pt at large

"Louisiana-Proud Radio" - Music by the mile

The soundtrack for driving through the prairies and swamp lands of southwest Louisiana is right on your car radio. Hit the scan button while driving from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Henderson, Lafayette, Lake Charles, then down Route 27 to the gulf coast towns of Creole, Cameron, and Holly Beach, and you’ll hear old time religion, some top 40, and then POW, you’ll hit upon 100.3 FM and its neighbor 101.1 FM. If the reason you’re in Louisiana is to dig the indigenous music and dance culture, you’ve found the Holy Grail. And you’re in for a sociology lesson on where pop music’s deepest roots are buried.

If you’re under the tender age of 40, you’ll find out what radio used to sound like before it became solidly commercial. There’s “KBON, brought to you by Southern Barbecue Sauce, a Cajun tradition since 1957.” 101.1 FM in Eunice plays a gumbo of Cajun, Country, Blues, Swamp Pop, Zydeco, Oldies, most of it played and sung by Louisiana musicians.

The endless flatlands lining I-10 become drenched with some of that Southern sauce when accompanied by Little Alfred singing Louisiana Soul with “You Can Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” Wayne Toups and The Jambalaya Cajun Band playing a sweet little Cajun waltz, and an impromptu interview with Terry of Terry and The Zydeco Cowboys, who happened to drop by the studio with his wife.

Louisiana versions of “Sixteen Candles” and “I Want My Baby Back Again” with the distinct doo wop beat that characterized the late fifties appear in the midst of this. The writer imagines a whiff of Aqua-Velva and recalls his first awkward close dance with a girl at the Friday night dance at the Boys’ Club in small town America. This trip, meant to create memories, momentarily plumbs them.

We tuned in one day to hear “I want to wish Happy Birthday to Loyce ‘Topsie’ Babineau and (several other people named too fast for us to write) who live in Eunice, Crowley, and Houma.” Between “songs coming up by Red Beans and Rice and Louisiana Boogie with Kim Brasso, brought to you by Cypress Bayou Casino and Shorty’s,” we heard the daily fishing report. This is exactly what their target audience of 35 to 64 year-olds wants to hear.

Every time KBON’s signal faded we tried clicking down to 100.3 FM looking for KLRZ, “The Ragin’ Cajun,” out of Larose. It took about a hundred miles to discover it shares the same bandwidth with 100.3 KRRV FM out of Alexandria.  At KRRV, we got an earful of Johnny Allen’s  “You’re Nobody’s Darlin’ But Mine” and Ronnie Milsap’s “I’ve Got A Houston Solution in Mind” rather than the spicy Cajun, Blues, and Swamp Pop mix we were looking for on KLRZ.

All the stations got mixed up in a spicy aural jambalaya that fed us for days. Ping pong back and forth and you’ll hear a Cajun version of “I’m Just A Gigolo,” then a Louisiana cover of Waylon Jennings’s “I’ve Always Been Crazy But It’s Kept Me From Going Insane,” and occasionally be startled to hear a song you recognize like The Rolling Stones “Beast of Burden.”

There’s a Cajun force field in the bayous that will not submit to commercial radio. You won’t hear the same song twice in a day. You will hear news and weather at top of hour, plus a health tip of the day brought to you by a local pharmacy. This is “BWM” radio (Before Wall Mart), where sponsors include The Cajun Trading Post in Carencro that advertises - “We have motorized ice chests you can ride, “ and “The only thing we can’t fix is a broken heart.”

Listen to KBON long enough and you’ll hear the forebears of blues - horns and all, rock ’n roll, and soul, along with zydeco and Cajun music. The common denominator is a dance beat. Whether you’re Sunday driving down a two-lane road or ripping along a Louisiana interstate, your fanny will be wiggling in your seat. The music isn’t everyone’s cup of gumbo, but if it’s yours you’ll spoon it up every time you get in the car.

Cafe des Amis: Morning Thunder on the Dance Floor

From brass bands playing on street corners in the French Quarter to Cajun bands playing mixes of zydeco, blues, swamp pop, and country in roadhouses all over southwest Louisiana, you're never far from music - and a place to dance to it.

“And Saturday morning, we can go dancing from 8 until 12 over in Breaux Bridge,” says my traveling companion.

“You mean Saturday night,” I reply.

People don’t dance at breakfast time. It’s just not done. I mean, you might be dancing Saturday morning at around 1 AM but that’s really Friday night. Saturday morning you’ll be bagging a few extra hours of sleep, and upon awakening you’ll listen to the quiet gurgling of hot water dripping through a filter basket of fresh ground coffee and stare at the large print of the morning paper, confirming that war hasn’t broken out somewhere. Somehow or other, dancing, which requires energetic motion and hip-torso coordination, doesn’t come to mind until well after noon.

Not so, Bucko. You’re in southwest Louisiana where zydeco dancing and coffee are as common a combination as red beans and rice.

By the time we arrive in Breaux Bridge, the outer walls of the Café des Amis are twitching from the happy sound of Cajun and Zydeco music and god knows how many feet pounding on its floor. One step inside is as unlikely a world as this Yankee has ever witnessed.

The five-piece band on a makeshift stage is deep into a two-step, a hundred people or so are packed onto a dance floor created by removing half the tables and chairs in the place, and another hundred or so are either watching the action from the bar on one side of the room or from the handful of tables jammed up at the rear of the café.

 The smell of coffee, bacon, and biscuits hangs in the close air. If you could roll it into cigarette papers, you’d be high on it all day. It felt like the whole place had been struck by an errant lightning bolt of energy.

The joyful music seems to create a “One World” vibe in which truckers and tourists, motorcyclists and accountants, blacks and whites, rub elbows and wise-crack with one another. A school of sardines couldn’t pack themselves any closer onto the dance floor and definitely wouldn’t be having as much fun.

If you’ve ever wondered how so many people can squeeze out of one of those clown cars at the circus, you’d conversely wonder how you and your honey could possibly squeeze into the dense pack of people on the dance floor.

By the time the song is over, you feel like you’ve been dancing in a crowded elevator with miraculously friendly people. No one’s feet have been stomped and you don’t feel jostled. And that person hollering with joy as the fiddle and accordion match solos is you. Cajun music was made for this. And you haven’t even had lunch yet.

 “Those people sitting at the tables are the tourists,” one guy in a cowboy hat says to me. I’ve apparently acquired a stamp of approval by squeezing onto the dance floor with my partner for every song since arriving. The sweat running down our faces, not to mention our goofy grins at the utter joy of finding this place, has elevated our status. Plus the fact that we’re pretty good at dancing, if I do say so myself.

