P.N.ZOYTLOW

In its bleak setting in an arid basin, Quartzsite is peculiar and yet not unique. Centuries and even millennia ago, such places were familiar on the trade routes of the deserts. From afar, bartering folk came to offer their wares–camels, ponies, textiles, tools and whatever else was worth schlepping. Or these were the places where future brides came to the attention of suitors. Think of Timbuktu there on the edge of the Sahara or the Great Khan’s annual fairs held in the Gobi.  [Digression: similarly, Quartzsite in the SonoranDesert is also associated with camels, introduced in the 1850s by the U.S. War Department. No information available on maidens and swains, then or now.]

Perhaps it is a fool’s errand to go to Quartzsite in hopes of making sense of the place.  And yet, readers of these Field Reports know that thanks to the stubborn and unslaked curiosity of the Social Sciences, something can always be found that seems to be at least mildly interesting even if forgettable.  Additionally, there are few places or events that are not worth 75 minutes  (the mandatory limit) of this Observer’s time.

Quartzsite, Arizona is west-centrally situated near the border with California.  It is indeed in the desert, barren, dull colored, and sparsely inhabited during the torrid summer. At that time, the focus is the gasoline stations, fast food restaurants and other services geared to the passing traffic on Interstate 10 connecting Phoenix and Los Angeles.  But in winter, this same little nexus swells to a community of 300,000  (some claim more) temporary settlers and visitors. The habitation of choice is the motor home, a massive, costly thing on wheels sometimes referred to by the more archaic term,  “coach.” Like many places that exist for purposes of commerce, Quartzsite is ugly, an unpaved parking lot made of desert earth in which many thousands of vehicles (motorcycles, autos, trucks and the always dominant coach/motor home) are spread randomly for miles. Quartzsite also features many large white tents or open canvas shelters not much taller than the prevailing roofline of the motor homes.  From the air Quartzsite must appear like a colony of bacteria, some round and others elongated.

The winter months bring the snowbirds, mainly retirees or tourists from the colder parts of the US who merely want to sit in the desert and gloat over the weather reports at home. Others are attracted by the commercial lure of selling equipment for the motor homes, much as a blacksmith might have wandered to earlier horse-powered gatherings. Then there are scheduled exhibitions, under canvas, and of these the most common are the gem and rock markets. The existence for Quartzsite has much to do with earlier mining and as a place where rock collectors and gem enthusiasts might gather. Place a major highway nearby and add mild winters for motor home dwellers and Quartzsite makes sense. Besides minerals, the array of other consumer goods, antiques, curios, and food items add up to more complexity than would be apparent to those stopping only for fuel or the use of a restroom.

As it was, this particular research in Quartzsite was linked to the Observer’s brief visit with persons looking for old engines, tractors and the like. These were not research associates, but focused and serendipitous companions who had business there. For 75 minutes of observation (strictly adhered to!) a few of Quartzsite’s secrets were gently probed before some unexpected questions arose.

Leaving the Interstate, and turning into the community, pavement immediately gave way to sand and chaos. There were few signs as to what was where. The heightened danger of collision either with humans or something vehicular meant maneuvering at a crawl.  Soon you are lost, dependent on the occasional person who looksed like he or she might know the answer to the question: where is the engine and tractor show?  The first informant wore a cap announcing that Jesus Is Lord! There seemed more menace than love in that and especially by the yellow T-shirt worn by his female companion. Printed boldly in dark green, it featured a lengthy paragraph with words like  “rapture” and “righteous” and “castigate” in bold type. Reading the whole thing would have meant staring at her bosom for much longer than good “judgment” (another word inscribed thereon) required. Besides, she had already nudged him with her elbow; what did that mean? The couple stood at the opening of a narrow cul-de-sac of soft sand and tire ruts ending at a tabernacle/tent. A banner hung over the entrance: “God’s Voice in the Wilderness Is Awesomeness in the Desert.” They had no idea of where the engines were and likely cared not.  How deficient we must have seemed to seek such crass worldliness while declining the “awesomeness” at hand.

After another quarter hour winding through the labyrinth that is Quartzsite, past other self-appointed traffic directors proud to move the turgid flow along with authoritative hand signals, our dusty cars, like tired pilgrims, arrived near the land of small and ancient coughing engines. The travel companions, devotees to such matters disappeared, leaving this Observer alone to ponder why he had come toQuartzsite. [Digression: contrary to the usual pattern of social science methodology, the Observer has always leaned towards the theory that sooner or later, something turns up which will justify the research, whatever it is.] With the moments moving along, some research design was needed and soon. The one chosen was elegant and classic: sample the place. In this case, imagine a circle and examine its contents, seeking the essence of a locale that so far had revealed only dust, fumes, and vehicles. Not forgetting the background coughing of ancient and venerable engines. Within the sample circle having an approximate radius of 40 meters, the Observer noted the following:

1. A dealer in Tibetan paraphernalia, mainly religious icons and a hand-lettered sign which promised “Cultural Revolution Kitsch” meaning those hard-to-get Mao Zedong posters. Also featured was a large barrel of crude ten-dollar heads of the Buddha. No two alike, the work of unknown workers in an unknown land.

2. True to its Quartzsite’s reputation, there were several vendors featuring samples of rocks, minerals, gems made into hundreds of objects or simply left in their natural state. Agates! Meteorites! Geodes! Dinosaur dung!

3. Clothing: everything for the visitor who wanted that macho Quartzsite look, a mix of rancher/miner/biker with a touch of NASCAR or something boldly patriotic for the shirt and cap.

4.Covering nearly a quarter of the space within the sample area were food stands emitting the seductive odors of funnel cakes, hotdogs, corndogs, chilidogs, and strawberry-flavored cotton candy. This was an American smell, a happy smell. “Proud to be an American” said the hand-lettered sign on a lemonade stand.

All of these elements came together at one of the small raffle events held in an impromptu (and what wasn’t?) arrangement of folding chairs and tables. For one dollar, said the man wearing camouflage pants, a chance to win one of a number of mystery items hidden behind the red curtain. Sixty or so persons, older couples, northern toads, the obese, the desiccated, a mix, an American mix, a happy mix, smiled and bantered with each other, waiting to see if they were winners. Western gear was what they wore—that Quartzsite look. A number wore clothing advertising his or her devotion to Jesus, a football team or a dead race car driver, but no one (odd in this political year) wore anything partisan. Nothing promoting candidates (for this was and election year) One can either surmise that these were an apolitical lot, or that revealing one’s partisanship would somehow spoil the quiet bliss that Quartzsite seemed to bring to those present. In this particular raffle, the winner collected a tub of plastic picnic dishes to the warm applause of the audience.

Just then a small incident took place which dramatically changed the focus of this research. A man of middle years in a straw hat approached the Observer and inquired as to the location of the restroom, the bathroom, the comfort facilities, etc. The field notes fail to record just which of our euphemisms he employed, but he did not say “toilet.” Few people do. Interesting. Since he appeared to be a foreign tourist judging by the accent and other subtle features such as the slant of that hat on his head, it would have been useful to record his choice of words because that is what social scientists are supposed to do. As noted, one of the permanent features inQuartzsite is a McDonalds, and since this stood a short walk away, that was the best suggestion to give the man. After all, McDonalds is globally recognized for many things including restrooms for the public, no questions asked. He took the suggestion, expressed his thanks by tapping the brim of his hat (likely influence of John Wayne movies) and headed for McDonalds.   [Digression: In fact, this Observer had already noted that the Quartzsite McDonalds features an unusually large “restroom.” It is generally known that MacDonald’s restrooms are small, and while adequate, not restful. They tend to get crowded and at times, tired. But here, the restroom had 50% more porcelain per square foot (PPSF) than elsewhere.]

With a rush only a rare insight (even flawed ones) provides, the Observer knew why he was in Quartzsite!  A great Truth had descended upon him from somewhere, like a voice roaring in the desert: “No Sewer, No Civilization!” Where were the sewers of Quartzsite? How did this mass of humanity take care of that without which there could be no Los Angeles or Phoenix, and maybe no Timbuktu? Time to find out, but time was short: less than 17 minutes left of the allotted 75 minutes research time. Did everyone go to McDonalds?  Answering that would entail observation, mathematical models, a team of research assistants and perhaps lawyers to fend off a threat of litigation from some unexpected source. No doubt there were those familiar portable pit toilets e.g. Porta Potty, somewhere in the twisting maze of Q-town, but who knew where? Motor homes/coaches contain their own solutions (unavoidable pun) by means of capacious holding tanks. Without sewers in Quartzsite and only vehicular tanks of diverse capacities, would this not demand an export of ordure on an unprecedented scale? A motor home or coach, by definition, could start its engine and drive to a so-called dumping station. Already the Observer had seen motor homes e.g. coaches lining up in Blythe, the nearest town, at the public dump station to manage these humble logistics. If all the coaches in Quartzsite went to Blythe, the nearest town, one could, mathematically, anticipate a scenario of long and urgent caravans seeking relief, thus revealing the slender grasp that Quartzsite had on any claim to being civilized! If, indeed, lacking sewers, it had any such claim!

“Things are both simple and complicated at the same time.” The Observer learned this from a fortune cookie in North Dakota some years ago. True, day visitors did go to McDonalds since they would not be welcome on the toilet of a stranger’s coach. And, obvious or not, there had to be mobile potties somewhere. These would be emptied (pumped out) by the very same technology that saved the motor home populace from drifting to Blythe: a mobile trucking service making the rounds with its tanks and hoses and relieving them, with regularity, of their accumulations.  These are known by many vulgar terms, the mildest euphemism being “Honey Dipper.”  Oh, how unlike a sewer is the foundation of this tenuous civilization called Quartzsite!!  When the Romans built their great sewer, the CloacaMaximus, transferring effluent into the Tiber, people were proud of yet another confirmation of their amazing degree of civilization. This set the state-of-the art standard for many centuries, but it took a long time to regain the glory that was Rome.  Quartzsite is keenly aware of this: leaving the place, this Observer spotted from the highway those fat water pipes widely used to establish or expand sewer systems. If Quartzsite wasn’t a civilization, it was an emerging one. An interesting and worthy topic: how civilizations evolve, but too late for this Field Report. The allotted time had elapsed.  What could have been a major contribution to scholarship appears to have lapsed into a mere footnote on sewers.

The Boar’s Mochi

NOTE: Rules for these Field Reports, mainly the 75-minute observation limit have, of late, been conscientiously recalled. Thanks to those of you, forbearing readers, who expressed your concerns about recent lapses. Be assured that this Report conforms to the highest standards currently available for the sciences (the social ones).  There is every expectation that this incoming Year of the Boar will be fortuitous for these Field Reports.

.  .  .

