Whales in Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia is duly famous for its lobsters and lighthouses, and they're plentiful, all right. But the highlight of our July 2010 vacation to the island was a whale watch in the Bay of Fundy.

The humpback whale's life cycle brings pods of females with their calves in tow to the north Atlantic as they swim to summer feeding grounds off Newfoundland. Nova Scotia seems to be something of a stopover on the way further north. So whale activity there is somnolent; it's as if they were catching their breath before the last push to Newfoundland.

Pacific Life Insurance’s use of the whale as its logo, and their superimposition of breaching and tail slapping to try to convince viewers to use their products trivializes the attraction of whale watching. First of all, nothing is guaranteed. Certain areas of the coast, certain times of the day make sightings more likely, but much depends on luck. Many outfitters guarantee that they will take you out until you see whales, but that is a hollow promise given most vacation schedules. And second, the dramatic breaching occurs so unexpectedly that it is almost impossible to observe and even more difficult to capture on film or digits. Talking to the crew after our own successful cruise, we learned that the day before, they had seen nothing. But I get ahead of myself.

Whale watching boats come in two flavors. The “traditional” rigging is a flat decked, diesel powered craft carrying a couple of dozen people and a crew of four. These are often refitted from other uses for the tourist season—ours is a lobster boat eight months of the year. The second type is the Zodiac, a large, inflatable craft with an outboard motor and a crew of two. The appeal of the Zodiac is that it takes its six passengers right up to the whale. But because they are so close to the water, Zodiacs require a wetsuit-like garment to shield whale watchers from chop and spray. We chose the traditional rigging.

Most outfitters run two daily cruises, morning and evening. In making reservations in the spring, I had quizzed the owners on which was more likely to see whales, but never succeeded in getting a straight answer. For some reason, I chose the 9AM departure. This seemed reasonable until we got driving times from our B&B at Annapolis Royal to the dock at East Ferry, an hour and a half. What was I thinking on a vacation? As it turned out we arrived with ten minutes to spare only to learn that the cruise had been cancelled. Turns out we were the only takers; “people just don’t want to get up early,” the owner observed as my wife gave me a withering stare. Rather than get back in the car, we reserved seats on the 2PM boat and took in some Nova Scotian lobster and lighthouses as we whiled away five hours.

The afternoon boat was filled, but not beyond capacity. I believe that we were the only people from the States aboard. Most of our companions were Canadian, but from all across the country, one couple hailed from Vancouver. There was one Englishman (more on him later) and an Australian couple. After its crew provided a brief overview of the trip and safety instructions, the Passage Provider, chugged off from the pier and out into Digby Neck before turning north into the Bay of Fundy. The first half hour passed uneventfully. We excitedly sighted a pair of dolphins rolling off our starboard and laughed as a seal (of some sort) poked its head above the water and watched us pass. To this point we had dutifully seated ourselves along the boat railing and on both sides of bench positioned in center of the deck. This would soon change.

Perhaps a half hour out of port, one of the crew who was sitting on the roof of the cockpit spotted a whale breaching. He didn’t say “thar' she blows,” but that anachronism would have been appropriate as spray propelled from the breathing hole is the surest sign of a whale when viewed from a distance. As we approached our quarry, the passengers moved, tentatively at first and then in a rush to the side of the boat that would have the best view. Our Englishman, brandishing a video camera, was particularly aggressive in his movements. After a while, we learned to give him a wide berth. But everyone managed to get a good look.

For an hour and a half, moving between four pods, we saw whales breach with loud hisses as they expelled carbon dioxide and water vapor above their blowholes. Sometimes they just logged as we went by. They rolled and dove—the pattern was three rolls and dive. We even got several signature tail raises on the dive. Everyone was thrilled, especially the crew.

Since we had done so well, they felt free to admit that things are not always so good. The day before, the single whale that was sighted became the quarry of five boats. But not today. Today was wonderful.

Marketing in Solola

Sololá is a town of 35,000 perched 2,000 feet above the shore of Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán. It has a long history, appearing in the Anales de los Cakchiquels as Tecpán-Atitlán and dating its Spanish foundation to 1547. But that’s all in the past. Today, a sunny Friday, Sololá welcomes shoppers to its twice weekly market, and we’ve come along for a look.

Sololá sits at the nexus of a commercial network that includes fish and water plants taken from the lake below and garden vegetables harvested on the plains above. Wholesalers visit the market on Thursday night and make purchases destined for tables in Guatemala City, El Salvador and the United States. The retail action begins (very) early on Friday, and we found that some items, especially flowers, were sold out by 9:00, the time we pulled into town.

