Enchanted Rock

Some photos from my hike yesterday at Enchanted Rock, with my friend Melodie. I used to come here a lot when I was in grad school in Austin. It’s about 17 miles from Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country. We found the prickly pears in full bloom.

Camels in the Texas Hill Country

In the Texas Hill Country near Kerrville and Bandera, it’s not uncommon to see peculiar fauna behind fences near the highways. Various ranches here keep exotic game for sport or meat: bison, gazelles, emus and ostriches. But yesterday, I drove past a sculpture that caught my eye, and it’s of an animal I’d seen aplenty in Egypt and Jordan, but never in Texas.

This sculpture of a camel sits just off a highway on the way to Bandera. At the Camp Verde General Store, the camel is king. The store was established in 1857, when the land it sits on was a US Army outpost.

In 1854, Jefferson Davis, then the Secretary of War (in a few years he would become President of the Confederacy), issued an order for an experiment in Army transportation.

The arid climates of western Texas were often a hardship for those who had to travel in them: Pony Express horses would wilt from lack of water, and infantrymen would do the same. The harsh and waterless region proved dangerous and often fatal. With a $30,000 appropriation from Congress, the army imported swift dromedaries and burden camels from Egypt and shipped them to Texas, where they ended up at Camp Verde. The camels proved to be perfect pack animals for the climate here, carrying heavier loads and traveling farther than horses.

When the Civil War broke out, there were 53 camels at Camp Verde. The fort passed into the hands of the Confederacy in 1861, and was recaptured by the US Government in 1865. By then, the number of camels had grown to 100.

With reconstruction taking up the resources of the government, the army halted the program, and the fort was deactivated in 1869.

The camels were distributed to circuses, and, by some accounts, a large part of the herd was bought by a local family named Coopwood, who contracted with the US Postal Service to carry mail between Texas and Mexico. Thievery and mishaps scuttled that operation, and many of the animals were confiscated and set loose in Arizona. But Coopwood kept some of the beasts, and bred them for years afterward.

One account from a website said: “According to Coopwood’s descendants the camels were once the hit of Austin’s Mardi Gras parade. The King of the Carnival’s float was drawn by thirty-two camels, each camel was lead by a costumed Negro holding a lighted torch.”

We can be grateful that our society has moved forward and no longer tolerates racist spectacles like Coopwood’s Mardi Gras float in Austin.

But it might be nice to see camels again, mingling with the other exotic critters in the Hill Country pastures.

The Camp Verde General Store and Post Office does its part to keep the spirit of the great camel experiment alive. Nearly every nook and cranny of the reconstructed building is inhabited with the figure of one of these so-called ships of the desert.

New Year Baby on PBS

A couple of summers ago, I helped a young filmmaker in the final weeks of edit on a film about her life. Socheata Poeuv was born in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand and lived almost all her life in Texas with her parents, two sisters and a brother.

But one Christmas she learned some truths about her family that had been concealed since the time she was born, after her parents fled the camps where the Khmer Rouge forced millions of Cambodians to go during Pol Pot’s reign of murder. Socheata learned her family was affected in profound ways.

The film, called New Year Baby, chronicles Socheata’s journey back to Cambodia with her parents, where she comes to understand the story behind the shocking news she got that one Christmas holiday.

The film is a lovely and moving story of a family coming to grips with a horrible past and a young woman finally comprehending so much about the history of her family and their home country. And it makes innovative use of animation to tell the story of the Khmer Rouge’s impact on Cambodia.

New Year Baby premieres on PBS tonight on WNET in New York on the program Independent Lens. To check local listing where it will play in your area, go here.

Carrier

A couple of people I know worked on a multi-part series that premieres on PBS this week. It’s called Carrier, and production crews spent six months on the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2005. The editing took two years to complete. Judging from the first two hours which showed last night, it is an extraordinary effort, beautifully shot and well told.

Seeing the amazing imagery in vivid high definition and observing how the producers found characters that represent the various strata of the floating population of 5,000 crowded into a ship 24 stories high, I was reminded of my own experience on aircraft carriers. For CNN, back in December of 2001, I spent a week and a half on the USS John C. Stennis (named for an Alabama senator, the only carrier in the fleet named for a senator, the others are named for presidents, an admiral, a member of the House and the site of the first airplane flight). I produced an hour-long documentary called Carrier at War with correspondent Frank Buckley. That was my first trip to the Middle East (the US Fifth Fleet, where we caught the flight to the carrier, is based in Bahrain) and my first coverage of the military. As followers of my career know, it would be the first of many.

Several months later, for a documentary on military aircraft called War Birds, I visited the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was first to deploy a squadron of the new class of Navy fighter jets - the F/A-18E Superhornets. For that show, I got shots of carrier landings from a helicopter. I was strapped in a harness, my feet dangling over the Pacific Ocean, as I shot out the open side door of the chopper.

And I also sat next to a sound man who had a fear of flying and threw up on the short COD (carrier on-board delivery) flight and carrier landing, which jerks to a halt when the tail hook grabs the wire.

With several hours to tell the story, Carrier appears to be a comprehensive — but still fascinating and gripping — story of a deployment of one of ten aircraft carriers in the American fleet. I’m looking forward to meeting more of the thousands of the Nimitz crew who support the 4.5 acres of flight deck and the dozens of aircraft of Carrier Air Wing 11.

More Princeton Springtime

A tiger near my apartment in Palmer Square, Princeton.

My office (the window on the top left) in the attic of the Joseph Henry House. Built in 1837 for the eponymous physicist who was lured to Princeton with a $1000 annual salary and the promise of his own home, the house was constructed to Henry’s specifications.

Joseph Henry House has been moved three times over the years, but has been at its current spot — above Nassau street across from Starbucks — since 1946, when it was moved to make room for the Firestone Library. Over the years, the house has primarily been a private residence, but now serves as home to the Council for the Humanities and the seminar room where I teach.

An Oval with Points, a Nose, an Elephant

“Have you ever taken pictures of this before?” the security guard asked me just after I pressed the shutter for a photo of this sculpture on the Princeton campus.

“Just one wide shot a few weeks back when it was snowing,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Have you seen the nose?”

“Uh, no.”

“Follow me,” he said, and he made his way up a walkway, chatting away. “I tell people whenever I see them taking pictures, because it changes as you walk around this side, and some people miss it. See the nose now?”

“Yes, I do.” And there it was. Plain as the… er, well, you know.

“We call it Nixon’s nose,” he said, and wished me a “blessed day” as he continued his rounds.

From this angle, it did resemble a face with a prominent nose. Walk further around it and the face contorts, like the comedy/tragedy masks on a theater facade.

The bronze sculpture is one of a handful of casts of Sir Henry Moore’s “Oval With Points,” and it sits on a lawn next to Princeton’s Nassau Hall. There are other casts of the work in Kew Gardens and the Columbus Museum of Art. I’ve seen several of this British artist and sculptor’s works in my various travels. Most impressive are his large bronze sculptures like this Oval with Points.

And though the sculpture was created during the same years Nixon was in office, the genesis of the piece was not that infamous President’s famous profile, but the skull of an elephant. British evolutionary biologist Sir Julian Huxley brought home a skull from East Africa and showed it to his friend and fellow knight Henry Moore. Moore became fascinated with the curves of the skull and its empty eye sockets and, as the story goes, his close study of the elephant head inspired this oval cum face.

But none of the literature I found about the work confirms whether the protuberance is a proboscis.

Though the sculpture is now roped off to allow the grass to grow back, judging by the areas where the green patina has rubbed away to shiny bronze, it’s clear many hands and buttocks have polished parts of this artwork over the years, as people posed for photos and children played and climbed on it. Just as Henry Moore intended.

But what of the other intentions of this pointed oval, inspired by a dead elephant, appearing like a face?

Is that a nose? Only Moore knows.

And he’s taken the secret with him to the elephant’s graveyard.

Spring Arrives in Princeton

Owl in Flight

Today, while importing some other photos I took at Princeton’s campus this morning, I discovered this photo of the owl you met the other day.

Here he is, flying away from me and my camera.

Noisy Cairo

I am convinced that my hearing is worse after a year of living in Cairo, and I always thought the decibel level in the city is unhealthy. New York Times bureau chief Michael Slackman has a story in today’s paper that confirms my suspicions.

He quotes an engineer named Mustafa el Sayyid, who helped carry out a study on Cairo’s high decibels: “All of greater Cairo is in the range of unacceptable noise levels from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.”

To illustrate the story, photographer Shawn Baldwin finds salesmen yelling in one of the city’s crowded markets. Another image highlights the chaos of Cairo’s streets, the traffic with its engines and blaring horns. In that photo, two boys cling to the back of a microbus with rebar on its roof.

Cairo’s overall noise level, according to the article, is like living with a running lawnmower next to you.

No wonder the word for *what* in Egyptian Arabic is “eh?”

Skyline Drive, Virginia

While driving from Harrisonburg, Virginia to Washington, DC today, I took the scenic route and caught a glimpse of this marvelous owl on the side of the road on the famous Skyline Drive.