Archive for the Photography Category

Chocolate as Wealth

© David W Wood­dell, April 21, 2012

 

Some years ago I fell in love with dark choco­late. On a visit to Paris in the early 90’s, I dis­cov­ered extra-fine dark choco­late nor­mally used in cook­ing. It was inex­pen­sive, and I was eat­ing it by the half-pound. Boy howdy, let me tell you that such choco­late con­sumed reg­u­larly was a means of near-hallucination. I drank cof­fee back then, too, and smoked cig­a­rettes, a deadly triple com­bi­na­tion of habits I later gave up on doctor’s orders. Now I just drink a bit of cof­fee of a morn­ing and try not to eat more than one choco­late candy at a time. Mod­er­a­tion is best for intended longevity.

Infrared pho­to­graph, © David W Wooddell

 

     Choco­late, in the form of cocoa derived from the cacao bean has been with us for a long time. Skilled at fine-tuning plants for agri­cul­ture, the Maya may have per­fected Theo­broma cacao: “nat­u­rally select­ing prized cul­ti­vars for their hi-flavor, bring­ing forth the finest cacáo ever cul­ti­vated on Earth.” The Maya also per­fected the pineap­ple from the bro­mil­iad plant by cross­breed­ing strains of plants selec­tively to pro­duce the fruit they desired.

     They prob­a­bly helped give us maize, too. The dates in the sacred Maya text Popul Vhu indi­cate it was around 7900 BCE when maize was cre­ated. The Maya ven­er­ate corn as the source of life, it is cen­tral to the cre­ation myth in illus­tra­tions, includ­ing at Bonam­pak. They also mixed maize with cacao for a strong, hearty drink.

     So maybe (am I reach­ing here?) the Maya turned some cacao into an un-sweetened choco­late spread, kind of an ancient ver­sion of Nutella: The Orig­i­nal Hazel­nut Spread®? Cer­tainly, they had no short­age of nut trees in that part of the world, going as far south as the Amazon.

     But that is sheer speculation.

 

     What seems to be known is the Maya con­sumed hot choco­late with­out sugar in it, mak­ing the bev­er­age pow­er­fully bit­ter and strong. (Kind of like that unsweet­ened extra-fine choco­late I was eat­ing in Paris). It became the hit in Paris after the Span­ish intro­duced cocoa to Europe, along with another new world native fruit, the tomato (Colum­bus brought the tomato back on the first voyage), 

     Tea was still the thing at the time, but cof­fee (Cof­fea ara­bica) would soon appear in Europe as bev­er­age of choice, brought to the west from Ara­bia, per­haps via trade with India and the east, or directly as has been doc­u­mented else­where in his­tory. It was not long until the appear­ance of cof­fee houses in six­teenth cen­tury Europe. Tobacco would arrive from the new world, also cour­tesy of the Span­ish in 1518, and then all of Europe would be addicted to the same stuff that had me in its grips dur­ing that trip to Paris. (Andorfer, 15;  Hig­man, 152; Hodge, vol. 4, 768)

 

     At Bonam­pak, Chi­a­pas, in one of the famous three rooms of painted pre-Hispanic Mayan murals, cacao appears in a royal scene in which a bag full of the com­mod­ity is evi­dently the city’s riches, per­haps the very riches on which the royal fam­ily was founded. Cur­rency is what you make it, any­thing can be used as a means of exchange. Gold was impor­tant, but cacao was wealth! (Coe, 131)

     Pho­tograph­ing the Bonam­pak Murals in black and white infrared film was a lot bet­ter than choco­late: it meant that we could see through the age of time, through pig­ments used to paint the murals, and down through the lay­ers to the red under-drawing, as well as to define the black out­lines of impor­tant fig­ures, a method the Maya artist used to empha­size the impor­tant play­ers in a scene. In this scene at Bonam­pak, the cacao was one of the impor­tant ele­ments, clearly labeled and impressive.

     The Maya used var­i­ous sub­stances to find the vision ser­pent, which was their way of com­muning with spir­its, ances­tors, gods and demons. It is pos­si­ble that they made strong solu­tions of fer­mented cacao and used them in enema solu­tions. Such prac­tice gave a short trip to the cos­mic expe­ri­ence they sought, and almost cer­tainly to the sacred thun­der­jar. (Coe, 181)

 

    This give new mean­ing to the long-standing ques­tion: Where did the ancient Maya go?

 

                    — David W Wooddell

 

Sources:

 

A Con­cise His­tory of Cacao” http://www.c-spot.com/atlas/historical-timeline/

Andor­fer, T. The Com­plete Idiot’s Guide to Cof­fee and Tea, Pen­guin, 2006

Coe, M. The Maya 5th Ed. Thames & Hud­son, 1993, p. 131, 180

Hig­man, B.W. How Food Made His­tory, John Wiley & Sons, 2004

Hodge, F.W. Hand­book of Amer­i­can Indi­ans North of Mex­ico, Vol­ume 4, Smith­son­ian Institution

 

 

 

 

Don’t turn that dial!

