Alexandersmap

    Month: March 2019

    • Ice Sculptures

      Winter in New England brings an endless cycle of freezing and thawing.  This morning we got heavy wet snow.  Today it has warmed up and much of the snow is melting.  Tonight brings bitter cold and water will re-freeze.  This constant cycle brings frustration to those who are ready for spring, but it also brings ice sculptures to the landscape.

      This is most apparent wherever water flows over a surface and down.  The blasted ledge along the side of the highways is a great spot to see ice sculptures as you drive by.  Quarries, rail trails and nature rock outcroppings are other options for seeing ice sculptures.  And of course waterfalls offer a daily transformation as water flows and freezes.  Icicles hanging off rooftops are another source of ice sculpture inspiration.

      Sunday we walked the Windham Rail Trail again.  It was transformed by ice and snow from the previous time we’d walked it a couple of months ago.  Part of that transformation is the ice flows coming off the blasted ledge on the north side of the trail, which formed spectacular ice sculptures.  It’s one of the joys of winter, if you only look for it.

    • Hiawatha, Ben Franklin and the United States Constitution

      The Iroquois Confederacy, or the Five Nations as the British called them, were five united tribes that as a confederacy were stronger than the sum of their parts.  The Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga and Seneca were united through the efforts of Hiawatha.  Hiawatha, an Onondaga adopted by the Mohawk, was born around 1525 and became a great orator.  He was Chief of the Onondaga and a follower of Deganawida, a tribal elder who recognized that the Iroquois were weakening themselves by constantly fighting amongst themselves.  Deganawida apparently wasn’t much of a speaker, while Hiawatha was considered a dynamic speaker.  They developed “the Great Law of Peace” and sold the other tribal nations on it, creating the Iroquois Confederacy.

      Ben Franklin and other powerful men in the British colonies saw the power of this confederacy and sought to model it.  Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union was the first attempt to bring the colonies together.  It served as the foundation for the United States Constitution, whose preamble reads:

      We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

      At its core, the concepts of a common defense and promotion of the general welfare were modeled after the powerful example in Upstate New York in the Iroquois Confederacy.  So in some ways Hiawatha influenced the very core of who we are as a nation.  And yet most people don’t think of Hiawatha of the Iroquois when they think of Hiawatha.  They think of the Hiawatha from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, which was a fictional character from a different tribe (The Dakota).  Longfellow knew of the legend of Hiawatha and decided that this name would be better than the original name he was working with.  And ironically, the fictional character Hiawatha is more famous than the actual Hiawatha is today.

    • Chickadees in the Snow

      “All substance is soon absorbed into nature, all that animates it soon restored to the logos, all trace of them both soon covered over by time.” – Marcus Aurelius

      I was helping Bodhi down the stairs last night and noticed a set of chickadee tracks in the snow.  I thought to myself that they would make a great picture for the right photographer (I’m a pale alternative).  Bodhi proceeded to step into the snowy tracks, forever changing the image.  And yet there were still a couple of other tracks in the snow that I opted to leave well enough alone.

      This morning the tracks were still there.  Not a complete surprise since the temperatures remained below freezing and there was no snow overnight.  But there will be tonight and these tracks will disappear in time; a memory for me and anyone else who happens to see them before they’re forever lost.  So I took a picture to capture the moment.  I’ve done my best to capture as many moments as I can with photography.  I recognize that sometimes you have to live the moment instead of constantly having the phone out, and I’ve tried to keep the phone in my pocket most of the time.  Perhaps InstaGram has suffered for the omission, but I don’t believe the 20-30 people who look at my pictures felt the lapse.

      There is only today after all.  We’re told to make the most of it and generally I live that way.  Capturing a moment in time with a photograph is a blessing for only the last eight generations or so.  We all see time flies by too quickly.  Footprints or castles in the sand are typical analogies to this rapid passage of time and our fragile place in it.  But I think I prefer the chickadee footprints in the snow as my analogy.  Chickadees are fragile creatures, and yet they find ways to deal with the harsh New England winters.  Chickadees are social creatures, as much for survival as anything else.  Humans share similar survival instincts, and the same fragility.  Time marches on.  Best to focus on the day at hand.

    • Morning Cleanup

      This morning I got up early and did my usual Saturday morning routine when I’m at home: Coffee and some contemplation, followed by the outside chores.

      Step one as I sip coffee is to look around the house and yard to take stock of what needs to be done.  Once my coffee is done I’ll get to work.  This morning that meant putting on my boots and winter gear and heading outside to shovel shit.  In summer?  Eliminate step one.  This shit’s not going to take care of itself.

