A Turning Point, A Remembering

Welcome back to American Voyages!  Our long absence has come to an end as I find myself once again in possession of a workable computer.

Much has been going in North America lately, events setting in motion a rather vast set of political changes.  While life will continue as normal for many, the extremes of polarity that have built up between camps of ideology and alliance grow farther and farther apart.  At this point, I could easily turn this into a political blog, but there really is no point to such a disservice.  Rather, consider that American Voyages has always been about exploration and trying to paint a picture about the context of our history.  As a radical centrist, its, well, my "thing".  I'm also something of a royalist, at least in a constitutional sense; it's amazing what an un-elected political leader can do to keep a bunch of elected political leaders at bay.  The colonials in the thirteen colonies at first felt the same way; their grievance was with a bloated Parliament and its military-industrial machine.  In fact, they even sent a petition just to George III to ask for his help in dealing with Parliament.

That said, I'm in no hurry to see a king set up, deposed, or necessarily even considered for appointment.  But there are those out there who very much are.  France, much like the United States, is currently undergoing a period of cultural introspection, brought on by a number of different factors.  Extremist populist movements are no less prevalent there, as they have been now for quite some time.  A minority within the far right of the country has been quietly calling for the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne.  This past Saturday, the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI, a memorial Mass was held in Paris at the Basilica of Saint Denis, the French equivalent of Westminster Abbey.  These faces should look fairly familiar:

They were the last monarchs before the first French Revolution.  Their descendants live on, as do their supporters.  I leave it up to each person to decide whether they were right to have been killed; personally, I think they made their own fate possible, even while I think that the revolutionaries were overreaching themselves.  They tried to flee and attack their own country, just as James II did so in Britain a hundred years before them.  They made little room for compromise, or at least made it a secondary concern, much as the last Catholic king of Britain did.  This was par for the course as far as the Bourbons (and Stuarts) were concerned.  Louis XIV started the process by trying to unify his kingdom through the sheer blunt instrument of an absolute monarchy.  He definitely had his reasons: his uncle Charles I lost his head over not gaining dominance over Parliament.  The Bourbons would ensure that their majesty, wealth, and power would put the nobility in their place.  The problem was, the nobility could be kept in check by ostentatious displays of the glory of the state.  The common folk, however, saw it as an affront to their very struggle for existence.

Populism toppled a regime in France, just as it had transformed a regime in Britain, just as it would change the game in the colonies and Mexico, just as it made the first half of the 20th century a rather terrifying era to live in... just as it keeps doing to this day.  While we need not and indeed should not be slaves to historical memory, we certainly should be aware that it has a lot to teach us, inspire us with, and warn us against.

For my part, I definitely see January 21st as something of a feast day, even while I would throw my support behind Henri d'Orleans and the Orleanist line of succession rather than the Bourbon.  That day in 1793 was a day to be remembered and pondered on for anyone serious about historical memory.  That day was a day in which both the Bourbons and the New Regime failed France, failed themselves, and was a day in which the dangers of extremes became truly painful and divisive, not just here but in a new American nation.  Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians, Anti-Federalists and Federalists started rallying behind supporting Republican France or divorced Mother Britain, even as they were more definable by preexisting theories of government.  People love a cause.  People love to get behind "Change we can believe in" just as much as they love to get behind "Making America great again".  Centrists like Benjamin Franklin, and later, a man very much touched by his aggravating advice, John Adams, would try to acknowledge passion even as they supported a little bit more sanity.  Mr. Adam's epitaph does not proclaim "I did for the dream of a strong central government", it reads:

"Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in 1800."

Isolated from his enemies and his former architect of power, Alexander Hamilton, Mr. Adams found his life to be one of a dreamer of change who ended up simply wanting others to have the freedom to dream of their own change or stability.  In the history of my country, there was Guy Carleton, the first Baron Dorchester.  You see, even while I take interest in the revival of interest in a French monarchy (and the French do love their freedom even while they idolize "kings" like Napoleon and De Gaulle, because they are as into populist excitement as much as the Americans), I already have a monarch, Queen Elizabeth.  Her predecessor George III had the wisdom to see Lord Carleton as "a sensible man" who could effectively manage newly British Canada.  He saved my culture, managed to keep Canada out of the colonial cause for independence and helped create English speaking Canada by shepherding loyalists out of the United States when the war was over.  For her part today, the Queen has served as a place for rival camps in British politics to find at least a ceremonial common ground.  In 2011, she even became the first British monarch to visit Ireland as a guest rather than a general leading troops.  She is an ironic symbol, I think, for an alternative to the personalization of politics.

But what we all have is a shared history, progressives, conservatives, moderates, Caucasians, African-Americans, Native Americans... even while we still attend rallies to see a man of powerful presence in a red hat... or stand our ground in the cold as a pipeline threatens to cross close to our native land.  In Paris, a Requiem is celebrated for a long dead king, perhaps to stir up some concept of patriotism, even as others march against this and other visions of what they deem repression.  Lately, all sides seem to be calling their opposition the oppressor.

The king is called to the scaffold yet again; this time he is embodied in no single individual.  This is in many ways the perfect time to read 1984, and not because the "other side" is your enemy personified in Big Brother.  May passion inspire us, not rule us!

The Place Of Desert

For the last year or so in American Voyages, I have been largely focused on eastern North America.  My long-time readers and those who dig further into the heap of posts will find that my emphasis started out in a completely different direction, that of the vast, diverse wild-lands that is the West (or in the case of Mexico, the North).  My travels out there were what ultimately inspired me to give a go at this blog, but heaven knows I did not start out loving such a place.  I grew up in the boreal forest, which remains to me the most primal, holy, and majestic landscape on the planet.  I viewed the southern pinelands as the next most incredible landscape, followed by a child's imaginary view of the evergreen forests of the western rainy reaches, and largely disliked that which was in between, the world of the deciduous forests and grasslands.  When it came time for me to take my first ground trip across the continent, I was dreading the flat, boring plains that I would be forced to endure.

Of course my image of them was made uglier by what I figured they would be, a continuation of the flat, artificial cornfield "prairies" of far southern Ontario, Ohio, and southern Michigan.  There was no life between the Appalachians and the Rockies, I had gathered.  But then I drove into central Illinois and saw the sky get bigger.  I crossed the Mississippi and found Iowa to be rolling, and in places where the farms had gone fallow, lush green lands dotted with the occasional Bur Oak (Quercus Macrocarpa) standing as a lone witness to another world.  August rains had come and blessed the land so that it looked as if it were something out of Hobbit country.  Again, I placed my conception of the world on top of the landscape as it truly existed and was perhaps even eager to be seen by my overly-focused eyes. 

Then came Nebraska, and some more corn, especially between Lincoln and where the Platte and I-80 meet for the first time heading west.  That river though, that shallow, silty, seemingly unimpressive river... it stole my heart and my attention.  Perhaps it was the trees that did this; tough-as-nails Cottonwoods (Populus Deltoides) forming gallery forests that made the trip so much more enjoyable for my stubborn sylvan-centric tourist agenda.  The funny thing is, though, my eyes started looking for the prairie.  I had long wondered what the transition between eastern forest and western void was like, and found instead that the corn, or at least my concern for it, had prevented me from finding this remarkable transition area.  Around North Platte, however, I saw it; hills of grass and what I presumed was only grass.  I-80 kept following the rivers, but I was headed for golden California, and the majestic mountains of Colorado.  I turned onto I-76 and into the High Plains, and much like viewing a religious icon, my mind was made quiet and my gaze indirect.  The immensity of all that was not human overtook my concentration; not for nothing have many religious experiences of some of the most intense contemplative types from western Christianity (Jesus, in fact, started to "find himself" in the desert) to the Lakota mystics who once ranged far and wide over that same northeastern Colorado grass included sharing that nature made them forget the self and connect with the infinite.

