A. L. Gibson

I would not normally post so many links to other blogs in a row like this, but I absolutely fell in love with the latest post over at The Natural Treasures of Ohio:

http://floraofohio.blogspot.com/2013/02/upstate-new-york-iii-old-growth-pines.html

Now, naturally, the Adirondacks are but a mirror of the boreal beauty that northern Ontario has to offer, but damn, they really do a good job at looking the part of the "northern woods" despite being so far south.  The Adirondacks have the same wonderful granite, gneiss, and gabbro popping out of the ground that the Canadian Shield on the other side of the St. Lawrence has, as well as (I admit it!) even more rugged terrain than can be found there.  They do tend to lack the same wonderful sand...

Off of the Brent Road just south of the Trans-Canada Highway.

...but on the whole, Pre-Cambrian floored New York is pretty impressive.  What is even more impressive is Monsieur Gibson's blog.  While he tends to stick closer to home in Ohio, his nature photographs are lovely no matter where he takes them from.  I found his blog when I was looking for something on the natural side of southern Michigan.  Google decided to be a fan of Ohio State rather than the Wolverines that day, and I ended up with his blog instead.  A rather nice auto-correct blunder on their part, at least in terms of the discovery I ended up with.

Where South Persists

A few days ago we caught a glimpse of southern extensions of the Boreal world into southern Michigan in a post on a tamarack swamp.  Today's post will be a compliment of that one, taking a quick glance at the "southern" temperate eastern forests showing up in small traces in the northern forests.

Said Elm was immortalized on digital canvas from a location on Cedar Lake in Ontario.

The American Elm (Ulmus Americana), that graceful, drooping tree that so delicately sticks up among the birches, alders, aspens, and spruce is definitely a creature of another world, one that looks alien among the landscape of the Canadian Shield.  This amazing tree, which shades so many parks and avenues further south, can indeed grow here, just as it can grow in central Florida and the moderately arid parts of the Great Plains, but it does so at a disadvantage in regards to growing conditions.  The gentle appearance of the tree certainly seems to hint at this; elms growing among the more rugged and savage Boreal conifers add an exotic tough to the landscape, clearly something that probably is there under generous conditions.

They certainly looked like they did not belong, even to a knowledge-thirsty six year old.  Overall rarity was made even more interesting by the presence of the above elm to another mere yards away:

I kept wondering exactly what this tree was doing standing out among the Balsam Fir.  By the time I was six and could manage reading decently in English, I looked in every tree book we had to try and explain what the lone elm was all about.  As you can see, it has since deteriorated due to Dutch Elm Disease and now bears little resemblance to the healthier tree it once was, but even these days it still tends to stand out even among other dead trees.  That it is still alive despite brutal winters which easily feature overnight lows in the minus forties (both scales) compounded with the disease is beyond me.  The miracle is a good point to focus on, however, in considering "what belongs where".  Boreal trees are certainly hardy, but more southerly varieties are hardly weak, being able to endure extremes of temperature over 120 degrees apart or more!

The meeting of north and south is thus less of a "holding on" and more of an acknowledgement of different forms of arboreal adversity.  These elms grow here because they can, just like a Red Maple (Acer Rubrum) in the Everglades, a Ponderosa Pine (Pinus Ponderosa) in the desert elevations of the Mojave or even spruce at the arctic treeline.  Trees such as these are a wonderful reminder of how tough life is on this continent, and how interconnected, yet diverse, our ecosystems are, much like the people who live here.

Yep, here she is again, just to the left of those two fir spires.

Thus, "does not look like it belongs" is more like "yet a part of this forest".

In general, good places to see such mixes of the Boreal and Eastern North America are along the northern Great Lakes and northern Appalachians.  While the overall feeling, say, of northern Maine, central Ontario, etc. is that the north has been arrived at, such places are still only the doorway of a much more expansive world that continues more than a thousand miles northward to the edge of the tundra.  The above scenery, for instance, would seem positively southern to someone from extreme northern Quebec!  Perspective is everything.

Kylee Baumle

It should come to no surprise that a botanist such as myself has a fondness for gardening, and as such I tend to follow a few gardening blogs.  One of my favorites is Our Little Acre, a blog by Kylee Baumle.  Kylee is a fellow central Great Lakes gardener, and I found her blog when I was looking for the adaptable growing range of the majestic Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum).  She has so far managed to make one thrive in nearby northwestern Ohio, and needless to say I then began reading up on her horticultural teachings.

