Check Out the Yorktown Riverwalk

Have you strolled along the Yorktown Riverwalk lately? I hope you'll have a chance to do that very soon. York County has really done a great job beautifying the place and filling it with shops, restaurants, and activities that will draw folks to the riverside.  The Riverwalk itself is a brick path that follows the river between the Yorktown Victory Center to the National Park Service - Yorktown Battlefields property. It runs along that stretch of beach that we love in warm weather. The path follows the beach behind the Riverwalk Landing shops and the Waterman's Museum.

I'm very proud to have played a small part in making it a more interesting place by designing the historic information signs that you will see on pedestals there. I worked with a great committee of York County employees, historians with local attractions, and interested citizens to pull together text and pictures that would tell the history of the town that visitors to the historic attractions wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to learn.

Yorktown's claim to fame, of course, is the Battle of Yorktown, the last significant battle of the American Revolution. But the signs recall other famous events, like the time an asteroid fell nearby! I hope you'll enjoy a walk to take in the lesser known facts on the signs as well as the beautiful views of the York River.

Happy Halloween!

Just a few more days until Halloween! Since my children have left home, it's been a non-holiday for me. No one to dress up, no costume parts to find. Since we're in a relatively dark corner of the cul-de-sac, few trick-or-treaters stop by our house. But this year I am happy to report that I'm getting back into the fun.

As a volunteer at Child Development Resources, I accompanied "my" playgroup children and their parents, as well as CDR staff, to Pumpkinville in Toano. I've been volunteering with the group since last spring, so have developed a special relationship with some of the kids and enjoy knowing the staff and parents. I couldn't stop smiling as I watched my friends on the hayride. While watching parents take pictures of their children choosing pumpkins, I felt that little tug at my heart as I remembered taking Elizabeth and Lewis on similar outings to Belmont Farm in Mathews and Hunt's Farm in Lightfoot  (BTW, the picture of Hunt's Farm in my James City County book is of Elizabeth's kindergarten class walking to the barn to see apples and pumpkins during a field trip there!) 

I'm also volunteering with the speech teacher at Matthew Whaley Elementary School. I'm going in on Friday for a meeting and look forward to seeing all of the kids dressed up for the Halloween Parade, when the children stroll down to Merchants Square and back in their costumes. If you're in Williamsburg, its at 2:30 p.m. and not to be missed!

Earlier this morning, I pulled out a plastic pumpkin and filled it with the Halloween candy that Ken bought a week or more ago! Since he's been in the elementary schools for more than 30 years now, he's well aware of this holiday and knows how kids delight in its key attractions: dressing up and eating candy!

Amazing Grace

"We cannot transform our lives, unless we allow them to be transformed by that stroke of grace ... Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual ... It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed ... And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance."

Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, 1955

I felt awe and connection on the day that I saw the sun flash its bright light through the clouds and snapped the picture above. But that wasn't grace. Amazing grace is something more, something that John Newton felt in his darkest hour, when he turned away from the slave trade.

For the Christian, grace saves, inspires faith, brings transformation and renewal. It absolves the sinner of original sin and turns him to do good. Grace is God's love and desire to be in communion with his creation.

I've nearly lost my life, I've nearly taken my life, and I've known grace. Because of these things piled atop a fundamental Christian upbringing, I push the envelop. What is God? Why God? Paul Tillich takes the next step: it just is. That's good enough for me. You can download the podcast of Rev. Jennifer Ryu's sermon from the Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists' website, if you'd like. As a writer, though, I was compelled to take notes as I listened, and have transcribed and transformed a few of them here. They rang true for me and I saw myself moving toward transformation.

The liberal religious view is that grace is also a gift and we need it even if we don't believe in original sin or the traditional view of a God who pulls the strings. We need grace because sometimes we do take turns that move us away from "God," creation, the essential nature, core goodness. And we aren't saved by luck or the serendipity of looking up at sunbeams piercing clouds. Grace gets mushed up with providence, good fortune, and karma, but it is something more.

Paul Tillich wrote about a philosophy of grace. Grace is a gift of renewal and transformation that only comes when we are in pain and there is a turn that needs to be made. For me, grace came in 2004 when I was disgusted with myself, had lost direction and composure. It was intolerable and I was clinically depressed. (The bold emphasis in the quote above is mine.)

I'm not worried about eternal damnation, but it doesn't mean I didn't need grace. Grace came to me back then when I needed it most. It was unbidden and, although it is a work in progress, my life is transformed. Grace has transformed me as I have learned more about the essential nature through experiences with creation. I have turned from a life that was more focused on material things to a realization that one is more likely to find the meaning of life when digging in the dirt than when digging through a sale rack. In my darkest hour, the transformation began. My cup is slowly being filled and I am free.

I am loved, I am accepted, I belong to this earth. On this windy day, I put up my sails and move forward. I will help an autistic child, I will plant more ferns, I will harvest tomatoes. I will work on college applications again as I retool myself to move in the direction I had intended when I first thought about college nearly 40 years ago.

Grace is the unexpected transformation. May it be so.

Woohoo! The Chesapeake Bay Foundation is blogging for the Bay too!

Soon after I posted my last piece, I took a look at Facebook (soooo addictive!) to see if there was any news. I was excited to see a post from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation with more on our impaired waters. I've copied the post here:

"Blog Action Day" Makes Waves for Clean Water

A hard rain is falling this afternoon on the Chesapeake Bay. And whenever this happens, health departments across the region warn people to avoid all contact with the water for two full days.

Why?  Rain flushes all kinds of pollution off of our yards, streets, parking lots and farm fields, driving up bacterial levels so high it might be unsafe to swim, wade or kayak.

These warnings have been issued by health departments for years –- and many people don’t know about them, or just ignore them.  But I think it is a tragedy that we are warned not to even touch our waters every time it rains. It is something that we should stand up and scream about.  According to the 1972 Federal Clean Water Act, our waters, by law, are supposed to be “swimmable” and “fishable” –- and often, they are not.
Tomorrow is an international blog action day to raise awareness of the global water pollution crisis.

According to United Nations statistics, every day 2 million tons of human waste are released into waterways around  the world.  In developing countries, 70 percent of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into waters where they pollute the usable water supply.

In the Chesapeake Bay region, this type of pollution – from the discharge pipes of factories or sewage plants – has declined significantly since the 1970s, because of mandates imposed by the Federal Clean Water Act. But runoff pollution, especially from developed lands, continues to grow, and continues to make many of our waterways unswimmable, especially after rains.

One man from suburban Anne Arundel County, Maryland, who went swimming after a rain was Bernie Voith. He took a dip in a tributary of the Severn River with a cut on his leg, during a time when bacteria levels downstream were 30 times what the EPA considers safe for swimming.  He contracted a fecal bacteria infection in his leg that erupted into a tomato-sized wound. The bacteria entered his bloodstream and nearly killed him, requiring four months of medical treatment, according to his doctor.

“He was basically almost on the verge of death by the time he was admitted to the hospital,” said his doctor, Dr. Sarah Jamieson.

These kinds of infections from swimming in the Bay are rare. But the fact that they happen at all is an illustration that the “swimmable, fishable” standards of the law are not being consistently met.

The Bay area states recently submitted new pollution reduction plans to the Environmental Protection Agency.  In Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware and West Virginia, these plans were seriously deficient, in part because they didn’t do enough to control runoff pollution, according to EPA. Now the states are rewriting their plans (called “Watershed Implementation Plans” or WIPs) and resubmitting them to the EPA.

Here’s  how you can help.  Write a letter to the governor of your state and tell him to include strong and specific actions to reduce runoff pollution into the Bay in the state Watershed Implementation Plans.   To find out how, visit our web page and click on your state under “Take Action.”

Tell your goveror you are sick of being warned not to even touch the water after a rain.

Click here to find out more about Blog Action Day.
By Tom Pelton
Chesapeake Bay Foundation

On Blog Action Day, a reminder about the dirty waters of the Chesapeake Bay

The Chesapeake Bay is one of the world’s largest estuaries, or bodies of water where fresh inland water mixes with salt water as tides rise and fall. Located near the middle of the North American continent’s Atlantic Ocean shore, the bay was prodded to form where it did because an asteroid hit the Earth there 35 million years ago. As the glaciers thawed after the last Ice Age, water dripped down toward that low and broken spot on the Earth’s crust. It grew into a stream that created the ancient Susquehanna River Valley as water eroded mud, silt, and clay.

Today’s Chesapeake Bay is imperiled as its watershed drains five U.S. states (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia) as well as the District of Columbia and collects its anthropogenic pollution. It is so polluted that large areas of it are unable to support aquatic life, the result of areas that boil with algal blooms. The health of humans who come in contact with it is at risk as is the region’s economy, due to the loss of seafood industry and recreational opportunity. The water is brown and the banks are eroded.

I've poured over the situation from many angles (see list below), and I despair that the region's people aren't more up in arms about the Bay. The Gulf Oil Disaster over 1,000 miles away caused some to awaken to the realization that the Chesapeake Bay really is broken. Residents of the Chesapeake region, such as the folks in my hometown, Gloucester, Virginia, didn’t feel the pinch of environmental disorder until the shrimp and oysters stopped coming up here. They knew our restaurants didn't get their oysters from the Chesapeake, but it was never something anyone would say out loud. When I go out to Gloucester and Mathews area restaurants with my elderly parents I’m hearing more and more people say things about there being no oysters on the menu. “Got any of those oily oysters?” or “I reckon we won’t get any more oysters,” they will say.

It goes further. The world’s oceans are impaired and there is less of the seafood we love available, even in Gloucester, blessed with a history of plenteous seafood and hard-working watermen. I took my 87-year-old mother shopping at the Super Wal-Mart in Gloucester last week. They no longer have a seafood counter. The time before that, my mother wanted fresh flounder, so we asked the clerk if any was available. There wasn't. Mom also wanted some scallops, which she thought she would get from the fresh seafood counter. They were expensive. I asked the clerk about the ones in the boxes and she let slip that all she does is open some of the frozen product and put it in the counter display, so there's no difference. Wow. I think she wasn’t supposed to let that slip.

