The Triad is Complete…

For the last year and a half I have been reminiscing about three rock carvings I remember from the early 1970s. I had visited two of them in the last year and found them much as I had remembered them. The last time I had looked for the third and most intriguing one I had failed to find it.

This morning when I got up there was a notification of a comment on my last post on the subject. As I read it, I realized that Mr. Claassen had resolved the lingering questions about the third, unfound carving. All of them but one. I was determined to answer that one this morning.

So after breakfast I headed for Glenmont. After passing through town, I turned north toward Nashville. I soon came to the intersection where I remembered seeing the carvings. The rock just was not there. I continued on up the road looking for it, eventually arriving in Nashville. I turned around and went back to Glenmont via another route that eventually brought me back to the intersection of interest. There on the north side of the road was the rock I was seeking. The details of the location had been lost or reformed in my memory but here was the rock that I remembered.

I pulled the car off the road and walked back to the rock. One carving was still clearly visible…I didn’t really remember it, another detail failure. The other one was missing but it was clear from the size and shape of the void (on the right) that the image I remember had been there.

Sadly, while there was some weathering as Mr. Claassen observed, there had also been some vandalism on these fine carvings. Also of note, around on the west side of the rock, up somewhat higher than the others I could make out the remnants of a third face, more crude than the ones of interest or perhaps a carving started and abandoned before it was complete.

My original triad of Holmes County rock carvings is complete and a fourth has been added. Thanks to all who have commented on my posts on the subject, especially to Mr. Claassen.

Colors of the Day…

Last month when I was out in the deserts of Southern Utah I started to see connections between the forms and colors in the natural landscape and the motifs used by the native people there. It was quite interesting to think about these connections as I rode along in the car. In particular, we attended a lecture on ancient sky legends at Bryce Canyon. They showed characters seen on petroglyphs in the area. These are large, square shouldered beings with tapered sides. As we drove through Arches National Park a couple of days later I saw patterns in the walls of the monoliths that looked identical to those characters. Later the markings, shapes, and colors on an insect reminded me of Native American ceremonial costumes I remembered seeing in a book many years ago. I am sure that scholars have made all of these connections…nothing new here. Except that I became aware of them through personal observation.

 

So this week when I walked the puppy back through the south pasture, I saw the fall colors here in Ohio in a different way than I have before. They reminded me of colors in the desert. Colors that I never particularly liked before but now think about often. Colors that I have developed some kind of affinity for. Colors and forms that keep drawing me back to the desert…

 

Well, well, well…

I have noticed over the last few years that summer rain storms seem to break up around Holmes County. We often don’t get rain from storm systems passing through. This summer the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on the changing rainfall patterns in Northern Ohio. They observed that some areas get intense rainfall while others are bypassed. The long term consequences of this pattern could be drought, as the hard dry ground cannot absorb the intense rainfall. Most of it runs off.

This year the shallow hand dug well that we use to water the animals here on the farm went dry. We decided to try to divert the runoff from the barn roof to the well…a really big rain barrel. Last week a friend of ours came to do the project.

As he and I peered down into that dug well, we marveled at the people who dug that well. A person worked in the bottom of that deep, narrow hole. All of the diggings must have been removed by the bucket full, one at a time. The rocks for the walls were probably lowered down the same way…and without an OSHA approved hardhat on the poor guy at the bottom. Physically hard, dangerous work.

In a couple of hours, our friend and his son had our job done. We got a nice rain at the end of the week. We’ll have to wait to see how well this scheme works in reducing our water shortage next summer.

As I thought about that dug well again this week, I remembered the well on the back porch of my grandparents’ house in southern Ohio many years ago. It was always exciting for me to standby (and sometimes help) my grandfather draw water from that well. He would open the cover to the well, drop the bucket into the darkness, controlling its decent by his hand on the windlass…we all waited expectantly, listening for the gentle splash of the bucket into the water. Then we would start cranking the handle on the windlass to draw that bucket of water up from the depths. I still remember the glimmer of light reflected from the bucket of water as it came up out of the darkness.

Here in Ohio, just south of the Great Lakes, we always take our water for granted. Maybe we should take a little time to think about what we have and to be grateful for it…

Postscript

November 2, 2009

We lifted the cover off the well yesterday…it was nearly full.  We have only had 1 1/4 inch of rain since the project.  That is much better recovery than my rough calculations predicted.  Next summer will be the real test but for now our project seems to have been a success.