Doubtless I found such a place in the small, innocent world of childhood.  I remember the towering pines and ancient granite of the Canadian Shield transporting me far away from the worries of the present.  Then I grew up, indulged in material culture, formed a rigid world view like most other college students sharply liberal and conservative alike tend to do, and forgot about my and my world-view's insignificant place in the cosmos.  At some point I started realizing that this was at best silly and at worst insulting to myself, my place in history, and my purpose in the greater world.  Maybe I was looking for something else, or something more whole... but that trip to California plunged me into less of a tourist run and into more of a pilgrimage.  The High Plains cleared my mind and prepared me for the grandeur of the mountains to come, and more surprisingly so, the desert beyond.  I was amazed at the vista given by the Front Range, but the High Plains managed to keep me even more enthralled with my first ever glimpse of an honest-to-goodness western plant, the Sand Sagebrush (Aretmisia Filifolia).

This one was taken at Pipe Spring National Monument, on the other side of its range compared to where we first met on the Colorado High Plains.  I think this is where we fell in love. 

If you've never experience one, I would say that it alone is an excellent reason to go out west.  It feels and smells incredible, with the best olfactory performance coming after a rain.  Like so many White people before me, I always viewed sagebrush as an afterthought, even a weed.  I had encountered its northernmost version, Artemisia Frigida, back in my magical boreal youth.  Perhaps I was bred to hate prairie, however, because I found nothing likeable in that patch of meadow that constituted the "back yard" where I found my first specimen of this plant.  I have since apologized to what I assume is its children.  Back then, however, I was all about the pines, like so many people are.  No one can tolerate the fly-over states, and they seem to view anything even drier as either a wasteland, the backdrop for Vegas and sci-fi movies, or a good place to extract resources and produce more crap for us to throw away.  I certainly headed into my California voyage with a similar attitude.  Then I saw the open skies, and then I saw the sagebrush, and then I saw the yuccas... and then the cacti.  Nearly two years later, on a misty March day, I saw the saguaros, and a view of the desert that had gone from hard on life that had turned into otherworldly had then become something closer to ethereal.  The desert is a place teeming with life that has managed to not only make the best of the situation, but in many cases to positively thrive there. 

I write this because far too often we dismiss the desert as an unwelcome, useless intrusion into our idealized view of the world.  We like it lush and green, happy and managed/cultivated.  Our vision of the world, even the wild portions of it, are often frowned upon if they do not conform to our place in it.  This attitude exists in persons as different as lobbyists for the Koch brothers or ecological restorers concerned with the dwindling wolf populations on Isle Royale.  Those religious types I mentioned would probably tell the rest of us to focus instead on greater things than our immediacy.  I write this because today I read a piece related to this post, written by an "activist" living in the Mojave, an atheist no less.  I wanted to share his piece here, with all of you, and give a brief description of my own of why I think it is important.  Please, take the time to read it, because I'm shutting up now.

https://www.beaconreader.com/chris-clarke/the-desert-is-not-your-blank-canvas

Destination Food In Your Backyard

I was going to continue with the food posts today, covering a delightful Buffalo treasure known as the hot wing, but I searched in vain for a decent picture of the Anchor Bar, home of the "Buffalo Wing".  I've mostly gone at night, and the best I had were some very fuzzy images of their sign.  It's a wonderful place, one of many reasons to go to western New York, and I really recommend their cheese garlic bread to be enjoyed alongside their wings.   Then I realized that, in addition to not having any good pictures of anything, I was pretty much devoting a week to fast food.  While such worship is part of the American religion, this felt wrong.  People from around the world have taken a peek at this blog, and if I really want to talk about North American food, I figured I should probably talk more about Native American food, as well as more traditional fare of us newcomers from abroad.  The problem is, outside of pre-Columbian Mexican cuisine, Ojibwe and Algonquin fare, and a half bad look at how we improved on the eternal boil that is British food, I lack the proper experience to share more on such matters.

Worse, I have not done a lot of destination dining as far as such things go, or at least I've never organized my thoughts much on the places I have been.  Instead of heading head first into a food week, then, I'm going to take us to such places as a lowcountry boil when I get to them, that is to say getting to the stomach once I have visited the landscape and the history.  In the meantime, I'm going to issue a challenge to my readers: find out what sort of regional cuisine you have, and start with the First Born.  They've been here a lot longer than us colonial types, and as a result have used the ingredients on hand a lot more.  I'll start!

Here in southeastern Michigan, in addition to having access to passably decent maple syrup, and trading access to some of the best stuff in our own northern lower peninsula, we've also long since had a variety of fruits, from plums, paw paws, blueberries, and persimmons to later introductions of apples and berries; the climate here is excellent for temperate fruit trees, as we get much in the way of winter chill without excessive cold.  This part of Michigan was historically part of the Sauk and Fox nations, which after the Black Hawk War.  They were later joined by the Wendat (Huron) people, who were most likely also here and in neighboring southern Ontario centuries before their arrival in exile after their near destruction in 1649 (long story).  All of these people were excellent farmers, growing squash, beans, and corn (the three sisters), like many people in North America.   They were also expert fishers, Michigan being absolutely permeated by waterways.  Tomorrow being Friday, I'll talk about a particularly wonderful catch then, one less common so far south as Lake Erie and Lake Saint Clair.

I've barely scratched the surface on local food, not even touching the contributions of many later peoples such as the Polish, and yet we've already found quite the buffet set up for us, a vegetarian and fishy one at that.  Fear not, meat eaters, there were also plenty of ungulates around to be hunted, and the deer have yet to catch on that this is not really a wilderness anymore.  That said, find out what's in your backyard; even if it is a cuisine that has evolved from far away places and through millennia of development, the truth remains that fresh and local is making a comeback, probably because it tastes just a bit more real.  There's a reason to be mindful of history and geography, after all, as a sense of continuity is helpful for figuring out perspective.   

Real Maple Syrup: Part Three

Eastern North American Maples: A Brief Guide To Sugary Goodness

I wanted to cover all the syrup trees in one post, but these fine trees deserve more attention and better pictures than what I can give them.  I've lived around these trees most of my life, and yet I always seem to focus on the pines, spruce, fir, etc.  For now then, a shorter look at the individual maples, starting with a whole post for the top tree:

Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum)

This, without a doubt, is the best tree to draw sap from, by far.  The map included in the last post, in fact, is pretty much biased towards the best terroir for the noble Sugar Maple, to the expense of the other trees.  To be fair, this is a maple almost made to work with the cycles of frost and thaw.  Few others, if indeed truly any, trees germinate at only two degrees above freezing.  That's right, our little friends sprout when it is 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and not much warmer.  This is not to say that they are a true northern tree; while they can handle extreme lows, they do need some decent length of summer heat to truly make it.  They are a species that needs the sun, and also a species that needs the cold, like their frequent companions the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus). 

The range of the noble Acer Saccharum.  Thanks again, USGS!

In pre-colonial times, many moister forested areas in the eastern-central part of North America would have featured a dense canopy of Sugar Maples towered over by White Pines the equal of some of the most amazing giant trees out west.  In the fall, one imagines how amazing the bright orange foliage would have been in contrast with the towering, swaying pines.  Many of the first colonial residents in virgin forest areas left awe-struck accounts.

Oh, did I mention they turn orange?  Sadly I have no pictures to really do it justice...

Taken at Maybury State Park.  Maybury has lots of excellent second-growth beech-maple forest, as well as some of the furthest southern Tamarack swamps.  These are northern extensions into what otherwise starts to turn hot and dry with oak savannas and tallgrass prairie. 

