Another great walk in coastal Georgia

Because we can’t walk in our woods in hunting season we’ve been going afield and this week we found a real winner, Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge. Once a training air base for the Army it is now a park and it is beautiful. It’s peninsular location and varied habitat make it popular with the migrating and wintering birds. I’d been a little down about duck populations in the Atlantic flyway, roughly 10% of what they were when I was a little twitcher, and it was good to see such numbers and variety of water birds. Lots of teal (blue and green-winged), widgeons, coots, moorhens, all the waders, including wood storks and one thrilling fly-by of a female peregrine. Also the biggest gators we’ve seen in Georgia, even in Okefenokee. There are really fine trails through varied forest with good live oaks and moss and long leaf pine.

To make the day complete we went to the Altamaha Riverkeepers Clam Jam and dug into the oysters (from Louisiana, Florida and Georgia), clams and shrimp. A fine bluegrass band from Atlanta, the Dappled Grays played two good sets and we met some good folks. The riverkeepers in Georgia are fighting the good fight and we are grateful for them. We also support the Satilla riverkeeper, Gordon Rogers, a forceful advocate for an endangered ecosystem.

Green winged teal photo from christinevadai.com  Thanks.

 

Al Shavarsh Gardner Bardezbanian

It is still too soon to have fully formed thoughts on a character as large and wonderful as Al Gardner but I’ve attempted a start at it.

In one’s short time on earth it is a rare and fortuitous occasion to be accepted as a student by a truly great teacher. The teacher/student form is ancient and human and has a structure from time immemorial. Such a teacher was Al Shavarsh Gardner Bardezbanian and I was infinitely lucky to have found him as a student.

The martial arts as practiced in Asia had a teacher/student dialectic that does not translate easily into modern America. Obedience, respect and subservience are not characteristics of americans, as de Tocqueville observed. For a bookish, intellectual recluse like myself to have found a great teacher of the oriental physical disciplines is an impossibility not to be imagined. Nonetheless something led me to Al Gardner and it changed my life. I remember how it happened. I was in the locker room of a gym and someone mentioned him. I had seen him around town, how could you miss him, 400 pounds, barefoot, on a motorcycle and I said something slighting. A man there said I was completely ignorant and that that man was something really special. I was impressed enough to go and introduce myself.

He accepted me as a student with his easy grace and friendly air. Just as I was about to sign up he grasped my wrist, gently but with immense strength. Looking into my eyes he said; “Ninety percent of the people that want to join the martial arts are assholes. Are you an asshole?” “I don’t think so,” I squeaked, and he accepted it.

To learn at Al’s dojo was to accept his understanding of the martial arts. He told me that learning karate his way meant that one would never have to fight again and he was right. Sure there were tournaments, sparring, exercises, but in the real world, no, one’s acceptance of the way meant that one’s carriage, posture, behavior would preclude fighting as an intrusion of ego. More than my mind he taught my body and when I went on to travel the world, walking the streets of strange cities and byways alone in far away places time and again I saw that my mere attitude meant that I was safe from attack. Because of what he taught my body I was able to walk around the whole world without fear, able to experience the most exotic places and not find them in the least threatening. For this I could never thank him enough.

It was an amazing thing to me that he was not only a martial arts master but one of the finest musicians I’ve ever known. The oud is a notoriously difficult instrument, fretless and obstinate yet Al could make it effortlessly soulful, ardent and deeply emotional. He was not only an oud master, and I don’t believe there’s been a better oud player in America, but his understanding of jazz was encyclopedic and his reed playing was superb, clarinet and alto sax in particular. It was a relief to him to have a student that understood, at some level, music, because he could teach me kata forms with reference to musical notation. “Slow the sweep like a dotted quarter, then the hand strikes are triplets,” he’d say; a great teacher finds a way to communicate. He could enchant me with stories of his encounters with the jazz greats and make me want to learn better. I saw him create the same sort of common understanding with all his students; bankers, ironworkers, lawyers, hippies, it didn’t matter, he would find a way to get his knowledge across.

Anyone that has studied the martial arts with a great teacher knows how they become part of how one experiences the world, a voice in the ear, a presence over one’s shoulder, helping one to be stronger, more disciplined. I saw time and again how Sensei Al turned ordinary people into better humans and I felt myself how he changed me. There is a great loss in my world now that he’s gone yet his voice will still be there, making me work harder, think ahead and BREATHE! I can never thank him enough.

Update: There’s a fine article here (sign in required):

http://www.prx.org/pieces/15307/stationinfo

 

Cumberland Island Report

In an attempt to shake off the profound sadness resultant from the death of my teacher ( see post below) I’ll describe the beautiful weekend we had on Cumberland. We keep some bees on the Island, in good years making honey for the spectacular Greyfield Inn. This year was no good year, either on the mainland or the barrier islands for honey, blueberries, peaches, corn or most other agricultural enterprises. In the dearth of nectar some or our colonies on Cumberland succumbed, to starvation or varroa mites or hive beetles but I went through the survivors, helped them out as best I could and got them ready for the spring that will soon be upon us.

This is the best of times to be on Cumberland, cool, clear, free of pestiferous insects, generous of sun and balmy airs. We had a fine hike on Friday morning, along a trail new to us, through mature longleaf forest and old live oak. 10 kilometers of beauty full of butterflies, spanish moss and big trees. I did some fishing in the afternoon. The sea was soft and still with fish swirling and jumping and small pods of dolphins feeding back and forth in the river. I caught one speckle trout and one redfish and sent them both back to eat more shrimp and get bigger. The air was so still that one could hear the exhalations of the dolphins in the channel as they hurried back below to hunt.

In the evening we went to Lane’s Landing where there’s a cabin we hope to stay in soon. There we experienced a sunset of transcendent beauty and imagined bringing friends there for another such. From the immense marshes to the west rails and herons squawked and chattered and stately wood storks roosted in the trees. As it got dark we went to Plum Orchard, the restored Carnegie mansion, now a Park Service facility, to use their dock for some early evening fishing. I hooked a pair of beautiful sea trout and sent them back to get bigger.

At sunrise we drove up to Stafford Beach, where we were engaged, six years ago, and had a good beach walk, poking in the spindrift for curiosities. Cuban rum bottles, many florescent light tubes and the remains of a dolphin, clearly butchered for meat. Who eats dolphins? It couldn’t have been killed more than forty miles away and I puzzled over it though Ellen pronounced it ’stinky’ and insisted we move on. I’m not talking about dolphin fish ( dorado, mahi-mahi ), a noble fish for the table, this was a bottle nosed dolphin, like Flipper, a mammal and not generally thought of as food. Perhaps it was by-catch for a commercial shrimper. We watched the shrimpers towing their enormous nets offshore, defined for our eyes by the cloud of birds diving into them, and saw plenty of dolphins inside the trawl.

Grateful to our generous hosts we were back in Fernandina by 4:30. It was as fine a weekend as one could have.

Update:  I really should always ask Stacia first.  All dolphins found dead are necropsied, the skulls saved along with some crucial parts and the remains sent back into the sea.  What I found was a relic of research, not harvesting for meat.  Wrong again.

 

Al Gardner Bardezbanian RIP

It is with the greatest sadness that I hear of the death of Al Gardner. One of the finest musicians I’ve ever had the privilege to hear and my martial arts instructor for many years he had a huge influence on me and all of the students in our dojo. A wonderful teacher, a great friend, a man it is impossible to describe. I’ll try to gather my thoughts and write more about him later, I’m too affected now.

 

Night swimming

Went out with a friend for some night time shrimping and it was really fun.  With a 75  by 4 foot seine net we walked out into the Brunswick River about two hours after high tide, around ten pm.  The water was about 74F, quite pleasant and there was plenty of moonlight along with the lights from the Lanier Bridge.  Once out to mid-chest level we turned downriver and forming a long curve with the net started to pull.  The water was alive, little splashing sounds all around, shrimps bouncing off me, phosphorescent trails and sparkles in the water.  We made four pulls and got about half a bucket of shrimp, say 15 pounds or so.  I also brought home a pail of crabs to try, never having cooked blue crabs before.  What do you know they’re pretty good.  It is a really fun way to fish, wading so far from shore, I can’t wait to do it again.

 

Good times down South

Here’s a picture of the way life should be, a Georgia smoker building up heat to slow cook a Cajun style pork shoulder. Weather near perfect, Red Sox heading toward game seven. There is a genuine cloud of mosquitoes, not pictured, everything else pretty all right.

 

Other Reptiles

Not only do we have long skinny reptiles but big round ones too. Gopher tortoises were once very common here and their burrows are an important part of the ecosystem giving shelter to lots of other critters, including the long skinny kind of reptiles. We have a few of them here on the farm though one rarely sees them as they go about their unassuming business. They make a big sand pile at the mouth of their burrows and bury their round leathery eggs in the sand to incubate. Coons and coyotes sometimes leave evidence of egg feasts. This feller wandered through the yard on Friday and I put him in the screen house so Ellen could see him. That’s her hand for scale; he’s a big old thing and was pretty philosophical about an afternoon in the screenhouse.

Local opinion is that they are good to eat and watching him I was starting to think he probably is. General Winfield Scott hero/imperialist warmonger of the Mexican War retired from the Army at the beginning of the War between the States, spending his first leisure at Delmonico’s in NYC where he could get his fill of terrapin; “the best food vouchsafed by Providence to man” as he liked to say. A different critter but not much different. We don’t eat endangered species here, needless to say, even when they’re ‘vouchsafed by Providence.’

 

Fernandez-Armesto, professor, historian, arrested in Georgia

The Columbus Day edition of Bob Edward’s show featured one of my favorite historians, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. I know him only from his magisterial “Civilisations”, one of the most entertaining, provocative and, to me, convincing works of history I’ve read in a very long time.

His talk with the Bob was ridiculously entertaining, confirming everything I’d suspected about the man from reading his book. When I described it to Herself she suggested he might have a blog, something I instinctively disbelieved, and sure enough there is no evidence of such a thing. After some googling though I found that he’d been here in Georgia just this year and had been arrested for jaywalking, roughed up by Atlanta’s finest and tossed in the tank for his sins.

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/34426.html

I wish I’d known this, I would have ridden to the rescue with relish. It is possible that he got more entertainment out of his cellmates than he would have from having a history nerd bail him out so perhaps its all for the best. How typical of This Modern World (TM) that such a thinker would be treated this way.

 

More Fun With Snakes

I know they say white men can’t jump and certainly my hoops ability tended to confirm that but now I know that its all about motivation.  I went reaching into the sandpaper drawer and was faced with this. There’s now a little head shaped dent in the roof of the barn.

 

Michael-ogical

The monsoon has made the yard bloom with an astonishing variety of shrooms. Given that they are the fruits of an organism of mycellial threads interwoven underground its curious they can all exist in the same space. There’s polypores, amanitas, agaricus and a fine Old Man of the Woods ( thats the grey shaggy one upper right ).