While the market spills across the whole town, its main concentrations are the Parque Central and three commercial blocks to the west. Grain and vegetable sellers sit around the park’s perimeter, breaking down large lots into small quantities weighed out on hand-held balance scales. Commerce at this location seemed pretty bland—order, weigh out, pay. But walk a little further west, and hold on to your wallet.

Three narrow streets are closed to motor traffic on market days, making way for one of the most interesting brokerages on earth, a wave of crowd and color. The products are as varied as they are copious, a pot potpourri of the familiar and exotic. “BAÑO hay BAÑO,” droned a man with plastic basins at his feet. A shoe salesman hawked his wares with “ZAPATOS MEXICANOS, BARATOS.” We stepped over chickens, ducks and turkeys and learned that they are priced at 60, 50 and 100 Quetzales, respectively. In another area, we sniffed medicinal plants, some of which have yet to emerge from their Maya nomenclature.

At some point, I realized that my friend, Leigh, was in the grasp of a woman selling textiles. Turns out that “Maria” had made first contact as we crossed the Parque Central and was now addressing Leigh by her first name. Leigh doesn’t speak Spanish, but Maria had crossed the language barrier for her. “Give me another price,” she kept repeating. For what seemed like an hour, but was probably no more than fifteen minutes, Maria followed us through the crowd. She would sometimes disappear from view, but only to get a better angle for the next round of bargaining. And when we entered the park again, the two adversaries reached a dignified agreement.

We left soon after, but I still have my memories and my sunburn.

Alacitas

January 24, 2010
Today La Paz, Bolivia, begins a month-long observance of Alacitas, the annual festival of hope for a bountiful future. A mix of indigenous and European traditions – what in Bolivia isn’t?— Alacitas encourages the purchase of miniatures in anticipation that with enough faith and effort from the devotee, they will grow into the real thing before the next January 24th rolls around.

The miniatures have morphed over the years with advances in technology and expectations. Trucks, cars and houses along with dollars and Bolivian currency used to dominate. Now currencies are world-wide with Euros, Yen, and yuan entering the market basket. I did not see many trucks this year, but busses abound and Hummers have supplanted sedans. Another interesting twist for 2010 is a miniature house construction, with reinforced concrete pillars erected and sacks of cement, corrugated roofing panels and floor tiles laid nearby.

To add to their prospects, shoppers can also purchase a blessing. The blessers, most looking like curanderos brought in for the day, burn offerings of coca, honey and flower petals over tiny braziers and pass the miniatures through the smoke. Another technique employs intinction, using a flower dipped in solutions whose compositions I could not discern.

The icon of Alacitas is the Eke’ko, a jolly, little man offering an expansive gesture with his arms and sometimes accessorized with a cigarette thrust between his parted lips. “Eke’ko” means “buy me” in the Aymara language. Thus named, he is the pitch man for Alacitas’ miniatures, some of which he carries on his arms and back. The Eke’ko also references Pachamama, the Andean earth mother, and is appropriately venerated as the sustainer of life.

Another item associated with Alacitas is the “periodiquito,” a miniature edition of Bolivia’s major news dailies. These mini-jounals, which began at the end of the 19th century, combine an approach reminiscent of The Onion— one headline reads “For Tiger Woods, Eighteen Holes are Not Enough,” with biting political satire. This year president Evo Morales appears as a super hero called Egoman, the futuristic Evotar and a bumbling detective, looking for corruption in his administration. Evo’s unsuccessful rival in the last election is held up to particular ridicule. Manfred Reyes, who surreptitiously fled Bolivia last year, has his escape ascribed variously to: disguises, a tourist with pot belly and shorts or a tall chola with exceptionally long skirts, but more likely reverting to his true nature as vampire who winged it out of the country in search of new prey.

Just Read the Signs

“Just read the signs; we have very good signs.” These were the last words we heard from our Budget Rent A Car agent in Frankfurt as we set out on a three week spin through Germany and France. High speed motor highways are as emblematic of the EU as the Euro, and despite the high cost of gasoline, western Europeans are almost as car happy as we are. But driving there, by the English-speaking, has its perils, as we found out.

Peril number one, the chameleon Autobahn.
Autobahn 5 begins at the Swiss border and tracks the Rhine to Frankfurt before turning northeast to cross the Hessen plains. Seventy kilometers along the route, I was finding my stride behind the wheel of our leased BMW sedan and congratulating myself on my astute navigation. Just then I noticed that the route sign read “4.” Had I missed a turn?

It turns out that there was no turn. Unlike North American Interstates, where route numbers are persistent, European highways act like chameleons. Autobahn 5 simply disappears, maybe like a river in the desert, and number 4 nonchalantly replaces it. If you don’t believe me, look at the map.

Peril number two, the roundabout access ramp.
European highway engineers eschew the cloverleaf to reroute freeway traffic. They use the traffic circle, instead, directing vehicles into a gyre that spins them toward a new direction. Theoretically this approach is an elegant one; a single exit offers the driver multiple alternatives connected to the circle. But as a practical matter, the traffic circle forces a driver unfamiliar with the routes to simultaneously manage where to exit, traffic already in the circle, and traffic entering the circle from multiple points. I often made two or three complete revolutions before managing to escape what amounted to gravitational forces emanating from the circles’ centers.

Peril number three, when dead reckoning fails.
Not always understanding the nuances of signage, I sometimes depended on a general knowledge of European geography. In Germany I reckon that Munich is “south,” and Hamburg is “north.” Those “very good signs” we heard about usually keep this kind of orientation in play. But what happens if the signs offer a choice between a known and an unknown, as they did once on the beltway that surrounds Berlin. I knew that the Munich choice would lead south, and since we were headed north, it had to be the other, unknown, choice. Well, it turned out that the unknown choice also led south, down a road that eventually narrowed to a lane.

We finally righted ourselves through a comic exchange with a garage mechanic. After determining that we would not be able to converse in symbolic language, he grabbed our map and using two jabs of his finger showed why a picture is worth a thousand words. With one gesture he located where we intended to go, with another where we were. I turned the car around, drove north, reentered the Berlin beltway, and found the proper exit. This time I had made the right turn.

Peril number four, when you can’t get there from here.
Often the case in medieval cities and for us in Strasbourg. We arrived from the north, crossed the River Ill and entered a maze that the Queen of Hearts would be proud to govern. At one point my wife saw a taxi and suggested that we hire it to lead us to our hotel. Too late, the cab sped away. Finally, we decided to ask directions and took our city map into a bar across the street from our parking place. Since the bartender had no customers, he spent several minutes explaining scenarios. Seeing us satisfied, he walked us to the door, but on watching me unlock the car exclaimed “you drive?” “My directions no good.” Finally, he advised us to recross the Ill, follow an expressway that circles the city to a point nearly 180 degrees north of where we stood, and try it all again. It worked, but we left our car in the hotel garage until we left Strasbourg three days later.

Peril number five, interpreting the signs (a.k.a., linguistic nuance).
I have already introduced our linguistic ineptitude. It came into play in France as we drove along rural roads in Alsace. Here the traffic circles present drivers with some cryptic choices. For example, the exits of one read “Colmar;” the next “Strasbourg;” the third “autres directions.” Apparently for French signers, if you weren’t going to Strasbourg or Colmar, you must be going somewhere else. We were also bemused by the use of the “/” symbol painted across a city name to signify the end of a municipal jurisdiction.

The Land of Shined Shoes

Shined shoes are the stuff of literature and political legend. Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman rode on a smile and a shoeshine, and Alejandro Toledo famously rose from shoeshine boy in the 1960s to President of Peru thirty years later. In the United States shoeshining has largely vanished from public space, retreating to airports and luxury office buildings. But the trade remains very much alive in Latin America.

Latin Americans like a luster on their footwear. It connotes self-respect and a sense of style, and it employs a small army of service workers. Some ply their trade at fixed stands, located in areas of high pedestrian traffic. For a small gratuity, their patrons enjoy the comfort of a padded seat as they supervise the shine or read a courtesy newspaper. Far more numerous are the roving shoe shine boys who leave no corner of the city unvisited and no one wearing shoes unsolicited. You can’t miss them, and they certainly don’t miss you.

I have sworn off smooth leather shoes for my Latin American travels. Shoe shiners are likely to accept a gruff “no son lustrables” (“they’re unshinable”) from someone shod in running wear or rough suede. But shinable shoes and a sweet disposition, both worn by my good friend, Paula, attract shoeshine boys like pheromones.

In March Paula and I visited Peru and Bolivia where we scoured bookshops in Lima, Cuzco, La Paz and Cochabamba for our university libraries. We escaped Lima without a single shoeshine; I don’t know how. But in Cuzco our luck ran out. As we waited for the Centro Bartolome de las Casas to open, an eleven-year-old by the name of Christian called attention to the condition of Paula’s clogs. He described, in unflattering detail, how dirty they were and how he could help restore their luster, and their owner’s dignity. No amount of protest on our part would shake Christian’s resolve, and, finally, Paula caved.

