The Yonderist – Page 21 – All those who wander are not lost.

In some American speech communities, being “good with words” is valued as a skill. Certainly this is the case in a number of studies of African American speech communities, and I have found that to be the case among Cajun communities as well. Within the broader stream of American folk culture, however, there is a healthy skepticism of individuals who are “good with words.” Salespeople and politicians are considered to be “smooth talkers,” a descriptor which rarely carries with it approbation. Instead, they are types of talkers whose talk we are encouraged to “take with a grain of salt” because in all likelihood any promises made were only in the moment and will not be kept.

All that noted, my own observations and a few recent conversations here with colleagues from diverse parts of the U.S.A. have interested me in a phenomena that may or may not be more broadly part of American culture. The anecdotes I have heard, and begun to collect only very loosely, have to do with the speech of older folks, mostly older men in my own work, who it seems feel freed of the constraints of the general opprobrium applied to talking without seeming purpose. Reflexivity in the stories and comments is high and often touches on topics that are usually considered of fairly sensitive nature in American common culture.

A small interchange reported to me recently is indicative of at least some of the things I am interested in teasing out:

A man is complaining about various aches and pains and comments: “It sure is hell getting old.”

His companion responds, “That’s not you getting old. That’s you dying.” And goes on to note that every ache is actually something dying within his friend. Both are laughing by the end of it.

Teach Yourself to Program in/with Scheme

2008-02-22

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The good folks at MIT and MIT Press have made the influential computer-science text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs available on-line with sample code and the instructor’s manual. It’s all here.

AT 301A as Told by Ray Hicks

2008-01-28

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This one is about Jack and Tom and Will—of old Fire Dragon that spit balls of fire. And Jack’s dad had a great bug track of land, owned it. So, he give it to Jack and Tom and Will to clear; give ‘em the land and made ‘em a deed for it, to clear and start clearing it theirselves. And so, they got up a wagon-load of vittles and went where it was at and built ‘em a …notched ‘em up a shanty to stay in. And so, they knowed that the next…that, when they got ready to clear it, that they’d have to leave, uh, leave one till twelve (and he could help, then, after twelve) to cook dinner. So they left Will the first time.

And Jack and Tom cleared, and Will got dinner and rung the dinner…blowed the dinner horn. And, just when he blowed it, up out of a holler come old Fire Dragon, up with his pipe in his mouth, and come in at the door. And just come on in. And Will had the dinner set on the table, and he come in and never said a word to Will. And Will was so scared he hid behind the door. And Fire Dragon eat every bite, sopped the dish, and went back through in by the fireplace and got the biggest chunk of fire that he could find and stuffed down in his pipe and went off.

And Jack and Tom got to the house, come in, and says, (Will shot out from behind the door), says, “Where is the dinner, Will?” Says, “Hain’t you cooked no dinner?” He says, “Gosh,” says, “if you’d a seed what I seed,” said, “you wouldn’t want no dinner!” And they ‘gin to laugh, and Will says, “All right, laughing’s catching,” he says. “Tom,” says, “tomorrow’ll be your turn.” And so they fixed up a little, right quick, extra, then, and eat it, and went back and cleared that evening. And the next day they left Tom to get dinner, clean up, till twelve. And Will and Jack was a-clearing till twelve.

And so Tom got dinner and blowed the horn, and up come old Fire Dragon. And just come in and never said a word—and Tom hid—and eat every bite and sopped the pot. And went through by the fireplace and got the biggest coal of fire he could find and put it in his pipe. And Jack and Will come in, and Tom shot out. And says, “Where’s the dinner, Tom?” He says, “Gosh,” he says, “Tom’s (here, Ray means Will, of course) right;” says, “Jack, don’t laugh!” Says, “Tomorrow’ll be your turn.” Says, “Great…” says, “you won’t want no dinner when you see that.” And he says, “He went in by the fireplace, after he eat up all the eating, and got the biggest coal of fire he could get,” Tom said. And he said, “When he put it in the pipe and puffed it a few puffs,” said, “it looked like a steam engine took off with the blowers on.” Well, they fixed up a little, right quick, and eat ‘em a little bite extra, and all went back that evening and cleared. And said, “Jack, now tomorrow’ll be your turn.”

Well, so, they left Jack the next day and jack fixed dinner and cleaned up and went to setting it on the table, and he blowed the horn. And, while he was scooping out of a kettle a mess of beans, he looked and there come old Fire Dragon, with his arms crossed behind him.

And just as he come to the door, he (Jack) said, “Hello there, Dad!” Says, “Is you hungry?” Said, “Nope.” Said, “Don’t want a bite.” ‘Cause Jack offered it to him, he didn’t want none. Said, “Yeah, Dad,” says, “just get you a seat in there in the fireplace.” And says, “I’m a-setting it on the table now.” Says, “Will and Tom will be in just in a few minutes.” Said, “I blowed the dinner horn.”

Said, “Nope,” said, “I don’t want a bite.” Said, “I just stopped by to light my pipe.” He said he went in and got the biggest chunk, a great big stick of wood, too, Jack said, and stuffed it way down in his pipe. And said that beat any cloud of smoke, when he give that a few puffs, he ever seed in his life. And said he just struck out behind him then; follered him by the smoke down through a wilderness, way down in a holler.

And while he had gone, Jack had…While Jack was gone, Will and Tom come in and said, “Good gracious!” Says, “The dinner’s on the table.” Said, “He’s eat Jack this time.” Said, “Boy, we’ve lost Jack;” said, “he’s eat him.” Said, “The dinner’s on the table.”

Well, so Jack come in, directly. They said, “Where you been?” Says, “We thought he’d eat you up, account of dinner on the table.”

He said, “No.” Says, “I called him ‘Dad’,” and said, “tried to get him to stay and make a seat and get him a chair in the fire-setting room and wait, and was setting it on the table.” And said, “Just got it set on the table when I left.” And he says, “I found out where he went.” Says, “He went down there, way down in the wilderness of that holler.” And said, “He went in a hole in the ground.”

And so they eat then and ‘gin to rig up to find out what was in there. And they eat and fixed ‘em a basket out of splits and took and made ‘em a rope out of hickory bark and went down to the hole. And they let Will down first. And they fixed it…Will…if that Will hit any trouble, he was to shake the rope of the hickory bark. And so, just hadn’t went down but just a few feet till Will shook it and they snaked him back out just as fast as they could and they says, “What did you see, Will?” He said, “I seed a house under there.” And so they put Tom in it then, and let him down, and he was gone down just a little longer and he shook it and they jerked him out and says, “Tom, what did you see?” He said, “I seed a house and barn.” And so they put Jack in then and let him down, and Jack let ‘em let on down till he hit on the top of the roof. And he let it ease on down and he slid of the eaves. And he let it ease on down in the yard.

And so he got out of the basket and went and pecked on the door. And a girl come; the oldest girl, which he didn’t know it, when he pecked. And he says, “Howdy.” And she was so pretty till he just started in talking courting right when he seed her. And she says, “Oh,” says, “don’t do that!” Said, “The second room you come to,” said, “has got one in it prettier than I am.” And so Jack went on in and seed her and she was so much prettier till the first word he spoke was courting, wanting to court. And she says, “Oh, don’t do that!” She said, “The third one, in the third room,” she said, “is a beauty.” Said, “She’s the prettiest one of the bunch.” So Jack went on in and seed her, and he just got to talking about getting married, she was so pretty.

And so, she ‘posed to him and tied a ribbon in her hair, and she put a wishing ring on his finger. And so told him that the Fire Dragon was a-coming back any minute. And said, “Here’s some ointment;” said, “If he hits you with any if them fire-balls,” says, “they burn a streak!” And says, “Here’s a sword,” said, “is all that’ll hurt him is a silver sword.”

Well, so Jack took the ointment and, in just a few minutes, the Fire Dragon come in and seed him and ‘gin to make at him and spit them fire-balls. Said it was a sight to see them sparkle over the floor. And he dodged him around and some would glance him and burn him, and he’d rub that ointment right quick, and try to get a lick with that sword. And said, directly, he got a lick and just swiped his head slick off.

Well, he then fixed up to get the girls out of there. And he put the first one in the basket, that he met when he knocked on the door, and sent her up—or shook the hickory rope and they pulled it up. And Will and Tom got to jarring off of it; said, “This one’s mine!” Directly she says, “Don’t do that.” Says, “The next one is a-coming is prettier yet than I am.” And so they shoved the basket back down in quick as they could, and Jack put the second one in it and shook the hickory rope and they flounced her out, and he heard ‘em a raring over her. And said Will said, “Good gosh, don’t you put your hands on her; that one’s mine.” Tom said, “Don’t you touch her; that one’s mine.” She says, “Oh,” says, “don’t do that.” Says, “The third one, the last one that’s down there, is a beauty.” Said, “She’s the top.”

And so they shoved the basket down as quick as they could, and that was Jack’s—they’d done ‘posed to be married and had the ribbon in her hair. And so Jack out her in the basket. And Will and Tom, she was so much prettier, they got to fighting around over her. And she says, “Don’t fight.” Says, “I’m done supposed to be married to Jack.” They said, “Well,” – just pitched the hickory rope and the basket right down in the hole—and said, “let the rascal stay down in there.” And said, “He’ll not get you.”

And so they took ‘em and went back to the new ground shanty. And Jack stayed in there and eat all the rations up that the Fire Dragon had, he thought. And he stayed a week or two. And, directly, he got to getting weak, and he hunted around and he found a few more bites to eat, a little more. And he got to feeling so weak, till he looked down and…looking at his fingers to see how much he’d fell off, what time he’d been down in there. And he looked, and his fingers was fell off, and the made him notice the ring. Hit was so loose it would fall off his fingers, from the time he’d been in there. And that made him think about the ring, and he said, “I wish I was home with my mother, a-setting in the chimley corner, a-smoking my old ‘kachuckety’ (?) pipe.” And said, just as the words got out of his mouth, there he was a-setting, and his mother a-talking to him. She said, “Jack,” she said, “looks like you ought to be to the new ground a-helping Tom and Will clear.” He says, “Bedad, that’s where I’m started.”

And so he got on up there and they had the three girls and was still a-fighting over them. And so, him and the youngest one, the prettiest one, married—that had put the ring on his finger—and the ribbon was in her hair yet. And her and Jack married, and Tom married the next one to her, and Jack…ah, Will had to take the oldest. And the last time that I was around there, they’d built more shanties and they was a-doing well.

This version of the story is a transcription from the Folkways Records LP that contains four stories narrated by Ray Hicks. I believe this story, and thus this transcription, to be in the public domain.

Leonides

2008-01-10

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Our old truck’s radio crackled the Blue Danube
Waltz as the blacktop dissolved and gravel rushed to
replace it. The susurrus of the truck’s tires matched
the station’s stutter and as we stared through the glass
of the windshield, we wondered if the streaks of our
hoped-for meteors weren’t a form of interstellar
static, white flickers on the night sky’s screen.

The draft of this poem is from before Lily’s birth.

Prayers in “The Daily Advertizer”

2008-01-01

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Holy Spirit

Holy Spirit. You who solves all problems, who lights all roads so that I can attain my goal. You who gives me the divine gift to forgive and forget all evil against me and that in all instances of my life You are with me. I want in this short prayer to thank You for all things and to do confirm once again that I never want to be separated from You, even in spite of all material illusion. I wish to be with You in eternal Glory. Than You for Your mercy toward me and mine. The person must say this prayer for three consecutive days, the favor requested will be granted even if it may appear difficult. This prayer must be published immediately after the favor is granted without mentioning the favor, only your initials should appear at the publication. Publication promised. G. F. [2007-10-29]

2008-02-06. R. M. R. (Also appears to have published an instance of The Miraculous Prayer. See below.)

The Miraculous Prayer

THE MIRACULOUS PRAYER
Dear Heart of Jesus, in the past, I have asked for many favors. This time I ask You this very special one (mention favor). Take it dear Jesus and place it within your own broken heart, where your father sees it. THen, in your merciful eyes, it will become your favor not mine. Amen.
Say this prayer for three days, promise publication and favor will be granted. Never known to fail. A.B.B [Verbatim transcript of text as it appeared in 2008-01-07 issue of The Daily Advertiser.]

2007-12-31: 3 (K.T.K., FB, S.C. & W.C.). KTK instance does not put parentheses around “mention favor.”
2008-01-01: 3 (A.B.B., K.T.K., FB, S.C. & W.C.) KTK as above.
2008-01-02: 3 (A.B.B., K.T.K., FB) KTK as above.
2008-01-03: 3 (A.B.B., K.T.K., FB) KTK as above.
2008-02-06: 2 (D.L.D., R.M.R.)
2008-03-17: 3 (D.F, C.C., S.D)

Thank You

Thank You FATHER GOD MOST HIGH FOR WHO YOU ARE, FOR EVERYTHING YOU HAVE DONE, ARE DOING, AND CONTINUE TO DO, YOU ARE AWESOME, WE LOVE YOU VERY MUCH!!
We want to thank Our Father God Most High the True Living God, “ABBA” for His only begotten Son JESUS THE CHRIST, “YESHUA OF NAZARETH”, our Lord and Savior. We dedicate our lives to You. We Bless You and we Love You very much. Glory Honor and Praise to you Father God Most High FOREVER AND EVER. Than you Lord Jesus for suffering for all our sins and rising from the dead. Thank you Holy Ghost for being our Comforter. We Love You Father God Most High, Lord Jesus Christ, And The Holy Ghost Amen. The Jolivette Family (Terrell, Jennifer, Teal, Keenan, Nia, Malachi, and Charity Jolivette). [Verbatim transcript of text as it appeared in 2008-01-07 issue of The Daily Advertiser — also 01-02.]

