Pine-Scented Turkey

Aaah, 'tis the season for the turkey. I am not always called upon to cook the turkey, though I have done so in the past. Most notably, I made Thanksgiving dinner with a big turkey when living in England one year. I had to lug the frozen turkey in my backpack home from the supermarket. I can't remember anything about cranberry sauce or stuffing, but it met the Thanksgiving needs of the three Americans at the table, and satisfied the Thanksgiving curiosity of the three British women at the table.

I went to visit my parents in Connecticut for Thanksgiving. Little Joey the dog came along. It's hard to know what he thinks of the holidays and the dinners since he may not have had the most stable home life before coming to live with me, but he was rewarded with a juicy piece of turkey on Thanksgiving night. We all, that is, Joey's Dad and the extended family give thanks that Joey has come to live with us and become a part of our lives!

The Christmas tree part of the store.
 Notice the blow-up Santa in front. 

It's rare for me to visit my parents without paying a visit to the "World's Largest Dairy Store." (Excuse me, while I scoff. But I can't scoff too long, since Ripley's Believe It or Not gave them this designation a long time ago -- it's on their neon sign.) I grew up near this place when it was still a small barn and the little farm out front still looked more like a hobby farm. As kids, we used to lug their colorful plastic bags for schoolbags, since no one ever bought a backpack back then. I was really shocked recently to learn that my cousin from California had put down a visit to Stew Leonard's on his "must-do" list of tourist sites. Excess and kitschy farm imagery help bring people into the store, though we have always liked the freshness of many items offered. It's the Disneyland of Milk, and they have the same animatronic animal figures to prove it. The milk is definitely a big draw, though they have stopped processing the milk at this facility. Nowadays the display of milk cartons going around the conveyor belt is just for show, and you can tell when you look closely at it.

At different times of the year the Stew Leonard's complex features a garden store, or a holiday store. On the day after Thanksgiving, Florentina's approach to the store was greeted with the huge smell of pine trees. Christmas is on its way.

Heat and Light, Wet and Dry

This past week has been one where lots of people have been eager to get back to routine, the most humdrum of routines if possible, especially if it includes heat and electricity. I am not terribly proud to admit that I couldn't handle the lack of heat and electricity for more than a day and a half before I escaped to Connecticut to my parents' house for those highly coveted items. I'm not quite sure what my dog Joey thought, but I get the sense he was awfully happy to visit a warm house, too.

Downed tree limbs still needing to be cleared from our local park.
(Florentina's been too freaked out by crushed cars
and downed live wires to get those more exciting photos.)

N.B.: Connecticut was actually the hardest hit state with its power outages and still has many residents waiting for the resumption of their services. But my parents were lucky, never having lost power at any time in the aftermath of our freak Halloween snowstorm.

I will admit that I kept thinking of two travelers, if not three, in the past week as the post-snowstorm drama unfolded across the region. Isabella Bird and Mildred Cable kept popping up at alternating moments this week, depending on the conditions around me. I've been looking at Isabella Bird's narrative, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands (1875) for the conference presentation made in Houston, and on my trip to Houston my airplane reading was The Gobi Desert by Mildred Cable with Francesca French (1942). The radical difference in these two environments and the objectives probably caused me to keep thinking about them together, as a way to work out what they might have in common as women travelers coming out of late Victorian backgrounds. I'm going to talk more about Mildred Cable because her narrative describes the extreme conditions here in Florence that made me a little bonkers.

Worth the trip. You'll wish you
could have been with them. 

When things got really cold, sitting around with candles lit and waiting to go to bed with four blankets and thermal underwear under flannel pajamas, my sense of guilt would arise when remembering Mildred Cable's twelve years in the Gobi Desert. That's right. Mildred Cable spent twelve years making circuits in the Gobi Desert with Francesca French and her sister, Eva French. These single women were missionaries for the China Inland Mission and are known to be the first Western women to have crossed the Gobi. Because of the number of times they crisscrossed the desert from 1923 to 1936, the narrative created is non-linear in chronological terms (a typical feature of many travel narratives). Instead the narrative is built around salient aspects of their travel route -- the people, their cultures, the religious landmarks, the local rulers who would be taken over by the Communist Chinese toward the end of the fifteen year period.

