Survival of Memory

The other day I read John McPhee's The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975) and parts reminded me of the one canoe trip I took in Maine when I was fifteen, a trip that's usually a blip on the memory timeline. Often books with grand outdoor adventures make me feel less-than for not doing that sort of thing all the time. This time I felt wistful, yet also proud of this thing I'd accomplished many years ago. Even if our windy day wasn't as severe as theirs, it was a big challenge for the members of my Girl Scout troop, and having met it, we added another layer resilience to our cores. 

At first place names were the biggest memory trigger. I had it in my head that Moosehead Lake is where we paddled. And then McPhee mentions in passing a leech on someone's leg -- and that struck a deep chord. I'm not much of a freshwater person even now; to that fifteen year old, leeches were new and viscerally alarming.

Reading, I could picture a souvenir map I bought of the region. I didn't think I had it anymore, though, but I couldn't really bring to mind any snapshots of the trip, either. Or then again -- didn't I dig up a picture to post for Mary Sam, maybe when we turned 50? Where are they? McPhee of course is keeping notes for himself on their trip. A couple of the men he paddled with knew their Thoreau and his journalistic The Maine Woods (1864) and while they have a copy, they also can conjure excerpts from memory. Didn't we have BSA-issued booklets, journals for our canoe trip? Gosh, if I had that, where would it be?

As it is for anyone on a packed-out trip, food is a major theme. McPhee notes that the canoe-builder and defacto leader (despite, it turns out, having perhaps the least backwoods or tripping experience) insisted they each pack their own. McPhee and his friend have a variety of things, and McPhee waxes on about Mountain House freeze dried foods. These absolutely were about the major brand in play ten years later when I started backpacking with my Girl Scout troop. I've certainly eaten the meals they did. The canoe-builder poo-poos McPhee's reflector oven. The writer brings it anyway and they all relish the things he bakes for them. Probably, we Girl Scouts used one on my Maine trip; certainly our troops and summer camp units messed around with reflector ovens. I never became anything like expert with them and the sight of one still makes me roll my eyes. 

While he focus of McPhee's narrative is the crafting of the canoes and what it's like to paddle one and care for it, we get his usual digressions into interesting natural history and character study, too. The canoe-builder comes across as a talented craftsman and a bit of a savant, but a terrible leader. While he takes charge and his companions defer to him almost always, we eventually learn that he's been on scant few long trips before this and has no idea which techniques and gear are truly useful. Not only does McPhee's reflector oven redeem itself, the flashlight he was told to leave behind is a clear necessity, too. McPhee teaches everyone (excepting the friend he brought) pray and draw strokes and other crucial paddling skills. Skills I've had since I was twelve or thirteen. Idle canoeing in the Cove at camp and preparing for the Maine trip taught me that. Everything about being in Girl Scout troops taught me leadership and consensus-building.

I found the scrapbook from my trip in the third place I looked. While I certainly would have guessed it was made by Hallmark -- Dad's mom work in an office supply-Hallmark store and kept us well supplied -- the robin on the cover was a surprise. The Instamatic photos must have been cheaply developed; they are faded and yellow-brown. The journal existed and was right there to remind me that it rained lots; that we hit about 160 miles (!); that we had not only the guide provided by the Boy Scout high adventure camp that ran the trips, but also miscellaneous adults I did not particularly remember. Perhaps I didn't have great leadership modeled to me if I don't remember them? Or is that an indicator that they were good and melted into the background? In the official photo of the bus-load that travelled from Richmond were the faces of people I remembered and people I'd forgotten til just that moment.

Gentrification Book Reading Notets

 How To Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Peter Moskowitz New York : Nation Books, 2017)

Tiny summary: Capitalism combined with state and federal laws to set us up to value real estate over people. Author documents examples in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York.

