Technical Writer

Caribbean Cruise Aboard the Crown Princess

Here are some photos to show the interior of a cabin aboard the Crown Princess, which incidentally happened to be mine and my husband's, in mid-January in the Caribbean.   

This is the Crown Princess mini-suite, which simply means that there was a sitting area with a couch and a couple of chairs, and a small balcony with four lounge chairs and a table, quite useful for having breakfast in the cabin at 7:30 a.m., and for standing at the rail to let the night air whip my hair into a salty tangle.

I took the photo before we unpacked our bags. The unusual bed cover is to protect the coverlet from the suitcases flung on top.  We didn't jockey our own cases. Passengers relinquish their bags before they board, and by evening, our bags had been delivered to our door. We carried aboard only modest hand luggage.

  Here is another shot to show you the small yet adequate cabin, which was mid-ship on the so-called Dolphin deck, which has a significant advantage in that  when one stands looking down, over the rail to the ocean, there is no view of other balconies. All other balcony cabins overlook balconies below, and our Dolphin deck escaped that fate because the lifeboats are slung beneath our deck, which extends to cover them.  Of course, I could look up at people watching me, but most people were not watching the sea. Instead they were at the casino, in the vast auditorium, in the remarkable number of small, intimate lounges and bars, or dashing about in the noon-day sun in port.

I want to show you the flowers my husband had delivered to our cabin. I put them outside to enjoy during our alfresco breakfasts. 

Our cabin was serviced at least three times a day by Lauro, from the Philippines.  He was responsible for 17 cabins, every day of the week. On shore, I talked to cruise ship personnel and learned that employees of the ship line work on 10-month contracts, and work 11-hour days, with a couple of hours mid day for a break, which they might use to dash ashore to enjoy private time. 

The service staff are usually either from Eastern Europe--Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria--or from either the Philippines or the Latin American countries. I imagine that the competition for these jobs is fierce, with an eager pool of willing workers at the ready back home. As a result, the service employees are really top-notch. One cruise ship staff member told me that his salary provides a better-than-average income for his family in the Philippines, and that he can send his sons to a private school. He added that when he is home, he is treated like a king. Our waiter and our cabin steward have been at the job for many years, having worked up to their present positions.

The officers, crisp and polished, are often from sea-faring families, and pleasant to talk to, but we did not frequently interact.

The Crown Princess is a new and pretty ship, with commissioned art everywhere, at every stairway and landing, on the walls of public rooms, and even in the cabins; it is everywhere. The art is mass-market and meant to please the viewer.

Here are a few pictures, which I have requested to use, but have not yet been given permission. I might have to remove them at some point. The works are far better to view on board ship.

 

The mosaic floor is in the central atrium that rises three floors and is surrounded by graceful spiral staircases. Musicians entertained here in the evenings and at night, and in other places besides.  The musicians are classically trained string and wind ensemble performers.

I took these ship photos on the first day in a port, when most people were ashore or in the many dining rooms or other public spaces, and not here, in the morning.  As for lounging about like a kidney, nothing can beat the area on the top deck, called the sanctuary, where children are not permitted.  Again, either no one has found this spot, or they are all at the beach on shore. I took the picture late morning on the second day out.

In all, I would return to the Crown Princess, if i could avoid the rest of the 3,000 passengers, which I managed to do this day.  In fact, a person is never amid the crowds due to the design of this ship, which cost 1billion dollars to build and furnish.

Angels Over Grand Turk Sept. 07, 2008, the Islanders Say

In the memory of the very old who have lived here all their lives, the island of Grand Turk had always escaped hurricanes.  There had not been a great hurricane since 1949 except for two, including the one that hit the island in 1960.   That, compared to Hurricane Ike, was like a child’s watering can upturned on the sunny beach, but in early September, Grand Turk was lashed by the fury of hell, but no one died.

Grand Turk is the capitol of the British overseas territory of Turks and Caicos, and a new governor arrives every four years at this outcropping of eight small islands in the ocean, west of Cuba and north of the Dominican Republic.  The governor presides over a place named for an interesting species of cactus, and where Columbus dropped anchor October 12, 1492.  Later, pirates ruled in the 17th and 18th centuries, and after the coast was clear salt rakers arrived from Bermuda and settled down to export their haul.  The salt trade eventually collapsed, and now the principle employer on Grand Turk is the British government. 

Of the 3,000 people on Grand Turk, I met police, small shop owners, and taxi drivers and tour operators (who will take you all around in an hour) and all of them exhibit great devotion to their island home as is no wonder, because the island is a place of great beauty.

Grand Turk was in the path of Hurricane Ike in the days leading to its collision with the island.  The islanders were not especially alarmed by the approaching storm because Hurricane Hannah had flooded the place just three days before, and even up to the very end the people believed they were safe.  Does lightening strike the same place three days apart?  As it happened, it did.

This is the story two people told me.

A lone British military helicopter pilot was aloft, tracking the hurricane and keeping watch over the islands.  When the pilot realized that Grand Turk would be at the center of a new storm against all predictions when even Hannah was a surprise, he flew to warn the island because by then communication had been broken.  To prepare for the worst that he expected, he stopped at a supply base to pack in as many empty body bags as the helicopter could hold. 

As he flew into the gathering storm, he had to change course through raging wind and rain because human bodies were storm-tossed through the air.  He dipped and dodged around the human forms, and when he finally landed after the hurricane's ferocity had passed, he believed all the islanders would be dead. 

The pilot made for the island’s hospital and delivered the body bags to the nurse who told him body bags were unneeded for in fact no one had died.  Ninety-five percent of all buildings were destroyed. Houses were washed away or smashed and vegetation was upturned, but no one had died, although they had stood in their houses with water up to their chests.  The wild horses?  These wise and sturdy creatures, descendants of the horses of the Spanish Conquistadors, every one of them made for the relative safety of the island’s airport runway and they survived, too. (Look for the airport near the bottom of the map. The island is only 7 miles long, and 1.5 miles wide.)

The islanders of Grand Turk love their island in the deep blue sea.  They have theories about what the helicopter pilot knows that he saw in the raging air above Grand Turk that day, and while they do not forebear to speak of it, it is not for an outsider to write another word about their story.

Here is a link about the island and Hurricane. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4699477.ece.

Backward Glance

The gangway is never a place for farewell.    The departure from ship is the denouement of a voyage, after farewells have been said, or left unsaid.   I could have told him that in six months we would meet at the top of the Empire State Building, but I did not. I will live with that look of reproach upon Nick Ferrante's face, but I will not succumb to it.

Was it the hat?  I have always been fond of men in hats, having married the best of them.

