texas – Page 7 – To Hither and Yon

A Little San Antonio History, Part 1 (Most Likely)

This weekend Wurstfest starts in New Braunfels, Texas. If it doesn’t rain, we’re planning to go. This reminds me that I haven’t given you much of the history of San Antonio. Trust me, the Wurstfest/San Antonio connection will become apparent. At least, that’s the plan.

Prior to 1718, the only residents of what is now San Antonio were nomadic bands of Native Americans, primarily the Payaya. I live uphill of a creek and was told that Native Americans used to camp on my land. Sure enough, I found, not an arrowhead, but a genuine, for-real stone age tool in my back yard.

On June 13, 1691, a group of Spaniards traveling through Texas discovered a river. They named the river for the saint whose feast day it was, Saint Anthony of Padua. These Spaniards left and others arrived later, on April 13, 1709. They arrived somewhere near where San Pedro Springs Park is today and promptly named the springs for a saint whose day it wasn’t. Surprises the heck out of me. Among the choices of April 13 saints, for those playing at home, were San Martín, San Carádoco and San Urso de Rávena. Maybe the friars just didn’t like any of those choices.

As an aside, my ex and I used to watch Sliders and in one episode they arrived in a world that was virtually indistinguishable from their home world and they settled back in and lived for a while and Quinn kept noticing tiny differences. They were finally convinced when, after some time (I seem to recall it had been months) they saw that the Golden Gate Bridge was blue. My ex and I were incredulous because the Alamo is ubiquitous around here. There’s just no way you could live here for months or whatever without ever seeing a picture of the Alamo. If the parapet were a different shape, it’d be pretty obvious to a careful observer within days, if not hours, and the Alamo is not nearly as iconic as the Golden Gate Bridge.

Anyway, that was just in aid of saying that there may well be parallel worlds where San Pedro Creek, San Pedro Springs Park, and the major road known as San Pedro Avenue are all “San Martín” or something.

These Spaniards were apparently just passing through as well, because the next contact the natives had with Spaniards was May 1, 1718, when the friars established a new mission, San Antonio de Valero, near the San Pedro springs. They apparently chose the original Spanish name rather than sticking another saint, in this case, likely San Jose Obrador or San Orencio or something, on the area (just wait, there’ll be another new saint eventually).

This mission, which would eventually become the Alamo, moved around a bit before finally settling not too far from the San Antonio River in what is now downtown San Antonio.

Two years after the founding of the Alamo, the Franciscans founded another mission in San Antonio. This was Mission de San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo.

In 1731, San Antonio experienced something of a population boom. First, three more missions moved to the area from East Texas.

One was Mission San Francisco de la Espada (for those who speak Spanish, yes, it does mean “St. Francis of the Sword,” and no, we don’t know why it ended up with that name). San Francisco de la Espada, known locally as “Mission Espada,” was actually the first Spanish mission in Texas, founded in 1689. Another was Mission San Juan Capistrano (not the one in California), which was founded in 1716 as San Jose de los Nazonis. The third was Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña, which is a mouthful, and is generally known locally as “Mission Concepción.” Mission Concepción, which is my personal favorite, was founded in East Texas in 1716.

Then, the King of Spain sent 400 colonists from the Canary Islands to San Antonio they had set out in 1730 and finally arrived in 1731.

All of this settling of the area was in aid of one thing: outdoing France. France had a foothold in what is now the United States, and Spain and France had something of a rivalry going. Spain didn’t want to be outdone, so they decided that the fastest way to win was to cheat, by turning the natives into Spaniards. One drawback to this plan was that by law all Spaniards had to be Roman Catholic. So, rather than sending Conquistadores and all of that, they sent Franciscan friars to build missions and convert the natives.

People still ended up dead, tragically. Germ theory was still years away at this point. People believed that disease was caused by something called a “miasma,” so it was something of a surprise when all of their new converts started getting sick and most of them ended up dying.

The Canary Islanders formed the settlement of San Fernando de Bexar, and their parish church is now San Fernando Cathedral. As San Fernando de Bexar, grew, and merged with the settlement called San Antonio, it attracted settlers from elsewhere. The earliest were Anglos from the United States, who moved in once Mexico was independent from Spain in 1820. German settlers followed in the 1840s. The Germans were led by Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels, who founded a settlement in New Braunfels, to the northwest of San Antonio (this is where the connection to Wurstfest comes in). At about the same time, a group of French immigrants came in with Henri Castro and founded a town called Castroville to the west of San Antonio.

Then there are the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, a Roman Catholic religious order, also French, which have had a major impact on San Antonio, despite not being part of the breeding population. The first three sisters of the order to arrive in San Antonio arrived in 1869, where they proceeded to set up the first hospital in the growing city, which was located on the site where the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio (formerly known as Santa Rosa Hospital, and which was named for St. Rose of Lima, the first Catholic saint from North America) stands today. The sisters also founded a school, which is now the University of the Incarnate Word.