Today she shared something that perfectly fits in with the theme of American Voyages, a post combining travel, flora, culture, and history pertaining to North America on the whole.  Check it out:

Thank You, Lady Bird: A Visit to the Wildflower Center in Austin

An excellent article, one well worth a read, especially for anyone interested in conservation history, Texas, wildflowers, or even just blue skies.

Suburban Southern California...

...from olden times, say, even just 60 years ago.

All selections were taken at a private home in Fontana, California.

No sprawl all the way to the margins of the desert and colder reaches of the mountains.  No fancy boulevards lined with designer boutiques or fast food feeding troughs.

Hell, no lawns.  Just some trees to take advantage of the climate both for beauty and practical use.

Sure, the trees and flowers are mostly exotic introductions meant to make California feel more like a tropical paradise (this is why so many palm trees were planted there, to get people to move to an otherwise arid and water-hungry place, palms symbolizing the easy life) than its own interesting unique ecosystems and habitats, but the native life does manage to creep through here and there.

California Poppy (Eschscholzia Californica)!

Native life was easier to come by anyway back then.  While outlying non-desert areas did feature extensive orchards and vineyards, the foothills were often left to their own devices.  Fires and mudslides were far less devastating  mainly because development did not remove the natural California hillsides to leave either weed fields or barren rock wastes on the margins of housing developments that inched closer into what could have been defensible space.  The first American Californians considered their new home to be the next best thing to paradise, and the first few immigrant generations felt similar enough feelings that they focused more on what could be grown or appreciated rather than on what could make the most money.  These people wanted  their California to still be the paradise that the place had come to be known as for centuries.

The homes even tried to pass for something of an earlier era, stuccoed enough to fake the look of adobe mission architecture rather than look like some grand Italianate mogul's estate.  Architecture, it seems, is a good indicator of what sort of core interests and values a society is attracted to.  Sounds like something to jump around the country looking at, no?

The Northern Thrust

While the higher elevations of the Appalachian Mountains commonly feature floral extensions of the great northern forests as far south as Georgia, what most people do not realize is that remnants of great bogs can be found even at lower elevations as far south as parts of Ohio and Indiana.  The inhospitable conditions of a  bog, along with occasional cool groundwater seepages, means that our hardier northern friends are often the only plants that can thrive.  While more southerly trees and flowers might make it even to the edge of the peat, they are forced to yield to the true survivors.  Such is the scene captured below, in a rather damp, nearly bog-like place between two lakes around Cement City, Michigan.

Taken from Hallson's Gardens which neighbors the wetland.   

The large conifers sticking out of the wetlands are tamaracks (Larix Laricina), northern trees which grow all the way to the Arctic Treeline and find their climactic southern limit not far from here in extreme northern Indiana and Ohio, with, of course, the exception of higher ground in the Appalachians.  Southern Michigan is where a few more northern sentinels start to pop up, including spruce, pines, birches, and northern willows.  Like so many native plants that could otherwise be seen as the delightful blessing that they are at the edge of their range, diversifying an otherwise familiar landscape, these trees are often dismissed as scrub and uninteresting, and are often consigned to a fate of being chopped down as their wet ground is drained away to make room for a far less interesting condo development or mini-mall.  

Granted, your author is a bit passionate about having something boreal practically in his backyard.  To me, it is what makes the western Great Lakes region so interesting: we can have a tallgrass prairie a stone's throw from a boreal bog, again only a walk away from towering forest of maples, beech, oaks, hickories, and more.  Let's just say that nature makes our housing developments look mundane, what with nothing but mile after mile of carefully chopped lawn grass and manicured trees serving as green background rather than a reminder of how we can still dominate a planet that we can keep largely natural.  

Northern Forests of Arizona

OK, so by now most of my readers get that when I state something will be in the next post, I really mean the next post when it is convenient.  I wanted to take the week to share with the world just how great Detroit is and can be, and only got a little past the theoretical stage of that discussion.  The fact of the matter is that I do not have a lot of photographs of the area, despite having lived here a decent amount of time so far.  I suppose this condition is something similar to New Yorkers never going to see the Statue of Liberty, or more so, New Yorkers never taking pictures of their city.  Thus, I think I will spread out the Detroit love throughout the blog whenever I come across some interesting things to share.

