A WALK IN THE FIRMAMENT

Had you been in Ridgecrest, California on the afternoon of Saturday, January 21^st you might well have seen a small group of people walking south down the narrow sidewalk of China Lake Boulevard, occasionally spilling into the road.  The group was mostly, but by no means all, women, and one of the walkers appeared (I say appeared because you don’t want to be dogmatic about these things) to be a very tall man in a wig and fishnet stockings.  This was, as you’ll have guessed by now, one more anti-Trump demonstration, officially described as the Women's March to Petroglyph Park, followed by a candlelight vigil.  The photo below is by Jessica Weston of the Daily independent.

I didn’t join in because I wasn’t sure of the etiquette of some out of town, sis-gendered male infiltrating a women’s march, but I waved and cheered as they went on their way.  It was a very good-natured march.

In fact I was going to the Murango Museum, which I knew had the Gladys Merrick Garden, and a labyrinth, but I hadn’t been expecting a “planetary walk” a long outdoor path depicting the solar system, the sun represented by a small football-sized yellow sphere, the other planets represented by spheres of appropriate size and positioned at the proper scale distance from the sun. Pluto (which perhaps they still regarded as a planet: info was thin on the ground) was some two hundred yards away along the path.

In fact it was cold and raining in Ridgecrest by the time I got to the museum but who could resist a walk to the end of the solar system?  You walked out there, past earth:

past Saturn:

past all the rest, and when you got to the end (well before you reached the mall with the Marshall and Jo-Ann stores) you looked back across the planets at a now barely visible sun.  

You could also make out some white structures related, I think, to astronomical observation; one of which had been burned since I last visited.

I was deeply impressed by this planetary arrangement. I’d never seen or done a planet walk before, though I now gather there are plenty of them about, and many are much longer than the one I did.  The walk at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, Vermont, is 1.6 miles long.  The one at the Robert Ferguson Observatory in Sonoma is two and a bit, though the latter has the planets set at intervals along a winding trail.  The joy of the walk in Ridgecrest is that it’s straight and flat (the way you imagine a diagram of the planets to be).

Ridgecrest is on the edge of the Mojave desert, and I often get annoyed by people who describe the desert as a “lunar landscape.”  Nevertheless, I dreamed that night that I was walking on the moon.  I didn’t have an oxygen tank but I could breath without any problem.  There were also trees on the moon, actually bristlecone pines.  This picture is by Ansel Adams (but you probably new that).

I’d only vaguely heard the name until that day, but there was a photographic exhibition about them in the museum – wonderfully gnarled, twisted things, and they are, by most accounts, the oldest living organisms on earth, some of them about five thousand years old. 

I determined that come spring I will make an expedition to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest which is just up the road from Ridgecrest.  (It closes for the winter).  The bristlecones grow between 5,600 feet, which is not a problem, and 11,200 feet, which makes me think an oxygen tank might be a useful bit of equipment for that part of the hike. 

WALKING IN WIGS

Here’s some fairly minor walking lore relating to James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), a Scottish judge, linguist, and (I suppose you’d have to say) philosopher, one of the early theorists of evolution. On no obvious scientific basis he posited the notion that men were descended from apes.  He’s even mentioned in Martin Chuzzlewick.

He seems not to have been taken all that seriously by contemporaries.  According to a piece in The Herald and Genealogist, Volume the Third, 1866, “it is said that Lord Kames, to whom he would on one occasion have yielded precedence, declined it, saying. ‘By no means, my Lord, you must walk first, that I may see your tail’.”

That's him below on the far right, Lord Kames on far left, Hugo Arnot in the middle: the etching is by John Kay:

And he's the fellow second from the right in this one:

There’s another walking story about Monboddo that I have yet to fully fathom.  On one occasion he came out of court to find it was raining.  A sedan chair was waiting for him but he declined to use it, calmly placed his wig in the chair, and walked home in the rain.  Some sources say this was because he employed the methods of “the ancients” to keep fit, but that hardly seems a complete explanation.

IF IT WALKS LIKE A DUCK

I was listening to variant versions of Chuck Berry’s song “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”  - sometimes brown-eyed gets hyphenated, and sometimes it doesn’t.  It’s an interesting song.  As I’m not the first to observe, at this point in history you inevitably hear it as a song about race: he’s really singing about skin color, not eye color.  The fact that the song could be a hit in America 1956 is some measure of its double-coding and perhaps of its deniability.

I can’t find a great Chuck Berry live version, but here he is performing the song with Robert Cray (no, I can't work out how to put the video itself on my blog):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg9EdOCE1zI

The lyric that interests us here comes in the second verse

Flying across the desert in a TWA,
I saw a woman walking across the sand
She been a walkin' thirty miles en route to Bombay
To get a brown eyed handsome man
Her destination was a brown eyed handsome man

*

Well, Bombay (or Mumbai as we now know it) is of course a pretty good place to find a brown-skinned or indeed brown-eyed man, though I don’t know that there’s a lot of sand in precisely that part of India.  

Now, the song has been much covered by people of varying eye and skin color – Buddy Holly, Paul McCartney, Lyall Lovett – they all sang the line about Bombay; but Waylon Jennings in his own countrified version sings it thus, in 1970 – yep he really dressed like that in 1970, but he got over it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ5DlUe8bNE

The lyrics in question:

Flying cross the desert in a TWA
Saw a woman walking cross the sand
She’s been walking thirty miles en route to L.A. to get
A brown eyed handsome man
The destination was a brown eyed handsome man

Now obviously you get a very different class of brown-eyed man in LA than you do in Bombay, and you’re in with a better chance of finding sand.  The song also works perfectly well when sung by a woman, Fontella Bass sang Bombay (it’s a great version), and Tanya Tucker sang LA.

So, a question: did Jennings change the line in the interests of topographic accuracy?  Or did he think that walking to Bombay was just too darn exotic, maybe even Orientalist, for his country fans?  I’m guessing the latter.

THE COLD WAR ON CHRISTMAS

Thomas Bernhard writes, or rather has one of his characters think, “There is nothing more dreadful than having to go walking on one’s own on Monday.” I have yet to take a view on this.

I went walking on my own on Friday the 13^th – it didn’t seem especially dreadful, but as I wandered the streets I did see that the spirit of Christmas had well and truly receded.

Of course the world is divided between those never want to take down their Christmas tree at all and those want to get rid of it while the turkey’s still lukewarm.   Having grown up only having "fake" Christmas trees, I felt a great need for a "real" one, and had them for a few years but you don't exactly need to be Al Gore to think there's some conservationist issue at stake here.

But why do people just leave them out on the street?  I can see that the same question could be asked about old TVs and armchairs, but you can’t easily get a TV or an armchair into the average garbage can, whereas the ubiquitous green recycling bins of LA, could accommodate most domestic Christmas trees without much of a problem.

Somebody – the garbage men, I suppose - does take the trees away sooner of later, because there won't be any Christmas trees lying on the streets of Hollywood come July, but it takes a while and I suppose they’re delivering some kind of punitive, Scrooge-ish message, “Look what a bunch of littering scumbags your neighbors are!”  It works pretty well.

And of course there are those who think that while they’re putting the Christmas tree out on the street they might as well throw out the cat’s climbing tree as well.  Sad!