Bottle Trees

You’ve seen them, and if you are from the South, you probably know someone who has one in their yard.  Take a tree (preferably a crepe myrtle) and start shoving empty bottles over the ends of the branches.  You can use blue bottles if you are a traditionalist, and damn near any color bottle if you’re more artistic.  The result is a Southern Bottle Tree.  

You’d be surprised at just how long man has been playing around with glass.  Long before he could make it himself, he could find small pieces of decorative clear glass in deserts, the remains of where meteorites that had exploded in the silica-rich sand millions of years earlier.  There were examples of this in King Tut’s tomb.

Man-made glass dates back to roughly 3500 B.C., in the Middle East, with the first hollow shapes created after 1600 B.C., in Egypt and Mesopotamia.  Glass production advanced dramatically, becoming an important trade good throughout the Mediterranean world.  By 100 A.D., clear glass was being produced in Alexandria and the Romans had begun mass producing both cast and free blown glass objects using tank furnaces that could hold as much as a ton of melted glass at a time.  

These early Roman bottles were obviously designed as much for their aesthetic appeal as for their utility.  The bottles range in color from pale blue-green to brown and are both spherical and bell shaped, with long tapering necks.  Several of the bottles have a separate decorative rope lip applied around the mouth...And those mouths may be the start of the real story of our bottle trees.

The wind blowing over the tops of those bottles produced an eerie sound that had to be obviously the work of demons and evil spirits.  This is roughly about the same time that the stories of genies in bottles started appearing.  And then, poor Jeannie had to wait over a thousand years for Major Nelson to show up and…. Oops!  Wrong story!

The bottles—and the belief in trapped spirits—made their way south into Africa, eventually reaching the Congo, where there was already a custom of decorating the graves of family members with plates and various household goods.  It was here that the custom of bottle trees was born.  And when slaves were brought to the new world, they brought the custom with them.

The “logic” of bottle trees is easy to understand.  The light of the sun shone through the glass, attracting the evil spirits lurking around houses.  Once inside, the spirits were caught like flies in a bottle, unable to find their way out again before the intense sunlight killed them.  Think of it as home security—spirit-catching bottle trees around a house would protect you from evil.

It didn’t take long before the plantation slaves were placing bottles on trees, especially crepe myrtle trees (probably because the crepe myrtle is linked in the Old Testament with slaves seeking their freedom).  And the custom spread and endures to this day.

Before some damn Yankee writes me about the quaint customs of hillbillies, I should point out that at the same time those stories of genies spread south into Africa, a related custom was spreading north into Europe, eventually reaching England.  Witch balls were round glass balls containing a single strand of hair or string.  Hung in windows to catch the morning light, an inquisitive witch would enter the ball and become entangled with the strand of hair, unable to escape before the sun killed them.  European immigrants brought the custom to New England, where they are still being made three hundred years later.  Sometimes these witch balls are called ‘watch balls’ or ‘gazing balls’ and are the source of those strange shiny bowling ball thingys you can see atop pedestals in people’s yards.

If you spend fifteen minutes online looking at photos of bottle trees, you’ll notice that about half of them use only blue bottles—cobalt blue bottles.  About five thousand years ago, someone accidentally noticed that if you added little lumps of various metals to molten glass, you got pretty colors.  I can just picture it:  Groups of Bronze Age glass makers running around trying to find something different and interesting to throw into the vat of molten glass to see what would happen.  (Was this one of the first, “Here—Hold my beer and watch this!” moments?).  Eventually, someone tried a lump of brittle gray cobalt—and got a brilliant blue cobalt glass for his trouble.

I’ll bet a dollar that you didn’t know the word cobalt came from the German word, kobald, which means “demon”.  Unfortunately for this story, the Germans named it for the bad spirit that gave them lung ailments when they tried to refine the silver containing cobalt.  It would have been so cool to picture early Germans placing empty bottles of Liebfraumilch onto trees…  Nah, it won’t stretch.

Today, you can generally tell the age of a bottle tree by looking at the bottles on the branches.  If there is a pretty blue, rectangular bottle—then it was made before 1980—back when the Phillips company was still selling Milk of Magnesia in glass bottles.  If there is a straight-sided Skyy Vodka bottle up there in the branches, it was made after 1992.

Bottle trees are the epitome of Southern folk art…. Well, they were the epitome for a couple of hundred years.  Today, they are so popular, you can find them just about anywhere, including in all fifty states.  I spent a little time amusing myself doing Google searches like “Boston Bottle Tree”.  (There are eight there.... And there are twelve in New York City).  You can find them in London, Paris, and Hong Kong.  Well, to be fair, I couldn’t actually find one on display in Hong Kong, but they make them there and sell them on Amazon.

I doubt that very many people are still making bottle trees in order to to catch evil spirits.  (If they were, they’d be all over Washington D.C.)  Maybe bottle trees are popular because Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, took a photo of a bottle trees in front of an old Southern house.  The image inspired the short story Livvie, where she wrote:

Solomon had made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a year, and without a sign that he had any uneasiness in his heart, for he took as much pride in his precautions against spirits coming in the house as he took in the house, and sometimes in the sun the bottle trees looked prettier than the house did.

Maybe.  Or maybe bottle trees are so popular today because, like the artist Jenny Pickford said, she is “holding glass up to the light, where it can sing.”

About Time to Shove the Cob

Enema U is an ag school, so I guess technically, I’m an Aggie.  Yeah, I’ve heard all the Aggie jokes.  (Did you hear about the Aggie coyote that got caught in the trap?  Chewed off three legs and was still caught in the trap.)  

Strangely, about the only people who ever tell me Aggie jokes or even use the word around me are university administrators hired from back east who are obviously a little embarrassed at finding themselves working at Harvard on the Rio Grande.  These are the people who sign their constant stream of nonsensical email with the phrase, “Go Aggies!”  

While the vast majority of faculty and students at Enema U have never been within a hundred yards of a tractor, it is still hard to spend a few decades at an agricultural school without learning something about growing crops.  I guess if you went back in time and plucked up a reasonably intelligent Neanderthal and dropped him down in the middle of a modern nuclear power plant for thirty or so years, he would eventually figure out a few things.  That’s me—an agricultural Neanderthal.

I’ve learned a few things about corn, probably the most genetically modified crop grown today.  At archaeology sites, I’ve seen some ancient examples of what corn used to be like.  Most people would not even recognize corn’s cultigen (original form).  Looking more like bumpy okra that corn, the cob was originally only a few inches long and had only five rows of tiny kernels.

Thousands of years ago, some farmer must have noticed that one of the ears of corn in his crop had seven rows instead of five and wisely decided to save it for seed.  Over a long time, such tiny selective processes have led to the monster ears of corn I like to roast in my BBQ grill.  (As Nero Wolfe said, people who boil ears of corn should themselves be boiled.)  

What originally got me to thinking about all of this was a conversation I had with my neighbor, Chuck—who is also an Aggie (though I think of him more as an autodidact).  We were talking about mechanization of troops in WWII, which eventually led us to discussing the rapid adaptation of tractors in the 20th Century.  If we hadn’t run short of beer...and if our good friend, Jack, had been present...we eventually would have balanced the national budget and brought about peace in the Middle East.

For some reason, people seem to believe that when new technology is invented, the old tech magically vanished instantly.  Worse, some politicians think that by outlawing the old tech, they can speed the adoption of new technology.  (California’s banning new gasoline-powered cars will not cause a dramatic increase in sales of electric vehicles, it will cause a dramatic increase in the sale of gasoline cars in neighboring states.)  In any case, the incorporation of tractors in farming was slower than most people think.

Among the “benefits” of the mechanization of farming wasn’t just the increase in efficiency:  mechanization also dramatically increased the amount of land being used to grow food for the table.  Before tractors, fully 40% of the cropland in America was being used to grow fodder for draft animals.  As the use of tractors grew, increasingly more of that land was used for the production of human food stuffs, which, while it dropped prices for consumers, also brought about agricultural overproduction that aggravated the Great Depression.

Eventually, Americans found markets for the surplus...which was good...but they also found other uses for the surplus, such as for corn, and this has turned out to be something of a problem.  Slowly, more and more corn was used to produce ethanol and high fructose corn sugar.  Today, the vast majority of corn production is used for these two products, so that the area of farmland used to produce corn  is roughly the size of California and 40% of that is to grow corn for the ethanol industry.

Ethanol production has not proved to be the environmental solution that most of us were promised.  It is bad for most engines, it is more expensive to produce than gasoline, and perhaps worst of all, it has totally warped the political landscape of the United States.  As every American is currently (and somewhat painfully) aware, presidential politics revolve around the Electoral College, which means that candidates must do well in the early primaries (particularly in Iowa, the golden buckle of the Corn Belt).

Every politician, whether Democrat or Republican, who hopes to do well in Iowa eagerly takes the Corn Pledge.  That’s a political promise to continue government subsidies for corn.  Today, largely because of the political power of the Midwest states in determining early primary races, the federal government spends more on subsidizing corn through direct payments, tax credits, low cost crop insurance, and subsidies for ethanol production, than on any other crop.  This is currently about $100 billion a year.  With these subsidies, corn is profitable, prompting even more farmers to switch their agricultural production from foodstuffs to non-food corn, slowly raising the prices of the food.  Today, corn is produced in all fifty states, and every year the total number of acres producing corn increases about 3%.

As more and more of the Midwest is devoted to producing a single crop, the risk to the economics of the agricultural community increases.  A bad year resulting from a worse than normal drought, a crop disease, or a flood would mean wide-scale disaster to the entire industry, and enormous cost to the taxpayers (who fund the federal crop insurance).

In addition, there are indirect costs of corn production:  Roughly six million tons of nitrates from fertilizer annually wash down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, helping to produce a “dead zone” that is seven thousand square miles this year.  This growing dead zone kills fish, shrimp, and oysters, raising the price of seafood to the consumer.  And every year, America’s burgeoning corn crop requires the use of more groundwater than the year before.

Worse, while ethanol is “cleaner” than gasoline, that is not the whole story.  To produce really large and profitable crops, corn farmers must use a lot of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides—all of which require even more petroleum for their production, transportation, and application.  Further, for reasons that are too involved for this blog, processing corn releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.  Increasingly, economists who have studied the net result of all of this have concluded there is little, if any, benefit to the environment from switching to ethanol.

The worst part of all of this is that the type of corn grown for ethanol and high fructose corn syrup isn’t even edible.  It’s a special variety of corn that you would have to boil for a day to get it soft enough to chew, and even then, it would have no flavor.  Even an Aggie knows this  stuff is not only not meant for humans, it hardly qualifies to be called corn.  

But, I’m just a poor dumb ol’ country boy:  Maybe you should ask a real Aggie.

The Queen of Washington D.C.

As we begin to once again change the occupants of the White House, we are starting to see stories about both outgoing and incoming First Ladies.  Predictably, not all of the stories are either complimentary or even kind, as if is okay to blame the wives of presidents for the political policies of their husbands.

Being the First Lady has to be right down there on the shit list of the most horrible jobs imaginable—somewhere between being Wolverine’s proctologist and Donald Trump’s speechwriter.  No one would want to volunteer to do that rotten job, much less be forced into the role by an overly ambitious spouse.  Still, the job today is better than it used to be, and for that we can thank the woman who really created the role—Dolley Madison.

Dolley, Dolly, Dollie--no matter how you spell her first name, you’re probably correct, as even Mrs. Madison kept changing the spelling.  This was back in a glorious time when only the truly ignorant could only think of one way to spell a word.  And technically, in Dolley’s day, you didn’t refer to the wife of the president as the First Lady, a term that didn’t exist until President Zachary Taylor used the term to refer to Dolly at her funeral.  While her husband was president, society was still debating exactly what term to use—Presidentess or Presidentress were considered before a more informal title was used, Queen Dolley.

During the two terms of President Washington, his wife Martha worked diligently to make her role the social head of the government.  Though she staged parties, as the wife of the president, she eschewed European fashions, wearing instead homespun American clothing envisioning her role as making the head of a new socially conscious American government.  Her successor, Abigail Adams, had a different vision, and sought to make her role as the political partner of her husband, the President.  

The Adams were the first to live in the newly completed White House, and perhaps the city of Washington was just not yet up to the role of grand capital.  The streets were rutted muddy swamps with vast open distances between the few buildings and houses.  Poor Abigail had to hang the laundry up in the East Wing to get anything to dry.

Thomas Jefferson was a widower, and once again, had a different idea about White House parties—mostly, he didn’t want any.  Nor was Jefferson a great believer in bipartisan efforts, usually inviting the men of his party to the White House—without their wives—to argue and hammer out policy.  Then Jefferson would invite the men of the opposition to the same kind of meeting.  The results were predictable—fistfights and the occasional duel and damn near no cooperation between the parties.  Believing that formal protocol and courtly fashions had no place in a democracy, Jefferson went out of his way to act informally, frequently answering the front door in slippers and casual clothing—a deliberate ploy to demonstrate that he thought that even the President

 should be a common man.

