Avery Island: Nature and a Buddha

After buying an entrance ticket to the Avery Island grounds, one of the first views one gets is of the beautiful hanging moss. Southern hanging moss is a romantic symbol of southern nature. This is one of Corrie's pictures from right around the first bend in the road.



This next picture is the McKinley Tree. President McKinley was a good friend of the Averys, visited the island often, and they named this tree after him. I'm in the picture for scale, and if you look close, I'm dealing with a bug that's just flown into my eye.



A gift to an Avery was a 900 year old statue of the Buddha, sculpted in China. A raised temple was built for him. The temple has since been encased in glass.



Here's the actual Buddha statue.



I asked Tony to stand next to one of the many tremendous bamboo bundles that were growing in various places around the island. If he looks distracted it's because a fly flew into my mouth and a wasp flew into my sweaty hair at exactly the same moment I was pressing the capture button on the camera. I was flinching and ducking and hollering at the insects and Tony thought something else was happening off to the side.



This is a picture of a walkway on the grounds. Its one of my favorites that Corrie took.

Avery Island: Tony and his Gator

Avery Island is a salt dome south-east of Lafayette outside of New Iberia. It is best known for Ed McIlhenny's Tabasco pepper sauce, a sauce he sold commercially, and remains for sale around the world, and is quite popular. I myself love hot sauce, but am not so keen on McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.

In any case, McIlhenny married into the Avery clan, a family that still owns and occasionally stays on the island. I wanted to subtitle this post "Animal Kingdom", but Tony had wanted to see a live alligator so badly his entire time living in Louisiana, that it was rather amazing and satisfying when we actually came upon them--not blocked in by any fence--that I had to give Tony his due.

Besides 'gators, we saw herons, turtles, a snake, a gaggle of butterflies, a rabbit, a bright red cardinal, dragonflies, lizards, and a wild algae bloom, and those were just what we photographed. Not all of those pictures were worthy of inclusion here.

The mosquitoes and snappy flies were relentless and annoying. This sign gave us a chuckle, since it was around the sign that we didn't see any gators, and makes you think "Oh, really?":



They must catch the gators once they reach a certain length, since all the ones we saw weren't so big that we were terrified, but big enough to do some damage to ankles and calf meat. Here's Tony enjoying a moment with his first close up.



Here's a picture of a larger alligator, maybe the largest we saw, chilling against the sky's reflection.



This gator, hanging amongst some reeds, is chanting the mantra of all the gators here: "Imalog-imalog-imalog-imalog-you-don't-see-me-'cuz-imalog-imalog-imalog..."



I really like this picture of the heron that Corrie took.



On Avery Island exists a preserve that's called Bird City. We found it near the end of our walk around the island. Many planks have been set up as nesting portals for what turn out to be thousands of herons. The ones in the pictures are the old and weak that didn't migrate for winter. They were majestic and plentiful, which had a calming effect over all that visit and experience it.

New Orleans: The Quarter

Since Corrie hadn't been to New Orleans, the French Quarter was a destination for us on our journey. I have a post about spending some time in the Quarter in 2009. This trip cemented my affection for New Orleans as a destination to visit in the future. The city reminds me of a black jazzy American Berlin--fun, energetic, drunk, loud and bustling.

Before arriving in the Lower 9th, we got sidetracked and had to make a quick jaunt down a small street and drove directly into a large block party. Police cars were driving at us slowly, me, inching the Passat with three white folks in it past the throngs of revelers and peaceful police...it reminded me of Bed-Stuy.

After the drive in the outer ward, we made our way to the Quarter. Corrie took this picture of the juxtaposition of the dense French/Spanish streets and the New Orleans downtown skyline.



I was told a story by someone not named Tony about Tony having to take a nickname while out on a rig, and happened to use Caliboy, a reference to his (and my) homeland. I thought it was cool, two guys from California picking "caliboy" as a moniker independently of each other, as a way of stating something about who they are in a way that means something to people living outside the Golden State. So, even if this picture's blurry, here are two caliboys for you, caliboys in New Orleans.



