Dr. Metablog

A Further Note on Nineteenth-Century Horsedrawn Vehicles

Modern readers of the great classic novels of the previous era generally have no clue about the significance of horses and horse-drawn vehicles.  As I wrote, right here on this blague a couple of months ago, "no, I'm not obsessed, it's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance of jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, but we are, except for specialists, utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, dearborn, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, phaeton, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, tandem, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, and wurt."

What does it tell us when our hero arrives on the scene in a wurt?  Does it mean that he is rich and stylish, or vulgar and pretentious, or tasteless, or downtrodden.  We don't know, and so we read our own traditional literature with one hand tied behind our backs.

Well, I though that I had made my point, and I thought also that I had exhausted the list of nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicles.  But then I came upon this passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (a truly splendid novel published in 1920, though the action is set in the 1870s). 

     They [Archer and Countess Olenska] walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.
    "I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cabstands were still a "foreign" novelty.

The novelty, the herdic, was "a kind of carriage invented by Peter Herdic of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1881" (so Wharton is guilty of a tiny anachronism).  "A predecessor of the taxicab, the herdic was a small two-wheeled carriage that had side seats and an entrance at the back.  Their low entry made it easy for passengers to enter and exit the cars.  The first herdics carried up to eight passengers.  The earliest herdics were painted bright yellow."

Cheers to Peter Herdic, forgotten father of the Yellow Cab. 

New Bird in Town

A creature previously unknown to me has appeared in the pond.  After a few moments with the binoculars and a glance at Peterson's classic Field Guide to the Birds along with some intense internet research, I could make a positive identification.  It's a double-crested cormorant, usually found at the seacoast but sometimes in rivers and lakes, which has been "recently extending its range" and which has just now arrived on Hackett Hill Road.  Although it's exciting to encounter a new bird, especially a large graceful swimmer and diver, the cormorant arrives tarnished by a bad reputation.  Cormorants form very large colonies and over-indulge their voracious appetites -- they gobble fish, frogs, salamanders, clean out the lakes.  Is it after our trout?  They've become a pest on Lake Champlain, where they're now "taking measures" to reduce the population.  I don't mind one cormorant, but I certainly don't want to host a horde of them

When the first wild turkey arrived, about fifteen years ago, everyone would stop and stare.  Now turkeys are as common as pigeons, but as far as I can tell, do no damage (unless they get into the garden, which they haven't, so far).  They eat insects, not frogs. Plus they're good eating.  I've never heard of anyone salivating over roast cormorant.

I'd trade the cormorant, and the turkeys for that matter, for some of the birds that have disappared over the last forty years.  We used to have a symphony at dawn and dusk -- now there's hardly a peep, except for the robins and the bluejays.  I'd give a lot to hear a white-throated sparrow at daybreak.  It's been years since I've seen a bluebird, a wren, an indigo bunting, an oriole, a purple martin, a red-wing blackbird, a sandpiper, a tanager, a vireo.  Or seen the swifts overhead. Even our once-abundant swallows have become rare. Where are they? 

Late Blight

It sems so allegorically named, late blight, especially appropriate to your septuagenarian gardener. But it's more than symbolic -- late blight here and it's real.   It's official name is phytophthora infestans.  It's a noxious fungus and it appears just when you're about to start harvesting your abundant tomatoes.  Late blight blackens and putrifies leaves, stems, and the fruits themselves. It leaves nothing edible, and there's no recourse o do except to pull out your plants, and then either burn them or put them in black plastic and take them to the dump.  We're trying to rescue a few of the tomatoes by pulling off the bad leaves, but it's a losing cause.  All that work -- starting the seeds, watching and watering, fertilizing and staking and tying up -- all wasted.  What a pity.

 Late blight also affects potatoes.  In fact, this nasty fungus is responsible for the great Irish famine of the 1840s.  So while we're mournful, we're glad that we don't depend on our tomatoes for sustenance or income. 

Why this year?  Some say that the disease comes to us from the great factory farms in the south, where tomatoes are started early and then shipped north in late spring. My neighbors put the blame on Wal-Mart.  But in all honesty, I must admit that all my tomatoes were started locally, by friends and relations.  The fungus can't be transmitted through the seed, so the tomato factories are off the hook.  The real culprit is the weather -- the soggy cold of June and July was hideous if you're a tomato but just perfect if you're a blight.  

I think I'll take a year off from tomatoes -- let the garden go fallow, or just plant flowers.  I couldn't bear to lose another crop. I'll follow the official advice --root out every single volunteer tomato and pull every weed in the nightshade family.  No tomatoes until 2011.       

The Slightness of the Lambs

As far as I can tell, the deer generally keep clear of the back field where the Morgans and the Scottish Blackfaces are pastured.  Perhaps it's because the domestic animals eat down the grass, or perhaps the deer just don't like company.  But a few days ago, I watched four white-tailed deer -- a doe with three fawns, I believe, though such a group makes an unlikely family -- chase twenty-two sheep out of the field and back to their fold.  Sheep are notoriously skittish, but then, so are the white tails.  It was a battle of cowards.  It was especially painful to watch because one of the sheep was the ram, McCavish, and it's his job (aside from the annual servicing, at which he performed brilliantly) is to guard the ewes.  McCavish is the "herd sire," new to the flock,  He was recently imported from Wisconsin; his grandfather came from Scotland in the form of a vial of sperm packed in dry ice.  What was Mr. McCavish thinking when he ran from the field?  I was embarrassed for him and for the entire flock.  Query:  will the sheep stand their ground or will they allow themselves to be intimidated by the wild turkeys?

Pastorale

Sharon was here yesterday.  She has a new method to keep the raccoons and the rats out of the food bins.  "The rats gnaw through the plastic garbage cans, the raccons open them unless I bungee them real tight. Galvinized works, but what we do now is buy junk refrigerators or freezers.  The rats can't get into them.  Of course, what you spill is feast for the mice."  Sharon's husband is a vet, but at lambing time last winter he was still recuperating from a hip replacement.  "One of the ewes," Sharon says, "was having a hard time delivering her lamb.  I went out to help pull.  I pulled out a head and a leg.  The lamb must have been dead for a long time.  I whipped out the cell phone.  I said to David, 'I don't care how long it takes to limp down here, you're in charge.'  He took one look, got the rifle, and shot the ewe." 

On Aggasiz

Louis Agassiz was, Darwin aside, the nineteenth century's most acclaimed naturalist.  He was the first to speculate about the ice ages and the first to suggest that mastodons and other giant quadrapeds had become extinct as a consequence of the deep freeze in Europe and America.  Agassiz was much celebrated in his lifetime, and at his death, Harvard, where he taught, shut down for a day for his majestic funeral.  James Russell Lowell contributed an eleven-page elegy to the Atlantic. "Seldom, if ever, has the death of a man of science been so deeply felt," reported The Nation.

These details are drawn from Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's (2009) an oddly-titled but informative and accessible history of Darwinism in gilded-age America.

Here's a striking and crowded sentence about Aggasiz, also drawn from Werth's book."The son of a strong-willed assistant pastor to the Protestant congregation of a lakeside village in French-speaking Switzerland who married well, he was his parents' fifth child but the first to survive infancy." 

Agassiz was a therefore a "replacement child" with a vengeance. He "replaced" four lost siblings (but whether male or female Werth does not say).  Imagine his parents' pain; imagine how young Louis must have been cherished and protected but also, possibly, afflicted with the 'guilt of the survivor.'  Or how he must have unconsciously competed with his deceased and therefore perfect brothers and sisters.  And then try to imagine both his mother's suffering and also how his aspiring and apparently devout father might have responded to such an appalling succession of family tragedies. 

Agassiz wa.s America's foremost opponent of evolution.  He rejected natural selection because, he claimed, "Darwinism" led inevitably to "atheism" -- which hasn't turned out to be the case, although I personally can't imagine why not.  Agassiz took his own idiosyncratic route and proselytized for the curious and retrograde doctrine of "polygenism" -- the idea that the various races of man were separately -- and hierarchically -- created.  Agassiz imagined eight different kinds of humans, ranked according to their "cranial capacity" -- Caucasian, Arctic, Mongol, American Indian, Negro, Hottentot, Malay, and Australian (thereby running afoul of both "monogenists" like Darwin and bible-worshippers who acknowledged only one creation -- that of Adam and Eve). For Agassiz, each species was "a thought of God."  An odd path for usually observant scientist.  Agassiz was the favorite intellectual of slaveholders and their apologists. 

Agassiz was also a virulent and odious racist. Here's what he wrote to his mother when he stopped at a hotel in which he was served by black waiters.  "It is impossible to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on their heads, their bent knees and elongated hands, their large curved fingernails, and above all the livid colors of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance, and when they advanced that hideous hand toward my plate to serve me, I wished that I could leave in order to eat my bread apart rather than dine with such service.  What unhappiness for the white race to have tied its existence so closely with that of the Negroes. God protect us."  And so on, and more, and worse.  I can't remember reading a paragraph that more turned the stomach or that more cried out for psychological analysis.       

I cannot help wondering whether there might not be a connection between Agassiz's status as a replacement child and his embrace of polygenism.  It is possible that he unconsciously thought that he was a special and superior person because he, of all his siblings, was chosen for survival?  And that in the same way, white people were chosen and superior among all the "races" of humankind.  His deeply-held resistance to evidence that persuaded almost all of his fellow naturalists is inexplicable -- unless he clung to the doctrine of special creation for reasons that were fundamentally irrational.  Put it this way:  Agassiz's unusual situation required him to believe that he, and people with whom he could identify, were marked for distinction -- and that all others were inferior.  One of five among the siblings, one of eight among the races.  How else could he free himself of the guilt that he lived and thrived while his apparently less deserving siblings had perished?

Broad-brush cheap pop psychologizing, to be sure -- but let's reserve judgment until we find some time to get ourself to the library and learn a little about this brilliant, disgusting man. 

Carrots, etc.

I've experimented a bit in with flowers but in my choice of vegetables I've been quite conservative.  My garden has always relied upon the standards:  black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Detroit red beets, Danvers carrots, Waltham 29 broccoli.  But now I've decided to take a walk on the wild side.  In today's mail came my brand-new heirloom and rare seed catalog.  (Is there anything that more brightens a cold December morn than the colorful arden catalog that arrives in the mailbox at winter solstice?)  Consider the lowly carrot, for example.  Here are some of the possible choices for next year's adventure garden:  the 12" long red-orange St. Valery, dating from the 19th century;  Lunar Whites -- "white carrots were grown during the Middle Ages but now rare";  Cosmic Purple -- a dark variety, loaded with lycopene;  Parisienne -- "small round carrots popular in France";  Chantenay Red Core -- "a large stump-rooted carrot with a deep red-orange center" dating from 1929;  the "mild and sweet" Shin Kuroda, a Japanese variety.  And twenty other equally entrancing varieties.  How to choose?  I have room for twenty feet of carrots.  Just enough for one variety, or possibly, if I push it, two.   And what about tomatoes, the king of all summer vegetables, but an uncontrollable plant that turns itself into a jungle come August.  Nine pages of varieties -- greens, yellows, pinks, reds, purples in various sizes form cherry to plum to 2-pounders;  some of them mottled, others striped, round, cylindrical, and every one of  them claiming to offer old-fashioned sweet/acid tomato taste.  How many can I possibly plant?   However few, I know I'll be imploring my friends take some, please, with you when you leave.  Old Vermont saying:  "always keep your car locked in August, otherwise someone will open your door and throw in a bunch of zucchinis."  Or tomatoes. Which brings me to the nine pages of exciting squash, including the Hopi Cushaw and the Pink Banana and the.....  Well, you can see my dilemma. 

The Black Cochin

Cathy: "We have a Cochin.  She's beautiful.  Her feathers are an iridescent black.  With Cochins, the feathers cover the entire leg.  She's a pet, part of the family.  She's four years old and must weigh seven pounds.  But just lately she developed some sort of neurological disease.  She would quiver, shake, sometimes her wings, sometimes all over.  Faint.  We took her to the vet.  We thought she had eaten something bad.  It's such a wet year, there are mushrooms all over the place.  Perhaps she ate mushrooms or some poisonous berries.  The vet took an x-ray.  It cost $400."

Dr. M. (flabbergasted):  "You spent $400 on a ten-dollar chicken?!

Cathy:  "Actually, she was given to us.  Free."

Dr. M.:  "What did the x-ray show?"

Cathy:  "An egg.  You could see it clearly."

Dr. M.:  "I mean about the disease."

Cathy:  "Nothing in particular.  The shaking stopped after a while,  But a few days later she developed bumblefoot because she couldn't perch correctly.

Dr. M.:  "Bumblefoot?"

Cathy:   "Bumblefoot is an infection.  It distorts the shape of the foot.  So we've been giving her antibiotics.  One of us holds her in a towel, then the other pries open her beak.  You insert a mixture of applesauce and antibiotic into her beak. She doesn't like it."

Dr. M.:  "Is it working?"

Cathy:  "It's not clear.  She may have to have surgery. The doctor recommends it."

Dr. M. (in a state of shock):  "Surgery?  On a chicken?  How much is that going to cost."

Cathy:  "The vet says $700.  He's an avian specialist.

Dr. M (astounded):  "Are you going to do it?"