Other than one break the band took to sit down and eat breakfast (photo right), the music lasted till exactly noon. It was about that time we became card-carrying honorary citizens of Southwest Louisiana.

Bourbon Street to Jackson Square - the many faces of New Orleans' French Quarter

The French Quarter is a tiny piece of New Orleans that packs a big wallop. Eat muffulettas at Central Grocery or po'boys from Johnny's for lunch, find one of the good restaurants on Royal Street for dinner, and never be too far from the sound of a brass band the lure of a tarot card reader. Much of the Quarters' architecture dates back to the late 1700s. It's a piece of old world charm wearing a baseball cap.

On any night, Bourbon Street is a sea of college-aged fun seekers, intent on consuming as much alcohol and having as much fun as humanly possible, and an equal number of tourists entertained or horrified by watching the spectacle of it happening.

The gaudy street with the boozy name runs the length of the French Quarter, from Canal Street to Esplanade. By late afternoon, this sleazy sleeping giant awakens. Like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors”, you can practically hear it yawling, “FEED ME!” By dusk, the police have closed the street to four-wheeled traffic. By Saturday night, the street becomes a Mississippi River of humanity.

The entire mass, like a two dimensional conga line, weaves its way through the street, bathed in the garish glow of the neon lights of saloons, restaurants, strip joints, and trinket shops that live off it.  Shills line the street entreating passersby to come on in and sample whatever is on the other side of their doorways- “Big Assed Beers,” lap dancers, “men who look more beautiful than women,” packed bars and bands playing music with enough volume to tickle the soles of your feet as you walk by.

Occasionally, glitter seems to fall from the heavens. Look up on the wrought iron balconies of the Omni Parker House and you’ll see tourists, mostly of the male persuasion, laden with arm-loads of Mardi Gras beads, intent on getting the attention of partiers of the female persuasion who just might do something provocative enough to attract a blitz of said beads. As a social experiment, I got the attention of a group of these men in an effort to snag one of the baubles and had the experience of feeling invisible for the first time in my life. I would have done way better had I been equipped with a good pair of bazoombas. Oh well, next lifetime.

It is entirely necessary to have witnessed the nocturnal version of Bourbon Street to appreciate the matinee version. As if a cosmic hand pulled the plug, quietude reigns. Like the college students who roamed it hours before, the street seems to be sleeping it off.

The hum of automobile tires coasting slowly down the street replaces the cochlea rattling decibel level of the evening before. Piles of plastic beer cups, soiled napkins, and party beads are swept into refuse trucks. Tanker trucks hose down the street with a sweet smelling wash of water and suds. Without neon, Bourbon Street in daylight looks like an aging actress, relaxing with a cup of coffee after she’s removed her stage makeup.

The rest of the French Quarter has remained well mannered day and night. Away from Bourbon Street, the Quarter wraps its arms around you on early morning walks down narrow streets, showing off her brightly painted three and four story buildings with shuttered floor to ceiling windows graced by wrought iron balconies, many spilling over with the dense green foliage of hanging plants.

The scores of hotels, eateries, shops, and galleries that fill this small section of New Orleans curled against an elbow of the Mississippi River in the southeast part of the city will soon bustle with activity. The clip clop of horse carriages on sun-bleached streets, music from street bands, and the clatter of foot traffic over slate and brick sidewalks are the leitmotif of a day in the French Quarter.

Jackson Square, an emerald gem set in the midst of the Quarter, is surrounded by historic buildings. The famous Café du Monde lies one block beyond. By day, the promenade around the square is given over to artists and musicians. 

By dark, most businesses in the buildings have closed. Luminous islands of tarot card readers and psychics, their small tables and chairs bathed in candlelight, glow gently in the dark. Readers sit pensively and softly solicit couples that walk by. The adventurous, perhaps seduced by the pungent scent of patchouli or a whim to hear their futures foretold in such a romantic setting, choose a chair and hope for the best.

 A tourist destination for thousands every day, the Quarter is also home to people who live in apartments and condos hidden behind wooden doors that line the narrow streets. It’s always a surprise to see a resident pop out of a door, brief case in hand, and head to work. And more of a surprise to catch a glimpse of a daintily manicured courtyard behind one of those doors

New Orleans is of European lineage, founded by the French in 1718, ceded to Spain in 1763, reacquired by Napoleon in 1801, then sold to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The French Quarter, rebuilt by the Spanish after two disastrous fires, is the oldest part of the city (Vieux Carré). The buildings with their floor to ceiling wooden shuttered windows that open to narrow balconies with wrought iron railings are architectural remnants of the late 1700s. Like Paris, this enclave has old world elegance.

The Quarter has its own scale and style. Magic? Yes...

Cajun Country: The Beating Heart of Southwest Louisiana

Southwest Louisiana breathes music. pt at large spent the past ten days sampling gumbo, Dixie Beer, red beans and rice, and spending nights and one memorable morning dancing to Cajun music. The fiddle, accordion, bass, and drums that comprise most bands capture a range of joy and heartbreak with a rhythm and levity that displace every thought but one...find a partner and step out on the dance floor.

Forget about Louisiana as a state. It’s a state of mind. Full of crawfish po' boys, gumbo, and shrimp, what really holds the state together is music. Nowhere is this more evident than in bayou country.

Southwest Louisiana breathes music. It exhales from radio stations, juke boxes in restaurants, and bars and dance halls in places like Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, and Henderson. Zydeco, Cajun two-step, pretty little waltzes, Whiskey River jitterbug, and swamp pop at close quarters so you can taste the sweat on your honey’s cheek when you pull her close and move as one to the rhythmic beat, and oh yes, the absolute joy of inhaling that music.

This is roots music. No fancy clothes or shoes necessary. Just the ability to open your heart for a couple of hours to music born of sunshine, toil, and the displacement of the Acadian people two centuries ago. Now it’s the music of fishermen, farmers, truck drivers along side college kids, smooth-shaven lawyers, young professionals, and more gray haired grandparents than you’ve ever seen within a country mile of a dance floor. Women wearing cut offs and cowboy boots, sundresses that stick to their perspiring bodies, and tank tops with black jeans are just as down as any of the bluejeaned men in the dance halls. When a woman is of a mind to dance, she marches straight to the first man she sees who’s shuffling his feet in time with the music and pulls him to the dance floor.

There may be some mating games going on amongst all the happy hip shaking couples, but the custom is four or five minutes of whirling to the sounds of accordion, bass, fiddles, and drums then look around for another grinning partner with whom you can spend the next few minutes on the dance floor. Sitting down is out of the question until the band decides to take a break. Hell, you’ve got all week to sit down. This is the weekend in Cajun country. There’s a possibility that you’ll catch up on some sleep, there’s a likelihood that you’ll do some laundry and stop in at the local grocery store. But there is no doubt whatsoever that you’re going to find a place to dance.

