Wednesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Wednesday

photo / Wednesday — No Comments
24
Jul 24

That suitcase was heavy

We had breakfast at a big round table this morning. My wife, my mother, my step-father, my grandfather, my great-aunt and uncle. After that we got on the road for the airport. We made it just in time and breezed through TSA.

At the airport you have to take a shuttle to the plane. On the shuttle we heard a message, something about building a world class airport for a world class city. I don’t know if Nashville is a world class city, but it seems to want to be. And the airport isn’t bad. But we did have to take a shuttle to get to gate C9.

That’s the gate from which Spirit flies. We’re flying a yellow bus out of a world class airport. It’s a two-hour trip and for our purposes it worked well this time. Small seats, though.

Leave the plane, get the bag, find the car, drive to the house. We got off the highway just in time to see the sunset.

After which it was cats and plants and unpacking and the dozen or so things you do to get your house back on track after a few hasty days away. Tomorrow, I imagine, I’ll be tired.

So much about light

There was the eeriest light in the sky and on the trees this evening. The rain clouds came in from the west at the same time as the sun was going down. The photos don’t capture it, but it doesn’t matter. We need the rain that’s coming in now.

The grass will approve. Of the rain, not the last of the leaking light. And so will the flowers. They’ll be interested in the rain, though the flowers will miss the light a bit. They do love to show out.

This giant hibiscus is always looking for an audience.

And the hydrangea, a bit more understated, deserves some attention too.

There are other plants and flowers to see. I’ll try to show you some more in the next few days.

Usually, that’s a code for yard work. That is the case this time, as well. Fortunately, the heat wave is about to break. I will try to get philosophical about it this time. The yard work, not the temperatures.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 41th installment, and the 73nd marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.

The only reason I’m counting is to see where this ends up. I started from a database and I know how many markers are on that list, but I’m not sure how I’m going to reach that number. But not to worry! There’s still plenty to see! Light helps with that.

The Finns Point Range lights served as a point of entry and exit for maritime traffic between the Delaware Bay and River. In 1950, after the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the channel to 800 feet wide and 40 feet deep, the Finns Point Rangelights became obsolete.

Erected in 1876 for the U.S. Lighthouse Service at a cost of $1,200, the Finns Point Rear Range Light is constructed of wrought iron as opposed to cast iron typically used in similar towers. Wrought iron was considered ideal for a tall structure exposed to both high winds and elements because of its resistance to corrosion and stress fractures.

Prior to automating the lamp in 1939, imagine the lighthouse keeper climbing each of the 130 steps to the top twice each day – once at night to light the lamp and again in the morning to extinguish the flame.

Efforts to Save the Lighthouse

In the years following its decommissioning, the Finns Point Rear Range Light went through a period of neglect, and the lighthouse keepers home burned to the ground. The toolshed is believed to be all that remains.

Through the efforts of a local citizens group called the “Save the Lighthouse Committee” and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Finns Point Rear Range Light was restored in 1983. Today, the lighthouse is part of the Supawna Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

The light gets its name from the 17th century Finnish colonists who settled there in the 1630s. Jump forward 200-plus years, Congress put $55,000 for two pairs of lights to help navigation. This was the second light, the rear range light.
The Kellogg Bridge Company of Buffalo, New York made the parts for this tower, and it was all shipped by rail and then carried by mules. It was designed to be higher than the first, to aid with visibility and navigation, which was placed one-and-a-half miles inland. That front range light was put in a spot prone to flooding. Today you can only get there by boat. Eventually, river dredging made the lights obsolete, so that front range light was razed in 1939.

At the rear range, over half a century, four people were in charge, Edward Dickinson (1876 – 1907), Laura Dickinson (1907 – 1908), Charles W. Norton (1908 – 1916), and Milton A. Duffield (1916 – 1933). Laura was probably Edward’s wife. But that’s just my guess based on what usually happened when the head keeper died or could no longer keep up the work. His family would keep the lights going — this was a serious business — until a new head keeper could be hired.