With the exception of the Sassafras (Sassafras Albidum), the other maples, and the sumacs, no tree comes close to sheer brilliance.  One imagines that the First Born and then the colonial arrivals took notice of such brilliance and figured something special must be in the Sugar Maple.  In Vermont, home of the supposed best syrup ever (I will never let it go, Green Mountain guns at my door or otherwise), the spectacular autumn show which makes Bostonians and New Yorkers jam up their expressways in search of colored leaves is pretty much made by mountains of orange trees pocked by smaller concentrations of red and yellow.  The Adirondacks and Opeongo Laurentians (Algonquin), on the other hand, also feature a lot more lakes, somewhat darker skies, and a higher inclusion of northern conifers.  Alright, alright, so Vermont looks nice too.  Anyway, even further south where you get more southerly elements as well as a lot more beech trees in the mix, the noble tree still manages to steal the show. 

Maybury State Park again.  That is the same second-growth beech-maple forest back there, while the front is a reclaimed field turned into a prairie restoration; the soil and tree cover in the immediate area points to a moisture level that would have made most of this still forest.  You can easily see in this picture how Sugar Maples tend to stand out as the dominant species.  I did not make it over to successfully identify the bright yellow foliage.

The First Born probably made the stuff, inspired by the orange leaves, well into Tennessee, as long as the odd winter kept things cold enough, long enough, and provided an appropriate thaw.  Obviously, such winters would not be common at lower elevations, and to this day commercial production of syrup from any tree ceases much farther south than the Great Lakes basin.  That said, the Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, and colonials certainly made syrup along the northern forest extensions along the Appalachians.  Sugar Maple would be the primary choice for such an activity, considering as how most other reliable and tasty maple species such as Silver and Red (next post) tend to be lowland, river loving species.  That said, while the syrup would come from higher than where most people would dwell, and the southern Appalachians have the same problem that the ocean-proximate New England mountains have: maritime influence.  The Smokies, for instance, are temperate rainforests.

Not that Sugar Maple forests are too far off, in some ways, from that sort of lush dampness.  Where the beech trees that so often pair with them start to taper out (Fagus Grandifolia is a tree of vast range, equally at home among the north as it is in Florida and even Mexico), Sugar Maple becomes the dominant tree and starts making the place look really green,

A bit more southern than intended, still at Maybury.  Nevertheless, maples are far more dominant here than beech or most other trees.  The wee plants on the ground are seedlings, the majority of which will die off from lack of light in the next year or so. 

 ...with the exception of heavy leaf litter on the forest floor.  The canopy is thick enough to prevent most light from reaching the forest floor.

Not quite what I was trying to get at (a bit south of what I wanted), but the maples are pretty dominant here.  This was taken in Brighton Recreation Area, one of the most underrated and unmentioned places in Southeastern Michigan in which to get a good look at the native landscape.

In the farther north, the forest then almost looks like something from Ohio or Pennsylvania instead of Laurentian Canada.   

This is about three and a half miles north of Brent, Ontario.  In this moist, loamy environment, the dominating maples cut out competition from the slower growing northern conifers, and in the modern absence of wildfire, never get killed back now and then to let pines get a foothold.

In the future I can probably snap up a shot of what I'm talking about, but these two pictures come close.  The road shot is obviously crowded with underbrush from the extra light.  One can easily see how this species would be very attractive for making syrup, however, as in the ideal situations (see map in previous post), you get what is called a "sugar bush".  This is a naturally provided area with most of the trees being the syrup givers, relatively little underbrush to have to fight through, and the whole thing being remarkably convenient.  I could go on and on about this tree, and I might in the future, but one last item of concern draws us to a close here today: taste.

If you've never had maple syrup, get the hell off your computer and go try some.  If you have, think of the richest, most smooth maple taste you can imagine.  This is syrup and associated products from the Sugar Maple.  In other maples the flavor can sometimes overtake the other delicate features and even the sweetness; not so here.  Everything is perfectly balanced, all the more so if you can get the triple crown of glacially-deposited organic loam, Canadian Shield minerals, and that awesome northern water to make the maple sing with all the voices of heaven.  Needless to say, you don't want the bottle saying "made from x, x, and x in x, x, and x.  I may be biased, but just like in wine, the purity of singular source does not confuse the senses with complications to an already delightful complexity.  Oh, and one more thing that makes it even better?  Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) is usually close at hand in such northern places.  While I would never advocate stripping a birch, which usually scars and kills the poor thing, the First Born, especially the Ojibway and Algonquins, who use the entire tree, still have traditionalists who make cooking vessels out of birch bark (they heat the water with red hot stones).  Trust me when I say that the addition of that birch leeching into the syrup enhances it akin to an oak barrel kissing the grapes in wine.

Palms In The Carolina Landscape: An Historical Overview

When I recall traveling down to Fort Lauderdale back in the late 80's and early 90's for our annual winter romp from frigid Canada to tropical Southern Florida, I recall that I found narry a palm tree until one hit the Georgia-Florida border on I-95.  As if announcing that this was a truly unique land of eternal summers and palm trees even so far north near the rest of the country, palms suddenly exploded from the median.  Oh sure, Georgia nearby had a decent ground-cover of Saw Palmettos (Serenoa Repens) that emerged from the dense pinery around about Brunswick or so, but they had nothing on the veritable carpet of them that showed once one found high and dry ground past the St. Marys River.  One notable exception stood out, that being the Jelly Palm (Butia Capitata) which grew by two as a lovely frame to the entrance of a Fieldcrest towel outlet in Smithfield, North Carolina.  This was very, very much to the north of Florida, especially to the eyes of a child who liked to exaggerate distances.

This might, in fact, have been the occasion in which I started reading about trees, way back in either the second or third grade.  I was fortunate to have a mother who was wise to the concept of providing her offspring with as much book book book as possible, and no sooner did I turn to the palm pages in lovingly acquired Florida's Fabulous Trees than I found our friend the Jelly Palm, an import from exotic subtropical southern South America.  The block of text accompanying the delightful picture of the frosty-green fronds stated that the noble plant could be found as far north as Washington, D.C.  If this were so, and people liked palm trees so much, I wondered why I only ever saw the pair outside of towel land, and none more until far into the deepest reaches of Georgia.  Believe me, I looked!

Then this last year, when I made my way to a steamy South Carolina, I found palm after palm pop up starting with some lovely Jelly Palms planted beside a pool at a Days Inn off of I-26 exit 154 near Orangeburg, South Carolina.  Why yes, I do take botanical observation locations seriously!  Anyway, anywhere downstream from that location was awash in palms as part of the landscaping.  It seems that the last two decades have seen a flurry of palm planting as people are discovering the hardier species can take a few cold nights on an otherwise humid subtropical landscape.  Humorously enough, to the equal delight and chagrin of my traveling partner, I was worried that I had to stab very far south to see palms, either wild or cultivated, as common enough features in the landscape.  The truth was that they are EVERYWHERE in lowland South Carolina.  Again, I really do not recall this being the case back in my younger days, and believe me, I was every bit as botanically precise and insane back then as I am today.  This led me to question a few things, namely just how prevalent the mighty Cabbage Palm (Sabal Palmetto) was in older times.  Well, to start off with, the flag of South Carolina prominently features the lovely tree:

Thanks, Open Clipart!

This flag does not date back to Colonial times, but it does feature elements of one that does.  The blue field and crescent moon date from William Moultrie's original South Carolina military flag of 1775, a flag which flew over his fort to save Charleston from capture by the British.  Despite being in command of a tactically inferior force, Moultrie successfully defended the city from initial British assault.  He found that Cabbage Palm trunks are perhaps the most amusing and surprising military grade wood material known to exist on the planet.  Cannon fire from the British ships apparently bounced right off of the palm walls of his fortress, which is fairly believable considering as how the King's navy was unable to simply plow over the weaker Carolinian forces.  In 1861, when South Carolinians were getting ready to oust what they saw as Union invaders, the modern flag seen here was raised.  The Cabbage Palm, mighty defender of Charleston, was seen as a natural symbol of defiance against out-of-state invasion, and the newly-minted Confederate defenders of Fort Sumter declared themselves the heirs of the Colonial Carolinian defenders.

