Journal of a Sabbatical

November 15, 1999

one stop shoping

Today's Reading: Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau, Bird News by Vernon Laux, A.C. Bent's Life Histories of North American Wild Fowl, Volume 1

Yesterday's Reading: Born Naked by Farley Mowat, Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau

Day Before Yesterday's Reading: Born Naked by Farley Mowat

About Friday's cryptic mention of a Ross goose:

There is some controversy as to whether the small plump goose at Plum Island is a Ross goose, a small snow goose, or a hybrid. I might have been influenced in my identification, as the law enforcement guy at the gate asked me if I was looking for the Ross goose. It plants that predisposition in your mind.

It was late in the afternoon, nearly sunset - I'd gone there as kind of an afterthought. Anyway, said goose was in the field near the Pines Trail about 15 to 20 yards from the fence. It was grazing contentedly so had its head down most of the time. When it finally did raise its head, I saw a stubby beak that to me looked mottled with a bluish color near the base. Based on its overall stubbiness and small size, the bluish mottling on the beak and either no or very little black on the sides of the beak I figured it must be a Ross. The snow goose has like black lipstick on the sides of the beak - I remembered that from a binoculars ad that touted stability using the absence of a "grinning patch" on the Ross's goose as an example of why you needed their binoculars.

I tried to take a picture (see Friday's entry) but it was getting dark and I was shivering in the cold. For some reason I had forgotten to put my jacket on. The picture is blurry and no help at all.

Birders with way more experience than I have disagree about the identity of the small plump goose. So who am I to say it's a Ross? Since I've never seen one before, I have nothing to compare it to. I guess I'll hold off on entering it into Bird Brain for my life list until I get a better look and confirmation by somebody more experienced.

Since I wrote the above, greater minds than I (not to mention photographers with longer lenses) have determined the goose in question to be a hybrid: snow goose x Ross goose. But the debate continues. I guess I'll have to wait for a definite Ross to come along.

Saturday it was off to the Museum of Fine Arts for the Martin Johnson Heade exhibition. We both really wanted to see the salt marsh pictures and Thunderstorm on Narragansett Bay. I think we both thought that we'd be able to commune with the paintings quietly. Ha! The museum was a madhouse. Crowds upon crowds upon crowds. Children and old people all attired in their best upper middle class WASP finery. Art students attired all in black with so many piercings they look like pincushions. Japanese tourists by the dozens. More people than a sellout at Fenway Park. And the blockbuster Pharaohs of the Sun thing hadn't even started yet.

Thunderstorm on Narragansett Bay was in the first room of the Torf Gallery, so we made a beeline toward it. I was trying to point out some details about the gulls (very tiny but accurate laughing gulls or Bonaparte's gulls) and the thin streak of lightning. I was pointing at these and we were both leaning in close. I guess I get carried away trying to help Nancy see things. A formidable museum guard came over to us and reprimanded me for pointing so close to the painting. Silly me responded "I wasn't touching it!" to which she replied "I didn't say you were but you're too close to be pointing, someone could bump into you and your finger would go into the painting." I felt embarrassed and wanted to sulk. Especially when I saw a guy doing exactly what I was doing who didn't merit the guard's attention.

One of the paintings, Sunrise on the Marshes, has a gigantic haystack in the foreground that dwarfs everything. There's a bunch of miniature cows behind it making it look wildly out of proportion. No human could stack hay that high. Nancy opines that the tiny cows must be showing perspective and they're further away than I think. I'm not buying that. The haystack is monstrous. This gets me onto a tirade about one of my favorite philosophical problems: the introduction of perspective in western art. If I don't understand something that I think everybody else gets, I'll beat my head against it until I do.

Oh, I understand the idea that objects look smaller when they're further away. And I understand Alberti's rules of how to paint in perspective. That's not my problem. My problem is the philosophers' and the Jungian psychologists' belief that humans didn't see in perspective until perspective was introduced into western art. Particularly troubling to me is the notion that people from societies with a different, that is flat, art tradition don't see the world the same way that people in societies with perspective in their art do. I'll buy that they don't see art the same way. I'll buy the idea that we in western societies have the collective illusion that perspective in art makes the scene look more natural. I just can't buy the idea that simply being born into a society that has one type of art or the other changes a person's visual perception of objects in space.

