Alexandersmap

    Author: nhcarmichael

    • Faraway Places

      I’m looking at an app showing the best locations right now for viewing the Aurora Borealis.  One of the best spots at this moment is 1,063 miles away from where I sit in Labrador.  Seeing the Northern Lights has grown to be a priority for me.  Something I’d like to do today, or at least before the end of the year.  Alas, responsibilities trump dreams.  Which makes me wonder, who made these rules anyway?

      “But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go.”
      – The Beatles, You Never Give Me Your Money

      I’ve got plenty of places to go.  Plenty of reasons to stay too.  I’m not going to roll out The Clash’s lyrics now, but it’s a real battle taking place.

    • The Upside Down

      This year is a bit upside down.  Winter came before the oak leaves came down in the form of a couple of early snowfalls and freezing temperatures.  Then came the rains that washed away the snow but left a brown landscape of dead leaves, bare trees and Christmas decorations.  In truth, this isn’t an unusual year for New England.  The weather always seems a little screwy.  But it just seems a bit more screwy than ever before.

      “And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
      Maybe this year will be better than the last
      I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
      To hold on to these moments as they pass”
                                                                        – Counting Crows, A Long December

      Eventually when we hit December these Counting Crows lyrics run through my head at least a couple of times.  While my life isn’t as, uh, melancholy as this song, reflecting on the year and looking ahead with a measure of hope towards the new year are a rite of passage.  But 2018 has been a challenging year in many ways.  Too many great people passing away.  Too much Trump (any amount of Trump is too much).  Too much bad news about mass shootings and climate change and immigrants getting tear gassed and corporate greed.  Parents and pets getting older and having struggles along the way.  The nest is empty, and other empty nester friends are taking flight themselves.  No doubt, 2018 was challenging.

      And yet, it’s been a great year in many ways.  Visits to interesting places near and far.  Quality moments with extraordinary people.  Better career opportunities for both Kris and me.  I’m doing more reading and writing and appreciating the things that make life great.  We’re appreciating time with Ian and Emily and watching them grow further into adulthood.  I’m doing my best to hold on to these moments as they pass.

    • Dancing with an Elephant, Darwinism and Missing a Ghost

      In Buffalo for work, I debated dancing with an elephant or walking in the footsteps of a ghost.  With better planning I could have done both.  They say we all have one life, and to make the most of the opportunities you’re presented with.  I confess to not taking full advantage of that over the years.  The way the day was shaping up, I had the opportunity to hit a couple of local points of interest while in the area.  Or work a little more at my desk in the hotel.  I know which I’d regret on my deathbed and chose wisely.

      Niagara Falls is a well-known elephant that everyone should dance with at least once in their lives.  I’ve danced with the falls on several occasions before.  But I’d never gone there in winter.  So I got up and out of the hotel early and drove out to Prospect Point at Niagara Falls State Park.  I walked in with one of the park employees who was going to work.  The park is open 24 hours a day but on a cold, wet morning in late November who the heck is going to go there pre-dawn?  Only the security patrols know for sure.  And in the Niagara Falls neighborhood, I’m sure they have some doozies.  I’m probably on that list now myself.

      The view of the American Falls from Prospect Point is spectacular.  This was the dance with the elephant that I’d had in mind when I debated the side trip the night before.  With a distinct chill in the air, the mist rising from the crashing falls was beautiful.  This view alone was worth the 20 minute drive out from the hotel.  And perhaps I should have stopped on this high note.

      I should mention that while I was in the car, I’d contemplated putting on either the boots I’d brought with me or the running shoes that I had for the hotel treadmill I ignored.  I also scrutinized the winter hat and gloves that I’d brought for this weather.  In a move of questionable, Darwinian logic, I chose to just keep my dress shoes on and skip the hat and gloves.  After all, I was only going to be there for a short time before I went to my first meeting of the day, so why take the two minutes to change shoes?  And why get hat head before your meeting?  This is the very logic that precedes business tourist tragedies.