 

Don’t Turn That Dial

© David W Wood­dell, April 2, 2012

 

When I was younger, I worked in a fac­tory on the other side of town: it was an easy place to make money and the work was not that dif­fi­cult. I was assigned to Eddie’s crew of assem­blers. He was not the fore­man, but thought he was. Eddie was middle-aged, but seemed ancient to me when I was 20. He had a work bench that was per­son­al­ized in a lot of ways, and every­one knew you didn’t fool around with Eddie’s work­bench. His radio was set to GodAw­ful­Coun­try, one of the many local sta­tions that seemed to find one terrible-twang after another.

 

Eddie was short, prob­a­bly no more than five feet four inches, and more than a bit round at the waist. Tend­ing to wear blue jeans that still had a crisp blue color, they were turned up the reg­u­la­tion two inches at the cuff, and being the sum­mer he wore short-sleeve sport shirts in sub­tle plaids with the short sleeves rolled up to expose the white t-shirt he wore under­neath. He car­ried a gray metal lunch box with a ther­mos of cof­fee in it, and would not ever think of buy­ing any­thing from the roach-coach that came around at break and lunchtime. His wife made his lunch, and it was substantial.

 

Whether Eddie was or was not the smartest kid in the class when he grad­u­ated from high school was imma­te­r­ial, that had been at least some thirty years before. But he paid atten­tion to news­breaks on GodAw­ful­Coun­try, as did the rest of us in his work gang. And some­times, that was pure enter­tain­ment. For instance, I was work­ing there the year we sent the first moon buggy up in space to land on the moon. Eddie lis­tened to a news report on his ever present radio and then slammed his hand down on the workbench.

 

“God­dam gomernt,” he pro­claimed, “Ain’t it just like them to send that moon-buggy up there and then leave it for the Rooskies to go up and steal!” He went on about the idea of the Roos­sians “joy-riding around the moon in our moon-buggy,” and had us all in stitches from laugh­ing so hard, it was such a ridicu­lous thought. That just pissed him off even more.  Eddie was the salt of the earth — and of the skies, too, as one of the boys used to jest. No amount of ratio­nal dis­cus­sion would con­vince Eddie that the Rus­sians did not have any intent or need to steal the moon-buggy – they’d never even landed on the moon, and never would.

 

Those coun­try west­ern songs got tire­some. “Old dog tree, ever faaaaaaith-full” come­dian Jonathan Win­ters once char­ac­ter­ized it, and that pretty much said all that needed say­ing. If you dared change the radio sta­tion to rock or a clas­si­cal sta­tion out of nearby Mans­field, Eddie would absolutely froth at the mouth. “Gawd­dammit! Who’s been fart­ing around with my radio!” He would storm and rage and stomp around and the fore­man would even­tu­ally come over and tell us to knock it off and set­tle down to work. It was good fun, and Eddie played his part well. We did that about once a week for the enter­tain­ment value alone. Repet­i­tive assem­bly in such a fac­tory is easy, except for the bore­dom of doing the same mechan­i­cal process over and over and then some more. We needed lev­ity to keep the mood light.

 

Eddie was such a fan-boy for cer­tain musicians. “Hello, Dolly,” the man on the radio would sing. “Hello, Porter” we would all war­ble in high-pitched falsetto voices in imi­ta­tion of Dolly Par­ton. Eddie wor­shiped the ground Dolly stood on and would have licked it like a squir­rel clean­ing up spilt gravy if given half a chance. He would lunge to turn up the vol­umn when he heard his crush singing. “That’s Dolly Par­ton and Porter Wag­ner!” 

 

Does Dolly Do Porter, or is it that Porter Duz Dolly?” one of us would ask, very solemn-like in ref­er­ence to the then-current tele­vi­sion and radio com­mer­cials for a brand of laun­dry and dish-washer deter­gent called Duz in which the young Dolly Par­ton would crow about the free dishes she received in her box of Duhzzzz.

 

Eddie nor­mally sat with his back to us at his work­bench. He built sub­assem­blies of the grip­per devices that clamp onto bowl­ing pins when the pin spot­ter swings down at a bowl­ing alley to pick up the stand­ing pins left after some­one misses them with their bowl­ing ball. Another guy was in charge of run­ning matched sets of wires through the tri­an­gu­lar frame where the clam­pers hung after assembly.

 

My job was to bolt the clam­pers onto the frame, con­nect the wires in the right order, and then send the frame on to the tester, who ran a diag­nos­tic test through the wires to make sure they were con­nected in the right order and made the clam­pers work a few times to see if they were wired prop­erly. I used an air-powered drill with a quick-change fit­ting on the end to hex-bolt the clam­pers onto the frame, and it made a lot of noise, as I had dis­cov­ered on morn­ings when I was hung-over or suf­fer­ing from lack of sleep from stay­ing out too late the night before.

 

One morn­ing we came in early to the shop and we super-glued Eddie’s radio dial to the clas­si­cal sta­tion out of Mansfield.

