Meeting the Artist

Many of my conversations with strangers start, So, what do you do?  Answer: I work at the Corps of Engineers downtown.  On Clay Street?  Answer: no, the one downtown.  Oh.

Meeting the artist.  

And then, invariably, the conversation peters out.

Last Saturday, I had a very different experience.

Kathe and I were sitting down for a nice Saturday lunch at the Pig & Pint, a lovely little beer and bbq shop on the outskirts of Jackson, and there was a guy was crouched down on the ground off to the side of the building, hitting something.  With something else.

"What do you think he is doing?" I asked Kathe. Kathe looked over.

With anyone else, my question would elicit an eye roll.  I was essentially asking if I could go and play with the stranger in the side lot. Kathe, however, has dealt with me for a LONG time.

"I don't know.  Why don't you go over and ask him?"

"OK."  If a look ever rubbed its hands together with excitement, this was it.

Pig & Pint. 

I went over.  The guy was intently hammering a piece of glass with a rock.  "How's it going?"  Nonchalance, at my finest.

"Oh, hey!"  He stood up and met me with a grin.  Held out a hand, with a piece of glass in it, formed into a crude arrowhead.  "I am learning how to make arrowheads.  There is a bunch of material here that is good to use - I prefer to use glass, because there is no way for it to be confused with the old artifacts."

I needed no further invitation. I grabbed a small piece of glass and grabbed a hammerstone, and started knapping, too.

There was a time in the distant past where I spent quite a bit of time making stone tools, and could bang out an acceptable point in a matter of minutes.  Those days are long gone. The simple mechanics of the work, however, are still somewhere in the physical memory, and I even recall some of the lectures I used to give on the process.

So suddenly I am just sitting around with a new friend, looking at pieces of slag (what in the world did this spot used to be, that there is glass slag everywhere?) and grinding platforms and talking about conchoidal fracture... and listening to Scott's story.

It made for a great way to end a lunch.

Forged aluminum mold, with plastic gear.

"I have lived outside for the past twelve years," his story began.  He went on to tell me, in between strikes of stone on glass, that he was an artist, and his work has been featured in the Arts Center of Mississippi in downtown Jackson.  He started talking about powering electronic devices with art pieces he created.  He talked about the process, how he started out by carving out a wooden mold for the melted plastic, but he found that the wood started to char and deform after a few uses.  The clay mold he hand built and pitfired and tested out was too fragile.  So he went online and figured out how to make a forge, and he made an aluminum mold for gears.

For the next half hour Scott and I talked story about found items, and about creating gears out of melted shopping bags, about carving molds out of wood and building aluminum forges out of a lighter and a battery-powered pocket fan, and flintknapping, and archaeology, and carving wood and painting...

Kathe eventually walked up, and I introduced her to Scott, who showed her the gear mold he had forged and shaped and filed and.... dang it, he MADE something with his hands.

I was so impressed.

Scott even mentioned meeting me on his FB page.
Shout Out!

He invited me to meet him on Facebook.  And so as soon as I got home, I did.  I also looked up to see if there were any stories about his art online. Yeah, OK, so I cyberstalked him a little.  But very little of my day-to-day interactions even remotely resemble the delicious five-minute conversation I had with Scott.

I friended him on Facebook.  Scott has been going through some rough stuff, and he tells it straight.  But his work is amazing, and I love his creative process.  He is not just going into a studio and cranking out pieces in a factory-like setting.  He learns, builds, tinkers; he tests hypotheses, tries and fails, and experiments with new techniques.

Daily elevator speeches between me and the people I interact with have to do with budgets and authorizations.  But I have friends who build stuff, who do stuff, who make music and art and grow things.

Three thousand years ago, the Preacher said, It is good for one to eat and to drink..., and to enjoy the good of all his labour (Ecclesiastes 5:18).

