Odd Trees I’ve Seen: The Granby Oak and Pinchot Sycamore

Granby Oak

August 30, 2012 — We have always anthropomorphized trees. Our myths and stories are full of tall, barky organisms bestowing on us their oracular wisdom drawn straight from the soil or attacking us in nightmare forests with pointy limbs. When, out in nature, you come face-to-trunk with some of the more massive, ancient, and gnarly of the species, it’s really easy to see why we do that.

At least, that was my experience a couple of months ago, when I made a quick jaunt down into Connecticut to see two such specimens that should have eyes and mouths carved into their trunks, the Granby Oak and the Pinchot Sycamore.

The Granby Oak is a white oak and can be found in the town it’s named after, in a small plot of cleared land the size of a house. It’s directly on and overshadows the residential Day Street, so much so that tall trucks passing through have damaged its limbs in the past.

The 450-year-old, 80-foot-tall monster is also called the Dewey-Granby Oak, Dewey being the family name of the settlers who purchased in the 1700s the land it dominates. In fact, the Dewey family continued to own it throughout the generations until the end of the 20th century.

It’s most distinctive features are its creepy pythonic branches, some of which are so long (sometimes as long as the tree is tall) that they have to travel down and along the ground for their weight to be supported, creating this weird jungle gym that’s almost impossible to capture with pictures. Were it not for the fact that is has similarly serpentine branches stretching toward the sky, it would seem like the tree is growing upside down.

I absolutely love this tree. I found it grand and spooky and I want to rock babies in its branches and read large books at its base. Sadly, we saw some pretty extensive storm damage during our visit. If it manages to continue to avoid being broken by weather, then sitting so close to the road as it is, I can only surmise that its end will be equally as violent, with an automobile accordioned against its immense flank. But it will take as many of us with it as it can when it goes.

While not as aesthetically awe-inspiring as the Granby Oak, the Pinchot Sycamore is the largest tree in Connecticut and one of the largest sycamores in the country. The only measurements I could find for it online are about 15 years old, but at that time the trunk was a staggering 26 feet in circumference and it stretched to a height of 95 feet, while spreading its limbs for an average width of 140 feet.

This tree is estimated to be between two and three centuries old and is named after Gifford Pinchot, a conservationist and forestry expert from Connecticut.

Pinchot Sycamore

Its colossal trunk is like the leg of some prehistoric beast, the kind that your eyes can’t make sense of up close, but then again there’s no real need to as you only need to be cognizant of the bottom of its giant foot when it smashes you. Four or five major limbs sprout asymmetrically off it at a point relatively low on the thick trunk, rendering it not so much majestic as, I don’t know, thick. It’s more elephant than elegant.

Its shape changes drastically depending on which side of its column you view it. From one angle it looks like some enormous claw reaching from the ground, from another it appears almost humanoid with two arms uplifted like his favorite football team just scored.

You can find this guy on the banks of the Farmington River in Simsbury Park in the town of Simsbury. On the other side of the intersection of Hartford and Nod Roads is a dirt road that descends into a parking where you can get up close to it. It’s not a very pretty spot due to the tree being back-dropped by an automobile bridge, but I guess if you’re an ancient giant tree, then you can be the 800-pound gorilla that sits anywhere it wants to.

Well, that’s it. I’m out of synonyms for big. Although I will say that writing about trees feels like a real palate cleanser for some reason. Maybe it’s because five of out of my last six posts have dealt with dead astronauts, dead actors, dead animals, and dead pirates.

Give Us More Space

Neil Armstrong’s Death Puts Humankind’s Space Efforts into Perspective  

August 27, 2012 — God damn it. Neil Armstrong is dead. The first human being to set foot on a solar body other than this well-trod Earth. The first man to disturb the dust on a satellite that humankind has been worshiping and waxing philosophical about since we could worship and wax philosophical.

Bums me the heck out.

But not because we’ve lost somebody who is a hero for our entire species. That’s sad, but not tragic. He lived a kick-ass life, a statement that would be true even if he had lived only a mayfly span of time, just long enough to take a giant leap for mankind. What’s tragic is how little our space programs have progressed since that mammoth moment on July 21, 1969.

From the time Orville Wright flew a crude spruce wood and canvas plane into the air for 12 seconds on a sand dune in North Carolina to the exact second that Armstrong floated down the ladder of the Apollo Lunar Module was 66 years. That is a staggering amount of progress for that timeframe. It means entire generations lived in both a pre-flight world and a post-spaceflight one. That’s crazy to me.

So you’d think progress in that area would continue to be exponentially propelled forward in the 44 years since Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. I mean, we should have a moon base. Regular manned missions to Mars, maybe some of the moons of the gas giants. Landed on a comet or two. Robots all over the solar system. A “Welcome to our solar system banner” somewhere outside of the orbit of Pluto. Instead, we have a cramped and obsolete space station orbiting the Earth and a few robots on Mars.

