Nullius in Verba

Brazil (part um) SFO to Brasilia

WWSWAD (What would Southwest Airlines do?)

Wednesday March 4, 2008

I have grown used to how Southwest Airlines runs its operation. Conditioned like a gerbil to their needs. Needless to say, when I fly with someone else I compare the experience to SWA. I could not fly on SWA to Brazil. They don’t go there, yet. I opted for American Airlines.

We flew out of San Francisco International. The flight’s departure time was 12:30 PM. Mary and I got up at oh-dark-thirty and headed for Emeryville where we picked up my son, Lee. He drove us to a nearby BART station to take a train to San Francisco airport. BART is showing its age and when it’s in a tube passing another train, it’s louder than a Stone’s concert. Still, we got to the airport for less that bridge toll and gas. Plus, giving my son the car keys for a couple weeks is much cheaper than airport parking.

I found the experience in the terminal to be satisfactory. We picked up the received boarding passes for all the legs in the journey, including the leg from Rio to Brasilia on domestic TAM Airlines. The woman at the American Airline ticket counter claimed that our luggage was checked all the way through too. (Not quite.)

We knew our seats before boarding, that’s kind of nice…until you discover that you are going to be next to a squalling baby for the next four hours, forty-seven minutes, twenty-seven seconds of this leg. Trapped. Thoughts of shoving a pencil through my eardrums ricocheted in my head like marbles on a tile floor.

On Southwest Airlines I could have changed my seat because it’s “sit where there is a seat.”

On the domestic flight, American Airlines sells their snacks. Half a sawbuck for a sandwich, or three bucks for a can of Pringle-style chips, cookies, and a candy bar. We split a sandwich. It tasted good. I cannot remember any more than that.

Our flight from Miami to Rio de Janeiro got out of the gate about forty minutes late. I’m no world traveler, but the few times I’ve flown out of country my flight has been delayed (once by twelve hours). In the air, they never made up the time. The good part is that due to a duplicate seat assignment, we were upgraded to business class. That came in handy at the end of the flight when we had to dash to customs, through the international terminal to baggage to domestic to security to the boarding already TAM flight.

Quarta-Feira 6 Março 2008

We flew TAM Airlines (who, by the way, have arguably the most beautiful aeromoças—stewardesses—in the world) arrived in Brasilia around 1:30 PM local time or about 8:30 in the morning by our Circadian clocks. Sergio and Luciana were there to pick us up. Sergio was a Brazilian exchange student who lived with Colleen, me, and the boys in the mid ‘90s. He is now 29 and to be married on Sabado (Saturday). Luciana is gorgeous as, it seems, most Brazilian women are. While at the airport we tried to convert American Express traveler’s checks into Brazilian Reals (Reais in Portuguese) with no luck.

Brasilia-A Bit of History

Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer designed Brasilia in the mid-1950’s and much of it was constructed in three years (1959-1961). And, like Washington, DC, it looks good on the map (the outline is of an airplane and the cidade is laid out in a grid pattern norte-sul-este-oeste). On the ground the effect is not unlike Disneyland’s Autopia with overpasses and underpasses criss-crossing everywhere. All the road signs are in Portuguese. Pare (stop) signs and lane markings are merely suggestions. Many roads didn’t even bother with lane lines. Brazilians straddle lanes to create new ones when the need strikes them. Despite the apparent anarchy, (or freedom if you’re of a Libertarian bent) we saw only one accident.

We went to the suburb of Agua Claras (clean water) where Sergio and his brother Rodrigo live and went to Rodrigo’s (pronounced Hoe-drig-go) apartamento and met Sergio’s mother, two aunts, and cousin stocking the pantry for us. They assigned us Rodrigo’s room and told us to make ourselves at home.

So I did.

I tested the multi-outlet surge protector we brought with us and in a flash of light and smoke, blew out the apartment’s electrical panel. In this part of Brazil, 220 is used. Later, I discovered Rodrigo’s line conditioner that reduces 220 to 110 for all our electrical toys: camera, laptop, AlphaSmart Dana, Palm Pilots, etc. Phew.

After a much needed nap, we went to dinner at a local churrascaria called Buffalo Bio’s. A churrascaria is a meat eater’s paradise. They had the standard salad, seafood, casserole buffet. They had a sushi bar. But the churrascaria’s allure is in the skewers of meat the staff bring around until you say “nao mais.” (there should be a “~” over the a in nao but I can’t seem to produce one). In addition to the mignon, lamb, sausage, pork, chicken, etc., one skewer has chicken curaçaos—yikes!

Two Second Drill

This last Sunday, one statement on a segment of CBS Sunday Morning titled, The Name Game caught me up short. Mostly Charles Osgood looked “at famous book titles, including the stories behind “Catch-22” with legendary editor Robert Gottlieb and “Winnie The Pooh” with British columnist Gary Dexter.” He talked about the naming of famous books like Catch-22 (originally titled Catch-18), The Postman Always Rings Twice (originally titled Barbeque), and 1984 (originally titled The Last Man in Europe).

