Video Script: Mount Auburn Cemetery

Jeff Meller

11 Dec 13

5 minutes recording time; 737 words

1. The Cemetery

In 1831 the Massachusetts Horticultural Society purchased 72 acres of woodland situated in Watertown and Cambridge to create of a “rural cemetery” and experimental garden.  The idea was to allow visitors to escape the hubbub of Boston by traveling all the way to Cambridge.

By “rural” they meant a “garden cemetery,"  that is a rolling landscaped terrain, as distinct from the blandness of church graveyards set with classical monuments.

Today Mount Auburn Cemetery is important both for this historical role and for its role as an arboretum. The cemetery has 1500 trees of a wide variety of species and ages. When a landscape designer is planning a new project and she wants to see what a 60-year-old dogwood will look like, she can come here and see one at 20, 50 and 100-years of age.

Among the 93,000 residents, there are many illustrious and unsung “proprietors,” as they are called.

2. Nathaniel Bowditch

One of my favorites is Nathaniel Bowditch, who lived from 1773 –1838. He was an early American mathematician and often is credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation. His book, The New American Practical Navigator, was first published in 1802 and it is said to be still carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel, though this may be an urban legend.

Bowditch was self-educated. At the age of   he had to leave school to work in his father's cooperage, making wooden barrels, in Salem, Massachusetts. At 12 he was indentured for nine years as a bookkeeping apprentice. But he taught himself algebra, calculus, Latin and French.

In 1795, Bowditch went to sea on the first of four voyages as a ship's clerk. His fifth voyage was as master and part owner of a ship.

Following that voyage, he returned to Salem in 1803 to resume his mathematical studies and enter the insurance business. In 1804, Bowditch became America's first insurance actuary. An actuary calculates mathematically the probability of loss.

In 1806 he was offered the chair of mathematics and physics at Harvard in 1806, but turned it down.

When Bowditch moved from Salem to Boston about 1800 the move involved the transfer of his library of more than 2,500 books.

3.      Harriot Hunt, (Poplar Avenue, Lot 2630)

This statue of Hygeia was commissioned in 1870 by Dr. Harriot Hunt for her grave. Dr. Harriot Hunt helped design the statue, the Greek Goddess of Health and Hygiene. It was executed by Edmonia Lewis. Both Harroti Hunt and Edmonia Lewis were African-American women.

Dr. Hunt was one of the first female physicians in Boston. In 1853 she received an honorary medical degree from the Female Medical College of Philadelphia. She had twice been refused admission to Harvard Medical School. She practiced in Boston for 40 years.

Edmonia Lewis was the first non-white man or woman to receive international recognition as a sculptor.  Her father was African-American. Her mother was of Chippewa descent.

Previously Edmonia Lewis had moved from New York to Boston in the 1860s. In 1865 she opened a studio on via Canova in Rome. After she settled in Europe she had an international career in Italy, France and England.  At the time of the Hunt commission, Lewis was the only black professional artist living and working in Rome.

4.      Anson Burlingame (Spruce Avenue, Lot 4008)

Anson Burlingame lived from 1820 – 1870. He was a lawyer and opponent of slavery. Burlingame helped to found the Republican Party, which was the anti-slavery party, in Massachusetts.

Burlingame achieved fames in 1856. In that year Massachusetts’s Senator Charles Sumner made a speech against slavery in the Senate. In that speech he ridiculed a pro-slavery senator, Andrew Butler.  In retaliation Butler’s nephew attacked Sumner with a cane. Burlingame challenged the assailant to a duel. Dueling was illegal in the United States so Burlingame chose as the location the United States Navy Yard on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Burlingame chose rifles as the weapon. Perhaps because of Burlingame’s reputation as a marksman, Brooks declined to appear. He cited his inability to travel safely through “hostile country,” that is, “the North.”

After Abraham Lincoln was elected President he appointed Burlingame as ambassador to China. The Chinese in turn appointed him their minister to the major European countries. While on that mission in Saint Petersburg, Russia, he contracted pneumonia and died. His body was shipped all the way back to Mt Auburn cemetery for burial.

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Sources:

1.            http://mountauburn.org

2.            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Bowditch

3.            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriot_Kezia_Hunt

4.            http://www.publicartboston.com/content/anson-burlingame

Round-up - Trafficless Runs Around Boston

Jeff Meller

4 Dec 13

570 words

One of the more intimate ways to explore a city can be running: a good speed for observation; interaction with citizenry, if only a cheery “hello;” exploration off the beaten track.

If you don’t like your run interrupted every couple of hundred feet by a traffic intersection, these relatively trafficless routes around Boston, Massachusetts, may be appealing.

The routes are listed by proximity to downtown; all distances are round trip; each route, except Fresh Pond, also is suitable for mountain biking.

Charles River Reservation, Boston - Even though the Charles River flows through the center of a metropolitan area of a million people, only 14 streets cross this 17 mile loop on both sides of the River from the Museum of Science to Watertown Square. Run past MIT, Boston University and Harvard. See scullers from eight boat houses along the shore. Gawk discreetly at hundreds of other runners. Observe urban wildlife including geese, ducks, swans, carp and turtles; one winter I saw an American Bald Eagle right in Cambridge gnawing on carrion embedded in the frozen Charles.