Full Moon Start of a Voyage

Tonight is the night of the full Wolf Moon. This moon is also at perigee, the closest it will come to us in 2009 in its eliptical orbit of the earth--an auspicious start of the voyage.    We ship out just before the peak of high tide tomorrow evening, which is at 7:12 p.m. from the Port Everglades turning basin.  I will stand on the balcony in the salt air and watch the lights of Florida recede while the moon rises.

Sailing Away

http://www.princess.com/bridgecams/kp/crown_bridgecam.html

Tomorrow morning I embark on an excellent adventure to the Caribbean.  I am posting the webcam so someone might alert the captain if it appears that Cary Grant is making any untoward advances upon me. Oh, I know that the good man is no longer with us, but time aboard ship is mutable, and further, although I am married, aboard ship no one will notice, and my gown is always fetching.

A Man at a German Christmas Market

The huge Christmas market in Nuremberg is over rated, in my opinion.  Give me the small, local markets where the townspeople display their own wares or sell their hot wine, gingerbread, and every good thing to eat.  The markets are also a good place to observe people at their convivial best. 

For instance, here is a handsome man of Germanic extraction.  Note the gleam in his eye.  He is probably going to buy something nice.  In fact, he did buy something nice, and then he took it all back to his hotel and distributed the goods to all the employees.  Notice the fine hat and professorial bearing. This is an individual at home in the world, where in fact he has lived all his life when not lost in profound thought.

I learned that this person's ancestors came to the United States from northern Germany 100 years ago and he learned the German language from his great aunt, when he was but a pup.  He calls his language skill "kitchen German," but he uses it bravely, and with special success, especially in tiny villages. He had to improve his kitchen German to earn his PhD, he told me, and that was back in the day when a PhD actually meant something.  So here he is now, back in Germany (remember, he travels all the time) to continue his studies at the famous Goethe Institute.  What an excellent fellow.

German Village of Glass Blowers, Lauscha

Lauscha is the very heart of the German, Christmas glass-ornament industry of small companies, many of which have been family run for decades, if not centuries. To celebrate the Christmas market this year, prized model trains have been set up in a classroom in the school near the rail head in this town in the former East.  Someone has made a model of little Lauscha, and hauled it out for all to admire as part of the annual Christmas Market in December, just a few weeks ago. 

The town was built along the river, in the cleft of the valley surrounded by steep, forested mountains, and a narrow road runs along the river, and a small, two-car train follows the road and the river through villages along the way north from  nearby Coburg. The road by the train station is paralleled by a roadway on each side, and all three roads run through town, encircled by connecting roadways.

In the town live 4,000 thousand people, and today, a bright Christmas market day in mid-December, you can follow the crowded main street to the top of the town to the town hall, and inside are rooms set aside by glass blowers to demonstrate and sell their wares.

The earliest photos taken in Lauscha are of families in their homes, sitting and working on decorating glass ornaments at the kitchen table. Glass has been blown in Lauscha since the 1597, in the forest of Thuringwald along the sandy banks of the brisk river Lauscha.

In 1846 Albert, Victoria's beloved Bavarian prince, decorated a Christmas tree with blown glass ornaments from the villages near his home in Coburg, and ornaments from the remote land come to the notice of rich Londoners.  The illustrated London News showed a pretty drawing that Christmas of the royal family gathered around their gaily bedecked tree.  Within just a few years, blown glass ornaments from Lauscha became popular in England.

The woman in the photo is painting a glass ball just blown.  She paints a bit, then twirls the ball in its stick handle while she   dusts glitter over the wet paint.  She repeats the process until the ornament is complete.  The glass painter looks as if she could have sat for the photo in 1950, not just a few weeks ago.   Notice the lighted torch at the end of the table. The glass blower had stepped away for just a moment and kept the tool aflame. There are early pictures from the beginning of photography that are not dissimilar to this. 

The ornaments may be entirely mouth blown, or they may be blown into a mold as are the red and golden pine cones in the basket here.  I saw a humble basket of simple, round mouth-blown balls on the floor and they were exquisite.  I imagine them on a table-top tree as the only but perfect ornamentation. 

Wurth Art in Schwabisch Hall

A wonderful occurrence in the art world culminated in Schwabisch Hall, Germany, in mid-November, just before I visited this town of 36,000 people in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg.  The town had become the landing place in 2003 for a princely acquisition of Northern Renaissance paintings when patron of the arts and industrialist Reinhold Wurth bought the entire 64-piece Furstlich Furstenberg collection, works by Swiss and German masters including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, the unknown Master of Messkirch, and other luminaries of medieval Europe. 

 

The collection is housed now in the redundant but recently renovated Johnannite church acquired by Mr. Wurth to house this treasure. The church-gallery is at the head of the Neue Strasse bridge over the river Kocher, and it is across the street from the magnificent Kunsthalle-Wurth museum that opened in 2001 in this ancient town.

 

Schwabisch Hall was settled in a crook of the meandering river Kocher, which flows north from headwaters in the Swabian Alps to join the Neckar a little more than 100 miles away. The Celts arrived in the river valley and began to distill salt from the local mineral springs as early s the 5th century.  By the 12th century, Hall, as it was then known,was a town tributary to the local nobility.  Disease, famine, and war revaged the town over the centuries, and the hand of man turned against itself yet again in World War II, when a collection and transport center for Jews was established at the town railroad station.

 

Situated in the American occupation zone, the town rebuilt itself and the largely intact, beautiful town center of ancient houses remains as well as the later Baroque buildings around the town square, which were not seriously damaged by Allied bombs at the end of the war.  (See my posts from this city, dated November 27 and 28, and December 5.) In the decades after the war, prosperity asserted itself, and in recent years a giant savings and loan banking corporation, headquartered in town, enriched the city by tens of millions of euros a year. Within the last year, however, the corporation has suffered significant business losses and can no longer pay the city any of the 54 million euros that the town had come to expect annually, and the city is experiencing a great loss.

 

This time, however, there is more to the city than money from the salt trade, banking money, or even the prosperity that comes with being the county seat, for such it is.  Schwabisch Hall now houses one of the great collections of Northern Renaissance art, thanks to Reinhold Wurth, who has been a great benefactor to the city itself, and all of Germany as well, for decades.

 

Before the medieval art became available, in 2001 Mr. Wurth’s new Kunsthalle-Wurth museum opened to display modern art. This museum honors the depiction of perception and the human struggle, which in the example of the present exhibition of agonistic sculpture and paintings by Georg Baselitz means that the museum is the embodiment of a wedge of light supported by glass and steel in which a meaningful interpretation of experience stands witness. The walk through the exhibition changed me.  I do not write this lightly.

 

I saw the Baselitz exhibition in December (http://kunst.wuerth.com/en/kunsthalle-wuerth/kunsthalle-wuerth.php) and wondered initially why I was there; I am happier studying antiquities. The Baselitz art is more than edgy.  Much of it wrestles with the screaming memory of war and want, and inhumanity.  The art is large and requires vast, cavernous space.  Its themes are not intimate, but their effect is personal. 