Mathews Book cover site today

Seafood is a really big deal around here. So today, on Blog Action Day 2010, since the theme is water, seafood from my water comes to my mind first. I grew up on the tidal fringe of Virginia. It’s in my blood. My father likes to say he has salt water in his veins.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Chesapeake Bay, I hope you’ll read a few of my posts I've written for the online magazine Suite101. There’s even a recipe for crab cakes you can try at home … that is if you can find and afford any crab meat.

• Dragon Run: An Ecologically Important Chesapeake Bay Tributary
• Chesapeake Clean Water Act Legislation is Needed Now
• Chesapeake Bay Foundation Reaches Agreement with EPA
• Lawncare and Phosphorus
• Chesapeake Bay Oysters and Disease 
• U.S. Atlantic Coast and Sea Level Rise 
• Is It Safe to Swim in the Chesapeake Bay?
• Colonial Williamsburg Crab Cake Recipe 
• Chesapeake Bay Pirates
• History of the Chesapeake Bay
• Chesapeake Bay Oysters
• Disease and Chesapeake Bay Striped Bass
• Blue Crabs and Chesapeake Bay Pollution
• Seventeenth-century Chesapeake Settlers
• How to Restore Chesapeake Oysters
• How to Save the Chesapeake Bay
• Chesapeake Bay Watershed Habitat and Ecosystem

Hot News from the Middle Ages: Invasive Species Caused the Plague

I'm interested in history and DNA (I got into this via DNA genealogy) and invasive species (see my blog post on World.edu about thoughts on a biodiversity "tipping point" suggested to me by presentations at a recent seminar at VIMS), so a recent article on Discovery News caught my eye. I've copied it below so that you don't have to click away. I love articles like this that bring diverse interests together.

Black Death Blamed on Bacteria

The bacteria wiped out a third of Europe's population in the Middle Ages.

Anthropologists said on Friday they had confirmed long-running suspicions that a germ called Yersinia pestis caused the plague that wiped out an estimated third of Europe's population in the Middle Ages. Teeth and bones sampled from 76 skeletons found in "plague pits" in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands and sequenced for DNA intrusion are conclusive evidence that Y. pestis was to blame, they said. Y. pestis has been in the dock for more than a century as the source of so-called Black Death, which gripped Europe in successive outbreaks from the 14th to the 18th century. But scientific data to convict the bacterium have until now been sketchy or debatable. As a result, a clutch of rival theories have blossomed, including the contention that an Ebola-style virus or the anthrax germ were to blame. The study, published in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, also sheds unexpected light on the geographical route taken by the germ, which is believed to have originated in central or southern Asia before arriving in Europe through trade. (emphasis mine) "The history of this pandemic is much more complicated than we had previously thought," said Stephanie Haensch, a co-leader of the research, at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. In samples where Y. pestis genes were found, the researchers ran a test for 20 DNA markers to identify a particular bacterial strain. They wanted to see if there was a match for either of two types of Y. pestis that are still knocking around the world today, in parts of Africa, America, the Middle East and in the former Soviet Union. But neither of these modern types, known as Orientalis and Medievalis, showed up. Instead, two unknown types were found, both of them older than today's strains and different from each other. The map of Y. pestis' death march in Western Europe starts in November 1347, presumably driven by fleas living on rats which crept on land from a merchant ship docked at the Mediterranean French port of Marseille. (emphasis mine) Over the next six years, it then spread through western France to northern France and then over to England, again through commerce. However, a different strain was found in a mass grave in Bergen op Zoom, a port in the southern Netherlands. This suggests Y. pestis also entered Europe from the north, perhaps from Norway and via Friesland, a northern Dutch province. (emphasis mine) After the initial surge from 1347, the pandemic progressively spread around the continent, inflicting a toll that had massive social and political repercussions. "Our findings indicate that the plague traveled to Europe over at least two channels, which then went their separate ways," said fellow investigator Barbara Bramanti.

Friends with Asperger's Syndrome

This post is "off topic" for regular readers of my blog, but it's so big in my life right now that I feel compelled to get it out, as I often do, through writing. So here it is: I have several close friends who I love for being smart, witty, and a little different. But I am often irritated by them because they don't like to go out where we can interact with others, frequently hurt my feelings by acting in superior ways, and mystify me when they go off into their own world.

Recently, I've discovered that what is different about these individuals is that they have Asperger's Syndrome. In my research quest, I found a YouTube video by someone who appears to be able to speak from their point of view. As I begin to understand and cope with this, I wonder if my new-found knowledge alters my ability to interrelate with them in the future. I don't know. I'm just figuring this out. I need an Asperger's caregivers support group!

For many years I thought that they might "come around" to enjoying parties, get pleasure from meeting new people, and share their feelings with me. They won't. Individuals with Asperger's can be taught through early interventions to be more social and interactive, but my friends probably weren't. And although they probably understand that they have Asperger's, they probably will never be able to talk to me about it in a generally acknowledged "normal" way. I feel suddenly alone, cut off from them in a way. The warm relationship that I thought we had is, in many ways, not shared. What's different? Does it matter? More research ahead.