My Summer Vacation, Take 2

(A more plant-centric version of this journey can be found at PrincetonNatureNotes.org.)

For many in Princeton, August means it's time to hit the open road, which in reality often translates to crawling along roads that would be open if not for accidents, road construction and a general outpouring of humanity and machines. It was flattering and validating to see that so many other people decided to head westward on the very same day we did. Where we were going was surely very important, given how many people were trying to get there.

One traffic jam lasted close to two hours--long enough to contemplate what it would be like if traffic never resumed flowing. Since road-building is not keeping pace with production of vehicles, there eventually will be enough cars and trucks to occupy every square foot of asphalt in the United States, at which point we will all have to get out and walk.

Arriving at our destination after 13 meditative hours on the road, I had another spooky encounter with the underlying irrationality of modern civilization, the next day at the post office in Ann Arbor. Though the town has its share of attractive buildings, this is not one of them. One time, about 20 years ago, some Neo-Nazis decided to come to town to demonstrate. I happened to be walking down the street as they drove up and climbed out of the back of their truck. Apparently it had been pre-arranged with the authorities that they would be allowed to demonstrate in front of this building. Anti-Nazi demonstrators had shown up in force to let them know they were not welcome. With police keeping the two groups apart, the Nazis proceeded to line up in front of the large windows, whereupon the anti-Nazis pelted them with stones, breaking most of the windows. It looked from a distance like some elaborate form of architectural criticism, or an exploration of deep irony--the Nazis with their violent, hateful, intolerant ideology standing silently, while the anti-Nazis defended peace, love and tolerance by hurling stones and epithets.

This bizarre event is likely replicated across the country on a regular basis. I just found an article about a similar incident in Trenton in April of 2011, with a Bank of America losing some glass in the process.

Fortunately, the rest of the trip showed the better side of humanity, with a series of inspiring encounters--inspiring in that they are examples of success in endeavors where so many of us struggle.

1) Begin with the old telescope at the University of Michigan's Detroit Observatory, beautifully restored to the condition it must have been in when my father used it in grad school in the 1930s. Many historic buildings in the Princeton area, including my cause celebre, the Veblen House in Herrontown Woods, are in desperate need of a similar trajectory.

2) Next came a highly edible encounter with the world's fastest egg. From a friend who has to rush out the door early each morning to get to his day job, I learned that eggs can be microwaved. (Scramble an egg in a bowl, add a dabble (somewhere between a dab and a dribble) of water, microwave about a minute. As it heats, it rises very impressively in the bowl like a chiffon, then collapses when the microwave turns off. Wash the bowl right after eating to prevent the residue from hardening.) This was a fine addition to my three other microwavables: corn on the cob (leave in husk, 1.5 minutes per ear) broccoli (put in a bowl, dribble olive oil and a little salt, cover and cook a couple minutes), and oatmeal (half cup each of quick oats, water and milk, heat 1.5 minutes).

3) Then witnessed was a successful harboring of pet rodents, with which I have had no luck and much grief, most poignantly when as a kid I had a hamster die after just four days. We later suspected the cage carried some pathogen despite our efforts to clean it thoroughly beforehand. After I came into the house after the burial, sitting down in the living room, close to tears, Ravel's Pavanne for a Dead Princess came on the radio. If music hadn't already become attached to my deepest pain, it certainly was after that. My kids have had little more luck than I, so we were well prepared to be impressed this August by our friends' improbably good experience with, of all things, rats. Among rodents, I now know, rats excel as intelligent, gentle pets, and can even be therapeutic to hold, as long as one monitors them to make sure they don't circle round behind you and start nibbling on your clothes. These were rats of high pedigree--"Berkshires", no less. The long, bare tail may seem more attractive if one realizes it is a clever device for regulating temperature.

4) There was, too, a rare sighting of a healthy cucumber plant in a community garden nearby. Most cucumber plants that I've seen will grow to a length of about two feet, bear one deformed, bitter cucumber, then proceed to die. Only once did I manage to grow a healthy plant, and then only by breaking the rules, transplanting an extra plant into ground fertilized with fresh horse manure and mulched with manured hay. All the books said that fresh manure will burn the roots, but the result of my spontaneous experiment was a monster plant that bore 30 well-formed cucumbers, while the others planted in ordinary soil withered in the customary way close by.

5) Just down from the happy cucumber was a friend's project to turn much of the local park's sprawling turfdom into "wet meadow" habitat to absorb runoff and feed the local pollinators with a bonanza of native wildflowers. As winter shifts to spring each year, the parks department comes out and conducts a prescribed burn, cleaning the meadow of last year's spent growth. It's an elegant horticultural tool when properly done, and draws a crowd of neighbors to witness the controlled conflagration. Though I've managed to catalyze conversion of some turf in Princeton's parks to meadows, I have not yet ventured to convince the powers that be that a nice prescribed burn late in the winter would be a good way to stimulate healthy growth and replicate historic ecological conditions.

6) And then there was a visit with a jazz guitarist friend I used to perform with in a latin/jazz group. In the years since I saw him last, he has quietly gained a prominent place on youtube, with more than three million visits to his channel. His magic formula for success seems to be to post performances of his arrangements of well-known jazz, rock and popular tunes, then sell DVDs that demonstrate how he plays every note of the arrangements. Though he also plays many gigs, he can have a very positive effect on the world and his financial well-being without venturing much beyond his basement studio.

7) Having witnessed a rare success at monetizing musicianship, it was off to Cleveland, where I saw a demonstration of how to take on perhaps life's greatest challenge, entropy. By entropy I mean the tendency of all human endeavors to sooner or later unravel, through the tendency of the product of our labors to gather dust, decay, wear out, and/or be misplaced. This is closely related to String Theory, which here is defined as the tendency of string to become hopelessly tangled at the slightest provocation. Yet on a quiet street in Cleveland Heights, my sister and her husband have vanquished entropy to a degree only dreamed of by most of humanity. Through a combination of love, time, and persistence, they have restored their historic home, placed their lifelong accumulations in a pleasing and accessible order, and continue to send packing all dust that dares to fall. The lack of stuff-out-of-place dissonance made for a peaceful effect.

8) On the drive home on I-80, boredom finally led to a short detour through Black Moshannon State Park in Pennsylvania, the centerpiece of which is a small reservoir. There awaited a different sort of serenity, the sort that comes only when all machine noise has been stripped away, allowing our ears to experience profound silence. Even if there are sporadic sounds of birds or people talking in the distance, those sounds take on a crystalline quality, and you can still hear the silence beneath them, extending up the valley and deep into the forest all around. A car may come by, bringing with it a slow crescendo of white noise that blots out silence like a city's waste light blots out the stars. If one's lucky and no more traffic comes by, the car's noise will peak, then fall and fade away until the silence reemerges in all its beauty.

And so here, in a world well stocked with humanity's failings, are a few successes worth seeking to replicate. The lion may never lay down with the lamb, but if rats can cuddle up with humans, if musicians can prosper and cucumbers find the right soil to grow, if heritage can be preserved and entropy kept at bay, and if exquisite silence can still find refuge on this earth, then maybe there's a future for us after all.