LafondblogGeneral blog about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

PHOTO TITLE: Thin

THE PHONE RINGS. Telltale pause. Oh well, let’s see what it’s about. A clear, pleasant albeit authoritative voice comes on to share the news — that we have a SNOW EMERGENCY in St Paul. SNOW EMERGENCY! I am trying to comprehend the full meaning of this dispatch. First I imagine fire trucks, police cars, ambulances tearing and slip sliding around the city with no evident destination in mind. They pass each other going north and south on Snelling Avenue and east and west on University Avenue. The high tech Opticam sensors on the stoplights don’t know what to do (they are triggered by strobe lights on the roofs of emergency vehicles). The devices do the only thing that makes sense. Turn red for everyone. Traffic on a Sunday is backed up all the way west to the new Menards store that has had a “coming soon” sign sagging across its front for at least eight months; the parking lot jammed with cars of employees working 24-7 to stock the shelves (where will customers park when that store finally opens?).

ISN’T A SNOW EMERGENCY supposed to mean there is something happening that we have to do something about NOW? But the voice on the phone tries to calm my anxieties. There will be parking restrictions from 6 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. He doesn’t go into details. Instead he gives me a telephone number I can call to find out what I am supposed to do. I try to remember. Park my car on the north side of the street overnight while the snowplow clears the west side of the street? Keep my car off of both sides of east-west streets? For how long? Wait a minute, I know! I live on a corner. I’ll wait until I see people start parking cars on one side or the other of the two streets by my house. THEY all know what to do.

I CAN’T COUNT the number of movies I’ve seen in which something dramatic occurrs on the Staten Island Ferry. Someone is going home from work. Someone is meeting a spy courier. Someone is going to be exchanged for someone else. But I’ve not been on the Staten Island Ferry, myself. Not until November of last year.

When I think of Staten Island, somehow I imagine an island city that is so distant out to sea that one cannot hope to reach it by any means other than the ferry. But Staten Island really isn’t like that. It is out across a pretty big piece of New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty and past Ellis Island (the trip takes about 25 minutes). The Borough is right there by New Jersey, separated from it by a strait about the size of the Delaware River at the point at which the Benjamin Franklin Bridge crosses it between Philadelphia and Camden.

SETTING SUN. So, anyway, I have finally taken a ride on the Staten Island Ferry on my way to visit clients who live on Staten Island. It is early evening and the sun is setting as we debark. Parenthetically I will offer that I am a huge fan of ferries, and will go out of my way, when traveling, to avail myself of the opportunity to ride one. I’ve been on some really tiny ferries in Iowa and rural Washington State. And big ones running between Seattle and an archipegalo of Islands arrayed 170 degrees from southwest to northwest. I’ve been on the coal-steam powered ferry that crosses Lake Michigan in a six-hour voyage; and a ferry that connects Denmark and Sweden (that one carried autos and the train on which I had been traveling). In this case, I’ve not gone out of my way to ride the Staten Island Ferry. It is there crossing the water between where I was (which happened to be Battery Park) and where I need to be.

FERRY FEVER. I am like a little kid on ferries. I want to get all around the ship and see what’s there. But on this trip I am drawn permanently to the stern where the darkening and twinkling Manhattan skyline is receding. After some time passes, a woman about my age standing next to me offers: “Quite a sight isn’t it.” I heartily agree. Nothing like it. Not in this country, anyway. So we chat. She is a clergywoman who has a church and congregation in Manhattan. She is on her way home from work, as are the vast majority of people on the ship this evening. And she always rides in the stern on her way home favoring the view of Manhattan. She shares that she was on this ship on her way to work on Sept. 11, 2001. She sees the look of awe in my eyes and goes on to describe what could be seen from her terribly good vanage point (there was a ferry on its way to Manhattan when the first plane struck, I have since learned. The captain turned the ferry around and returned his passengers to Staten Island. I guess this woman must have been on that trip because the ferry did not carry passengers to Manhattan after that. The captain was ordered to return empty to the Battery Park terminal and begin evacuating people 6,000 at a time).

She tells her story matter-of-factly but not without affect. Of course she has told it many times before but it is not a story one can stop telling.

