peterography

I was working in my garden Monday and listening to podcasts on my iPod. It was warm in the brilliant sun, but I was cooled by the wind which was strangely strong in the clear blue cloud-free sky, and the tall oak trees near my garden were thrashing and bending all around me.

I was behind on my podcasts, otherwise I should have been enjoying the weather instead of submerging into a pair of Etymotic ER6i earbuds – the “i” stands of “isolation” and Etymotic brags about how well they take you out of your environment. It was disorienting enough to feel the shovel in my hand, the wind in my face and slippery scree under my feet while listening to a detached academic interview in a radio studio. The studio in my ears was in Australia; the program was By Design on ABC/Radio National, and they were talking about architecture. It got more disorienting when the host, Alan Saunders, read a letter of mine on the air.

Of course, it wasn’t really a “letter”; it was an email. And it wasn’t really “on the air”; it was an MP3 I had downloaded over a wire. And he really didn’t do it then, since the show was broadcast in April and it’s now late May. But it feels strange to hear someone with an Australian accent unexpectedly read your own words into your ears while you’re working in your yard.

And it’s not really a yard either. We call it the “backyard” but it’s really a rocky hillside overgrown with shrubs and trees. Yet it does face south and get good sun, so for years I’ve been terracing it and improving the soil with green manure, plus the traditional brown kind, and I’m starting to get some decent yields.

Toiling on that hillside always transports me to other times and places anyway, so being time-shifted a few months or hearing my own words in a different accent from a land down under seems somehow just right when I’m mixing concrete or lugging boulders in my garden.

I sometimes think the terracing is more fun than the gardening. I have retaining walls made of landscape bricks, and ones made of cast-concrete and others made of pressure-treated wood or from rocks dug from the ground. The walkways and steps are made of granite or concrete or kiln-baked bricks or pavers or slate or wood frames and crushed stone. In my imagination the walkways are highways; the terraces are vast fields of productive farmland. To me this is the fruit and vegetable equivalent of some guys’ electric train sets with their tiny villages and towns and miniature economies and local politics.

I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (take it from me – I also grow apples). My father was a civil engineer and when I was one year old he gave me the best gift I’ve ever had – a dumptruck load of coarse gravel and sand in the side yard of our house in New London, New Hampshire. In this picture I’ve just taken delivery of my gift, and in the background you can see one of my relatives trying not to be recognized in my presence - something they still do today.

Between my father’s civil engineering magazines and all the construction going on everywhere we drove, I had plenty of inspiration for the years of roads and bridges and tunnels and aqueducts that I built in that sandpile.

Professionally I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps, nor those of my mechanical engineer brother, opting instead of the money, glamour and girls of software engineering. But, trees and their apples, you know – I still like messing around in the dirt with my little but strangely vast civil engineering projects.

In the last few decades popular music has splintered into ever  narrower segments. In most big city markets you can tune to stations featuring formats such as Adult Hits, Adult Contemporary, Adult Standards, Classic Hits, Contemporary Hits (AKA “top 40”), Pop Standards, Progressive Rock, Soft Rock, Soft Adult Contemporary, Urban Contemporary, Urban Adult and Urban Oldies. Few ordinary listeners know the difference between these, but the radio industry does, and those categories matter to the executives and program directors who select the songs we hear.

Listeners who like a little variety are bored by this narrow specialization, and those who like a little music from their music stations are bored by all the yakking of the DJ’s, especially during the morning commute when many stations are now double-teaming the poor listener with pairs of happy-talk jocks blabbing endlessly about TV shows and celebrity gossip.

Some listeners are tuning out of terrestrial radio altogether, preferring satellite radio or playlist shuffles on their MP3 players. And some radio listeners are tuning into a new format called “Jack radio”.