 

The art is presented through the auspices of Mr. Wurth, who, speaking in a different context, has been quoted, “Living and working with art is an expression of a high quality of life.” (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PAL/is_/ai_n15950298) Mr. Wurth believes that an important element of the success of his industrial empire is due to the literal place art has within the walls of his corporation, but he has also turned his gaze out to the community of Europe and the world.  Examples of his search for the significance of understanding that strengthens people led to his commissioning music by Philip Glass, and in 2005 and 2006, his Kunsthalle-Wurth museum-display of work about Abu Ghraib as part of the exhibition of the work of Colombian artist Fernando Botero. 

 

The town of Schwabisch Hall is a fortunate beneficiary of Mr. Wurth’s belief that living with art is an expression of a high quality of life, and I am writing about him because his aesthetic sense and largess have positively entrained the people in contact with his gifts.

Through art Schwabisch Hall continues to grow.  Just two years after the opening of the mighty Kunsthalle-Wurth museum, Mr. Wurth bought from the Furstenberg family a collection of Northern Renaissance paintings that otherwise could have been dispersed.  The collection is important in its parts, and a treasure in the whole.  So great a treasure in fact that Mr. Wurth bought the redundant church and reconstituted it as a museum to house the new collection. 

 

A redundant church is one no longer used for worship.  The church may be decommissioned or deconsecrated in some ritual way, but I do not know about the church itself.  At Mr. Wurth’s behest, however, the building has been turned into the Johanniterhalle, a fitting repository for some of the best art in the world.  The museum opened only recently, and it is across the narrow street from the Kunsthalle-Wurth. http://kunst.wuerth.com/en/johanniterhalle/johanniterhalle.php 

 

I have long admired the Northern Renaissance and its art.  This art trailed the Italian Renaissance by at least 100 years, and depended on the indigenous upheavals in perspective that followed sweeping social, religious, and political changes north of the Alps.  More specifically, the Northern Renaissance interest in morality of individual, rather than collective, humanity spread like a wildfire along the valley of the river Rhine, and then across the continent from there in art, music, and literature. Much of the art remained religious because life was organized by religious forms and its inherent contradictions and antagonisms.

 

Virtually all the art in the Johanniterhalle has a religious association, and many of the painters are known, but among the best is the unknown Master of Messkirch, whose name comes from the town of the same name in the south of Germany, where many of his paintings were commissioned by the rich for the altar of the monastery there.  The great painter’s name has been lost, but patient scholarship has mooted a few candidates, including Joseph Maler of Balingen.  

 

Here is a side panel of a ten-panel altarpiece, eight of which are here at the Johanniterhalle (the other two are in other museums in Europe). Download Master_of_Messkirch_St_Paul_First_Hermit[1]This painting is from the second quarter of the 1500s, and I chose it because it is a miracle of fresh perspective, and because I was in its presence and stood before it and all the other magnificent work in the collection.

 

I have scanned this crooked copy of this altar side panel image from the weighty and detailed book Old Masters in the Wurth Collection, which I found at the museum store. The book was published in 2005 by Swiridoff, although the date is inferred because I do not see a publication date in the book.  I must mention a disclaimer found at the bottom of the Web page http://kunst.wuerth.com/en/johanniterhalle/johanniterhalle.php in English:  All activities of the museums Wurth are the projects of the Adolf Wurth GmbH & Co. KG. 

I have a great deal more to write about Schwabisch Hall and the museums and art found in the town, and that will come in future posts.

 

(A museum representative has given me permission to use images from the book.)

Kachelofen, the Green Tile Stoves of Southern Germany

These are examples of the ubiquitous, and usually green, tile stove common in the Franconian region of Bavaria, in the south of Germany.  The kachelofen, as the stoves are called, are common elsewhere, but it was in this historic region in northern Bavaria that I first found them.

While these stoves are made to burn wood, many are gas fired, but the stoves look the same, and they are a formidable presence in any room. Notice the antlers now positioned high above the coat and hat racks used today.  These are deer antlers, but much smaller racks elsewhere once belonged to the little alpine chamois, now officially protected from hunters. 

Many of these stoves are made in a village about 20 kilometers from Bamberg by about a dozen families.  While green is typical, stoves are made in brown and other colors, and there are fine examples of blue and white decorative tile stoves in the fine houses of rich merchants, or in castles whose owners had modern notions.

 

 

The next photo is of Klaus Hocher, in the breakfast room of his Hotel Spitzweg, in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.  Notice the green stove in the background.  Herr Hocher, an accomplished man with international experience in hotels and restaurants, is a superlative host in the most beautiful town in Germany.  Of Herr Hocher I have written in the piece Good Beginnings in Germany, on November 24.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is yet another stove, with a stylish, modern bonnet that bespeaks self confidence in both stove and owner.  These stoves have a personality, but their chief aim is to keep the place from freezing. 

If they can accomplish their mission, who would gainsay their vernacular whimsy?

I appreciate stoves since the days when I lived with a Glenwood Modern E wood burning stove that was the hearth of my old country house in New Hampshire, in the United States.  Each of the three main rooms downstairs had a fireplace around the central chimney, but the Glenwood in the kitchen was the center of the house. 

Imagine installing a tile stove in your dwelling in middle Europe in older days--what a statement of the family's prosperity.  Above the stove from the rafters you would string ropes through large pretzel-shaped breads.  You could hang clothing to dry nearby.  On the bench surrounding the stove you would place the baby's bed, and you could sit there as well, especially if you were old and your joints ached.  The cat would curl up nearby, and the old dog would not be too far away.

Snowy Afternoon and Medieval Art in Bamberg

There is something about being the only customers on a snowy day in Bamberg, Germany that makes shop keepers open doors to inner sanctums of whatever they hold most dear. 

After we talked to a keeper of a small antiques shop about his silver and a few fine oil paintings, and examined the workings of every one of his old pocket watches, the fellow brought out a photo of his dog to show me.  The dog was standing on a comfy dog bed in front of the green tile stove that all Germans we met seem to have, and the dog was wearing red reindeer antlers that the fellow's daughters put on the dog.  I recognized the Australian shepherd breed, and that elicited the entire pack of photos of the dog and its mate and a female friend of the shop owner.  The shop owner confided that his wife did not like him to spend time with his rather pretty friend. 

In the next block I visited a firm that deals in exceptional medieval European antiquities. The world of this art is small and well connected, so I will not name this fine company so I can discuss it freely. We had entered the modern art wing of the firm, and we gained entry to the medieval art wing, which the daughter of the owner opened for us. I examined everything and reveled in the presence of museum-quality work, and in fact the firm sells most of its findings to museums.