To continue on with the blog in general...

This year, being the Auroral Maximum, when the Northern Lights will be more spectacular than ever, American Voyages will be dedicated to all things northern.  That's right, anything that has more spruce than people will be featured in this glorious year of 2013, even if northern falls far to the south.

Take a look at the misty forests on the north rim of the Grand Canyon:

That's right, this place is all the way down in Arizona, land of sunshine, giant cacti, and vast desert stretches.  As you can see, there is nary a cactus around, and the place is quite wet.  Elevation can extend Le Nord quite some distance south, well into Mexico.  While the trees might be a little more Western Mountain than James Bay, the overall effect is the same.  

Sunday Post: Cactus Mountain

Well, it's actually just an unnamed slope along Potrero Rd. in the Santa Monica mountains.  The thicket took me by surprise; I knew that coastal California had its fair share of cacti, but this slope was just packed with them, just like in parts of the inland deserts.  The species is Coastal Prickly Pear (Opuntia Littoralis), probably with some friends mixed in.  While the place may look dry and desert-like, this is mostly owing to being on a south facing slope in rather well drained soil.  Nearby locations are covered in the typical California chaparral and are quite verdant even in the drier parts of the year.  This slope might have had more cover at one point, but successive burnings and invasive species might have overly-stressed the native stuff.  Cacti, though, are a hardy bunch, and seemed to be thriving.  

Resurget Cineribus

It Shall Arise From The Ashes

Detroit once burned to the ground, much like her rival Chicago.  In 1805, after a rather difficult first century of changing political hands twice and being under the perpetual threat of invasion from Canada (come on, you can laugh), the mostly French-Canadian inhabitants of the city found themselves having to start over from scratch.  Thus we have the motto of the city: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus.  While the dominant culture of the city would then change into a melting pot of both internal and external immigrants much like New York, the heart of her founding people would remain in a resilient population that would turn adversity into reason for existence.  How?

A precarious existence next to Upper Canada turned into a port of entry and departure.

As the wounds of 1812 slowly began to heal through the 19th century, trade began to grow between the two banks of the river.  Western Ontarians were, and are, a far more agrarian folk than their brethren to the east of the Niagara Escarpment.  Michigan would later include a strong agricultural base, mostly in fruits and vegetables, in its diverse economic portfolio, but its emergence out of frontier life came at a comparatively slower rate than neighboring Ohio and Indiana.  People came to Michigan, after all, to harvest timber or trap beaver.  You came to Michigan for the one last piece of the frontier lifestyle that could still be found east of the Mississippi.  If your family followed, they would most likely set up camp in the more serene domesticity of the rich croplands of the true Midwest, not some off-the-beaten path place that would not even become a state until 1837.  That said, a lot of people did come to Detroit, all 46,000 of them by the time tempers flared at Fort Sumter.  They needed food, and what they could not provide for themselves they could find across the way.  Position was everything, after all.

Position was how Chicago grew from a backwater fort into one of the greatest cities in the world.  Chicago was a transportation hub, a gateway between east and west.  One would get off the boat in New York, sure, but if one wanted to move deeper into the land, one ended up with countless native born Americans before a great menu of destinations awaiting them at this gateway.  Despite the open nature of the continent, nearly all travel somehow centered on the great bottleneck there.  Traffic still does; multiple interstates get their start in the city, leading in a great radial pattern to all points except due east into the drink of Lake Michigan.  The great northern transcontinental roads and railways all stop here, and some of the success that New York achieved as the premier port of the United States was in the fact that Chicago was at the other end of a passage to the west, be it by canal and lakes or rail.

Chicago never had the benefit of being next to Canada, however, and certainly not the benefit of being a mere three hours and change away from Toronto, with a bit more of a double investment getting one to Montreal and thus the ocean.  Or, if one was feeling overly patriotic, one could still take the Empire route through Buffalo and onto New York.  Yes, Detroit had, and has, the distinct advantage of also being a transportation hub, and then one on international scale.  Detroit could serve as the staging point for more than just settlement expansion and agricultural commodities trading.  Detroit could serve, rightly so, as the center of a Great Lakes powerhouse of natural resources both arboreal and mineral.  Chicago was the doorstep to the west, sure, but Detroit was right at the center of everything industrial east of the Mississippi.  If ever there can be declared a true capital to the Great Lakes, it is the city right at the middle of them.  Of course, back then raw materials for industry were all the rage, and this included people themselves, some free, many not so free.

