Bridges and Walls

On our ride up to our hike, 3 police cruisers rushed the left lane and blocked traffic. As we waited in frustration, we wondered whether it was an accident. 10 minutes later the entire southbound lane of the west side highway was overtaken by thousands of Black lives matter protesters. 5 days ago a Minneapolis cop, Derek Chauvin, clamped his knee down on handcuffed George Floyd’s neck snuffing out his life while Floyd pleaded his last words, “I can’t breathe... you’re killing me...and mama.” Marchers crossed over the median to the northbound lane and streamed around our line of stalled cars.

Outrage over police brutality has spawned race riots across the country. Notions of social distancing for corona were thrown out the window. Ironically for ‘black lives matter’ protests, within a month we will see the next wave of corona virus deaths hit America spawned by these mass protest gatherings. These protestors were so mad, they were willing to risk spreading viral deaths and infections to vent their rage. Many more black lives will be lost.

Once the traffic cleared we headed to Stamford. Our latest hiking obsession. A suburb I had known only through passing views of garish office buildings whenever I rode commuter trains en route to new haven. Drive 15 minutes north of downtown, there are 3 preserves that were once farmland in 1890s now designated for hiking and recreation. Mianus (pronounced “my anus”), zofnass family preserve, and ward pound ridge reservation.

Yesterday we visited ward pound ridge reservation. upon arrival, the sounds of honking and racial protestors were supplanted by oblivious bullfrogs and crickets. We’ve gotten into a sort of corona hiking routine. Arrive late in the late afternoon, get lost on winding trails, drive frantically to Tabouli grill for chicken shwarma sandwiches a few minutes before they close, and return to nyc. Our exploration of the trails has been matched by the exploration of Tabouli’s menu. At first it was stream walks, then it was beech and poplar forest hikes, and yesterday it culminated in pond wading and J, getting completely wet. The first time we ordered food it was standard schwarma and falafel, then we explored tabouli and Israeli salads, and yesterday mujadarra instead of pilaf and Moroccan salad and a series of smoothies.

All the hikes we’ve done in Stamford share one curious characteristic - meandering waist high stone walls. Miles and miles of serpentine walls slither through the landscape. back in 1890’s they marked extents of property. One can imagine the cows and sheep bound by these walls. Then the farms were abandoned, probably because farmers could not compete with the agricultural efficiencies in the flat plains of the Midwest. Today, towering tulip poplars, beech and maple conspire to coverup the history of place. 24,000 years ago, the Wisconsin Ice Sheet glacier covered half of north America. Like a slow moving river, the glacier which was 1000 feet deep at one point, picked up till – an array of sediments, rocks, sand and clay, as it advanced. At their farthest point of expansion glaciers left the most till. 16,000 years ago, the glacier retreated leaving the protective moraine of long island, and sheltered harbors of Connecticut coast line and rocks that are so abundant that farmers nicknamed them “New England Potatoes.” The farmers used these rocks to construct the walls we see today. Current day hikes cut through the walls providing a slice through time – modern day recreation hiking trails reveal the bygone farm borders and agricultural endeavors from 200 years ago, and retreating glacier action from 16,000 years ago.

                                        

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Pingvellir - Site of Iceland's parliament

A normal traveler would’ve probably hung out around Reykjavik (named smoky bay due to geothermal steam activity) to recover from a red eye flight, but I figured it would be better driving inland a couple hours and hiking around pingvellir, “the fields of parliament”. Iceland lies at the intersection of ever moving North American and Eurasian tectonic plates and seismic zone in the south west. It’s unique in that the plates are visible above land. At pingvellir, you can see the North American plate, which continues all the way to California. From the entry, you can start at the top of the North American plate at can survey the land... a strange landscape of lakes, fissures, volcanic rock, streams. With the four hour delay, I got there in time for a free tour of the site in English which started at the church at the bottom of the valley. The modest parish church sits next to a Norse pagan circular mound where two famous poets have been buried.

It is said that the Greeks first landed here.. the Irish monks.. then the Vikings from Norway. By 900 AD there were 39 chieftains on the island. To ensure people lived in harmony, Geitskör proposed this area as the meeting place for Icelanders in 930 AD. Like Washington DC, he chose a place that was neutral. DC was sited where it was because it was between north and south... industry vs agriculture, free vs. slave... it was a compromise in location to ensure one side did not have an advantage. The same reasoning held true a pingvellir. The chieftains all around the island would come here during the summer... when it was warm enough to travel here by horse. The horses in the summer could graze in the fields on their journey, that’s why the convening occurred at this time of year. For 2 weeks, the chieftains had to lay their arms down before entering pingvellir... it was a place where all could air their concerns. They speakers would make their pleas in front of the North American tectonic plate cliff. In this dramatic location, the longest standing parliament in the world was created and still operates today (but in Reykjavik).

Today, you can see the layers of settlement.. the stones laid out for foundations, the barren landscape that resulted from tree harvesting, the pagan mound, and the church. What’s striking about this place is the running water. It’s glacial water but crystal clear which is unusual. Glacial water is usually cloudy with minerals. In the Canadian Rockies the water is milky translucent blue and green. Here it is exceptionally clear. You can see 100 meters through the water it’s so clear

The tour guide looked like a Viking. Very tall and solidly built. As we walked the streams and rivers he told the stories of the place through Icelandic sagas (which he aid usually end in lose lose tragic situations), and political history (ambitions in power).

The saga story he told of the site was a love story. At a summer meeting, gunnlaug fell in love with beautiful helga. He asked and received permission to marry her from her dad. But before marriage he took part in Viking conquests for 3 years. In battle he met a good friend hrafn.... he told him about helga and her legendary beauty. Little did he know, when Hrafn left battle, he went to Iceland to meet helga. He told helga that gunlaug had died in battle, and married helga. Upon return, gunlaug felt betrayed.

It was at pingvellir that they decided to settle the score. Since they were both great warriors, the parliament made a rule, that they should not fight to the death as that would lose a great warrior. So they fought till they drew first blood. Gunlaug won, but they were unsatisfied with the result... they wanted to fight to the death.

So they went to Norway to fight. There Gunlaug chopped off hrafn’s leg. As he lay dying, Hrafn made a dying wish. He wanted to drink some water. When gunlaug returned with a helmet of water, Hrafn plunged a sword into him, killing him. The next year, helga married another man. In this way, the saga ended lose lose--  the typical ending of Icelandic saga.

Would you have guessed pingvellir was Iceland's Washington DC? Murcutt would say it starts with geology... then the streams and water to support the fish and trees... the backdrops for their hearings and airing their grievances in natural amphitheaters... thousands would descend on this valley yearly for 1000 years..

Tale of the Tape (Ski Bum Part 2)

We borrowed a car from G. He told me he parked his car tight next to a pickup truck at the Costco parking lot yesterday. He noticed his car got scraped when he came back to the car. Oh the misery of suburbia! He was pissed but didn’t think much about it cause the car is so old till... this morning when he found the bumper dangling loose from the car. Apparently his car got scraped so hard the plastic bolts that fasten the bumper to the trunk were sheared off leaving his bumper hanging. I called Costco to see if they had surveillance cameras to catch the criminal in action. They didn’t. It’ll remain an unsolved mystery in the suburbs.  

To make sure the car was safe to drive on the highways at very high speeds,  I asked G. if he had any duct tape. G. only had a few inches  left on the tape roll, so despite his skepticism, i taped his bumper back on just secure enough to drive it to the local supermarket to buy more duct tape. Instead of taping along the seam (like most normal people would probably do), I taped perpendicular to the joint to maximize shear capacity.  G. is a mechanical engineer by training and he thought I was being  idiotic and probably daydreamed laughing at me when  I’d drive back from the store without a bumper,  but I remembered from my structures classes, shear stresses are counteracted proportionately to the length of of straps  that span joints perpendicularly (i.e., strap anchors for wood connections). But as Schopenhauer said, first the truth is  ridiculed, then violently opposed, then when proven right, accepted as self-evident. I was willing to look like an idiot for the truth. 

In the supermarket parking lot, I put 8 more pieces of duct tape onto the bumper to keep it from falling off. I thought if I put the duct tape in triangles like a truss, maybe it’d be stronger? My brain at work. Anyways when G. saw what i did when I drove back victoriously, he was incredulous. I couldn’t tell whether he was rendered speechless by the structural success of the duct tape, or the fact that  I managed to turn his car into a worthless junkmobile. Who tapes their car together? (Except the same guy who tapes his ski jacket. Picture ski bum emerging from taped car in middle of winter at ski resort) 

We drove 3 hours north to our destination stopping at a huge outlet mall on the way.  The parking lots are immense, and encircle the mall. Hundreds  of cars are in the parking lots. I took some pictures, like the sea of cars, an elevated police lookout point overlooking the cars, a sheik man holding shopping bags and looking kind of burdened.... After we finished shopping, we couldn’t find our car since there were so many cars in the lots.. but with our duct taped bumper we were able to locate the car a lot easier while walking the lots because it’s so unique. So far so good, the bumper hasn’t fallen off yet and it makes car identification at mega malls easier. 



Flashback to Indonesia 1996. I was on a biology fellowship to study macque evolution there. I bought a cheap acoustic guitar to pass the time. I strung it with metal strings instead of nylon for the quality of sound. Surprise surprise, the cheap guitar head with all the pegs snapped off the neck after a couple weeks due to the unforeseen tension of the metal strings. To salvage the guitar, I nailed the head to the back of the neck in an act of desperation. Luckily the nails didn’t split the neck. It looked completely ridiculous, like those headless duct-tape-masked spray painted Eddie Van Halen guitars from the 1980s but acoustic... with a head nailed backwards to the neck.  Every time I played it, the locals  would gather around... and thought it was amazing. Between songs I would adjust the pegs on the back of the neck to tune it like a rockstar.  They had never seen a guitar like that before and probably never will again. They thought it was some special American guitar, when in reality it was just a hack desperate attempt of mine to fix something, like the duct tape holding up the car bumper today.

Saratoga Springs lies 3 hours north of New York City by car and is a springboard into the 4th dimension, time. There's a confluence of three overlapping scales of history there: military and modern settlement (hundreds of years), indigenous inhabitation (thousands of years), and geological (millions of years). Recently I’m finding a recurring theme - geology plays an underlying role in war, migrations, and settlement patterns and city planning. I have a friend who made a thesis that in a lot of city planning, main roads were and are situated  over flowing  rivers... he’s devoted himself to underground urban exploration slogging through train tunnels, sewers, and aqueducts.  Murcutt really opened my eyes to geology’s relation to flora and fauna. The geology will support certain flora which in turn support certain fauna which in turn support certain herbivorous or carnivorous people, which in turn support certain settlements, which in turn support certain architects who in turn design certain structures for certain uses for certain people, who in turn buy tuna fish sandwiches... everything is connected. While I possess a profound understanding of duct tape and its applications, I must profess I have no geological knowledge whatsoever... if I could tell one rock from another, that would be a great accomplishment.  I can, however, tell the stories of the effects of geology. 

100s of years scale....
There was a pivotal battle in Saratoga between US and Britain that helped determine the outcome of the American Revolution. At the time, the British controlled Canada in the north, and were trying to go down the Hudson River to New York City to try to cut off the rebellious troublemaking Northeast states from the rest of the country. Since the Hudson River constricts at Saratoga, it was a coveted location for a military control point. The British divide and conquer strategy failed because they overextended themselves by sending troops to Philadelphia and Bennington. They underestimated the resilience and guerilla tactics of the Americans. The fields of Saratoga are marked abstractly with white posts with blue markings for the american lines, and white posts with red markings for British battle lines. The fields are rolling and lush. It's hard to imagine the savagery that visited the place. It's also interesting to imagine the small scale of the war. The losses for either side was less than 500 people, but the battle had a tremendous  impact on world settlement patterns. Now america has over 250 million people... 


Millions of years scale...
A few miles west of the battlegrounds  lies Saratoga Springs. Pre-dating the age of the dinosaurs, 400 million years ago in the Devonian period, the site was a shallow bay. Shells of marine life fell on the ocean floor, gradually turning into limestone when it was compacted by the weight of accumulated sediment above. The limestone layer was essentially covered with an impermeable mud-like layer of shale until 12,000 years ago when an earthquake ruptured the shale allowing the trapped water in the limestone strata to surface.



Thousands of years scale... 
The Mohawk Indians were the first people to discover the springs as they hunted the animals that would come to the springs for their high salt content. All the mineral spring water in Saratoga springs surface at a 55 degree temperature.  The two dozen  springs that comprise Saratoga Springs State Park are the only naturally carbonated springs east of the Rocky Mountains. Each spring has a different chemical composition. The Polaris spring is high in calcium carbonate and was used to treat acid reflux. To spout the water up so that the water could be easily accessed, a pipe was installed with a slight tilt northward... hence the name Polaris.  Karista spring, named after the Mohawk word for iron, has iron and iodine in the same proportion as human blood so it tastes oddly  like blood. To drink the spring water here is like drinking an aged wine... except the spring water is 400 million years old, and it’s sulfurous smelling bouquet is composed of minerals and gas byproducts of ancient marine animals.  People with anemia and thyroid problems drink Karista water. The Hayes spring contains magnesium and lithium. Lithium is a free ionized mood stabilizer... but the magnesium is a laxative. To drink enough Hayes water to become happy, one would probably end up sitting on the toilet first. A parks tour guide mentioned a couple weeks ago, a trucker came by to fill up 3 thermoses full of Hayes water. When he told the trucker that drinking all that water would cause a bowel cleanse, the trucker replied he knew that and would drink the water in the morning daily to relieve himself in the morning to avoid making pit stops the rest of the day. 

 

Back to the present... 
For a period of time around 1900s, large monstrous pipes were bored into the ground to harvest the spring waters for its carbon dioxide. The water was transported to Albany and the gas was extracted to manufacture carbonated drinks. Several springs within the park ran dry, prompting officials to halt the commercial spring water extraction activities on site. In the 1930s during the Great Depression, large lavish neo-classical buildings were constructed with lavish pools and water bars inside. People would come to the springs for 3 week stays, and treat their ailments with various baths and drink spring water. The bath water was heated with underground equipment. Once the equipment broke down, the buildings and baths were abandoned in the 1950's and have become curious monuments to water.