And yet I look around and see people who are unhappy with their labor, at least partly because they cannot see the good in the work that they do (and, as my friend LeeAnn pointed out, that sentence applies particularly to ME).  When the distance between your work and the good that you do is far removed, it is much harder to get a sense of satisfaction from it.  There is immediate satisfaction to be had in doing work with your hands.

His second projectile point.  Dang.

Granted, in the same vein, frustration from doing direct work is also more immediate, because when you have a setback, it is a personal setback. Learning to play the fiddle or the piano, and struggling.... there is no template to deal with that.  There is no shortcut.  My banjo playing has not improved one iota, partly because I get so frustrated with it, and without the template, I put the instrument down. My lack of understanding about what makes bees work is a personal struggle, and there is no shortcut to getting it right.

Some of the FB entries from Scott reflect similar frustrations.

But they are different from the frustrations of beings bound by process and Procrustean bed solutions.

Scott makes his own processes.  Scott makes his own solutions.  And his art, is, like his story, just so beautiful.

Unintended Selfie

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Montana on training for work - it was an ecosystem restoration class, where we learn the mechanisms and some of the science behind trying to build healthy ecosystem where human impacts have occurred. It was a great class, and showed a lot about how resilient systems can be when you give them a little help.  We saw areas that had been poisoned by mines, and areas that had been trapped by dams, where some effort from our projects had re-built a lovely place where dynamic natural processes had been restored.

It was also Montana.  And so, I stayed an extra day so that I could do some sightseeing.  Not really understanding the scope of what it would entail, I put Glacier on my to-do list.

From Missoula, it was a 3+ hour drive to Glacier National Park.  I started out early. and no sooner had I paid my entrance fee and started to drive through the park, than a startled elk ran in front of my car, turned around, and then ran off the way it had come.  My phone, of course, was sitting in the passenger seat, and there is no proof.  Y'all will just have to take my word for it.

For the next few hours, I drove through some of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen, overlooking snow-capped peaks under enormous skies (Big Sky is a real thing - I don't understand it, but it is HUGE.)  There were bears, and deer, and spectacular waterfalls and terrifying drops adjacent to the road and snow packs and stramatolites and glacial moraines, and.... it was hard to focus on anything for trying to see it all.

Every flower needed to have a picture taken.  Every vista needed to be recorded, and the accompanying selfie taken.  I have never been much of a selfie person, but the giddiness of seeing such beauty really came through in the pics I took.  I stopped at every turn-off and parking spot along the road.  It took hours to get through the park, and every picture was more beautiful than the one before.

At the end of the drive, I decided to follow the advice of Chuck Willis, a friend of mine that I met in Peru on the breathless hike to Macchu Picchu.  (Yes, the scenery was spectacular, but that is not what I mean by breathless.)

He said to me: "Hike out to Iceberg Lake. Was my favorite hike there."

Now you have to understand this: Chuck is a beast.  He destroyed his ankle just a couple of weeks before we went to MP, and toughed it out by running until he had gotten back to an 8-minute mile.  I took his advice with trepidation, because the last hike I had gone on with him had nearly killed me.

The guidebook said this:

'...strenuous'.

Um.

Aw, what the heck.  I'll give it a try.

The hike was a ten-mile round trip.  The hike itself was not terribly difficult.  I had a couple of moments where I was a little short of breath (OK, truth be told, for about three hours I was keeping time with my heartbeat using Clemson's cheer at full 170bpm - 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-C-L-E-M-S-O-N....), but it was completely doable.  What was not doable was the phone.

You have 18% of your power remaining.

But I couldn't help myself.  I took pictures of flowers, of scenery, of waterfalls, viewsheds, and snow-pack.  And so, instead of having a phone with 18% power remaining, I joyfully continued to deplete it.  Pictures of rocks, pictures of animals, pictures of every flower that I came across.  Always on the lookout for bears (I had gotten a good pic of a bear earlier in the day, and part of the trail was closed because of bear activity in the area), and for any other large mammals that might show up to have their portrait made.  It was glorious beyond words.

