TRUE TALES FROM THE EAST - 10. Art & Landscapes

My last two days in the East I mostly spent in art museums in DC. I've been to them hundreds of times during the past thirty years. One of the bonuses of getting fired from NWF a year before we moved to Oregon was the time it gave me to spend on the National Mall, and especially the National Gallery of Art. I made it a point to go there three times a week for an entire year. After an absence of several years it was like visiting old friends.

A favorite place(National Gallery of Art)

My favorite architecture(East Wing of the National Gallery of Art - I.M. Pei; Alexander Calder mobile)

My favorite room(Rembrandts at the National Gallery)

A favorite artist
(Jean-Honoré Fragonard)

Another favorite artist(Johannes Vermeer)

My favorite sculpture("Last Conversation Piece," Juan Muñoz, Hirshhorn Museum lawn)

My favorite nude (sculpture)("Nymph," Aristide Maillol, Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden)

My favorite Native American sculpture("Spirit of Haida Gwaii," Bill Reid, Canadian Embassy)

My favorite lunch spot
(National Gallery of Art cafeteria)

Western Oregon where we live has almost everything I love. But it's missing two things: friends and art. As for friends, well, there's this here story... And some come visit us in Oregon. Facebook fills the gaps.

As for art -- the National Gallery of Art kind of art -- it's scarce in Oregon, but then, no place equals the National Mall's art, gardens, science, history and culture. What Oregon does have, however, is a stunningly diverse and beautiful landscape. For me, that landscape is constantly renewing and surprising. Friend Al observed the other day that however beautiful, landscape does not challenge you intellectually the way art does. True, but there is no place I would rather be than right where I'm at.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

- the end -

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TRUE TALES FROM THE EAST - 9. Friends (Part 3)

John:

And then there is my friend John. I headed to rural Cortland County, New York (pop. 48,302, 96.3% percent white, median home value $74.700). This is where John grew up. After his marriage fell apart years ago he bought a tiny 1840s-era farmhouse with room out back for a big garden and fruit trees. Then he fell in love with Jennifer, the official local dairy princess, they got married and have lived happily ever after.

John, a Ph.D. biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, retired about a year before me. He was my role model for retirement. The last few years of his career he and Jennifer lived in a Honolulu high rise with John managing pollution clean-ups in the North Pacific. Bright lights, big city. What a contrast to the back-to-the-earth lifestyle of upstate New York. But when he retired they returned to the frozen north without a backward glance.

All those questions I raised with David about northern New England's lifestyle challenges? John and Jennifer -- they love it all. They are becoming one with their homestead, canning and freezing local vegetables, fruits and meat; tapping trees for maple syrup; splitting firewood; keeping a local bird list; reading; watching movies and the Weather Channel; and occasionally traveling to see John's grandchildren on both coasts.

I met John the same way I met Rick and David, through Great Lakes environmental work. John and I first crossed paths in 1978 on a U.S. Coast Guard ice breaker in late-winter on the frozen river below the Soo Locks. I had tagged along on a fact-finding trip to see the potential impact of that part of proposed all-winter shipping.
John is another of those unsung heroes of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River environment. Where some of us used politics and media, John used science and biology (and some fancy internal politics) through his federal agency to undermine the winter navigation proposal.

John (right) and Abbie Hoffman - 1983

We became fast friends and it's lasted a lifetime. John was a trusted advisor through my entire career, especially at some key moments. Only one time did I ignore his advice, which was: "Don't hire her. Don't let her ruin the National Wildlife Federation like she ruined the Fish and Wildlife Service."

I was in charge of the search process to hire a person to run NWF's conservation programs, the "senior vice president for conservation programs." And our head hunter wanted us to hire the woman, Jamie, who had been John's boss and head of his agency during the Clinton Administration. I resisted but finally relented for an interview with the search committee after all the other candidates fell flat. We were impressed and, as they say, the rest is history. And an ugly history it was, though that's a story for another day. She certainly didn't ruin NWF; others deserve credit for that. I've always wondered how different things would have been had I stayed with John's advice.