Cathy:  "We don't know.  We're thinking about it."

Dr. M.:  "Have you considered physical therapy?  Massage.  Perhaps acupuncture?

Cathy: "First we're going to try echinacea or goldenseal."

The Sculpin. Slimy or Mottled?

Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006).  It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond,  The bullhead, a villainous omnivore, is one of the causes of the steep decline of our population of frogs.  The butt-ugly, scaleless, bebarbelled brute gobbles frog eggs.    

Readers of this blague will not be astonished to learn that Dr. M .has fallen deeply in love with fish names.  Take the brown bullhead, for example.  It's also known by such evocative and lunatic denominations as the horned pout, the mudcat, and the minister.  Minister?  To whom, or under what circumstances, would a brown bullhead minister?

My favorite Vermont fish, nomenclature-wise, is the slimy sculpin, also performing under such titles as the blob, the chucklehead, the rock cusk, the stargazer, and the cockatouch.  The slimy sculpin should not be confused with its near cousin, the mottled sculpin -- which can also be addressed as the slowfish or gudgeon. 

Many of the common Vermont fishes have lost their colorful historic names.  The bowfin was once called the John A. Gindle, the stonecat was the doogler, the lake trout was the togue or longue, the burbot was variously ling or lawyer (lawyer? minister?  why not accountant? or dentist?), the quillback was the buffalo, and the gar was the needlenose. On the other hand, the blandly-named pond perch of olden days is trending in the reverse direction:  it's now called the pumpkinseed -- a name which seems curiously vegetarian for a denizen of the deep.   

If I had known that there was a fish called the cisco (known on jolly days as the tollibee and on prosaic days as the sand herring), I would long ago have promoted Galen Cisco to my all-time-great Baseball-Fish Team, adding him to such piscine luminaries as Catfish Hunter, Dizzy Trout, Chico Salmon, Sid Bream, Bobby Sturgeon, Art "Red" Herring, and Shad Roe.

No Sculpins in MLB that I can recall, but In a more poetic universe, "Slimy" Sculpin would have been a spitball pitcher, or perhaps even a team owner.

A Non-Mystical Experience

It was the evening of a cloudy day and I had my face in among the clumps of blooming daylilies, which I was trying to protect from the constant encroachment of witch grass.  It's a minor art -- to lie on the ground and reach arm's length into the forest of leaves, careful not to knock the fragile buds off the scapes, and identify and remove the underground stems of the witch grass by feel alone.  I had pulled out a heap of noxious weeds and was lost, absolutely lost, in the project, when suddenly, from behind my back the about-to-set sun emerged and illuminated the scene   For no more than thirty seconds the daylily spectrum was on full display:  apricot, pink, a range of yellows, each slightly different from its neighbor, a near white, along with a few fully saturated, shimmering crimsons, plus some bicolors with their cute contrasting throats.  For a glorious moment, everything leaped at me. It was truly theatrical to be surrounded by such brilliant colors and shapes and fragrances -- a rare and memorable instance of transcendent aesthetic bliss. 

The next day, on he telephone, I tried to convey my rapture to The Daughter. She was concerned.  One of her friends had had a similar moment. Her friend was walking in the Colorado mountains and came upon a magnificent field of wild flowers.  The experience was powerful and life-changing, and she's now, after years of study, an Episcopal priest. "You're not going to tell me that it was a religious experience, are you?"  I could hear the worry in her voice.  My response:  "I would have thought you'd have known me better than that."

Some people conflate beauty with spirituality and religion.  I'm not one of those people.  Beauty is transcendent, yes, but it's also material and explicable. 

No question but that the profusion of daylily colors is glorious. For a hundred years now, careful hybridizers have worked on the homely fulvous lily, a roadside weed sometimes inelegantly called the "outhouse lily", and have transformed it into the bearer of the rainbow colors in which it now sparkles.  Thank you, clever daylily breeders, for your generations of imaginative work.  Thanks also to the parcel post driver who every year brings me three or four more new varieties from Oakes in Tennessee.  And while I'm at it, I would also like to thank the people who designed and built that brown truck and its rubber tires and constructed the roads and refined the gasoline -- no border of daylilies without their help.  Nor without the designers and manufacturers of my spade and my favorite dibble and my all-purpose dandelion puller.  I could add other equally essential people -- go right back to the first practitioners of smelting -- but I think I've made my point.  The daylilies do not declare the glory of god;  they declare the glory of human civilization and human enterprise. 

I  grow a single wild fulvous lily on the grounds, just as a reminder.

It's drab.