My grandfather Paddy Campbell turns 136 years old today and I decided on the spur of the moment to commemorate that auspicious date with the 4th blog of #mysongscapes this winter. Born January 9, 1884 to a blacksmith (also a Patrick) and his wife (my great grandmother Ellen) in Kilkinamurry, County Down, Northern Ireland, not far from Belfast, he was the eldest of 10 children. By the time this photo was taken of my great-grandparents and some of the other children and cousins at the house/blacksmith shop at Glen Corner, my grandfather had emigrated to Canada.
We visited Ireland in 2008 and made our way to Grandpa’s house on Glen Corner.
There was nothing left but a pile of roof slate in a sheep field.
But standing by the road there helped me to imagine his life here in the country. And we had some clippings from Irish ex-pats who’d visited my great-grandfather Pat Campbell. This one was written in 1938 by J.D. Morgan and published in New York in The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator:
“A fast disappearing feature of every country is the forge or blacksmith shop or smithy. It was immortalized by Longfellow in his “Village Blacksmith”. In no country was it more famous than in Ireland; it was the gathering place for the young people in the country. It was the library, the club, the news centre of whatever district it was located. The blacksmith was usually a witty character who could crack jokes, tell stories and amuse the boys.
In my boyhood days one of those places was situated about a mile from my home; it was Pat Campbell’s shop at Glen Corner (County Down, northern Ireland). Pat was an uncompromising Nationalist and had played an active part in the Land League and the Irish National League movement. The boys used to gather at Pat’s shop to hear the latest news and when we first organized the Hurling Club it was there that we made the first hurleys. Pat was the father of ten children, and his oldest son Paddy (my grandfather) was a great athlete and was one of the organizers of the first hurling club in the parish. He also held the one and two mile championships in track in 1910.”
It was a lovely trip, in springtime when the gorse was in bloom everywhere….
….. and the weather changed every half-hour, from rain in Galway….
…. to a rainbow and the sun emerging outside our hotel window in Donegal.
The vistas were spectacular throughout the north. These are the Slieve League Cliffs in Donegal, some 2000 feet (609 m) above the sea.
The roads there were steep and twisty and we had a close call on one corner….
We often passed traditional peat brick harvesting for heat.
I did buy wool hats for my sons and a lovely throw for my sofa in Donegal.
Japanese cherry trees were in bloom throughout the north and I wore the blossoms behind my ears.
We gazed out at the crowded harbour in Killybegs, the largest fishing port in Northern Ireland, and later watched the fishmonger in the market.
William Yeats’s grave in Sligo was a must-see for visitors to the North.
We also visited Dublin on that trip and made the requisite trip to Temple Bar, where we had to push our way through a gaggle of drunken brides-to-be and their girlfriends…..
…. to enjoy the customary ‘Guinness pour’.
The National Botanic Garden at Glasnevin in the Dublin suburbs was a favourite destination for me. The bluebell woods were in full flower.
The glasshouses at Glasnevin are architecturally stunning….
…. and full of choice plants.
In Kildare, we stopped into the Irish National Stud and Gardens to see the Japanese garden…
… and watch the very pricey stallions being led to the stud shed to earn their keep.
The Cliffs of Moher in County Clare were as dramatic as the tourist guides promised….
The Antrim coast was spectacular. This is the Giant’s Causeway, with its otherworldly, hexagonal basalt columns….
…. where tiny sea thrift (Armeria maritima) flourishes, true to its name.
At Whitepark Bay near our Antrim bed and breakfast, we took a path down to the ocean amidst wild primroses (Primula vulgaris).
The Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge tested my fear of alarmingly porous things swinging in the wind 80 feet above the ocean….
….. but I made it out to the little islets and back in one piece.
And we enjoyed seeing the incredible formations of the limestone cliffs at Portrush…..
….. and even notched a sighting of one of Ireland’s most famous golfers, Graeme McDowell, practising his chipping on the famous Royal Portrush Golf Club.
Now… back to Galway, for this is Grandpa’s musical connection to the Emerald Isle, as I recalled it so vividly as a child visiting my grandparents’ house in Saskatoon from British Columbia every few summers. On that spring day a decade ago in Northern Ireland, I needed to sit for a while looking out on Galway Bay, below, “at the closing of the day”. It was the song I remembered Grandpa Campbell singing in his soft, old man’s voice in his living room. “Have you ever been across the sea to Ireland….” As a little child, I even tried to figure out the first few notes on his piano (when I wasn’t plunking Chopsticks or God Save the Queen) and he kindly sat on the piano bench beside me and sang it.
There were other songs we sang in Saskatoon on those summer visits. Irish songs. ‘Danny Boy’, of course, and other ones less well known.
O, they all went down to Mick McGilligan’s Ball,
Where they had to tear the paper off the wall,
To make room for all the people in the hall,
All the girls and the boys made a devil of a noise
At Mick McGilligan’s Ball
Grandpa emigrated to Canada in his 20s, ultimately becoming a blacksmith in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where my mother & I were both born. (My parents moved to the west coast when I was an infant.) He always had his vegetable garden in the back yard.
We visited every few years, and I was pleased to be doted on by my mother’s younger sisters Veronica, aka aunt Bonnie (I’m on the left)….