I like this drain detail, obviously a remnant of the older days when the drains and gutters like these ran all throughout the neighborhoods.



The next two pictures are of what are called "Second Lines". I had to make an inquiry of my New Orleans pals about what the hell had been going on: a random late night parade? Well, actually, yeah, was the answer. Saturdays are rowdy days of the week, and a parade here or there usually spawns Second Lines, groups of brass instrument players who lead a group of (usually drunken) paraders in their tow. Whether or not the Second Lines happen anywhere around the vicinity of the original parade is inconsequential, which makes them quite fun. Police cars usually bring up the rear, even late on a Saturday night.





The Second Line we witnessed late in the night and took pictures of was on Toulouse Street. Another thing on Toulouse St. that I needed to photograph was the following cool gas lanterns, still in use at the inn across the street, and visible in the two Second Line pictures above.



Finishing off the evening, I tried to set up my ISO level (the shutter to stay open longer to let in more light) so I could capture the shadow of the onion spire against that particular building. This was on the walk back to the car after the days festivities.

New Orleans: Lower 9th Ward

While Louisiana has parishes instead of counties, New Orleans has wards instead of districts. The numbering of the wards starts in the west and grows towards the east, ending in the Ninth Ward, which came to include wide swaths of land south of Lake Pontchartrain and north of the Mississippi. Because of its initial distance from the center of town (in the late 1700s) and the fact it's below sea level, land--and later housing--in the Ninth was affordable.

A canal running north to south logically connects the lake to the river, but an east-west canal also exists, offering access from other harbors on the large lake. This canal effectively bisects the Ninth Ward into the Upper 9th and the Lower 9th. The Lower 9th gained some notoriety during the 2005 Hurricane Katrina when it was flooded, and the poor underbelly of an American metropolis was exposed to the greater world.

From our recent experience I can say that six years later there are still houses that are in shambles, with "X"s spray painted on their front doors or walls, with roof shingles blown off and windows blown out. This first picture shows that a little bit, but not quite as condemned looking as many others that felt odd not wanting to be captured on film. (Corrie took all the following pictures.)



The Make it Right Foundation has committed itself to rebuilding houses in the Lower 9th using sustainable principles. Having had some success in raising money, some sixty million dollars, and having built some structures in a concentrated area, caused Corrie to want to check it out.

An obvious theme of all theses structures is the extended stilts. Another is a modern to post-modern design philosophy in the outer look of the places.



I like the neat shading device used on this one. We parked in front of this house while Corrie went for a walk and sho the rest of the pictures.



Here is another neat new house.



Here one can see the density of the new construction surrounded by the desolation left in the wake of Katrina. (Understand that since we weren't there before the hurricane, we can't attest to the true original density, but we imagine it was similar to other nearby sections of the Ward.)

Starting Simply: Pictures from Louisiana Roads

On our first day driving from western Louisiana to New Orleans, we passed through the capital city, Baton Rouge. In contrast to Texas, which has tiny towns all along minor highways, Louisiana has Shreveport in the northwest section of the state, the cities along I-10, and that's pretty much it. From Texas to Mississippi along the interstate you get Lake Charles, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, then New Orleans. There are some towns off the highway, but...

Baton Rouge has the major university, Louisiana State University (LSU), which has recently won national championships in college football and boasts having schooled Shaquille O'Neal as a student athlete. In this picture, Corrie caught Tiger Stadium from an elevated section of the highway that comes off the bridge over the Mighty Mississippi. A football game that ended with a touchdown in the last six seconds in a victory for the Tigers elicited a celebration that registered as an earthquake in LSU's geology department.



On the second day of driving west I got a picture of something that native Cajuns and other Louisianans might take for granted, the bridge that signals Lake Charles. As a driver heads west along I-10, this sight appears after a slight bend in the road, a few short miles from Tony's current city of Sulphur.



I guess sex sells, right? I was pretty surprised by this billboard the first time I saw it, so I took this picture the second time around. Used computer parts and crucified-looking bikini-clad blonds? Still not quite sure what to think...