      My first clue that my logic was bad was when I hit a patch of ice walking to view the falls at the American Falls viewing area.  The park service did a decent job of clearing and salting the walkways, but things melt overnight and refreeze, and that’s exactly what I found with my leather soled dress black shoes.  But I pressed on and had a nice photo of the falls to post on Instagram.  Mission accomplished?  For the responsible, reasoned and experienced traveller for sure.  In this moment I omitted responsibility and reason and thought to myself, if you got this spectacular picture at Prospect Point of the American Falls, imagine how good a photo you might get over at Terrapin Point of the Horseshoe Falls?

      Looking over at Goat Island and then down at my footwear, I had another moment of false hope for my future where I thought that no, this wouldn’t be a good life choice.  Go back to the car, drive over to Goat Island, put on better footwear and then if you’re still insistent go see the Horseshoe Falls.  Better yet, go get a coffee and celebrate having this small victory.

      Instead I pressed on, shuffling across the frosted sheet metal of the pedestrian bridge, hands pressed deep in my coat pockets against the cold, and over to the very quiet Goat Island.  The few tourists I did see were dressed in winter-appropriate clothes and footwear, and were certainly wondering who the idiot was dressed for a sales meeting shuffling about on a cold morning in Niagara Falls.  I was wondering that myself.  But since I’d come all this way, I was going to get that picture at Terrapin Point, damn it, as a reward for my stubborn persistence.

      In the back of my mind from the moment I thought up this idea the night before, across the frozen tundra and the treacherous white water of the American Rapids, and then shuffling along the icy walkways where the mist from the falls froze on the paved paths, that there’s no way that the park service would have Terrapin Point open.  It would be way too dangerous having tourists on a sheet of ice inches away from the falls.  People die in summertime when they lean over too far to take a picture.  In winter?  Forget it.  Self-selection is a great theory but who’s going to clean up the mess?  No chance at all it’s going to be open.  And sure enough…

      I laughed to myself, or rather at myself and shuffled the 20 minutes back to where I parked my car where I toweled off my black dress shoes and cranked the heat to the highest setting.  I’d survived my flawed logic and can laugh at myself, but I know I was pretty lucky for a dumb ass business traveller.

      This ill-fated side trip to Terrapin Point ate into the available time I had for my dance with a ghost.  So saved for another day is a stop at the plaque memorializing the spot where President McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition on September 6, 1901.  I’d come across the McKinley Memorial in Canton, Ohio several years ago and was struck by his story.  So learning about this small memorial in Buffalo was almost as alluring to me as going to see the falls.

      The Pan-American Expo was a big deal at the time, and there was a big fight for it between Niagara Falls and Buffalo.  Due to better transportation options in Buffalo and maybe some political muscling, Buffalo won out.  The Exposition showcased technology like X-Rays and electric lights, things that they neglected to use to save the President when he was shot by an anarchist at the Temple of Music.

      Like most expos, the buildings were torn down long ago, and that site is now a neighborhood with a small median of grass where the memorial is.  It’s nothing like the spectacular waterfalls I saw.  But there’s a whisper of history there that I’d like to feel on another day.  How many such memorials do we breeze by, not realizing the stories and the lives of those that came before us?  I’m not a “ghost” kind of guy, but I like to walk in the footsteps of history and better understand those who stood there before me.  Capra on Wednesday on Bridge Street in Seneca Falls, McKinley on Fordham Street in Buffalo was to be Thursday.  But alas, adventure is time-consuming and my career called me back to reality.  Perhaps another day.

    • Seneca Falls: Birthplace of Women’s Rights

      If time allows when I visit a town I try to dig into the history of the place and learn something about it.  I think of it as dancing with the ghosts of history.  And there’s no shortage of history in the northeast.

      Seneca Falls is famous for two things.  As I wrote about in my previous post it was the inspiration for Bedford Falls, the town in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, and the bridge inspired the scene with George saving Clarence.  The second, or more appropriately, the first thing that Seneca Falls is known for is it’s role in Women’s Suffrage.  Seneca Falls was the birthplace of the Women’s Rights Movement in America.