Virtually all of the finest work for sale had ecclesiastical beginnings, either from churches or the collections of private priests, and the pious rich.The art is rarely acquired at auctions, and is bought through private hands so the artifacts remain fresh in the market.  The firm's owner has an international network of buyers and sellers.

We admired yet again Jonah and his whale, carved in the Alps in the 1450s, and sighed in dismay that we had to leave such stimulating surroundings, and then the young woman asked us if we would like to see more wood carvings, and she led us through a back room, through a vaulted passage and down a stone stairway into what looked like a crypt.

She turned on the lights and the room sprang to medieval life.  A long refrectory table surrounded by ancient chairs stood in the center of the low-ceilinged room, and on the table, and mounted on the walls and poised on pedestals, were beautiful wood carvings of great antiquity, a fortune in art.  We had a piece-by-piece tour of a gallery that would be the centerpiece of any great museum's medieval art exhibition.  I was allowed to handle and closely examine work carved 600 years ago.  

We left the gallery eventually and found our way to yet another brewery, this time the oldest brewery in the city.  This brewery had been commissioned by the bishop in 1533, who desired to have his personal source of brown beer.  The tile stove in this brewery was not green, but dark brown.

Smoke Beer in Bamberg

It’s best to have dinner in Bamberg where local people dine, so we followed our noses down a winding alley (past the café where earlier in the day we drank steamed chocolate), around the blind corner, and to the lamp-lighted front door of the Schlenkerla on Dominikanerstrasse, and believe me, those Dominicans had their work cut out for them in years past, for the best beer hall in Bavaria is but a two-minute walk from the church, where a thirsty man can have a second salvation hard upon the first.

The beer is famous throughout Germany, and Joe bought a few bottles in Frederick, Maryland about 20 years ago, the first and only time he had ever seen it until we came upon the brauerhauss in the cold, snowy evening, with its inviting lamp by the door.  The beer is a smokebeer, or Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier, in German, where all the nouns are capitalized. We are here at a propitious time, for the bock beer is tapped only from October until Christmas, and it pours dark and smoky straight from the bottom of wooden barrels. This beer has been brewed in this building, in the same way since 1678.

Not recognizing the door to the marginally more genteel dining room (the Dominikanerklause, from the year 1310) on the other side of the flagstone covered inner-courtyard off the street, we entered the bierstube instead, and time began to reverse itself.  The place is full of men. 

Convivial men, and lots of them, were seated eight each at what looked like red beech tables, scrubbed clean and worn nearly white over the years.  The room was long, the ceiling low, and the massive beams were as dark as the rich, nearly black ceiling, for you see,  the wood, when it was new had been coated with ox blood to preserve it from insects.  Time and the smoky pipes of men had turned this into a gathering place to drink or eat with other men, and incomers are welcomed to the open seats at the tables. 

I hung up my coat and looked up at old racks upon racks that had once been on the heads of the alpine chamois, the sturdy little goat-like creature now protected from hunting.

There is a green tile stove in the room. The green stove, although its size and shape may vary, seems nearly ubiquitous in restaurants and in older, traditional private houses in the region.  We had just come from an antique shop converted 50 years ago by the owner from what had been the last wood-fired bakery in Bamberg.  When the bread-baking fire died, the stove took six weeks to cool.  Bread-baking stoves and green tile room-heating stoves hold their heat.

Joe broke into genial conversation over supper with the men at our table.  One of them drank from a personal stein kept for him at the bar counter.  He kept the pewter top down to keep beer and froth clean.  Our dinner was simple—potato pancakes with cheese, but platters of a favorite meal were circling the hall, and a man at our table tucked into his, which upon sidelong examination was a huge pork haunch with three inches of femur sticking out of it. He devoured it.

Dinner over and hours of conversation in broken German and English to the better, we walked home to our hotel over snow-covered cobblestones, which if you are not careful can break your ankle.

Hitting the Books in Schwabisch Hall

One of the chief treasures of this ancient town in old Swabia is the town library.  Actually, there are two libraries; the new, beautiful and glass walled, four-storey building on the pedestrian way in the center town, and the single, lovely room in the town hall where the survivors of wars, reformation, and rats are now housed in majestic simplicity. 

Before I describe the books, I must tell you about how they are housed.  To enter the old book room, the librarian opens a double, fire-proof, keyed door.  The room is small, about 25 by 15 feet, and softly lighted. The graceful arched stone doorway into the room and another on the far side of the little room, leading to a workroom, draw the eye up to a single vaulted arch. The base of the arch seems to rest on top the walls. The vaulted ceiling is plastered white.

There are two levels of books circling the walls, and each level has five shelves, with the biggest books on the lowest and longest shelves.  The top shelves on the balcony are shorter in length than the ones beneath so that the balcony shelves form their own arch up to the ceiling.  To reach the balcony that circles three sides of the room, there are two open but banistered stairways, one on each side of the stone arch doorway.  All of the books on each level may be reached by a person of average height. There are no ladders here.

The wooden bookshelves are painted a faded and rubbed apple green overtop a darker green.  Painted onto the roof of the under-balcony is a geometric pattern in dark red and gold, and dark green.  The floor of the balcony is edged with an elaborate crown molding, painted in the same colors, and with great restraint.  The entire room is quietly, serenely elegant.  In the center of the room is a long, narrow table of oak.  What better place to spend hours hitting the books?

Books fill the shelves and are piled book upon book on the library table.  The old books are facing spine-side out, and their covers are leather or parchment, and frequently leather-covered wood boards.  Many of them are fastened closed with leather and iron clasps with intricate designs worked onto the metal surface. You can’t open a big book one clasp at a time. The way to open a great big volume is to slam your two hands down hard on the flat surface. The clasps will pop open for you.  

These walls of ancient books blend their colors so that the impression is a wall of faded grey and taupe.  These are very old books.  The library at Schwabisch Hall has manuscripts dating from the 900s. The treasure room I was in held the books from the dawn of the age of printing, the very dawn.  In fact many of these books were printed here, on paper made in the locality.  Many books have gold gilt on the edges of the pages, top, bottom and side to keep moisture and insects from attacking the books side on.

The gilt edges have been tapped gently on with a small hammer and a fanciful pattern is stamped onto the gold.  After the Reformation, many of the earliest hand-scribed manuscripts in Schwabisch Hall were torn apart and their parchment pages were reused, either buffed down and printed, or used to bind new books.  Many small books printed after Martin Luther's time are bound in gorgeous pages of early church music, all red and black hand lettered notes writ large to be seen by a choir.  Better to reuse the cursed stuff than burn it all.

The contents, you ask?  I just shivered, and not just because it’s cold outside and I have all windows cracked open so I can listen to the merriment outside in the town Christmas market below my window at the town tower where I am staying.  A while ago, a talented clarinetist was playing some American jazz and the international students were shouting out the words to When the Saints Go Marching In.  Now, a single flute is singing carols of the season.  There is laughter and conversation, and the music.