….. and Dorothy, aka Aunt Dot.
Summers in the 1950s when my family visited Saskatoon meant that my brother Paddy (yes another Paddy) and I slept on the screened front porch, where early in the morning I’d hear the milk horses clip-clopping down the street and wonder if they had been shod by my grandpa.
There were always tons of cousins there in the summer, and we loved going down to Grandpa Campbell’s root cellar to find the orange crush and root beer he stored there. In the photo below, I’m the oldest, back row holding a cousin. I think there are 11 in that photo, which is just one-third of the “Campbell cousins”.
We didn’t talk about “the troubles” back in Northern Ireland, but I knew Grandpa’s stand on things through my mother. He rode his bicycle to his blacksmith shop, attended mass every day, and had a popular moonlighting gig as a “turf accountant” (that would be the name of the perfectly legal occupation in Ireland) or bookie (much frowned upon by the Saskatchewan constabulary).
He had a big vegetable garden in the backyard with lots of potatoes (befitting an Irishman) and leafy vegetables too, like the ones he’s harvesting here beside 12-year old me for my family to take back in the car on our 3-day camping trip back home to British Columbia. My Uncle Vic and cousin Debbie are standing beside our little Austin in the background, waiting to wave goodbye.
My Aunt Dot lives in the house now, and still tends her own garden there. A few years ago, some of the cousins gathered to celebrate the memorial of another of my mother’s sisters, Lena, aka Aunt Lee. We poured a few drinks that day.
So Galway Bay. The lovely thing about Irish music is that anybody can celebrate and be Irish for a little while. Here’s Johnny Cash….
And Sam Cooke, too. Why not?
But the Irish love their sweet-voiced women, and here is Celtic Woman, herself. Happy Birthday, Grandpa Campbell. I think you’d like this version.
*******
This is the fourth of #mysongscapes which I’m reflecting on in these winter months, rather than gardens. Click on the back button to hear Protest Songs of Vietnam, Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’.
It seems the drums of war are beating again this week in the Middle East. Perhaps they’ve never stopped beating, because humans like to fight each other. We’ve done it for eons and we’ll continue fighting forever, as long as there are resources to steal, land to fight over, religions to march for and political grievances to settle. One final line from a newspaper opinion piece on the Rwandan genocide back in the 1990s has stayed with me: “We are all Hutus and Tutsis.” It is human nature.
In order to make this third blog in #mysongscapes resonate, I had to dig out a very, very old photo album. That’s me in 1969, below. He was a Navy pilot from New Jersey based at Whidbey Island, Washington, heading off to Vietnam. His A-6 Intruder plane had wings that folded up to fit on aircraft carriers. I was his young Canadian girlfriend. He and his roommates rented a house on the Pacific Ocean.. My kid brother thought he was cool because he drove a red sports car.
We were part of a big cross-border gang whose winter life centred on the ski hills of Washington’s Mount Baker, except somehow I got through that period in my life without actually skiing (though I took a few lessons). I always joked that I had a more important job: I was in charge of brewing the glühwein back at the chalet. But while many people on both sides of the border were protesting the Vietnam War, I was hanging out with my girlfriends and the guys at the Chandelier Bar in the town of Glacier at the bottom of the mountain, dancing to our jukebox favourites Proud Mary and Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
My pilot was shipping out to Vietnam on an aircraft carrier and maybe he would never come back. (I later learned he did return safely and became a commercial pilot.) In time I realized we weren’t really suited and I broke it off by mail before his tour of duty ended. So that was that. And life went on.
The closest I got to any meaningful protest in those days was going to an October 1970 Greenpeace concert in Vancouver to protest American nuclear testing at Amchitka. Joni Mitchell was the lead performer with her then-beau James Taylor.
Another young singer, activist Phil Ochs performed his own protest song that night: “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore”. It was a litany of American battles and wars through the ages. I already owned his fourth album Pleasures of the Harbor, from 1967, which included a scathing song about the social apathy that surrounded the 1964 Kitty Genovese stabbing death in New York. Sadly, Phil Ochs would take his own life in the grip of bipolar disorder five years later.
I AIN’T MARCHIN’ ANYMORE, Phil Ochs (1965)
Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans At the end of the early British war The young land started growing The young blood started flowing But I ain’t marchin’ anymore
For I’ve killed my share of Indians In a thousand different fights I was there at the Little Big Horn I heard many men lying I saw many more dying But I ain’t marchin’ anymore
It’s always the old to lead us to the war It’s always the young to fall Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun Tell me is it worth it all
For I stole California from the Mexican land Fought in the bloody Civil War Yes I even killed my brother And so many others And I ain’t marchin’ anymore
For I marched to the battles of the German trench In a war that was bound to end all wars Oh I must have killed a million men And now they want me back again But I ain’t marchin’ anymore
For I flew the final mission in the Japanese sky Set off the mighty mushroom roar When I saw the cities burning I knew that I was learning That I ain’t marchin’ anymore
Now the labor leader’s screamin’ when they close the missile plants United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore Call it, “Peace” or call it, “Treason” Call it, “Love” or call it, “Reason” But I ain’t marchin’ any more
The Vietnam War (aka The Second Indochina War, aka the War Against the Americans to Save the Nation) began in 1955 and ended when Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. The first US Marines arrived in Da Nang in 1965 but there were already 25,000 American “advisors” there backing up French Colonial forces, the aim being to restrict Communist expansion into Indochina under Stalin and Mao and to battle Hồ Chí Minh, the North Vietnamese Army and the rebel Việt Cộng in South Vietnam and Cambodia. (That’s a great oversimplification but this isn’t a history lesson.) The U.S. would register more than 58,000 deaths during the war; Vietnam would number its dead at 4 million.
