Ghosts of Industry: Valladolid, Mexico

 

                                   Painting of the train station in Valladolid.

I love riding trains and hanging out in train stations. I ran into another lover of trains and train stations a couple of days ago at a party in Valladolid, Mexico, where I'm shooting a documentary about the resilience of the Maya people of the Yucatan. He's Tom Earnest Jones, an 88-year-old American who relocated down here three decades ago after he retired from his job as a psychologist in Ashville, N.C.

Tom loves train stations so much that he bought his current home based primarily on its proximity to the abandoned station in central Valladolid. He's just two blocks away. He wrote a small book about the station in Spanish and English in 2015.

                          Tom Jones, not the singer.

This morning, I met Tom at his house and, because he broke a hip a couple of years ago and can't get around easily, his daughter Becky drove us down to the station so we could look around. The station opened in 1906 with train service to Merida, the Yucatan state capitol. It closed down in the late 20th century.

Tom advocates for the station to be renovated and put to new use--perhaps as a museum. Right now, the Mexican government is constructing the massive Tren Maya project--a luxury passenger line for tourists that will start in Cancun and loop around the peninsula's interior. The Valladolid station is being built about four miles north of town. Tom hopes the authorities will build a rails-to-trails walking and biking path from the new terminal to the old one.

Here are some shots of the old station:

Tom's a fascinating guy. He grew up in Detroit, son of a bigwig in the Republican Party. When he was 12 years old,  in 1947, he traveled by train to Washington, D.C. to become a US Senate page. He stuck with that until he graduated from high school, and, shortly afterwards, began exploring the world--taking the first of many trips to Mexico. Tom is determined to become fluent in Spanish. He's not there yet but he's still working at it.

Here's a photo he has leaning against the wall of his bedroom in Valladolid:

What it Takes to Make Your Home More Sustainable

By Rob Hamm

My wife Ingrid and I live in a house a suburb of Oklahoma City. We decided to make some major investments in the house to reduce our carbon footprint and, over the long haul, to reduce our monthly energy bills. Our journey to achieve a more environmentally-sustainable home shows two things: it can be done and it costs a lot of money. We are upper-middle-class people. We can afford it. Many other people who would like to reduce their carbon footprints can’t afford it, so, if the United States and the states are serious about meeting climate-change goals, our government leaders need to come up with a package of incentives that make it more affordable.

We started with an interest in solar panels. A local church had them, so I went with others from our church to see and we had an estimate. A friend had a solar installation business and produced enough to power his electric car. 

 

Then I joined a Sierra Club campaign, “Ready for 100” (100% non-fossil electricity), aiming to get our city to commit to not buying gas or coal fueled electricity by 2035.  Turns out our city owns its electric company, and the electric company was part of a cooperative providing power for many municipally-owned power companies, and that cooperative had just built a new gas-powered power plant, named for our former mayor, and it also had several multi-year contracts with coal- and lignite- (peat, in effect) burning power plants, and 100% renewable energy was not going to happen.  In fact, it was not even possible to connect solar panels to the electric grid because they had yet to establish rules and procedures for doing so.  With pressure from multiple parties, they finally got around to it. The rates and rules the electric company first proposed were atrocious (we would have had to PAY THEM for electricity we created and used at home) but they got modified and passed. 

 

Having been involved with that, we decided to get solar panels for our 3100 square foot house.  We wanted a 25-panel plan, but our home owners association board said we could not have any panels facing the street; we ended up getting 16 for $18,000+. They provide from 25% to 75% of our electricity use.  Oklahoma has hot summers, so we use a lot of air conditioning.  To reduce attic heat we went for blown foam insulation in our rafters, for $8,000+. This has benefit for both summer heat and winter cold.

Back to the church. I learned that the church’s furnace and air conditioning are highly inefficient. A church member  who is a property assessor told me that the payback on better insulation and more efficient heating and air conditioning (HVAC) is quicker than on solar. Then on our annual home HVAC inspection, they let us know that our attic air conditioners have SEER ratings of 10 and 12, less than the currently permitted 14.  And they needed replacement bearings; and they were low on the old refrigerant, which is no longer legal to sell, and they are designed for that refrigerant in particular.  Repairs would be $8000 and would only be stopgaps. So we bought SEER 17 heat pumps, with new 90% efficient furnaces. Costs: $18,000 and $13,000.

