Taking Ø’s advice yesterday afternoon, I walked down through the meadow by the lake towards the tree that’s now nearly invisible in the picture below,
because it’s lost most of its leaves.
More than its foliage I admired the colour of its mossy branches, it’s not quite prominent enough in the photograph. The branches were cosy looking, like an old green velvet sofa my mother used to have.
I think it’s a spisslønn, Norway maple, acer platanoides. Here’s one of the more prosaic-seeming brownish leaves that Marie-Lucie mentioned; and it has been an uncharacteristically warm autumn here so far, I suppose that’s why there’s so little red to be seen.
A Bad Guide 
Thanks. I hope the walk was enjoyable. Are you all recovered from being run over by the Irish Moosehounds or whatever they were?
Our Norway maple always turned a spectacular yellow in the fall, not red (and not brown until the end).
Not all maples turn red, but the sugar maple of North America does. That’s where maple syrup comes from (a distillation of the sap, which is slightly sweet – it takes many trees to make a small amount of syrup, that’s why it is quite expensive).
This was only a small part of a much longer walk, yesterday. My knee’s much better. Today I saw a Shetland pony that, although broad-chested, I figured was about half the height of the dog that ran ran me over.
I love maple syrup. You’d think it was possible to grow the trees on this side of the Atlantic too, but apparently not.
Maybe it just doesn’t get hot enough in the Norwegian summer: you have a much more temperate climate than New England and adjoining parts.
Well, the bottom part of New England is the same latitude as Barcelona. But Marie-Lucie’s a good deal higher up than that, I thought.
Yes, but the key point is that it’s on the east coast of a continent => extremes. Compare Japan or Korea. Or compare coastal New England with coastal Washington State or BC.
Oh. But we’ve got the Gulf Stream.
Yes, and BC doesn’t, and coastal BC is still much more temperate than, say, Korea.
I used to live in BC where we had the Kuro-Shiwo, but the coast is not too cold, especially Vancouver and Victoria which are protected by Vancouver island. Now I am in Nova Scotia where we have the Labrador current, which is much colder than the Kuro-Shiwo. We are farther North than New England, about the same as Southern Maine (Northern Maine pushes against Québec), so we are quite far from the Gulf Stream. Halifax is about the same latitude as Bordeaux in Southern France, but definitely colder, although quite warm compared to many other places in Canada.
Thank you both for your explanations, I think I’ve got it now. I’m not going to Korea (it’s a coldish morning here).
Ah, so it’s only the sugar maple that turns red? This has troubled me for years. Russian maples also only turn yellow — nothing here turns really red. (Hence autumn in Russia is always “golden autumn.”)
The variety of words for maple in various languages, even just Germanic and Romance, is remarkable. Google translate quickly gave me
maple, lønn, ahorn, esdoorn, hlynur, arce, bordo, erable,
(Also ahorn looks like it ought to bean oak tree).
mean
Ah, Artur, your autumnal wonders. Dead gorgeous, wicked good, as we say round back of the dasha.
The oaks here, commonest and among the noblest of local trees, are being mightily assailed by a condition called, bluntly but accurately, sudden oak death.
I believe I know the feeling.
(Don’t know, Ø, if the bean oaks remain immune, but here’s hoping.)
Wait, an incorrect correction: When I typed “bean oak” I didn’t mean “mean oak”, did I? I meant “be an oak”. Sloppiness compounded. If I could find a way to be an oak, then I wouldn’t be so prone to hasty errors.
There is a series of consecutive side streets in our neighborhood, and in my obsessive fact-gathering way I have memorized their names in order. The series begins:
Adams, Richards, Oakley, Stearns, …
I always note to myself that Adam was the father of us all, that my own father was named Richard, that the oak is the paterfamilias of the forest trees, and that Laurence Sterne wrote the father of all shaggy-dog stories.
Perhaps a commemoration of local property owners?
More difficult mnemonic than the inventory of consecutive side streets in my own long-ago childhood neighborhood: Adams was (and probably still is) flanked by Harrison, Jackson, Van Buren, Madison, Washington & so on, down through the presidents, democratically including the obscure and even inglorious ones.