This would have been their entourage
during the warmer months. Imagine traveling
with this uncovered wagon during the cold desert winter.

The conditions endured by these three women, their animals, and their porters seem unimaginable when at their worst, and barely tolerable by softy industrialized North American standards even at some of the better oases. But reading this lovely narrative taught me the beauty of pure, clean water and a warm place to sleep. How much these two qualities were valued, as well as the hospitality of their various hosts who grew accustomed to seeing them over the years, teaches the essentials of travel. No complaints about cold noses, lack of fashionable clothes for really cold interiors, or grumblings about when the internet would come back on again.

The narrative describes an unnamed place of danger north of what was known as the Valley of Demons: "From the crest of those hills the blizzard crashes with a violence unknown elsewhere. Here many travellers have met death when the dreaded fan-shaped blizzard cloud spread from behind the summit, and the sudden violence of the wind robs man and beast of any sense of direction, while the perishing cold grips its victims in a deadly embrace" (97). Not many of us can actually be in a place empty enough to see the shape of a storm about to descend upon us, and to be able to do so in such a detached manner suggests a fortitude in meeting the hardships presented in the desert. Cable and French go on to talk about the difficulty in moving forward in these desert weather conditions. Think of that picture of a sandstorm, and add it to the worst snowstorm you've had yet. "All this drought, sterility, climatic hardship, blizzard and hurricane, combine to produce extreme difficulties in the matter of communications. No river is navigable, no railway system is available, and motor traffic, which would be the only remaining solution of rapid land transit, can only be sustained on certain defined routes, and that by dint of very effective organisation" (97). In other words, they had to rely upon their mules, and in certain storms, even they couldn't pull the wagons forward.

The China Inland Mission was famous (or infamous) for allowing women the power to become missionaries on their own, without the tie of marriage to grant them permission to work. Cable and the Frenches show that the CIM were right in recognizing women's abilities to do hard work and endure conditions unimaginable to their sisters living comfortably in Europe, and to me, running away to Connecticut in a warm car with my dog.

The Hatchet Lady at Taylor Farm

Photo by Callie Bundy; norwalk.patch.com

A long time ago, when I was growing up on Long Island Sound in Connecticut, I was brought to this place by a day camp counselor or two. One of them singed her eyebrows trying to start a barbecue for us, while the other one insisted on sending us away to play hide and seek after scaring us with a story about the hatchet lady who lived in the thicket of trees at the top of the Taylor Farm property. Making this problematic was the fact that people would often park their cars at the farm when watching the Fourth of July fireworks at Calf Pasture Beach across the street. Wouldn't the hatchet lady have them for dinner on the Fourth?

I was visiting my family for the Labor Day holiday weekend so that they could meet Joey. We had never been to a dog park, since they weren't really popular when we had the family dog. At first my brother suggested going to the other dog park in town because he remembered Taylor Farm and Calf Pasture Beach lay underwater for days after Hurricane Irene. But the beach is irresistible.

Photo by Callie Bundy; norwalk.patch.com

This time: no hatchet lady, no stupid camp counselors, but just lots of dogs and dog owners ready to make conversation. It's interesting to imagine how the Taylors (if they were the farmers) held this piece of land with their cattle grazing on what is now our city beach, across the street from the farm.

As a kid growing up in this town, we learned nothing of its history, not how this piece of land came to be a farm, or how there had been a vicious Revolutionary War battle fought a half mile away from my former middle school. We weren't even told that my former middle school was once an airfield because it sits at the highest point in the town. Even worse, I certainly never remembered writing down "1651" in my third-grade notebook for the town's incorporation. In fact, it was incorporated on September 11, 1651. This means Norwalk is 360 years old at the end of the week.

Calf Pasture Beach (wiki.worldflicks.org)

What I do know now, besides the fact that I had some pretty crummy public school teachers and will not excuse their failings, is that the name of this town is only one of two municipalities in Connecticut to retain its original Native American name. The name "Norwalk" is deceptive when placed against the other Fairfield County place names such as Westport, Ridgefield, and Easton because it looks like a match. But in fact this was the name of the Native American tribe that lived here on the water, digging up oysters and clams, catching lobsters, and fishing for dinner. I wonder what they did with the horseshoe crabs that I used to see lurking near shore.