Other city institutions with French roots include the Ursuline Academy (now the Southwest School of Art and Craft) and San Antonio’s basilica, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower, which started out as a Spanish church in the early 1920s, but which is dedicated to the French saint, Thérèse of Lisieux.

Over the next months/years I will probably go into all of these places (I just noticed that most of them are churches) in future posts, but I just thought I’d put a little bit out there on how San Antonio, a traditionally Mexican-American city, came to have so many people of different ethnicities whose families have lived here for centuries.

South Texas Destinations: Museum Reach, the River Walk, San Antonio, Texas

While you are on the River Walk in downtown San Antonio, you will see occasional signs pointing north (well, generally north, I suspect there may be some that actually point east and will take you to a north/south part of the river, where the signs point north, and the river is not strictly straight, so some may point northeast or northwest) that say, “Witte Museum.” These signs will take you to the Museum Reach section of the River Walk.

The Museum Reach section is comparatively new. I remember one of my parents’ visits here in the 1990s my dad insisted on walking to the northern end of the River Walk. At the time, the path ended near the Hugman Dam. The San Antonio River’s elevation changes pretty suddenly both just north and just south of downtown with the end result that the current was faster than Hugman would have liked for the gondolas that he envisioned traveling up and down the river. So he put a dam in at either end of the River Walk. The water would pool up a bit behind the dams and would slow down the flow of the water. When they extended the River Walk to the north, they added a river taxi service and put an opening in the dam so that the boats can get through.

Anyway, back to the 1990s. My dad wanted to keep walking, so we continued through the underbrush for another couple of blocks after the sidewalk ended. I don’t think we went as far as McCullough, though. All of that is area paved and landscaped now and it is unrecognizable from that scrubby bank that we walked along in the 1990s.

The Museum Reach section of the River Walk is designed for use by tourists, so as you go farther north, the River Walk passes several other destinations. First is the new lock and dam that they built to take care of that elevation change and allow the boats to go on farther north on the river. If you are so inclined, you can just stand on top of the dam for hours just watching the river boats being carried up and down in the locks.

Along the way towards our next destination, the San Antonio Museum of Art (must remember to bring these links back here once I make these posts. If I never do, at least you will know that I meant to do so) you will find a public art installation called “Sonic Passage.” Sonic Passage is a sound-based installation, so there’s nothing to see, but it’s an interesting experience.

The Art Institute of Chicago, it is not, but the San Antonio Museum of Art, which is housed in the original Lone Star Beer brewery, has a lot going for it, including a very important, both regionally and nationally, collection of Asian art and most of the collection of Mexican folk art amassed by former Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller.

Continuing farther north, we will go under Interstate 35, where you will see another art installation, ‘F.I.S.H.” F.I.S.H. is, just like the name implies, fiberglass fish. The fish light up at night, as well. Past the bridge is another installation, the concrete “Grotto.” Another former brewery, the Pearl Brewery, is the next stop. The Pearl Brewery was a working brewery until 2001 and was nearly razed after it closed. The centerpiece of the brewery, the brewhouse, was built in 1894 in a sort of I guess Second Empire style. Today the complex is home to a number of businesses, including restaurants, a hotel, and a farmer’s market that is held twice a week. The Pearl Brewery also has 324 apartments, so it is not just a restaurant complex, it is also home to (at least potentially) 324 families.

And I was right. The Pearl Brewery is Second Empire. I spent several days researching the Hugman Dam, and didn’t want to lose that kind of time on the architectural style of the Pearl Brewery. So I basically thought, “It reminds me of Philadelphia’s City Hall. What style is that?” And Philadelphia’s City Hall is Second Empire. So when I searched for “Pearl Brewery” and “Second Empire” I found all kinds of pages that backed me up.

Not too far north of the Pearl Brewery, the sidewalk ends at a big concrete structure that looks kind of like a dam. It isn’t a dam, however, it’s the flood control inlet. There is a giant tunnel underneath downtown where extra water from potential flooding is channeled underneath the city so that potential flooding won’t become actual flooding and flood downtown (as we saw in the spring of 2015, the tunnel is not 100% effective). The water comes out south of downtown and we will see the outlet in my post on Mission Reach (once Alex and I finish walking that entire distance, which probably won’t be until winter sometime — it’s October and still hot here).

If you are looking at the flood control inlet and want to continue on farther north, you have to double back to the other side of the Josephine Street overpass and go up to street level. The other side of Josephine Street is Flood Control Inlet Park. At the far side of the park, there’s a ramp that goes back down to the river level.