And while both of those accomplishments are pretty awesome in and of themselves, they lose luster in the grander context.

ISS is merely the extension of the millions of satellites-turned-space-junk that we've been tossing into orbit for the past half a century. The recent and exhilarating Mars Curiosity landing is only a refinement on something the Soviets did four and a half decades ago. That’s right. The very next year after the moon landing, the Soviet space program successfully landed a probe on Venus, following it up with some 10 more over the course of 15 years that sent back data and pictures. You can see them here.  As an aside, they also “reached” the moon a decade before we did. Here’s the proof.

And, of course, the U.S. landed on Mars in 1975 with the Viking probes and the Mars Pathfinder in 1997, while the Spirit and Opportunity rovers missed the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to land on the red planet.

So we’re receiving more and more data with more and more sophisticated instruments on Mars, but we’re not exactly branching out into the solar system. More like running over the same old, albeit alien, ground.

And, today, in 2012, we have no excuse.

We haven’t been stagnating in other areas of development. We’ve made unbelievable progress in the realm of computing, with every one of us having tiny computers in our pockets right now that are more powerful than the computers used in the Apollo missions. But that just underscores how far behind we are. We’re not using that technology to do anything we weren’t already doing in space with much cruder instruments. We’re using it to spy on each other with social media, create the most perfectly targeted ad system, and find the best-reviewed restaurant within a block of us.

But here’s why all of this is important. Every problem, every controversy, every challenge we read about in the news won’t get solved with all the things that we’re constantly fixated on, not new political leaders, not new laws, not new treaties, not new gadgets. In the cosmic scheme of things all of our moral and social progress are just the baby steps in a grander lifecycle. At some point in our distant future—if we have one of those—space exploration will have been the only thing that really mattered. That we took our eggs out of the basket. Otherwise, every cool thing we’ve ever done is moot with one asteroid impact, one temper tantrum from the sun, one virulent strain of disease.

On the positive side, it does seem we’re about to get out of this space exploration stagnation somewhat. We have a private spaceport in New Mexico, for goodness' sake. And, while that just might end up being a carnival ride for the super-rich, maybe it’ll be the catalyst we need to get us out of this gravity.

In the end, the moon landing was a promise to future generations. One we haven’t really kept. I mean, the first man who ever set foot on the moon just died of old age. We're so far behind where we should be in space exploration and development. Let’s hope we get it on track before the NASA Mohawk Guy dies of old age, too.

All images courtesy NASA.

Hollywood Walk of Fame and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre

August 25, 2012 — I was really tempted to just wrap the lyrics of the Kink's Celluloid Heroes around these pics and call it a guest post. But then the “trite” alarm went off in my head, and for some reason I didn’t hit snooze this time. Still, you should know that melancholy little tune was playing inside my head the entire time I wrote this post. And I really need to upgrade my speakers.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is an almost 1.5 mile stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street sidewalk that is lined with terrazzo and bronze stars honoring entertainers from all media, but mostly those in the movie industry. Started in 1960 and run by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, entertainers are nominated and voted on annually and then told that for a fee (Wikipedia says it’s about $30K these days), they can have their name immortalized among the gods and then walked on by the masses.

It’s a little cheesy. A bit of a racket. And a lot hubristic. In addition, over the decade, the area around the Walk of Fame is has really descended into a depressing dinginess.

So, basically, there are a lot of reasons to skip this Los Angeles tourist attraction, although you’ll probably just be trading one bit of depressing dinginess for another. But here’s why you should go. Because it’s pretty much the only bit of planet on which you can guarantee that somebody famous whom you respect stood. I mean, Ray Bradbury knelt here while his star was placed. So did Alfred Hitchcock. Vincent Price. Stan Winston. Pee-Wee Herman. Obviously, I’m just mentioning those in my pantheon, but whatever multi-millionaire has gotten you through the drudgery of this working life, if their star is here, they stood here—actors, directors, musicians, even fictional characters like Godzilla and Lassie, somehow.

The most famous stretch of the Walk of Fame is around Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Pretty much everything I’ve said so far about the Hollywood Walk of Fame goes equally for the 85-year-old Chinese Theatre. Once upon a time, this was the movie venue of movie venues. It hosted Academy Award ceremonies. Appeared in movies. And was the site of some of the biggest movie premieres of all time. Star Wars debuted there. The Wizard of Oz did too. Final Destination 5, as well. And the entire theater is basically upholstered in red carpet since along with those debuts appeared all the actors and directors who made those movies.

Today, instead of it being a glittering beacon of cinematic history, the area in front of the theater is crawling with tourists and those costumed panhandlers who want you to pay to take a pic with them just because they shopped at Party City and have developed the unique adaptation of being able to be fully covered in the dismal Southern California heat. And speaking of those guys, you should watch this documentary about them. Extremely damaging to you if you do.

Still, in that same cement where tourists spit out their gum and cigarettes are far more than just the plain, metal and stone stars of the Walk of Fame. Here are the actual hand, feet, and/or autograph imprints of Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Jack Nicholas, Steven Spielberg, R2D2 and C3PO. The fossil evidence will forever prove that those guys stood there.

I had been prepped in advance for the squalor of Hollywood Boulevard. And knew by common sense the less than impressiveness of brass stars in concrete. But what I was pleasantly surprised by were the murals. I’m not sure if I visited Hollywood Boulevard at a weird time of day or if I was just witnessing the usual economic straits of the area, but just about every other shop that lined the road was shuttered by metal security doors. However, on just about every one of those garage-door-style theft deterrents was painted large black-and-white portraits of those whose names were under our shoe rubber. Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog. Abbott and Costello. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. It was a nice touch.

So I’m going to conclude this post by stating officially that this miserable part of Hollywood is a great spot. Because it shows both the shiny side of glamor and all that disgustingess that the shininess is supposed to distract us from.

From Such Modest Beginnings Will Arise a Smithsonian

August 21, 2012 — I feel like the easiest part of putting together a curiosity cabinet should’ve been the cabinet part. But for some reason it’s that meager piece of furniture that kept me from having one for the past few years.

Mostly, it’s my laziness in actively looking for one, but we also had some requirements. It had to be cheap because we didn’t want to commit to a nice piece of furniture for this purpose. It had to be just the right size to fit on the on-foot-wide lip of granite that runs along the wall of our family room. And it had to have a balanced amount of display space, decent enough to be worth filling but not so much that filling it would take over our life.

Basically, we wanted it to be unobtrusive. A showy curiosity cabinet can sometimes be like that interesting guy who knows too well how interesting he is. Or worse, that mildly interesting guy who thinks he’s fascinating. It’s also the reason why we refuse to call it a Wunderkammer. You have to be at an elite-level of collecting—like ovarian tumor in a custom-made jar or hand of a mummy level of collecting—to be able to use that term.

Last weekend we finally found a cabinet thanks to my mother-in-law’s diligent Craigslisting, meaning I had to start corralling all the random specimens of nature and mildly interesting artifacts from some of our experiences that to this point had been dropped into kitchen drawers, shoved onto dusty bookshelves, and secreted and forgotten about in the center consoles of our cars.

And with that background, here’s a tour of our brand-new, humble curiosity cabinet:

• Vial of dust from our overnight stay at the Lizzie Borden B&B 
• Peruvian Day of the Dead offering from Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo in New Orleans (at least, that’s what the price tag said) 
• Clydesdale shoe sent to me by a trainer in Florida who took pity on me after reading the account of my visit to the Budweiser stables here in New Hampshire 
• A pair of baby octopus tentacles given to us by Mr. ARM from Trundle Manor outside of Pittsburgh 
• Volcanic rock from the top of Mount Vesuvius, the Pompeii-killer 
• Jar of preserved shrimp from a junk shop in North Carolina 

• Shark tooth given to my daughter by a waitress at a restaurant in the Outer Banks 
• Finger armor I bought at a shop in Edinburgh more than a decade ago 
• Snake skin from Maryland 
• Jar of mermaid purses gathered on Ocracoke Island 
• 400-million-year-old Orthoceras fossils bought from some random store in New Hampshire 
• Tiny horseshoe crab in a jar, from the same junk shop as the shrimp on the previous shelf 
• A tiny not-horseshoe crab from a beach in Kitty Hawk 

• Ace of spades from the grave of Houdini in New York 
• Jar of snails (North Carolina junk shop again) 
• Fragment of brick from the demolished sections of Danvers Insane Asylum in Massachusetts 
• A barnacled rock from Bar Harbor, ME, from my wife and I’s first trip to New England together 
• Fairy stones from Fairy Stone State Park in Virginia 
• Sea urchin shell from Odiorne Point in New Hampshire (site of a drowned forest) 
• Spoon-like artifact that my father picked up from some unclaimed luggage a long, long time ago 

• A wine cork from a bottle of Dan Aykroyd wine we bought the day we saw him 
• Large clam shell that was my long-deceased grandfather’s 
• Seashell from the beach where they filmed Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard 
• Redwood pine cone from Redwood National Forest in California 
• Star fish in a clam shell from Hampton Beach in New Hampshire

• Way too many sand dollars from a camping trip on an island off the coast of Maine
• Rock-shell conglomerate, also from Maine 
• Chiton from the already twice-reference North Carolina junk shop 
• Geode that was my wife’s from childhood 
• Seashell that I don’t know where it came from. The Nevada desert, I think. Maybe Rigel III.

