Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
20
Jul 21

A very green post

A little campus beauty shot from the hip. Come morning, come lovely atmosphere. I put it on Twitter and some of the right accounts passed it along. Oh, look at the pretty picture!

And 22,000 something people saw it. Not bad for just walking in from the car.

I trimmed the shrubs around the air conditioner this evening. I know, I know. And I agree. You’re not wrong, faithful reader. This is a lot of excitement in just one day. But I also pulled some weeds. In one flower bed some of the weeds hadn’t been there just the night before. And I disposed of some other pulled undesirable plants that had previously been displaced and left to brown. In one of those small piles a truly huge jimsonweed had joined the pile. I’d never seen one with such large seed pods. No idea from where it had emerged.

To review: weeds are growing almost knee-high overnight on one side of the house, and, on the other side, they just appear, pulled from the ground by the root, and added to a pile of already pulled weeds.

That would demoralize a normal gardener, but I don’t spend that much time in the flowerbeds.

I also had to straighten up some things in the garage, where I do a little as I go. Very, very little. I met this little guy on the garbage can.

So if anyone needs a green stink bug, or some jimsonweed seeds, well, re-evaluate whatever it is that you are doing. But if either of those items are still on your list, let me know.

Act fast, as they say. You don’t want to miss an offer like this. The supplies won’t last forever — but the weeds might.

cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
19
Jul 21

I made a Latin joke

I had a 27-mile ride on Saturday. It was not my best bike ride, he said for about 60th time this year, but it was a fine ride otherwise. This one, meanwhile, is cruising along in fine form. I think she’s lapping me here.

We celebrated with the traditional Saturday Chick-fil-A takeout and then had a chat with friends. We also watched the final two stages of the Tour de France, completing the race as we do every year, singing Joe Dassin’s Les Champs-Elysees.

I also went for a run. Nice and slow. Any slower and I’d be walking. Somehow, I’m told, being slow makes me faster. Which might be the case if you were running slowly deliberately. At the moment I’m running slowly as a matter of function. It’s the status slow, you might say.

It’s Monday, and that means it is time to check on the cats! It’s the week’s most anticipated and widely viewed feature, and don’t think I haven’t noticed.

Phoebe would like you to know she was framed.

Framed!

No one has ever caught her doing anything she isn’t supposed to do, because Phoebe is a good girl. No one has ever caught her out on the ledge where she doesn’t belong …

It does look cozy out there. I always wonder why it was carpeted. Every day I wonder.

Poseidon is hanging out in his tunnel and is playing up his big ham tendencies.

It takes a lot out of him, being a ham. Here he is asleep. Under a blanket. On a pillow.

That cat. Et quod ad somnum.

adventures / Alabama / family / Friday / history / London / maps / memories — Comments Off
16
Jul 21

Rocks and washing machines

I was gripped, a few years ago, by an article that made the case for the washing machine as the most important invention of the 20th century. Sure, you say, there’s also the refrigerator and the computer and/or the microchip. Penicillin, a discovery rather than an invention, doesn’t count.

The argument has been spelled out in many other newspaper opinion columns, in historical research and even in one of the 20th century’s oddest inventions, TED Talks. Simply put, doing the laundry was once an all day exercise. It was hard, backbreaking labor. It was almost exclusively ‘a woman’s job.’ And when the first powered washing machines came along, they freed up people, almost all of them women, to do other things. Probably it helped with their hand care, too.

I asked my grandmother about this article at some point. She always called it The Wash. If you heard her say it, you heard the capital T and capital W. The Wash. Do you remember, I said, a time before you had a washer and dryer?

“Of course,” she said, in that not-dismissive-but-entirely-obvious way that your elders can use on you.

I asked her when she got her first washer. It was when they’d built and moved into that very house, the only one I’d ever known my grandparents in. It was the 1950s. She was a young woman still starting a new family. The washer and dryer lived on the covered back porch. (Where the laundry connections are is almost a tell. Back porch, that’s hedging your bets on this technology at best, an afterthought at worst. In the two houses I grew up in the connections were in the basement. Out of the way, but inherently inconvenient. In our house today the laundry is upstairs, very near the bedrooms.)

I asked how she did The Wash before she had a washer and dryer. She took it down to the creek. Soap, boards, stones, the old antiquated thing. That’s just what you did. This is the middle of the 20th century.

