a.d. elliott - Take the Back Roads

Dear Henry, Occasionally you stumble across something that instantly grabs your attention. For example, a secret society called The International Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo, Incorporated grabbed my attention and I just had to ask, Who is a Hoo-Hoo? The term Hoo-Hoo was created by B. Arthur Johnson, an editor for the Timberman.  He used the term to describe a single bit of hair, twisted and oiled to a point on top of the (mostly) bald head of Charles McCarer. The term then spread throughout the lumber industry to describe anything weird and unusual. B. Arthur Johnson, William Eddy Barnes, George Washington Schwartz, A Strauss, George Kimball Smith, and William Starr Mitchell would later use the term to create a "secret" society in 1892. The Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo was established in Gurdon Arkansas with the purpose of fostering the health, happiness, and long life of its members. The order has, from the beginning, embraced the unusual, taking nam...

Dear Henry, Have you ever seen the White House? I've gone by it several times but have not seen any presidential pets. Speaking of pets... We both know  President Theodore Roosevelt  was quite the character, but I think he stands out as a presidential pet owner. During his presidency, the White House was a zoo and, briefly, was the home of a hyena named Bill. Bill was a gift from Ethiopia's Emperor Menelik II in 1904. Despite President Roosevelt's dislike of hyenas (he thought they were cowardly), he eventually grew to love the hyena, feeding it table scraps and teaching it tricks. Finally, however, the hyena grew too large for the White House and was moved to the National Zoo. Other unusual pets owned by the Roosevelt family include a chicken named Baron Speckle, Bill the lizard (to distinguish from Bill, the hyena), a garter snake named Emily Spinach, and Josiah, the badger. A bear, Jonathan Edwards, was also a brief member of the family before he also became to...

Dear Henry, I have been totally enthralled by the news surrounding the "Storm Area 51" fiasco that is supposed to take place this Friday.  But only because I have been to Area 51 and Rachel Nevada and only because I can't imagine this turning out in a way other than comical. If you haven't heard about this yet, let me fill you in. Back in June, a college student created an event on Facebook called "Storm Area 51: They Can't Stop All of Us" as a joke.  Only everyone decided to attend....right now, there are currently 2 million or so people who plan on attending.  Fearing the worst, Matty Roberts (the student) began coordinating with Connie West, the owner of the Lil A'le'inn in Rachel, Nevada, to host a festival. But that partnership has come to a close, with Matty Roberts now calling the party off and throwing a party in Las Vegas.  Connie West, however, is still planning on a potential party, however, just in case. If you do decide t...

Dear Henry, The recent storm we have had has caused havoc with the area birds. With so many trees down, many have found themselves homeless and searching for new places to live. For example, a wren ( formally of the strawberry planter, I think ) briefly thought about moving into our bathroom. I say briefly because, as you may remember Henry, I have three cats. Fortunately, my girls are far too chubby to be great hunters and I found the bird before anything bad could happen. The next ten minutes or so was quite the adventure, as I, standing in my bathtub, attempted to open the window next to the bird and quickly remove the screen (snort, screens never come of windows easily), all without any fatalities. It was very loud. Ziggy, attracted by the yowling of the girls and the squawking of the bird, added his own brand of mischief by encroaching into the girl's space, sandwiching them between the bird and himself, and then barking at them all. It seemed like an etern...

Dear Henry, I have just heard of the most mysterious book ever made, and now, I want to read it. The trouble is, I can't. No one can. The book is an illuminated codex called the Voynich Manuscript, which has been a mystery throughout the ages. Carbon dating places the creation of the document somewhere between 1404-1438, but that is all anyone knows about its early life. Although it was rumored that Emperor Rudolph II and then Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenez, the royal gardener, owned the book. The first documented owner didn't appear until 1639 when the alchemist Georg Baresch sent script samples to Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher hoping for a translation. After Baresch's death, the book made its way to his friend Jan Marek Marci and finally to Kircher. After that, the book disappeared into the Jesuit archives until 1912, when the book was sold, along with many others, to raise funds for the order. The book was purchased by Wilfred Voynich, a rare book deale...

Dear Henry, This is one of the Tylopilus versions of the Bolete mushroom.  They are gorgeous, with deep purple caps and, like most boletes, are non-toxic (there is a bolete with red spores which is said to be dangerous.  They don't appear to be wide-spread and I haven't seen one). There is, however, a huge variation in the edibility of "non-toxic". Any bolete with a purple cap tastes awful and by awful, I mean so bitter that your tongue tingles. You could not eat this mushroom, not even if you are starving. Ask me how I know. You see, once, Fish and I, armed with the knowledge that "all boletes are non-toxic", picked, sauteed, and attempted to eat one. It smelled heavenly while it was cooking.  It tasted horrific. The taste was so bad that we were afraid we had misidentified the mushroom. We didn't, they are just that inedible. I hear (unverified and unresearched) that they are a component of bitters.  I did, however, make a joke about ...

