The Grand Canyon/Colorado River: Day 1

Orientation and River People

The night before the trip begins, we meet at the Holiday Inn Express in Flagstaff. Erin, a slightly built enthusiastic woman who looks more like a college freshman than a 26 year old river guide, orients the group and passes out our gear. She will be our hiking guide on day 6, the day Julia Rose and I, along with the Zifkin family, hike up the Bright Angel Trail to the South Rim, while 5 more passengers hike down and continue the canyon trip with our group. Erin is a swamper, an apprentice raft guide, not yet qualified with oar boats, especially with passengers–she tells us later she will probably pilot a motorized raft before an oar raft). We meet the other 13 members of the group–3 couples; a family of four, the son and daughter freshly graduated from college; and 3 men traveling solo–receive our dry bags for our camping gear and our ammo cans for our personal gear, and watch a video and ask questions. Erin reassures us about the hike out, which has worried me for a year, given the shape of my knees. “It’ll be fun,” she says, alluding to the temperatures, which are expected to be 110 or higher. “We’ll take our time and ‘shade-hop.’ It’s just another part of the canyon, something you don’t want to miss.”

Afterward, we go to WalMart for last minute supplies and to  Cracker Barrel for supper, then spend the evening sorting gear into the army surplus ammo cans–waterproof and easily opened, for personal items on the raft–and the larger dry bags, for sleeping bags, clothing, everything else.

We awake the next morning, not having slept a lot, to eat breakfast and catch the Canyoneers bus to Lee’s Ferry and the put in. There, we slather on sunscreen, receive our life jackets and adjust them for the trip, and meet our guides: There are three passenger boats and guides–Ethan, the trip leader, Omar, and Captain Dave; two guides to row the equipment boats–Jason and Leo; and two swampers–Erin, also the hike-out guide, and a friend of Leo’s who is taking the trip as a work-along, essentially paying for the trip by doing all the grunt work. In addition to the rafts, our trip features an original 1939 wooden “cataract boat,” built by the first commercial river runner through the canyon–Norman Nevills–and paddled by his grandson, Gregg Grieff.

The passengers divide up into the three boats. Not quite sure of the etiquette, I ask Captain Dave is Julia Rose and I can ride on his boat for the day. “I’d love to have you on my boat,” he says, and I know that I instinctively made a good choice. Raft guides take great pride in their boats, how they are rigged, keeping them clean, and how they feel comfortable interacting with their passengers. Each guide instructs his passengers how to sit during a rapid, because each rower has a feel for the way weight is distributed and how the boat handles in the waves.

Captain Dave–Photo by Ken Herman

Dave is not a particularly big guy, but once he starts rowing it’s clear that he is powerful. Thirty-one years old, he eventually tells us, with a dark complexion, he rarely applies sunscreen even though he wears shorts and muscle shirts and a white sailing captain’s hat. He’s serious about his guide duties, and as we drift down the entrance to the canyon he entertains us with lessons on the geology that we see on the canyon walls, and stories about the early river runners who named–or had the rapids named for–the rapids and other features, as well as pointing out sites that played a major role in the history of river running. We see a condor soaring beyond Navajo bridges, briefly, before it veers out of sight, and Dave recounts the story of their near extinction and ongoing recovery, point out that there is a release point near the put in.

Riding in the bow with Julia Rose and me is Glen, a quiet 70 year old science teacher from Connecticutt, not yet retired. Later on the trip we discover that we both hung out around the Nantahala River in North Carolina in the 1970s, doing whitewater, though he beat me there by a few years. Still, it’s quite possible we could have been there at the same time at some point. Glen reminds me of the actor who played the old Norman Maclean in the movie A River Runs Through It, in that final scene where he is fishing the Big Blackfoot river alone. Glen proves an inspiration, going on all the hikes, experiencing the canyon with a quiet serenity, the way I like to imagine myself at 70.  Like us, this is his first trip to the canyon.

