Author: David Gorsline

Providence side trip report

DSCN1155Leaving the Providence metro, I took a long swing west to the Berkshires to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and its incredible edible installation of Sol LeWitt wall drawings. The painted brick and steel of these former mill buildings is a perfect counterpoint to LeWitt’s hard-edged, sometimes kandy-kolored koncepts.

capacity 65A couple of blocks away from the museum, I found another relic fallout shelter sign.

giftOn the way to my motel, I paused for this gaudy building in Pittsfield that’s seen some better days. At one time an athanaeum, it’s now a courthouse building named in honor of James A. Bowes.

Providence trip report: 3

The rain kept to the west side of Narragansett Bay, so our birding around Newport was only dampish. In the parking lot of the Sachuest Point NWR, we watched a young gull trying to get the hang of dropping a mollusc to the pavement in order to smash it open. Our neophyte had figured out the dropping part, but not the targeting: his lunch kept landing softly in the grass.

beautiful pointThe loop trail around Sachuest Point is smashing, all the more so in that we got fine looks at rafts of Common Eider (Somateria mollissima), good for my #363. Mike Tucker pointed out the salt-tolerant Rosa rugosa in fruit, not a native but apparently prized locally for its rose hips it produces. Not prized but just as apparent at Sachuest Point is the invasive Asiatic Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus). Just down the shore at Third Beach, we turned up the lovely pale yellow “Ipswich” subspecies of Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis princeps).

Back up Third Beach Road is the privately-run Norman Bird Sanctuary, where we stopped for lunch then birded the old fields and woods. The meadows are managed for Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), who returned the favor by perching in the open for good looks. Trip leader Lauren showed us the local geologic specialty, a metaconglomerate known locally as puddingstone.

Providence trip report: 2

Our original schedule called for today to be the Block Island trip, but high waves on the Sound and Ocean cancelled ferry service. So Mike Tucker and other ABA trip leaders improvised, and we started the day at the pond and barrier beach of Trustom Pond NWR, a brackish hundred-acre pond that is the only pond in Rhode Island without residential development. The hinterland of the pond includes some wooded areas and fresh water.

old wallCoastal New England geology is actually rather complicated—at least judging from some of the material I’ve skimmed—not at all the simple extended barrier islands of sand that we have at home. The material in many areas is glacial till. Evidence: several relict stone walls skirted by the trails leading to the pond.

level horizonThe appositely-named Moonstone Beach (formerly a nudist hangout until it became FWS’s responsibility) is managed for Piping Plover (Charadrius melodus) and Least Tern (Sterna antillarum) in breeding season.

spiffyWe took a break at the huge, beautiful Kettle Pond Visitor Center, the interpretive center for the network of coastal NWRs in the state. By FWS standards, this place is palatial: gift shop, exhibits, a big classroom where we ate lunch.

Good birds but not lifers: Common Loon (Gavia immer), Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo), Nashville Warbler (Vermivora ruficapilla), Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis). A lifer candidate but not seen well enough to tick (on my list, at least): Common Eider (Somateria mollissima).

no visitorsAfter the lunch break, a quick stop at Soccotash Marsh turned up a pair of the Savannahs. Then we found a relatively sheltered spot to scope the very breezy waters off Point Judith to get a distant look at a few eiders. Here’s hoping for a better look later in the week. The working lighthouse at Point Judith is a Coast Guard facility, and hence not open to us tourists. The crashing surf and high winds coaxed a whoop out of me.

Providence trip report: 1

Drew Whelan’s report to the ABA conference at Providence, R.I., about disaster response along the Gulf Coast to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is less than encouraging. Cleanup efforts are hindered, it appears, in any number of ways—from well-intentioned protocols that protect NWRs, to corporate bungling. Drew’s images of oil-soaked booms washed ashore into coastal marshes and apparently abandoned are especially disheartening.

The American Birding Association continues to collect funds in support of recovery efforts.

King decoded

Not particularly obscure (it’s in AHD), but a new word for me (and Firefox’s spell-checker): adscititious, “not inherent or essential; derivative.” Use it in a sentence? Why, yes, we can:

Despite my meager funds, I started bicycling each Saturday morning to the estate auctions I saw advertised in the paper, where I would take note of wonderful objects to covet, things that might answer my need to be an owner. However, the few crumpled dollars I had stuffed in my jeans kept my attention tied to the boxes of bric-a-brac and potpourri and nearflung gewgaws, which were always assigned to the very end of the auction, when the high-end collectors had already roped their prizes to the roof of the station wagon and driven off. I thrilled to crates of chilly hardware—coffee tins of rusty nails and mismatched bolts and buts, odd attachments, gimcrack, rickrack, and adscititious crap—because at least then my dollar or two would bring me something hefty, clumped, and durable, in good quantity, penny per pound. Sometimes my fifty-cent bid would be enough to claim it all, and I’d sweat to get it home by bike, understanding at last what I really meant by “adscititious crap.”

—William Davies King, Collections of Nothing, pp. 31-32

Riding the rails

When I interned in New York back in the late 1970s, my colleague/mentor Glen taught me how to ride the Long Island Rail Road in comfort. The rolling stock was fitted with five seats across, with the center aisle dividing them into a bench of three and a bench of two. Trouble was, there was really only enough room for four to sit easily. So what the two of us did, per Glen’s instructions, was to sit in the three-seat bench “and look big.”

The other thing I remember—dimly—about commuter rail in New York was the bar cars. It turns out that the tradition of alcohol service is still going strong in the New York metro, with the added assist of bar carts on or near the platforms. Michael M. Grynbaum reports on new data released by the MTA about differential tipple preferences between Metro-North and LIRR riders.

McPhee decoded

John McPhee drops a Celtic allusion into The Control of Nature to describe the severe hazard along the lower Mississippi. From the “Atchafalaya” section:

This threat to navigation could be called could be called an American Maelstrom—a modern Charybdis, a Corryvreckan—were it not so very much greater in destructive force.

The whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, off the west coast of Scotland, is better known by Britons than by me. Fans of the Powell-Pressburger films should know it, too.

On the other hand, this word looks like a McPhee nonce. It appears only one place else online, in a Jstor-protected source.

Wells fills a dish with a dark soil from burned chaparral. He fills the eyedropper and empties it onto the soil. The water stands up in one large dome. Five minutes later, the dome is still there. Ten minutes later, the dome is still there. Sparkling, tumescent, mycophane, the big bead of water just stands there indefinitely, on top of the impermeable soil. (“Los Angeles Against the Mountains”)

Presumably the sense of mycophane is “semi-transparent, like threads of mycelium.”

Flying

The Old River Control Auxiliary Structure is a rank of seven towers, each buff with a white crown. They are vertical on the upstream side, and they slope toward the Atchafalaya. Therefore, they resemble flying buttresses facing the Mississippi. The towers are separated by six arciform gates, convex to the Mississippi, and hinged in trunnion blocks secured with steel to carom the force of the river into the core of the structure. Lifted by cables, these tainter gates, as they are called, are about as light and graceful as anything could be that has a composite weight of twenty-six hundred tons. Each of them is sixty-two feet wide. They are the strongest the Corps has ever designed and built. A work of engineering such as a Maillart bridge or a bridge by Christian Menn can outdo some other works of art, because it is not only a gift to the imagination but also structural in the matrix of the world. The auxiliary structure at Old River contains too many working components to be classed with such a bridge, but in grandeur and in profile it would not shame a pharaoh.

—John McPhee, “Atchafalaya” (1989)

Mauritius

1st Stage’s less-is-more aesthetic, usually successful, doesn’t deliver the goods for Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, a fighting-over-the-inheritance drama with overtones of American Buffalo. Indeed, what’s needed most to help this slight story—scams and counter-scams surrounding what could be an extremely valuable legacy of 19th-century postage stamps—is a trim to one-act length and more sharply drawn characters. As written, Mary (Amy Waldman), one of two sisters squabbling over the property, has only one note to play: “they’re my stamps; they’re not yours to sell.” Her ne’er-do-well sibling Jackie (Leigh Taylor Patton) does better, but the necessities of the plot require her to acquire information about her trove at unrealistically precise points in time. The casting of Roger Payano as the small-time stamp dealer Philip and of Edward Daniels as the small-time small-time Dennis unfortunately obscures the relationship between them.

  • Mauritius, by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Mark Krikstan, 1st Stage, McLean, Virginia

I get confused: 2

(With some help from Leta.)

  • William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies and several other books less well-remembered. No matter, he received a Booker and Nobel for his work.
  • William Goldman writes screenplays, including the magically popular The Princess Bride and the Penelope Ann Miller vehicle Year of the Comet. He is the source of the catchphrase “Nobody knows anything.”
  • James Goldman made the stage play The Lion in Winter and collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on Follies and Evening Primrose.

Still confused about the Goldmans? It’s not surprising: they’re brothers.