Here there is a street whose name has evidently been pulled asunder more times than a poor child’s rag doll. It is called, variously, Martin Luther King, Alameda, and Grove.
Ø would be far more inventive, and in every way preferable.
Manhattan is a bit of a missed opportunity with its uptown- and crosstown-numbered grid. “Columbus” Circle could have been 3.14159 Circle. There could be square roots, a golden section in Chelsea perhaps. My math skills are too slight to take full advantage of the possibilities, but I always liked the Greek summation sign ∑. Perhaps it could be embossed on envelopes before the apt number, building number, street number and zipcode.
In this town, that would long since have become Indigenous People’s Circle.
I always got mixed up with Ahorn when I lived in Germany even though I knew it wasn’t oak. Then when I moved to Norway I found that ekorn in Norwegian means squirrel rather than acorn. Almost as confusing.
Yes that’s right. Berkeley has some very pc names. Nothing about bishop Berkeley as far as I remember.
No, I fear the Course of Empire went that-a-way, at some indeterminate past juncture — likely just before the Advent of Free Speech. (Or was it the Demise? Difficult keeping all that history properly sorted.)
Tom, at first I thought you were saying that the presidential streets were laid out in chronological order, but on rereading I’m not so sure.
When two presidents had the same surname (Harrison, Adams, Johnson, Roosevelt), did they have to share a street or did they get separate ones?
If chronological, what they do with Cleveland, who served nonconsecutic=ve terms. It is probably too much to hope that Cleveland Street somehow curves around and surrounds Benjamin Harrison Street?
When did we do that acorn/Eichh&\ouml;rnchen thing? Was it here or at LanguageHat? I remember going nuts about the etymological facts that were unearthed.
Eichhörnchen
We’ll have to ask Stu. I can’t remember that sort of thing. It’s too bad one can’t do a search through blog comments, though.
Ø, you’ve had me wobbling down Memory Lane as far as the logic of those Presidential streets will take me. And that’s not very far. Nonchronological, they were, and noninclusive. There was, for instance, no Grant, and no McKinley. Whereas here there are one of each. Neither town had a Coolidge or a Hoover, however. Just unfortunate memories, or too late to have streets in their honour? (Or simply no honour to be found?)
A half century ago, in our tossed-salad days in West Marin, we lived on a dirt road named Nymph, at the corner of Cherry. Now THOSE are the sort of street names upon which nostalgia can more easily train its dishonourable, watery old eyes, behind its fogged-over, rose-tinted spectacles.
A Dirt Road Named Nymph, a great title for something by Tennessee Williams. Any Nixon Streets? Reagans? Nothing postwar, I suppose.
Oh, yes! You can see it on google maps:
Nymph Rd, Bolinas, Marin, California 94924
It’s an odd one to have in the series:
Rosewood
Pine
Oak
Nymph
Maple
Laurel…
Oh my, Artur.
I had not seen those grounds in, well… a very long time. ‘Twas our abode from 1968 to 1973. The five years after that we spent a longish stone’s throw away from that spot, over toward the center of that mesa, in from the ocean a bit.
The Nymph/Cherry intersection sits directly above a rocky protuberance called Duxbury Reef, site of legendary shipwrecks of yore. The rocks formed tidal pools where mud sharks innocuously disported. Above the rocks the cliff was continually crumbling and giving way, so that houses occasionally broke off, and/or slid down.
Google is so intensely nosey — there is an old person with a walker caught by the eye-in-the-sky in her driveway — and in “our” epoch there never was a driveway there, in any case — and the entire picture has been metamorphosed by the general upscaling introduced by the New Rich, and then the Newer Rich, over several decades of intense colonization and gentrification. The place is now thick with movie directors, designer brand owners, oenologists, gourmet restaurant owners and all those sorts of stratosphere-level real-estate punters whose multi-millions can’t be taxed (it’s a Law of Nature in Our Great Democracy). The satellite view reveals there has been a general proliferation of decks and fences and outbuildings and additions and extensions of proper appurtenances and fastidious landscapings, to the extent that any resemblance to the mythical wild place of my imagination, once a tangle of blackberries, poison oak, swamp grass, brambles and bushes of every description, grazed upon by deer, inhabited by armies of singing frogs in the rainy season… is apparently gone, gone forever.