At this point we don’t know the performance of these new systems. We trust that they’ll use less fossil fuel.  The total we have spent in the last three years is $57,000, though we got a 26% federal tax credit on the solar and there may be some credits available for the new efficient HVAC, under the new “Inflation Reduction Act”. With that money we could have bought a Tesla. 

How long will it take to pay this investment back in energy savings?  Here in fossil-fuel worshiping Oklahoma, the gas for the furnace is cheap and the electricity (made in part by burning gas) is, too—relative to the east coast and California. So, it will take many years of reduced gas and electricity expense to recoup the initial expense. For example, if it were to save a total of $100 a month it would take 48 years.  We assume “the prices of energy will go up,” faster than general inflation, but don’t know that.

 

A bit more certain is that we will be using less fossil fuel, here and at the power plant, to produce our household energy.  We know that utility-scale solar and gas combustion are more efficient than small-scale home installations, but utilities are moving along at their own pace, satisfying their shareholders and maximizing their profits, and it is not fast enough to limit global warming.  So, when the society as a whole (utilities and governments) was not pushing greenhouse gas reduction fast enough, we spent a lot of our own money to do so.  We are fortunate to be able to add this drop to the bucket; most people can’t. That’s why it’s important for governments and businesses to help America become more sustainable by making sustainability more affordable. 

River Teachers

 

The Mill River in New Haven's industrial zone.

We humans love our rivers. We love to walk along them, sit beside them, fish in them, swim in them, skate on their frozen surfaces, write songs and poems about them, and drink from their reservoirs. But we don't treat our rivers very well. We use them as dumping grounds for human and industrial waste. Our road salt, lawn fertilizer, and pesticides screw them up. And, unfortunately, when we kill our rivers, we kill ourselves.

Because rivers are so essential to our lives, a group within Pivot Projects decided to explore the potential for rivers to be used as teachers—to sensitize both children and adults to the complex interplay of humans and nature. The idea is that we can encourage people to appreciate the planet more, and to change behavior to address global warming, if we reintroduce them to the rivers next door. So thus began our River Teachers project. Please read on about it but also explore your own river. Walk along it. Learn about it. Tell its story to others. Make your own video or photo slideshow. Blog about it.

Pivot Projects is a global collaboration of people who assembled in the midst of the COVID crisis to help create pivots in human behavior and policy that will make the world more sustainable and resilient. The group uses collective intelligence, systems thinking and modeling, and artificial intelligence to produce insights for policymakers and to engage with groups of regular people where they live. If you want to learn more or to participate, visit www.pivotprojects.org. 

Pivot Projects is divided up into about 20 sub-groups that take on particular issues or domains. Two of the sub-groups, Education and Arts & Culture, decided a few weeks ago to try to develop the theme of rivers as teachers. We began gathering examples from around the world where groups had organized to save rivers, teach about rivers, make arts and trails next to rivers, etc. 

I got to thinking about my local river, the Mill. The Mill River runs about a half mile from my apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. I walk across it and beside it all the time. I have also kayaked and fished in parts of the river. I love the Mill, but I realized that I didn't actually know much about it. So I decided to learn more. I'm a documentary filmmaker, among other pastimes, so I decided to explore the river from its source to its terminus in New Haven Harbor and capture what I saw. I knew that a snowstorm was coming up and decided to walk parts of the river after the snow had settled. I figured the snow would make for a nice visual contrast. So that's what I did.

Though the Mill is only 17 miles long, it tells the whole story of humanity's relationships with rivers. It arises in a suburban forest and passes through a rustic state park. It's bottled up to make a reservoir, then snakes gracefully through a beautiful urban park. It is crisscrossed by highways, roads, and railroad tracks. Then it enters an industrial zone where, for more than a century, it was the city's outhouse. Then it passes into the harbor and mixes with the Long Island Sound.

Here's a photo I took last spring of birders spotting migrating warblers on a section of the Mill in New Haven's East Rock Park (also a photo of a warbler).

I actually spent a couple of days shooting scenes along the Mill. It was really a marvelous experience. The snow was fresh and light. I explored in the car and found parts of the river I had never seen before. I saw a pair of swans on a pond next to the river, and happened to be standing on a pier in the harbor when a drawbridge, which rarely opens, lifted to let an oyster boat pass in from the harbor. The weather cooperated beautifully, too.

My thought was to make a short documentary that would serve as a talking point and inspiration for the Pivot Projects' River Teachers group. I usually have a lot of words in my documentaries, but, for this one, I decided to let the images and sounds tell the story as much as possible. 

Here's a rough draft. https://vimeo.com/493131008 (It has been revised to include more words. I will repost it several times in the future as it evolves.)

After I finished the draft, I posted it on Facebook and asked for feedback. I figured I would crowdsource the content ideas for the documentary. I got a lot of positive feedback. Also, people told me they wanted to know more—more history, more nature, etc. So I decided to elaborate on it by adding more people and more explanations. I'm in the midst of improving it now. If you have any ideas, please send them my way. Email: stevehamm31@gmail.com.

A couple of points about this documentary. It's different from most of my past work and from conventional documentary making in a few ways, in addition to the crowdsourcing of ideas. 

First, the B-Roll is the A-Roll. In filmmaking, frequently we show video clips or photo graphs that are relevant to what a speaker is saying when the speaker is saying it. That way you don't just have a face and a voice on screen. Boring. The clips and photos that are shown over the voice are called B-Roll. The interview images/voice are called A-Roll. In this case, I'm featuring a lot of images and sounds, which would normally be used as B-Roll, as the focal points on screen—separate from interviews.

Second, I'm approaching the editing of the film something like building a photo slide show. In our world, we're constantly bombarded with information. Bombarded to the point of distraction, in my view. It's hard to think clearly when you're overstimulated. So we tend to make decisions based on impulses rather than on contemplation and reason. With the slide show approach, I present a series of images/sounds that invite the viewer to experience what they're seeing and to think about it. Many of the video and still images in the film are presented for about eight seconds each, because, through experimentation, I find that that span of time is just about optimal for promoting the experience of contemplation. While some of the intervals are shorter or longer, I settled on eight seconds as the standard so viewers would get comfortable with the idea that they had time to settle into a scene before it would be yanked away.

Please tell me if you think these two approaches are working or should be modified.

One cool thing that happened after I launched on this project was I began to meet and interact with many people and groups who were already involved in the river in some way—scientists, environmentalists, historians, community activists, birders, kayakers, hikers, artists, educators... Some of these people and groups were already working with each other. I joined them and learned from them. Hopefully, we will get good things done together.

The main thing I want to get across is to urge you to explore your own river or stream. Walk it from end to end, if it's short enough. Learn about its history. Meet people on its banks and talk to them. By learning about our rivers we learn more about ourselves. And, just maybe, we can save ourselves.

We're All In This Together

Redwood grove in Loma Prieta, by Gabi Hamm

I have long believed that there are essentially two types of humans—those of us who believe we're all in this together and those who don't. By "we" I mean the human race. By "this" I mean life on Earth. I understand that we're not purely either/or. There's a spectrum. But typically, I have found, people are drawn to one side or the other. I am one of those who believes we're all in this together. 

I have spent the past nine months participating in a global collaboration aimed at working through the COVID crisis to help the world become more sustainable and resilient. It's called Pivot Projects. I am an embedded journalist in the enterprise, and I'm writing a book, The Pivot: How Collective Intelligence Can Help Save the Planet, which is to be published by Columbia University Press next year. 

Most everybody in the group, as far as I can make out, agrees with me that we're all in this together. But through the experience of being involved in this group, I have expanded what I mean by "we." I now include all living things—up to and including microbes, bacteria, and germs—plus all physical forces, mainly climate and weather. 

Pivot Projects sees the world through the prism of systems thinking. That's the idea that the whole universe is a giant system of interrelationships between living things, other things, forces of nature, ideas, electrical impulses, beliefs, science, etc. It's a system of systems. The group believes that in order to address the world's most critical and complex problems, we have to understand the interrelated systems that come into play so we can intervene and help them achieve or regain balance (optimize them for sustainability and resilience).

This means we can't think about the fate of humans in isolation. We also have to fully take into account the lives of animals and plants. In a sense, even plants have "rights," like we do. This is what it means to live in balance with nature. 

I started off this post with the photograph taken by my niece Gabi in the Forest of the Nisene Marks, in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco. I asked her to take this picture for the book because in that forest, in a place called Loma Prieta, was the epicenter of the disastrous earthquake that struck the Bay Area in 1989. A lot of human-made things were damaged in the quake, mainly brittle things such as brick buildings, glass, double-decker highways, and bridges. However, when I went on a walk in the Forest of the Nisene Marks a few weeks after the quake I saw that few Redwoods had fallen in spite of the violent shaking. This was due at least in part to the fact that even though the root systems of Redwoods are shallow, the roots of Redwoods in a grove intertwine to provide added stability to all of the trees. It's a metaphor for humanity and for ecosystems. Cooperation is a critical source of resilience.