 

By the time Eddie rolled in, the glue had dried nicely and that radio was never going to play any sta­tion other than the clas­si­cal sta­tion over to Mans­field. It was one of those old-fashioned plastic-housing radios with the mar­bled fin­ish, you could buy them at the hard­ware store back then, with a large twist dial for the sta­tions, a selec­tor switch for AM/FM and a large dial for the vol­ume. FM was new back then, and good FM receivers were not inexpensive.

 

We all worked in quiet for a while, all of us shuf­fling around and set­ting out our tools and get­ting ready to make some noise. Finally, one of us broke: “Eddie, why don’t you turn on some music,” some­one sug­gested. “Get­tin’ kind of lone­some here with­out Dolly.” The other young’uns, as Eddie liked to call us, snick­ered at our work stations.

 

Eddie flipped the radio on and went to work, but it was only moments before he dis­cov­ered that his favorite sta­tion had been changed. “Who changed the radio sta­tion?” he demanded. I revved up the pneu­matic drill and let it chat­ter loosely on a hex bolt so no one out­side of our area could hear Eddie’s com­plaint. Every time he demanded who had done it, I did chuchuchuchuchcubr­raaaaaat with the drill. Grins were on every face except Eddie’s as he stormed into the usual routine.

 

And then he reached for the dial and tried to turn it and the radio turned almost a 360 in his hand. Eddie let out a howl that could have been heard by Billy on his fork­lift at the receiv­ing dock at the other end of the fac­tory. Com­ing out of nowhere, with no warm up to warn oth­ers, since I had cov­ered Eddie’s usual warm-up with the chat­ter­ing of the drill,  Eddie ranted, screamed, swore, and carried-on as loud as he could shout. Then he flipped.

 

Charg­ing in my direc­tion with a ball-peen ham­mer, he backed off when I revved the drill in his direc­tion. It was clear that our prank had crossed a line, and some­one could get hurt, though it would not be from my hand, the drill was just for scare. He turned in the direc­tion of the guy who wired the frames, but the fore­man showed up and man­aged to col­lar Eddie and turn him around and frog-marched him off the work floor.

 

We didn’t see Eddie for a few days, the fore­man announced that Eddie was tak­ing some time off. Our prank had turned more seri­ous than we’d thought. Gang­ing up on Eddie had seemed hilar­i­ous at the time, but from such stuff can nascent bul­lies be turned into the real thing with a just a bit more per­sis­tence. It was time to grow up, and the les­son was not lost on me. No more ganging-up on any­one, it was child­ish, rude, and yes, it smacked of the bully. I didn’t want to be that guy.

 

We were given a talking-to, and told to buy a new radio for Eddie. “Have it ready for him when he comes back to work on Mon­day,” the fore­man told us. When he came back, his face pos­i­tively lit up when he saw the new radio on his work­bench. Eddie sheep­ishly admit­ted he’d been a bit obsessed with his coun­try west­ern sta­tion on the radio. He promised to mix in other kinds of music in the future, and came around and apol­o­gized to us each indi­vid­u­ally, and we said, “Oh, Eddie, that’s all right, and we’re sorry to make you so mad.”

 

We came in on Tues­day and the radio was play­ing some­thing other than coun­try music. “You boys are right,” Eddie announced, “I’m turn­ing over a new leaf,” proud to be so lib­eral and enlightened. Eddie had found the local sta­tion that played noth­ing but polka. Ooompa, pa pa pa, Ooompa.

 

***

Belief without reason does not equal rationality

Athi­ests and non-believers, free­thinkers and agnos­tics recently held a large rally in Wash­ing­ton, DC.

 

The Rea­son Rally claimed to be the largest assem­bly of athe­ists: it brought together thought­ful peo­ple, some who are musi­cians and satirists, oth­ers who are poets, come­di­ans, essay­ists, philoso­phers, and com­mu­nity activists. They used the rally to express what they believe, and what they think oth­ers should under­stand about athe­ists. They are a lit­er­ate bunch: poetry, song, essay, and humor­ous sto­ries enlivened the con­fer­ence, but the seri­ous work was to demon­strate that there are num­bers on the side of the non-religious, they are not a demo­graphic to be dis­missed. Some­where around ten to twenty per­cent of the US pop­u­la­tion are either athe­ists or are non-believers, free­thinkers, or agnos­tics. Bring­ing them together at one place in a body of peo­ple of all age, race, sex, and pro­fes­sion shows them to be adamant about their rights, insist­ing on the lawfully-given right of the non-religious to define themselves.

Many athe­ists are moral and eth­i­cal. So then why do the reli­gious claim that Athe­ists are not good peo­ple? Isn’t it up to those who make such a claim to offer some mea­sur­able proof of their asser­tion? As far as I can deter­mine, there are no crime, or sig­nif­i­cant other sta­tis­tics to sup­port the view that there is some­thing wrong with athe­ists, morally, eth­i­cally, or when it comes to crime. It’s all just grum­bling and trash talk­ing from some who claim that only peo­ple of their reli­gion can be good. But what about the sta­tis­tics that show that peo­ple over­all, includ­ing the ones who claim to be reli­gious, com­mit crimes and make morally and eth­i­cally bad decisions. 

 

Daniel Moyni­han, Sen­a­tor and sage of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics said it best: You are enti­tled to your own opin­ionbut you are not enti­tled to your own facts. 

 

 

****

 

Parks and Recreation

Last week I was down near Quan­tico, VA for some­thing going on at the National Marine Corps Museum. Later in the day I wanted some­place nice to read for a while outdoors. GPS sent me to the near­est park, Prince William For­est

 

Spring was just then start­ing to show, but I noticed how many trees had not lost their leaves from last fall. Yesterday, I was at Calvert Cliffs State Park near Lusby. MD. and noticed some of the same kinds of trees had also not lost their leaves. Maybe it is just some­thing to do with that species. Spring was much far­ther along, of course, as warm as it has been, four days can mean a lot of new growth. Being right on the bay may also give an advan­tage of slighty warmer micro­cli­mate: as we walked toward the Chesa­peake Bay, the plants became notice­ably far­ther along in their spring bloom. 

From park­ing lot to the shore, one trav­els past a fresh­wa­ter marsh, and then a stream. Today is Inter­na­tional Water Day, so my recent explo­ration of the fresh­wa­ter marsh at Calvert Cliffs was a great chance to admire the engi­neer­ing of  beavers. 

 

A few more images from my field trip to Calvert Cliffs is here.

 

 

Cats & Dogs

Humans love their pets, espe­cially those two species we call Cats & Dogs. I’ve been a dog owner for more than a decade, and long before that I was a cat owner. Each type of crit­ter seems to have its own mer­its, as well as down­sides. For­tu­nately, there are few down­sides to our sheltie Kiah. If he had fin­gers and thumbs instead of paws, I think I could teach him to drive the car. 

 

 

I spent a few months this past year work­ing on a spe­cial edi­tion of National Geo­graphic mag­a­zine on this very sub­ject, Cats & Dogs, shar­ing research fact-checking with another for­mer NGM staff researcher, Michelle Har­ris. The text is from Cathy New­man, Vir­ginia Mor­rell, Jenny Hol­land and oth­ers, and the pho­tographs are from the archives of NGS as well as from free­lancers around the globe such as Carli David­son. This is an infor­ma­tive, fun, col­or­ful and heart­warm­ing spe­cial issue. I’m hop­ing the read­ers will buy it at the news­stands, because it is sold only online and at news­stands and your gro­cery checkout.

 

But back to my dog Kiah. Here’s a recent snap­shot of him at the Col­lege Park Dog Park. He’s a pretty dog, so every­one assumes he’s a girl, or a “Lassie” or is fussy about get­ting dirty. Shet­land sheep­dogs are hearty work­ing dogs, with coats designed to keep off the ele­ments. He does not like to get his boy bits wet, though, some­times attempt­ing “big air” to keep them dry. On sec­ond thought, maybe I won’t teach him how to drive.

 

The BIG Cheese Truck

Just down the street from Baked & Wired on Thomas Jef­fer­son Street, NW, the Big Cheese truck was doing a fairly brisk busi­ness one day in Feb­ru­ary as I parked my car in front of The Foundry and the offices and stu­dios of CDIA-BU. I sat in my car for a while and watched. Peo­ple passed by on the side­walk, some of them mut­ter­ing and ges­tur­ing at the food truck as though they were offended by its pres­ence. Oth­ers, mostly young work­ers with a han­ker­ing for some­thing dif­fer­ent in the way of fast food lined up, placed an order, and waited a few min­utes until their order was ready. It’s get­ting good press around town. They made the list on Wash­ing­ton Post’s Best Food Trucks this week. Let them know, and they’ll come by your place. 

 

The city is ask­ing for per­mis­sion for Food Trucks to park along 7th Street at the Mall, but the National Park ser­vice is quib­bling over this. They have a rule that no one should trans­act busi­ness on park prop­erty. Evi­dently, hot­dogs and indi­ges­tion from their sanc­tioned food stand is ok, and should be all that is needed by way of food down on our big walk­way past the mon­u­ments and muse­ums. Some of those hot dogs ought to be encased in plas­tic for your pro­tec­tion. Why not allow the food trucks? Surely, peo­ple will walk on your grass at the curb, but don’t you think that too is part of Amer­i­can life? Get­ting a decent grilled cheese sand­wich instead of the age-old tubesteak?

 

 

CDIA-BU architecture class at work photographing National Geographic

Every now and then I con­tribute a lit­tle bit of time help­ing out at the Cen­ter for Dig­i­tal Imag­ing Arts — Boston Uni­ver­sity (CDIA-BU) in George­town. A cou­ple weeks ago I helped by arrang­ing per­mis­sion for an archi­tec­tural pho­tog­ra­phy class to make images on the cam­pus at National Geo­graphic Soci­ety at 17th and M Street, NW.

