Persimmon Alley Press
Persimmon Alley Press
  • About Persimmon Alley Press
  • Books
    • Close Encounters with the Cold War
    • Mother's Century: A Survivor, Her People and Her Times
    • Encounters: Ten Appointments with History
    • Killer Protocols
    • Clean Coal Killers
    • The Killer Trees
    • A Feast of Famine
    • Molly Malice in Alterland
    • Alligator In My Basement
    • Sudden Addiction
    • The Flesh of the Cedarwood
  • Smoke the Dottle
  • Richard's Rants
  • Contact

Wading the creek

7/30/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I like to take a walk most every day, an hour at least and usually a bit more. I figure it’s inspirational to the neighbors to see an old codger out strolling the neighborhood. I’ve laid out a few routes so I don’t see the same scenery every time, nor suffer the residents of any particular block too often with my old frame, goofy hat and worn-out sandals. This means that, on occasion, I’ll be walking a particular path that I’ve not been down in a few weeks.

A digression: three weeks ago our neighborhood got a downpour of Biblical proportions. Some 4-plus inches dumped on us in about an hour. There’s a creek I walk along periodically—well, a “run” in Virginia parlance—that I heard on the radio rose 12 feet. Given that there’s usually only several inches of water in this “waterway,” that’s impressive. Still, that was a few weeks back. I decided to walk that route and see whether any damage was still visible.

Well over halfway through the circuit, I hadn’t really encountered anything out of the ordinary. Sure, there had been a tree down along the way, but the county had already chainsawed it into pieces and moved it off the trail. All told the walk was hot but pleasant. I looked forward to the shaded footbridge over Four Mile Run where I often stop for a moment and occasionally see a few ducks splashing in the foot or so of water that pools beneath it.

Not today. The bridge was gone. Apparently that 12-foot surge carried it away. I had to decide. Should I backtrack the half mile to take the bicycle bridge—one thing about Arlington, Virginia; it’s got lots of streams and lots of footbridges—or just wade across? Today Four Mile Run was only a couple of inches deep in places. My sandals and feet would get wet, but it’s 90 degrees, so they’d dry fast.

I remember another creek from years back, Antietam Creek that flows through what is now Antietam National Battlefield. I’ve toured it several times. The last action of the battle took place at Burnside’s Bridge, although it wasn’t called that during the war. General Ambrose Burnside’s Corps was charged with seizing this bridge, which it did, but late enough in the day that Confederate reinforcements from Harper’s Ferry prevented it from turning the Confederate flank. Today, in a memorial on one side of the bridge, are repeated the sarcastic comments of one Henry Kid Douglas, who served with General Stonewall Jackson, to the effect that naming the bridge for Burnside would needs be sarcasm or irony since his forces could have waded the creek in multiple locations. Later scholarship indicates Antietam Creek wasn’t all that easy to cross, by the way. Certainly not while being shot at.

But those words came to me as I considered the less daunting stream in my path. Would I delay my journey merely from a reluctance to get my feet wet? I certainly wasn’t facing enemy snipers on the other bank. Yet defeat or victory were not exactly at stake in my decision. Historians would not debate my course of action. On such a hot day, nary a soul was even around to observe. This was between me and Four Mile Run.

This was not the first time in my life I’ve encountered washed-out bridges or other roadblocks, although more typically metaphorical ones. I’ve even been lost in the woods once or twice, and I’ve faced situations in life where the way forward was unclear. One thing I have learned, though, is that indecision never succeeds. Pick a path and follow it. Better the wrong path than no path at all; you can always adjust later.

I plunged forward, into the three-inch-deep lazy current. The water was cool and felt good on my feet. Climbing up the rocks on the other side, I could feel the soles of my sandals squishing. Fifteen minutes later, feet and footwear were dry. It felt good, knowing I’m not too old to do something usually reserved for the young.

Next time, I’ll take the other path and cross at the bicycle bridge. No reason to be reckless, after all.

​David
​

0 Comments

"One small step"

7/26/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
This summer has seen much well-deserved reminiscence of the first Moon landing. I was fifteen and just out of what we called junior high school, now more commonly referred to as middle school, when I watched the landing streamed live on TV. Just the previous summer I had gone with my family to the “fancy” Houston theater to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, and of course I had seen every episode of Star Trek. Space travel was a fixture of my imagination. I don’t know that it was the first book I read, but the first book I remember reading was Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit Will Travel. So seeing someone actually set foot on the Moon was exciting.
And a bit disappointing. Of course, there was no way Neil Armstrong’s first step could be as thrilling as Keir Dulyea traversing a wormhole to the other side of the Galaxy, nor could it compete with the fantastic adventures of all that pulp science fiction I consumed. Mostly, though, I was disappointed with the “one small step” pronouncement. It sounded to me like something written by a committee.
So I was young and stupid at the time, but I’d been hoping for something like “Tomorrow the Stars!” I now realize, of course, that Armstrong faced not only a historic first step but the ridiculous position of being live-streamed to millions of viewers back home. That was as unprecedented as landing on the Moon itself. Stanley didn’t have a camera crew accompanying him when he found Livingston. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had no such added pressure when summiting Mt. Everest. Hillary claims they just shook hands and hugged in silence. Somewhat better known is his statement to George Lowe as he and Norgay were descending: “Well, George, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Hillary himself was unimpressed with Armstrong’s words; “Better if he had said something natural like ‘Jesus, here we are.’”
But imagine the consternation had Armstrong made an off the cuff wisecrack. He’d have never been able to escape it. Who is to say Stanley didn’t really remark, “Livingston, you sod, where the f--- have you been hiding yourself?” He had plenty of opportunity to spin the story a bit before making it back to give all those speeches to the explorer societies. But Armstrong was going to be stuck with whatever he said. Any wonder, then, that he came up with prepared—and prepared sounding—remarks?
And he was correct; it was a giant leap. So giant, in fact, it hasn’t been repeated since the last Apollo mission departed the Lunar surface almost forty-seven years ago. That is the greatest disappointment, of course. So many of my generation grew up believing—well, fantasizing, actually—that colonization of the solar system was just around the corner. The “space race” was supposed to give way to human cooperation exploring Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter and Venus. Turns out that was too difficult and way too expensive, so we went back to bickering among ourselves.
Still, it’s nice to remember the dream. And maybe it’s just a dream deferred.