Being even briefly in Honolulu tends to inspire interest in the Japanese. They are a long-established and generally prosperous group, especially on Oahu, where they make up 25% of the population. Honolulu is also a huge magnet for tourism from Japan. Their motives are varied: warm weather, a customary place to get married, and a chance to visit the United States in a culturally comfortable manner e.g. you can shop at Prada, Gucci and Nieman-Marcus and someone will speak Japanese as will the bus drivers and hotel personnel.  Restaurants cater to these generally cautious visitors who prefer the familiar foods of Japan.

Japanese tourists fascinate. Whether they are honeymooners from Osaka, trios of willowy Tokyo secretaries, or graying retirees from some far-flung prefecture, they are the dominant life form along Waikiki’s main shopping avenues.  The things that astonish social scientist observers may include: Japanese make no eye contact with anyone other than their immediate familiars.  It is quite common to be in a place with a dozen or more of these visitors and have that odd sense of non-being, as if one has become invisible. The women may wear flip-flops but more typically torment themselves in high-heeled shoes. The men take enormous amounts of photographs even in sub-marginal conditions. They are a quiet people, evidence of a presumed cultural preference for remaining unnoticed. As the saying goes, “the nail that sticks out must be hammered back into the wood.”  Detractors of Japan have (unkindly) called its people “robotic,” unless chemically altered (alcohol) to promote euphoria, drop the self-effacing mask, and, fleetingly, cause eye contact.  So the theory goes. But how paltry a set of impressions for so venerable and vital a people!  Is there not more that can be said?

Before observing the crucial focus of this Field Report–a New Years celebration– a modest preliminary probe into the Japanese cultural marrow occurred at the Fuji Ramen, a noodle house frequented by Japanese tourists. This effort yielded nothing. Not to say there was nothing to learn there, but whatever it was must have been throbbing at a wavelength far too low for this observer.  All except two of the twenty-seven patrons were Japanese.  The other two were white folks who, according to their ball caps and t-shirts, had also once visited Illinois. The place was studiously quiet except for an occasional clatter of pots or exclamation from the kitchen. Noodles were the focus; noodles were consumed; that’s all.  And they, the Japanese, were lined up outside the place, awaiting a chance to sit at the counter for ramen with egg, ramen with octopus, ramen with shrimp, ramen with beef, ramen with tofu, ramen with teriyaki chicken or ramen with tempura of one sort or another.  A profound event, no doubt suffused with precious revelations about the authentic Japan, but hardly the sturdy stuff of Field Reports.

By chance, an item in the Honolulu Advertiser called attention to what had to be an opportunity to uncloak the missing cultural insights. A “New Year’s ‘Ohana Festival” was set for a Sunday in mid-January at the Japanese Cultural Center.  A big event, all day, everyone welcome and bring the family. The word “ohana” means “family” in Hawaiian (not Japanese) and looking back this was a crucial clue (missed!) about the event. The sponsors and participants were largely Japanese who had lived in the Hawaiian Islands for at least a generation or more. They were assimilating, borrowing words, and already distant from Japan in numerous ways.  In other words, Japanese Americans.  Authentic Japanese tourists were not here; they were miles away doing what they had come to Honolulu to do.

Since the Japanese had been in Hawaii, especially on Oahu, for well over a century, they are now well established as immigrants. Hawaii’s two U.S. Senators are Japanese-American. So, no surprise that the Japanese Culture Center was a prosperous-looking five-story building, headquarters of an important organization very similar, as it turned out, to ethnic organizations whether Irish in Boston or Polish in Chicago. Such organizations are deeply dedicated to preserving pieces of the cultural past. Though they were not the original focus of this research, surely observing Japanese who were not tourists but locals could reveal something? More than anything the event resembled a folk festival/carnival, a mix of whatever the community chose to recall about the past blended with elements common to Anglo-American county fairs.  In the latter case, you could get a ride on an antique fire engine, eat hamburgers, send your children to roll and jump on a series of inflated shapes that looked like generic European castles, etc.  To lean more towards the Japanese side of your bicultural being you would chose activities suggesting fidelity to older traditions. Mochi pounding was one of these.  But we will come to that.

Looking over the events in the Cultural Center and adjacent Mo’ili’ili Field, it made sense to visit those places where the largest number of visitors had gathered. These events were:

Gyotaku.  For kids.  Take a fish (dead) out of a cooler. 

Daub poster paint on it. Take a piece of paper and press it against the fish to make an impression. An old art form. It is said that an elderly artist somewhere “on the windward side” of the island will do large ocean fish for you as a trophy.  Not cheap.

Keiki Kimono Dressing. For $70 your child will be carefully dressed in the most                   exquisite traditional style. Samurai outfits for the boys, kimonos for the

girls.  Photos extra. Very well done.  An emotional gift for the grandparents.

Animé.  A joint effort by several high school animé clubs to spread the word about the famous Japanese cartoon genre.  Soft-spoken, dignified teen-aged advocates politely offer to tell you what to look for as you stare at the videos. Sample: “Sir, do you know animé? May I show you a few things about it?  It‘s very compelling.”

Tea Ceremony. Not for everyone. Requires at least a half hour and legs which do not cramp and fall asleep while kneeling. You must attempt to read non-verbal hints as to when to bow, in which direction and how deeply.

And so to Mo’ili’ili Field and the event that had the largest crowd, mochi pounding.  On the way, $6 and ten minutes spent waiting in line to buy okonomiyaki (“sizzling, nutritious, Hiroshima-style, topped with Otafuku Okonomi Sauce”).  Noodles, eggs, cabbage, eggs, pancake and more. Indefinable? Kind of an omelet?  Overheard: “What makes ‘em Hiroshima-style anyway?” Excellent question, the voice of the skeptic.

Mochi pounding (mochitsuki ) seemed as if it might be the climactic event, the one in which was most probably galvanic for persons whose origins were in the Land of the Rising Sun.  Mochi is made from a specific rice that is highly glutinous, sticky, and slightly sweet. The supermarkets in Hawaii feature it, small lumps of smooth rice flour.  But those commercial mochi are made with machines. Real mochi, the kind associated with New Years, are made traditionally. Mochi pounding drew the biggest crowd, maybe because of the taste, more likely because of the significance of the dramatic way in which it had always been produced in the old days.

From a distance it looked as if this ethnic festival had borrowed one more attraction of American carnivals, the event where hopeful machos smack large clubs in hopes of making a bell ring. The difference was that three men were coordinating their blows and despite this massive effort, no bell rang. They were striking a huge ball of cooked mochi rice in a massive stone basin and with each blow walloping the sticky ball into a rubbery paste in which, soon, no grain of rice was visible, only a silky dough which would be eaten in small portions, either plain or filled with something sweet like red adzuki bean paste. Teams of three took up the large mallets, each one a yard long and with a striking face four or five inches across. Since alternating strikes were delivered, the coordination of the three was critical. To strike the hammer of another, to hit the rim of the basin, or to weaken and interrupt the pattern was bad form and bad luck.

For this session on this Sunday afternoon, young men of the Tenrikyo Church, each wearing identical deep-purple t-shirts, pounded mightily while a large crowd watched quietly and occasionally moaned when a blow missed the blubbery mass in the basin.  A radio personality, apparently known to the audience, narrated the event, offering encouragement, but often betraying an impatience as the bludgeoning went on for nearly half and hour.  A short distance away, stolidly patient, were the women of Tenrikyo Church, whose duty it would be to pounce on the prepared mochi and pinch it into small portions to be passed out to the expectant crowd. Old-timers pointed out to the youngsters that “this is the way it used to be done” and other sage observations. In contrast, the radio personality, joking into an overly loud microphone took the trouble to tell his captive audience that, no kidding, this was the first time he had seen this done. Way cool!  Hey, didn’t mochi come only in packages in the supermarket?  The crowd ignored him and his banter, another irritation he must have suffered during the long wait for that mochi to be pounded to meet the standards of Old Japan.

The sweating Tenrikyo men saw it differently: mochi pounding was a “self-purifying or self-reflective act” something usually done in December to prepare for New Years in January.   The pounding of mochi attracted good fortune. Small cakes of mochi would be placed in the family shrine or “in some other prominent place for households without a shrine.” A flexible approach.  The Tenrikyo Church believes in a god that “created human beings to live a joyous life and to share in that joy.”  As they see it, the deity lends our bodies to us, but our minds belong to us alone.  Fair enough.

Eventually, but without exhausting the patience of the onlookers (though a few white folks had politely departed) the mochi was complete, pronounced good, passed to and filled by the women, and shared with everyone.  The radio personality had gone on to the next event where he made much of asking an old woman in a kimono for assistance in pronouncing the name of a drum group due to perform next.  And then he stumbled through it. “Wish I could say it like she does, folks,” he laughed in the mindless way of radio personalities everywhere,  “but, you know me, I’m American-educated.”  Since he was ignored, the question must be asked: did he exist at all?

Mochi may be timeless, but the 75 minutes allowed by the immutable laws of social science field reports were soon exhausted. It would have been a fine thing to take a seat and relax while the drummers thundered away, but it was time to go forward, satisfied with the quality of this research and the promise of good fortune into the Year of the Boar.

. . .

NOTE: At that moment, dingy wisps of doubt appeared, plaintive moans of woodwinds, the odor of funereal blooms and so on.  Standing at a bus stop, this observer noted (nearby) a number of karaoke bars. The wisps of doubt thickened into a dismal fog.  Karaoke is wildly popular among the Japanese, so much so that it is thought to be an irrefutable key to their world.   Without it a researcher could surely expect derisive giggling and worse,  braying anathema.  But, alas, the 75 minutes were gone and the bus arrived.

Field Report # 9: Tasting Wine

Where there is wine there is wine tasting, and the Mosel Valley in Germany features dozens of small communities with hundreds of shops and vineyards where one may sample.  Some tastings are free, some charge a modest price, and all sell wine by the bottle, the case, the carload. This is an age of great glut in viniculture;  all over the globe wine is plentiful and cheap. Though use as biofuel for engines may offer a way out,  most producers prefer to compete with each other and convince the consumer of the excellence of this wine, that vineyard, the quality of the soil and sunlight: but, please, do buy a few bottles and help us to get rid of it!

Finding a place to do a wine tasting that met the extraordinarily high standards demanded by these Field Reports was no easy task, but suffering in the name of science is always a pleasure. After a tedious search along that valley,  the Weingut Einhorn (trans. something about wine and unicorns) appeared in the village of Pockenfels. An easy choice, for who among us is not familiar with the proud insignia of the vineyard: a unicorn, nibbling at grapes, with a golden goblet balanced on its back?  It was mid-afternoon and the staff was setting traditional glasses on long tables covered with blue and white cloths.  In the middle of each, a  basket of bread cut into cubes.  The next tasting would begin in twenty minutes.

The host of these tastings was Herr K. a vintner at mid-life whose degree in oenology from the University of Ulm was prominently displayed in the reception room of the winery.  He was costumed as a sort of forest ranger, spoke several languages impeccably, but failed to illuminate either the history or the metaphorical sense of the unicorn/goblet theme which could now be discerned on everything from napkins to the carpeting.