There’s the big ol’ Whiskey River Landing dance hall in Henderson tucked between the levee and the shore of the Atchafalaya Swamp where there’s dancing on Sunday afternoon from 4 pm to 8 pm. An 82 year-old farmer dances with his wife, his weathered face wearing a devilish grin that just might have been responsible for his wife saying “I do” five or six decades ago. The man’s been up since 5 am feeding cattle and here he is wearing his wide brim hat, clean jeans and pounding the floor with his leather boots just as vigorously as any young buck in the crowd. From the jammed dance floor to the walls lining the building, the place was packed. Jeffery Broussard The Creole Cowboys made sure of that.

“You don’t come from around here, do you,” says Jean Prejean, a wiry man with a shaved head and one gold earring, as I’m taking photos of the band stand and the swamp just beyond one of the huge picture windows that line the rear wall of the Whiskey River Dance Hall. My T-shirt and shorts don't look out of place but only a tourist would want to take that photo. For everyone else the place was as ordinary as a 7-11.

Prejean is a 56 year-old carpenter who lives three miles down the road. “I used to truck up to Boston, still know some people there from when we kept track of each other on our CB radios,” he says. Dressed in his black T-shirt and jeans, the man has some of the most original dance moves I’d ever seen. “I’m self taught,” he says proudly, “been dancing since I was a baby. I’m the man who laid the dance floor at Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge,” he says.

Any zydeco dancer within a hundred miles knows the Cafe des Amis is the place to go for live music and dancing from 8 am till noon on Saturday. This is not a typo. Let me put it this way. When the band begins playing at 8 am, most of Louisiana might be on their second cup of coffee; the people at the Café des Amis are on their feet dancin'.

For people down here dancing isn’t recreation, it’s a way of life. Saturday night in Lafayette, Randol’s was full of men and women and their children, couples, singles and exactly two tourists- this writer and his dance partner. The restaurant has a sprawling dining room, a small bar and a pine-paneled dance floor surrounded by a low wooden railing. Two fifty apiece, “for the band,” got you a wristband to enter the dance floor.

The band was kicking up a storm of zydeco, waltzes, and Cajun jitterbugs. Over the hand-lettered sign proclaiming “Salle de danse” was a shelf loaded with pieces of parade floats and Mardi Gras costumes. Two giant fans whirred cool air onto the dance floor to neutralize the 90-degree humidity that sat like a fat cat on the countryside just outside the rough-hewn pine paneling.

This is the kind of place Jean Prejean probably had his first dance. Amongst the couples nearly every dance you’d see a mommy or daddy whirl around the perimeter with a toddler in his/her arms. Grade school kids sat with their parents tapping time to the music. Every so often Parain and Marain (grandpa and grandma) or mom or dad took a turn leading one of them through a dance.

There was nary a shred of self-consciousness from the children. They were as at home on the dance floor as a catfish lazing around the bottom of the swamp. The kids’ eyes were bright with excitement. This music was more than happy notes coming from diatonic accordions and ancient fiddles. This was birthright, a sense of belonging that would never be erased by distance or profession.

Music floats lazily over the whole of Southwest Louisiana. Like the Spanish moss cascading over cypress trees in the Atchafalaya Swamp, it’s fed by nutrients floating naturally in the hot, humid air. Hurricanes, floods, and man-made assaults may affect what is on the ground. They will never still the music in the air.

Spring Training

Spring Training
Grapefruit League

New York Mets vs. Cleveland Indians
Tradition Field, Port Saint Lucie, FL
March 20, 2008

Smaack. 
There is only one sound like this. A stick of white ash swung in a powerful arc by a man with powerful forearms collides with opposing force against a sphere of horsehide hurtling toward it at 90 mph. The trademark sound of a national sport.

Marching into the dark maze of walkways leading to the grandstand of a major league baseball park sets you up for one of the peak visions in American sports. The walk up a narrow ramp then POW!  the impossibly immaculate emerald green of the playing field set off by the terracotta base paths with three marshmallow pillow bases. Perhaps it’s the scale of seeing the whole shebang - seats, field, walls, lights - with one glance. Or the simplicity about it, grass and dirt, blue sky overhead for day games, dusk settling in for night games. If you’ve only watched the sport on TV, you’re unprepared for the scale of splendor in this grass.

The two team managers meet with umpires at home plate to hand in their lineup cards, the national anthem is played, defensive players jog to their positions, fans cheer. The grand old game begins, an American ballet, soap opera, and occasional roller derby all wrapped into one. The game is an extraordinary mix of deliberate acts laced with moments of blinding speed and physical skill. Over the next two or three hours we will cheer, gasp, groan, clap, chat amiably with people we’ve never seen before - and perhaps have nothing in common except that we are here together. And would never choose to speak with on the outside world.

The cement beneath the seats will become littered with peanut shells, beer cups, and hotdog wrappers. Every so often a really big smmaack resonates through the stadium when a batter connects the sweet spot of his bat with the incoming pitch. The crowd erupts in a reflexive roar.

Assembled around you are more people that live in some small towns in America. Rush Limbaugh followers, NPR devotees, atheists, god fearing people, vegetarians, tree huggers, teamsters, and none of them at this moment with an ax to grind. Except maybe why the manager leaves a pitcher in the game too long or why he doesn’t pinch hit for a certain batter.

And in a spring training game in Florida’s Grapefruit league, even that doesn’t seem to matter much. For a few precious hours the walls of the ballpark keep the worries of the world at bay. We drop our worldly judgments like so many peanut shells. That’s worth the price of admission right there.

Don Pedro Biernay, a gem in the Chilean rough

Saturday February 2, 2008

Fine dust from the earth he tills is etched in the lines of his sun-weathered face. The dirt embedded under the nails of his small strong hands is the same dirt that produced the cantaloupe you may be having for breakfast today.

I've watched him work during my two-week visit to Susaan Straus’ and Ricardo Ceriani’s 50-acre farm in Nogales, Chile. He harvested 20,000 cantaloupes during this time - cantaloupes he had grown from seed. Each afternoon the fruit dealer’s truck lumbered out the dirt road to the highway, Don Pedro had confirmed the melon count on board.

That was for starters. By 8:00 AM other days, he’d hitched his fifty pound steel plow behind his muscular, dutiful red mare, LaRubia, and tilled several acres of corn fields. He’s prepared several more acres for a cabbage crop. He’s repaired rustic farm implements as they wear out and kept his eye on everything that moves or grows.