2007-12-31: Jolivette family
2008-01-01: Jolivette family
2008-01-02: Jolivette family
2008-01-03: Jolivette family

Thanksgiving Novena to St. Jude

THANKSGIVING
NOVENA TO
ST. JUDE
Holy Saint Jude,
Apostle Martyr.
Great in value, rich
in miracles, near
kinsman of Christ,
faithful intercessor of all who invoke your special patronage in time of need, to you I have recourse humbly beg to whom God has given such great
power to come to my
assistance. Help me in my present and urgent petition. In return,
I promise to make your name known,
and cause you to be
invoked. Say three
Hail Marys, three Our
Fathers and Glorias.
Publication must
be promised. Saint
Jude pray for us
all who invoke
your aid, Amen.
This Novena has
never been known
to fail. I have
had my request
granted. Publication
promised. D.F

2008-03-17: D.F

Thanks for St Jude and St Anthony

THANKS TO St Jude and St Anthony for answered prayers and the safe return of Atticus.

2008-03-17

Textmate Tips

2007-12-01

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Add Line Breaks

On 20 Nov 2007, at 22:33, Robin Houston wrote:

On 20/11/2007, Frank Eves gold_eagle@mac.com wrote:

TextMate Soft Wrap set to 66 characters
How do I Hard Wrap my document at 66 columns?

As far as I know, TextMate doesn’t have a built-in command to do this. You can use Text > Filter Through Command… to run some external formatter of your choice. Unfortunately the BSD version of fmt included with OS X can’t quite be made to do the right thing […]

fold -sw66 though should do exactly what Frank wants. Or to make it actually use his soft wrap setting: fold -sw$TM_COLUMNS

Using Perl:

If you don’t need to worry about dealing properly with (hard) tabs, then you can easily write a short command to do the reformatting.

Set input to “Entire Document”, output to “Replace Document”, and put the code

#!/usr/bin/perl -p
print "$1\n" while s/(\S{$ENV{TM_COLUMNS}})//;
print "$1\n" while s/(.{0,$ENV{TM_COLUMNS}})\s//;

into the Command(s) box. This will treat a tab as though it took up a single column, so if you have a lot of tab indents then it will leave excessively long lines. Writing something that deals properly with tabs would be a bit harder, but very possible.

===

How to select something in a document by using a macro/command?

I found a way to select something – calculated on run-time – by using a normal macro (plus command) without TMTOOLS!!

The problem was if I have a script which outputs a text chunk or a regexp how can we select that text/regexp in a TM window? The approach is actually very simple. I copy the text/regexp into the shared find pasteboard; place the caret to a proper location; and execute ‘findNext’. Thus I wrote a tiny C program which copies a string into the shared find pasteboard. OK, then I wanted to write a man page for that command on basis of the normal pbcopy man page, and I figured out that pbcopy is already able to do this ;)

Fine. The only problem was that if I write a tmcommand à la:

echo -en “FINDTEXT” | pbcopy -pboard find

it doesn’t work because “pbcopy -pboard find” is called from inside of TM. If I execute that in a Terminal, switch back to TM it works. The solution: I have to execute this in a new bash environment.

The basic tmcommand (example name “SELECTTEXT”):

RESULT=$(A SCRIPT WHICH RETURNS A TEXT OR REGEXP) export RESULT /bin/bash -c ‘echo -en “$RESULT” | pbcopy -pboard find’ #place the caret to a proper location to be able to execute ‘findNext’! open “txmt://open/?line=$LINE&column=$COLUMN”

After executing that command the string $RESULT is in the shared find pasteboard, and the caret is set.

Next step > the macro: Before we can execute ‘findNext’ (= APPLE+G) we have to set the parameters of the find panel, meaning whether we want to do a regexp search or not; ignore case or not.

Thus record a macro à la:

open find panel, set the desired parameters, and do a dummy search for something which is NOT in the document -e.g. look for \xFFF3; and close it
execute the command “SELECTTEXT”
APPLE+G

That’s it. The nice side-effect is that the macro changes nothing within TM’s find panel ;) And the macro does not affect the undo buffer, it does not change the text etc., and the selection is done instantly.

But attention: The only tricky point : Be aware of correct escaping!!

On that basis I wrote the “Select XML/HTML balanced tags” script which will come as soon as possible. I only have to fix some tiny things.

Comments?

Addition:

To minimize the escaping one can use:

/bin/bash -c ‘echo -n “$RESULT” | pbcopy -pboard find’

instead of:

/bin/bash -c ‘echo -en “$RESULT” | pbcopy -pboard find’

Addition II:

To get rid of the utf8 encoding one can use:

/bin/bash -c ‘export __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x1F5:0x8000100:0x8000100;echo -n “$RES” | pbcopy -pboard find’

On 5. Apr 2007, at 16:26, Digital Rust wrote:

Hi, the tidy feature used to create an xtml compliant document. Since I upgraded to 1.5.5 it now creates an HTML 4.01 doc. How can I change this back to XTML?

Set TM_XHTML to ” /” in Preferences → Advanced → Shell Variables, that should both make inserted tags XHTML and make Tidy default to XHTML as output.

