Big Bang Day

This is a big day in the course of human events according to a fellow named Johannes Kepler.  About the time this area became a destination voyage (the wag in us wanted to say destination getaway) Herr Dr. Kepler was something of a key player in the history of science and we bring him up because he calculated that on this day, April 27 in the year 4977BC, the universe, or at least what was known of it, was created. Big Bang Day.

In 1600, Kepler was in Prague doing work on planetary motion.  He corresponded with Galileo, even bought one of his telescopes. His work was a good deal of the basis for Newton's work on gravity. In short, he was something of a big cheese in the history of science.

We bring this up because at the time all this stuff was going on, our little neck of the woods was being settled.  That we find interesting.  When our founders were scratching out settlements here - right here mind you - folks in Europe were doing the work of scientific genius. That is the point of this little thread. 

We think of history as a straight line set of events.  We think chronologically, like Kepler did when he traced things backwards and came up with 4977BC.  What we don't think about very often is that when Kepler was doing his thing, Shakespeare was doing his in London, Monteverdi was doing his in Italy and our friends to the northeast were standing by a rock thinking about where to go next.  Most of these folks and their proteges were alive and contributing when the church in Southold (picture) was founded, people were exploring Shelter Island and Greenport was identified as a very "fair harbor".


Kepler of course was more than a little off in calulating April 27, 4977BC as "day one".  We can forgive him for that.  He was right in perspective.  He tried. He gave it his best shot. That was certainly one thing all had in common.

Mind Pictures

By chance yesterday we were speaking with an "eyewitness".  What she saw wasn't much more than a silly adult indiscretion - perhaps just a moment of forgetfulness - less than a $1.00 and missed in the bottom of a shopping cart. But what she saw wasn't so much the $.79 cent candy bar with orange lettering and "peanuts" on a grey white background, but the glance towards it by the miscreant and that instant glance of recognition as eye met eye. She knew. The miscreant knew she knew.

We envy those with terrific "mind pictures". It isn't perfect memory. It is an ability to capture a scene in that mind's eye and store it away for later reference and up it pops as if in some sort of carnival peep show - a lifetime of pictures that run endlessly and stop for examination when prompted.

When we think of Ansel Adams, untrained as we are, we think that his mind's eye is working every second and that when he saw something of interest he found a place where he could snap a shot of it when it appeared again. He must have had a plan - a premonition - a mind's eye reference point to catch the scene as surely as our friend had the chance to nab the candy thief.

Adams did. She didn't.

Fountains

..A good look at this photograph tells a lot of tales.  Mom brushing the face of her youngster after a drink at the fountain on Main Street.  Main Street itself as a dirt road.  The brick retaining wall that exists to this day, the dome of the old opera house, even a few wheel tracks.  Pretty swell stuff and not a parked car in sight.  We are guessing that this scene is about 1910, what with the telephone poles and all.  100 years ago seems so distant.  If you were alive then, say in your middle 30s you were born closer to 1776 than to today. Think of that. Our father was born about the time of the picture and his early years were closer to the civil war than to the years when we were in high school...a fulcrum if you will; a teeter totter date dividing up the ruler of years.

Fountains are great things in a village.  A common meeting place of sorts where people headed on a hot summer day with the promise of an answer to "Mom! I'm thirsty!".  They were also landmarks in a village where everyone knew where it was and if they wanted to meet up later they would say "meet me at the fountain at 4pm".

We note with some dismay that there isn't a water fountain to be found in our entire Village and that is sad.  There can't be a picture taken of a scene like this again.  Pretty soon, depending on the year that fountain was dismantled, there might be no one around still alive who saw it in action.  Pretty soon thereafter the fulcrum in the yardstick of life will balance out so that no one will have been around closer to that 1910 fountain than to day.

It is, of course, crazy to attach such sentimental value to a fountain that, if it still existed, would have cause countless fender-benders and taken up precious parking spaces.  It isn't out of the question, though, to think of a mom, dressed in her long black dress and snappy hat, bending over her child, dabbing a chin after helping him or her up to the magic fountain that made thirst go away.

The god of Agricultural Affairs

The Greeks and Romans had a god for just about everything. Not to be politically incorrect but basically when they ran up against something they couldn't explain, they called in the gods and attributed things to them.  Saturnus was the god of the harvest; the Roman secretary of agriculture in a sense.

Saturn-mania has struck. Not really but if curiosity killed the cat we should all be a foot in our graves because of that big bright light in the western sky. When you consider that same big bright light has looked as it does for the past bazillion years folks, tended to notice like we do now every evening. Imagine how it must have looked before we dumped all that stuff in the atmosphere.  On close approaches, like now, it must have been some pumpkins. And that is the rub of things.

