Legacy of Leadership in Upstate NY
Much of the world uses “New York” as shorthand for the city of New York. Those who grew up or spent chunks of time in or around the city remember that New York is also a fairly large state (by east-coast standards) which stretches from the Atlantic beaches of Long Island to the shores of lakes Ontario and Erie. NYCity folks tend to call the rest of this vast area, once out of the 5 Boros, “upstate.” And it’s through “upstate” that my Mom and I travelled on the first leg of our cross-country adventure last month.
High on her list was Seneca Falls, seen in the disused riverside-factory shot above & site of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. In my school days little or no mention was made of the fact that women were not permitted to vote until the 19th amendment finally passed in 1920. In upstate New York of the 19th century were the leaders who stood early and proud for women’s rights, and finally pushed that amendment through after many decades of trying. (And oh by the way, the state legislature in good old Mississippi, ever the thought-leader here in the US, didn’t get around to ratifying that 19th amendment until…wait for it….1984. But, hey, even Switzerland didn’t get around to agreeeing women deserve the same full citizenship rights as men until 1971, and the last cantons didn’t get with the program until 1990. And I need to fact check whether women are allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia yet or not…but Wikipedia does tell me that they’ll be permitted to vote there in 2015…)
Here on the home front, Susan B Anthony got arrested & convicted for voting in 1872, in her home town of Rochester not far from the statue of Anthony & Frederick Douglass (good friends and intellectual sparring partners) with which my Mom is posed, two photos up. So anyhoo, we wandered through Seneca Falls, spent time in Syracuse exploring the history of the Erie Canal – which propelled NYC to the dominance it achieved in the 1800s, driven by a state government visionary & capable enough to establish a well-maintained and regulated system to bring boats, people and goods from the Hudson river (and, by extension, the Atlantic Ocean) all the way over to Lake Erie. We continued our exploration of the leadership tradition in Rochester, where we visited both Susan B Anthony’s house (and the statue!), and spent time at the Eastman House learning more about George Eastman’s impact on the popularization of photography. Enjoy the shots – and do consider a visit to upstate New York. Each time I’ve been anywhere from the Catskills north, I’ve wished I could linger longer and explore more. There’s a ton of natural beauty throughout, plus much interesting history scattered just about everywhere.
The study in Eastman House has lovely windows featuring all the modes of travel George Eastman had personally experienced – and flight is missing, since the house was built right around the time of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. This is my little “windows” section, with a detail also from the lovely Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in Rochester, which Mom and I drove past in Rochester. It’s privately owned but you can still drive by and look.
5 Views of the Statue, 3 of the Tower, and other odd angles on NYC & Environs
OK, so I figure if off-angle shots of SF seem to have appealed to enough of my viewers a few weeks ago, I’d finally put up the grab-bag of odd shots from NYC and its region which couldn’t be made to fit in that last entry from Storm King. What you’ll see here are shots from a flat, gray day in Red Hook, which used to be a rather gnarly neighborhood when I lived in Brooklyn. It now seems to be hipster central, and has a few big box stores (most of these were shot in and around the Ikea parking lot), which were not yet permitted inside the 5 boroughs by the time I went west in the late 90s. These shots include some odd views of Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the lovely new One World Trade Center building. Some people are calling it, in classic American let’s-use-terms-without-considering-what-we-mean-by-them manner, freedom tower. I never quite get which freedoms that kind of folks mean, since they’re always wanting to take away my own freedom to disagree with the foreign wars they like to start start (or to take away my friends’ freedom of choice in matters of reproduction or of life & love partner) – but hey, who ever expected words to actually mean something?!
OK, off that soap box for now. Other things in this entry: the impressive Great Falls at Paterson, NJ; a couple shots from the reservoir in central park; and pond scum at a wonderful bird haven in northern NJ. Paterson began its life as an important and powerful mill town, driven by the force of these waterfalls and the river that creates them. Its manufacturing glory days are long since past, but these falls, like the history of the Erie Canal which I’ve been visiting & will document later here on the blog, remind me of how the country was built and grew and prospered in our formative years.
