I know how busy you—and we—all are. But if you can carve out a bit of time, read Gary Smith's story on the Gulf oil tragedy in this week's Sports Illustrated. Here is the link:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1171518/index.htm
Gary has won multiple National Magazine Awards for his stories. This one is a powerful, well-reported essay that brilliantly answers the question of why a sports magazine would send a writer to cover an oil spill.
People who come into the Notebook are amazed by Pamelia's low-tide photography. They are often startled by the colors and by the blue starfish she shoots. This is not a photo from the shop, but it shows how small those blue starfish are—just look at them next to mussel shells.
Laurie Schreiber of the Bar Harbor Times visited the Notebook last week and just did a nice piece that came out yesterday:
http://mdi.villagesoup.com:80/ae/story/human-creativity-takes-its-place-in-the-natural-order/335072
We've had so many interesting visitors over the last week that it's hard to keep track of them: biologists, microbiologists, professors, authors, artists, oceanography teachers, a pair of cool 8- and 10-year-old boys from Paris, even a location scout for music videos and movies. An editor from Atlas Obscura e-mailed to say she thought our shop should be included in that website's guide to the world's wondrous, unusual places to visit. I'm about to head to the shop to see what surprises await today.
After towing us to the top of Cedar Swamp Mountain, Wooster needed a breather.
As you may recall, Wooster, our Wheaten terrier, likes to drive the car. (If you missed the revealing photo, go to http://www.thenaturalistsnotebook.com/our-blog/the-highly-evolved-dog.) Like Pamelia and me, however, Wooster prefers walking. And climbing mountains. While hiking the peaks of Acadia National Park with Wooster last fall, we decided to see how many other people (and dogs) like going up, up, up and up some more to reach pinnacles that offer a great view of ocean, mountains, lakes and forest. To that end, we created The Naturalist's Notebook's 28-mountain challenge.
Every Saturday morning starting on July 3 and continuing into September, photographer and naturalist Tom Lawrence will guide a hike up one or more of the 28 tallest trail-accessible mountains on Mount Desert Island. Tom will offer photo-taking tips, find scenic spots to shoot from and provide insights into the flora, fauna and geology. We will encourage participants to keep field notebooks of their hike, filling the pages with writing, quick sketches and photos.
In other words, we will help them create their own naturalist's notebooks.
Tom Lawrence enlivens each climb with his photography tips, nature knowledge and wonderful sense of humor.
Now, you may look at a map of Mount Desert Island and question whether the bald peaks of Acadia deserve to be called "mountains." They are rocky, but not Rockies. I certainly would never boast at The Explorers Club that Wooster had "summited" Cedar Swamp Mountain (altitude 942 feet).
But how many people want to carry oxygen tanks and fight snow-blindness just to get to the top of a mountain? Acadia's peaks are a reasonable challenge for a normal person—and some are tough and dangerous enough that one misstep could be your last. While descending a particularly steep path on Penobscot Mountain last November, I found myself backing down a natural cliffside ladder of rocks and roots while holding a 35-pound terrier on my shoulder. If Pamelia had not been steadying me from below with a hand on my butt, I might have ended up as a headline in various Maine newspapers. FOOL AND HIS DOG PLUMMET FROM SUMMIT, or some such.
Anyway, that route will not be included on the 28-mountain challenge.
Our Acadia map board offers guidance on where to climb and hike.
Anyone who climbs all 28 mountains over the course of the summer (and has the photos to prove it) will be recognized at The Naturalist's Notebook with a laudatory exhibit. His or her name will become a verb, in the tradition of Xerox, Google, Robert Bork and Wally Pipp (you'll get that if you're a baseball fan). If the first to reach all 28 is, say, our friend Janet Higgins (who's fit enough to actually do it), then around the Notebook we will forever refer to climbing all 28 peaks as the act of "higginsing." Goal for 2011: I want to higgins!
Of course, given that Tom Lawrence will be leading all the hikes, and that Wooster more or less tows us up mountains, insisting on getting to the top first, the odds are that the act of climbing all 28 peaks will become known as either lawrencing or—my personal favorite—woostering.
Notebook News:
1) If you didn't know it already, The Naturalist's Notebook is now on Facebook. If you're a Facebooker, please check it out and join us as fans or friends or whatever. Spread the word.
And if you didn't see the item that we posted on Facebook on Sunday, here it is:
A seven-year-old girl who came to the shop multiple times last summer just showed up for the first time this year. She had a fun visit and then left with her mother. Her mom returned a few minutes later. "I have to tell you what she said when we got to the car," the mom said. On a scrap of paper the mother had written her daughter's comment: “I think there's magic in my heart that comes from The Naturalist's Notebook that inspires me."
