Monthly Archives: February 2011

Uppity Up Up

25 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by in Arizona, Sports, Travel, Uncategorized

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Hot air ballooning is a big attraction in the Southwest. Probably the best known balloon event is the Albuquerque (New Mexico) International Balloon Fiesta, held in October each year. Among the zillions of scheduled events is a ‘mass ascension’ of hundreds of balloons, which must be quite something to see.

There’s ballooning activity here in Arizona as well, though it appears from the web sites I could find to be centered more around Phoenix proper , Scottsdale and Sedona rather than out to the east where we are.

I suspect the balloon we saw the other day belongs to an individual rather than one of the several tour companies that run balloon flights in the area.  We don’t often see balloons here, though part of the reason might be that flights generally take off at dawn and at dusk when the air is at its stillest.  We’re not usually looking out the window at dawn (ahem).

Our first glimpse, off to the east:

Getting closer and losing altitude:


About to land in the parking lot of a nearby shopping center:

It’s such a pretty sight, a hot air balloon; it gets one thinking adventurous thoughts.

The Captain and I went on a hot air balloon ride a number of years ago with the dashing Captain Bollard who dressed the part and served champagne.  I was terrified; the wicker basket you ride in comes up only to about your waist.  I spent the entire flight kneeling on the floor of the basket and peeking over the edge.  If I’d had a rosary you would’ve heard clicking beads a mile away.

Most of a balloon flight is calm, slow, gentle, graceful and still.  Until the captain decides it is time to gain some altitude.  Then he ignites a flame under the bottom hole of the balloon that makes a huge whooshing sound (the hot air fills the balloon above which is what makes it rise).  What a shock it was to hear that for the first time, and to be so close to a rather large open flame.  In a wicker basket.  Still, you see things from a completely new perspective when you look down from a balloon.  And since you’re not as high or moving as fast as you are in an airplane, you have time to look carefully at the scene slowly passing beneath you.  Sometimes you see a lot of faces staring up with their mouths open, which is quite satisfying.

One day about 15 years ago The Captain (not of balloons, by the way) and I were sitting on our terrace at our New England home having sundown drinks with friends.  We lived far out in the woods, and there were not many clear areas nearby other than the space in front of our house.  We watched a balloon in the distance grow larger and larger; in fact pretty soon it seemed immense – to the point that our 130-pound guard dog started quivering and soiled himself.  Yes, the same dog that kept delivery men rooted to their van seats in our driveway.  The balloon filled our sky and suddenly we realized that the pilot was looking for a place to land.  We also realized that he really had few options.  We knew who it was because there was only one balloonist for miles around (not Captain Bollard).  Sure enough, before long the balloon bounced along the field in front of our house, knocked over two sections of garden fence, took out a row of tomatoes and came to rest in our lettuce.  The sprightly 70+ year old pilot was all apologies, his comely companion, ever so much younger, was charming.  Drinks were offered, toasts drunk, the chase car appeared, and before we knew it balloon and balloonists were gone, as if it had all been something we imagined.

And that’s the thing about balloons, I think – they get the imagination going.  They’re romantic and slightly exotic; surely if you’re in a balloon, adventure cannot be far away!  So if you ever have a chance to have a balloon ride, I hope you’ll do it.  Even if you’re afraid – you can always kneel on the floor of the basket.


Sunnies

19 Saturday Feb 2011

Posted by in Food, Uncategorized

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Today I met a Canadian man who grows sunflowers, flax and other grains and vegetables on quite a large scale.  He and his family also have a business that cleans the seeds and hulls them.  Then they ship them off all around the world.

I never thought about how a sunflower might get hulled – I just know that sometimes I buy them salted with the shells on for nibbling, and sometimes with the shells off for bread-making.  That turns out to be two different varieties of sunflower.

My new acquaintance described the hulling procedure this way:  The seeds are fired against the side of a round ceramic receptacle – not too hard, because you don’t want to damage the kernel.  The hull cracks and everything is sent on its merry way on a vibrating belt (to help seed separate from hull) to another part of the machine where the hull is blown away.  Then there’s a weighing and color sorting part of the machine that the seeds pass through.  Any seed retaining its hull is routed back to the ceramic chamber for another percussive meeting with the sides and another shuddering journey on the conveyor belt.

