An early episode of South Park established that if Cartman hears the tiniest snippet of “Come Sail Away” by Styx, he has to sing the entire song. I suspect we all have a song that we just have to finish if we hear its beginning, no matter where we are…call it a “Stay In The Car” song. What’s yours?
Five Lakes (and one book)
I’ve pretty much been of the opinion for years, even though I don’t think I realized it until more recently, that I honestly don’t ever want to live more than a few hours from one of the Great Lakes. This region has been my home since 1981, and you might make a case for before that, since Pittsburgh certainly falls within the “few hours from the Lakes” category. These five inland seas encompass so much beauty and history and character, all of which are sometimes overlooked in our seemingly forever-ongoing “North versus South” thing in this country.
There’s a children’s book I read not long after we moved to Allegany, NY, in 1981. I don’t recall exactly when I read it, or the circumstances under which a copy found its way into my hands; I don’t recall if I owned it or if it was a library book. The book’s title is Paddle To The Sea, by Holling Clancy Holling. If I owned this book, it vanished from my personal library years ago. However, I found myself remembering it recently, so I availed myself of the Erie County Public Library and checked it out.
The book came out in 1941, and it tells a simple story: a young boy living in Canada carves a wooden Indian in a canoe, names him “Paddle To The Sea”, and sets him afloat on a river that empties into the northern reaches of Lake Superior.
From there, Paddle follows the long and improbable journey through every one of the Great Lakes, until he finally reaches the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean. Paddle’s journey is mainly a narrative frame, though, which supports Holling’s real goal: exploring the nature of these five enormous lakes.
Holling’s art in this book alternates between pencil drawings accompanying the text on the left-hand pages, and full-color plates on the right. In this way Holling traces paddle’s voyage, which doesn’t even begin to follow any kind of straight line.
Along the way Paddle encounters various obstacles and dangers, such as the huge cargo ships on Lake Superior, the enormous waterfalls at Niagara, and a sawmill, whose operation Holling depicts:
I also love the fanciful ways Holling interprets the shapes of the lakes themselves. Lake Superior as a wolf’s head is pretty obvious, I suppose, but the others are impressively creative, and I have thought of all the Great Lakes as these shapes ever since I read the book when I was ten or eleven. I remember a conversation with some college mates, trying to explain to them this particular interpretation of the shape of Lake Huron, and I remember wishing I had a copy of the book then to show them.
Holling’s prose is somewhat dated at this point, but that’s to be expected, and I wonder how Holling would depict the Great Lakes now, since the region endured a period of extended decline that began not terribly long after this book came out and which some might still think is going on. But it’s still a region of nature and industry often side-by-side, all of it dominated by these enormous bodies of water.
Paddle To The Sea is a wonderful piece of Great Lakes lore, and I’m glad I took the time to revisit it.
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Sunday Somethings
A few oddities and randomments for the lot of you:
:: One night, while we were sitting around at home reading stuff, The Wife came across this, and mentioned it to me. I said, “That can’t be right,” but lo and behold, apparently it was. The thing? Well, you know those incubator things they put premature babies into, so as to keep them nicely warm while they develop after their births? Apparently the guy who invented those had no luck convincing the scientific community of their validity, so he did the next best thing: he set up a sideshow at New York’s Coney Island to display them to the public. Babies and all.
Sometimes human progress happens so strangely.
:: Want to get some kind of notion of the scales of the distances in space? Say, the scales the NASA people were working with in flying New Horizons to Pluto? Check out If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel. Space is big, yo.
:: For the record: the perpetrator of this prank was not me.
That is all.
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Neil Simon on how to finish a day’s work
There are a lot of other videos from this same interview on YouTube; I plan to watch a bunch of ’em this weekend. Hat-tips to Mark Evanier, where I first saw the video, and Roger, who notified me of its existence via electronic pony express thing.
(Oh, and the bit of advice in question from Mr. Simon? I’m not sure if I follow that or not, to be honest. I tend to write until I’m tired and don’t want to write anymore. On reflection I think I very well might follow this advice, but I’ve never really thought about it. I’ll pay more attention next time I’m working on something new.)
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Something for Thursday
An old favorite of mine: the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I love this piece to death. Make sure you pay attention at about the 2:40 mark, when the soloist (Hilary Hahn, in this case) soars to a lingering very high note and then descends all the way back down to the lowest register on the instrument, and then holds that low note as a pedal while the woodwinds sound the magical second theme of the first movement. This entire concerto is utter magic.
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A Ransom Wednesday Conversation Starter
It may be my year….
A new Star Wars movie and a new James Bond movie. I’m releasing my second book. Overalls appear to be coming back into fashion. and now this appears in the New York Times.
Ah, the thrown pie. Among the sweetest delights in life is the sight of an airborne cream-and-crust concoction finding purchase. It is the great leveler, a puncturing of pretension, and those who find pie throwing beneath their refined comic sensibility deserve nothing more than a lemon meringue treat, smack in the kisser.
Setting aside the fact that lemon meringue is, in fact, a terrible choice for facial dispatching, this is still quite a thing to read in the Gray Lady.
2015 may well be my year!!!
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I'm ON to you, Monday.
The Whitening
White overalls. Oh yeah, babe.
I’ve wanted a pair of white overalls forever, and I even got a pair a while back, by Carhartt. My problem, though, was that most white overalls are made for painters, and for some reason, the bib pocket on painters’ overalls is almost always that triangular shape, as opposed to the “traditional” style of bib pocket, which I prefer. Finding a pair like this has been mostly fruitless — they exist, and they occasionally show up on eBay, but they’re pretty rare and I’ve never seen a pair in my size. So I did the next logical thing: I took an older pair of blue ones that I owned already and bleached them. This is the result. Score!
By way of technique, I used a big 5-gallon bucket, filled it about two-thirds with water, and then added some bleach. I didn’t measure the bleach, but my concentration was no more than 1 part bleach to 3 parts water, and likely even less strong than that. I submerged the overalls, stirred them around a bit, and then left them in there a while. After an hour or so, I changed the water and repeated, and then waited another hour, whereupon I changed the water again. I think I went through four changes of water altogether, and the result is that almost all the blue is gone. There’s a tiny bit remaining, if you know to look for it, but functionally, these are white!
After the final removal from the bleach water, I rinsed them with the garden hose and wrung them out, and then I washed them twice. First trip through the washer I used no soap at all, so it was essentially two rinses, and then a full washing in cold water with soap. After that, an air drying on our line, and that was that.
Not that I’m wearing overalls much in July, but fall will be here soon enough!