      Jeffrey Amherst is a good example of one-time hero being re-examined with the lens of history.  There’s no doubt that Amherst was a man of action trying to win the French and Indian War.  There’s no doubt that the settlers in the region were enduring atrocities at the hands of the Native Americans allied with the French.  But history points out that Amherst is the man that approved giving smallpox-infected blankets to Chief Pontiac’s Ottawa who were wreaking havoc on Fort Pitt and the settlements in Western Pennsylvania.

      In a letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet in 1763 Jeffrey Amherst approved of a plan to “to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.” in response to Bouquet’s letter asking for permission to “inocculate the Indians”.  Biological warfare utilized to eliminate a problem during war.  It’s hard to justify the action, but it’s easy to understand if you look at the North American settlers killed and kidnapped over the past 70 years in wars between the French and British.  There were horrors on both sides.

    • Slavery in New Hampshire

      Slavery in New Hampshire

      When I think of New Hampshire, I don’t think about slavery.  Frankly, it’s inconceivable to me that someone would enslave another human being, but it was commonplace in all of the thirteen colonies in the 1600’s until 1865, when it was finally abolished after the Civil War.

      But it surely existed here.  In 1767 there were 187 slaves in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  Portsmouth was a hub for the transport of slaves into North America and human beings were bought and sold right on the same streets we walk today.  There are as many as 200 deceased slaves under the streets of Portsmouth around Congress Street who probably died soon after arriving in the city.  Slaves that died on the transport ships were thrown overboard like garbage.

      New Hampshire wasn’t an optimal location for slaves, not because of a moral imperative, but because the land didn’t support farming using slave labor.  It simply wasn’t as profitable here, but it was still cheap enough to justify the act.  Over time, as the Industrial Revolution transformed the region to a manufacturing hub, cheap human labor used in the factories because the norm.  Slavery was pushed to the south, where plantations made slavery economically viable.

      Looking around New Hampshire, it’s not a particularly diverse population.  Perhaps that lack of slave labor meant that when it was finally abolished there simply weren’t many black people living here.  Perhaps its because when these slaves became freed they congregated in communities elsewhere.  Whatever the reason, New Hampshire remains one of the whitest states in the union.

      I’m not at all comfortable writing about slavery.  I’m not a perfect man, but I’m a free man and I can empathize with those who endured the horrors of slavery.  For all the talk of freedom in the years leading up to and after the Revolutionary War, the colonists of the time largely overlooked the plight of those who served them.  Still, there was a growing revulsion towards slavery, and over the one hundred years from when those 187 slaves were in Portsmouth the Americans reached a tipping point where it was outlawed.  Slavery remains a stain on our history, and it’s important to remember that the stain wasn’t just in the south.

    • Choosing a Response

      Choosing a Response

      “Between stimulus and response, there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.” – Victor Frankl

      In a career spent interacting with other people, some who aren’t always pleasant to be around, I’ve come to appreciate this Frankl quote.  In general I work to choose the appropriate response.  And by appropriate I generally mean professional.  I write this with one particularly nasty human being who runs a successful business and happens to be a customer.  He’s taken the opportunity to attack me a couple of times.  I’ve taken the opportunity to never respond to his attacks.  And while I haven’t fired this company as a customer, I have taken steps to replace his business with more pleasant people.

      Life is too short to work for assholes. – Unknown

      I use this one a lot when people ask me about taking certain jobs, or working with certain people.  I’ve applied it in my own career to people who I didn’t like all that much but happened to be working for.  In every one of those cases, we parted ways pretty quickly.  There are four in particular who I won’t ever associate with again.  And until I wrote this I hadn’t even thought about them in some time.  Filed them in the memory dumpster.

      I was listening to a podcast with David Goggins, an ex-Navy SEAL who is famous for putting himself through insane long distance running events, setting pull-up records, and generally for being a tough SOB.  The interviewer stated that he did his best not to get upset about the trolls who commented on his social media feeds.  They both agreed that deleting the comment and blocking the troll was the best thing to do.  Why get upset about someone you don’t know saying something about you?

      This goes for any celebrity, or anyone that contributes anything meaningful to the world.  Haters are gonna hate.  The New England Patriots are about to play in their third straight Super Bowl and the tenth in Tom Brady’s career.  Fans of other teams, and sports writers and commentators who are sick of the same team being in it every year love to tear them down, find controversies, invent scandals, and otherwise act like trolls.  I don’t believe Brady gives a damn what anyone thinks about it at this point in his career, but it must get old having to filter out the haters.

      Perhaps the worst offense of all is the way many of us self-talk to ourselves.  We’re our own worst critics.  This is the stuff that drives growth but can cripple you with self-doubt if you let it.  That’s choosing our response too.  I try to delete the comment and block the troll whenever possible.  Especially when the troll is in my own mind.

    • Sea Smoke

      Sea Smoke

      On especially cold days like the last few, the air temperature is well below the temperature of the ocean.  The differential between the two temperatures causes the water to steam, creating a fog that swirls across the surface of the water.  It’s a beautiful thing to see, even if you don’t want to linger outside too long.

      Similar swirls can be seen on the highway in extreme cold after a snowstorm.  It’s caused when the snow that’s accumulated on cars and trucks breaks off and crashes onto the road surface (and hopefully not your windshield) and this snow is cast about by the wind currents of high speed traffic. This is beautiful for all the wrong reasons (Clean your cars off people!).

      Sea smoke has another couple of interesting names.  Steam fog, which is a great name for a beer, and frost smoke.  But we call it sea smoke around here.  When you see it, you know it’s bloody cold outside.

    • Paradise in the Starbucks Drive-Thru

      I was waiting in a Starbucks drive-thru this morning and looking at the house behind it.  Before there was a Starbucks in this spot there was a Mobile station.  Before that?  Probably the yard of the house I was looking at.  Before that?  Probably farmland for a family that owned a larger plot of land in this corner of Haverhill.  Before that?  Probably a few generations of farmers.  And before that?  Perhaps the Duston family, who lived across the Little River, or another family that settled this land.  Before that?  Deep woodland that the Eastern Abanaki inhabited for centuries.

      I wonder now and then what the generations of people who lived on this land would think of it now.  Plunked down in the Starbucks parking lot, they’d be stunned to see the semicircle of cars lined up around the building as coffee addicts and Frappuccino posers each pulled up and completed their transactions.

      They call this part of Methuen Paradise Valley.  The valley today doesn’t measure up to the name.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s some lovely parts of Haverhill and Methuen.  But the spirit of the place, that intangible that prompted some folks a few generations back to name this place Paradise Valley is gone now.

      “Don’t it always seem to go
       That you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone
       They paved paradise
       And put up a parking lot.” – Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell

      Conservation and preservation are really the only way forward.  I hope people look up from their phones and lattes long enough to realize that.  Or maybe its just progress and I don’t see it.