I don’t know if my friend’s hulling machine looks anything like the one above; it’s probably something similar.  Who would ever have imagined when noshing on the humble sunflower that it had had such an adventure?

Photo courtesy of infinitetrends.in

Photo courtesy of vt-fiddle.com

Win, Win, Win

13 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in American habits and customs, Food, Uncategorized

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My last post was hard to write because it was about a very disturbing subject.  What better antidote than to tell you about something really positive?

Are you sick of hearing me say, “We’re in Arizona?”  (Will it make you feel any better if I tell you the temperature was 27 F a few mornings ago (-2 C)?)  One of the things the Phoenix valley is famous for is its citrus orchards.  There are far fewer now than there once were, as many have been ripped out to make room for housing developments, but some of the developments saved as many trees as possible and built the houses among them.

Such is the case in a lovely development in Mesa where I was recently fortunate enough to join a bunch of volunteers who were picking citrus for the United Food Bank, which acquires, stores and distributes food through partner social service agencies.  Many of the houses in this development have ten or more fruit trees in their yards.  I guess there’s only so much grapefruit a family can eat. And yes – it’s mostly grapefruit.  Why?  Grapefruit is faster-growing and more productive than the other citruses, so more grapefruit trees were planted than orange or lemon (or tangerine, or tangelo, or…)

Here’s how it works.  The United Food Bank coordinator has teams of people who gather at a staging area and then carpool to wherever we’re picking.  Our team leader is the indefatigable Terry Parsons, who happens to be a neighbor.

On this particular day we began picking at the home of Lori Wegner (seen below with a couple of hardy pickers).  That was a good thing, because she puts out great goodies.  It turns out that most of the homeowners put out great goodies; at a subsequent house we were invited to take whatever we wanted from an outdoor fridge, which included soft drinks, water and beer.

Picking is not especially easy work.  In fact I can’t imagine doing it all day long; I’m pooped after two and a half or three hours.  There are three basic jobs in the picking operation.  The first is just to hand-pick whatever is easily accessible, and that is what I try to do because it is the least back-breaking approach.  But one must be sly and quick to be successful, because others also want to do this work, and most of the fruit is not low-hanging.

The higher-up fruit is reached with long poles with a curved prong at the end.  You put the prong around the stem of the fruit and drag or jerk down; then you duck because the fruit may well land on your head.  In any event it will eventually land on the ground  where the third kind of work is required: stooping down to pick the fruit up and put it in pails.  The pails fill up pretty fast, and they are heavy.

Someone who is not me (my aching back!) then carries the pails and dumps the fruit into huge cardboard bins that other volunteers have assembled on palettes.

At the end of the morning the Food Bank truck miraculously appears and a man with a small fork lift picks up the bins and puts them into the truck.

Once they arrive at the food bank there are other volunteers who sort the fruit; that which is not suitable for consumption is sent to the squeezing station where it is turned into juice.

Terry told me that there is an even larger food bank in the area that sends semi-trucks of citrus up to Oregon where they have no citrus, and comes back full of surplus Oregon apples.  How clever that is!  (It got me thinking about all the untended olive trees in Liguria – could volunteers pick the olives for oil which could be sold to benefit the food banks?  Or the oil given to hospitals or to the food banks themselves?)

So – who wins the citrus lottery?  First the homeowner.  She has more fruit than she knows what to do with and has to pay someone to come and remove it from her trees if the volunteers don’t do it.  She also will get a small tax write-off for the value of the fruit, if she wants one.  The second winner is the Food Bank and by extension the hungry people whom it feeds.  (I  wonder if some of them say, “Oh no, not more grapefruit!”)  The third, and biggest, winners are the volunteers.  They get to be outdoors in the lovely weather with a group of jolly others, to see parts of town and lovely homes they otherwise might not see,  to eat delicious snacks, and they get to feel really good about doing something helpful for others.  And no one at all loses.