When I visited Saigon — now called Ho Chi Minh City — in 2013, 44 years after my Navy pilot shipped out and 38 years after the war ended, my husband and I were on a cruise ship tour of Southeast Asia. I read my book on deck as we sailed northeast from Singapore on the South China Sea.
Though some days were rougher going than others, it was heaven to be on that ship, away from winter in Toronto.
It was late afternoon on February 1st as we sailed up the Saigon River. There were all kinds of fishing boats and sampans but none more interesting than the one below, with its “push-ahead” submerged net attached to the ends of the poles which scoops up small fish while the boat motors slowly ahead. Note the fisherman at the side with the perforated blue laundry basket which has just been lifted from the water, presumably with a haul to be placed in the coolers at the back.
The Saigon River delta on our starboard side consisted mostly of mangrove species, their salt-resistant roots extending into muddy soil at the shore while harbouring molluscs, crustaceans, fish and amphibious species. Migratory shorebirds roosting in the branches and herons could be seen fishing at their base. A few miles behind (but not visible here) is the UNESCO-designated Cần Giờ Biosphere Reserve, a 75,000-hectare mangrove forest and wetland biosystem that has been dubbed the “green lungs” of Ho Chi Minh City.
As we drew nearer to the city, the water became less brackish and we saw nipa palms (Nypa fruticans) interspersed with the mangroves in the slow-moving tidal water. A little further upriver, the mangroves disappeared completely and the nipa palms became the dominant species. Curiously, the palm’s horizontal trunk lies below the soil. The leaves, which can reach 30 feet high, are used for roof thatching and basketry, while the brown flower buds yield a sap that can be tapped to make an alcoholic beverage.
During the Vietnam War, the mangrove-nipa palm forests were used by the Việt Cộng as hiding places and became the target of millions of gallons of Agent Orange defoliant herbicide sprayed from tanker planes by American forces. Despite the fact that Monsanto informed the government as early as 1952 that Agent Orange contained a toxic substance (dioxin), it would be used for almost a decade and cover one-seventh of Vietnam’s land area. In 1969, the UN passed a resolution declaring Agent Orange in violation of the Geneva Convention; the following year its use was suspended. But the damage had already been done, not just to nipa palms and mangroves, but to the Vietnamese and Americans who had come into contact with the deadly spray. Not only would many of them develop lethal cancers, their DNA would suffer damage that, in many cases, resulted in severe birth defects in their children and grandchildren.
From the small village on our port side, below, came a loud, bizarre cacophony of bird-chirping. I overheard something about “birds-nest soup” and later discovered that the tall, concrete building is a commercial birdhouse for edible-nest swiftlets (Aerodramus fuciphagus). The tiny birds, normally cave-nesters, are lured back to their nests on the building’s rafters in the evening by the tape-recorded chirping sound. In other words, the entrepreneur uses the birds’ native “echolocation” trait to call them back to the nest. Turns out those little nests are made almost entirely with bird saliva, no plant material, and they sell for up to $3,000 a kilo. Why? They are the supposedly magical “aphrodisiac” ingredient in the Chinese specialty dish birds-nest soup. Not just a libido pick-me-up, but women also think the gelatinous saliva helps to keep their faces wrinkle-free. Alas, the noise pollution from the big birdhouses has caused problems in areas throughout southeast Asia where governments such as Vietnam’s have offered financial incentives to those wishing to get into the business. I was also intrigued by the two-spired church I saw in this little town, assuming at first it was from the French Indochina period. Except when I returned home and look closely at the shot, I realize those aren’t crosses on the spires — and what church has two spires? It wasn’t until I heard Catherine Karnow give a National Geographic talk on her photography in Vietnam in Toronto three weeks after returning and she described Cao Dai, a religion where people venerate Victor Hugo, Thomas Jefferson and Joan-of-Arc as saints, that I learned what it was I photographed. There’s a lot more to this modern (1926), uniquely Vietnamese religion than that but this was a Cao Dai temple and there are anywhere between 2-6 million adherents in the country.
A barge was tied to the mangroves. Nipa thatch? Nipa alcohol? Shrimp-fishing? Dredging? We had no clue.
The sun had gone down by the time we approached Ho Chi Minh City harbour.
The emerging night skyline was rather shocking to those of us who expected to find a somewhat sleepy Communist version of old French Saigon. But Vietnam is “nominally” Communist and has become the Asian Tiger of the 21st century, with many “boat people” refugees from the 1970s returning to the country to create businesses. However, growth is said to be uneven and bogged down in the old political trappings, corruption, inflation and infrastructure problems.