Even Jefferson had to host a few parties a year where the wives were invited, and the customs of the time required the president to have a female hostess as a chaperone.  When this happened, he usually asked the wife of his Secretary of State—Dolly Madison—to handle the chore.  Jefferson’s biographers are still debating whether he didn’t know proper protocol or was just deliberately ignoring it to make a political point.  At a state dinner, the President was supposed to take the arm of the British ambassador’s wife and escort her to dinner, but chose instead to escort Dolly.  Anthony Merry, the British ambassador was so indignant at the insult, called the Merry Affair, that he arranged a social boycott among the European diplomatic corps.  Jefferson ignored them and eventually the affair was dropped.

After Jefferson, James Madison became the president and he and his wife moved in to finally begin the process of turning the White House into a home suitable for the functions required by the head of state.  For the first time, the government bought furniture for the building and began decorating it for the state dinners and social functions that had to be conducted there, all under the personal supervision of Dolley Madison.  In essence, she was the first wife of a president to realize that the job required the social functions of Martha Washington and the political partnership of Abigail Adams.  Washington benefitted greatly from this, and during these parties a lot of important business was conducted.

Dolley ignored the American homespun cloth, and imported French silk for her gowns, which were cut scandalously low.  Much like Jacquelyn Kennedy, who later admitted Dolley was her inspiration, Dolly Madison was a fashion trendsetter.  Under her guidance, the large drafty Executive Mansion became a stylish home that hosted large and formal parties.

Unfortunately, this was work she had to do twice, as we all know that during the War of 1812, the British burned the White House as poor Dolley fled after rescuing the famous Washington portrait.  Well, sort of...Actually, she had the White House slaves gather up the best china and some important papers (including her husband’s notes on drafting the Constitution), sending everything away on carts.  While the slaves were doing the real work, Dolley was writing a letter to her sister, detailing the events.  (Not that it matters, but the Washington portrait that Dolley saved was a copy.)

While the White House was being rebuilt, the Madisons moved into the Octagon House, about two blocks from the ruined executive mansion.  This house survived the general destruction because the owners had arranged to have the French flag flown on the building, indicating it was part of the French embassy.  The British were temporarily at peace with the French, so they left the house standing.

After the Madisons left the White House, they returned to their beloved home, Montpelier.  Following the death of her husband, Dolley eventually moved back to Washington, becoming something of the social queen of the city, famous for her ability to work with politicians from both parties.  The House of Representatives, in recognition of her bipartisan work, gave her an honorary seat in Congress.  When Henry Clay said, “Everyone loves Dolley Madison,” she answered, “That is because she loves everyone.”

Dolley Madison was famous for creating conditions in which the two parties could work together, both formally and informally.  Perhaps it is time for a little more of the Madison spirit—and a little less of the Jefferson system—to return to Washington.

Once Upon a Time In Westerns

The other night, The Doc and I were watching the new Tarantino movie and I had a hell of time figuring out who was who.  I’m face blind, and as far as I can tell, about half of the actors in all Hollywood movies are Brad Pitt, and this movie actually had Pitt in it, and Leonardo DiCaprio was his stunt double and made up to look just like him—unless it was the other way around—so the plot was sort of hard for me to follow at times.

To me, it looked like Brad Pitt was in all the movie scenes, except occasionally, when he was joined by Brad Pitt.  I was very surprised not to see Scarlett Johansen, since she is in almost every other movie I watch.  (Brad Pitt would understand all of this, since he, too, is face blind.)

What I did notice however, were the horses in the Western scenes.  I have no idea how many different horses were used in total, but most of the scenes featured the same three bays and a single sorrel.  There was even one particular scene where Brad Pitt was talking to Brad Pitt, and both were seated in front of what looked like a crowded corral of horses—BUT, if you watched carefully, there was a guy in the corral that would walk across the screen from the left leading a bay followed by a sorrel, then he walks back the other way leading the sorrel followed by a couple of bays….  If you pay attention, there are even a couple of scenes where Brad Pitt is riding the sorrel.  

It’s a good movie, Brad should get an Oscar for Best Actor.  And another one for Best Supporting Actor.  (The Doc just told me the movie came out last year and Brad Pitt got an Oscar for Best Producer.)

As a child of the fifties and sixties, with about a zillion hours of television under my belt, I have a Ph.D. in Westerns, so I have always known that it wasn’t all that strange to see the same horse in several different television shows.  Matt Dillon, for example, rode the same buckskin horse in Gunsmoke as Ben Cartwright in Bonanza.  Thankfully, so as not to confuse the poor animal, he was named Ol’ Buck on Saturday night in Kansas and just plain Buck when he was in Nevada on Sunday nights.  And Little Joe’s appaloosa would occasionally wander off the set of Bonanza and appear on The Virginian.  

If you looked close, a lot of movies in the early fifties featured Roy Roger’s Trigger.  Occasionally, the horse even showed up in the credits, but never using his real name.  Trigger was a stage name; the palomino was registered as Silver Cloud.

A few Western stars actually owned their own horses.  Besides Roy and Trigger, Dale Evans owned Buttermilk.  (This prompted the show’s co-star, Gabby Hayes to call Dale ButterButt on the set.)  Tom Mix owned Tony, Gene Autry owned Champion, and Hopalong Cassidy owned Topper.  

You could just about fill a phonebook with all the horses that John Wayne rode in various movies.  Wayne was pretty candid about the fact that he was not exactly a horse lover, though he was a good rider and spent a considerable amount of time in the saddle.  The only movie horse that he actually liked was one called Dollar, a chestnut quarter horse Wayne rode in several of his last movies.  Wayne, like most actors didn’t actually own the horse—by the time a horse was trained enough to stand the noise and confusion of movie set, the trainers were very reluctant to sell their talented animals.  Though Wayne claimed he didn’t particularly like horse, he did arrange for an exclusive contract so that no other actor could use Dollar in a movie.   And in several movies (in particular, The Shootist), Wayne had the script altered so the horse would be mentioned by name. 

The Duke wasn’t the only actor to get attached to his horse, when Bonanza ended, Lorne Greene was afraid that Buck would end up in the glue factory—the poor animal had been hauling two big men around the West for almost two decades and his career was about over.  Greene bought the horse and arranged for the animal to be used in horse riding therapy classes.   Buck lived longer than some of the stars that had ridden him, passing away at the age of 49—an unusually long life for a horse.

Perhaps no actor formed as close a bond with his equine co-star as James Stewart and a sorrel named Pie.  If you’ve watched a western with Jimmy Stewart, chances are you have seen Pie—they were together in at least 17 movies.  The exact number is a little confusing, since officially, the last movie Pie was in was Bandolero, but you can clearly see the horse (right) in Cheyenne Social Club, released two years later, when the horse was at least 30 years old.  Let’s just say the two were together a long, long time.

Stewart didn’t own Pie, though he tried to buy the horse multiple times.  The owner, a young girl whose family had been training horses all the way back to the days of Tom Mix and William S. Hart refused to sell the animal, since they made their living hiring the horse out to lots of assorted movies and television shows.  The sorrel was a trifle small for a quarter horse, and was supposedly difficult to ride—he almost killed Glenn Ford by running deliberately into a tree.

With Stewart, however, Pie was a different animal; the actor claimed the horse understood the business of making movies and always hit his mark, standing still until the shot was over.  In one famous episode, Pie was supposed to slowly walk down the middle of the street without a rider.  On the day of the shot, the trainer wasn’t around, so Stewart simply explained what was needed to the horse, who did his solo scene flawlessly.  You can see the scene for yourself in the 1954 movie, The Far Country.  

While they were filming their last movie together, Pie was obviously in bad health.  Stewart’s co-star, Henry Fonda was a talented amateur artist and while they were filming in Santa Fe, Fonda painted a portrait of Pie for his friend.  Shortly after the painting was finished, Pie passed away.  Though Stewart didn’t own the horse, he arranged for a private burial of the horse at an undisclosed location, so that no one would be able to bother the grave.   

It’s kind of sad that we don’t make many Westerns any more.  There probably aren’t that many trainers devoting the years it takes to produce horses like Pie, any more.  Out of work horses should start a union.

And I can already hear the criticism from my own family, “How can you tell these damn horses apart and you can’t remember which granddaughter you’re looking at?”

The horses are bigger and have four legs.