About Me

My photo
Adventurer in life's bewilderness

Monday, November 7, 2011

I am now a hunter-gatherer of insights and information to bring back to the homestead. My first destination,   Lower Manhattan, to catch up with friends and immerse myself in metropolis energy. I sojourn with family at the apex of City Hall Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, a few blocks from Zuccotti Park.

For almost a week I open myself to NYC, join the walking throngs, crisscrossing town by foot, registering neighborhood changes from Tribeca and Greenwich Village to Chinatown, Little Italy, Upper Broadway and the East side. I mingle with OWS and nearby union protesters, listen to stories and take in the glint of Mad Men and Women. The Zuccotti zone sings with purpose and inquiry, the rest of the Big Apple throbs with the revolving door power of ignoring anything outside of arm's reach and the next text message. The diversity of impressions heightened by restauranting on Japanese, Indian, Korean, Greek, and nibble of sticky buns sprinkled with sesame seeds and a dab of bean paste in the middle.

A side trip upstate on Metro North from Grand Central, traveling along the Lordly Hudson to Beacon brings broader vistas, a walk across the Hudson at Poughkeepsie on the Rail To Trails bridge, and a challenging art adventure at the cavernous DIA-Beacon gallery in the renovated Nabisco box factory overlooking the Hudson.

From NYC I fly to Savannah International and head to Hunting Island State Park to tent on the beach fringe under wind-rustled Palmetto palms. Hunting Island is one of my favorite retreats going back to the early '70s when our kids were toddlers and our little gang of friends would fly kites, picnic, swim and nap away long summer days. We ran into one of that gang at the supermarket on our way to the beach. His comment on our camping trip, "I camp at the Ritz Carlton."

This past weekend my friend Jay and I were docents for the Beaufort County Open Land Trust fundraiser tour at Auldbrass, a modern plantation designed and built over 20 years (1938-1959) by Frank Lloyd Wright for industrialist Leigh Stevens. Joel Silver bought the plantation in 1986 and has spent millions working closely on the restoration with Wright's grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright, and a team of artisans and landscapers who continue to restore the architectural masterpiece. I was stationed at the front door--a sort of homeland security agent for the arts--and enjoyed meeting and talking with people from around the country, most sharing a genuine interest in Wright and his work, some curious to see Silver's blockbuster restoration. On one occasion, talking about the restoration, the producer of Diehard and Lethal Weapon glibly announced, "I paint with a checkbook." The night before the tour Eric Lloyd Wright, now in his late 80s, gave a touching, firsthand account of the painstaking effort to restore the long-abandoned and incomplete complex of structures.

All inspires ideas for the homestead...especially Wright's genius for discerning fundamental characteristics of nature such as walls that echo the angle of mature live oak trees, rain spouts that parody the flow of Spanish Moss from expansive live oak branches, copper roofing that captures the light and shadow play on palmetto fronds, and interpreting and transforming the essential qualities that draw the eye to the built environment's place in nature.