Wild Webmink

Nesting, a photo by webmink on Flickr.

I spent a half-day walking around the centre of Amsterdam following a speaking engagement. I can never decide how I feel about this city.

It’s a place with many scenes of great beauty – water, trees, long vistas with distant vanishing points, interesting and colourful buildings. Yet at the same time, there’s so much that’s ugly – prostitutes and the men looking for them, clouds of skunk-smelling smoke from seedy cafes and equally seedy passers-by, over-dense human population and the mess that accompanies it, endless junk food served by people with scorn for their customers.

Walking back to the station, I saw this swan nesting in the best material she could find in central Amsterdam. She seemed to me to sum up the paradox of the town – great beauty nesting in filth and making the best of it.

The tranquil isolation of Mono Lake in California – just outside the eastern entrance to Yosemite National Park at Lee Vining – makes it almost a place of pilgrimage for me. It’s a lake filled with mountain snow run-off from the Sierras, and it has no outlet.  The mineral wash from the mountains and the volcanic springs that enter from the lake bed get concentrated through evaporation and as a consequence the water is highly alkaline. Almost nothing can live in it, except algae, a specific kind of brine shrimp and a kind of brine fly almost unique to the lake.

All of these thrive in unthinkable numbers, making the lake the perfect feeding stop for migrating birds. The consequence is this “dead” lake is one of the most important wetlands in North America, providing a “service station” for countless birds each year as they cross the otherwise barren wastes of Nevada…

Staying with a dear friend near São Paulo, I noticed a sound like crickets or cicadas coming from the front of the house. I’ve never actually seen a cicada in action (they go quiet when you find them) so I rushed outside with my camera, only to find it wasn’t insects.

The sound was actually made by squirrels gnawing through the leathery shells of the palm nuts that had fallen to the ground from the tree just outside the house. This video shows you how the squirrels do it – they gnaw a ring around the nut, pausing regularly as they get the opening started and then munching away at the kernel once they get through the shell.

Despite the crowds who gather to share the experience, watching the sun set and the shadow of the Sierra Nevada pass across the face of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park is always a tranquil and enriching experience. A hush settles over the place, as if everyone is aware of a sacred presence, and discussion settles to a whisper as the transition to night gradually embraces the landscape.

The year I went there with friends after JavaOne (including Juggy the Java Finch) I set up a tripod and took a sequence of stills to build this timelapse record of the experience.

Spending as much time travelling as I do, one of the things that strikes me is how differently we all view history. For example, a favourite perspective vortex is to visit the tomb of Napoleon I in the crypt of Les Invalides in Paris and realise that all the terrible stuff I learned in school about “old Boney” was at best only half the story.

As well as the stuff about ruthlessly dominating Europe by armed force (which, of course, is spun differently in Paris!), the walls of his magnificent tomb at the Les Invalides recount how he created a fair system of law, established education for all, created a national network of roads and so much more. I’m sure French children learn all about this but all English children learn is about wars and how we eventually put Bonaparte in his place (a small, remote island).

Re-Discovering American History