But what made me sit up was that they talked about the effect the title has on a potential reader. A book’s title tries to encapsulate what’s in the book. In the piece Charles Osgood says, “A title is no small matter, because readers really do judge a book by its cover. … shoppers give a book just two seconds to make an impression before moving on.”

Two seconds. Those first words and the book’s blurb had better be great.

It reminds of the the Hemingway challenge to write a story in six words. Hemingway wrote, “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” I also like, Horny professor. Failing coed. No tenure. –“A Short History of Academia,” by Sue Grafton

The Chance of a Lifetime

It was the chance of a lifetime: going into the backcountry to search for section corners and quarter-section corners set by surveyors one-hundred and one years before. The fly-in-the-ointment was that the surveyors probably had done their work while perched on a barstool in 1882. Someone knew how to nurse a beer.

In cadastral surveying the place to start is to assume that the survey was done and either the evidence has been lost, obliterated, or simply not found. You begin searching for clues in the field notes that the surveyor took. These notes state the where they ascended, descended, crossed creeks and such along the way to setting a corner. The early surveyors carried a metal tape called a “Gunter’s Chain” to measure distance. (There are 80 chains in a mile and 640 acres in a section.) For instance, the notes might say, “at 25 chains 24 links, crossed a small creek.” You can put the items on a piece of Mylar and overlay them on a topographic map to see if maybe the notes match up in any way to the actual terrain.

Mountain Home State Forest is located in Tulare County, twenty-two air miles northeast of Porterville, CA. It is situated in the middle north fork and north fork drainages of the Tule River. Elevations from 4800 to 7600 feet above sea level. And for over forty years of state ownership, about half of the boundaries were not known. These were primarily in the township of 19S 31E.

A survey crew in 1919

So, based on these field notes and any hare-brained cockamamie idea or hunch, we went out and searched for the rock mounds and sticks and bearing trees (a tree that bears witness to a monument by having a rectangular section of bark removed and the distance and bearing is scribed onto the exposed wood). We did find one: an interior corner that had been missing for one hundred years. When our licensed surveyor (under who’s license we did all our work) went to the spot, the post crumbled in his hand as he dug it out.

To be continued…

Sections, Townships, and Range

A long time ago (call it 1983) in a place far, far, away (call it Mountain Home State Forest), a small band of courageous neophyte surveyors began a project that many in the California Department of Forestry hierarchy felt to be impossible. We started work on finding, and then marking, the precise boundaries of Mountain Home State Forest.

Not impossible to survey, just hard work

History of Mt. Home
California bought Mountain Home from the Michigan Trust Company on January 6, 1946 for $550,000. The deed delineated all the boundaries based on the section corners and quarter-corners of such-and-such section of townships 19 or 20 south and ranges 30 or 31 east of the Mount Diablo Base Meridian (normally abbreviated MDBM). On paper the acreage of the holding totaled around 4615.77 acres and was, mostly fiction. Mostly fiction because the total area based its value on townships of 36 one-mile square sections. Many of which had never been surveyed.

The US Public Land Survey System
Pretty much all the arable land (remember that term “arable”) that isn’t contained within the original thirteen colonies is supposed to have been placed into a grid known as the Public Land Survey System. Its basic units of area are the township and section.

Within a 6-mile by 6-mile township, the upper right section is Section 1 the section west of number is Section 2. The numbering moves left to all the way Section 6, the section south of Section 6 is section 7 and the number and progresses in a serpentine manner all the way to Section 36. There should be no Section 37.

In the 1880s, surveyors contracted with the General Land Office of the federal government on a per-mile of surveyed line basis to survey the land now known as Mountain Home. In the San Joaquin Valley, surveying went quickly. The land was flat and had few obstacles to get in the way. But the forested mountains were another challenge altogether. Hmm, a federal contract, thousands of miles away from Washington DC, based on the number of miles surveyed in mountainous terrain with trees. What could possibly go wrong?

More tomorrow.

My Old Day Job

At Mountain Home State Forest - circa 1973

I worked as the assistant forest manager at Mountain Home State Forest from 1979-1986. The old joke asks, “Where do forest rangers go to ‘get away from it all?'” As if working in the forest was not, well, work. I remember days when I’d been stung by wasps, hiked cross-country through thorny buckbrush in the beating sun, emptied overflowing trash cans, cleaned filthy outhouse toilets, listened to campers complaining about the yahoos nearby playing their music too loud, etc. Then, someone with a cold beer in his hand would come up to me as I tried to keep the 1 mil plastic garbage bag–filled with fermenting fish guts that leaked through onto my pants–from breaking and say “damn, I wish I had your job.”

