Canals

A Dan, a clan, a canal, Canada! (That is a palindrome in the style of an already well-known palindrome. But this story doesn’t really involve anyone named Dan, nor any clans. But it does include canals and Canada. So well worth the reversibility.)

Thinking about some of the places we have visited—Chicago, Illinois; Midland, Michigan; Kingston, Ontario—as well as many other cities we didn’t get to, I realized that many of them wouldn’t exist or would be much smaller if it weren’t for canals.

Water is essential for a big city. Certainly we need it to drink and wash. But just as important in the development of trade, we need water for shipping. Big cities are generally cities where lots of trade can occur. There are inland big cities, like Atlanta, which was a major trading location due to the railroads that crossed there, and later the interstates. But most big cities are on major waterways or on the coast.

The Great Lakes are massive. But for realistic shipping, you need to be able to go from one lake to another. And more importantly, you need to be able to connect to the ocean. That’s not the case with the Great Lakes as nature left them.

You might be saying, “What about the St. Lawrence River?” Great question. The St. Lawrence River does run from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean. The trouble is that the river isn’t navigable the whole way.

Prior to canals, if you entered the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, you could go upstream a long way. But then you hit a set of rapids. Where? Right at Montreal. That’s why Montreal is where it is. It was the furthest into the interior you could get by river. But this meant you had to transport goods over land from Montreal further west or from the west to Montreal. That’s heavy work.

The rapids were originally called Sault Saint-Louis (sault is the French word for rapids.) They were named for a teenage sailor, Louis, who drowned in these rapids during an early expedition up the river. But they were later renamed the Lachine Rapids. That’s a funny name. They were named for a city called Lachine, just southwest of Montreal and very close to the rapids. But Lachine is the French term for China. It’s kind of a joke name, because the original nobleman who was granted the land, René Robert Cavelier de La Salle, thought he could use the St. Lawrence River to find the Northwest Passage, a way across North America to the Pacific and eventually to China. That didn’t work out, but ironically they named this piece of his land Lachine, so he could say he had reached China.

Narrow boats with little draft can actually go down the rapids. In fact, there are whitewater excursions that run them. But it wasn’t possible to go upriver over the Lachine Rapids. So ships from the Atlantic couldn’t reach Lake Ontario. Montreal was as good as it got.

Then someone had an idea! Let’s build a canal that goes around these rapids. And they did. The earliest canal was called the Lachine Canal. These days that has been replaced by the bigger South Shore Canal which is part of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The St. Lawrence Seaway project was a joint venture between Canada and the United States to make it possible for ships to go from the Atlantic all the way through any of the Great Lakes to reach as far as Duluth, Minnesota or Chicago, Illinois.

But passing the Lachine Rapids was only one necessary step. It isn’t generally possible to get from one Great Lake to another. There are two exceptions. The first is Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. They are connected by a channel called the Straits of Mackinac which is deep and navigable. In fact, the water levels of Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and the Straits of Mackinac are all the same elevation. Hydrologically this means it is really all one big lake. But historically we think of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron as being separate lakes.

The other exception is between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. You get from one to the other through rivers and another lake. Lake Huron drains into the St. Clair River which runs to Lake St. Clair. Ironically, this lake is in the middle of the great ones, but it’s not big enough to be great itself. Maybe it is great adjacent. From Lake St. Clair, you go downstream through the Detroit River and reach Lake Erie. These rivers are navigable upstream as well.

Lake Superior is the highest of the lakes in elevation. It connects to Lake Huron through a river, St. Mary’s River. But that river also has a set of rapids: Saint Mary’s Rapids. Or, in French, Sault Ste. Marie. On each side of the rapids is a city called Sault Ste. Marie, one in Ontario, Canada, and the other in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, United States. How does one get past these rapids? With a canal, of course!

But the biggest, scariest barrier to navigation is between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. These are also connected by a river, but the barrier here is no set of rapids. That river is the Niagara River and that barrier is Niagara Falls. No ship is going upstream or downstream across that massive obstacle.

Ships passing between these two lakes avoid the Niagara River entirely. They use the Welland Canal, a north-south cut through the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario. It is an impressive feat of engineering, such a long canal.

But the Welland Canal isn’t the longest canal connecting the Great Lakes to the ocean. That honor goes to the Erie Canal, 351 miles long, which cuts across upstate New York to connect the Seneca River which empties in Lake Erie to the Hudson River which empties in the Atlantic Ocean. The Erie Canal is the longest canal in North America. But it is only the fourth longest canal in the world.

The longest canal in the world is also the longest duration for any canal to have ever been built. It’s called the Grand Canal and it is in China. It connects the Yangtze River and the Yellow River and it runs 1,104 miles. But what’s crazy about this canal is that work began on it in the 5th Century BCE and it was completed in the 17th Century CE. It took over 2000 years to build this monster and it was completed before any of the canals of the Great Lakes was even begun.

Well, I had plenty to say about canals and certainly Canada was mentioned. If anyone has any ideas as to how to work a Dan or a clan into the story, let me know. I hate to waste a good palindrome.

Canadian Eats

Part of the fun of going to new places is trying the local foods. As foreign nations go, Canada’s foods are perhaps the least foreign. In many ways, Canada offers similar choices to the U.S. You can find a great variety of good ethnic foods and barbecue and burgers and all the things you might find at home.