David

0 Comments

Smoke the dottle

7/22/2019

0 Comments

 
It was during my misspent youth I first heard the word “dottle.” Houston, Texas in 1971 was an odd place, home to NASA, “Space City,” a major league baseball club named in honor of the astronauts, but also southern prejudices, pot-smoking hippies (I was one of those), flag-waving rednecks, and a lot of heat and humidity. This was a city desperately trying to be sophisticated, with a world class symphony and opera company, one of the nation’s first public television stations broadcasting “refined” programs made by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and yet rings of chemical plants and refineries spewing toxins into the atmosphere. Add the absence of a modern public transit system compounded by an ever-expanding network of beltways, outer beltways and crosstown freeways to accommodate the pre-carpool commuters; well, Houston had air quality to rival other great cities like Los Angeles or Pittsburgh.

Yet, with the Vietnam War raging and having served as a backdrop for all our post-pubescent lives, most of my high school classmates and I worried little about pollution and more about finding some decent hooch to smoke. And when you couldn’t score some MaryJane, there were always cigarettes. They were cheap, plentiful, and legal. Oh, sure, technically you had to be 18 to buy them. Rest assured, in the 1970s, the only identification required for a pack of smokes was a picture of George Washington. And you got change back.

But there was a guy in my high school, a really smart guy a year ahead of me who was a debate champion, honor graduate, all that. And the thing is, so was I. This guy, though, was, as we used to joke, born 40 years old. I don’t know if he became a stodgy, stentorian judge later in life, but he seemed destined for law school and a distinguished career. And in 1971, shocked to see a bright young speech and drama apprentice like me turning into a bad seed, he took me aside and explained to me that cigarettes were the devil’s handiwork. Mind, he didn’t seem to take issue with my long hair and pot-smoking friends.

“There’s nothing wrong with tobacco, mind you. But cigarettes just lack class. If you want to smoke, smoke a pipe.” Then he produced one of his and handed it to me with a small pouch of pipe tobacco. He changed my life that day, and I’ve never thanked him. Well, until now.

“Keith. Thank you!”

Keith showed me how to load and light the pipe, explained the art of keeping it lit without drawing too fast and burning it out. His final admonition: “Properly smoked, you can enjoy a bowl for an hour or more and a pipe your entire lifetime. And you’ll know you’ve smoked it properly if, when it goes out on it’s own, there’s a small amount of unburned tobacco still in the bottom of the bowl. That’s called the ‘dottle’.”

Years have passed and I now know that these directions are not universally considered truth. There are many who argue that a dottle results from improper smoking, that a correctly-smoked pipe burns smoothly all the way down leaving nothing but ash. Perhaps. But I will note that, according to Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes left a dottle in every pipe he smoked. In fact, he scraped his dottles out at the end of every day, packed them into a fresh pipe and puffed away on the collection to start the next morning. I’ve never done that, but I will confess, many’s a day I’ve dug out the last pipe from the evening prior and smoked the dottle to start my day.

Pipe smokers are a disappearing breed, by the way. Smoking in general is declining, which is good. I attribute most of this to public shaming and ordinances increasingly banning lighted tobacco products anywhere within sight of public spaces and commercial areas. Still, you see people sneaking a smoke here and there, and if you’ll look around the next time you’re stuck in traffic, I suspect you’ll notice lots of folks dangling their arm out a car window holding a smoking butt. Smoking continues, it’s just smokers are embarrassed to be seen doing it. The exceptions, of course, are teenagers--especially vaping teenagers--and cigar smokers. This last group generally want as many people as possible to know that they have, literally, money to burn. There are always a group of them where I buy pipe tobacco; loud, obnoxious men in their forties who like to make it known that they believe the world is filled with fools and miscreants to which they claim to be exceptions.

Pipe smokers are a quieter lot. Loading a pipe, lighting it, nursing it, cleaning it, setting it aside to rest while selecting the next one, these are rituals ill-suited to the hectic, modern world. Pipe smokers accumulate pipes as well. They have to. It takes awhile to break in a pipe, smoking it slowly and giving it a decent rest over many weeks before you can just light it up and puff away while pounding keys on your typewriter or computer or whatever you write on. And maybe Keith still has that pipe he showed me almost fifty years ago, but I typically burn one out after ten years’ use. That means I want to have some breaking in to be ready to replace that pipe that finally cracks wide open. Mark Twain reportedly chain-smoked corncob pipes and burned them out so frequently that he’d pay people to break in new ones for him.

Pipe smoking and writing do go together, by the way. And, no, not every decent writer plies the trade with a pipe clenched between their teeth. Nor does every briar addict feel the need to scribble words on a page and then obsess over them. But there has always been a community of pipe-smoking scriveners. I pray this community continues at least a few more decades. And perhaps something may still come of starting each day on the remains of the last.

Carpe diem!
Smoke the dottle!

David​
0 Comments
    Picture

    Persimmon
    Alley
    Press

    Carpe Diem

    Smoke the dottle

    Archives

    December 2021
    August 2019
    July 2019

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed