I grew up partly in Mobile, and have always loved Fairhope, which has GOT to be the friendliest name for a city in the world. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 7, 2006
A Hermit's Refuge Is Now a Writer's Muse
By WARREN ST. JOHN
FAIRHOPE, Ala.
EVER since its founding in 1894 by a group of 28 utopian dreamers from Iowa, this quaint waterside town on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay has been a refuge for what Southerners politely call "characters."
There was Craig Sheldon, a sculptor known for making fantastical creatures, like a wacky insect he called "head holding high hopper," and Winifred Duncan, a spinster who lived by the water with four bloodhounds and was regularly arrested for canoeing at night in the bay, naked.
Strangest of all, perhaps, was an Idaho man named Henry Stuart, who moved to Fairhope in the 1920's, after being told by his doctor — incorrectly, it turned out — that he had only a year to live.
Mr. Stuart, who wore a long white beard and became known locally as the Hermit of Montrose, after a neighborhood in Fairhope, built himself a small round hurricane-proof hut out of concrete and lived in it for 18 years, apparently certain he might die at any moment. Mr. Stuart eventually died at 88 in 1946, somewhere in Oregon.
Today, Mr. Stuart's hut in Fairhope has become an odd sort of tourist attraction, a kind of temple to eccentricity and individualism, thanks largely to another Fairhope eccentric, a goateed man often seen in a seersucker suit riding around town on a Harley-Davidson: the novelist Sonny Brewer.
Since the publication last year of Mr. Brewer's first novel, "The Poet of Tolstoy Park" (Ballantine), which is based on Mr. Stuart's life and the construction of his concrete hut, readers, along with various searchers, spiritualists and philosophical types, have been turning up at the hut to commune with Mr. Stuart. Two thousand people have signed a guest book Mr. Brewer left in the hut last year, and some have brought sleeping bags and spent the night inside.
"It's a special place," said Jimbo Meador, 64, a kayak designer who lives in nearby Point Clear and who meditates regularly in the hut. "The acoustics in there are pretty unusual. Like you say, 'Om,' and it really resonates."
Mr. Brewer, who is 57, is quick to cop to the charge of being an oddball, even by Fairhope standards. He has been a carpenter, a bookstore owner, a real estate agent, an editor and a rock musician, and he once sold vintage cars for a living, though he lost money at it.
Mr. Brewer has also been through a boat phase, an R.V. phase, a convertible phase, and several motorcycle phases. As for religions, he's tried a bunch of those, too: He was raised a Baptist, became a Methodist, a Presbyterian, a Quaker, and converted to Catholicism for a while. Mr. Brewer said he's an Episcopalian — for now.
"I sometimes have a feeling I'm from another planet," Mr. Brewer said in a soft southern Alabama drawl. "Even my own behavior looks alien and ridiculous to me."
Mr. Brewer discovered Henry Stuart's hut in the 1980's during one of those career changes. He had quit his job as a carpenter, and was on his way to a seminar on selling real estate when he pulled into a parking lot about a mile from town. Though originally built on 10 acres of wilderness, the hut in the intervening years had been encroached upon as Fairhope grew. Office buildings have been built to within six feet of the dwelling. It now sits just off the parking lot of a local Coldwell Banker office, which used the hut for years to store its "for sale" signs.
"I thought, 'What is this crazy little house doing in a parking lot?' " Mr. Brewer recalled. "It was like finding a very strange bird nest in the forest. You want to know, 'What kind of bird built this?' "
Inside the real estate office, Mr. Brewer came across a framed copy of a newspaper article about Mr. Stuart and his hut. Mr. Stuart, the article said, left behind two grown sons in Idaho when he came South to die. He admired Tolstoy, naming the acreage around the hut Tolstoy Park, and with his white beard even resembled him.
Mr. Stuart was described as quick to lend a dollar, and unconcerned about repayment. And though described as a hermit, he accepted visitors regularly; 1,200 people signed a guest book he kept in his hut, according to one article, including the lawyer Clarence Darrow.
Mr. Stuart, who was in his late 60's at the time, built his hut over the course of a year and 16 days in 1925 and 1926, and refused all help with the construction, the newspaper reported. Mr. Stuart's bed was a hammock that hung 10 feet off the ground; he could get in only by climbing a ladder. He kept a loom on the floor that he used to weave rugs, which he sold for a living.
"I was completely mesmerized," Mr. Brewer said.
He managed to find two other newspaper articles about Mr. Stuart, and six photographs. Mr. Stuart is barefoot in all of them, even one taken with a woman in a winter coat.
The more Mr. Brewer learned about the man, he said, the more obsessed he became.
"I identified with Henry; he did what he wanted to do, and so did I," Mr. Brewer said.
He decided to try to write about Henry Stuart. He considered a nonfiction account of Mr. Stuart's life, but settled on fiction, "because I lie," he said. He wrote a couple of short stories about Mr. Stuart, and the first 20 pages of a novel, but put it aside in favor of an autobiographical novel about his own life, which he sent to a literary agent in San Francisco.
By now, Mr. Brewer had quit real estate to open an independent bookstore called Over the Transom, in Fairhope. It was losing money — a lot of money. Mr. Brewer's only hope was that his novel would sell, but his agent was not optimistic and asked him if he had anything else. Mr. Brewer mentioned the Stuart novel, which begins with Mr. Stuart taking off his shoes after hearing the news that he will die. Based on the first 20 pages and a six-page outline, the agent sold the novel to Ballantine for $100,000.
Mr. Brewer said he got the news hours before an appointment with a bankruptcy lawyer.
"I broke down and cried," he said.
Mr. Brewer's next move was to persuade a local banker who owns the hut and the land around it to rent the building to him for $9 a month. He wrote a draft of "The Poet of Tolstoy Park" in four fevered months, and then immediately set about restoring the hut, ridding it of "snakes and lizards and fast-food wrappers," he said, replacing windows and removing a wooden floor. When he was finished, he moved in to revise his novel — while barefoot.
"Where did Henry Stuart stop and Sonny Brewer start?" Mr. Brewer asked. "That line was not clear. Some ladies from the real estate office told me they thought I had gone crazy."
A local architect who studied the hut noticed that the diameter of the floor, 14 feet, perfectly matched the distance between the floor and the top of the hut's domed roof. The hut was also dug 16 inches into the ground, which at that depth is a constant 57 degrees, making the floor cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
When he was finished with his book, Mr. Brewer left a copy of the manuscript in the hut, and then left the door unlocked. Shortly after publication last year, he began to hear from people who had visited.
One of those people was Wilson McDuff, 35, a schoolteacher from Fairhope who spent a night in the hut last year with his father and son. "It was kind of weird to me," Mr. McDuff said. "I started imagining what it would be like to be Henry Stuart, living in a little bitty house like that. I was inspired."
Mr. McDuff's father died later that year in a cycling accident. Unable to sleep the night he heard the news, Mr. McDuff said he was drawn back to the hut. "I didn't feel like I was alone anymore," he said. "It was comforting to think about Henry Stuart and to know that just because you're not here doesn't mean you're forgotten."
Somewhere along the way, Mr. Brewer said, people began leaving coins and dollar bills in an iron skillet in the hut, money that seems to be lent and borrowed according to Mr. Stuart's principles.
"Sometimes I come in here and it's $65, sometimes it's $5," Mr. Brewer said with a shrug. "The pile just comes and goes."
Mr. Brewer said that so far he has remained on good terms with the banker who owns the hut. But one thought keeps him up at night.
"My fear is that sooner or later the proverbial offer that can't be refused might come along," he added. "I could see a Blockbuster Video standing where Henry's house is."
That thought has inspired Mr. Brewer's latest crusade: getting the hut placed on the National Register of Historic Places, a move that could help preserve it in perpetuity. So far it hasn't gone so well. Though the State of Alabama designated the hut a landmark, the United States Department of the Interior said that his application needed more work.
"They said it was too weird," Mr. Brewer said.
###
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Eating New Orleans
Bon Appetit !
The New York Times
May 10, 2006
At Lunch With Paul McIlhenny
A Scion of Spice Cheers Each Morsel of Good News
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
New Orleans
LUNCHTIME on Friday on Bourbon Street. A raucous weekly ritual is under way beneath the antique rotary ceiling fans in the downstairs dining room at Galatoire's, the beloved watering hole of generations of New Orleans movers and shakers.
The dinner-jacketed waiters, some almost as old as the restaurant itself, which was founded in 1905, scuttle across the black-and-white tile floor bearing thick crockery plates of shrimp rémoulade, crab meat maison and snapper amandine.
From time to time they stop to trade gossip about politics (and, these days, about Hurricane Katrina) with the regulars, who will not be returning to work on this or any other Friday afternoon. They sing "Happy Birthday," always off-key, to celebratory groups (one of which, on this day, comprises women wearing blinking green plastic stars on cords around their necks and men wearing silly beanies with propellers mounted on top).
All the while the alcohol flows: Pernod-haunted Sazerac cocktails; mostly white wine, most of that Burgundy; and cups of café brûlot spiked with brandy and Curaçao.
At one of the better tables (there are no really bad ones) sits Paul McIlhenny, the beefy, gregarious, 62-year-old president of the McIlhenny Company, which makes Tabasco sauce, Louisiana's most famous food product. This year he also reigns as Rex, King of Carnival, the last in a series of monarchs who have presided over Mardi Gras since 1872. Although he carries no scepter, you cannot miss his royal status; his wife, Judy, is wearing a big gold pin that spells out "R-E-X," with a crown on top and three tiny gold peppers and a diamond half-hidden in its upper reaches.
With them — lucky us! — are me and my wife, Betsey. If anybody is qualified to talk about New Orleans, its food and its restaurants, to say nothing of Katrina (and the storm that followed, Rita), it is Paul McIlhenny. We were there to soak up some of his wisdom. And his wit.
No other place has a more devoted tub-thumper than Mr. McIlhenny, and he was eager to emphasize the good news, eight months after Katrina struck: the vast majority of restaurants serving again, and excellent new ones, like Cochon and the Longbranch, opening so soon after the disaster, miraculously enough; local shrimpers and other fishermen again delivering prime goods; his daughter and her friends pitching in to clear debris from the streets.
"It takes stamina and courage to face devastation like this every day and keep going, and we've seen a lot of that here," he said. "We're still a little bit bleary-eyed, but human resourcefulness is remarkable. We're moving ahead at a nice pace."
Some pommes soufflés with béarnaise sauce put us in a festive mood.
John Fontenot, Mr. McIlhenny's regular waiter, a droll, mustachioed Cajun from Ville Platte, La., near Opelousas, dropped off an order of oysters en brochette, Mr. McIlhenny's favorite, and some plump, deep-fried soft-shell crabs that might have leapt from the Gulf of Mexico into the hot fat and then onto the plate. The two of them began exchanging the latest jokes featuring Boudreaux and Thibodeaux, two amiable but dim-witted Cajuns — a vein of humor they have been mining for decades.
A trencherman of the first order, and (like me) a sloppy eater, Mr. McIlhenny spilled one delicious morsel after another down his front. He sounded happy as a clam, or maybe an oyster, when he told me, "If you can wear the same shirt at lunch and dinner, you're a better man than I."
Everything seemed as before, but of course it isn't. Only the unquenchable spirit of the people involved is unchanged. David Gooch, one of the owners of Galatoire's, confided that he had been unable to find a new pastry chef to replace one who left the city (no great loss, if truth be told; desserts are the restaurant's biggest weakness).
Mr. Fontenot told us that he was living in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer because the three houses he owns in Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish, took on 10 feet of water and remained uninhabitable.
"We're the luckiest people in the world," said the ever-chipper waiter, nudging Mr. McIlhenny. "We've both got good jobs, and plenty of good food to eat."
Maybe so, but there are disturbing realities that Mr. McIlhenny, at least, is ready to acknowledge. Some major restaurants remain shut, including Commander's Palace, the crown jewel of the Brennan family's empire; Emeril's Delmonico, one of Emeril Lagasse's three New Orleans operations; Gautreau's, the cradle of several of the city's best young chefs; and Mosca's, the venerable roadhouse on Highway 90, with its garlicky baked oysters. (Happily for everyone, Mary Jo Mosca said the family hopes to reopen by next week, after completely rebuilding the kitchen. She added: "We are elated. I never thought we'd see the day.")
More modest establishments have suffered as well. Jacques-Imo's erstwhile fried-chicken wizard, Austin Leslie, died in Katrina's aftermath. In the hard-hit Tremé neighborhood, Dooky Chase's and Willie Mae's Scotch House, perhaps the city's leading African-American-owned cafes, guardians of the cherished Creole soul food tradition, have been unable to reopen. And out near the end of the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line (also inoperative), the Tara-like Camellia Grill, where generations of excited debutantes ate hamburgers when the last notes of the last quadrille had died away, might have cooked its last patty.
"Some of these guys will be back," Mr. McIlhenny said after a slow, thoughtful sip of Meursault. "Some won't. And meantime, a lot of places, including Antoine's, are just limping along with shorter menus, limited seating or curtailed staffs. I think it may well take us 25 years before our economy gets back to where it used to be."
The labor shortage is so severe, he added, that the Loews hotel here cannot find room cleaners, even at $15 an hour with benefits. "Now hiring" signs hang in windows everywhere. Many restaurant employees once lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, where powerful floods reduced frame houses to kindling and scattered the workers to the winds. With no place to live, with health care scarce and with schools problematic, many have chosen to stay away.
Tourists are New Orleans's best hope, and they are gradually filtering back. Though scaled down, both Mardi Gras, for which Mr. McIlhenny ordered church bells sounded to mark the hour the hurricane struck, and the more recent Jazz and Heritage Festival drew big crowds.
They might have been bigger if the city could have handled them. At the moment, only half of the 38,000 hotel rooms in the metropolitan area are open, with the Hyatt and other convention standbys shuttered. Airline seats are in short supply as well. Only 99 flights a day currently serve echoing Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, as against 166 a day before Katrina, then Rita, mauled the area.
Mr. McIlhenny and Tabasco suffered less than most. The factory of his friend and competitor Al Baumer Jr., who makes Crystal Hot Sauce, was all but destroyed in the storms, he said. The McIlhenny Company, headquartered in Avery Island, in the heart of Cajun country, emerged with its buildings intact; it sits atop a salt dome, about 160 feet above sea level. Katrina flooded out eight employees from the New Orleans sales office and Rita displaced 35 from the general offices in Avery Island.
"Nobody escaped completely unscathed," Mr. McIlhenny said.
Still, New Orleans survives, and these days it serves its oysters Rockefeller and its bananas Foster, its beignets and its gumbo, with smiling, heartfelt thanks for your visit.
Its best chefs, like Ken Smith of Upperline and John Besh of August, have regained their creative stride. Mr. Besh, who won a regional James Beard award this week, is regaling his customers with fresh delights like a salad of heirloom beets, crab meat and quail eggs; ravishing deep-fried soft-shell shrimp; and several preparations of the plump, succulent strawberries from the town of Ponchatoula, La.
In this lush if tempest-tossed part of the world, so blessed in some ways, so cursed in others, the berries hit their sweet, scarlet peak in April.
###
The New York Times
May 10, 2006
At Lunch With Paul McIlhenny
A Scion of Spice Cheers Each Morsel of Good News
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
New Orleans
LUNCHTIME on Friday on Bourbon Street. A raucous weekly ritual is under way beneath the antique rotary ceiling fans in the downstairs dining room at Galatoire's, the beloved watering hole of generations of New Orleans movers and shakers.
The dinner-jacketed waiters, some almost as old as the restaurant itself, which was founded in 1905, scuttle across the black-and-white tile floor bearing thick crockery plates of shrimp rémoulade, crab meat maison and snapper amandine.
From time to time they stop to trade gossip about politics (and, these days, about Hurricane Katrina) with the regulars, who will not be returning to work on this or any other Friday afternoon. They sing "Happy Birthday," always off-key, to celebratory groups (one of which, on this day, comprises women wearing blinking green plastic stars on cords around their necks and men wearing silly beanies with propellers mounted on top).
All the while the alcohol flows: Pernod-haunted Sazerac cocktails; mostly white wine, most of that Burgundy; and cups of café brûlot spiked with brandy and Curaçao.
At one of the better tables (there are no really bad ones) sits Paul McIlhenny, the beefy, gregarious, 62-year-old president of the McIlhenny Company, which makes Tabasco sauce, Louisiana's most famous food product. This year he also reigns as Rex, King of Carnival, the last in a series of monarchs who have presided over Mardi Gras since 1872. Although he carries no scepter, you cannot miss his royal status; his wife, Judy, is wearing a big gold pin that spells out "R-E-X," with a crown on top and three tiny gold peppers and a diamond half-hidden in its upper reaches.
With them — lucky us! — are me and my wife, Betsey. If anybody is qualified to talk about New Orleans, its food and its restaurants, to say nothing of Katrina (and the storm that followed, Rita), it is Paul McIlhenny. We were there to soak up some of his wisdom. And his wit.
No other place has a more devoted tub-thumper than Mr. McIlhenny, and he was eager to emphasize the good news, eight months after Katrina struck: the vast majority of restaurants serving again, and excellent new ones, like Cochon and the Longbranch, opening so soon after the disaster, miraculously enough; local shrimpers and other fishermen again delivering prime goods; his daughter and her friends pitching in to clear debris from the streets.
"It takes stamina and courage to face devastation like this every day and keep going, and we've seen a lot of that here," he said. "We're still a little bit bleary-eyed, but human resourcefulness is remarkable. We're moving ahead at a nice pace."
Some pommes soufflés with béarnaise sauce put us in a festive mood.
John Fontenot, Mr. McIlhenny's regular waiter, a droll, mustachioed Cajun from Ville Platte, La., near Opelousas, dropped off an order of oysters en brochette, Mr. McIlhenny's favorite, and some plump, deep-fried soft-shell crabs that might have leapt from the Gulf of Mexico into the hot fat and then onto the plate. The two of them began exchanging the latest jokes featuring Boudreaux and Thibodeaux, two amiable but dim-witted Cajuns — a vein of humor they have been mining for decades.
A trencherman of the first order, and (like me) a sloppy eater, Mr. McIlhenny spilled one delicious morsel after another down his front. He sounded happy as a clam, or maybe an oyster, when he told me, "If you can wear the same shirt at lunch and dinner, you're a better man than I."
Everything seemed as before, but of course it isn't. Only the unquenchable spirit of the people involved is unchanged. David Gooch, one of the owners of Galatoire's, confided that he had been unable to find a new pastry chef to replace one who left the city (no great loss, if truth be told; desserts are the restaurant's biggest weakness).
Mr. Fontenot told us that he was living in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer because the three houses he owns in Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish, took on 10 feet of water and remained uninhabitable.
"We're the luckiest people in the world," said the ever-chipper waiter, nudging Mr. McIlhenny. "We've both got good jobs, and plenty of good food to eat."
Maybe so, but there are disturbing realities that Mr. McIlhenny, at least, is ready to acknowledge. Some major restaurants remain shut, including Commander's Palace, the crown jewel of the Brennan family's empire; Emeril's Delmonico, one of Emeril Lagasse's three New Orleans operations; Gautreau's, the cradle of several of the city's best young chefs; and Mosca's, the venerable roadhouse on Highway 90, with its garlicky baked oysters. (Happily for everyone, Mary Jo Mosca said the family hopes to reopen by next week, after completely rebuilding the kitchen. She added: "We are elated. I never thought we'd see the day.")
More modest establishments have suffered as well. Jacques-Imo's erstwhile fried-chicken wizard, Austin Leslie, died in Katrina's aftermath. In the hard-hit Tremé neighborhood, Dooky Chase's and Willie Mae's Scotch House, perhaps the city's leading African-American-owned cafes, guardians of the cherished Creole soul food tradition, have been unable to reopen. And out near the end of the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line (also inoperative), the Tara-like Camellia Grill, where generations of excited debutantes ate hamburgers when the last notes of the last quadrille had died away, might have cooked its last patty.
"Some of these guys will be back," Mr. McIlhenny said after a slow, thoughtful sip of Meursault. "Some won't. And meantime, a lot of places, including Antoine's, are just limping along with shorter menus, limited seating or curtailed staffs. I think it may well take us 25 years before our economy gets back to where it used to be."
The labor shortage is so severe, he added, that the Loews hotel here cannot find room cleaners, even at $15 an hour with benefits. "Now hiring" signs hang in windows everywhere. Many restaurant employees once lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, where powerful floods reduced frame houses to kindling and scattered the workers to the winds. With no place to live, with health care scarce and with schools problematic, many have chosen to stay away.
Tourists are New Orleans's best hope, and they are gradually filtering back. Though scaled down, both Mardi Gras, for which Mr. McIlhenny ordered church bells sounded to mark the hour the hurricane struck, and the more recent Jazz and Heritage Festival drew big crowds.
They might have been bigger if the city could have handled them. At the moment, only half of the 38,000 hotel rooms in the metropolitan area are open, with the Hyatt and other convention standbys shuttered. Airline seats are in short supply as well. Only 99 flights a day currently serve echoing Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, as against 166 a day before Katrina, then Rita, mauled the area.
Mr. McIlhenny and Tabasco suffered less than most. The factory of his friend and competitor Al Baumer Jr., who makes Crystal Hot Sauce, was all but destroyed in the storms, he said. The McIlhenny Company, headquartered in Avery Island, in the heart of Cajun country, emerged with its buildings intact; it sits atop a salt dome, about 160 feet above sea level. Katrina flooded out eight employees from the New Orleans sales office and Rita displaced 35 from the general offices in Avery Island.
"Nobody escaped completely unscathed," Mr. McIlhenny said.
Still, New Orleans survives, and these days it serves its oysters Rockefeller and its bananas Foster, its beignets and its gumbo, with smiling, heartfelt thanks for your visit.
Its best chefs, like Ken Smith of Upperline and John Besh of August, have regained their creative stride. Mr. Besh, who won a regional James Beard award this week, is regaling his customers with fresh delights like a salad of heirloom beets, crab meat and quail eggs; ravishing deep-fried soft-shell shrimp; and several preparations of the plump, succulent strawberries from the town of Ponchatoula, La.
In this lush if tempest-tossed part of the world, so blessed in some ways, so cursed in others, the berries hit their sweet, scarlet peak in April.
###
Monday, May 08, 2006
Buy-nary systems
Some you have plenty money and some of us don't. This article explores what happens when folks from the former group try to mix in with folks from the latter. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 7, 2006
Money Changes Everything
By JENNIE YABROFF
GRETA GILBERTSON was caught off guard recently when her 9-year-old daughter, who attends a private school on the Upper West Side, requested a cellphone.
"I sort of snapped at her," recalled Ms. Gilbertson, an assistant professor at Fordham University in the Bronx. "I said, 'Don't think that you're one of the rich kids, because you're not.' " Though her daughter rarely expresses envy of her more affluent friends, Ms. Gilbertson said, it was an "unedited moment" revealing her anxiety over being in a world where other parents have more money than she does.
Carol Paik, a former lawyer who is married to a partner at a prominent New York law firm, found herself on the other side of that money equation. When she returned to school in 2002 to get her M.F.A. in creative writing at Columbia, her diamond engagement ring attracted particular attention from her new group of friends. "When I was working," she said, "I never thought about the ring, it seemed unremarkable."
But at school, she said, "People said things like, 'That's a really big diamond,' and not necessarily in a complimentary way." So she began taking off the ring before class.
If, as Samuel Butler said, friendships are like money, easier made than kept, economic differences can add yet another obstacle to maintaining them. More friends and acquaintances are now finding themselves at different points on the financial spectrum, scholars and sociologists say, thanks to broad social changes like meritocracy-based higher education, diversity in the workplace and a disparity of incomes among professions.
As people with various-sized bank accounts brush up against each other, there is ample cause for social awkwardness, which can strain relationships, sometimes to a breaking point. Many find themselves wrestling with complicated feelings about money and self-worth and improvising coping strategies.
"The real issue is not money itself, but the power money gives you," said Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University, who studies issues of wealth and class. "Money makes explicit the inequalities in a relationship, so we work hard to minimize it as a form of tact."
For Ms. Gilbertson, that means not having her daughters' friends over to play because, she said, her apartment in Washington Heights is small and in what some parents might consider a marginal neighborhood. For the same reason, she had a pizza party for her daughter's birthday at the local Y.M.C.A.
For Ms. Paik, that meant avoiding inviting her classmates to her prewar, three-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side, because many of them lived in student housing and she feared they would think she was showing off. "I didn't want to introduce that barrier," she said.
Money's discomfiting effects are explored in the recent film "Friends with Money," in which three of four female friends are well off while one is barely getting by. In an early scene the friends are gathered for dinner when Olivia, a former schoolteacher played by Jennifer Aniston, announces that she has started working as a maid. A few moments later Franny, played by Joan Cusack, says she and her husband will be making a $2 million donation to their child's elementary school. When another friend asks why Franny doesn't just give the money to Olivia, everyone laughs uncomfortably and the subject is changed.
"Money is talked about with such discomfort; it's so taboo," said Nicole Holofcener, the writer and director of "Friends With Money." "With close friends it takes work; I have to make a conscious effort to talk about issues of money that come up between us."
Economic barriers to friendship have come about in part because other barriers have been broken down, sociologists say. College, where people form some of the most intense friendships of their lives, is a melting pot of economic differences. Students from country-club families and those on scholarships are thrown together as roommates, on athletic teams and in classes.
"There has been an incredible expansion of higher education," Professor Conley said. "More people from more varied backgrounds are going to college. There are also more meritocratic admissions among elite institutions."
According to data compiled by Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute in Washington, 42 percent of young adults (age 18 to 24) from the bottom quarter of family income were enrolled in college in 2003, compared with 28 percent in 1970. Enrollment for students from the two middle income quarters also increased. Participation of students from the highest-income families changed the least, with 80 percent attending college in 2003, compared with 74 percent in 1970.
Once college friends leave campus, their economic status can diverge widely depending on their careers. While 20 years ago a young lawyer and a new college instructor might have commiserated about their jobs over coffee and doughnuts, today the lawyer would be able to invite the assistant professor out for a meal at a restaurant with two sommeliers and a cheese expert.
At New York University, for instance, instructors make $35,300 for the current academic year, up from $24,500 for the 1985-86 academic year, according to the American Association of University Professors. A first-year associate at a large New York law firm, however, can earn as much as $170,000 with a year-end bonus, compared with about $53,000, including bonus, in 1985.
"In New York City we're on the front lines of the rise in inequality in income because it's happening at the top half of the income distribution ladder," Professor Conley said. "The difference between the middle and the top has grown incredibly."
Although the wealthy can wall themselves off in buildings with doormen or in high-tax suburbs, other trends in society lead the affluent to brush up against the not-so-affluent. Gentrification, an urban movement from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn to downtown Los Angeles, moves the professional class into the neighborhoods of the working class. They mix when their children attend the same school or participate in athletic leagues.
Feeling awkward about the differences in net worth is not just an issue for those on the bottom of the equation. Some wealthy people — especially the young — have trouble admitting that they are different.
"We are allegedly a classless society, and that's obviously completely untrue, but people don't want to acknowledge that those differences exist," said Jamie Johnson, a 26-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. He explored attitudes about money among his peers in his 2003 documentary, "Born Rich." His new documentary, "The One Percent," which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 29, looks at the political influence of wealthy Americans.
Mr. Johnson said that some of his moneyed friends act like they have fewer resources than they do, making a show of taking the subway and saying they can't afford a cab. "It's to avoid that awkwardness of seeing the distinction of social class," he said.
The pressure to fit in economically can be especially intense for teenagers and young adults. Marisa Gordon, a 27-year-old account executive at a midsize Manhattan advertising agency, recalled that as a student at Syracuse University, her roommate resented that Ms. Gordon had more spending money than she did. The roommate made comments when Ms. Gordon brought home a pair of Diesel sweatpants and cried because she couldn't afford the same Issey Miyake perfume.
Though she and the roommate are still friendly, Ms. Gordon said money issues contributed to the fact they aren't as close as they once were. Now it is her younger sister, a freshman at Syracuse, who is feeling the sort of competitive pressure Ms. Gordon's roommate felt. The sister recently asked their parents for a Louis Vuitton bag, Ms. Gordon said, because, "Everyone at school has a Louis bag."
Suze Orman, a financial writer and speaker whose latest book is "The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke" (Riverhead Hardcover), said young adults can go into debt trying to keep up with their friends.
"I call them 'money pods,' " she said. "Look at a group of female friends walking down the street. They're often all dressed identically: the same shoes, the same belts, the same handbag."
But what is not easily apparent, Ms. Orman said, is that one of the women may have saved for months to buy her one expensive handbag, or more likely, put it on her credit card. Her identically dressed friends, meanwhile, may have the salary or the family money to afford a closet full of designer purses.
"That is how we get in trouble," Ms. Orman said. "We think our friends are just like us, and if our friend can afford something, we fool ourselves into thinking we can afford it, too."
Mary Ochsner, a stay-at-home mother of three in San Clemente, Calif., ended a friendship after money issues came to the fore. She had befriended a woman after college when they were both, as she put it, in "very affluent periods." But their paths diverged when Ms. Ochsner married a Marine and her friend married a man whom Ms. Ochsner described as an ambitious executive. She said her friend became increasingly status-conscious and would brag about home improvements.
The final insult came, Ms. Ochsner said, when she invited the woman to a birthday party for her daughter. The woman barely socialized but tried to poach her babysitter by offering $5 more an hour than what Ms. Ochsner was paying. Ms. Ochsner decided the friendship wasn't worth it.
"It wasn't about the money," she said. "The money made me realize she had different social ambitions."
Perhaps the most fraught social ritual of all when it comes to money and friendship is the settling of a restaurant bill. "I know wealthy people who are extremely troubled by the whole idea of who's going to pay the bill," Mr. Johnson said. "They're terrified for hours before it happens."
He said he has found himself arguing over the check with a dining companion who was not as wealthy. "Sometimes people feel obligated to buy me dinner because they don't want me to think I'm expected to pay for the meal," he said. "I don't really appreciate it. If anything, I think it's unfortunate that people feel that uncertainty."
The uneasiness is also acute on the other side of the income divide. A 30-year-old book editor in Manhattan who earns less than $40,000 a year recently went to Miami for the weekend with two friends from high school who both work for hedge funds.
"We're staying at the Shore Club, in a suite they've booked; I'm sleeping on the pullout couch and they're paying for it, which is hugely generous of them," the editor wrote in an e-mail message. He has not been identified to avoid offending his friends. "However, tonight they've booked a table at Nobu, with Mansion" — an expensive night club — "to follow. I'll end up spending about a week's pay in the next two nights, probably more. It'll feel worth it while I'm hanging out with them without any of the unpleasant reminders that our lives have seriously diverged since high school, but it's going to sting when I get back."
Mike Seely, a 31-year-old journalist in Seattle, recently arranged a lunch date with a wealthier friend who works in politics. He said he suggested a diner "where nothing's over $10, right in my price range." She countered by suggesting the Dahlia Lounge, an upscale restaurant where a spinach salad costs $14.
"I said, 'Sure, as long as this is on your dime,' " he said.
It was one of the few times he has felt comfortable addressing the issue so directly, he said, because his friend was the one to press for the more expensive place.
Even those who study the topic for a living have a hard time when it comes to divvying up the check. "I have friends who are economists who are comfortable getting down to the last decimal point of who owes what when we go out," Professor Conley said. Yet he feels compelled to keep quiet when he finds himself across the table from a friend who orders three glasses of wine to his tap water, then suggests they split the tab.
"It's probably because I don't want to appear petty," he explained. "I'd be battling pretty strong social norms."
###
The New York Times
May 7, 2006
Money Changes Everything
By JENNIE YABROFF
GRETA GILBERTSON was caught off guard recently when her 9-year-old daughter, who attends a private school on the Upper West Side, requested a cellphone.
"I sort of snapped at her," recalled Ms. Gilbertson, an assistant professor at Fordham University in the Bronx. "I said, 'Don't think that you're one of the rich kids, because you're not.' " Though her daughter rarely expresses envy of her more affluent friends, Ms. Gilbertson said, it was an "unedited moment" revealing her anxiety over being in a world where other parents have more money than she does.
Carol Paik, a former lawyer who is married to a partner at a prominent New York law firm, found herself on the other side of that money equation. When she returned to school in 2002 to get her M.F.A. in creative writing at Columbia, her diamond engagement ring attracted particular attention from her new group of friends. "When I was working," she said, "I never thought about the ring, it seemed unremarkable."
But at school, she said, "People said things like, 'That's a really big diamond,' and not necessarily in a complimentary way." So she began taking off the ring before class.
If, as Samuel Butler said, friendships are like money, easier made than kept, economic differences can add yet another obstacle to maintaining them. More friends and acquaintances are now finding themselves at different points on the financial spectrum, scholars and sociologists say, thanks to broad social changes like meritocracy-based higher education, diversity in the workplace and a disparity of incomes among professions.
As people with various-sized bank accounts brush up against each other, there is ample cause for social awkwardness, which can strain relationships, sometimes to a breaking point. Many find themselves wrestling with complicated feelings about money and self-worth and improvising coping strategies.
"The real issue is not money itself, but the power money gives you," said Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University, who studies issues of wealth and class. "Money makes explicit the inequalities in a relationship, so we work hard to minimize it as a form of tact."
For Ms. Gilbertson, that means not having her daughters' friends over to play because, she said, her apartment in Washington Heights is small and in what some parents might consider a marginal neighborhood. For the same reason, she had a pizza party for her daughter's birthday at the local Y.M.C.A.
For Ms. Paik, that meant avoiding inviting her classmates to her prewar, three-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side, because many of them lived in student housing and she feared they would think she was showing off. "I didn't want to introduce that barrier," she said.
Money's discomfiting effects are explored in the recent film "Friends with Money," in which three of four female friends are well off while one is barely getting by. In an early scene the friends are gathered for dinner when Olivia, a former schoolteacher played by Jennifer Aniston, announces that she has started working as a maid. A few moments later Franny, played by Joan Cusack, says she and her husband will be making a $2 million donation to their child's elementary school. When another friend asks why Franny doesn't just give the money to Olivia, everyone laughs uncomfortably and the subject is changed.
"Money is talked about with such discomfort; it's so taboo," said Nicole Holofcener, the writer and director of "Friends With Money." "With close friends it takes work; I have to make a conscious effort to talk about issues of money that come up between us."
Economic barriers to friendship have come about in part because other barriers have been broken down, sociologists say. College, where people form some of the most intense friendships of their lives, is a melting pot of economic differences. Students from country-club families and those on scholarships are thrown together as roommates, on athletic teams and in classes.
"There has been an incredible expansion of higher education," Professor Conley said. "More people from more varied backgrounds are going to college. There are also more meritocratic admissions among elite institutions."
According to data compiled by Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute in Washington, 42 percent of young adults (age 18 to 24) from the bottom quarter of family income were enrolled in college in 2003, compared with 28 percent in 1970. Enrollment for students from the two middle income quarters also increased. Participation of students from the highest-income families changed the least, with 80 percent attending college in 2003, compared with 74 percent in 1970.
Once college friends leave campus, their economic status can diverge widely depending on their careers. While 20 years ago a young lawyer and a new college instructor might have commiserated about their jobs over coffee and doughnuts, today the lawyer would be able to invite the assistant professor out for a meal at a restaurant with two sommeliers and a cheese expert.
At New York University, for instance, instructors make $35,300 for the current academic year, up from $24,500 for the 1985-86 academic year, according to the American Association of University Professors. A first-year associate at a large New York law firm, however, can earn as much as $170,000 with a year-end bonus, compared with about $53,000, including bonus, in 1985.
"In New York City we're on the front lines of the rise in inequality in income because it's happening at the top half of the income distribution ladder," Professor Conley said. "The difference between the middle and the top has grown incredibly."
Although the wealthy can wall themselves off in buildings with doormen or in high-tax suburbs, other trends in society lead the affluent to brush up against the not-so-affluent. Gentrification, an urban movement from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn to downtown Los Angeles, moves the professional class into the neighborhoods of the working class. They mix when their children attend the same school or participate in athletic leagues.
Feeling awkward about the differences in net worth is not just an issue for those on the bottom of the equation. Some wealthy people — especially the young — have trouble admitting that they are different.
"We are allegedly a classless society, and that's obviously completely untrue, but people don't want to acknowledge that those differences exist," said Jamie Johnson, a 26-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. He explored attitudes about money among his peers in his 2003 documentary, "Born Rich." His new documentary, "The One Percent," which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 29, looks at the political influence of wealthy Americans.
Mr. Johnson said that some of his moneyed friends act like they have fewer resources than they do, making a show of taking the subway and saying they can't afford a cab. "It's to avoid that awkwardness of seeing the distinction of social class," he said.
The pressure to fit in economically can be especially intense for teenagers and young adults. Marisa Gordon, a 27-year-old account executive at a midsize Manhattan advertising agency, recalled that as a student at Syracuse University, her roommate resented that Ms. Gordon had more spending money than she did. The roommate made comments when Ms. Gordon brought home a pair of Diesel sweatpants and cried because she couldn't afford the same Issey Miyake perfume.
Though she and the roommate are still friendly, Ms. Gordon said money issues contributed to the fact they aren't as close as they once were. Now it is her younger sister, a freshman at Syracuse, who is feeling the sort of competitive pressure Ms. Gordon's roommate felt. The sister recently asked their parents for a Louis Vuitton bag, Ms. Gordon said, because, "Everyone at school has a Louis bag."
Suze Orman, a financial writer and speaker whose latest book is "The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke" (Riverhead Hardcover), said young adults can go into debt trying to keep up with their friends.
"I call them 'money pods,' " she said. "Look at a group of female friends walking down the street. They're often all dressed identically: the same shoes, the same belts, the same handbag."
