Congress Heights

Nathan Harrington led my afternoon WalkingTown DC tour, a scamper through the neighborhoods of Congress Heights. Nathan didn’t have a wealth of heritage markers or quirky landmarks to pause for, and we covered a lot of ground, but the tour was quite enjoyable.

Colonial period settlers used this land as tobacco plantations, but became victims of their success: runoff from the farms silted up the Anacostia River, rendering it no longer suitable for shipping. (Early Bladensburg, upstream, served ocean-going boats until the river filled in.) Later, freedmen like Tobias Henson owned property.

In the late nineteenth century, the heights were put to use as cemeteries for the Jewish community; walking east along Alabama Avenue S.E. from the Congress Heights Metro station, we passed these places of rest. We also passed Malcolm X Elementary School, which provides a STEM curriculum.

old names die hardDoubling back and making our way to the small commercial district at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X Avenues S.E., I noticed numerous street trees that resembled Willow Oak (Quercus phellos), but these trees sported very bristly caps to their acorns. A cultivar? A mimic thrush also made its presence known. Nathan’s not sure why this particular intersection warrants the “formerly” signage: the street has been named for Malcolm X for at least fifteen years.

come playUnfortunately, dining options in Congress Heights are limited. Nathan mentioned the IHOP (franchised to a group of D.C. policemen) to the east, one of the few sit-down restaurants in Ward 8. But the neighborhoods are leafy, and this bit of green extending from Shepherd Parkway is attractive. (Not too many neighborhood folks out today, on this unseasonably cool and wet Sunday.)

down the blockleafyIn the late nineteenth century, Arthur Randle converted about 48 acres of the Knox farm for residential property. The name “Congress Heights” was chosen through a promotional contest, and is typical realtor hyperbole: you can’t actually see the Capitol dome from any ground-level Congress Heights location. Most of today’s residences were built later, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Nathan’s home on 11th Place S.E. (where he treated us to post-tour coffee and superlative banana bread) is a Craftsman bungalow from 1925. Many of the houses of these working- and middle-class neighborhoods are quite spruced up, although security dogs and alarm systems are all too necessary. Certain of the blocks remind me of Archie Bunker’s Hauser Street in Queens. The area holds attractions for would-be homeowners in the District: prices are much lower than west of the Anacostia, and parking is easy-peasy.

back in serviceLocal landmark Congress Heights School is back in the education business, now as a charter school.

found anotherTrue to the neighborhood’s mid-century history, fallout shelter signs can still be found. I spotted two for my collection: one at 5th and Mellon Streets S.E., and this one at Brothers and Highview Places S.E.

Further reading: The Advoc8te’s Congress Heights on the Rise; John R. Wennersten, Anacostia: The Death and Life of an American River (2008).

Fort Totten

keep your powder dryMy first of two walks under the auspices of WalkingTown DC was a quick spin through Fort Totten led by Mary Pat Rowan, with an emphasis on the woody plants of this semi-preserved area. The geology of this high point in the landscape is somewhat unusual: it’s a gravel terrace perched on impermeable clay. You can get a bit of the feel for the geology in the image, where the clay and gravel are exposed by excavations that provided a powder magazine for this Civil War earthworks in defense of the capital. Unusual geology means unusual flora, with some dry conditions specialists in evidence, among them Amelanchier species (one of these days I will learn to recognize Serviceberry) and Blackjack Oak (Quercus marilandica). Chestnut Oak (Q. montana), that upper-elevation specialist, is also thriving. Mary Pat also noted that Pitch Pine (Pinus rigida) can be found in the park, but we didn’t have time to take a look.

Barreling off trail and kicking up occasional human-dropped litter, Mary Pat led us through a patch of heath community plants, including high and lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium sp.), huckleberries (Gaylussacia sp.), and Pink Azalea (Rhododendron periclymenoides).

Oh, please

One of the web’s minor annoyances are those ads from “people finder” web sites that pop up on Google’s search results page whenever there’s an iota of a chance that you are searching for someone by name. It matters not that the service has no information for you, the lame ad is still there looking at you.

From time to time I do a vanity search for Larry Shue to check that my little shrine to L.S. is still being indexed by Google the Stupendous. Recently these ads have been appearing. Dude, I already found Larry Shue, and he’s buried in Staunton, Virginia!

Camus quoted

There are a couple versions of this eminently quotable passage from Albert Camus knocking around online, but I have found none of them that clearly cite the original essay and translator. So let’s rectify that situation, shall we?

This paragraph is from an essay that appeared in the symposium Réflexions sur la peine capitale, by Camus and Arthur Koestler, and published by Calmann-Lévy in 1957. Translated by Justin O’Brien, it appeared as “Reflections on the Guillotine,” and was collected into Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, published by Alfred A. Knopf, in 1961. The collection in English is posthumous, as Camus died on 4 January 1960. Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

It’s the last three sentences of the paragraph that are most quoted (and most powerful), beginning with “what then is capital punishment…”

Let us leave aside the fact that the law of retaliation is inapplicable and that it would seem just as excessive to punish the incendiary by setting fire to his house as it would be insufficient to punish the thief by deducting from his bank account a sum equal to his theft. Let us admit that it is just and necessary to compensate for the murder of the victim by the death of the murderer. But beheading is not simply death. It is just as different, in essence, from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It is a murder, to be sure, and one that arithmetically pays for the murder committed. But it adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization, in short, which is in itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Hence there is no equivalence. Many laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence. But that then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. (p. 199)

(Thanks to The Atlantic for bringing this quotation to my attention.)