Good morning, Vietnam! After a night on board dockside, we walked into the city centre the next morning. This was rather orderly traffic for HCMC but it IS a red light, after all. At other intersections, the traffic criss-crosses in four directions in something approaching a random, quasi-choreographed meshing with no one really giving way. And take it from me, it is terrifying to be a pedestrian timidly lifting your foot off the curb to cross at an intersection.
A food vendor was walking by with his baskets and….
… we passed a bicycle loaded with lychees and rambutans.
City gardeners were planting bedding plants on a traffic island in something that looks like spring planting-out at home. But spring, summer, autumn and winter are not words in the southeast Asian lexicon, for Vietnam is governed by monsoons which divide it into two seasons. Early February during our visit is the latter part of the cool northeast monsoon that lasts from October into early April. The hot southwest monsoon – which is the dominant weather pattern in southern Vietnam – then takes over and lasts until September. Though we think of monsoon as torrential rain, the rainy season in south Vietnam is primarily between May and October, with the heaviest rainfall in June.
We passed the Museum of Ho Chi Minh City, taking note of the jet and helicopter on display. Reminders of the war are still very much a presence in this city, which was the American base of operations until 1975.
There was no denying which side won the war. Pictures of Hồ Chí Minh were displayed in many places. Born in 1890, he died in 1969, the year my navy pilot went to Vietnam. He served as Prime Minister of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1955 and was its President from 1945 to 1969. A Marxist-Leninist, he was Chairman and First Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam. Under his leadership, North Vietnam defeated the French in 1954 and he was a key figure in the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Việt Cộng in the first part of the Vietnam War. In 1976, Saigon was named in his honour. (From Wikipedia)
Built in 1864 by the French, the old Saigon Zoo and Botanical Garden was a welcome green oasis. It was Saturday and lots of families were wandering the paths of the garden. After reunification in 1975, few resources were expended on the garden, but it does contain a good collection of native Vietnamese species and some pleasant areas.
The greenhouse was neat and well-cared for, if not exactly accessible to visitors.
The massive buttress roots of the tung tree (Tetrameles nudiflora), a native southeast Asian species, jutted out into the lawn and cracked the neighbouring sidewalk.
A yellow gibbon nibbled on fruit in its enclosure.
We emerged from the Botanical Garden hungry, yet not quite brave enough to sample the street food from the vendor carts. But just across the street we found a lovely outdoor cafe on the ground floor of the PetroVietnam building. And here I sampled my very favourite meal of the entire trip: Gỏi cuốn, which features ground pork & shrimp with crunchy fresh greens & cilantro in a delectable sauce, all wrapped in rice paper rolls and offered with spicy chili sauce.
My husband ordered a delicious noodle dish. To quench our thirst, we had the most amazing frozen fruit drink. Simple, inexpensive, delicious.
The most evocative stop of our day in Ho Chi Minh City was the War Remnants Museum, or Bảo tàng Chứng tích Chiến. Technically, “the American War” as it is referred to here (never the Vietnam War), began in 1959 with the first battle between the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army and the Communists; escalated in 1965, when the first U.S. combat troops landed; and ended on April 30, 1975, when the Vietnam People’s Army and the National Liberation Front seized Saigon, raising the North Vietnamese flag over the presidential palace. The involvement of the French in colonial Indochine; the Geneva Accord and the resultant clash of ideologies; Ngô Đình Diệm and the Ho Chi Minh trail; the roles of President Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon; the Viet Cong and Green Berets; the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet Offensive; the millions of dead and wounded; the protests at home and abroad; Jane Fonda; Apocalypse Now and the Fourth of July: for us in the west, those fifteen years and all the horrific details were the stuff of Walter Cronkite and the evening news. But here in Ho Chi Minh City, renamed to honour the fervent nationalist who refused to accept the separation of his country by foreign states and fought to reunify it, the script is very different, as you might expect. And these school children were undoubtedly learning the story of their country’s war with its “oppressors “and the happy ending that came with its ultimate liberation and reunification. Perhaps inspired by the dove of peace on the facade, they would also be taught to embrace a different way of living in this world — a way to settle differences without resorting to armed conflict. But then wars are not fought by children.
School students gathered around the big Chinook helicopter….
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I saw this little girl taking studious notes all around the museum grounds….
….. even staring at the gruesome guillotine in the outdoor jail exhibit, where the sign reads: “It was brought by the French to Vietnam in the early 20th century and kept for use in the big jail on Lagrandiere Street, now Ly Tu Trong Street. During the US war against Vietnam, the guillotine was transported to all of the provinces in South Vietnam to decapitate the Vietnam patriots. In 1960, the last man who was executed by guillotine was Mr Hoang Le Kha.”
Inside the museum, the Agent Orange room was shocking and distressing, but the living embodiment of the chemical’s effects were the disfigured people selling souvenirs at the museum’s entrance: multigenerational victims of Agent Orange. It is a testament to the healing power of time that many U.S. war vets have returned to Vietnam to work with victims of Agent Orange and the U.S. is also working officially to help clean areas where the toxic spray was used.
Ample use was made of photos and clippings of American war protestors, conscientious objectors and draft-dodgers…..