The books are a book drunkard’s dream. The books may weigh 30 pounds, for use in the library, while the smallest may be slipped in your cassock pocket for reading by candle light in your cold, bare cell. Come to Schwabisch Hall to look at small drawings made in the margins by the literate clergy.  Feast on old maps showing the vast island of California of the coast of the New World.  Read (if you can) the commentary to scripture, the scripture printed in a small center square of a double page that is mostly commentary.  Look upon illustrations by Albrecht Durer—still in the book and not hanging on someone’s wall.

Page after page of richness and quietness, soft lights and reverence. 

Hot Spiced Wine

Only red wine will do for this drink, and you don't need expensive wine because you are going to pour a bottle or two into a pot, and warm it slowly over a low flame.  Into the wine put cinnamon sticks or just sprinkle some powdered cinnamon in the pot.  Slice up a couple of oranges, and maybe a lemon, and add a few whole cloves.  Add a little sugar to taste if you want.  This is the basic recipe.  You may add a few anise stars, maybe a little ginger, whatever you might enjoy that smells like Christmas to you.  Drink it piping hot, in a mug.  Why stop at one?  Remember, if you boil the brew you'll lose the alcohol, and what's the point of that?

Schwabisch Hall Christmas Market

Today, November 28, is a giant shopping day in Germany, and not because it is the day after the American Thanksgiving.  The stores offer big sales, but it is only a small part of what is really the big event here in Schwabisch Hall, and that is the start of the Christmas market. 

The Christmas market is throughout the center of town, extending to the tower gate under which is our small apartment.  When I look out the front door I see directly across the cobble stones the tiny door built into the wall that allows a small man to climb through after the gate is locked at night.  Oh--wrong century. The gate was locked in medieval times, and there was a night guard to admit the laggard farm hand or drunken lout who overstayed his time elsewhere.  No decent women were abroad after sunset.

I, however, plan to be out tonight with the crowds and the laughter and singing and hot spiced wine and wooden stalls alight with hand-worked ornamentstoysclothinggingerbreadcandycanesicedcakes and more, more.  A feature of Christmas market stalls is that each little roof is decorated.  I have watched the family closest to my door as they have worked for days preparing their stall, and this morning, the father decorated the roof.  Up went a shaggy camel, gaily caparisoned, and wise men in cloths of gold. The entire downtown, a network of cobblestone streets that are narrow pedestrian ways, will be ablaze all weekend, but not with work for the night-watchman to decry.

Schwabisch Hall, City of Salt and Night Lights

About 50 kilometers east of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and a 2.5-hour train ride (alternatively, a taxi can close the distance in 45 minutes), is the equally old city of Schwabisch Hall. Hall means "a mound of salt," and this town grew as rich as its neighbor by distilling and selling salt. 

By the 5th century, the Celts discovered salty springs here and in the mid-11th century when the Benedictine abbey was consecrated, the city was officially recorded as a free imperial city in the annals of the the Holy Roman Empire. Bountiful taxes were paid directly to the emperor and the city was not beholden to the abbey or any feudal lord.

While I do not know this, I suspect that the word beholden, from Middle English and dating from the 14 century, may have derived from the Middle German.  I long to open my Oxford English Dictionary to read a good airing of this word.  What I know of the word is that beholden means to be obligated to another, whether person or concept. Often the two are joined as in the bonds of feudal loyalty, and bound to the past that forever creates the present in its old form.

The city of Schwabisch Hall grew rich from salt. Techniques of harvesting salt from the springs in town must have remained the same through the centuries because the process is very simple. Spring water is boiled in cauldrons, and salt is left behind and collected. The hard and dirty work of feeding the fires that boiled the cauldrons produced a rough lot of workers, and they were probably on the margins of society, one step up from the night-watchmen. Both the salters and the watchmen minded fire, which was as dire an enemy in those days as any marauding band of armed men.  The salters kept theirs glowing day and night, but the night watchmen sounded the alarm on their great horns should they see any outbreak of fire in town.

Schwabisch Hall was most recently devastated by fire in the 1720s, and 400 houses were burned to the ground. The streets themselves helped route the flames as the winds gusted down narrow passages, most being about 10 feet wide. New houses later replaced the ones destroyed, and now many of the building surrounding the lovely market platz are in the new, baroque style.

Imagine the platz:  It is night, and St. Michael's church stands on high ground at the top.  Opposite the church, across the wide cobbled open platz is the rathaus, or town hall.  To one side is a long hotel, and surrounding the platz on the other sides are very old companies that have been in business for hundreds of years. Today, large lanterns illuminate the buildings, which are plasterd over their half-timber frames.  The plaster is painted green, or cream, or salmon, and shades of yellow, and the fronts are decorated with dark red, or yellow and white and gold painted designs in long curls and sweeps. Some buildings have painted shields of professions, and other shields are painted with decorative flowers and trees and animals of the forest.The buildings could be many-tiered, colorful cakes, illuminated and set in place around the platz.  I want to break off a tiny corner of so many of these houses because I am certain that they really are made of gingerbread and icing.

Just off the main market platz are the narrow side streets, and these streets are often joined together by steep stairways linking them by several flights. The houses are all at least 300 years old, and one beauty was built in 1200.

A particular feature of building construction in this town is that a building would be anchored by a center pole of an upright beam of oak arising from a massive pile of stone in the basement through all floors, to finish at the roof of the house. The beam remains exposed as it rises through the floors. I saw one such house, and the center oak beam was 20 inches on the side, a little bit checked because it was hoisted green, and four stories tall.  The old beam has held up the house for 500 years.

No Pictures from Germany

I do not know why pictures will not upload to illustrate my posts from Germany, but if you check back around Christmas, when I return to the States, I'll illustrate what I write then. Just rely on your imagination until then.

Good Beginnings in Germany

Our host at the Hotel Spitzweg in Rothenburg ob der Tauber is the genial Klaus Hocher, a talented man of many parts, who settled in this town in Germany when he retired from his career as a chef around the world, including the Hotel Olympia in London, where he won a prestigious international catering award in 1962 in the category Chocolate, at the start of his career.   

Herr Hocher is a worldly man, but he is also now the quintessential Franconian innkeeper, interested in his guests and his family; in fact his daughter and her husband operate his newly opened second hotel, just a two-minute walk around the corner on the Rodergasse from our own small hotel on Paradeisgasse, a stone’s throw from the Marktplatz that is the heart of this ancient medieval town.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber on a high plateau was formed a millennium ago, an exurb but a kilometer across the Tauber River from the hamlet of little Detwang, still thriving today, which itself was founded in the middle 900s, with the St. Peter and Paul Church consecrated in 968. The grand new buildings surrounding the Marktplatz in Rothenburg had carved into the stone lintels of the doorways now weather-faded years from the 13^th and 14^th centuries.

Rothenburg was in those years a major center of commerce, and one of the finest and largest European cities.  The patricians of Rothenburg used some of their money earned from the salt trade and other commerce to improve the public good, and the city was rich enough that the town had forty civic water wells for drinking and firefighting, and water pipes to buildings were laid in the 16th century under the cobbled streets.  Just this year the city is installing new water pipes because those now 500 hundred-year old pipes are leaking and showing wear. 

The cobble stones of the Alter Keller have just been relaid over new pipes last week. The cobble stones are set deep and sand is poured around them much as brick masons sanded my brick sidewalk in Frederick, Maryland last summer.  With foot traffic and the few autos that use the interior streets in Rothenburg, the sand will become packed around the stones to form a good surface good for hundreds of years.

The city entered centuries of decline when the horror of the Hundred Years War altered Europe.  New trade routes bypassed Rothenburg, and the city faded in international fame.  Its beauty remained, however, protected, as the inhabitants today say, by poverty.  The gentry of Europe and the United States discovered this medieval town in the late 19^th century, and for awhile it seemed as if Rothenburg’s renaissance had come. 

The World Wars intervened, however, and at the end of WWII, something remarkable happened here.  In the waning days as the Americans were sweeping through Germany in March, 1945 hot after the holdout pockets of the Nazi high command, word came that the Nazi leaders fled Nuremberg, but 60 miles away, and were hiding here.  The Americans bombed the city overnight, and 300 houses were destroyed, 36 people died, and many kilometers of the city wall were destroyed.

This is the interesting part:  As a child, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy had visited the city with his parents, and he loved the city.  He ordered the U.S. general not to bomb it again. Instead, the American general rode into the city in the morning, and the local commander defied military orders to fight to the end and he surrendered the town to save it. Three years later, Mr. McCloy was named Honorable Protectorate of Rothenburg. After the war, the city rebuilt itself, and the wall surrounding it bears the names of people from all over the world, and the year of their gifts to help rebuild Rothenburg.   Many American soldiers’ names appear on those bricks embedded in the rebuilt walls.

Herr Hocher joined us with a cup of coffee this morning at breakfast.  He and Joe spoke in English and German, a good deal of the latter because Joe is striving to improve his language skill.  Both men play chess.  In Joe’s youth, before family and professional responsibilities took over his life, he was devoted to the game.  Herr Hocher plays well himself, and he pulled down from a small shelf a well-thumbed and patched 1915 Staunton guide to chess, and the two fellows began looking at page after page of play details.  Herr Hocher said he was a specialist in the Evans Gambit and its many variations for opening a game. 

The opening can determine the course of game events, depending on the multiplicity of variables.  Bobby Fisher said that chess was life, and he saw the world through the lens of his game.  His game in life’s social interactions was poor, but he was on top of chess. This very afternoon at 2 p.m. Herr Hocher is meeting a friend of many years for a game of chess in the dining room.  He said of his friend, “He does not have a wife; he plays chess.”  The board is set up on a breakfast table under the lamps that illuminate a painting by a local artist by the door into the tiny kitchen.

Herr Hocher is a superb host. He greets our return to the hotel each evening with a small glass of fragrant, local liquor that burns going down.  He tells us stories and he prepares our breakfasts.  At the last at breakfast, one quaffs a glass of orange juice before setting out for the day.

 

Away Away to Germany

This evening I'm off to Germany with Joe.  We tucked the little brown cat in her posh and comfy quarters yesterday evening so we could pull out the suitcases this morning without needing to extract her from Joe's packing.  If we had an extended stay, we might take her with us.  We took Kitty to France when we went to stay for Joe's entire last sabbatical. On the very first day we lost the old fellow.

I mean that we lost Kitty. 

We were unpacking in our beautiful apartment near the Council of Europe, just off the city center of Strasbourg, France. Kitty went room to room to explore.  Missing him, we became convinced that he had slipped out the open kitchen window, and we cursed our carelessness. For the long miserable day we combed the neighborhood until we returned to the flat, heart sore and grieving.  We were on our balcony overlooking the Orangerie,  ruing the blue mean day, the trip, our miserable lives when our old pal stepped onto the balcony from a secret hiding place inside, and he asked us where the funeral was. Suddenly the sun came out, birds sang and the fountain in the square leaped high.  Kitty lived to age 21, and to tease us, once in a while he would speak with a French accent.  Now days, he spends his time in the afterlife playing chess with Winston Churchill.

Tammietta is safe and sound, and my thoughts are turning to the delights to come.  I just clicked on a link to the nightlife in Rothenburg ob der Tauber and discovered that apparently the entire village looks forward to the twice weekly puppet shows in the town square. What the people of this small town (12,000) do for a living is that many, many of them work in the toy manufacturing shops that feed the company Kathe Wohlfahrt. There are several stores in the town itself, and the company has a few international locations.   Here are some things they make.

The first is a pewter ornament, and this one is about 2.5 inches tall.

The next is a nutcracker, about 15 inches tall.  This is made right here in the region of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Finally, here is a 6-inch toy shop.  Note the exquisite German workmanship (with all).  Also note that this little item costs $500. 

My trips abroad are not for shopping.  I have achieved the state of having too much stuff. I enjoy admiring the wares, however, and I will have mugs of hot spiced wine when we stroll around the market platz at night.

The Christmas market stalls look very much like this little toy. Here is a picture I took from our most recent visit to demonstrate what I mean. He is selling cheese.

Wild Animals of This Afternoon

I went to Surreybrook Gardens (www.surreybrooke.com) today and walked all over the gardens and over to a large pond fringed with bushes planted with birds in mind.  I was admiring the lovely weeping willow tree nearby when a stunning new wildlife sculpture attracted my attention at the far end of the pond.  I was surprised to see it, because it was obviously a Great Blue Heron, but outsized.  The sculpture was facing up the pond toward me, and it really was big, perhaps four and a half to five feet tall.  I have seen many such herons on the coast of Maine in the summer, from near and far, and I am familiar with these birds.  I started to walk toward it for a closer inspection when it turned to look directly at me, and then it lifted itself up and away into the nearby trees. The heron was larger than any I have ever seen--it could have been a modern pteradyctl.

Later, I went to Boonesboro not far away, a Civil War-era town in an agricultural region.  My husband and I visited a shop whose owner was tinkering away on his product, which I will not name for reasons that will be made clear.  Richard (not his real name) and my husband were discussing gears and works from the early 1800s when Richard looked over at me and excused himself for a moment saying that he was going to check on a pal.  He ducked in to his house, and moments later he appeared with a frisky squirrel on his shoulder.  The squirrel was riding high.  I was introduced to Merry, a three-year old gray squirrel who was reared by Richard, who found him in the grass, fallen from a high nest in a tree in the front yard.  Merry's eyes were still closed, and he was probably no more than two or three days old the veterinarian later estimated.  Richard tenderly nurtured the little fellow to the fine figure he is today. 

Richard advised me not to pet Merry, and we had a conversation about sharp little teeth that can bite to the bone.  All the while, Merry was climbing over Richard, and down over the work table, and back and around, exploring.  Merry had a medical emergency in his hindquarters last year, and his heretofore plush tail, is now not quite as plush.  Richard had called his friend out from his spacious romper cage but little Merry could not move his back legs.  Off to the vet he went, and after twenty X-Rays and consultations, and a course of antibiotics and other non-invasive therapies, Merry regained use of his legs, although he does not grip as well with his back feet as once he did. 

Richard knows that the life expectancy for gray squirrels is only four years or so, and he is providing a wonderful life for friendly little Merry, who remains in the very pink of good squirrel health.  Richard said he doesn't tell many people about Merry, and I was honored to have met him.

 

My eyes were bigger than my walls

I  have stood transfixed by tapestries hanging in the Cluny in Paris, the Walters in Baltimore, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  I have taken a tour through the  Gobelins tapestry manufactory (with its own metro stop) in a language I did not understand just so I could look again at these great works of art.

At the Gobelins, taken over by France in the middle 1600s, I watch modern-day craftsmen and women ply their ancient and honorable trade by the light of day through the windows.  No other illumination is permitted, and these tapestries are woven for the ages, for the hundreds and hundreds of years they may hang in great halls. 

The  first time I saw Les Vendanges at the Cluny, I became lost in a medieval world of viticulture and colors and sensibility I have yet to recover from. There is a little tapestry shop across the street from the Cluny, close by a patisserie that makes the most marvelous chocolate creme tart on earth.  In fact, while eating such a tart in a small, iron-gated garden nearby where I retreated to consider the state of my bank account, I decided to go back into the tapestry shop and bring home a smaller version of Les Vendages, but that is not what I am showing you here. 

Permit me to demonstrate how one's eyes can be bigger than one's house.

Last winter, while visiting Cancun, or rather visiting the international shopping area, I found myself in a vast carpet emporium.  Walking deeper and deeper through cavernous rooms, I came into a small, modestly lighted room at the back and I saw the tapestry of my dreams.  It was 8 feet tall and 15 feet long, and it was of a forest scene of green trees, woodland animals, water ways and falls. If I could have convinced my husband to mortgage the house and build  a gallery for the tapestry, then I could have brought this grand thing home with me.  As it was, I started looking for something that would actually fit my house.

Here it is--my Diana after the hunt, for such it is.     As a modern piece made in the style of the 18thcentury French tapestries, I decided I had to have it. The colors, the canopy, the beautiful tree and those dogs--what was not to like?  Sadly, it remains folded up, and I sit upon it on my office chair because I do not have a wall in my house large enough to display this correctly.  I hauled it outside this afternoon and flung it over a garden wall so I could take this picture for you.  Notice those beautiful dogs, the stream, and handsome lads hauling the canopy above Diana's head.  

What was I thinking, I have more than once asked myself.

Roman Vishniac

Roman Vishniac died in 1990, having lived a remarkable life in his 93 years. I knew him only as the photomicroscopist and cinematographer of a scintillating film about diatoms and rotifers that I watched innumerable times when I was 14 years old.  The world knew him as scientist, philosopher, and photographer as well. 

He was a profoundly well-educated man, and Jewish.  He fled with his family from Lisbon to New York in early 1940 to continue a life that I will not shame myself by attempting to draw in a few sentences.  I am writing about him because I saw an image of a diatom recently and remembered how much I enjoyed watching his film of exquisitely beautiful unicellular creatures. Gyre and gimble in the wabe they did, and Vishniac filmed them from the perspective of a loving and good-natured friend. 

It was his eye that mattered, his benevolent photographer's eye that found beauty in everything he saw, and he saved what he saw for us.  I do not mean that he took pictures of the pretty, I mean that he saw with such compassion and tenderness, and perhaps even amusement (when filming diatoms) that he caught for us what was essentially true about the life before him, and his photos were always candid, never posed.  Here is Albert Einstein in an unguarded moment caught for us in what became Einstein's favorite photograph of himself.    

As a high school student, I knew nothing of the Vishniac who in a desperate Europe in the 1930s began to take pictures of Jews and amassed 16,000 images of a people and a life that would soon be wiped from the continent.  There are books and collections of his photographs, including the 1983 A Vanished World.  The Only Flowers of Her Youth is a photograph from it.   

I'm also thinking of Vishniac because in a couple of months I will be in Germany, on a study trip of my husband's, and we will visit friends in Strasbourg, France, on the west coast of the Rhine river.  When I first visited Strasbourg in 1994, I was amazed by the number of Jews living in the city--I was that told the population at the time was approximately 16,000 Jewish people in the city of now nearly 800,000 people. Those few Jews are probably not survivors in place of the Holocaust; instead, they probably came to Strasbourg in the decades after the war, but I do not know. I can not imagine what the old people of Alsace and across the river in Germany themselves see when they gaze at a quickly changing world that may seem to them remorselessly forgetful.   I will always love Roman Vishniac for his compassionate view of the world and his willingness to preserve memory for us.

Crazy About Ducks

What is not to like about duck decoys, I ask you?  This is a Red-Breasted Merganser, a diving bird, and it was carved and painted this year by Charlene Nelson, of Jonesport, Maine. The merganser joins a few other decoys that Mrs. Nelson and her late husband, R.L. Nelson, carved and painted.

Once I collected spider webs inside a bathroom window, cleaning them up only when their makers had done with them.  I otherwise kept a spare house, until recently, when I began to collect Nelson ducks.  Friends have amassed prize collections of objects, which they display on their walls or have stowed away in dresser drawers loaded now with hundreds upon hundreds of slide rules, for instance.  My friend John is so avid a collector that his slide rules are numerous enough to supply the nation's science labs and universities with computational instruments they will need when the lights go out.

There is much to be said for using a slide rule instead of a hand-held calculator that is loaded with every formula to solve a problem of mathematics.  The former promotes thought and mental dexterity, while the latter may wind you up with your thumb in a sling.  Every innovation has its detractors, and I imagine that when slide rules were developed in the early 1600s, there were nay-sayers who decried that their use obviated any mathematical knowledge by the user, and I wonder how many students who use hand-held calculators today understand the theories of exponents and logarithms, of trigonometry and calculus.  I must quickly return to the more solid ground of ducks, for safety.

