Among Egrets and Alligators

Bird life along the coast outside my windows is naturally plentiful. A part of any walk on the beach is bound to be through flocks of gulls, skittering ruddy turnstones and under the elegant wingspan of soaring pelicans. Season and weather conditions influence both the number and type of birds encountered, and while there is some constancy, one of the examples not seen along the east coast of central Florida during winter and early spring is the egret. Probable that many of them move farther south to warmer coastal waters, but many of them are satisfied to move inland to lakes and waterways less troubled by cold wind. I was surprised to see last month two egrets calmly foraging in the grass verge of a freeway exit ramp in downtown Orlando, unmoved by the approach of cars up the ramp or the high speed swoosh of cars on the freeway side. The absence of any water seemed unimportant against the presence of grasshoppers in the six inch grass.

Though most of my life is identified with large cities, and while certainly not any kind of biologist, growing up in Louisiana left me with at least a kinship with bayous and swamp and the life that thrives in those ecosystems. Most days of my youth were spent riding a bicycle on paved streets that marked the habitat of more cats and dogs than anything else, but weekends and holidays spent at bayou camps fishing and hunting were many and from those weekends I developed an abiding appreciation of the wet green and cypress knee beauty of South Louisiana bayous.

The southern fringes of Louisiana’s extensive marshland are home to the largest species of egrets native to America. Unlike the smaller egrets that populate the summer coast of Florida, Louisiana egrets stand three feet tall, with a wingspan of five feet. By mid-April these giant egrets have mated and built nests in bushes or on tree branches, laid and hatched their eggs. Egret pairs usually produce four chicks which require six weeks of near constant feeding, but by the end of May the chicks will begin to fend for themselves.

The weeks from birth to self-sufficiency are like that of almost all creatures in nature, fraught with a host of dangers from spring storms and floods and from natural enemies like hawks, raccoons, alligators and snapping turtles. Not unheard of for alligators to batter bushes and tree trunks with their tail to shake the young down from the nest. A nasty thought, but tame compared to the bird’s onetime worst enemy, man. Now the birds are protected, but in earlier times plume hunters almost wiped out the egrets in southern Louisiana, providing decoration for women’s hats in the form of a luxuriant plume called aigrettes which the egrets exhibit only during courtship and later lose. But that is the past, and if we are able to avoid tragedies like last year’s BHP oil spill which has destroyed hundreds of square miles of Louisiana wetland, perhaps these beautiful birds will continue to flourish.

The two black and white photos of Louisiana egrets come from a 1973 Time-Life book, The Bayous.

In the top photograph an egret stands poised on a dead cypress tree. It is a carefully balanced stance from which the bird can launch instantly into flight.

The second photograph shows an adult egret repairing the platform of twigs that serve as a nest. The male procures the materials and the female does the building.

Tasting the Sweetness

On the patio under a clear, bright sky. With the usual randomness of undisciplined daydreaming, a goulash of jumbled thoughts sloshes around in my head, among them images of writer Alfred Kazin’s Brooklyn childhood. Maybe it’s a hint. I go inside and hunt up my copy of Kazin’s A Walker in the City, pull it down and settle with the last section looking for the gateway to slip once more into that earlier recollection of the writer’s childhood.

Alfred Kazin was born the son of Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of East Brooklyn in 1915. Until his death on his 83rd birthday he was prolific as an author, literary critic, teacher and cultural historian. His first book, On Native Grounds was published in 1942 attracting great acclaim for the twenty-seven year old. He followed the first with ten other books, writing up to the day of his death.

Kazin perhaps had much in common with contemporary New York Times journalist and walker, Nicole Krauss who wrote in harmony with Kazin, ‘I like to walk to be alone with the world, not to be alone. In this way, walking is a lot like writing. Both writing and walking (as I know it) are fueled by a desire to put oneself in relation to others. Not in direct contact—some aloneness wishes to be preserved—but contact through the mediation of language or shared atmosphere of a city street.’

A Walker in the City came out in 1951. This second book is a memoir of the writer’s youth in Brownsville, a marvelous odyssey of walks with Kazin through the streets and rooms of a child growing into youth and manhood—a minute portrait of a Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1920s and 30s. In the simplest labeling, it is the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America seen through the eyes of a boy walking the streets of his Jewish neighborhood. The book is filled with pages of deliciously simple prose that rolls around on the tongue like a favorite taste in perfect clarity. Here is a sampling of that prose from the book’s last chapter titled, “Summer: The Way to Highland Park.”

