Windsor Mansion Ruins, Port Gibson, Mississippi

To those who read and especially those who commented to my first post ever linked to Facebook, a big thanks.  I'd been meaning to do something with the picture of the Ugandan charcoal bike for a while and had been thinking about it for a maybe an article to send to Bicycling magazine, but--alas--along with all my other big plans for writing, it has come to naught.

Here are some pictures that I took at the ruins of the Windsor Plantation mansion outside of Port Gibson, Mississippi.

I headed out there one late afternoon.  The owner of the Isabella Bed and Breakfast advised me not to bike out there because of the nature of the road and terrain, and I was very thankful for that advice.  I got out there when the light was still harsh but hung around by myself (with the exception of a brief visit by a young couple) until it got kind of spooky dark.  As a result of the changing light I kept walking the perimeter of the columns essentially taking the same pictures over and over again hoping to get at least a good one or two.

I think columns have interested me since I learned about them back at Cranbrook.  With the different orders and the rules about proportions, I think it is mixture of art and math that appeals.  I remember as a kid looking at Greek and Roman columns and thinking that they were chiseled out of monolithic chunks of marble.  Seeing the quotidian brick exposed beneath what is left of the stucco exterior seems like an apt metaphor for the Old South.

As I mentioned in early post, I planned on visiting Windsor because of a photograph taken Karekin Goekjian.  We have a print of the photograph signed by Goekjian in our upstairs hallway that was part of the High Museum of Art's "Picturing the South: 1860 to the Present" exhibit during the 1996 Olympics.  However, the first picture I remember of the Windsor Columns was a black-and-white photograph by Eudora Welty that included her back-lit shadow taking the picture before the full complement of columns that was standing at the time (it's remarkable in that picture of few and small trees surrounding the site.   For that picture and a history of the house, the Architecturalist blog has a nice post.

The ruins are an artifact of the Old South, especially the flush, booming years right before the Civil War that led to delusions of grandeur about southern civilization that lead to succession.  Beyond the moral blindness the South had with regard to slavery, the foolish Romanticism of the Old South seems embodied in these structures based upon some vision of ancient Greece and Rome.  Though this house actually survived the war only to be destroyed by carelessly thrown cigarette in the 1890s, the remaining ruins remind me of the wrecked steamship, the Sir Walter Scott, in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which is typically read as an emblem of the wrecked Romanticism of the Old South run aground.

And then there's Faulkner, who so masterfully used that failed society and turned used it to build upon the Southern Gothic literary tradition that Poe sorta-kinda started in the nineteenth century.  For as much as Windsor is evocative to me because of the photographs that have come before, it is stark and powerful and sobering because I can't help but recall Thomas Sutpen, Faulkner's Jay Gatsby from Absalom, Absalom!

When I think about the trip I made from Athens to Oxford to Port Gibson to New Orleans and back, I think maybe the 90 minutes I spent at the Windsor Columns will stick most powerfully with me.

Everything is Connected to Everything Else

This is known as the first rule of ecosystem ecology.  In terms of my foot, I went to see Jimbo today and he placed the blame for my foot ailment not only the perodeal tendons but on the cuboid:  "Your cuboid is locked down."  The cuboid is truly a hunk of bone.  The value-added was that he got me on the treadmill to study my running form.  My cadence is perfect at 180/minute, but . . . I've got to work on keeping my arms low, driving through, and using my arms to leverage my hips muscles that will result in a heel kick.   And I'm one of the few people whom he tells to wear "less of a shoe."  That took me straight to Athens Running Company where I got a new pair of Brooks's Pure brands.

Athens Half Marathon Report

Elemental Thing #1:  running.
Ran my first half-marathon of the season.  I love the Athens Half or AthHalf:  running on the streets I know so well, being greeted by friends along the route, being super close to home.  This year's weather was perfect for a race.

I felt that my training had been modest so I was modestly hoping for 8-minute miles.  So I went out and decided not to let the runners passing me in mile one lured me into chasing.  Even holding back the horses, I ran a 7:38.  At that point, I didn't know what that meant.  After my last two disastrous marathons where I bonked at 18 or 20 miles, I didn't trust that I had gone slow enough.  So I made plan and revisions of plans for the race as I was racing, all considerations on the conservative side.  I finally decided that if I felt good running 7:30s up to mile 7 or 8, I'd pick up the pace.  Ended up running a bunch of sub-7:30s but waited until 10 to really try to run harder.  Started running 7:08s, then a 7:02 for God's sake.  Finished very strong running negative splits.  Ended up running a 1:36, which ain't anything to write a blog about (even for me that is about four minutes of my PR) but it is better than expected.