 

It wasn’t acci­den­tal that I asked NGS for per­mis­sion to do this. I worked there for a cou­ple of decades and know the employ­ees of NGS are very proud of their work to make the phys­i­cal build­ing oper­a­tions at National Geo­graphic as eco-friendly as pos­si­ble. Accord­ing to, Robert Ciine, Vice Pres­i­dent in charge of the building’s oper­a­tions, they are once again appy­ing for LEED cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, a mark of approval for envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness and good prac­tices. They are the lead­ers in the field of LEED for exist­ing build­ings. It is a worth­while achieve­ment, and has demon­strated to other busi­nesses how they can save money while help­ing the environment.

 

The other major rea­son I asked NGS for help may seem a bit absurd, but it has to do with per­mis­sion to use a tri­pod, or even to pho­to­graph at all within the Dis­trict of Colum­bia. They under­stand pho­tog­ra­phy at NGS, but the rest of the city doesn’t really get that it takes time and patience to make a really good pho­to­graph. In DC, it’s a mat­ter of access, too. Pho­tog­ra­phy is a first amend­ment right, but some­one for­got to tell that to the var­i­ous gov­ern­ment author­i­ties in DC that have reg­u­lated the who, what, where and when pho­tog­ra­phy can be done “for com­mer­cial pur­poses.” (and yes, they con­sider a pho­tog­ra­phy class a com­mer­cial purpose)

 

The DC gov­ern­ment wants $150 for still pho­tog­ra­phy. And they want proof of a mil­lion dol­lar insur­ance polcy “list­ing the “Gov­ern­ment of the Dis­trict of Colum­bia” as addi­tional insured.” The city is will­ing to waive the insur­ance clause for studnts, but not the $150 fee per stu­dent for the per­mit to make still photos.

 

The Capi­tol Police con­trol per­mits for tri­pod use and all pho­tog­ra­phy on any of the grounds of the Capi­tol, or within the build­ing itself.

 

All of the green spaces in the city are under the author­ity of the National Park Police, who may or may not  give per­mits for tri­pod use.

 

Pri­vate build­ing own­ers are ever more wary of grant­ing per­mis­sion to pho­tog­ra­phy stu­dents to allow them to pho­to­graph their build­ings. Many of the build­ing own­ers in George­town reg­u­larly send their secu­rity guards out to move the stu­dents away with threats of arrest for trespassing.

 

Add all of that up, and find­ing a decent place for a photo class to make archi­tec­ture shots in DC becomes a ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult endeavor. 

 

Thanks, Bob Cline and NGS for help­ing us out. The pho­tog­ra­phy stu­dents did well that day, accord­ing to their Teach­ing Assis­tant Kat Forder and Instruc­tor John Pel­let. Here are a few of my snap­shots of the class catch­ing the light com­ing up on a cold morn­ing in the court­yard at National Geographic. 

 

Cover Model

Cover Model

 

I never set out to be in front of the lens, and that’s ok, I’m a pho­tog­ra­pher, researcher, writer and not a pro­fes­sional model. But as with many in my pro­fes­sion, I have enough stand-in expe­ri­ence as a model to know how it is in the stu­dio when on the lens side of the cam­era. I’ve ben pho­tographed numer­ous times in the process of help­ing to make photo illus­tra­tion, and one time it landed me on the cover of US News & World Report as a terrorist. 

 

Let me be per­fectly clear — I was not a ter­ror­ist. I only played one for a cover story on inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism. The story ran just days after Aldo Moro, the kid­napped Ital­ian politi­cian was dis­cov­ered dead as his ter­ror­ist kid­nap­pers, the Red Brigade dumped his body as a mes­sage of some kind (dis­dain, hate, who can tell what’s in the minds of ter­ror­ists? It’s not like they are nor­mal peo­ple, they are thugs.)

 

For the cover shoot, I brought in my favorite ex-army parka, one that I picked up at a real army sur­plus sale back in high school. It had been on count­less camp­ing trips and excur­sions all through my late teen and col­lege years, and since I was a bearded, long-haired kind of guy, I thought the army-ness of the coat would lend a cer­tain look to the ter­ror cover image. I also picked up a cou­ple of balaclava-style stock­ing caps, because the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhoff gang were wear­ing them.

 

Photo edi­tor Berni Schoen­field brought his gun to the ses­sion: a .44 mag­num, it was a real Dirty Harry type of revolver. The gun was a beast, so Berni fig­ured it would lend the right kind of threat­en­ing image to the photo illus­tra­tion we were mak­ing for the cover.  

 

But I have a big head. No, I don’t mean ego-wise, although I prob­a­bly have my moments. Phys­i­cally, I carry the Scot­tish blood of some­one with a large head, so when I held the pis­tol up next to my face in a mock­ery of James Bond, the .44 mag­num did not look all that large. In fact, after the mag­a­zine came out with my pic­ture on the cover, one over-eager reader wrote to the edi­tors that our photo illus­tra­tion was a fail­ure because no self-respecting ter­ror­ist would use a .22 cal­iber revolver. Berni was allowed to answer that one, to the effect that cover model Wood­dell has such a large head that it dwarfs even the Dirty Harry .44 mag­num he is hold­ing. Or some­thing along those line.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the image appeared on the cover of US News and World Report dated May 22, 1978, it was cred­ited: photo by USN&WR. As I recall, the staff pho­tog­ra­phers Thomas J O’Halloran and War­ren K Lef­fler worked on the cover shoot together, with spe­cial projects photo edi­tor Berni Schoen­field stand­ing over their shoul­ders, direct­ing the stu­dio session.