Canada has plenty of fast food options. One difference is that their most frequently encountered fast food chain is Tim Horton’s. Where we are staying, there are two Tim Horton’s so close to us (and by the Triangle Inequality, so close to each other) that I could easily walk to each in ten minutes. Tim Horton’s serves coffee and donuts, but also has grilled sandwiches (like grilled cheese or grilled cheese with some sort of lunch meat included.)

But we have tried two uniquely Canadian foods. The first, and perhaps most well known is poutine. Poutine is a dish originally out of Quebec, but has spread through the rest of the country. It’s french fries with brown gravy on top and then cheese curds atop that. That is the classic poutine québécoise. There are many variations on it. Some use a marinara sauce instead of gravy, or mozzarella instead of cheese curd. Others use different gravies. (I’m not sure I have ever needed to use the plural of gravy before.) Or different cheeses. Some even use some other form of potato.

Poutine (and forks which are not part of the poutine)

 

This really gets us to the philosophical question of the Poutine of Theseus. If Theseus replaces the cheese curd with another cheese, say parmesan, then replaces the gravy with a different sauce, say marinara, and then replaces the french fries with a different potato or a different starch, say pasta, is it really still poutine? Isn’t it now spaghetti? Are spaghetti and poutine just different varieties of one another? And is all of this irrelevant since Theseus wasn’t Canadian?

We tried poutine and found it delicious. I can only imagine how much cholesterol it has. (I could do better than only imagine, I could look it up. But I am happier not knowing the exact amount.) The cheese curd was pleasantly squeaky. The gravy was pleasantly savory. And the fries were pleasantly… um, fry-y is not a word. Let’s just say they were good french fries. As with so many things, when you combine three good ingredients, you get something that transcends the flavor of all three.

Another Canadian victual is beavertails. Before you panic, no beavers were harmed in the making of this blog post. Beavertails are named for their shape, not for having any beaver ingredients.

Picture of a picture of a beavertail

 

A beavertail is deep fried dough that is similar in shape to, you guessed it, the tail of a beaver. The fried dough is similar in crunch and flavor to a funnel cake, but it is flatter and ovaler (again not a word, but neither is ellipser. So I am at a loss as to how to explain that the shape is more ovular or elliptical. I’ll have to think about how that could be expressed.)

You might think that this fried dough would, by itself, be delightful. It probably would, but I wouldn’t know. Because a beavertail is then covered in toppings. You can have savory beavertails or dessert beavertails. The original beavertail was topped with cinnamon and sugar. Very classic. But now you can have all kinds of frostings, candies, jams, and more.

We tried an Avalanche. This had a cheesecake frosting and Skor toffee bits on it. As you can imagine, it was tasty! (Let’s not talk about the cholesterol in this delicacy either. Or maybe we should. How do the Canadians survive if all their foods are deep fried and chock full of unsaturated fats?)

Avalanche! (partially eaten)

 

Here’s something that isn’t exactly a Canadian food but a Canadian flavor. Check out this Ben & Jerry’s. Ah! More empty calories!

My home and native dairy dessert

 

The only way to work off all those calories is to walk. And the walk signals here have a jaunty head-thrown-back, shoulder-lifted attitude, unlike our walk signals with more regular posture. I know that’s not about food, but do you think I could get away with a blog post about walk signals?

I'm walkin' here!

 

Walk this way! Talk this way, ay?

Maybe I could get away with it, because no one could stop me until they had mastered the head-thrown-back, shoulder-lifted walking style of Canada. Of course, I haven’t mastered that yet. Something to work on.

Sweet Sorrow? Seriously?

William Shakespeare is often revered for having written plays that are telling in all times, not just his own. But when Juliet says, “Parting is such sweet sorrow” in Act Two of Romeo and Juliet, I have to wonder if maybe the Bard missed the mark on this one. I get the sorrow, but sweet? Where do you detect sweetness, Will?

I say this finally writing the blog post I have not been writing. Have you ever had a project that you knew you had to do, but you had no great desire to do it. So you found other projects, maybe of lesser importance, so you could work on those, never getting around to the one hanging over your head. Of course, when you eventually finish the one you must do, it is a big sense of relief, but you can’t bring yourself to do it until you just do it. (Not in a Nike way, just in a resigned-to-your-fate way.)

For example, when each new semester approaches, I have to set up the learning management system. This is the computer portal where students get the videos and problems. This set up is tedious in the extreme. I set due dates and load videos and write the syllabus which is mostly standardized, so there is little interesting about it to me. (Probably none too interesting to my students either. I write an amazing syllabus, but no one is giving Pulitzer Prizes for best syllabus.)

So instead I say to myself, “I could write a better problem for the midterm!” (The midterm is two months away, but writing problems is interesting.) I find things that I do need to do, but not really right now, so I can avoid the right now course set up that is so dry.

That’s what I have been doing as a blogger of late. There is a blog post in me that wants to come out. But I also don’t want to think about it, so I have been writing other posts so as to not write this one. I can’t not write it forever. (In truth, I could not write it forever. It’s not like I’m being paid to do this and there are job requirements. But it does feel dishonest not to write it forever.)

This past Monday was momentous; a change of season in the life of a man (this particular man) if you will allow the metaphor. We dropped off Syarra at Syracuse University. Our youngest child is now no longer a child. She’s off to pursue her adulthood, to get an education, to take steps in the life that is outside of our home.

