markers


24
Jan 24

I am trying a new thing, a shocking new thing

I’m trying a new thing. That’s unusual. But let me back up. I don’t know anything about this. But let me back up further. Maybe two Christmases ago, I got a gift package from the Butterfly Bakery of Vermont. It was the Guster tie-in, you see. I had received the Gustard the year before, and it was good. I didn’t think I would like it, but it’s great on burgers. The complete gift package includes a hot chocolate, the Gustard, the Fa Fa Fire hot sauce (maple rum chipotle) which I’m working up to trying and Gusternola.

Let’s learn about Gusternola.

We made this warm hug of a granola in collaboration with Ryan Miller, Guster’s lead singer and fellow high functioning weirdo. A portion of all proceeds benefit Zeno Mountain Farm, one of the greatest places on Earth.

Organic gluten free oats*, pure Vermont maple syrup, organic coconut, organic coconut oil, organic pumpkin seeds, brazil nuts, organic quinoa, vanilla, organic brown rice flour, sea salt, organic cinnamon, organic ginger, organic cloves, organic cardamom, organic fennel, organic fenugreek, organic nutmeg. Contains nuts.

A few weeks ago I finally got around to trying it. First off, it’s a 9.6 ounce bag, and the service size is ridiculously small. I got a couple of breakfasts and an odd late dinner out of it.

But the granola was quite tasty.

I was about to order some more from the bakery in Vermont — and I will — but I decided to try some other granola varieties, because Gusternola was my first ever granola.

So, yesterday, I went to the grocery store and stood in the breakfast cereal aisle and studied the offerings. There was a whole section. I got several different kinds. Today, I tried one, which is the first one I picked up.

I tried it first because I picked it up first, and firsties mean something. Also, I figured, it would be most like the Gusternola. And it’s pretty close.

It’s not as good, but pretty close. It’s mass produced, and cheaper. And the ingredients list is close, but there are a few things missing that is in the now high water mark of Gusternola. Plus, it is made somewhere in Oregon. I’m sure Oregon has great granola, but what if Vermont’s granola is just better?

If anything, the syrup here might be a bit too sweet. (This is a big note coming from me.) It is almost acrid. But I have an experiment to try to counteract that for tomorrow.

Anyway, I picked up four different types of granola. This should give us something to dissect for a week or two.

Unrelated, we sure do get some strange looking icicles around here.

We heard one of those fall, during a particularly intense part of a television show — the new and overwrought True Detective — and that didn’t set every human sense to “hyperalert” or anything.

But wait’ll you seem them melt!

This is the 22nd installment of We Learn Wednesdays, where I ride my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. This is the 41st one we’ve seen in this series.

And this place is named after John Fenwick who opened the first English settlement established in this region. He came from money, got married, had three kids, lost his wife, got remarried. He landed here in late 1675. Three days later, on October 8, 1675 Fenwick, a Quaker, recorded a land deed with the local Lenape Indian tribe. He gave his new home the name of New Salem, meaning peace.

It wasn’t always named after him. This place was built as Ford’s Hotel in 1891. In 1919, it was converted to Salem County Memorial Hospital to memorialize WWI soldiers and sailors. The hospital was opened with 30 beds and 12 physicians and surgeons worked there. They treated 1,093 patients in their first year. The hospital was moved in 1951.

In 1989 the building was renovated as the “Fenwick Building.” It’s used now as county government offices. Thirty-five years is a long time after a renovation for local government office space. But it has the all important plaque.

In the next installment of We Learn Wednesday’s, we’ll visit the location of an old jail and market house. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Before that, though, let’s go back underwater. Here, you’ll find a ray, a puffer, a butterfly fish, a black triggerfish, a beautiful scrawled filefish and much more!

If that isn’t enough, we’ll have more photos from the waters off Cozumel tomorrow.

I haven’t mentioned it, but I have been able to spend a fair amount of time on the bike recently. On the bike, which is on the trainer. Anyway, 80 easy miles in the last three days, which isn’t that much.

Twenty of them were in London yesterday, 43 of them were in a fake world, today, but I did a very real 20 mph pace over the route which, for me, is substantial. Tomorrow, then, is a rest day. After which, I’ll try to achieve another long streak of consecutive days in a row — a humble number I set last November. You will, no doubt, be riveted.