Detroit was for many the last place they would experience of an American existence.  Detroit was the last frightful stop for escaping slaves heading to safety in Canada through the Underground Railroad.

The thing was, some of these slaves would one day return, and Detroit became more than just a gateway.  Many other people would come in their wake, from many different lands and cultures.  They would come because of racial tolerance and freedom, not in spite of it.  They still do today; Detroit has one of the most diverse immigrant populations outside of the major port cities of New York and Los Angeles.  Freedom, a reasonable cost of living, good living conditions, excellent paying jobs in a number of fields, all of these and more attracted people to a city that truly encapsulated the American dream far more than the crowded slums of packed New York or even great gateway Chicago.

The new Underground Railroad works the same way.

Immigrants finding tough restrictions, discrimination, and economic difficulties in the United States have been increasingly turning toward Canada as an alternative destination nation.  Now, as then, many make a life for themselves there only to find that they still want to make a go for it, largely because of relatives who have done so, in the United States.  Detroit actually turns out to be one of the first places that springs to mind for making this happen.  How do I know?  Personal experience.  Having spent time in various INS offices, I can assure my readers that the two most diverse waiting rooms I have been to were in Detroit and New York.  In a rather sterile and tranquil modern version of Ellis Island, voices from around the world crowd daily into the immigration offices on Jefferson ave. in Detroit.  To most Americans, Detroit might symbolize decay and corruption, but to people from the rest of the world it symbolizes diversity and opportunity.  When I lived over in London in 2003, most of the people I met in that extremely cosmopolitan world city saw Detroit as a point of racial and national encounter.  Violent, perhaps at times, but for the most part a different view of the country and continent at large.

To these same people, a place like New York was more of a melting pot where cultural assimilation and absorption takes place.  Everyone picks up the habits and customs and tastes of everyone else and the country is enriched the more so even while the newcomers also become more American.  In Detroit, the process is a bit slower, and differences become far more apparent.  The movie 8 Mile was often pointed out to me as an artistic representation of this encounter between different worlds.  In reality, 8 Mile road is very much the boundary between the suburban and urban worlds here, and as the movie illustrated all too well, it can be a very messy border indeed.  As noted, though, encounters do not necessarily mean confrontation, just more so a lot of transmission without dilution.  Case in point, we have amazing musical talent here that has benefited from cultural fault-lines.  We also have the most diverse regional cuisine in, well, North America.  If you wanted to, you could gorge on a day of restaurant binges and get stuffed full of authentic Mexican, Italian-American, Polish, Arabic, Greek, Soul, and even Coney Island food.  Best of all, poutine has recently made a dramatic entrance here, and this gets us back to one of our two main events.

What is Detroit good for?  Being plain exciting and having what is possibly the most potential of any city in North America.  If we can rely more so on the strengths of our racial differences than the bigotry that can exist between them, we can easily, along with what I envision to be our ideal sister city of Toronto, become one of the new prime destination cities of the country.  Recent plans to reintroduce efficient high-speed rail service to the United States incorporates Chicago as the primary central hub of connections, one of which is as the terminus of a corridor stretching to Montreal, through Detroit and Toronto, the true lifeblood of this circuit.  We already have a second major international crossing on the way to help facilitate commercial traffic, and Canada already has the high speed lines built on their end.  We also have the wealth here to reinvigorate what treasures do remain in our city, which we see in the next post on what Detroit has to offer to the world.

For now, we have soul, and we sure do have hope.

The best way to illustrate this post would be an early morning shot of the city, taken just as the sun is making its way up.  We sure do have a tree-filled city!

We have this virtue not in the memory of a glorious past or in spite of rampant corruption and decay, but because of an energy which never did get dissipated during so many rough times, it just got either redirected or channeled into different values for a different age.  Again, come by next post to see what we have accomplished.

And oh yes, I am a proud Michontarian, a word I predict will have a much wider usage in the coming decades.