For the next half hour, as we sat on a step, Christian demonstrated his skills, pulling bottle after bottle from his kit. “This one cleans the soles,” he assured us, “and this one makes the leather like a mirror,” he said, applying one final coat of polish. In the course of his work, he told us that he was in the fifth grade and that he lived in a neighborhood north of the city, a twenty-minute walk from our location. We were taking it all in and enjoying ourselves until Christian finished his work and named his price. “25 soles,” he said, without a hint of mirth. That’s about $8 US, an outrageous charge for the streets of Cuzco where a good meal can be had for less. I assumed that this was a purposeful joke, intended to take in tourists who might be arithmetically challenged. But no, Christian insisted that 25 was a fair price for such a great shine. I believe that we ultimately settled on 15, and I am sure that Christian is still telling his friends about how easy it is to outsmart gringos.

Paula’s clogs have never been the same.

Back in the Big Easy

To date, New Orleans’ reputation in the arts rests primarily on music performance and literature. (I’d add haute cuisine to that list of artistic accomplishment.) The city has never been known as a fine arts mecca. Oh sure, Edgar Degas paid New Orleans a brief visit in the 19th century and produced work that merited a museum named for him. But from there the list of New Orleans artists runs to regional painters and folk practitioners. In Katrina’s wake (so many sentences could begin with that phrase), a small group of art impresarios organized Prospect.1, a multi-venued, two-month-long biennial intended to bring the city squarely into the international art scene. The exhibition opened November 17, and from that date forward, my wife and I whetted our appetites for a visit by reading what were uniformly positive news accounts. Finally, on Prospect.1’s last weekend, we went to see the art and to avail ourselves of the collateral pleasures that New Orleans always offers its visitors.

The difficulties of travel from Ithaca are one of the staples of this blog. Winter snow adds an additional element of risk for those using small airports and taking multiple flights to reach their destinations. For this trip, we decided to improve our odds by booking a passage through Syracuse. While hardly a major hub, Hancock International hosts twice as many carriers and roughly three times the daily carriage of Ithaca. However, to fly from Syracuse, Ithaca travelers must brave sixty miles of highway, some subject to heavy snows, and, sure enough, heavy snows were forecast for the day before our flight. We reasoned that, given our scheduled departure (mid morning) and bad weather drive time to the airport (who knew how long?), we would be best served by driving to Syracuse the night before, spending the night near the airport and checking in as early as possible. Events were to support our reasoning, but good luck figured heavily in our success. We met people in our motel who had used our strategy only to be stranded for two days.

We managed to find a hole in the weather, and both our flights flew through it. US Airways delivered us to Louis Armstrong International right on time, and we marched out into the balmy weather that held for the entire weekend. A South Asian cab driver took us to our hotel, Soniat House in the French Quarter. For the record, New Orleans cabbies much prefer street numbers to coordinates. My directions, “corner of Charters and Governor Nicholls, please” produced only a blank stare, and the attempted clarification, “near Rampart Street,” proved equally ineffectual. I had a similar experience on the last morning when I took a cab to one of the houses that we had gutted after Katrina. Am I missing something?

One of Soniat’s calling cards is a room service breakfast of juice coffee, and biscuits, served with local strawberry preserves. Fortified with this and a good night’s sleep, we set off to make contact with Prospect.1. Turns out that this was not so easy. First, it didn’t seem to us that New Orleans locals were totally enthralled by the biennial. Perhaps they didn’t see it as a big revenue generator, in the way that Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest is. Perhaps they were reserving judgment, but for whatever reason, neither our hotel concierge nor the staff at the New Orleans Historical Foundation was able to direct us to where we needed to go. Finally, we managed to reach P.1 headquarters, a small desk in a large empty building in the Warehouse District. There a perky, young woman provided us with complimentary passes, an orientation and directions to shuttle bus stops.

The idea of Prospect.1 was to make the whole city an art venue, and there were exhibitions all over town. But many of them, and most of the signature ones, were in the Lower Ninth Ward. That area is still blighted, three years after Katrina. Large swaths of land lie fallow, cleared of its homes, schools and business establishments and of most signs of civic life, including public transportation. The P.1 shuttle service provided an orientation to the art sites and a whirlwind tour of them, but it did not stop long enough for passengers to absorb what they were seeing. We wished we had rented a car, as some of the other visitors did, but we ended up settling for a second visit to the area on Sunday. A pedestrian-paced tour revealed that the Lower Ninth might be on its way back.

The “Brad Pitt Houses,” winners in a design contest sponsored by the Hollywood actor have sprouted up near the Industrial Canal. These brightly painted, raised dwellings offer a flood resistant, energy efficient vision of repopulating the area. Another approach, stressing very low-cost construction, comes from Common Ground, an NGO that has established a beachhead in the Lower Ninth and teaches organic gardening and recycling along with home building. For now these initiatives look like the demo homes at the front of a subdivision. We’ll be watching to see if property owners are impressed enough to buy into them.

I am not a great fan of contemporary art, especially its nonrepresentational forms. So I treated many of the P.1 exhibitions as walk bys. For me the photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick at the L9 Center and an installation of film clips on Royal Street that illuminated the French contribution to Louisiana culture were the most enjoyable stops on our tours. But, with our without art, the Lower Ninth is a venue all by itself. On our Sunday morning visit, we took a slow walk around the area, scrutinizing Mark Bradford’s Arc, the signature piece of the biennial, and the haunting metal and mirror sculpture inside the shell of the Battleground Memorial Baptist Church.

On our way out of the city, I picked up a Times Picayune to read on the plane. The editorial page was largely a post mortem on the biennial. Civic leaders and members of the local art scene reflected on the significance of the event and openly speculated on whether there would be a Prospect.2. I certainly hope so, and I hope that when they return in 2010, the artists will find a less devastated New Orleans.

In DC

Nearly fifty years after I saw it for the first time, Washington still thrills me. Its monumental architecture, the permanence of its geography, the excitement of being close to the seat of government are an intoxicating brew.

Washington was the first city of any consequence that I ever saw. In 1962, with an appointment as page to the Honorable E.C. Gathings of Arkansas, I got on a plane in Memphis, flew to Washington National airport and followed directions provided by the Congressman’s secretary to Mrs. Smith’s boarding house, near the Capitol. For a month I worked on the floor of the House of Representatives, delivering messages between Congressmen and their minions and other duties, as assigned.

It was very much a CSpan experience. I never saw anything even vaguely resembling a debate. The chamber was often empty, except for the presiding officers and those with business in the chamber. When I did see the nation’s representatives, I usually did so in the cloakroom, a large space filled with booths and tables where pie, coffee and chat were served up in ample portions. I also glimpsed the very privileged world that Congress took for granted. In those days the Capitol was a world within the world—meals, drinks, recreation, grooming, travel arrangements (and who knows what else—this was before Wilber Mills’ downfall) were all provided in the vast underground that connected the House chambers with the office buildings across Constitution Avenue.

I left that summer’s experience in haste, as I was beginning my three years at Woodberry Forest School, and the Head Master seemed to think that my attendance was more important than the life experience I was getting in the halls of government. Washington was a very different city in the early 1960s—before integration, before urban renewal, before the Metro. But from those two months, I gained a feeling for the geography of the Capital zone very much akin to a GPS and an appreciation for the museums and other cultural meccas of the National Mall—real eye-openers for a boy from rural Arkansas.

On this trip, I came to evaluate proposals for the National Endowment for the Humanities. That, in itself, was enlightening. Who knew that five manuscripts for Homeric verse still existed and are in need of conservation or that Yiddish speakers from Galicia and regions of the former USSR not only survived the Holocaust but Soviet persecution as well? With projects like these to talk about, time goes quickly, and I had a few hours the next day before I needed to catch my plane, incidentally at the same airport where I touched down in 1962.

I was especially interested in seeing the “broad stripes and bright stars” that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. The flag was once the principal tableau of the National Museum of American History, unfurled right at its entrance. But fabric’s obvious deterioration necessitated a major conservation project, and it has only now returned to the museum five years later. To prevent further damage, the curators have provided a climate controlled cased and dark room for its display, but what an artifact! It’s huge, over forty feet long, even though its size was reduced by early souvenir hunters who clipped several inches of stripes and one of its stars. And the exhibition has a bevy of supporting cases with information about the flag maker who sewed it for $400 and change and how the artifact made its way to safe keeping in Washington.

To mark the reopening of the museum, the White House has lent its copy of the Gettysburg Address—the only one “titled, signed and dated,” as the caption says. Since my own institution boasts one of the four other copies of the document, I had to take a look, and there are differences. This one is written on three separate sheets of paper; Cornell’s is a folded letter with the text appearing on both folios and the recto of one piece of paper. But the words are the same, beginning “Four score and seven years ago” and reminding us of the high ideals that marked our country’s founding. Let us hope that the new administration, now establishing itself to face challenges only slightly less prodigious than those faced by Lincoln, will help us reestablish our moral compass.