During my recent visit with John and Jennifer it rained but we went bird watching anyway. They live on a deserted gravel road with almost no traffic and have seen more than 100 bird species on their walks. Best for us were the bob-o-links, black-white-yellow grassland birds, nearly done nesting already in June and ready to head 6,000 miles back to South America.

We drove to a little bird preserve and found dozens of one of my favorite birds just arrived from Brazil called the veery. This tawny, robin-like bird has a call that sounds like a flutist falling down a well (www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Veery/sounds). It's a signature sound of the New England forests in spring. John, Jennifer and I soaked it in.

And so my trip to the East neared its end. My scorecard:

Friendships forever lost: 1

Friendships apparently lost: 1

Friendships rescued: 2

Friendships renewed: lots

"You know what they say. They say it's all good." -- Bob Dylan

Next: "Art & Landscape"

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TRUE TALES FROM THE EAST - 9. Friends (Part 2)

David:
From Rick's island I headed northeast along the St. Lawrence River, across the top of Lake Champlain to about as far north in Vermont as you can get where David and Micha live. The hospitality was just as warm, their property nearly as remote as Rick's place, but the architecture changed dramatically.

Like Rick, David had a dream of living in the place he loved. So after a couple of marriages and a DC political career while living in Arlington, he built his dream house in Vermont. Exquisite is the best way to describe it. Beautiful craftsmanship throughout, the house sits on 70 acres looking south into the valley of Lake Willoughby. It's a fiord-like glacier-carved lake, 300 feet deep, flanked by Mt. Pisgah on the east and Mt. Hor on the west.

I last had visited their home when he and Micha got married there the autumn before I moved from Virginia to Oregon. A major remodeling had made the house even nicer. And not one dead mouse or flying ant did I see. They have their own milliondollar view, this one including immense thunderstorms rolling across the mountains and valley, then engulfing the house in sheets of lightning and rain.

As with Rick, I first met David through my Great Lakes environmental work in the 1970s. He was the head guy at a U.S.-Canadian commission that deals with cross-border pollution. I soon learned that David has superb political skills and instincts.

David & me -- Rainbow Range, British Columbia -- 1981

No one person ever did more to move the political agenda forward on Great Lakes toxic chemical pollution -- you know, the really bad stuff like PCBs, dioxins and hormone-disrupting chemicals in the environment.

It's not that he, personally, got any laws or rules passed. Or got a bunch of money to clean up pollution. What he did was choreograph a new public and political awareness of the issues. He got his staid, conservative institution, the International Joint Commission -- created in 1909 but largely invisible prior to David's imprimatur -- to issue reports that were revolutionary. Not surprisingly, one of his closest allies was Greenpeace's Jack ("never trust anyone over 30") Weinberg. The IJC's meetings became focal points for cutting edge, sometimes raucous debates about social costs of pollution, burdens of proof regarding harm to environmental and public health, responsibility for pollution, and on and on. David's name isn't on much of anything but his marks are on much good that came out of that era.

Today David travels the world for the U.N. trying to get foreign countries to protect their special places, like Africa's Lake Chad. It's a mystery to me how it does it, both the work and the constant travel.

On my visit David told me he had hiked to the top of Mt. Pisgah at least 300 times. He liked to do it really fast. It's seven miles up and back, plus 1,500 feet of elevation gain. But what a hike! To Micha's relief I insisted on walking slow and stopping a lot -- there was much to see. Along the forest trail we caught toads and what I later learned was a hairy-tailed mole. My dawdling let me enjoy close-up and personal a breeding pair of black-throated blue warblers. Atop Mt. Pisgah peregrine falcons that nest on the cliffs swooped below.

Some kind of next-door-to-Canada paradise, eh? Well that depends. You say you don't need nice restaurants, libraries, art galleries, cinemas? You're ok with frost in June? A tiny rural supermarket is good enough for your food shopping? You love shoveling snow from your roof? Minus-30 degrees is invigorating? How about horse flies, mosquitoes, black flies and no-see-ums; you consider them friends?

No, you say?

Well then why on earth do you live in northern Vermont?

We had that conversation and even talked about an alternative -- western South Carolina near a university, where David's brother recently relocated. I know. The state with the "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" Governor. Confederate flags. Eeew! But everything comes down to this: compared to what?