What got me started beating my head against this problem was reading Steve Talbott's book The Future Does Not Compute the first summer after I quit my "real" job. He has a whole chapter on perspective as one of the abstractions that once introduced has separated us a little further from actual reality. How did our ancestors judge how far away the charging mastodon was? How did they keep from stepping off cliffs? Why do we have two eyes? Enquiring minds want to know.

So between being reprimanded by the guard and disturbed by the monstrous out of proportion haystack, I was already weirding out. Nancy went off to find a restroom while I looked at the hummingbird and magnolia blossom paintings from a distance that made it hard for me to read the signs. I reached up and held my glasses a little bit away from my eyes to bring the signs into better focus without getting closer to the painting. I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I knew it wasn't Nancy. A woman in her 70's with tubes up her nose and an oxygen tank on wheels behind her tells me taking pictures is a no-no in the museum. Hunh? I look really confused. She says "Oh, I thought you were taking pictures" and laughs. I laugh too, a little uncomfortably, and decide to go sit on a bench near the entrance to the gallery until oxygen cart woman is gone and I feel like I have a right to view the pictures again.

When Nancy came back from the ladies room she wanted to show me some botanical prints she had passed on the way, in an exhibit called Temple of Flora. There was one of the underside of a water lily leaf that was just stunning. I wanted to live with it. In fact, the whole botanical print exhibit was much more fun than the Heade because it wasn't crowded and the prints were better lighted so you could actually see details.

We finally did go back to the Heade exhibit and get our fill of salt marshes, hummingbirds, and magnolia blossoms, but my comment when we finished was that we'd have been better off to view it on CD-ROM or something. I bought the catalog to study at home.

After Saturday, I never wanted to visit the MFA again. Nor did I want to go to Boston ever again. I hope I'm not developing some weird form of agoraphobia or worse, Merrimack Valley Syndrome a condition in which people never travel outside of the Merrimack Valley their whole lives and don't feel they've missed anything.

I read aloud to Nancy from Born Naked both Saturday night and Sunday morning. She's a big Farley Mowat fan too. I'm getting near the end, to the part where we see the young boy becoming the Farley Mowat we're familiar with. His expedition to Churchill with his Uncle Frank at the age of 15 clearly formed his adult attitudes toward birds and other animals, and it makes for very good reading.

I drove Nancy home on Sunday afternoon, figuring we'd take a walk on the East Bay Bike Path, but by the time we got near Providence it was pouring rain. So we took our nature walk in the Brown Bookstore. Nancy browsed heavily at a collection of Audubon's writings and I browsed at and bought Wild Fruits, a previously unpublished work by Thoreau.

I started to feel extremely tired and hot at the bookstore but figured it was just because I wanted to be outdoors. By the time I got home though I felt like I had a raging fever and every muscle and joint in my body ached. I took to my bed with the Heade exhibit catalog, Born Naked, Wild Fruits, and the dictionary in case I needed to look anything up. I finished Born Naked and read huge chunks of Wild Fruits, which follows the seasonal cycle of fruits and seeds of New England plants. I especially liked the passages about strawberries.

I fell asleep early Sunday night but woke up feverish in the middle of the night convinced I was about to die from something exotic like cat scratch fever and nobody would know. This morning the fever seemed not quite as high, and I obviously wasn't dead, but my skin felt so prickly I couldn't stand the feeling of clothing or sheets. If I could have taken my skin off, I would have.

I stopped for gas at one of those mini-mart places this afternoon. I'm still a little feverish so I find myself staring intently at the display screen on the gas pump with its scrolling message thanking me for choosing Salisbury One-Stop Mini-Mart for my "one-stop shoping". Shoping? I watch it scroll by again hoping to see another p. It still says shoping. I'm mesmerized by this, lulled into a half conscious stupor when the gas pump starts talking to me. "You've been working hard. You deserve to relax. We have ice cold Bud to help you unwind." Startled doesn't begin to cover it. It took me a minute to calm down and realize it was a speaker next to the gas pump blaring preprogrammed advertising just like the scrolling "one-stop shoping".

I should never have gone out at all, but I was feeling so cooped up I just had to.

Maybe shoping is the new modern spelling...

Volume 1 of A.C. Bent's Life Histories of North American Wild Fowl: Ducks, Geese, and Swans finally came in today's mail.