Not pictured is a large cow skull that I found in the middle of a field in Florida during my college days. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to couple that with the cabinet.

And there you go. Maybe not a curiosity cabinet worth killing a cat over, but it makes my life feel a sliver less void-y now that we finally have it up.

We Make Great Pets

August 19, 2012 — I’m definitely one of those jerks who treats exotic pet shops like they’re free zoos. Except that I really am always in danger of being a customer, walking out of there with an emperor scorpion or an albino python and everything it needs to make my house its home.

I’ve written somewhat about my love/hate relationship with pets already here, but in a nutshell, I’ve gone through phases of my life where I’ve had lots of them. Phases where I’ve had none of them. I want every pet and I don’t want any pets. I love them to death, hate them to life.

But I still flirt constantly with starting up the old menagerie again. Yesterday, for kicks, we went to an exotic pet store in Plaistow, New Hampshire, called Zoo Creatures. It was relatively small, but packed with a variety of wildlife I couldn’t believe.

First, they had snakes. Everywhere snakes. Like so many that if they had a fire, they’d need Pee-Wee Herman’s help to get them all out of there. They were in little bins stacked floor to ceiling. In acrylic cases like those fill-your-own-bag candy shops. In large tanks. Coiled around the rafters. Waiting for you in the lobby. Following you home in your exhaust pipe. They even had multiple species of cobras, and more than one albino torso squeezer.

They also had a five-foot-long monitor lizard. Australian sugar gliders. Bird-eating tarantulas. Something that looked suspiciously like a baby alligator. A shelf full of scorpions. Peacocks just walking around the parking lot. And that’s in addition to every creature you’d expect to find at any solid pet store: fish, birds, rodents, less exotic lizards and turtles.

I suspect their reptile specialty has something to do with the fact that they share a sign and land with a reptile breeding facility and party venue called NERD. Check them out, and if you make use of their services, invite me. Please.

Zoo creatures was an amazing place, and now I have to spend the next week or two trying to deal with my conflicted attitude toward pets. I’m pretty sure I’m going to break down, but I think it will only be in the direction of what I like to catalog as “decorative pets”. Reptiles, fish, arachnids. Anything behind glass that just looks good in my study.

A five-foot-long monitor lizard would look good in my study.

If he were mine, I'd call him "Hall."

I'm pretty sure you could just customize the colors of
these things according to your preference.

Every time I see an albino python I hear Ziggy Stardust,
but see Brittany Spears.

Just a baby. A terrifying, terrifying
bird baby.

Thought these were just supplies until
I almost leaned against them.

No way would I ever risk asking for one of these by name.

I kind of just want the boxes.

It makes complete sense to me that this was not for sale.

Scorpions under black light. A mixed media piece.

Joseph Steward Museum of Natural and Other Curiosities

August 16, 2012 — Under normal circumstance, the closest you'd probably ever get to the Old State House in Hartford, Connecticut, is signing a permission slip to let your children go there on a field trip…if it were not for one room. One beautiful, inspiring, amazing room that’s worth stowing away on the school bus or even volunteering for dreaded chaperone duty.

Designed by the famous architect Charles Bulfinch, the Old State House was built in the late 1700s. About 150 years later, both the state and city government had moved to new digs and the Old State House at 800 Main Street was turned into an historic site. Today, you can tour through the courtrooms and council rooms where harrumphed such luminaries as P.T. Barnum and Noah Webster, peruse exhibits about Connecticut history and culture, and, if he’s there when you visit, awkwardly avoid the guy wandering around in colonial gear and a powdered wig.

But it’s to a small room on the third floor that you’ll really want to go after you’ve paid the small entrance fee and turned down the guided tour. You’ll know you’ve found it when you see the two-headed calf under glass and the alligator suspended from the ceiling.

Soon after the Old State House was built, Joseph Steward, a painter known for his portraits of eminent citizens, started a natural curiosities collection in its attic, a not-unheard-of practice in those days before the country had natural history museums. A little more than a decade later, the collection outgrew the space and was moved elsewhere in the city before eventually dissipating into other collections, as private collections often do.

However, at some point in the recent past, those persons in charge of preserving Connecticut history had the absolutely brilliant idea to honor Steward’s collection by starting their own collection of curiosities in the same upper space of the Old State House.

As a result, everything in the single room is real…and real awesome. I’m talking stuff like an albino cobra, a stuffed two-headed cow, a two-headed pig in a jar, a whale vertebra, a narwhal tusk, some African tribal masks, and a mummy hand.

There are also some of Steward’s paintings on the walls, but his real legacy is taxidermied piranhas and mounted ungulate heads.

Man, just listing that stuff makes me want to go back. Anybody need a dreaded chaperone?

You should know that the gates of the Old State House
are lined with battle axes.