Sometimes they kept the job for years. Not all of the women who did this work inherited the role, but these were some of the few jobs available to women in the government that weren’t secretarial. The Coast Guard records several women who worked on various lights for decades. Just a few of them: Julia F. Williams in California, 1865-1905, Catherine A. Murdock in New York, 1857-1907, Maria Younghans, Biloxi, Mississippi, 1867-1918, Ida Lewis in Rhode Island, 1857-1911, Kathleen Moore in Connecticut, 1817-1878. Who knows how much good they did for safety and commerce. Between them, the last two women are credited with saving almost 50 lives between them.

That local preservation group the sign mentioned wanted to move the light to a park, but that project failed. They did get it put on the National Register of Historic Sites in 1978.

After the restoration in the ’80s, the tower was opened to limited touring. In 2004, a re-creation of the keeper’s dwelling was built as part of the property. Today it serves as an office for Supawna Meadows Wildlife Refuge.

If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

adventures / history / journalism / links / markers / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Jul 24

I really buried the video here

I’m feeling mostly better, thanks. Progress is progressive, and I’ll take every positive signal possible. Now, it takes twice as long for the fatigue to kick in, and so on. By next week, or perhaps next month or next year, I’ll be approaching the maximum allowable approach to 100 percent.

This allows for time, which I am told must be accounted for. I don’t necessarily agree with that. One could say I don’t believe it, because I don’t believe it. I’m sitting in this chair and I feel great!

I only believe in time when I must crawl around on my knees for something.

That’s not entirely true. I only believe it when I have to stand up, after crawling around on my knees.

A wise person learns when to be careful of one person’s criticism. A singular critique, no matter how nuanced, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how accurate from an independent perspective, is just that.

But then there’s this.

It’s something news leaders should really do some soul searching about. Are we doing our job of informing the American public so that they can do their job of voting in an informed way? If many people don’t know the facts, the media needs to take some responsibility for that.

That’s Margaret Sullivan, the former editor of The Buffalo News, where she was also the vice president. She is the former public editor of the New York Times (a position they axed, wholesale, a while back, for times just like these) and media columnist for the Washington Post. Sullivan is the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University and is currently doing some terrific work for The Guardian. I’m not being critical of Sullivan, indeed I agree with her here.

But there’s two things here. Three things. First, she’s 100 percent correct.

Second, that this is a position we are in, that this is a thing that needs to be said — and ignored — says a great deal. We shouldn’t have to be doing this sort of soul searching, because we should already be doing this sort of soul searching. The responsibility is baked in and, often, ignored. This is the civic duty in which we were all trained, and which is now so often put aside for clicks, subscriptions, outrage. Dismissed for access, favor and larger corporate interests. The business model, in this configuration, hamstrings itself and everyone dependent upon it.

Third, and the less obtrusive, point, now that I’ve given you a thumbnail of Sullivan’s impressive bona fides: who are the news leaders here? Hers is only one pen, and she is well regarded by her peers. Sullivan does her part in trying to set tone. This interview with Public Notice, a quality independent outlet, furthers that conversation somewhat. At least she uses “We.” There’s a complicity in the problem, and she knows it. (And, if you read that, you do to, now.) For a media critic to have a criticism is proper. For it to go unheeded, for the sake of a dollar, with so much at stake, is a dereliction of civic responsibility.

Separately, but also related …

Some 16 years ago (give or take), there was this notion that companies and events would hire journalists to cover their programming.*

This, I guess, is what that mutated into. NATO’s newest weapon is online content creators:

Mingling with the top brass and world leaders at the NATO summit in Washington this week will be some fresher faces on a unique mission: social media influencers recruited to improve NATO’s image with young people.

NATO invited 16 content creators from member nations including Belgium, Canada, the United States and Britain to attend the summit. The United States is running its own social media mission in support. An additional 27 creators were invited to the summit by the Defense Department and the State Department, which last year became the first Cabinet-level agency to establish a team dedicated to partnerships with digital content creators.