‘Summer was the passage through. I remember first the long stone path next to a meadow in Prospect Park where as a child I ran off one summer twilight just in time to see the lamplighter go from lamp to lamp touching each gas mantle with the upraised end of a pole so that it suddenly flamed. On the other side of those lamps, the long meadow was stormy-green and dark; but along the path, the flames at each lamp flared in yellow and green petals. Then, that summer I first strayed off the block for myself, the stone steps leading up from the lake in Prospect Park had stalks of grass wound between their cracks, were white with dust and drops of salt I thought came from the peanuts whose smell was everywhere in the park. But there was also some sugary taste in the air that day like the glazed wrapper around the cracker-jack box—and at the bottom of the box, caught by my sticky fingers, some fife or whistle which I blew that glorious warm Sunday full of cars from all over and the Stars and Stripes over the bandstand and the band in their colored coats and the dust flying up from everybody’s shoes as we came over to hear.

Summer was great time. I think now with a special joy of those long afternoons of mildew and quietness in the school courtyard, now a lazy playground, and of the main hall, where the dust rose up brown as we played quoits against the principal’s door.’

As the memoirist recalled… ‘I taste the sweetness of summer on every opening on my face.’ — A perfect description of the reader’s experience in A Walk Through the City.

All Shook Up

Seeing the headlines on Friday morning, making my way in a dazed state through the CNN reports and filmed disaster of a devastating earthquake in Japan, concern for friends and all affected people was an immediate concern. Pictures and reports were horrible, but the worst of those were from northeastern Japan, a good distance from Tokyo. The city looked badly rattled but without the catastrophic collapse and inundation of Sendai 300 miles north and near the quake’s epicenter. Continuing to read the incoming reports it was hard to stop the thought of what if…? One year ago today I was preparing to leave Japan. With departure imminent, the house was more than usual in a muddle of sifting, sorting and unsecured piles of everything from furniture to knickknackery. What if an earthquake of 8.9 magnitude had hit Japan at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2010—what would I have seen?

With classes still in session ongoing tremors trigger an alarm recognizable by all as a signal to evacuate the buildings and move away to a pre-determined distance and location. Because of the severity and continuance of the tremors—only 5.0 in Tokyo, three hours south of the epicenter—students and staff are instructed to return home either by bicycle or on foot without returning to the school buildings. All trains have been automatically stopped so those without bicycles—about fifty percent—have no choice but to walk home, be it near or far. Most students have cell phones but service is down and they are like everyone else, unable to contact family and friends for the present. For me the walk home is eighty minutes, much of it through areas free of traffic and buildings. Everywhere people are out on streets and sidewalks, even strangers are talking, commiserating, offering help or whatever is needed. It is a time when all come together without the smallest thought of discrimination or reserve.

In Kugayama, approaching my apartment building I find five or six of the residents out front and I stop to talk with them, to ask for news or about conditions inside the building. Much of the dramatic description and rolling eyes I put off as exaggeration and head up the stairs to my third floor apartment. The greatest worry is an eighteen gallon aquarium, the horrible thought of it knocked down and smashed with a flood of water and tropical fish. Opening the door and looking in is an anxious moment, but the indoor scene shows less collapse than expected. The fish are fine, but there in the middle of the kitchen floor lay the shards of several irreplaceable old Japanese dishes and bowls. The top of the paulownia chest of drawers is a jumble of collapsed figures and trifles, two CD cases have tipped over spilling their cargo into a hash of plastic and glossy covers. A mirror has fallen to leave shards of bad luck on the living room carpet and a reading lamp leans awkwardly over a reading chair, saved from a crash by the cushioned arm. I take a few deep breaths, relieved that it’s not as bad as my imagination had painted. But I have no electricity and no water, no telephone and no Internet. For the time being talk with neighbors will have to serve to keep me posted on conditions in a shaken but intact city. Easily the worst earthquake in my experience but in Tokyo at least we’ve been spared.

News reports have mentioned more than once that Friday’s earthquake in Japan was the worst in a hundred years. Some truth to that but many are forgetting that at noon on September 1, 1923 the Tokyo area was rocked by a cataclysmic earthquake that killed over 100,000 people in the city alone, with 570,000 homes destroyed and 1.9 million left homeless. The Great Kantô Earthquake of 1923 hit with a force of 7.9 but conditions made it a disaster of biblical proportions. At that time all homes as well as many of the city’s buildings were constructed of wood, an extremely fragile structural base. The quake hit at an hour when many were preparing lunch over open fires. The spread of fire was an immediate threat and to add a big measure of ill fortune, a typhoon was blowing from the north fanning the flames into a firestorm which trapped many in melting tarmac, burning them where they stood. 38,000 died in a huge clothing depot when the fire induced something called a fire tornado. But in looking back at that disaster we can see that preventive measures were nonexistent, buildings and planning much different from the architecture and infrastructure of Tokyo in March of 2011.

Modern Tokyo is a city designed with earthquakes uppermost in the mind of civic engineers and architects. An earthquake with the power of Friday’s temblor is certainly not anything that Tokyo or any other large city can ignore, but the chances of loss in both life and property on the scale of 1923 are unlikely today. While it may be true that twenty-four hours after an 8.9 earthquake 300 miles distant, four million homes in Tokyo remain without power and while trains sit unmoving and people are still finding their way home, there is great relief in the small number of human casualties today in Japan’s capital.

Drizzling on Bike Week

The Daytona International Speedway main entrance is directly across the street from the Daytona Barnes & Noble and today it looked like maybe Justin Bieber was making his debut in car racing. The entrance to B&N was clogged three deep with cars and motorcycles, but once through the entrance drive the traffic melted away revealing a half-empty parking lot. There was something quieter about the bookstore and after a minute it came to me that the people shopping for books had for a change forgotten their cell phones and were browsing quietly or sitting phoneless in cushiony easy chairs with book or magazine. My friend Yû found himself an edition of Catcher in the Rye (a Japanese favorite) while I stumbled upon a new book by one of my favorites, Don Winslow—a reworking of Trevanian’s 1979 bestseller, Shibumi. Winslow has taken a radical shift in choice of title, calling his new version Satori. The two Japanese word-titles are not even close in meaning, but… More about this book at a later time. Also picked up a paperback of the 1965 Truman Capote classic In Cold Blood. Probably too young to appreciate it fully the first time I read it, and seeing the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie Capote recently gave me the idea of reading it again through somewhat older eyes.

From the bookstore we ambled over to Panera Bread for some lunch, and a good idea that turned out to be. Thai chopped chicken salad made with romaine, cashews, Japanese edamame, red peppers, carrots, cilantro and wonton strips with peanut sauce and Thai chili vinaigrette, served with a bowl of all-natural steak chili and cornbread. Across the table from me Yû chomped on a huge smoked turkey sandwich served with a bowl of cream of tomato soup. Panera Bread puts on an impressive spread. We have many franchises in Florida but I’m sure it’s also in other states. If there’s one in your area and you’ve never been, then go. You will like it.

A walk through the library, up and down a couple of supermarket aisles and then back to cleared skies over the beach. Good timing to get a walk in, watch pelicans soaring like feathered ballerinas over the Atlantic blue and still find a late afternoon hour to play around with a vintage Pelikan 400NN and some Montblanc Racing Green ink.

Diamond in the Rough

I made brief mention yesterday of a new pen in the household, the gift of a visiting pen enthusiast from Tokyo. The very handsome gift is a TWSBI Diamond 530 and completely new to me. To say the pen is new shouldn’t imply that it’s one fresh off the company’s drawing boards, The Taiwanese company began production of their own fountain pens in early 2010. Before that their business was focused on supplying other fountain pen brands in the area of metal stamping, metal turning and plastic injector molding. For many years they made OEM writing instruments for well-known brands. The Diamond 530 is their first fountain pen under the name TWSBI.

The unusual name, pronounced 'Twiz-bee' is a puzzle made up of the first letters of the company name in Chinese reversed. San Wen Tang becomes TWS, but in a hard to understand twist, they added the Chinese word ‘BI’ explained as referring to writing tools. Thus, TWS plus BI gives us the name. I may have been wandering up the wrong alley, but among the twenty characters for ‘BI’ in my dictionary of Chinese characters none of them refer to writing tools. Lots of reference to noses, tails, eyebrows and art but nothing about writing tools.

What is special about the design of the TWSBI Diamond 530 is how the company sought suggestions, preferences and recommendation from fountain pen enthusiasts around the world. They posted on the Fountain Pen Network the idea that they were designing a new pen and would appreciate input about what people liked and disliked, what troubled them in other pens, as well as what impressed. The feedback became an important part of their design specifics.

No question they came up with a solid product, handsome in the traditional sense yet modern in a clear demonstrator body with visible black mechanics. The Diamond 530 is a large pen, comparable to the Pelikan 800 or the Pilot Custom 823. It has a heft to it that makes me wonder how well it suits a writer with smaller hands. The injection mold clear plastic body works well with the black piston filler providing good contrast along with the stainless steel clip and trim. My favorite touch is the silver on red seal at the top of the cap. Elegant, I’d say. The nib is stainless steel and naturally lacking the flex of gold, but there isn’t stiffness enough to make the flow of writing uncomfortable. Mine is a medium nib and satisfactory thus far. I expect that continued use will add some flex to the nib and bring it gradually closer to the feel I prefer. I have heard complaints of leakage from the piston seal, but TWSBI reports that the newer 1.5 model has an improved seal.