I’ve just been trying TextMate, trying to move away from TextEdit and TextWrangler. One thing which is really bugging me is the way it underlines hyperlinks on the ‘Plain Text’ setting. If I wanted that kind of behaviour I’d use Microsoft Word! Is there a way I can set it up so that plain text is exactly that, completely plain vanilla typing?

Thanks

Go to the Bundle Editor (Bundle -> Bundle Editor -> Show Bundle Editor) and open the Text Bundle (click on the triangle). Then to scroll down to the object “Plain Text” with a gray L in front of it. If you want to remove all markings then just delete everything. If you just want to remove the underlined links then delete the following:

{ begin = ‘^([ \t]*)(?=\S)’; end = ‘^(?!\1(?=\S))’; patterns = ( { name = ‘markup.underline.link’; match = ‘(?x) ( (https?|s?ftp|ftps|file|smb|afp|nfs|(x-)?man|gopher|txmt)://|mailto:) [-:@a-zA-Z0-9_.,~%+/?=&#]+(?<![.,?:]) '; }, ); contentName = 'meta.paragraph.text'; },

Then close the bundle editor and TextMate and start it again.

Hanging Indent in Plain Text

2007-11-17

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Hanging Indent

I’ve got a list that looks like this:

The job of a writer is to discover what series of events best illustrates an idea or an emotion.
Just like the actor, your job is one of translation, the most difficult part which is that it all comes down to this: you have to write something that a person can do in front of a camera.

and I want it to look like this:

1.    The job of a writer is to discover what series of events best illustrates
      an idea or an emotion.

That required the insertion of a hard return at the end of the line and then an insertion of three spaces in addition to the existing single space in order to make it four spaces and to line up with the tab.

Just like the actor, your job is one of translation, the most difficult part which is that it all comes down to this: you have to write something that a person can do in front of a camera.

Okay, that’s consistent:

Go to end of line.

Insert hard return

Go to beginning of next line (or advance one character)

Insert three spaces.

Continue until you get to a pre-existing hard return.

Videography for All?

2007-11-11

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OS News has a nice post about how the video “scene” has opened up to amateurs in the same way that photography has — pointing out that much of what resides on Flickr is “amateur” only in that the folks doing it are not getting paid to do it. The skills and techniques and subject matter are the same as professionals. (The contrarian in me wants to argue that the real opportunity here is to change the nature of photography, to make it more interesting than conventional professional photography which itself was modeled on fine art paradigms — I would argue that the blend of fine art photography and photojournalism combined with passion for place is what sets my aunt’s photography, Tika Laudun, apart from others.)

CUPS Printing

2007-11-05

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Just go to http://localhost:631/, authenticate with your password and have access to all the CUPS-options you’ll ever need.

Boats That Go on Land and Water (AFS 2007)

2007-10-21

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Introduction

In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there ranged a variety of debates and discourses around the nation about the wisdom of rebuilding in the areas struck by the 2005 storms. It makes no sense, many argued, to build a city, especially a modern American city, on land so, well, not land. The same argument has been made before about New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana: Too much risk. Too much water. Too little land.

On the second anniversary of the storms, National Geographic reporting on the current state of things in New Orleans led off with the following:

The sinking city faces rising seas and stronger hurricanes, protected only by dwindling wetlands and flawed levees. Yet people are trickling back to the place they call home, rebuilding in harm’s way. (Bourne 33; emphases in the original)

Those five adjective-noun pairs — “sinking city,” “rising seas” — build to a kind of apocalyptic inevitability that underlines the absurdity — or, alternately, undermines the actuality — of living on, or in, an ambiguous landscape.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that the residents of Louisiana would come to imagine the relationship between land and water differently. New Orleans after all was established on a portage point between Bayouk Choupique, today Bayou St. John, and the Mississippi River. The city was founded, in other words, on land understood as a bridge between two waterways. Much of the state’s history is caught up in its need to negotiate on a recurring basis what parts are wet and what are dry.

During the colonial period, land grants, which were measured in lengths of river frontage, typically required land holders not only to build roads but also to build and maintain levees. The colonial authorities were right to worry about levees. The general consensus after Katrina is that the storm itself was not the disaster, the levees breaking is what changed everything for everyone. The Seventeenth Street Canal is now famous. Less well known is “Mister Go,” the common nickname for the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), which was dug in 1965 by the Army Core of Engineers through the existing land bridge and barrier islands. MRGO is commonly believed to be the ruin of Saint Bernard Parish. It is also, it should be noted, but one of hundreds of canals, locks, damns, weirs, pumps, drains, and other structures and bodies managed by a wide array of local, super-local, state, and federal agencies.

Closer to home, the Vermilion River that passes through Lafayette actually began through a slow process of coastal erosion, making its way up through the marshes, until, reaching Lafayette, where later a wandering distributary of the Bayou Teche would make the Vermilion into a true, flowing river. The Teche — itself a product of a complex geological history — is now fed by the Bayou Courtableau.