……and atrocities such as that perpetrated in My Lai in 1968 by Army Lieutenant William Calley and his platoon.
History is written by the victors, it is said, and we were in the land of the victors. Some of the American travellers saw the displays as propaganda and gave parts of the museum a pass. It all depends on your frame of reference, I suppose, but throwing back the U.S. Declaration of Independence at visitors was a masterful touch.
My final image from the War Remnants Museum was a familiar one: the grief-stricken face of a student at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, following the shooting deaths of four fellow students and the wounding of nine by the National Guard during an anti-war protest. That tragic event gave rise to one of the most powerful protest songs of the war, Ohio, written by Neil Young and performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
OHIO, Neil Young (1970)
Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it Soldiers are gunning us down Should have been done long ago What if you knew her and Found her dead on the ground How can you run when you know
Ah, la la la la…
Gotta get down to it Soldiers are gunning us down Should have been done long ago What if you knew her and Found her dead on the ground How can you run when you know
Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming We’re finally on our own This summer I hear the drumming Four dead in Ohio Four dead in Ohio
In 2017, we visited the National Mall in Washington DC. The two-panel, black granite Vietnam Memorial Wall bears the names of 58,320 individuals who died or were missing in action in the Vietnam War.
The names below were among those who died on just two days of the war, June 6th and 7th in 1968, the year that claimed the most casualties. I looked many up on the virtual Wall of Memories; they were Marines or Army, mostly, aged 19, 22, 24. So young…. sons, brothers, lovers. Whatever you think of the morality of war, the wall is a powerful reminder of the ultimate sacrifice made by those who go to battle for their country.
It isn’t possible to know which names on the wall enlisted, and which were drafted. The next song is by the late California singer-songwriter John Stewart (1939-2008) and the video is one I created myself to illustrate the song he recorded that same year, 1968, on the album Signals Through the Glass, along with Buffy Ford, who later became his wife. Some of you might be aware that I spent a few years from 2008 to 2010 working on a theatre treatment of the music of John’s long career, first with the Kingston Trio (1961-67) and later on his own. I wrote a comprehensive blog about that chapter in my life. The song ‘Draft Age’, inspired by a painting by John’s friend Jamie Wyeth, is not strictly a song of protest, but it is an ominous musical preface to the next chapter in the life of young Clarence Mulloy. Balboa in the lyrics is Balboa Park in San Diego. (Eagle eyes will see that I misspelled the fictional lad’s name in the draft letter.) I used public domain Vietnam photos from the U.S. Government to imagine what that might look like.
DRAFT AGE, John Stewart (1968)
Clarence Mulloy stands in his bedroom and stares, He is going away. Clarence Mulloy stands at the mirror and shaves, Today is the day. Oh, it had to come sooner or later, That the message of greeting would say, “Clarence, my boy, you are draft age today”.
Clarence Mulloy looks at his shelves and his soldiers Made out of clay, Clarence Mulloy looks at his Ma and they know There is nothing to say. Boarding the bus on the corner, Every face on the street seemed to say, “Clarence, my boy, you are draft age today.”
And the boys have all gone to Balboa With some girls that they met on the way And Alexis stayed home like you told her, Clarence Mulloy, you are draft age today.
Clarence Mulloy looks out the window and sees What is passing him by. Clarence Mulloy how incredibly short it can be It is making you cry.
And the dirty small boy that has seen you Looks up from his baseball to say “Clarence Mulloy, you are draft age today.”
And the boys have all gone to Balboa With some girls that they met on the way And Alexis stayed home like you told her. Clarence Mulloy, you are draft age today.
Clarence Mulloy, you are draft age today. Clarence Mulloy, you are draft age today.
But this week. The drums of war. Iraq. Iran. Middle East oil. The ancient back and forth. And this century, a changing climate and an increased urgency to enact changes in how we live on the planet before we flood and burn ourselves and the living things around us out of existence. That is, if it’s not already much too late, if we’re not already on ‘the eve of destruction’.
I could have included other songs: Buffy Sainte Marie’s ‘Universal Soldier’, Cat Stevens’ ‘Peace Train’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, Pete Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’, Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’. But I think you got my message. And on that note, I’ll finish #mysongscape with Barry McGuire’s raw song of protest. Even with its 1960s references — the space race, JFK’s assassination, the civil rights marches in Alabama, strife in the Middle East and, yes, Vietnam — it seems that we are always poised on the eve of destruction.
EVE OF DESTRUCTION, P.F. Sloan (1965)
The eastern world, it is explodin’, Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’, You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’, You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’, And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin’, But you tell me over and over and over again my friend, Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
Don’t you understand, what I’m trying to say? And can’t you feel the fears I’m feeling today? If the button is pushed, there’s no running away, There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave, Take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy, And you tell me over and over and over again my friend, Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
Yeah, my blood’s so mad, feels like coagulatin’, I’m sittin’ here, just contemplatin’, I can’t twist the truth, it knows no regulation, Handful of Senators don’t pass legislation, And marches alone can’t bring integration, When human respect is disintegratin’, This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’, And you tell me over and over and over again my friend, Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
Think of all the hate there is in Red China! Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama! Ah, you may leave here, for four days in space, But when your return, it’s the same old place, The poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgrace, You can bury your dead, but don’t leave a trace, Hate your next door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace, And you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend, You don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
No, no, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
When I first listened to Paul Simon’s ‘There Goes Rhymin’ Simon’, released in spring 1973, I was swept away by the rollicking cadence of ‘Kodachrome’, the first song on the album. It was obviously metaphorical, but I loved the bouncing rhythm and the irreverent opening…. “all that crap I learned in high school”. And it was Simon without Garfunkel, a big change from the 1960s and their hits, ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘Mrs. Robinson’, ‘The Boxer’.
Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away
1973 was a bit of a heartbreak year for me. A long relationship had ended and I was in a new job, in a new apartment near the beach in Vancouver, with four white parsons tables that my carpenter dad built for me, a mustard-gold Sears sofa, dozens of plants (it was the 70s after all), a brand-new attitude, and a brand-new turntable and Pioneer receiver (far right in the old photos below). I played Paul Simon so loud on my new stereo that my downstairs neighbours often took exception and knocked on the ceiling, which of course was the essence of (One Man’s Ceiling is) Another Man’s Floor, from that album.
I still love listening to my music loud, and I still adore this album, though now I have the CD, of course. Sometimes, on the 2-1/2 hour drive north to our cottage, I just keep it in the changer and let it play over and over. Kodachrome, Tenderness, Take Me to the Mardi Gras with its New Orleans gospel vibe, American Tune, St. Judy’s Comet, Loves Me Like a Rock, the Reggae rhythms of Was a Sunny Day, etc.
But what about “Kodachrome”…. the film? Fifteen years later in 1988, I was married with four kids, living in Toronto, and determined somehow to create a career combining writing, which I loved, with gardening, which I also loved. And somehow, I did it! I had my first piece published in my botanical garden’s newsletter that spring. It was about my backyard pond. Six years later, I debuted my newspaper column with the Toronto Sun. After my spring introduction, below, I would be required to provide my own photography each week. That went on for six years with this paper, (okay, it was a tabloid with bikini-clad girls on page 3 and hardly any of my friends ever read it, unless they found it on a streetcar or in a hockey arena dressing room, but still….), then another few years with the National Post. So I became a photographer, too. And when I discovered I loved photographing plants as much as writing about them, I launched my own stock photo library.
In the early 90s, I used a Pentax point-and-shoot camera to illustrate my gardening articles and columns. Then I bought a new Canon Elan SLR. And yes, in those days (1990-1996) I used Kodachrome 64 slide film. It did produce Paul Simon’s “nice, bright colors” but it had problems, too. It was high contrast, something that can be problematic in garden scenes in bright light. (And since I was never an early morning riser, preferring to work in my office late at night, I counted on overcast conditions for my optimal outdoor light.) Because of its unique emulsion (something about dye couplers), it meant that development of the film had to be done by Kodak or an approved dealer. When digital began to emerge in publishing in the late 1990s and necessitated the scanning of slides, it was apparent that the emulsion did not behave like the Fujichrome transparencies to which I switched after 1996. (These are so old that the little kid with the beans in the top row is now a dad of a toddler!)
Today I have an overflowing bookcase filled with many dozens of binders of slides containing tens of thousands of pre-2007 images. Having switched to digital that year, I rarely pull out a binder. (The photo below only shows some of them; the rest are scattered around my office.)
But when I do, I cringe if it’s a Kodachrome slide I need to scan with my Plustek scanner (the successor to my first Coolscan scanner, below it), because it requires a lot of fiddling with the software. I kept the old Coolscan as a stand so the Plustek insertion frame would not knock into my Canon flatbed scanner below.
Over the years, I went through a lot of cameras and lenses and photo tutorials. In 1998, at a workshop in New Brunswick, when the renowned photographer Freeman Patterson turned my camera from horizontal to vertical to show me the difference it made in framing a scene, I could only watch him in amazement. I wanted to see with his eyes.
My cameras came with me everywhere. This was me in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the 1990s. (My hair was still mostly dark then….)
I’ve been photographing at that wonderful 200-acre arboretum/graveyard in all seasons for more than two decades. Just one of my many ongoing projects.
Another multi-year photography project is the Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve in Muskoka. One year, a cousin took me up in his plane with the window open (!)….
……so I could get some aerial shots of the Barrens with fall colour.
I recently had a night sky photography lesson there, with well-known photographer Wes Liikane. I blogged about that evening.
….the other fitted with a 70-200 f 4.0 lens for intimate design vignettes and close-ups of my beloved pollinator insects.
Photographing on safari in South Africa was much more satisfying with my telephoto lens…..
…..which let me zoom in on the eyes of a black-maned lion just waking up. (I wrote a 3-part blog about that safari at Kapama Game Park here.)
By the time I visited the Wellcome Collection in London en route to Kenya in spring 2016, I had purchased a lightweight, mirrorless 50x-zoom digital camera (Canon SX50 HS). And rather than draw a self-portrait like the other people had done there….
….. I used my new camera to do a mirrored selfie. (Well, I needed one for Instagram!)
My new zoom telephoto camera had pretty good video and let me focus at a safe distance on the cheetah brothers roaming the savannah at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya a few weeks later.