“Jack FM” first appeared among a handful of Canadian and US stations in 2002 and the format quickly spread in both countries and is now appearing in the UK.  Typical “Jack” stations play a mix of hits from the 1960’s to the present. Most “Jack” stations have no disc jockey, although they may have a canned voice promoting their format or announcing on-air contests. The moniker “Jack FM” is trademarked by Rogers Communications but competing brands are now offering “Bob Radio” or “Joe Radio” Here in the Boston area, Jack radio is called “Mike FM” – WMKK. I listen to them sometimes, especially when I’m near a radio that I can’t connect to my iPod, but Mike FM’s playlist is too small.

On my iPod I have the usual music of my generation, such as Joni Mitchell, the Clash and Johnny Cash, or Diana Ross and ZZ Top. Also, the Allman Brothers, Tori Amos, A-ha and Abba. Not to mention Leonard Cohen and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvis Presley and Elvis Costello. Also, the Bangles, the B-52’s, the Band, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Billy Idol as well as Men at Work, Men Without Hats, Moby, Bob Marley, and Martha and the Vandellas.

But Mike FM’s slogan is “we play everything”, with the word “everything” drawn out with snarky emphasis. And I beg to differ. I’ve never heard Yo Yo Ma on Mike FM, not even playing soundtrack music from “Crouching Tiger”, never mind the Bach Cello Suites. I’ve never heard Miles Davis or Sarah Vaughn or Tito Puente. I’ve never heard Brian Eno or Edward Elgar. I’ve never heard Edvard Grieg, George Gershwin or Max Graham. No Bob Wills, Duke Ellington, Billy Holiday, or Cibo Matto. No Ozo Matli, Battlefield Band, the Peatbog Faeries, the Klezmatics or Evgeny Kissin. But I listen to all those on my iPod.

Mike FM likes to capitalize on their variety by playing “mash ups” and “trainwrecks” of unlikely pairs of artists back-to-back. Their idea of a mash up is Billy Joel followed by Nirvana. You should hear my mash ups. Mike FM doesn’t know anything about “everything”.

The office park adjacent to my company’s campus takes the “park” portion of its description seriously. Scattered among its four office buildings and two hotels are almost a dozen ponds and countless glades, woods, landscaped lawns, marshes and footpaths. It’s a far cry from the lovely wild forest and meadow with coyote and fox that I used to see out my office window when I first went to work here in 1994, but, as they say, that’s ‘progress’. Some of the ponds are manicured and sculpted pools with fountains and elaborate stonework and others are semi-wild and surrounded by reeds, tall grass and trees.

Many of these ponds have Mute Swans in residence. Most of these swans are rented. I once made the mistake of calling one a “leased swan” when talking to an ornithological-minded coworker and she thought I said “Least Swan”. The smaller varieties of several bird species are called “least”, for example the Least Bittern, Least Flycatcher or Least Tern and it took a while to deobfuscate that conversation.

Besides Mute swans I’ve seen rented Black Swans - a species native to Australia - and rented Mandarin Ducks and I used to think that the only purpose of such bird-rental was ornamentation. But the companies that supply the swans promote their ability to keep Canada Geese, and their droppings, away. My company’s solution to the goose problem is styrofoam coyotes which are far less graceful and pretty, but we don’t have any good swan ponds.

Yet the Mute Swan itself is regarded as a pest species. A native of Europe, it was introduced to North America in the 19th century to beautify the ponds of wealthy estate owners, and it soon began to drive out native waterfowl using the same aggressive and territorial nature that drives geese away. Most states along the east coast now require that Mute Swans be either pinioned or neutered to limit their growth and federal legislation and regulations to reduce their populations has been tied up in disputes and court challenges for years. Yet by now the orange bill and gracefully curved neck of the Mute has become the public’s idea of a swan. The Swan Boats in the Boston Public Gardens depict Mute Swans and the average person can hardly imagine a Trumpeter Swan or Tundra Swan, our two native species.

None of these existential issues were likely on the minds of a pair of Mutes who appeared a month ago on one of the outlying ponds. They showed up weeks before the birds on the spiffier ponds with the fountains near the corporate atriums so they may have been wild swans just looking for a place to raise a family. They set right to work building a nest on the wide end of a little feather of a pond near our corporate gate. The tiny sliver of water presses hard against our chain link fence on one side, and is bordered on the other side by a landscaped grassy slope. At one tip of this pond is a busy intersection and at the other a reedy swamp.