The creators have large followings on platforms including TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and cover topics ranging from politics to national security to news, current events and pop culture. In the space of 48 hours this week, a band of creators met with top officials from the most powerful institutions in D.C., including the Pentagon and State Department. At the White House, they met with John Kirby, President Biden’s national security communications adviser. At least two creators were granted interviews with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The tools, of course, exist to reach desired audiences directly. And now an enterprising entity can. This will come with varied results, of course. Some such influencers may have a great grasp of their subject matter. Perhaps more than a parachuting journalist. This could be useful. Some could have less. This could become propaganda.

Think on that awhile. With the news media diminished, and avenues to the public zeitgeist easily and readily available, what are the best approaches for an agency or nation-state to deliver its message? And who defines “best?”

It’s a brave new world out there, where the Huxleyan and the Orwellian meet.

*Yes! Our best media thinkers invented corporate hack stringers for everyone!

We went for a bike ride with one of The Yankee’s running groups. She’s running with two groups. One of them has a subset of people who do triathlons. And, once a week, they do a brick workout. They go out for a ride, and then they run.

So we went to that nearby town. Parked at one of the group member’s houses, and went out for a ride. This was the ride before the group ride. We just went … that way for a while, and then turned around to go back for the group ride.

So it was a warmup ride. Also the headwinds were about 15-20 miles per hour. I worked quite hard to stay on her wheel.

And then came the group ride. They all just go out … that way … at their own pace for a fixed time. The diea is that they all return to the starting place at roughly the same time for a quick run. I am not running just now — I’ll get back to it one of these days — so I just kept riding into those headwinds.

When I turned around, I saw some bramble berries, so I stopped and had a few of those. Anyway, it all turned into a nice two hours. A 36-mile ride that felt pretty good after my recent almost-illness.

From today’s adventure, to a previous bike ride, then.

It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 40th installment, and the 72nd marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.

The state really should get around to updating some of these signs …

Pea Patch Island Heronry is the largest Atlantic Coast nesting ground north of Florida for wading birds. Originally a dredge disposal site, this vegetated high ground has been a nesting habitat for nine species of wading birds since the 1970s. It is one of the few protected areas available for these birds. Pea Patch Island supports between 5,000 and 12,000 breeding pairs annually.

Wading birds are highly social and thrive in noisy crowded colonies. However, the habitat available for these birds is being threatened by oil spills, industrial pollution, and pesticides. Protecting the heronry is critical to the survival of these species. By observing the population of these wading birds, the health of the wetland can be determined. A low population can be an early warning sign of environmental changes in these areas.

The heronry shares Pea Patch Island with historic Fort Delaware. It is a designated nature preserve with limited access and is managed by the Division of Parks and Recreation.

Local folklore has it that a boat loaded with peas that ran aground on a mud shoal in the 1770s. The spilled peas sprouted, mud caught in the vines, and so the island grew. Today they call it Pea Patch Island.

The seasonal ferry will take you there. And that’s what the heronry marker is about, ultimately.

As for the island on which it sits, In 1794, the island appeared on a map from the first time. Around that same time Pierre L’Enfant — you remember that name, he designed Washington D.C. — suggested that the island should be used as river defense. The installation burned in the 1830s. A new fort there became a prison camp during the Civil War. Pea Patch Island was only about 75 acres in size at the time. It was abandoned in the 1870s, but briefly came back to life during the Spanish-American War, and saw some service in World War I and World War II. It got larger in the interim. Earth dredged from the river was dumped onto and around the island in 1906, giving it the modern size, about 300 acres.

It’s a state park. There’s the fort, and the birds, and that’s it.

The marker, above, also features illustrations of some of the birds you’ll find there, and their approximate nest heights.