Enjoy the river while you can, because we’ll be leaving it (temporarily) soon. The path goes under U.S. 281 and then makes a right, but the river goes on straight. Straight through the Brackenridge Park Golf Course. They don’t want tourists walking through the golf course, so instead the path goes along the southern edge of the golf course, then along Avenue B. From Avenue B, make a left onto Mulberry and then a right onto Red Oak. At this point, you are in Brackenridge Park. A block or two down Red Oak, the path will meet up with the river again, but the river will never be quite as manicured as it was south of Flood Control Inlet Park.

Red Oak ends at Tuleta, and there is really only one direction to walk — right. There, at the intersection of Tuleta and Broadway, is the destination that the sign way back downtown was leading you — the Witte Museum.

It looks like most of the destinations I have covered are handicap accessible. There’s a ramp at Lexington, just south of Hugman Dam. There is are others at the San Antonio Museum of Art and at the Pearl Brewery. It looks like you need to be able to navigate stairs to get down to the actual flood control inlet, but the way to get back up to street level at Josphine Street sure looks like a ramp on Google Earth.

The last time I did this walk (I’ve done it twice) there was no signage indicating what to do after the flood control inlet. I suspect a lot of people just give up and go home at that point. Maybe they go back to the Pearl and throw back a beer or something. I know that if I had any interest in beer, and was less determined to find that damn museum, that’s probably what I would have done.

September 2015 Supermoon

Alex and I just returned from looking for the “blood moon.” It was too cloudy in San Antonio to see it, so I looked at the Clear Sky Chart website and saw that the sky seemed clearer out west on Interstate 10. It seemed that the farther west you go, the better viewing conditions were, so Alex and I headed west. We drove until we left the city lights behind and then went even farther west on local roads.

When we finally reached a place where we could see the moon, we put on our hazard lights and pulled over to attempt to take some pictures. A family in an SUV stopped to make sure we were okay, and we explained what we were up to. They recommended that we drive even farther out on that road, so we did.

We stopped just about at the maximum of the eclipse and attempted to take some pictures. I say “attempted to take” because it was still pretty cloudy, so all we got, for the most part, was darkness with a little smudge of light in it. I am thinking about getting one of those apps that will average them together and perhaps bring the moon out a little more in the pictures, but maybe I will decide that just having made that drive and seen the moon is sufficient.

All I know for certain is that it’s getting towards 11:00 here and I’d better get to bed if I want to get up to see Alex off to school in the morning.

I played around with the edit functions of my phone last night and came up with some kind of image representing the moon that I saw last night. It’s not perfect and, in fact, is kind of blobby looking, but at least it’s visible.

September 27, 2015 Blood Moon — The supermoon eclipse of September 27, 2015, seen from northwest of San Antonio, Texas

National Geographic, March 2014, Part 2

I thought I wasn’t going to be able to finish this issue prior to the scheduled posting date of September 8. But I did. Whew!

Quicksilver, by Kenneth Brower, photographs by Brian Skerry

Quicksilver is a picture of overfishing, which seems to be a common theme in National Geographic in recent years, told through the population of bluefin tuna. Bluefin tuna live in all of the world’s oceans except, traditionally, for the Arctic Ocean (this has apparently changed in the months since this issue went to press).

Along the way, we see how important bluefin tuna are to Japanese culture. The first bluefin tuna of the season is subject to a bidding war that raises the price far above what a bluefin normally would cost. In 2013, the first bluefin tuna went for $1.76 million. We also watch scientists who are studying bluefin tuna using tracking devices to watch the movements of the fish. Scientists used to think that different populations of bluefin stayed to their own oceans, but the use of tracking devices has put an end to that idea.

Hopefully with proper studying and fishery management, the population of bluefin tuna will rebound and reach numbers that will ensure that people will be able to eat bluefin tuna long into the future.

Star Eater, by Mark Finkel, photographs by Mark A. Garlick

Star Eater starts off on the cheerful note of the expected extinction of Earth’s sun. This made me nervous. Contemplating the death of the universe is a nice thought experiment, I guess, but it’s not really something that makes me comfortable.

Things become a lot less personal in the second paragraph, though. This is when we start to talk about the forces that cause the creation of a black hole.

The rest of the article is about the way that black holes function, only now I’m more confused than ever. In one paragraph, Finkel tells us that black holes “roam the galactic suburbs” and, later, that some are “star-shredding, planet-devouring Godzillas,” but then later, he says “A black hole has no more vacuuming power than a regular star.” I am now thoroughly confused. So there are stars that wander the galaxy and the star-shredding Godzilla would have done it anyhow even if it hadn’t been turned into a black hole?

Then we talk about the relationship between the black hole and time. Finkel tells us that if you were to fall into a black hole, time is so elongated there that we would never see you fall in. You would just be stuck there on the edge of the black hole, from our perspective, “for an infinite amount of time.” But earlier Finkel told us that at the time this magazine went to press, a gas cloud was headed towards the black hole and that we would see a ring of debris form around the edge of the black hole as it eats the cloud. Why will we see the debris of the gas cloud form, but the person on the edge of the black hole would never fall in?