Wangari Maathai at Wooster College

Last evening we went to The College of Wooster to hear Wangari Maathai speak.  I have heard a couple of radio interviews of her, especially after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She is one of those people who, in spite of difficult conditions, have the drive and vision to make a difference in the world. Thirty years ago she identified deforestation and the planting of monocultures as the cause of many problems for the poor people of Kenya. She started the Greenbelt Movement, empowering African women to plant native trees to improve the soil and water quality on the land where they live. In the process they are empowered in other ways too.

I have thought of one thing in particular that she said last night several times today. When she asks people in Kenya who is to blame for their problems, they almost always place the blame on someone else, the government, the police, the army. But as they discuss the problems, she shows them how many of the problems are caused by themselves. This is not unique to Kenya. As I listen to the news here in the United States, it seems that we cause many of our problems here too, thinking particularly of health care and mortgage problems.

Sometimes there really are simple solutions to complex problems or at least the solutions begin with simple steps.

The Brothers Trip – 2009

My three brothers were successful once again this year in talking the reluctant traveler into accompanying them on the annual brothers trip, usually taken with only 75% of the brothers going along. I am not a traveler but the desert areas of the west have an appeal that sometimes I cannot resist. They caught me at one of those moments.

We visited Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Arches National Parks in southern Utah this time and I think we all had a good trip, each in our own way. On Saturday evening we were at the Garden of Eden in Arches NP after dark. The landscape was gently lit by the first quarter moon, the sky was full of stars, it was quiet with the exception of a few insects and bats (and four brothers)…it had everything to do with The Quiet Way. Sunday evening we were in Las Vegas, Nevada preparing for an early flight east…it had absolutely nothing to do with The Quiet Way.

I have no intention of ever returning to Las Vegas but every intention of returning to Arches some day to explore that area a little more.

I have posted a page of a few photographs from the trip.

Exploring Space

I was 10 years old when Alan Shepard became the first American to go into space. I remember that the school somehow arranged for televisions to be set up in the classrooms so we could watch history in the making. They did it again a few months later when John Glenn went into orbit.

A small group of guys sat right up front under the television and wrote down every word from the broadcast into our notebooks. I wish I still had that notebook but it has been gone for decades.

I watched the Apollo launches and the moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have watched various other NASA events related to the outer planets and the Mars rovers but none of them really had the excitement of that very first manned mission into space.

I was reminded of all of this tonight, more than 48 years later, as I sat in front of my computer monitor watching a NASA webcast of the launch of a four-stage sounding rocket. The purpose of the launch was to seed a rare, high altitude, noctilucent cloud. My older son was on a boat, a hundred miles or so downrange out in the Atlantic with a special camera to photograph ionospheric disturbances associated with the experiment.

There wasn’t a human being on board the rocket and it wasn’t history in the making. It was an experiment in space weather…an experiment that I had a connection to through my son. It was pretty exciting…

I hope they all get some good results.

Jupiter — Without Visible Satellites

Back in February I alluded to a couple of interesting events in the sky that I was looking forward to this year. The first was last March when I sought Venus during its inferior conjunction with the sun. The second one was last night. For a period of about two hours last night all four of the Galilean Moons of Jupiter were either in front of or behind the planet from the perspective of an observer on Earth…Jupiter without visible satellites. This happens a few times every century, but for a human being, if one is interested at all, one needs to try to observe it when one has the chance.

So last night I did. The window of time was 4:43 to 6:29 UT on September 03, 2009. There are four Galilean moons, Callisto with an orbital period of 16.689 days, Ganymede with a period of 7.1546 days, Europa at 3.5512 days, and Io with a period of 1.769 days. Two phenomena were of interest last night, occultations where the satellite passes behind the planet as seen from earth and transits where the satellite passes in front of the planet. Occultations always start on the western limb of Jupiter and end at the east. Transits always start at the eastern limb and end at the west. Both cause the satellite to be unseen, although theoretically you might see the satellite in front of the planet with a good enough telescope…I wasn’t trying for that.

The action started before I did. At 23:18 UT on Sept 2nd Callisto, was occulted. I set up my telescope at about 2:00 UT (10 pm EDT). I could see what appeared to be two satellites, spaced well out from the planet’s disk. By 3:00 UT I could see that the satellite on the eastern side was really two, Europa and Ganymede. These two would transit across the face of the planet. By 4:00 UT, Io, the moon on the western side was gone, occulted by the planet, and Europa with its shorter period had just begun its transit. At 4:30 UT I could still see Ganymede very near the eastern limb. After that no satellites were visible until, 6:30 UT when Io immerged from behind the planet on the east limb. That was my last observation…the cold and lack of good sleep did me in.