What's So great About Texas?

Before we return to a look at Detroit, I feel that the following link is an excellent introduction to the better bits of somewhere a bit to the south that also receives its fair share of stereotypes.

50 Sure Signs That Texas Is Actually Utopia

I always figured utopia was Northern Ontario, but...

Think about Texas.  Texas is often viewed by the Right in this country as the grand paradise of conservatism and reasonable taxes, legislation, and decent moral culture.  Conversely, it is often viewed by the Left as a backward land of revisionist education, gunslingers, racists, and country music.  Texas is often viewed by all as either a desert that is boiling hot or an open range home to many cowboys.  Texas has a little of all of this, but it is actually one of the most diverse places on the continent, both in terms of its human and natural environments.  A land where South meets West meets Plains meets Mexico is almost guaranteed to produce very special people and landscapes, sort of like... Detroit, where we shall return to next post.

A special thanks to a friend in Wichita Falls for sharing this with me.

Detroit, the Third-World City?

This post is something I have wanted to write for a long time.  I have taken nearly a week off from the blog preparing for it, or more so hesitating to write it, but the last few weeks have seen some, well, aggravating developments in a long line of blunders made by the Detroit City Council, coupled by yet more media attention lavished upon former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.  

In 1701, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac was travelling up the Detroit river when he cast his eyes upon a length of short bluffs on the west bank of the river.  They were covered in towering beech-maple forests pierced by even grander White Pines and were surrounded by ash swamps absolutely loaded with beaver.  A defensible location approximately halfway into the Great Lakes teeming with fur bearing mammals featuring much milder winters than anything back in Quebec proper must have seemed like paradise to any resident of New France.  Cadillac thought so, for he founded a city here.  Fifty years later, it was to rival Montreal and New Orleans, the other two great cities of New France, in size.  In 1760 she changed hands, but not cultures.  Detroit remained a French-Canadian city into the early 19th century, and many residents in the metropolitan area still bear French last names, as do the city street names and grid pattern up and down the river on both banks.  Though not as immediately recognizable as a heart of Franco-North American heritage, Detroit has every right to lay claim to being a part of this history.  

Time and people have marched on.  Lured by the same promise of free land that attracted the first Canadians here, Americans came to the region, if not in the same great numbers that they flocked to newly minted Chicago.  Perhaps this was because Detroit and Michigan were north of the beaten path, and a little too close to Upper Canada for comfort.  Still, immigrants and escaped, later freed African Americans came to settle here throughout the 19th century.  Detroit was heard of a destination even in Mexico, and the city boasts one of the oldest Mexican communities in the northern United States, established now for over a century.  While she grew alongside the other great old cities of the Northeast and Great Lakes, she positively exploded when Henry Ford and other industrial innovators set up shop here in the early 20th century.  Ford and the other industrialists offered incredible opportunities, including high wages for even entrance-level factory workers and hiring policies that dismissed any notion of racial segregation.  

Even as the mansions of the wealthy sprang up to rival the finest estates in New England and New York, even as skyscrapers and a cityscape to rival New York and Chicago rose from the lit, paved streets laid out in a Parisian pattern, the ordinary Detroiters saw a piece of the pie and could afford comfortable lives of their own.  Relations with Canada had significantly warmed by the turn of the century, and while Detroit had once been off the beaten path, it was now an international gateway, one made even more prestigious by proximity to alcohol-loaded Ontario during a rather dry time in the United States.  Best of all, Detroit was, and remains, on a powerful corridor running from Chicago to Montreal, a corridor which is every bit as urban, wealthy, and sophisticated as the east coast of the United States.   By the second world war, she was the fourth largest city in the United States, and among the wealthiest.  48302, the zip code for Bloomfield, MI, in fact, is the second richest zip code in the country after 90210, made so not by celebrity but by the automobile.  

So what happened?

Why do people now associate Detroit with something far more grim?  Why do photographers come here only to take shots of urban decay and abandoned buildings that look as if they would have once been palaces and theatres to rival the sights in Vienna and Paris?  Why do people associate the name Detroit only with what is wrong in America?  When people think of the word they sometimes re-arrange the last two vowels to spell "riot".  Well, Detroit sure did have a riot to end all riots.