I’m not the first parent to go through this. I’m probably not even the most verbally fluent parent to go through this. What can I say that hasn’t been said? My own experience of it.

Barren dorm

Monday itself was good. I was upbeat, so excited for Syarra. What an adventure? A new dorm room. New friends to be made. So many activities to participate in. We got to Syracuse. She checked into the dorm. We brought her stuff upstairs and helped her unpack. We gazed at the view out of her window. (It was grassy, but it is not the quad. Not all that is grass on campus is a quad. Or so I am told.) We bought some supplies and ate lunch. And then we left her.

Not barren dorm

There were no tears, no long clinging hugs. She was ready to go and to meet people. We were ready to let her be ready.

For me, Sunday night was the hard part. Looking at my daughter, knowing it was the last night of her just being a kid. For sixteen years, she had been ours, depending on us, bringing home love and tears and frustrations and laughter. This is my culinary adventure partner. (We love to try new things when we cook together.) This is my little mind reader. (When she was very young, she told us this was her superpower.) This was a face I could look at forever and enjoy seeing it. And I knew that Sunday night, it was the last of this.

Of course I will see her again. But she won’t be just a kid. She won’t be living with us. She will be growing in all kinds of ways and Alrica and I will find out who she is becoming from the sidelines now.

Really, I’m lucky. Syarra gave me a trial run. She spent her senior year abroad in Sarajevo. I didn’t get to be with her for ten months straight. But even then, I knew when she did return, she was still my child, my kid. Next time I see her (which will be a lot less than ten months) she will still be my child, just not my kid. She will be my young woman. And I will be proud.

I can hardly wait to find out who she becomes. I can hardly wait to find out what kinds of friends she makes, what clubs she joins, what classes she loves and hates, what stresses her out and what makes her smile. This is a huge adventure for her. I couldn’t be happier for her to sally forth into her own future. Happier for her.

This is also the launch of a huge adventure for Alrica and me. We have nothing tying us to any one place. We are living a completely nonstandard lifestyle. We might love it, we might hate it. But we’ll find out. We are using this new freedom our own way.

So I guess it’s not all sorrow. There is a lot of wonder, imagination, and hopeful anxiety mixed in with it. Parting is certainly sorrowful, plenty of it, but, I hate to admit, it's also a little bit sweet. Damn it! The Bard was right again. That guy!

Touristish

In probability theory, there is a term: mutually exclusive. When you have two events that cannot possibly both happen, we say the two events are mutually exclusive. For example, if I flip a coin and one event is that the coin lands heads and the other is that the coin lands tails, these events are mutually exclusive. They cannot both happen on one flip of a coin.

For an example of two events which are not mutually exclusive, consider this scenario. You are the stage manager of a play. Event A is that all the actors listen perfectly and there is never any conflict or tension. Event B is that you enjoy being stage manager of the production. These can (and often have) both occur. In fact, I find the probability of event A is very high, and the probability of event B is even higher.

In our current travels as digital nomads, it is not our intention to be tourists. We want so much more than just seeing the sights. We want to experience the people: how they live, what’s similar or different. We want to experience the lifestyle: how are homes set up, how are neighborhoods set up. Of course, only being in a place for a few weeks means you cannot fully know what life is like there. But we can know more than just the major sites and (if it is a true tourist trap) the fudge confectioners.

This being said, being more than just tourists and doing some of the traditional tourist activities are not mutually exclusive. (Aren’t you glad I defined my terms at the beginning.) I remember when we lived in the New York City area and some of the lifelong residents had never been to the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. In a way, I get it. This is your city, you don’t think anything of those sites. But on the other hand, you are missing some pretty cool things and you don’t even have to go far to get to them.

We don’t want to miss the cool things just because we want to experience other things in addition. That’s why we have been touristish, not exactly tourists, but not shying away from it either.

On the way to Syracuse, New York, we passed through Niagara Falls. Syarra had never seen it, and it has been many years since Alrica and I enjoyed that wonder of nature. So we stopped. We saw the falls. And we took the Journey to the Falls. It’s a boat that takes you right up to Horseshoe Falls so you get sprayed by the mist of the thundering water. You also go past American Falls and get amazing views of it.

American Falls from the Pier

You may have heard of the Maid of the Mist. That’s the name of the corresponding boat that leaves from the U.S. side of the falls. We took the one that leaves from the Canadian side, Journey to the Falls.

Humans are a strange species. Who else would say, “Wow! I know that is a very dangerous natural phenomenon. Let’s find a way to get spectacularly close to it.” And yet, I am very glad we did it. I can’t explain in words what it is to hear the constant but varying sound of the falls crashing down. I can’t describe the feeling of the mist hitting you, not quite like rain. Nor can I explain the sight where you look at the falls but you can’t see the middle of them because there is just so much spray in the area that it is a blur, a haze. (Okay, I did put all of that in words, but those words pale next to the reality.)

Now Alrica and I are in Kingston, Ontario. The city is situated on the north shore of Lake Ontario, right where the lake drains into the St. Lawrence River. About 12,000 years ago, glaciers that were over a mile wide came through this area and carved lows and highs. After the glaciers receded, water filled in the lows. The result is islands, so many islands, here at the beginning of the St. Lawrence River. The river itself is eight miles wide at some points. And there are big islands, tiny islands, in between islands. This region is aptly named the 1000 Islands region.

To be precise, there are more than one thousand islands, though the exact count is up for debate. It depends on where you draw the line between an island and a shoal. Everyone seems to agree that an island must be at least one square foot in area, and it must stay above water year round. However, there is some disagreement regarding foliage. Some say that to be an island, the landmass must be capable of supporting one tree. (By this definition there are 1864 islands.) But others require the heftier qualification of being able to support two trees. (By that definition there are 1836 islands.) Regardless, both are greater than 1000. I guess calling it the Somewhere Between Eighteen-hundred Thirty-six and Eighteen-hundred Sixty-four Islands region would be unruly. Or less poetic.

We did not want to come this close to such a spectacle and then not see it. So once again, Alrica and I boarded a boat. And we took a three hour tour of the 1000 Islands. (It ended better than the three hour tour mentioned in the Gilligan’s Island theme song.) We learned about the bridge to nowhere. It is a series of five spans that crosses from New York to Ontario. When it was being built, it didn’t connect any major cities and that’s what locals called it. Now it connects Interstate 81 and Canadian Highway 401 and is a major border crossing.

Tiny Island

We saw the spectacular Boldt Castle, built by hotelier George Boldt for his wife Louise. But Louise died shortly before he was going to present it to her and he never returned to the castle or to Heart Island again.

Boldt Castle

We learned about shipwrecks in the St. Lawrence, and there are many. We couldn’t see the ships under the water, but they showed us sonar images and maps of where they went down.

Most of all, we saw the majesty of nature, which, as it so often does, carves and forms beautiful landscapes.

It’s okay to be a tourist. In fact, the probability is high that we’d be disappointed if we didn’t do some of the tours and see some of the sights. And ideally, travels and disappointment should be mutually exclusive.

The Measure of a Country

So how does Canada measure up?

On our way to Syracuse we passed through Ontario, Canada, the part at the north shore of Lake Erie. After dropping Syarra off at Syracuse, we then headed back into Ontario, but a different part. We are in Kingston, Ontario, at the point where Lake Ontario drains into the St. Lawrence River. This region is the 1000 Islands region and I will have more to say about that soon. But I have several blog posts in my head and they will come as they come.

Today, I want to talk about Canada, and some of the differences and similarities for Americans traveling there. There are a lot more similarities than differences, so, while it is a foreign country to Americans, it won’t feel all that foreign.

Driving is much the same. Canada has big controlled access highways that are practically the same as our interstates. Just like in our highways, most drivers treat the speed limit as though it were a suggestion (one that is cute, but hardly relevant) rather than a true limit. Of course the big difference is that these speed limits are measured in kilometers per hour. Now I am going to approach a tangent (not quite a limit.)

When we lived in Reno, we had two cars. My car was named Ozark. Going into a tangent within a tangent! The reason my car was named Ozark was because of its first big trip. We had just returned to the United States. We were with my parents in Boynton Beach, Florida. That is where we bought the car. That car went on an immediate road trip. First it went from Boynton Beach to Lancaster, Pennsylvania so we could see friends from the city we left when we started our international travels. From there the car took us to West Des Moines, Iowa, where we visited some of my family. Then we drove southwest to Harper, Texas, where Alrica’s parents live. Finally, the car took the long journey to Reno, Nevada.

We found the longitude and latitude of each of the cities on that first trip and took the average (the arithmetic mean for you mathematically minded people) of each. We then used the mean longitude and mean latitude to find a point on the map. That point was in the Ozark National Forest. Thus, the name of the car.

You may be curious what the name of the second car was (or is, since it is the car we still have.) Answer: It doesn’t have a name. Now you may be curious why doesn’t the second car have a name. I know this is going to sound a bit out there, but my wife does not believe you can just name a car. This isn’t to say that no car can have a name. But she feels a car must earn its name. Though the process for doing so is a bit opaque to me. I mean, if our car won the Indianapolis 500, would that be enough? (Heck, if it even competed in the Indianapolis 500, that would be quite a feat. Especially as it isn’t an Indy Car. I guess Nascar racing is more realistic.) What, short of some epic racing, jumping over a river, or being thematically related to a superhero makes a car worthy of having a name? Thus far, I don’t know. And that’s why I call our current vehicle The Car Which Shall Not be Named. (And no, that is not a name, it is just what I call it. Don’t argue with me, you’ll get me in trouble with Alrica!)

Back to only one level of tangency (though I am super tempted to consider, geometrically, what the tangent to a tangent would be, but I will save that for my imagination). We took a trip to Vancouver, British Columbia while we lived in Reno. And we took Ozark on that trip. Alrica was driving when we crossed the border. At the first speed limit sign we came to, she noted that it was in kph (kilometers per hour) and the car’s speedometer was in mph (miles per hour). The speedometer was digital only, Bemoaning that she would need to do conversions, I pointed out that there was no such need. One lovely thing about Ozark was that, on the dashboard, there was a button which would convert your speedometer from miles per hour to kilometers per hour. (Luckily, that same button would also convert back if you pressed it again, or the car would have been very frustrating for the rest of our days in America after that trip to BC.) One button convenience.

Now, we are using The Car Which Shall Not be Named. It has no such convenient button. But it does have an analog speedometer, where the needle moves along a circular arc with speeds on it. The outer edge of the arc has the numbers in miles per hour. But there is an inner arc with smaller numbers (here by smaller I mean in a smaller font size, because the numbers are actually greater numbers) which lists kilometers per hour. Zero button convenience. The Car Which Shall Not Be Named also has a digital speedometer. Thus far, I can’t figure out how to make that change units.

Incidentally, this difference in units applies to all the distances too. If a sign reads Toronto 240, you are not 240 miles away. You are about 150 miles away, because you are 240 kilometers away. And on that note, unlike in America where there is a mile marker every mile, in Canada there do not seem to be regular kilometer markers on the edge of the road.

The place where the change of units is most confusing is when you want to buy gasoline. In America we state our prices in US dollars per gallon. But in Canada they state their price in Canadian cents per liter. How can you know how much you are paying? Math to the rescue!

First, I convert from Canadian cents to Canadian dollars. This is just like it would be in America, you divide by 100, or you move the decimal point two places to the left. Then you multiply the price by 3.79. Why? There are 3.79 liters in one gallon, so to buy a gallon of gasoline, you have to buy 3.79 liters of gasoline. Finally, you multiply by the exchange rate, how much US money is one Canadian dollar? Right at the moment, that is about 74 cents or 0.74 dollars.

I could write fractions to explain it using dimensional analysis. Would anyone be excited about that? I mean, other than me? Anyway, effectively if you turn the price into Canadian dollars and multiply by 2.8 then you have approximately the price in US dollars per gallon. (If the exchange rate changes, that number would change too.)

For example, right now in Kingston, you see gasoline for 164.9 meaning 164.9 Canadian cents per liter. (Note: Canadians would correct me and say it is 164.9 Canadian cents per litre. I acknowledge that it was the Americans who changed the spelling of words and the Canadians are keeping it pure. But both my second grade teacher, Ms. Pelz, and my spell checker would be disappointed if I were to go around writing litre. You can’t probably see it in the blog post, but as I am writing this, there is a wiggly red line under litre.) So I would say 164.9 cents is 1.649 Canadian dollars per litre. And then multiplying by 2.8 says I am paying about 4.62 US dollars per gallon.

If you are feeling hot under the collar after that entire excursion into mathematics but you still want to travel abroad, no fears. There are apps that will convert your gasoline (or really petrol) prices from local currency per liter into dollars per gallon. So you can cool down now. And you would do so in Celsius.

Yes, that is the other everyday unit of importance. (It’s not the only other one, but it is one that comes up pretty often.) But think of it this way: 20 degrees - shorts, 10 degrees - pants, and somewhere in the middle, you decide when to change.

The grocery store is very familiar. I mean, I don’t know which aisle holds anything unless it happens to be common enough to be on the big signs. But that’s true anytime I go to a new grocery store. They have similar products, they have store brands, they have shopping carts and check out clerks and self-check out lanes. But I have noted a few differences.

The butcher area has a Halal section. I think this is very cool. We saw that a lot in Muslim majority countries when we traveled. It is nice to see such helpful service in a country that has many Muslims, but which are certainly a minority.

Weights are in grams, so if you want to compare meat prices to those at home, remember 454 grams is a pound. (You can approximate with 450 grams.) I was surprised by how many packages of ground meat are 450 grams or even 454 grams. This is probably a remnant from the days when Canada still used the Imperial system. Not saying the meat is that old, just the size of the containers.

The grocery store doesn’t give you any bags at all. At least not in Ontario. You can buy reusable bags, but you really need to remember to bring your own. They don’t have paper and they don’t have plastic.

I guess it is a question of flexibility. If you are going to travel internationally, there are so many cultural differences you have to appreciate. Honestly, the units of measure aren’t that big a deal. There are plenty of conversion apps and after a while, you get a sense of how much you are spending relative to the prices you are used to.

The other possibility would be for the United States to switch to the metric system, making all of us get used to it, and then foreign travel would have one of the obstacles taken out of the way. But that doesn’t seem likely. While I wouldn’t say we are diametrically opposed to such a move, we are certainly metrically opposed.

Unholy Green

A song about Chicago hot dogs and homage to Howard Ashman. To the melody of Somewhere That's Green. You can click on the video if you want to hear me singing it. (Not necessarily saying that will be better. But you know, it's up to you.)

A hot dog made of beef
A bun with sesame
With peppers and tomatoes
And diced onions I can see.
A pickle spear and relish
Like none I've ever seen
With a color you might name
Unholy green.

It's brighter than the hue
Of leaves on summer trees.
It's shinier than Kelly
And darker than split peas.
The taste is not like spinach
Nor sweet like nectarine
No other food is this
Unholy green.

The hot dog makes it juicy
The onions make it sweet.
The pickle makes you pucker
And the peppers bring the spicy heat.

So if you are around
Chicago, Illinois
You ought to try their hot dog,
A taste you might enjoy.
But when you see the relish
You'll wonder what machine
Could make a plant based food
Unholy green.

All My Sisters and Me

First, I must clear the virtual air and admit that I have no sisters. I have a brother and no other siblings. The title of this post is a reference to the song "We Are Family" which continues with "I got all my sisters and me." Even sisterless as I am I have the temerity to use the reference. I throw myself on the mercy of my readers as they judge me for my allusionary (or is it allusory) prowess or lack of prowess.

For the past week, we have been visiting family as we traverse the middle of the country. First we visited my aforementioned brother and got to see our niece and two nephews. Then we visited my aunt and three generations of cousins descended from my aunt. From there we visited one of Alrica's cousins. And in a couple days we will see one of her aunts. That journey will have taken us from Mountain Time to Eastern Time (currently in the middle of those in aptly named Central Time.)

There are so many commonalities in families. Don't overgeneralize from my statement. Families are all very different. Even separate branches of the same extended family have their unique history and interactions. But it is those differences, those quirks, which inform the similarities.

I suspect every family seems pretty eccentric to outsiders. My wife's family will always be a bit inexplicable to me. I'm sure my family seems equally exotic to her. And yet, it works. Families make it work.

When Alrica and I married, we both inherited new sets of relatives. We didn't have a good grasp on the history, the personalities, the past conflicts or triumphs, not the intergenerational issues. And now we are each a part of the other's family, writing our own history, bringing our own personalities, and developing new conflicts and triumphs. (What about new intergenerational issues? Ask my kids or my parents or my in-laws. Probably, yes.) For better or worse, she's a Goldstein. And I'm a Green. (As Kermit might tell you, that's not always easy.)

But in the same breath, it's great. We've each also gained new loved ones, new friends we can enjoy, new family who will always open their doors to us as though we had been born into their clan. I have a great time talking philosophy (and other esoteric topics) with Alrica's cousins we just visited. Alrica got to help my cousin choose paint samples. And the new baby who is my first cousin twice removed is just as much Alrica's cousin. There was plenty of snuggling to reinforce that.

Alrica with the first of a new generation

My point? (It's optimistic of you to think I have one. Thank you.) I may not have all my sisters and me, but I can still proclaim, for better or worse or in between, that we are family. Twice.

Splendor - Erich

There is a game called Splendor in which you are a gem merchant and you are trying to attract nobles. Our family would play that game and I would never win.

We took a car trip to San Diego and we brought along three games: a deck of cards to play Pitch, the game Pandemic, and Splendor. But since the other games started with p we said we brought along Pitch, Pandemic, and Plendor. And while on that trip, I dominated at the game. I can't win Splendor, but at Plendor I am unbeatable.

That was a very drawn out way to get to the topic of splendor. Not the game but the awe inspiring beauty. We have just spent several days in western Colorado surrounded by splendor.

The west slope of the Rockies, the canyons along the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers, the roads through the Colorado National Monument; every view is a spectacle. At one point while looking across the valley at the plateau topped mountains, Syarra declared those were not mountains but a painting. They are that majestic and artistic.

In the distance, does that not look painted?

 My brother, Adam, came to Grand Junction to visit. We went out in his truck and drove into public lands with petroglyphs and narrow canyons. You can see the stripes of each separate sedimentary layer in the different kinds of sandstone. Sometimes the canyon walls look like bubbles burst out of them. Sometimes you see fallen rocks and you can make out the gaps in the cliffs where that boulder fell from who knows how many millennia ago. Tectonic activity and erosion shaped this land, continue to shape it in patterns that would take lifetimes to observe.

Proof of Adam

And it is out there, public, we are all welcome to visit. You don't have to go to a national park to see some of the wonders. There is magnificence within striking distance and often you are the only ones there. The American West is beautiful.

Spectacle and Splendor

 In the midst of all that, I think I finally won at splendor.

Vestigial, Colorado - Erich

You know how humans each have an appendix and we don’t know what it does? Or how we have a tailbone which is a fusion of four vertebrae even though we don’t have tails. Or how whales have hip bones which are disconnected from the rest of the skeletal system.

These are all vestigial. This means that they hang around but with a different use (or possibly no use) than what they were originally intended to be. Our appendix must be leftover from an evolutionary ancestor who needed it for some reason. Our tailbones are from our ancestors who had tails to help balance their weight when walking or leaping on all four legs. Whales are marine mammals which evolved from land mammals. Early whales had legs, but that was not of an evolutionary advantage, so now they don’t. But the bones are still there, just in a different form.

We are currently in Grand Junction, Colorado. I wondered, why is the city called Grand Junction? Like tailbones and whale bones, it’s vestigial!

The “junction” in Grand Junction has to do with the confluence of two rivers. It is here that the Gunnison River and the Colorado River meet. But why “Grand”? That’s what is vestigial and what is so interesting.

Prior to 1921, the part of the Colorado River which began in present-day Rocky Mountain National Park and flowed to present-day Canyonlands National Park wasn’t called the Colorado River. It was the Grand River. The Grand River flowed from Colorado into Utah and met the Green River in Canyonlands in Utah. Downstream of that confluence, it was called the Colorado River.

So at the time that Grand Junction was named, this was the location of the confluence of the Gunnison River and the Grand River, flowing downstream as the Grand River. So, it was the Grand Junction, since it was a junction with the Grand River. Isn’t that grand?

What it means is that originally the Colorado River didn’t even flow through Colorado. That brings up a few questions: First question – Why was Colorado named Colorado? As is often the case in the western U.S. there were territories that became states. So the state of Colorado was named for the Colorado Territory. And the Colorado Territory was named because it means “colored red.” A lot of the rock in Colorado (particularly in the west, where I am now) is red.

The Colorado River was named for the same reason. It cuts through much red rock. So neither the river nor the state was technically named for one another.

Second question – How did the Grand River get renamed the Colorado River? That was due to the lobbying of a Colorado Congressman named Edward Taylor. He was a true believer in the wonders of Colorado.

