Rolling On One

We were in Maine last weekend (Jan 13-14) with Charley, Nicole, and Emma. There was a dusting of snow on Sunday morning.

Arlene and I walked around our trails, I put up two signposts at the junction of the Blueberry trail and the Rock-to-Rock trail,

and we all put together something that Charley had given us, a sort of color mixing puzzle that’s sixty-four cubes of different colors, that’s designed to go together to demonstrate a color solid. The colors must not be that precisely mixed, because many of the jumps aren’t at all uniform — that is, there’s a biggish jump between two little blocks, and then the next two are very close together. Emma was very good at finding the next color to go in sequence. I cheated by looking at the numbers on each cube, but most of the time the one Emma handed me was the right one to go next.

We call that the rock-to-rock trail because when we were cutting it we sort of kept saying, “Let’s go to that rock over there next.” There are rocks all over the property, this being northern New England. Some of them are pretty substantial, like this one.

It’s not half-dome in Yosemite (but now that you mention it, I think that’s what we’ll nickname it), but look where it comes up to on Arlene:

I swam on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, 28, 32 (or more likely 34 — I thought maybe I lost count at the end and did two more just to be sure I got in a good 32) and 32 lengths. Thursday I had to get to work early so I didn’t swim, and Friday I had too much of a cough to want to assault my lungs with all that chlorine. Just an excuse for laziness? I’m never sure.

For the record, I swam on Friday Jan 12, 24 lengths (600 meters). Let’s say it took 16:35. That’s the farthest so far this year, and it was nonstop. Gradually getting in shape.

Maybe you remember, from our trip to Orono, that we (especially Arlene) are into baskets. Well. There’s a long tradition of basketry on the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands. Arlene has heard about it for years from one of her art teacher colleagues who lived in Charleston. She was hoping to see some Gullah basketmakers at the big market area (a little — OK, a lot — like Quincy Market in Boston), and indeed there were a couple; but the guide books all said that basketmakers set up their stalls along route 17 in Mount Pleasant, north of Charleston. There’s a highway around Charleston that runs into route 17 somewhere in Mount Pleasant. I wasn’t sure if the basketry would be north or south of that intersection, but north seemed a better bet so I crossed my fingers and drove that way.

I don’t know if there are more on the other side of the intersection, but we did find basket stalls the way we were going. Here’s Joel watching; I don’t know if Ethel or Celestine Ravenel is working here:

… and then this is Celestine or Ethel, who we did buy some baskets from.

Arlene had read something about one basketmaker, Vera Manigault, who is dyeing some of the materials and producing baskets with different colors. She was at the third place we stopped to look. If you google her you’ll see that she does workshops all over. She explained to me all about the difference between left-handed and right-handed basket sewing; the spiral goes in the opposite direction because of how the weaver holds it all.

We continued along US 17 to Boone Hall plantation, a major tourist trap. It’s a huge place, one of several former plantations in the Charleston area that are trying to make a living off tourism. Unlike most of the others, Boone Hall is still a working farm. Besides tours it has pick-your-own fruits and vegetables in season, a corn maze, and so on. Once upon a time Boone Hall was the biggest pecan growing operation in the country (world?). There are still lots of pecan trees, but they’re no longer the main cash crop.

For fiber people, here are a couple of pictures of cotton. Boone Hall doesn’t raise cotton as a crop, but does plant a small patch just so visitors can see how it grows.

Of course, on a 4000 acre property “a small patch” is as big as a Newton house lot.

There’s a whole lot to see at Boone Hall. Besides the real tourist trap things, we saw two pileated woodpeckers flying over.

There was a tour of the big house. We asked the guide for recommendations for restaurants in the area. She said, “well, downtown, my favorite place is Jestine’s Kitchen.” Hah! we did right by ourselves the previous evening. She also told us about a place called The Mustard Seed there in Mount Pleasant, where we did end up going. It was excellent, more like modern city cuisine than regional cooking, with very reasonable prices.
Here are Arlene and Millie walking around the gardens of the place. Although it’s not barren like winter in New England, nothing was in bloom.

This round building is the smokehouse. It looks small from here, but it’s big enough inside to hold lots of hams and sides of bacon.

The big entrance drive is just for decoration. Some of the live oaks were planted in the early 1700s.

This was a presentation about Gullah culture, given by a woman named Sharon who has studied acting and really knows what she is doing. She told a story all in Gullah, and almost all I could understand was “binyuh” and “kumhyuh.” And of course I wouldn’t have understood that if we hadn’t been on the bus tour two days before. Here she’s demonstrating one of the steps in threshing, winnowing, cleaning, and polishing rice. That’s one of the brick slave quarters buildings.