Too bad I've seriously pissed off the peroneal tendons in my right foot.  Because exercise is essential to prevent me from killing other humans, I scheduled an appointed with Horizon PT yesterday and met with Brett today. He hooked me up to all kind of cool things that plug in: ultrasound, a thingy attached up high on my calf that made my foot rhythmically twitch with another thing that make the foot area of the tendons tingle.  And a tuning fork to check for a stress fracture.  Anti-inflammatories in a patch with magnets is strapped to my foot as I type.  I ran for 45 minutes today.  I'll see the King of Horizon tomorrow, Jimbo, for him to look at my running on slow mo.

So here's Jane Prater's idea for my blog:  posted selected pictures from my travels and comment on them.

This is one of my favorite pictures.  I took it in Kampala, Uganda, back in 2008--hard to believe it was over four years ago.  Given my penchant for bicycles and my admiration for them as the most energy-efficient form of human transportation ever created, I tend to always be on the lookout for how people are using them.   Movement, transportation, sustainability, physical activity, mechanical beauty, and the implications of the bicycle for urban design:  all of these things are tangled in my head.  So here I am in freakin' Africa seeing these bikes that none of the other Americans on the trip even seem to notice.  And one of the first ones I see is this bike carrying an impossible load of . . . what?  One of our Ugandan hosts enlightened me that those are sacks of charcoal--the fuel of choice among the poor brought in from the country by the even poorer folks who have the one of the worst jobs in Uganda.  Father Stephen told me that one of the lowest positions in the country is charcoal maker, a backbreaking and lung-blackening job sure to lead to early grave.  Charcoal making:  responsible for the widespread deforestation but necessary to fuel the subsistence living that seems to be large swaths of Kampala's population.

This picture could be entitled "Energy."  The energy it took to produce the charcoal.  The energy represented in the charcoal.  The energy it took for the cyclist to bring this product of the country to the city.  The energy of the city itself.  The glow of the charcoal fires at night that cook the meager meals and provide spectral light for those gathered around red penumbras in the pitch dark of night.

The bike represents a means of the semblance of a livelihood that the cyclist relies upon.  It is not for speed, for "green" commuting, for weekend leisure.  It's essential, like the bike in "The Bicycle Thief."  No bike, no job.

I had the chance to ride one of these heavy steel beasts.  They are awful single-speed monsters made in India or China.  They are ill-designed for the rigors of Africa--the "roads" and the loads that life in Africa demands.  So the first thing that a new bike goes through is Africanization:  rebar is welded to the front fork and rear triangle.  The meager rear rack is removed and replaced with a homemade steel rack which can support a passenger, jerry-cans used to transport water from wells, furniture, or impossible huge sacks of charcoal.  When we went up to Gulu in northern Uganda, I had the opportunity to see how this African retrofit happens with the most improvised of materials.  It was an exhibit of ingenuity that was cut short when the boss bruskly said,  "You go now." 

Technology makes me feel old: blogs and blogging

So, I have done this whole blogging thing in fits and starts.  I think I first blogged when I went to Uganda and that was one way the team was able to keep folks back at home informed about what we had seen.  I think I associated that blog with one of accounts and then had a hell of a time separating out that blog from my personal blog on blogspot http://psquick.blogspot.com. I could have sworn that I had figured it out but low and behold this blog, also called Elemental Things, is completely different. 

And my mother-in-law (and friend) Jane Prater has urged me to write, though I wonder if anybody else but her will read.

She has a very widely read blog (merelyasuggestion jpknits:  google it), which is heads and shoulders superior to anything I'll every produce.  It is a real blog.  It is the kind of blog for which blogging was invented.  It has features.   It has readership.  It has a purpose.  Jane says that blogs are first drafts.  Actually, I think my paper journal is my first draft.  I'm still trying to find my raison d'etre to blog.  I've blogging at work www.ctl.uga.edu, and I've enjoyed that and gotten a real kick out of people saying that they have read the blog.

Elemental Things is really just about the kinds of things that I like to do.  So maybe now that I've sorted out which blog goes where, I'll come back more often.  Next up:  pictures from my Southern Tour, though really you could just go to my Facebook page if you wanted to see those.

Oh, and there's a new car commercial out that makes fun of cars with cassette decks.  That makes me feel old too.