17
Jan 24

A long bike ride, shallow fish and old history

I’m trying, now, to slip back into the ol’ routine. We got back into town around midnight on Sunday, and at about 3 a.m. I was able to get to bed. I have no idea why everything took so long that night, but that meant Monday was a day spent moving through syrup. Plus the snow. And then Tuesday was a bit more of that. The last part of my sinus allergies, something I brought home from Cozumel, started to … de-allergize themselves yesterday. Breathing is fundamental.

Also, there’s the usual series of small things that need to be done. House things. Work things. Prep things. And so on. It’s amazing how quickly the little things will fill a substantial chunk of a day.

Also, I got in my first bike ride in 10 days. I did 50 miles, which gives you a lot of cool sites. Some of them are views I am sure that are new to me. I feel like I’d remember Mr. Crank’s Crab Shack.

But nearby, a lighthouse that I’m sure is familiar.

New on Zwift, or new to me, at least, are these climbing portals. I tried one, and entered into a quantum realm. I’m not sure the point, except for “up.” I think I climbed about 3,000 feet. Trainer feet. That’s not a real climb. You just keep turning over the pedals, no matter how slowly, and grind your way up. It’s never as much of a grind as a real climb. And I can’t fall over.

Not in the quantum realm.

Here’s today’s quick return to the underwater realm. And here’s Aquawoman. Still no bubbles; still not breathing.

I’m pretty sure I’d intended to just take a photo of this brown sponge bowl. I noticed the purple sponge cluster in the foreground, but I didn’t notice the one in the background until just now. And I’ll never know what was inside of that one.

The scrawled filefish, (Aluterus scriptus). It can be found all over the world, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, and in that Caribbean-Gulf of Mexico region too, of course. Typically, this is a shy fish, so we’re lucky here.

It also has a toxic chemical inside, the scrawled filefish, that is significantly more potent than the puffer fish. The likelihood of it causing you problems is more from intravenous introduction, rather than digestive, so don’t let that fish give you an IV.

Here’s another beautiful reef dweller, the queen triggerfish, (Balistes vetula). Carl Linneaus described it in 1758. It can be found all over the Atlantic and, in the western hemisphere, from Canada to Brazil and beyond.

That fish might also be in the quantum realm. It may have come to that reef directly from that other plane. It did seem to suddenly appear, and never let me get close. I have three shots, of the queen triggerfish, and that’s the best of the bunch.

But I was more interested in what was hiding among the coral and sponges anyway. Behold, the giant sea anemone, (Condylactis gigantea). This is an animal, not a plant.

Anemone are often not mobile, but these can move around. And they look delightful, but they can sting predators and prey. The anemone is, itself, a predator. But it’s also a cleaning site for other fish. Smaller creatures will hang around here to clean bigger ones. The smaller fish eat the irritants of the bigger fish. And, also, they provide a bit of protection for the anemone itself. It is a great big set of circles in the underwater ecosystem.

This is the 21st installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I’ve been riding my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. Including today’s installment, we’ll have seen 40 of the markers in the Historical Marker Database. This one marks a home that dates, in part, back to the 17th century.

This is the Alexander Grant House, which dates to 1721, and the Rumsey Wing goes back a few years before. Some of the walls were put up for an earlier structure, so you could say it dates to 1690. This is the home of the county’s historical society. There’s a colonial artifact museum inside, along with the home’s original woodwork. (The historical society is also in three other adjoining buildings.) The Rumsey Wing has some restored features, comprised of some of the original work from other nearby old homes, in the 1950s. All told the historical society maintains thousands of artifacts, displaying a wildly broad array of history, some of it believed to be thousands of years old.

It was originally a one-room home. The first room became a kitchen when Alexander Grant bought it. Finding out about this man is a bit tricky. I did discover his will, dated 1726, where he’s listed as a yeoman. Seems he had 118 acres in a few different locations. I believe he died in 1734 or so.