      Chores are a form of meditation if you approach them the right way.  Tasks done repetitively, and done well, are a reward in and of themselves, even when that task is shoveling up dog crap.  I don’t take pleasure in the process, but in the result it brings.  Clean yard, walkway, deck…  wherever he’s done his business.  Winter with an old dog is tough.

      Despite having responsibilities in my teens and twenties, I can point to one event that accelerated my journey to adulthood.  I was married to the wrong woman at the time, and had moved to Connecticut with her — literally meeting her halfway between where she’d lived and where I’d lived prior to that.  She got a job before I did, and while I looked for a job I worked part-time at Guiding Eyes for the Blind cleaning dog kennels.  Nothing offers perspective like realizing you’re in a bad marriage while shoveling the crap out of 30 kennels, hosing them down and then going outside to clean up the outdoor kennels they occupied while you were cleaning the indoor kennels.  Day after day while you look for a job in a place where you know next to nobody.

      I thought that, until I became a parent, thankfully in a great marriage the second time around, where changing diapers became one of my primary roles.  Explosive diarrhea blows out a diaper?  Clean it up and change their clothes.  Son’s explosive diarrhea up the entire sleeve of your dress shirt?  Clean it up and change your shirt.  Daughter’s barium enema leaks out all over your dress shoes?  Clean it up and buy new dress shoes.  Shit happens.

      So now, with an older dog who tends to shit while he’s walking somewhere to take a shit, there’s a lot of cleanup again.  But I have perspective on what cleanup can be.  Not optimal but not so bad.  Bodhi is one of many to teach me a lot about myself over the years.  Certainly patience was a key lesson as he went from his adolescent years to his adult years to his senior years.  He’s teaching me a final lesson.  Today it’s him.  Someday it may be me.

      But not today.  The shit’s cleaned up, the bird feeders are filled.  Snow is falling now, adding a coating of white over the places I’d just cleaned.  Looking over at the feeders I see three bluebirds taking turns at one of the feeders.  It’s going to be a good day.

    • Onondaga

      Long before present-day Syracuse dominated the lake that bears their name, the Onondaga lived in this area.  Onondaga means “hill people”, and there are certainly plenty of those in the region.  If you look at a map of the area, you see that there’s another dominant feature in this region: water.  Lake Ontario is just to the north and west of Lake Onondaga.  The finger lakes are southwest.  And the Mohawk River cuts an East-West corridor from Albany to roughly Lake Oneida, which connects to Lake Onondaga via the Oneida and Seneca Rivers.  This network of waterways was a superhighway for native populations, and later for Basque and French traders, and eventually British colonists and the waves of settlers who followed them.  Salt production was a major industry for early settlers to the Syracuse area as they tapped into the massive natural deposits around the southern part of Lake Onondaga.

      In my fourth year of crew, I rowed on Lake Onondaga in the summer of 1988 in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta.  This regatta was memorable for me for a few reasons.  That year Northeastern University had an accident on the way to the regatta and their rigger was killed.  The Heavyweight Men went on to win the IRA’s that year, and I witnessed the race.  To say Northeastern was a sentimental favorite after that event is an understatement.

      When you drive down I-90 you cross the lake outlet between the Seneca River and Lake Onondaga where Syracuse has their boathouse.  This is where we launched during the IRA’s and I still have vivid memories of my time there that bubble to the surface whenever I cross this outlet in the daylight.

      The Onondaga were one of the five original tribes in the Iroquois Nation.  The Oneida and Mohawk were to their East, and the Seneca and Cayuga were to their West.  So the Onondaga as the middle tribe were the logical “keepers of the fire” for the five nations.

      During the Revolutionary War, the Onondaga fought on the British side and paid for this in 1779 Sullivan Campaign led by Major General John Sullivan.  George Washington brought the fight to them in a series of coordinated raids in when the United States won.  Thousands of Iroquois fled to Canada and many starved in the winter of 1779-1780.  Their homeland was settled by New York veterans of the Revolutionary War as part of the Military Tract of Central New York.  Today there are roughly 500 people living in the Onondaga Nation Reservation just south of Syracuse.

      Lake Onondaga has suffered its own affront, as a company called Allied-Signal, which later became Honeywell, and other companies used the lake as a dumping ground for Mercury and other toxic chemicals.  Years of dredging and capping the bottom of the lake were completed in 2017.  The Onondaga consider the lake sacred.  Corporations considered it a convenient dumping ground.  It seems to me that the way the Onondaga lived on the land and the waterways that cut across it is preferable to the way that those who came after them have treated each.  I know that in 1988 I wasn’t thinking about how much mercury I was rowing over as we competed in the IRA’s.