Like many state flags of the South, South Carolina held on to hers once Grant reminded them that their viewpoint was inappropriate, and in some cases, these flags are a sad reminder of the racism that belies a supposed continuing crusade for subsidiarity.  Don't get me wrong, I get the point of state's rights and all, I am a Canadian and therefore hold as sacred the intense power placed into the hands of individual provinces at the expense of anything not Ontari... er... you know what I mean.  Anyway, that is a post, indeed a blog and a lifetime of political and social upheaval unto itself.  Back to the point, this is one of those Southern Flags that can stand for something above and beyond what the flag makers intended, namely because it is cool enough to have an actual tree for a central figure.  Likewise, the intent of heroic defense symbolized in said tree has its greatest meaning invested in an older and far more morally-righteous rebellion.  In the north, they crowned an American Elm (Ulmus Americana) as Liberty Trees. and the economic symbol of American independence, used even on one of the first flags of the continental army, was the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus).  Down here, in warm, lush South Carolina was the Cabbage Palm.  That's right, this country had trees for symbol before it had flag-dressed women or men, eagles, chopped-up snakes, or any other sort of symbol.

So if I don't remember seeing so many of them before the cold-hardy palm craze caught on, just how widely planted were they as a landscape feature for our Second-Born ancestors?  Did they tend to leave the small space trees alone when clearing their fields of otherwise broad pines and oaks?  Did they line their streets with them?  Art from the period does not really seem to show the city as being particularly gardened, at least not nearly to the extent that it is now.  Considering the relative sophistication and connections with Britain that the city did maintain in the Georgian era, one wonders why this would be the case.  Botany was extremely popular among the planters and merchants alike, and both got rich off of a thriving plant trade.  Perhaps palms did not get much press as most gardeners did not see them as being particularly hardy or useful in the place where most of the commerce was directed, rainy and cool England (unlike today where they have gained a bit of popularity).  The palms that did start catching on in Europe in Georgian times were mostly Old World palms, notably the dates and in particular the Canary Island Date Palm (Phoenix Canariensis), which saw container planting use at Versailles.  I can't say I blame them, the thing is pretty freaking cool looking, and can even be trimmed into, well, a pineapple.  Down in our yard in Florida I wanted one really bad, at least as a kid who knew nothing about the difference between plants native and exotic.  I can see the appeal for people in an age when the world was still largely being discovered by everyone and the backyard took a backseat. 

Very few Georgian era depictions of Southern life bring palms into view, however.  Magnolias appear now and then, as do moss-draped oaks, but by and large paintings of the era, in fact those up until the 1860's, seem to be Colonial versions of the romantic natural visions of John Constable.  American landscape art in general seems to emulate the dreamy, sweeping romanticism he championed.  On the one hand, the concept of broad, vast frontier wilderness is celebrated, but on the other hand, art and gardens alike seemed to want to give homage as well back to manicured England, which in turn wanted to be more flowing and open like North America, and yes, I seem to really be opening a slew of topics at this point.  I end the post with a question as much as a summary of the concept of historical overview: how were palms envisioned and used by early Americans, and where have they come today?

Why Is Congaree National Park Special?

I have mentioned this place quite a bit in talking about the natural South.  Historically speaking it would not have been overly different from many other places in the lush bottomlands of the greater Southern lowcountry.  Yes, its location in the midst of South Carolina meant that it has played host to a number of significant historical events, not the least of which were the exploration of DeSoto and subsequent colonial ventures by the Spanish, as well as being a hiding place from which American nationalists would seek refuge from and use as a striking point against British forces during the Revolutionary War.  By and large, however, this land would just be considered more of what people were taking pains to avoid throughout the South.  People settled on higher ground where the floods could not reach and the land proved workable enough to not necessitate making an existence out of a swamp.  The mosquitoes alone would have sent me packing, as least as soon as summer came around!

Time pressed on, and with it came development.  The end of the antebellum economic system based on slavery meant that the a greater amount of industrialization came to cities like Columbia and Atlanta, along with railroads and a noticeable increase in population.  The swamps were still less than desirable to settle in, but as free and open land became harder to find, they too would fall before the path of civilization.  What's more, there were still incredible trees here the likes of which the first Europeans had seen when they landed on these shores centuries before.  Picture then the typical avarice found in your timber baron and it does not take long to imagine that the giants were seen wrapped in gift paper for the taking.  Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum) grew this big, and had an even greater advantage to the consumer: extreme resistance to decay and rot.  What else would one expect of a tree that basically thrives when getting its feet wet?  When the forests of northern Michigan and Wisconsin started looking a bit thin of those equally valuable Eastern White Pines (Pinus Strobus) as the end of the nineteenth century arrived, northern millers also started turning an eye to new Southern potential.  With so many eyes on the scenery, it is a wonder that most of the riparian South held out as long as it did.

Congaree was fortunate, however, in having a rather broad floodplain which made extraction more difficult than in many places.  Even Chicago's Francis Beilder, one of the continent's most resourceful and determined timber barons, found that the logistics of extraction were just not economically feasible to make a clear cut of the place.  His company, which by the early twentieth century had purchased the land the park now sits on, left it alone.  Come 1969, prices for timber eventually caught up to the logistical difficulties.  Even as the Tar Sands of Alberta are now tapped for petroleum in an age when the costs of the process of extraction are cheaper than the raw material, so too then did the same reality come to nearly claim Congaree. 

The late sixties were a different sort of time, however.  Even as social upheaval changed the face of the continent and was putting a fight to sexism, racism, and a lot of different conventional ways of thinking, so too had come to pass a new environmental consciousness which had dawned in the wake of Rachel Carson giving everyone a reminder about the danger of our artificial domination of the biosphere.  By the end of the decade, a new appreciation for the science of ecology had awakened local fervor for such otherwise ignored sites like Hoosier Prairie.   What had once been viewed up as a typical Midwestern abandoned field was rediscovered as a true remnant of an otherwise glossed over tallgrass prairie.  In the South, the old bottomland finally got the same recognition, and the Sierra Club and others started to fight for Congaree.   By 1976, just as the locals back in Indiana got a taste and rush of feeling for something they had almost entirely lost, the locals down in deep South Carolina got the same thing for their majestic Congaree.  That's what makes this place so special, really.  Congaree is an amazing link back to the historical, indeed wild and primordial, South.  In an age when political divisions were already working toward the societal breaking point that they find themselves at today, you had all sorts of politicians suddenly drop camp, including even Strom Thurmond, better known for turning back the clock in other less than lovely ways.  All of a sudden people started looking at just how far we had come and just how much we were willing to throw away.

I mention the White Pine logging and Hoosier re-discovery in this post because of just how important Congaree is in relation to the rest of the, well, world conservation movement.  All too often national parks are thought of as areas that protect outstanding natural scenic beauty and little else, and while Congaree does boast incredible spires of trees in a nearly vanished virgin Southern bottomland, we really only see this now after the park has been in existence for a decade and has been officially protected since 1976.  People went nuts over the Sequoias as soon as they were found by us second-born North Americans; a swamp or a floodplain would take much longer to appreciate.  Hell, people still don't appreciate why Cuyahoga Valley got full national park status and probably will not for a long time to come; why be giddy over your typical Ohio low-relief ravine?  There is no towering cliff-face or even old growth forest there, it's just the natural backyard with a few historic trinkets... right?  Guess what, people thought the same thing about your background cypress swamp named Congaree.  People thought the same thing about Joshua Tree National Park until Minerva Hoyt spoke up on behalf of the Mojave.  People thought the same thing about the Everglades (a much better example for this soggy part of the world) until Marjory Douglas told the rest of us to give a damn.

Congaree got a reprieve, and in comparison with some other places like the tallgrass prairie or some bog somewhere on the Canadian Shield, it is easy to see why this place is special.  After all, the trees here are something amazing!  But like all those other places, what is most special about Congaree is how it keeps us connected not only with the wilderness, but with our connection to it.  I may constantly bring up the insane June visit I had among hordes of mosquitoes, but the fact is that this was a wonderful time to visit, to see just how comfortable this Northern Ontarian had otherwise become with the the ease of modern convenience.  It is easy to point out just how easily we can lose historical memory when we demolish a building or change a school curriculum to focus on more "practical" subjects, but it is even easier when do lose that "background" swamp, desert, prairie, etc. that we had to remind us what existence itself was like for those who brought us into our own.  So what does Congaree do for us that other parks do not to the same level of consciousness?

Let's head north for a little bit.

In Canada our national parks got to the same start the way that yours did.  We had our pre-Carson conservationists who had a sense of the overall importance of nature for the soul, you know, like your Roosevelts or Muirs or such.  They saw Banff and made a park out of it (yes, there is more to it than that, but you get the idea) just as down here you had Yellowstone and realized what a unique natural place it was and did the same thing.  After this, though, the Canadian concept of national parks changed.  Perhaps starting as early as 1893 when Algonquin was made into a (then) national park in an otherwise fairly typical section of southern Canadian Shield highlands, park makers got to thinking that in addition to protecting the outstanding areas, perhaps we should start protecting some of the more pristine or exemplary areas of particular biomes across the country.  Today we thus have a place like Point Pelee National Park set aside to show us what is so special about the southern Great Lakes and the Carolinian (eastern-mixed) forest, a place which aside from being a bird-watcher's paradise would not otherwise be seen as significant in the national or continental scheme of things. 

Back South now.

In Congaree we have an amazing park which does this very same thing, celebrating not just the lowland South Carolina landscape but that of the riparian South in general.  In essence, Congaree is amazing not just for its incredible forests but also because it is perhaps the first "regional" park of its kind according to the Canadian concept.  It has been joined recently by a California Chaparral version, Pinnacles National Park, which gives me hope for the future for the central prairies and other "background" scenery.  Yes, there have been many parks created for different purposes in the past which could easily fit into this line of conservation theory (Great Basin National Park really stands out in this regard), but Congaree strikes me as being a huge victory for this idea in general, and it helps that the place is downright beautiful and even a little savage.  Want to see what I saw?  Take a trip down the boardwalk with me next post, but in the meantime check out some of their amazing pictures at their various websites.


Main website

Congaree National Park Facebook Page

Congaree National Park Twitter Page

Gratitude For Snowy Saturdays

Snow has finally made it to Southeastern Michigan, and it looks as if the ground will have a decent blanket for some time to come (I know that seems shocking to those of you who live in the Ohio Valley or D.C. which has since seen winters to put our historic ones to shame).  This is the first decent snow cover we have seen in Livingston County for well over three years now, a sad situation that has gone hand in hand with extremes of heat and cold, prolonged seasonal lag, and even tornadoes in March, something I thought I would never see.  I write this now because I am thankful that we are seeing something of a real winter this year so far.  I write this because I have seen so many people posting about the snow in Cairo and claiming that such is evidence that global warming is a hoax.  Perhaps it is, but what is not a hoax is that the world's climate is changing dramatically, rapidly, and through our actions.  Snow in Cairo, week long freezes in Florida, an August here in Michigan that felt more like an October, followed by a September that felt more like a July?  These are not normal things, and they are happening more and more.  Hurricanes are turning into half-a-continent wide superstorms.  I, and people like me, don't say these things to scare you into something.  What good does it do me?  What do I get out of it?

On the other hand, there are politicians in the pocketbooks of corporate leaders who want you to feel like this is all some Leftist conspiracy meant to take away even more of your guns, religious freedom, and force you to give money to poor people or else the Planet might explode.  Truth be told, I could care less about your guns as they are your property and not mine, but I do care about how you use them and if you have the right judgment to know when a good time to use them would be.  Truth be told, I don't want religious freedom taken away as I view religion as I view the rest of human everything, an incredibly good thing, again, if used properly and for the sake of looking into our place in eternity.  I myself am a Roman Catholic and believe in my heart and soul that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, which is a very good thing because I have so many, many bad things to be accountable for.   I'm thankful that I can proclaim this without being shot by some control freak despot who thinks I should be something else.  Truth be told, I don't want you to be forced to give money to some poor person, because you might just miss the point of what that deed means.  I want you to understand what life is like for that person and to see them as more than just some required object of charity, as they are much more than that.  Money, like any resource, should be also more than just an object and used a bit more responsibly than we tend to use it, at least in Canada and the United States. 

I could keep going, but this is not a political blog.  Why bring it up at all, you ask?  I bring it up because this is a very political continent.  I tend to view such a reality in a positive light, even while I can sometimes be pessimistic about the path to open war we seem to be set on.  I say this because politics of our sort does have a good side wherein change can come a lot quicker than in more sedate democratic societies.  While I tend to think that extreme partisanship is a dreadful thing that weakens us all, I think that having sides at all means that we care a great deal about some issues.  That partisanship, though, can lead us to believe that we have to follow a certain line and that yucky, ugly things like "climate change" are part of the package of the "other side" and we must therefore think of them as little more than a blinding toxin.  I could probably keep blabbering on here to tell you why climate change should not be just dismissed as a political issue of the opposition, but I think for now I will let this wonderful video do the talking for me:

http://www.upworthy.com/the-future-of-the-earth-s-next-100-years-visualized?c=ufb1

Our continent, and indeed our world, is a precious thing.  It is our home, and we are responsible, as its most dominant species and/or as its caretakers entrusted by God not to keep vomiting on it the way that we have been.  Yes, we do need to rise above political agendas from both sides (looking at you Kyoto accords, you dirty, self-serving German brainchild designed to cripple economies you don't like), but we also need to understand that we are having a really bad effect on our planet. 

In the meantime, there is a solid blanket of snow outside, we are getting a good amount of winter chill needed by the local assortment of ecosystems to thrive, and it does well to remind me that while change is a constant in nature, there is a plan for it and us that are far beyond what our limited visions can even imagine, a plan which our arrogance needs to be reviewed in the face of.  The celestial time table could give a you-know-what about your stocks and futures.  In the meantime, I am happy to have a reminder that I don't actually live in the South that I look at with envy, because down South they don't have these:

I-94 near Port Huron, some of the southernmost Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) around. 

And for the moment, I am glad to be reminded that we do, and that I live at the southernmost whispering edge of the amazing hemisphere-spanning Boreal forest.  Those lovely birch there are still holding their own despite thousands of years of gradual climate change after their prime northern weather retreated with the Laurentian Ice Sheet.  They are a testament to a grand plan in which some things do remain constant despite and/or even in the midst of so much change, a reminder that a greater mystery always remains above our little plans and fields of vision.  As the elegance of the birches reminds us, though, not entirely being in control is hardly as bad as it might seem.  This Saturday night, when someone my age should be out getting bombed somewhere, well, I'm instead just happy because I see that pure white blanket outside. 

Residents Of The Piney South: The Loblolly Pine

Sometimes a tree is just considered a weed with a trunk.  In much of the South, pines are considered to be simply background material, stuff that grows in the way of development and agriculture.  A friend I met back in college, a Carolinian in fact, told me that pines were sometimes even considered to be more than just a weed but a real nuisance.  "They don't take too well to storms and hurricanes, and leave a tangled, sap-filled mess to clean up".  Pines are nothing if not sap-filled, but I hardly considered that to be problematic.  After all, they are just as ubiquitous in Ontario as they are in the Carolinas and we go out of our way, occasional tornado or violent microburst aside, to pay vast sums of money to get mature ones in our landscape if they are not already present.  In mostly deciduous SE Michigan and NW Ohio, nearly every public works landscaping project includes at least shelter-belts of pine, usually Scotch (Pinus Sylvestris) or Austrian/Black (Pinus Nigra) but often the native reds and whites.  Mile after mile of I-75 is lined in such a way up in these parts.

I-75 in Georgia or I-95 anywhere south of central Virginia look like such a landscaping project put into years of growth, and a nearly solid wall of Loblolly Pines (Pinus Taeda) screen off the northern tourists and other thru-travelers from the local world.  Janisse Ray even insisted that this was their purpose in her masterpiece Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.  Janisse, you see, loves all the spires of her native forests down in Georgia, but just as I have a particular weakness and reverence for the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), so does Janisse look upon the noble Longleaf Pine (Pinus Palustris) with grand esteem.  To her, is the Loblolly a seemingly unworthy also-ran that has filled a niche that the Longleaf once dominated?  Without a doubt, she considers it an important and lovely tree, but it is just in so many ways ordinary and second-fiddle to the monarch that was once the Longleaf.  This is not to say that Loblolly Pines are bad trees, just that they are an unfortunate sign of the times wherein entire ecosystems have been disrupted and trees such as this one find a place in an ever-changing world made by humans that lets such highly adaptable species thrive.  The Loblolly is one such tree.

The Lobolly, you see, does not mind getting its feet wet, unlike most other pines.  It can tolerate being at the margin of a swamp better than most of its genus, even while it can handle the harsh, alkaline conditions of an abandoned clay-soil farm field baking in the sun.  Surprisingly, it does not take well to the pure prairie environments found scattered in the South, notably the eastern extensions of the central prairies into the Louisiana coastal plains and the Black Belt, an arching area of prairie (that can now be seen on physical maps as a dense concentration of farmland) stretching across central Mississippi and Alabama.  Like most established prairies, the incredible roots of the grasses and forbs have contributed to the formation of a rich, dark mineral soil.  Likewise, rich soils can be found in the Mississippi valley, an area which forms a significant gap between the eastern and western portions of the Southern forests.  While the Loblolly does tolerate getting its feet wet, it does not like them soaked.  Such land is instead reserved for incredible stands of tupelo, cypress, cottonwoods, and willows (along with the lovely Red Maple <Acer Rubrum>).  In short, we can see that it dislikes certain ecological extremities and even in its very broad choice of tolerable situation is still... average.  Simply put, the Loblolly is a common tree that you will find across much of the South, from Texas clear to southern New Jersey. 

That's the direction I became inspired by when writing this post.  You see, I have so very few specimen pictures of the Loblolly because of how "common" they really are.  Most of my shots incorporate the sentiments of how they get viewed by Southerners, as background scenery behind modern development.

There they are, filling up the backdrop in Santee, SC, just off of Loblolly-framed I-95.  I witnessed very few trees, except maybe old survivors that were big enough to not be considered "weeds", used in a landscape around homes or businesses.  That honor instead went to cold hardy palms (like that lovely Pindo Palm, Butia Capitata) and magnolias fighting with crepe myrtles for places of honor on the front yard.

 In fact, aside from the photo of your typical "it was too big to just yank out" Loblolly back a few posts ago, this is the only canopy or crown shot I have of them!  I regret this, as a stand of Loblollies (and do they ever make fine stands, just like the Red Pines do up north) is a wonderful wall of green, a wall which I remember fondly as a child welcoming me to a South that otherwise felt so very distant from my far north.  I always tried to squint deeper into those dense growths along I-95 and wonder what the forest was like inside them.  Even at that age I figured that this was not a natural situation, that there had to be more in the forest besides a single giant plantation of one tree.  For the life of me though, even as common as they were, they were a tree that seemed to outweigh all the other elements of the landscape.  Only after a half day of Loblolly wonder would I notice the subtle changes that happened in Georgia as Saw Palmettos (Serenoa Repens) started carpeting the understory and Slash Pines (Pinus Elliottii) started to take over, especially into Florida.  The bigger needle globes of the Slash Pines were part of the very different world of the Deep South and Florida, not a Red Pine look alike that the Loblollies were.  The Loblolly fit perfectly into a Canadian child's image of what the South looks like: the same as the north, but with even more pines, palm trees, and a night time that was as hot as a Northern day time, complete with some buzzing outdoor light illuminating this mysterious pine that grew even in such a hot land. 

I was too young to imagine that things had not always been this way.  This is not to say that I had no imagination or that I knew not what a wilderness was (I grew up in one), but that I was simply ignorant of the fact that the Loblolly would have been truly an "also ran" back in the days when the Longleaf was king of the forest and savanna.  The settlers who followed the First Born would have seen that very different world of an incredible arboreal diversity, with towering pines stretching forth above grasses and flowers stretching as far as the eye could see, kept open by the same agent of nature that made lower Michigan, Ohio, and Southern Ontario into a natural park of oak openings, fire.  I imagine, as Janisse Ray does of a South long past, settlers living among these giants, every bit as transfixed upon them as... a child doing the same thing when confronted by the inheritor pine, the Loblolly.  Maybe it is not, after all, such a common tree as it is a survivor and a triumph of nature trying to cope with human development.  I consider the Loblolly to be an arboreal emblem of the modern natural South, in which nature still manages to rebound like, well, a weed!  Even in farm country down there you can't help but run across a tree every few hundred feet, and often enough it will be a Loblolly.  In truth, I have never seen the ancestral forest with my own eyes, and I can only imagine the grandeur of the Longleaf Savanna.  The Loblolly, though, has managed to welcome me home every time I have come back to this land of the South, which holds such an irresistible lure to a botanist who is still a child at heart. 

A part of me wonders what life was like where this tree held its own once against the broad rule of the Longleaf.  Perhaps places like Jamestown, places where the continent started to forever change into the modern land it has become, are places where one can still find a forest of curiosities otherwise stepped quickly past by human advancement.  Here maybe can be seen not some oak or pine parkland that provided an irresistible lure to colonial settlement, but a needle carpeted half-forest, half-opening maze of strange trees that grew beyond the landings of mushy cypress forest infested with mosquitoes.  Would the first Virginians have tried to press on toward higher ground capable of more agricultural wonders and either ignored or found inconvenient the odd forest that was too open to give good shade, yet to thick to plop a house on?  What would they have made of this place come winter when even the leafy shrubs beneath the pines would refuse to surrender their greenery, like the Red Bay (Persea Borbonia) or the Loblolly Bay (Gordonia Lasianthus)? 

Both of these delightful messes were captured at Historic Jamestowne, in the drier center of the swampy hook of land that John Smith and company tried to give Virginia a decent go at.

Were such forests taken in by the colonists like the Red Pine forests of wonderful blueberry (Vaccinium Augustifolium) and Wintergreen (Gaultheria Procumbens) understory of an otherwise grand White Pine dominated North, which together with the more open Jack Pine (Pinus Banksiana) openings on sand and granite (depending on what side of Lake Huron you would find them on), and considered second fiddle and scrubish by their northern settling counterparts (compared to the valuable timberlands of the White Pine supercanopy forest)?  We may never know.  After all, we don't even notice the trees around us these days...

But what about that Longleaf?