In the back, riding behind Dave and the drybags which give him a backrest, are Ira and Delana from Kansas City, one of the 3 couples. Ira’s retired military, mid-forties, and still does consulting work to supplement his retirement after putting in his career years. Delana is a special education teacher. Together they are quiet though friendly.

As he rows, Dave slowly reveals his story. He grew up in southern Arizona, and he tells of making an exploratory trip to the canyon about seven years earlier, spending a few days backpacking and being thunderstruck by the country. He quickly realized that in only making a couple of trips a year he could never see it all or even begin to have some sense of a relationship with the canyon. He sold everything he had and committed to the canyon, moving north and working whatever jobs he could in order to live there. He spent a lot of time working as a backpacking guide and eventually moved into river work, advancing from swamper to guide. We would find out later that he and Erin are together, living frugally, with no electricity or running water and not much space, but lots of books. I end up talking books quite a bit with Dave–he reads us a passage from a Loren Eisley essay one night around camp, a passage talking about the appeal of the desert and rivers. We discuss Ed Abbey, and I tell him about Brown’s Four Corners, a book that describes the geography, geology, history, biology, and anthropology of the Colorado Plateau uplift.

As we begin our trip the Paria River enters river right at mile 1. Today there is virtually no flow coming out of the Paria, so the Colorado, flowing aqua green and cool (46-47 degrees) out of Glen Canyon dam, about 15 miles upstream, is unmuddied and will remain so for the remainder of our trip. As the days go on and we get further from the dam, the water will cloud a little, but it still looks pure and drinkable by day six. Last summer when we stopped by the put in on our way home from the North Rim, the Paria was running a low volume, but the incredibly concentrated silt content transformed the Colorado into a muddy brown for the length that we could see, the first five miles of the river, well past the Navajo Bridges spanning the canyon. When the Paria is running, I am told, the Colorado is muddy.

Paria River muddying the Colorado, Paria Riffle, just below Lees’s Ferry,  August 2015

The Paria River also marks the beginning of Marble Canyon, so named by John Wesley Powell because he thought the name sounded more majestic–there is no marble in the canyon. Powell describe it this way: “The limestone of this canyon is often polished, and makes a beautiful marble. The rocks are of many colors–white, gray, pink, and purple, with saffron tints.” Technically, it is part of the Grand Canyon.

The day is warm and clear, well over 100 degrees, possibly 110 or higher–intense, but with a low humidity, and not as overwhelming as might be imagined by a non-westerner. As we float the sun strikes our legs at the thigh, the most vulnerable part of the body because it’s horizontal, and we dip our bandannas into the cool water and cover the exposed skin, which keeps us cool and prevents any burning on the first day. Our Outdoor Research Sombriolet sun hats keep our faces and neck in deep shade, but sunscreen helps us with the reflections.

The Grand Canyon/Colorado River “Put-In”: Lee’s Ferry and Navajo Bridges

The Put-in

The Sandra, a “cataract boat” built by Norm Nevills, the first commercial river runner on the Grand Canyon, c1939, oared by his grandson, Greg Greiff

I’ve always loved the simplicity of that term, the put-in, literally the location where river runners put their boats into the water. Obviously, the end of the river trip comes at the “take-out,” but the essence of what is involved in those two places packs so much more weight.

Photo by Ken Herman

For river-runners, and here I mean the boaters, or guides, in our case, the guys and gals at the oars and their swampers (as opposed to the passengers), the put-in is more than the simple task of passing out life jackets and telling passengers to point their feet downstream if they fall out of the boat in a rapid. There is a science involved in rigging out a boat, balancing necessity versus luxary, packing a seemingly infininte array of gear and equipment, food and beverages into a fininte space that must be perfectly balanced against the power of massive hydraulic holes and ten and twelve foot standing waves. The boaters make it look easy, orgainzing their dry bins, strapping down dry bags, tying boaters’ knots, bantering with customers and other boaters. It’s a science learned over thousands of hours, reinforced through multiple bad experiences–an essential piece of gear forgotten or lost–passed down over generations of boaters.