Great Blue Heron (50 feet, tall trees)
Black-Crowned Night Heron (15 feet, small trees)
Little Blue Heron (1-2 feet, shrubs)
Great Egret (40 feet, tall trees)
Snowy Egret (5 feet, shrubs)
Yellow-Crowned Night Heron (30 feet, small trees)
Cattle Egret (3 feet, shrubs)
Tri-Colored Heron (2 feet, shrubs)
Glossy Ibis (low shrubs)

If you go over to Pea Patch Island, take your bug spray.

If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

markers / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
3
Jul 24

I don’t want to overstate it, but …

Slept in. Thought about taking a nap after that. Tomorrow I’m going to do some stuff, if for no other reason than the buzzards will be circling overhead, patiently waiting to see if there are any signs of life. Sitting still has been a good strategy, but it hasn’t restored my energy. I still don’t feel terrible. I just don’t feel … good? Normal? Right? Not ready for a rest at the slightest exertion? Last night I nodded off watching the Tour. This evening I had to work to stay awake during another stage.

So it’s been a lost week. Maybe two. Perhaps three. It’s a bit disappointing. Frustrating. Maybe that’s what this pseudo-sinusitis has been. It has been frustrating. Frustrating and persistent. Persistent in its frustration. Persistently frustrating. I’m just running out of patience in slogging my way through it.

At least I’m telling myself that it feels like tomorrow will be back to normal. I will manufacture, if necessary, some light at the other end of this tunnel.

It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 39th installment, and the 71st marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. We return once more to Fort Mott, which protected the river, and Philadelphia upstream, from invaders. We’ve been here for some time, as you might recall, but our time here is nearing an end.

In the last few weeks we checked out the old gun batteries and had a quick look at the observation towers that helped them in their work of defending the river and Philadelphia, beyond. Lately, we’ve looked at the parados and the moat that served as the fort’s rearguard. We saw the signs for the generator, plotting and switchboard rooms and we saw the battery commander’s station and, most recently, the peace magazine.

The park has a map to orient you to the fort’s layout.

The river is on the left side of this drawing. You can see the pier jutting out into the water. That’s the area we’re briefly visiting today. And we’ll see it from atop the earthworks that protected the battery placements

The construction of a fortification the size of Fort Mott required the delivery of a large amount of materials and equipment. The river provided an excellent “highway” and the government constructed a wharf to receive the construction materials. Equipment, materials, and supplies were unloaded at the wharf onto a rail line which was built from the wharf to the fortification site. Once the fort was completed, the rail line additionally served to transport ammunition and supplies to the various magazines. Eventually the rail line was extended through the parados to access the newly constructed Peace Magazine. The Army used teams of mules to pull large service carts along the rail line.

The bottom of the marker features a National Archives photo from February 1898, when the troops were unloading the 12-inch gun carriage that helped command the river.

The wharf juts out from a small river beach. On the other side is the walking trail. In between us and the wharf is a field full of mosquitos and other insects ready to take a bite out of you.

The fort’s job was to defend the waterway, and the Delaware River was also key to keeping Fort Mott supplied during its years of service. Most of the building materials, guns, and ammunition were delivered from here. The wharf also provided access to travel between Fort DuPont and Fort Delaware, the other two links in the river defense system. Fort Mott, and the others, were rendered obsolete when Fort Saulsbury, was ready for business downriver after World War I. Mott housed soldiers from 1897 to 1922. It became a state park in 1951.

If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

adventures / photo / SCUBA / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Jun 24

Diving in the Cenotes

We had booked four dives a day in Playa del Carmen. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon. This allows for the necessary surface intervals — a safety consideration — and other important considerations like lunch. You could get in a few more dives each day if you pressed, but there are things like timing, fatigue and money to afford them all.

But because of the weather — a tropical storm formed up around here and moved off, and is still impacting the local conditions — our dive card is thinning out. We didn’t get any of our tanks yesterday. We moved to Plans B and C. Plan B was today.