Showing up

Dwight Garner’s provocative challenge in last week’s Times magazine to novelists who publish infrequently,

If you and your peers wish to regain a prominent place in the culture, one novel a decade isn’t going to cut it.

is more than a little short-sighted. Did James Joyce forfeit his influence on literature, his place as a modernist, for publishing only two books in the 23 years after A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? (Granted, all three works were serialized first, à la Charles Dickens.) Do we think less of Ralph Ellison for never publishing his follow-up to Invisible Man?

And yet, Garner makes a good point. He finds exemplars in Dickens, John Updike, Woody Allen:

Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot.

Bank on it

Catherine A. Lindell, Ryan S. O’Connor, and Emily B. Cohen make a contribution to what we know about songbirds’ nesting success in active and abandoned coffee plantations and active pasture. Specifically, they studied White-throated Thrushes (Turdus assimlis) and Clay-colored Thrushes (T. grayi) in Las Alturas reserve (for four breeding seasons) and Rio Negro, an active coffee farm (unfortunately, only for one season).

These two species of birds, congeners of our American Robin, do not migrate north to the U.S. to breed (there are some records in south Texas for Clay-colored Thrush), in contrast to the charismatic migratory wood warblers (used to promote shade-grown coffee) that feed in forests and plantation overstories in the winter months. The thrushes of the research prefer to nest on the ground or low in a tree. The slightly surprising results of the paper are that nesting success is only indirectly affected by type of land cover, and the effect is through how well the terrain provides concealment from predators. In particular, nesting in a steep bank in pastureland provides the greatest protection (the nest can’t be detected from below, and cattle can’t trample it).

There is a scintilla of a hint that the birds can be more successful in an active coffee plantation—more humans means fewer predators—but keep in mind that only one year of data is available.

I’ll let the authors summarize the research’s conservation implications:

Conservation recommendations based on land-cover type would be relatively easy if we could rank land-covers as to the quality of habitat they provide for target species and if rankings were consistent across species. Our results indicate these conditions are not met for these species.

Happy Days

Delia Taylor gives a gleeful yet genteel reading of Winnie, Beckett’s lady of the mound—indeed, it’s musical: her “Hoo-oo!” summons of Willie (Jose Carrasquillo) is particularly fine. Taylor’s eyes (a key to this role) are mobile and expressive; her various reactions to the revolver in her bag are effective. Carrasquillo adopts a creaky old man’s voice for Willie that doesn’t quite fit.

Technical elements in this production are mixed. Here, the mound that encloses Winnie is a clever extension of her elegant china blue brocade dress. Tony Cisek’s design also places Winnie high enough off the deck so that we all can see her clearly, especially in Act 2. But the constraints of working in Artisphere’s black box theater leave Winnie pinned onstage during the intermission, so that the transition to her neck-deep state in Act 2 has to happen in black, after an unnecessary introductory “the days pass” lighting effect. And the challenge of Beckett’s specification “Maximum pause. The parasol goes on fire. Smoke, flames if feasible” isn’t met.

The program notes that provide the details of the allusions in Winnie’s text (Shakespeare, Milton, Robert Browning, Thomas Gray, and others) are quite helpful.

That explains it

Eric Fidler answers a question that’s been gnawing on my mind ever since my last ride down North Capitol Street from the Catholic campus: what’s with the brick silos and open fields between Michigan Avenue, N.W., and Channing Street, N.W.? An abandoned Nike base? Sequestration of toxic waste from the big domed building at the start of North Cap? The Undisclosed Location? (It looks even more hush-hush on Google Maps.) No, it’s the remains of the McMillan Sand Filtration Plant, which originally purified the city’s drinking water.

Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park

on the vergeA meadow in early fall means a goldenrod clinic for the experienced, but I shied away from genus Solidago and concentrated on the easier plants. Charles Smith ably led a VNPS field trip to Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park, which features more than 100 acres of upland that are being restored to meadow. (The park is so new that it doesn’t register on Yahoo! Maps.) A field of fescue aside, the place looks pretty good (especially compared to another old field that I have visited recently).