 

 

 

 

No, they didn’t pay me extra at USN&WR for play­ing cover model for the day. It was all in the day’s work for some­one in the pic­ture depart­ment, but I did get a free ham from the com­pany at the hol­i­days, an employee perk of that media com­pany that was patron­iz­ing and yet appre­ci­ated at the same time. Each year they gave the employ­ees a choice between a ham and turkey. As Berni would say, only a putz would take the turkey. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the mod­el­ing jobs I worked on at Nation’s Busi­ness include a hand-model cover shoot with David Valdez and Gary Kief­fer col­lab­o­rat­ing on the pho­tog­ra­phy for a story by staff edi­tor Henry Eason.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A life-style/health arti­cle was about eat­ing healthy snacks: Pho­tog­ra­phy was by Judith Sloan, one of my favorite free­lancers when I was pic­ture edi­tor at Nation’s Busi­ness.  (Polaroid light­ing test on left — B&W in the mag­a­zine from color transparency)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Direct­ing the man­ag­ing edi­tor Henry Alt­man on how to sneeze dra­mat­i­cally for the cam­era in this polaroid, but the vet­eran copy edi­tor him­self stood in with a great sense of humor for the real deal. Photo by Nation’s Busi­ness staff pho­tog­ra­pher (and for­mer New York Times con­tract pho­tog­ra­pher) T. Michael Keza, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One last hand-model job, this one is a mys­tery to me today, but I think it was for a story on credit card fraud — or maybe the dan­gers of smok­ing, who knows, some of us still smoked back then. Here the polaroid is some­what pos­ter­ized by my scanner. 

 

Maybe one of the pho­tog­ra­phers can com­ment — who shot the credit card image? Valdez, Kief­fer, or Keza? 

 

- David W Wood­dell, Novem­ber 13, 2011

 

 

Tornadoes and Hanging Trusses

 

Grow­ing up in north-central Ohio, we had plenty of hot days, humid from so much corn grow­ing next to our house on the edge of town. That corn­field some­times was allowed to lie fal­low, or was planted with a crop of soy­beans to re-fix the nitro­gen in the soil. The farmer had loaned our neigh­bor­hood a piece of his field, on the agree­ment that we wouldn’t run through his corn any more, and we kept the grass mowed and used it to play base­ball and foot­ball and fly kites. Out there one could get away from the houses and see a long ways toward the horizon.

 

We had fresh pro­duce in seem­ingly unlim­ited quan­ti­ties, toma­toes as big as a baby’s head, and green beans to die for, espe­cially cooked the West Vir­ginia way with bacon or ham until they were nearly soft. Cucum­bers, green-onions and melon arrived at our front door, car­ried by door-to-door sales­man from a place called Cel­eryville, a huge pro­duce farm that employed young­sters to sell their stuff in the sum­mer, going from house to house. Sum­mer was good in north-central Ohio, not least for the fre­quent tornadoes.

 

My mother’s favorite movie was Wiz­ard of Oz, and she was ter­ri­fied by the word tor­nado. The very idea of one would send her into a panic and she’d yell, “Every­one, run to the base­ment, there’s a tor­nado!” Didn’t mat­ter if the local AM radio sta­tion said the tor­nado was in the next county, or the next town over, she’d always announce that every­one should head for the base­ment until the “all clear.” Dad would groan, because he didn’t have a choice, he had to go down there with her. Not my brother and me – one word of a tor­nado and we went out the back door like the two young ter­rors we were, because we wanted to see the tor­nado. We were pretty sure we were faster than any tor­nado on Earth, and we didn’t know any­one who’d actu­ally been injured by one, much less taken up and floated about.

 

My older brother and I often spot­ted fun­nel clouds off in the dis­tance while we stood in t-shirts, sum­mer shorts and ten­nis shoes in the July or August heat, out there on the ball field. That part of Ohio was kind of flat, with some rolling hills, and from the van­tage point on the edge of town we could see the fun­nels form as the cloud dropped down and turned tri­an­gu­lar, and then at the last minute a bit of cloud would seem to come up from the ground to join it and the tor­nado was in busi­ness. One day we saw a cow come fly­ing up with the dirt and stuff, and get jet­ti­soned out of the fun­nel, and we knew some farm fam­ily would be hav­ing steak that night. Mom would be ‘fit-to-be-tied,” as she called it, that we’d have the nerve to go out­side when such a ter­ri­ble dan­ger was in the off­ing, but we were never pun­ished for it. And who wouldn’t want to see a cow fly?