How cool is that?
2) Tom Lawrence will also be leading photography and notebook-making hikes and bike rides four afternoons a week. This is the schedule: Mondays: Jordan Stream Tuesdays: Little Long Pond Wednesday: Geology of Ocean Drive Thursdays: Bike Hike on the Carriage Roads of Acadia. The cost is $20 for an adult and $30 for a couple. Kids are free if accompanied by an adult. Please call 207-801-2777 by 5 p.m. the day before to reserve a spot.
Rocco's mechanical mosquito flies around his artwork now on display at the Notebook.
The works of New York contemporary artist Rocco Alberico rise like small buildings on stilts. They are meticulous architectural constructions, some of which stand more than five feet tall. They house dioramas, make use of 3-D images and sometimes feature mechanical objects and even video screens. The works can be humorous, surreal and politically edgy.
Rocco has come to Mount Desert Island for nearly 30 years to vacation, and his love of the area and Acadia National Park inspired his newest piece, now on display at our shop and exploratorium. It is called "Rockefeller's Teeth," a reference to the affectionate nickname for the rows of granite blocks lining the park's John D. Rockefeller-built carriage roads.
The new work includes a 3-D viewer, a video drawer, a remote-controlled mechanical mosquito and a variety of images from Acadia. To me, the work speaks to the disconnect between the human-built world and nature. You can make your own judgments. The piece—and Rocco—arrived in Seal Harbor this week. We're holding an open reception at the Notebook tonight (Friday, June 25) from 5 to 8 p.m. Please stop in if you're in the area and haven't seen the expanded shop yet this year.
Notebook visitors have been enjoying taking a 3D look at the surprises inside Rocco's Acadia-inspired piece.
I came to know Rocco when he was the acclaimed art director of Sports Illustrated For Kids magazine. In recent years he has focused on his own art, which has been displayed in Berlin, Valencia, Miami and Los Angeles as well as New York, where he is represented by the prestigious Westwood Gallery in Soho. Rocco's pieces earned him honors at last year's Clash of the Artists competition put on by the New York arts organization Art for Progress and have attracted international collectors.
I did a short Q-and-A with Rocco about his art and how he fell in love with Acadia:
How and when did you start making these unique artworks?
I started making them when I was in art school [at Cooper Union in New York]. The first ones were very simple and quite small. They were very similar in shape to the house I grew up in. There were no dioramas or 3-D viewers. When I graduated and started working in graphic design my art work was put on a back burner. When I left Time Inc. about ten years ago, that's when I started to get serious. My pieces have gotten bigger and more complicated and I've recently started to incorporate video.
Did something or somebody spark the creative idea?
I grew up out on Long Island in a very tiny Cape Cod style house. All the homes in my neighborhood were virtually the same and were very close together. They were basically big boxes with roofs. When I looked out my bedroom window all I saw was clapboard siding. I think this made a huge impression on me.
As a kid I had a slot-car race track set up in the basement of my parents' house. My dad helped me build a plywood table for it and I spent hours landscaping in miniature. I was obsessed with making everything look real but could never afford the really convincing and expensive plastic trees and hand-painted figures. I had to make due with twigs from the back yard and lichen from the local hobby shop. I'm sure that's where my love of dioramas comes from.
I started experimenting with 3-D photos when I was in high school. I only had one camera so I would take one shot and then move over one step to the right and take another shot. This was very limiting because I could only shoot stationary objects. When I was able to afford it, I built a 3-D rig using two cameras mounted side by side that were synced so they would fire simultaneously.
That's Rocco with a 3-D camera he created—it's two side-by-side cameras that he has rigged up to shoot simultaneously.
Why do you like making these works?
I enjoy certain aspects of the process more than others. I love being outdoors and taking pictures and I'm very happy when things are going well. However, some tasks can be really tedious like cutting sandpaper up into tiny rectangles to simulate shingles and gluing 500 of them to the roof of a structure one by one. Time seems to stand still.
As my pieces have gotten more complicated I seem to run into more and more technical problems especially now that I'm also dealing with video. There's always a challenge but I guess that's one of the things that keeps me going.
Where is your studio? In your apartment?
I work in a small room in the back of our apartment in Manhattan. It's crammed with art supplies, tools, my computer and tons of stuff I've collected over the years including sand from various locations, doll parts and cheap Chinese toys. I do a lot of my wood cutting and sanding in a small bathroom outfitted with an exhaust fan (which sucks out most of the sawdust) next to my "studio" and I'm slowly taking over the rest of our apartment. I also have a huge table saw I keep in my mom's basement and if I have any heavy-duty wood cutting to do, I'll do it out there.