Which is where my story gets a little foggy. My grandparents’ house was surrounded by a creek. It’s just a small bit of water that breaks off a larger waterway which is itself a slough of a tributary of the Tennessee River — and we talked about that yesterday. If you saw it on a map, my grandparents’ road and the creek almost make a four-way intersection. I started wandering through their woods at a young and early age, when some of those creeks looked like wild, untamable testaments of God and nature. And to my young mind that water was everywhere.

The water was nice. It was always cool, and it always looked clean. But it was never the water that interested me the most, it was the rocks.

Where I grew up was far enough away from my grandparents that the soil was, in places, noticeably different. All of my family lived in this area, a place around a massive river, where the water was a dominant element of everyday life. Having different topographical features where I grew up meant I spent a lot of time playing in the little streams and on the rocky shores.

On a physiographic map this is on something called the Highland Rim, the southernmost section of the Interior Low Plateaus of the Appalachian Highlands Region. By name and almost everything else, it’s a series of contradictions. It’s messy and beautiful.

How the underlying rocks erode in different ways define the area. The rocks formed during the Mississippian period (353 to 323 million ago. Explain that to a kid taken in by the many colors and the smooth polished feel that ages in the water have created.

I lived in a different physiographic region, a bit to the south, in the Valley and Ridge province. Our soil was exclusively clay and, to me, the rocks didn’t have the same sort of interesting character. Has to be that river, I always thought when I was young. I told you yesterday, the river figures into everything, so why not the rocks?

It actually has to do with the mountains.

Kaiser Science tells us:

The mountains of the British Isles and Scandinavia turn out to be made of the same kind of rock, and formed in the same historical era.

Evidence shows that in the past all of these were one mountain system, torn by the moving of the tectonic plates – continental drift.

Put another way, if you like the hypothesis of continental drift, you look at this as a broken mountain range, making these mountains older than the Atlantic Ocean.

A few years ago, longer after the Atlantic Ocean was formed, we visited London and caught a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

There’s a lot of standing around and waiting and jockeying for position and wondering who you’ll see and what the bands will play. It’s good fun if you are patient, and you don’t mind crowds.

We walked to the palace, from wherever we’d been before, through Green Park, and we returned that same way. At one point there in the park I looked down and picked up this rock. It looked familiar. Looked like home.

I brought it back with me, and later took it to my grandmother.

The queen has the same rocks you do!

As ever, my enthusiasm was what amused her most.

If you look at that map, you can see it. The rocks you saw when you were doing chores are the same sort of rocks the queen of the United Kingdom was used to. Their rocks, your rocks, same kinds of rocks.

I wonder when the queen got her first washing machine.

Alabama / family / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
15
Jul 21

This post was a century in the making

Water is the predominant geographical feature of the area where all of my family live. I didn’t grow up there, but I understand the story of the Tennessee River. It dips down into the northern part of Alabama, creating a topography that has defined generations and generations of people that lived there. The Tennessee River forms near Knoxville, Tennessee and flows to the southwest, into Alabama, before looping back up, helping form the Alabama-Mississippi-Tennessee borders and then heading on up to Kentucky.

The Yuchi tribe, the Alibamu and the Coushatta, and maybe some other members of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy lived their lives on it. They called it the Singing River. White people moved in and, a little over two hundred years ago, Alabama became a territory, in 1817, and then a state in 1819. Some of my ancestors were among the first white people into the area, some even before the Native Americans were forcibly displaced. They became hardscrabble dirt farmers, for the most part. Agriculture and water transit came to define this era, but even then the shipping was difficult. The Muscle Shoals were the problem. It was shallow and swift and turbulent. It typified the area for generations. Predominant geographical features figure into everything.

Then the Great War came.

There was a worry that the Imperial German Navy would cut off shipments of nitrates from South America. Nitrates make explosives. Things that go boom are important for the military. So the National Defense Act of 1916 called for nitrate plants. Hydroelectric power would run them and the U.S. could produce its own nitrates. Muscle Shoals was understood to have the greatest hydroelectric potential east of the Rockies.

So in 1918 they started building a dam.

We’ve driven over it, jogged over it, fished underneath it, taken photographs of it, watched the ships pass through the locks and dined above it. During the build it became it’s own city, employing thousands, and had a school, barbershops, a hospital and more than a hundred miles of sewage lines. But the war ended before the construction did. And the soon-to-be named Wilson Dam didn’t contribute to the war effort.