Mute Swans like to build their nests in a shallow spot in the middle of the water. And  after a day of hard work during which they often sat back to back, looking like one large white two-headed nest building creature, they had a fine nest.  Then they abandoned the pond.

I found them the next day in another outlying pond, building another nest. Their new pond was bigger and better protected from traffic and passers-by. It also wasn’t at the bottom of a landscaped slope, which had worried me at the first location because I saw no weeds in the grass there so I assumed it was treated with weed killer, which can’t be good for raising cygnets in.

After another day of hard work they had another fine nest. Then they vanished again.

They had returned to the first pond. One swan  was sitting serenely on the nest and the other circled it warily, eyeing me with suspicion. The eggs had been laid.

That was a few weeks ago. Sometimes I see them both in their pond and sometimes only one. Mute Swans have very little sexual dimorphism and they share egg-sitting duty, so there’s no telling which is the male and which is the female. The other day I discovered where the missing swan goes. It visits the decorative ponds near the big shiny office buildings, which by now have their own swans, not to mention well-stocked feeders. This journey is hazardous – crossing several lanes of busy traffic and then having to contend with the swans that are already there.

Some of the other swans are also sitting on eggs. In fact right now the whole office park is in a family way - today at lunch I watched a robin tend its nest, I was beset by a redwing blackbird protecting its nesting territory, and I paused to watch a pair of geese guide their six little golden goslings across the grass from one pond to another. I’ll try to report on the progress of these families in future blog entries.

After Tony Blair announced his enthusiastic support for the invasion of Iraq he was widely castigated as George Bush’s “poodle”, his “lap dog”, his “puppy”. But it took George Michael’s 2002 music video for “Shoot the Dog” to cement this image in people’s minds. It shows Blair chasing a ball across the White House lawn and then rolling over on his back while Bush rubs his tummy.

So this week when Tony Blair visited Washington on his farewell tour, Bush held a press conference with him in the Rose Garden. And trying to choose just the right adjective to describe the quality he admired most about Blair, Bush praised him, without the slightest hint of irony,  for being so “dogged”.

Many people believe that we might never have invaded Iraq had it not been for Tony Blair’s support. Just yesterday Jimmy Carter, speaking to the BBC added his voice to the long list. (Carter Interview on BBC)

Prior to the invasion Bush desperately needed to add legitimacy to his “coalition of the willing”. Small or token contributions by Spain, Poland, Australia, Costa Rica, and others just didn’t cut it. Blair’s contribution of 43,000 troops for the invasion made it seem like a real coalition and helped sell it to the American public.

But more important than an armored division, several brigades and substantial Royal Navy and Royal Air Force assets was Blair himself. Intelligent and articulate, he was a mover and shaker. He had already transformed the Labour Party, even renaming it New Labour, moving it to the center, marginalizing its old lefties, and gaining a huge majority in Parliament. His policies had streamlined and invigorated the British economy, giving it a growth rate and job generating power that left Germany and France behind.

And in 2002 he was the darling of the American Clintonistas. Not only was he a centrist progressive like Clinton, but his intelligence and eloquence seemed like a tonic for the bizarre policies and statements issuing almost daily from the Bush White House. In December 2002 Thomas Friedman wrote an article in the New York Times entitled “Blair for President”, expressing the admiration of many American liberals: “He’s tough on national security, he has an alternative global vision, people like him and he is a beautiful, reassuring speaker. He’s Bill Clinton without baggage. I’d say he’s a natural.”

Friedman famously supported the invasion of Iraq, a position he has defended, like Blair himself, with ever more tortuous rationalizations. And many other American centrists and liberals did so too, but have since regretted it. I’ll never understand why so many of my fellows supported the invasion but in my conversations with them, Blair and his support for the project were almost always mentioned. (for the record: in 2003 I sent a posting to BBC’s “Talking Point” website saying that “if we invade Iraq we had better learn what the Arabic word for ‘quagmire’ is.”)