I actually very, very briefly considered studying astronomy at one point, and I’m glad that the consideration was very, very brief, because I’m clearly not smart enough for this.

People of the Horse, by David Quammen, photographs by Erika Larsen

The horse evolved in what is now North America. During the era of the Bering land bridge, some horses moved to Eurasia and then an extinction event happened in North America (perhaps they were hunted to extinction), leaving North America horseless. Horses were domesticated in Eurasia, and then thousands of years later, Christopher Columbus and future colonizers brought horses back to North America, where horses settled in as though they were at home, largely because they were. Many nations of Native Americans embraced them and made them part of their culture. And they are still a major part of Native American culture today.

Quammen gives us a little of the history of the horse, but People of the Horse is largely about the relationship between modern Native Americans and their horses. We meet Toni Minthorn, whose family didn’t have enough money to provide their children with toys. The family had 47 horses, however, which saved Toni’s self-esteem.

People of the Horse goes into the events of the Native American rodeo in great detail. I won’t even try to summarize, because I couldn’t do justice to it without quoting Quammen in detail. However, if you need information on the Native American rodeo and the Indian Relay, this article is definitely a good resource.

Call of the Bloom, by Susan McGrath, photographs by Merlin D. Tuttle

I love bats. Sometimes living in Texas gets me down (particularly when the temperature is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit), but the abundance of bats is definitely a plus. Just yesterday (as I write this; it will post about six days later), Alex and I were in Fort Worth, and we saw the wings of several bats in the parking garage. So, yeah. Bats.

There are numerous species of night-blooming flower and if you think about it, with nothing to pollinate them, the flowers would have died out. Sometimes the pollinator is a moth or the rare nocturnal variety of bee, but quite often the pollinator is a bat.

Call of the Bloom goes into the mechanics of how nectar-drinking bats find the flowers that produce the nectar, including having dish-shaped leaves that bounce the sound of the bat’s cry back at them strongly. We also see how those flowers have evolved to make it easy for the bat to get the nectar out While the bat is drinking the nectar, the stamen will drop pollen onto the bat, and the pollen sticks in the bat’s fur, where it remains until it falls off into the next flower. Interestingly, while many night-blooming flowers have smells that are pleasant to the human nose, the flowers that attract bats don’t necessarily smell so good to us. McGrath describes the smell as being like cabbage, sour milk, and skunk, among other smells.

The Mexican free-tailed bat is the bat that summers here in San Antonio, and they are known to drink some nectar. The night-blooming cereus, which does have a pleasant smell to the human nose, is one of the plants that bats pollinate.. I am tempted to get one for my front yard (so that the bats don’t get into conflict with my dog) and see if I can attract some bats next summer.

Texas State Parks Passes

There are 102 state parks in Texas, stretching from Resaca de la Palma near Brownsville in the south to Palo Duro Canyon south of Amarillo in the north; from Franklin Mountains in El Paso in the west to Sea Rim State Park in Sabine Pass to the east. Wherever in Texas you are, you are likely to be near (for Texas-native values of “near”) a state park. State Parks come in all sizes, as well, from the largest, the 311,000-acre (126,000 hectare) Big Bend Ranch State Park in Marfa to the smallest, the 16.1-acre (6.5 hectares) Old Tunnel State Park in Fredericksburg.

With a Texas State Parks Pass, which in 2015 costs $70, you and your guests can have unlimited visits to the parks of the Texas State Park System. “Guests” generally works out to anyone in the same noncommercial vehicle with the pass holder. Holders of Texas State Parks Passes also get discounts on purchases in the stores of the parks and also on overnight camping, which can be done in a tent or in a recreational vehicle/RV.

This is not an ad, it’s more of a testimonial. On and off (mostly on) for the last ten years or so, I have been the proud holder of a Texas State Parks Pass. And we take pretty good advantage of our pass. Generally, my “guest” is actually a household member, my son (who has decided that he would like me to call him Alex in blog posts). Occasionally, Alex and I will bring a friend (or two) with us to a park.

Being that Alex does not have a driver’s license yet, we haven’t wandered too far afield too often. I am a native Chicagoan. Where I grew up, anything farther than about 20 minutes away by car is far. I have adjusted somewhat to the Texans’ idea of “close,” which is something along the lines of three or four hours (before we moved down here, Texans would tell us that San Antonio is close to Mexico, to Houston, and to the Gulf; the closest of these is two and a half hours away0. However, an hour, maybe as much as three for something really important, is about my maximum. We have made it as far as the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site to the east, Mustang Island State Park to the southeast, Garner State Park to the west, and McKinney Falls State Park to the north. Mostly, though, we stay pretty close to the city. We visit Government Canyon State Park once or twice a year, and Guadalupe River State Park a little less frequently than that. We also go to Lost Maples State Natural Area every few years. In another year or so, once Alex has a driver’s license, we will be able to go farther, since we will have two drivers.