When we got there, there wasn’t much on that mesa beyond the modest cottages of a few older Portuguese fisherman (from a previous epoch) and a few younger surfer dudes and other accidental arrivistes sans portfolio (like us).
By the by, the sequence of street names does make a kind of sense, if nothing else does. They’re alphabetical: L, M, N & so on. However the primordial planners obviously could not come up with anything even approximately botanical for “Q”, more’s the pity. There were, and probably still are, quail on the premises… that might have done quite nicely as an interpolation… better, for example, than “Eisenhower”. Instead, it seems they simply left it out.
And for that matter, after “Pine,” my memory drops off that cliff.
Nymphs at least dwell in trees, some of them. Queens not so much, though I have come across one story.
Crown, there is a Queen Rd between Pine and Rosewood. You can see it if you zoom in.
There is a Quail Refuge on Evergreen near Alder.
We lived for five years (1973-1978) near Evergreen and Alder. No Quail Refuge then. (When men were men & c.)
Still, this fat quail (in Golden Gate Park, perhaps lost) looks like any street he lands upon ought to be named after him.
As long as it’s not Queen.
There are folk who speak of the rowan as a “nymph tree”, but that is merely because that is where they find their nymphs, apparently.
On the other hand, there is the tree nymph.
But that is a butterfly not a tree, and lives in Ceylon.
So there is a definite street-naming category problem here. Which I reckon has never until now concerned any living soul.
Well, Rowan Atkinson played Mr Bean, and some nymphs are said to dwell in oak trees, but probably not bean oaks. The larvae who dwell in jumping beans are not strictly nymphs.
I’ve looked through my tree dictionary (Hillier’s). There are remarkably few trees beginning with N and nothing of the pine, larch, oak type at all.
I zoomed in and saw Queen Road. No King’s Road.
Talking of Dan Quail and SF, I remember San Francisco has a Bush. Bush & Pine, one goes uptown and one down, but who can remember which is which?
Tom, I too thought that area looked very built up. We must never go back, I’m sorry I mentioned it – though while I was there, I took a look at the Shoreline Hwy at Marshall CA, where I used to live, and it looks unchanged from the mid-1970s. Only the house prices are different, probably.
Look at that quail. You can blow it up to the size of an albatross.
I’m not sure why I’m persisting with this, but …
Here is a nine-year-old article about quails in Bolinas that speaks of the Bolinas quail refuge as a thing of the past. Maybe they have revived the refuge.
Here is a WiPe article about Bolinas that lists “Tom Clark, poet, biographer” as one of the notable residents and former residents.
I’d forgotten the flower Clarkia. I wouldn’t mind getting it if it grows here. Do you know Alice Waters from Bolinas, Tom? It says she’s a notable resident too. Tom, do you know Grace Slick??? I once met Barbara Streisand.
We must never go back, indeed, Artur, as I say to myself once again, rising from the dark… where I have been pondering the intermittent reports from my sensible, rationally day-person-ish yet it seems equally back-going partner, about all these rumours of matters of the past.
One must not quail before them, lest they turn into an albatross-feather lei.
I refuse to ever look at any Wiki listing concerning myself or my various haunts or hench-persons. The errors and inaccuracies are always so grossly inaccurate, the listings so often seeming to have been composed for the convenience of, if not actually by, the interested parties.
But the wiser half betrayed her own wisdom by poring over the Bolinas wiki, and returned to report the names of all sorts of celebrity residents, a number of whom qualified for the celebrity part, but were never actually residents. The place became, in the 1970s, a sort of well-kept-secret temporary-escape-from-New York, muddy yet increasingly well-frequented-watering hole of the roving minor-celebrity herds.
We felt quietly guilty about this, because a goodly share of the new people had made our tiny cottage their point of entry. No wonder the plumbing stopped working.
About this time some of the more neanderthal-oid of the earlier residents began a determined effort to effectively wipe Bolinas off the map. This meant nocturnal guerilla resistance to the Highway One turn-off signage. Every time the authorities posted a new sign indicating the Bolinas turn-off, a night party of flat-earthers went straight out and tore it down.
That battle was eventually lost, when Bolinas became the favoured destination of Real Money, with those satellite navigation devices in their Lexuses.
Well before that, we left. The idea was, go out unto the world, and make a living somehow.
Alas, had we simply stayed put, the insanely accelerating “property values” would have ensured a life free of all employment, forever.
Ah well.
This brief view from the Mesa of the local “sacred mountain” (Tamalpais) reflects perhaps something of the feel of the place, c. 1971.
Also, there may be some further hints of the spirit of the place in an obit I posted a few years ago for a dear departed friend, Jim Carroll, with whom, during that period, I had shared the awful onus of being a hermit.
As to specific parties mentioned, the Grace Slick presence was brief and barely noticeable. She and her then partner Paul Kantner bought a massive house overlooking the town bathing beach. They installed a tall security fence, with cameras, which did indeed pretty well guarantee their isolation. This was perhaps the first arrival of Real Celebrity. On one occasion my wife and daughter were toiling up the road from the school to the Mesa when Mr. Kantner, in a spiffy sporting vehicle, stopped to pick them up. Hitch-hiking with the stars! Also, the Slick-Kantner ménage had a private swimming pool installed, the only one in town at the time. Certain designated mothers and children were afforded use of it at certain designated times. Thus our daughter was permitted to paddle about among the stars.
Alice Waters (as you’ve asked) was a late, late comer, making the place a sort of decompress-from-my-fame-for-the-weekend retreat. I’m told she is listed as a “famous resident”.
By the by, regret to have to say that Clarkia was NOT named in my honour.
But I am consoled in this by the fact that Sir Joseph Banks never laid eyes upon, nor was aware his name would be given to, Banksia.
You’re aware, I’m sure, there are some beautiful pictures on the Wikipedia Banksia page.
Well, that was an interesting hour-and-a-half I just spent reading about Jim Carroll and Jo’mama – both your evocative eulogy, and the comments and their links – for me it’s funny to think I was just down the road from you in 1976-7. I was sorry to hear about your ’53 powder-blue Chevy pickup (and of course about your license), that’s my daughter’s ideal vehicle for pulling her horse. I think I remember the mountain road from San Raphael, that’s the one we took the first time I went to Tamales Bay. After that, we drove via Petaluma, Chicken Capital of the World, (what my first wife used to serendipitously call Pantalooma).
Curious to think we may have once passed one another on those roads, Artur… and now again on these.
Your wife’s wonderful name for the Chicken Capital at once serves the place right, and gives rise to interesting visions of chickens strutting about in pantalooms.
That road from San Rafael over towards the coast traverses some very pretty woodlands indeed, dense also with all manner of interesting floor-level fauna, though unhappily not much of interest in the way of Banksia.
I see that Banks was given the Order of the Bath. Nowadays, they (whoever they are) only give it to bureaucrats, the military and foreign heads-of-state (Reagan, Sarkozy and Bush the Elder), but in the Middle Ages according to Wikipedia:
Possibly symbolic possibly not, I guess.
Well, that’s quite lot of gear to be put into bed with. Probably dry but possibly not (the horror!).
By the by, Artur, it is to be noted that Banks hungered mightily over a long period for the honour, suspected his delay in receiving it had political implications, and when he finally got it was “in transports,” as was said.
As he wrote to a cousin concerning the occasion of receipt (6 July 1794):
“…While I was kneeling on the Cushion before the King & the Sword of State which had me a Knight was still hanging over my Shoulders the King said to me in a low voice Sir Jos: I have for many years wishd to do this a mark of distinction so flattering has made me pleasd with an honer which as it came without sollicitation you my easily believe not to have been any object of my wishes, it had been in the first instance made palatable by coming in a direct course from the pure Fountain of honer without any portion of ministerial contamination but this latter instance of Gracious Condescension had made it inexpressibly valuable to my Feelings”.
Ok, just so long as he enjoyed it. The trouble with giving it to bureaucrats is they expect it, it’s in lieu of the extra cash they’d theoretically have been making in the private sector. Very unromantic and unbathlike.
The king’s remarks were quite long, it was jolly clever of Sir Jos to remember them word for word like that. Nice and informal of the king to call him “Sir Jos”, too. I think George III sometimes gets badly misrepresented.
Well, by that time, having been relegated to an armchair, no longer able to do what he had most loved, that is, sail the world and poke about for curious botanical specimens — he was also noted by the way for having poked-about a bit among the South Sea native maidens, doubtless some fine specimens there as well, though probably somewhat less suitable for preservation by pressing between journal-pages — JB was settling for the calmer pleasures. And a cushion is a kindness for the agéd knees.
I’ve always thought George III was unfairly treated by history, largely as a result of having been made the “fall guy” for the American Troubles.
‘”A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” This was the language in which the Declaration of Independence blamed George III for the American Revolution. John Adams later admitted that it contained “expressions which I would not have inserted, if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant.” Adams, reminiscing at the age of eighty-eight, thought it “too personal . . . too passionate, and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document.” He confessed that he had “never believed George to be a tyrant” or to be guilty of the “cruel” acts committed in the name of the king.’ — Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnhnessy
That’s interesting. Good for Adams. Alan Bennett wrote a play about George III, but it’s no more than a palliative to George’s reputation. I’m not crazy about any of the Hanovers, but G3 “Farmer George” is the least worst, unless you count Victoria as a Hanover (and then I like Albert more). George encouraged the development of science, especially the agricultural revolution, and he paid for Herschel’s 40-foot telescope.
Sorru, off topic: have you seen this fantastic Norwegian journey?
(I meant “sorry”, of course)
“I meant “sorry”, of course”: of course you did – ‘sorru’ is obviously Roumanian.
And not only that, and perhaps even more wondrous, it seems Queen Charlotte — who before he became “tetched” by porphyria magnanimously provided him with fifteen children (thirteen of whom made it through to adulthood) — was black.
Altogether a more interesting, variegated and productive crowd than the latterday descendants.
Thanks, Julia. I hadn’t seen that. There are some marvelous pictures. I especially liked the man with one leg. Is that blog by someone who reads Language Hat?
Les Deux Sorrus is a restaurant in Corsica, apparently. I didn’t know.
If Queen Charlotte’s descendants have some diluted African blood then the royal family has been even feebler in discharging its imperial obligations than I’d thought. I think most people assume you have to be white to be that bland and wooden.
Ha! dearie, that’s right: I only made mistakes to prove how polyglot am I…
AJP, have you read the book’s description? It sounds so Norwegian in its satire… It looks like the protagonist went down there very narrow minded and he returns with a completely different attitude toward other forms of living.
(I must have proved here that I’m not only influenced by Spanish and Rumanian, but also Chinese, Russian and Guaraní! I hope you can understand what I wrote…)
“I am”
“am I” has a pleasantly old-fashioned, poetic ring to it.
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating his pudding and pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said ‘What a good boy am I!’
“I think most people assume you have to be white to be that bland and wooden.”
In that case most people would do well to check out our latest “Presidential hopeful”, the Texas Republican pizza magnate Herman Cain. He has this “99.9” plan. (Don’t ask…)
I wouldn’t quite say “wooden”, as even a bit of wood, in the present straits, might prove more useful. A drowning person, for example, might cling to it in a storm.
I hope you can understand what I wrote
I had to google “Guaraní”, very interesting.
I believe Herman Cain and Sarah Palin may be fictional creations.
If only…
That’s true, Tom.
They’d make a hell of a villan characters!
Wait: they already are. So, I wish we’re all are in a fairy tale.
(Thanks, dearie)
My most treasured Sarah Palin moment was created by the Montreal talk show hosts who phoned her, pretending to be Nicolas Sarkozy. (This was in 2008.)
Pseudo-Sarkozy: You see, I got elected in France because I’m real and you seem to be someone who’s real as well.
Palin: Yes, yeah, Nicolas, we so appreciate this opportunity.
Pseudo-Sarkozy: You know, I see you as a president, one day, you too.
Palin: [laugh] Maybe in 8 years.
Pseudo-Sarkozy: Well, ah, I hope for you. You know we have a lot in common because personally one of my favorite activities is to hunt too.
Palin: [giggle] Oh very good, we should go hunting together.
Pseudo-Sarkozy: Exactly! We could go try hunting by helicopter, like you did, I never did that.
Palin: [giggle]
Pseudo-Sarkozy: Like we say in France, “on pourrait tuer des bébés phoques aussi”.
Palin: [giggle] Well I think we could have a lot of fun together as we’re getting work done, we can kill two birds with one stone that way.
Pseudo-Sarkozy: I just love killing those animals. Mm, mm. Take away a life, that is so fun!
Palin: [hahahaha]
Pseudo-Sarkozy: I’d really love to go as long as we don’t bring your Vice President Cheney! [hahahaha]
Palin: No, I’ll be a careful shot, yes.
Sarah Palin’s Conversation with Fake Sarkozy
you seem to be someone who’s real
I told you. Canadian journalists knew she was fictional even in 2008.
Fantastic, Tom (it’s a pity Sarah Palin isn’t a fake Palin)
A pity indeed. A bit too real. I’d definitely prefer a faux version.
However, there remains a glimmer for those of us who can no longer endure the intense whatever-it-is-ness of political “reality”.
Several of the current cast of “hopefuls” are now becoming available as simulations.
(Just in time for Hallowe’en.)
It’s six feet high. That’s 1800mm. Big. You could create a contemporary Republican Mt. Rushmore in your own backyard.
Large, yes. And the greenery gives the effect of one of those wigs worn in school productions of classic drama.
It puts me in mind of Marvell’s famous crux, in his Horatian Ode :
Then burning through the Air he went,
And Pallaces and Temples rent:
And Caesars head at last
Did through his Laurels blast.
Though I suppose the cranial verdure looks more like ivy than laurel. (Not forgetting where this conversation began.)
I’ve been pretending not to have read this thread ever since Julia came with the Niels Klim link. Being partly raised in Bergen I should have had something intelligent to add about Holberg, and I don’t, since the Wikipedia article says way more than I knew. It’s interesting, though, that Niels Klim is a rather late work. I had it pegged as a youthful exercise, before he found his vocation in theatre comedy. I also hadn’t quite appreciated his importance for Danish Law.
What I might do is add a link to his poem Peder Paars, a parody of the Aeneid, complete with notes from the fictional author and a foreword by a fictional scholar.
Well rhymed, Trond!
Note that it’s only the eight first lines of, I don’t know,
(372+478+520+312+372)+(316+446+548)+(350+318+602)+(728+400+487) = 6249.
If I was put up front at start I might well lead the New York Marathon after 54 meters.
Do you wear the right headgear when walking down through the meadow?
Thanks for that, dearie. I only just saw it.
Prince and Lafayette Streets, a few blocks from where I had my office in New York. I don’t blame that cat, it looks a lot cleaner on his hat than it is on the pavement. And the man has such a New York accent. It takes me back. Not such a bad place, New York.
When did we do that acorn/Eichh&\ouml;rnchen thing? Was it here or at LanguageHat? I remember going nuts about the etymological facts that were unearthed.
I believe you’re thinking of this epic thread, in which squirrels and acorns were a prominent feature.
While I’m here, and even though this thread is Not About Goats: Sophie, the Healing Goat.
Thank you, Language.
I love that place the Gentle Barn. I wish there were more of them.
Thank you, Hat, for finding those lost squirrels.
How I laughed.
H/T Nourishing Obscurity
That sausage dog is loving it. I wonder where you buy them (the machines). Maybe for Christmas.
My dog would love it too.
Thank you, dearie!
It’s great, but there’s a part of me that resists the idea of inventing machines to play with your dog for you. Come to think of it, when I go for a walk in the park and see people with labor-saving devices (long handled gadgets like this) that allow them to pick up a tennis ball and throw it for their dog without having to exert themselves too much, I feel a faint disapproval. I must be some kind of puritanical fanatic at heart. Never mind.
I know what you mean: don’t have a dog if you can’t be bothered to look after it. Quite true; but it’s the dogs that count, and I don’t think they would disapprove.
I like the item you linked to, Ø. I’d like to have one to play with – nothing to do with dogs.