With each stop, I would decide to pass on this picture, not taking a shot of that vista, of letting those flowers remain unphotographed.

And then out would come the phone, once again.  Irresistible forces at work.
I know, I know.  But the scenery is just so breathtaking.  How can I avoid taking pictures?  So I'll just take this one more, and then I'll turn off the phone and put it in my pocket.



You have 15% of your power remaining.



Oooh.  That is a pretty picture, too.  I'll take it.

Oh, man, I need that picture.

Wow.


Over and over again, I took pictures with a phone that had a rapidly depleting battery.  Beautiful pictures that almost captured the grandeur and the majesty of the place.

You have 10% of your power remaining.

As I was getting closer and closer to my goal, the images I took changed, as both the scenery and the flora did.  Things got a little rockier, the snowpack got more common, and the flowers got a little.... well, hardier.  But the breathtaking views, wow.  And still, every flower needed to be captured.  And since I was not able to tell if the picture was in focus, I just pointed it and mashed the button.  Then turned to the landscape and mashed the button.  Grab a selfie, mash the button.










So it was with a certain amount of pure self-deprecating laughter that I realized that I was not sure whether the most recent picture - of a lovely flower of a dazzling cornflower blue  - had been pointed at the flower.... or at me.  And what was worse, the low light setting meant I could not even review it until I had returned and plugged the phone in.

Such a lovely blue flower

Here is the kicker.  Of course, the phone's battery died before I got there.  Of course, I did not get my own pictures of Iceberg Lake (which was stunning).  And of course, I asked a stranger there to take my picture and send me the shots when she got back to a place with wifi. (She agreed, and then of course, it got hung up in her outbox for three weeks).

But then, what I did for the remainder of the trip was.... that I enjoyed the scenery for me.  I was not pulling out my phone for every few steps to record a vid to send back to my wife when I got back, nor a photo of a marmot, or to take a picture of anything to record it in perpetuity. I was making my memories.  For me.  

It also occurred to me at that point that the picture taking with the darkened screen is very much like what we are doing with the work I was there to study.  Ecosystem restoration is a tough business.  We are never certain what the outcome is going to be.  The stories from the teachers all week were loaded with tales of well-meant projects that did not fit with natural processes, and failed to do what they were supposed to do, or worse, made things worse for the residents.  Every success story was coupled with a cautionary tale.  

What we do is to take a picture without being able to see or focus.  We take our best shot, given the knowledge we possess, and we mash the button.  The result is sometimes a pretty picture, and other times we get a distorted picture of ourselves.  

It doesn't mean that we don't take the picture.  And like an old-fashioned film camera, sometimes we wait a long time to see the results of our work. Instead of having that immediate gratification of the selfie on site, we wait to see what develops.  Sometimes, it is beautiful and worth the wait.  Other times, we have to see if we can do it again, or make changes to the negative.

But what we can't do is not try.  Because this isn't just making memories for me.  It is making sure that the beauty I get to see is saved in perpetuity.  For all to see.

Thank you, Kristin Rode, for the pic of me at Iceberg Lake

Turn the Lights Out When You Leave

I'm home.

Still trying to figure out which end is up.  I arrived a little over a week ago, late on Thursday night, weary and shell-shocked.  Eight days later, I am just starting to get my feet under me.

People want to know how the trip was.  Whether it was fun.  How I liked it. Where my suntan is.

Fun?

I'll sum it up, just to make it clear.

My deployment was brutal, but important.  Given the different permutations available, I will take that combination, every single time.  Gimme important battles to fight with real consequences, and let me see how I can help.  The work was hard, and the reasons were complex, and there were battles raging on all sides.  Some of them were overblown (including an honest-do-goodness "fake news" story - see below).  Some of them were unnecessary.  And then some of them were

Unfinished Business

November 19, 2017, 2330 hrs: Crorey arrives in Puerto Rico. 

A couple of days before my arrival, I saw this video that inspired me:

https://twitter.com/USACEHQ/status/930799330398699520

...and that video set the tone for expectations for the two-month effort.  It is true.  I fully expected to hear those cheers regularly.  I mean, I was not going to be the field guy, but that cheer when the lights went on was both the goal and the expectation:  I envisioned videos every few days from the field, as people get charged up, leaving me charged up as well.  I was going to be building relationships, fighting to get funding to get the mission completed, working to do the job. Bringing lights to the people of Puerto Rico.

Fifty eight days later, I am two days away from leaving a situation that is not yet fixed.  I am leaving behind work that still needs to be done, and it is work that needs to be done in areas I thought would be complete by now.

The work is not complete.  I am leaving without having done what I thought I would be able to do.  There should be a feeling of satisfaction that accompanies the completion of a mission, a sign that announces MISSION COMPLETE!

Or, at the least, there should be a profound sense of accomplishment associated with furthering the mission.  I am just a cog, but I am a cog in a significant effort.  And I am adding my weight to the pushing.

I am struggling to get my arms wrapped around what I am feeling right now.  It is not disappointment in my effort or in the mission.  The situation needed our attention, and it needed that attention right away.  We came in and pushed as hard as we possibly could.  It was, and is, a good mission.  It has been an incredible effort.

It also has nothing to do with the people working the mission.  Everyone I met - with one notable exception (adult beverage conversation) represented the best of what the Corps of Engineers brings to the work it does.  They are dedicated.  They work hard. 

Changing the Mission

"In 8.3 miles, take a left on De Diego Boulevard."  The voice on the navigator's iPhone counted down as we got closer to our destination.  "In 7.5 miles, take a left on De Diego...."

Ugh.  I hate the talking map.

But regardless of my feelings about it, the voiced gps is a critical tool here.  So today we were listening to some disembodied voice tell us where to go, and we followed it blindly.

In between instructions, I thought of how our mission has changed since we first came.  When we first arrived in Puerto Rico, we were desperate to get people and material onto the island (well, we are still desperate to get materials here).

Empty trucks parked on the yard in the middle of the day.

But we are now focusing on a whole new set of variables.  How do we increase productivity on a time-and-materials contract?  How do we ensure that the lines are assigned to crews who can complete them fastest?  How do we acquire access to staging areas where we can put stuff where it is easy to get to?  When do we stop using the generator that we put in to power up a community down south?

As we answer those questions, our focus changes.

It really isn't all that different from listening to the disembodied New Zealand female voice defining the road I am going down.  She can't really see where we are going, she doesn't know what the traffic is like (I know, current technology is getting there, but still), and she doesn't know what tree has fallen across the road and is going to make us turn around and find another route.

She also gets stuff wrong.  Sometimes she sends me down a one-way street the wrong way - which happened.  Or tells me to take a left, which would take me across a four-foot concrete barrier and across oncoming traffic on a six-lane highway - which also happened.  Or takes me to a gated community that is ALSO named Calle 2....

But she knows where the roads are.  And she gives you a good general map of the landscape.  And she can help navigate the way there.  She can even re-calibrate your path, depending on which gated community you accidentally turned into.

Our plan of action - every plan of action - is the same way.  We have a lot of information that we use to come up with the path we will follow.  And there is a certain point at which it is better to commit to the path you are on, despite a little bit of traffic (we got stuck for 45 minutes in a choke-point on the road today, because we weren't willing to find a new path).  Until there is clear benefit for changing the path, we stay the course.

But if we are clinging to the words on the page - the road map we agreed to at the beginning - we are sending bad money after good.  Some times, we have better, more recent information than we knew when the plan was established.  When that happens, our path changes.

"In 4 miles, take a left on De Diego...."

We are further down the road.  We are no longer where we started, and slavishly following the original instructions is stupid.

We took a left on De Diego.  We got to the yard.  We counted trucks and talked to the yard manager.  We got information about how desperate they were for the materials.  We heard about their concerns about salvaging the material from old poles.  We took down names.  We got a feel for the frustration they feel, about the safety concerns (a guy fell 50' from a tower last week - and survived) and about what they need to do their work well.  Some were defensive.  Some were challenging us.  Some evaded.

All of them are here to fix the problems.  All are going down the path with us.  And trying to bring the lights back on.  Suggesting different paths, arguing with us about how to light up the island.

They are like us.  They are here.

Estamos aqui.

What is Wrong?

This situation is a mess.  Despite everyone's hard work and great intentions, the situation here is just rough.

We have so many problems, that I have to number them.

1.  When the Corps of Engineers came down to Puerto Rico, we were tasked with doing one thing.  Eventually, the work we were doing was morphed into something else. And then something else.  First we were restoring the grid (ESTAMOS AQUI!).  Then we were restoring all power to everyone (YAY!).  Then we were restoring some power, and working with the local utility to bring the rest back (POWER TO THE PEOPLE!).  It is difficult, however, to capture the flag if your end zones keep changing.

We are working in partnership with FEMA, who is providing the funds, and with the local electric board.  PREPA is a public utility, they are flat broke (having declared bankruptcy in July of last year), they have a system that is hopelessly outdated, and are almost entirely made up of people who replaced their predecessors, many of whom got fired after the storm.

The media reported on something this week that demonstrates a serious issue.  There is a warehouse that was under the control of the local public utilities company.  Apparently, there was a bit of consternation about the fact that they were not coming forward with the stuff that was stockpiled there.  The lead from FEMA gave the strong impression in a stakeholders meeting that she was not above using Federal Marshals to storm the place and turn the materials over to the contractors doing the work.

The story here gets a little muddy.  But the best I can figure out, the warehouse was filled with materials from dead projects.  You know, like that 1958 Ford Fairlane that you have in your garage, but have never been able to complete?  The parts are stacked up, but you have completely given up on getting it running again.

And yet, if someone asked you for parts for fixing cars, you might not think of your Fairlane.

That is kind of what the current situation was with the power company.  They had dead project stuff.  Not well catalogued.  Not usable for regular maintenance.  Not on anybody's radar.  There is also suggestions that the information about what was there had been made available, but that the right people did not know about it.  (The communication issues following a disaster is a whole different blog entry).

Just an old fashioned love song

In 1997, I met a woman who would change my life forever.

I was interviewing for grad school at Tulane University, and was about to walk into my first  interview.  Interviews, in case you were not aware, are not my forte.

This woman, who called herself Kathleen Trujillo, talked me down off the ledge.  She let me crack jokes until I calmed down.  She told me about the professor I was interviewing with.  She gave me insight into his style (...Let the pause play out.  He doesn't respond quickly.)   She was smart.  She was kind.  She was helpful.

And, as all of you know, she was gorgeous, with the biggest, brightest blue eyes I had ever seen.


Later that year, I came to Tulane, and eventually made the smart move of having my mom propose to her.  (She said yes to mom, after turning me down.)  The wedding was more fun than anyone could have expected, and the decorations we had at the museum at the Middle American Research Institute - set in the 1920s - was the backdrop for the portrait of the exquisite flapper I had married.  And, of course, Monroe Edmonson providing the a capella highlight to the wedding, and the brilliant string trio of Mary Laurel, Katie, and Andrew Lawton all gave me the music to make it perfect.

That was eighteen years ago, today.

Yeah, that is right.  Our marriage could vote.

This amazing woman has stood by my side, pushed me, suggested, nudged, let me grow, and has, impossibly, blossomed into an even more beautiful woman than the one who agreed to marry me. She has endured deployments and absences and even endured a forgotten birthday (but only one....)

I could not imagine putting up with me for a week, let alone 18 years.  But she has, and has done so with a grace that I cannot even begin to describe.  She is my partner, my translator (always necessary when I am in a public setting), my travel partner, my co-conspirator, and my friend.

Changing my life, every day, Kathe Lawton is the light of my life.