I don’t know if we exactly get $70 of activity out of the pass, but we do pretty well. It is nice to be able to go to a state park on a whim. It is also a nice feeling to know that I am helping support the conservation and preservation work that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department does.

National Geographic November, 2014

This is going to be kind of a downer of an entry. First, we have an article on how parasites change the behavior of their hosts. Second, we return to Nepal in April 2014, for the single deadliest day on Mount Everest. I should have expected this issue to be kind of a downer after the “still life” featuring a dead pelican on pages 28 and 29. Continue reading “National Geographic November, 2014”

National Geographic, December 2014

As I write this, it is around 6:45 (I say “around” because my cat is sleeping in front of the clock on my computer) on July 9, 2015. When this posts, it will be midnight, Central Daylight Time, on July 16, 2015. If all goes as planned, my son and I will be asleep in New York City, recovering from our first full day of vacation. We will definitely have just visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island the day before and hopefully will have been to the United Nations as well. We probably will have taken the bus to Battery Park so that we could make it in time for our tour, but I may have convinced my son to walk at least some of the way back. Let’s see how it all plays out in the end.

The theme for this issue is food. There are other articles, on the Middle East, 3-D printers, and the like, but the first three articles (well, technically, article and two pictorials) are about food, so I am going to group them together.

The Joy of Food Text and photos by various writers.

The Joy of Food is the first pictorial in the article. There are both historical and current pictures of people eating (mostly of them sharing food) from as far back as 1894 and from locations all over the world.

We open with two children in England sharing an apple in a photograph first published in National Geographic in 1916 accompanied by text by Victoria Pope. Following this are images from Afghanistan, Germany, England, and the United States (one from California and one from Washington, DC). The 1894 photograph takes up two pages. It is of picnicgoers in Maine eating watermelon. The next pages feature images from Croatia, Ghana, China, and one of a family saying grace where the location is unknown (but likely is the United States once again). We get another two-page photograph, this one likely to be a modern photo of nuns in Beirut making marzipan. The final five photographs are of 1934 birthday party, an Armenian wedding, food laid out for the dead in Belarus, a fisherman in Alaska, and a boy eating porridge in Denmark.

In addition to the Victoria Pope quote, the text is from Erma Bombeck, M.F.K. Fisher, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The Communal Table Text by Victoria Pope, Photographs by Carolyn Drake

I think that this is the first article I’ve reviewed that has both text and photographs by women.

The Communal Table is about a meal in Milpa Alta, the poorest borough of Mexico City. Milpa Alta, which is Spanish for “high cornfield,” is the site of around 700 religious festivals a year, culminating in an annual pilgrimage, which begins on January 3, to a holy site in Chalma, 59 miles from Milpa Alta.

This meal, which is held just before Christmas, is called </i>La Rejunta</i> (Spanish for the roundup), is a meal of tamales and atole, which is traditional Mexican chocolate drink. The tamales and atole of La Rejunta given to thank those who made donations to the pilgrimage, and the amounts of each are proportional to the value of the donation.

The Communal Table focuses on the people who make La Rejunta work, particularly on the 2013 majordomos of the event, Virginia Meza Torres and Fermín Lara Jiménez. Pope takes us through the steps of preparation for La Rejunta until the day of the event.

My only issue with this article is that the focus on the people leaves the places shrouded in mystery. The reference to “the ancient place of the holy cave,” and to “a life-size darkened statue of Jesus” led me to the conclusion that the pilgrims still visited the original cave. Instead, the “statue” is a crucifix and the current pilgrimage is to a baroque church that stands in front of the cave. There are references in the text to Milpa Alta being “rural,” but the images are all very crowded looking. In reality, the area is spread out enough that three major hot-air balloon festivals are held in the area every year.

By Their Fridges Ye Shall Know Them, photography by Mark Menjivar

This is a two-page spread featuring several photographs from Menjivar’s “Refrigerators” project. Menjivar takes pictures of the insides of people’s refrigerators and displays them full-sized, so that the viewer gets the feeling that he or she is really looking into someone’s refrigerators. Four images are featured in this spread, including the refrigerators of a football coach and social worker, of a midwife and science teacher, of a street advertiser, and of a bartender.

The bartender, by the way, has a container of mayonnaise from the Central Market Organics line which is local to South Texas (where I live currently). I looked up Menjivar’s CV, and he is in South Texas, as well.

Cross Currents, by Kennedy Warne, photographs by Thomas P. Peschak

Even though this isn’t an official part of the food theme of this issue, this is also an article on food — fishing in particular.