      In 1848 the first Women’s Rights Convention was held at Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls.  300 attendees participated, and five notable women spoke.  The attendees included a mix of women and men, and one notable black participant; Frederick Douglas.  Douglas encouraged the women to include the right to vote in their Declaration of Sentiments.  This document was a highly controversial statement at a time when women were largely seen as inferior to men.  The convention inspired others soon after in Rochester, New York and in Worcester, Massachusetts and opened up the minds of many that women were equal to men.

      It would be another 71 years before Congress gave women the right to vote, and many years after that before women were perceived as equal to men.  Frankly there are still some idiots who think they aren’t.  But the slow march towards equality began in Seneca Falls.

    • It’s a Wonderful Life in Seneca Falls

      The movie It’s a Wonderful Life was set in a town called Bedford Falls.  Which in the real world is apparently Seneca Falls, New York.  According to folklore Frank Capra spent some time in Seneca Falls the year before the film was made.  Looking around, he was inspired him to set the movie there.

      To commemorate this film classic, Seneca Falls has a festival every year in December.  This year it’s December 7-9.  And while the town has changed a lot over the years, there are still some areas that are the same as they were in the 1940’s when the film was made.  Most notably, the bridge that George jumped off is still there.  There’s a plaque on the bridge honoring Antonio Varacalli, who jumped into the river to save a woman who jumped off the bridge.  Antonio saved the woman but perished in the river himself.  It seems Frank Capra saw this plaque and it inspired his version of George jumping in to save his guardian angel Clarence.

      Visiting downtown Seneca Falls during the holiday season, and with snow falling, it’s easy to see what inspired Capra to film the movie here.  There’s a certain vibe downtown that inspires.  Sadly, that vibe doesn’t extend to other parts of town.  Seneca Falls is a gritty factory town, with a smelly landfill between the highway and downtown that fouls the air when the wind blows the wrong way.  Chain stores and Walmart line the road.  In some parts of town it’s more Pottersville than Bedford Falls now.  But downtown on a snow globe night, it’s easy to see Jimmy Stewart running down the street shouting “Merry Christmas!” to one and all.

    • Dancing with Elephants

      Dancing with Elephants

      “One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted.  Do it now.” – Paulo Coelho

      Fresh off a trip to Key West and celebrating family time on Thanksgiving, I’m already thinking about the next trip.  Frankly, I was thinking about the next trip before I took the last trip.  I have a serious case of Wander Lust.  I was watching a scene from Local Hero that inspired me to look up where it was filmed in Scotland.  Turns out it was filmed in several locations, all beautiful.  That led me to Google how long the drive would be from Edinburgh to one of those locations, and that led to a big lump in my throat.  How the heck am I going to pull this trip off with all the other trips I want to do?  Wander lust reality check struck again.

      “Just be, and enjoy being.  If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything.” – Eckhart Tolle

      Thanksgiving brought together family, and ever so briefly, filled the empty nest before the kids went back to school.  They say that you’ve used up 90% of the time you’ll spend with your children and parents by the time you graduate college.  That’s certainly true if you live far away or travel often.  We have to remember that we’re all here for a brief time and embrace the time we have together.  It’s all just a blip of time.  Think about how fast this year has gone as we approach the end of the eleventh month.  Then mix in the reality of how little control we have over our time together.  I’ve watched too many people exit this world too soon.  A person I worked with lost her husband to a heart attack on Thanksgiving night.  They’d been married for a little more than a year.  You really never know how much time you have with someone. You never know how much time you have left yourself.  Do it now.

      “… we need to hurry.  Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding – our grasp of the world – may be gone before we get there.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      “Think of yourself as dead.  You have lived your life.  Now take what’s left and live properly.”
      – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      So there it is; the dueling priorities of time with family and friends versus time exploring the world.  I’ve always said I love travel, it’s the tradeoff of time away from family that I hate.  Best to take them along if possible.  But that gets prohibitively expensive quickly.  And there’s the dilemma.  One I confess I haven’t mastered yet.  Balancing work and family and financial responsibility and elephant hunting for a “successful” life.  Challenging to say the least.