Dear Henry, Did you know there were vampires in New England? In 1990, a coffin was discovered at a gravel quarry in Griswold, Connecticut, with the initials JB and the number 55 hammered into the coffin lid with brass tacks. The bones within the coffin were arranged, several years postmortem, into a Jolly Roger. Intrigued by this arrangement, local archeologists started "digging" (couldn't help it) into the mystery, and through historical records and DNA testing, they were able to put together his story. JB was a man named John Barber, and he had tuberculosis. Oddly enough, what happened to John Barber's body wasn't all that rare. Tuberculosis was a real problem during that period and was called consumption because of the wasting and draining effects of the disease.  The disease was (and still is) incredibly contagious. Because of the disease's symptoms  (paleness, blood at the corners of the mouth, a decaying smell to the breath), there was a be...

Dear Henry, Do you know who the first person who flew around the world was? Did you think it was Charles Lindbergh? Yeah, me too. Charles Lindbergh was such a larger than life character that it is easy to attribute all acts of early aviation to him.  But this honor isn't his. The first aviator to circle the world was actually Wiley Post, he completed the journey in 7 days 18 hours and 49 minutes, landing in New York on July 22, 1933. Wiley Post, like Charles Lindbergh, was himself a larger than life character.  He was born in 1898 to cotton farming parents and he initially tried to enter the aviation program during WWI but the war ending before his training was complete.  He then, briefly, drifted through the professions of roughnecking and bank robbery (for which he served a year in the Oklahoma State Prison systems). When an oil rigging accident caused the loss of his left eye, he used the settlement money to buy an airplane. Ultimately, Wiley Post caugh...

Dear Henry, Last Spring, in a sale bin, I found three tubers in a baggie with "Dahlias - 3.00" written on it in magic marker. I figured why not? They were all different, one of the tubers grew to a purple one with stripes, one was a fluffy yellow, and one was a black. All three were beautiful but I particularly loved the black, however last Fall, after pulling the tubers for the Winter, I noticed one of them had mildewed. I thought it was the black dahlia and I was very sad. After what has been a particularly wet Spring and early Summer, the dahlias are finally blooming and to my surprise, there was my black.  It was my fluffy yellow one that mildewed. (*Side note - I feel like I am maligning the yellow dahlia or implying that it wasn't a worthy flower.  Not at all, it was lovely and I wish I could have gotten a picture that did it justice.  I seem to struggle with photographing that color of yellow.) Once, years ago, there was a woman in the neighborh...

Dear Henry, Fish is really good at I SPY and his latest find was really cool. While weeding the flowerbed next to the mailbox, he had moved one of the boundary stones and discovered a nest of Five-Lined Skink eggs. We have a few of these little lizards living around our house.  They are great bug catchers and are rather cute. Like the wren experience,  finding the skink nest changed many of the preconceptions I had about lizards. For example. skinks tend to their eggs. I had always thought that all reptiles laid eggs and then abandoned them.  They don't - or at least skinks don't - mom was sitting with her eggs when Fish moved the edging stone. It is considered to be one of the most common lizards in the US, although you probably won't find it in the West because it loves humidity.  In Arkansas, they are everywhere, although I am reading reports that they are threatened in Connecticut. They aren't very big, about 5 inches with the tail and can liv...

Dear Henry, I think I have mentioned that I want to do a " Great American Road-Trip " before, and still, despite the logistical challenges, I plan to take one. While thinking about (pre-planning?) my road trip, I wondered where the idea of a cross-American road trip came from. As it turns out, one of the first American road trips was made in 1919 by the U.S. Army. It began as a post-WWI project for the military - imagine, if you will, a bunch of soldiers, fresh from Europe and with nothing to do. So the army decided that conquering the roads of America was the perfect project.  The First Transcontinental Motor Convoy consisted of about 100 vehicles (including a tank!) that left the White House on July 7, 1919 and headed toward the Presidio in San Fransico, California. The convoy made it to the outskirts of D.C. before suffering the first of its many mechanical issues. On a lark, a young Lieutenant Colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower  decided to join the convoy ...

Dear Henry, I have a family of wrens living in one of my strawberry planters. Several months ago, the wrens had moved into an old barbecue grill that we had on the deck. We bought a new one last fall but we hadn't considered moving the old one until this spring,  we discovered we had waited too long. Fish found the nest during the spring cleaning and pressure washing of the deck, and although we decided to leave the grill where it was until the babies had left the nest, the event proved to be too much for the birds and Fish and I received our first ever wren lesson. Wrens can move their babies. I discovered this a couple of days later when I noticed a bird's nest in my empty strawberry planters and I recognized the birds from the barbecue grill. I don't know how they managed it (or maybe they didn't and we really have two sets of birds, I'm not sure). Their new nest is in the strawberry planter directly in front of my "morning coffee and paper o...