It must be admitted that until this moment the Field Report seemed to be about nothing so much as the banality of wine tasting. However, Herr K. revealed how busy this day would be and that the first group to visit would be 42 German tourists arriving on a bus, followed in rapid succession by 34 English tourists arriving by river boat, and finally,  just before the dinner hour, 17 Belgian chemists, some with their spouses, on bicycles heading towards home. Now,  it was clear that this Field Report was not about wine, not the Mosel River,  nor the postcard-worthy town of Pockenfels, home of the Pockenfelser Kabinett Riesling Spaetlese,  a noble wine which might fetch $18.00 a bottle in upscale districts of America.  No, it would be cross-cultural research, about Germans and English and even biking Belgian chemists. Three key nationalities of the European Union put though a wine tasting, rodents facing a maze of vintages, of mouth-feel and finishes. How would they react and what conclusions about the future of Europe would be revealed?  And, not unimportantly to this researcher, what prestigious journals would not clamor and yowl to have this seminal piece of social science research on its fine pages?

The 42 Germans. They were uncommonly gregarious, having done one wine tour in the next village already, so one learned easily enough that they were warehouse employees for a plumbing supply distributor. Herr K. met them in a courtyard facing the steep vine-covered slopes.  “Riesling!” he shouted in a heroic tone of voice and with a wave of the arm, “brought by the  Romans to this valley and it is all we produce here and all we ever hope to produce! Very beautiful!  Gift of the gods or of the One True God, one or the other. Follow me, please and mind your feet and your head.” With another confident flourish he led the group into a  passage  beneath the shale hillside on which those godly vines were growing.  Soon daylight seemed far behind us; our light came from the bulbs which Herr K. switched on as we advanced. The cold and humid air quieted the bantering of the Germans.

Herr K gave a quick overview of the equipment that stood in the dimness before us, the various filters, bottle-fillers, and hoses. “All hand work! No automated lines here! This is old-fashioned wine and it comes from the earth so it is not for us to interfere.” This remark remained obscure and certainly no one cared ask for an elaboration. Most of the group was now showings  signs of impatience with  the chill air and the likely unease from being in this unexpected place with its attar of damp crypt. “Oh, let me show you this one.” said he pointing towards a device that turned out to be a corking machine. “I must tell you that we have to make sure of our product and the only way is to taste it.  All employees taste the wine. You see the wine glasses here.  We must be sure. But it sometimes happens that the vintage is so good that the person operating the corker has been known to put five corks into a single bottle. When that happens we know that it is time to put another man on the corker and make the wine samples smaller!”  This was a joke, but not  well-received beyond a few obligatory grunts and  a “Ja, Ja” from somewhere in the gloom.  Perhaps this we due to a collective sense that the sooner this was over, the sooner one would be in the a brighter, warmer, life-affirming tasting room.

The tasting room with its blue and white covered tables seemed especially inviting and it may be that the extremes of the wine tour, the dismal cave and the warmth of wine tasting, is part of some arcane hades-to-heaven ritual used since Roman times. But to what purpose?  Certainly, the Germans seemed overjoyed to have reached this place; they became loud and there was a lot of shifting about for chairs.  One became aware that some of the couples were resuming a pattern of flirtation that must have slowed in the cold cave. The walls were decorated with proverbs, every one of them a humorous justification for wine consumption along the lines of “Wine is the sunshine that brightens the dullard’s head.”  or some such thing, These now were used as jibes by the guests, e.g. “hey, Manfred, this one is for you…just read it, hoo ha!” And so on.

Herr K. had a difficult time with  them, they were like school kids who had lost patience with learning anything. He fairly yelled over the din as the first serving of wine was placed before them. These were generous portions, more than a sip, more like several swallows.  Actually half a goblet.  Given the clowning demeanor of the group, this seemed a very risky business.

“Hold it  up to the  light!”  Herr K. demanded.  “You will notice a slight  greenish cast. Smell it!  You will smell  the earth of that hill and all its minerals. Take a generous sip!  Push it around with your tongue, up  against the palate.  Now chew it, really bite it!  Yes, go on! Then snuffle it over the tongue, under the tongue. That’s how you taste our own fine Riesling!’’  Those who were paying attention tried to follow this sequence, but most were distracted  at the sight of so much exaggerated chewing and gurgling.  And then a florid-faced woman called out that she would be happy to buy any bottles with more than one cork in it.  Loud laughter for a bit of humor that had failed in the dismal cave. Then four more Rieslings to sample. Herr K hurried them along a bit; the English would be arriving soon. Much to his relief, these festive Germans bought 138 bottles of various dry, semi-dry, and full-bodied wines.  “No broken glasses, no throwing bread, no arguments,  good sale.” said he with a smile as he watched them leave.

This researcher was able to establish a number of criteria by which groups could be compared: demeanor in the cave, behavior in the tasting room, and number of bottles purchased per capita. The Germans could be assigned a 3.28 on this basis.  Later on, it was shown that the English did a more modest 1.63 and the Belgian chemists a paltry .77, due most likely to the limitations of bicycle travel.  Such data, generously supplied by Herr K. strongly reinforced the early expectation of excellence for this Field Report.

Alas!  These hopes would be dashed. While it is true that the English did show up promptly, their behaviors along the lines of this cunning research model were not accurately recorded.  Just how this happened  was the result of a mix of circumstances, a tangled web of variables, and, it must be admitted, the shortcomings of the researcher himself.  Critics will quickly assume that no matter how promising this research model was, it likely could not withstand the ravages of alcohol. This researcher was seated unobtrusively in the shadow of an oak post where two smiling maidens wearing wreaths of wildflowers on their heads to stunning effect served the samples. Perhaps they pitied the relative isolation imposed by this research (of which they had no suspicion) but the samplings were excessively generous. And there was no stopping them nor  explaining the most elementary requirement of this project,  maintaining a steely-eyed objectivity.

The English were river boat people and ancient mariners at that. Looking in the distance towards the Mosel one saw  the sleek vessel which had that morning brought them from some port on the Rhine.  They had four hours on land and had chosen the option of doing the wine tasting. Very old people, neatly garbed in dark blazers for the men and pastel cruise-wear for the women. Quiet and dutiful, they gave their host close attention and conscientiously chewed, snuffled, and palate-pressed their Riesling. They smiled at the joke about the bottle with too many corks and a few indicated mirth by letting their breath out through the nose. All this was uninteresting  to observe from the  margins until one woman, possibly during the second sampling,  the one reputed to be from a particularly good year, turned to her husband and whispered loudly,  “Oh, Socrates, now I, too, have drunk my hemlock!”

It was a stunning remark, powerful and transforming. From here on, this report could no longer be concerned with Riesling, but with hemlock. With so many places to sample Mosel wine, the mind, now wrestling with a despairing monotony here at the Einhorn, yearned for a place that advertised hemlock tastings.  Oh, for shame, arguing monotony for so pleasant a pastime as sipping wine along the Mosel. But it is not the wine nor the sipping thereof that’s the problem, it’s that it is such an  uncommonly tedious thing to write about: folks standing around, looking thoughtful, murmuring to each  other, rinsing the palate between this ounce or that ounce. That quick glance over the shoulder, has someone noticed how poised we look, how bored we are?

Hemlock tastings, carefully done, would provide the honest drama that wine tastings invariably lacks. Hemlock is indigenous to Europe and it isn’t a tree.  It is a bush with leaves similar to fennel or parsley;  these leaves, crushed, smell like parsnips or like mice. Yes, “mousy”  bouquet would be one of the sought-after attributes for the hemlock connoisseur.  Hemlock tasting opportunities in Europe would be state-of-the-art for years to come, far superior to those offered  only years later in upstart California. The experienced purveyor of hemlock would be mindful that,  depending on your faith in Hellenic medicine,  small amounts of hemlock would be delightful in a variety of therapeutic uses. Arthritis comes to mind. However, the margin of error is slight and once the line is crossed, the consequence is a dramatic lack of bowel control,  some paralysis,  and then death.  Socrates and death! These are the very qualities, lacking with the juice of the grape, that makes hemlock tasting so much more interesting.

Preposterous, the idea that anyone would encounter Huns today. Franks maybe, or Visigoths, but Huns?   Attila the Hun comes to mind, appearing as a subject of films and even as a political marker  (“Cheney?  He’s to the right of Attila the Hun!”). Finding Huns in Germany seems even less likely since that was the term used during World War I to stigmatize Germans as savage beings who had forgotten how to conduct their wars like high-minded gentlemen.   But that is what is happening, there are Huns in Germany and they are showing some expansionist tendencies as was their habit in the 5th Century when, on horses and armed with the Hunnish bow, they made a mess of Europe. More than any other historical group they have attracted the label of “barbarian.”

[Note: In 2005 a group of Hungarians numbering over 2000  individuals petitioned their government to be declared an official Hun minority group  The request was denied. Who needs that kind of trouble?]

Huns are most easily found in pre-Lenten revelries along the Middle Rhine Valley.  There may be more agglomerations elsewhere, a topic that should be researched by others.  It has been harrowing enough for this researcher to identify the phenomenon, much less hope to inspire younger social scientists to cut their academic teeth on the disquieting gristle of German Hunnishness.

The first encounter with Huns was unexpected. This researcher was impressed with (note academic jargon) “the thickness of Rhineland Carnival as a pervasive overarching cultural artifact”  of the region and was keen on investing his customary seventy-five minutes of field work into this phenomenon.  Observation of the carnival would be best as it intensified in the week before Ash Wednesday after which all Christendom hereabouts would abjure having any fun any more whatsoever (never again, no sir, not me! ) until Easter Sunday; in other words, they were fixing to have a blowout before Lent. All signs suggested something orgiastic was in the air and so 75 minutes of unbiased observation seemed like an easy task. [ Note to those who may be reading a Field Report for the first time or who need reminding: no more than 75 minutes of actual field work takes place. However, a lifetime of rumination about the implications of this stuff is not discounted.]

So: the Carnival. Many avenues of research presented themselves.  Some Big Ideas might be :

(1) the tension between hedonistic Fasching (as Carnival time is called) and pious Christian fasting.  This has already been tirelessly ÿstudied from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro. The world of flesh has many students, maybe envious Protestants smugly noting Roman Catholic public sinning.   Still, it’s a compelling theme especially if you regularly hear a song here along the Rhine which states (loose translation) that “we  believe in dear God, but my, we have a lot of thirst!”  Wait!  Was that a drinking song from a Major World Religion?  However, following this line of research would only encourage  resentment towards Martin Luther by those among his high-spirited devotees who want to let go and get silly but have lost the knack over the long cautious centuries since the Reformation.

(2) the military angle: many towns pride themselves on  elegantly dressed and bewigged troops (Stadtsoldatencorps) recalling the Napoleonic Era  Their behavior is mostly a parody of military seriousness. whether French or Prussian. They march sloppily and their maneuvering is apt to cause slapstick collisions. Old rifles may have carnations in the barrels. Interesting stuff in a country usually thought of as wild for snappy militarism.