But what is not easily apparent, Ms. Orman said, is that one of the women may have saved for months to buy her one expensive handbag, or more likely, put it on her credit card. Her identically dressed friends, meanwhile, may have the salary or the family money to afford a closet full of designer purses.
"That is how we get in trouble," Ms. Orman said. "We think our friends are just like us, and if our friend can afford something, we fool ourselves into thinking we can afford it, too."
Mary Ochsner, a stay-at-home mother of three in San Clemente, Calif., ended a friendship after money issues came to the fore. She had befriended a woman after college when they were both, as she put it, in "very affluent periods." But their paths diverged when Ms. Ochsner married a Marine and her friend married a man whom Ms. Ochsner described as an ambitious executive. She said her friend became increasingly status-conscious and would brag about home improvements.
The final insult came, Ms. Ochsner said, when she invited the woman to a birthday party for her daughter. The woman barely socialized but tried to poach her babysitter by offering $5 more an hour than what Ms. Ochsner was paying. Ms. Ochsner decided the friendship wasn't worth it.
"It wasn't about the money," she said. "The money made me realize she had different social ambitions."
Perhaps the most fraught social ritual of all when it comes to money and friendship is the settling of a restaurant bill. "I know wealthy people who are extremely troubled by the whole idea of who's going to pay the bill," Mr. Johnson said. "They're terrified for hours before it happens."
He said he has found himself arguing over the check with a dining companion who was not as wealthy. "Sometimes people feel obligated to buy me dinner because they don't want me to think I'm expected to pay for the meal," he said. "I don't really appreciate it. If anything, I think it's unfortunate that people feel that uncertainty."
The uneasiness is also acute on the other side of the income divide. A 30-year-old book editor in Manhattan who earns less than $40,000 a year recently went to Miami for the weekend with two friends from high school who both work for hedge funds.
"We're staying at the Shore Club, in a suite they've booked; I'm sleeping on the pullout couch and they're paying for it, which is hugely generous of them," the editor wrote in an e-mail message. He has not been identified to avoid offending his friends. "However, tonight they've booked a table at Nobu, with Mansion" — an expensive night club — "to follow. I'll end up spending about a week's pay in the next two nights, probably more. It'll feel worth it while I'm hanging out with them without any of the unpleasant reminders that our lives have seriously diverged since high school, but it's going to sting when I get back."
Mike Seely, a 31-year-old journalist in Seattle, recently arranged a lunch date with a wealthier friend who works in politics. He said he suggested a diner "where nothing's over $10, right in my price range." She countered by suggesting the Dahlia Lounge, an upscale restaurant where a spinach salad costs $14.
"I said, 'Sure, as long as this is on your dime,' " he said.
It was one of the few times he has felt comfortable addressing the issue so directly, he said, because his friend was the one to press for the more expensive place.
Even those who study the topic for a living have a hard time when it comes to divvying up the check. "I have friends who are economists who are comfortable getting down to the last decimal point of who owes what when we go out," Professor Conley said. Yet he feels compelled to keep quiet when he finds himself across the table from a friend who orders three glasses of wine to his tap water, then suggests they split the tab.
"It's probably because I don't want to appear petty," he explained. "I'd be battling pretty strong social norms."
###
Sunday, May 07, 2006
For the birds
I live for this. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 7, 2006
13 Ways of Looking at an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
By JACK HITT
If I wanted to, I could claim something that fewer than two dozen people on the planet right now can: I have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker. It was only a year ago that history was made when it was announced that this legendary woodpecker — also known as the Lord God Bird for the excited cry said to accompany a sighting — was not extinct, as had been widely believed, but had been positively identified in a swamp called the Bayou de View in Arkansas. On Feb. 26, I visited the bayou with Bill Tippit, a friendly bear of a birder. We were expecting to spend the day in the swamp with an expert guide, but in the chime of a cellphone, we found ourselves suddenly guideless, standing there with our waders, a canoe and a big desire. "I'm game," he said in his slow, deep twang. So we put in and spent the day drifting around the primeval beauty of Arkansas's most famous bottom-land swamp.
Even though I grew up among South Carolina's cypress swamps, I had never seen cypress trees this huge and haunting. Towering beside them was the ancient tupelo, like some Devonian Period beta version of "tree." These thousand-year-old senator trees are large enough at the base to garage a car, and then they suddenly narrow like a wine bottle before shooting up into a regular tree. Tippit and I spent the day paddling into swampy cul-de-sacs and just hanging there, strictly quiet, for half an hour at a stretch.
"You can't find the bird," Tippit said. "The bird has to find you." By late afternoon, the swamp had come to life with a dozen birdsongs. Blue herons flapped through the trees, while above, the canopy was a rush hour of swallows and sweeps. At times, the dimming forest could be as chatty as a crowded cocktail party, filled with the call of the pileated woodpecker. A relative of the ivory-bill, the pileated is common and often mistaken — very often — for its more renowned cousin.
Then: "Ivory-bill!" Tippit urgently whispered from the back of the canoe. I looked ahead but saw nothing. I turned to see precisely where he was pointing. I whipped back around to see the final movements of a large dark bird disappearing like a black arrow into the dusky chill of the swamp.
I knew the drill. To confirm the sighting, I asked Tippit to report to me precisely what he saw. As with any witness, it's important to set the interview down on paper as soon as possible. Tippit called out: "Two white panels on the back of the wings! It lit on that tree. It was large. Also saw it flying away from me with flashes of white."
Since that February afternoon, I have been able to say, "I saw an ivory-billed woodpecker," yet I have not said it. It turns out it's not an easy sentence to utter, and not only because all I really saw was a distant flash of black feathers. I got a better sense of the difficulty of this claim when I attended the Call of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Celebration in February in nearby Brinkley (formerly Lick Skillet), Ark. The town had so gussied itself up in midwinter woodpecker boosterism that I fully expected to see a parade led by Robert Preston sporting an ivory-bill haircut (available at Penny's Hair Care for $25). A modest motel is now the Ivory Billed Inn. Gene's Restaurant and Barbecue offers an ivory-bill cheeseburger. There's even ivory-bill blue: I bought a T-shirt that reads, "Got Pecker?" And yet talk of seeing the bird was curiously absent. It's hard to describe, but it's like saying you've walked on the moon or been anointed by the Dalai Lama. It's a boast of immense magnitude, frightening to claim, and here's why: In the weeks after the initial sighting, Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology flew down dozens of scientists to comb the swamp, and the Nature Conservancy intensified its efforts to secure large swaths of the habitat. Even the Department of the Interior got involved. The gravitas of powerful institutions and eminent professionals now looms over every claim.
During the question-and-answer period after a talk given by Sharon Stiteler, a perky, witty, smiling blonde who is the host of www.birdchick.com, I cut off a back-and-forth about bird feeders to ask her, "Have you seen an ivory-billed woodpecker?" It was as if I'd dropped a glass on the floor. The room went weirdly silent. The smile on Stiteler's face flickered away quick as a chickadee. "I am not allowed to comment on that," she said. "I was out with Cornell in December and had to sign a lot of confidentiality agreements."
Soon after the original declaration of the discovery was made last April, controversy broke out, and it quickly got nasty. The ugliness derives from something deep in the heart of birding. Most people think of birding as either a science worthy of a word like "ornithology" or a harmless hobby pursued by rubber-faced old men in porkpie hats. But the act of birding, ultimately, is an act of storytelling. For instance, if someone said to you, "I saw this cardinal fly out of nowhere with yellow tips on its wings and land on the side of a tree," even the least experienced amateur would counter that cardinals don't have yellow wingtips and don't cling to trees but rather perch on branches. Each bird is a tiny protagonist in a tale of natural history, the story of a niche told in a vivid language of color, wing shape, body design, habitat, bill size, movement, flying style and perching habits. The more you know about each individual bird, the better you are at telling this tale.
Claiming to have seen rare birds requires a more delicate form of storytelling and implies a connoisseur's depth of knowledge. Saying "I saw an ivory-bill's long black neck and white trailing feathers" requires roughly the same panache as tasting an ancient Bordeaux and discoursing on its notes of nougat and hints of barnyard hay.
If you don't pull it off, then people presume that you are lying or stupid. And this is where birding gets personal. Telling a rare-bird-sighting story is to ask people to honor your ability as a birder — to trust you, to believe you. To say I saw an ivory-bill — and Tippit says we did — would put me in one camp; on the other hand, to say that I'm not sure totally disses my canoe partner's integrity. And I came to like and trust Bill Tippit quite a lot. He pointed out about a dozen birds to me that afternoon that I never would have seen without his keen eye. I don't want to deny him. So I cagily keep myself suspended between two potential truths, which is where a lot of birders now find themselves.
The ivory-billed woodpecker is, essentially, Schrödinger's cat, the famous physics paradox in which a cat in a box is neither dead nor alive until you open the box. By keeping my mouth shut (about as rare an experience as an ivory-bill sighting), the bird is both extinct from the planet and nesting in the swamps of Arkansas.
But this is not one of those crummy stories that ends with some annoying riff about "ambiguity." Birding is not philosophy. Birding is storytelling, and ivory-bill birding is the most exquisitely nuanced yarn of them all. It requires that you consider the different facets of the ivory-billed woodpecker from every angle. (My experience with Bill Tippit and this philosophical mumbo jumbo are but two.) There are, with some editing, 13 ways of looking at the ivory-billed woodpecker, and there is an answer to the burning question Did I see the damn bird or not? Here's the thing — I'm not able to give the answer. It's a birding story. Only you can.
The fantastic story of the bird's rediscovery begins with the first confirmed sighting. Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird magazine, published by Cornell University's ornithology lab, was writing a book, "The Grail Bird," a history of the search for the ivory-bill. He intended to interview every living person who had seen one. It turns out that there's a whole subcategory of bird aficionados known as ghost-bird chasers, who look for birds presumed to be extinct. Gallagher himself was one, and over his years of searching, he met Bobby Harrison, a photography professor at Oakwood College in Alabama, who was also in this game.
The two men were made for the Chautauqua circuit, which they're now in fact on, sometimes together, sometimes solo, telling the tale of their sighting. Their appearance before an awestruck audience capped the Brinkley celebration. Gallagher is a tall 55-year-old with white hair and a pleasantly restrained Yankee demeanor who introduced himself in Arkansas by confessing amiably that he'd always thought the South was weird and that he considered Harrison his "interpreter and guide." Harrison, a fun guy with a head like a mortar shell, had his own schtick, like saying that he didn't know "damn Yankee" was two words until he was 20 years old. The audience laughed wildly at their tale, which was, like the best sightings, a great adventure story full of snakes, mayhem, missteps, mud, bugs and a bird.
In early 2004, Gallagher was alerted to an online posting by another Southerner, a kayaker named Gene Sparling, who reported that he'd seen an unusual woodpecker in the Bayou de View. Gallagher and Harrison each interviewed him and were convinced. They rushed to Arkansas and put in. The second day they were there — Feb. 27, 2004 — the two saw something burst into the sunshine. "Look at all the white on its wings," Gallagher shouted. "Ivory-bill!" they both screamed. And it was gone. They wrote down their notes and drew sketches. Gallagher had a new ending for his book. Bobby got on the phone to his wife, Norma, and sobbed.
Back at Cornell, Gallagher told John Fitzpatrick, the head of the school's lab of ornithology, and Fitzpatrick was persuaded by Gallagher's description. After quietly deploying a few pros (and then a lot of them) to poke around Arkansas, Fitzpatrick decided to throw the lab's prestige and best resources into the search. Meanwhile, Gene Sparling, the kayaker, had contacted the Nature Conservancy, the environmental group best known for buying undeveloped land. According to Scott Simon, the conservancy's state director, the group had helped save some 120,000 acres of this part of Arkansas, known as the Big Woods, a good bit of the habitat where the bird might be.
"A few days after Feb. 27, Fitzpatrick called me," Simon told me, "and we danced around trying to find out what the other knew." When they discovered that they knew the same thing, Simon became a partner and agreed to supply aerial photographs.
"Fitz emphasized the need to keep it quiet," Simon went on to tell me. "They wanted to get in one full year of research uninterrupted and focused. For 14 months we did that. We called it the Inventory Project, and we talked about it in code." Eventually, when all the necessary groups were brought in, the Inventory Project had a 16-person management board. "And it was really fun," Simon said. "These people met on a conference call every Tuesday night at 8:30 p.m., Central Time." The ivory-bill was now the subject of the greatest supersecret mission in the history of ornithology.
Cornell's swamp operation moved swiftly into place in Arkansas in the spring of 2004, and it is still there today. "We have 36 people on the ground at any one time," the field supervisor, Elliott Swarthout, told me. "Twenty-two are paid staff; 14 are volunteers." There are 28 Autonomous Recording Units, or A.R.U.'s, stationed at strategic flyways in the swamp. Hundreds of hours of audio recordings are routinely flown back to Cornell, where they are computer-searched for the patterns of the ivory-bill's two most famous sounds. There is the "kent" call, a funny bweep that sounds like a kid's toy horn. And there is the double knock — two heavy bill blows into a tree, so close together they almost register as one sound.
Scattered throughout the forest, time-lapse cameras are mounted on trees. The ornithologists have also drawn up grids and transepts and are systematically moving through the area with human eyes to conduct regular bird counts and spot roost holes. They have flown as many as four ultralight aircraft low over the swamp canopy to flush out ivory-bills. By the end of the first year of searching, Cornell had registered seven brief sightings of the bird.
In April 2004, a compelling piece of evidence came in. A computer scientist named David Luneau was videotaping in the swamp when his camera, fixed in the canoe and focused on his colleague, captured a large black-and-white woodpecker in the background. The woodpecker was half-hidden by a tree and was startled before making an out-of-focus escape into the swamp. The tape lasts four seconds. Fitzpatrick and 16 colleagues slowed down the tape and concluded that the fuzzy white patches appeared in the right places.
Fitzpatrick waited a full year, studying the habitat, before taking the discovery public. On April 28, 2005, the peer-reviewed 17-author paper was published with much fanfare by Science magazine on its Science Express Web site. Cornell and the Nature Conservancy launched www.ivory-bill.com and provided the media with easily downloaded images. The lab's marketing department fired off electronic press releases to 1,000 members of the media. Cornell's press office beefed up its presence in Washington and assisted in the media rollout of news items: 43 radio shows, 174 television programs and 459 newspaper articles. Overnight, the ivory-billed woodpecker became a generally accepted scientific fact.
But not for long. Within weeks, both professional ornithologists and amateur birders were starting to have doubts. Four world-class bird specialists, led by Richard Prum of Yale University (who is a neighbor of mine) and including a renowned ivory-bill expert named Jerome Jackson, prepared a peer-reviewed paper, arguing that the Science magazine material did not rise to the standard of scientific evidence. It was a heavy charge.
But then last summer, as the authors prepared for publication, Cornell sent them some fresh and exciting evidence: recordings of kent calls and double knocks. Prum was temporarily won over, publicly stating that the "thrilling new sound recordings provide clear and convincing evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct." The authors pulled their paper.
But as the months passed and no new evidence materialized, the doubters were heard from again. In January, Jackson published a direct attack on Cornell's science in The Auk, a respected bird publication. He charged, among other things, that Gallagher's original sighting suffered from what might be called "story creep." Gallagher's book, published in May 2005, estimates his distance from the bird at "less than 80 feet." In the July 2005 issue of Audubon magazine, his wife wrote that it was "less than 70 feet." In an interview on "60 Minutes" in October, Gallagher said the bird was "about 65 feet away." At one news conference, Fitzpatrick observed that if Gallagher and Harrison had not shouted, the bird "might even have landed on the canoe." Jackson wrote: "Observations can become more and more 'real' with the passing of time, as we forget the minor details and focus inwardly on the 'important' memory." He characterized Cornell's science, memorably, as "faith-based ornithology."
The video has always been held out by Cornell as the most solid proof. After all, the pileated has white on the front undersides of the wings; the ivory-bill's wing is distinguished by a lot of white on the top trailing feathers. But in March of this year, David Allen Sibley, the author of "Sibley's Guide to Birds," issued a frame-by-frame analysis of the video. (I know Sibley and have been in the woods with him on a few occasions.) Sibley's critique (which Cornell quickly rebutted) offered a completely different interpretation of the video. As Sibley saw it, the bird pushed back from the tree and rotated its wings furiously, scooping the air to gain initial flight. In other words, the "topside trailing feathers" you could see were actually the underside feathers of a wing strenuously wrenched backward in the act of getting airborne. The most famous ivory-billed woodpecker of the 21st century looked to David Allen Sibley like a pileated flying away.
Early last month, I was back in the swamp, this time with Bobby Harrison, the ivory-bill rock star. If you're going to spend a day in a swamp, there is no one better to spend it with than Harrison. He had a nearly silent trolling motor, so we were able to penetrate the darkness of the swamp this time without a peep, except when we were beating off cottonmouth snakes with our paddles or portaging the whole rig over frustrating logjams. After three miles we came into an area called Blue Hole, and we puttered up the way just past a visible A.R.U. when suddenly: bam-bam. "Did you hear that?" Harrison said. I had. No question. We pulled the canoe onto a mud bank and stepped out. Visibility was becoming limited, not because of light but because the forest was in early bud. Leaves seemed to grow bigger by the hour, making the distant vistas close right up around us. As Harrison and I stood there, a large black-and-white bird came from behind us and soared into the green. "Did you see that?" he said. I did. His eyes tightened with disappointment. "I couldn't tell," he said. Me either.
The problem with double knocks is that they are not that distinctive a sound. As Fitzpatrick himself told me: "There are certain double-knocky sounds that come from wood ducks flapping wings on the water or running into each other." Two branches banging in the wind can make that sound, as well as a distant truck running over a manhole cover.
When I was out in the canoe with Bill Tippit in February, we were disturbed by some amateur birders nearby, loudly discussing their dinner plans. Tippit hammered the side of our canoe twice with his paddle: bam-bam. The woods went so totally quiet that I might have been able to hear the birders scratching down the notes of their encounter if it hadn't been for Tippit's chuckling.
The first sentence of Gallagher's book reads, "I think I've always been the kind of person who gets caught up in obsessive quests, most of which seem to involve birds." This sentiment of deep longing grips all those now on the prowl in Arkansas. "It's been a fixation since early childhood," Fitzpatrick told me. If you accept the thinking of Jackson and Sibley, then it's possible to reread Gallagher's book not as a birder's adventure of discovery but as a fanatic's confession of self-delusion. He sometimes seems to undermine his own claims. Gallagher confesses to be prone, for example, to "quixotic quests." The code name used for the bird during the Inventory Project was "Elvis," an unusual choice given that Elvis is now someone seen by true believers but who is, well, extinct. In Gallagher's book, you can find Harrison's initial reaction to Luneau's video: "It makes a bad Bigfoot movie look good."
Gallagher also tells the story of a ghost-chaser named Mary Scott, who had an Arkansas sighting a year before Gene Sparling, the kayaker, and was the first person to alert Gallagher to Sparling's account. Scott is a former lawyer who in midlife took up residence in a yurt near her parents' house in Long Beach, Calif. On one birding expedition, Scott took along a friend who knew an "ivory-bill whisperer." With the clairvoyant on the cellphone, the search party learned that the bird wanted to be seen but was troubled by the group's "energy." Scott eventually wandered off by herself and, she says, saw the bird. In fact, Scott has seen the bird quite a lot, so much so that she is openly scorned by other birders. "I must admit," Gallagher nevertheless writes, "I had come to believe strongly in her sighting."
Trace back the involvement of the Department of the Interior, Cornell University, the Nature Conservancy and a half-dozen other groups on the ground, and you'll find that all of them, arguably, owe their presence in Arkansas to a tent-dwelling courthouse dropout taking her guidance from an ivory-bill whisperer on a cellphone.
From the moment the Inventory Project began, according to Scott Simon, environmental organizations carefully laid out a fund-raising strategy. The Nature Conservancy immediately went to work raising money to buy or option some 18,500 more acres. "Because 18,500 acres is about $28 million," Simon said, "we went to about seven or eight key donors who have supported other projects. We shared everything with them, like you would with a board member." Simon contacted people like Marshall Field, the department-store owner; Roger Sant, a founder of AES Corporation; and John Norris of Lennox Corporation. They were briefed on the ivory-bill after being asked to sign confidentiality agreements.
The conservancy was raising millions. Cornell, meanwhile, had committed itself to an extensive ground research operation costing, Fitzpatrick told me, "between half a million and a million dollars a year." At the time of the 2005 announcement of the discovery, Gale Norton, then the secretary of the interior, pledged more than $10 million in federal funds to help secure the bird's habitat. She called it the Corridor of Hope.
In his article in The Auk, Jackson describes the pressure this put on the bird sightings: "How many major donors, how many granting agencies, how many government officials would contribute to the more than $10 million associated with this effort, if the message had been only, 'There might be ivory-billed woodpeckers out there'?" The ivory-bill suddenly looked less like Audubon's stately woodpecker and more like Hammett's Maltese falcon.
The one sturdy argument on behalf of the ivory-bill is that there were repeated sightings, all by the Cornell team, during the secret mission. After Cornell got Gallagher's first sighting report, the ornithology lab excitedly sent down another experienced birder. He didn't see anything, but he returned with enough enthusiasm to inspire a half-dozen more birders to head down. Expanding the clique while still incubating the secret, Fitzpatrick dispatched ever-larger contingents.
"For me, it was just a recipe for misconception," Sibley told me recently. He and other birders believe this expanding pool of people being let in on a secret sighting may well have fed a kind of groupthink, leading to wishful sightings. But could such a thing happen among birders? Actually, it turns out, it does happen. A lot. In Sibley's introductory book, "Sibley's Birding Basics" (published long before these sightings), he warns against "the overexcited birder" and "group hysteria." Sibley cites "one very well documented case in California" in which "the first state record of the Sky Lark (a Eurasian species) was misidentified for days, and by hundreds of people, as the state's first Smith's Longspur."
"There is a long list of well-studied effects," Sibley told me. "There is peer pressure, the expectation of what they were there to do, as well as the authority effect of finding what the boss wants you to find." Most of the Cornell sightings occurred in the surge of joy immediately following Gallagher's return to Cornell. Since then, they have come less frequently. At the ivory-bill celebration in Brinkley, the organizer got up on the big night and said, "We were hoping that tonight we'd be making news with a big announcement from Cornell, but apparently we won't be."
These two opposing views in birding now exist side by side. Each day more birders join the Prum-Jackson-Sibley side. But the Gallagher-Harrison-Sparling view is not yielding any ground. In March, I was invited to attend the annual dinner of the Explorers Club, at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. The group is a grown-up version of the Boy Scouts, minus the solemnity of tying knots. In the hotel's Grand Ballroom, there was a visit from a llama and, of course, a march of penguins. The ivory-bill trio were onstage in black-tie to receive the coveted President's Award for Conservation. Around a banquet table loaded with exotic appetizers — "Sweet-and-Sour Bovine Penis Braised, With Testicular Partners" and "Mealworms With Durian Paste, on Toastettes" — the chat was about the thrill of the ivory-bill's rediscovery. Reports of Sibley's critique were still in the newspapers, yet there was not a peep of dissent to be heard near the "Kangaroo Balls Bourguignon."
The bird was both seen and unseen. "The Arkansas ivory-bill," Prum later told me, "is the W.M.D. of ornithology."
One morning last month in Arkansas, a Fish and Wildlife clerk named Karen, sporting ivory-bill earrings, winked at Harrison, handed me a map of the swamp and told us she'd been hearing about an area called the George Tract.
The ground there was not exactly swamp — just wet, full of sinks and little bogs. We didn't find much. We were just chatting when I asked Harrison if he could remember when he first got bit by ivory-bill fever.
"Oh, sure," he said, without pausing. "It was after reading Don Moser's article in Life magazine in 1972. I was 17 years old."
I had been hearing about this article — an account of a search for the ivory-bill — since the festival in February. Gallagher had mentioned it in his talk, and I noticed how often it came up in lunchtime chats with visiting birders. "I remember reading that Life magazine article," Fitzpatrick later told me. So I ordered the old magazine. From paragraph to paragraph, Moser's story quivers with melancholy and wistful longing, and as is typically found in Northern writing about the South, the author's prose goes all damp as he contemplates a landscape of things lost and, at twilight, almost found.
"If the question of its existence remains unanswered it will continue to range the back country of the mind," Moser wrote of the ivory-bill, "and those who wish to trail it there can find it in their visions."
"It's a funny thing about that magazine," Harrison said to me in the bog. "I cannot tell you how many people I stumble upon out here in the woods, and when we get to talking, I find out that they were inspired by the exact same article."
The greatest search for the ivory-bill was a 1935 expedition led by Arthur Allen, who, like Fitzpatrick, headed the Cornell ornithology lab. As Gallagher relates in his book, Allen and his team ventured into some virgin swamp in Louisiana known as the Singer Tract, owned by the company that bought such forests to make cabinets for its sewing machines. Allen not only saw the bird but also filmed it, photographed it and recorded it. Today, when Cornell scientists play the famous kent calls in Arkansas hoping to attract the bird, they are playing Allen's 70-year-old recordings.
After the expedition, Allen sent his best student, a young man named James Tanner, down South to spend three years observing the bird. Out of that work came a slim book, still in print, and no ghost-bird chaser is without a dogeared copy.