We needed a telescope to see the "rings" and before that amazing advance, it was the same bright blob we see now.  We needed a tool to get the full impact.  When some of us were kids, there were less than a dozen moons. Now there are 62 and counting. Tools give us so much information and the gap between us is how many tools we have at our personal disposal. Books are tools. The Internet is our current supreme tool.  There will be more in the future.  The point is sometimes we need help in seeing things for what they really are and adjusting our spheres of knowledge and comprehension accordingly.

Help comes in the form of telescopes and books, Internet and enlightened curiosity.  If we don't keep looking closely and always asking to see "more", we may as well go outside at night and mumble thanks to Saturn(us) for the upcoming great harvest.

A Walk to the Paradise Garden

It is Sunday morning. Easter. Spring. Flowers. Grandkids.  Friends, here, there, and remembered.

Paradise.

One if by land, two if by sea

We came upon this sketch of the waters off the Greenport Pier, fanciful as it may seem to most, in a collection of photos found at Floyd Library.  We get spoiled a bit with our "mind's eye" view of seaports, all bustling with whaling ships and big sailing vessels from Europe.  The truth in the matter is far more practical and in that light, much more personal.

These aren't whaling vessels; not by a long shot.  The are, instead, schooners (some topsail schooners) and were the modern equal to short haul freight trucks. This type of vessel was hugely popular because they were fast and did well with the wind.  There are a lot of folks locally who can give chapter and verse on the intricacies of schooner construction and handling prowess so we will leave that to more experienced hands.  What we do note is that the waters off Greenport Pier were deep and protected and that, after 1844 (approaching the hay day of schooner popularity and construction), could dock a short distance from the mainline of the railroad that led directly to the  Vanderbuilt Yards in Brooklyn and then by ferry to New York City.  This transportation "fact" saved sailing time and made Greenport a great place for off-loading cargo.  If you think about it the Long Island Railroad runs to the shoreline ending at a dock that can accommodate these vessels only here in Greenport.  This was a natural connection.

We  think about this scene from nearly a couple centuries back. Harbor full of craft of all sorts. Schooners arriving constantly from Connecticut and points east - even Bermuda or the continent.  A harbor that represented the commercial world, offloading items great and small, with a swift transfer a short distance west to a set of iron rails that moved a ship full of stuff to distant New York in the course of a morning and brought things unimaginable from the factories and shops 100 miles to the west, all to find their places in this busy harbor for return trips to who knows where.

(by the way, many thanks for the correction ... a well versed reader commented below that the Atlantic end of the line was really the Vanderbilt railyards. I regret the error but we never regret the correction and are thankful for it.)

Terminus

Everyone west of 2nd Street and South of South Street in our village lives close to the train.  As much as it tries to sneak out of town at 530ish on work mornings, it just can't. Trains come with whistles and aside from the chug-a-chug we associate with them (they don't do that anymore - alas!) aside from the groaning of the rails and the dinging of the crossing signals, that whistle is the big aural clue.

We looked on the place you can find anything (photo courtesy of eBay) and there are actual old brass whistles for sale.  We might buy it just so it doesn't find its way back to a real life train and toot at 530.

Greenport was the terminus of the main line some 150 years ago; a line that went to Brooklyn as a tunnel under the East River was pretty much out of the bounds of consideration.  A lot more trains "snuck in and out" back then than they do now - nearly a dozen a day - and we even had a way to put freight cars on ferries and ship them to Stonington, Ct. to latch on the rail lines there (we originally thought this ferry went to New London but a very sharp reader from up north told us, correctly, that Stonington was the destination to the line to Boston....many thanks).

These whistles, by the way, have a code. We won't list them here but this is a link that will tell you all you want to ever know.  The one we hear is Two long and two short (or two long, one short, one long) - and if you have read that little article at the end of the link, you'll know that it means the train is going to cross a "crossing point" and watch out; so the 4th Street crossing is the culprit.

More than a few of us wake up to this sound and there was a time more than a few were on it every morning.  We didn't like catching it but we would miss it if it went away.  We suppose that trains and tracks were just a part of our lives growing up as most small towns and rural communities had them in some fashion - leftovers perhaps from before endless trucks clog our roads and they were either terminus points or crossing points (meeting points or waiting points in railroad talk) and we built towns and societies around them. What journeys we missed.  What greetings and waves goodbye.