I’ve had some magazine covers over the years, and many self-illustrated stories inside the pages.
I loved this cover because it illustrated my story inside the magazine on my wild meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka.
Indeed, our cottage is where I indulge in my love of nature photography….
…. using my own meadows and wildish garden beds……
…… and hummingbird-friendly containers as my muses.
I’ve done some smoke and mirrors fine art photography over the years. Especially in spring, after six long months of winter.
And I’m crazy about autumn, so I’ve used my light table to create some fall colour fine art…..
….. then had a photography show at the perfect time of year.
But seriously, my old slide light tables are mostly used as superhero or cute-kitten tracing centres now….
….. and most of my non-floral photography these days is devoted to my three grandkids. I’ve made a gallery each year filled with photos and videos and I keep them in a private folder on my Smug Mug site. A gift to my daughter and son-in-law.
All those years, all those days spent in gardens with cameras… sometimes three of them… slung over my neck, often for 6 or 7 hours straight. Thank you, Naomi Brooks, for recording the moment on that hot August day in 2016 on New York’s High Line when some helpful tourist suggested I get some harness contraption that would keep all the camera straps straight. That really sounded too logical to me!
Though I’ve spent more hours alone photographing in gardens than I could begin to imagine, from time to time, I had a dear photographer friend, Virginia Weiler (aka Ginny) who would bring her camera from her home in North Carolina and we would play like kids together in various photogenic places that piqued our fancy, like a Civil War graveyard in Charleston. Or we would play hooky from boring symposiums and rent a car and drive to the garden we both wanted to photograph. Or we’d phone each other on a few days notice and say, “Superbloom, California!” and fly out to meet and wander the Mojave Desert or Mount Figueroa in the Santa Ynez mountains to photograph poppies and lupines. That’s us below in April 2004, and below that, Ginny and me at the beautiful 2014 Quebec wedding of Ginny and her partner Claudine.
Cellphone cameras? Selfies? I secretly scoffed at tourists like these ones posing beneath the Statue of Liberty and resisted buying a cellphone of any kind until late 2017 when my family said I should have one for night-time driving emergencies.
Then my Samsung S8 became my easy travel camera for social media updating. And yes…. okay… selfies, too. I joined the legions of ridiculous people, just like I said I wouldn’t.
But for my stock photo library of plants, I still need the higher resolution of my digital SLRs – and I spend much too much time at my desk late at night photo editing. It is truly a life immersed in photography and I am so happy to be there. Buried so deeply I may never be found.
And when I look at my rainbow array of flora, made especially to illustrate my paintbox garden concept, I do know Paul Simon had it exactly right way back in 1973. We need “those nice bright colors”….
….. because “everything looks worse in black and white”.
When I think back On all the crap I learned in high school It’s a wonder I can think at all And though my lack of education Hasn’t hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall
Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away
If you took all the girls I knew When I was single And brought ’em all together for one night I know they’d never match My sweet imagination Everything looks worse in black and white
Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away
********
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Here is the entire #mysongscapes list up until the end of winter (and Covid)!
My favourite night photography session happened because of a full moon. A “Supermoon”, that is, if you’re trying to sell the concept as an advertising ploy, instead of a very normal celestial occurrence during which the full moon comes to within 90 percent of its closest approach to earth, as measured from their respective centres. Anyway, it was November 14, 2016, and I was on a 4:15 pm ferry from Harbourfront to Ward’s Island, a sandy, somewhat bohemian enclave in Lake Ontario just a 20-minute sail away from downtown Toronto.
It was still light when we pulled up to the Ward’s Island dock.
I was there to photograph the supermoon which I strangely believed, without researching, would rise like a golden balloon over the skyscrapers of the city to the north. I found a spot on a smooth rock on the island’s wildish north shore. It was cold. On a rock beside me sat a young Irish girl named Cheryl, in Canada on a temporary work visa and living with her “brudder”. She fielded a call from him as we sat watching the sky; he was wondering when she’d be home for dinner. “I told ya, I’m out to see the moon!”
And there we waited, two moonstruck women watching the sun set in the west….
…. as geese flew by….
…. and the ferry headed back to town with the vestiges of sunset splashed across the sky.
The sky darkened, the air got colder and I regretted not adding a second layer…..
…. as Porter airplanes flew past the CN Tower homing in on the airport on Centre Island nearby.
Soon the sky was black velvet and the lights twinkled in the financial buildings downtown, a mile or two south of Yorkville, the scene of Joni Mitchell’s Night in the City. It was night in the city, but still no supermoon.
Cheryl and I decided we’d had enough. Clearly we’d missed the moonrise or it had climbed unseen behind some bank of cloud. Disappointed, we said our goodbyes and I wandered slowly along the lit island pathway towards the ferry dock. By chance I gazed up and there was my moon, hazy and framed by a verdant tracery of autumn leaves still hanging onto a tree. It was not a supermoon; it was just my faithful moon, bathing with its glow this cold November night in the city.
