"A stone with which one could see where the sun was in Heaven."

Here.

"Using his research and his navigational skills, Karlsen seeks to solve the mystery of how the Vikings could have determined the vital position of the hidden sun. In his book he writes: 'During the middle of the summer there is too much light in the night sky to see the stars at the high latitudes where the Vikings sailed. The sun was the only dependable celestial body available for reference.' He explores hints in the ancient Viking Sagas, as well as Thorkild Ramskou's theory of a mineral answer, by devising and successfully utilizing what he considers to be the most obvious choice: calcite.

"Karlsen makes a very strong case for Iceland Spar. His proposed technique is premised on the ready availability of optical quality calcite in an area of Iceland where the Vikings made first landfall and which relies on the mineral's high birefringence. Mr. Karlsen devised a plausible scenario as it might have happened more than 1000 years ago and which he proved to be extremely accurate.

"The Vikings reached their destinations by latitudinal sailing, that is to say they sailed in straight east-west courses. They used a myriad of navigational clues and techniques to hold to this kind of course, such as observation of sea-birds, waves, stars and the sun. Karlsen found that with the help of a calcite sunstone and a 'bearing board,' very accurate determinations of latitude could be obtained."

From here. More here.

"Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.' So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes.

"But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, 'Woman, why are you weeping?' She said to them, 'They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.' Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, 'Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?' Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, 'Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.' Jesus said to her, 'Mary.' She turned and said to him in Aramaic, 'Rabboni!' (which means Teacher)."

John 20:1-16

One of Ogawa-san's photos of Shichigahama. The rest look worse, but this is the most familiar view.

"One hundred years ago, magnificent American chestnut trees dominated the forested hills and mountains over much of the eastern U. S.  They made their best growth on the slopes of the Appalachian mountains where some towered up to 100 feet and had diameters greater than 10 feet. In some places, chestnut trees formed nearly pure stands. It has been estimated that one out of four trees in the Appalachian forests was an American chestnut (Castanea dentata) prior to the arrival of the lethal chestnut blight, a fungal disease which destroys the bark tissues of the chestnut."

"TACF has crossed the American chestnut with the Chinese chestnut to produce blight resistant hybrids. Their plan as envisioned by Charles Burnham is to backcross blight resistant hybrids with pure American chestnut trees for a few generations so as to develop blight resistant trees that are about 15/16 American and 1/16 Chinese; these offspring are expected to have the attributes of the American chestnut (fast-growth, straight timber form, ability to thrive in the forest, and sweet-flavorful nuts) coupled with the disease resistance of the Chinese chestnut. The latter produces nuts which are of good quality but it has the growth form of an apple tree--it does not succeed in the forest or in very cold climates. An important component of TACF's breeding program is to cross resistant hybrids with American chestnuts from different locations throughout the country so as to develop a diverse gene pool. TACF expects to have some blight resistant, forest-ready, and predominantly American chestnut trees in a few years, but many years may be needed to develop trees with blight resistance that are well adapted to the different regions of the eastern U. S. Breeding for blight resistance has been the major goal, but further breeding to develop trees resistant to ink disease and insect pests is also needed."

More here and here.

City or no city? Litter (not pictured) or no litter?

that's more like it! compare.

"Regions are 'interpenetrating bodies in semi-simultaneous spaces' (Cafard, 1989). Biota, watersheds, landforms, and elevations are just a few of the facets that define a region. Culture areas, in the same way, have subsets such as dialects, religions, sorts of arrow-release, types of tools, myth motifs, musical scales, art styles. One sort of regional outline would be floristic. The coastal Douglas Fir, as the definitive tree of the Pacific Northwest, is an example. [...] Its northern limit is around the Skeena River in British Columbia. It is found west of the crest through Washington, Oregon, and northern California. The southern coastal limit of Douglas Fir is about the same as that of salmon, which do not run south of the Big Sur River. Inland it grows down the west slope of the Sierra as far south as the north fork of the San Joaquin River. That outline describes the boundary of a larger natural region that runs across three states and one international border.

"The presence of this tree signifies a rainfall and temperature range and will indicate what your agriculture might be, how steep the pitch of your roof, what raincoats you'd need. You don't have to know such details to get by in the modern cities of Portland or Bellingham. But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can truly feel more at home. The sum of a field's forces becomes what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place'. To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in."

From "The Place, the Region, and the Commons" by Gary Snyder, published in The Practice of the Wild

I asked my good friend Kat if I could link her website, and she said yeah! She is a sensitive and grounded person with a good imagination, and she inspires me to try and see things more thoroughly.

Kathleen Carey Hall, Girlfriends

I subbed for this kid's lesson, and he drew me a beautiful map of his old neighborhood in New Jersey. Note the good climbing trees.

"Under the guise of studying animal physiology, Belyaev set up a Russian silver fox research centre in Novosibirsk, setting out to test his theory that the most important selected characteristic for the domestication of dogs was a lack of aggression. He began to select foxes that showed the least fear of humans and bred them. After 10-15 years, the foxes he bred showed affection to their keepers, even licking them. They barked, had floppy ears and wagged their tails. They also developed spotted coats – a surprising development that was connected with a decrease in their levels of adrenaline, which shares a biochemical pathway with melanin and controls ­pigment production.

"'With stray dogs, we’re witnessing a move backwards,' explains Poyarkov. 'That is, to a wilder and less domesticated state, to a more 'natural’ state.' As if to prove his point, strays do not have spotted coats, they rarely wag their tails and are wary of humans, showing no signs of ­affection towards them.'"

"Even though the city budget allocated more than $30m to build 15 animal shelters last year, that is not nearly enough to accommodate the strays. Still, there is pressure from some quarters to return to the practice of catching and culling them. Poyarkov believes this would be dangerous. While the goal, he acknowledges, 'is to do away with dogs who carry rabies, tapeworms, toxoplasmosis and other infections, what actually happens is that infected dogs and other animals outside Moscow will come into the city because the biological barrier maintained by the population of strays in Moscow is turned upside down. The environment becomes chaotic and unpredictable and the epidemiological situation worsens.'"

"'I am not at all convinced that Moscow should be left without dogs. Given a correct relationship to dogs, they definitely do clean the city. They keep the population of rats down. Why should the city be a concrete desert? Why should we do away with strays who have always lived next to us?'"

From this article about Moscow's stray dogs.

The view out the warped glass of my old apartment.

"The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. [...] Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field."

Genesis 2:15, 19-20

"It is often said that the frontier gave a special turn to American history. A frontier is a burning edge, a frazzle, a strange market zone between two utterly different worlds. It is a strip where there are pelts and tongues and tits for the taking. There is an almost visible line that a person of the invading culture could walk across: out of history and into a perpetual present, a way of life attuned to the slower and steadier processes of nature. The possibility of passage into that myth-time world had been all but forgotten in Europe. Its rediscovery – the unsettling vision of a natural self – has haunted the Euro-American peoples as they continually cleared and roaded the many wild corners of the North American continent.

"Wilderness is now – for much of North America – places that are formally set aside on public lands – Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management holdings or state and federal parks. Some tiny but critical tracts are held by private nonprofit groups like The Nature Conservancy or the Trust for Public Land. These are the shrines saved from all the land that was once known and lived on by the original people, the little bits left as they were, the last little places where intrinsic nature totally wails, blooms, nests, glints away. They make up only two percent of the United States.

"But wildness is not limited to the 2 percent formal wilderness areas. Shifting scales, it is everywhere: ineradicable populations of fungi, moss, mold, yeasts, and such that surround and inhabit us. Deer mice on the back porch, deer bounding across the freeway, pigeons in the park, spiders in the corners. There were crickets in the paint locker of the Sappa Creek oil tanker, as I worked as a wiper in the engine room out in the mid-Pacific, cleaning brushes. Exquisite complex beings in their energy webs inhabiting the fertile corners of the urban world in accord with the rules of wild systems, the visible hardy stalks and stems of vacant lots and railroads, the persistent raccoon squads, bacteria in the loam and in our yogurt."

From "The Etiquette of Freedom" on page 14 of The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder.

Got some old 35 mm back this week!

Dad in Omsk, more of these later.

I recently found out that Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road goes right by my house in Virginia!

april lol

"A sensibility of this sort might help explain why there is so little 'landscape poetry' from the cultures of the old ways. Nature description is a kind of writing that comes with civilization and its habits of collection and classification. Chinese landscape poetry begins around the fifth century A.D. with the work of Xie Lingyun. There were fifteen hundred years of Chinese song and poetry before him (allowing as the Shi-jing - China's first collection of poems and songs, 'The Book of Songs' - might register some five centuries of folksong prior to the writing down) and there is much nature, but no broad landscapes: it is about mulberry trees, wild edible greens, threshing, the forager and the farmer's world up close. By Hsieh's time the Chinese had become removed enough from their own mountains and rivers to aestheticize them. This doesn't mean that people of the old ways don't appreciate the view, but they have a different point of view."

From "The Etiquette of Freedom" by Gary Snyder, page 22 of The Practice of the Wild.