      The year started with hope and adventure in Portugal.  The elation of hiking along the cliffs of Sagres and watching surfers bob in the swells as the sun set was offset by my wish that family and friends were there to enjoy it with me.  Key West was delightful.  But more so because Kris was there with me.  Hiking the Appalachian Trail is a life goal, but one that will come at a cost should I pursue it.  It’s unlikely that Kris would go, and regardless, for every moment spent hiking the AT, I’d be subtracting moments I’d be spending with family or on some other activity.

      “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it?  Do you realize that you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?” – Robert Cohn to Jacob Barnes, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

      Such is the curse of a short life.  And the blessing of a life lived in relative freedom and prosperity that grants us the opportunities to experience these things at all.  The vast majority of people who have lived or live in third world countries or under totalitarian conditions couldn’t imagine the opportunities to see and do the things that we can do now.  Wars and disease and dictatorships have conspire against the vast majority of humanity’s hopes and dreams.  So I’m at once filled with gratitude for that which I can experience and frustration that I can’t experience even more.  Greedy?  Perhaps, but then again, wouldn’t it be worse to ignore the opportunities presented to you?

      As I wrote about previously, the expression “I have seen the elephant” meant that you’ve experienced a rare, bucket list thing.  Seeing the pyramids or the Great Wall of China or the Eiffel Tower are “elephants”.  Seeing an elephant, before zoos and in-captivity breeding programs, was once incredibly rare for most people on earth.  Having seen the literal elephant, visiting notable places or experiencing notable things – that Grand Canyon moment if you will, is the figurative “elephant” that I pursue now.

      And I have many elephants on the dance card.  Extended stays in Scotland, Dublin, Paris, Hawaii, New Zealand, Machu Picchu are on the card, and so is viewing the Aurora Borealis and hiking the Appalachian Trail and sailing in the Greek Isles.  All elephants I’d like to dance with before I take my last breath.  Hopefully I’ll find a way to check each of those boxes before I reach age 60, and maybe dwell in a few spots along the way.  And in that time I’m already balancing both Ian and Emily graduating college and hitting their own life milestones.  And time with family and friends, and making a small dent in the universe in career and work contribution.  Prioritization.  Eliminating things that aren’t as important.  Focusing on the things that matter most.  There’s no time to lose really.

    • Key West

      Key West

      I’ve been to Key West twice in my lifetime, but feel like I know it as well as any city I haven’t lived in.  There’s a mystique that surrounds this old town, founded in legendary characters and salty songs. It was once the richest town in America until the Great Depression made it the poorest.  Jimmy Buffet built this town back up, but so did Ernest Hemingway, and Tennessee Williams and the tourists who followed these characters to the end of A1A.  Above all, Key West is a drinking town.  And what goes better with drinking than music?  Some of the biggest drinking towns also have the liveliest music scenes; Key West, Nashville, New Orleans, Austin.

      The charm of Key West is partly its size – 4 miles by 2 miles, and partly it’s location as the southernmost point in the continental United States.  But the laid back charm combined with all those other factors makes it magical.  Key West is a tourist town, but it doesn’t feel like those other tourist towns a cruise ship might drop you off at.  No hard press to buy this souvenir now!  No barter culture that I detected.

      Duval Street is a lovely stroll.  A bar seemingly at every turn, and a guitar playing in just about every one of them.  Hemingway’s house and the lighthouse across the street, having our token picture at the Southernmost Point, Mallory Square, the Old Seaport, sunset cruising, Fort Zac Taylor and swimming at the State Park were all highlight moments of course.  But it was going with Kris that opened my perspective up quite a bit.  I’m usually traveling alone for work, and we don’t have the opportunity to play tourist all that much as a family.  Getting up early, driving to the airport and flying to Miami, renting a convertible and driving to Key West was a shared experience.   We simply don’t have enough of those.

      That drive from Miami to Key West is in parts beautiful, but in other parts ugly highway sprawl.  But it was an adventure in both directions, especially when you look for stops along the way.  We stopped for lunch on the way down, and at a bar and for Key Lime Pie on the drive back up.  So Key West joins the Alaska cruise, the two Caribbean cruises, the Bahamas trip, Disney x 3, the Sedona/Grand Canyon trip and other trips for shared experiences.  We need many more of these.