It wasn’t finished until 1924 and began generating power in 1925. The promise of that hydroelectric power is what we’re looking at today, and, indeed, in 1921, it was full of potential. So we go to a now century old edition of The Florence Herald.

The Herald began publishing in the 1880s and ran at least until the mid-1960s. In fact that Spillway graphic above is from a 1950s edition of the paper. It was a regular feature of the weekly paper, because predominant geographical features figure into everything. And people from far away take notice, as we shall see.

Henry Ford, yep, that one, wanted to buy in. He was interested in hydroelectric power, too, and dreamed of buying up the area and building factories for his own empire. It was the big news in mid-July, 1921.

But Ford wasn’t the only suitor.

“The publication this morning of the effort of Mr. Ford to acquire Muscle Shoals, followed by the development that several other individuals or corporations would likewise acquire the property, is taken to mean by Alabamians in Congress that Muscle Shoals, instead of being a corpse, is indeed a very live proposition.”

Because the news was coming in so fast the local weekly was having difficulty agreeing with itself, but inside there’s a several-days-old story that gives us more context, and a none-too-subtle bit of cheerleading. Excuse the hasty redesign I’ve made here. Long newspaper columns aren’t always conducive to the web.

There are little unsigned blurbs and letters like this all over this edition of the paper.

And that was the prevailing opinion of the day. That’s the story I always heard. The area was going to be a little Detroit. Roads were laid out and named to mimic the Motor City. Even the advertisements were cheering for Henry Ford.

But a U.S. senator from Nebraska, George Norris, had other plans. He thought the half-finished dam should stay under public management. The debate ran as the river flowed, for about a decade. The dam was completed and Henry Ford bowed out in 1924. The debate continued until the Depression, FDR, and until the TVA was born and took over. Predominant political structures figure into a great deal, too.

Even today you can drive through areas where there are rough old roads named after streets in Detroit, laid out in anticipation of the failed Ford deal. Nothing has ever been built on them.

Speaking of advertisements, here are a few more from that issue of The Herald. “We can’t be particular and so the little girl was smart to shop here, where we can’t be particular about our candy.”

Benjamin Luna was a longtime merchant in the area. He died at his home in 1956.

His wife, Adele Luna, shows up in the paper well into the 1960s. Quite the social figure, her name often appears under that Spillway graphic. She passed away in 1982. They had two daughters and a son. One of the daughters died just last year having lived just shy of 101 years. It was a full life, some 80-years of it right there in the Shoals.

I wonder what she thought about the lamb.

Hard to imagine ads explaining how your phone works, isn’t it?

But easy to imagine the phone companies would like you to spend some long-distance money with them. At least we have this advertisement here to explain long distance rates to younger readers.

This is the last advertisement in the June 15, 1921 Florence Herald. W.I. Swain started his business over in Mississippi in 1910. He was still touring at least through 1931.

Stand where he set up his tents for this show, you could see the river. Predominant geographical features figure into everything.

cycling / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Jul 21

Life in slower motion

We set out for a bike ride this evening. Nothing serious, just a quick hour through an hour’s worth of neighborhoods. About seven of them, I’d say. Then again, not every stretch of road runs through a tightly grouped neighborhood. I bet if you went door-to-door along today’s route not everyone would think they lived in a neighborhood. They’d wonder why a person in a helmet and funny clothes was knocking on their door. Asking about their neighbors. And sweating all over the place.

I’ve had to swap inner tubes in a few front yards. You get self conscious of that quite quickly. It’s probably the funny clothes.

Anyway, a nice little ride. I was slow, because that is my lot lately. The only solution to that is more riding. The Yankee was faster. There’s a turnaround on the route, and she made it there first, slowed, turned and was coming back the other direction.

I don’t think she was going especially fast, or trying overly hard, she just was fast. Maybe it’s the bike or the gearing, but probably it’s just she’s good at this. Also I’m not riding especially comfortably just now. If I thought about it too much I’d convince myself someone has been tinkering with my bike setup. Which always feels precarious, anyway. I’m like the princess and the pea over here. Change the tires, use different bottles, I can feel it.

And if you’re going this slow you have plenty of time to notice!