As the end of her presentation, Sharon taught a Sea Islands childrens’ call and response game and got eight volunteers (Arlene volunteered herself and me) from the audience up on the threshing floor to play.
Millie was amused by this Carolina Anole climbing up her leg.

This is the old cotton dock. A boat from here was the way to get to Charleston, especially if you were ready to row for eight or nine hours.

We didn’t have to row to Charleston. We just got in the car, drove to the Mustard Seed, found that they weren’t opening for another half hour, drove down to an old fort on Sullivan’s Island, came back, and had a delicious dinner.

Last weekend we stopped at Hannaford’s in Windham for groceries. They had all the nuts that people hadn’t bought for holiday entertaining marked down to 49 cents a pound. Including pecans! Since we had just got back from the part of the country where pecans are fairly common, they were on my mind. So I scooped up a small bag of them. I was eating a couple each evening and packing a couple for lunch, thinking of baking either a Huguenot torte or a pecan pie. Finally on Thursday evening I looked around the cupboard and was pleasantly surprised to find a bottle of Karo corn syrup, the missing ingredient for pecan pie.

Well! Most of the work was shelling the pecans. Once I had them all shelled, mixing up the filling and making the crust was pretty quick. And I have to say, it worked fine. I like pecan pie, and I’ll often choose it when I’m ordering dessert in a restaurant, on the rare occasions when it’s available around here, but that’s the first time I’ve made one. I’ll keep my eye out for pecans on sale in the future.

Recipe? just google and you’ll find several recipes, pretty similar. I followed one by GAgirl. I think her site has a popup window behind it, so I’m not going to link it.

Actually more, I’ve been swimming every morning so far this week. I think 12 lengths Monday, 16 Tues, 20 Weds. Tues and Weds I did the first 8 breathing every other stroke. That’s what I expect to do most of the way when I’m in shape. Tues it was just under 11 minutes for the 16 lengths, say 10:54. I want to be able to do 32 under 20 minutes, twice as far at a little faster pace the whole way.

Weds. night I did some database maintenance for ZGG. We had some customers listed multiple times (under the same name!) with multiple listings for (the same!) addresses. I cleaned that out. The goal was to be able to list all the invoices for a given customer, which wouldn’t have worked when the same customer had multiple IDs.  Unfortunately that meant not much knitting nor eraser carving.

We drove to Charleston, stopping to walk at a county park called the Caw Caw Interpretive Center. It had some nice trails and a very interesting exhibit about growing rice.

It turns out that rice growing is all about hydraulics, or at least about moving water. It also turns out that West Africa was one of the places where rice has been grown for centuries. Guess where the know-how for the Carolina rice industry came from? Caw Caw park has a network of (long abandoned) ditches which were managed to flood and drain rice fields according to the plants’ seasonal requirements. The field has to be flooded when the rice is planted, then drained, then flooded again, drained again, and flooded once more before harvest. The visitor center exhibit had a model of a ditch control gate, a rectangular wooden culvert that had paddles suspended from an overhead frame to close it off at each end, depending on which way you wanted the water to go. Water pressure on the outside would push a paddle against the culvert, preventing water from flowing in from that side. The paddle on the side from which you wanted water to come could be raised by levers inserted into a series of holes on the paddle’s handle, so you slid the paddle along the front of the culvert rather than trying to push against the water pressure. This is just my science background and basic nerdiness coming out — I spent a while studying the model and talking with the woman running the visitor center, trying to figure it all out.

We walked around Charleston. There’s a big visitor center for the whole city, with a parking garage. The city is small enough that we figured we could walk all around, and we did, but there are trolley tours and shuttles for people who don’t want to walk as much as we do. There were cars from all over the country in the garage.

To minimize the amount of street frontage that houses took up (thus cutting down on the tax assessment) early Charleston houses were built with the side to the street and the front door on the side, still having those big second-story porches that I think of as southern architecture. This was the first one of those that we saw. Kind of strange? At least distinctive. The door on the street isn’t the front door, just the door to the yard and the porch. In other sections of the city the houses like that are separated from the next one just by the width of a driveway.

This is the front of the oldest theatre in Charleston. It’s famous for having the bar where Planter’s Punch was invented. How about that wrought iron. Did you think the French Quarter of New Orleans was the only place with that kind of thing? There’s plenty of it in Charleston.

On our way from the parking garage to the sections of the city with the old houses we noticed a restaurant, Jestine’s Kitchen, that seemed to have lots of regional food and looked like the level of place, and the price range, that we were interested in. When we came back it was full, with a short line waiting outside. We were seated after a little while, and yes, it was just what we had been looking for. I got pecan-crusted fried chicken with side dishes of field peas and fried okra. Arlene shared her side of collard greens with me, and we swapped some stewed okra for some of the fried. There was no sweet potato pie on the dessert menu, but there was pecan pie, with a thick layer of chopped pecans on top rather than one or two pecan halves.