The Colorado River was one of the most important rivers in the western United States. Taylor wanted that famous and important river to be part of his state too. He pushed Congress hard for a resolution to rename the Grand River, to make it more of the Colorado River. And in 1921, they agreed to do so. They passed a joint resolution renaming the Grand River as the Colorado River.

But places like Grand County, Grand Lake, Grand Valley, and yes, Grand Junction, kept their names. I guess that relegated the names of these places to the appendices of Western U.S. History. Which is perfect since they are all vestigial, like our own appendices.

I Didn't Say Banana - Erich

The title of this post is a reference to the universally-funny-to-all-seven-year-olds knock knock joke that ends when the joke teller finally says “orange.” My nephew recently told me this joke, and I was eager to get to the orange.

That is what I’m doing now. Alrica, Syarra, and I are crossing the country to reach Syracuse University where Syarra will be a student in the fall. If you don’t already know, Syracuse students are oranges. Yes, their mascot, Otto, is an orange. With legs.

At least an orange is a count noun. Harvard is the crimson? What do you call just one Harvard student? A crimson? Well, only if the student is male. I suspect a female student is a crimdaughter.

My son, while at University of Nevada Reno was a wolf pack. How does that work? That’s already plural. Besides, there are no wolves in Northern Nevada. Of course, there are no oranges grown in Syracuse, New York. But there must be some oranges in the region’s grocery stores.

Now, Carver has shed his wolf pack’s clothing to become a duck. We saw ducks in the Willamette River while we were visiting Eugene. So they do definitely have ducks there. We also saw turkeys (not in the river) but I guess the founders of the school didn’t want their fighting cheer to be “gobble gobble gobble.”

Back to the present trip. We emptied the house and left Reno on Sunday afternoon. We made it as far as Elko, Nevada that day. Along the way we experienced the Mormon crickets that had until recently infested Elko. Mormon cricket is a complete misnomer. They’re not Mormons! In a recent survey, 97% of those questions expressed no religious affiliation. Of the 3% who consider themselves spiritual, most aligned themselves with the worship of Quetzalcoatl. Go figure. Oh, also, they aren’t crickets. They’re katydids and they’re huge! For katydids. Not like bigger than humans. Or even human shoes.

Mormon cricket and shoe
For size comparison

 

From Elko we traveled to Lehi, Utah. That’s just a bit south of Salt Lake City. And we took a much needed chill day after the frantic work of clearing and cleaning the Reno house. We enjoyed pool of two forms, the swimming kind and the hit balls with sticks kind.

The mountains around the Salt Lake City area are beautiful. This is also true of Reno, but the beauties are different. Certainly the mountains in Utah were more green. That was surprising and maybe isn’t always the case, but is only a function of a very snowy winter this past year. I only get the one snapshot that I get. Though as I write this, rain is falling. So maybe it is more than just one winter.

Our next stop is Grand Junction, Colorado. I can’t want to find out what is joining so grandly.

That’s pretty much all I wanted to say in this post. Though if I had the humor of a seven-year-old, I would restart at the beginning and post the whole thing again. Lucky for you, I am slightly more mature than that – emphasis on the slightly – I will just leave you with this: Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?

Reno Recap - Erich

 

So, yes, I acknowledge that there was a six-year hiatus in the blog. And it is very fair to say, why? What happened in that period? So, in that same spirit of fairness, let me give you a quick overview of six years in one blog post. (How is that for compression?)

While we were still traveling around the world, we started to talk about to where we might want to come back when we returned to the U.S. We each took a map of the continental U.S. with the state borders drawn in. And everyone then colored their map. You could color an entire state one color or break a state up into different parts and color each part a different color.

Green meant “Yeah, seems like a cool place to live.” Yellow meant “Not exactly eager, but this place would be fine.” Red meant “Uh, no.” Then I compiled a map with the average of everyone’s individual maps. The greener a region, the more everyone valued it as a great place to be. The redder, the more everyone valued it as a great place to avoid. And the state of Nevada: entirely red.

Note that none of us had ever been to Nevada before. SIDEBAR – that’s a bit untrue. When I was seven, my family went, by plane, to California and then back to Iowa (where we lived.) One of those two ways, we had a layover in Las Vegas Airport. I remember this because there were slot machines only a couple feet away from the waiting area by the gates. And my mother was going to teach my brother and me a lesson about gambling. She pulled out a few quarters (they still took quarters in that time) and started plunking them in and pulling the titular one arm of the bandit. On the third or fourth pull, she won. Several more quarters came pouring out of the bandit’s mouth. But to prove her point, she then proceeded to feed in all those quarters until they were no more. The lesson, I suppose, was gambling is a losing game. But I thought maybe there was an alternative lesson. Once the quarters come out, stop! You got lucky, say hooray, and move on. Having said this, or written this, I am not a gambler myself, so maybe I did learn the intended lesson. (Or I learned enough about probability theory in my training as a mathematician to recognize a negative expected value. Didn’t that sound mathy?)

BACK TO THE MAINBAR – None of us had seen Nevada, but we all assumed it was a big desert with little but sand, wind, and casinos. (And airports with casinos in them.) So if it rated so poorly, why did you go there? (I’m speaking as the reader now, or I would have written “why did we go there”.)

Carver was accepted into a program for profoundly gifted children called the Davidson Institute. They promised that he would be able to continue academically at his own pace, and when he was beyond their curriculum, they would let him enroll in classes at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). That’s what led us to living in Reno.