Dear Henry, My cousins are safely back home and it has been such a fun adventure. I mean, how often do you get to explore your hometown like a tourist? I am grateful they came to visit and trusted me enough to allow me to plan a trip for them. I would like to call the trip a success as they seemed to have a good time (I hope they weren't lying). So here it is, a Take the Back Roads Ultimate Northwest Arkansas Destination Guide*  *(according to me) Day One: Eureka Springs Arkansas Eureka Springs Arkansas is a quaint town nestled in the Ozarks. It became most known, during the early 1900s, as a mountainous spa and resort town.  Many of the oldest buildings have been maintained and the entire area is on the National Register of Historic Places. Our first stop on our tour of  Eureka Springs was the Thorncrown Chapel . The chapel was commissioned in the 1980s by Jim Reed as a pilgrimage chapel. It was designed by E. Fay Jones. The design gives an open-...

Dear Henry, I just learned about a new word type - the Hapax Legomenon. Hapax Legomenon is a word that occurs only once in the written form.  Most hapaxes occur as a single occurrence in a book, or as a word used only once over the entire author's portfolio of work. However, there are a few English language hapaxes, where their usage has only occurred once in the entire written record. although technically, as soon as I write them here, they are no longer hapaxes. The English hapaxes I found were: Flother  - a snowflake - from "The XI Pains of Hell" Hebenon - a type of poison - "Hamlet" Manticratic - ruling by a family - "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" Nortelrye - an education - "Canterbury Tales" Sassigassity - audacity?  - "A Christmas Tree" Sleepwerigne - sleep weary? - "The Exter Book" One of the problems I noticed about these words is that no one is entirely sure what the definition really is, as they w...

Dear Henry, Of all the through hikes I wish I could do, the Camino de Santiago has been the highlighted one. The Camino de Santiago (the way of St. James) is a route about 500 miles through the mountains of  Northern Spain (there is a small part in France) to the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, which is thought to be the final resting place for St. James. The trip takes at least a month. Fortunately, Spain has another trek called the Camino dos Faros (the lighthouse way).  This trek walks along Spain's "Costa da Morte" and takes about eight days.  The reports that I have read call the hike absolutely breathtaking. It is also much less crowded than Santiago. Where do you want to go? xoxo a.d.

Dear Henry, Do you remember when I told you I was inspired by Anna Atkins, the English botanist? In addition to being one of the first female photographers (if not the first) she also used to preserve images through cyanotype photograms - laying material over chemically treated paper, which was then laid in the sun. Her book, "Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions" is considered to be the first book illustrated with photographic images, although it was William Henry Fox Talbot's book "The Pencil of Nature" that was the first book which used camera produced photographs (versus photograms).  His book was also the first to be commercially produced. I had seen images of her cyanotypes and was inspired to pick it up and have been trying to duplicate the detail and feel of her work. And I finally think I would be proud to show her my work. xoxo a.d.

Dear Henry, I get to work from home (which I love) - but it is nice to get away from home. But even then, sometimes getting out of the house isn't a rest. Because I am generally with Fish and sometimes it is really nice to be ALONE - which is impossible at home, I have far too many animals (3 cats, 1 dog). So I decided to head out to Lake Hamilton Arkansas for an "evening away" (planned before we knew of the upcoming storm system), and catch some early morning "sunrise over the Quitchitas and/or Lake Hamilton" photographs on the way back (and maybe sneak in a spa treatment, Hot Springs has wonderful spas). But this Spring has had some erratic and powerful storms. I wasn't too worried when I left, I checked the radar on the map and was positive I was going to be between the two bands of storms the entire time  - and here you thought I was being irresponsible for leaving during last nights weather activities. And really, I was right, I stayed bet...

Dear Henry, This waterfall is called Moonshiner's Falls. It is generally the barest spring unless it rains.  It is a short mile hike right before Devil's Den State Park.  You can park in the area right near the sign. The hike isn't too bad, with my trekking poles, it was easy, however, it is important to remember, you will be walking back uphill.  I was disappointed when I looked up the name, hoping to get the backstory on house, perhaps some juicy details about the moonshining business that used to thrive in this area. Nope, there is nothing of the sort. It may not, in fact, be anything more than a place to stay while hunting.  From what I can gather, ATV'ers discovered this find only a few years ago and because it was a tiny home tucked in a bluff next to running water, it must be a moonshiner's cave and the name stuck. I somehow doubt it was used regularly for moonshining, although everyone says it was - the water source only runs during the rainy seas...

Dear Henry, Today I am thinking of things philosophical - and ended up editing a picture that reminded me of that philosophical.  The photo was of a narrow path, next to a bluff, over jagged rocks and clumps of last year's leaves, with a waterfall pouring over the trail. I remembered that I had seen this side fall during our latest hike and wanting to get a shot of it, but it was rather challenging to do. It was raining that day and had been raining heavily for weeks (I suspect this waterfall exists only during heavy rains).  The trail had the interesting "floaty" feel of ground that is so saturated that the entire forest floor feels as if it is suspended in a lake and that you are walking on an air mattress.  The rocks were also pretty mossy and slick (I really had to rely on my trekking poles) and I was convinced there were copperheads under each and every one of them (I am always positive there are venomous snakes under each and every rock and all the piles of...