I’ve noticed a lot more views and viewers on the blog recently, and I want to thank viewers both new and old for your interest. I hope you’ll come back, and I hope you’ll leave comments and let me know what you’d like more (or less!) of. Ciao.
High Summer – Storm King
Perhaps my single favorite place to visit in the NY Metropolitan area is Storm King sculpture park, which is something like two hours or so north of the city itself. My mother, who dearly loves grand sculpture of the Calder, Nevelson and Noguchi style, first introduced me to it back in the 1980s, or perhaps even earlier though I believe my first visits would have been early-mid 80s. I have fond memories (and photos) of visits there with a dear friend now long-dead of HIV; such is the nature of places one’s visited again over decades – and I also appreciate the new large works or temporary displays that appear every time I visit, about which there’ll be a caption or two scattered throughout.
In season, no visit to my mother feels complete unless we also head up to Storm King for a day. And you do need to allocate a full day for this trip, especially if you are coming from NYC…and please do try to get here , even if it feels like one thing too much – if you love nature and abstract sculpture, you won’t go wrong. So in early July we headed up with my brother for an afternoon of enjoying the art, the flowers, the nature. They’re not open during winter months, and my recent visits have been in the shoulder seasons, so this was my first chance to appreciate the glory of the wildflower beds at their summer peak. Hope you enjoy these views – and do visit, or support your nearest arts institution instead. 🙂
The mirrored fence was newly refurbished for this season so truly stands out at one edge of the lower lawn area (far center in the panorama above) – they have a more formal name for it, but I think of it as the route I I typically take toward Andy Goldsworthy’s wonderful wonderful two stone walls at Storm King, both additions of relatively recent decades…you can see shots of those in an entry I made in December 2011), and so I had fun with some arty selfies with it, though this is a piece you really do need to experience in person.
And since it was high summer, we saw a good bit of floral and natural beauty. Some time a decade or two back, they started letting large areas of the lawn flourish with higher wildflower patches rather than always mowing it all down, and the results are wonderful. I also did my usual up-close-and-personal study of a few little vegetal items that grabbed my imagination.
The piece above is isn’t my favorite – tends to give me the willies a bit too much – but I do love the wildflowers. The lawn full of Mark di Suvero scultpures, shown below with a foreground of black-eyed Susans, certainly is one of my favorite spots here…though that could be said of nearly all corners at this truly wonderful place…
Other Angles on SF
Between assignments, I’ve been a wanderer since I first filled up the storage space in January, 2005. People viewing my life from outside often express envy of how much I ‘get’ to travel: comments along the lines of “oh, it’s so exciting that you get to go to all these places and travel so much.” People who know me a bit better, or people for whom, like me, going to work = packing a bag with (one hopes) sufficient saline solution & undergarments for a year’s assignment in a remote location of which one has, so far, only indirect knowledge, understand that the travel is the part I hate the most. And that the rootedness that comes from identifying one solid piece of earth as one’s spiritual and physical home is what I envy everyone else the most. Be that as it may…the participant observer is an identified role in sociology and anthropology, and as someone who increasingly feels reasonably comfortable many places, but at home nearly nowhere (aside from a few places like SF Bay area and LA’s west side), I do have a certain distance from what I observe in most places. And what I observe in the US is always most fascinating and too often disturbing, since it’s the place o’ my birth and so on and so forth.
Some recent observations, for those outside the US who’ve missed it:
Our supreme court’s decided that companies (on whom most of us rely for our health insurance, crazy though that seems to anyone from a sane nation) have the same right to religious freedom that individuals do – and they get to express that right by dictating what forms of family-planning and possibly other health care choices their employees (and their employees’ family dependants) may make within the insurance plan. To illustrate the broader socio-political insanity this ruling might unleash unless the country gets to single-payer soon, I’ll take a short quote from Justice Bader Ginsburg’s strong dissent from the narrow majority’s decision: Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations[?]…Not much help there for the lower courts bound by today’s decision.)
This follows by a few years the same court’s decision that companies have the same right to freedom of expression that individuals do – meaning they can buy all the elections they want now, pretty much, as in campaign donations and campaign advertising are pretty open game for whatever rich & greedy corporation wants to drive “public” policy its way.
So, to review: companies can (and do) buy as many politicians as they want; and companies can (and do, now) ensure that their employees receive only the health-care services that the companies’ owners approve of. (And oh btw, for those believing this is a ‘narrow’ ruling – check out the definition of closely held, and what % of Americans work for such a company. Not so narrow, eh?) Ah, ‘democracy.’ And lots of my American friends ask how I can stand to live & work in so many other countries where corruption and greed are so rife… 
But at least there’s always SF to go home to. Indeed, I guess the fact it’s such a successful, happy & healthy city because of its openness to heterogeneity and its willingness to embrace the importance of good, common-interest governance to the health & welfare of society & individual citizens (i.e. not just big companies & their majority owners) is precisely what’s always made it so very scary and threatening to the Koch-funded tea-party types. Oh well, their loss, unless they succeed in dragging the rest of us down with them. Enjoy the views, folks – I realized I’ve actually shown very little of SF in these pages over the years – not quite sure why, but here’s a bit finally.
Beauty in the Details
Eight miles into the Atlantic from the mainland coast at the border between New Hampshire and Maine lie the Isles of Shoals, a small cluster of windswept rocky bumps in the ocean which housed some of the earliest long-term European settlements in North America. Ample cod fishing fueled the economy, a legacy you’ll see reflected in the weathervane on top of the old stone church which now serves as non- or multi-denominational chapel for the many conference-goers who enjoy week-long conferences and other retreats at Star Island, which has served as a base for Unitarian-Universalist retreats and conferences for more than 100 years. I’ve just been out there for a week of meditation, my third such outing since 2009. I’ve deeply relished and valued all of these meditation weeks, the intensity with which they permit to settle into the moment and clear my mind and emotions of plans, of worries, of day-to-day “reality” and just be for a bit. In essence, meditation – especially when I’m on Star to do it – takes me to a mental and spiritual place which evades intellectual and verbal description. That said, this time more than my two past such retreats, I was intensely drawn all week to attempting to photograph & record the magnificence of that which is small, the perfect beauty and reality of this physical world, its tides and seasons and flowers. And though I’m working with a very basic pocket-sized field-appropriate camera, I think my results were reasonable. Hopefully you’ll find at least some of these images as lovely as I do and maybe they’ll take you into a quieter place for at least a breath or three. Peace, enjoy.
At first I thought crab, now I think maybe mouse. I get comfortable with impermanence through meditation…a good thing, in my current life plan/lifestyle…
California Coastal Reconnection
smw, slt has been in my titular US home of San Francisco for three weeks now. Prior to that, during the post-assignment re-alignment of my sensibilities that I undertake after each international work stint, I spent five weeks living on the coastal side of Los Angeles. During that time, my activities consisted primarily of the following: bike rides up and down the coast and up into Topanga Canyon, concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, concerts and museum visits at both Getty Centre and Getty Villa, and getting together with the various friends I have there. On the theory that it’s good to post the imges from my last location before leaving my current one, I present a selection of shots undertaken during those activities. Each photo has a name which says what it is, and I think I will let them do all the speaking. If you’re in touch with me, you know the process of transition and rearrangement I’m undergoing vis-a-vis preparation for the next phases. If you’re curious but not yet in touch…what’s stopping you? 🙂 Enjoy!
Zurich: Many Churches & The World’s Largest Easter Bunny
A few random facts. In the process of returning from PNG to my US home on the west coast, I had to go the long way around in order to debrief at our HQ’s in Berlin and Amsterdam. That’s why you saw some Amsterdam photos recently – since I was in Berlin less than 24 hours, the camera didn’t come out there. In order to take a break from all the intensely long flights cramped into economy-class seats, I gave myself two weeks visiting friends in a few parts of Europe before returning to North America. These are the last Euro shots from this trip. They’re from Zurich & surroundings, where I was honored to stay with an Oberlin friend her family.
I’ll let the pics speak for themselves, and for those curious what stands out to my still-outsider eyes here in the US, I’ll share just two items noticed in the last 24 hours: on 3rd Street Promenade at a clothing store, the offer of a ‘survival kit’ which was two t-shirts and one pair of shorts for a special price – not quite sure where survival comes into it, but hey, knock yourselves out American consumers. Next: a very large SUV (noticed because it was large enough to squeeze me down in my bike lane on Main Street in Venice) called “Armada.” I sense a theme here, which I admit to my eyes and senses attuned to the neediest zones of the world seems, may I say, rather contrived and consumer-driven. Oh yeah, one more thing: my smart phone (first and only one, so far) is dying a rapid death so I went to T-Mobile where they try to finance all your phones. What’s the advantage to paying for the phone fully rather than financing it? Once you’ve paid at least half the value of your phone, you can ‘upgrade’ – this means, trade it in for a newer model. Planned obsolescence: it’s not just for cars any more! (And we all know how well that car thing has worked out for the world around us…) I really do want to take a full seven months off here, and I thought I wanted to consider working back here…but, sheesh, with such a consumer-driven culture, I really hardly want to settle in any more deeply than necessary to just see my friends and families & then get back to where things are more…well, whatever. You get what I mean, maybe. I’m not sure I do. I’m just sure I don’t feel like this all makes perfect sense yet.
A Morning Walk in Amsterdam
This is definitely one of my gnarlier re-entries from resource-poor work setting back into developed-world life. Not surprising, that fact, since it was a full intense two years in Papua New Guinea, a place which remains unique to me in its vast and complex history and sociocultural variety. Plus the fact it was my longest assignment so far. But the fact it’s not surprising doesn’t make the re-entry any less personally … well, gnarly, which is basically a nice way to say challenging as all get out. I sit in darkened auditoriums – mostly Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, where I’m spending five weeks just now – and when the orchestra goes through its organized tuning-up ritual, tears come to my eyes that humans can organize themselves for the creation and appreciation of beauty and magnificence, not just death and destruction. I sit, finally, at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica and find myself racked by sobs when we sing some of the hopeful, compassion-and-acceptance-filled hymns that are standard UU fare: again, reminded that the world can be full of hope and collective human effort towards generosity, warmth and creation rather than in-group fighting against in-group. It’s also me letting myself, finally, feel some of the pain and grief our patients experience in PNG and which I’ve not let myself feel since it would have impeded my work while I was still on the job…
I know this is all a bit raw, and I apologize – but I do need to move through this process. Remembering beautiful times and places, like the daffodils above which I saw during my too-short two-day sojourn in Amsterdam, helps. As do all the bike rides I’m taking up to Topanga Canyon or down to Hermosa Beach, here in LA. You’ll see those in due course. But I still have a lot of basic sorting and catching up to do, and my basic apartment setup is lacking in many basics such as printer and even reliable steady internet… So I’m still color-correcting and sorting – and yes, I really do delete most of the photos I take and try to put only the ones I think will you give you some window to where I’ve been. My soul and body are still landing back on this side of the world; in some ways these photos help me trail myself back to where I am now. Maybe they’ll give you either a glimpse of places you’ve loved or would like to be, or lacking that maybe a sense, if you know me, of why I seem to confused a lot of the time lately!
Ahhhh, Springtime in Northern Europe
So at this moment, smw slt has actually been in one region (the NYC area) for eight nights! That means, as I sat in a lovely NY Philhmarmonic Ensembles chamber recital yesterday and let the music soothe out the kinks of my scattered psyche, that I could count back the Sundays and realized I’d actually gone to bed the prior Sunday in the same rough location as where I’d be going to bed last night. And that’s a big deal since I’d woken up each of the prior several Sundays in at least different countries and more often than not on different continents. And that, my friends, does get old fast. 🙂 That said, there are clearly joys to travel and they include both seeing old friends and meeting new ones, as well of course as having one’s sense of the possible expanded. After two years in the tropics of PNG, I found myself utterly captivated by northern Europe in spring. I also found myself captivated by the grand buildings, the flat fields, the old brickwork and lovely metal and stonework adorning so many buildings. And I was delighted by the freedom and safety to walk or bike at will, at sunrise or sunset and all hours of the day, through the fields and along the streets. In this entry you’re seeing a bunch of shots from the fields and streets around where I was visiting friends in East Frisia & Schlewsig-Holstein in Germany, plus a few urban scenes from Hamburg where I also spent a wee period. It does all look rather different from, say, Port Moresby or the highlands around Tari? Hard to really believe that phase of my life is now wrapped up… 
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Hamburg Church…Petrikirche perhaps??
Hamburg Public Library
Hamburg Canal and Buildings
Hamburg Rathaus
Ambling Around Canberra
Canberra is one of those cities oft-mentioned but never visited, thus far. Especially in the past two years, based as I was in the next nation north of Australia, the city came up. Like capital cities everywhere, folks love to hate it and hate to love it. On the way out of PNG, I was fortunate enough to be welcome for some meetings with various folks who work with Australian Aid, as well as various politicians in the capital about what we’ve been accomplishing in PNG and what the unmet needs are, etc. If you’re interested in that work aspect of the visit, I say most of what I’d write in the following radio interview, taped while I was there: http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/pacific/radio/program/pacific-beat/png-family-violence-needs-local-and-overseas-attention/1281294
For those interested in a few of the sights and landscapes of this grand national capital created as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne (which have always argued over who’s #1 in Australia…), these shots give an impression. I walked a lot. It’s a very suburban city, reminding me of the old saying “there’s no there, there.” I suspect if you’re raising kids, it’s great; I think for a single person looking for the urban life, it would tire rapidly. As an exit-ramp from two years of hard work in PNG, it was a nice in-between station. Here you’ll see mostly the public spaces – lots of parliament house, sculpture garden at the national gallery of art, lots of the lake and the national museum building, which is that unusual multi-colored construction by the lakeside. All the shots have names which say what they are. Enjoy.
Bidding Adieu, Closing a Chapter
Like this butterfly which kept me company on my last afternoon in POM after I’d left the office & gone home to pack, I’ve spread my wings and flown away. (Ah, soooo many flights: pom->cairns->sydney->canberra where I pressed the pause button for three nights; then canberra->sydney->beijing->frankfurt->berlin where I pressed pause for one night then berlin -> amsterdam where I sit in the jetlagged early AM as I post this…) Farewells are not my strength, at least the social part of them: I tend to just get up and go, since for me belaboring the departure simply makes it more painful. I prefer, as it were, to pull the band-aid off in one painful pull rather than try to gently remove it – those staying on have the rest of their lives to get on with, and I…well, I had about a dozen flights awaiting me! And the rest of my own life, I guess. So yeah: the PNG chapter has come to a close, and as of last night when I wrapped up the debriefings I’m again a free agent in the world, unemployed and homeless but at least stranded for now on the shores of Europe where I’ll get to see lots o’ good friends and such in the coming two weeks. Yippee!
It’s become a habit for me to try to photograph, as I leave a project, as many of the faces of the colleagues I’ve been working with as possible. It helps me remember the generous, kind and hard-working people who will carry on the work after I’ve left. There’s a gallery here full of those shots, and otherwise mostly the farwell pizza-party & cake lunch that I threw for the office on my last day, last week on Friday. Otherwise this entry contains only the butterfly who visited me, and one shot of the coast near Cairns…at least I’m fairly sure that’s what it is. I suppose it might be the coast near Sydney airport but I don’t think so. This is also, after all, a farewell to that entire region including Australia which I flew into and out of, or visited long or short, many times while there. The next entry should show some views of Canberra during that three-day intermezzo. Ciao, thanks, peace.
Honiara’s Lovely Harbor & A Bit o’ History
So four weeks ago today as I post this, I was flying from Port Moresby in PNG to the lovely hillside harbor you see in the photo just above: Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands. We’re hoping to do some work there similar to the work we’ve been doing for years in PNG, and that of course would be the reason I was flying over. But since this remains as always the blog about my own personal observations of the places I find myself in around this world, we won’t talk about that. Instead, we’ll talk about all the lovely Pacific-Island sculpture to be seen in the National Museum’s courtyard, and about the importance of the airfield where I landed in the history of WWII. Yes indeed, 71 years before that shot above was taken, it would have been quite impossible for a non-military plane to fly past; and any plane flying past would have faced a scary battery of defenses set up by the US and Australian military when they landed here in August 1942. More about that a bit lower down. For now, isn’t it a lovely harbor? I found it to be quite a warm and friendly place – a bit more mellow and smaller than Port Moresby.
smt, slt reminds you that when we try to do nice things with photos such as make them smaller and larger or shift them left or right, this blog is best viewed in something other than firefox or i-explorer: we find chrome works best on windows-type machines.
Above, sculptures in the courtyard of the National Museum in downtown Honiara; lots more further on. Also, above and below, shots of the harbor of Honiara at various times of day. This is one of the most wreck-strewn harbors in the world, I guess, with so many ships of both sides sunk during the many battles fought between 7 August 1942 and about 9 February 1943 when the front line decisively moved a bit further north.
And it’s all about that air field: why the Australians and Americans decided this would be the first place they would decisively commit to holding a line and stopping the Japanese advance across the Pacific. Had Japan completed and maintained an airstrip here, their planes would have been able to attack the shipping between Australia and the US West Coast, something Australia particularly wanted to avoid. I know someone, an old family friend, who in her childhood at the family dinner table placed a pin on the map for Honiara when they learned her marine brother had been sent here. Who knows, maybe he was among those who set up or used the gun in the shot below, which I assume (didn’t verify) was actually used during that war. History can seem cold and stiff if you’re born after it happened, but it’s good to remember that it happened to real living, breathing people who experienced real living strong emotions of fear and joy, and though time dims the immediacy, it’s still wise to honor the gains, losses and lessons learned by our predecessors…
This lovely plein-air structure is one of two waiting rooms sitting in front of the concrete airport terminal. Naturally I spent most of my time here, until immigration opened and we were allowed through into the actual boarding area – though the modern terminal building has a cafe, it couldn’t compete with the views out of doors. Lower down, a view of a small island across the way from Honiara Harbor: that’s Savo Island. History tells us that the very night after the first US-Australian landing on Honiara, a Japanese naval force disabled or sank nearly all of the allied ships remaining nearby; and if they’d realized the aircraft carrier was already powering back to Fiji, they could have stayed and possibly turned the battle back their way. They didn’t, instead hustling back to their main base at Rabaul (PNG) to be under cover of their air squadrons…and the war played out as it did.
And it was all for that airstrip there, photographed as we approached for landing on the 16th of February, 71 years and 7 days after Wikipedia tells me that campaign was officially considered ended. And now we get to the great local culture stuff: I loved all the wooden sculpture in Honiara, as you’ve seen from the airport waiting shacks. Here’s more, below, from the National Museum.
This is art from all over the Pacific islands, not just Solomons. There are three primary regions – Melanesia which includes both PNG and Solomons; Polynesia which is more famous in the US at least and stretches eastward to Hawaii and southward to Tahiti etc.; and Micronesia which is up north and includes, I think, Guam.
And with that little gallery, I wrap up the shots from Solomon Islands, and shift to more of my PNG pastime, aerial shots! Below, you see the following shots in the order listed: the bay on which I believe Alotau, at the eastern end of the island of New Guinea, is located; with a peninsula of land stretching east on the southern side of the bay. The next shot down, you see that peninsula ending in the sea, effectively pointing east towards Honiara more or less. And we end with a larger-area shot of Bootless Bay and Pyramid Peak on Pyramid Point, and then with one final shot of that personal-favorite landmark (Pyramid Peak, which you’ll find several other times in these entries…) just on the coast east of downtown Port Moresby. Since I’ve now left PNG for the last time (at least on this assignment), this is one of a few fond farewells likely to appear in these pages to a land that gave me meaningful work, a good home and very warm and welcoming friends and colleagues over the two years I was there. Tenk yu tru.
Roads, Rivers and Markets of Maprik District
Something I’ve always loved about this life with MSF is how it lets me see so many towns and villages in so many parts of the world – so many ways that humanity organizes itself into social units and carries out daily life. Here in PNG there is such tremendous range cultural and social diversity that I’ve really cherished all the opportunities I’ve had to get out and see villages, meet local people and find out how they access health care, how they live, see the kids playing or running by the road, see the market ladies selling their coconuts or buai (betel nut) or onions, and so on.
This is the final entry that I will post from PNG. There are still some shots from a recent trip to Honiara in the Solomon Islands, which I might post next weekend when I expect to be in Canberra; or the next entry might have to wait until I’m back in Europe debriefing and then seeing friends and family there. It’s lovely that this last entry can show another style of roads and villages from those that you’ll see from my past visits to Tari, the peeks at the streets of Port Moresby I’ve offered you in recent years, or even the views of roads and rivers in Bougainville from late 2012. Just a month ago or so I had the chance to get out with our teams in Maprik, a town and district centre in East Sepik province – these shots are from outreach activities (health education) at the main market in Maprik town, plus a trip we did to a lovely little town (which you see, across the valley, in the shot directly above and whose streets and houses you see also in the shot below) called Brugam. I won’t say a lot more – the photos have names which tell what they are, and there’s a small gallery below in which a colleague documented me buying a nice big coconut to enjoy the coconut juice…which we’re told is nature’s perfect electrolyte drink, and certainly is a fine thirst-quencher after a day on the road. Consider this my sign-off from my dear temporary home since March 2012, good ol’ Port Moresby…
…many of the rivers reminded me of streams that I’d play in with my brothers as a kid in Southern Ohio (especially the one at the very top, first in the entry), while others reminded me of streams I drove past in New Zealand with one of those brothers and my Mom, just a few months ago. Notice also how differently the houses and family compounds are set up compared to Tari — here, open yards and houses on stilts for cool and flood-protection; there, big earthen walls to create privacy and…well, I’ve never been inside a Huli home, but I’m guessing they’re on the ground since it’s plenty cool overnight up there in the highlands…
The River at Pagwi
A few weeks ago, I got back to East Sepik again for the first time since July of 2012. It was great to see the towns and have a sense of continuity; also great to see it through eyes that have now been around PNG a bit longer and come to understand the extent to which the arts of the Sepik region are represented all around the country. At Ambua Lodge near Tari, the dining room is full of magnificent woodwork carved by folks from Sepik. This set of photos is all from the settlements on both sides of the river at Pagwi, which so far as I can see is the first place along the course of the river, in its run from the mountains at the Indonesian-PNG border to the Bismarck Sea, where a sealed road gets to the river’s bank. The detail of roof decoration above is from a lodge I photographed at that time as well; but then I’d not seen the gorgeous close-up mask that I shared with you all back when the orchid show was happening down the road from us at the house of Parliament….which was built in the style of a House Tamburan, a men’s house for traditional ceremonies in the Sepik region, from what I understand.