(3) the self-concept of the Rhinelander as a joker, the funniest folks in all Germany, even more than Bavarians. Their specialty:  playing the Fool (Narr). Most comedians use the Koelsch dialect to do their Fool schtick.

(4) fasching eroticism,  present with the glamorous and stunning women always in traditional outfits of red boots, short full skirts, white blouses,vests and huge smiles. They make a grand and astonishing entrance at the head of any soldier corps by being carried while seated on a man’s hand, high above his head and then for as long as it takes to get on stage. Observers might be thinking: does he have a brace under his sleeve to carry out this feat?  More likely other observers are thinking something else.  Still, is it all superficially innocent as it seems, or is there a subtext of the flesh?   These women are special features of Carnival season and much esteemed.  They train a long time to do their energetic routines, a hybrid performance of drum majorette, acrobat, and free-form dancer.  They are called Funkmariechen,  “Sparkling Little Marys” literally, but who would risk a guess at deeper interpretations?

Easy to conclude, sitting and watching the proceedings that February night in a crowded hall in a small city, that the Funkmariechen was the best choice of the four for Field Report # 8.  Research  was immediately and daringly begun by observing the audience reaction to the prominence (one must conclude) of the lovely Funkmariechen’s underpants as she hopped, tumbled, did handstands, and kicked her right leg straight and high above her head.  Time to apply the litmus test of Eros: could a researcher observe any men in the crowd, pausing for a millisecond between gulps of beer or sausage, giving each other knowing looks?

It was now that the subject of this Field Report came into view.  Not men ogling the Funk-maiden, but hairy men costumed as weasels with caps and capes fashioned of animal skins.  Men (?) who left a hall during a Funk dance! There were perhaps as many as eight of them,  moving along the edge of the crowd and then disappearing again into a corridor.  This researcher (the Observer)  immediately put down the beer and the sausage which had been ordered  (merely to fit in, just another item in the research package) and followed at a distance.  The men, for they were all males, stood near the beer taps and looked like uneasy feral beings, rather like werewolves at an art gallery opening.  Since this is happening not too far from the original Neanderthal sites in Germany, it made some sense to assume that these were fellows who would spend Carnival as cave men.  This group had something that had (perhaps) not yet been developed by humankind during those neolithic times, a self-conscious and aloof manner.  They were, according to someone dressed like a British Redcoat, The Huns. At the sound of that word, all research on the Funkmariechen phenomenon evaporated.

Huns do not attend every event during Fasching. They seem to be selective in presenting themselves to the public. From the point of research with human subjects, they were a disappoinment and so much of the information had to be painstakingly collected in beer gardens and similar venues from disinterested third parties.

As far as is known today, Huns are indeed concentrated along the Rhine. How many bands exist is not known, but they do seem to be found in some of the major cities (Cologne, the capital of the Carnival season)  but more often in smaller towns with ancient names that suggest basic stuff such as worms, swine, ponds, stones and so on. The Huns see themselves as gathered into Hordes, but this is absurd.  You cannot have a Hun Horde of, say, thirty men and women.  Perhaps together these smaller units could form a horde capable of doing some real damage and even reversing the democratic directions of the European Union today. Surely they would work towards purging any remaining royalty.  They messed with European civilization 1500 years ago, more or less, so we know it is in them. Huns like to dress up as barbarians and their taste runs to leather, fur, and horn with some metal studs and clasps.   They especially like caps with borders of fur trim that suggest connections with the steppes of central Asia.

Huns make an annual appearance in fasching parades in a number of communities and they also have summer encampments with much eating of roast swine and drinking beer from kegs.  This latter event, even if observable,  might have yielded a better result for this report.  But, with Huns, you just don’t know. As it was, on the day of the fasching parade, chance revealed the staging area and therefore the preparations of the Huns to take their place in it.

The Huns had brought along a covered wooden wagonbed mounted on a small truck.  If Huns do spread to North America, this is sure to be dubbed a Hunmobile.  About 16 Huns stood around this conveyance, men and women,  gorgeously dressed for the day. Again, they were aloof and despite an effort to get them to engage in some small talk, they were notably disinterested in anyone except their own horde.  Even so, talk among themselves was sparing. The Greeks, who seem to have coined the word “barbarian” used it to signify those who did not speak Greek or whose own language was inelegant. This did not bode well for the much-needed centerpiece of this research, an actual interview with Huns.

An hour later, the parade was underway.  Along came several units of troops and one dragged a cannon which gave a sharp report from time to time. There were many other costumes, some benign (ice cream cones, milk maids, peasants, flowers) and others which would not have worked in a parade in the that sensitive land known as the United States, (“wild Indians” and African “cannibals” cooking up something in a pot).  A big part of the parade was the throwing and even dumping of treats towards the crowded sidewalks. Most of it was junky, but everyone expected that now and then you might get a really great item.   One man was handed something promising wrapped with ribbons in colored tissue:  it was an old and worn bicycle seat. He held it aloft, laughing at his foolhardiness and the crowd laughed with him. What fools these mortals be….

Then, towards the end of the parade: Huns!  Wooden vehicle creaking, the Huns strode along, impassive, not offering a thing to the crowds except for small pieces of yellow paper.  The one with the goat horns attached to his helmet seemed to be the leader, his body padded to increase its substantial bulk. People reached out the touch the Huns, and you heard the words  “die Hunnen, die Hunnen”  repeatedly until  they passed and some group dressed like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, dispensing beer in cups to the crowd, began to command more attention. The  Huns’ yellow paper was an insult note which you could put on the windshield of cars that had parked carelessly, taking up more than their space in a land where parking is mostly a challenge.   Basically, it was a diatribe regarding the stupidity of parking malefactors and ending in a vile, tasteless suggestion as to what you could do with yourself if you didn’t like it; not a pretty insight into the mind of the Hun.

The Huns did not hang around after the parade: you did not see Huns in the taverns as you did the soldiers, the princesses or the clowns or even the occasional couple dressed as parakeets or tubes of toothpaste.   It was Shrove Tuesday, time to drink up, eat schnitzel, and to stand in the loud and smoky bars, maybe dancing a few steps or maybe just kissing.  Remember,  tomorrow  it would be, so they said, ashes and fish, maybe even the confessional.  This explained the fervor of the folks, one would like to think.

Last chance to further this research on Huns. Had the revelers in the tavern seen any Huns around here? (No, only in the parade. ) And what did they know about them? (Not much, they were “normal”• folks.  You could be sitting next to one on the trolley.) Are the Huns politically motivated?  Were they Germanophiles hard at work with an agenda?   (No, don’t think so.)  Would you and your lady like to be Huns?  (No, not really.)  So, just like that, the Huns had presented themselves, inspired admiration, curiosity, and some disgust but leaving little to fill the notebook of this researcher. Anyway, wasn’t it stupid to try to do research in a bar on an extraordinarily hedonistic day?   The Huns had taken barely 75 minutes of  research effort and produced little for the annals of social science. A Funkmarienchen would have been the better choice.  Too late. Fool!

[PNZ felt the need to preface this FR with the following: “As usual, the strict and single methodological rule here is to invest no more (or less!) than 75 minutes research in the field. In this way, the writer seeks to honor the scientific method and to count himself in the Lustrous Company of Science.”]

Go to Bonn, lately the capital of Germany before reunification, now a receding political place, and you will find a earlier call to fame still in play. This is the birth city of Ludwig van Beethoven.  You will not forget this, since the city terms itself “Beethovenstadt Bonn.” Short of transferring his remains from Vienna, the town has done what it could with what it had of its most famous son. His mother lies nearby in the Old Cemetery, a surrogate for tourists who prefer graves to cradles.   No word on his father. Here and there are statues of the  wild-haired Beethoven, but he was out of this small city on the Rhine by 1790, gone to Vienna to try and meet Haydn and Mozart.

The streets of the old inner city, Beethoven’s neighborhood,  are packed this gloomy Saturday afternoon in February.  Somber clothing, the citizens’ preferred choice, deepens the effect. Brightness lies in the fruit and vegetables, hawked at the green market and with the baroque and pinkish Rathaus. Fat peppers, ruby beets, glowing oranges from Spain.  As a child on his way to St. Remigius Church (which proudly features the baptismal font where Ludwig became a Rhineland Catholic) he must have witnessed earlier versions of this market.  The mind  places him in these streets, though not in the Turkish restaurants or near cell phone kiosks.

What you have read so far is fluff.  Formal research for this field report starts now, upon entry at Number 9 Bonngasse, which the plaque announces as the birthplace, on December 16th (but maybe the 17th?) 1770.  This is serious: the composer of the Ninth Symphony, of “da-da-da-daaaah,” of history’s most ironic hearing loss (more on this later) beginneth here!  Right off you learn that the building facing the street, the one with the plaque, was nòot the place of birth at all. The Beethovens actually lived in a small, narrow three story slate-roofed house that was behind the other buildings, You would never know it was there unless someone led you though the houses on the street and pointed you towards it.

Up  the stairs, to the third floor in the back.  The floors creak.  Here is the only room none may enter, blocked off with a velvet cord.  Very small, and low.  Empty,  just a pedestal with a bust of  stormy-haired Ludwig.  A family with two young children peers into the room. “This is where he was born,” says the mother. “Who?” the daughter asks. “Beethoven!’ says her slightly older brother. They move on, making  room for the next visitors, a young Japanese couple taking their turn briefly staring into the near-emptiness. A man with a cane and a bandaged ear clumps to the door to takes his turn. He leans around the corner into the room: there musât be more to this! And up the stairs come two tourists, probably British, who, standing there exactly as the Japanese did, murmur something and move on.

Time to over-intellectualize, to squeeze the most out of this moment. Odd is it not, looking into that little room?  What do people think as they look in?  What are they supposed to think?  What is the significance of Significance? All anyone of any age or origin can come up at the doorway of Bonn’s most significant garret nursery may be nothing more than thinking: this is where Beethoven was born.   Everyone gets born is one thought, gets born somewhere. We already knew Beethoven was born somewhere, right?  Significance?  Watch out, the whole edifice of sight-seeing is leaning and groaning! Why is anyone here? Is there an air molecule of the master available for our own respiration?

Onward!  More floors creak in former family rooms filled with display cases featuring this and that.   Clavichords, violas, woodwinds,  note paper, and other items either used by Beethoven or often copies of the same. Much of the stuff here would not be familiar to them; it’s mostly from Vienna, brought here to fill the empty space of a house that was nearly destroyed a century ago.   On the second floor the subject of deafness appears. This draws a morbid knot of people to the display of ear trumpets, attempts to defeat his hearing loss. They are of brass and fashioned in various ways to capture and then augment sound. 1The largest resembles a device to make popcorn over a fire.  Nearby, two cuttings of his hair. Different colors. How can that be?  Then his last known writing, a codicil to a will in which he makes a provision for his nephew, Carl.  The German word for nephew is “Neffe” but Beethoven, a day short of his death, has spelled it “Neffffe.” Twice the number of “f’s required. This is unexpectedly moving.