Just a few miles north of Krotz Springs, sitting just a football field’s length from the Atchafalaya River, Ralph Castille and his crew of eight men keep watch on the depth of the Bayou Courtableau. The number 17.64 has an almost magical quality for them. 17.64 is the height above sea level of the bayou at a particular point in its course that it is their job to maintain. When the bayou is in flood stage, there are two massive weirs designed to bleed off the excess water, but when the bayou is low, it’s Castille’s job to crank up one to four 1500HP motors and begin pouring water into the Courtableau. The water backs the bayou up to Bayou Fusilier, which in turn floods into the Bayou Teche. The Teche feeds the Vermilion River via Bayou Fusilier north of Lafayette and via the Ruth Canal south of the city. Both outlets are sometimes necessary when farmers like Keith Luquette start pumping their fields either to flood for planting rice or for growing crawfish.

Luquette’s farm is one of hundreds that cover the Louisiana prairies, which, interestingly enough, were first imagined in terms of the sea. Standing on some of the small mounds on the edge of the prairie, stands of trees seemed like îles, or islands. Conversely, when a patch of prairie was surrounded by trees, it was dubbed an anse, or cove. Driving across the prairies today, one passes through places like Anse LeJeune, Anse Maigre, Point Blue, and Pointe Claire.

It is perhaps no wonder then that when Alan Lomax drove across these prairies in search of the country Mardi Gras he imagined that he was in the midsts, or mists, of marshes silvered with fog. In fact, Lomax was, as the sign for Louisiana 13 reveals as it rolls by, on the highway from Eunice to Mamou, driving through fields freshly flooded in preparation for planting rice.

How, then, to go about trying to understand such a mixed-up, mutable landscape as this? More importantly, how does one go about understanding what the residents of the landscape understand? The obvious answer is that we need to turn to the actions of those residents, the things they say and do, in order to begin to understand how it is they structure the raw material of their physical environment into something like a landscape.

The larger project examines a wider swathe of the archeological record, discussing, for example, the few recorded instances where the land and water ship appears in folktales, or, for example, the variety of legends that always place buried treasure at a tree which is almost always located adjacent to a lake or in a swamp. There are also a number of jokes and a few songs that give us glimpses into the minds of Cajuns and Creoles making their way through the watery world of Louisiana’s landscape.

I have included in the handout a version of AT513b that George Reinecke found printed in the pages of Le Meschacébé, a French language weekly of Saint John Parish. This version was printed in 1878 as the last of a series, all in Creole (unlike the rest of the paper), called “Contes Nègres.” Previous stories in the series were all African animal stories, much like those later published by Alcée Fortier and Joel Chandler Harris. This version of the tale, Reinecke observes, “combines the theme of the male Cinderella suitor for the princess’ hand with three others: the king’s insistence on an amphibious ship, the unexpected but deserved help from a disguised supernatural being, and the presence of skillful helpers, each with a special gift, who allow the suitor to comply with the king’s increasingly difficult demands” (20).

The audience handout is in English, but I have inserted the French form of “a boat that would go on both land and sea” in italics.

A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF LAND & SEA BOATS

In reality, there are a number of boats that can perform the folkloric feat of going on la terre com on la mer. The oldest boat imagined to be capable of doing so if, of course, the pirogue, sometimes said to be a boat that can “glide on dew.” Wood pirogues are still being made in Louisiana, sometimes out of venerable cypress planks and sometimes out of plywood, but there are also pirogues made out of fiberglass and out of aluminum. Pirogues and other wooden water craft have been documented by Malcolm Comeaux and Ray Brassieur.

Pirogues are still used for some hunting and some fishing and of course by naturalists, but they are not the preferred craft when you need to cover a great deal of territory, when you need to move quickly, and/or when you need to carry a load. In those situations, most Louisiana residents turn to power boats. The classic bateau with an outboard motor is very popular in south Louisiana. (My family is no exception; we own three vehicles: a car, a truck, and a boat.) The bateau, or john boat as it is sometimes known, traverses water as shallow as a foot, if carefully handled, but nothing less. In those instances, however, it is still possible to use an air boat.

Air boats were invented soon after airplanes, it seems, with the first documented craft being built by Alexander Graham Bell in 1905. By the 1930s, home-made air boats were in use throughout Florida and Louisiana. Air boats solve the power-to-weight problem in one way, by having the propeller out of the water, but it took some time before engines became light enough that a sufficiently powerful but also sufficiently light enough engine could be coupled with a propeller in the water, transforming the mid-century “put-put” boat into the late-century mud boat.

The classic mud boat has the engine mounted amidships with a long shaft running above the hull and through the transom. The mud boats I grew up riding in usually used Volkswagen Beetle engines because they were both light and fairly uncomplicated, both factors being a dimension of their being air-cooled. The mud boat got its name for being able to power its way through water so shallow as to be effectively mud. The introduction of the Go Devil engine in the early 1980s, and the innovations brought about by the Provost brothers of Pro-Drive in the last decade, changed the nature of the mud boat considerably, shifting the balance of production from home-made craft to three regional manufacturers.

Both the air boat and the mud boat are part of the current project, but for now this brief history will have to suffice.

The third boat capable of going on la terre com on la mer is the modern crawfish boat. The particular form that I will be discussing today is known, to those who build it and those who use it, more simply as “the hydraulic boat.” As the demand for crawfish grew through the sixties and seventies, and as rice production alone became less economically sustainable, area rice farmers began to experiment with ways of mechanizing what was still largely a hand and foot operation. That is, crawfishing rice fields was still a matter of a farmer pulling or pushing a pirogue or bateau, and working the traps as he himself stood knee to hip deep in water. (Probably should explain the geology of rice fields here: 4 to 12 inches of top soil on top of a clay pan.)

I should note that the willingness to embrace new technology or to innovate within an extant technological domain is not new to the area or to the industry. As one observer has noted: “Louisiana rice farming gained prominence, and market share, in the post Civil War period precisely because it was mechanized. Where older rice-growing regions in South Carolina and Georgia sought to remain viable, their labor-intensive practices were difficult to continue when workers were no longer enslaved” (ESC: 44-45). I should also note that the shift to rice agriculture seems to have been largely precipitated by an influx of German immigrants from other parts of the U.S. as well as from Europe. They were mostly assimilated by their Cajun neighbors, but there are some interesting ethnic identity issues that deserve a fuller treatment than we have time for here.

Our experimenting farmers — with names like Zaunbrecher, Frugé, Heinen, Richard, LeJeune, and Frey — tried a a variety of engines, gearings, and forms of power delivery — shafts, belts, chains — in an effort to harness small engines, which operate best at high RPM, to the task of moving a boat slowly through the water. Farmers were modifying standard bateaus in various ways so that they would “crawl” through a rice field/crawfish pond. There seem to have been a number of attempts at various mechanical configurations, almost all of which are only recalled in terms of their “contraption”-like nature. The arrangement that seems to have eventuated out of all of this experimentation involved mounting a small Briggs and Stratton or Honda engine to a Montgomery Ward tiller transmission on the transom of a boat and then transferring the power, usually with a shaft, to a driving wheel — the cleated wheel seems to have been part of the overall configuration from close to the beginning of the craft’s history.

Part bateau, part paddle wheel, part processing plant, the modern crawfish boat is both amazing to behold as an object and a thing of grace when operated by an experienced crawfisherman. The boat’s engine drives a hydraulic pump that turns the great wheel, lifts the wheel boom, turns the boat left and right, and controls the boat’s speed. Sitting behind a tray with sorting holes leading to mesh bags, the crawfisherman dances a water-born, cyborg ballet. Man and machine arc in and out along the line of crawfish traps, with each trap in turn being pulled, dumped, sorted, and rebaited just in time to replace the next trap which is in turn pulled, dumped, sorted, and rebaited.

The dance travels along the line of traps until a section of field is completed. The boat then reveals its amphibian nature as the powerful propelling wheel pushes the craft up a field levee until it noses back down into the next section. When a field is complete, the crawfish boat crawls up onto land and motors its way down the road to the next field, rolling both on the back wheel and on wheels tucked into the front of the hull.

THE MAKERS

Credit for the invention of the hydraulic boat is usually given to Gerard Olinger of Robert’s Cove. Olinger defers credit to a local farmer who first had the idea of using hydraulics as the only form of power delivery that would survive being immersed in water. Olinger made his first boats in 1983, and they quickly became the standard by which all others were judged. Over the next five years, he was joined by a number of makers.

Kurt Venable in Rayne, Mike Richard in Richey, Dale Hughes in Welch, and Jimmy Abshire in Kaplan, along with Olinger, are the five major makers of the hydraulic boat. (There are a few other builders still building boats and a few others who have come and gone, but that’s for another time.)

Kurt Venable is central both in terms of his location and in terms of being the most prolific of the makers, assembling something on the order of 40 boats a year. Mike Richard makes about 20 boats a year. Dale Hughes about a dozen. Jimmy Abshire and Jared Olinger about a half dozen each.

THE “HYDRAULIC BOAT”

Each maker has his own “style” of boat, but the basic form of the crawfish boat, since Olinger introduced the front wheels, is fairly well established: the hull has the typical scow bow, flat bottom, square stern, and moderately flared sides of the traditional Louisiana bateau. Indeed, as I have already noted, the first crawfish boats were simply modified versions of the boats most commonly used for inland fishing. However the four-foot wide hulls of the widely available commercial hulls had a tendency to swamp when the boat turned. An immediate adaptation was to raise the sides of the boat near the stern. [I should note that the boat builders and the farmers and operators who are their clients do not use nautical terminology when discussing these craft. There are no sterns, nor transoms, nor keels. There are backs and bottoms.] It was a short-lived modification. Having wearied of reinforcing the commercial hulls which did not hold up well to the weight and thrust of the wheeled drive unit, the boat builders had already begun to build their own hulls, which led to the current hull form which is based on a five-foot wide sheet of aluminum that flares out to the craft’s six foot width. (The overall length of the boat has held constant at fourteen to fifteen feet.)

At the front of the hull, usually about four feet back, are a pair of wheels — typically the kind used on small utility trailers. On a Venable boat, the wheels are set inside wells in the hull. Olinger places his wheels in a bay, giving the front of his boats a very car-like appearance. Hughes and Richard mount their wheels outside the hull with an axle connecting them running through the interior of the hull, with the axle also acting as a stiffener. Both Venable and Olinger prefer to place decks in their boats, with the supports for the deck stiffening the hull.

At the back of the hull sits the massive drive unit, an articulated steel arm that raises and lowers, swings left and right, and holds a cleated steel wheel two to three feet in diameter and usually about one foot wide. Like the hulls, almost every facet of the drive units are fabricated “in shop.” The boat builders buy the following stock items: • the forward wheels (as noted above) • the gasoline engine (usually a Honda or Kohler)1 the battery the two rams, or pistons the hydraulic system components (pump, motor, valves, and hoses — the reservoir, however, is handmade)

Everything else is hand-made through careful combining of pieces of stock aluminum and steel materials. In addition to being available in sheets of various thicknesses, widths, lengths, and finishes aluminum and steel are also available in lengths of various shapes — like angles, channels, and beams — and in lengths of various pipe/tubing configurations — described in terms of shape (round or rectangular), thickness, and hardness.

The two basic parts of the hydraulic crawfish boat are closely denoted by the metals of which they consist: aluminum hulls and steel drive units. Where the two meet is where power gets transfered. This means not only securing the drive unit to the rear, or transom, of the boat, but also making sure that, once secured to the back of the boat, it doesn’t literally rip the back of the boat as it pushes. Mike Richard uses two sets of braces, interestingly one aluminum and one steel, welded or bolted to bars welded to the bottom of the boat.

The steel platform stretched across the boat is where everything, except the battery, that has to do with powering and operating the boat, are housed: the engine and hydraulic pump, the oil reservoir, the valves, and the driver’s seat. Richard is, in fact, known for the openness of his design.

CRAWFISH BOATS AS A CREATIVE SYSTEM

When I first began approaching the boatmakers to ask them about their work, I admit that one of my concerns was how much they would be willing to tell me about their work. My concern was based in part on my experiences with the builder who, it turns out, is most known for his curmudgeonly presentation of self. He was simply the first one I encountered. As I began to work with the other builders, however, I realized that my concern was ill-founded. While each man is fairly certain that he builds the best boat, they all have worked on other’s boats, repairing or modifying them as customers’ needs, wants, and understandings change. And, it turns out, the farmers who are their customers are not only a source of and feedback, as well as their own ideas (which are variously received by the boatmakers) but also a conduit for information about developments by other builders. (Farmers talk. A lot. E.g., Dale Olinger’s “Cove News Network.”)

Front wheels were first put on boats by Jerry Olinger in the early nineties. Olinger had the idea when he realized that the reason hulls were wearing out so fast because farmers were driving the boats from field to field. He placed the wheels so they wold not to interfere with levee crossings — the hull needs to slide over the dirt ridges — but to be useful for riding down the road.

Sometimes the solution to one problem actually solves another problem. One of the complaints about the rear wheels is that they create trenches in the fields — they can create one foot or more drops in the bottom of a field. This has largely seemed an intractable (pardon the pun) problem with various solutions proffered — Olinger has gone to two six-inch wide wheels set two feet apart. About three years ago, Kurt Venable began to weld steel bars onto the edges of his wheels’ cleats. The problem he was trying to solve was how quickly a piece of three-eighths inch thick piece of steels four inches long can get worn down to a nub, sometimes, depending upon the composition of a farmer’s soil, in a single season. It turns out, however, that the reinforced cleats ride a little better on field bottoms and dig a little less. This was, all the builders agree, an unexpected bonus.

The more academic question I am hoping to address in doing this research, apart from having an answer to the question posed by the National Geographic quotation at the start of this essay, is to understand the nature of creativity, especially understanding creativity not in terms of an individual but in terms of a system, a network of individuals. There seems to be a gap in current research into creativity between human science studies that focus on fields and domains and humanistic studies that focus on the exceptional individual. My hope is that this handful of boatmakers will allow me to understand how creativity can be both dispersed and focused within a field, such that all participants are both part of the system and exceptions to it. My hope, in short, is to build a boat … of a kind.