One of my favorite authors is John Buchan, who wrote extensively between the World Wars, and his subjects were people who grappled with the problems tangential to the dislodged social order of the British class system. When protagonist Richard Hannay needs respite from tracking villains down the 39 Steps or on The Island of Sheep, he and his cronies fill the pages with remarkable scenes of stalking deer on the corries, or shooting and falconing on remote islands off the outer Hebrides of Scotland.  One early passage from the 1936 The Island of Sheep thrills me, and I have nearly memorized it.

We had a miserable vigil, during which the sleet died away and the wind slightly abated.  My hole was close to a creek, and I remembered that, just as dawn was breaking, the shiny, water-proof head of a seal popped up beside me.  After that came the usual ritual--the thunderous flocks of waders, the skeins of duck, and then in the first light the wedges of geese, this time mainly white-fronts. ...

The guns did nothing. Samson never fired, and although I had two shots at the tail birds of a wedge, I was well behind them. The birds were far out, and there was something mightily wrong with the visibility.  I was just getting up to shake the mud out of my boots when I squatted down again, for I was the spectator of a sudden marvelous sight. ...

Peter John had flown Morag, and the falcon had picked a gander out of a wedge and driven him beyond the echelon.  The sky had lightened, and I saw the whole drama very clearly. Morag had soared above her quarry, to prepare for her deadly stoop, but the goose had been at the game before and knew what to do.  It dropped like a stone till it was only a couple of yards above the mud, and at that elevation made at its best pace for the shore.  Fifty feet or so above it the falcon kept a parallel flight.  She had easily the pace of the goose, but she did not dare to strike, for, if she had, she would have killed her prey, but, with the impetus of her stoop, would also have broken her own neck. ...

The whole business can scarcely have lasted a full minute, for the speed was terrific ... . The white-front turned slightly to the left, rose a little to clear a hillock in the crab grass, and then the two became mere specks in the distance.  But the light was good enough to show us the finish.  The lower speck reached a pinewood and disappeared, and the upper speck was lost in the gloom of the trees.  The goose had won sanctuary. ...

"Is it safe," he stammered. "Tell me, it is safe?"

"Safe as the Bank," I said. "No falcon can do anything against a bird in the wood."

Many a man of Downeast Maine, and sometimes the women, too, make their livings hunting wildlife or guiding others with camera or shotgun.  There are also people who inspired by the beauty of wildlife have made livings carving decoys and more elaborately carved and painted birds.  When I first visited the Nelsons' decoy shop in Jonesport, Maine, I was startled by the dexterity of knife against wood, and saw exquisite ducks and other birds take shape in masterful hands.  Bob Nelson carved, and Charlene Nelson painted. They have won many high awards, citations, and honors for their work, which is much respected among carvers and treasured by the people who collect their birds.

Mr. Nelson became sick just a few years ago, and he died recently.  Suddenly the husband and wife team was thrown into a new dynamic as Mr. Nelson began to teach his wife all he knew about carving the birds that she had been painting for so many years.  Mrs. Nelson continues to work in their studio that was once Jonesport's old schoolhouse.  By day she carves, and at night she paints her beloved mergansers, grebes, puffins, pintails and teals and other birds of Downeast.  She is also carving the small birds of field, wood, and shore. 

Here are some other birds from the Nelsons.  I have brought them outside to photograph them in natural light. The first beauty is a Cinnamon Teal, which Mr. Nelson carved in 1988, and which is in a craft style, different than other life-like Nelson birds. 

The next example is a pair of Atlantic Puffins, and the one on the stick is an actual decoy used by the Audubon Society Puffin Project in Rockland, Maine to reintroduce puffins to islands off the coast of Maine.  Take a look at the Puffin cam below and spot the two puffin decoys amid the many puffins convinced to loaf on the rocks because these enterprising fellows had alighted first.  http://www.audubon.org/bird/puffin/puffin-cam.html

This is an example of another decoy, a Wood Duck carved by Mr. Nelson in 1991. 

Notice how the duck's head is turned. The head swivels on a post, and can be removed so the decoys can be piled on each other in the boat and then assembled with heads as they are set in the water.  Mrs. Nelson has started to carve decoys.

Finally, here is Mrs. Nelson's very first Pied-billed Grebe, a small bird of the ponds, creeks, and marshes of the eastern United States.  I have heard the call of this little bird, cow-cow-cow-cow-cow-cow-cowk-cowk. Each little feather is lined by the carver's knife.

This year, Mrs. Nelson continued the tradition of setting up Nelson's birds at the Winter Harbor Lobster Festival, not far from Jonesport.  The festival was one day only and she combined the trip with the annual carvers' association meeting, which she chairs for the second consecutive year. She sold virtually everything that she made this year for the show.  "I cleaned out the shop," she said.

If you would like to look at Mrs. Nelson's ducks and birds, you must go to her studio and shop, in Jonesport on Cranberry Lane, just up from the water. You may also reach her by e-mail at nelsondecoys@midmaine.com.

Vergennes, Vermont

The waterfall at Otter Creek is in the center of tiny Vergennes, the smallest city in Vermont, and one of the oldest cities in the United States.  Ethan Allen himself suggested that the new city be named after the Comte de Vergennes who, as a great advocate in the American War of Independence, informed representatives of the Thirteen Colonies in 1777 that France supported their cause against the British.

The word city may seem a misnomer because there are 8 incorporated cities and 55 towns in Vermont that are larger than Vergennes, population 2,800, but there are 190 towns in the state that are smaller.  When the city was chartered in 1788, and laid out in nearly a square covering 2.5 miles, there were plans to make the place a great center of commerce, with access by canal to Lake Champlain a short stretch to the west. 

The waterways of New England and the Great Lakes were being developed at the time as travelways of commerce. Barges moved salt and grain and other commodities from the Finger Lakes east toward the Hudson River in New York when the Erie Canal was finally completed around 1825. In Vermont, timber was brought down Lake Champlain to Vergennes to be milled. Spurred by the War of 1812, Vergennes became the center of a burgeoning ship-building industry when as naval commander, George MacDonough ordered sloops and gunboats built to reinforce the small naval fleet on Lake Champlain that had been overcome by the British, and then he drove the British and their claims back to Canada.

The great national system of transport by water faded to insignificance by the late 19th century, however, when it became cheaper to transport goods by rail. The topography of tiny Vergennes was too steep to connect the town to a railway. What does a city do when its founding hopes are dashed?  It may not grow, for one thing.  Possibilities disappeared that had been created for Vergennes when goods were moved by water, or that were opened to the city when the young nation was securing its borders in war.  Today, Vergennes is a quiet and pleasant place of small enterprises and agriculture.

I am writing about this little city because I visited it on a recent trip.  While there, I stopped by the Kennedy Brothers Factory Marketplace and met William Haloway, artist.  I will write about him later.