    • Seeing the Elephant

      There’s an old expression that people used to ask when asking if someone had experienced something unique or special.  Have you seen the elephant?  Today seeing an elephant isn’t particularly hard to do – go to a zoo and there they are.  They used to be a big draw in circuses as well, until people realized how traumatic it was for the elephants.

      At any rate, seeing the elephant meant checking a box. Today people might talk about it as a bucket list item.  Have you seen Niagara Falls?  Have you seen the elephant?  Have you been to Paris in the springtime?  Have you seen the elephant?  According to Jon Sterngass, “seeing the elephant” also signified a quest for satisfactions in disreputable quarters.”  Wikipedia describes another meaning for seeing the elephant for soldiers – have you been to war?  Have you seen battle?  Wiki describes seeing the elephant in a negative connotation – yeah I saw it but wish I hadn’t.

      I confess to not really knowing the term.  I’d heard it before but it didn’t resonate with me.  Seeing the elephant?  Whatever.  Didn’t care.  I’d seen elephants since I was a kid.  But the term stuck for me when I read a Sports Illustrated article about the 18 inning World Series game 3, in which Tom Verducci compared watching that game to “I have seen the elephant”.

      I’ve seen a few metaphorical elephants in my lifetime.  I’m hunting many more.  Currently seeing the aurora borealis is by far tops on my bucket list of elephants.  Paris, Scotland, Hawaii, hiking the Appalachian Trail, hell, even seeing the last six episodes of Game of Thrones…  the elephant doesn’t have to be big to be meaningful.

      Life is very short, and as the expression goes, “Man Plans, and God Laughs”.  I keep aiming for the elephants, and hope that I might see all of them before I check out of here.  Without goals, what would life be?

    • Hardtack

      Hardtack

      In the world of refrigeration and preservatives that we live in today, we don’t think a lot about how long our food lasts.  Sure, canned food and beef jerky are still a part of our diets, but in general we aren’t thinking about enduring long periods of time without a source of food.  When I look at the diets of sailors, soldiers and explorers a few hundred years ago some items come up again and again.  A ration of rum was certainly expected.  But so too was hardtack.

      Hardtack is made from flour and water, with some salt to help preserve it and hopefully make it more palatable.  But taste wasn’t the priority with hardtack, it was to have something to sustain you when fresher food wasn’t available.  Dip it in water, tea or if you were lucky whiskey or rum to soften it up to save what was left of your teeth.

      Hardtack was called many things, depending on who was using it for food.  Army Bread, sailor’s bicuits, and a large assortment of derogatory names was used to describe this staple.  Ultimately it was often the only thing between carrying on and starvation.

      Thinking about traditional foods like hardtack help me appreciate being alive today.  Life is much easier now, and our food is so much more available and palatable than it was not that long ago.  I’m going to have a turkey wrap for lunch today, with avocado.  I’ll be sure to savor it.

    • World Series

      World Series

      Sleep deprivation is common when your team is in the World Series, and the 18 inning marathon that ended at 3:30 this morning set me up for a rough day today.  The Red Sox and Dodgers played an epic Game 3, and I was in awe of Nathan Eovaldi pitching in relief for 90+ pitches of shutout baseball until the Dodgers finally hit a walk-off home run.  I’ll save the hyperbole for others, but it was one of those games that you’ll remember.

      Watching sports is a time suck.  And there’s no greater time suck than baseball.  That game robbed me of over seven hours of my life, and taxed me of energy I might otherwise use for a productive Saturday morning.  But the tradeoff is the shared joy and agony of cheering for the same team.  Sports are a distraction from the darker stuff that happens in life, and offers some of the only unscripted moments you’ll find on television.  But at some point you have to get on with your own life.
      Being a Boston sports fan offers many opportunities for joy and agony.  For my own sanity I try to keep the regular season games to a minimum but double down during the playoffs.  We’ve been spoiled with the four professional sports teams in Boston, but the tradeoff is time.  We all have to ask what is the best use of my limited time on this planet?  For me the drama of sport is worth the exchange.  But it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if the Red Sox closed this out in two games instead of wringing me through four more.