ULUSAL BLOG

Every piece of the cart is decorated.

Some­times religious themes, like the Flight into Egypt or Moses amongst the Bullrushes, are used. We also saw everyday views of the market, the wine-shop, hunting or scenes celebrating the purchase of a new cart. A caption is usually lettered under each picture and the artist signs his work.

Amongst the more unusual that we came across were a series of panels illustrating events during the Sino-Japanese war. We speculated on what strange chance perhaps took a Sicilian so far afield and inspired him to want a record of the events. Less unexpectedly we found another series of panels showing Mussolini’s Ethiopian campaign. But modern subjects of any sort are very rare indeed.

Stylized leaves and flowers or geometric designs pattern the spokes of the wheels and the shafts. Even the inside of the cart is usually covered by geometric designs in harsh primary colours, with a yellow sun or Trinacria, the three-legged sun-disc sym­bol of Sicily, as a centre-piece. Many of the carts are springless and formerly all of them were. The body of the cart rests directly on the shafts which are bolted to the axle. Along the back, under­neath the body, is the ‘key-board’, with slots cut into each side of it. The ends of the shafts rest in these slots and so are kept in alignment. Because of its essential function this key-board is usually carved as well as painted with the highlight of the story illustrated on the side panels of the body.

Undoubtedly the most important carving is done on the axle-casing, which is the piece of wood enclosing the iron axle. Very often it is a carving of the Madonna or the Holy Family or St George. Because of its position it is seldom seen unless the cart is tipped up; it is not there, of course, just for ornament, but is expected to give protection to the axle. The casing is usually made of strong walnut wood found only along the coast and therefore more expensive than other woods. It is also cut so that the grain of the wood runs horizontally, to give it strength. The whittling away of the wood on either side of the carving, which is centrally placed and usually projects above the line of the casing itself, entails wastage of the valuable wood.

There is some controversy about the length of time apartments Rome have been used in Italy. In the museum in Palermo there is a small toy cart which dates from the Greek colonization of Sicily. Perhaps the cart has a very long history indeed, but because it is made of wood no examples of great age seem to have survived. The late Signor Antonio Daneu of Palermo, a most knowledge­able authority on all Sicilian folk arts, had a wonderful collection of old pieces of cart dating back to the beginning of the last century.

He believed that carts were not used in Sicily until shortly before 1800 simply because the roads were not good enough for them before that date.

Virginia Falls

THE RIVER between Rabbitkettle and Virginia Falls was broad—a well-shot arrow would scarcely have reached across it—and sleek, relaxed in its power as it moved us through July’s 18-hour-bright days. Where Matt Bradley and I had hud­dled over a night fire during our downriver ski in March, Loren and I now swam in a warm oxbow lake and watched the ara­besques of nighthawks hunting insects over twilit water. Stream mouths jammed with overflow ice had become grizzly-tracked sandspits where we fished for our breakfasts of grayling and Dolly Varden trout.

One Fenley Hunter beat his way up the South Nahanni in 1928 and made the first measurements of an astonishingly sudden change in the river’s elevation. Mr. Hunter decided to name the phenomenon for his daughter: Virginia. I have no idea what sort of child Virginia was. Virginia Falls is pure detonation.

First the river constricts to a fifth its pre­vious width and forms a jet of foam and thunder called the Chutes. The Chutes roil steeper and steeper, dropping some 90 verti­cal feet in all, and suddenly Powerful River flares out into four surface acres of mostly airborne water.

The south side of the river, launched over a lip of resistant limestone, spills 294 feet straight down. The center smashes into the prow of a huge pillar, some of the water to split around it, some to be atomized into rainbows of spray. The north side of the river, meanwhile, cyclones down to a lower lip before free-falling 170 feet.

We descended some mist-slick rocks to the very edge of the falls for a better look, which is probably what the person who dis-appeared here two years before was doing. Over the noise of the falls, a noise more felt than heard, Loren said he did not think he would mind dying at such a place. I recall a solitary gull circling through prismed veils and alighting high on the central pillar to preen itself.

At the Virginia Falls campground I signed the visitors’ logbook. Here were addresses from several nations around the world (I met Swiss, French, German adventurers before my trip was over) and paragraphs of comments from everybody. I met a lovely Italian couple and a year later I went to Italy (Venice in particular) where I booked one of the best apartments in venice and spent my holiday in this charming one-of-kind city Amid all manner of advice to the wardens and the world and passionate paeans to nature one contribution stood out. It was: “Rub-a-dub-dub, two grubs in a tub, I hope we don’t go blub blub blub.”