We’ll never know whether this tragedy would have occurred if Blair had witheld his support. But all his other accomplishments, most recently an historical agreement in Northern Ireland, will forever be overshadowed by his terrible decision to help America invade Iraq.

A dump truck from a local dairy farm just dropped a load of composted cow manure in my driveway.     This will become a soil amendment and mulch for my garden and I love this rich brown stuff!

Because there’s so much of it and it’s used it over a year and too valuable to waste, I need to store it.   The government has its Strategic Petroleum Reserve and I have my Strategic Cowshit Reserve – next to my garden, a hole in the ground with a hard-packed clay floor and stone-lined walls.   It’s so deep I’ve built steps to descend to its bottom.  Over the next few weeks, one wheelbarrow-full at a time, the manure will make its way there.

Anyone who has ever described the lies of the Bush administration or the claims of corporate hucksters or the tall tales told over a few beers as “bullshit” doesn’t know shit about shit.   There are few things more honest, more valuable, and more worthy than manure.  Whether daintily dropped by cows or brazenly pooped by bulls, this stuff will become my tomatoes and my lettuce, my zucchini and butternut squash, my red onions, scallions, basil, raspberries and blueberries.  It will become the food we serve to our honored guests and that which graces our daily meals.  It will become the beauty of the garden -  the dramatic greens and startling reds and deep black soil of my summers.  

At breakfast when my wife walks outside in the early haze of a hot summer day to top her cereal with blueberries or raspberries plucked fresh, the radiance in her face is not just from the morning sun but from the sweet promise of that fruit grown plump and healthy from this recycled cow food.    And thus does the stuff of ruminants feed my own bloggy ruminations.

At 4 AM on Thursday a few weeks week ago I awoke with chest pains. I thought it was a bad case of indigestion and tried the usual home nostrums but after 20 minutes none of them helped. Recently one of my co-workers had a heart attack and delayed going to the hospital because he thought the same thing and guys our age die that way all the time so my wife drove me to the ER.

The first words out of my mouth to the triage nurse were that “it feels like someone is squeezing my esophagus”. But let’s get real: if a middle-aged guy with a history of hypertension shows up in the ER at 4:30 AM with chest pains, unless he’s got a gaping bullet wound in his sternum they’re going to think MI (Myocardial Infarction = heart attack), as well they should.

They plopped me on a gurney, parked me in a service bay and got to work, hooking me up to all kinds of hospital gear. My ECG was normal; my other vital signs were OK, but they pointed out that my blood pressure was a bit high (well, duh …)

As a test they popped a tab of nitroglycerin under my tongue. Nitro widens your arteries so the theory was that if it widened an obstructed coronary artery the pain would subside and we would have a clue that this was a heart attack. But some people have overachieving vagus nerves and I guess I won that lottery because I passed out.

When I came-to everyone was all excited and they showed me why on the ECG: My heart had stopped. No P wave, no T wave, no QRS complex, nothing complex about it - simple, really - I had flatlined. Luckily, while I was blissfully dead, everyone there knew exactly what to do and they got me rebooted quickly. The doctor explained that these things happen sometimes with nitro.

But I had no time to ponder the meaning of death or why I didn’t rate a tunnel of light or an out-of-body experience (maybe you have to go to a prestigious hospital like MGH or the Mayo Clinic if you want that stuff) because the rest of the ECG told a scarier story - I now had an elevated S-T segment, which even I recognized as a sign of an MI. So they pumped me up with heparin, made me swallow a handful of Plavix and told me they thought I was having a heart attack. I asked if the ECG could be due to the the fact that my heart had stopped, or from the atropine they had given me while restarting it. Maybe, they said, but we can’t take that chance. An elevated S-T segment is classic, they explained. I knew that already. The problem with doing what I do for a living is that you already know some of the answers before asking the questions.

They handed me and my wife documents describing stents, and sheets to sign authorizing them to put one in.  I was rolled into the cath lab.

The plan was to run a tube from a blood vessel in my groin up into my heart, find a blocked coronary artery and insert a stent in it. I’ve always wanted to visit a cath lab as a clinical site visit for my job, but I never got to go. Doing it this way wasn’t quite as good, but it was still interesting because I was awake for the whole procedure. I’m not sure if they put a sedative in me - they commonly do for a cardiac cath, and I did feel spacey but I attributed that to my little vacation from the land of the living a few minutes earlier along with the atropine.

I was placed on an operating table. The room was filled with gear which in other circumstances I would have loved to geek out on. Everyone was dressed in greens and I could no longer recognize the cardiologist. Above me was a huge image intensifier suspended on a C-arm, aimed at my chest like the eye of God. They shaved my pubic hair, painted on a cold antiseptic, and numbed up my groin with a local anesthetic.

I felt a warm stream of blood flowing down my thigh and pooling at the bottom - they were in my femoral artery. As they wended the tube through my blood vessels toward my heart I desperately wanted to watch. I poked my head up and everyone in the room shouted for me to stay still - any movement could be dangerous. I tried to lay quietly and meditate on curiosity and cats.

I felt a flutter of arrhythmias and when I announced this the doctor explained that he was inside my heart having a look around. In my prior 54 years having someone in my heart had always been a strictly metaphorical concept. They began pumping dye into my coronary arteries to light them up and I felt waves of warmth as the dye passed through my body.

A few moments and a few waves of warmth later the doctor announced that I had the heart of a much younger man. He didn’t say who it was or what the guy was using now to pump his blood, but one thing was clear - this was not a heart attack! They aimed a computer monitor at me so I could see. Yup - even I could tell that those arteries were looking good and doing swell.

I lay quietly and thought happy thoughts while they unwound everything and plugged me up. They wheeled me into the ICU, which I kept referring to as the “Expensive Care Unit” and they kept pretending they had never heard that one before. I didn’t really need to be there but they had been so sure I was having an MI that they had booked it in advance.

For awhile people came and went drawing blood and doing other tests. I was attached to an ECG, a cuff, an O2 monitor, a saline drip, an oxygen supply, and lots of different colored ports connected to needles and tubes in my arms. I had my journal with me and I wrote everything down. Some of the equipment was made by my company’s competitors, and some was made by us. I observed carefully and quizzed the technicians about what they liked and didn’t like about those systems versus ours. Finally my wife went home and the staff went outside. I was left alone with all my tubes and wires and careful notes (and antiquated notions?), and I lay there marvelling at how my day was going so far. It was only 9AM.

From early April . . . .

Bruce Springsteen said,
The poets down here
Don’t write nothing at all,
they just stand back and let it all be

Some things do defy language.

This morning, west of Boston on Interstate 495, a truck lost its load of red dye. For a half a mile the highway was bright red.

Here’s a photo from the local newspaper

I work for a huge international corporation and the workers come from all directions and several states, but in the parking lot today it was clear which cars had driven on Route 495 because their tires and fenders and doors were coated red. All day long they sat in the parking lot, crimson curiosities, while the sky overhead grew darker and the wind began to freshen. When it started to snow we all remarked how suddenly winter had returned on an April day. The grounds and walkways and pavement grew white. And the cars began to bleed. The snow washed the red off the fenders and wheels and it flowed across the parking lot in great scarlet stains.

Here’s a photo I took with my cellphone

And when everyone went home at the end of the day, the parking lot resembled a silent, snowy plain where a terrible battle had been fought.

Peterography is almost here!

This blog will be a construction site for a week or two as dumptrucks and cranes and road graders rattle and scrape across it, and walls and jersey barriers and scaffolding appear one day and disappear the next. There will be dust and debris everywhere and the noise will be deafening.

In a few weeks the construction activity will settle down to just an occasional industrial accident but the noise will still be deafening.