The country around Bristoe (or Bristow) Station, on the railway line that connects Manassas to the Virginia hinterlands to the southwest, was the site of Civil War battles in 1862 and 1863. The line is still in heavy use (we heard freights come through about once an hour), and Bristow is just beyond the Broad Run terminus of VRE commuter service. Some of us complained about noise from the general aviation airport nearby. No two ways about it, this park is wedged in close to the built environment of exurbia and its housing subdivisions. According to a trailside map, the park also lies in the headwaters of the Broad Run watershed.

driftingCharles (who is part of Fairfax County’s Resource Management team), along with field trip participants who volunteer at Fairfax County’s Huntley Meadows Park, was a good source of peripheral resource management information and opinions. He calls the alien grass Arthraxon hispidus “the Microstegium of wet, open places.” Apparently the county champion Winged Sumac (Rhus copallinum) can be found in Huntley Meadows Park. Charles encouraged us to get a whiff of the maple syrup-scented Sweet Everlasting (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium); pointed out the cunning fruits of Seedbox (Ludwigia alternifolia); and found a loosestrife with the hard-to-spell name Cuphea petiolata, otherwise known as Blue Waxweed. Charles does birds, too, and he reports that Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum) is uncommonly cooperative in this patch—worth a return trip.

targetin fruitOthers in the group found several examples of a Ground Cherry in flower and fruit that we consensus ID’d as Smooth Ground Cherry. USDA gives the nomenclature as Physalis longifolia Nutt. var. subglabrata (Mack. & Bush) Cronquist. The ornamental plant Chinese Lantern is in the same genus.

getting the shotthe native oneNo fruits, but a native Red Mulberry (Morus rubra) was doing well (the common White Mulberries [M. alba] you see everywhere were imported by colonists in a failed attempt to establish a silk trade). I believe I heard Charles say that the leaves on rubra are more regular, a statement borne out by the image at right. David Sibley’s book also points out the lenticels in young bark, which you can also see in the photo.

A couple of Monarch butterflies made an apperarance; a skipper or two—the weather remained cloudy and cool. While I was stroking the greasy top of Purple-top (Tridens flavus), we spotted a lettuce and a spurge, each with their own milky sap.

mistyA lovely composite, no longer in the genus Eupatorium with the bonesets and Joe-Pye weeds, this is Blue Mistflower (Conoclinium coelestinum).

Bull Run Mountains loop

veiled mysterycoral brancherAfter our recent heavy rains, the woods were exploding with mushroom fruiting bodies on today’s field trip to the Bull Run Mountains, under the auspices of the Virginia Native Plant Society and the Prince William Wildflower Society, host to the VNPS’ annual meeting. I wish that I had had such conditions when I was working through David Farr’s mushroom class last year.

repose5 mos. 2ds.We hiked a state preserve property managed by the Bull Run Mountains Conservancy. The trailhead (within earshot of I-66) is on Beverley Mill Road, which parallels Virginia 55 through Thoroughfare Gap. Moving north, we crossed the railroad and moved into the area that was once the managed by the Chapman family. The family cemetery is compact, with most of the markers representing nineteenth-century passings, some of them quite premature.

long gonelate bloomerAt the ruins of Meadowland, the family home, late-blooming Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia) (in the Aster family) was still going strong. Smartweeds around here were prevalent, and I made a note to bone up on my Polygonum knowledge.

Our group was quite large, and it was only after we split into smaller groups to make the climb to the ridgeline that things felt completely organized. There was a temptation to hang back with the fern and lycophyte specialist leader as we moved up the Fern Hollow Trail—the hollows of this mountain are jumping with lycopdodium and other spore plants—but I pressed on with the climbers.

easy climbinglooking westThe ascent is fairly gentle, rising about 850 feet in 2 miles or so to the High Point Overlook. (The return felt a little more crumbly.) Going up, we paused to ID Pitch Pine (Pinus rigida). But the destination pine for this trip is Table Mountain Pine (P. pungens), found at the High Point overlook. The overlook, accessible through the indulgence of private property owners, is just over the line in Fauquier County, by my map reading. Also near the summit, False Foxglove (Aureolaria spp.) was isn bright yellow flower.

one flowermany flowersComing back down, parasitoids seemed especially easy to find. Both species of Monotropa (Indianpipe in the left image and Pinesap in the right)…

nice and freshand a Broomrape family member, Beechdrops (Epifagus virginiana). This is a lovely natural area completely new to me, visited by not too many people, not far from D.C. (It’s just a few miles beyond the Gainesville split.) I will make it a point to return.

Smith decoded

So. So the fact is, at the end of the 4th century Greenwich was covered in the kind of plant life and so on that grows over the places no one goes to or uses. Probably there was a lot of ancient wildlife which came when that happened, the equivalents of frogs and hedgehogs and the kinds of things that come and inhabit places like on Springwatch on TV. On that programme they tell you how to make a wilderness in your garden so that live things will come and visit it or even decide to make their homes there. Some of them can be quite rare like the bird that is called a willow warbler which used to be widespread but now there are hardly any. But the point is, places that right now right this minute are places people go to in London and do not think twice about being in, can seriously just disappear. (There but for the, p. 286)

Ali Smith’s ten-year-old narrator Brooke has the gist of the conservation argument, but her facts regarding the status of Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) are not quite there. Across Europe, the bird is not listed as a species of concern; it’s only in Britain that populations have fallen off, placing it on Amber conservation status.