Photo by Ken Herman

In addition to all the work that goes into the offseason–gear repair, inventory, training, studying of history and geology and nature, the sometimes tedium of off-river jobs, there is the dreaming, the dreaming of the river and the canyons and the camaraderie of the boaters’ life and the feeling and sound of the way water moves and the way a boat moves over water and the joy of hitting a rapid just right and feeling the rhythm of a perfect run and the frustration over a bad decision or a poorly executed move or the simple powerlessness that must surely be felt over attempting to maneufer a boat weighing several thousand pounds against the force of twenty-thousand cubic feet of water running downhill.

Captain Dave, “putting-in” (photo by Ken Herman)

 

There’s the infininte tinkering: adjusting the depth of the floor of the oar-frame, adjusting the collar on the oars where they fit into the oarlock, inspecing weakened or damaged parts, balancing and rebalancing. It’s a dance that has been going on for days, if not months, so that by the end of a boating season the process if fine tuned. But the passengers don’t see the hours that go into raft repair and inspection, blowing up air chambers, applying duct tape, tightening connections, running over gear lists and packing coolers and planning meals and shopping for groceries for twenty or more people over thirteen days.

And the passengers, filled with their own emotions, whether trepidation, anticipation, excitement, confusion, or doubt–“did I pack everything I need?” “Did I pack too much?” “Who are these people I’m going to be camping and boating with for six to thirteen days, and will I like them, and will they like me?”

Despite all the planning and wrestling with emotions, there comes the time to put the boats into the river, clamber aboard, clip in water bottles and find handholds and make introductions to other passengers and the guide. As you glide down the Paria Riffle you pass under a cable with an orange aircraft warning bubble and pass the point of no return (unless you decide, like other boaters over the years, beginning with some of Major John Wesley Powell’s boatmen, to hike out to the canyon rim–two of Powell’s men did this and were never heard from again), you’re in the Grand Canyon, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and nothing you should want to do about it other than embrace the experience.

Cadillac Ranch, Blue Hole, Roadrunners, and Petroglyphs National Monument–Day 2 of My Grand Canyon Adventure

Cross

Keeping on with the theme that getting there is half the fun, we pushed on from Oklahoma through Texas, continuing to break up the trip with short stops. For years, the trip across the Texas Panhandle east of Amarillo has always been marked by the 190 foot tall cross, visible from 20 miles, outside of Groom, Texas. Now it’s much harder to pick out the cross from any distance because of the abundance of giant windmills generating energy across the panhandle.

On the west side of Amarillo, we stopped for a few minutes at Cadillac Ranch, created by a “group of art-hippies imported from San Francisco. They called themselves The Ant Farm, and their silent partner was Amarillo billionaire Stanley Marsh 3. He wanted a piece of public art that would baffle the locals, and the hippies came up with a tribute to the evolution of the Cadillac tail fin. Ten Caddies were driven into one of Stanley Marsh 3’s fields, then half-buried, nose-down, in the dirt (supposedly at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza). They faced west in a line, from the 1949 Club Sedan to the 1963 Sedan de Ville, their tail fins held high for all to see on the empty Texas panhandle.” (Roadside America.com)

Cadillac Ranch

The ranch is set in the middle of corn fields, a couple of hundred yards off of the interstate. It was a scorching hot day and the abundance of spray paint fumes made it possible to get a good contact high for the next hundred miles of the trip.

We stopped for the evening in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, checked into our motel, then grabbed our swim suits and headed for the Blue Hole, a bell shaped artesian well, 81 feet deep, 80 feet in diameter at the surface and flaring out to 130 feet in diameter at the bottom, with a constant temperature of 64 degrees and flow of 3,000 gallons per minute. It was a popular afternoon spot given the 100 degree weather.