In some ways it isn’t altogether fair to attempt a definitive review of a new fountain pen when the experience of writing with it is still green and inadequately shaped. It’s very possible that a feeling or opinion might change after the pen has gone through a few dozen pages and a few refills. Despite that qualification first impressions have their value as well. At this early stage the Diamond 530 is a pleasure to use, producing the kind of fluid line I like and the feeling that performance will get better as the nib gradually shapes itself to my hand.

On the Lam

Hard to know when a typical Tuesday might turn into a day you’re on the lam from the police at one moment, and the next sifting through chicken bones and coffee grounds looking for a lost something and then being wowed by the gift of a great looking fountain pen from Taiwan. At least by this point later in the day I’ve stopped looking over my shoulder for flashing lights and cars bearing a big gold star on the doors. I’ve washed the grease and grounds off my hands, and sit now admiring the look and feel of a new TWSBI Diamond 530 fountain pen.

On the way to the airport to pick up a visitor from Japan I got to the toll booth with too few quarters. The change-only toll fee is $1.50 and I was stuck with only five quarters at an unattended booth and a line of cars behind me, the lady in the nearest one signalling ‘Duh!’ The machine won’t take bills and I’m out of change so I hit the gas and screech off down the highway. I mean, what are you gonna do?

Later…Safe from the law and relaxing in the living room with my houseguest, he picks up a Lamy 2000 from the coffee table, looks it over and asks where the silver ring is that holds the cap on. I explained that it had somehow ‘disappeared’ and since then the cap has been falling off too easily. He drew a picture of what the small ring looks like and I suddenly felt like a replacement for the Three Stooges. Yesterday I was cleaning under a table, found a small silver ring that rang no bells, didn’t look at all familiar, so I threw it away. It was the cap ring for the Lamy pen my friend had just drawn a picture of. Spent thirty minutes sifting through garbage and came up empty-handed.

No such thing as a Japanese houseguest arriving without a bounty of gifts. Because I had asked, the five Life Noble Note Plain (unlined) notebooks were no surprise, but on top of that was a TWSBI Diamond 530 fountain pen. I’ve read a little about this pen but still know next to nothing about the history and design. It’s made by a Taiwan company and from information on their website the TWSBI team listens very carefully to suggestions from fountain pen users worldwide, and are very responsive to input. The name TWSBI has an interesting story, but I will wait for another time to write about that along with my first impressions of the Diamond 530.

Work of the Chinese Brush

Clinging a bit longer to the Chinese theme from yesterday’s Kung Te-Ch’eng, thoughts today drifted to a book of Chinese poems translated by poet Kenneth Rexroth. It would be an exaggeration to say that Rexroth is a poet I have read extensively. I am familiar with a small handful of his poems, but have a handsome first edition of Chinese poems translated by Rexroth in my bookshelves. The book is a 1970 publication titled, Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese.

Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1905. Orphaned at fourteen, he led a roller-coaster life that included constant traveling both in the US and abroad, political activism, and four marriages. Mostly self-educated, he was an extremely well-read man. His poetry influenced Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and reflect his wide reading. Much of his work emphasizes ecology, sexuality, and mysticism. Rexroth died in 1982 in California.

Two poems: The first is by the poet Tao Chin (365-427 AD) recognized as one of the greatest of Chinese poets. His poems are quiet and unpretentious.

I RETURN TO THE PLACE I WAS BORN

From my youth up I never liked the city.

I never forgot the mountains where I was born.

The world caught me up and harnessed me

And drove me through dust, thirty years away from home.

Migratory birds return to the same tree.

Fish find their way back to the pools where they were hatched.

I have been over the whole country,

And have come back at last to the garden of my childhood.

My farm is only ten acres.

The farm house has eight or nine rooms.

Elms and willows shade the back garden.

Peach trees stand by the front door.

The village is out of sight.

You can hear dogs bark in the alleys,

And cocks crow in the mulberry trees.

When you come through the gate into the court

You will find no dust or mess.

Peace and quiet live in every room.

I am content to stay here the rest of my life.

At last I have found myself.

Lu Yu (1125-1209) wrote about eleven thousand poems in his lifetime. His poetry is described as loose and casual.

INSOMNIA

Even when I fall asleep early,

My nights are long and full of bitterness.

Tonight, tortured with insomnia,

Memories of the past flood back

Until they have exhausted me.

Alone in the house beside a smoky lamp,

I rub my heavy eyelids

And idly turn the pages of my notebook.

Again and again I scratch my head

And trim my brush and stir the heavy ink.

The hours go by. The moon comes

And stands in the open door,

White and shining like molten silver.

Suddenly I am back, sailing on Ts’ai Fong River

With the fellows of my youth,

Back in Yuen village.

Oh wonderful mountains! Oh noble boys!

How is it that I have lived so long

And never once gone back to visit you?