Tomorrow, I’ll write about the meaning of Section 37 and the coolest job I ever had.

Frank Morgan

In November, I asked Michael Connelly, on his Ask Michael Connelly portion of his message board, about a piece of music at the beginning of the video Blue Neon Night (Frank Morgan can be heard playing “Lullaby” at the end of the linked YouTube snippet). He answered in early February that if it had piano it would be George Cables, if it had saxophone it would be the late Frank Morgan. I hadn’t known that the jazz great had died.

Alto saxophonist Frank Morgan passed away in December. I wrote about him recently in the The Best Music You’ve Never Heard.

“Silence is our best friend. It gives what you play after it more meaning.”- Frank Morgan.

Guardian Obituary
Jazz Police’s Obituary

Writing's Aphorisms

Over the past couple weeks I have passed along a list that my instructors mentioned in class. It is a list of some mistakes that beginning storytellers (like me) make.

Top Ten Mistakes Newbie Writers Make
10. Flat writing with weak verbs
9. Setting and description delivered in large chunks
8. Telling instead of showing
7. Talking heads instead of narration
6. A book that begins with a flashback or dream
5. Too far removed from the inciting incident
4. The characters lack yearning the “hole in the soul”
3. Limited conflict or attention
2. Head hopping
1. No scene structure and action is episodic

Other Rules and Strictures

There are other “rules,” such as James N Frey’s ten rules and Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing, which includes: “never open a book with weather,” “never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said’,” and “keep your exclamation points under control.” I can’t show you all of them because, Elmore Leonard now has written a book around his aphorisms. It’s $15 and I probably will pick up a copy.

I admit that I like rules and, by nature, I’m not a rule breaker. I have some friends, who I have met through youwriteon.com, and they love to point out writers when they don’t follow the rules. “Look,” they say, “so and so started with the story with…” One such example of rule ignoring is JK Rowling and her Harry Potter books, he asseverated knowledgeably! One of them steered me toward an entry on Emma Darwin‘s This Itch of Writing blog – “Demandingly ‘wrong’-headed,” that started with the “rules” and ended with being taught how to write.

Hubris

One dismisses standards at one’s peril. Check out this one example on JA Konrath’s blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing” titled “Bad Stories.”

Writing’s Aphorisms

Over the past couple weeks I have passed along a list that my instructors mentioned in class. It is a list of some mistakes that beginning storytellers (like me) make.

Other Rules and Strictures

Hubris

One dismisses standards at one’s peril. Check out this one example on JA Konrath’s blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing” titled “Bad Stories.”

John Stewart – Never Goin' Back

America has lost its voice and a piece of its soul.

With apologies to Don Maclean, the music died at 7:30 AM on January 19, 2008.

John Stewart (September 5, 1939 – January 19, 2008) was an American songwriter and singer, best known for being a member of the Kingston Trio (1961–1967). He was much more than that.

He wrote about America from the viewpoint of the “wingless angels,” those who drove the trucks and did the jobs that kept the country alive.

I will say that I did not know John Stewart except through his songs and brief encounters. In 1971 (my oh my how the time does fly), I (and others) talked with him when he came to Santa Monica College to talk about the songwriting experience. Still, I went to some of his concerts and shook his hand every chance I got. I’m not a fully-fledged “Bloodliner” (named after his California Bloodlines album), but I have about half of his albums and named my golden retriever “Stewart” as a tribute.

According to Tom DeLisle on Chillywinds.com, “He recorded over 45 solo albums following his seven years in the Kingston Trio, 1961-67” and in a career that spanned over fifty years he “wrote more than 600 songs.”

John told the story of how The Monkees wanted to record a song he wrote in 1968 before leaving the Kingston Trio. The Monkees wanted to record Daydream Believer. But, the song had a problem—a word. See if you can find it.

You once thought of me
As a white knight on his steed
But now you know how funky I can be
And our good times start and end
Without dollar one to spend
But how much, baby, do we really need

The Monkees wanted to substitute “happy” for “funky.” John didn’t know if he wanted to do that; he’d written “funky” in the lyrics after all. As we know, he finally allowed “happy” to be used instead. Daydream Believer is still being played today and in his words after getting his first royalty check, “happy’s working real good.”

For more about John Stewart:
Appleseed Recordings
John Stewart’s Lyrics Database at CaliforniaBloodlines.com
Chilly Winds
Clack’s Cellar

Associated Press Obituary
Chicago Tribune Obituary
CNN’s Obituary

Or better still, play one of his songs. That’s what I’m doing. Every single one I have. Here’s John’s hit, Gold.

Footnote (08/10/08):

After posting this in January I went looking for more music for my library. Years ago I had listened to a live recording of the Kingston Trio featuring John. The double album was called Once Upon a Time. I finally found it at the Kingston Trio Store. You can order it and other Trio songs here.

John Stewart – Never Goin’ Back