Blue Hole, Santa Rosa, NM

On our second day we stopped at Petroglyphs National Monument on the west side of Albequerque. Just a few miles off the interstate, the monument, according to the NPS website, “protects one of the largest petroglyph sites in North America, featuring designs and symbols carved onto volcanic rocks by Native Americans and Spanish settlers 400 to 700 years ago. These images are a valuable record of cultural expression and hold profound spiritual significance for contemporary Native Americans and for the descendants of the early Spanish settlers.”

We scrambled up the Mesa Point trail in Boca Negra Canyon, pausing to look at many of the over 100 petroglyphs. As we hiked up the mesa, we were accompanied by a friendly and curious roadrunner, my spirit animal, signaling good fortune for that day and for the rest of the trip. My interpretations are strictly interpretations.

Mesa Point Trail

Handprint

Man/lizard

Antelope

According to the website Native American Roadrunner Mythology, “The Hopi and other Pueblo tribes believed that roadrunners were medicine birds and could protect against evil spirits. Their unusual X-shaped footprints are used as sacred symbols to ward off evil in many Pueblo tribes– partially because they invoke the protective power of the roadrunners themselves, and partially because the X shape of the tracks conceals which direction the bird is headed (thus throwing malignant spirits off-track.) Stylized roadrunner tracks have been found in the rock art of ancestral Southwestern tribes like the Anasazi and Mogollon cultures, as well. Roadrunner feathers were traditionally used to decorate Pueblo cradleboards as spiritual protection for the baby.”

 

For me, the roadrunner has a special significance. I see them regularly near my home, and on several occasions, roadrunners have acted in such an unexpected manner that I can’t help but attach spritual significance to the animal. Following the death of more than one beloved pet dog, roadrunners have been seen on the same day. Roadruners have lingered around the house following death of a pet by illness and euthenasia, perching on my garage roof, pecking at the glass of the storm door on my front porch, and even responding with a perked head and lingering look when I’ve called them by the names of my dogs. Believe what you will, but who is to say how God chooses to manifest Himself in our lives?

Roadrunner

lizard

dragonfly

Dragonflies

 

Anthropomorphic Figure–Perhaps a masked dancer

Remembering Paris and Arles, France, 2009: A Photo Essay

After waking to the news of the terrorist attack in Brussels, this morning, words are inadequate. Instead, I recently discovered pictures from a trip to France in 2009. It is in France, and Belgium, that my heart is today.

Men playing boules in a park in Arles

My daughters with their dolls, Natchez and Presley, in our hotel near the Place de la Bastille

Sunflowers near Arles

Spices at the market in Arles

Jim Morrison’s grave, Pere-Lachaise cemetery, Paris

Market, Place de la Bastille, Paris

Wooded lane, Provence

Garlic, Arles market

Shrouded statue, Pierre

Olives, Arles market

The garden at Nimes

Venus de Milo

The Tools We Work With, Part IX

I kept the hardhat on a bookshelf where I could see it, and my tools–a padded leather belt, a safety strap, and a set of wood pole climbing hooks–in my closet. I liked having those things to remind me of where I came from. I didn’t want to get too far away from that.

Two years ago–I had completed a Master’s degree and began a Ph.D. in writing–a friend from the powerlines called. Lance asked how school was going. We talked about the line we built at Dyersburg, Tennessee, the year we were crewmates. Lance is five or six years older than me, in his late thirties. For the last four years he’d been building houses, keeping close to his home town. He had half a dozen horses, forty cows, a wife, a daughter in second grade. He told me that housing was slow and he was thinking of going back to the lines. He’d sold his tools though, after he quit the job at Dyersburg. He wondered if I still had mine, and if I would sell them.

My tools had been collecting dust for three years, unused except for one late night climb to pirate cable TV service. I’d known at least ten linemen who dragged–lineman’s slang for quitting–because they were pissed off at the foreman or the company, another lineman or their girlfriend, or just tired. Most of them found their way back to the lines after a week, a month, or a year. People who climb towers and work with 161,000 volts of electricity don’t always make good career decisions. But a lineman selling his tools is like Hemingway selling his hunting rifles. There’s a finality to it.