But let me tell you about John Rock, who was mentioned in that first sign. This is an impressive man. Born a free man in 1825 to parents of few means, they put him through school, which was rare for any child in those days. A teacher at 19, he worked with students eight hours a day and then spent his evenings studying medicine under two doctors and apprenticed for them. He studied dentistry and apprenticed in that field and then opened his own practice. After that, he got into medical school, and became, in 1852, one of the first black men to get a medical degree in this country. By the time he was 27 he’d earned himself a reputation as a teacher, dentist, physician and abolitionist. By 1860, his health failing, he gave up medicine and the mouth and started reading the law.

On January 31, 1865, Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment. The next day, Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator, introduced a motion that made Rock the first black attorney to be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Writing for The Supreme Court Historical Society, Howard University professor Clarence G. Contee had a fine historical summary.

“By Jupiter, the sight was grand. ‘Twas dramatic, too. At three minutes before eleven o’clock in the morning, Charles Sumner entered the Courtroom, followed by the negro [sic] applicant for admission, and sat down within the bar. At eleven, the procession of gowned judges entered the room, with Chief Justice Chase at their head. The spectators and their lawyers in attendance rose respectfully on their coming. The Associate Justices seated themselves nearly at once, as is their courteous custom of waiting upon each other’s movements. The Chief Justice, standing to the last, bowed with affable dignity to the Bar, and took his central seat with a great presence. Immediately the Senator from Massachusetts arose, and in composed manner and quiet tone said: `May it please the Court, I move that John S. Rock, a member of the Supreme Court of the State of Massachusetts, be admitted to practice as a member of this Court.’ The grave to bury the Dred Scott decision was in that one sentence dug; and it yawned there, wide open, under the very eyes of some of the Judges who had participated in the judicial crime against Democracy and humanity. The assenting nod of the great head of the Chief Justice tumbled in course and filled up the pit, and the black counsellor of the Supreme Court got on to it and stamped it down and smoothed the earth to his walk to the rolls of the Court.”

Benjamine Quarles in Lincoln and the Negro concluded the ceremony; “A clerk came forward and administered the oath to Rock, thus making him the first Negro ever empowered to plead a case before the Supreme Court.”

The Boston Journal, the home town newspaper of Rock, was also able to feature the admission of Rock. The correspondent of the paper wrote that: “The slave power which received its constitutional death-blow yesterday in Congress writhes this morning on account of the admission of a colored lawyer, John S. Rock of Boston, as a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.” The paper noted that the faces of some of the older persons present at the ceremony were knotted in rage. Even papers in England mentioned the admission of Rock into the bar of the Supreme Court. Most of the observers who reported on the act saw it as a giant step in the repudiation of the Dred Scott decision of former Chief Justice Taney. It was evident that John S. Rock had set a great legal precedent. Before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, Rock had obtained one highly prestigious symbol of the citizenship status of the Negro in 1865.

While in Washington, Rock had attended a session of Congress; he was the first Negro lawyer to be received on the floor of the House. Congressman John D. Baldwin of Massachusetts, former editor of The Commonwealth and of The Worcester Spy, had escorted Rock to a seat. Baldwin was a close friend of Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, also a Massachusetts politician of some influence. Rock was warmly received by some of the leaders about to shape Reconstruction policies. Unfortunately, as Rock was returning to Boston, he was brought back to reality when he was arrested at the Washington railroad station for not having his pass. James A. Garfield, a Congressman from Ohio and later a President, thereafter introduced a bill that abolished required passes for blacks.

It appears as if the direct illness that brought Rock’s remarkable career to an end began the day before Rock was admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court. He had attended the Presbyterian church of the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, a famous black leader and abolitionist, the day before, on January 31, 1865. He caught cold. He was already in a weakened state of health, and to catch cold in the winter in those days was serious. When he returned to Boston, he had to appear at gatherings honoring him and in the interest of his race. His health continued to deteriorate rapidly.

He never argued before the court, however. In ill health anyway, he died in December 1866 of tuberculosis.

He’d done all of that by the age of 41.

Contee wrote much more about Rock in the Journal of the National Medical Association. Still can’t find more on the mysterious, colonial, Alexander Grant, though.

In the next installment of We Learn Wednesday, we’ll take a glance at a 19th century hotel. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.