After apartheid ended in South Africa, the government set up a new policy regarding fishing, allowing a certain number of licenses to commercial, recreational, and subsistence fishermen. The subsistence fishermen group were largely indigenous Africans who fish to provide food for their families. Subsistence fishermen had previously been shut out of getting licenses, so it was a huge step forward to allow them to have a certain percentage of the available licenses.

The are two problems with this scheme. The first problem was that the commercial licenses all went to large operations, leaving the smaller commercial operations (who are described in the article as “artisanal”) without licenses. The second was that they overestimated the ability of humans to overfish. As a result, the government ended up rescinding a bunch of licenses and set aside “marine protected areas” where the fish could, theoretically, reproduce undisturbed.

The end result of this, however, was that poaching is now skyrocketing. Warne spends much of this article talking to the poachers and trying to balance their viewpoints with those of the people who are in favor of keeping, or even expanding, the marine protected areas.

Blessed, Cursed, Claimed: On Foot Through the Holy Lands: (Out of Eden Walk – Part 3) by Paul Salopek, Photographs by John Stanmeyer

Blessed, Cursed, Claimed is the third installment of Salopek’s series, Out of Eden Walk, where Salopek is walking from Africa’s Rift Valley and across the Middle East, then through Asia, into North America and then down into South America. Apparently Salopek is taking a fairly liberal interpretation of the term “walk,” since he is doing some of the trip by boat. Salopek began the walk in 2013, and hopes to complete it in 2020.

In this installment, Salopek walks from Jordan to Jerusalem. We see archaeological sites, refugees, Bedouins, Jews, Muslims, and Christians, in this part of the walk.

Much of this article focuses on barriers. not only does Salopek cross a national border, he also crosses through the West Bank, where the two-state solution would have the nation of Palestine be. We also cross the barrier between the main city of Jerusalem and the community of the Haredi, ultraorthodox Jews who have a strict separation between men and women in their society. We also visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The actual site where Helena (mother of Constantine the Great) believed that Jesus was born is now a Greek Orthodox church. At the height of the tensions between the Greek church and the Catholic Church of St. Catherine next door, the only way that Catholic visitors could see the church was through a peephole in the common door between the two churches. And, finally, we see the gulf of darkness that separates a Bedouin family that was Salopek’s host on the shores of the Dead Sea from the nearby luxury resort.

Just Press Print, by Roff Smith, photographs by Robert Clark

I think that this may be the first non-travel-centric article that I’ve written about here, aside from the prefatory material from 1888. Though there is some geography-related content in the article, the article is mostly about the advances in technology that comes from 3-D printing. Most of the results of 3-D printing that I have heard of has been plastic and since the results of the 2-D printing industry, in the form of junk mail, has been a big stressor for me, my reaction has usually been “Oh, goody. Plastic three-dimensional stuff to take up even more space.”

So, this article was good for me to read, since we see some of the useful things that can be made, including a new face for a man who lost much of his face to cancer (warning: if you are squeamish about these types of things, don’t read this article, because there is a beautiful photograph of the man and his prosthetic face) and living tissue, with a view towards perhaps being able to print replacement organs for people.

The travel hook in the article is a bit about a printed house that the firm DUS is building in Amsterdam. They expect the house to be finished in around three years.

Wasteland, by Paul Voosen, photographs by Fritz Hoffmann

Wasteland is an article about Superfund sites in the United States. In 1980, Congress created a program, called Superfund, that was designed to remediate lands that were damaged by toxic waste. The Superfund program arose after toxic waste was discovered in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York. The original plan was for the companies that caused the waste to be left there to pay some of the cost of remediation and for the government to pick up the rest of the cost, but a number of the companies were unwilling or unable to pay for their share, leaving the government to pay the entire cost.

There are more than 1,700 Superfund sites in the United States, and one statistic given says that one in six people in the United States lives within three miles of a Superfund site. I have lived, if not within three miles, pretty close to that, of two in my life, one in the Chicago area when I was a child and one in the San Antonio area as an adult.

The article talks about the different types of remediation being done on some of the sites in the United States and also the increasing difficulty the government is having coming up with the money now that the tax that had previously paid for the government’s share, a tax on chemicals and oil, has expired.

Images of other sites profiled in this, article, aside from Love Canal, are Tar Creek in Pitcher, Oklahoma; a landfill in Monterey Park, California; the Gowanus Canal in New York City; and the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana. There is information on even more sites in the text of the article.

Cowboys on the Edge, by Alexandra Fuller, photographs by Tomás Munita

Cowboys on the Edge is the tale of baguales of Estancia Ana María, in Patagonia in Chile. In the early 20th century, Estancia Ana María was owned by Arturo Iglesias. Some of his herd of cattle went feral and natural selection caused them to become wilder and stronger than regular cattle. Now, rather than vacas, the name for this type of literally savage cattle is baguales, and the men who herd them are bagualeros.