As we were getting close to Sulphur after the day out at Avery Island fighting off gators and 'skeeters, industrial parks like the one I hiked by in Austin are all over, and I took this silhouette shot. There is something rather modern in the industrial aesthetic...a lesson I remembered from the art class Tony and I took together eight years ago at Cuesta.

Early Human Migration Ideas Need Adjustment

I heard a lecture from a NYU linguistics professor about Taiwan, and about the Austronesian language family. The Austronesian family has great diversity, is on par with Indo-European and Bantu for age and primacy in its areas, and until the European Colonial period, covered the most area. Parts of south-east Asia, all native Pacific islands, and even Madagascar speak an Austronesian language.

If you can imagine the earliest branches of the tree of this language, the spot where they differ enough fundamentally as to account for a new branch, then you can begin to see: all but one of those branches exists on the island of Taiwan. There is only one branch that sailed to the Philipines, to Hawai'i, to Samoa, to Madascar. The most diversity at the base lives on a small island, and one spread.

This is the way linguistics have helped migratory scientists track human migrations throughout history: look where the most diversity exists, post that as the source, and see where one or a few of the languages spread from there.

When applying this method to the aboriginal Americans, what we see is the most diversity exists in northern California (not in Alaska, as our current understanding should show) and that there are maybe a handfull language families that moved out over the continent. California has more diversity in native peoples, cultures, and languages, than then rest of North America combined, which I thought was weird when I took a class on it.

There isn't much vocal scholarship about discussing the origins of the Mongoloid folks' migrations to the Americas. I've been telling people with whom I randomly get into conversations with about the incorrect Bering Straight theory, but I'm not a professional linguistics researcher (I have placed the idea in a novel I'm working on, though).

The time period of their migration and entrance to the continent would have to be moved back somewhat anyway, so until we can lurch the clock back with some kind of evidence, that conversation won't be started.

Guess what: discoveries in Tamil Nadu show that Acheulian stone tools were being used in India far earlier than thought. Late last week it was reported that magnetic tests show that the tools were made before the last magneitc pole reversal, so at least a million years prior. There were thousands of tools at this site in India. Whether they were made by Erectus, Heidelbergensis, or Sapien is the question...

Also, and even as startling: discoveries were made in Texas just as recently as India that show human habitation that predates the "first" Americans, the Clovis people, by as much as twenty-five hundred years.

Maybe this conversation will get started in my lifetime.

Recent Louisiana Trip

I'll be posting soon about a trip to Louisiana, complete with pictures. Corrie and I went to visit our friend Tony, who lives in Sulphur, about twenty miles inside the western state line. We also wanted to take Corrie to New Orleans, since she'd never been, and while we didn't get to see the antebellum side of the Big Easy, we did get to the Lower Ninth Ward and the French Quarter. Corrie had wanted to see the Make It Right Foundation's new houses, an organization with faceman Brad Pitt that wanted to rebuild in the Katrina-razed neighborhood with sustainable structures.

We also visited Avery Island, which is home to the Tabasco Sauce plant, which we did not visit, but also home to a cool nature preserve, a preserve that fulfilled all of our imagination' desires that last year's trip to the Blue Goose walking trail left unsatisfied.

But, with those two things, we pretty much filled up an entire weekend worth of time, because driving hasn't been included. We spent more time in the car that awake and outside of it. We left at midnight Friday, and arrived slightly before five; it took us three and a half hours to get to New Orleans (traffic accounted for some of that extra time) and three hours and back; on Sunday it took just over two hours to get to Avery Island, and two back to Tony's, then almost five to get home...5 + 3.5 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 5 = 20.5...it was still worth it.

Both New Orleans and Avery Island were worth it, but being able to hang out with Tony made it truly bearable. I'll be getting to these posts soon enough.

March Madness Bracket Busting

I thought I'd use as many buzzwords as possible in the title of this post because I have a specific point to make about filling out brackets and watching college basketball games.