3
Jan 24

There’s not a word for it; it won’t matter tomorrow

I wanted to write about motivation but, really, who has the energy for that? It’s something akin to ennui that’s been afflicting me the last few days. Not ennui, but something close to it. If there’s a place where that feeling and paralysis by analysis might intersect, that’s where I’ve been living.

There is much to do, but it seems like a lot so …

You power through, because that’s what professionals do. But there isn’t a lot of joy in that. There is, instead, a tiny bit of fear: What if I messed up an important date, or sequence or things, because I found myself with a galloping case of Tuesdays that covered the first part of the first week of the new year?

Besides, he said on Monday, there’s tomorrow. Which is the same thing he said on Tuesday. And what he spent part of today saying.

Tomorrow, much work will be done.

Getting a good solid start, that’s the secret. It isn’t motivation; it’s momentum. Tomorrow I will create it. I will manufacture it. I will rip it from the air and these keys at my fingertips. I know the secret. The secret is to find the opposite of ennui, enthusiasm, in deadlines.

The self-imposed deadlines start tomorrow.

This is the 21st installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I’ve been riding my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. This one isn’t in the Historical Marker Database, but it’s the 40th one we’ve seen in this series. And the marker is about a now empty lot.

I can’t find anything with a few simple searches about that first academy. But the town’s high school was here, too, for a few years in the early part of the 20th century, before moving down the street and around the corner. I found a photo of the class of 1907. Someone wrote that it had 18 students, the largest the school had enrolled to that point. It also included the school’s first black graduate, apparently. If that’s true, it is interesting, since the marker tells us integration came later.

There were postcards featuring the Copner school. Here’s another one.

There were two generations of men named Samuel in the Copner family around that time. I believe that old school was named after the first. He was said to be an early and loud advocate for public schools in the area.

There’s also a black-and-white of the old Grant Grammar school.

Here’s the lot(s) today.

That church will come up in a future edition of We Learn Wednesdays. In the next installment, we’ll see a house that dates, in part, back to the 17th century. It has, as you might expect, a busy history. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.


20
Dec 23

Marginally productive, for a Wednesday

After a morning spent doing work stuff, I went downstairs to ride the bike. This would be ride three this week on Zwift. I did two short rides Monday, then last night’s projects got away from me. So I was going to ride long today. I am trying to ride all of the stages in the game, which is something I started last year. I’m almost there!

And so today I was riding Surrey Hills, in London, when I hit the wrong button. The game let’s you do a lot of things as you ride. You can send messages to other riders, you can change the “camera’s” perspective of your avatar. You can take screen grabs and more. The later is how I get the images I sometimes share here. (And I won’t do that as much this year, promise.)

Another thing you can do is hang a U-turn. When you do that you end the route. So there I was, halfway through it when I hit the wrong button. Human error. But there were too many other things I wanted to do today.

First, after a late light lunch, because I did get in 25 miles, I got cleaned up and set out to take on the world. Things to do! Items to scratch off the list!

I took out the garbage. Third time I’ve been to the inconvenience center in the last week, I think. Then, I visited one of the local hardware stores. This is a small place. A mom and pop place. An everyone talks to you place. A no-one-rushes-you-at-quitting-time place. In the back corner I found some cotton rope, which I need for an upcoming project. And then, just to mess with the guy, I asked about the zip ties.

He told me where they were. I looked them over and then said, Nah. You don’t seem to have the industrial strength version I’m looking for. Maybe, I said as I arched an eyebrow while staring at the rope next time.

And then I got my haircut. Clumsy woman, but at least I still have both of my ears. I thought she was going to take my eye, and it wasn’t even when she was attacking the waviest part of my hair. But she was nice. She’s over Christmas music. No need for the standards at Halloween in her book. She likes Prince. She told me about trying to understand “Raspberry Beret” as a kid. She started telling me the story about asking her mother about the lyrics. But I don’t know this woman, or her mother. Am I supposed to ask about this? Prince, I said, was a clever one, and I left it at that.She still goes to the mall for her Christmas shopping. (Is that a thing people do?) I was hoping for some last minute tips, but instead I heard about her brother who is an expert at guessing about what’s inside each present. It was all a blur. They don’t waste a lot of time on a guy’s haircut. No need, really.