Since entering this small museum, a visitor will have been informed, then reminded, then reminded again of the desirability of visiting a recent (2004) innovation: a place where one can (this from a brochure) “enter the new worlds of the Beethoven-House where past and future meet in a thrilling way.”  Scheduled once an hour, the “unique worldwide opportunity” is located in a vault beneath the house next door .

It’s an odd facility, this medieval artifact now made into a sleek/ birch-panelled chamber.  Along the walls on each side are benches for visitors. There were six of us in this chamber, experimental subjects ready to have that past and future collide.  A young woman in jeans tells us what to expect and what to do. What to do?  Quickly she gives us the plot of Act 2 of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, then passes around a tray (also birch) with 3-D glasses, large dark ones. Strangers before, now we are bug-eyed strangers.  Before us, on birch pedestals,  (all this pale wood: IKEA?) are four interactive stations which would be operated by the walleyed insects. The object (we are told) by the young woman in jeans: to alter the image and  motion of the characters appearing on the screen. A dozen speakers are aimed at us, ready to present a standard recording of the opera.

Lights out.  Darkness of the tomb. Sound.  The character Fidelio, is unjustly imprisoned by Pizarro, a Spanish jailer. They are represented on the screen by electronic imagery, emphatically non-human. So, the  thing that sometimes looks like a spiral pastry fashioned of white points of light is poor Fidelio, and Pizarro is four white sticks with blue ends like old-fashioned wooden matches. Leonor, wife of Fidelio who saves him from certain execution, is a tangerine blob.  All of these shapes were highly changeable (by us!), presumably to demonstrate action and mental states  (whose?), but that may be a stretch. The experts will note that there is a fourth character, but it really seemed not to matter.

So, there was poor Fidelio, singing about his hopeless state and spinning away like a vertical  conch shell with a sort of breathing tube snaking out and around him.  As such, he invoked no sympathy.  Pizarro just sort of swung there, looking like four bored rather than malicious matchsticks.  Leonor zipped here and there, but you would have a tough time deciding which side the little tangerine was on. Because we were wearing those glasses, these figures did seem to move in and out and towards us.  As the insect/visitors began to get their courage up and operate the tools on the pedestals before them these images moved up, down, back and more interestingly, forward so that they might appear close to you.  Maybe we were now in that prison with Fidelio and maybe we could affect their fate?  More likely that we did not care about these characters. Once it was over no one said anything. Tight smiles, no questions, 3-D glasses returned; all seemed to shuffle out of this dungeon happy for their release, just as Fidelio had been from his.

With just a few minutes of research time remaining, there is always the gift shop which provides an unintentional synopsis or even antidote to many a  museum.   Neckties, posters, t-shirts,  copies of manuscripts:  Beethoveniana in good taste. No hair samples, no reproductions of ear trumpets. Wait! Here are two plaster masks, copies of course, of life and death masks, items you may have missed on the upper floors.  In Beethoven’s time, if you re÷ached a certain stature in life, both masks might be required in the era before photography came along.  The life mask was made at age 41 and is a good counterpoint to those portraits which seem never to agree on what he looked like. The death mask was made shortly (12 hours) after his death, about the time the skull  was opened to see what had caused that horrendous deafness. Macabre fact-of-the day!  Not a casual memento, the two of them together can be yours for about $180.

Back out on the Bonngasse, the Saturday shoppers had thinned and this made the vegetable mongers cry out more loudly that two melons for an Euro was a bargain and did anyone want a few leeks to take home to the family?  The bakery wagon had its trays of earth-toned loaves and the sausage man was perfuming the air with wurst miasma.  Behind lay a significant and empty attic room and a medieval dungeon where, despite the best efforts of a digitally-engaged audience, Fidelio never gets out.

For nearly forty years, the town of Barnesville, Minnesota has celebrated itself and the potato on the last weekend in August. Why is this? There are the usual explanations having to do with this being potato country, just an excuse to have some fun, or a gimmick to boost the economy by attracting up to 14,000 visitors who reputedly come from all over the country?  Or is it the clear voice of Barnesville as it answers the Strawberry Days, the Apple Days, the Corn Festival, the Pork Fest, and the Blueberry Celebration of other small towns in the Upper Midwest?  But these are mere prosaic answers which do less than a teaspoon of dried potato flakes to stopper our hunger for deeper truths.  And Barnesville will not willingly tell you why it does what it does. So you have to go there and probe, to expose the tuber that lies beneath the subconscious soil of this usually unassuming town of 2300 inhabitants. Many scholars have treated the history and social influence of potatoes (Inca cities, Polish vodka, Irish famines, the curious potato gun) but none have devoted the required research effort to ask why a small town in Minnesota raises its annual song of praise to the potato.

Potato. Such a word. Potato Days, even better for its pleasant little beat. On radio and television, highway billboards, and with simple but omnipresent brochures, Potato Days seemed to create a drone, insistent, filling the mind: Potato Days! Potato Days! Soon it will be Potato Days!

Those familiar with these Field Reports will recall that they are governed by a severe methodology: no more that 75 minutes in the field. How would an extravaganza like Potato Days be served by such strictures?  A decade ago, this Visitor had gone to Potato Days for only the most crass reason:  to eat.  Recalled is a parade on Saturday evening with an abundance of farm machinery chugging down Front Street, Barnesville’s main street anchored at one end by the massive old Catholic Church of the Assumption and a bank near the other end. The six or eight blocks in between was where Potato Days really happens. Now, this year, the Visitor was no longer a callow tourist, but a shrewd Observer, tightly disciplined for this Field Report. Checking the schedule of events, it was quickly obvious how to spend the hour and fifteen minutes in Barnesville.  And the focus of observation? One word leapt off the pages of the Potato Days brochure: Mashed.  Three events featured mashed potatoes: Mashed Potato Wrestling in a field south of the Church on Friday afternoon and a Mashed Potato Eating Contest on the bandstand in the center of town and last, the Mashed Potato Sculpture contest in the Bank parking lot. There were no other events that could match this promise of drama, and that included Potato Car Races. Potato Sack Races, Miss Tater Tot Contest, Potato Soup Cook-off, or the Potato Peeling Contest to name a few.  When a thing is mashed, it must reveal.

Unexpectedly the road to Barnesville helped to set the context for this event. The visitor must drive there and, regardless of direction, the last 20 miles is a crossing on a disc of earth, horizons equidistant. No hills disturb this perspective, you are in one of the flattest places on the planet. On this day, great white clouds were marching evenly from the west and the fields looked healthy and green (the sugar beets) or gold ( the sunflowers or the wheat). No potato plants.  It is beyond this research to ask how it is that Barnesville has Potato Days without any in the nearby fields.  On those uncrowded highways, you might feel yourself floating, daydreaming, thinking of old stories in which the journey itself is the destination.

At the venue for the mashed potato wrestling lies a large blue tarpaulin lined with hay bales. A modest crowd has gathered early, sitting on folding lawn chairs. There is a problem. This wrestling area contains only a cream-colored depth of dry potato powder. Dry?  Two men are leaning against a truck, shaking their heads, waiting for the tardy fire department with a water tanker. While waiting we learn that the potato substance is “non-edible grade” meaning that it is usually fed to cattle and not people. Hence Barnesville cannot be accused of flaunting its potato plenty in the face of a hungry world. It is an explanation that will be given again at the sculpture event.  Still…one wonders if that which is about to be wrestled in or sculpted would not be seen differently in the famished regions of Africa?  When the water truck arrived, a dozen barefoot citizens slogged back and forth until the texture was  without dry spots or lumpiness. It looked more like a potato soup, a gruel but without the consistency sufficient to form gravy pockets.

First Disappointment:  the Observer had hoped to see large farmboys in overalls strip down to their swimming trunks and heave each other around with large gobs of potato flung out into the electrified audience.  And they would be followed by bikini-clad maidens, maybe even the daughter of the banker furiously shoving the face of the tractor dealer’s daughter into the starch.  Nothing like it!  Mostly young kids taking turns tripping each other until both were creamy with potato slurry.   One was declared a winner after five minutes of slopping about, then both reported to the truck where the fire department guys hosed them potato-free.

On the way to the next event, the Mashed Potato Eating Contest, the Observer passed the Dunk Tank where were manifested some of the class and sexual tensions so keenly missing at the wrestling.  A young woman, perhaps seventeen (who was in a bikini) sat on her perch above an unpleasant looking tank of dark water. For a dollar you got three softballs to throw at a target and if you hit it she would be dropped into the dismal tub. All the contestants and most of the bystanders were young males. They threw very hard, much harder than necessary and with scowling faces. Even when one of them succeeded they took no pleasure in it: some kind of score was being evened. The young woman seemed not to know these fellows and smiled unconvincingly as she climbed out of the tank and back on her perch. The hurling of softballs began anew.

Also on the way was a food vendor recalled from an earlier visit.  The church ladies of a nearby village served Swedish potato sausage wrapped in a sheet of Norwegian lefse. But they had temporarily sold out and a long line of the hungry was waiting for the next shipment to arrive. This was exactly what had happened a decade earlier. You cannot make enough potato sausage in a church basement to feed the demands of these faithful communicants.

Second Disappointment. At the Mashed Potato Eating Contest, one had to endure the music coming out of the speakers on either sides of the awning-covered portable stage. Was this potato music? In front of the stage were many picnic tables where the consumers of potato sausage, french fries, or lemonade sat with friends and neighbors awaiting the spectacle.  The contest was broken into age groups, and disappointingly it would be kids again. not four hundred pound men and women in bib overalls who would vacuum up the spuds with aplomb and then shyly retreat until next year, trophy in hand. The youngest contestants were six and the oldest sixteen. They were supplied with one bowl at a time of mashed potato (very white, stiff, and very edible) and allowed to bring something to drink on stage as they sat together at a long table facing the audience.  Note Rule # 1 :  No mixing your drink with the mashed potato!  The excuse given was that it created a mess, but it was easy to see that he or she who mixed up a kind of milk of potato would win by just gulping it down.  All you were allowed to add was butter and salt.   The mashed potatoes were late in coming from the Eagle Cafe just half a block away on Front Street. When they did arrive, they were plenty warm, almost too warm for the youngest contestants. But they were tough, these kids , who soon had clots of potato hanging from their mouths. Somewhere   paramedics must be hovering, wondering if insurance releases had been signed by parents. But this was Potato Days in a place called Barnesville where such intrusions from the more anxious world beyond the prairie disc were not in evidence. Except for one teenager who consumed four bowls, the event was quite discreet and one could say that most of the children must have fine manners drilled into them at home for they found it difficult to crudely shovel the potatoes into their innocent mouths.

The Mashed Potato Sculpture Contest was beginning a block away and I hurried to see the beginning. Contestants (and there were perhaps thirty including ten adults) were grouped by age once again. Each had thirty minutes to take as much cold mashed potato and complete whatever their inner Rodin dictated.  Alas, the Third Disappointment.  Not only were the sculptures small, less than a foot in height, but they were not of noble inspiration. I saw cats, dogs, pizzas, a radio, a sheep, numerous cartoon or Star Wars characters as well as five- pointed stars, and a candy bar. All made of mashed potatoes and often liberally adorned with food coloring or jelly beans. It took very little time to take all this in, but as this Observer was leaving he spotted a rough abstraction easily mistaken for the Venus of Willendorf.  He went to encourage the twelve-year old who had been working on it and to tell him that he should be awarded a prize. Where, one wanted to ask, did you learn about the Venus of Willendorf,? Just then he was heard to say to a girl working on a potato sofa for her Barbie Doll that he should not have attempted to sculpt a bullfrog; just too hard.

Crossing the great disc of the flat prairie again the Observer listened to the news and noticed a small quantity of mashed potato drying on a sleeve. The news was of the impending doom of distant hurricanes, of a soldier from some other place in Minnesota dead in Baghdad, and speculation over the ruinous impact of rising petroleum costs. Back in Barnesville, surely others were also becoming aware of small amounts of mashed potato in unexpected places.  But they had happily escaped the news of the day–was that why Barnesville does what it does?

(Here is the last Field Report of the Big Road Trip of 2005 which covered some 11,000 miles between 12/15/04 and 5/2/05)

The car wash may be the best example of the American Culture. It is rich in symbols because you submit to having your vehicle sent into the tunnel of foaming water mixed with special chemicals. Think about the times you sat there slowly moving through the blinking lights and coarse sprays like a penitent being wiped clean of accumulated stain. You might even be offered a scent, for a price, at the end of the line which would mask any of the ordure that still hung about you and your machine. Not to forget the powerful jets that loudly dry while we imagine undertones of approving Puritan voices admitting us again, out of the dankness, to the light of day….but this is a solitary, even a lonely moment and Americans are gregarious, a Happy Folk who would rather sit at a baseball game and feel their cores resonate with their compatriots.  Or rather experience an elusive communalism that may or may not be available at The Motel.

Because of recent experience with dozens of these phenomena, it seemed a Field Report was in order. But how to do it for, as students of these Reports know, these efforts must be grounded in a mere 75 minutes of careful observation. How to do that with the Motel, a thing  where one might spend anywhere from 12 hours to one week experiencing the layers of “stuff” which are there?    As to the Method: (1). Let us assume that all Motels are the same; this allows us to ignore the need for all that picky comparative analysis. Or just think of a Motel somewhere in Kentucky or Kansas which will serve as an archetype for all the rest. (2). Let us meet any objections to #1 by further stating that all Motels are like quasi-communities, ephemeral little Villages whose raw ingredients are,uh… (3). Let us agree that Method is unimportant.

Each day, towards evening, most thriving Motels experience a swelling of new Villagers, inhabitants who may stay from a mere twelve hours to several days. Common to all is to approach The Desk, a counter behind which Authority will scrutinize our various affiliations: from whence do we come, what manner of machine transports us, and do we have an acceptable fiscal blessing? It seems wise to also offer these worthies the information that we have earlier argued our case with an even more obscure Authority: reservations via telephone or Internet.

If all has gone well, we are given a key, shrouded in electronic secrecy, and so become Villagers.  Our humble belongings may now be taken to our Very Own Room in which we may either smoke tobacco or abstain from that practice according to our established traditions.

We go to Motels so that we may avoid the night dangers of the world and to sleep. So, as new Villagers, we now contemplate the Bed. Motels have generally firm beds. Soft beds invite backaches and, worse, remind us emphatically that we are sharing this bed with many hundreds of Others of our species whom we do not want to think about. Also to be avoided are recollections of news stories in which DNA samples figure, or on rare occasions, the corpses of murdered prostitutes entombed in the wooden substructure of the bed itself. Better to glance at the ceiling and tap a wall to tell whether is room will be a quiet (concrete) or not (plaster board).  And yes, the smoke detector, it’s there and it winks with its red indicator. On the nightstand, a very cheap radio/alarm, which must be inspected because it may be set it for an odd hour, say 3:27 AM, a possibility which once again raises questions about those Phantom Villagers of the past with whom we are now sharing this bunk.

On to the bathroom. Here are the most revealing surfaces of the 150 or so square feet one has rented and usually they will reassure you. They are clean and the soap and shampoo are new and sealed. But always mind the toilet: how does it flush and does it have any idiosyncrasies? Some are very loud, almost aggressive in their zeal to please. Others raise doubts, some will not soon cease their song. Never take a Motel toilet for granted; observe it carefully and get acquainted early before the maintenance person leaves the premises for the night.

A recent Motel oddity is the shower curtain and this is most unexpected and interesting. It cries out for more research: shower curtains are being retrofitted all across America in response to the burgeoning obesity of a prosperous people. It is no longer possible to expect that only a small minority will be able to shower and not have the curtain cling disgustingly to their Wet Flesh. Solution: install a curtain rod that bows outward in the middle so that this Wet Flesh, this lathered and proud Wet Flesh may be spared contact with a curtain that multitudes of Others, those Phantom Villagers, have used before.  For those who wish precision here, the deviation from the formerly straight rod to its more accommodating bulge is 6.5 inches, translated into pounds of Wet Flesh….? Quantity unknown but significant.

If you go beyond the confines of your Very Own Room, do not expect to see many Villagers.  The place may be fully booked but you will see few of the Other.  This is at once reassuring and disturbing, a matter of some subtlety. First, no one want to stay in a Motel alone. It recalls Hitchcock too easily as well as a few other films or news reports in which an otherwise “normal” Motel had attracted Evil.  But, if fellow inn-mates there must be, who can one tolerate? We all want quiet, of course, so inevitably those you do encounter will engage in careful mutual scrutiny, assessing whether you or they may be a Bad Villager. Some danger signs: carrying a twelve-pack of beer, noisy children, loud voices, college age four-to-a-room, missing teeth.  These are truly The Other; let us not have them settle too near Our Very Own Room. Smokers and Non-Smokers, groups which share a mutual suspicion, are carefully segregated. Perhaps you will wander to the pool or spa, where whole families sometimes dunk themselves and acquire a strong odor of disinfectant chlorine, one of the ways the Motel Authority seeks to protect one Villager from the other, past, present, and future. But mostly they do what we all do, stay in that room and try to forget that there are strange people all around.  Use the locks on the door, use the peep-hole, and review safety procedures found in the room.  Although it may not always seem that way, there is an excellent chance that most Villagers will sleep through the night and awaken too.

By morning, the night having gone well with no violence in the next room, no stray bullets and whatever else you could fantasize, you are ready, finally, to meet Other Villagers in the Breakfast Room.  Nearly all Motels now feature a breakfast usually labeled “Continental” a hopeful term which has no precise meaning.  You may occasionally see a claim for an “expanded continental breakfast” which may mean one of those waffle irons, or more interestingly, regional favorites such as boiled eggs, biscuits and gravy, sausage, and grits. It is astonishing that some moderately populated Motel can go through, per breakfast period, several gallons of pinkish gray gravy slopped over thick biscuits.  This may correlate to the shower rod retrofitting mentioned earlier.  In most Villages the coffee lacks muscle and all cups, dishes, and utensils are disposable. If you get there too late all you will see is the Breakfast Lady tying up sacks of plastic waste on its way to the landfill.

Regardless of the satisfaction which may come from breaking our nocturnal fast with the victuals offered by Village Authority, the Breakfast Room is where we meet many of our new and fleeting neighbors. To deaden the palpable awkwardness of being suddenly thrust into such a community, the TV is on and whether we like it or not, we all must now see and hear that morning program from New York where everyone is so determinedly cheerful. Being here in the Breakfast Room helps to lessen ruminations over what kind of people stay here and, importantly, what kind must have inhabited the rooms over the years. Although most Villagers are of a modest good cheer and a few will acknowledge us with nods or small tight smiles, typically we all want little to do with the Others; hence the TV set and only low, sporadic conversation in the room. There are small and infrequent violations of personal space as Villagers attempt to fill cereal bowls or attend to the toaster without getting close to Others. Brush the arm of that woman whose hair is in curlers, still wet from her shower, or that man smelling strongly of chlorine from the pool or hot tub and he or she is sure to flinch and there will be murmured apologies for this breach of Breakfast Room protocol. No one wants to be the sole inhabitant of the Motel, but all would like to be left the hell alone while struggling with the cereal dispenser or picking through the donuts.

When breakfast is over guests disappear down the long corridors or into the elevator to return to their rooms. Now is the time when some may encounter the Housekeeping staff and its carts loaded with the stuff that will purge our Very Own Room. The perspective of these “maids” (such a quaint term) on Village Life would be revealing if we could only get them to talk, but they have taken vows of silence enhanced by their inability to speak Village English except for words like “housekeeping” or “towel” which they render in the accents of Haiti, Mexico, or Southeast Asia. But they are of good cheer. Others, not of recent immigrant stock, down on their luck and less well educated, do speak English but are more circumspect regarding guests. Unlike us, mere temporary room inhabitants, they know the Village well and know the nature of the thousands of Phantom Villagers who have come and gone before us.  What is it they know that we do not know and perhaps should never know?

Or would their own Field Reports be much like this one? Allowing for a few outrageous episodes of Village High Comedy or Despairing Tragedy known only to these Housekeepers, most would perhaps agree that the Motel is a premier example of American Culture, a elusive sort of communalism touching more lives than, say, a baseball game or a car wash.

Zoytlow, in an observational aspect,  was driving East across the deserts of southern Arizona and New Mexico on Interstate 10 when a fabulous opportunity presented itself. The road had been labeled the Pearl Harbor Memorial Highway. He had occasionally noted the number of memorials established in communities concerning the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Everywhere Zoytlow had encountered those magnetized ribbons attached to the rear end of cars which variously asked that the troops be supported, that America be blessed, or that all must heed that  “these colors do not run.”  These were motorists pledged never to forget 9/11.  And there were the personalized veteran’s plates that provided information about  the owner of the vehicle:  Purple Heart, Gulf War Veteran, POW-Vietnam, or simply World War II Vet.  The open road was also the way of patriotism.

Columbus, New Mexico is a very small town thirty miles south of the big Interstate  and just above the border with Mexico. Here, on March 16, 1916, Francisco “Pancho” Villa chose to attack the United States of America for reasons related more to Mexican internal politics than the need to vent a spleen or two to the North.  He hoped to embarrass his political enemies by causing the U.S. to retaliate. It worked, sort of. U.S. troops crossed into Mexico and even used airplanes to try and find him, but they failed.  Villa’s raid became one of only handful of actual violations of Fortress America by combatant “outsiders.” This puts him in the same company as the British who burned the White House in 1812, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the “day of infamy” in 1941 and, of course, Osama Bin-Ladin’s horrific masterwork in 2001. Imagine, a little town in New Mexico having a place on the charm bracelet of national trauma?  How had they dealt with it and had they exploited it?  What sights, sounds, and souvenirs awaited the tourist who took that half hour south to reach the scene of this earlier outrage?  It’s said that during the raid one of Villa’s men had shot at the town clock and it had stopped at 4:10 AM.  Was the clock still there and could you buy a t-shirt with the clock on it? How about an ashtray with Villa’s raffish face?  Maybe CDs with songs of the Mexican Revolution and U.S. Army songs of the era? Would there be Pancho-burritos or burgers in honor of General Pershing? Surely little Columbus must be milking the event in a big way. Would Zoytlow’s strictly enforced time limit of 75 minutes for this research be enough to take it all in?

New Mexico State Highway 11, straight and flat for all of the thirty miles to Columbus, failed to have even one sign advertising what must be the town’s singular attraction: its glorious victimhood. Instead Zoytlow was given to ponder one of those Adopt-a-Highway signs which announced that the next mile or so would be cleansed by “ Elizabethans, Arabians, and Belgians.”  Whatever that really meant, the literal possibilities were thickly entertaining just thinking about how those diverse groups (horse people?) would agree to groom the same stretch of highway.  Then came Son-Shine Baptist Church at the crossroads communtiy named Sunshine.  Interesting, but not too interesting.  Finally, a sign that announced that Pancho Villa State Park was so many miles ahead.

Columbus has about 1700 inhabitants, most of them poor and of Mexican descent. From the corner of Broadway and Highway 11 you can see the Mexican border three miles to the south. A glowering black water tank dominated the town and got darker and larger as the sun hung lower in the sky. It was 5:00 PM, a very stupid time to come to town and investigate anything. The historical museum in the old train station was closed, the streets were empty, and a huge silence crushed the landscape. It was as if all sound and all life had been neutralized. Unnerving, of course. There were no obvious places of business except for the (closed) antique shop in the old jail. On the north side of the village stood a Fina gasoline station which, though dimly lit, seemed to be open, but who knew?  Driving along the few streets yielded nothing  on Villa except for the (closed) Pancho Villa Cafe, a windowless affair with a gnome-like caricature of the terrorist above the door.

The sixty-acre Pancho Villa  State Park was once Camp Furlong, the object of the Villista raid in 1916. The park contains a few old buildings of the era, but as these were closed there no reporting their contents though they are said to contain examples of automobiles of the time employed by Pershing’s soldiers, with poor results, to chase  Mexican raiders.  Villa arrived at Camp Furlong at 2:30 A.M. and then turned on the town as an afterthought on the way back to the border. He shot out the windows of most buildings, terrorized the citizens, and then torched the place. Eighteen Columbians were killed though the Army dispatched over fifty of the five hundred Villistas. But none of this was apparent today in Columbus. No memorial statuary, no fountains, not even a plaque to commemorate who had stood here and who had died there.

Only a graduate student charged with providing something of substance in a research paper or thesis can know the unease which Zoytlow was feeling after nearly an hour of feckless driving and walking hither and yon wondering how Columbus remembered and then capitalized on its history. Desperate and with so little time left, Zoytlow headed for the Fina station to interview any available citizen of Columbus, New Mexico

There were two of them, a young man behind the counter and another, older man, hidden on a stool, reading a newspaper. Three impressions of the place came to the inquiring visitor: (1) the store was devoid of any souvenirs related to the High Point of Columbus History, not even a postcard, (2) the two men present did not appear willing to make small talk, much less engage in historical discourse,  and (3) the place was filled with the a rich tenor sound from a radio station from the south, perhaps in Chihuahua,  singing in a most sentimental and heartfelt style. Time to ask questions, but not too many and the interview as such proceeded quickly and in the mixed-language common to the borderlands .

“Buenos tardes, me llamo Zoytlow. About the Villa raid, do you know what happened to the town clock and might it be in the historical museum? El reloj del pueblo?”

“No se….don’t know.”

“Cuando esta abierto el Museo?”

“Todos los dias hasta las cinco de la tarde, but, maybe only afternoon Sunday.”

“ Y quien canta? Jorge Negrete is singing?”

“No, senor, ..singer, he is Pedro Infante!”

What a fool to have come asking questions in a town where they listened with reverence to the great Pedro Infante. Anyone who mistook him for Jorge Negrete was a a gringo imbecile.  But, Mexicans are usually extraordinarily courteous and the visitor was allowed to leave the Fina station and Columbus with dignity intact.

Zoytlow, an observer, drove north, away from a curious little bordertown with a sinister black water tower, too modest to capitalize on its history.

Saturday morning, still abed in Phoenix, the Observer heard a radio whisper that the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona was marking the 75th anniversary of its discovery of the planet Pluto with a public event scheduled for Sunday evening, March 13.  Straight-away, he made immediate plans to be in Flagstaff at the appointed hour.

The celebration was to take the form of an open house from 6:30 until 9:00 PM at the famed Observatory atop Mars Hill in Flagstaff.  Following the strict guidelines governing these Field Reports, one and one-quarter hours (75 min.) were allocated to studying this unusual event. Then unease: would it be fair to allocate such a small amount of time? Perhaps not, but rigorous training helped the Observer recall the discipline required to keep this research in line with previous reports. But was he already too excited to report dispassionately, realizing he had stumbled on a fiesta given for a nasty planet like Pluto? Tough questions.  To make sure of the details, the Observer drove up to the observatory in the late afternoon to confirm the event. This is only good science: a scrupulous preparation for the observation itself.  A young woman was on duty and assured him that there would be different activities presented in an open house format; that is, the public could show up anytime between 6:30 and 9:00 PM and still enjoy the entire program. Boorish though it was, the question needed asking: would the activities involve refreshments?  “Absolutely not!”   was the answer followed by “an observatory cannot risk sticky fingerprints on the exhibits or equipment.” This Observer had his own reasons for being disappointed at this bit of news, but not for the obvious reason, (free) food. No, he wanted to see, in detail, down to the color of any possible cupcakes or punch what kind of a party astronomers would give to honor the discovery of a dismal planet.

March 13th was also the 150th birthday of Percival Lowell who had founded the observatory in 1894 and set its direction to find a “Planet X.” Lowell hypothesized that a “Trans-Neptunian Planet” would be found, but at the time of his death in 1916, it had eluded him. Later, in 1929 and 1930, a young astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, again took up the challenge and succeeded in finding Pluto on February 18, 1930. The announcement was withheld from our own planet until March 13th so that careful verification of data would protect the Observatory from howling derision.  The worst thing that can happen to astronomers is to discover something that does not exist.  It is very hard on your job mobility. Clyde Tombaugh took no chances. You can tell this by his photographs: there he sits before the eyepiece of some great astral tube, dressed in a three piece suit, nicely groomed and wearing those terrific round and dark-rimmed spectacles that simply everyone with a brain wanted to wear during those times. But  let us return to the Field Report.

When this Observer returned to the Observatory (hmm…) for the open house at  7:30 only a horned crescent moon hung in the black sky above Mars Hill, but there were more than a few clouds in evidence. Inside the lobby of the Education Building a poster announced the events of the evening, but viewings of the sky would not be among them. Unfavorable conditions. Instead, visitors were directed to displays, equipment, photographs and the like here and in an older building, the Rotunda. But first, a multimedia presentation in an adjoining lecture hall. The Observatory was unveiling, for the first time, a presentation which would henceforth orient visitors to the place by telling them something about its history and present work. A slim and well-spoken Lowellian circled around the lobby and encouraged guests to enter an adjoining lecture hall.  Perhaps 25 did so. It should be noted that the open house was not well-attended and most of those present had that wan academic look. The Observer, setting aside objectivity, felt a pang of sadness for Pluto and its handlers.

The lights dimmed and the screen was filled with projected views of the Universe moving either towards or away from us. It was hard to tell. Either way, this silent cosmic floating could cause a loneliness and introspection.  About this time a small child (one of the very few present) in the lobby briefly began making a sort of baboon-like whooping sound, quite joyful really, but annoying as hell.  This was in sharp contrast to the New Age crooning (mainly ahhing and even oohing) by Enya which had been chosen to musically accompany the images on the screen. Was the audience was being manipulated into a mood of powerlessness? We are mere specks after all. Then unexpectedly, one by one, images of  jovial scientists floated across the background of distant stars and galaxies while subtitles identified them and their current projects. Pluto was not among them.  Seventy people, from astronomers to clerical staff, lens grinders and groundskeepers all took their turn floating across in a heavenly parade. Enya’s crooning never let up and then, fifteen minutes later, it was over. But not one word about Pluto, or if there was, it must have been cancelled out by this Observer’s own sense of miniscule insignificance following the Big Bang.

Then it was off to the Rotunda where Percival Lowell had toiled. On display, many lovely brass instruments for measuring this and that and finally, the thing that Clyde Tombaugh had been looking into when Pluto showed up. It was not a telescope!  What a disappointment to the general public to learn that the elusive Trans-Neptunian, Pluto, was not plucked from the sky with a huge spyglass. One by one the guests solemnly peered into the blink comparator that Tombaugh had used for months 75 years ago, comparing photographic images that, at last, revealed the speck that was Pluto. Looking through the device leads to a sobering appreciation, not of Pluto, but of the demands of the scientific method and how infrequently the rewards are as intoxicating as they were for young Tombaugh that evening. As the tale is told, the young man had to re-photograph the sky as one part of the verification process, but as the sky was obscured that evening he went down the hill to see a movie. It happened to be “The Virginian” with Gary Cooper. To quote from the Lowell newsletter, “This movie, incidentally, was based on the first Western ever written, and was published in 1902, the year that [Percival] Lowell first mentioned his belief in a ninth planet.”  What a strange and unexpected notion!  Here was a vision of a Big Bang so immense that it could encompass both hard science and softer popular culture. Only a Supreme Intelligence could have wrought that. Again, one can be reduced to a speck of miniscule significance, right?

It has been already mentioned that there were no more than forty of the truly curious on hand for the celebration and when this Observer returned from the Rotunda most of them had already descended on a sheet cake being cut into squares by two soft-spoken, even reticent ladies.  FORBIDDEN CAKE!!  Capable of gumming up the machinery of planetary discovery!  Did its presence suggest a schism at Lowell, those hedonists who were for introducing party food against those who were of a more severe tradition?  But to return to the cake: this Observer had hoped that describing such an object would have put some frosting (sorry!) on what would otherwise be just another dull Field Report in the annals of science. What would a Pluto-Torte look like? Would it say “Happy Birthday, Pluto” or “Happy 75th” or  simply “Eureka!”   But this white cake which would unlock these secrets of astronomical minds had been mostly consumed. How had the cake been decorated?  One of the ladies thought a moment and said she could not recall, the other one told me that it had been decorated with green representations of Martians. This seemed a rather tasteless, if inadvertent, dig at the great benefactor Percival Lowell himself who had once, in 1905 or so, published his erroneous convictions about life on Mars. The cake itself had a layer of pudding which made it the worst possible choice to serve in a serious Observatory intent on protecting itself from earthly stickiness.

It was now 8:35 and only enough time to ask a few questions and inspect the gift shop. Here were the usual sweatshirts that glowed in the dark, educational toys, wonderful books on astronomy, and many star charts for those who wished to become more informed stargazers.  Again, there was very little to suggest that Pluto had been discovered here. Or its moon, Charon, discovered in 1988.   Where were the coffee mugs with the planet pictured on it, despite the comparative ugliness of the little plant?   How about a poster of the ninth planet? A baseball cap, at least, with the honored lump on it?  Nothing, nada, nichts!  The only thing for sale was a cloth patch: “Lowell Observatory. Discovery of Pluto.1930” which could be sewed on your sleeve. And who has the time do a thing like that?

Time to go. The horned moon was more directly overhead and the sky cleared as it did not for Tombaugh 75 years ago. Too late to crank up the big old Clarke telescope and have the public peer upwards. These things take time and the party was over, the guests straggling out into the parking lot and descending Mars Hill, one automobile at a time

Beaches and bars coexist easily.  In San Diego, California this is no less true than elsewhere and perhaps more so since this city with its miles of beaches for strolling, surfing, swimming and just sitting is also home to numerous colleges and serves as an important base for the U.S. Navy. The Observer became interested in what a bar near the beach might yield as a focus for Field Research because he passed by them on and noted their considerable number and variety. One, the Lahaina, was more deck than bar and was always crowded with a tanned and muscular crowd  drinking out of soft plastic containers in deference to barefoot clientele. Another, The Open Bar, was a short block off the beach featuring a deck usually crowded with heavily tattooed and pierced hairy men and not-so-wary looking women. But which of these would offer the best results for an hour and fifteen minutes of careful and unbiased analysis?

Enter the Informant, a person who knows bars on the West Coast and who proved to be a capable advisor for the critical stage of picking the site as well as designing some of the methodology. Caveat: The Informant became a necessary interpreter during the part of the observation phase as well; so much so, that inevitably he may be folded into the thicker textures of this little study. It’s all a bit hazy on this point.

Since there are always those skeptics who will question whether useful research can be conducted on a site where alcohol is present, let us say at the outset that both the Informant and the Observer consumed no more than 36 ounces of beer each. If this research were only about beer, we would have to say that the bottled beer, Pura Vida, from Costa Rica was too ordinary for comment, the Guinness was disappointing and did not deliver its potential even after a great show of microscopic bubbles, the Newcastle seemed too flat, and only the Sierra Vista Pale Ale was adequate and met expectations. But this research is not about beer though hindsight requires the admission that perhaps that would have been a better choice of subject matter.

The observation took place on Sunday, March 6, 2005 at [the] Beachcomber (known locally simply as “The ‘Comber”) which is located on South Mission Blvd. The time spent in formal, rigorous research at The Comber was between 4:50 and 6: 05 PM. South Mission has other bars along it and all of them share the bar/beach duality since the Pacific Ocean is less than a short block away and can actually be seen from many of these establishments, particularly if they face west. In the case of the Pennant, a bar directly south of The ‘Comber this is enhanced because that bar’s principal feature is a deck on the second floor. The Informant and this Observer toured the Pennant briefly in order to verify that a patron could peer from the Pennant into The ‘Comber and perhaps make a shrewd decision to move from one to the other if circumstances so dictated. It was not clear what those circumstances would be, though the Informer assured me that at times the line waiting to get into The ‘Comber might stretch back along the outside perhaps a block or so. Critical mass, a vague notion if there ever was one, is the only explanation for this phenomenon.  On dense occasions, the most you could expect was standing on a ‘Comber 16 inch square floor tile with one other person. California real estate being what it is, you could not expect much more space than that for the small amount you would spend on a beer. But this afternoon was not one of those occasions, else it would have been impossible to note anything except great noise and heat.

As to The ‘Comber itself, there are worse bars and better ones. If a grade of 0 signifies intense worries about one’s health and safety and 10 a place with the antiseptic appeal of a three-star hotel bar, The “Comber checked in at a 2.7. Was this place being remodeled or slowly dismantled? Many of the walls were a patchwork of particle board possibly affixed to hide something even less inviting. Behind the bar sat ten plastic coolers filled with bottled beer for there were no refrigerators here, just ice in coolers as if the whole enterprise might shift to the back of a truck.  Where did the tap beer come from? Perhaps beneath our feet there was a chamber for that purpose but who would want to find out? The bar itself is a rectangular affair with 23 stools and a few small, high tables closer to the narrow windows which faced the street.  Most of the clientele, on busy nights, would be standing.  Four televisions were silently at work in each corner but no one seemed interested. Towards the rear, away from the windows, a surfboard with the word “Budweiser” hung on a wall overlooking the sole pool table. In the dark recesses of the rear of the bar were small utility rooms  where glasses were washed or stored and where one would find toilets. There was no impression of the women’s toilet possible except to note that it did have a door.  The men’s did not, only a grey plastic curtain shielding patrons from possible observation. The Informant was quite sure that this particular room had once featured a plain trough, but these days three urinals had replaced it.  Overall, The “Comber shared many features with those dingy bars in rural Minnesota where there was a disinclination to plump up the infrastructure: the place would be a gold mine no matter how the owner maintained it.

This was a Sunday afternoon on a beautiful day and that anyone was in a bar at all recalled the quote about millions yearning for immortality who cannot find anything to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  Whatever the nexus between this place and the problem of immortality may be, it’s like the question of who ordered two urinals to replace the trough:  beyond the scope of this research. And yet, as we all know, a decent concern for mortality and its attendant existential dread can seldom be absent from the affairs of humankind.

Some 25-40 persons were present during the research period,  perhaps half seemed to be over fifty and were in many cases probably members of the OMBAC, the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club. Their particular type of athleticism was not clear, but judging by some of the memorabilia on the walls, at least some of it was due to OTL, or Over The Line, a game unknown to this Observer, originating fifty years earlier in San Diego. It seemed to combine some features of baseball (bat and ball) tennis (hitting the ball into zones) and soccer (the fielder having something of the challenge of a goalie in anticipating where the ball might be hit). Each team was made up of three persons and traditionally these teams were distinguished by their intensely lewd and perverse  names. It is beyond the objectives of this research to have investigated this, but it is part of the lore of OTL that it cannot be televised simply because the names of the teams are so highly objectionable and would unquestionably require large fines to by paid by the offending networks  A striking photograph behind our place at the bar showed the game being played on the deck of an aircraft carrier (the “Comber is popular with Navy folk) and two others showing OTL tee-shirts being held by people in Africa and on The Great Wall by Chinese soldiers. Still another photo suggested a  strong connection between this little known game and large-breasted women wearing thong bathing outfits and posing shamelessly, some would say. This is another mystery which cannot be brought to light in a mere hour and fifteen minutes, and isn’t the purpose of True Research to frame questions for those researchers who will follow?

So, if OTL players had selected this bar as a watering hole, then surely there should be something as rowdy as the pierced and tattooed bikers were staging a mile north at The Open Bar where one may see big men roar at each other like bull walruses. But this was not the case here.  These old boys, most of them with their ladies, were tame. The were without the tusks and goofy noses of true bulls down the street. They were good fellows and gentlemen.

More noise came from five maidens  singing something like  “doop doop doo” (this is an approximation)  inspired by some tune played at their request by the disc jockey, a friendly chap who appeared halfway through the research period at 5:25 PM.   The maidens were seated around one of the small high table on stools. Each one had long straight hair down to mid-back. Each one had a fashionably short top and low cut jeans and so exposing  a goodly six inches of tanned torso.. When there was, however, briefly, no music to inspire them to jump off the stools and dance among themselves they were hunched over their drinks. Should you pass by them at this time of hyper-animated conversation, you could not help but note that each has a tattoo at waist level on the posterior.  Mostly these tattoos are symmetrical in nature. A butterfly alighting exactly on the spine. A Moorish design reminding one of the reluctance of Islamic artists to depict other than the abstract.  An arrangement of flowers.  A more involved scene suggestive of a fairy tale, perhaps something out of the Brothers Grimm by way of Disney. These were among the designs which presented themselves easily and without the need to become excessively intrusive as an observer.  I should add that to assay butt art  (or less bluntly stated, the art of the supragluteal) is best done by a disinterested observer when the medium is drunk.  What  had brought these maidens here?  Clear it was that they were enjoying themselves and adding disproportionately to the communal din.˛  The Informer,  apparently disinterested in such phenomena simply noted the category “beach girls” when their yelping momentarily distracted him from the micro-bubbled transformations in his freshly drawn glass of Guinness.

If these two archetypes, the aging, OTL athlete and the tattooed maidens a.k.a. “beach girls” were dominant in The ‘Comber  during the time frame of the research, it must be noted that there were a few variants as well such as the Androgynous Guy who entered  with dark glasses offsetting his bright-blond hair and  garish blue Hawaiian shirt.  As he later happened to stand near us at the bar one could also note gold earrings as part of his ensemble. He told the Informer that his shirt was perforated (small, imperceptible holes everywhere) to help him stay cool and that it came from Quicksilver, an important outfitter for surfers. And that, as tangential as it was, together with the Budweiser surfboard, was the only reference to surfing in The ‘Comber during the period under investigation.  This is not a surfer bar, more a place for OTL veterans, their ladies, and the beach girls. Quite in a category to themselves was the forty-something couple at a table staring at a sheet of paper which they must have picked up while looking for real estate. Charming South Mission Condo! was the heading and towards the bottom of the sheet, $525,000. Sobering! No wonder their beers had scarcely been touched.

Perhaps it was the low ceiling with its particle board treatment that captured all sounds and let them hang there, making talk and eavesdropping next to impossible. The burly bartender, normally the expected source of small talk, was working alone and too busy drawing beer and mixing drinks.  No alternative except to listen in as best one could despite the din and the music coming out of the two oversized towers of Peavey speakers. You could make out words such as “hey!” or “sure!” and even fragments such as the sleek seal-maiden who, having ordered a Pacifico called out “limon, limon, limon!” to no one in particular. The longest sustained communication recorded was something about “old Ronny Reagan took these Marines, see, and….”  with the response “you haven’t seen me at my best!”  Whatever these fragments mean, at the very least they support the likely conclusion that The ‘Comber is a happy bar and that its patrons have a tentative answer for the problem of existential dread.

Time was up!  The Observer cannot risk having these Field Reports become a source of derision and so the time frame of 1hr. and 15 min. will be, it must be(!)  scrupulously observed.