I discovered a connection between fantasy sports, a phenomena that I've resisted entirely, and watching the NCAA basketball tournament games, a connection about why I resist fantasy sports and almost don't enjoy the bracket deal (besides losing and having your mistakes highlighted).

I'm not involved with fantasy sports for two main reasons. The first is that I don't want to spend that much energy dealing with paying that kind of attention. I like reading about it, hearing about it, but I like being able to miss time, to not pay attention, and to not have it matter in a contest I'm engaged in with friends or strangers. The second reason is that I don't want to be forced to have players on my fantasy team that are going to need to succeed for my fantasy team to do well, and that success would have to come at the expense of my favorite team, my emotional team. I fundamentally have a problem rooting for a player who's playing against my favorite team for the sole sake of my fantasy team.

If I know a player, if I'm related to a player, if I know a player's siblings or family, or they grew up in a vicinity to me or mine, I have no problem rooting for them against my team; those reasons satisfy whatever sports morality criteria I have inside.

The connection with the NCAA brackets I realized last night. I was watching the Duke-Arizona match. Arizona took them apart in the second half, winning by nearly twenty and knocking Duke out. I learned while living in New York City that I have affinities to west coast teams, conferences like the Pac-10, Big Sky, Big West and the like. In New York, I found myself rooting for USC even, blasphemous in my family, when they played Ohio State. I rooted for the Giants in the World Series this past year (also blasphemous). While watching the Pac-10 men's basketball finals between Washington and Arizona, I rooted for Washington because they were more "western" to me.

Don't get me wrong, this is easily the most college basketball I've ever watched in a fortnight in my life.

In the Duke-Arizona game, I was rooting for Arizona...partly because Duke is like the Yankees, and you either love them or hate them, and I'm not a fan (my friend Imai went to Duke, so I'm softening up for them), but mainly because Arizona was from the West.

Corrie was rooting for Duke because she had them in her bracket moving on. I didn't, and realized that if you have an interest in winning a bracket contest you'll have to root for plenty of teams you may hate and against plenty of teams that you may have a regional and/or emotional connections with.

I'll be involved in the choices and brackets next year, more than likely, as while it does irritate me, it doesn't really bother me, like fantasy sports. I enjoy helping others with their fantasy teams, I just can't invest my own energy into it.

"Alternative" Food

I'm not talking about hippie foods in cities like Austin and Boulder, local and organic food grown close by by people who want to eat foods not covered in pesticides or grown with Monsanto genetically modified seeds.

North Korea, after experiencing a drastic drop-off in agricultural and economic production, lost between 900,000 and 3.5 million of her citizens to famine--starvation--in the 90s.

There is the claim that famine is not sweeping through the secretive country in current times. A humanitarian crew has returned from North Korea with claims that while hundreds of thousands of people may not be starving to death every month, most regular people spend the majority of their waking hours concerning themselves with acquiring food.

When food sources run short, people begin to consume alternate food. In this context, "alternate" food means that they go into the hills, grab leaves and grasses to mince small and boil, collect bark to scrape the reverse side and make porridge, and mix these things with their meager ration of rice.

Children's stomachs can't process theses foods.

What kind of solution is there for this human catastrophe? How does it appear in the face of the nuclear crisis in Japan?

The Obama Administration is currently in talks with the humanitarian group that has given the world the most recent reports, but this also highlights how hard and shitty being the President of the US can be.

North Korea isn't sexy, like fighting for people's freedoms while working multilaterally, like Libya, or dealing with Japan's nuclear crisis.

It isn't even as sexy as cleaning up the Gulf, which remains an ongoing and quiet enterprise.

Small Texas Towns

I have a larger treatise about small-town-USA that I'm getting to later on this blog, and our trip from Austin to the Texas panhandle region helped bring about those ideas. Corrie's family's farm is about seven hours away from Austin, and the drive is along the US HWY routes and not interstate highways. Passing through small towns means you have to slow down, watch for lights and pedestrians, since the highway is also the town's main street.