I read a couple of days ago in the New York Times that trees actually communicate with each other through their root systems, using funghi as network neurotransmitters. Those are some subtle signals!

We humans have a long way to go before we pick up signals like that from our natural environment. In fact, it seems like one of our primary skills is our ability is to ignore signals from nature, even distress signals. 

For instance, today I took a walk around part of New Haven not far from my house called Fair Haven. It's an ancient village that was occupied by indigenous people for maybe thousands of years and has been occupied by European immigrants since the 1640s. For many years, it was a center for the oystering industry, and there's still one oyster company operating there. Down by the tidal Quinnipiac River, not far from the oyster company's docks, I saw evidence of a fish kill. 

This is nature talking to us. It's telling us that it is in distress, and, if we are students of systems thinking, we realize that if nature is in distress, we humans are also in distress. Why aren't we listening?

On the way to the river, I walked along River Street, which is in a former industrial section of Fair Haven. It's mostly vacant lots along there, but there are a few crumbling old abandoned factory buildings, some restored buildings, and some remediated brown fields. In this forgotten zone, I saw a beautiful piece of art reminding people not to dump stuff in the storm sewer. 

Somebody had made the connection between the storm sewer and the river/harbor/sound. But, clearly, not too far away, somebody else had dumped something into the storm sewer or the river that had killed a shitload of fish.

I have no way of knowing who and what had killed the fish, but I didn't have to look far to see evidence that humans are allowing potentially toxic material to get into New Haven's rivers. Just a half-mile away, I walked a bridge over the Mill River, which also empties into the harbor, and saw that huge piles of road salt mixture that had been piled beside the river had finally, after several years exposed to the elements, been covered with plastic tarps. Floating barriers in the river next to the salt pile suggested that the owner of the salt, Gateway Terminal, was trying to prevent something from spreading across the surface of the river. Who knows what? (By the way, the building in the background is an abandoned power plant built in 1929. It gifted lots of toxic material to the river over the years.)

We humans in the United States have been aware of the dangers of harming nature since the 1960s, when Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring. A decade later, the country created the Environmental Protection Agency. We have many laws and regulations protecting the natural environment —even after Trump has done his worst. Why can't we wake up and take this situation seriously? How can we be so careless? By killing nature we are killing ourselves. 

Farewell to a Freedom Rider

In 1961, when Lula Mae White stepped off a Trailways bus in the Jackson Mississippi bus station and walked towards a "whites only" waiting room rather than the "colored" section, she was confronted by a police officer. He asked "What's your race?" Her answer: "Human." Thus began her life as a fighter for justice.

I never met White, but I felt that I got to know her during a memorial service held today at Southern Connecticut State University. Family members, friends and former students of hers at Lee High School, where she taught history for 28 years, spoke touchingly about her life and the lessons she taught them. It was a fitting send-off for one of the brave Freedom Riders who helped change the course of American history.

Some of the attendees at the memorial service.

White was arrested several more times in her life for committing acts civil disobedience--in Chicago, where she went to college, at a protest over equal rights for housing; during the teachers' strike in New Haven in 1975; and at a protest in support of unionized clerical workers at Yale University. When she was a child growing up in rural Alabama, she was outraged after a family friend was imprisoned for stealing an item valued at 25 cents. "She never stopped risking her life for civil rights and social justice," said one of her brothers, Ronald White.

In Alabama, her parents were were so poor they couldn't afford bicycles for the kids. So her father traveled to New Haven to look for work. He landed a job at the Armstrong Rubber Company, and the rest of the family followed--becoming part of the Great Migration.

She graduated from high school in New Haven and got a scholarship to study at the University of Chicago. After one of the first Freedom Rider buses in the south was stopped and burned by the side of the road, she decided that she had to join the movement. "I was excited to know that people without power could break unjust laws," she told an interviewer decades later. "I wanted to change history."

Before she got on the bus for Jackson, White wrote a postcard to her parents telling them she planned to get arrested and she expected to be in jail by the time they got the card. Which turned out to be correct. She served time in Mississippi's notorious Parchman prison. The guards took her bible and a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare that she had planned on reading, but she said the female Freedom Riders passed the time by telling stories and singing songs.

Take a look at the mug shot of White at the top of this blog post. It's one of 329 photos of arrested Freedom Riders collected and preserved by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which became the basis of a book, Breach of Peace, authored by Eric Etheridge. "She was all about good trouble," Etheridge said when he spoke at the memorial.

I'm used to seeing contemporary mug shots of people who have been arrested for shootings, stabbings and beatings. They typically look sad, or desperate or angry. But these mug shots of the Freedom Riders are different. They were dignified, determined and hopeful. White told the interviewer that when she walked from the bus towards the "whites only" waiting room, she felt "uplifted."

During the memorial service, one of White's former students, Marcella Flake, said White "taught little brown girls like me to be hopeful and brave."

At the memorial service, she was still teaching.

A Homecoming in the Heartland

When I was about 10 years old, I had an experience that reshaped my image of what a woman could be. It was 1962 or so. I was standing on Bridge Street in Humboldt, Kansas, my Hamm family's ancestral home, when I saw what at first seemed like an apparition.


A tractor was barreling down Bridge Street toward the Neosho River Bridge. The driver was standing rather than sitting on the seat, with head held high and shoulders thrown back and legs spread wide. It took me a moment to realize it was a woman. She wore a sleeveless shirt and had muscular upper arms; she wore her hair short. She powered past me me on the way to who knows what. She was in command, and she was flying.

The Neosho River Bridge, built in 1932.

Years later, in fact, just a few years ago, I learned that the woman driving the tractor was a distant cousin of mine--who farmed a spread of land on the other side of the Neosho.

Yesterday, when my siblings and I were in Humboldt to bury our father, I saw that cousin sitting on the front porch of a farmhouse alongside the road with a large black dog resting beside her. We waved to her and she waved to us. She's in her 90s now. She doesn't farm any more. Another cousin told me she's now a tiny person.

But she still looms large in my memory and makes me think of the type of people who farm in southeast Kansas and a lot of other places in our country. I have tremendous respect for them--for how hard they work, the financial risks they face, their self reliance, and their persistence.

My father, Bob Hamm, was one of them even though, for the last many years of his life, he was no longer a farmer. He was shaped by his farm upbringing. He lived the life of the responsible citizen committed to serving society.

Dad left Kansas in 1960, but on Friday we buried his ashes in a grave next to our mother in Humboldt's Mt. Hope Cemetery. The cemetery lies just east of the land he farmed when my elder brother and I were children, and just to the north of the spot where a brick factory owned by our ancestors had once stood. He had been born in another farmhouse about a mile from where we stood.

When I looked at the small hole that had been dug in the earth of the cemetery (by the nephew of one of his childhood friends) and at the rich, almost-black dirt that had been piled next to the hole, I felt that this was the perfect place for him to end up.

We don't get back to Kansas often. A couple of years ago my siblings and I took our father back to his hometown for what we all knew would be his last visit. It was a totally satisfying time--of fond memories of people who have passed away and places that have been transformed. This time our visit was full of love for each other and for our cousins, who kept us company at the grave and around town.

On our visits, we follow a beaten path--stopping at the house where our father was born, the home of our great-grandparents, our cousin's trailer hitch factory, the land our great-great-grandfather farmed on the banks of the Neosho after he served the Union Army in the Civil War, and the downtown square, where our great-grandfather, James Willis Hamm, played the cornet in a small community band that performed in a gazebo on the town square.

James Willis Hamm, 1865-1947.

Thanks to the efforts of some of our cousins, Humboldt, which once seemed to be on the verge of being a ghost town, is full of life and hope. It looks better than it has ever looked in my lifetime.

I have done very little actual farming in my life, but I have a romantic attachment to it. On this trip, I asked a cousin if he would mind taking me out in the combine to harvest corn. He readily agreed. I was thrilled.

A combine is like a mobile corn processing factory. The tines on the front strip ears off the stalks as the 25-foot-tall machine moves relentlessly forward, gobbling up six rows at at a time. The machine chops up the stalks, shucks ears and shears the corn from the cob. The corn kernels get blown up a pipe to a hopper sitting on top of the combine and the rest gets blown out the back onto the field.

When my cousin's father and my father were were  teenagers, they plowed the fields using mules or horses and harvested corn by hand. Today's automated and air conditioned harvest factories are wonders. But my cousin tells me that some farmers now use driverless combines. Trucks pull up alongside the machines when the hoppers are full and offload the corn without the combine having to stop for a minute.

Dick Works and a couple of his cousins.

My farmer cousin, Dick Works, is thinking he will farm for one more year. After that, land that has been in my family since the 1850s will be worked by others. So I'm glad I got to ride the combine while I still had a chance.

When we were in the cemetery, before my father's burial, we stood at a nearby grave site while yet another cousin buried the ashes of her grandmother, my father's aunt. My cousin spoke lovingly and movingly of her grandmother.

It reminded me of a truth that I have contemplated repeatedly over these past few years, as I attend more funerals than weddings: History books tell the stories of the march of human progress through the tales of kings and queens, generals, and captains of industry The stories of the millions of regular people are ignored, and, typically, when their children and grandchildren die, they are forgotten. But, in my view, it is these people--people like my father and his aunt and the cousin who drove the tractor down Bridge Street--that really move our civilization forward. I tip my hat with respect to them.

-----

It turns out there's a lot to see and do in the heartland in September. Here are some shots from the Great Oklahoma State Fair, in Oklahoma City. I sampled my first corn dog, and it was delicious.

Ghosts of Industry: Christow, England

The countryside in and around the village of Christow, in the southwest of England, is as bucolic as all get out. The hillsides are covered in trees and sheep-filled meadows. The houses are beautiful old stone structures, and, in some cases, they have thatched roofs that seem to have been around since medieval times.

Much of the country around there is part of Dartmoor National Park, and there are awesome moors nearby where heather-covered hills undulate far into the distance.

You drive along one-lane roads where the hedges stand like soft green walls, and, in places, the leaves brush both sides of your car as you pass through. And when a car or tractor comes from the opposite direction, watch out! You may have to back up 20 yards to find a place in the road that's wide enough to accommodate two vehicles.

While walking, or between infrequent encounters with autos, you might see a fox trotting along the road or hear people talking on the other side of a hedge--but never see them.

Former Bennah Mine headquarters.

Yet this delightful pastoral scenery hides a surprising past. From the early 1800s until the 1950s, this was a bustling mining region. They mined silver, lead, copper and other metals in pit mines powered in the early days with steam turbines.

That charming old farm house was once a mine headquarters. The tumble-down stone wall was the remnants of a powerhouse. Those handsome stone chimneys once took away the smoke of burning coal.

Former powerhouse and chimney.

The only pub in Christow, the Artichoke Inn, has been operating since at least 1165--and most probably longer. Nathan, the manager, told us it had been a recruiting site during the Crusades. He also told us it was haunted by the ghost of an old woman. She passed by while he was sitting at the bar one night. The sight of her made the hair on his arms stand on end.

There were some wonderful old photos on the walls of the Inn.

 

Some of the mine shafts went down 500 feet. The miners blasted the rock faces with an explosive jelly, gelignite, which was made by dissolving cotton in nitroglycerine and mixing it with wood pulp and saltpeter. After blasting, they dug out chunks of ore with picks and shovels.

I found a local oral history book in the house where we stayed. They used horses on the farms until the mid 1930s, when tractors came in. There was no electricity in the village until 1949. One of the oldsters, Len Bushen, said: "The valley used to be very productive. There were the mines, two quarries, and the concrete works--and now there's nothing. Taken over by big firms and then shut down."

This has been the pattern all over the world during the past 150 years. Locally owned businesses are sold to large corporations based elsewhere--which maximize profits and have little regard for the local people or environment. Then bad stuff ensues.

We had a drink in the Artichoke Inn.

My nephew James told me that mine operators in Mexico brought in miners from Devon. The miners took with them a local dish, the Devon Pasty. which is made by folding meat and vegetables in a pastry dough and baking it. The pasties were practical for taking down into the mines. In Mexico, he said, the Devon Pasty evolved into the empanada. This story is echoed by others, but I read elsewhere that empanadas came to central and south America from Galicia, in northwestern Spain. So, who knows?

I want to leave you with a couple of bucolic photographs:

Moonrise over the hedge.

Poet Mary Oliver said that the spirits of the dead rest in the tops of trees. I would add: hedges. Our patriarch, Bob Hamm, who died in February, was watching over us in Christow.