Death in America

06 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in American habits and customs, Crime, Law and order, Uncategorized

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Here we are in Arizona, now famous around the world for its violence and death, and I have to tell you that in early January I felt a bit like an  angel of death myself.  Friends visiting from Italy very much wanted to go to San Francisco, so that is what we did for three days in the early days of the new year.  One of our goals?  Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.  We met our goal on a crisp, breezy (read ‘cold, windy’) afternoon, and it could not have been lovelier.

On almost every bridge support we were somewhat surprised to see one of these signs:

The blue sign says, “Crisis Counseling – There is Hope – Make the Call.  The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic.”  Also, the bridge railings are surprisingly low, making it very easy for would-be suicides to clambor over and make the leap.

On our walk back across the bridge, with the wind mercifully behind us, we noticed a small commotion at rail side.  Indeed, someone had just jumped to his or her death moments before we arrived.  The people responding to the tragedy were extremely low-key and very, very professional.  I doubt many bridge-walkers that day knew that anything untoward had happened.  There’s a reason why they were so good – they get a lot of practice.  Someone jumps off the bridge about once every ten days.  No one survives.

Flash forward a few days to January 8 – what a good day for our visit to Tucson to look for a church my friends particularly wanted to see.  There was a fair amount of traffic in the outskirts of the city, and as we waited in an accident-caused traffic jam the Captain called to tell us there had been some kind of assassination attempt somewhere nearby and we might want to head home.  We didn’t want to head home, so we pushed ahead and eventually arrived downtown.  Downtown Tucson on a Saturday is a very sleepy place – most of the shops were closed and there were very few people about.  I don’t think it had anything to do with the terrible events that had unfolded at the suburban Safeway Market a few hours previous.

These two experiences with our friends, one right after the other, made me feel extremely uneasy – is America really and truly such a violent place?  More violent that the rest of the world?  I’ve waited a long time to write about what happened because it’s taken a while to sort out my thoughts on this question.

Here is a picture of Jared Lee Loughren, the unrepentent man who shot and killed six people and injured twelve others (including the now famously and miraculously recovering Representative Gabrielle Giffords)  in Tucson the day we were there:

This is what insanity looks like, at least in one of its iterations.  And my point, I guess, is that insanity is all around us, not only in the United States, but on every continent in the world, even in our beloved Italy.  It is a difficult to find hard figures, but according to Wikipedia there were 5.7 murders per 100,000 population  in the U.S. in 2006 and in Italy there were 1.06 per 100,000.   The difference between the U.S. and Italy, I suspect, is the ease with which one can get guns and the number of guns that are in private hands.  Here in Arizona, which is one of the gun-totingest states, it is legal to carry licensed guns both openly and concealed.  I can’t tell you how disconcerting it is to be in a store and see a fellow swagger in with a pistol on his belt.

The NRA will tell you that it is not guns that kill, but people who kill.  They will also tell you that it is our Constitutional right to arm ourselves.  The first is a nonsense.  People cannot kill nearly as effectively without guns – it is guns in the hands of people like Mr. Loughren  that kill, and kill often and very effectively.  The second assertion is open to frequent debate.  The second amendment of the U.S. Constitution says, ” A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  Some say that it means anyone and everyone has the right to own and carry guns.  Others say that the framers intended that guns be owned privately but used in a militia setting to protect the country.

It doesn’t matter who’s right – what matters is that as things stand now there are a lot of guns in the hands of a lot of people.  Most people are responsible and careful.  But there is a small percentage who are not, and they are the ones who are deadly.

So why the description of the suicide at the beginning of this screed?  Only this.  It is disturbed people who kill – either themselves or others.  Some take their own lives, some decide to take the lives of others.  It all adds up to the tragedy of senseless death.  These deaths, all of them, are tragic to the close circle of family and friends around the dead and the killers; but they are also tragic and harmful to the fabric of society as a whole.

So… what to do?  One of the men taking care of the suicide on the bridge told me that if only the authorities would put up a wire fence high enough to make it difficult for people to jump the number of jumpers would decrease.  And it seems logical that if only we could keep guns out of the hands of those who are not stable enough to have them we would all be a lot safer.  The first isn’t happening because the bridge authorities do not want to ruin the view from the bridge.  The second is not happening because no one knows how to do it.