Fuller traveled with the bagualeros as they went to round up as many baguales as they could in the period before the Iglesias family sells the land to a rancher. The bagualeros hoped to collect as many as 50 baguales, but it was a tougher job than they expected.

I am used to running with a fairly sensitive group online, so I want to put a small content warning on this article. Several of the baguales die on the trip and there is one reference to invading Poland that is kind of tone-deaf to those who are sensitive to Nazism.

Otherwise, this is a quick read written in a pretty informal style. I did have to wonder about Fuller’s assertion that boat or a 10-day horse ride through fairly deep water are the only ways to get to Estancia Ana María. I wondered if there are some extreme updrafts preventing one from reaching it by helicopter or if that was an oversight.

(originally posted March 2015)

National Geographic, January 2015

National Geographic has occasional theme issues. This is one of them. The theme for this issue is “Firsts.”

First Artists by Chip Walter (Photographs by Stephen Alvarez)

This article, just as the name implies, is about the beginnings of artistic expression in humans. We start out at one of the best known early artistic sites, Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, where artists starting at least 36,000 years ago made charcoal drawings on the walls. We then go to South Africa, where an even older form of artistic expression was found — pieces of ocher with geometric patterns carved into them dating back to at least 100,000 years ago.

There is no continuity to the artistic expression, however. It will flower in one place and then die out again only to resurface somewhere else. The development of art seems to track to times when there were more people, so the theory that Walter and, presumably those he’s spoken with, advances is that the art was a way for groups to communicate.

I wonder if it could be the other way around, though. Perhaps the default state of humanity is to be creative, but stresses on the population reduce that urge. Maybe the population increases were because times were relatively good, which allowed the natural creativity of our ancestors to show. We are, from all the research I have read, naturally wired to acquire a language, so it doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch to think that maybe we are wired to express ourselves artistically as well.

And despite their reputation as brutish, there may be some evidence that there was a creative urge for Neanderthal humans. Archaeologists have found items with holes drilled into them as if for jewelry in a cache with some tools in France.

Along with the articles are the usual stunning National Geographic photos, including pictures of the earliest pieces of art (including one that is described as a flying bird, but which looks awfully phallic to me), of the archaeological dig in South Africa, and of two young women covered in ochre.

The First Year by Yudhijit Battacharjee (Photos by Lynn Johnson)

Technically this article should have probably been called The First Years because much of it relates to events in the second year of life and there are even some references to events beyond that point.

The article, for the most part, recounts studies being done on the brain development of children in the first years of life. We begin with Hallam Hurt’s study of children who come from poor backgrounds which showed that the damage our culture associated with prenatal maternal use of crack actually reflected the situation of poor families in the United States. From this, we developed programs to encourage bonding and mental development during infancy and early childhood.

We also see a glimpse into some of the imaging studies being done of the brains of babies, including studies that show how language development works.

There is also one study referenced that made me uncomfortable. Nicolae Ceausescu made birth control and abortion illegal, in service of increasing the population of Romania. It worked. It worked so well, that many families ended up abandoning their children, who then ended up in orphanages. The orphanages were understaffed and fifteen to twenty babies were generally taken care of by each worker, which meant that there was no time for the babies to be given any kind of personal attention, which harmed their brain development. A group of scientists saw that the children in these orphanages had irregular behavior patterns similar to those of children with severe autism. When the children’s brains were studied, it was shown that they had much lower levels of activity than would be expected from a child of that age. So they devised a study where half of the children would be put in foster home and half left in the orphanage. The brains of the fostered children under the age of two came to resemble those of children who had not been deprived, but the brain development of the children who remained in the orphanage remained abnormal.

Now, my own background is training as a medical librarian, so my frame of reference is clinical trials, but it is my understanding that if a treatment (which in this case is being put in a foster home) is shown to work (which it clearly did), the study is halted and all of the participants are given the treatment. To do otherwise would be unethical. Yet, there is no indication in this article whether the institutionalized children were put in foster homes in hopes of helping their brain development as had been done with the children put in foster care. I finally had to do some research on my own to find that homes were found for most of the children who had been left in the institution. Out of 68 institutionalized children in the original study, ten of the institutionalized children were still in the orphanage by the age of eight. So at least something was done for most of those children, but I’m still not happy about the ten who were still in the orphanage. On the good side, Romania now has a law forbidding placement of children younger than two in orphanages.

While the article itself is fairly dry, with lots of talk of studies and brain imaging, the “human element” comes from Johnson’s black-and-white photographs of families, many of them poor, taking the time to bond with their children, thus enriching their lives and helping their brains grow.