The burden of this noble history is undeniable. "No doubt about it, this is a venerable institution," Fitzpatrick said, "and one of the things I'm doing is sitting in Arthur Allen's chair." But that burden carries much more than the reputation of Cornell University. If the ivory-bill is a story, it is one that reaches deep into America's most anguished history.
After the Civil War, when the South lay in smoldering ruins with no railroad or economy and with federal troops occupying many of those states until 1877, there were no jobs for the freed slaves or the poor whites living on the land. When Reconstruction ended, the Northern timber companies descended. "Some 200 million acres of forest were cut in about 30 or 40 years," Scott Simon of the Nature Conservancy told me. (At one talk at the festival, a conservationist put up a slide depicting the annihilated "range of the ivory-bill." It was essentially the Confederacy.) These primeval swamps and old-growth forests had been sheared into flat farmland by the time Allen and his party headed South to visit the last stand of virgin woods.
It's hard to imagine that it's a coincidence that the story of the ivory-bill so often involves a serious Northern expert coming South to hook up with a smart-alecky good old boy from Dogpatch, and these two lighting out for the swamp to find the iconic bird. The stately Gallagher found Bobby Harrison, just as Allen and Tanner found an amusing local lawyer named Mason Spencer and a woodsman named J.J. Kuhn.
After Tanner returned from his famous study, naturalists undertook a monumental project to save the ivory-bill and its habitat. Chicago Mill, a lumber company that had bought the timber rights to most of the 81,000-acre Singer Tract, expressed some willingness to sell them, since there was no labor to cut the wood at the beginning of World War II. But in 1943, as Phillip Hoose recounts in his book "The Race to Save the Lord God Bird," negotiations with government officials and environmentalists broke down when company executives learned that German soldiers were being held in P.O.W. camps nearby and could be used to cut timber practically free. "We are just money grubbers," the company's chairman explained with a long-lost candor. Despite the intervention of four governors, the last large virgin forest in Dixie was clear-cut by Nazis.
After that, there has not been a single undisputed sighting of the ivory-bill. Some theorize that the bird, unable to find appropriate habitat, simply died out. Others disagree. "The bird didn't just die," Harrison explained to me. "He went — somewhere."
A lot of birders believe this, and perhaps that is why the recent Arkansas sightings are hardly unique. Ivory-bills have been seen sporadically since the end of World War II. In 1950, Chipola River, Fla. In 1955, Homosassa Springs, Fla. In 1966, Big Thicket, Tex. In 1971, in Atchafalaya Basin, La. In 1975, near Baton Rouge. In Cuba in the 1980's. In 1999, Pearl River Swamp, La. Each sighting had mythic tones, and not just because the iconic bird could never be definitively seen. There was also that repetition of plot that marks the cultural myth — the friendship of a Billy Yank and a Johnny Reb, the almost-confirmed sighting, talk of resurrection, sometimes a media circus or a fuzzy image. Some of these sightings led to vicious disagreements. The 1966 sighting by a very respected birder, John Dennis, ended brutally: "Dennis wants to believe he saw something," intoned James Tanner himself. "But he didn't." In 1971, George Lowery Jr. came forward with a story that he had befriended a local man who trained his dogs in the swamp. Lowery refused to identify his swamp-loving sidekick, who had given him two fuzzy Kodak Instamatic pictures of an ivory-bill on two different trees. Critics right away noticed that the ivory-bill had the exact same body posture in both pictures. The conclusion was that the bird was stuffed and put up in the tree. Lowery went to his death standing by his mysterious friend and the pictures.
"Am I worried?" Fitzpatrick mused. "That if the ivory-bill is never seen again that people will look back and say, 'Fitzpatrick laid an egg'? No. I did the right thing to jump on the story and put resources on the ground. We continue to focus on this as a conservation story whether or not the bird decorates the treetops." After the disputed sighting in Texas in 1966, 84,550 acres became the Big Thicket National Preserve. The Nature Conservancy says it will be satisfied if this sighting has a similar ending. "There may not be an ivory-bill there," said Steve McCormick, president of the conservancy, "but it's a habitat that now and forever could sustain an ivory-bill."
The ivory-bill's habitat is this Edenic swamp, an old and majestic forest. The names of the areas where it has been sighted — the Big Woods of Arkansas, the Big Thicket of Texas — suggest large and wild habitats, crowded with senator trees and brimming with other life. The swamp's ivory-bill is the storied messenger bird. He is Noah's dove, surviving improbably after a catastrophe to bring us grace. Lord God Bird, forgive us our trespasses.
Back three miles in the bayou with Bobby Harrison, the swamp air got a bit awkward. "We heard a double knock," he said from the back of the canoe. "That is so exciting."
"Yeah, I heard it," I replied. Harrison brought up the double knock a half-dozen times on our way in. He was plumbing my level of enthusiasm. He was listening for that certain tremolo, the true believer's excitement. I was cradling Schrödinger's cat as delicately as possible.
"That is such good news," he said. "It is the first indication all season that I had that tells me the bird is still here." We dragged the canoe through a shallow part of the swamp. The sun was setting. "I feel optimistic," he said.
But the truth is, few of the people involved in the hunt feel all that optimistic anymore. "It would be a shame if the bird is not there and a marvel if it is," McCormick confessed to me one day last month, "but what I care most passionately about is the integrity of the ecosystem and the fact of its rebounding, even if the bird is not there." When I asked Fitzpatrick recently what he had learned after studying the ivory-bill for two years, he said, "The bird is not that common."
Harrison attributed Fitzpatrick's slim finding to the Yankees' grids and transepts, which he mocked as a form of intellectual clear-cutting. "The Cornell method is a bust," he told me, adding, "They had a tiger hunt the other day. You know what a tiger hunt is? When the servants run through the woods banging pots and pans so the maharaja can walk in at the end and shoot the tiger." (Fitzpatrick prefers to call them saturation searches: "Using 30-odd people spaced out in the swamp with G.P.S.'s so that anything that moves that day, we'll find.") "It just shows you how desperate they are," Harrison added. "They'll never see the bird if they keep scaring it off." Harrison prefers the Tippit method, floating and sitting. Harrison has a camouflage rig that covers all of him and his canoe, leaving only his eyes to poke out of some fake leaves. "I want to become part of the landscape," he said, as much a dream as a strategy.
Since bird-watching season begins when the leaves fall off the trees, I asked Fitzpatrick if he intended to hit the swamps with the same ground operation this fall. "The answer is probably no," he said. "We will try to get more robotic. We'll use more technology without human effort."
The 22 paid staff members of this past winter will most likely be downsized to somewhere "in the 3-to-5 range," he said. But Fitzpatrick affirmed Cornell's commitment to Arkansas. "We'll be looking for years," he said. "Maybe for the rest of my life."
Jack Hitt is a contributing writer. His last article for the magazine was about abortion in El Salvador.
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Thursday, May 04, 2006
TENTets of a solution
Tents are popping up all over Paris. The tents are being given to homeless people as a temporary solution to the problem of homelessness in the world's most beautiful city.Could this strategy be part of the solution to homelessness worldwide? It would be gratifying to see millions of tents, popping up like mushrooms all over the world in various colors, emphasizing man's inhumanity to man, and humanity, at the same time ! HAIL TENT CITY ! Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 4, 2006
Paris Journal
For Migrants and the Poor, Tents Must Count as Homes
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, May 3 — The Arc de Triomphe, the towers of Notre Dame and, now, pup tents for the poor. There is new architecture springing up along the streets of this stately city, a counterpoint to the stone monuments and Beaux-Arts apartment buildings for which the French capital is known.
Since the frigid days of late December, Doctors of the World, a French organization that helps the homeless, has been distributing nylon tents to the growing number of people who sleep on the city's sidewalks and beneath its bridges.
Not everyone is pleased.
"They're ugly," said a short woman with a large red purse marching past two tents in the affluent Seventh Arrondissement, where four young Poles are living beneath the sycamores with a view of the Hôtel des Invalides.
There are thousands of people living on the streets of Paris, many of them newly arrived immigrants from European Union countries to the east, and Doctors of the World vows to continue distributing tents until the government finds housing.
For now, the city authorities tolerate the tents. But as word spreads among immigrants, the phenomenon could spread. Already, some charitable Parisians are giving the homeless tents, and some of the homeless are procuring them on their own.
That's fine with Doctors of the World, which says the more tents there are, the more pressure on the government to address the problem.
"The moment will come when they will have to do something," said Florian Borg, head of the organization's Paris chapter, peering through the fogged windows of a white van as he navigated the medieval twists and turns of the Latin Quarter.
In keeping with France's centuries-long nod to the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution, anyone can stake out a patch of city sidewalk, as long as there is no public disturbance.
The homeless have long slept along the quays beneath the bridges over the Seine. Camping in public areas without authorization is illegal, "but the law doesn't allow us to take forcible action," said Capt. Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for the Paris police. "It is only punishable with a fine." No fines have been levied so far.
This latest twist on being down and out in Paris is yet another sign of the high unemployment and weakening welfare system that have set off unrest here in the past year. There are still relatively few homeless people in France; a 2001 survey estimated 86,500, of which 15,000 lived in the Paris region. But everybody agrees the number is growing.
Doctors of the World was formed in 1993 to give the homeless medical care and help in finding shelter during that year's unusually cold winter. More than a decade later, the organization is still at it, and sees many of the same people year after year.
On Dec. 21, the organization sent teams throughout Paris, offering a tent to anyone they found sleeping outdoors. About 300 tents, stenciled with the white cross of the group's logo, have been distributed so far; another 150 are on order.
Mr. Borg pulled the van over to the curb, where three tents sat on subway exhaust vents beside the Seine. An umbrella formed a makeshift portico at the entrance to one of the tents, the bottom half of a water bottle hung hopefully beside it to collect coins from passers-by. The team's records show that they left four tents at the site in December. Two were gone but a new one had appeared.
The flap of the new tent opened and Franck, 34, who would not give his last name, poked his head out, releasing a plume of fetid air. His right ear was swollen from a streptococcus infection, and he asked the doctor with Mr. Borg for advice.
He said he had come to Paris from Tours, in the Loire Valley, and had been living on the streets for 13 years, mostly in a triangle between the Austerlitz train station, the Botanical Gardens and the Seine.
Many of the homeless with papers manage to collect welfare payments of about $450 a month, but it is almost impossible for the homeless to get into public housing, for which even people with jobs and fixed addresses wait years, and sometimes decades.
There are not enough beds in the city's shelters to house all of the homeless, even in the winter months. And many shelters shut down when the warm weather arrives, forcing people into the streets to endure the spring storms.
The gray, blue and maroon tents are usually arranged in clusters, like barnacles on a rocky shore, allowing their occupants to take turns guarding one another's belongings. Franck's encampment includes three tents and four men. Two Poles live in the tents left by Doctors of the World and Franck shares his, left by a passer-by, with another Pole.
While the doctor examined Franck's ear, a tall Polish man dressed in denim and with a fresh haircut approached Mr. Borg and asked with hand motions if he could have a tent. After determining that the man was living under a nearby bridge, Mr. Borg promised to deliver one as soon as the new tents arrived.
Franck returned to his tent and Mr. Borg and his team climbed back into their van to escape the quickening rain when another man in a sodden red windbreaker appeared, asking for help.
The tents shelter people moving up in the world and those on their way down.
On Boulevard Montparnasse, where Polish men have gathered eight tents under a railroad bridge, a middle-aged man named André asked Mr. Borg for help finding a cheap flat and French lessons. He has a job and said his employer had promised to help him get working papers if he could move to a fixed address.
Not far away three young Poles, who gave their names as Roberto, Raphael and Annette, huddled in a tent with a pit bull named Ares. A white ceramic dish of dog food sat beside the tent.
Though they speak only rudimentary French, Roberto and Raphael said they each earned about $2,000 a month in construction. They've been in France for six months and have no intention of going back to Poland.
"We'll buy a house someday," Annette said.
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Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Birdbrain
Yet another piece of evidence that sophisticated communication is NOT what separates us from the rest of life. All categories are illusions. Enjoy.
The New York Times
May 2, 2006
Starlings' Listening Skills May Shed Light on Language Evolution
By CARL ZIMMER
The warbles and rattles of a starling seem innocuous enough. But starlings are now the object of a fierce debate about the nature of language.
In the current issue of Nature, scientists report that starlings recognize song patterns based on rules of the sort that make language possible. Their paper has drawn sharp reactions pro and con from linguists and animal communication experts.
The debate is over what, if anything, the results mean for human language. Some scientists believe that the findings offer new clues to how it evolved. Others dismiss the notion.