12 Years A Slave In Review

\Last post I promised some palm trees, and I do not intend to disappoint, but I would also like to serve up a review of a film I saw last night, namely 12 Years a Slave.  It's an incredible film with art direction that puts director Steve McQueen into the same artistic pantheon as Rossellini or Bergman and is a much needed dose of reality in an age when popular images of the plantation era are given off as something of slapstick racism at best or a romantic confession at worst.  As we celebrate the victory over chattel slavery won at Vicksburg and Gettysburg this very year, we ought to be mindful that such fighting was far from merely over some sick, twisted defense of States' rights.  Yes, there were many underlying causes of friction between Union and Confederacy, but ultimately, to claim that slavery was not the source and summit of cause for a nation being torn apart is a fundamental disrespect to a very painful and sacred chapter in the history of humanity.  

And oh yes, there are palm trees, and an absolutely incredible look at the American Southern landscape, or at least the low country therein.  In following the kidnapping and enslavement of freedman Solomon Northrup, the film takes us from the upper Hudson Valley in New York down to Washington (past an incredible shot of a human being made into property, fittingly, under the shadow of the temple of the United States Congress.  From then on we get to see quite a bit of the Deep South in low country Louisiana, complete with palms of the Sabal genus, magnolias, baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana), and an absolute TON of Spanish Moss (Tillandsia Usneoides).  Now normally, this is among the most lovely setting of vegetation anywhere on this earth.  Everything is green, lush, luxuriant, and yet not overly confining so as to create an overbearing jungle.  

A street somewhere in Beaufort, SC.  While this is a semi-cultivated landscape (I noticed that among ordinary neighborhoods gardens and planting were allowed to flow without a lot of pruning), you can tell from the trees and shrubs that neither canopy nor sky reign supreme on their own.  We will revisit the general concept in a later post.  Everything just looks organic, flowing, and relaxed really, like much of the South.

Yet for the most part in the film, McQueen has set out to have the camera fix on a focus and lighting that makes the whole thing look sickly and tired.  Instead of incredible drapes of moss, we see trees festered in it along with baldcypresses, tupelos, and magnolias that are defoliated and gangly.  This compliments the plantations where Solomon, now re-named Platt (which can mean, for Louisiana especially, flat in French or alternatively an old word for silver in English), gets pushed around to.  With the exception of Mr. Ford's manse, we hardly see grand, polished estates.  The houses are dirty, the interiors are sparse, and even the masters of the manor are looking a bit disheveled.  There are stomping forced dances rather than graceful ballrooms full of lovely dames and debonair gentlemen.  The whole set up does little to implore the viewer to lament the tragic romance of a soon-to-perish Antebellum South.  Once Mr. Ford is removed from the scene, any semblance of that lovely imaginary world vanishes, house, people, landscape, and all.  

But we did see a little bit of that in this film, which McQueen uses to great effect to prove a point.  Solomon gets treated well, the landscape looks a bit more inviting (even while things are in a swamp along the Red River and we see little of cotton picking, cane gathering, or other typical agricultural ventures).  We see the slaves clearing a little land, constructing buildings, even encountering some of the First Born who were wandering the last vestiges of what they could find before Europeans totally changed their world.  The action is that of exploration, encountering a new, albeit uninvited world.  Things look more exotic than sedate New York or distressingly urban Washington, and definitely more relieved than stressful slave market New Orleans.  We see a decent plantation with a well-mannered Ford and a true-to-form, if insensitive, lady of the house.  Solomon's talents are appreciated, and he sets into survival mode while also thinking about escape.  Overall, it seems as if things could be a lot worse.  We see construction and creation.  Feeling complacent?  We are reminded very sharply that for all his generosity of spirit and apparent gentility, Ford is still a slave owner who treats people as property.  As such, we also see our first overseers and start hearing "Nigger" almost every other line.

The swamps then start looking less luxuriant and more nauseous, those broad-limbed oaks start looking more like little other than convenient lynching posts, and the moss and palmettos start reminding us that this place is hot, uncomfortable, and malarial.  Moving on to the next plantations, we see less of a settlement with slavery-made-possible ornamentation and more of a series of work farms meant to use humans purely for profit.  Notably, in the shabby houses and clothing of the owners, we see very few fruits of such overwhelming profit, as if to say that even could slavery be economically justifiable, it simply has not fit the bill even then.  Speculatively, this makes one question just how much wealth really got passed around at the expense of an entire race.  We see a lot of labor, poverty even in the middle man plantation owners, and the fancy scenes of Gone With the Wind left only in the hands of a select few at the very top.  There is possible political commentary on present economic conditions here, but more than likely, this truly is reaching (this is slavery, a bit more intense than a wage issue...  right?)  Instead we go for less speculation and more reality and see that even the master of the house does not put on his Sunday best every day when things are 95 and dripping.  The house might afford a little mess during the cultivation periods.  See how many different ways things are already being twisted? 

If anything, that is what is supremely brilliant about this film.  Yes, we do see a lot of brutality and a cold bucket of water thrown at us in the face of a disconnect of 150 passing years of fading memory.  More so, however, we also see attempted justification for the rape of not just an entire people, but all peoples.  We get to see peace feelers trying to pave the road for a defeat for humanity.  Even when we see Patsy constantly dragged into the mud and slashed open within an inch of her life, completely broken and crying in some of the most emotionally honest acting ever seen...  we try to rationalize.  We can't though.  The music alone keeps reminding us that we are faced with something first and final about the way things are between people.  In the end we see one human being turn another one into something less than animal.  In the end, we have hope.  The moss looks graceful again and whitewash covers blemishes and dirt.  A man's soul stares into our own through eyes that should cause anyone truly humble to melt onto the floor.  My readers, go see this film.  Take your older children, or any children, that will understand even the mere difference between right and wrong.  I dare say it will awaken in all a new spirit of seeking understanding and exploration into not just North American, but human history in general and sympathy, if not empathy, for the suffering.  Would that there were films of this caliber for the other darker places in our continental history.  

In the meantime, check around here more frequently for a bit more of a look at the better side of the South.  If you do see the film, this might give you an appreciation for how McQueen managed to strip the veneer off the image.  After all, as God created her, the low country is a truly amazing place. 

A Change Of Pace

Over a month ago I pledged a return to regular posting on American Voyages.  I wanted to share with my readers some thoughts on what direction the politics and culture of the continent were headed in, mostly spurred on by a flurry of political commentary from all fronts in the wake of the United States Federal government shutdown.  Then, now, and as I hopefully will remain true to form for, I was and am for keeping this blog free of too much current political commentary.  Why?  Democracy has enough angry voices out there already!  All joking aside, however, in general I try to view current events in light of a broader historical lens.  This is probably due to several factors, notably an academic background in the humanities.  Yes, a philosophy student can direct all possible energy to making bold statements about post-modernism or attempt to disprove everything that came before said student, but my own intellectual journey has found an exploration of the past, with an examination of the organic development of humanity, to be far more helpful in coming to thoughts about things in general. 

That's what I had been trying to accomplish in coming to a statement about where language and the political culture surrounding language have come to.  Why?  The why is simple.  People these days fight about everything from minimum wage to military spending (and yes, most of it revolves around money), but the thing that seems to get people, even people who could care less about all the other issues out there, very riled up.  I say this because time and again I see a mother in a grocery store talking to her kids in Spanish, or some men working together again talking in that apparently taboo language, and nearby listeners almost fly into a red hot rage over the issue!  "Speak English!"  "This is America!"  Then of course, the party in target usually apologizes, in English no less, and moves on, to no avail.  Heck, Spanish is nothing, you should see the reactions I get to when I mumble to myself about how expensive gas is, en Francais, here (or even worse, in some heavily Anglo-centric place in Ontario).  A personal mumble, barely audible to most people, is tantamount to treason for some people.