Besides great regional food, Jestine’s big idiosyncracy is its collection of chinaware salt and pepper shakers. Every table has a different set, and counters around the room have dozens more pairs on display. It seems as though it’s a tradition for regular customers to send a pair of salt and pepper shakers to the restaurant from wherever they travel.

Oh, and did you ever wonder about those Corona Beer commercials showing Christmas lights on palm trees? I guess that’s real, because even in Charleston you can see them.

In the morning we went back to the Sea Pines Forest Preserve with Millie and Joel and walked farther than we had the day before. It was later in the day than we had been there on Wedensday, and there were fewer birds about. It’s still a place we like, with several boardwalks, upland and swamp forest , and lakes to look out over. We saw quantities of pied-billed grebes as well as anhingas, a pelican, and the usual (for South Carolina) suspects.

After lunch Arlene and I went on bus tour with Gullah Heritage Tours. We had seen them leaving from the visitor center the day before. Well! We finally got to see a lot of the part of Hilton Head that’s not gated communities and brand-new shopping areas. We were the only people on our tour bus, except of course for the driver. He started the tour with a ten- or fifteen-minute talk in the visitor center parking lot, telling us about the Gullah language and his own background.

The Gullah language is really just like Yiddish. Yiddish is mostly medieval German with lots of Hebrew words and words from other languages mixed in, with its own sentence structure and speaking patterns. Gullah is largely 17th century English with lots of words from various West African languages mixed in, using the grammar and sentence structure of those languages. My grandfather used to say that Yiddish was corrupted German, and Gullah was once regarded as broken English, but neither of those views is respectable nowadays.

So our tour driver started with a sample of Gullah, “Unnah koomyuh koom yuh fuh talk me binyuh.” After several repetitions, and remembering what I had read in the cookbook I got the day before, I thought I got it — “You off-islanders came here to talk to me, a native islander.” Yes, “binyuh” is “been here”, natives; “koomyuh”, “come here”. Just like “from away” in Maine, you could have lived on Hilton Head since you were one year old, but if you weren’t born there you’re “koomyuh.”

The driver, David Campbell, was a year or two older than I. He lived on the island through the ’50s, was in the Air Force, and came back. When he was a kid there was only one paved road on the island (and that was built just so the military could get to lookout towers built to watch for German submarines during WWII), no electricity, and no running water. He went to a segregated one-room school, one of several on the island that had been built by the WPA. Talking to him, and seeing  what’s real about the island, was definitely the high point of our Hilton Head experience.
Joel drove us out to the Baynard (I think that’s what) plantation ruins at dusk. There’s mostly remains of one big building, which had been built of a material called tabby, a mixture of oyster shells, lime, and mud, which had originally been covered with stucco to make it more weather resistant. It doesn’t hold up well. The building, less than 200 years old, was in worse shape than medieval castles I’ve seen in France or, really, the 5000-year-old ruins of Erebuni in Yerevan.

We played dominos in the evening. I had several non-starter hands, got stuck with the double blank once, and ran up a score over 400.

I took a bicycle out for a short jaunt down to the lighthouse area. Actually, Millie and Joel had rented bicycles for the week and said I could take one, but when I got up before everyone else I found that the bikes were locked up. I walked across the street to a strip mall which had a bike rental place, but it did I say I was up before everyone else? That included the bike rental place. I walked down the mall to the gas station and convenience store at the end, saw the headline that President Ford had died and decided to get the paper, got a piece of coffeecake or some such, and walked back. I did get to take a bike out when Millie found the lock combination for me. There are bike paths all over that end of the island, designed for people who only ride bikes when they are there I guess, because they are very winding and have stop signs every time they cross a driveway, which is every 100 or 200 feet. It’s a lot better than not bicycling at all, though, and a lot better than trying to bicycle on an ice-covered street in New England. At any rate, I did get down to the lighthouse —

— those are the LESS fancy of the yachts in the Harbourtown Yacht Basin — mostly to make sure I had that picture.

Arlene & I walked around the Sea Pines Forest Preserve in the morning. It turned out to be a wonderful place for birds, with a higher concentration of birds than almost any place we’ve ever been except for good days at Mount Auburn in the spring. There weren’t an awful lot of species, but there were several kinds of woodpeckers, loads of Carolina wrens, and zillions of yellow-rumped warblers. We also saw two small raccoons padding around the swamp near the rice field boardwalk.