I liked having the tools around, idle or not. I liked the smell of oiled leather and the feel of strapping on the hooks the night after the cable company turned off my service. I felt more comfortable knowing that if other things failed I could always go back to the lines. But Lance had a family to support and livestock to feed.

I boxed the tools and mailed them UPS, resisting the urge to try them on one last time, sad to let them go. It’s not that I planned to use them again. Recently, I’d noticed that my knees didn’t ache every morning before a hot shower. I liked rolling out of bed early, making coffee, and sitting down at the typewriter. When I came to graduate school, I thought I might take a few writing courses, learn what I could, and then go back to work again. But when I sold my tools, I had to admit what I had known for a long time: that I was through with the powerlines. The action seemed as irrevocable as tearing up my union ticket.

I work as hard now as I’ve ever worked in my life–writing, studying literature, teaching college English–but it’s different. It’s not work in the same sense as physical labor, which bothered me. For years, work meant diesel fumes, heavy equipment, bad weather, scars, good pay, and yelling a lot. Sometimes I feel guilty, sitting at a desk, because I call what I do work and never get dirty.

When they ask, I tell my family I’m working hard, putting in hours at the computer or in the library. It’s true, and they believe me. My father quit school after the eighth grade to farm. My mother finished high school and has worked as a secretary ever since. They were proud that my brother and I had the chance to go to college, proud of his work as an engineer, and proud that I will be the first person in our family to earn a doctorate. Oddly enough, I think that my parents may realize better than I do that abstract work is as honorable as physical work. They never had that choice.  My mother is relieved that I don’t climb anymore. She says that she sleeps better now, knowing that.

For years though, academia felt false to me, perhaps because it was dirty in a way that I wasn’t used to. I know that I romanticize the dirt too much, the idea of being working class. It’s easy to foget the days I slogged through knee deep mud wishing I was somewhere clean and dry, or the day lightning struck a pole two spans away and green fire sizzled through the wires three feet above my head. I missed the companionship of my crewmates, and the satisfaction of seeing my work strung up in the air.

What made me stay in graduate school though, was the desire to write. I realized that a college English department was not the pure world that I once imagined. There are slackers and screw-ups, professors riding tenure to retirement, and self-important backbiters struggling for a modicum of power; but there are just as many men and women who find value in–and who others place value on–their work. They enjoy a satisfaction at the end of a day that no one can take away from them.

The Tools We Work With, Part VIII

During the period when I was working on the lines, I began to work at writing stories. I had always read–mostly thrillers about Viet Nam vets and cowboys–but somehow I stumbled onto Hemingway, and from there to Fitzgerald, Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Tim O’Brien, and Richard Ford. In those writers I began to recognize a power, an ability to touch someone with words, and I wanted that for myself. I bought an Olivetti manual typewriter and dragged it from job to job. In the evenings after work, or on rain days, I would sit at a table in the room and type for an hour or so, until I was too tired or something else came up. There were enough excuses that I didn’t work at writing very hard.

My friends on the line were curious about what I was doing, and whenever a fight, or accident, or close call occurred on the job they would always ask, “Is that going in the book?” My climbing partner, a kid named Ben who climbed two years before he was old enough to buy beer, wanted to die a spectacular death in the story. He always said, “I have to fall at least two-hundred feet so I can scream my little lungs out.”

There was a certain romance to dangerous work, but it was consuming.  Weather wore at my face and hands. Climbing aged my knees and ankles. The voices of the men I worked with had deepened and grown harsh from years of yelling at people on the ground. And it was lonely–motel rooms five nights a week, long drives from the job to my home that burned up weekends. But worse, though they were curious, no one understood about wanting to write. I pictured myself–sitting at my typewriter at night–as a young Salinger writing on weekend leave from the army, or as Hemingway writing in a tent after a day’s hunting in Africa. But I began to realize that I could spend my life writing in motel rooms and never learn what a good writing program could teach me in two years. I thought that making myself into a writer would require undivided attention, and guidance, and I knew that I would never accomplish that as a lineman.