The irony is that we moved there for Carver, and he had the worst experience that first year. The Davidson Institute did not let him move at his own pace. They slowed him down. And then when he finished Multivariable Calculus, they said they would not let him take further math classes at UNR. Given that we had moved there for this program, that was pretty crummy (to say it in nice terms.)

However, the rest of us did well in Reno. It is not a desert, but a rather beautiful city in a valley within the Sierra Nevada mountains. We took Carver out of the Davidson Institute and put in him the Washoe County School District. He went to the Gifted and Talented Institute at Hug High School and things improved dramatically. Plus, they gave us no trouble about taking UNR classes.

Now allow me to present a recap of six years, person by person:

Syarra had a great experience in middle school and then went to the Gifted and Talented Institute at Hug High School. She took a lot of advanced classes including several at Truckee Meadows Community College. In fact, she took enough credits that in her senior year, she only needed one more English class to graduate with the Honors Diploma. I will get to her senior year in a moment. But also on the academic side, Syarra participated in Science Bowl and Academic Olympics. In fact, her Academic Olympics team won first place in Northern Nevada. Syarra was part of an engineering team that built a pumpkin chucker (catapult) and a robot for competitions. She was part of a team that won the National History Day competition at the regional level and she got to travel to Washington, D.C. to represent Nevada in the national competition. The team’s historical presentation was on Disney’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

A pumpkin display created by Syarra and Erich
Not the pumpkins chucked by the chucker

 

Syarra was very active in Girl Scouts, becoming a student board member for the district and representing the district as a delegate at the national convention. She interned at the Northern Nevada International Center. She earned her biliteracy degree in Spanish.

Back to that senior year, Syarra studied abroad through the U.S. State Department’s Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange Study program (YES). Syarra lived in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina for ten months where she learned Bosnian, attended an International Baccalaureate school, joined Toastmasters, and competed in Model UN, winning best delegate at one of the competitions and being the runner-up for best delegate at two others. She returned to Reno just in time for graduation at the top of her Hug High class. And now she is on her way to Syracuse University.

Carver, as I mentioned, did spend one school year at the Davidson Institute, but then moved on to better things. He decided he wanted to finish high school and college early. He was allowed to take many classes at UNR while still in high school and graduated in two years. (He did graduate in 2020, which meant his graduation was virtual.) He then continued at UNR. Thanks to all the credits he had already earned, he finished in three years with two majors (physics and applied mathematics) and one minor (linguistics.)

Carver also did Academic Olympics and his team also won first place in Northern Nevada. (This was in a different year than when Syarra’s team won.) Carver founded the science bowl team at Hug High School. And at UNR, he won a computer programming competition. While at UNR, Carver also had a successful trivia team, an active D&D group, and was a member of the Society of Physics Students. In his last year, he became the Secretary for that organization.

As a college graduate, Carver can assure you
that mustard packets are not spoons.

 

Alrica took a position as the Director of Editorial and Production for the University of Nevada Press. There she fostered many books through the process of publication, and even had a couple get a starred reviews in Publishers Weekly. (To any non-publishers who happen to read this blog, that’s a biggie.)

In December 2019, Alrica left that position to found her own publishing company: Keystone Canyon Press (https://keystonecanyon.com/) Had she known the pandemic would begin three months later, she wouldn’t have started the business at that time. It was rough for a young publishing company, and then with the supply chain issues, there was much frustration. Still, in spite of this, Keystone Canyon published some amazing books. There was a series called Fields of Silver and Gold which covered history of the western United States for children at a middle school level. There was a series of detective novels, the Ratio Holmes series, for upper elementary school kids. (The author – Horatio Holmes – that’s a pseudonym for another author, one whose writing you are reading right now.) There was a very successful picture book for the newest readers that was about the importance of dark skies and nighttime for animals. There were books for adults too. Alrica really wanted to publish books about things that mattered, things that have a positive impact on the world.

Alrica was also active in Girl Scouts, leading the troop, but also engaged with the Service Unit. There she helped plan and run events. (She also spent a lot of hours at cookie booths in inhospitable temperatures. As did Syarra. Don’t worry, both survived.)

You see snakes here, sometimes.

 

Erich (now going to write in third person) works for Johns Hopkins University. He teaches in their online mathematics department and also for their Center for Talented Youth. He teaches higher level mathematics courses for advanced students. During the pandemic, he also started teaching some courses for UNR. It was virtual the first year and in person after that.

Outside of work, Erich got very active with the theater community in Reno, especially with the Reno Little Theater. He introduced the 24 Hour Plays to Reno, produced a virtual show during the pandemic, and produced some live theater when live theater was allowed. In addition, he acted in, assistant directed for, and stage-managed various productions in Reno. Plus he wrote two long plays: Two Wrongs and FU Aristotle. He made a lot of friends in that community. The hardest part of leaving Reno is leaving them.

24 Hour Plays - get moving!

 

Along with one of those theatrical friends, Erich started a podcast called Namely (https://namelypodcast.podbean.com/). Each episode explores the history of a name or a group of related names, but with a cartoonish and comical take. Chicken Pox, Dr Pepper, Days of the Week, and others in all kinds of topics.

Obviously, there are many details being glossed over or even left out. But consider this the executive summary or the nearly executed summary.

(Back to first person.) Leaving Nevada, I believe that were we all to color the blank U.S. map again, the Reno area would be a field of green. (Let me have my illusions.)