Human language is unique in the world of animal communication. Humans can convey an infinite range of ideas with a limited vocabulary, because they are not limited to strings of disconnected sounds. Humans can generate meaning by combining words in various ways, building them into clauses and inserting those clauses into sentences.
It is possible to come up with all sorts of rules for stringing symbols together. In the 1950's, Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Teachnology ranked classes of rules by their power. A very simple rule might call for one word always to be followed by another word.
Dr. Chomsky argued that the rules that govern language must be more powerful. At the very least, they must let people embed smaller groups of words in larger ones again and again — a process sometimes called recursion.
In 2002, Dr. Chomsky, with Marc D. Hauser of Harvard and W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, wrote a paper about what all this meant for the evolution of language. Language evolution is vexing, they argued, because it relies on so many things that are not specific to language.
"Memory is critical to language, because if you couldn't keep in mind several pieces of a sentence, you couldn't understand anything," Dr. Hauser said in an interview. "But memory's not specific to language."
Whether any feature was unique to language and to humans remained an open question. In their paper, Dr. Hauser and his colleagues suggested that only one thing might fit this bill: the ability to link words and meaning with the help of recursion.
To test this claim, Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch created simple artificial languages. The words in the languages were made up of two categories of words. In one category were short sounds made by men, such as "mo" and "li." The other category were the same sounds made by women. The difference in the pitch of their voices made it easy to tell words from the two categories apart.
Dr. Fitch and Dr. Hauser then combined these sounds according to two different rules. One was a simple rule that a female sound should always be followed by a male sound.
Then they built sentences with a more complex rule that embedded a female-male sound pair within another pair. Let A and B stand for the two kinds of words. The simple rule produces sentences such as ABAB. The complex rule produces AABB.
As the scientists reported in a 2004 paper, humans figured out both patterns. College students listen to 30 sentences and then were tested on new ones. More than 80 percent could correctly say whether a sentence matched the pattern.
The scientists then tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys. In the evening, they played recordings of one kind of the pattern to the tamarins. The next morning they tested the monkeys, noting when the tamarins looked toward a speaker that played sentences that violated the patterns. The tamarins noticed when the simple ABAB rule was violated. But they failed to recognize patterns with the complex AABB rule.
Dr. Fitch and Dr. Hauser concluded that there was a ceiling on the ability of tamarins to recognize patterns in sounds. But they hesitated to draw broad conclusions, calling instead for tests on other animals.
Enter the starlings.
The songs of male starlings are made up of warbles, rattles, whistles and other sounds, collectively known as motifs. "They learn new motifs and embed them in their songs," said Timothy Gentner, a neurophysiologist at the University of California, San Diego. Starlings can also recognize other individuals by learning the unique motifs used by each bird.
These skills, Dr. Gentner decided, made starlings a perfect choice for an experiment. He teamed up with three psychologists from the University of Chicago to see which patterns the birds could recognize.
"We said, 'Well, if there's any species that's capable of doing this, it's starlings,' " Dr. Gentner said.
Dr. Gentner and his colleagues built an artificial language from warbles and rattles. They constructed some songs according to the simple ABAB rule and others according to the complex AABB rule.
The starlings trained by listening to songs. They had to peck at a hole if a song had the right pattern, and do nothing if it did not. If they chose correctly, the birds got food; if they chose wrong, the lights went out briefly.
It took as many as 40,000 trials, but 9 of 11 starlings learned to recognize the complex AABB pattern over 90 percent of the time. They could even recognize it when three pairs of warbles and rattles were inserted between an original pair of warbles and rattles.
"They can do this, and they do it with a high degree of proficiency," Dr. Gentner said.
He is confident that he can rule out the possibility that they are using a very simple strategy, like paying attention to whether a warble was followed by another warble. If that were true, the birds would react the same way to an AABB pattern and to AAABB, which violates the rule.
"I was surprised by how well they did when we threw really hard challenges at them," Dr. Gentner said.
Gary Marcus, a New York University psychologist who wrote a commentary on the research for Nature, praised it highly. "I thought it was a cool paper," he said. "The interest here isn't that it's the only species to do this, but rather that it's the first. It opens the door to see how widespread this ability is."
It will be important to see if tamarins or other primates can pass the test with training, Dr. Marcus said. It might turn out that this ingredient for language already existed in our distant ancestors. The evolution of language might be "a reconfiguration of old parts," Dr. Marcus said. "So studies like this show us what those old parts might be."
Some linguists strongly disagree. "I'm not buying it," said Geoffrey Pullum, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
For one thing, he said he doubted that the rules the scientists used to build songs had much to do with the important features of human language. Dr. Pullum also argued that the tamarin and starling experiments used "sentences" that were too short and simple to detect any thought process involved in grammar.
"It's purely about bird abilities, I think, and not about the foundations of human abilities," he said.
Dr. Chomsky also rejects Dr. Gentner's conclusions. He suggests the starlings are merely counting rattles, storing the number in their memory, then counting warbles. "It has nothing remotely to do with language — probably just with short-term memory," he said via e-mail. Dr. Gentner argues that even if the starlings are counting, they are still using a strategy more sophisticated than has been seen before in animals.
"Chomsky may find this trivial, but that is a bit like saying apes use tools, but only the trivial kind that lack the sophistication of a tri-square or a laser level," he said.
Dr. Hauser added: "This shows a capacity that goes way beyond what we showed with tamarins. That's what makes it an important paper."
He is intrigued that starlings can recognize patterns even though the new patterns create no new meaning. "It's still, 'I'm Fred, I'm a male,' " he said. In humans, this pattern recognition is linked not just to speech, but to meaning.
Dr. Gentner said, "It's that interface between meaning and pattern where we humans really excel."
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Monday, May 01, 2006
Long live men !
There's probably a word or phrase for this phenomenon - where someone works hard to get a certain something - and then, after gettng it, finds that the object of their desire begins to do them in.
Women must be feeling this way about now - they are catching up with men in so many ways - and now, it appears - length of life (or lack thereof) is becoming one of them !!!
Enjoy.
The New York Times
April 30, 2006
Ideas & Trends
The Bell Tolls for the Future Merry Widow
By KATE ZERNIKE
MEN are catching up to women in the life expectancy game; the National Center for Health Statistics reports this month that the gap between them has shrunk to five years, the narrowest since 1946. If current trends continue, in 50 years men and women will live the same length of time.
This is better news for men than for women, if you believe some economists and therapists. It's not just the extra years; it's all those extra meals to prepare.
By necessity, women have gotten used to a life lived for long periods without men. They have had the advantage in life expectancy since the late 19th century, when overall longevity started to climb. More than men, women have developed strong friendships to support them in their frailest hours. They have forced doctors to pay attention to their health concerns. They no longer have to cater to men. Travel companies now cater to their interests.
"Women don't need men as much as men need women," said John Gray, the therapist and author of, most famously, "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus."
But for all that, consider how women would be better off.
Men living longer means women are less likely to suffer the fate that Miranda from "Sex and the City" so feared: dying alone with only the cat to rake over her rotting bones. With the existing gap, women are more likely than men to be widowed — 71 percent of people over the age of 85 are women, and the majority of them will have been married. And being alone increases their risk of dying or getting sick. No one is there to help when they fall; they eat less, and poorly.
"Even given the limited capacity of men, having a surviving spouse is going to mean that women do not go as early to nursing homes when they have chronic illnesses," said Ronald D. Lee, an economist and the director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley.
And a shorter widowhood means women will be better off financially, largely because, as Heidi Hartmann, a labor economist and the president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, said, "Money attaches to the men."
Men, typically the higher wage earners, get bigger Social Security checks. And if the couple is living on his checks alone, she gets less when he dies. The surviving spouse's cost of living is about 80 percent what the couple's was, economists estimate, but the Social Security payments decline to about 65 percent.
Men are much more likely to have pensions, too, leaving women dependent on them, and one-third of men, Ms. Hartmann said, do not leave theirs to their wives. (That number used to be higher, she said, until wives were required to sign off on the deal.)
But men and women growing old together is not always easy.
"Men have this expectation that women should take care of them," Dr. Gray said. "And she has her own expectations, that she should be there for him."
Particularly after retirement, she is not used to having him around quite so much. "It's different taking care of him for dinner, as opposed to him being home all the time, and expecting her to make every meal," Dr. Gray said.
Though some may object to the assumption that sex roles will be this traditional by 2040, recent studies have shown that among husbands and wives who both work, the woman still does the much larger share of the housework. As one Connecticut woman in her 70's was heard to retort recently when her husband asked if they were ready to move to an assisted-living facility, "You've had assisted living for 40 years."
This dynamic is reflected in the statistics: men are four times as likely as women to remarry after the death of a spouse, experts on aging say. (Men who divorce also remarry faster; within three years, compared with nine for women.) They're looking for love, Dr. Gray said, but they're also looking for lunch.
Marriage lowers everyone's risk of death, Professor Lee said, but the benefits go mostly to men; women lower their risk only slightly by marrying. Similarly, a man's risk of death increases sharply after the death of a spouse; a wife's does only negligibly.
"Women are very helpful for men," he said. "Men are not very helpful for women as spouses."
Women not only do fine despite a spouse's death, they may even do better.
"In married couples, women tend to be the ones who manage the social sphere," said Laura L. Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Life-span Development Laboratory there. "They're the ones who make dinner plans and invite friends over for weekends. So a man loses a social network, whereas a woman continues to make plans and see people."
People have traditionally felt sorry for older widows, thinking they had so few prospects for remarrying, she said. The truth is, they may not want to remarry.
"They're the ones taking care of everyone; they've often taken care of a frail husband, and doing it again isn't necessarily appealing."
Then there are the disputes over sex. Dr. Gray said a woman's sex drive increases as she ages, while a man's declines. But then, is Viagra upsetting that balance, putting men in retirement homes permanently on the prowl?
On that count, at least, things may even out. And that may be true over all.
"There is a lot of poverty among older single women, so if men live longer, that's good economically, for women and men," Ms. Hartmann said. "Men are generally happier when they're married. The women may not be happier, but at least they've got more money."
###
Women must be feeling this way about now - they are catching up with men in so many ways - and now, it appears - length of life (or lack thereof) is becoming one of them !!!
Enjoy.
The New York Times
April 30, 2006
Ideas & Trends
The Bell Tolls for the Future Merry Widow
By KATE ZERNIKE
MEN are catching up to women in the life expectancy game; the National Center for Health Statistics reports this month that the gap between them has shrunk to five years, the narrowest since 1946. If current trends continue, in 50 years men and women will live the same length of time.
This is better news for men than for women, if you believe some economists and therapists. It's not just the extra years; it's all those extra meals to prepare.
By necessity, women have gotten used to a life lived for long periods without men. They have had the advantage in life expectancy since the late 19th century, when overall longevity started to climb. More than men, women have developed strong friendships to support them in their frailest hours. They have forced doctors to pay attention to their health concerns. They no longer have to cater to men. Travel companies now cater to their interests.
"Women don't need men as much as men need women," said John Gray, the therapist and author of, most famously, "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus."
But for all that, consider how women would be better off.
Men living longer means women are less likely to suffer the fate that Miranda from "Sex and the City" so feared: dying alone with only the cat to rake over her rotting bones. With the existing gap, women are more likely than men to be widowed — 71 percent of people over the age of 85 are women, and the majority of them will have been married. And being alone increases their risk of dying or getting sick. No one is there to help when they fall; they eat less, and poorly.
"Even given the limited capacity of men, having a surviving spouse is going to mean that women do not go as early to nursing homes when they have chronic illnesses," said Ronald D. Lee, an economist and the director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley.
And a shorter widowhood means women will be better off financially, largely because, as Heidi Hartmann, a labor economist and the president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, said, "Money attaches to the men."
Men, typically the higher wage earners, get bigger Social Security checks. And if the couple is living on his checks alone, she gets less when he dies. The surviving spouse's cost of living is about 80 percent what the couple's was, economists estimate, but the Social Security payments decline to about 65 percent.
Men are much more likely to have pensions, too, leaving women dependent on them, and one-third of men, Ms. Hartmann said, do not leave theirs to their wives. (That number used to be higher, she said, until wives were required to sign off on the deal.)
But men and women growing old together is not always easy.
"Men have this expectation that women should take care of them," Dr. Gray said. "And she has her own expectations, that she should be there for him."
Particularly after retirement, she is not used to having him around quite so much. "It's different taking care of him for dinner, as opposed to him being home all the time, and expecting her to make every meal," Dr. Gray said.
Though some may object to the assumption that sex roles will be this traditional by 2040, recent studies have shown that among husbands and wives who both work, the woman still does the much larger share of the housework. As one Connecticut woman in her 70's was heard to retort recently when her husband asked if they were ready to move to an assisted-living facility, "You've had assisted living for 40 years."
This dynamic is reflected in the statistics: men are four times as likely as women to remarry after the death of a spouse, experts on aging say. (Men who divorce also remarry faster; within three years, compared with nine for women.) They're looking for love, Dr. Gray said, but they're also looking for lunch.
Marriage lowers everyone's risk of death, Professor Lee said, but the benefits go mostly to men; women lower their risk only slightly by marrying. Similarly, a man's risk of death increases sharply after the death of a spouse; a wife's does only negligibly.
"Women are very helpful for men," he said. "Men are not very helpful for women as spouses."
Women not only do fine despite a spouse's death, they may even do better.
"In married couples, women tend to be the ones who manage the social sphere," said Laura L. Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Life-span Development Laboratory there. "They're the ones who make dinner plans and invite friends over for weekends. So a man loses a social network, whereas a woman continues to make plans and see people."
People have traditionally felt sorry for older widows, thinking they had so few prospects for remarrying, she said. The truth is, they may not want to remarry.
"They're the ones taking care of everyone; they've often taken care of a frail husband, and doing it again isn't necessarily appealing."
Then there are the disputes over sex. Dr. Gray said a woman's sex drive increases as she ages, while a man's declines. But then, is Viagra upsetting that balance, putting men in retirement homes permanently on the prowl?
On that count, at least, things may even out. And that may be true over all.
"There is a lot of poverty among older single women, so if men live longer, that's good economically, for women and men," Ms. Hartmann said. "Men are generally happier when they're married. The women may not be happier, but at least they've got more money."
###
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Where the west begins
What a well-lived life. Enjoy.
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
April 30, 2006
A Cajun Craftsman Preserves the Hallowed Ping of History
By JON PARELES
SCOTT, La., April 26 — The triangle may seem like a humble instrument: nothing more than a bent steel rod hit with a steel stick, merrily clanging away behind the fiddle and accordion of a traditional Cajun band. Visitors here in the bayou country of Acadiana often buy them as souvenirs at tourist stops.
But there are triangles, and then there are the triangles made by Dieu Donné Montoucet, an 80-year-old Cajun who goes by Don and whose hand-forged, antique-steel, virtually indestructible triangles are prized by musicians for the way they ring.
"They have a lot of volume, they have a lot of clarity and they have a lot of sustain," said Barry Ancelet, a professor of Francophone studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who is a historian of Cajun music and a triangle player. "On a final note they'll continue ringing like a church bell."
The simple triangle paces traditional Cajun music, and its peal echoes beyond the bayou. While Cajun music's stronghold is around Lafayette, about 130 miles west of New Orleans, its two-step beat and high, tense vocal style have made their way into American music like country and New Orleans rhythm and blues.
Cajun music is a staple of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. [The 37th edition started on Friday and runs through next Sunday.] Advance ticket sales alone have topped 100,000. Among its headliners are Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon and Dave Matthews. But the lineup also includes hundreds of Louisiana bands, among them traditionalist Cajun bands like Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, who use Mr. Montoucet's triangles.
Hurricane Katrina did not reach Acadiana, and Cajun music may be making new inroads in the 21st century, since many New Orleans residents — musicians included — evacuated west into Cajun country.
A small printed sign on Mr. Montoucet's workshop reads, "Don Montoucet, Lafayette — Lafayette Parish, Triangles — Cajun." His workbench and his office occupy one corner of his son-in-law's furniture warehouse. Inside, a dozen triangles hang on the wall; there's also a deer head, a stuffed raccoon and some birdhouses made from old license plates. A larger sign announces that Mr. Montoucet does Louisiana state vehicle inspections, his day job.
Mr. Montoucet has never had just one job. He drove a school bus for 45 years and began fixing cars at his own Don's Garage in 1940. From 1968 to 1996 he played accordion in his own Cajun band, Don Montoucet and the Wandering Aces. It changed its name to Don Montoucet and the Mulate Playboys when it became the house band at the well-known Mulate's restaurants in Breaux Bridge, Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
There's history in Mr. Montoucet's triangles. It's an old instrument; Mr. Ancelet says that triangles are described in accounts of medieval and Renaissance music. His triangles have a distinctive tight, flat loop at each end. He copied the design from a set — triangle and beater — that he inherited from his grandfather, a blacksmith who came to Louisiana from France. He made his first set around 40 years ago for a friend who knew he did ironwork.
Soon word got around, not just to Acadiana but to Canada and beyond. He sells the triangles himself in his workshop; they are also sold at the Savoy Music Center in Eunice, La., a stronghold of Acadian traditional music founded in 1960 by the musician and accordion builder Marc Savoy. They cost $35.
Mr. Montoucet makes the triangles from the U-shaped tines of salvaged old hayrakes: huge wheeled contraptions pulled by horses or tractors. The tines are springy and patinaed with rust from sitting in wet fields. He does not shine them up. "They can't be too rusty," he said. "The first thing that people ask me is, 'Is that the old iron?' They don't want to hear nothing else."
With an acetylene torch — he used to use a coal furnace — Mr. Montoucet heats the tines to straighten them, then cuts them to the right length. (One tine makes a triangle and its beater.) He heats them again to bend them into shape and keeps them red-hot to make the loops at the end. "It takes 250 licks of that big forge hammer to make one," he said.
The key to the sound, he says, is in the final stage: the tempering that heats and cools the steel for strength. He said: "If you heat them too hot, or not enough, it makes a difference. I can show you how to temper them, but if you don't have it here ..." He pointed to his head.
The hayrakes were collected through the years by a friend who works as a trucker. There is no new supply. "The iron is getting scarce," Mr. Montoucet said. "A lot of these farmers, they were glad to get rid of these hayrakes and glad to get them out of the way. But they got no more, pardner. I have a few of them left. My oldest son says, 'Dad, what you going to do when you can't get any more steel?' I say, 'Don't you think it's time for me to retire?' "
The triangles are guaranteed for life against the walloping a Cajun musician will give them. In the days before amplification, the triangle might have been the only thing heard by dancers at the far edges of a party. Mr. Montoucet knows of only one of his triangles that has broken: one that he made for Christine Balfa, the daughter of the great Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa. After a forensic examination of the pieces, Mr. Montoucet found that there had been a hairline crack in the original hayrake tine.
Although Mr. Montoucet makes triangles in set sizes — usually from 8 to 12 inches on a side — they are anything but standardized. Mr. Montoucet played a few of his 9-inch triangles: each had a different note and a different ring.
"One day a lady came in and said: 'How come they're all different sounds? Why can't you make them all the same sound?' We were five or six men here, and I said, 'Lady, it's like this: if all us men liked the same woman, it wouldn't work.' Everybody likes different things. Some people like gumbo, some people don't like gumbo, but I don't know too many people who don't like gumbo."
Cajun musicians do not simply hit the triangle. A Cajun two-step or waltz is defined by a quick-changing ping and clank that vary depending on how the triangle is gripped: with a few fingers, an open palm, a closed fist. Mr. Montoucet smiled as a visitor attempted to coordinate the rhythmic tapping, clasping and unclasping.
"You ought to see my little 18-month-old great-grandchild doing that," he said. "He comes, and he gets all my tools, and then he picks up the triangle. His father says, 'He's probably going to be a mechanic.' And I say, 'He might be a musician too.' "
###
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
April 30, 2006
A Cajun Craftsman Preserves the Hallowed Ping of History
By JON PARELES
SCOTT, La., April 26 — The triangle may seem like a humble instrument: nothing more than a bent steel rod hit with a steel stick, merrily clanging away behind the fiddle and accordion of a traditional Cajun band. Visitors here in the bayou country of Acadiana often buy them as souvenirs at tourist stops.
But there are triangles, and then there are the triangles made by Dieu Donné Montoucet, an 80-year-old Cajun who goes by Don and whose hand-forged, antique-steel, virtually indestructible triangles are prized by musicians for the way they ring.
"They have a lot of volume, they have a lot of clarity and they have a lot of sustain," said Barry Ancelet, a professor of Francophone studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who is a historian of Cajun music and a triangle player. "On a final note they'll continue ringing like a church bell."
The simple triangle paces traditional Cajun music, and its peal echoes beyond the bayou. While Cajun music's stronghold is around Lafayette, about 130 miles west of New Orleans, its two-step beat and high, tense vocal style have made their way into American music like country and New Orleans rhythm and blues.
Cajun music is a staple of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. [The 37th edition started on Friday and runs through next Sunday.] Advance ticket sales alone have topped 100,000. Among its headliners are Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon and Dave Matthews. But the lineup also includes hundreds of Louisiana bands, among them traditionalist Cajun bands like Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, who use Mr. Montoucet's triangles.
Hurricane Katrina did not reach Acadiana, and Cajun music may be making new inroads in the 21st century, since many New Orleans residents — musicians included — evacuated west into Cajun country.
A small printed sign on Mr. Montoucet's workshop reads, "Don Montoucet, Lafayette — Lafayette Parish, Triangles — Cajun." His workbench and his office occupy one corner of his son-in-law's furniture warehouse. Inside, a dozen triangles hang on the wall; there's also a deer head, a stuffed raccoon and some birdhouses made from old license plates. A larger sign announces that Mr. Montoucet does Louisiana state vehicle inspections, his day job.
Mr. Montoucet has never had just one job. He drove a school bus for 45 years and began fixing cars at his own Don's Garage in 1940. From 1968 to 1996 he played accordion in his own Cajun band, Don Montoucet and the Wandering Aces. It changed its name to Don Montoucet and the Mulate Playboys when it became the house band at the well-known Mulate's restaurants in Breaux Bridge, Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
There's history in Mr. Montoucet's triangles. It's an old instrument; Mr. Ancelet says that triangles are described in accounts of medieval and Renaissance music. His triangles have a distinctive tight, flat loop at each end. He copied the design from a set — triangle and beater — that he inherited from his grandfather, a blacksmith who came to Louisiana from France. He made his first set around 40 years ago for a friend who knew he did ironwork.
Soon word got around, not just to Acadiana but to Canada and beyond. He sells the triangles himself in his workshop; they are also sold at the Savoy Music Center in Eunice, La., a stronghold of Acadian traditional music founded in 1960 by the musician and accordion builder Marc Savoy. They cost $35.
Mr. Montoucet makes the triangles from the U-shaped tines of salvaged old hayrakes: huge wheeled contraptions pulled by horses or tractors. The tines are springy and patinaed with rust from sitting in wet fields. He does not shine them up. "They can't be too rusty," he said. "The first thing that people ask me is, 'Is that the old iron?' They don't want to hear nothing else."
With an acetylene torch — he used to use a coal furnace — Mr. Montoucet heats the tines to straighten them, then cuts them to the right length. (One tine makes a triangle and its beater.) He heats them again to bend them into shape and keeps them red-hot to make the loops at the end. "It takes 250 licks of that big forge hammer to make one," he said.
The key to the sound, he says, is in the final stage: the tempering that heats and cools the steel for strength. He said: "If you heat them too hot, or not enough, it makes a difference. I can show you how to temper them, but if you don't have it here ..." He pointed to his head.
The hayrakes were collected through the years by a friend who works as a trucker. There is no new supply. "The iron is getting scarce," Mr. Montoucet said. "A lot of these farmers, they were glad to get rid of these hayrakes and glad to get them out of the way. But they got no more, pardner. I have a few of them left. My oldest son says, 'Dad, what you going to do when you can't get any more steel?' I say, 'Don't you think it's time for me to retire?' "
The triangles are guaranteed for life against the walloping a Cajun musician will give them. In the days before amplification, the triangle might have been the only thing heard by dancers at the far edges of a party. Mr. Montoucet knows of only one of his triangles that has broken: one that he made for Christine Balfa, the daughter of the great Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa. After a forensic examination of the pieces, Mr. Montoucet found that there had been a hairline crack in the original hayrake tine.
Although Mr. Montoucet makes triangles in set sizes — usually from 8 to 12 inches on a side — they are anything but standardized. Mr. Montoucet played a few of his 9-inch triangles: each had a different note and a different ring.
"One day a lady came in and said: 'How come they're all different sounds? Why can't you make them all the same sound?' We were five or six men here, and I said, 'Lady, it's like this: if all us men liked the same woman, it wouldn't work.' Everybody likes different things. Some people like gumbo, some people don't like gumbo, but I don't know too many people who don't like gumbo."
Cajun musicians do not simply hit the triangle. A Cajun two-step or waltz is defined by a quick-changing ping and clank that vary depending on how the triangle is gripped: with a few fingers, an open palm, a closed fist. Mr. Montoucet smiled as a visitor attempted to coordinate the rhythmic tapping, clasping and unclasping.
"You ought to see my little 18-month-old great-grandchild doing that," he said. "He comes, and he gets all my tools, and then he picks up the triangle. His father says, 'He's probably going to be a mechanic.' And I say, 'He might be a musician too.' "
###
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