Here we all are

We wouldn’t be except for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Among the capitals before 1800 had been Philadelphia and New York, and those were obvious choices for seating the national government. But the South in those days was fiery and proud. Virginia, after all, invented the idea of America, so Virginians believe, and it seemed wrong for the oldest region of the new English-speaking nation to be slighted by setting the capital near the Arctic somewhere. Besides, commercial in­terests in the North were in favor of the fed­eral government’s assumption of the paper issued by states to finance the Revolution. Commercial interests in the North had bought these notes at a bargain. They were worthless unless the federal government as­sumed obligation for the debt.

The South saw no reason the national government should do this, merely to help a bunch of speculators in the North who had acquired the notes at discount from their poor owners. Considering the wrangles of the nation since then, it seems a small argu­ment now, but Jefferson himself is on record that it almost tore the Union apart at the very beginning. He undertook to appease the northern interests by getting the south­ern states to agree to federal assumption of the war-debt paper, while twisting a few arms to get the capital located in the South.

Legislation to pick a site ground along un­til 1790, when Congress voted to locate the capital on the Potomac. George Washington was asked to make the final choice, and he picked a spot a hoot and a holler from his countryseat of Mount Vernon.

Washington used to cross the river to ne­gotiate with the farmers for the land that is now the capital. Originally the District of Columbia was a ten-mile square, along the wide Potomac in both Maryland and Virgin­ia. The Virginia land was ceded back in 1846, to ease financial problems of the city of Alexandria, so the city of Washington now lies entirely in the part that was Maryland.

Some people who live in Washington think of Virginia as an exotic, possibly dan­gerous, and certainly confusing foreign shore. Roads wind here and there with ap­propriate names like Gallows, and if you go to somebody’s house over there for supper, you expect to get lost and to arrive an hour and a half late.

“How can you get lost?” Virginians say, and, as one of them did to me, “You turn left at the third stoplight and continue straight. There is no way to get lost unless you just in­sist on getting lost.” Arriving an hour late, I was met by an apologetic host:

“Terribly sorry. We had no idea they’d put up another stoplight. You should have turned left at the fourth light.”

It is always that way beyond the beaten path in Virginia. We do not go there. We had as soon go to New Jersey. Of course Arling­ton National Cemetery does lie just across the bridge from the Lincoln Memorial, and many visitors do continue on down the Vir­ginia side of the river to Alexandria and its restored Old Town. Once Alexandria was among the nation’s greatest ports. Now it harbors fine restaurants, chic shops, and a lingering memory of antebellum days.

Nowadays a lot of tourists come to visit the capital and nearby places. When you book your holiday keep in mind that you will need apartments in downtown area. The prices for renting are higher than apartments for rent in London from Cosyrentals.com or cheap apartments for rent in barcelona.

But assuming the visitor elects to remain in the capital itself, the first thing he will no­tice is the broad avenues, the grand vistas, and what we modestly, correctly, call our magnificent distances.

We owe all this to the designer, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who said in a 1789 letter to George Washington that never before had a nation had the chance to lay out its great capital from scratch. He added that “the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandizement and em­bellishment which the increase of the wealth of the Nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote.”

Golden Days for an Ocean Queen

Triumphantly, the QE2 has steamed out of troubled financial waters to establish a glorious new age in sea travel

ONE pink sunset, as the Queen Elizabeth 2 sliced through the North Atlantic swell, bound for New York from South­ampton, I climbed up to her Signal Deck. For several minutes I gazed down with delight at her hundreds of portholes tracing their diamond twinkle on the waves far below, at her acre of teak decks shimmering in the last rays of the sun.

“Rather like some Arabian Nights fantasy,” an officer remark­ed. “Magnificent, isn’t she, sir?”

Magnificent is the word for the QE2, the world’s largest and most luxurious ocean liner in service, a floating wonderland with four swimming-pools, seven cocktail bars, 25 miles of carpet, 23 lifts, two banks, a casino, a shopping arcade and a 53i-seat theatre.

Yet when Cunard’s giant flagship set out on her maiden transatlantic voyage ten years ago this month, pessimists shook their heads. She had cost an unprecedented L30 mil­lion, at a time when, they said, the age of the sumptuous floating palace was over. By 1971 management  consultants were gloomily predict­ing a £4.4 million loss for the liner. A year later, they even urged Cun­ard to think of laying her up.