I didn’t know what to expect out of a graduate writing program, or the people in the program. On the powerlines I talked about hunting, fishing, women, sports, building powerlines, and living away from home–the things I knew. I thought that if I had any advantage it was that I had lived a lifestyle that few people were familiar with. I knew that I wanted to write about the people and places I had lived with and worked at. I thought the confidence that I had developed on the powerlines would carry me through.

          

The last day I worked for TVA we clipped in new conductor wire on a powerline outside of Montery, Tennessee. I climbed five towers, but after lunch my foreman called me down and took my hardhat. Everyone on the crew signed the hat, most by nickname, the last guys I climbed with. Just before I left, Ben said, “Kill me good in the book.”

The Tools We Work With, Part III: Particleboard

My first job out of college I was hired as a quality control supervisor in a particleboard mill in Georgia. The mill was housed in a building fifty yards wide and a quarter mile long, with metal siding painted a dirty pale green color specially mixed for the company: Temple green. The plant was laid out like a long assembly line, with tall silos and fifty foot piles of yellow pine shavings at one end, the warehouse and loading dock at the other. In between the shavings were ground to particle size, dried, treated with urea-formaldehyde resin, formed into mats eight feet wide and twenty-four feet long, pressed and sawed. High pressure blow-lines four feet in diameter sprouted out of the roof of the building and moved the wood furnish from the silos to the dryers to the blenders. Fine particles of wood floated through the air and dusted the cars in the parking lot and formed windrows on the ground that looked like cream colored snow.

The company was based in Texas, but the particleboard division had mills in Alabama and New Hampshire as well. In college I had studied forest products and had worked for another particleboard company through cooperative education. The man who supervised my co-op job had told me that I could expect to work sixty to seventy hours a week in management, and that dedication to the company, good intentions, and hard work would ensure promotion. That sounded right and I was willing to make any sacrifice for the company. But everything I thought about how big business operated turned out to be wrong.

A week into the job I was called upstairs to the plant manager’s office, where he stood by the window looking down at the conveyor belt that shuttled the long mats into the press. The man’s name was Larry, and I was struck by the way his Southern accent sounded affected, the Hollywood version of the way people in the South talk. His boss, the division manager, was a short man from Texas who wore Brooks Brothers shirts and spat tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup packed with tissue. They said I had two “problems” in my department–two technicians whose main crime proved to be that they were black, union troublemakers. The division manager told me that it was my job to run those two out of the company. I was twenty-three years old and I thought that I could do it.

I left the office with every intention of running those two off, even though I had no idea what sort of employees they were. In college I had learned something about making particleboard, but nothing about managing people. I didn’t think it would be so hard. I planned to be fair and I assumed that everyone cared about the quality of their work. I put pressure on Lloyd and Waldo. Both men were in their thirties, which seemed very old to me at the time, and they looked even older because the wood dust turned their black hair white. Every mistake they made I reacted with the company’s established disciplinary process: verbal warning, written warning, three days off without pay, termination. But I learned that I was doing a bad thing when Lloyd responded to a written warning by filing a grievance against me.

Waldo represented Lloyd when the grievance was heard before the division manager. The man who ordered me to fire Lloyd, who had promised to back me up all the way to arbitration, spat tobacco juice into his cup and said: “Lloyd, Terry’s just a young guy trying to make an impression, a little too gung ho. I think we can convince him to back off on this warning and remove it from your record.” I backed off Waldo and Lloyd, and the pressure switched to me.

I met with the plant manager, Larry, once a week to discuss Lloyd and Waldo.  One day he explained why the division manager hadn’t backed me up. The union contract was due to expire soon, and the company couldn’t afford to make the men martyrs by going to arbitration. I remembered the first or second day I worked for Temple, when he’d given me a copy of the union contract and said: “I hope we don’t have to work with this long, but you’d better know it pretty well.” When the contract expired, the employees would have a chance to vote on whether or not they wished to be represented by the union, and I realized that the move to fire Lloyd and Waldo was a move to weaken the union. Larry said that I should try to catch them in gross negligence, an offense not protected by the contract, and he offered fatherly suggestions on ways to trap the men. Other days he threatened to fire me if he didn’t see results before the union vote. It was sort of like good cop/bad cop. I never knew what to expect when I went upstairs to his office.

When my parents asked about Temple, I told them how bad the situation was in much the same way I’d told them I would probably fail physics in college. I was afraid of disappointing them, and I didn’t want them to be surprised. I’d decided that there was something wrong with me, that I didn’t understand personnel management any better than I did physics. My father talked to me about DayBrite, about what it felt like to work at a thankless job, and how being fired was the best thing that ever happened to him.  “There’s plenty of work that you can do well,” he said, “without having to work for assholes.”

Trafalgar Square, London

  Trafalgar Square, London, 2014

Ambleside and Grasmere, Lake District, England, and a poem by William Wordsworth

November 2014

Ambleside, England

We arrived in Ambleside after 10 p.m. after a horrific day traveling from London by chartered bus. There had been rain and diverted traffic due to accidents involving trailer trucks on the highway. We had passed the time reading, watching Mrs. Potter on the DVD, and staring at stalled traffic jockeying for position a few meters at a time.

We stayed at the Thornyfield Guest House, a comfortable bed and breakfast overlooking a churchyard. The weather was cool and rainy, and the Lake District Hills were lovely in the mist.

Border Collies at Play in Grasmere

To the Memory of the Same Dog

by William Wordsworth, 1805

LIE here, without a record of thy worth,
          Beneath a covering of the common earth!
          It is not from unwillingness to praise,
          Or want of love, that here no Stone we raise;
          More thou deserv'st; but 'this' man gives to man,
          Brother to brother, 'this' is all we can.
          Yet they to whom thy virtues made thee dear
          Shall find thee through all changes of the year:
          This Oak points out thy grave; the silent tree
          Will gladly stand a monument of thee.                       10
            We grieved for thee, and wished thy end were past;
          And willingly have laid thee here at last:
          For thou hadst lived till everything that cheers
          In thee had yielded to the weight of years;
          Extreme old age had wasted thee away,
          And left thee but a glimmering of the day;
          Thy ears were deaf, and feeble were thy knees,--
          I saw thee stagger in the summer breeze,
          Too weak to stand against its sportive breath,
          And ready for the gentlest stroke of death.                 20
          It came, and we were glad; yet tears were shed;
          Both man and woman wept when thou wert dead;
          Not only for a thousand thoughts that were,
          Old household thoughts, in which thou hadst thy share;
          But for some precious boons vouchsafed to thee,
          Found scarcely anywhere in like degree!
          For love, that comes wherever life and sense
          Are given by God, in thee was most intense;
          A chain of heart, a feeling of the mind,
          A tender sympathy, which did thee bind                      30
          Not only to us Men, but to thy Kind:
          Yea, for thy fellow-brutes in thee we saw
          A soul of love, love's intellectual law:--
          Hence, if we wept, it was not done in shame;
          Our tears from passion and from reason came,
          And, therefore, shalt thou be an honoured name!

Borough Market, London, Fall 2014

Saturday at the Borough Market. The crowds were so thick that it made shopping, or keeping up with your loved one, difficult to impossible. Shopping in a market in London, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, is fascinating for Americans who grew up shopping in air conditioned supermarkets where everything is processed and packaged away under cellophane, plastic, and cardboard.

The crowded market around lunchtime

Cheese Booths

Our students try a variety of new cheeses just outside the market.

Freah