For me almost any reasonably warm place north of Florida or west of Texas would be better than northern Vermont. But that's just me.

Next: "Friends (Part 3)"

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TRUE TALES FROM THE EAST - 9. Friends (Part 1)

There are friends of the road and friends of the heart, says my best friend, Eva. It's a saying usually brought up in the context of bemoaning why we never hear from some old friend.

I got sidetracked from finishing these last tales because of a week-long visit to Oregon from my friend, Al. It seemed more important to actually spend time with a friend than to spend time writing about friends.

I had lost track of Al for 20 years. After moving to Oregon I learned he was living in southern California and looked him up. We've been having a great time ever since, getting together a couple times a year to hike and hang out. We've been friends for nearly 45 years. Here's a picture of Al (on the left) at the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, and a more recent likeness:

During Al's visit we heard Bob Dylan say that "friends are God's apology for our families." Never mind that it's an old quote by someone else, it's still pretty good, don't you think?

After leaving Craig and Jean's home in rural Virginia, I traveled for ten days visiting friends in New England before returning for Craig's memorial service.

Rick:

"I must not have got all of him." OK, that's not something you expect to hear from your host regarding the goo on the floor swarming with flying ants that you found in your guest bedroom. But the remnants of a long-dead mouse is not an altogether unexpected experience in the rustic quarters that Rick has created on his island on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. Since the shop vac was right there next to the bed, no problem. Whoosh and no more vermin. We doused the remaining ants with Cutter's insect repellant, Rick put out the last of his mouse poison, and all was well. Except for the live mouse spotted later in the evening running across the kitchen counter, but that's another story.

You put up with such minor inconveniences in order to share Rick's little bit of paradise -- a place of his own in The Thousand Islands on "The River." Rick fell in love with the River when he was young and it defined his life. He bought his land on Grindstone Island when he couldn't afford it, then found jobs that would pay the mortgage and let him spend time building a cabin. Like being a merchant seaman.

He started with just the raw land -- woods and marsh with no dock, electricity, plumbing or phone. The only way to get to his place is by boat. But he did have a million dollar view. And today, decades later, Rick has a two-story cabin with running hot water, electricity, phone and dock. His recently finished knotty pine upstairs is beautiful, with a little deck off his bedroom that looks across his bay to the River -- it's still a million dollar view. The first floor remains, shall we say, a work in progress. But Rick has realized his dream. He is a happy man.

I've known Rick since the 1970s when I lived in Michigan and worked for a state conservation group. Our paths first crossed when we both were trying to stop a multi-billion dollar boondoggle by the government to open up the Great Lakes to all-winter commercial shipping. It would have been an environmental disaster for the lakes and his river. Rick is a born community organizer; it's in his genes. Working with others who live on and along the river, including then-incognito Abbie Hoffman (a.k.a. Barry Freed), they created Save the River. We joined forces and after years of real hard work killed the project. It wouldn't have happened without Rick's brilliant organizing and lobbying. And Rick wouldn't be who he is without that battle. In fact, it led to him going back to college; his master's thesis was a political analysis of the history of winter navigation. And all that eventually brought him to his longest-held job as an organizer for the National Wildlife Federation.

It was my fourth or fifth visit to Rick's island since the 1980s. We talked long about political battles won and lost over the years. Mostly, though, we soaked in the wonder of the River. We watched the sun set over his marsh, a mink hunting along the shoreline, redwing blackbirds calling from the cattails. One morning we boated close to a mother loon with two babies riding on her back. We hiked across the interior of Rick's island -- my first time -- and identified lots of his forest birds.

Bird watching is a new thing for Rick. When he retired from NWF last fall he decided that birding would be a good thing to do and set about learning how. He spent the winter traveling the country and by the time he got to Oregon in late February he was better really good at it. Now, after owning land on his island for half his life, he finally is seeing and hearing how many different birds live there.

I asked Rick what he was going to do next winter, since staying in his isolated cabin all year isn't feasible. He really had no idea and didn't seem the least bit concerned: "I'll figure something out."

Next: "Friends (Part 2)"

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