Joni’s Night in the City
I met Joni Mitchell once. It was 1996 and Joni was already standing in the elevator I entered at the Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, the city of my birth. My family and I were staying there while attending a Campbell family reunion to celebrate my Irish-born grandfather’s arrival in Canada eighty-five years earlier. Though Joni was born in Alberta, her family settled in Saskatoon when she was 11 years old, so this was her childhood home. There was a man with her – well, there was always a man with Joni. Given her towering reputation in song, she was shorter than I thought she’d be, just 5’5”. As the floor numbers lit up on the descent, I succumbed to my inner fangirl and said: “Joni, I’ve always loved ‘Night in the City’. It was on one of the first albums I owned.” She replied, in a voice made husky by decades of smoking: “Oh, I leave those songs to the young voices now.” On this day, as I recall, she was heading out on a bike to ride along the Saskatchewan River and we smiled at each other as we left the elevator and went our separate ways.
But Joni had her young, soaring voice back in 1967 when she recorded her first album, Song to a Seagull, released in 1968 That year I was in my first apartment in New Westminster, just outside Vancouver. I had a job and a roommate named Jean from work. An older woman, she came from Yorkshire and when she’d had a little too much to drink, she’d say with a thick Midlands accent: “Aye, be gum. It’s champion!” I had the Seabreeze record player I’d brought with me from my family home and Joni’s album, with her fantastical art on the cover, played on it constantly. It was a 2-part LP, a concept album; one disk was titled “I Came to the City”, about Canada, the other “Out of the City and Down to the Seaside”, about California. And all those songs were like poems to my ear. In fact, Joni dedicated it to her 7th grade English teacher Mr. Kratzman “who taught me to love words”.
The album cover is actually an interesting story. When the sleeve was first printed and packaged by Reprise Records on the album that was going to be titled simply Joni Mitchell, they didn’t notice that Joni had painted a message in flying seagulls and they cut off the last “L” in “Seagull”. You can see it on older versions of the album, below. When the mistake was noticed, the album cover was reprinted and the album was re-released with a new title.
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Coincidentally, I saw Murray McLauchlan sing exactly 40 years later at a little club near our summer cottage on Lake Muskoka. He’s on guitar at left, with Toronto singer-songwriter Marc Jordan (‘Living in Marina del Rey’) on guitar in the centre. They are part of a foursome called Lunch at Allen’s with Cindy Church and Ian Thomas.
Joni, who cut her entertainment teeth in Yorkville with her first husband, folksinger Chuck Mitchell, wrote about the scene there and how she came to write ‘Night in the City’:
“So one night I decided I was going to go down, I was going to be very broad-minded, I was going to enjoy myself, I wasn’t going to pay any attention to any of the wise-cracks I got from people as I walked down the street. I was just gonna walk down and groove. And so I did and I stood in front of all of the buildings, like they have about 6 or 7 or 8 – more than that – on Yorkville Avenue proper of music spots like this that showcase everything from good folk music to bad folk music to good rock n roll to bad rock n roll to good jazz to bad jazz. You can stand out in front of the clubs in what I like to call music puddles – it’s the area where the music just kind of hangs and you can walk over that far and you’re out of the range of it again. So that’s what I did and I came home, climbed up the stairs to the place where I was staying and wrote this song, called Night in the City.”
Night in the City
Light up light up
Light up your lazy blue eyes
Moon’s up nights up
Taking the town by surprise
Night time night time
Day left an hour ago
City light time
Must you get ready so slow
There are places to come from
and places to go
Night in the city looks pretty to me
Night in the city looks fine
Music comes spilling out into the street
Colors go flashing in time
Take off take off
Take off your stay-at-home shoes
Break off shake off
Chase off those stay-at-home blues
Stairway stairway
Down to the crowds in the street
They go their way
Looking for faces to greet
But we run on laughing with no one to meet
The album was produced by David Crosby (later of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills Nash and Young). He would say: “The strongest thing I did for Joni as a producer on Song to a Seagull, from 1968, was keep everybody else off of that record. She was a folkie who had learned to play what they call an indicated arrangement, where you are like a band in the way you approach a chord and string the melody along. She was so new and fresh with how she approached it. It’s the reason I fell in love with her music. She was a fantastic rhythm player and growing so fast. She had mastered the idea that she could tune the guitar any way she wanted, to get other inversions of the chords. I was doing that too, but she went further. I understood her joy in using bigger tools later – jazz bands, orchestra. But the stuff she did that was basically her, like 1971’s Blue, was her strongest stuff. Match her and Bob Dylan up as poets, and they are in the same ballpark. But she was a much more sophisticated musician.”
Now listen to the young voice of Joni Mitchell… actually two voices, both hers, singing harmony in rounds. And hear 22-year old Stephen Stills playing a very strong bass. As Joni said: “He came up with a beautiful bass line that I just couldn’t deny.” And if you like, do sing along with me on some beautiful night in the city.
******
The blog above is a bit of an experiment for me, the product of a restless mind and a love of photography and music. I decided that 2020 would feature some blogs that combine my photos (not always of gardens or flora) with a little bit of memoir-ish trivia topped with a You Tube video of a favourite – and related – song from the era. I’ve called them #mysongscapes. If you like the idea, please drop a note below and I’ll do some more. But don’t worry. I will include lots of garden blogs in 2020 as well. Happy New Year!
Postscript: Here are the other song blogs in this series:
