Hole in the Clouds


November 2011

The End of the World, from Below

Nov 1, 2011

On a crisp October Saturday, deep in the Loyalsock Canyon of World's End State Park, you have to wait on line for your turn to take pictures of the waterfalls.

Ordinarily, creeks and waterfalls have shriveled to a trivial trickle by this time of year. But after a wet, wet summer and then the floods of Hurricane Irene, waterways throughout Pennsylvania are putting on a show.

landscape   Pennsylvania   fall   rocks   waterfall   End of the World State Park   cameras   photographers   creek  

Dogs of the Wissahickon

Nov 3, 2011

Our neighbor Carolyn Duffy poses for a snapshot along Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, with her dogs Max and Toby. The big dog, Max, must really like Fairmount Park because he is notorious for making all the decisions with respect to where they'll go on walks and how long they'll stay out. He weighs well over a hundred pounds, and if he doesn't want to go somewhere, it's probably just as well if you don't bother trying to go there.

landscape   animals   Philadelphia   Carolyn Duffy   dogs   creek   park   Fairmount Park   (Image credit: Sheila)  

Balloon Boy

Nov 9, 2011

Somehow, Norman believes he can remember sitting in that chair and putting that balloon to his mouth, while Iris Quigley posed for the camera. The photo was probably taken in 1954, maybe 1955, in Iris's house, which was down the street from Norman's house in East Meadow, Long Island, New York. Great furniture, great dance moves, and we can hope those little baby teeth weren't too sharp.

New York   vintage   Long Island   children   1950s   Norman   Iris   East Meadow   (h/t: Iris Quigley)  

Who's the Heretic?

Nov 11, 2011

One of the leaded glass windows in the University of Pennsylvania's original library building, now the Fisher Fine Arts Library.

Frank Furness designed the red-brick library, with its massive fireplaces and heavy iron fixtures, in 1888; Frank's older brother Horace, a Shakespearean scholar, selected the window mottoes and other inscriptions. In sharp contrast with the popular architecture of the day, which featured classical motifs and marble columns, Furness's iron-and-brick structure seemed to take its inspiration from Philadelphia's foundries and factories. People hated it, and he was fired from his post as campus architect. Furness's successors designed the neo-gothic buildings that came to characterize the University of Pennsylvania campus through the twentieth century.

Philadelphia   library   Shakespeare   Fisher Fine Art Library   University of Pennsylvania   Frank Furness   stained glass window  

One Holiday Behind

Nov 12, 2011

Friday was Veterans' Day, but in these pages we have yet to catch up with the holiday from almost a fortnight ago: Halloween.

I kept good statistics this year, and the number one costume at my door, far and away, was Scream. Not the scream pictured here–I don't know who this baby is, just some poor child out alone on the web–but the vampire sort of monster Screams, with identical masks that must have been a really good bargain at Dollar General on 23rd Street. Six Screams got candified here on Kater Street.

As for the non-Screams, we noted:

  • 2 unicorns
  • 2 generic vampires
  • 2 zombies
  • batgirl
  • Super Girl
  • a soccer player
  • Hermione
  • Wonder Woman
  • Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt
  • a jester
  • "a guy from a TV show I like"
  • "a skateboarder who had a wipeout"
  • a baby
  • a bumble bee
  • a vampire
  • a ladybug
  • Hello Kitty
  • a nurse
  • a construction worker
  • a boxer
  • a ninja
  • undecided
  • a princess
  • a monster
baby   Halloween   scream  

The Birdwatcher

Nov 18, 2011

He had driven a thousand miles for the chance to set up his scope at Deception Pass, on Puget Sound about an hour north of Seattle. But the notebook in his left hand received no new entries; he saw birds, to be sure, but he'd seen them all before. The only thing he saw that day of even mild ornithological interest was the long line of black dots way out at sea–they were grebes, he told us, a very common waterbird, but a kind that didn't usually flock together so massively; there were hundreds of grebes out there on the tide, he estimated, bobbing and diving, more by far than he'd ever seen in one place before.

The Audubon Society reports that grebes are pretty standard inhabitants of Deception Pass and thereabouts, along with mergansers, cormorants, black oystercatchers, alcids, and common and Pacific loons. But the big ornithological draw, especially in the wintertime, is the red-throated loon. Maybe this birdwatcher will schedule another trip when the weather is a whole lot worse.

Washington   landscape   Deception Pass State Park   ocean   coast  

Turkey Bowl

Nov 24, 2011

This Thanksgiving Day we 99-percenters might as well be grateful for football, a blessing as mixed as any but as American as . . . never mind. The postcard pictured here is from 1900

In Maine, Deering and Portland high schools have been facing off in their annual Turkey Bowl since 1911; the forecast for this hundredth annual game calls for clear skies, temperatures just below freezing, and a Deering victory, though you never can tell.

In Alabama, college football starts getting serious this weekend as LSU contronts Arkansas and Alabama has to deal with Auburn; if these games go according to book, LSU and Alabama will meet at New Year's for the national title, in a rematch of an October game that just didn't go right at all for Alabama.

I suppose that only the very smallest families in America could possibly all dine together at the same Thanksgiving table; our table, like so many others, will be missing important people this year, for all sorts of reasons. But we'll be thinking of them, and probably making fun of them, and we'll raise a glass and eat cranberries and maybe later if it's not too cold, some of us will go out in the street and throw a football around, because it's a free country or something like that.

football   Alabama   Maine   Thanksgiving   Philadelphia   1900   holiday  

Like a Character from Moby Dick

Nov 28, 2011

We have permission from The Ensign™ to share in this space one of his stories of high adventure on the high seas. As many of you have already heard, he is currently deployed on the USS Ingraham, a navy frigate patrolling the Pacific off the coast of South America.

Happy thanksgiving!

Last week, we caught a drug smuggling ship disguised as a fishing vessel, which is awesome. However, there is a down side; having the prize vessel means that we have to send a crew over there to man the fishing vessel [and] what this means for the rest of us is  ...  we get even less sleep than we did before.

I stand watch, get a break just long enough to take care of my DIVO stuff and eat and if I'm lucky get two hours of sleep before I have to go back on watch again.

Eyeing an opportunity to get off the ship and do something interesting and new, I asked the captain if I could go be part of the captured vessel's crew for one of the shifts. She smiled at my excitement to get over to the other ship but said no. So the next day I asked again, citing the fact that it would be a good "learning" experience for me. She thought about it for a short time, but once again shook her head. Third time's the charm. I approached her stateroom the next night after dinner. "Captain," I said, "what an adventure this could be for me! A chance to be the executive officer on board a captured drug smuggling vessel would make this deployment for me!"

Finally, out of being annoyed by my Stein persistence more than anything else, the captain shrugged her shoulders and picked up her phone. "Go ahead and put Ensign Stein on the watch bill for tomorrow morning, uh huh, okay, thanks." She looked up at me and smiled. "Well, go pack a backpack, Electro, you're on the 0600 small boat transfer tomorrow morning."

And my adventure began.

All I packed was a book, my board shorts, my flip-flops, and a water bottle.

The next morning I was transferred over to the fishing vessel early. The first thing I noticed was an incredibly putrid smell. I gagged even before I stepped foot on board. These drug smugglers really went all out in making it appear that they were a legitimate fishing ship; they even had actual fish in the icebox below deck. ...  only I'm sure all of the ice has melted by now. It was one of the worst smells I have ever been exposed to. One of the other guys started throwing up immediately.

I spent most of the morning down in the bilge with the resident engineer while a Coast Guard guy and an LT drove the ship. We finally figured out how to rig the electric pump and got the bilge flooding down as much as we could. The engine died a couple of times, too, but we were able to get it up and running after some sweet engineering magic.

After everything was set down below, I changed into my board shorts and flip-flops, grabbed one of the cots, brought it up to the roof of the pilot house, took out my book (Moby Dick), and lounged out and read for an hour. The sun was shining, the ocean had a nice breeze, it was awesome!

After a short lunch consisting of a pop tart and a peanut butter sandwich, we made a startling, disgusting discovery: cockroaches. At first we just saw one, and there was a bottle of Raid, so we quickly took care of it. Then another came out, and we killed that one too. Then another. What the hell was going on? The Coast Guard guy noticed that they were all coming from behind this one crack in the bulkhead, so we decided to spray some Raid in that crack. We hit the mother lode! All of a sudden, cockroaches started pouring out of there like the mass exodus from a movie theater after someone pulled a fire alarm. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, fast ones. It was unnerving, to say the least. We sprayed the ones we could, but the others made fast to another crack and were gone. For the rest of my time on board the prize ship, my head was on a swivel.

I was John Wayne in a classic western movie, only [with] a can of Raid instead of a 44 magnum, and in a fishing ship floating in the Pacific instead of a western frontier town.

After the cockroach scare died down a little, we got a call from the Ingraham. There were some buoys way off in the distance that were suspicious, and they wanted us to investigate. We left our stationing spot off the Ingraham's port quarter and headed for the buoys. Well, these buoys did not have any drugs in them, but the lines around a buoy had wrapped tightly around a poor sea turtle's left front leg. Feeling bad for the turtle, we decided to pull up close and cut it free. The turtle was so funny up close; it had zero expression on its face, it didn't even say thank you! It felt good to save the turtle's life, though.

All of a sudden, after the turtle swam away, the buoy started pulling really hard from us. Apparently, there was something really strong caught in the net below the buoy. What happened next was all at once terrifying and amazing:  A twelve-foot manta ray–twelve feet no exaggeration– wrapped all in the net, exploded from the depths of the ocean. It started splashing about vigorously in the sea and pulled the buoy out of our hands and then dove back down underneath, temporarily pulling the buoys down with it below the surface. We couldn't believe it! Watching a sea monster splash around so close to where I was made me feel like a character from Moby Dick.

After the experience with the turtle and manta ray, the engine died and we were dead in the water until our reliefs came that night. I went back to the Ingraham smelling like long-dead fish, but filled with tales to tell. About how I fought a war against an army of roaches. About how I saved a life. About how I came face to face with a sea monster from the deep. It was so much fun. I was tired, sunburned, I had to stand watch on the Ingraham's bridge from two in the morning until seven in the morning, I smelled awful, but I was happy!

Hopefully this message finds everyone with full bellies and in good health. Tell people I miss them and that I wish I could be there.

Navy   Allen   USS Ingraham   Pacific   Moby Dick