It’s good I went for the orchid show and took those shots of the lovely facade of parliament house when I did, because not long after, the speaker of parliament had the lovely row of traditional masks just above the lintel taken down and (at least partly) destroyed, for religious reasons – something about idolatry, I think. This caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the local media. I remain somewhat shocked that in such a multi-cultural country, such a senior leader can get away with simply destroying something of that sort which, as I see it, represents both part of the wondrous heterogeneous cultural patrimony of this rich nation, and beautifully skilled artistic craft. This blog, it would appear, is one of the few places where one can easily see images of the original, intact facade of the lovely house of parliament. That entry, and another example of a lovely traditional larger mask like the one above can be found in these entries:
https://somuchworldsolittletime.wordpress.com/2013/11/02/arts-of-png-parliament-house/
and here, though I think some of these masks have origins from other regions as well:
https://somuchworldsolittletime.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/more-masks-and-many-magnificent-orchids/
If you’d like to see the rainy vs dry season comparisons, go check out a few of the river shots from the entry below:
https://somuchworldsolittletime.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/along-the-sepik-river/
if you scan through that entry you’ll see a few shots of the same stretch of shore above and below; there’s one where many people are unloading from a boat that’s down below where I was shooting from: that spot is where the boat is in shot just below. I figure the river is a good several metres higher in these shots than last time I was here.
On the other side from Pagwi is a crocodile farm, with riverine crocodiles. Compared to the massive saltwater crocs I saw in Northern Territory two years ago, these guys look cute and cuddly. Still, I’d rather not step on one or even share the same patch of water with them! And as the wonderfully decorated skull below shows, even these freshwater guys can grow to substantial size if not captured by croc hunters like those pictured above and then sold for either meat or leather.
Northern Coast & Central Highlands … from the Air
I increasingly take in, on a personal, intimate and frankly emotional level, that these magnificent and challenging two years of working and living in this vast and varied land which is fabled in the annals of anthropology, botany, zoology, history, linguistics, diving, and so many other areas…well, these two years are truly winding down. In three weeks I should be on an airplane somewhere over Australia, having left PNG for the last time. Today, I’ve just flown back into PNG, for the last time, from a trip to Honiara. Honiara is situated on Guadalcanal, a name which echoes for many students of 20th century world history.
I feel a mixture of sadness, pride, and weariness along with both anticipatory and actual nostalgia. (After all, having been here two years and having flown into and out of the POM airport dozens of times, it’s easy to get lost in memories of this trip to that place, or that conversation with this person, almost any time I find myself at either the domestic or the international terminal.) It’s certainly been two years full of purpose and hard work, and I admit to being ready for a bit of a rest.
Look in these pages, over the coming months, for scenes of me at rest in my beloved coastal California home(s), and various other spots around North America. Before I get there I’ll visit some friends in Europe, so we might reflect some early spring landscapes from a few parts of that far-away land… But for now, as I realize the load of unsorted photos grows ever larger, I’ve decided to get a few more up for those of you who find shots of coastlines and cities from the air as fascinating as I do. I deeply hope that I’m not alone in staring avidly out the window much of the time I find myself on any airplane flying through blue skies, even after all these years and flights. Hope you enjoy: they all have names which say what they are; and these are all from the recent trip from POM up to, and back down from, Wewak on the northwestern coast of the country.
…below (if this lays out right) is clearly one of the larger cities in the Highlands, and if I’d been around that part of the country other than just Tari and environs, I might know which one, but I suspect it’s either Mt Hagen, or Goroka. My guess is Goroka, given the route the airplane seemed to be taking, but what do I know?
(so much world, so little time....) 