What about Acadia do you find creatively inspiring?
Everything. It's just a beautiful place and for me there's something restorative about being there. I love the geology, the symmetry of the Bubbles and I can stare at the ocean all day.
Did you intend the new piece make any sort of statement? All of the imagery in the piece comes from or was inspired by Acadia, however, I think it says more about me than the park. I embrace nature and the outdoors but it also arouses a great paranoia in me.
How and when did you fall in love with Acadia?
first came to Acadia in the early 1980s. I was on a road trip with my girl friend at the time. She had been there before and wanted to go back. Our intention was to spend a couple of days in the park and then continue up the coast. We ended up staying in Acadia for the rest of the trip. I was hooked. I just thought it was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen and vowed to come back.
What things do you most like to do when you come up here?
I love to hike, kayak, take pictures ... and eat [Jordan Pond House] popovers.
Bangor Daily News photographer John Russ visited the shop last week to shoot photos for the article.
A wonderful feature article about The Naturalist's Notebook by Emily Burnham came out this morning in the Bangor Daily News. Pamelia woke me up at, I think, 5 a.m. (I'm still a little groggy). "The article's great!" she said. "Emily really got the place!" The photos, by John Clarke Russ, look beautiful too. The timing is perfect: At 10 this morning we open for the season.
To read the story, go to this web address: http://bangordailynews.com/2010/06/20/living/taking-note-of-nature/
My dad and mom preparing signs and hat displays in The Naturalist's Notebook workshop at our house.
I've been a sports writer and editor for a New York-based magazine for 30 years. If someone asked me how I ended up helping Pamelia create a quirky shop and exploratorium on the Maine coast devoted to nature, science, art and a curiosity about the world, part of my answer would be simple: Dad.
His name is Henry Neff, and he helped instill in me a love of nature, an appreciation for plants and organic gardening, an inquisitiveness and a capacity for really hard work. His own story is unlikely: After a hardscrabble, Depression-era, city childhood in the Hartford, Conn., area, he and my mom, Jean Neff, raised my brother, Brian, and me in a couple of small towns in Connecticut (Tolland and Roxbury) where we could spend hours exploring the woods and helping with the gardens.
This was our family's approach: Despite being complete novices to vegetable gardening, Dad and Mom planted a one-acre spread in Tolland—totally organic, of course; who wants to spray poison on their food?—and made fresh produce the cornerstone of our diet. Because we grew so much of what we ate, our weekly food bill for a family of four was $14.
We made our own maple syrup. We composted, decades before it was fashionable. Dad took us camping, tried to identify wild plants, talked to the birds on our property by whistling back to them. He kept track of which animals showed up at certain times of the day or year and came up with his own explanations for their timing and behavior. He was, in his own way, an amateur naturalist.
He worked at companies that sometimes required employees to take their entire allotment of annual vacation in the first two weeks of August. We always went camping in either Cape Cod or Cape Hatteras. I quickly grew to love the ocean and dreamed of someday being able to live on one. Dad set the stage for my move to Maine.
From left: Dad, Brian and I on Cape Cod, sometime in the 1960s
And so, on this Father's Day, I say a gigantic thank-you to my 82-year-old dad—who, I should add, made the seven-and-a-half-hour drive up here with Mom two weeks ago just to help Pamelia and me get The Naturalist's Notebook ready for its season opening tomorrow. They worked dawn to dusk on every thankless project we could come up with. I just wish they could have stayed longer.
As I write this, Pamelia is pulling out photos of her dad, William Markwood, a thoughtful, world-traveling engineer who died in 1984 and shaped her global-mindedness, her interest in science and art and her love of great food and seeing the planet. She is also digging through shots of her late stepfather, Robert Voris, whose fun, booming spirit and late-in-late love affair with the Maine coast enriched my life as well as Pamelia's.
From left: Pamelia's brother, Scott; her mom, Pam; Pamelia; and her dad, Bill, at Au Mouton de Panurge restaurant in Paris in the 1960s.
One of Pamelia's favorite shots of her dad, also taken in the 1960s in Europe, where the family lived during a big chunk of Pamelia's childhood.
Pamelia's late stepfather, Bob Voris, with her mom in North Carolina.
It dawned on me that, like others of their pre-computer generation, my parents and Pamelia's don't show up on Internet searches. That seems unfair—a huge hole in the planet's collective knowledge of extraordinary, ordinary people. I will hereby change that by putting their full names in this as Internet tags.
As Pamelia and I put in a 16-hour final day of preparation for the re-opening the Notebook, we will be thinking of our fathers and how lucky we have been. I love you, Dad. We love you, Dads.