Needless to say, this tends to make me irate.  Now, while I have every intention of continuing a historical overview of the history of how we came to this place linguistically on this continent, I might as well come out and say it for all those who were wondering:  Half of this country was speaking Spanish before 1848 and a Mexican presence everywhere from California to Kansas evolved on this soil at about the same time an English-American one did (to say nothing of how many native tongues were around).  For that matter, most of the people who get mad at the "Spanish threat" are buying into an old cultural imperialism despite the fact that their ancestors were probably considered second class to anything even remotely resembling a northern European, if the standards consider even other Germanic languages to be on the same level as beloved English.  There.  I said it.  Now let me say this.  English is not going anywhere.  People around the world consider fluency in it to be desirable or at least profitable (believe it or not, especially in Latin America).  English really is an amazing language with an incredible literary history.  I say this as a person of Irish Catholic and French-Canadian heritage. 

So why put off the history posts?  They take a lot out of me.  I can rant on easily like I did tonight, but I want American Voyages to be a place of learning, not diatribe.  When I write these posts, I like them to be informed, and trust me, the next few posts in this series enter a period of remarkably complex history.  Here we will see French make a thrust to the Canadian shores of the Pacific, Spanish encounter the United States again now in the friendly territories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and native tongues get diminished everywhere.  We get to see English change into so many regional variations in both countries, and we have a lot of fact checking to do.  Each and every post, if I try to do it well, takes a lot out of me. 

And let's face it, you all really come here just for the nature photography, right?  Well, maybe not.  It has been a while since I talked about the primary focus of this blog though: the land around us, and not just where the people have gone on it.  The statistics indicate that A.V. has been opened to a much broader reader base even on an hourly basis, probably thanks to social media advertising, but also thanks to botanical and historical organizations out there.  I need to get this thing hopping again, and the heavy posts are going to have to take a backseat until we can get things up and running.  I want to share our wonderful corner of the world, after all, with the world.  In particular I would like to thank The Hardy Palm International journal, based in Vancouver, of taking note not of my diatribes, but of my coverage of fun things like trees growing where they ought not.  Wait a minute, palms, that sounds wonderful, let's go there next.

Glitzy New Vegas: A Portrait Of Our Mentality?

American Voyages decided to take a break for a while, as the intoxication of late summer overwhelmed the blogger with much to plant, care for, journey to, plant some more, and then think about more planting.  A lot has happened on the continent since then, and much of it is very problematic, to say the least.  When I started this blog, I wanted to make it all about what things look like in the natural world in different places on our diverse continent.  The focus of American Voyages was to share with people the details and realities of what the corners of our land look like.  Owing to botanical fascinations, and because plants are pretty much the most ubiquitous things on the landscape, the blog focused a lot on what emerges from the ground.  Very quickly, however, it turned to history and her mean half-sister politics, because, well, we are a very integral part of our landscape these days.  Opinions, of course, come with the discussion of such topics.  In the coming weeks, I plan to visit the issues which are knocking on our doors day in and day out.  I start this potential ideological rampage by making a very bold statement:

The United States of America is teetering on the verge of a new Civil War.

This time, however, the sides will not be down to mere blues and grays.  Even while the political structure of the nation has been ravaged by a seeming encampment of two main forces against one another, the way that our entire continent works is national evolution through a lovely, albeit somewhat reckless, individuality.

Yeah, yeah, that's all well and good, you say.  What about that article on modern Las Vegas you promised?

Why, this ties right into that.  You see, Vegas is everything that we are rolled into one.  Vegas is the glittering allure of free-market potential.  Vegas is a place where everyone has a choice on how they want to find pleasure or pain.  Vegas offers gluttony and indulgence for the tourist while it also offers temperance in the name of making it happen for the local.  Vegas is surrounded by one of the most amazing, simultaneously fragile and dangerous deserts in the world, offering amazing opportunities for experiments in conservation and Eco-tourism, while also tapping out so many of the local natural resources to keep a 120 degree day feeling like 65 beside artificial watercourses.  Vegas can be a lot of fun.  Vegas can also be a lot of regret.  Vegas was founded by Mormon missionaries bent on promoting a very specific cultural supremacy and has since become a place to find almost as much diversity of cultures than London or New York. 

Is Vegas a bad place?  It most assuredly can be.  Prostitutes might be swept off the streets these days, and gambling shares the stage with even bolder offerings of sheer indulgence from the spa to the buffet, but people come here to accelerate what they might otherwise do at home: vacation, or morally bankrupt themselves. So what can you do here, for good or for ill?

The options are many.  As noted, one of the most incredible features of Las Vegas is its location, pretty much dead right center in the Mojave Desert.

I-15 Northbound, about 1 mile north of the turn of for US 93. 

As most people arrive in Vegas in the relatively safe and isolated environment of a commercial jet plane, then get whisked to frigidly cooled hotel lobbies in slightly less cooled taxis or limousines with tinted windows, they really don't notice that they are in the middle of one of the hottest and driest places on the planet.  Granted, the winter can sometimes be chilly and the place can get both rain and snow, but the fact is that by and large Las Vegas should by all rights not be where it is at all.  It has since sprawled over whatever was left of a slightly more verdant part of a dusty valley.  It uses millions of gallons of water a day to not only provide for the needs of over a million people who live and work and play in the metropolitan area, but also to allow for spectacular fountains and pools to dazzle its visitors, in broad daylight, what they normally expect to be more impressed by at night.

In fact, I have very few pictures of Las Vegas at night.  Most of my shots are of the, well, palatial splendor that lines the modern Strip.  Granted, much of the splendor is better classified as "tacky", but some places such as the Bellagio, Caesar's Palace, and even the MGM Grand manage to dance a fancy line between the two concepts:

And for all the spectacles that the modern democratization of pleasure and pleasure-driven civil engineering have accomplished here, much of the attraction is themed around a romantic view of the past, rather than the present:

What could be more American?  Here we have an artificial oasis that has striven to outdo its natural predecessor, in bold defiance of both nature and scale.  What could be more North American, then too, than a place where success still feels some sort of reverence for things older than it, even while such a history is bent and exploited (which to be fair is nothing new and not unique to this part of the world, but brother, do we ever do it well).  Is this not a fitting portrait for the current political and cultural battles we as a nation, indeed as a continent in many ways, find ourselves in?  Everyone claims an Evangelical's devotion to the Constitution while otherwise maintaining a Greek and Roman Christian devotion to the iconic Founding Fathers, all to just try and back up that they are the place to come find life and gamble in. 

Well, New Vegas, at any rate, is a heck of lot more fun than what it might serve as a portrait for.  The place certainly is more exciting, having the effect of the downtown theater district expanded a dozen times over and existing in purpose to be a city that is an entire entertainment district. 

The more mundane aspects try to live up to the hype that this is a different sort of city, a place where a fast food restaurant or a pharmacy even tries to put on a show to be more than what it is.

More than just something normal, to be sure, but then something that needs to put on a show just to exist here.  Just around the corner are little reminders that tastes are fickle and passing.  For a city that erects giant pyramids, castles, and fake world monuments even from the contemporary age, it is also one that forgets things quickly.

Of course, that is what this place is built on, memory directed to pleasant places and forgetful of reality, even in the recent past.  Little has changed here in that regard; this is no longer the city built by mobsters to cater to greed and lust over an oasis in a bone dry desert which served as a stopping place for an army of religious settlers bent on creating a paradise out of it.  This is now the city where whole families with kids in tow come to see a show, splash around in an exotic looking pool that they had to walk through a shark tank or past a habitat scene full of rare white tigers to get to.  This is a place of dreams which mirrors the dreaming we do as a wider society. 

Its fun, it can be sad, and its definitely much more than meets the eye.  Las Vegas is definitely worth at least one trip, if only to see what it means to you and you mean in it. 

Welcome back, readers!  I did notice that the traffic never really stopped, but rest assured that things are moving again.