Terry's Tale

This is why I am storyteller.

I met Terry on a flight to Omaha. He was an older man, kind and gentle, with a quick and easy smile and a never ending story to tell – the kind of seatmate that makes a long plane ride almost enjoyable, especially for someone who loves to listen to a good story as much as he likes to tell one. After we got situated I introduced myself, and we began to talk.

“My grandfather ran his own winery in southern California until the day he died,” he told me, his eyes far away. “We lived at that winery, and I played hide and seek among the grapevines. I remember the smell of the fruit in the hot summer; it was so sweet it was cloying. And toward the end of the season, just before harvest time, there was a very different smell in the air – a heavier smell, a smell that you just knew meant that the grapes were ready to be picked. The weather was different too: there was dew in the morning, and we didn’t go out to play until later.

“He had a wonderful old house on that winery with a huge cellar – at least, to a kid, it was huge. It was deep, and long, with hand-laid stones lining the walls. On one side was a long row of sour-sweet-smelling barrels that contained different vintages of his favorite wines. I loved to go down there; it was a secret place, one that my grandfather and I shared. It was our fort.

“On Saturdays, he would make dinner – pasta, salt cod, sausages, whatever we wanted – and he and I would go into the cellar to pick out the food we would prepare that day. The place was a jungle of savory foods, most of them hanging from the ceiling. There were handmade salamis and pepperonis, white and chalky and smelling musky; big, yellow rounds of cheese; and gallon jars of tomatoes, pepperoncini, and pickled onions. Depending on the menu for the evening he would walk among the foods with the big pocketknife that he called his matasuegras (mother-in-law killer), slicing off huge chunks of salt cod, great wedges of hard cheese, and thick, greasy slices of salami. We’d sit down there in the cool dark air and eat smoky sausage and hard cheese and drink secret glasses of wine from his personal cellar, ruby red from the bare bulbs, watching the snarly shadows on the walls from the tree roots that hung from the low ceiling. For dinner he’d make big steamy bowls of pasta, with meatballs the size of tennis balls wrapped around seasoned croutons, and a thick, rich tomato sauce, cooked all day long in a big battered aluminum pot with sausage, pork chops and a big handful of basil in the bottom.

“He was a special old man, and he lived until he was 95. My own kids got to know him, and he lived long enough for them to realize how special it was for them to get to know their own great-grandfather. I have pictures of them all together, and I treasure them.”

 He smiled at the thought, and drifted away for a few minutes. I interrupted his reverie to ask him the reason for his trip to California. Retiring, I asked? He shook his head, smiling. “No, I retired a long time ago. After being bored for a few years I decided I’d like to run a winery of my own. Since I wasn’t working, I had time to think about my grandfather, and those memories I had of him were so good I made a decision. The time was right to do it now, so I did it. I bought a winery.” I told him how great I thought that was, and how he must already look forward to drinking the first glass of his first vintage. “Oh, that’s the only pleasure from this great and grand venture I won’t get to enjoy,” he chuckled. “Not a drinker?” I asked. He laughed out loud at that. “No, I like wine as much as anybody. The problem is, I’m dying. I have cancer. The doctor tells me that I have about two years if I take care of myself, so if I’m going to die, I want to die in that basement, smelling those smells. If anything’s going to take me away I want it to be those smells.”

Red Oak, Iowa

I travel to many places in this work that I do that could be called exotic, off the beaten track, unusual, and strange. I like them because they tend to knock me off kilter, stagger me a bit, cause me to run through my mental inventory of the many realities I have accumulated and catalogued in my travels. But every once in a while I visit a place that creates a new category of reality, one that stops me in my tracks and makes me happy once again to do this job, in spite of all the time it requires me to be away from my home and family.

The most recent of these occurred last week, when I found myself in Red Oak, Iowa, a tiny place about 35 miles East of Omaha. It’s beautiful: This is farming country, corn, mostly, and everywhere I looked I saw ramshackle barns and turn-of-the-century farm houses in various states of disrepair. I was about halfway there in my rental car when I received a text message from my client, the owner of a small but extremely forward thinking independent telephone company. WE’RE IN THE BAR, it said. And since the only bar in town is in the only restaurant in town which is in the only hotel in town, as near as I can tell anyway, I knew where to find them.

There is a kindness to this part of the country, a geniality, a genuine sense of welcome that is part of life here. After handshakes all around and much back slapping, we settled down to eat. It was harvesting time and the talk over dinner was about corn (most of it headed to ethanol plants in China), crop yields, moisture content, and new grandkids. It's funny: Even though these people own and operate successful and profitable (albeit small) telephone companies, many of them are also farmers or at least come from families with farms. I had been with them several times before, and at one point in the conversation one of them asked me if I had taken any good pictures on my way over from Omaha. I responded that yes, I had seen a large corn harvester off in the distance with the sun setting behind it, and with the dust cloud it created I had managed to get a few good shots. He then told me that I should've gone over to get closer to it because they're pretty cool machines, to which I responded that it was way off in the distance on the other side of corn field, and that while it would have been nice to be closer, I couldn't very well take my rental car bouncing across a half-cut cornfield. He smiled, and I knew something was up. “That was probably my buddy you saw,” he smiled, “and he’d love to show you his combine if you'd like to see it.” Needless to say I effusively accepted.

This kind of thing happens to me, it seems, all the time. By showing enthusiastic and real interest in the working lives of others, I have had the opportunity to walk up the cables of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, spend three days on a cable-laying ship in Singapore, tour an 800-foot supertanker, land in Los Angeles sitting in the cockpit jump seat in a 747 (well before 9/11), wander through the unbelievable inner workings of a cotton gin in north Texas, and now sit in the driver seat of a combine with tires taller than I am. Does it get any better than this?

The remarkable thing about this machine – besides the fact that it is HUGE (look at the size of the tires in the photo, below) – is that it is 100% guided by GPS. It knows the dimensions of the field, and performs least cost routing to ensure that it drives the most efficient possible path as it covers the corn field. As a consequence, this thing saves the farmer as much as $120,000 per year in fuel, and at least that much in seed, fertilizer and pesticide.

When we finished, we drove over to Stanton, the next town over, and took a driving tour of the place. It’s a beautiful little town and is also the home of Mrs. Olsen, whom people my age will remember as the spokesperson for Folger’s Coffee back in the 60s and early 70s. And because she was from Stanton, they designed the water towers in her honor (below).

I love this job.

Sabine and I sat down last night and watched my friend Jan Cannon’s latest film, “An Uncommon Curiosity,” his biography of Vermont biologist and acclaimed author Bernd Heinrich (photo at left by Jan Cannon). I know Bernd, and the movie left me - charmed. There is a sense of childlike wonder that surrounds Bernd, and it is as infectious as a virus. He spots a carefully sculpted leaf in the forest and wants to know why the caterpillar ate it so methodically (to disguise the fact that a caterpillar was around as a way to confuse birds). He notices the shapes of the trees in the forest around his home, wondering why some conifers have long leaves, others stubby (better adaptation by native spruce to snow load). He wonders how certain insects are able to survive and even thrive in Vermont’s harsh winter, and figures out a way to measure their internal body temperatures.

Cannon’s film is a story about scientific curiosity, but it is primarily about Bernd Heinrich, the man. He is an enigma of sorts; he is a committed runner, and was the first person in the world to run 100 kilometers, largely without stopping. He holds world records for ultra-marathon distance running, and has even written about it in his lyrical book, “Why We Run.”  But it is his other books for which he is best known. They include “Winter World,” about the natural world in the depths of New England winter; “Summer World,” about the fecundity of the same area in summer; “Mind of the Raven,” an entire (and wonderful) book about Heinrich’s extensive work with these remarkable birds; and “The Geese at Beaver Bog,” about the birds in and around the pond adjacent to his home.