In the afternoon Joel went off-island to play golf. Arlene, Millie, and I went to the island visitor center and then to the Pinckney Island national wildlife refuge just off the island. At the visitor center I bought Lorenzo Dow Turner’s book Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect and a cookbook with recipes in Gullah and translation.

Turner’s book is a serious scholarly classic. One of the nice things about it is that he writes Gullah words out in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA stands for other things than India Pale Ale, in some contexts). That does a lot for the language, just by making it clear that it’s its own language, not misspelled or broken English. But as I say it’s not light reading. I will have my February work cut out for me.

I wasn’t sure about the cookbook. I do think the Gullah versions are written with a lot of affection and respect, and food is a big part of any culture. I’m glad I got it and read it, even if I may never make any of the recipes in it.

We walked four or five miles at Pinckney Island NWR with Millie. It was another great place for birds, especially marsh birds. We saw lots of gallinules (moorhens)

and a sora

and lots of other birds.

Some other people walking asked us to take their picture, and then they took one of us

We watched “An Inconvenient Truth” on DVD in the evening.

The weather was beautiful on the 26th. Joel drove us all to Savannah, which is about an hour from Hilton Head. I had sort of forgotten that it’s a big seaport, but look at those ships! I got the impression that it’s built on the first high ground that Oglethorpe came to on the river, the first place that made sense to build a big settlement. That was admirable foresight!

We parked next to river. There are lots of little boutiques all along the cobblestone river walk, with wrought iron bridges connecting the next street to the backs of the stores that are on the third floor up from the river. We walked all around that side of the city, including a cavernous antique store that had (along with normal antique furniture) wooden counters around twelve-foot squares that could have been bars from English manor houses or registration desks from Victorian hotels, with price tags in the $25K range. I’m sorry to say I forget the name of the place where we ate, but when my eye got to the menu item “shrimp and grits” I looked no further. It was good, as long as I didn’t mind a lot of cream sauce, which I didn’t!

This park is all along the street a block from the river —

— and this is the block right along the river. There are shops and restaurants all along the bottom floor on the river side.

We moved the car and walked and walked around squares. The city, at least the old area, is made of something like 22 squares with trees and monuments and traffic that has to detour around the square. Fortunately, or maybe thanks to Oglethorpe’s foresight, there are through streets between the squares.

Savannah is full of historic houses with admission fees. We went into the gift shops of several of them but were content with the outsides of most.

We tracked down the synagogue, a gothic structure housing the third oldest Jewish congregation in the U.S. They are proud of a letter that George Washington wrote to the congregation way back when they needed some reassurance that this new nation really intended to have religious freedom.

Hmm, you can see that the weather was less nice by that part of the afternoon than when we got to Savannah.

Our other goal was the Beach Institute African American Cultural Center. It’s this unpretentious frame building, which wasn’t where the map showed it as being. We had to ask two people in the neighborhood before finding it. Arlene was very eager to see an exhibit of wood carvings by Ulysses Davis, a Savannah barber who was a genius with wood sculpture and design. What an imagination, and what a range of interests he had! There were busts of all the presidents of the U.S, items inspired by African art, flowers, animals, fantasy creatures, and more.

In the evening we watched “Little Miss Sunshine” on DVD.

It was a rainy Christmas day on Hilton Head. There’s always a lot of time discussing what we want to do, what and when we’re going to eat, and so on. I try to keep out of it because I’d rather be doing something than talking about it. In the rain there wasn’t much to do outside, though, and of course nothing was open. Joel drove us all around our corner of the island, just to see a little. The rain let up late in the day and we walked on the beach starting at Coligny Circle. It’s a very wide, gently sloping beach with sand packed so firm that you can easily ride a bicycle on it. On most of the New England beaches I know, it’s a real effort to walk from the parking lot through soft sand down to the water. Here, there were only a few yards of soft sand before you got to the firm part.

The palmetto-covered dunes look very different from the northeast shore, too.

We saw two piping plovers, as well as many small sandpipers. There really were quite a few people out on the beach. I had to be selective in snapping pictures to get this one that makes the beach look somewhat deserted.

Millie wanted to show us a place where they usually see pelicans, a Disney resort at Shelter Cove. We walked in, didn’t see pelicans, but did learn about crabbing from some people who had dropped a double-ring crab net, baited with a piece of shrimp, off a dock. They didn’t seem to be having any luck, maybe because it was the wrong part of the tide cycle. We did see a beautiful sunset from that dock, though. The smudges aren’t smudges, they’re clouds that are already in shadow while the higher ones are sunlit.

After supper we watched “The Devil Wears Prada” on DVD.