NEVER HAVE I BEEN MORE ASHAMED of my former profession of journalism than I was today. Hotel Rwanda is the starkest, most compelling movie I have ever seen in part because I could not, as with the Holacaust, say that I wasn’t born when it happened. These people were abandoned by the “western world” including the very colonial powers — France and Belgium — that had created the conditions that led to the Rwandan genocide. There is blood on their hands and all of us citizens of the world’s advanced industrialized democracies. Why was there only a token force of United Nations “peacekeepers” in-country to stand by and watch the mass murder of a million people over less than a year’s time?

We saw this movie on “Super Bowl Sunday” so the theater was not crowded. For awhile after the credits started rolling no one in the theater moved a muscle. Everyone sat in stunned silence. Maybe it was a shared moment of political awareness or personal responsibility. The murder of innocent people in huge numbers is still happening. They cannot wait for America to have a new president.

PHOTO Title: My home on the range 

It is very hard for me to believe that anyone could look out and see in real time what is represented in this tiny photograph and call it home. And yet I have ancestors — a grandmother and some great aunts — who did just that. It was called homesteading. While their husbands were comfortably in town (Powell, Wyoming) running the Sheehy & McWilliams General Store, these tough women were spending at least a portion of their time trying to “prove up” on land that nobody would want and still doesn’t want to this day. They called it Polecat Bench. You can see it looking south from Powell. It is flat land that is raised up above the rest of the area on what is called “a bench.” The rise to this land is, for the most part, quite steep. And there is NO … let me repeat that … NO water up there. No rivers. No streams. No little streams. No lakes, ponds or puddles. No water. Which means there is almost nothing anyone in the early 20th century or the early 21st century can do with it. But, somehow these dear ladies managed to do it. And the land has remained in family hands ever since.

The taxes got paid out of the proceeds of the meager rent paid by a few ranchers who ran their cattle up there (I think the ratio was one per square mile). And they were paid exploration rights some of the time by various oil and gas concerns. And there is a gas operation up there and some wells so it was always a possibility I suppose. But my grandmother and her sisters-in-law weren’t lucky in that way. What did make them lucky is that after a few fires and a depression, the men decided it might be a good idea to go back east again.

Epilogue: Now it is November 2007. I am in receipt of communications from Robert Brown of Cody, Wyoming, who has an amateur interest in documenting historical sites, one of them being the structure located on what we knew as “Nellie’s Place.” I will write more about this and request permission from Robert Brown to possibly incorporate his images. For the time being, here is a slide show of his images.

THE SUN IS SHINING and the melting snow is finding its way into my garage. But there is nothing to be done about it right now. We are on our way to Ginkgo to drink coffee, write stuff on our laptops and talk about things. The coffee shop’s back door is propped open (40 degrees is not winter in Minnesota). A young woman is guarding it leaning on the remains of a rear garden structure smoking a cigarette. In the post apcalypse, Ginkgo has become smoke free. Inside we choose one of the less wobbly tables near one of the three electrical outlets.

An extended family enjoying a sunny Saturday morning at their local coffee shop.

At the moment the room is modestly crowded with subdued coffee drinkers. I am facing the door and the table there right by the window is occupied all the time we are there. Now an extended family has somehow squeezed around the tiny table. A silent man sitting at a table mounted on the makeshift tiny stage has his elbow in my way as I take their photograph. They are replaced by a couple communicating in sign language. The fellow goes to the counter and orders coffee drinks while the gal sits at the table and sends a text message on her Blackberry. There is an ebb and flow of customers and now, just after noon, one of the staff wearing a post apocalypse hand-knit dress thingie is at the table facing me, eating one of the giant sandwiches they keep in the glass cooler.

ERUDITE SCRAWLINGS. I head for the restroom. I remember when it was pretty new with clean white floor. Now the dirt is so thoroughly ground into the little linoleum sqauares that one might think that is as the designer intended. Except that those squares over in the out of the way spots are still white. The grafitti on the inside of the wooden door is mostly erudite and tilting largely against right wing madness that, the writers believe, has taken hold of our country, our state and, here in St. Paul, our city (at least at the Mayoral level).

Two guys come in loaded down with gear similar to ours and ask whether Ginkgo has internet access. No, they are told and they are directed to a nearby shop that does. “Sorry,” one guy says and the two head back the way they came in, past the cigarette sentry in the back.

I’m trying to figure out how to end this post right now. But then I realize … this is a blog. I don’t have to “end” it.