Black Day in July

It's a good video, so I thought I would provide a bigger link for it here than just a line leading to YouTube.  Gordon Lightfoot is a folk singer from central Ontario, a major influence on none other than Bob Dylan, and perhaps one of the finest bards on matters relating to the Great Lakes region.  

Detroit might have been a northern city of a great dream of economic and racial equality, but it was still paralyzed by racial tension that gripped far more than just the southern United States.  These days, the city has turned from a diverse population into one that is vastly Black, even as the ever-expanding suburbs have taken in that former diversity.  Non-institutional segregation has given way to a seeming exclusivity, but this is not the sole reason why Detroit has changed so much, no matter how many people want to blame a race for the downward slope of a once great city.  The wealth, power, development, and greatness just got so dispersed in the ever-expanding donut of the suburbs that it faded from view.  Who cares about a suburb, after all, if the city it satellites is a second string attraction?   Anyway...

What was that about race?  Better yet, what was that about racism?  Oh, and not just White on Black.  Black on White.  Everyone on everyone else.  We have had so much racial tension here since the 1920's that it is hard to posit a place where the madness began, but I am going to say that two people encapsulate just how divided and exclusionary the lifeblood of Detroit has become:

Coleman Young, first black mayor of Detroit and an emblem of reverse-racism.

Orville Hubbard, segregationist mayor of Dearborn and an emblem of overt racism. 

Young was the mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1993, while Hubbard was the mayor of Dearborn from 1942 to 1978.  On first glance, why yes, these times are far, far too long to be dominating the politics of any governing body.  During Young's time as mayor, Detroit shrank in population by well over half, became known as the murder and arson capital of the United States, and presided over city-councils dominated by pro-Black segregationists and some of the most corrupt civic leaders, well, anywhere in the world.  He personally fought to racially integrate the city's civil services and was committed to a crusade against racism, at least as he defined it.  Most baby-boomers and older residents of the metro area consider him to be the worst thing to ever happen to Detroit.  More neutral viewers of history consider him to be a man who did not try to veil his opinions and could hardly be blamed for just how volatile and dangerous the situation of the city became during his time in office.  His motto might best be summed up as "integration and social-equality at all costs, <expletive>".

Hubbard, on the other hand, was determined to keep his neighboring city of Dearborn out of the hands of what he deemed to be forces that were killing Detroit, and yes, he very much disliked integration of Whites and Blacks.  Ironically, Dearborn has since become a largely Arab-American city and largely added to the multiculturalism of the metro area.  Whereas Young's intentions might at least be debatable, Hubbard's were never in question; he openly detested anyone who was Black.  His motto might best be summed up as "keep your Black <expletive> out of my city."

So who do you think is talked about more when thinking about the history of the metro area?  Young.  Hubbard hardly even gets a mention, which is pretty sad.  When suburbanites see abandoned neighborhoods, long deceased businesses and factories, crumbling churches and overgrown parks, they decry the remaining residents of the city rather than think back on what might have been had they, you know, stayed and worked things out.  When city residents look out at the suburbs and look around again at their own neighborhoods, and I say this from personal experience in working in the city of Detroit, I have seen many look at the situation as if it were inevitable, and even inescapable because of race, rather than, you know, try to make a better city.  It does not help when much of the city and county leadership is corrupt beyond the dictionary definition of the word.

I simply tell all of these "historians" the same message.  It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with attitude.  Race is simply an excuse.  A powerful excuse, if the history of the world has anything to say about it, but an excuse.  Detroit is no longer French-Canadian.  Do I blame my own race for this downfall?  No.  Does this seem ludicrous to us now?  Indeed it does.  Back in the 18th century though, it would have been the talk of the town.  The change in power and hands of one group into another would have been discussed as "only natural, seeing as how Catholics and Frenchmen at that hate liberty, modern advancement, and true, English (or later, American) civilization".  

So what about the title?  Is Detroit simply a third-world city and a scary place full of "those people"?  Take a look at the scene below and tell me this is a slum and not a modern North American city:

No.  Detroit has gone through some rough patches, and (especially in our older generations) is still a bit overburdened by racial tension, or more so, the racial excuse.  There are some rather scary areas, but then there are scary areas in Los Angeles and New York as well.  We also have so many amazing things about us  too.  Come by next post for a better look on what Detroit actually is, and even better, what it can become.