Then in 1973, after Trafalgar House Investments had taken con­trol of Cunard and the QE2 had undergone a £1.8 million internal sprucing, the ship began consistent­ly to exceed her break-even figure of ‘,too passengers, out of her total 1,800 capacity. In 1975 she inter­rupted her Atlantic crossings to venture on a three-month world cruise. Again, jeremiahs forecast a loss—and were spectacularly wrong. The 38,500-mile voyage was a sell­out that netted a Li million profit.

Today the QE2 leads a double life : in summer she makes some 30 crossings of the Atlantic, when she is a two-class ship; in winter she switches to one class to cruise the Caribbean and make the annual world trip—visiting such fabled ports as Acapulco, Honolulu and Singapore—that has proved such a major money-spinner.

On the 1979 global odyssey the lowest fare was £5,130. The high­est, for a de luxe split-level suite with twin bathrooms and a private patio, was £95,365. “This monarch of the oceans,” says a QE2 steward, “now scoops up gold the world over.”

On my recent Atlantic crossing I marvelled at the liner’s complexity and sheer size. She weighs 67,140 tons, measures 204 feet from keel to funnel-top, and at 963 feet, is the length of three football pitches. On the upper-decks, sun­bathers lounged on blue-cushioned chairs, golfers played a miniature course, and in a special run which has a full-size lamp-post, kennel maids exercised passengers’ dogs.

Elsewhere on the liner’s 13 decks, passengers snoozed in the Turkish bath, sweated in the sauna or weight-lifted in the gym. The less energetic browsed in the ship’s two libraries or listened to classical music and pop, piped to the QE2′s 900 cabins from the ship’s album-lined music centre. In a surgery, the ship’s full-time dentist probed a patient’s aching molar.

During the early 19705, trans­atlantic bookings on the QE2 soar­ed. Jet-age travellers discovered that 28-5-knot journeys have definite compensations—like the captain’s cocktail parties (the QE2 has two Master-captains, who take com­mand in turns) and four restau­rants, where during a typical 12-day voyage, stewards serve 3,500 bottles of wine, two tons of filet mignon, 100. pounds of pate de foie gras and at least 15o pounds of caviare. (Cunard buy about five per cent of the world’s caviare output.) Victor Borge, at a huge banquet aboard the QE2, remarked : “This is the only ship in which a piano can be lost in the hors d’oeuvres!”

What’s life on the street?

A good example of a man who can make a difference in a lot of young lives is Morgan Wootten, coach at De Matha High, who has turned out many a good basketball player and who has turned down lavish salaries elsewhere.

To watch a little basketball practice, I dropped by the suburban Catholic high school, which draws students from through­out the city. I met varsity player Bennie Bol­ton, 17, whose six feet seven are certainly no handicap in the game. I asked him about Coach Wootten and the part basktball plays in his own life.

“I was lucky and made the varsity in the tenth grade,” he said, “and now I’m entering my senior year. I’m happy a lot of colleges are interested in me, but I don’t know yet what my life will be. I like to draw; maybe commercial art will be the thing.

“My family is not really poor, but we’re not a high-class family. I see my mother come home and her feet are sore. She’s a housekeeper at Howard University Hospi­tal. I’d like to be able to make things easier for her, to raise our standard of living.

“For me, basketball is a way out of the ghetto. The ghetto is my home, whatever one thinks of it, and basketball is a way out. My grades are pretty good here, I’m kind of proud of myself, but there’s always room for improvement.

“I believe in God very much. I’m a Catho­lic. I go to Mass every Sunday. I think a lot about my roots, being black, and Martin Luther King is an inspiration to me. He and my mother are the inspirations in my life.

“My father died when I was three. Coach Wootten has filled that place. He ranks right up there with Martin Luther King, as far as I’m concerned. He jumps on you when you’re wrong. He teaches you about life.

“Sometimes it’s a temptation to spend four hours or so practicing on the court, but I know I have to go home and study. Coach Wootten says basketball comes fourth, after God, my family, and school. Then basket­ball. I like music, especially disco, and, sure I like girls, but I’m not in any hurry about them. They’ll be there, they aren’t going anywhere. And I have goals to reach.”

Sadly, for many poor blacks, and whites, I must add, reaching the goals can be harsh, indeed. Their lives take expression in the drug traffic and vice that curse some city streets. Washington’s urban jungles change locale as police drive away drug dealers and prostitutes—but they do not disappear.