 

A num­ber of years later I was work­ing car­pen­try in Colum­bus, Ohio, one of the many jobs I worded to pay for my col­lege edu­ca­tion. I had learned to swing a ham­mer, could mea­sure accu­rately, was well-balanced, and much to my hor­ror, able to calm my fears enough for “walk­ing walls.” Walk­ing walls is a rare expe­ri­ence in a young man’s life. When a wooden framed house is built of 2x4’s and 2x10’s, there is usu­ally a stage when the fram­ing walls have been built and raised, with some light insu­lated sheath­ing attached to the out­side frames, and the floors decked in with ply­wood. The tri­an­gu­lar roof trusses have not been added, so it looks like an open framed box. For a two-story house with a base­ment, that means from the top of the house, before the trusses and joists have been added, it is a drop of 30 or more feet to the ground. If you hap­pen to be stand­ing on the 10-inch wide top of the wall above the open­ing to the poured con­crete base­ment when you fall, it’s a bit far­ther and a lot harder when you land.

 

So there I was that sum­mer, walk­ing the tops of walls of a partially-built new house. Bobby, the lead car­pen­ter had decided I would be good as the sec­ond man in the truss-hanging oper­a­tion. A rented crane arrived, along with the truck­load of pre-made trusses – they are those tri­an­gu­lar things you see on top of houses, with a beam at the bot­tom called the joist, and they are heavy and big. The crane lifts the truss and places it approx­i­mately where the boss tells him to place it, sus­pended a few inches off the top of the wall, and the two lucky car­pen­ters who are walk­ing the walls try not to get bumped off by any sway of the truss, and using their ham­mers to kind of prod it into stop­ping, they wait until the right moment, the truss is low­ered to the top of the wall, and — bam, bam, bam, wham! You drive in a spike with a 20-ounce fram­ing ham­mer, and then pound in a cou­ple of more nails, and attach that truss to the top of the wall. You have to kneel down at the last minute, or bend over from the waist, all the while just stand­ing on a 10-inch wide beam with no safety net and noth­ing to hold onto. What­ever you do, you can’t hold onto the truss to catch your bal­ance because it’ll move if you do, or fall over and bring the rest of the trusses down like triangular-framed domi­noes, and prob­a­bly take you with them.

 

One morn­ing, hot and humid with threats of rain for later in the day, we were hang­ing trusses on a two-story mon­stros­ity of a house in a new sub­di­vi­sion. We were halfway through with the trusses when I noticed the sky was dark­en­ing into that famil­iar deep blue and pur­ple mass in the dis­tance that meant a major storm com­ing. Zip, some light­ning started appear­ing in the dis­tant hori­zon. We were non-union and didn’t get paid if we got sent home, and that sum­mer we’d already been sent home a lot because of thun­der­storms. I looked over at Bobby, the lead car­pen­ter, stand­ing on the oppo­site wall from me, and he shrugged and motioned for the crane to bring up the next truss.

 

Pretty soon the wind was kick­ing up, and I was wor­ried about being blown off the top of the wall, and the sky became more defined as the storm drew closer. I could see the angry, boil­ing clouds grow heavy and start to droop, not all that far away it seemed. When you are on the top of a wall in a partially-built sub-division on the out­skirts of a city you have a scope of vision to the hori­zon that is rather sweep­ing. So I wasn’t sur­prised that I could see the for­ma­tion of a tor­nado off in the dis­tance. Mean­while, we kept hang­ing trusses with the wind swirling and mak­ing the trusses sway on the end of the crane’s cable as they came up and were low­ered into posi­tion, prompt­ing no end of four-letter words and oaths and impre­ca­tions at the unwieldy mass of wood we were try­ing to man­han­dle into position.

 

We’d already been up on the walls a cou­ple of hours by then, and the ten­sion of mus­cles keep­ing bal­ance, of bend­ing down on one knee and nail­ing the truss to the wall cap, of then stand­ing up unas­sisted, like an acro­bat in work-boots, was start­ing to get to me. The one tor­nado had become two in the dis­tance, and then look­ing around, I spot­ted one com­ing down in some other part of the city, and all the while light­ning strik­ing where it wanted down from the sky, and the booms of thun­der rip­ping the air. Shortly before noon, we fin­ished hang­ing the last truss and I slid down the lad­der to the ground with legs like rub­ber a-tremble. The rest of the crew were wait­ing to go home, every piece of equip­ment loaded in the pickup trucks. “You two are crazy,” they said, and Bobby and I shook hands, aware of the slight under­state­ment of that fact, and I headed for my old Blue Buick with 100,000 miles on the odome­ter and the blue and white seats faded and stained from all kinds of unmen­tion­ables, includ­ing too many trips to the drive-in movies with my girl­friend of sum­mers long-past.

 

I don’t walk walls any­more, or hang trusses: my body is not nim­ble enough for that, and tri­fo­cals play hell with one’s aim with a ham­mer. But to this day, I don’t fear tor­na­does. I don’t per­son­ally know any­one who has died from one, or been swept up in the air like that cow I saw as a young­ster, so long ago on a hot, sum­mer, Ohio day. I don’t really enjoy Wiz­ard of Oz, all that much, though. I think it’s the fly­ing mon­keys that scare me the most.

