20th Century Woman

When I was 12 years old I spent the summer with my grandmother, Julia (called Julie by her family including all her grandchildren), in Maine.  My grandmother had lived for years in Italy but left because of WW II.  She and I were staying at the house of her friend, Elizabeth Holt.  Elizabeth wrote books on art history, and my grandmother made herself useful by translating Italian articles and documents.

By the time she was a widow, Julie had gone through most of her capital – some was lost in the depression.  She was a good-looking, witty and charming woman (sometimes known in her family as the Duchess) and she had many friends who found it agreeable to have her stay for extended periods.  She found it convenient and profitable to live on friends when possible.

I am not sure I was a desirable adjunct in Elizabeth’s household, but they found uses for me.  I was supposed to baby sit Elizabeth’s two pale, skinny kids, and every few days I rowed the garbage out to a channel in the bay where it could be dumped overboard.

I don’t remember actually doing much babysitting, but I really enjoyed the second chore.  As soon as I pushed off in the row boat swarms of sea gulls would glide over and follow me out to the channel.  When I threw the garbage over the side they screamed with excitement, fighting and diving for the delicious treasures, like orange peels and fish heads.

It was a wonderful summer.  There was a boy who took me sailing, and the last evening of the summer we walked together on the beach and we held hands.  I can’t remember his name.

The house was a summer place, simply furnished and minimally equipped.  My grandmother had a few gramophone records which she sometimes let me play, and I grew to love the music from the Cosi Fan Tutte, an opera by Mozart.  There wasn’t much to read, but I found an old textbook of geology.  For some reason it fascinated me, and I learned about igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks.  Maine had plenty of rocks for me to examine.

When I went to college I remembered my early love for rocks.  At Northwestern, where I began, I took a class in geology.  It was deadly boring.  We spent hours measuring things on relief maps.  I got mono and dropped all my classes.

As a biology major I made another stab at geology and signed up for a class in paleontology.  That was another interest killer.  The professor was writing a paper, so he made use of students for the tedious parts.  The paper was about small changes in fossil clam shells over time.  Students sorted and classified fossil clam shells.  That was the entire content of the class.  I dropped it.

All this was before the discovery (really rediscovery) of plate tectonics and continental drift.  That set the world of geology upside down. There was seething controversy: what had been dry and plodding became dynamic and fast changing.  People got furious with each other and called each other names.  Some actually came to blows.  But by that time I had moved on.  Babies and biology had taken over my life.

Half a century later I am reading (bedtime reading aloud to Jerry) a book by John McPhee: Annals of the Former World.  The book is over 600 pages and we are almost to the end.  It is about the history of the world, how it formed, how it changed, how the oceans and land masses came to be and how they change over time.  How life came to be on earth, how the physical world affects life, how life changes the physical world and how they are actually parts of a single whole. It’s about eruptions and earthquakes and unimaginable catastrophes and periods of time so vast that a human life is no more than the blink of an eye.  It’s about rocks: how they form, what they are made of and forces that bend them, fold them, destroy them and recreate them.  Now I am really hooked on geology.  I have to know more.

Geology has an enormous special vocabulary, much of it new to me.  Words like ophiolite, gabbro, diabase, peridotite, syncline, unconformity, zone of subduction, pillow lava and many many more.   I look them up on the Wikipedia.  But I have to know more.

I have bought 2 courses from The Teaching Company, both video college courses on geology.  Jerry and I watch one or two lectures every night.

The first course, which we are about half way through, is taught by John Renton of West Virginia University.  I learned from the internet that Bill Gates likes this course and says it is “phenomenal.”

Dr. Renton is a plump, down to earth fellow.  He presents his material in simple folksy language with concrete examples and explanations.  I am slightly distracted by his luxuriant and shiny red toupee, and his Dali moustache (I found out from Wikipedia that those twirly moustaches are called that).  But I am enjoying the course, and firmly planting in my head all sorts of new (to me) knowledge.  Some of these things I sort of knew, but now they have a structure.

I know that the earth began from a cloud of cosmic debris about 4 ½ billion years ago, and that life began about a billion years later.  In another billion years plate tectonics began, and the continents and oceans formed and began their cyclic breaking apart and coalescing a billion years after that.  These things are happening now, and the Atlantic Ocean is expanding at about the same rate as our finger nails grow.

I know something about the inside of the earth, something about volcanoes, and I know that Yellowstone Park is going to explode any time now with such force that it may destroy civilization as we know it, and perhaps the human race.  There have been great mass extinctions in the past that have killed large numbers of species from just such catastrophes.

Sometimes I ask myself what good it is to learn a lot of new stuff at my age.  My head is already quite full of unused knowledge.  I think of the inside of my head as an endless collection of caverns connected by tunnels and crevasse.  Some of what I knew has fallen into the crevasses.  Some of it is in remote caves but still retrievable.  But I will never again have any practical use for it.

When I die it will all be wasted.  So why bother?  I guess because it gives me pleasure, and that is what is left in old age.  It is something that Jerry and I share and enjoy together.  As we drive to Alaska soon we will look at the mountains and rocks with new insight into their origin and dynamic, knowing that they are always changing.

On the way to Alaska

Tomorrow I fly home: from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere, from summer to winter.

I am leaving the cousin I love and a country I love.  I‘ll miss the birdsongs, the flowers, the exotic trees and ferns, the sunshine and the long white clouds.  Aoteoroa: the Maori name for their homeland.  Land of the long white cloud.

Jerry and I spent 4 days in Coromandel.  That’s a peninsula on the north east coast of the North Island.  We had a motel that was a bit more than 2 kilometers from town, so we did a lot of walking.  Even though it pelted rain most of the time we were there, we walked to town and back at least once every day.

We visited a gold mine run by a talkative geologist who told us a lot, very fast, about the geology of New Zealand.  He demonstrated his rock crusher for us and for a bus load of tourists (mostly Brits).  The rock crusher didn’t work and he talked a lot more, very fast.  Finally, one of the English gentlemen leaned over and said to me, “I wish he’d shut up and get on with it.”  The “demonstration” cost $10 for each person.

Jerry was interested in the gold mining, since he had mined gold in Alaska.   There was a major gold rush in the Coromandel just as the California gold rush was subsiding.  Jerry asked our talkative geologist where the tailings are, since the mines in this region are all underground.  Talkative geologist said they had all been dumped in the harbor, and he advocates dredging the harbor, since modern chemical methods of mining can extract a lot more gold than the old methods.  He is having a fierce battle with the Greens over this proposal.

When we came back to Jocelyn and Albert’s house in Pukekohe we took them out to dinner, and I finally and unexpectedly got a really good meal in a restaurant in New Zealand.  We went to a Chinese buffet.  There was a wide array of well cooked Chinese dishes and western dishes, including some fresh oysters on the half shell.

Today my last outing will be with Jocelyn to a luncheon with her Mah Jongg group.  Some of these ladies I have met on other visits when I watched them play Mah Jongg.

I am thinking about Christmas and all the rush and activity.  Christmas preparations here in New Zealand are well underway, and seem incongruous in this warm sunny land.  People sing all the carols and songs about winter and cold and snow and never seem to notice that they don’t fit.

I am bracing myself for winter.

I think of my head as having little squares inside.  One square is in the present, here in New Zealand, looking around at the sights: flowers, ferns, tree ferns, undulating green hills, beaches and bays.  The country is largely agricultural, with sheep, cattle, farmed deer, and sometimes more exotic animals like alpacas and fancy goats.  I have not seen ostriches on this trip, but my cousin David used to have an ostrich farm here and I once ate ostrich steak at a restaurant in Queenstown.  It was delicious. As I look out of the motel window where I now sit I can see a quiet bay.  The tide is out revealing long beds of farmed oysters.

There are still places, even on the North Island, where native bush grows and blankets the hills.  When the first Europeans came here in around 1830 they began to cut down the majestic forests of giant kauri trees.  Now almost all of the kauris are gone and the remaining ones are strictly protected.  The forests are full of tree ferns and ferns carpet the forest floor.  There is a move afoot to change the New Zealand flag from the Union Jack with the Southern Cross to a white fern on a black field.

New Zealand has no native mammals.  Of course, many have been introduced: rabbits, deer, rats and mice, and most significantly, Australian possums.  These don’t look at all like the possums of the US.  They have lovely soft fur and are sort of cute.  But they do terrible damage, eating the young trees and plants.  They also chew on electric wires and interrupt power.  There are efforts to control them all over the country, and every telephone poll has a metal band around it to keep possums from climbing.  That’s ironic, since they are protected in Australia.

Besides thinking about what I see as a tourist, I have been trying to understand a little of New Zealand politics.  This is not a simple matter.  For one thing, the way they choose their parliament is peculiar.  Each person has two votes, one for the candidate they want and another for the party they like.  These two things don’t have to match.  You can vote for a candidate of one party, and then turn around and vote for the opposition party.  Then the votes are apportioned in some kind of mysterious formula.  There are 7 political parties and 122 members of parliament.  The Maori Party is a powerful minority party.  A lot of formerly private land has been returned to Maori ownership

The conservative National Party is in power now.  It advocates things like a flat tax, aid to private schools, cuts in all other social spending, mining on government land, a balanced budget.  Some of these things are incompatible with reality – for instance, they can’t both balance the budget and lower taxes even if they eliminate social spending.  There is already a big deficit.  So they talk a lot, and most of the news on New Zealand TV is about sports and celebrities.  Tiger Woods’ marital difficulties have been extensively covered.

My mother was a New Zealander, and she grew up here, so one compartment in my head thinks about what it was like here when she was young.  Her sister Pat is still alive, and my cousin Jocelyn, her husband Albert, Jerry and I visited Pat.  We had dinner together with her and her son (my cousin), Michael and his wife, Maris.  The restaurant was expensive and the food was terrible.  Little black bugs bit me as I ate and days later I am still scratching.  A good meal in a restaurant in New Zealand is hard to come by.

The next night Pat visited with Joc and Albert and Jerry and me at our motel.  Most of the middle price motels in New Zealand have cooking facilities, and for Pat’s visit I cooked a good dinner of pork shoulder and roasted vegetables.  This is a very standard New Zealand meal.  We talked and laughed about the past.

I brought the book Annals of the Former World by John McPhee with us to read to Jerry at bedtime.  It is a very thick tome about geology.  A compartment of my head is in the realm of rocks and continental drift, plate tectonics, volcanoes (New Zealand has a lot of them)  and time periods so vast that there is no way to comprehend them.  Jerry and I walk, and as we walk we talk about how New Zealand formed, and what kinds of rocks and soil we are looking at.

After geology has had its magically soothing effect on Jerry and he begins to snore gently, I pick up the other book I am reading, and I am transported into nineteenth century England.  I brought Trollope’s Doctor Thorne with me.  I have read it before, but I have reached such an age that I have forgotten a lot of what I once read and so have the pleasure of reading it again.

Trollop invented a place, Barsetshire, and all its surroundings and inhabitants, and I think to him it became as real as the place he lived.  It is so to me as a reader.  I think there is a modern equivalent in the long lasting radio soap opera, The Archers, which most Brits follow.  The Archers is set in the fictional village, Ambridge.

Doctor Thorne is about Dr. Thorne’s niece, a young woman who was born out of wedlock. She is courted by the son of the local squire.  She is penniless.  The young squire’s mother is the daughter of an earl and regards “birth” and noble blood as the most important thing in life, second only to money.  She requires her son to “marry money”, but he persists in courting Mary, the penniless bastard.   When Mary turns out to be the heir to a huge fortune, she is instantly forgiven for being of low birth, and all ends happily.

Trollope is critical of the notions of noble birth, aristocracy, wealth, and the idea that to have to work for a living at a profession is “low”.  Yet all his characters believe that these ideas have legitimacy, at least to some extent.  If a man must earn a living, it is best to be a clergyman, hire a curate to do the work, and as much as possible live the life of the idle rich.

For a while I was so absorbed in reading this book that I found it a stretch to switch back to twenty-first century New Zealand.  I began to neglect my husband and family.

Yet another place my head traveled to was my own past.  About a month ago I mentioned in a post that I had written to the daughter of an old friend, long lost.  The daughter gave me her mother’s email and I wrote to her.  I was disappointed to have had no reply.  Last week, when I had an opportunity to check my email, I found another email from the daughter, Janna.  She said, “I am sitting with Helen now, and she is remembering you.  She wants to know where you are living now.”   Helen is six years older than I, so she must be 83.  Janna went on to say that her parents had been divorced years ago, and that her father had died in 1990 of Parkinson’s.

I remembered them as a wholly devoted couple.  Ed was a friend as well as Helen, and it took some thinking to absorb the fact of their divorce and his death, even though those things happened a long time ago.

Here I am, on the third of December 2009, in Coromandel, New Zealand.  My mind wanders from here to England in the Victorian era, to New Zealand at the beginning of the last century, to vast eons in the earth’s past, to Washington, D. C. in the middle of the twentieth century.

It’s astonishing what you can do with your head.