Don Pedro Biernay is 66 years old and has worked the fields since he was 16. He splurged once and took a week vacation. God knows how he relaxed. Born in Quillota, about two hours north of Santiago and a short drive to Nogales, Don Pedro and his family have lived in a small shack on the perimeter of this farm for decades. His grandfather immigrated to Chile from France.

He hasn’t reported in sick in fifty years. Sore and tired, yes, but way too proud to stay home. For the painful arthritis, he captures a honeybee and allows it to sting his shoulder. He says his shoulder feels better after the treatment. (Note: a Google inquiry surprised me with accounts acknowledging the effectiveness of this treatment.)

When my friends Ricardo Ceriani and Susaan Straus bought the farm from Sr. Saffi, Don Pedro was in the same category as the outbuildings - he came with the farm, a wizened miracle in a battered white leather hat.

He reads and understands the dirt beneath his feet, the clouds over his head, and things that grow around him with the ease with which you digest your morning paper. The birds, sun, weather, and winds speak to him in tongues he understands.

How often does the newly planted corn field need to be irrigated? Don Pedro knows. What will grow faster, melons or potatoes? Don Pedro knows. How many seasons will that plot of land produce alfalfa for Ricardo’s horses before it’s time to plant something else to give the land a rest? Ask Don Pedro.

He leads a hard, simple life. A few years ago, his fourteen-year-old grandson was killed as he stepped from behind a bus into oncoming traffic. Shortly thereafter, a daughter bore another grandchild. “God takes away with one hand and gives with the other,” Don Pedro said to Ricardo not long afterward.

Every morning, I see him, immaculate in his clean blue and white shirt and work jeans, making purposeful strides to his next job. I've never seen him at rest.

When it comes time to celebrate, his 5’8” 135 pound wiry body can consume and hold prodigious amounts of local red wine mixed with Coca Cola. And, as he did at the Saturday BBQ to celebrate the completion of the framing of a new barn, he holds forth with the same vigor he puts into plowing the land.

Class lines are still distinctly drawn here in the post-feudal countryside. Don Pedro is an “old school” laborer. He’s never approached, never mind entered, the Patron’s little farmhouse on a tiny hillock 100 yards away. but here in the barn that will hold orange produce before it’s shipped to market, he sits across from Ricardo, the Patron, and yaks with him as though they were a couple of country boys enjoying a Saturday picnic.

Here I was, sitting next to Don Pedro, a part of and, due to language barrier, apart from the celebration, when I heard the word “Clinton” and realized he was asking me a question.

“He wants to know who you think will win the election, Hillary Clinton or the black man Obama,” Ricardo translated for me. I felt some kind of cultural lightning bolt had struck the corrugated metal roof of the barn.  A major recalculation on every assumption I had about Don Pedro and god knows how many others in the Spanish-speaking country crowd around me was in order.

For the next 15 minutes, with Ricardo acting as the UN interpreter, I had a conversation with Don Pedro about the US presidential election, the Yankee and Confederate war about slaves (he wanted to know which side was ‘blue’ and which side was ‘grey’), the president who was a woodsman and had a tall hat (Lincoln) and the American war about tea and why it started.

“How do you know about these things?"  I said, wondering if he could read the incredulity writ across my face.

“I read, ”he said with a grin that did little to disguise a sense of pride.

“He says he used to lie down with a candle on his chest and read every night when he was a boy. When it got too late his father would make him blow out the candle, “ Ricardo said. “Once he went all the way to Valparaiso to find a book.” I recalled the story about Honest Abe allegedly walking miles to return a book. Here was another country boy with a thirst for knowledge sitting right beside me.

Apparently, I’ve had to travel several thousand miles into the southern hemisphere to relearn the “Don’t judge a book by its cover” lesson. I suspect it won’t be the last time I’ll need to relearn it.

Chile Farms Wednesday January 23, 2008

10 am, Wednesday, January 23.  I survey my temporary fiefdom at Susaan and Ricardo’s farm in Nogales, Chile. The epi-center of “Chile Farms” is a wood frame little castle located on a hillock overlooking their orange groves, alfalfa tracts, and fields full of ready for the picking cantaloupes and corn.

Ensconced in a comfy chair on the corner of the veranda that surrounds their farmhouse,

I’m surrounded by an agrarian kingdom Birds twitter, roosters crow, dogs bark, a tractor chugs through the orange groves, and a pool filter gurgles in the back yard.

Panning to the east on my left, I see the tip of the stable, the frame of the new barn which will hold orange produce, and the steep foothills of the Cordillieras de los Andes, dotted with avocado fields and wild espina trees. Beyond them lies the forbidding mountain range that is the spine of South America.

Straight ahead, just over the screen of my laptop, are one corner of Chile Farms’ orange groves and sprawling fields of a neighbor’s neatly rowed green pepper plants with a wedge of shoulder high corn tucked between them. A peek of one of Ricardo’s horse corrals and a patch their vegetable and herb garden lay at the bottom of the hillock.

To my right, the azure pool with its terra cotta tiled deck, and a small patch of lawn bordered with wild flowers. And just over the scrub espina trees on a hillside there are the tops of eucalyptus trees that surround Ricardo’s practice rodeo arena. The backdrop from there is the foothills of the Coastal Range. The Pacific Ocean lies 15 miles to the east beyond.

Time here is measured in growing seasons not by calendars embedded in Blackberrys. I can get used to this.

pt in paree:an american in paris

Forget about “Old Europe.” While Paris is as old world as it gets, the City of Light has been a watering hole for change ever since the Romans built administrative offices on the Left Bank of the Seine centuries ago.

At any given time, a Parisian is either talking on a cell phone, eating, drinking coffee, or seated in a cafe doing all three. I assume they work someplace but that’s an afterthought. When they pull up a tiny chair at a sidewalk café, they extricate themselves from the business of the day - the world can wait.

ptatlarge has arrived in late spring and tout le monde strains to be outdoors on a spectacularly blue sky Sunday.  The ones with the maps are the tourists. On any given day, their array of digital devices soak up gadzillions of pixels to capture the history, art, architecture, monuments, squares and scenes on the river Seine.

click on any photo to enlarge it
The world-class Paris Metro hums through stations every two to five minutes. Electronic signs display the names of the trains coming and the time they’ll arrive, and they damn well arrive when the display says they will. The only thing they have in common with their cousins in NYC or Boston is the graffiti sprayed or scratched onto the surfaces.

You can reach any district in the city, from seedy Monmartre to swanky Louvre in minutes. Over 4 million people a day use the Metro. Occasionally a dapper man with an accordion sets up inside the door. For a few magical moments, it feels like the spirit of Edith Piaf, “The Little Sparrow,” floats through the quiet rumble of the train.

 Up on the surface, ooo la la, Paris is visually stunning. The Boulevard Périphérique that rings the city seems to have locked it into an architectural time warp. Look down the narrow side streets, many of them still cobblestone, and you’re gazing at streets that resemble an eighteenth century etching.

Paris is stubbornly retaining its sense of scale. Six stories is about the limit for most buildings. Paris is so totally non-American. No big box stores, steel and glass skyscrapers, miles of blazing neon. It doesn’t seem to be devoured by a consumer economy. Its swagger devolves from its history not its height.

Considering the whopping number of cars jockeying through rues and boulevards, the degree of horn honking is minimal. But the whine of motorcycles, which are like a plague of locusts, is often overwhelming. And yes, you can still spot a cyclist with a two-foot baguette or two poking from the backpack.

Is it a coincidence that the word insouciant is derived from French? I’m not naïve enough to think that Parisians don’t have family problems, marriages on the rocks, or business failures but there’s an uncommon amount of laughter and smiling going on here. Does drinking wine with lunch make that much difference?

And where is the hauteur? I see smokers, animated sidewalk cafe story tellers, waiters who bring food and drink on time then let me sit and watch the world go by, water trucks daily rinsing the streets, tons of really small cars that can park on a postage stamp and use thimbles full of high priced gasoline, but I experience none of that Gallic disdain that I’ve been warned about. 

I walk by bakeries and brasseries and am lifted into another dimension with the aromatics of baking bread or garlic being sautéed in butter. And I drink vin ordinaire for less than three bucks a glass. Could my high school French be that disarming to the locals? I begin to think that this whole French arrogance thing has been cooked up by the Italian Ministry of Tourism.

Paris seems  to be in a state of equilibrium in which traffic jams, strikes, noisy elections are taken in stride. The legacy of writers, poets, painters, revolutionaries, and royalty here is breath taking - Picasso, Monet, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Stein, Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, Rodin, Degas - the list is longer than several baguettes. With this history, why would the Parisians even think we Americans were worth the effort to get haughty about?

It’s not paradise. Paris hasn’t escaped the political malaise that has crept into the mainstream life of other urban centers. It has growing pains as we do. It’s just not in a rush to crush its past to embrace its future.

Back here in my home territory, spring is in full bloom - forsythia, daffodils, and cherry blossoms ignite the landscape long dreary from winter.

But, ahhh, I miss the magic of those narrow cobbled streets, the church steeples, the public squares - both the tiny jewels and the colossal - and the proud mantle of history that drapes itself so un-self-consciously over the City of Light. April in Paris was magic.

Playing in Pucon, Chile

“I don’t want to frighten you but some of what I’m going to tell you might sound scary. What I’m going to tell you are not probabilities but possibilities. There are some dangers in river rafting. The more closely you listen to what I’m going to tell you, the better the chances are you’ll have a good experience. You probably wont fall out of the raft but if you do, you’ll end up with a story you can enjoy telling for a long time.”

The short, sturdy young man with a beard and reddish brown hair falling in ringlets to his shoulders has called us to order on the bank of the Trancura River, nine miles from Pucon.

At this moment, I wondered whether it might not have been a better idea to sign up for the Class 3 rapids rather than the Class 4 version flexing its blue muscles behind us.

One of us did fall out of the boat. And yes, we have recounted that story about fifty times since it happened on the Trancura River in Pucon, Chile a few days ago (see map below).

pt was at large again in the southern hemisphere. Dominated by the nearly 10,000 foot snow capped spectacle of broad shouldered Mount Villarrica, an active volcano that vents sulphurous steam daily, Pucon has become a destination for Chileans searching for a summer playground. The place is drop dead beautiful, still quaint with a small town feel. For now.

Developers see dollar signs all over the mountain and lake strewn district of nature preserves, rapids, waterfalls, thermal pools, and volcanic black sand beaches. If I return in a few years, much of the local charm may have been swallowed by commerce but in the meantime, you can walk around this tiny hamlet in less than an hour.

And that’s exactly where we four gringos found the Trancura Raft Company. And ended up wearing wet suits, helmets, and listening to a river guide calmly describe how to save our lives if we fall out of the raft in the downdraft of a whitewater rapids.

Jordan is a certifiable river rat. He gleefully recounts stories of the startled look in airline employees’ eyes as he plops his banged up 6’6” orange kayak onto their baggage check platforms. He’s floated like a cork on some of the world’s more cantankerous rivers, ones that would swallow rookies like us and not even burp after the effort. This particular Class 4 rapids is a stroll for Jordan. For us, it’s a test of our mettle.

His blue eyes coolly survey us to calculate how his speech is registering and probably estimate which one of us is most likely to fall overboard. Jordan states facts much like a surgeon. He says what he intends to do, what the possible dangers are - all of them in unvarnished matter of fact tones - and finishes with saying “in all likelihood, it’s going to turn out fine”. Right.

During his dissertation, a little voice in my mind, the one that values survival, is nattering, “Do you need to do this?” And in spite of fear, I really want to dance on the edge of safety, to feel the rush of fear-fueled adrenaline, to feel more alive because I’m closer to death.

Like “Proud Mary”, we were about to go ‘rollin’ down the river’ - except a lot faster, a lot wetter, and a lot closer to the water.

Finished with his introduction, Jordan turns us over to young Capitan Raul. We drag the raft into mountain-fed river and immediately grasp the wisdom of wet suits. Now that Jordan has trained us how to hold the paddles, Raul tells us what to do with them.

For the next hour, my entire nervous system will be poised to follow commands of  “Forward!”“Fast Forward!” “Back!””Down!” “High Side Left”“High Side Right”. Immediately.

Our crew of six is made up of me, my three Chilean friends in front, plus two guides in training and Raul steering the raft from the stern. And several kayakers whose job is to ride herd on the raft, pick up any of us who fall out and can’t make it back to the raft, and paddle ahead on the lookout for anything that might impede our safety. Plus have fun by barrel rolling their little one man kayaks 360 degrees, doing a fine impression of frolicking seals, water shedding off their sleek kayaks, wet suits and helmets as they resurface after a bracing rollover.

Practice over. The voyage begins. The two men in front and the two women in the middle get real quiet.

I can see the first white water from my perch on the front right side of the raft. More impressively, I can hear it. I swallow hard and take a deep breath. I feel like a foot soldier waiting for his commander to order me up and over the top of the trench.

“Forward!” Then, “Fast Forward” shouts Raul.  The image of accelerating a car and then heading for a bridge abutment comes to mind. Rock outcroppings, churning water, flash by. The bow abruptly dips, plows into blue water and pops to the surface. Yeeeeeaaaaahhhhhhh! Was that my voice?

“Paddles Up!” (the victory salute after we negotiate each of the rapids), shouts Raul. It’s amazing how much energy you can put in a shout when it's fifty percent excitement and fifty percent relief that you're still alive. We’re rockin’.

The totally incongruous hard paddling right into the rapids begins to make sense. Raul is lining the raft up for the best entry and we’re the propellers. He’s also a thrill provider. Just when we think we’ve become masters of the river, he heads us into white water sideways, then once backwards. And when he shouts, “Down!” (crew slide off the sides and onto the floor of the raft) you’ve never seen a bunch of AARP members move so fast. None of us wants to learn how much pain a boulder could inflict on a body liberated from the raft involuntarily after an unexpected lurch.

Halfway down the rapids we head for shore for one short portage, a short vertical climb over hardened magma, through dense underbrush full of roots, then re-board the raft after a steep ten foot rock climb down.

The portage is around a constricted set of falls with only two narrow ways through between rock outcroppings. The drop creates nasty “hydraulics”, as Jordan calls them, capable of sucking kayaks and people down under the surface and keeping them there, and rocks that would cause severe damage to a human body or a kayak.

Raul and others tied the raft to a line and tethered it through the falls.

The next stretch includes the biggest drop of rapids, presided over by a huge boulder in the middle. The gringos had become a cocky bunch, ready to take the plunge. Until Raul shouts “Fast Forward!” and seems to steer directly for the impassive giant. Adrenaline rules. Raul shouts commands - white water churning, frothing, hissing, the raft closing on the boulder and the drop, and the crew paddling furiously right into it. It was twenty seconds to eternity.

The bow rams the boulder, stalls for a moment then with a lurch, pitches abruptly down at a 45 degree angle. One moment I’m in daylight, the next I’m encased in a dark blue cocoon of solid water. The world goes silent for two seconds. I nearly gag on the water that’s been driven up my nose and down my throat during the drop.

That’s where we lost Susan.

As water sluices out of the raft, I look back. There is no one was where she was sitting half a lifetime ago. Silence.

Up rockets her yellow helmeted head a few feet from the raft. One split second later, her husband Ricardo springs to the side of the raft, reaches over, yanks her up by her life jacket, and lands her inside like a tuna.  Cheers. Laughter. Relief.

The coiling rapids behind us are morphing into stories we’ll tell for days.

Capitan Raul asks if we want to jump overboard to float last few hundred yards on our own.  I’m in. As instructed, I’m on my back, feet facing downstream, my life vest giving me buoyancy. My outstretched arms steer toward the shore of the river a few hundred feet from the same place we’d donned our raft gear a couple of hours earlier.

We chatter like school children after a wild ride on the roller coaster. We’ve conquered the unknown. Today.

Being alive means more than just breathing. Can we exist without testing our limits? In the past, we would have been the foot soldiers of history, crossing prairies, oceans, or deserts, risking danger to find our promised lands. Today, we sat in a tough-hided rubber raft to ride the rapids because we wanted to find something within ourselves.

Passing the test today doesn’t mean we’ll be able to pass it again. But we know it will be waiting for us. Tomorrow.

IF YOU GO:
The Trancura River Class IV rapids are located 14 kilometres east from Pucón. It is ideal for the most daring and adventure-seeking who will encounter  turbulence and strong rapids. For safety the raft will be guarded by a safety Kayak during the whole adventure.
USD 50 fee includes guide, transportation, insurance, wet suit and shoes, wind-jacket, safety helmet, paddle, life jacket and towel.

Pucon is 789 kilometers/493 miles from the capital, Santiago de Chile. TurBus Company offers ten hour overnight service to Pucon via the North PanAmerican Highway, a wide asphalt road in very good condition. Dinner and breakfast included. Buses are quiet, air conditioned, with reasonably comfortable reclining seats and clean lavatories.

Geography:
Pucon is south of Santiago (and  east of Villarrica, shown on map). Both Villarrica and Pucon are in the "Lake District" of Chile.

 

Chile: A rooster crows

Notes from ChileFarms in Nogales, Chile, a small town nestled in a valley between the foothills of the mighty Andes and the Coastal Mountains lining the Pacific Ocean.

A rooster crows.At first a solo cock a doodle doo in the darkness at 6 AM then more insistent invocations as the sky begins to pale. During the velvety black night, every star and galaxy ever created was visible, as if scattered into the cosmos by a high rolling hand playing with the order in the universe.

By 6:30, the Southern Cross will fade into the cosmos. The rural countryside in this central region of Chile is beginning to awaken. In a few minutes the black and white lapwings will begin their incessant gull-like chatter as they begin swooping over the fields in search of food. Dogs will bark. Tractors will sputter and horses will neigh as they begin to cultivate the fields.

pt at large has launched his first communique from South America, where he’s come to visit his friends Ricardo Ceriani and Susaan Straus at Chilefarms, their farm here in a fertile valley in Nogales, Chile.We all know that apples and pears grow on trees. Who knew that peaches, avocadoes, lemons, limes, quince, figs, walnuts, and almonds do too? Not pt at large until he saw them with his own eyes in the past week in this country. Dry and sunny days range from the sixties to the nineties. Warm temperatures of spring and summer melt snow from the mountaintops ringing the valleys. Miles of irrigation channels water a staggering variety of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and flowers. The chances are good that much of the produce in the aisles of your local supermarket is grown in the Mediterranean-like climate here in the middle of Chile.

Chile is a country of contrasts. A look at the Spanish, Indian, and Anglo faces in the Metro, the ultra modern subway system in downtown Santiago reveals the history of the country. A view of Santiago from a steep mid city hilltop shows an immense example of sprawl, a city spread out from it’s center at the Plaza de Armas for miles to the foothills of the Andes on one side and the coastal mountains on the other. Millions of people from rich to poor, from high rise to hovel. The city is intensely alive. Buses, taxis and cars hurtle down the roads but the pace on the sidewalks is leisurely. The tourist learns not to set one foot into the street until he has confirmed there are no microbuses careening down the street less than a meter from the sidewalk. An imaginary sign on their grills might read “Take no prisoners.” Old Santiago and new Santiago live incongruously happily side by side. In the Paseo Moneda, a shopping district downtown, middle class, country people, kids with purple hair and black goth attire, Indians, and tourists like me fill the street. A cultural anthropologist’s dream.

This country is leapfrogging from the nineteenth century to the twenty first. Horse drawn carts might be driven by a farmer with a cell phone in his hand. Santiago is a huge metropolis with every bit of the commercial trappings of downtown USA. There are things to be consumed and Chileans are getting the hang of it. Slick billboards on the outside and large TV monitors in the underground Metro show snippets of news, the arrival time of the next sleek quiet train, and an amazing amount of jiggling cleavage, which made me wish the train to be at least two minutes late.

Poverty is a fact of life here. Money is hard to come by for many but if they aren't buying something, Chileans are selling something. And showing entrepreneurial creativity. Fruit, newspapers. crafts, food, of course. But also yellow plastic wind up baby chicks, used parts for every kind of machine, lipstick and makeup, old tools and rags are spread out on shawls on the sidewalk. An object only becomes of no value until it disappears, melts away, or is worn down beyond the original elements from which it was composed.

Nogales is an hour and a half drive northwest of Santiago. The two lane road has been replaced by a superhighway leading all the way to the Pacific coast. Commercial complexes that support the country's massive growth-spurt line the roadside.Cement companies, propane and electric plants, trucking companies, business complexes sprout like crops in the scrubby plains. Miles and miles of avocado trees ordered in soldierly fashion line the steep hillsides and fertile crop-bearing fields along the highway.

Condominiums packed like avocado trees on the steep mountainous coast are being built by the hundreds on the fifteen-mile stretch along the huge crescent shaped bay from Con Con to Valparaiso, a Chilean Riviera aborning. An upper middle class is forming in Santiago and the first place they want to play go to play in the South American summer between December and February is this central region of the coast,

The road leading from the new "Ruta 5" highway to Nogales was a bumpy dirt road until just last year. This year it is paved... a macadam metaphor for the changes happening all over this country.

Peace and Plenty Beach Inn, The Bahamas

Peace and Plenty Beach Inn
Queen's Highway, Georgetown, Great Exuma Island, Bahamas
(a mere 1758 miles south of Boston)
February 14, 2006

A flip-flop marinated in Coppertone might have tasted good in this little piece of Paradise. The brilliant aquamarine water of Elizabeth Harbor in Georgetown was frosted with dainty whitecaps in the brisk southeast breeze. The Blizzard of '06 had just blanketed the northeast and here sat your reviewer in a polo shirt and shorts amongst sailors, tourists, and a few locals having lunch in the dining room of the Club Peace and Plenty Beach Inn. Somewhere to the north, denizens of the northeast were seeing their breath crystallize as they huffed while they shoveled snow. I was busy spilling sand out of my beach shoes on Great Exuma Island in the Bahamas.

Embedded in Caribbean DNA is an affinity for colors most Americans haven't seen since finger painting class in kindergarten. The peach toned walls in the dining room, ceiling fans overhead, smooth white tiles underfoot, were the opening salvo of color. Lined with windows, the dining room was perched over the royal blue and yellow striped awning of a tiny poolside bar. Emerald chaise lounges encircled a pale blue mini pool and the whole terrace was bordered with a low wall of flat peach colored rock overlooking the harbor. As if this weren't assault enough on a poor Northern boy's limited winter sensibilities, the sandy ribbons of beaches on Stocking Island lay invitingly a few miles off to the west. Lunch was almost an afterthought.

Conch burgers are a local favorite. Tiny cubes of conch in a slightly piquant batter are fried to a crusty brown and served on burger buns with lettuce tomato and onion. In truth, New England fried clams have a more distinctly oceanic flavor but - all due respect to Gloucester, Manchester, Portland, and Provincetown - aren't served with a view like this. Bahamian fish and chips stood up to New England's version. Chunks of grouper, golden fried in a delicate simple batter, were moist and flaky. The chicken wings weren't appealing to look at but pronounced tasty by my dinner companions, even though the kitchen had run out of the spicy sauce that reputedly fired them up considerably. Virtually all foodstuffs arrive by boat. The savvy tourist quickly adapts to two quirks of life in the Bahamas: island time and "we ran out of that."

The range of the Bahama's water color makes you wonder what planet you're on. The word paradise often comes to mind. There are certainly vistas in my native New England that inspire awe but none of them can match the sight of Caribbean beaches in mid-February.

pt at large spent five idyllic days relaxing with good friends on a small island east of Georgetown, with only two trips into town to reconnoiter and get a feel for the culture, history, and the native and adopted residents of the island. I’m already looking ahead to next February when I hope to be invited back to visit my friends on Elizabeth Island, a ten-minute boat ride from Georgetown, and one light year away from a New England winter.

www.peaceandplenty.com

Fish Story

SSSSSSSSZZZZZZZZ…the sharp  metallic mechanical whirring of a fishing reel being unspooled by a big fish pierced the afternoon air. “Fish on the line!” shouted skipper Paul Wagner. “

We had been cruising right on the edge of the soundings line, the border between depths a marine depth sounder can accurately record and the gorgeous blue water over the underwater canyons too deep to record on the depth sounder.

Marine paradise, two miles off Great Exuma on the southeast end of the Bahama Islands. A dozen brilliant shades of water from blue to green, sandy beaches, warm trade winds kissing my bare shoulders, clean salt air blowing through my hair. New Englanders are rendered speechless with sights and sensations like this. We’d been trolling in the deepest blue water for about an hour and a half.The hope of fresh fish for dinner was fading. But disappointment is easy to absorb in paradise. The music of that steely rachet spooling from the fishing reel put the idea of fish back on the front burner.

Blue water was foaming from the thrust of the 150 HP outboard on the 21 foot center console Alcar fishing boat. The rod bent and whipped. Whatever was on the line was in full flight mode.

Command structure ensued.

“Take the helm and throttle down!”
“Reel in the other line!”

The captain began to reel in, pause, tug the rod, reel in again, pull his shoulders back and tug the rod in from his perch on the stern deck. Four minutes later the black mackeral-like markings of a thirty inch wahoo were within sight.

“Open the fish box!”, the captain shouted as he gave a final heave and landed the writhing fish into the fish box in the stern, slamming it shut as soon as the line was cut.

Recipes* for a fresh wahoo dinner began in earnest.

*The winner:filet of wahoo, rubbed rubbed with salt, T hot chili oil, lemon juice. Marinate for couple hours, served with salsa of avocado, lg tomato,half onion, cilantro,  juice of one lemon. salt and pepper.