DWW

Protecting the Land

The Allegheny Moun­tains were named by Native Amer­i­cans for the most impor­tant resource that comes out of the ground – clean water. I can say first­hand that the name is well deserved. Those moun­tains pro­duce water that comes up through the rocks and then spills back down, clean and use­ful for all ani­mals and plants liv­ing and grow­ing on its flanks and in its valleys. 

 
 
Water is the sub­stance from which all life flows. Very few bio­log­i­cal processes exist with­out water. A new­born baby is as much as 75% water. Our food has water in it, or requires clean water to grow and be healthy. Restau­rants and bak­eries need it to cook and serve foods, as do the can­ners and pack­agers of veg­eta­bles and fruits.  Schools need it for thirsty stu­dents. Physi­cians and sur­geons need it, den­tists need it, and sports teams need it. Our fac­to­ries need clean water to man­u­fac­ture goods, and the short­age of clean water is already hurt­ing indus­tries around the world. The US mil­i­tary has defined the lack of clean water as one of the most impor­tant resources that could cause wars in far away lands, it is that important. 
 
Why should we in Amer­ica not think it is impor­tant to safe­guard our clean water? 
 
I have been doc­u­ment­ing our old fam­ily farm on top of Allegheny Moun­tain for a good part of my life. My great-grandfather started the farm, along with his Civil War-widowed mother in the 1870s, mov­ing up there from the Green­brier Valley. Over the years our family’s land has been “hus­banded”, to use an old fash­ioned con­cept, or pro­tected and conserved.
 
The past few years I’ve been fol­low­ing sto­ries about hyrdro-fracturing for nat­ural gas. It always sounds so ideal for landown­ers: the gas com­pany assures all kinds of stuff, includ­ing fat pay­checks to the landowner, and these days the pitch is even wrapped in patri­o­tism, remind­ing us that our coun­try must have energy sources to break our depen­dency on for­eign oil. Kind of makes you think you should salute when you see that drilling truck come crunch­ing down the two-lane road, break­ing off pieces of pave­ment under it’s over­weight tires. 
 
What is unsaid is the dam­age done at sites across the US as energy com­pa­nies drill and frac­ture rocks at depths unimag­ined by the nor­mal human. Using high-pressure water mixed with toxic chem­i­cals to frac­ture the rock strata and force nat­ural gas to escape from the earth’s depth, “frack­ing” as a min­ing prac­tice has proven to be the very stuff of night­mares. Inject­ing toxic chem­i­cals into the strata of the earth in order to force the trapped nat­ural gas up to the sur­face has poi­soned water wells and streams, and has brought radioac­tive and toxic chem­i­cals into the back­yards of some parts of America. 
 
There is a lot of money involved, and wher­ever there is money there is also greed and flex­ing of mus­cles. In some states, protests against nat­ural gas drilling are met with out­right hos­til­ity from the local police, who main­tain the first pri­or­ity is to pro­tect the rights of the gas com­pany and landowner who owns the min­eral rights being exploited by the min­ers. States like West Vir­ginia claim jobs are cre­ated by the drilling com­pa­nies, and money is injected into the local com­mu­nity. Some is, that is true. 
 
What is not said is that prop­erty own­ers who are neigh­bors to the frack­ing oper­a­tions need and deserve clean water for their fam­i­lies, agri­cul­ture, and busi­nesses. They have the right to use their land in an unpol­luted, and uncon­t­a­m­i­nated way, unsul­lied by the chem­i­cal spills or water-table destruc­tions that had hap­pened repeat­edly next to frack­ing operations. 
 
I recently wrote a let­ter to the edi­tor of the Poc­a­hon­tas Times, the small-town weekly news­pa­per that is pub­lished out of the county seat where my great-grandfather’s farm is sit­u­ated. It’s a good let­ter, but there are a cou­ple of infor­ma­tive arti­cles in the same news­pa­per that relates first­hand to what has been seen in another county where frack­ers run hog-wild. One landowner was required to put on a flame-proof suit in order to visit his own land. It was a place he had thought to even­tu­ally build a house and live. Sounds to me like it would be liv­ing in hell if he tried that today.
 
I don’t want “Allegheny” to be changed in mean­ing to “mother of poi­son.” I don’t want toxic chem­i­cals to some­day bub­ble up on our farm.  That will not be con­ser­va­tion or good stew­ard­ship of our land. Some things can’t be bought – and some things can’t be changed once they are destroyed. No one today knows how to clean the con­t­a­m­i­nated water that is despoiled by nat­ural gas frackers. 
 
It is not a rad­i­cal idea to con­serve the land, to care about the envi­ron­ment and to pro­tect the nat­ural resources that we have on earth. The radical’s are those who want to destroy it by care­less use of tech­nol­ogy in pur­suit of some­thing that has lit­tle worth com­pared to clean water.
 
Take a look through my ongo­ing cov­er­age of the Wood­dell farm and you’ll see what I want to protect.
 
- David W. Wooddell
 
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