Cannon spent a year with Heinrich, documenting his life, getting to know him, his family, his students, and the rich, remarkable curiosity that drives him.

You won’t be disappointed: For $25 (which includes shipping) you can be as charmed as I was. Order it here, and enjoy!

A New Idea: DigiBrigade

I was thinking recently about some of the work I've done in Africa and how rewarding it is, both personally and professionally, and during those musings it also occurred to me that many of the projects I've had the honor to be involved in in Sub-Saharan Africa (as well as the results of those projects) could teach us a thing or two here, in North America. One in particular, captured in this White Paper, is particularly interesting to me. Please download and read, reflect, enjoy, act.

Energetic Observations

While flying from O’Hare in Chicago last week on my way to Omaha, the first stage of a flying and driving trip that would take me to the gorgeous town of Red Oak, Iowa, to deliver a workshop, three images presented themselves to me that were remarkably related. The first was just outside of Chicago as we were climbing to cruising altitude. Call me weird, but I usually play a game when I’m either taking off or landing, and it goes like this: from the time the pilot announces that we’re descending through 10,000 feet on our way down, or from the moment of take-off until we clear 10,000 feet on ascent, I count baseball fields. Silly, I know, but consider this: My record (so far) occurred while flying to Washington Dulles from Chicago. Field count on descent: 182. And that’s only looking out one side of the airplane (One of my rules).

Now consider this: While baseball fields vary somewhat in size, there are certain standards that must be met. For instance, the distance from home plate to the pole that designates the “end” of the foul line in the outfield must be at least 325 feet. That means that one baseball field (and we’re not talking about a professional field here), taking into account the area of the outfield, the bleachers, and whatever other miscellaneous space is required, covers about 160,000 square feet, which is roughly equal to 3.67 acres. That means that between Washington DC and Chicago, there are 668.5 acres of baseball fields. That’s just over a square mile…and apropos of nothing. Just an interesting point, because the other day I got distracted from my ball field counting by a large circular structure that we passed over, which turned out to be the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, otherwise known as Fermilab. What I was seeing was the Tevatron Ring, which is the final stage of three that accelerate subatomic particles to 70% the speed of light in pursuit of a better understanding of the fundamental nature of – well, nature. This is the place where atoms are split, and the resulting wreckage is studied to develop a better sense of the origins of the universe, among other things. It also gives us a better understanding of energy and what it really, truly is. (I should also point out that this is where the Bottom Omega Baryon was discovered, as we all know. I have two in my basement, just in case.

Scarcely a half-hour later we were overflying the vast green expanse of Iowa, and far below I saw wind turbines – hundreds of them, spinning slowly. A little research when I got to my hotel informed that Iowa produces a remarkable 4,000 megawatts of power from its wind farms, and that number is expected to increase as the number of turbines and the efficiency of the blade arrays increase.

Flying into Omaha, I was shocked to see the destruction caused by the flooded Missouri River. After overflowing its banks it spread out like a chocolate blanket, engulfing everything, leaving nothing but the tops of silos and the roofs of farm houses showing. A few minutes later I was shocked to see a highway disappearing into the flowing water. The two sides of the road just disappear into the depths, and it’s pretty easy to imagine that the constant flow over many days has undermined the submerged roadway. It will no doubt have to be completely rebuilt.

Several years ago, I read a wonderful book by John McPhee called “The Control of Nature.” As I photographed all of these things, I couldn’t help but think of that marvelous book, in which the author describes the many ways in which humans have futilely attempted to - well, control nature. He talks about vain attempts to change the flow of Icelandic lava, and to change the course of the Mississippi. What I witnessed through my D3 viewfinder in that short 90-minute flight was interesting. First I saw a place where we attempt to break matter into its component energy parts so that we can understand it. Then, I saw how we create energy by harnessing wind so that we can use it. And finally, I saw the devastation caused when the natural energy of a river, despite all efforts to the contrary, rebels against our attempts to control it. In the battle of hubris against nature, nature wins every time.