The Gates: An installation by Christo

The Gates: An installation by Christo and Jeanne Claude Christo
Central Park, New York, February 12 – February 28, 2005
February 19, 2005

Want to go to a really big party? Want to see what a multi national, polyglot, block party looks and sounds like while it’s strolling google eyed at 7500 steel and plastic “gates” covered with 1,067,330 square feet of brilliant saffron colored, recyclable, rip-stop fabric and temporarily plunked over 23 miles of NYC’s Central Park trails and paths?

Get in your car, take a bus, hop the train, hitch a ride, just get to NYC to enjoy this wonder. Total strangers start up conversations with each other, passers-by offer to take the photo so you can stand with your family, significant other, or the family pooch, with a magnificent backdrop of billowing saffron shimmering in the breeze.

It’s like an old fashioned love in, now playing in the nation’s grandest city park. And on February 28, poof. It will be dismantled, disappear and become an urban legend. Most visitors will revert to their insular habits, roller-blading and cell phoning their way through the park.

Is it art, is it farce, who cares? Why does it work? Is it the brilliant saffron color; or the immense scale of the project; or the Central Park setting that Frederick Law Olmsted, another visionary, designed in 1858? You’ve got to love that these two artists have been trying to get their Gates installed since 1979.

It’s nothing but nylon, plastic, and steel but it’s turned out to be the best kind of interactive device of this young century, an oasis for the spirit. Thousands of participants are looking one another in the eye, talking to one another, and sharing from some invisible well of good will. That’s art that borders on a divine plan.

for info, photos go to http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/tg.html

Robert Treat Paine Estate, A National Historic Landmark

Robert Treat Paine Estate, A National Historic Landmark
100 Robert Treat Paine Drive · Waltham, MA 02452 781-314-3290
http://www.stonehurstwaltham.org/

On a recent trip just west of Bentley College on Beaver Street in Waltham, MA, pt at large spied a sign proclaiming Stonehurst Estate. Intrigued that he'd never noticed it before, he jotted down the name, and vowed to have an Excellent Adventure there some day. A summary of his January 28, 2005 visit, with background data for history buffs in the audience, follows.

The Robert Treat Paine Estate represents an intersection of 19th century Americana in which architecture, landscape design, social conscience, and genteel opulence intersect.

The social conscience was provided by Robert Treat Paine (1835-1910), a great grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. After amassing a fortune in railroad and mining investments at age 35, Paine retired to a life of philanthropy (one hopes he wasn’t a robber baron and engaged in philanthropy to assuage his guilty conscience). He founded building and loan associations and organizations to teach crafts to working class of Boston, even hosted an annual picnic at Stonehurst for members of these organizations.

His marriage in to Lydia Lyman was a match made in Boston Brahmin heaven. Mrs. Lydia Lyman Paine had summered nearby in what’s now known as The Lyman Estate. In 1866, the Paine’s built a “modest” Second Empire Mansard style summer house on land given them by Lyman’s father. From April to November, they relocated there from their city dwelling on Joy Street, Beacon Hill, Boston. In 1880 her father, a wealthy shipping magnate, died and left Lydia his fortune and land on the hill overlooking the couple’s summer abode.

Thanks to the ten live-in servants who attended to household operations, the Paines had enough expendable energy to produce seven children, and by 1883 their summer home to seemed the size of Old Mother Hubbard’s shoe.

Thus entered two giants from the fields of landscape and architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and H.H. Richardson (1838-1886). By a curious coincidence, Paine had been head of the building commission which awarded Richardson the commission to build the famous Trinity Church in Boston (1872-1877). Richardson was no phony, though. His Trinity Church in Boston remains one of the ten most architecturally significant buildings in the United States. His plan for Stonehurst demonstrated his command for designing open space interiors and structural ingenuity and mark him as a precursor to Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Adventurer forgives you if you’re not aware of the brain behind the design of Central Park and the U. S. Capitol grounds. But the “Emerald Necklace”, the series of parks and playgrounds surrounding Boston? Who but Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, another son of Boston.

Richardson and Olmsted, who lived ten minutes from each other in Brookline, MA, were a Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig tandem at the peak of their powers. They relocated the original Paine house 1000 yards to a higher elevation that commanded a sweeping view of the surroundings, and their imaginations seemed to ascend with it.

The architect and landscaper spoke in the same tongue and their the materials surrounding the mansion site became their vernacular. Richardson used its uncut glacial boulders to construct the tower where the first mansard house and the larger addition converged. Predating Queen Ann styles which would soon emerge, he used saw tooth and fish scale wooden shingling to set off its Romanesque arches, which were one of his signature designs.

The interior, although on a grand scale, is made inviting by the honey tones of the wood paneling and hand wrought woodwork throughout. Balustrades, columns, ceiling beams are all meticulously crafted (showing the influence William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement in England).

The mansion’s siting offered maximum light penetration through wide windows during the day. During a walk through the interior, the Adventurer was slack jawed at the subtle rose tones of the Sienna marble the couple chose for the hearths as they toured Italy to furnish their little love nest, and the wall and ceiling palette, influenced by Japanese art, deep soothing terra cotta, clear cobalt blues. The grand stair case in the central foyer is smashingly elegant, a blossoming of hand turned wood ballisters leading in three stages to the second level, under the canopy of a thirty foot ceiling. Although the mansion was designed for central heating, the Adventurer easily deduced why the Paine's repaired to their home base in Boston. It would have taken the veins of one of Paine's larger coal mines to heat the place for one season.

Outside, Olmsted configured the curved terracing from the glacial boulders that were strewn about the property, and relocated the site’s plants and trees to set off the house. The house achieves an organic unity with its surroundings. In 1970, the Paine family turned the entire estate over to the city of Waltham, MA.

The Adventurer gives this museum’s and its surrounding grounds a thumbs up for those who’d like to see how two geniuses integrated their art and the environment to construct a Brahmin family’s dream home, a creation remains gorgeous to behold.

It must be noted with some perverse satisfaction, however, that upon his January visit to this national landmark, the structure exhibited some of the same problems with ice dams (called “water infiltration” when it occurs in a historic landmark) that bedevil pt at large’s own manse.

In fact, were it not for pt at large, the day’s only visitor, the water pool upon the finely waxed oak foyer floor may not have been detected till the following morning, during which time irreparable damage would have been inflicted upon it. As it happens, pt at large pointed out said infiltration to the docent, then orchestrated a search mission for a barrel to receive the incoming H2O, and sought access to the second floor to ascertain the source of the influx.

Due to his acuity, pt at large was excused from paying the entry fee and may some day be in line for a preservation award from the trustees of the operation. Being modest by nature, he will undoubtedly demur from the attendant publicity but may relent by accepting an offer to use Stonehurst for a bash for all his friends and admirers, including, dear reader, yourself. Stand by for details.