Ever since I built my first telescope back in the early 1980s, I have enjoyed looking at Jupiter and its moons. Even in a small telescope like mine you can see the equatorial belts. The moons are always beautiful little pin pricks of light, sparkling like tiny diamonds against the black sky. Last night was the first time I looked that those little moons were not visible.

The Mystery Remains Unsolved…

I have written several posts about rock carvings (most recently here) that I had seen around Holmes County Ohio in the early 1970s.  I have recently visited two of them but I was fairly certain that the third now resided in the Killbuck Valley Museum in Killbuck.  This afternoon after church we rode our bicycles to Killbuck with friends and cycled into town to the museum.  It is open only during limited hours mainly during the summer and of course summer is coming rapidly to an end.

I had anticipated this visit since last spring but we hadn’t taken the time to do it.  We went inside.  There, along the main corridor, was a large block of sandstone with a face carved into it.  It was not the face I remembered…the location described was not where I remembered it to be, although there were obvious typos on the description.  They described the location as southeast of Glenmont while the face I remembered was north of town.

One of two scenarios might explain the discrepancy.  Foremost is that my memory is bad.  I have remembered things very clearly that turn out to be wrong and I have seen the same thing happen to other people…I am always pretty skeptical of the details of remembered things.  What I remember is one, possibly two drive by visits to the site nearly forty years ago.  This might be the face I saw and I just don’t remember it well…it just might be.

It could be another face.  There were many stonecutters living in the area around Glenmont because of the sandstone quarries located there.  There might be lots of faces carved in the stones and rocks in that part of the county.  The description in the museum indicated that their face was Euro-American which would fit with the local stonecutters population.

So, for now, the mystery is still unsolved and the quest for the mysterious face that I remember continues…

Vermont Retrospective

A few weeks ago, my wife and I, along with another couple we invited, went to Vermont for a weekend. My wife had received a gift certificate for three nights in a “cabin” near Stockbridge. People who know us know that if my wife hears the word “go”, she packs her suitcase and that I am more restrained, shall we say, in my desire to travel. Having said that, I usually enjoy our travels once we get going.

I was looking forward to some reading and writing time on the deck of the house where we stayed. Instead we spent a lot of time on the road travelling up and down through the middle of the state. That’s OK…I would have missed a lot of neat things had I sat on the deck all weekend. A few of those things are imaged on my photo blog starting here and going forward. And I got a little time on the deck too…

We sat out in the mornings and evenings each day. On Friday evening, our friend Lois, who is a birder, drew our attention to a beautiful bird song sung briefly at dusk. It was the song of a thrush that we later identified as a Hermit Thrush. What a beautiful song reverberating softly through the woods.

We also noticed that we could hear the sound of traffic very clearly from the road in the valley below. That was a disappointment and a distraction. Sunday morning I got up early and fixed a cup of coffee, ready for a little quiet time for thought and reflection on the deck. It was quiet. There was finally no traffic on the road. As I sat there I became aware of another, much fainter, sound. It sounded like water flowing over rocks…you could hear the river that ran through the valley.

At the time, I thought that the deck in Vermont was not so different from our own deck at home. I always hear traffic sounds at home. As I look back on it, the traffic sounds in Vermont were not anything like what we have here at home. And at home I find myself missing the gentle sound of the river, of water flowing over the rocks, and especially, the beautiful, clear, flute-like song of the Hermit Thrush…

Flying Home

My wife and I went for our walk this morning as we often do. As we rounded the bend in the road up by the Methodist Church we noticed a man standing in the northeast corner of the lot, the corner closest to the road. Just standing.

As we went a little further we could see that he had a poultry crate of some kind. We said hello to him and my wife asked, “Birds?”. “Racing pigeons” he replied. We went over to talk to him. He was from Canton, thirty miles or so northeast of here. He was letting the birds relax and acclimate to the light after their ride to Millersburg in the trunk of his car. We talked about pigeons for a little while. These were young birds that he was training. Eventually they would find their way home from two or three hundred miles away.

Then he said he thought they were ready and asked if we would like to see them fly. Without waiting for an answer he leaned over and opened the door on the side of the crate. With a flutter of wings the birds, maybe twenty of them, burst out of the crate taking immediately to wing, circling low to the right behind me, then gaining altitude and distance, circling one or two more times before heading off to the northeast toward home. It was very neat…

“They’ll be home in a half an hour” the man said, to which my wife said “Before you…” “Oh, I’m going to work” the man said. With that and a “thank you” from us we parted ways.

As we continued our walk down the road, I had to think about what seemed to me to be a great leap of faith that the man took by releasing his birds far from home. I don’t know how long he had been working with these birds but he had obviously had some time and money invested in them. He also had the confidence in them to do what they had been trained to do…to fly home.