Come to think of it, she didn’t even show me the back of my head via the customary handheld mirror.

Be right back.

OK, it is still there.

And almost every task of the day was achieved! Things put off until today were successfully addressed! If I could do that two more days in a row we’d have momentum.

Sounds stressful.

What else is still hanging around? This brief snippet of a video that I shot earlier this week, but haven’t shared yet.

This is the 20th installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I’ve been riding my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. Including today’s installment, we’ll have seen 39 of the markers in the Historical Marker Database. This one marks a 19th century building.

It is appropriate that there’s only wonderful, and generic, National Register plaque. I can find almost nothing about the house or its original owner, John G. Thackeay.

It was built as residence and store. It features three stories in a T-shape, and parapet chimneys. There are transom lights, broad pilasters and paneled shutters. The Greek revival style building went up in 1847.

It could be that this wasn’t John G. Thackeay’s place. There’s a John G. Thackray that lived in the area during that time. The dates, at least, make sense. But in the marker database, and some ancient county document that’s been uploaded to the web, they use the E spelling.

Thackray, though, was listed as a merchant in the 1860 census. His wife and four daughters were there. Two teachers, a hat maker and a servant were listed at his address. In the 1870 census, his last, Thackray is listed as a retired merchant. This house was a story, maybe that’s our guy.

He was laid to rest about a mile away, and almost all of his family is buried there as well. Today, his place is a store again. Hardwoods and carpeting.

In next week’s installment of We Learn Wednesday, we’ll go to school. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.


13
Dec 23

In the shade of history

Finals begin tomorrow. The emails should begin any moment now. The grading continues apace. Every time I feel like I have my arms around it, I find a new thing to look at. So I grade some more. Then I’m done. And then a late assignment rolls in.

Which will allow me to move effortlessly into the deadline talk as the big, final, speech of the class. Everyone will love that.

Something else just popped up for me to assess.

None of this is hard, mind you. It’s part of the job. It’s a bit like laundry, though: you’re never done, not really. All day long like this, and yesterday and most of Monday, too.

Oh, here’s two more things in the ol’ inbox now.

It was three degrees warmer today. The thermometer said 47, but the wind chill held things down to an uncomfortable 39 degrees. I went out for a bike ride at the warmest least cold part of the day. I quickly realized I was under-dressed. Wrong jacket. Also, I forgot the ear muffs. But my hands and toes stayed comfortable.

The wind was everywhere, and that’s what we’re blaming the whole thing on. It wasn’t that my legs were bad, it is that there was a headwind in every direction. I rode a big rectangle, so I rode in every direction, and there was always the wind.

And the close passers. Drivers were brutal today.

All of it was enough to make me cut the ride short. But I got in 20 miles, and I was able to see this, whatever it is.

There are fresh produce stands all over around here. They’re all empty now, of course. Some of the smaller ones got rolled away from the road at the end of the season, but most seem like semi-permanent fixtures. So, too, are a few of the homemade-built bus stands. I’ve found no little libraries, as yet, and I don’t know what’s happening here at Cedar Lane Junction. Maybe it’s a mini-pharmacy, or a bait shop, or both. I do know, from archival map photos, that sign has been slowing peeling away for a little more than a decade now.

Sometimes you see a stand of trees and wonder if they were left there, or planted there. Someone had a room with windows to the east of these trees and they knew there would come a day when they’d get tired of sunsets. Serious astrophysical prescience.

That’s a simple stand of two rows of trees. They are bracketed on each side by houses. And, no, that UAP to the right of the sun is not a Photoshop artifact. It’s in the raw photo, a lens flare within a series of them. That’s just going to happen when you’re shooting from the hip.

Anyway, I liked where the sun was and how the clouds were lined up, and I began to wonder about the chance nature of trees on old farmland.

A century ago this land was owned by a couple named Campbell. Asbury’s family could trace it’s roots back to the colonial era, right here in this community. Alice was the granddaughter of Irish immigrants. I wonder if they ever stood around that spot and stared off that way. I wonder what they dreamed about. The man died in 1992, not far away from here. She died in 1999. It looks like he served in World War I, but that’s a rabbit hole I’m saving for a different day.

I infer from the dusty old records that they sold the land in the 1930s, an all too common tale of the era, I’m sure.

Let’s go back even farther, though.

This is the 20th installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I ride my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. Including today’s installment, we’ll have seen 38 of the markers in the Historical Marker Database. And this one is pointing to one of the older moments the county recognizes. It’s colonial-era, even.

The fabled oak the sign references was about a quarter-of-a-mile away. It fell to the ground in 2019, having cast cool shade on man and beast for an estimated 600 years. That was the spot, according to the legend, where the original Quakers signed a treaty with the indigenous residents. That tree was in my grade school books. Probably yours too! Probably because it was one of the rare treaties with native populations that was honored. Beneath that tree was where the earliest white residents were buried. Indeed, Betsy Ross’ father, a third-generation immigrant from Wales, a man named Samuel Griscom, was buried there. He owned a lumberyard and was a master carpenter. (He helped build the bell tower at Independence Hall!)

Every town in the state, 565 of them, was given a seedling from the Salem Oak after it fell. (A follow-up story will soon be demanded.) Other groups of Quakers got still more seedlings for replanting at their meeting houses. This group, the Salem Friends, apparently maintained ownership of the tree and they were giving away leaves and small bits of the tree as keepsakes.

I’m glad I wasn’t here for that. I would have wanted a piece. Perhaps I would have gotten one. And then there would eventually be the desire to make something interesting with it. And great pains would be required to be sure it was done correctly. The curse of a not at all accomplished confident or competent craftsman.

When someone uses the old blood and sweat expression, this is what I think of.

I bet old Samuel Griscom would have known what to do with it, but I digress.

They had a memorial service for the tree. One of the Friends wrote an obituary that summer:

The Salem Oak’s life span was double the 300-year average of most white oaks. In that time, she witnessed the clearing of her forest home and many other events that history has forgotten. She saw Lenni Lenape, early Quakers, European settlers, free African Americans, and their descendants, grow, build, and gather around her. She watched as Revolutionary War soldiers marched through her peaceful town. She impressed Charles Lindbergh with her fall foliage as he flew over Salem on Oct. 21, 1927, on his way from Atlantic City to Wilmington, in celebration of his solo trip across the Atlantic Ocean. She saw travelers and shipments of goods arriving at the Salem port down the street, and witnessed the birth of industry in Salem, as a huge bottling plant was built behind her.

The mighty Oak watched generations bid farewell to their loved ones as they were laid to rest around her. She offered silent comfort to those who came to visit their deceased friends and family, embracing them with the shelter and cool shade of her vast canopy. She offered a peaceful place for sunrise services, social gatherings, and quiet reflection. She enticed hundreds of children to try to stretch their arms around her massive trunk and provided them with a giant prop to run around and hide behind while playing. And she inspired local artists to try to capture her beauty, her significance, her peacefulness, her impressive stature, and her sheer awesomeness, in every medium.

In 2000, she was bestowed the honor of being named a Millennial Landmark Tree, through the America the Beautiful Fund. This recognized her as one of the top 50 trees in the country with historical significance. In 2016, she was declared the largest White Oak in New Jersey by the Department of Environmental Protection. At that time, she towered 103 feet tall, with a circumference of 22 feet, 4 inches. She had a crown fit for royalty, spanning 104 feet.

It’s easy to see why people are romantic about trees.

In the middle of that oak’s life, all of the land around it was a proprietorship. The Quakers owned it for about 30 years, having purchased it from Sir George Carteret, who was strapped for cash in the 1670s. (And weren’t we all?) In 1702 it returned back to Queen Anne, as a colony. That’s an entirely different saga.

You wonder how that sort of thing weighed on the people who walked into this building during that time. These walls would look familiar to them, but so much that they would see from the doorway, today, would surely be a shock.

These were the people that sailed to the New World to find some freedom, so perhaps they would be pleased that their religious descendants are still here.

In next week’s installment of We Learn Wednesday, we’ll take a glance at a 19th century home and store. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.