Being from California, you get used to the large population centers, (SF-San Jose-Sac triangle and LA-San Diego-San Bernadino triangle) where almost 85% of the state's vast population lives, surrounded by swaths of deserted wilderness.

Texas certainly has large cities (Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio), but there are tiny towns popping up in every direction. Along the route we took to the Farm, there was a town every fifteen miles it seemed. In Texas, each county has a town that serves as the county seat, and probably a few decades ago, the county seats were the towns with the power--and the courthouse. County justice and county law was meted out at the county courthouse. We passed through so many towns that had signage that said they contained populations under two-thousand, and the ones with courthouses were noticeable.

If you want to talk about county seats, small town-Texas, and courthouses, you have to begin with Anson. Anson is the county seat for Jackson County. Jackson County is named for Anson Jackson. Creative, huh? The real funny thing is that Abilene, a city with over 100k people, is also mostly in Jackson County (quite far away, as it is) and tipped the power scales away from Anson many years ago. As a driver, when you approach Anson, you get a sense of the courthouse's importance to the area, since the driving route is just a paved horse and cart route. Check out the view as you approach: (you may have to magnify it...)



The road splits right where I take the next picture, and lets on the other side. This gives you a nice picture of the courthouse itself.



Since the power was drained from Anson, the endemic decay and rot of the small-town USA swept through, and allowed the following scene.



Seriously, I could have stuck around that lot and snapped pictures all day. The main downtown street, with original names still painted on storefronts, faded but still visible, obstructed now by signs, tells the tale.

Another town is Hamlin. Hamlin, to the best of my knowledge is not a county seat, did have this interesting "sculpture" going on. I pulled over specifically to get a picture of it.



The town that the Harrison Farm is technically a part of is called Clarendon, and Clarendon is the county seat for Donnelly County. Here's a picture of their courthouse. To get family and land oriented documents for her senior project, Corrie had to spend the better part of a day visiting the various offices and clerks inside.



Clarendon might have been a little bit bigger in its heyday or boomtime, as there were a few offshoots from the main street. This next picture is one of those. There is a push to save the Mulkey Theater. On the corner on the right and side is a hotel that, according to Corrie's Grandma June, used to have a cafe on the first floor and a dance hall on the second, before a level of rooms on the third. Now the spot is mostly just a shell, burned out and collapsed inside. Also, notice that the streets are paved with bricks, a dangerous nuisance in the rain I'm told.



The next two pictures are of the same grain silo in Clarendon, taken from different spots in town. From the first moments it rose above the Methodist church during its construction phase, this silo has been the tallest building in town, and visible from most anywhere.

To me, that in a small town in America the tallest point and the thing visible from almost anywhere should be a grain silo (and not a church spire like in many tiny European towns) is some kind of defining characteristic.

I'm not sure if that makes sense...

Harrison Farm: Cool Junkyard

Like any good farm, the Harrison Farm has its share of machinery that can't be used again, but isn't really able to be disposed of using normal means. In this case, like many others, there is a spot on the premises that acts as a junkyard.

The photographic opportunities were abundant, since rusted out machinery being overtaken by golden grasses is a cool aesthetic for me. I like the idea that the Earth will always come out victorious...that if the time scale is lengthened enough, nature always wins.

These are some of the cool angles, cool gins, as they were, and neat color compositions I put together just for this post, if you can believe it...



This next one has a circle/rust/green/grass motif that is as inspiring as it is baffling...





Here's a boat...go figure...





I might put some up later, I like them so much...

Pat Finally Makes it to the Harrison Farm

In the nearly fifteen months that we'ved lived in Texas, Corrie has made the trip to her family's farm many times. I haven't been able to make it because of my work situation.

Corrie's grandma, Grandma June, the nice lady we cooked for in the past (I posted about it) grew up on the farm. She is the oldest of her siblings, and being so, was deeded the property. Her son, Corrie's dad, spent most summers of his youth on the farm working, and even enrolled in the nearby town's community college during the early years of America's greater concept of the Vietnam Conflict.