Author's thesis statement: "In every gentrifying city -- that is, in every city where there is a combination of new coffee shops and condos, hipsters, and families struggling to hang on -- you can usually trace they start of that change not to a few pioneering citysteaders but to a combination of federal, local, and state policies that favor the creation of wealth over the creation of community." (p. 23)

Federal examples:

"Regan cut all nonmilitary spending by the US government by 9.7 percent in his first term, and in his second term cut the Department of Housing and Urban Development's budget by an astonishing 40 percent, hobbling cities' ability to pay for public housing." p. 42 

GI bill's focus on home ownership fostered suburbs, broke habit of multi-generational living

FEMA's failure to serve black New Orleanians post-Katrina

Misc

Quotes Jane Jacobs: "'Private investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image.'" p. 68

Urbanist Richard Florida with 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class is a leading force in hyping the creative class at the expense of the poor, working, and even middle class. Emphasis on creating cities or districts that cater to the needs and tastes of this group at the expense of others (who were generally in the districts first). (See section beginning p. 78)

Viral video in San Francisco captured white men bullying Hispanic people off a city soccer field because the former paid for the time and the people who'd always lived in the neighborhood followed the practice of the community. Moskowitz sees this as an example of how "[a]s our cities' landscapes have changed, we have too, increasingly viewing ourselves not as community members with a responsibility to each other but as purchasers of things and experiences. This is what pissed off Hugo the most -- the idea that these people felt they had more of a right to space than he and his friends; that the amount of times spent in a community and the traditional way of doing things, of accessing public space, did not matter and only money did." (p 136)

"How do you begin to form a tenants movement in a city where many residents feel like consumers of luxury products, not community members?" (p 215)

Local

Tax breaks favor Twitter over small-business owners; they bring in the massive stadium and its team with expensive tickets and demand for mostly service-wages jobs to support it.

Localities put incentives in place for real estate or tech companies rather than making sure people's basic needs met. Once those companies arrive, rents go up and businesses open that cater to richer people meaning people who had been living there have to go further for basic needs. See Detroit's "7.2" (beginning page 91) for example. "The people who are benefiting from all these subsidies -- the gentrifiers of the 7.2 -- do not seem to realize the work that has gone into bringing and keeping them here. They consider themselves cunning pioneers ... ignoring the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used to keep [Detroit native now displaced] Cheryl West in their homes...." p. 95

"The suburbs were the prototype for gentrification, not aesthetically but economically. Suburbanization was the original American experiment in using real estate to reinvigorate capitalism. Gentrification can be understood as a continuation of that experiment .... The suburbs are also a good reminder that housing, planning, and economic policy in the United States is deliberate, and that its main purpose is to produce money not adequately house people." (p. 147)

Given that urban gentrification pushes poor people to the suburbs, "The suburbs are being reused, reconfigured, and repopulated. They are becoming poorer, and that has wide-ranging implications for policy and the lives of lower income people." (p. 147) 

Moskowitz's concluding suggestions (p 209-13)

Expand, protect, and make accessible public lands. 

Give people an actual say in what happens in their city.

Heavily regulate housing. (e.g. rent control)

Implement a New Deal

End protectionism, add infrastructure. 

Raise taxes, raise wages, spend on the poor.

Boontonware

cream and sugar at my house

 

Today I learned that Boonton melmine dishes, the sturdy dishes gracing my Girl Scout camp dining hall, were designed by a woman named Belle Kogan (1902-2000). She studied mechanical drawing in high school and studied briefly at the Pratt Institute in New York. 

Boonton was promoted as stylish and sturdy -- indeed the company would replace pieces you broke. Lucky for them, we didn't know this at camp, where we made an art form of breaking them by forcing them into dish washing baskets. 

To learn more about Kogan, I especially recommend this website which considers a variety of drinking vessels and highlights the Boonton coffee cup. The researcher notes, “Kogan worked with many different media including silver, aluminum, ceramics, glass, plastic, wood and cloth and was one of the first industrial designers – man or woman – to experiment with plastic. Her 1950s lines of plastic dinnerware for Boonton Molding Co. was particularly popular and was purchased widely.” 

Additional Reading

Entry on the Cooper Hewitt's website; includes some of her drawings (such as the 1958 rendering of the sugar bowl lid below) as well as the pieces themselves.

Cooper Hewitt Museum

Cream and sugar in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Article in industrial design magazine Core 77, from 2015. 

Very artsy shots (you may have to click on each to see them fully) at another design website.