We met a couple, who showed up late, and waited for a shuttle driver. That guy showed up, later, and someone loaded up our gear and put it on the van. The van drove and drove, we made small talk with our new friends from northern California and the driver steered in silence. He steered us to … another resort. We picked up another diver, a Canadian. And then we road on a good deal more, in the gray and in the rain.

Finally we came to a gravel road with a chain across it. Carved out of the woods, with old rusting cars and the leavings of other projects scattered here and there. A barefoot woman under an umbrella came out and moved the chain. We drove on. Finally, we came to a little clearing with three buildings. One made of stone, los banos, another of commercial lumber, the kitchen, and another painted up hut. That was the changing room.

People were clumped loosely together and we found two guys around a pickup truck who were in charge of the five of us. Gear, briefings about the dives and so on commenced.

The cenotes are natural pits, sinkholes. Limestone erodes and collapses, exposing deep reserviours of groundwater. The Yucatán Peninsula has thousands of them, most privately owned, and some open to diving, so here we are. You can find features like this in various places around the world, some of the more popular ones are large open-water pools, but most are sheltered sites, like the ones we dove today. Descend down some slippery stairs, it rained the entire time we were there, and then slip into the water.

This is cavern diving, rather than cave diving. It’s a distinction, our guide explained for those that didn’t know, that has to do with distance between access points. Cave diving requires a more special training. Cavern diving is accessible to open water divers. Open water, no ceilings. Cavern diving, some ceilings. Cave dives, no ceilings.

Around here, the aquifer system is such that the caverns provide deep enough access that the fresh water and salt water meet, a halocline, around 25 or 30 feet deep. It changes two things, the temperature of the water, and the visibility. Right in the halocline you get a blurry, swirling effect. It’s as if, for a few minutes, there are hundreds of floaters in your eyes. As if someone moved the antenna and the signal is going fuzzy. It’s like watching a video online in 1997. It’s the change in the salt in the water. But, otherwise, the key feature of cenotes are clear freshwater. Rain water filters slowly through the ground. There’s not a lot of silt and such in the water.

There’s just less to see. We saw rocks! And a few small fish. Somehow some trees had slid into place. The defining feature were stalagmites, which you could see right up close. These fragile limestone formations tell us the caves weren’t always filled with water. They’re drippings, after all.

We weren’t allowed to take our cameras. But the local guy has a photographer and he took this photo and the dive master grabbed it for us.

I’m looking down in the photo. Incidentally, that’s the first time I’ve worn a wetsuit for a dive since 2006, I think.

The Yucatán has few rivers or lakes, so the cenotes make up the drinking water and so, for the history of man, these have been places where settlements were formed. A few decades ago, in fact, researchers diving in some of these cenotes found the oldest evidence of human habitation. The best thing we found was my dive buddy’s mask. She dropped it getting ready for the second dive. The Maya apparently thought cenotes were portals to the next realm. (Some are protected by the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.) That moment when you dip below the surface, you could see how the imagination would go that way. On our second dive, the water was brown-gravy murky at the entrance point. It only lasted about four feet or so — there’s no current, so if you stir up silt it just … hangs there — but those were a few interesting seconds of a dive.

For different reasons, we came up with the same idea about cenotes diving.

Glad I could do it; don’t need to do it again.

Back at our resort after our two dives, we decided to try the ocean. You’ve never seen a happier girl.

She’s a beach girl.

I like the floating part.

She loves the waves. And they were present and vigorous today.

To be sure, they make photo composition a bit of a challenge.

It is a permanent smile when she’s at the beach.

Here, she seems to be waving at Cozumel, which is just 10 miles over that way. You can see it, when the skies are clear. We could almost see it today. We’ll go over tomorrow.

We spent a long time, and 114 photos, trying to do this right, but it was somehow tricky. The angles, the waves, the sea spray, the timing, and so on and so forth. This one of the better ones.

This is, I think, my favorite one.

That was the 106th photo in the series.

Tomorrow we’ll dive in saltwater, if the weather finally cooperates.