First City, by Robert Draper (Photographs by Robin Hammond)

In the case of this article, the word “first” is more a reference to rank rather than to chronology. The census for the country of Nigeria has trouble tabulating the population of Lagos, which has grown so fast that, at the moment it is somewhere between 13 and 18 million. The economy of Lagos is flourishing, as well. In the 21st century alone, consumer spending in Lagos has grown from 24.4 billion to 320.3 billion. The economy of Nigeria passed up the previous front-runner, South Africa, in 2012.

As with many National Geographic articles, this one features the stories of a number of Nigerians, from Onyekachi Chiagozie, an electrician who has big dreams, to Banke Meshida Lawal, a beautician with offices in Africa but who has representatives in other countries, including the United States, to Kola Karim, a multimillionaire who owns a conglomerate that employs more than 3,000 people.

The article also discusses the political climate of Nigeria, including the gap between the culture of Lagos and the upheaval of the rest of the country. Draper also discusses the corruption of the national government of Nigeria, which is a major exporter of petroleum but which doesn’t have enough gasoline for its citizens and which is unable to supply a steady level of electricity to any of its residents.

The photographs range from sitting portraits of residents to pictures of people going about their daily lives, both in the upscale and downscale areas of the city.

First Glimpse, by Timothy Ferris, Photographs by Robert Clark

This article is on cosmology, and cosmology really isn’t my thing. Somehow, the huge numbers of years and distance and things just serves to remind me that the clock is running and the universe will wind down someday. I mean, I’d be gone by then anyhow, unless an article I read a few years ago that said that time might stop any second turns out to be true, but I still find the thought, particularly that there is nothing we can do to stop it, or even slow it down, sort of distressing.

That being said, I read this article, which opens with a quote that cosmologists are “Often in error but never in doubt.” That’s comforting. Well, not really, but it does kind of remind me of the Dunning-Krueger effect, which says that people who don’t know what they’re doing (“often in error”) will be more likely to be certain that they are experts (“never in doubt”) than one would expect. It is likely that they do know what they’re talking about, but obviously someone has some doubts.

The article that follows talks about “dark matter” and “dark energy,” which are two forces that we cannot perceive but that seem to have some kind of effect on the universe. “Dark matter” seems to be pushing things closer together, while “dark energy” seems to be pushing them apart. Ferris also talks about the things that cosmologists are doing to measure what they perceive as being dark matter and dark energy, including a large sphere of lights pointing inward towards a pool of argon. The hope is that dark matter will pass through this device and make flashes of light.

I did find out that dark matter is not some mysterious thing “out there,” though, which was kind of interesting. Apparently, the Earth is being bombarded by it constantly and since we cannot perceive it, it is likely to be be passing through our bodies and we just are not aware of it.

First Americans, by Glenn Hodges

Now I’m back on familiar, and far more comfortable, territory.

In 2007, Mexican divers found a cavern full of bones. The oldest one whose skull was intact enough to do a facial reconstruction on, was a teenaged girl who died somewhere between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago. She was given the name Naia, after the Naiads of Greek mythology. Naia’s basic genetic structure is the same as that of current Native Americans, indicating that the current Native American population is descended from the people who were here all those centuries ago, but her facial structure is very different, with much coarser features.

The bodies of Paleo-Americans that have been found so far seem to be very likely to have evidence of injuries from some kind of close-range battle. The standard explanation is that the men were fighting over women, and the women were victims of domestic abuse. While this is a possible explanation, and may even be the most likely explanation, I was a teenager several decades ago and remember a few physical fights among my female peers. As a result, I’m not going to completely discount the idea that perhaps the women fought among themselves just as the men seem to have done.

The article also discusses the Friedkin site which is described as being in central Texas “about an hour north of Austin.” That’s still a very large area, so I did a little digging and discovered that it is in Salado, Texas, in Bell County. The Friedkin site may be the earliest settled place in North America. A large quantity of stone tools have been found on the site, some dating back 15,500 years. The quantity of tools seems to indicate to the archaeologists that a group of Paleo-Americans actually settled there for an extended period.

Hodges mentions the Anzick site in Montana, as well, where the 12,600-year-old skeleton of a child. They were able to extract an entire genome from this child, the first time we had been able to do so. Fossilized human waste was also found in a cave in Oregon, which gives archaeologists a chance to see what people of the area ate and which indicates that the Paleo-Americans may have settled there for a while.

The photographs on the article were taken by various photographers including Timothy Archibald, Paul Nicklen, James Chatters, David Coventry, and Erika Larsen.

First Bird, written and photographed by Klaus Nigge

This is a short, six-paragraph, piece on the bald eagle accompanied by five beautiful photographs. In the article, Nigge discusses his time photographing the bald eagles of the Aleutian islands, who were so habituated to humans that they would let him walk right up to them to photograph them.