As the title of this post suggests, I finally made it out ot the Harrison Farm (Harrison is Grandma June's maiden name--when going to a market in town, mentioning "we're up at the Harrison Farm" stil means something to the older folks), and there was work to be done. On a farm, work never ends.

This is the building that needed the work: the milk barn.



There were originally milking cattle on the farm, but the main crop was cotton. The Texas panhandle region, in which the farm exists, is very big in cotton. We arrived after in the middle of the night, around 4:30 in the morning, after leaving around 10 at night, after I left work. The trip takes about seven hours, but that late, there are plenty of places to, um, travel a hair faster than legally allowed. It was quite cold when we got there, and here, in the corner of the picture, you can see our air mattress, inside the milk barn. (We moved into the farm house the next night.)



The work that needed to be done was to coat the roof in a new polymer paint. That meant climbing up there, checking the nails, pulling the bad ones, replacing them with heavy duty screws, then spraying the entirety with primer, and then spraying it again with paint. We had a cool new industrial paint spray gun to work with. Peter, one of my brothers-in-law, and Ron, my father-in-law, and I had a good time, even if it felt perilously cramped and dangerous. Corrie and her sister Stephanie even joined in the fun up on the roof. Here's a picture of Peter and me.


I traveled into town on a trash dumping and necessity gathering trip, and, remembering how much fun we almost had flying a kite, I made it a mission to purchase one. It sure was windy enough. I found one and dropped the $3.57 it cost immediately. Later, after I had some problems with the string, somebody asked if I felt bad about wasting the money on it, to which I said that it had been the best $3.57 I had ever spent. Here I am with it soaring really high. Really high.


Peter brought his young son, Colton, to the farm this trip, and here I am holding him, Uncle Pat sharing his sunglasses with the lad. This trip might have been the first time I really felt like I might want one soon.


The area that could be considered a "front yard", a fenced in area by the main door, has a few plum trees, and here, on the ground, you can see the pits from uneaten, even undisturbed, fallen plums from the last season. I think the picture is cool.


It makes me wish I could have been there more often.

I Like my Crow Rare...

So, my LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds lost to a very talented UNC team. It might have been the only game so far to have a school exceed a hundred points, as the Tarheels topped the century mark.

At one point I found myself cursing the television off in the corner of my job, when my boys from the BK were down by a bunch. Then I'd do something, check again, see that momentum had shifted, my Blackbirds had gone on a 9-1 run, and clawed back into the game. That was in the first half, of course.

I'll still root them on when I can from now on.

I had to sit by and watch the pinche Gauchos play in the tournament. At least they lost. The Gauchos are the mascot of my college, the Cal Poly Mustangs', main rivals, UC Santa Barbara. I usually root for Pac-10 (soon to be Pac-12) teams, and generally any college team from the west. UCSB is not on that list...

McKinney Falls

A slave owning aristocrat named McKinney moved out to the boonies outside the new capital of this thing called Texas. On the land he bought he found some cool waterfall sites. Today the area in this picture is known as lower McKinney Falls. There is an Upper Falls, but it is less spectacular as of right now.



Many million years ago this area was under water. Eventually volcanic activity bubbled up under the water, creating tiny mountainous hills, sometimes exploding in a ferocious show. Once things calmed, silt covered the mountains, but when the water receded, erosion exposed the volcanic hills. Erosion even exposed the softer underside seen in the picture above, the dirt having been excavated by nature, showing the hard sea floor rock bed.

This is a cool picture of what remains today of flowing water. This was taken during a time of low flow.



Here is a shot of the McKinney homestead ruins, built only a few minutes walk from the Lower Falls. It was constructed by slaves.



This is a picture of the oldest tree in the Texas State Park of McKinney Falls. Around it you can see a cool walkway that supports visitors' travels in the area.



This is a picture of the neat design of the information building on the grounds.



The cool thing about this park, I think, is that it is technically within the city limits of Austin. It's in the city's south, but not further than the cool neighborhood.