Emerald Necklace, Boston - When F. L. Olmsted started what became the Emerald Necklace in 1878, he was restoring a tidal saltwater marsh. After the Charles River was dammed in 1910 the Emerald Necklace became a freshwater marsh. The paths from Charlesgate to Jamaica Pond are primarily well-graded dirt, shaded in summer by stately oaks and maples, which were saplings in Olmsted’s time. Run past many illustrious institutions: Harvard Medical School, the Gardner Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts. But runners barely glimpse these man-made edifices because the trails are nestled in the terrain to screen the city from what Olmsted thought would be pedestrians and carriages. Twenty-one intersections in 5.3 miles.

Fresh Pond, Cambridge - This North Cambridge pond is a kettle hole, formed when a gigantic block of ice detached from the trailing edge of the last retreating glacier about 12,000 years ago. In the mid-19^th century ice again returned to prominence at Fresh Pond: 35 ice houses, some up to 300 feet long, ringed the Pond. Ice was pack in sawdust and shipped by sail, a four month trip, as far as India. Now all the structures are gone and the 2.2 mile dirt circuit has mutated into an intensively landscaped natural state with an obstacle course of doting dog walkers. There are no street crossings.

Minuteman Bikeway, Cambridge - This trail approximates the route that Paul Revere and William Dawes took on their famous nighttime ride in April 1775 to warn that “The British are coming.” Twenty miles are paved from Cambridge to Bedford. Ten miles from Bedford to Concord are a rough dirt track which follows the former rail bed of the Middlesex Central Railroad; it is the whistle from this train which Thoreau heard when he lived at Walden Pond. Nine street crossings in 30 miles.

Estabrook Woods, Concord – And speaking of Thoreau in his Oct. 20, 1857 journal entry he wrote: “What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! Not a cultivated, hardly a cultivatable field in it, and yet it delights all natural persons.” There are many paths through the 1,200 acres now owned mostly by Harvard University. You can run for hours on a variety of trails and never see a soul though perhaps an occasional horse and rider or snapping turtle. Access from the end of Estabrook Road, Concord. There are no street crossings.

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Sources:

1.            http://www.emeraldnecklace.org

2.            City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fresh Pond Master Plan (2000), Chapter 4. “Ecological and Social History of Fresh Pond Reservation.”

3.            http://www.minutemanbikeway.org/Pages/Brochure.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minuteman_Bikeway

4.            “ ‘This Great Wild Tract:’ Henry David Thoreau, Native Americans, and the Archaeology of Estabrook Woods,” James C. Garman, Paul A. Russo, Stephen A. Mrozowski and Michael A. Volmar, Historical Archeology, 1997, Volume 37, No 4, pages 59 – 80.

Pain: Cockfight in Bali

Jeff Meller

20 Nov. 13

545 words

The last thought of the fighting cock was: "One minute – champ; the next minute - dinner."

Sauntering down a serene gung, an alley, with morning incense lingering around open doorways, we hear the clamor of voices and gongs echoing from the other side of a high, limestone wall. The wall is built of square blocks, mined from what had been a coral reef, embedded with ancient seashells and marine life.

We follow the sounds to an open-air compound with a hundred squatting Balinese men in a raucous circle. They are sweating in the tropical heat, yelling unintelligibly in Bahasa, another of the 6,500 world languages we don’t speak. During the workweek the men wear pants; today they are wearing traditional sarongs.

The circle is celebrating a venerable, if illegal, Balinese pastime. Cockfighting is central to Balinese culture, a social relief valve for tension in a rigid, hierarchical society. The blood sport contrasts unexpectedly with otherwise aesthetic Balinese society in which the highest castes are dancers, musicians, poets and wood cavers; hedge fund managers dwell in the social netherworld.

The yelling, which first seized our attention, is partisans calling: “five on the spotted, white,” “four on the speckled.”

In the center of the circle of men a white circle 20 feet across is painted in chalk on the dirt floor. Two handlers parade around the circle showing off their cocks, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz reports that the double entendre is the same in Balinese as in English, to encourage betting. The cocks are the size of chickens except that special diets and training produce legs which are longer and more muscular. They display the ornate plumage of an Edwardian dowager sailing down Pall Mall in her “murderous millinery.”

The fighting weapons are a 3 inch long, thin razor lashed with red string to the rear of one leg.  Legend has it that blades are sharpened only during an eclipse and should be kept out of sight of women. From the high deference accorded to the blade by the man affixing them, we infer that even a slight mishandling will slash a finger instantly to the bone.

The two handlers step into the center of the ring holding their cocks face to face. To provoke the birds, red pepper is stuffed up their butts. The handlers step back, release the birds. The fight begins, the crowd quietens to semi-religious reverence.

The cocks do not tear at each other haphazardly. There is abundant beating of wings and squawking. But more impressively these two animals, who have only an ounce of bird brain, act with the trained, military nobility of samurai warriors. They psych their opponent, circle patiently looking for an opening, parry and feint, until finally one leaps on the other in a torrent of flapping and clawing and neatly draws the razor across his adversary’s throat, exactly as Kurasawa would have directed. The fight lasts 30 seconds.

If a cock can be such a calculating combatant, maybe he is capable of more profound introspection than we give him credit for. Perhaps his last thought might progress along the following lines: "One minute – champ; the next minute - dinner."

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Source: “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures.